Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2009, 11:16:20 AM
-
Where possible, please use this thread instead of the Cognitive Dissonance thread.
-
GM's post moved to here
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25557458-5013460,00.html
Loose cannon gives Obama a lesson
Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor | May 30, 2009
Article from: The Australian
THERE has been a battle of wills between North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il and US President Barack Obama. So far, Kim has won.
However history finally judges Kim - genocidal narcissist, self-declared god king, supreme Stalinist end point of communism - it also will have to acknowledge his extraordinary success in imposing his own reality, his personal paradigm, on the international system and on the US.
This week, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans argued that Kim's ambitions were essentially reasonable. Kim wanted recognition from the US, a reliable security guarantee and, according to Evans, didn't really want nuclear weapons.
That a sane man can make this judgment after decades of relentless nuclear development by Pyongyang, and after it has rejected or broken this same deal time and time again, demonstrates the feebleness of the foreign policy process mind.
It shows a complete failure of political imagination as to what the North Korean political culture really is.
It is the same kind of mind that dominates the Obama White House.
On May 12, Obama's special envoy on the Korean peninsula, Steve Bosworth, declared: "I think everyone is feeling relatively relaxed about where we are at this point in the process. There is not a sense of crisis." This could go down as one of the great ambassadorial dumb remarks of all time, indicating a disturbing detachment from reality. It certainly would do if it had been uttered by one of George W. Bush's officials.
Consider the implications of Bosworth's remark. Either the US knew a new nuclear test was imminent and Bosworth was telling a blatant lie in an effort to keep everyone calm or, likelier, it was the truth and indicates that the US had not the faintest idea what the North Koreans were up to, despite numerous analysts across the world, operating with far less information than the US Government had available, predicting Kim's nuclear explosion.
Certainly Obama's subsequent remarks, and those of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as US efforts at the UN Security Council, indicate that once the test was undertaken Washington was anything but relaxed.
To put it another way, Kim can predict Obama, but Obama cannot predict Kim.
Obama is plainly a leader of the highest intelligence, with a calm temperament and a very good bedside manner. But sometimes he seems to think he can change the world with PR.
Kim is teaching him that the world is a very intractable place. It is useful for the US to have good PR, but there are no serious problems that good PR alone will solve.
Obama is deeply involved in the detail of his foreign policy. Yet he came to the presidency with no foreign policy experience and few settled or even articulated views on national security. His multi-volume autobiography is noteworthy for its lack of anything resembling foreign policy substance.
Instead, as President he seems to have simply absorbed the world view of the US's great institutions of state, in particular the State Department and the Pentagon. In general this is not bad, as these institutions are generally reservoirs of expertise.
It also has led to Obama adopting almost exactly the foreign and national security policies of Bush's second administration. In the second Bush administration, with Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, the State Department's world view shaped the administration's actions.
The same is true for Obama, even if, through his vast panoply of special envoys and the beefing up of the National Security Council, he has continued the process of concentrating ever more direct power in the White House.
But on policy substance, Obama is an almost eerie replica of Bush's second term. In response to the Korean nuclear crisis, Obama is begging China to allow some sanctions through the UN Security Council, reassuring Japan and South Korea of the US military commitment, and trying to appear calm, all as Bush and Rice would have.
On Iraq, Obama is withdrawing on a slower timetable than he promised and one approved by his Republican rival, John McCain, with plenty of caveats allowing course correction.
On Afghanistan, Obama is surging with more than 20,00 additional US troops. Meanwhile the US predator drones are still flying and still firing missiles at al-Qa'ida and Taliban targets, including in Pakistan, wherever possible. On Pakistan, Obama is pleading with Congress to authorise billions of dollars in new aid for a corrupt and hopeless government because the alternative is Islamist extremists, exactly as Bush did.
On Guantanamo Bay, Obama has not yet closed the prison camp. He says he will try to within a year. He also says some inmates will be detained indefinitely without trial because of the risks they pose, while others will be tried in military commissions, not civilian courts. He has not flung open Guantanamo's doors, and rendition continues.
On Israel, Obama's support for Israel's security and its special relationship with the US is every bit as strong as Bush's. His promotion of the peace process, and his criticism of some aspects of Israeli West Bank settlement policy, are the same as Rice's and follow precisely from the Bush-initiated Annapolis process.
On Iran, Obama has indeed changed the tone, but not the substance, of the policy. He is pursuing dialogue to see if he can talk Iran out of its nuclear ambitions. This, in fact, is just what Bush and Rice were doing. Obama is even using exactly the same senior State Department official as Bush did to pursue this dialogue.
Iran is nonetheless one area where Obama's PR efforts may do some good. The dialogue with Iran will not work, but when crunch time comes the US will be in a better position for having made the effort.
Obama is even following Bush in taking a ridiculous amount of time to appoint an ambassador to Canberra.
In saying all this I am not criticising Obama (except for not appointing an envoy to Australia). Even the Left is slowly waking up to what a conventional and sensible President Obama mostly is on national security.
Even Maureen Dowd in The New York Times last week mocked Obama's national security policy as representing Dick Cheney's third term. Any president who earns that kind of abuse from Dowd is certainly doing a lot right.
At least for the past four years US foreign policy has been completely pragmatic, which is why Obama term I so far closely resembles Bush term II (which ought in honesty to lead to a re-evaluation of Bush II).
The sad reflection thereby arising, however, is that Bush had absolutely no success in stopping North Korea's progress along the nuclear path. The only real success in halting Pyongyang's nuclear proliferation came in 2007 when Israel bombed a North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria.
Obama has all the charm. Kim, demented, twisted, weird and evil, certainly has the will.
-
CCP's post moved to here:
=====================
I don't get the previous post. Is he critical of BO, Bush, BO because he is too much like Bush, Bo is too naive, or what?
He is all over the place. I have no idea what his point is or what his conclusion is.
Here is another one who sounds mixed up but states BO is while on the surface similar to Bush's it is at its heart diametrically opposed.
It appears to me that he is saying that it is tranformational in a positive way. Yet one gets the feeling that these people really are holding back because they are not sure that the cuddly adorable we are all the world we are one rhetoric, which is right out of a 1960s pepsi commercial, is going to work.
IN any case my opinion is that BO is selling the US down the river. Sure, he may be popular around the world - he is giving our soveriegnty to them. So what's for them not to like:
***Obama's Foreign Policy Isn't Bush Part 2
by Peter Scoblic
Peter Scoblic is the executive editor of The New Republic and the author of U.S. vs. Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror.
NPR.org, March 25, 2009 · With his bold budget and ambitious plans for health care, no one seems to think that Barack Obama's domestic agenda is anything like George W. Bush's. But many commentators seem to think that when it comes to foreign policy, the new president is just like the old.
Foreign Policy magazine, for example, ran a piece titled "The Making Of George W. Obama." And in the Washington Post, a former John McCain adviser wrote that the "pretense" of change has required "some sleight of hand."
Sure, there are some similarities: Obama hasn't immediately withdrawn troops from Iraq, and he's continuing Predator strikes against Pakistani militants. But his worldview is diametrically opposed to Bush's. And if the last eight years are any guide, that difference will be incredibly important.
At the most basic level, President Bush and the conservatives around him believed that the world was divided into good and evil. They certainly weren't the first to do so. The early colonists proclaimed America a holy refuge from the evils of Europe. And when Thomas Jefferson famously spoke against "entangling alliances," he too was dividing the world into two categories: "us" and "them."
That attitude worked in the 1800s, but in the 20th century, as our security became intertwined with that of other countries, those kinds of binary distinctions lost power. That's why isolationism fell out of fashion. That's why Woodrow Wilson and FDR spoke of a community of nations. And with the invention of nuclear weapons, our very existence became dependent not simply on our ability to wage war against our enemies, but on our ability to cooperate with them.
Yet conservatives resisted history's push toward globalism. They saw the Cold War as a quasi-religious struggle. So they rejected coexistence with communism, negotiation with Moscow and containment of the Soviet Union, because each of these represented accommodation with "evil."
Even after the Cold War ended and transnational threats — like terrorism, disease and proliferation — became paramount, conservatives clung to that vision. In 2000, Bush said, "When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world. And we knew exactly who the 'they' were. It was us vs. them, and it was clear who 'them' was. Today we're not so sure who the 'they' are, but we know they're there."
In office, he put that attitude into practice. He derided diplomacy while emphasizing military action, which didn't require cooperation with other countries. Rejecting negotiation, containment and coexistence with the "axis of evil," Bush invaded Iraq while refusing to engage North Korea and Iran despite their accelerating nuclear programs. The results were disastrous.
Obama's approach is strikingly different. Last month, he said: "In words and deeds, we are showing the world that a new era of engagement has begun. For we know that America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, but the world cannot meet them without America."
True, this approach is still developing. But, in and of itself, Obama's dismissal of us vs. them ideology is a crucial transformation in U.S. foreign policy. The only way you can argue it won't matter in the future is to completely ignore the past.
Peter Scoblic is the executive editor of The New Republic and the author of U.S. vs. Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror.****
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/05/30/administration-now-north-korea-is-a-threat-again/
Administration: Now North Korea is a threat again
POSTED AT 12:04 PM ON MAY 30, 2009 BY ED MORRISSEY
Sometimes, we need a scorecard to keep up with the Obama administration’s positions on foreign policy and national security. The latest case of whiplash comes from the ping-pong position shifts on North Korea. When Pyongyang tested a long-range missile in April, Barack Obama called the DPRK a “regional threat” to security. Last weekend, he upgraded North Korea to a threat to global peace. Wednesday, though, Obama’s national security adviser James Jones dismissed Kim Jong-Il almost entirely, claiming that he poses no imminent threat to the US.
Today, Defense Secretary William Robert Gates goes back to Square One (via Flopping Aces):
The United States will not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday at an international conference. …
His comments came amid growing concern across the globe over North Korea’s latest nuclear test and test-firings of short-range missiles.
On Friday, two Defense Department officials said the latest U.S. satellite imagery has spotted “vehicle activity” at a North Korean ballistic missile facility.
“North Korea’s nuclear program and actions constitute a threat to regional peace and security. We unequivocally reaffirm our commitment to the defense of our allies in the region,” Gates said in Singapore.
Gates sounded a lot less concerned on Thursday:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, en route to an annual security summit in Singapore Friday, signaled as much, saying North Korea’s actions so far do not warrant sending more US troops to the region.
“I don’t think that anybody in the [Obama] administration thinks there is a crisis,” Mr. Gates told reporters aboard his military jet early Friday morning, still Thursday night in Washington.
Anyone playing Pyongyang Bingo should note that the Obama administration has covered almost all of the positions on the card.
-
Not 24 hours after North Korea's nuclear test last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a statement insisting "we don't have any cooperation [with North Korea] in this field." The lady doth protest too much.
When it comes to nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, history offers two hard lessons. First, nearly every nuclear power has been a secret sharer of nuclear technology. Second, every action creates an equal and opposite reaction -- a Newtonian law of proliferation that is only broken with the intercession of an overwhelming outside force.
On the first point, it's worth recalling that every nuclear-weapons state got that way with the help of foreign friends. The American bomb was conceived by European scientists and built in a consortium with Britain and Canada. The Soviets got their bomb thanks largely to atomic spies, particularly Germany's Klaus Fuchs. The Chinese nuclear program got its start with Soviet help.
David Klein
Britain gave France the secret of the hydrogen bomb, hoping French President Charles de Gaulle would return the favor by admitting the U.K. into the European Economic Community. (He Gallicly refused.) France shared key nuclear technology with Israel and then with Iraq. South Africa got its bombs (since dismantled) with Israeli help. India made illegal use of plutonium from a U.S.-Canadian reactor to build its first bomb. The Chinese lent the design of one of their early atomic bombs to Pakistan, which then gave it to Libya, North Korea and probably Iran.
Now it's Pyongyang's turn to be the link in the nuclear daisy chain. Its ties to Syria were exposed by an Israeli airstrike in 2007. As for Iran, its military and R&D links to the North go back more than 20 years, when Iran purchased 100 Scud-B missiles for use in the Iran-Iraq war.
Since then, Iranians have reportedly been present at a succession of North Korean missile tests. North Korea also seems to have off-shored its missile testing to Iran after it declared a "moratorium" on its own tests in the late 1990s.
In a 2008 paper published by the Korea Economic Institute, Dr. Christina Lin of Jane's Information Group noted that "Increased visits to Iran by DPRK [North Korea] nuclear specialists in 2003 reportedly led to a DPRK-Iran agreement for the DPRK to either initiate or accelerate work with Iranians to develop nuclear warheads that could be fitted on the DPRK No-dong missiles that the DPRK and Iran were jointly developing. Thus, despite the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran in 2003 had halted weaponization of its nuclear program, this was the time that Iran outsourced to the DPRK for proxy development of nuclear warheads."
Another noteworthy detail: According to a 2003 report in the L.A. Times, "So many North Koreans are working on nuclear and missile projects in Iran that a resort on the Caspian coast is set aside for their exclusive use."
Now the North seems to be gearing up for yet another test of its long-range Taepodong missile, and it's a safe bet Iranians will again be on the receiving end of the flight data. Nothing prevents them from sharing nuclear-weapons material or data, either, and the thought occurs that the North's second bomb test last week might also have been Iran's first. If so, the only thing between Iran and a bomb is a long-range cargo plane.
Which brings us to our second nuclear lesson. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has lately been in Asia taking a tough rhetorical line on the North's nuclear activities. But it's hard to deliver the message credibly after Mr. Gates rejected suggestions that the U.S. shoot down the Taepodong just prior to its April test, or when the U.S. flubbed the diplomacy at the U.N. So other countries will have to draw their own conclusions.
One such country is Japan. In 2002, Ichiro Ozawa, then the leader of the country's Liberal Party, told Chinese leaders that "If Japan desires, it can possess thousands of nuclear warheads. Japan has enough plutonium in use at its nuclear plants for three to four thousand. . . . If that should happen, we wouldn't lose to China in terms of military strength."
This wasn't idle chatter. As Christopher Hughes notes in his new book, "Japan's Remilitarization," "The nuclear option is gaining greater credence in Japan because of growing concerns over the basic strategic conditions that have allowed for nuclear restraint in the past. . . . Japanese analysts have questioned whether the U.S. would really risk Los Angeles for Tokyo in a nuclear confrontation with North Korea."
There are still good reasons why Japan would not want to go nuclear: Above all, it doesn't want to simultaneously antagonize China and the U.S. But the U.S. has even better reasons not to want to tempt Japan in that direction. Transparently feckless and time-consuming U.S. diplomacy with North Korea is one such temptation. Refusing to modernize our degraded stockpile of nuclear weapons while seeking radical cuts in the overall arsenal through a deal with Russia is another.
This, however, is the course the Obama administration has set for itself. Allies and enemies alike will draw their own conclusions.
-
In his speech about Iran's rigth to nuclear technology he has to add this at the end. He simply cannot resist beratin the US:
Obama added that there is a danger "when the United States, or any country, thinks that we can simply impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture."
Do other people notice the incredible hypocrisy of this guy downing the US for imposing values while at the same time he has imposed more values, more of his agenda than any President in history on his electorate?
You know what the problem with him similar to Clinton - is the *deceit*, the deception, the down right lies.
The Democrats have made this into a an art form in US politics over the last two decades.
I can only imigane the speech he will give in Egypt this week.
-
CCP correctly notes the berating of the US in glibness speeches. I would add the hypocricy of acknowledging Iran's need for nuclear power generation while denying ours.
-
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 3, 2009
During a telephone interview Tuesday with President Obama about his speech to Arabs and Muslims in Cairo on Thursday, I got to tell the president my favorite Middle East joke. It gave him a good laugh. It goes like this:
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
There is this very pious Jew named Goldberg who always dreamed of winning the lottery. Every Sabbath, he’d go to synagogue and pray: “God, I have been such a pious Jew all my life. What would be so bad if I won the lottery?” But the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win. Week after week, Goldberg would pray to win the lottery, but the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win. Finally, one Sabbath, Goldberg wails to the heavens and says: “God, I have been so pious for so long, what do I have to do to win the lottery?”
And the heavens parted and the voice of God came down: “Goldberg, give me a chance! Buy a ticket!”
I told the president that joke because in reading the Arab and Israeli press this week, everyone seemed to be telling him what he needed to do and say in Cairo, but nobody was indicating how they were going to step up and do something different. Everyone wants peace, but nobody wants to buy a ticket.
“We have a joke around the White House,” the president said. “We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.”
A key part of his message, he said, will be: “Stop saying one thing behind closed doors and saying something else publicly.” He then explained: “There are a lot of Arab countries more concerned about Iran developing a nuclear weapon than the ‘threat’ from Israel, but won’t admit it.” There are a lot of Israelis, “who recognize that their current path is unsustainable, and they need to make some tough choices on settlements to achieve a two-state solution — that is in their long-term interest — but not enough folks are willing to recognize that publicly.”
There are a lot of Palestinians who “recognize that the constant incitement and negative rhetoric with respect to Israel” has not delivered a single “benefit to their people and had they taken a more constructive approach and sought the moral high ground” they would be much better off today — but they won’t say it aloud.
“There are a lot of Arab states that have not been particularly helpful to the Palestinian cause beyond a bunch of demagoguery,” and when it comes to “ponying up” money to actually help the Palestinian people, they are “not forthcoming.”
When it comes to dealing with the Middle East, the president noted, “there is a Kabuki dance going on constantly. That is what I would like to see broken down. I am going to be holding up a mirror and saying: ‘Here is the situation, and the U.S. is prepared to work with all of you to deal with these problems. But we can’t impose a solution. You are all going to have to make some tough decisions.’ Leaders have to lead, and, hopefully, they will get supported by their people.”
It was clear from the 20-minute conversation that the president has no illusions that one speech will make lambs lie down with lions. Rather, he sees it as part of his broader diplomatic approach that says: If you go right into peoples’ living rooms, don’t be afraid to hold up a mirror to everything they are doing, but also engage them in a way that says ‘I know and respect who you are.’ You end up — if nothing else — creating a little more space for U.S. diplomacy. And you never know when that can help.
“As somebody who ordered an additional 17,000 troops into Afghanistan,” said Mr. Obama, “you would be hard pressed to suggest that what we are doing is not backed up by hard power. I discount a lot of that criticism. What I do believe is that if we are engaged in speaking directly to the Arab street, and they are persuaded that we are operating in a straightforward manner, then, at the margins, both they and their leadership are more inclined and able to work with us.”
Similarly, the president said that if he is asking German or French leaders to help more in Afghanistan or Pakistan, “it doesn’t hurt if I have credibility with the German and French people. They will still be constrained with budgets and internal politics, but it makes it easier.”
Part of America’s “battle against terrorist extremists involves changing the hearts and minds of the people they recruit from,” he added. “And if there are a bunch of 22- and 25-year-old men and women in Cairo or in Lahore who listen to a speech by me or other Americans and say: ‘I don’t agree with everything they are saying, but they seem to know who I am or they seem to want to promote economic development or tolerance or inclusiveness,’ then they are maybe a little less likely to be tempted by a terrorist recruiter.”
I think that’s right. An Egyptian friend remarked to me: Do not underestimate what seeds can get planted when American leaders don’t just propagate their values, but visibly live them. Mr. Obama will be speaking at Cairo University. When young Arabs and Muslims see an American president who looks like them, has a name like theirs, has Muslims in his family and comes into their world and speaks the truth, it will be empowering and disturbing at the same time. People will be asking: “Why is this guy who looks like everyone on the street here the head of the free world and we can’t even touch freedom?” You never know where that goes.
-
Second post of the AM
By PAUL WOLFOWITZ
President Barack Obama faces great challenges when he speaks to the Muslim world tomorrow from Cairo. He must counter some of the myths and outright falsehoods about the United States that are commonly believed in many parts of the Muslim world, and he needs to present his audience with some inconvenient truths. But he also has an opportunity, based in no small part on his own remarkable career, to make the case that the political principles and values that are sometimes mistakenly labeled as "Western" are appropriate for the Muslim world.
The challenge of addressing the entire Muslim world in a single speech can be appreciated if one imagines what the reaction would be if some other world leader attempted to speak to the "Christian world," with all of its diversity. For example, although Islam is the state religion in most countries with Muslim majorities, there are a number -- including Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world -- where it is not. Moreover, some countries have large non-Muslim minorities. And the second largest Muslim population in the world lives as a minority in India. There is an enormous variety of views among Muslims around the world on everything from religion to politics to family values.
Although there are many expectations for this speech, one that Mr. Obama hopefully will disappoint is the expectation that he will walk away from what President George W. Bush called "the freedom agenda." That would be a great mistake for the U.S. and for the Muslim world.
Some observers have viewed the choice of Egypt as the venue for this important speech as a deliberate distancing from that idea. Egypt is an important country and the largest in the Arab world. But it is not the largest country in the Muslim world, or the most tolerant, or the freest, or the most democratic, or the most developed, or the most prosperous. The president should make clear that his decision to speak in Cairo does not mean he is indifferent to how the Egyptian government treats its own people, despite the importance of Egypt in the Arab-Israeli peace process and as an ally in confronting Iran.
The president said correctly in an NPR interview on Monday that "part of being a good friend is being honest," and that we need to be honest with Israel about "the fact that the current direction, the current trajectory, in the region is profoundly negative, not only for Israeli interests but also U.S. interests." The president also needs to be honest with the Muslim world. That means addressing the causes of the poverty and tyranny which are so pervasive that they create a widespread belief the U.S. is at best indifferent -- and at worst actively complicit -- in maintaining those conditions in order to deny Muslims their rightful place in the world.
Mr. Obama's own remarkable career is living testimony to the strengths of America's open society and free institutions. Most Muslims recognize his achievement in becoming the leader of a country that, despite our problems, is still admired and envied for its prosperity and freedom. At the same time, they recognize that no one of comparable background could become the leader of any of their own countries. That empowers Mr. Obama to argue persuasively that the institutions and practices that have enabled the U.S. to change so much over the course of two centuries can provide the key for their progress as well.
Genuine democracy is a matter of making government accountable and transparent, not only through elections but through many other means as well, including a free press. It means protecting the rights of all citizens to develop their full potential, both for their own prosperity and for the society as a whole, by protecting equal rights under the law. That includes the right of private property, which is recognized clearly in Islam. In speaking to the Muslim world, it is particularly important for the president to emphasize the importance of protecting the rights of women and those of minorities -- subjects on which he can be particularly eloquent and persuasive.
The denial of equal rights to women is unjust. It hurts society as a whole when half the population is prevented from achieving its full potential. The countries in the Muslim world that have developed most successfully are those -- such as Indonesia, Turkey and Malaysia -- where women have been able to play a substantial role. Those same countries have also benefited enormously from giving scope to Christian and Jewish minorities to prosper, although the record is imperfect. Turkey's Jewish minority found refuge there 500 years ago from the Spanish Inquisition. In those days, when Islamic civilization was the most advanced in the world, it was also one of the most tolerant.
Unfortunately, today's trend is in the wrong direction in much of the Muslim world. Church burnings and other intolerant acts are increasing. As a member of a minority himself, Mr. Obama is strongly positioned to speak out against that trend.
More generally, the president could counter the belief that the U.S. is indifferent to the fate of the world's Muslims or, worse, that we demonize Islam. He could remind his listeners of the many occasions in the past 20 years when the U.S. put its men and women in harm's way -- in Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, not to mention Afghanistan and Iraq -- to assist people suffering from tyranny or famine who happened to be Muslims.
He could tell them of the deep respect that Americans have for religious belief in general and for Islam as one of the world's great religions. He could reiterate our understanding that the actions of extremists do not represent the majority of Muslims, as his predecessors emphasized repeatedly.
Hopefully, however, the president will not repeat what he said to Al-Arabiyah television in January about going back to "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago." Throughout the Muslim world that was interpreted as a return to a time when, as President Bush said, the U.S. preferred stability to freedom in the Middle East and ended up with neither.
The president should make clear that the U.S. does not believe that democracy can be imposed by force. Nor should he suggest that stability is unimportant. Free institutions cannot be expected to develop overnight, and certainly not in Egypt. But particularly in Egypt it is appropriate to emphasize that true stability requires giving that country's persecuted liberal democrats the space to begin growing free institutions, rather than leaving the field entirely to extremists who organize effectively in secret.
One of those persecuted Egyptian liberals, Ayman Nour, recently asked whether Mr. Obama will "confirm his commitment to democracy, or will he appease dictators and aggressors?" One single speech cannot definitively answer that question but hopefully, tomorrow in Cairo, Ayman Nour will be pleased with Barack Obama's words.
Mr. Wolfowitz, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has served as deputy U.S. secretary of defense and U.S. ambassador to Indonesia.
-
Geopolitical Diary: Obama's Outreach to the Muslim World
June 3, 2009
U.S. President Barack Obama embarked late Tuesday on a key trip that includes visits to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The stopover in Riyadh was a late addition to his original itinerary, but Cairo — where Obama will deliver a much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world on June 4 — remains the main event.
The speech is part of a diplomacy initiative by Obama, with the stated objective of improving relations between the United States and the Islamic world. The campaign began with his inaugural address, in which Obama called for a new beginning with the Muslim world and relations based on mutual respect. That was followed by an interview with Saudi-owned satellite channel al-Arabiya (his first with a foreign news organization after becoming president), a message to Iran on the occasion of the Iranian New Year, and his speech to the Turkish parliament.
Reaching out to a global religious community in such a manner is a very unorthodox form of diplomacy. International relations usually concerns bilateral and multilateral dealings between governments of nation-states. But in the case of the U.S. relationship with the Islamic world, Obama is going beyond the standard approach to diplomacy and creating a new channel by reaching out directly to the Muslim masses, which harbor serious grievances over U.S. foreign policy, especially in light of the post-9/11 U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While many in Muslim countries take issue with Washington, they are often equally (if not more) opposed to their own governments. In fact, these two views are linked together in the criticism that Washington continues to support authoritarian regimes that have long suppressed citizens. The Obama administration, while it seeks to engage Muslim populations, obviously is not about to withdraw from its relationships with the governments that rule over them.
In this diplomacy initiative, Obama will have to find a balance between the states and their citizens in order to avoid further entanglement in what, to a great degree, is an internal struggle within the Muslim world. This is going to be extremely difficult: The masses seek change to the political status quo, which, from Washington’s point of view, translates into instability that might threaten U.S. interests. In fact, the likely purpose behind the president’s unconventional initiative is to offer what little assistance he can, in the form of an improved U.S. image, to governments in the Muslim world that find themselves increasingly estranged from the societies they govern.
Many within the target audience already are skeptical about the potential for change in U.S. policy — and rightfully so. The foreign policy of any country is a function of its objective geopolitical realities, which do not shift much with a change in leadership. Indeed, his rhetoric notwithstanding, Obama’s actual policies are very much a continuation of those of his predecessor.
While the administration says it is reaching out to the Muslim world, the choice of Cairo as the venue clearly indicates that the focus is on the largely Arab Middle East and, by extension, South Asia. There are many who argue that, while a major change in policy naturally cannot be expected, this should not discount the possibility of modest adjustments. But within the Middle East, the administration is caught within a complex constellation of relationships that include rival Arab states, Iran, Israel and Turkey. Any meaningful shift likely would upset the balance in the region. The latest example of this is the concern among Arab states and the Israelis over U.S. efforts to engage Iran diplomatically. In other words, there isn’t much room to maneuver with policy adjustments.
Ultimately, what this means is that the Muslim masses are in for a disappointment when it becomes clear that the Obama administration is not going to overhaul U.S. foreign policy. But this will not pose much of a problem for Obama. The fond feelings of the Muslim world might be nice to claim, but ultimately, he does not need their support. In the end, it will be the American people, not the rest of the world, who will issue the final referendum on his performance as president.
-
One benefit of the Obama Presidency is that it is validating much of George W. Bush's security agenda and foreign policy merely by dint of autobiographical rebranding. That was clear enough yesterday in Cairo, where President Obama advertised "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world." But what he mostly offered were artfully repackaged versions of themes President Bush sounded with his freedom agenda. We mean that as a compliment, albeit with a couple of large caveats.
So there was Mr. Obama, noting that rights such as "freedom to live as you choose" and "the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed" were "not just American ideas, they are human rights." There he was insisting that "freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together," and citing Malaysia and Dubai as economic models for other Muslim countries while promising to host a summit on entrepreneurship.
There he was too, in Laura Bush-mode, talking about the need to expand opportunities for Muslim women, particularly in education. "I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles," he said. "But it should be their choice."
Mr. Obama also offered a robust defense of the war in Afghanistan, calling it "a war of necessity" and promising that "America's commitment will not weaken." That's an important note to sound when Mr. Obama's left flank and some Congressional Democrats are urging an exit strategy from that supposed quagmire. On Iraq, he acknowledged that "the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein" and pledged the U.S. to the "dual responsibility" of leaving Iraq while helping the country "forge a better future." The timeline he reiterated for U.S. withdrawal is the one Mr. Bush negotiated last year.
The President even went one better than his predecessor, with a series of implicit rebukes to much of the Muslim world. There would have been no need for him to specify that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis if Holocaust denial weren't rampant in the Middle East, including Egypt, just as there would have been no need to name al Qaeda as the perpetrator of 9/11 if that fact were not also commonly denied throughout the Muslim world. There also would have been no need to insist that "the Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems," if that were not the modus operandi of most Arab governments.
Mr. Obama also noted that "among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of another's," a recognition of the supremacist strain in Islamist thinking. He also included a pointed defense of democracy, including "the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed" and "confidence in the rule of law." We doubt the point was lost on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, now in his 29th year in office. All of this will do some good if it leads to broader acceptance among Muslims of the principles of Mr. Bush's freedom agenda without the taint of its author's name.
As for the caveats, Mr. Obama missed a chance to remind his audience that no country has done more than the U.S. to liberate Muslims from oppression -- in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and above all in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than 50 million people were freed by American arms from two of the most extreme tyrannies in modern history. His insistence on calling Iraq a "war of choice" is a needless insult to Mr. Bush that diminishes the cause for which more than 4,000 Americans have died.
He also couldn't resist his by now familiar moral self-indulgence by asserting that he has "unequivocally prohibited the use of torture" and ordered Guantanamo closed. Aside from the fact that the U.S. wasn't torturing anyone before Mr. Obama came into office, his Arab hosts can see through his claims. They know the Obama Administration is "rendering" al Qaeda detainees to other countries, some of them Arab, where their rights and well-being are far less secure than at Gitmo.
The President also stooped to easy, but false, moral equivalence, most egregiously in comparing the U.S. role in an Iranian coup during the Cold War with revolutionary Iran's 30-year hostility toward the U.S. He also compared Israel's right to exist with Palestinian statehood. But while denouncing Israeli settlements was an easy applause line, removal of those settlements will do nothing to ease Israeli-Palestinian tensions if the result is similar to what happened when Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza. We too favor a two-state solution -- as did President Bush -- but that solution depends on Palestinians showing the capacity to build domestic institutions that reject and punish terror against other Palestinians and their neighbors.
Hanging over all of this is the question of Iran. In his formal remarks, Mr. Obama promised only diplomacy without preconditions and warned about a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Yet surely Iran was at the top of his agenda in private with Mr. Mubarak and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, both of whom would quietly exult if the U.S. removed that regional threat. They were no doubt trying to assess if Mr. Obama is serious about stopping Tehran, or if he is the second coming of Jimmy Carter.
It is in those conversations, and in the hard calls the President will soon have to make, that his Middle East policy will stand or fall
-
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476677973008511.html
The Kyrgyz say 'nyet' to Obama
Not to deny President Obama's diplomatic charms, but they seem lost on the world's harder cases. The latest is Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian nation of five million that has been home to a U.S. air base at Manas, a critical transit center to supply troops in Afghanistan.
In February, hours after securing $2 billion in aid from Russia, Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev announced -- in Moscow no less -- that the U.S. will have to leave by August 18. Mr. Obama this week sent a confidential letter to the Kyrgyz leader implicitly asking him to reconsider by "expressing his gratitude to the nation and government of Kyrgyzstan for its efforts to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and in the fight against international terrorism and narcotics trafficking," according to a summary released by the Kyrgyz government yesterday.
The Kyrgyz quickly shot those hopes down. "The decision to abolish the agreement on the military air base, Manas, has been made, and there is no turning back from this," Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev told a Kyrgyz news agency.
Russian fingerprints are all over this U.S. setback. Like many other authoritarians, Vladimir Putin's regime in Moscow derives its legitimacy in part from anti-Americanism. No "restart" in relations promised by Mr. Obama can easily change that. And for Russia, in its neighborhood, the policy consequence is to push America out and prop up local dictators.
That's true whether the U.S. President is named Obama or Bush. Perhaps this young Administration can learn with experience that goodwill alone gets one only so far in the real world.
---------------------
There is another more in-depth article discussing Putin's craft here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124467909278604353.html
-
Middle East
Jun 30, 2009
Obama creates a deadly power vacuum
By Spengler
There's a joke about a man who tells a psychiatrist, "Everybody hates me," to which the psychiatrist responds, "That's ridiculous - everyone doesn't know you, yet." Which brings me to Barack Obama: one of the best-informed people in the American security establishment told me the other day that the president is a "Manchurian Candidate".
That can't be true - Manchuria isn't in the business of brainwashing prospective presidential candidates any more. There's no one left to betray America to. Obama is creating a
strategic void in which no major power will dominate, and every minor power must fend for itself. The outcome is incalculably hard to analyze and terrifying to consider.
Obama doesn't want to betray the United States; he only wants to empower America's enemies. Forcing Israel to abandon its strategic buffer (the so-called settlements) was supposed to placate Iran, so that Iran would help America stabilize Iraq, where its influence looms large over the Shi'ite majority.
America also sought Iran's help in suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Obama's imagination, a Sunni Arab coalition - empowered by Washington's turn against Israel - would encircle Iran and dissuade it from acquiring nuclear weapons, while an entirely separate Shi'ite coalition with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would suppress the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was the worst-designed scheme concocted by a Western strategist since Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the bridges at Arnhem in 1944, and it has blown up in Obama's face.
Iran already has made clear that casting America's enemies in the leading role of an American operation has a defect, namely that America's enemies rather would lose on their own terms than win on America's terms. Iran's verbal war with the American president over the violent suppression of election-fraud protests leaves Washington with no policy at all. The premise of Obama's policy was that progress on the Palestinian issue would empower a Sunni coalition. As the president said May 18:
If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians - between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the potential Iranian threat.
Israel's supporters remonstrated in vain. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a prominent Obama supporter, wrote, "If there is to be any linkage - and I do not believe there should be - it goes the other way: it will be much easier for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank if Iran does not have a nuclear umbrella under which it can continue to encourage Hamas and Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israeli civilians."
No matter: America made clear that it had annulled the George W Bush administration's promise that a final settlement would allow most of Israel's 500,000 "settlers" to keep their homes, in order to launch the fantasy ship of Iranian cooperation with America.
That policy now is in ruins, and Washington has no plan B. David Axelrod, Obama's top political advisor, told television interviewers on January 28 that Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who spent the last week denouncing the United States, "Did not have final say" over Iran's foreign policy and that America still wanted to negotiate with Iran. This sounds idiotic, but the White House really has painted itself into a corner. The trouble is that Obama has promised to withdraw American forces from Iraq, and Iran has sufficient influence in Shi'ite-majority Iraq to cause continuous upheaval, perhaps even to eventually win control of the country.
By a fateful coincidence, American troops are scheduled to leave Iraq's urban centers on June 30. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein left Iraq open to Iranian destabilization; that is why the elder George Bush left the Iraqi dictator in power in 1990.
Offering Iran a seat at the table in exchange for setting a limit to its foreign ambitions - in Lebanon and Gaza as well as Iraq - seemed to make sense on paper. But the entity that calls itself revolutionary Islam is not made of paper, but of flesh and blood. It is in danger of internal collapse and can only assert its authority by expanding its influence as aggressively as it can.
After the election disaster, Iran's revolutionary leadership urgently needs to demonstrate its credibility. Israel now can say, "A country that murders its own citizens will have no compunction about massacring its enemies," and attack Iran's nuclear capacity with fewer consequences than would have been imaginable in May. And if an Israeli strike were to succeed, or appear successful to the world, the resulting humiliation might be fatal to the regime.
Israel may not be Tehran's worst nightmare. Iraq's Sunnis are testing the resolve of the weakened mullahs. The suicide bombing that killed 73 people at a Shi'ite mosque in Kirkuk on June 20 and a second bombing that killed another 72 Shi'ites in Baghdad's Sadr City slum most likely reflect Sunni perceptions that a weakened Tehran will provide less support for Iraqi Shi'ites. Although Shi'ites comprise more than three-fifths of Iraq's population, Sunnis provided the entire military leadership and are better organized on the ground. America's hopes of enlisting Iran to provide cover for its withdrawal from the cities of Iraq seem delusional.
What move on the chessboard might Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei venture to pre-empt an Israeli air raid against the nuclear facilities? Iran has the rocket launchers of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and terrorist sleeper cells throughout the world. Iran might seek to pre-empt what it anticipates to be the next move from Israel by demonstrating its capacity to inflict injury on Israel or on Jewish targets elsewhere. That would require careful judgment, for a heavy handed action could provide a pretext for even more serious action by the Israelis and others. The same sort of consideration applies to Iranian support for Pakistan Shi'ites, for Hezbollah, and other vehicles of Iran's program of imperial expansion.
The Obama administration has put itself in a peculiar bind. It has demanded that the Pakistani army suppress the Taliban, after Islamabad attempted a power-sharing agreement that left the Taliban in control of the Swat Valley. To root out the largely Pashtun Taliban, Pakistan's largely Punjabi army has driven a million people into refugee camps and leveled entire towns in the Swat Valley. Tens of thousands of refugees are now fleeing the Pakistani army in the South Waziristan tribal area. Punjabis killing Pashtuns is nothing new in the region, but the ferocity of the present effort does not augur well for an early end to the conflict.
While the Pakistan army holds nothing back in attacking the Taliban, American troops in Afghanistan have been told that they no longer can call in air strikes if civilians are likely to suffer. That will put American forces in the unfortunate position of the Pirates of Penzance, who exempted orphans. Once this became generally known, everyone they attempted to rob turned out to be an orphan.
The Taliban need only take a page from Hamas' book, and ensure that civilians are present wherever they operate. The US has made clear that it will not deal in civilian blood, the currency of warfare in that region since before the dawn of history. It will not be taken seriously in consequence.
What will the administration do now? As all its initiatives splatter against the hard realities of the region, it will probably do less and less, turning the less appetizing aspects of the fighting over to local allies and auxiliaries who do not share its squeamishness about shedding civilian blood. That is the most dangerous outcome of all, for America is the main stabilizing force in the region.
The prospect of civil wars raging simultaneously in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq is no longer improbable. The Israel-Palestine issue is linked to all of these through Iran, whose credibility depends on its ability to sustain such puppies of war as Hezbollah and Hamas. Whether or not the Israelis take the opportunity to strike Iran, the prospect of an Israeli strike will weigh on Iran's proxies in the region, and keep Israel's borders in condition of potential violence for the interim.
America's great good fortune is that no hostile superpower stands ready to benefit from its paralysis and confusion. When Soviet troops landed in Afghanistan in December 1979, America was in the grip of an economic crisis comparable to the present depression. American diplomats at the Tehran Embassy were still hostages to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The price of gold doubled from around $400 to $800 after the Russian invasion because most of the world thought that Russia would win the Cold War. If America lost its dominant superpower status in the West, the dollar no longer could serve as a global reserve currency. To the superpower goes the seigniorage, the state's premium for providing a currency.
By contrast, the gold price barely fluttered all through the present crisis. America remains the undisputed global superpower for the time being. America's creditors express consternation about its $1.8 trillion budget deficit and many trillions more of guarantees for the banking system, but there is nothing they can do about it for the time being but talk. That is how one should interpret a June 25 Reuters report that a "senior researcher with the ruling Communist Party" had urged China to shift some of its $2 trillion in reserves out of dollars and into gold.
Li Lianzhong, who heads the economic department of the Party's policy research office, said China should use more of its $1.95 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to buy energy and natural resource assets. Speaking at a foreign exchange and gold forum, Li also said that buying land in the United States was a better option for China than buying US Treasury securities.
"Should we buy gold or US Treasuries?" Li asked. "The US is printing dollars on a massive scale, and in view of that trend, according to the laws of economics, there is no doubt that the dollar will fall. So gold should be a better choice."
There is no suggestion that Li, even though he is a senior researcher, was enunciating an agreed party line.
The last thing China wants at the moment is to undercut the US dollar, for three reasons. First, as America's largest creditor, China has the most to lose from a dollar collapse. Second, Americans would buy fewer Chinese imports. And third, the collapse of the dollar would further erode America's will to fulfill its superpower function, and that is what China wants least of all.
America remains the indispensable outsider in Asia. No one likes the United States, but everyone dislikes the United States less than they dislike their neighbors. India need not worry about China's role in Pakistan, for example, because America mediates Indian-Pakistani relations, and America has no interest in a radical change to the status quo. Neither does China, for that matter, but India is less sure of that. China does not trust Japan for historical reasons that will not quickly fade, but need not worry about it because America is the guarantor of Japan's security. The Seventh Fleet is the most disliked - and nonetheless the most welcome - entity in Asia.
All of this may change drastically, quickly, and for the worse. Obama's policy reduces to empowering America's enemies in the hope that they will conform to American interests out of gratitude. Just the opposite result is likely to ensure: Iran, Pakistan and other regional powers are likely to take radical measures. Iran is threatened with a collapse of its Shi'ite program from Lebanon to Afghanistan, and Pakistan is threatened with a breakup into three or more states.
Obama has not betrayed the interests of the United States to any foreign power, but he has done the next worst thing, namely to create a void in the region by withdrawing American power. The result is likely to be a species of pandemonium that will prompt the leading players in the region to learn to live without the United States.
In his heart of hearts, Obama sees America as a force for evil in the world, apologizing for past American actions that did more good than harm. An example is America's sponsorship of the 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew the left-leaning government of Mohammed Mossadegh.
"In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government," the president offered in his Cairo address to Muslims on June 5. Although Iran's theocracy despises Mossadegh - official Iranian textbooks call him the "son of a feudal family of exploiters who worked for the cursed Shah, and betrayed Islam" - Iran's government continues to reproach America for its role in the coup. "With a coup they toppled the national government of Iran and replaced it with a harsh, unpopular and despotic regime," Ahmadinejad complained in a January 28 speech.
It is s a bit late to offer advice to Obama, but the worst thing America can do is to apologize. Instead, it should ask for the gratitude of the developing world. Weak countries become punching-bags in the proxy wars of empires. This was from the dawn of history until the fall of the last empire - the "evil" empire of Soviet communism.
The Soviets exploited anti-colonial movements from the 1917 Bolshevik coup until the collapse of the Afghanistan adventure in the late 1980s. Nationalists who tried to ride the Russian tiger ended up in its belly more often than on its back. Iran, Chile, Nicaragua, Angola and numerous other weak countries became the hapless battleground for the contest of covert operations between the Soviet Union and America - not to mention Vietnam and Korea.
The use of developing countries as proxy battlefields and their people as cannon fodder came to an end with the Cold War. As a result, the past 20 years have seen the fastest improvement in living standards ever in the global south, and a vast shift in wealth towards so-called developing countries.
By defeating Russia in the Cold War, America made it possible for governments in the global south to pursue their own interests free from the specter of Soviet subversion. And by countering Soviet subversion, America often averted much worse consequences.
Many deficiencies can be ascribed to the Shah of Iran, but a communist regime in the wake of a Mossadegh administration would have been indescribably worse. The septuagenarian Mossadegh had his own agenda, but he relied on the support of the communist Tudeh party. The US feared a Soviet invasion of Iran, and "the [Harry S] Truman administration was willing to consider a Soviet invasion of Iran as a casus belli, or the start of a global war", according to Francis J Gavin's 1999 article in The Journal of Cold War Studies.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with help from British intelligence helped the shah overthrow the left-leaning regime. But this was no minor colonial adventure, but a flashpoint with the potential to start a world war.
It is painful and humiliating for Iranians to recall the overthrow of a democratically elected government with American help. It would have been infinitely more humiliating to live under Soviet rule, like the soon-to-be-extinct victims of Soviet barbarism in Eastern Europe.
The same is true of Chile, where the brutal regime of General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973, with help from the CIA. Allende was surrounded by Cuban intelligence operations. As Wikipedia reports:
Shortly after the election of Salvador Allende in November 1970, the [Cuban Directorate of Intelligence - DI] worked extremely closely to strengthen Allende's increasingly precarious position. The Cuban DI station chief Luis Fernandez Ona even married Salvador Allende's daughter Beatrice, who later committed suicide in Cuba. The DI organized an international brigade that would organize and coordinate the actions of the thousands of the foreign leftists that had moved into Chile shortly after Allende's election. These individuals ranged from Cuban DI agents, Soviet, Czech and North Korean military instructors and arms suppliers, to hardline Spanish and Portuguese Communist Party members.
My Latin American friends who still mourn the victims of Pinochet's "night and fog" state terror will not like to hear this, but the several thousand people killed or tortured by the military government were collateral damage in the Cold War. Like Iran, Chile became the battleground of a Soviet-American proxy war. The same is true in Nicaragua. (Full disclosure: I advised Nicaragua's president Violeta Chamorro after she defeated the Cuban-backed Sandinistas in the 1990 elections; I did so with no tie to any government agency.)
Obama's continuing obsession with America's supposed misdeeds - deplorable but necessary actions in time of war - is consistent with his determination to erode America's influence in the most troubled parts of the world. By removing America as a referee, he will provoke more violence than the United States ever did. We are entering a very, very dangerous period as a result.
-
Missing Our Moment in Iran
Obama’s policy is a lose/lose proposition that will please neither side.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Last month, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest a rigged presidential election. Our president was extremely cautious in his initial criticism of the Iranian government’s fierce crackdown against the protestors. At first, President Obama said that the United States — given our history in Iran — should not be “meddling” in the country’s internal affairs.
Obama suggested that the leading opposition candidate, the reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi, might not be that different from the entrenched theocracy’s choice, the incumbent (and declared winner of the June election) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Finally, as both the crowds in the Iranian streets and the violence against them increased over the next several days, Obama conceded that he was “appalled” at the clerics’ repression.
In defense of the president’s hesitation, some of his supporters argued that our initial neutrality was aimed at not spoiling the administration’s earlier efforts at outreach to Iran’s Islamist regime. We were taking the realistic long view, they added, in which negotiations with the clerics might still curb Iran’s nuclear-weapon aspirations and their support for terrorism. As Obama’s U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, put it, the “legitimacy” of the regime was “not the critical issue in terms of our dealings with Iran.”
Perhaps Obama also wishes to avoid former President Bush’s muscular approach in the Middle East, which ended up in costly efforts to foster legitimate constitutional governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, after removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
Unfortunately, Obama’s policy is a lose/lose proposition that will please neither side in Iran. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, isn’t suddenly going to embrace the U.S. because of Obama’s more charismatic approach, much less stop subsidizing terrorists and developing a nuclear arsenal.
For over three decades, the Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations all reached out — both overtly and covertly — to the Iranian theocracy, with offers of normalizing relations, secret arms deals, back-channel meetings, and occasional apologies. But the clerics today are as anti-American as they were in 1979. And they’re still rounding up, killing, and torturing dissidents in the same manner that they used to consolidate power after the fall of the Shah.
In addition, our belated, tepid criticism of the repressive Iranian government may not translate into goodwill from Iranian advocates for freedom — given our painful silence in the early days of the demonstrations, when achieving global support was critical.
And what about other pro-democracy dissidents abroad — whether in Cuba, the Arab world, or Venezuela? Will they still trust that the U.S. supports their efforts to obtain a free society?
Meanwhile, authoritarians in China, North Korea, Russia, the Middle East, and South America may draw two unfair and unfortunate conclusions. One, the United States does not care much what other regimes do to their own people. Two, a new America will overlook almost anything in order just to get along with these authoritarians.
But is the U.S. at least consistent in its promises not to meddle?
Not all the time.
When Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in Israel, the Obama administration made its distaste clear. It also has tried to find ways to isolate Hamid Karzai’s elected government in Afghanistan — and was initially not happy about the prospects of its reelection.
Most recently, the U.S. condemned the Honduran military’s arrest of Pres. Manuel Zelaya. The nation’s supreme court had found his efforts to extend his presidential tenure in violation of its constitution, once Zelaya tried to finesse an illegal third term.
In other words, the U.S. pressures other nations as it pleases — though strangely now more to lean on friends than to criticize rivals and enemies.
In contrast, had President Obama voiced early, consistent, and sharp criticism of the Iranian crackdown, the theocracy would have worried that the president’s stature could have galvanized global boycotts and embargos to isolate the theocracy and aid the dissidents. And the reformers in the streets could have become even more confident with a trademark Obama “hope and change” endorsement.
Internal democratic change in Iran is the only peaceful solution to stopping an Iranian bomb, three decades of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, and a Middle East arms race. When thousands risked their lives for a better Iran, a better Middle East, and a better world, we, the land of the free, simply were not with them.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmY3ZTg4YjAyMTQ0M2Q2NDA5MTljOWFhOGVjMTNiZTE=
-
Geopolitical Diary: America's Indivisible Imperatives
July 2, 2009
Americans will celebrate the Fourth of July holiday on Saturday. For STRATFOR, this is a time to reflect on just how the world came to look the way it does today.
In the late 18th century, Britain was the most powerful country in the world for two reasons: first, it was an island, and second, the height of human technology at the time was deepwater navigation. Combining advancements in naval operations with the protection of the English Channel, Britain could focus all of its efforts on maritime-based imperial expansion, while its European peers were forced to fight for dominance on land. The result was a far-flung and remarkably lucrative empire with which no one could compete.
Eventually, Britain’s American colonies grew too large in land area, wealth and population to control from afar, and a revolution wrested them from the Crown’s control. Since that development, five core rules – what we call “geopolitical imperatives” — have determined the behavior of the colonies that became the United States.
The first imperative was to secure strategic depth for the new nation. One of the most successful tactics employed by the British during the American Revolutionary War was the coastal raid. Britain’s superior navy proved able not only to blockade the fledgling country’s coast, but also to move men and materiel up and down the coast much faster than the Americans could over land. That combination of economic and military disadvantages almost cost the nascent United States the revolution — and gravely threatened it again in the War of 1812, when the new country lost its capital for a short time. Thus, in its early years, the United States aggressively pushed inland to establish economic centers that were less exposed to naval power. By moving across the Appalachians, the United States opened up vast tracts of territory to absorb all the immigrants that Europe could supply.
The second U.S. imperative was to secure North America. Depth — particularly that acquired in the Louisiana Purchase — gave the United States insulation from the sea, but it also put the country into direct contact with land-based powers. This was partially resolved immediately after the War of 1812, when the United States and Canada forged agreements that would gradually loosen Canada’s ties to mother Britain.
But the much larger event was settled in Texas. During Texas’s battle for independence, the forces of Mexican general Santa Ana crossed north of the Chihuahuan Desert and sacked the Alamo. From there, they marched east to pursue retreating Texican forces in a series of battles that, at the time, the Mexicans seemed fated to win. Had Santa Ana succeeded in subduing the Texas rebellion, he would have been within reach of the very lightly defended New Orleans. (And after the agony of crossing the deserts and mountains of Chihuahua, this would have been a cakewalk.)
Santa Ana’s intent is lost to history, but if he had chosen to seize New Orleans, history would have turned out very differently. The Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Red and Tennessee River basins — all the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, in addition to that ceded by Britain to the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War — would have been held hostage by Mexican forces, which would have controlled the only point of sea access. As fate had it, Santa Ana did not make it that far; Texican forces defeated his army at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, achieving independence for Texas and pushing Mexican forces back through the desert. The United States quickly annexed Texas in the aftermath (1845), largely to secure New Orleans, and a mere year later prosecuted a war with Mexico to underscore the point. North America — or at least the really useful bits — belonged to the United States.
With North America largely secure from land invasion and coastal raiding, the third step for the United States was to gain control of the ocean approaches. This was accomplished in two phases.
First, the United States took over the Sandwich Islands (aka Hawaii), the only territory in the Pacific that lay within an easy sail of the West Coast, in 1898. That pretty much sealed up the Pacific.
The Atlantic — which contained European assets in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, Canada and South America — was more complicated. The United States seized Puerto Rico and Cuba from Spain in 1898. But the breaking point here did not occur until the early days of World War II, when the United States allowed the United Kingdom to borrow some mothballed destroyers in exchange for almost every naval base the British owned in the Western Hemisphere. What had been the world’s largest navy for three centuries was suddenly a nonpower in half the globe.
Once a nation controls its approaches, the next logical step — the fourth imperative — is to reach farther and control the oceans themselves. In this endeavor, the battles of World War II proved pivotal. The United States seized direct control of places like Micronesia in the Pacific, and the Azores and Iceland in the Atlantic. At the war’s conclusion, the United States’ containment strategy first and foremost included courting island and naval powers. Some, like Australia and Norway, proved to be new friends. The United Kingdom and Japan, onetime rivals, became regional lynchpins. But there was a deep commonality among these powers: They all controlled maritime chokepoints and were situated at or near the world’s major shipping lanes. Leveraged by U.S. naval power, their strategic locations ensured American dominance of the waves. In the years since, alliances with states like Singapore, Denmark and Taiwan have sealed the United States’ maritime dominance.
The only way to challenge a country that controls a continent-sized mass is to control an even bigger one. To prevent that from happening, the United States works to keep Eurasia divided. World Wars I and II both were fought in large part to prevent a single power from rising to dominance. After these wars, the United States developed a much more nuanced approach to its fifth imperative; rather than fighting battles directly, the Americans assisted states that were in a position to — and wanted to — resist local hegemons. The strategy most famous in this regard was containment of the Soviet Union — ringing a hostile power with a necklace of willing allies that feared the Soviets every bit as much as the Americans did. That strategy has been repeated with other powers ever since — backing Taiwan against China, Yugoslavia against the Soviet Union, Pakistan against India, Iraq against Iran, and more recently, Kuwait against Iraq.
These five strategic imperatives are not found anywhere in the Constitution or laws of the United States. But every one of the country’s 44 presidents, regardless of intention, has conformed to them, compelled by the inexorable logic of geography. In yesterday’s wars, under George W. Bush, U.S. forces stormed into Afghanistan and Iraq to preclude the formation of a unified, jihadist-inspired Muslim empire. In preparation for tomorrow’s conflict with a resurgent Russia, Barack Obama is attempting to recruit Poland and Turkey as active checks on Russian power. And the same geopolitical imperatives that drove these actions will shape American efforts into the future — just as they have since 1776.
-
NYT
U.S. Mulls Alternatives for Missile Shield Sign in to Recommend
by JUDY DEMPSEY and PETER BAKER
Published: August 28, 2009
BERLIN — The Obama administration has developed possible alternative plans for a missile defense shield that could drop hotly disputed sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, a move that would please Russia and Germany but sour relations with American allies in Eastern Europe.
Administration officials said they hoped to complete their months-long review of the planned antimissile system as early as next month, possibly in time for President Obama to present ideas to President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia at a meeting in New York during the annual opening at the General Assembly of the United Nations.
But they cautioned that no decisions had been made and that all options were still under discussion, including retaining the Polish and Czech sites first selected by President George W. Bush. The Obama review team plans to present a menu of options rather than a single recommendation to a committee of senior national security officials in the coming weeks. Only after that would the matter go to cabinet-rank officials and the president.
Among the alternatives are dropping either the Polish or Czech site, or both sites, and instead building launching pads or radar installations in Turkey or the Balkans, while developing land-based versions of the Aegis SM-3, a ship-based anti-missile system, officials said. The changes, they said, would be intended not to mollify Russia, but to adjust to what they see as an accelerating threat from shorter-range Iranian missiles.
People following the review, including anxious officials in Eastern Europe, said they thought that the administration was preparing to abandon the Polish and Czech sites. “It is clear that Eastern Europe is out of the epicenter of this American administration,” said Piotr Paszkowski, a spokesman for Poland’s foreign minister. “The missile defense system is now under review. The chances that it will be in Poland are 50-50.”
Dmitry O. Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, said Moscow anticipated news from Mr. Obama in September. “I hope that Medvedev will take some good result from this bilateral discussion in New York, and maybe in October we will live in a new world in Russian-American relations,” he said.
Administration spokesmen said it was premature to discuss what the review would conclude or when it would be finished. “Our review of our missile defense strategy is ongoing and has not reached completion yet,” said Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman.
The proposed system inherited by Mr. Obama envisioned stationing 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a sophisticated radar facility in the Czech Republic to defend against potential ballistic missile threats from Iran or other hostile nations. But Russia has long objected to what it sees as a threat in its own backyard and has insisted that the Obama administration abandon the plan as a sign that it is serious about improving relations.
Shifting an anti-missile system out of territory once dominated by Moscow might mollify Russian concerns without jettisoning the missile shield altogether. At the same time, it could set off criticism both at home and in Eastern Europe that Mr. Obama was caving in to Russian pressure.
Polish fears that the United States was having second thoughts were heightened after diplomats learned of a meeting last week in Huntsville, Ala., that included generals who oversee missile defense, including Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, head of the United States Strategic Command.
“What was revealing about such a high-level gathering was that the speakers did not discuss how and when the missile shield would be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic,” said Riki Ellison, chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a Washington-based lobbying group, who attended the meeting.
But administration officials rejected the assertion that a reformulated missile defense system would forsake Eastern European security. “We definitely are not abandoning our commitment to defend our European allies from a missile threat from Iran,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the review was not complete. “We are exploring options that will enhance the defense of our European allies.”
The cost of building the complexes in Poland and the Czech Republic could increase to more than $1 billion from $837 million, according to the Government Accountability Office, which published a report this month on preparations to deploy the system.
The cost estimates do not include support at the sites or the development, testing and procurement costs. The overall cost of establishing a modest ballistic missile system in Europe would exceed $4 billion through 2015, according to the G.A.O. report. Even at that, it said, “Congress does not have accurate information on the full investment required for ballistic missile defenses in Europe.”
The Bush administration strongly advocated a missile shield. Mr. Obama has been more skeptical, saying he will proceed only if it is financially and technically feasible. He has also told the Russians that the system would not be needed if they used their leverage to persuade Iran to drop its suspected nuclear weapons programs.
The discussions in Huntsville caused a stir among diplomats in Poland. Eastern European leaders worry that the Obama administration is playing down their security needs even though, they contend, Russia’s war with Georgia last year and increasing tension between Russia and Ukraine show the need for a strong American presence in the region.
“You can see that compared to the former Bush administration, the Obama administration is more interested in Russia, China and of course Afghanistan than Eastern Europe,” said Slawomir Debski, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw.
In Huntsville, General Cartwright made clear that the administration was focusing on the relevance, adaptability and affordability of any new programs, including missile defense, according to people who were at the meeting.
He also said that the United States had to take into account Russian sensitivities toward the missile shield for Eastern Europe.
Judy Dempsey reported from Berlin, and Peter Baker from Washington. Ellen Barry contributed reporting from Moscow.
-
Second post of the morning:
Obama's Foreign Policy: The End of the Beginning
August 24, 2009
By George Friedman
As August draws to a close, so does the first phase of the Obama presidency. The first months of any U.S. presidency are spent filling key positions and learning the levers of foreign and national security policy. There are also the first rounds of visits with foreign leaders and the first tentative forays into foreign policy. The first summer sees the leaders of the Northern Hemisphere take their annual vacations, and barring a crisis or war, little happens in the foreign policy arena. Then September comes and the world gets back in motion, and the first phase of the president’s foreign policy ends. The president is no longer thinking about what sort of foreign policy he will have; he now has a foreign policy that he is carrying out.
We therefore are at a good point to stop and consider not what U.S. President Barack Obama will do in the realm of foreign policy, but what he has done and is doing. As we have mentioned before, the single most remarkable thing about Obama’s foreign policy is how consistent it is with the policies of former President George W. Bush. This is not surprising. Presidents operate in the world of constraints; their options are limited. Still, it is worth pausing to note how little Obama has deviated from the Bush foreign policy.
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, particularly in its early stages, Obama ran against the Iraq war. The centerpiece of his early position was that the war was a mistake, and that he would end it. Obama argued that Bush’s policies — and more important, his style — alienated U.S. allies. He charged Bush with pursuing a unilateral foreign policy, alienating allies by failing to act in concert with them. In doing so, he maintained that the war in Iraq destroyed the international coalition the United States needs to execute any war successfully. Obama further argued that Iraq was a distraction and that the major effort should be in Afghanistan. He added that the United States would need its NATO allies’ support in Afghanistan. He said an Obama administration would reach out to the Europeans, rebuild U.S. ties there and win greater support from them.
Though around 40 countries cooperated with the United States in Iraq, albeit many with only symbolic contributions, the major continental European powers — particularly France and Germany — refused to participate. When Obama spoke of alienating allies, he clearly meant these two countries, as well as smaller European powers that had belonged to the U.S. Cold War coalition but were unwilling to participate in Iraq and were now actively hostile to U.S. policy.
A European Rebuff
Early in his administration, Obama made two strategic decisions. First, instead of ordering an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, he adopted the Bush administration’s policy of a staged withdrawal keyed to political stabilization and the development of Iraqi security forces. While he tweaked the timeline on the withdrawal, the basic strategy remained intact. Indeed, he retained Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, to oversee the withdrawal.
Second, he increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The Bush administration had committed itself to Afghanistan from 9/11 onward. But it had remained in a defensive posture in the belief that given the forces available, enemy capabilities and the historic record, that was the best that could be done, especially as the Pentagon was almost immediately reoriented and refocused on the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Toward the end, the Bush administration began exploring — under the influence of Gen. David Petraeus, who designed the strategy in Iraq — the possibility of some sort of political accommodation in Afghanistan.
Obama has shifted his strategy in Afghanistan to this extent: He has moved from a purely defensive posture to a mixed posture of selective offense and defense, and has placed more forces into Afghanistan (although the United States still has nowhere near the number of troops the Soviets had when they lost their Afghan war). Therefore, the core structure of Obama’s policy remains the same as Bush’s except for the introduction of limited offensives. In a major shift since Obama took office, the Pakistanis have taken a more aggressive stance (or at least want to appear more aggressive) toward the Taliban and al Qaeda, at least within their own borders. But even so, Obama’s basic strategy remains the same as Bush’s: hold in Afghanistan until the political situation evolves to the point that a political settlement is possible.
Most interesting is how little success Obama has had with the French and the Germans. Bush had given up asking for assistance in Afghanistan, but Obama tried again. He received the same answer Bush did: no. Except for some minor, short-term assistance, the French and Germans were unwilling to commit forces to Obama’s major foreign policy effort, something that stands out.
Given the degree to which the Europeans disliked Bush and were eager to have a president who would revert the U.S.-European relationship to what it once was (at least in their view), one would have thought the French and Germans would be eager to make some substantial gesture rewarding the United States for selecting a pro-European president. Certainly, it was in their interest to strengthen Obama. That they proved unwilling to make that gesture suggests that the French and German relationship with the United States is much less important to Paris and Berlin than it would appear. Obama, a pro-European president, was emphasizing a war France and Germany approved of over a war they disapproved of and asked for their help, but virtually none was forthcoming.
The Russian Non-Reset
Obama’s desire to reset European relations was matched by his desire to reset U.S.-Russian relations. Ever since the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine in late 2004 and early 2005, U.S.-Russian relations had deteriorated dramatically, with Moscow charging Washington with interfering in the internal affairs of former Soviet republics with the aim of weakening Russia. This culminated in the Russo-Georgian war last August. The Obama administration has since suggested a “reset” in relations, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton actually carrying a box labeled “reset button” to her spring meeting with the Russians.
The problem, of course, was that the last thing the Russians wanted was to reset relations with the United States. They did not want to go back to the period after the Orange Revolution, nor did they want to go back to the period between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Orange Revolution. The Obama administration’s call for a reset showed the distance between the Russians and the Americans: The Russians regard the latter period as an economic and geopolitical disaster, while the Americans regard it as quite satisfactory. Both views are completely understandable.
The Obama administration was signaling that it intends to continue the Bush administration’s Russia policy. That policy was that Russia had no legitimate right to claim priority in the former Soviet Union, and that the United States had the right to develop bilateral relations with any country and expand NATO as it wished. But the Bush administration saw the Russian leadership as unwilling to follow the basic architecture of relations that had developed after 1991, and as unreasonably redefining what the Americans thought of as a stable and desirable relationship. The Russian response was that an entirely new relationship was needed between the two countries, or the Russians would pursue an independent foreign policy matching U.S. hostility with Russian hostility. Highlighting the continuity in U.S.-Russian relations, plans for the prospective ballistic missile defense installation in Poland, a symbol of antagonistic U.S.-Russian relations, remain unchanged.
The underlying problem is that the Cold War generation of U.S. Russian experts has been supplanted by the post-Cold War generation, now grown to maturity and authority. If the Cold warriors were forged in the 1960s, the post-Cold warriors are forever caught in the 1990s. They believed that the 1990s represented a stable platform from which to reform Russia, and that the grumbling of Russians plunged into poverty and international irrelevancy at that time is simply part of the post-Cold War order. They believe that without economic power, Russia cannot hope to be an important player on the international stage. That Russia has never been an economic power even at the height of its influence but has frequently been a military power doesn’t register. Therefore, they are constantly expecting Russia to revert to its 1990s patterns, and believe that if Moscow doesn’t, it will collapse — which explains U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s interview in The Wall Street Journal where he discussed Russia’s decline in terms of its economic and demographic challenges. Obama’s key advisers come from the Clinton administration, and their view of Russia — like that of the Bush administration — was forged in the 1990s.
Foreign Policy Continuity Elsewhere
When we look at U.S.-China policy, we see very similar patterns with the Bush administration. The United States under Obama has the same interest in maintaining economic ties and avoiding political complications as the Bush administration did. Indeed, Hillary Clinton explicitly refused to involve herself in human rights issues during her visit to China. Campaign talk of engaging China on human rights issues is gone. Given the interests of both countries, this makes sense, but it is also noteworthy given the ample opportunity to speak to China on this front (and fulfill campaign promises) that has arisen since Obama took office (such as the Uighur riots).
Of great interest, of course, were the three great openings of the early Obama administration, to Cuba, to Iran, and to the Islamic world in general through his Cairo speech. The Cubans and Iranians rebuffed his opening, whereas the net result of the speech to the Islamic world remains unclear. With Iran we see the most important continuity. Obama continues to demand an end to Tehran’s nuclear program, and has promised further sanctions unless Iran agrees to enter into serious talks by late September.
On Israel, the United States has merely shifted the atmospherics. Both the Bush and Obama administrations demanded that the Israelis halt settlements, as have many other administrations. The Israelis have usually responded by agreeing to something small while ignoring the larger issue. The Obama administration seemed ready to make a major issue of this, but instead continued to maintain security collaboration with the Israelis on Iran and Lebanon (and we assume intelligence collaboration). Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has not allowed the settlements to get in the way of fundamental strategic interests.
This is not a criticism of Obama. Presidents — all presidents — run on a platform that will win. If they are good presidents, they will leave behind these promises to govern as they must. This is what Obama has done. He ran for president as the antithesis of Bush. He has conducted his foreign policy as if he were Bush. This is because Bush’s foreign policy was shaped by necessity, and Obama’s foreign policy is shaped by the same necessity. Presidents who believe they can govern independent of reality are failures. Obama doesn’t intend to fail.
-
"The U.S. has abandoned plans to install a missile defense system in Europe, according to a report. If true, this is a major strategic error that will have serious consequences for our allies in Europe and for us. Quoting a U.S. source, the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza says the Obama administration has decided against building a missile shield to protect Poland and the Czech Republic. The reason? Russian opposition. Now, if we want to build a defense system for friends in Europe, we'll have to place it in the Balkans, Israel or somewhere else. That is, if Russia approves. This is a stark reversal of past policy and reneges on promises made by the current administration. Worse, it shows weakness. We got into a staredown with the Russian bear and we blinked. ... We've just weakened America's standing in a critical region of the world -- Eastern Europe -- and let our allies down. We've made them vulnerable, in ways that only we could, to Russia's growing military menace. Polish and Czech friends who had relied on us to stand firm and keep our word no doubt feel betrayed. This diminishes our global influence. What smallish country will now take our word at face value when we promise to protect them? ... Given the threat to millions of American lives -- not to mention millions of our allies -- reducing missile defense is both dangerous and irresponsible." --Investor's Business Daily
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/17/un-nuke-agency-iran-can-build-a-bomb-right-now/
Foreign policy is raAAAAaaaaaaaacist!
-
Poles, Czechs: US missile defense shift a betrayal
By VANESSA GERA, Associated Press Writer Vanessa Gera, Associated Press Writer
1 hr 45 mins ago
WARSAW, Poland – Poles and Czechs voiced deep concern Friday at President Barack Obama's decision to scrap a Bush-era missile defense shield planned for their countries.
"Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back," the Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski said he was concerned that Obama's new strategy leaves Poland in a dangerous "gray zone" between Western Europe and the old Soviet sphere.
Recent events in the region have rattled nerves throughout central and eastern Europe, a region controlled by Moscow during the Cold War, including the war last summer between Russia and Georgia and ongoing efforts by Russia to regain influence in Ukraine. A Russian cutoff of gas to Ukraine last winter left many Europeans without heat.
The Bush administration's plan would have been "a major step in preventing various disturbing trends in our region of the world," Kaczynski said in a guest editorial in the daily Fakt and also carried on his presidential Web site.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he still sees a chance for Poles and Czechs to participate in the redesigned missile defense system. But that did not appear to calm nerves in Warsaw or Prague.
Kaczynski expressed hopes that the U.S. will now offer Poland other forms of "strategic partnership."
In Prague, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kohout said he made two concrete proposal to U.S. officials on Thursday in hopes of keeping the U.S.-Czech alliance strong: for the U.S. to establish a branch of West Point for NATO members in Central Europe and to "send a Czech scientist on the U.S. space shuttle to the international space station."
An editorial in Hospodarske Novine, a respected pro-business Czech newspaper, said: "an ally we rely on has betrayed us, and exchanged us for its own, better relations with Russia, of which we are rightly afraid."
The move has raised fears in the two nations they are being marginalized by Washington even as a resurgent Russia leaves them longing for added American protection.
The Bush administration always said that the planned system — with a radar near Prague and interceptors in northern Poland — was meant as defense against Iran. But Poles and Czechs saw it as protection against Russia, and Moscow too considered a military installation in its backyard to be a threat.
"No Radar. Russia won," the largest Czech daily, Mlada Fronta Dnes, declared in a front-page headline.
Obama said the old plan was scrapped in part because the U.S. has concluded that Iran is less focused on developing the kind of long-range missiles for which the system was originally developed, making the building of an expensive new shield unnecessary.
The replacement system is to link smaller radar systems with a network of sensors and missiles that could be deployed at sea or on land. Some of the weaponry and sensors are ready now, and the rest would be developed over the next 10 years.
The Pentagon contemplates a system of perhaps 40 missiles by 2015, at two or three sites across Europe.
_____
Associated Press writer Karel Janicek contributed reporting from Prague.
-
Summary
Despite the scrapping of current U.S. plans for placing ground-based interceptors in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic, American ballistic missile defense efforts will continue in Europe, according to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Just what those efforts will look like is still uncertain.
Ballistic Missile Defense
In a press conference Sept. 17 announcing the scrapping of current U.S. plans for placing ballistic missile defense (BMD) installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright spent most of the press conference talking about the future of BMD in Europe — and insisting that U.S. BMD efforts were not dead.
The announcement marked the confluence of changes already under way in the architecture of the U.S. BMD system, some potential alternative deployments down the road and political equivocation. As part of this shift, Gates and Cartwright insisted that the nature and timetable of the threat of Iranian long-range ballistic missiles had changed, allowing for some adjustment of the technologies and timetables necessary to address the threat. (With Iran’s successful satellite launch earlier in the year, it is difficult to see how the threat has been pushed very far into the future.)
The original system slated for Poland and the Czech Republic was the ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system, which is already deployed in Alaska and California. An early BMD system, it was fielded aggressively by the George W. Bush administration out of concern over the long-range ballistic missile threat posed by North Korea. The rationale was expediency: It was considered the only reasonably mature system capable of the necessary range and altitude that could be fielded immediately — and even then its deployment was accelerated. Despite being plagued by test failures, it was a version of GMD that the Bush White House also believed would be the most expedient choice for fielding a limited defense against an emerging long-range missile threat from Iran.
(click here to enlarge image)
But even before the Sept. 17 announcement, the situation had begun to shift. There were delays in Washington, Warsaw and Prague alike in nailing down the details. As time slipped by and ground was not broken on the installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, the potential benefits of GMD in terms of expediency began to erode. Competing technologies like the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) matured faster and proved more robust and reliable, and improvements and follow-on systems inched closer to fruition. Indeed, Gates has taken a different approach to BMD than his predecessor (former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a key proponent of the aggressive fielding of GMD), and the new Obama administration has allowed him to push forward with a new approach.
Photo by Chris Bishop/U.S. Navy via Getty Images
A Standard Missile Three (SM-3) is launched from the guided missile cruiser USS Shiloh in June, 2006Indeed, the Gates Pentagon may well have wished to scrap the GMD system slated for Poland even if it had not become so controversial. And many of the changes in the architecture of U.S. BMD efforts announced Sept. 17 had already been put in motion.
For example, BMD-capable, Aegis-equipped cruisers and destroyers armed with the SM-3 have long been postulated as an alternative to the Poland-based interceptors and Czech-based X-band radar. Indeed, though almost all U.S. BMD-capable warships are currently stationed in the Pacific, funds have already been allocated to upgrade more Atlantic-based ships to carry the SM-3. Gates has suggested that these warships could begin to patrol north and south of Europe as soon as 2011, though whether there would be a continuous at-sea presence is just one of a number of decisions yet to be made.
Another consideration was the potential deployment to Poland of an American Patriot air defense battery. Warsaw had originally hoped to see a Patriot battery deployed alongside the GMD interceptors (unlike GMD, Patriot missiles would actually be capable of defending Polish territory). Now the Poles are concerned that instead of a permanently stationed Patriot battery, they may see only U.S. troops conducting transitory training exercises with the Patriot, perhaps even with inert rather than actual interceptors. Gen. Cartwright said during the press conference that training deployments with the Patriot would precede any operational deployments, although there are no formal agreements on even the proposed training exercises, much less a sense of whether Washington will follow through on the deployment of Patriots in a more permanent way anytime soon.
The press conference was characterized by this sort of equivocation. A series of ideas divided into phases were announced in a very concrete way, as Gates and Cartwright tried to make it clear that U.S. BMD efforts in Europe would continue — that this was a shift in the hardware and scheme of maneuver, not the overall mission. But much like the limbo that the GMD system has been in for two years now, nothing has been decided (at least from all indications). When it comes to ground-based BMD systems in Europe, whatever might come next is still subject to change.
Gates raised the prospect of a still-to-be-developed ground-based version of the SM-3 that might be stationed in several unnamed locations in Europe, along with mobile X-band BMD radars system currently stationed in Israel. He insisted that Poland and the Czech Republic would be among the first countries the United States would talk to when the Pentagon considered the deployment of these land-based SM-3s in the 2015 timeframe.
While the conversion of the SM-3 to a ground-based system and its integration with other BMD radar systems should not pose any major technical hurdles, a lot can happen in six years’ time. One of the possibilities is the development of a deployable land-based SM-3, along with the fielding of Block 2 versions of the missile now under development that are larger and more capable. This would mean not only that the SM-3s the United States might deploy on land in Europe would be able to cover more ground from fewer locations but also that sea-based SM-3s would be able to cover more territory from the sea.
As the Pentagon insisted during the press conference, the United States is certainly not giving up on BMD in Europe. Some 18 U.S. warships equipped with the SM-3 already boast the most capable and deployable BMD interceptor that the world has ever seen (one that also has proven utility in a satellite role). The SM-3 and other mobile systems like the terminal high altitude area defense (or THAAD) in the pipeline will mean that the U.S. BMD network will be increasingly mobile. But while providing coverage to Europe remains a stated goal, the picture Gates and Cartwright painted of future plans for BMD basing in Europe was not well defined at all. And 2015 is a long way off — especially with the relationship between Washington and Moscow so susceptible to rapid change.
-
Op-Ed Contributor
A Better Missile Defense for a Safer Europe
By ROBERT M. GATES
Published: September 19, 2009
Washington
THE future of missile defense in Europe is secure. This reality is contrary to what some critics have alleged about President Obama’s proposed shift in America’s missile-defense plans on the continent — and it is important to understand how and why.
First, to be clear, there is now no strategic missile defense in Europe. In December 2006, just days after becoming secretary of defense, I recommended to President George W. Bush that the United States place 10 ground-based interceptors in Poland and an advanced radar in the Czech Republic. This system was designed to identify and destroy up to about five long-range missiles potentially armed with nuclear warheads fired from the Middle East — the greatest and most likely danger being from Iran. At the time, it was the best plan based on the technology and threat assessment available.
That plan would have put the radar and interceptors in Central Europe by 2015 at the earliest. Delays in the Polish and Czech ratification process extended that schedule by at least two years. Which is to say, under the previous program, there would have been no missile-defense system able to protect against Iranian missiles until at least 2017 — and likely much later.
Last week, President Obama — on my recommendation and with the advice of his national-security team and the unanimous support of our senior military leadership — decided to discard that plan in favor of a vastly more suitable approach. In the first phase, to be completed by 2011, we will deploy proven, sea-based SM-3 interceptor missiles — weapons that are growing in capability — in the areas where we see the greatest threat to Europe.
The second phase, which will become operational around 2015, will involve putting upgraded SM-3s on the ground in Southern and Central Europe. All told, every phase of this plan will include scores of SM-3 missiles, as opposed to the old plan of just 10 ground-based interceptors. This will be a far more effective defense should an enemy fire many missiles simultaneously — the kind of attack most likely to occur as Iran continues to build and deploy numerous short- and medium-range weapons. At the same time, plans to defend virtually all of Europe and enhance the missile defense of the United States will continue on about the same schedule as the earlier plan as we build this system over time, creating an increasingly greater zone of protection.
Steady technological advances in our missile defense program — from kill vehicles to the abilities to network radars and sensors — give us confidence in this plan. The SM-3 has had eight successful tests since 2007, and we will continue to develop it to give it the capacity to intercept long-range missiles like ICBMs. It is now more than able to deal with the threat from multiple short- and medium-range missiles — a very real threat to our allies and some 80,000 American troops based in Europe that was not addressed by the previous plan. Even so, our military will continue research and development on a two-stage ground-based interceptor, the kind that was planned to be put in Poland, as a back-up.
Moreover, a fixed radar site like the one previously envisioned for the Czech Republic would be far less adaptable than the airborne, space- and ground-based sensors we now plan to use. These systems provide much more accurate data, offer more early warning and tracking options, and have stronger networking capacity — a key factor in any system that relies on partner countries. This system can also better use radars that are already operating across the globe, like updated cold war-era installations, our newer arrays based on high-powered X-band radar, allied systems and possibly even Russian radars.
One criticism of this plan is that we are relying too much on new intelligence holding that Iran is focusing more on short- and medium-range weapons and not progressing on intercontinental missiles. Having spent most of my career at the C.I.A., I am all too familiar with the pitfalls of over-reliance on intelligence assessments that can become outdated. As Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a few days ago, we would be surprised if the assessments did not change because “the enemy gets a vote.”
=======
Page 2 of 2)
The new approach to European missile defense actually provides us with greater flexibility to adapt as new threats develop and old ones recede. For example, the new proposal provides some antimissile capacity very soon — a hedge against Iran’s managing to field missiles much earlier than had been previously predicted. The old plan offered nothing for almost a decade.
Those who say we are scrapping missile defense in Europe are either misinformed or misrepresenting what we are doing. This shift has even been distorted as some sort of concession to Russia, which has fiercely opposed the old plan. Russia’s attitude and possible reaction played no part in my recommendation to the president on this issue. Of course, considering Russia’s past hostility toward American missile defense in Europe, if Russia’s leaders embrace this plan, then that will be an unexpected — and welcome — change of policy on their part. But in any case the facts are clear: American missile defense on the continent will continue, and not just in Central Europe, the most likely location for future SM-3 sites, but, we hope, in other NATO countries as well.
This proposal is, simply put, a better way forward — as was recognized by Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland when he called it “a chance for strengthening Europe’s security.” It is a very real manifestation of our continued commitment to our NATO allies in Europe — iron-clad proof that the United States believes that the alliance must remain firm.
I am often characterized as “pragmatic.” I believe this is a very pragmatic proposal. I have found since taking this post that when it comes to missile defense, some hold a view bordering on theology that regards any change of plans or any cancellation of a program as abandonment or even breaking faith. I encountered this in the debate over the Defense Department’s budget for the fiscal year 2010 when I ended three programs: the airborne laser, the multiple-kill vehicle and the kinetic energy interceptor. All were plainly unworkable, prohibitively expensive and could never be practically deployed — but had nonetheless acquired a devoted following.
I have been a strong supporter of missile defense ever since President Ronald Reagan first proposed it in 1983. But I want to have real capacity as soon as possible, and to take maximum advantage of new technologies to combat future threats.
The bottom line is that there will be American missile defense in Europe to protect our troops there and our NATO allies. The new proposal provides needed capacity years earlier than the original plan, and will provide even more robust protection against longer-range threats on about the same timeline as the previous program. We are strengthening — not scrapping — missile defense in Europe.
-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091803046_pf.html
Shattered Confidence In Europe
By Ronald D. Asmus
Saturday, September 19, 2009
President Obama's decision to shelve the Bush administration's missile defense plans has created a crisis of confidence in Washington's relations with Central and Eastern Europe. The defense architecture the administration proposes may make more strategic sense in addressing the immediate Iranian threat. Nevertheless, it runs the risk of shattering the morale and standing of transatlantic leaders in the region who now feel politically undermined and exposed. The roots of this crisis lie less in missile defense than in policy failures over the past decade. Understanding and rectifying those errors is key to getting back on track with our allies.
Our first mistake was being overly optimistic about what would happen when these countries joined NATO and the European Union. We basically checked the box "mission accomplished." We assumed that Russia would finally accept that Central and Eastern Europe were gone from its sphere of influence and stop trying to interfere in their regional politics. But geopolitical competition didn't stop. Moscow simply tried to pressure and interfere in new ways, using energy and other weapons. It seeks to marginalize these countries in NATO and the European Union by going above their heads. It still wants to create a zone of special Russian interest, influence and lesser security.
The second mistake was poor handling of our commitment to defend Central and Eastern Europe counties under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. Given the low-threat environment, we decided NATO did not need to station troops in those countries' territory and pledged instead to create a reinforcement capability that could be used in times of crisis. I sat at the table in the mid-1990s as Washington promised Polish leaders that NATO would have a corps-size reinforcement capability to provide for their security.
But that NATO corps-size reinforcement capability never materialized. There are not even official defense plans for these countries. The power of Article 5 was always the fact that these commitments were backed up by planning, exercises and boots on the ground. Yet a lack of leadership and divisions within NATO prevented the alliance from fulfilling such pledges.
The alliance has also decayed in its role as the key crisis manager in Europe. Central and Eastern Europeans have watched as one ally after another has prevented NATO from acting over the past decade. NATO was AWOL during the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. When Georgian leaders quietly approached the alliance several months before hostilities, NATO demurred. When war broke out, the secretary general interrupted his vacation for one day to hold a meeting and issue a statement. NATO's supreme allied commander did not even do that much. The NATO Military Committee met only after the war was over. Hardly an inspiring performance.
Given this record, we should not be surprised that Central and Eastern Europeans doubt what NATO would do to help them in a pinch. While they are loath to say it publicly, their leaders have told me that they are no longer certain NATO is capable of coming to their rescue if there were a crisis involving Russia. They no longer believe that the political solidarity exists or that NATO's creaky machinery would take the needed steps.
Had we handled these issues differently, our debate about missile defense would be quite different. The Poles and Czechs bought into the Bush administration's plans for missile defense not because of Iranian missiles but because they were losing confidence in NATO. Atlanticist leaders were seeking additional security through an American military presence on their soil. That is why missile defense assumed a political significance in the region that transcended the merits of the actual program. And that is why abandoning the program has created a crisis of confidence.
We must take real steps toward solving this problem by providing strategic reassurance to Central and Eastern Europe through the front door of NATO and not the back door of missile defense. President Obama has already decided to push for defense plans for these countries. But a top-secret NATO defense plan in some safe in Brussels will not mollify Central and Eastern European anxieties. Their primary worry is not the prospect of an imminent Russian military attack but political intimidation or blackmail or a regional crisis that spins out of control. It is above all their lack of belief in our solidarity in the alliance.
That is why we need a broader package of political, economic and military measures that will reinforce that solidarity and provide reassurance. We also need to fix NATO so that it can again function as a crisis manager, as it did in the Balkans in the 1990s. Nothing prevents us from taking these steps. They do not contradict any of our commitments to Russia. They require only political imagination, will and a modest investment of resources. If we get that right, then the Obama administration's decision on missile defense can be a catalyst that helps us get this relationship back on track. If we don't, the crisis of confidence in the region will only deepen.
The writer, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, is executive director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Center at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The views expressed here are his own.
-
Nice one GM. That seems to me a very sound piece.
This from the WSJ:
It's been a good few weeks in what used to be called the war on terror. The main credit here goes to the folks in the intelligence community that our friends on the left love to hate.
Credit goes as well to Barack Obama, who as President has abandoned much of his previous opposition to proven antiterror measures like warrantless wiretaps, and who has only stepped up the campaign of targeted hits on terrorist ringleaders. He's fortunate the Bush Administration left him with a potent intelligence team and the precedent of taking the fight, pre-emptively, to the terrorists on their home turf.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Pakistani army troops fix their long-range gun in Taliban's stronghold of Piochar in the Swat Valley.
.On Monday, U.S. special forces operating in Somalia killed top al Qaeda operative Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, believed to have been a planner in the November 2002 bombing of a hotel in Kenya in which 15 were killed. Also killed in recent days was senior al Qaeda leader Ilyas Kashmiri—via a U.S. drone attack in western Pakistan—and Indonesian terrorist mastermind Noordin Muhammad Top, suspected in the July bombing of two Jakarta hotels.
Last week, too, a British court convicted three men for an August 2006 plot to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic. The convictions were obtained largely on the strength of communications intercepts—possibly warrantless—gathered by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to a report by Britain's Channel 4.
All this follows important gains for the Pakistani army in the area of the Swat valley, which fell briefly to the Taliban in the spring. Key among those gains was the August killing—again by a U.S. drone—of Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, suspected in the assassination of former Prime Minster Benazir Bhutto. Two of Mehsud's senior deputies were also killed in drone attacks in recent months, while at least eight key al Qaeda commanders have been killed in the last 12 months alone.
For those who were the victims or near-victims of the attacks perpetrated by these men, this is justice. For the rest of us, it is an additional measure of safety. Despite conventional wisdom that killing terrorists only breeds more terrorists and fuels the proverbial "cycle of violence," there is a reason that the U.S. has not been attacked in the eight years since September 11, and that major terrorist plots in Europe have been foiled.
Last week, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported that it had seen interrogation documents showing that European Muslim volunteers "faced a chaotic reception, a low level of training, poor conditions and eventual disillusionment after arriving in Waziristan [Pakistan] last year." It added that there is "evidence that al Qaeda's alliance with the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan is fraying, boosting the prospect of acquiring intelligence that will lead to Bin Laden's capture or death." This from a paper not exactly known as a cheerleader for the use of military force.
The logic of these attacks is simple, even if too many people are reluctant to accept it. Terrorist groups tend to coalesce around charismatic leaders, such as Abimael Guzmán of Peru's Shining Path, Abdullah Ocalan of the Kurdish PKK, or Abu Musab al Zarqawi of al Qaeda in Iraq. Not only are these men difficult to replace, but their death or capture often leads to infighting, disarray and disillusion within the group. As terrorist leaders are forced to spend more time trying to save their own lives, they also have less time to devote to plans for killing others.
None of this means that the war on terror (or whatever you'd like to call it) is anywhere near over. It may never be. But in a struggle in which a day when nothing happens is a victory, it's worth recalling that nothing doesn't happen by accident.
-
The Gates piece is important: "Last week, President Obama — on my recommendation and with the advice of his national-security team and the unanimous support of our senior military leadership — decided to discard that plan in favor of a vastly more suitable approach. In the first phase, to be completed by 2011, we will deploy proven, sea-based SM-3 interceptor missiles — weapons that are growing in capability — in the areas where we see the greatest threat to Europe."
It doesn't seem that he bothered to inform the Czechs or the Poles of his new enlightenment before springing it on the world. Either that or they knew the plan and were not particularly impressed or reassured.
One problem with scrapping the old plan is that is was a PROMISE MADE BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA to key allies that rely on our word for their survival and sovereignty.
Another problem is that the new improved plan is also a promise made by the united states of america, a lower case nation that sometimes keeps its word and sometimes doesn't, like our support for the u.s.dollar.
A bigger problem is that the current President along with his closest allies in the congress oppose missile defense systems on the grounds that the rogue states targeting missiles find them threatening and destabilizing. Worst is that the current Secretary of Defense despite all of his intelligence gathering capabilities and budgets doesn't seem to be aware of that.
-
A Pragmatist, Gates Reshapes Policy He Backed Recommend
PETER BAKER and THOM SHANKER
Published: September 21, 2009
WASHINGTON — On his tenth day on the job, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates signed off on an ambitious if politically charged plan to build a new missile shield in Europe. Just two weeks later, he supported an even more wrenching decision to send additional American troops to Iraq, into a war that was not going well.
That was nearly three years, one president and a political lifetime ago. Now serving Barack Obama instead of George W. Bush, Mr. Gates just recommended jettisoning his own missile defense program in favor of a reformulated version and once again is wrestling with whether to send more troops abroad, in this case to Afghanistan.
Quiet and unassuming, Mr. Gates has emerged as the man in the middle between policies of the past he once championed and the revisions and reversals he is now carrying out. His stature and credibility have allowed him to extract concessions on the inside, including on missile defense, according to senior officials, while serving as a formidable shield against Republican spears on the outside.
Along the way, Mr. Gates has become a White House favorite, for both his pragmatic style and his political value. With little national security experience of his own, Mr. Obama has leaned heavily on the holdover Pentagon chief for advice, aides said. And as a result, Mr. Gates has played a central role in reshaping national security policy, including fixing a broken Pentagon procurement system and recalibrating the size of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
“The president values what Secretary Gates says — and not just values, he knows what he brings to the table is 30 years of experience in Democratic and Republican administrations,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. “He understands that none of these decisions are between good and bad but between bad and worse.”
The looming decision on Afghanistan could put Mr. Gates’s experience to the test as never before. With both Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now on record as saying more combat troops would be required for victory, Mr. Gates must balance his commanders’ desires and his president’s stated skepticism.
Mr. Gates has made the transition from the Bush years to the Obama administration with insider skills honed over decades of working for presidents of both parties. He reached out from the start to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to encourage more civilian roles in Afghanistan and Iraq, and teamed up with Mr. Emanuel to kill the F-22 fighter program.
Just as he was in the Bush cabinet, he has at times been caught between high-powered hawk and dove figures. When Mr. Obama sent more troops to Afghanistan this year, Mr. Gates maneuvered between Mrs. Clinton, who strongly favored the reinforcement, and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who resisted it. And he has been a voice of caution on issues like Mr. Obama’s desire to eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons.
For Republicans, Mr. Gates poses a quandary in assessing Mr. Obama’s national security decisions: do they look at him as a turncoat for dismantling some of Mr. Bush’s policies or as the best hope for moderating changes brought by a Democratic administration?
“He’s got a president who’s pushing in a different direction than the previous president and he’s got to deal with that,” said Peter H. Wehner, a White House strategic adviser to Mr. Bush. “For us in the Bush administration, he’s got a lot of money in the bank because of Iraq and the surge.”
Mr. Wehner recalled a conversation over the weekend with fellow conservatives about the missile defense decision. “Nobody said anything nasty or vicious about him,” he said. “There was genuine puzzlement.”
Mr. Gates’s shifting role can be summed up in terms familiar to the defense secretary, an avid film buff who routinely brings piles of DVDs on long trips and cites favorite movies in conversation to make a point.
In his new memoir, Matt Latimer, a Pentagon speechwriter under Mr. Gates’s predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, compares Mr. Gates to the Harvey Keitel character in “Pulp Fiction” — the one who shows up after the grisly killing to wipe away all traces of blood.
Now that Mr. Gates has evolved from the clean-up guy to one of the most powerful members of the Obama cabinet, senior officials at the Pentagon have come up with their own nickname for him: “The Godfather.”
The missile defense decision demonstrated both the awkwardness and potency of Mr. Gates’s position. The Obama team arrived in office skeptical of the plan Mr. Gates had signed off on in December 2006 to build a system in Eastern Europe to counter potential Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles.
A new intelligence estimate on global ballistic missile threats in May concluded that Iran was making less progress than expected on such long-range missiles, but rapidly building short- and medium-range missiles that would not be stopped by the Bush program. Mr. Gates accepted that the threat had probably shifted, officials said, and that changing technology meant that the United States could counter shorter-range missiles more effectively with an expanded ship-based SM-3 system.
But officials debated whether to also continue the Bush program. Mr. Gates wanted to keep going in case Iran made a breakthrough in longer-range missiles; other officials wanted a clean break from the old system. In the end, at Mr. Gates’s insistence, the government will continue to finance research and development on interceptors that were at the heart of the Bush plan while deploying the new system.
“Secretary Gates played a pivotal role,” said James L. Jones, the national security adviser. “It was a rich and robust discussion. If there was a dramatic moment, it was when Secretary Gates affirmatively and without hesitation said this is a better solution.”
On Afghanistan, Mr. Gates has repeatedly declared his concern that more troops would make Americans look increasingly like occupiers. But he has recently softened that opposition, citing General McChrystal’s argument that an occupation is defined less by numbers than by how troops carry out their mission.
Whatever the president decides in the coming weeks, it will fall again to Mr. Gates to sell it — to the armed forces, to Congress and to the public. “We need to understand that the decisions that the president faces on Afghanistan are some of the most important he may face in his presidency,” he said at the Pentagon last week. “Frankly from my standpoint, everybody ought to take a deep breath.”
-
Hope I'm not overloading here this morning:
Beggar thy neighbor, bankrupt thy country, appease thy foe. As slogans (or counter-slogans) go, it isn't quite in a class with Amnesty, Acid and Abortion. But it pretty much sums up President Obama's global agenda—and that's just for the month of September.
In 1943, Walter Lippmann observed that the disarmament movement had been "tragically successful in disarming the nations that believed in disarmament." That ought to have been the final word on the subject.
So what should Mr. Obama, who this week becomes the first American president to chair a session of the U.N. Security Council, choose to make the centerpiece of the Council's agenda? What else but nonproliferation and disarmament. And lest anyone suspect that this has something to do with North Korea and Iran, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice insists otherwise: The meeting, she says, "will focus on nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament broadly, and not on any particular countries."
.But the problem with this euphemistic approach to disarmament, as Lippmann noticed, is that it shifts the onus from the countries that can't be trusted with nuclear weapons to those that can. Is Nicolas Sarkozy, with his force de frappe, about to start World War III? Probably not, though he has the means to do so. Should Mr. Obama join hands with Iran and the Arab world in pushing for Israel's nuclear disarmament, on the view that if only the Jewish state would set the right example its enemies would no longer want to wipe it off the map? If that's what the president believes, he should say so publicly, especially since he's offering the same general prescription for America's nuclear deterrent.
Of course what the administration wants is to set the right mood music for its upcoming talks with Iran. Mr. Obama would be better served having a chat with Moammar Gadhafi, who will be seated just a few chairs away at the Security Council: The mood music for his disarmament was set by the 4th Infantry Division when it yanked Saddam Hussein from his spider hole in December 2003. Col. Gadhafi gave up his WMD a week later.
Then again, it's not as if the administration doesn't know how to play hardball when it has a real villain in its sights. Like Chinese tire makers, for instance, who last week were slapped with a 35% tariff because Mr. Obama owed political favors to his friends in Big Labor. Quite something for a president who last year sounded off on the dangers of "trade policy [being] dictated by special interests."
In an op-ed in this newspaper, Brookings Institution economist Chad Bown noted that "the count of newly imposed protectionist policies like antidumping duties and other 'safeguard' measures increased by 31% in the first half of 2009 relative to the same period one year ago."
That's a global trend, and the sort of thing a group like the G-20, which meets Thursday and Friday in Pittsburgh, is supposed to set its teeth against. Instead, the agenda will be given over to such brainstorms as capping bankers' bonuses—"a critical part of our broader reform agenda," according to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Now there's a way to attract the best and the brightest to the world's dullest profession.
The G-20 also has no plans to put the brakes on further infusions of stimulus spending, the removal of which British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says would be an "error of historical proportions." But what's really historical is the explosion in the debt-to-GDP ratios of the G-20 countries, which the IMF predicts will rise to 81.6% next year from 65.9% in 2008. For the U.S. the jump is especially pronounced—to 97.5% next year from 70.5% last. Only Japan and Italy will be deeper in the red; even Argentina looks good by comparison. This is before the first baby boomer hits retirement age next summer, to say nothing of the liabilities coming from ObamaCare.
What happens to countries with these kinds of fiscal burdens? They decline. In 1983, Japan's gross government debt stood at 67% of GDP. It has since tripled. West Germany's was a little under 40%. It is twice that today. These used to be the economies of the future. They are, or ought to be, the cautionary tales of the present.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama is earning kudos from the Russian government for his decision to pull missile defense from central Europe, even as Poland marked the 70th anniversary of its invasion by the Soviet Union. Moscow is still offering no concessions on sanctioning Iran in the event negotiations fail, but might graciously agree to an arms-control deal that cements its four-to-one advantages in tactical nuclear weapons.
Also on the presidential agenda this week is a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Too bad for all concerned that the two-state solution has been superseded by the three-state fact on the ground.
And all of this in a single month. Just imagine what October will bring.
-
Crafty,
Did you see Larwence Eagleberger on one of the cable talk shows (CNN?) recently calling OBama's foreing policies "amateur hour"?
I could not believe I was hearing a Dem saying that. He was pointing out how Obama ahs marginalized Hillary and more or less simply blows her off.
So he may have a bit of an ax to grind (being an ex Clintonite) who is not making his/her fame and fortune with the present leftist regime ala the rest of the liberal polictical mercenaries.
Yet it may also be a *true* reflection of reality and not the spin coming from the other Dems, MSM. It may also be a kind of a leak as to what many Dems are thinking and saying privately but just not publically.
-
I guess it was Greta's show. I see Obama has been critical of the One for quite some time going back to the campaign as a search pulls up past criticisms on the World's Savior:
http://radioviceonline.com/eagleburger-on-obama-foreign-policy-amateur-hour/
-
Eagleburger said that? Wow.
=========
Taking the liberty of moving CCP's post here:
This could go under different threads but it seems reasonable here because it does illustrate the disconnect between Israeli
Jews view of OBama and (most though not all - Jakcie Mason, Horowitz, Levin, Bernie Goldberg, me, Crafty) American Jews (best evidenced by Hollywood and NYT):
***Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it's not just that they're saying no, it's also the way they're saying no.
US President Barack Obama
Photo: AP
SLIDESHOW: Israel & Region | World The Saudis twice said no to his request for normalization gestures towards Israel (at Barack Obama's meeting with King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, and in Washington at meetings with Hillary Clinton). Who says no to the American president twice? What must they think of Obama in the desert kingdom?
The North Koreans said no to repeated attempts at talks, by test-launching long-range missiles in April; Russia and China keep on saying no to tougher sanctions on Iran; the Iranians keep saying no to offers of talks by saying they're willing to talk about everything except a halt to uranium enrichment; Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is saying no by refusing to meet with Binyamin Netanyahu until Israel freezes all settlement construction; the Israelis said no by refusing to agree to a settlement freeze, or even a settlement moratorium until and unless the Arabs ante up their normalization gestures. Which brings us back to the original Saudi no.
The only thing Obama did manage to get Bibi and Abbas to say yes to is a photo-op at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in NY. Mazel tov.
RELATED
Editorial: Wobbling Washington
So why is everyone saying no to Obama?
It's the economy, stupid.
Everyone has worked it out by now: The great secret is out. America's economy has made Obama a weak president, and he will likely remain weak throughout his first term. He has about two years to pull the American economy out of its free-fall before he begins his reelection campaign. If he can do it, and that's a big if, chances are good that he'll get reelected, and in his second term he can try to pull some geopolitical strings. But for the next three years, expect to see a world that says no to Obama. No meaningful and dramatic diplomatic initiative can come out of the White House in the next three years, as long as Obama remains weak.
And that's a real pity, because there are some serious and imminent issues that need to be addressed.
Pyongyang is getting more bellicose and not being punished. The North Koreans have violated every single international agreement and norm, and nothing tangible has happened to them.
In Iran, this registers. "Look at how bad they're being," the mullahs say, "and they're getting away with it." Even so, the Iranian government is weak internally and internationally following its election fiasco.
The US and EU could tighten sanctions against Iran without the support of Russia and China, but they would need political will for that. Sanctions, such as a ban on refined oil imports, barring Iranian flights to America and Europe etc., could have a serious impact on Iran and weaken the regime further. The US and EU can act now against Iran like the US and UK did against Libya several years ago when they persuaded Gaddafi to abandon his nuclear ambitions. Back then, though, the US was much stronger. Now, the American economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea have all weakened the US.
In retaliation for increased, unilateral sanctions, Iran could turn up the heat on US and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will stymie Obama's plan to win and withdraw. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has the US president by the kishkes, in a manner of speaking. And so do the Taliban.
So, when a president with so many problems comes asking for a favor, everyone finds it easier to just say no.****
For more of Amir's articles and posts, visit his personal blog Forecast Highs
-
Point of clarification and I hope this doesn't take away from the importance or credibility of his criticism, but Lawrence Eagleburger served under Republican Presidents RR and GHWB. - Doug
-
Whoops! I misremembered him as a Clintonite :oops:
-
Obama creates a deadly power vacuum
By Spengler
There's a joke about a man who tells a psychiatrist, "Everybody hates me," to which the psychiatrist responds, "That's ridiculous - everyone doesn't know you, yet." Which brings me to Barack Obama: one of the best-informed people in the American security establishment told me the other day that the president is a "Manchurian Candidate".
That can't be true - Manchuria isn't in the business of brainwashing prospective presidential candidates any more. There's no one left to betray America to. Obama is creating a strategic void in which no major power will dominate, and every minor power must fend for itself. The outcome is incalculably hard to analyze and terrifying to consider.
Obama doesn't want to betray the United States; he only wants to empower America's enemies. Forcing Israel to abandon its strategic buffer (the so-called settlements) was supposed to placate Iran, so that Iran would help America stabilize Iraq, where its influence looms large over the Shi'ite majority.
America also sought Iran's help in suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Obama's imagination, a Sunni Arab coalition - empowered by Washington's turn against Israel - would encircle Iran and dissuade it from acquiring nuclear weapons, while an entirely separate Shi'ite coalition with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would suppress the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was the worst-designed scheme concocted by a Western strategist since Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the bridges at Arnhem in 1944, and it has blown up in Obama's face.
Iran already has made clear that casting America's enemies in the leading role of an American operation has a defect, namely that America's enemies rather would lose on their own terms than win on America's terms. Iran's verbal war with the American president over the violent suppression of election-fraud protests leaves Washington with no policy at all. The premise of Obama's policy was that progress on the Palestinian issue would empower a Sunni coalition. As the president said May 18:
If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians - between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the potential Iranian threat.
Israel's supporters remonstrated in vain. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a prominent Obama supporter, wrote, "If there is to be any linkage - and I do not believe there should be - it goes the other way: it will be much easier for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank if Iran does not have a nuclear umbrella under which it can continue to encourage Hamas and Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israeli civilians."
No matter: America made clear that it had annulled the George W Bush administration's promise that a final settlement would allow most of Israel's 500,000 "settlers" to keep their homes, in order to launch the fantasy ship of Iranian cooperation with America.
That policy now is in ruins, and Washington has no plan B. David Axelrod, Obama's top political advisor, told television interviewers on January 28 that Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who spent the last week denouncing the United States, "Did not have final say" over Iran's foreign policy and that America still wanted to negotiate with Iran. This sounds idiotic, but the White House really has painted itself into a corner. The trouble is that Obama has promised to withdraw American forces from Iraq, and Iran has sufficient influence in Shi'ite-majority Iraq to cause continuous upheaval, perhaps even to eventually win control of the country.
By a fateful coincidence, American troops are scheduled to leave Iraq's urban centers on June 30. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein left Iraq open to Iranian destabilization; that is why the elder George Bush left the Iraqi dictator in power in 1990.
Offering Iran a seat at the table in exchange for setting a limit to its foreign ambitions - in Lebanon and Gaza as well as Iraq - seemed to make sense on paper. But the entity that calls itself revolutionary Islam is not made of paper, but of flesh and blood. It is in danger of internal collapse and can only assert its authority by expanding its influence as aggressively as it can.
After the election disaster, Iran's revolutionary leadership urgently needs to demonstrate its credibility. Israel now can say, "A country that murders its own citizens will have no compunction about massacring its enemies," and attack Iran's nuclear capacity with fewer consequences than would have been imaginable in May. And if an Israeli strike were to succeed, or appear successful to the world, the resulting humiliation might be fatal to the regime.
Israel may not be Tehran's worst nightmare. Iraq's Sunnis are testing the resolve of the weakened mullahs. The suicide bombing that killed 73 people at a Shi'ite mosque in Kirkuk on June 20 and a second bombing that killed another 72 Shi'ites in Baghdad's Sadr City slum most likely reflect Sunni perceptions that a weakened Tehran will provide less support for Iraqi Shi'ites. Although Shi'ites comprise more than three-fifths of Iraq's population, Sunnis provided the entire military leadership and are better organized on the ground. America's hopes of enlisting Iran to provide cover for its withdrawal from the cities of Iraq seem delusional.
What move on the chessboard might Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei venture to pre-empt an Israeli air raid against the nuclear facilities? Iran has the rocket launchers of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and terrorist sleeper cells throughout the world. Iran might seek to pre-empt what it anticipates to be the next move from Israel by demonstrating its capacity to inflict injury on Israel or on Jewish targets elsewhere. That would require careful judgment, for a heavy handed action could provide a pretext for even more serious action by the Israelis and others. The same sort of consideration applies to Iranian support for Pakistan Shi'ites, for Hezbollah, and other vehicles of Iran's program of imperial expansion.
The Obama administration has put itself in a peculiar bind. It has demanded that the Pakistani army suppress the Taliban, after Islamabad attempted a power-sharing agreement that left the Taliban in control of the Swat Valley. To root out the largely Pashtun Taliban, Pakistan's largely Punjabi army has driven a million people into refugee camps and leveled entire towns in the Swat Valley. Tens of thousands of refugees are now fleeing the Pakistani army in the South Waziristan tribal area. Punjabis killing Pashtuns is nothing new in the region, but the ferocity of the present effort does not augur well for an early end to the conflict.
While the Pakistan army holds nothing back in attacking the Taliban, American troops in Afghanistan have been told that they no longer can call in air strikes if civilians are likely to suffer. That will put American forces in the unfortunate position of the Pirates of Penzance, who exempted orphans. Once this became generally known, everyone they attempted to rob turned out to be an orphan.
The Taliban need only take a page from Hamas' book, and ensure that civilians are present wherever they operate. The US has made clear that it will not deal in civilian blood, the currency of warfare in that region since before the dawn of history. It will not be taken seriously in consequence.
What will the administration do now? As all its initiatives splatter against the hard realities of the region, it will probably do less and less, turning the less appetizing aspects of the fighting over to local allies and auxiliaries who do not share its squeamishness about shedding civilian blood. That is the most dangerous outcome of all, for America is the main stabilizing force in the region.
The prospect of civil wars raging simultaneously in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq is no longer improbable. The Israel-Palestine issue is linked to all of these through Iran, whose credibility depends on its ability to sustain such puppies of war as Hezbollah and Hamas. Whether or not the Israelis take the opportunity to strike Iran, the prospect of an Israeli strike will weigh on Iran's proxies in the region, and keep Israel's borders in condition of potential violence for the interim.
America's great good fortune is that no hostile superpower stands ready to benefit from its paralysis and confusion. When Soviet troops landed in Afghanistan in December 1979, America was in the grip of an economic crisis comparable to the present depression. American diplomats at the Tehran Embassy were still hostages to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The price of gold doubled from around $400 to $800 after the Russian invasion because most of the world thought that Russia would win the Cold War. If America lost its dominant superpower status in the West, the dollar no longer could serve as a global reserve currency. To the superpower goes the seigniorage, the state's premium for providing a currency.
By contrast, the gold price barely fluttered all through the present crisis. America remains the undisputed global superpower for the time being. America's creditors express consternation about its $1.8 trillion budget deficit and many trillions more of guarantees for the banking system, but there is nothing they can do about it for the time being but talk. That is how one should interpret a June 25 Reuters report that a "senior researcher with the ruling Communist Party" had urged China to shift some of its $2 trillion in reserves out of dollars and into gold.
Li Lianzhong, who heads the economic department of the Party's policy research office, said China should use more of its $1.95 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to buy energy and natural resource assets. Speaking at a foreign exchange and gold forum, Li also said that buying land in the United States was a better option for China than buying US Treasury securities.
"Should we buy gold or US Treasuries?" Li asked. "The US is printing dollars on a massive scale, and in view of that trend, according to the laws of economics, there is no doubt that the dollar will fall. So gold should be a better choice."
There is no suggestion that Li, even though he is a senior researcher, was enunciating an agreed party line.
The last thing China wants at the moment is to undercut the US dollar, for three reasons. First, as America's largest creditor, China has the most to lose from a dollar collapse. Second, Americans would buy fewer Chinese imports. And third, the collapse of the dollar would further erode America's will to fulfill its superpower function, and that is what China wants least of all.
America remains the indispensable outsider in Asia. No one likes the United States, but everyone dislikes the United States less than they dislike their neighbors. India need not worry about China's role in Pakistan, for example, because America mediates Indian-Pakistani relations, and America has no interest in a radical change to the status quo. Neither does China, for that matter, but India is less sure of that. China does not trust Japan for historical reasons that will not quickly fade, but need not worry about it because America is the guarantor of Japan's security. The Seventh Fleet is the most disliked - and nonetheless the most welcome - entity in Asia.
All of this may change drastically, quickly, and for the worse. Obama's policy reduces to empowering America's enemies in the hope that they will conform to American interests out of gratitude. Just the opposite result is likely to ensure: Iran, Pakistan and other regional powers are likely to take radical measures. Iran is threatened with a collapse of its Shi'ite program from Lebanon to Afghanistan, and Pakistan is threatened with a breakup into three or more states.
Obama has not betrayed the interests of the United States to any foreign power, but he has done the next worst thing, namely to create a void in the region by withdrawing American power. The result is likely to be a species of pandemonium that will prompt the leading players in the region to learn to live without the United States.
In his heart of hearts, Obama sees America as a force for evil in the world, apologizing for past American actions that did more good than harm. An example is America's sponsorship of the 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew the left-leaning government of Mohammed Mossadegh.
"In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government," the president offered in his Cairo address to Muslims on June 5. Although Iran's theocracy despises Mossadegh - official Iranian textbooks call him the "son of a feudal family of exploiters who worked for the cursed Shah, and betrayed Islam" - Iran's government continues to reproach America for its role in the coup. "With a coup they toppled the national government of Iran and replaced it with a harsh, unpopular and despotic regime," Ahmadinejad complained in a January 28 speech.
It is s a bit late to offer advice to Obama, but the worst thing America can do is to apologize. Instead, it should ask for the gratitude of the developing world. Weak countries become punching-bags in the proxy wars of empires. This was from the dawn of history until the fall of the last empire - the "evil" empire of Soviet communism.
The Soviets exploited anti-colonial movements from the 1917 Bolshevik coup until the collapse of the Afghanistan adventure in the late 1980s. Nationalists who tried to ride the Russian tiger ended up in its belly more often than on its back. Iran, Chile, Nicaragua, Angola and numerous other weak countries became the hapless battleground for the contest of covert operations between the Soviet Union and America - not to mention Vietnam and Korea.
The use of developing countries as proxy battlefields and their people as cannon fodder came to an end with the Cold War. As a result, the past 20 years have seen the fastest improvement in living standards ever in the global south, and a vast shift in wealth towards so-called developing countries.
By defeating Russia in the Cold War, America made it possible for governments in the global south to pursue their own interests free from the specter of Soviet subversion. And by countering Soviet subversion, America often averted much worse consequences.
Many deficiencies can be ascribed to the Shah of Iran, but a communist regime in the wake of a Mossadegh administration would have been indescribably worse. The septuagenarian Mossadegh had his own agenda, but he relied on the support of the communist Tudeh party. The US feared a Soviet invasion of Iran, and "the [Harry S] Truman administration was willing to consider a Soviet invasion of Iran as a casus belli, or the start of a global war", according to Francis J Gavin's 1999 article in The Journal of Cold War Studies.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with help from British intelligence helped the shah overthrow the left-leaning regime. But this was no minor colonial adventure, but a flashpoint with the potential to start a world war.
It is painful and humiliating for Iranians to recall the overthrow of a democratically elected government with American help. It would have been infinitely more humiliating to live under Soviet rule, like the soon-to-be-extinct victims of Soviet barbarism in Eastern Europe.
The same is true of Chile, where the brutal regime of General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973, with help from the CIA. Allende was surrounded by Cuban intelligence operations. As Wikipedia reports:
Shortly after the election of Salvador Allende in November 1970, the [Cuban Directorate of Intelligence - DI] worked extremely closely to strengthen Allende's increasingly precarious position. The Cuban DI station chief Luis Fernandez Ona even married Salvador Allende's daughter Beatrice, who later committed suicide in Cuba. The DI organized an international brigade that would organize and coordinate the actions of the thousands of the foreign leftists that had moved into Chile shortly after Allende's election. These individuals ranged from Cuban DI agents, Soviet, Czech and North Korean military instructors and arms suppliers, to hardline Spanish and Portuguese Communist Party members.
My Latin American friends who still mourn the victims of Pinochet's "night and fog" state terror will not like to hear this, but the several thousand people killed or tortured by the military government were collateral damage in the Cold War. Like Iran, Chile became the battleground of a Soviet-American proxy war. The same is true in Nicaragua. (Full disclosure: I advised Nicaragua's president Violeta Chamorro after she defeated the Cuban-backed Sandinistas in the 1990 elections; I did so with no tie to any government agency.)
Obama's continuing obsession with America's supposed misdeeds - deplorable but necessary actions in time of war - is consistent with his determination to erode America's influence in the most troubled parts of the world. By removing America as a referee, he will provoke more violence than the United States ever did. We are entering a very, very dangerous period as a result.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, Associate Editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com)
-
Obama's Move: Iran and Afghanistan
September 28, 2009
by George Friedman
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, now-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said that like all U.S. presidents, Barack Obama would face a foreign policy test early in his presidency if elected. That test is now here.
His test comprises two apparently distinct challenges, one in Afghanistan and one in Iran. While different problems, they have three elements in common. First, they involve the question of his administration’s overarching strategy in the Islamic world. Second, the problems are approaching decision points (and making no decision represents a decision here). And third, they are playing out very differently than Obama expected during the 2008 campaign.
During the campaign, Obama portrayed the Iraq war as a massive mistake diverting the United States from Afghanistan, the true center of the “war on terror.” He accordingly promised to shift the focus away from Iraq and back to Afghanistan. Obama’s views on Iran were more amorphous. He supported the doctrine that Iran should not be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons, while at the same time asserted that engaging Iran was both possible and desirable. Embedded in the famous argument over whether offering talks without preconditions was appropriate (something now-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attacked him for during the Democratic primary) was the idea that the problem with Iran stemmed from Washington’s refusal to engage in talks with Tehran.
We are never impressed with campaign positions, or with the failure of the victorious candidate to live up to them. That’s the way American politics work. But in this case, these promises have created a dual crisis that Obama must make decisions about now.
Iran
Back in April, in the midst of the financial crisis, Obama reached an agreement at the G-8 meeting that the Iranians would have until Sept. 24 and the G-20 meeting to engage in meaningful talks with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany (P-5+1) or face intensely increased sanctions. His administration was quite new at the time, so the amount of thought behind this remains unclear. On one level, the financial crisis was so intense and September so far away that Obama and his team probably saw this as a means to delay a secondary matter while more important fires were flaring up.
But there was more operating than that. Obama intended to try to bridge the gap between the Islamic world and the United States between April and September. In his speech to the Islamic world from Cairo, he planned to show a desire not only to find common ground, but also to acknowledge shortcomings in U.S. policy in the region. With the appointment of special envoys George Mitchell (for Israel and the Palestinian territories) and Richard Holbrooke (for Pakistan and Afghanistan), Obama sought to build on his opening to the Islamic world with intense diplomatic activity designed to reshape regional relationships.
It can be argued that the Islamic masses responded positively to Obama’s opening — it has been asserted to be so and we will accept this — but the diplomatic mission did not solve the core problem. Mitchell could not get the Israelis to move on the settlement issue, and while Holbrooke appears to have made some headway on increasing Pakistan’s aggressiveness toward the Taliban, no fundamental shift has occurred in the Afghan war.
Most important, no major shift has occurred in Iran’s attitude toward the United States and the P-5+1 negotiating group. In spite of Obama’s Persian New Year address to Iran, the Iranians did not change their attitude toward the United States. The unrest following Iran’s contested June presidential election actually hardened the Iranian position. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remained president with the support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, while the so-called moderates seemed powerless to influence their position. Perceptions that the West supported the demonstrations have strengthened Ahmadinejad’s hand further, allowing him to paint his critics as pro-Western and himself as an Iranian nationalist.
But with September drawing to a close, talks have still not begun. Instead, they will begin Oct. 1. And last week, the Iranians chose to announce that not only will they continue work on their nuclear program (which they claim is not for military purposes), they have a second, hardened uranium enrichment facility near Qom. After that announcement, Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy held a press conference saying they have known about the tunnel for several months, and warned of stern consequences.
This, of course, raises the question of what consequences. Obama has three choices in this regard.
First, he can impose crippling sanctions against Iran. But that is possible only if the Russians cooperate. Moscow has the rolling stock and reserves to supply all of Iran’s fuel needs if it so chooses, and Beijing can also remedy any Iranian fuel shortages. Both Russia and China have said they don’t want sanctions; without them on board, sanctions are meaningless.
Second, Obama can take military action against Iran, something easier politically and diplomatically for the United States to do itself rather than rely on Israel. By itself, Israel cannot achieve air superiority, suppress air defenses, attack the necessary number of sites and attempt to neutralize Iranian mine-laying and anti-ship capability all along the Persian Gulf. Moreover, if Israel struck on its own and Iran responded by mining the Strait of Hormuz, the United States would be drawn into at least a naval war with Iran — and probably would have to complete the Israeli airstrikes, too.
And third, Obama could choose to do nothing (or engage in sanctions that would be the equivalent of doing nothing). Washington could see future Iranian nuclear weapons as an acceptable risk. But the Israelis don’t, meaning they would likely trigger the second scenario. It is possible that the United States could try to compel Israel not to strike — though it’s not clear whether Israel would comply — something that would leave Obama publicly accepting Iran’s nuclear program.
And this, of course, would jeopardize Obama’s credibility. It is possible for the French or Germans to waffle on this issue; no one is looking to them for leadership. But for Obama simply to acquiesce to Iranian nuclear weapons, especially at this point, would have significant diplomatic and domestic political ramifications. Simply put, Obama would look weak — and that, of course, is why the Iranians announced the second nuclear site. They read Obama as weak, and they want to demonstrate their own resolve. That way, if the Russians were thinking of cooperating with the United States on sanctions, Moscow would be seen as backing the weak player against the strong one. The third option, doing nothing, therefore actually represents a significant action.
Afghanistan
In a way, the same issue is at stake in Afghanistan. Having labeled Afghanistan as critical — indeed, having campaigned on the platform that the Bush administration was fighting the wrong war — it would be difficult for Obama to back down in Afghanistan. At the same time, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has reported that without a new strategy and a substantial increase in troop numbers, failure in Afghanistan is likely.
The number of troops being discussed, 30,000-40,000, would bring total U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan to just above the number of troops the Soviet Union deployed there in its war (just under 120,000) — a war that ended in failure. The new strategy being advocated would be one in which the focus would not be on the defeat of the Taliban by force of arms, but the creation of havens for the Afghan people and protecting those havens from the Taliban.
A move to the defensive when time is on your side is not an unreasonable strategy. But it is not clear that time is on Western forces’ side. Increased offensives are not weakening the Taliban. But halting attacks and assuming that the Taliban will oblige the West by moving to the offensive, thereby opening itself to air and artillery strikes, probably is not going to happen. And while assuming that the country will effectively rise against the Taliban out of the protected zones the United States has created is interesting, it does not strike us as likely. The Taliban is fighting the long war because it has nowhere else to go. Its ability to maintain military and political cohesion following the 2001 invasion has been remarkable. And betting that the Pakistanis will be effective enough to break the Taliban’s supply lines is hardly the most prudent bet.
In short, Obama’s commander on the ground has told him the current Afghan strategy is failing. He has said that unless that strategy changes, more troops won’t help, and that a change of strategy will require substantially more troops. But when we look at the proposed strategy and the force levels, it is far from obvious that even that level of commitment will stand a chance of achieving meaningful results quickly enough before the forces of Washington’s NATO allies begin to withdraw and U.S. domestic resolve erodes further.
Obama has three choices in Afghanistan. He can continue to current strategy and force level, hoping to prolong failure long enough for some undefined force to intervene. He can follow McChrystal’s advice and bet on the new strategy. Or he can withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Once again, doing nothing — the first option — is doing something quite significant.
The Two Challenges Come Together
The two crises intermingle in this way: Every president is tested in foreign policy, sometimes by design and sometimes by circumstance. Frequently, this happens at the beginning of his term as a result of some problem left by his predecessor, a strategy adopted in the campaign or a deliberate action by an antagonist. How this happens isn’t important. What is important is that Obama’s test is here. Obama at least publicly approached the presidency as if many of the problems the United States faced were due to misunderstandings about or the thoughtlessness of the United States. Whether this was correct is less important than that it left Obama appearing eager to accommodate his adversaries rather than confront them.
No one has a clear idea of Obama’s threshold for action.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban takes the view that the British and Russians left, and that the Americans will leave, too. We strongly doubt that the force level proposed by McChrystal will be enough to change their minds. Moreover, U.S. forces are limited, with many still engaged in Iraq. In any case, it isn’t clear what force level would suffice to force the Taliban to negotiate or capitulate — and we strongly doubt that there is a level practical to contemplate.
In Iran, Ahmadinejad clearly perceives that challenging Obama is low-risk and high reward. If he can finally demonstrate that the United States is unwilling to take military action regardless of provocations, his own domestic situation improves dramatically, his relationship with the Russians deepens, and most important, his regional influence — and menace — surges. If Obama accepts Iranian nukes without serious sanctions or military actions, the American position in the Islamic world will decline dramatically. The Arab states in the region rely on the United States to protect them from Iran, so U.S. acquiescence in the face of Iranian nuclear weapons would reshape U.S. relations in the region far more than a hundred Cairo speeches.
There are four permutations Obama might choose in response to the dual crisis. He could attack Iran and increase forces in Afghanistan, but he might well wind up stuck in a long-term war in Afghanistan. He could avoid that long-term war by withdrawing from Afghanistan and also ignore Iran’s program, but that would leave many regimes reliant on the United States for defense against Iran in the lurch. He could increase forces in Afghanistan and ignore Iran — probably yielding the worst of all possible outcomes, namely, a long-term Afghan war and an Iran with a nuclear program if not nuclear weapons.
On pure logic, history or politics aside, the best course is to strike Iran and withdraw from Afghanistan. That would demonstrate will in the face of a significant challenge while perhaps reshaping Iran and certainly avoiding a drawn-out war in Afghanistan. Of course, it is easy for those who lack power and responsibility — and the need to govern — to provide logical choices. But the forces closing in on Obama are substantial, and there are many competing considerations in play.
Presidents eventually arrive at the point where something must be done, and where doing nothing is very much doing something. At this point, decisions can no longer be postponed, and each choice involves significant risk. Obama has reached that point, and significantly, in his case, he faces a double choice. And any decision he makes will reverberate.
-
Israel will burn, Afghanistan will fail as Obama fiddles.
He's busy trying to get the Olympics for Chicago.
-
http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2009/09/todays-reading-assignment_26.html
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Today's Reading Assignment
...courtesy of Ralph Peters, in the New York Post. In his latest column, Colonel Peters (essentially) asks the same questions we posed yesterday: how long did President Obama know about that Iranian nuclear nuclear facility before he publicly acknowledged its existence? And why keep it a secret, particularly if you're trying to persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear program?
The answer, according to Peters, can be found in the President's lack of military experience; his unswerving faith in diplomacy and humiliation over a situation that is spinning out of control:
Obama didn't want you to know how much progress Iran had made. It's an embarrassment.
And it raises the pressure on the White House to act -- something this president's squirming to avoid. But the Iranians have now realized we know, so they tipped it themselves.
Obama had no choice but to come clean.
Yesterday, he interrupted the G-20 summit to go public -- before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did. Flanked by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's dead man walking, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, our president offered more uselessly vague rhetoric in response to proof of a major "covert Iranian enrichment facility" and its implications.
So what happens next? Peters predicts a coming apocalypse, caused (in part) by Mr. Obama's refusal to act. We've said the same thing, predicting that the commander-in-chief will face a foreign policy reckoning in the coming months, a catastrophic event that will make last year's market crash seem tame by comparison. Here's how Ralph Peters sees events playing out:
Obama will try more talks. We may see half-hearted sanctions -- which will be violated right and left. Russia, which profits hugely from dirty trade with Iran, can slip goods across the Caspian Sea or through Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.
And maritime sanctions are meaningless, unless our president is willing to order our Navy to fire on Chinese-flagged or Venezuelan-flagged merchant vessels.
Think that's going to happen?
How will it end? With desperate Israeli attacks that do only part of the job, followed by Iranian counterstrikes on Persian Gulf oil facilities, the closure of the Straits of Hormuz and oil above $400 a barrel.
Only the United States can stop Iran's nuclear program before it's too late. And this president won't.
-
Twilight of Pax Americana
Since the end of WWII, the world has depended on the United States for stability. But with American military and economic dominance waning, capitalism and global security are threatened.
The international order that emerged after World War II has rightly been termed the Pax Americana; it's a Washington-led arrangement that has maintained political stability and promoted an open global economic system. Today, however, the Pax Americana is withering, thanks to what the National Intelligence Council in a recent report described as a "global shift in relative wealth and economic power without precedent in modern history" -- a shift that has accelerated enormously as a result of the economic crisis of 2007-2009.
At the heart of this geopolitical sea change is China's robust economic growth. Not because Beijing will necessarily threaten American interests but because a newly powerful China by necessity means a relative decline in American power, the very foundation of the postwar international order. These developments remind us that changes in the global balance of power can be sudden and discontinuous rather than gradual and evolutionary.
The Great Recession isn't the cause of Washington's ebbing relative power. But it has quickened trends that already had been eating away at the edifice of U.S. economic supremacy. Looking ahead, the health of the U.S. economy is threatened by a gathering fiscal storm: exploding federal deficits that could ignite runaway inflation and undermine the dollar. To avoid these perils, the U.S. will face wrenching choices.
The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve have adopted policies that have dramatically increased both the supply of dollars circulating in the U.S. economy and the federal budget deficit, which both the Brookings Institution and the Congressional Budget Office estimate will exceed $1 trillion every year for at least the next decade. In the short run, these policies were no doubt necessary; nevertheless, in the long term, they will almost certainly boomerang. Add that to the persistent U.S. current account deficit, the enormous unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs and the cost of two ongoing wars, and you can see that America's long-term fiscal stability is in jeopardy. As the CBO says: "Even if the recovery occurs as projected and stimulus bill is allowed to expire, the country will face the highest debt/GDP ratio in 50 years and an increasingly unsustainable and urgent fiscal problem." This spells trouble ahead for the dollar.
The financial privileges conferred on the U.S. by the dollar's unchallenged reserve currency status -- its role as the primary form of payment for international trade and financial transactions -- have underpinned the preeminent geopolitical role of the United States in international politics since the end of World War II. But already the shadow of the coming fiscal crisis has prompted its main creditors, China and Japan, to worry that in coming years the dollar will depreciate in value. China has been increasingly vocal in calling for the dollar's replacement by a new reserve currency. And Yukio Hatoyama, Japan's new prime minister, favors Asian economic integration and a single Asian currency as substitutes for eroding U.S. financial and economic power.
Going forward, to defend the dollar, Washington will need to control inflation through some combination of budget cuts, tax increases and interest rate hikes. Given that the last two options would choke off renewed growth, the least unpalatable choice is to reduce federal spending. This will mean radically scaling back defense expenditures, because discretionary nondefense spending accounts for only about 20% of annual federal outlays. This in turn will mean a radical diminution of America's overseas military commitments, transforming both geopolitics and the international economy.
Since 1945, the Pax Americana has made international economic interdependence and globalization possible. Whereas all states benefit absolutely in an open international economy, some states benefit more than others. In the normal course of world politics, the relative distribution of power, not the pursuit of absolute economic gains, is a country's principal concern, and this discourages economic interdependence. In their efforts to ensure a distribution of power in their favor and at the expense of their actual or potential rivals, states pursue autarkic policies -- those designed to maximize national self-sufficiency -- practicing capitalism only within their borders or among countries in a trading bloc.
Thus a truly global economy is extraordinarily difficult to achieve. Historically, the only way to secure international integration and interdependence has been for a dominant power to guarantee the security of other states so that they need not pursue autarkic policies or form trading blocs to improve their relative positions. This suspension of international politics through hegemony has been the fundamental aim of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s. The U.S. has assumed the responsibility for maintaining geopolitical stability in Europe, East Asia and the Persian Gulf, and for keeping open the lines of communication through which world trade moves. Since the Cold War's end, the U.S. has sought to preserve its hegemony by possessing a margin of military superiority so vast that it can keep any would-be great power pliant and protected.
Financially, the U.S. has been responsible for managing the global economy by acting as the market and lender of last resort. But as President Obama acknowledged at the London G-20 meeting in April, the U.S. is no longer able to play this role, and the world increasingly is looking to China (and India and other emerging market states) to be the locomotives of global recovery.
Going forward, the fiscal crisis will mean that Washington cannot discharge its military functions as a hegemon either, because it can no longer maintain the power edge that has allowed it to keep the ambitions of the emerging great powers in check. The entire fabric of world order that the United States established after 1945 -- the Pax Americana -- rested on the foundation of U.S. military and economic preponderance. Remove the foundation and the structure crumbles. The decline of American power means the end of U.S. dominance in world politics and the beginning of the transition to a new constellation of world powers.
The result will be profound changes in world politics. Emerging powers will seek to establish spheres of influence, control lines of communication, engage in arms races and compete for control over key natural resources. As America's decline results in the retraction of the U.S. military role in key regions, rivalries among emerging powers are bound to heat up. Already, China and India are competing for influence in Central and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Even today, when the United States is still acting as East Asia's regional pacifier, the smoldering security competition between China and Japan is pushing Japan cautiously to engage in the very kind of "re-nationalization" of its security policy that the U.S. regional presence is supposed to prevent. While still wedded to its alliance with the U.S., in recent years Tokyo has become increasingly anxious that, as a Rand Corp. study put it, eventually it "might face a threat against which the United States would not prove a reliable ally." Consequently, Japan is moving toward dropping Article 9 of its American-imposed Constitution (which imposes severe constraints on Japan's military), building up its forces and quietly pondering the possibility of becoming a nuclear power.
Although the weakening of the Pax Americana will not cause international trade and capital flows to come to a grinding halt, in coming years we can expect states to adopt openly competitive economic policies as they are forced to jockey for power and advantage in an increasingly competitive security and economic environment. The world economy will thereby more closely resemble that of the 1930s than the free-trade system of the post-1945 Pax Americana. The coming end of the Pax Americana heralds a crisis for capitalism.
The coming era of de-globalization will be defined by rising nationalism and mercantilism, geopolitical instability and great power competition. In other words, having enjoyed a long holiday from history under the Pax Americana, international politics will be headed back to the future.
Christopher Layne is a professor of government at Texas A&M and a consultant to the National Intelligence Council. Benjamin Schwarz is literary and national editor of the Atlantic.
-
Obama's Moment of Reckoning
EVERY AMERICAN PRESIDENT, early in his term, discovers that vision and reality rarely meet. Some — Ronald Reagan comes to mind — are able to recover. Others — Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, for example — do not. But the world is the way it is for a reason. States do not have as much room to maneuver in their policymaking as election campaign rhetoric would suggest. U.S. President Barack Obama’s mistake to date has been very similar to that made by every president before him: namely, basing his foreign policy on the assumption that he, unlike his predecessors, will be able to talk to “those people” in a way that solves problems — that if things are just handled in a different way, a different president can achieve a different end.
That particular bundle of optimism pretty much shorted out this week. American diplomats will be in Geneva on Thursday for talks with their counterparts from France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, China and Iran. The topic: how to force the Iranians to come clean about their nuclear program. From what we’ve been able to gather from intelligence efforts, Iran is challenging the very agenda of the meeting. Russia is indicating that it doesn’t care a whit about Iran, but is willing to exert pressure if the Americans will grant concessions in the former Soviet Union, specifically Ukraine and Georgia. The Chinese are livid at Obama for his decision to implement tire tariffs and are not appearing particularly helpful either. Germany isn’t even sending an Iran expert to the talks, and is distracted by internal politics anyway.
“It is too early to pass judgment on Obama’s first year in office, but things are getting dicey.”
Nor is Iran the only issue that has forced its way onto Obama’s agenda. Afghanistan is a war that is going nowhere, and even with a massive increase of forces, it is unlikely that anything more than a stalemate will be feasible. Many empires have disappeared into the maw that is Afghanistan. The Greeks left. The Huns left. The Mongols left. The British left. The Soviets left. The Taliban is pretty sure the Americans will leave too. Obama’s campaign promise to fight the “right war” of course makes for some interesting public relations acrobatics, whatever direction policy — or the war — should take. But the problem remains that this war has gone from bad to worse — and to worse still — since Obama took office.
Things could be better at home, too. On Tuesday, the White House lost two major votes on health care, the issue that has crowded out nearly everything else on the domestic agenda — and this despite the tire tariffs, which were pushed through explicitly to guarantee the loyalty of some domestic groups. Making a sacrifice of China — and thereby complicating the Iran issue — has not generated a victory, but instead a loss.
It is too early to pass judgment on Obama’s first year in office, but things are getting dicey. Obama is now facing two crises in the Islamic world — Afghanistan and Iran — and by all indications he doesn’t have a clear strategy on either. His advisers are good enough, and he is smart enough, to realize that simply continuing in the same direction on either issue will not be a recipe for success. Iran, Russia and the Taliban already view him as weak. Doubling down in Afghanistan in order to confront the Taliban would rob the United States of its ability to act elsewhere. Going to war with Iran would (at a minimum) remove 3 million barrels per day of crude from the market and reverse the nascent economic recovery — not to mention reigniting conflict in Iraq. Shifting the country’s military orientation to re-contain Russia would leave Iraq and Afghanistan in the hands of potentially (if not already outright) hostile forces. Not a nice menu from which to select.
Obama’s moment is shaping up to arrive very soon. It well might be Thursday.
But it is not all bad news. Iran’s foreign minister on Wednesday flew from U.N. meetings in New York City to Washington, to visit the Iranian interests section at the Pakistani Embassy. Because Iran and the United States do not have direct ties, they operate via the Swiss Embassy in Tehran and the Pakistani Embassy in Washington. And given that lack of direct ties, any such visit requires a special visa with a high-level clearance. Someone like Manouchehr Mottaki does not simply visit Washington without approval. It’s pretty obvious that he didn’t come — and that the White House didn’t allow him to come — to go sightseeing. And if Mottaki simply wanted to mock Obama, he could have done that from the United Nations building in New York. He came to talk directly to the Americans before the public talks in Geneva on Thursday.
We see really only one clean way out of Obama’s dilemma: a deal with Iran. Should the Iranians and the Americans find a way to live with each other, then a great many other issues would fall into place. The Russians would lose their lever in the Middle East. The Americans could smoothly (for the Middle East) withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. American and Iranian intelligence and training in cooperation could limit any Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan.
Such a “happy” ending naturally faces some touchy obstacles. Israel would retain the ability to scrap any rapprochement, and would have strong incentives to do so if Iran’s nuclear program was not clearly and publicly defanged. Russia might have a thing or two to say (and do) to scuttle any warming in U.S.-Iran relations. And then there is that issue of a lack of trust between Tehran and Washington on just about everything.
But Mottaki visited Washington. And he did so with the full knowledge and permission of the White House. That’s a fact that cannot be ignored, and one that just might shine a light for an increasingly beleaguered president.
-
Nice article title by Pravda on the Hudson :roll:
Voice of Bush’s Pentagon Becomes Harder to Hear Recommend
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: October 4, 2009
WASHINGTON — Gen. David H. Petraeus, the face of the Iraq troop surge and a favorite of former President George W. Bush, spoke up or was called upon by President Obama “several times” during the big Afghanistan strategy session in the Situation Room last week, one participant says, and will be back for two more meetings this week.
David H. PetraeusBut the general’s closest associates say that underneath the surface of good relations, the celebrity commander faces a new reality in Mr. Obama’s White House: He is still at the table, but in a very different seat.
No longer does the man who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have one of the biggest voices at National Security Council meetings, as he did when Mr. Bush gave him 20 minutes during hourlong weekly sessions to present his views in live video feeds from Baghdad. No longer is the general, with the Capitol Hill contacts and web of e-mail relationships throughout Washington’s journalism establishment, testifying in media explosions before Congress, as he did in September 2007, when he gave 34 interviews in three days.
The change has fueled speculation in Washington about whether General Petraeus might seek the presidency in 2012. His advisers say that it is absurd — but in immediate policy terms, it means there is one less visible advocate for the military in the administration’s debate over whether to send up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
General Petraeus’s aides now privately call him “Dave the Dull,” and say he has largely muzzled himself from the fierce public debate about the war to avoid antagonizing the White House, which does not want pressure from military superstars and is wary of the general’s ambitions in particular.
The general’s aides requested anonymity to talk more candidly about his relationship with the White House.
“General Petraeus has not hinted to anyone that he is interested in political life, and in fact has said on many occasions that he’s not,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University who was the executive officer to General Petraeus when he was the top American commander in Iraq.
“It is other people who are looking at his popularity and saying that he would be a good presidential candidate, and I think rightly that makes the administration a little suspicious of him.”
General Petraeus’s advisers say he has stepped back in part because Mr. Obama has handpicked his own public face for the war in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who last week gave an interview to CBS’s “60 Minutes,” met with Mr. Obama on Air Force One and used a speech in London to reject calls for scaling back the war effort.
If anything, General McChrystal’s public comments may prove that General Petraeus might be prudent to take a back seat during the debate. On Sunday, when CNN’s John King asked Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, if it was appropriate for a man in uniform to appear to campaign so openly for more troops, General Jones replied, “Ideally, it’s better for military advice to come up through the chain of command.”
How much General Petraeus’s muted voice will affect Mr. Obama’s decision on the war is unclear, but people close to him say that stifling himself in public could give him greater credibility to influence the debate from within. Others say that his biggest influence may simply be as part of a team of military advisers, including General McChrystal and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The men are united in what they see as the need to build up the American effort in Afghanistan, although General Petraeus, who works closely with General McChrystal, said last week that he had not yet endorsed General McChrystal’s request for more troops.
Together the three are likely to be aligned against Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as other administration officials who want to scale back the effort. In that situation, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has worried about a big American presence in Afghanistan but left the door open to more troops, could be the most influential vote.
What is clear is that General Petraeus’s relationship with Mr. Obama is nothing like his bond with Mr. Bush, who went mountain biking with the general in Washington last fall, or with Mr. Obama’s opponent in the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain of Arizona, whose aides briefly floated the general’s name last year as a possible running mate.
By then the general had been talked about as a potential presidential candidate himself, which still worries some political aides at the White House.
But not Mr. Obama, at least according to one of his top advisers. “The president’s not thinking that way, and the vice president’s not thinking that way,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. “The president values his insights in helping to turn around an eight-year-old war that has been neglected.”
General Petraeus’s advisers say that to preserve a sense of military impartiality, he has not voted since at least 2003, and that he is not sure if he is still registered in New Hampshire, where he and his wife own property. The general has been described as a Republican, including in a lengthy profile in The New Yorker magazine last year. But a senior military official close to him said last week that he could not confirm the general’s political party.
In the meantime, General Petraeus travels frequently from his home in Tampa to Washington, where he met last week with the Afghan foreign minister. He also had dinner with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The general also makes calls on Capitol Hill.
“He understands the Congress better than any military commander I’ve ever met,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who said that General Petraeus had the nationwide influence to serve as a spokesman for the administration’s policy on the Afghan war.
But until the president makes a decision, and determines if he wants to deploy General Petraeus to help sell it, the commander is keeping his head down. “He knows how to make his way through minefields like this,” said Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army.
Peter Baker contributed reporting
-
Hi,
I thought this PJTV Video: " Game Theory and a Losing Strategy: Obama's Bad Judgment With The Prisoner's Dilemma" was interesting and hope you do too.
http://www.pjtv.com/v/2523
-
Dictionary: kow·tow (kou-tou', kou'tou')
1.To kneel and touch the forehead to the ground in expression of deep respect, worship, or submission, as formerly done in China.
2.To show servile deference. See synonims at fawn1.
n.
1.The act of kneeling and touching the forehead to the ground.
2.An obsequious act.
[From Chinese (Mandarin) kòu tóu, a kowtow : kòu, to knock + tóu, head.]
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/6262938/Barack-Obama-cancels-meeting-with-Dalai-Lama-to-keep-China-happy.html
Barack Obama cancels meeting with Dalai Lama 'to keep China happy'
President Barack Obama has refused to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington this week in a move to curry favour with the Chinese.
By Alex Spillius in Washington
Published: 6:20PM BST 05 Oct 2009
President Barack Obama has delayed a meeting with the Dalai Lama Photo: REUTERS The decision came after China stepped up a campaign urging nations to shun the Tibetan spiritual leader.
It means Mr Obama will become the first president not to welcome the Nobel peace prize winner to the White House since the Dalai Lama began visiting Washington in 1991.
The fog of war The Buddhist monk arrived in Washington on Monday for a week of meetings with Congressional leaders, celebrity supporters and interest groups, but the president will not see him until after he has made his first visit to China next month.
Samdhong Rinpoche, the Tibetan prime minister-in-exile, has accused the United States and other Western nations of "appeasement" toward China as its economic weight grows.
"Today, economic interests are much greater than other interests," he said.
Mr Obama's decision dismayed human rights and Tibetan support groups, who said he had made an unnecessary concession to the Chinese, who regard the Dalai Lama as a "splittist", despite his calls for autonomy rather than independence for Tibet. The Chinese invaded in 1950, forcing the young leader to flee.
Sophie Richardson, Asia advocate for Human Rights Watch, said: "Presidents always meets the Dalai Lama and what happens? Absolutely nothing.
"This idea that if you are nice to the Chinese Communist Party up front you can cash in later is just wrong. If you lower the bar on human rights they will just move it lower and lower."
Over several months of discussions the Tibetans resisted entreaties to delay the meeting, arguing that a refusal would make smaller countries more vulnerable to pressure from China not to meet the Dalai Lama.
But they were told by US officials they wanted to work with China on critical issues, including nuclear weapons proliferation in North Korea and Iran, according to The Washington Post. Mr Obama then sent a delegation to the Dalai Lama's home in exile in India last month that confirmed the meeting would be deferred.
Mr Obama has changed his position on Tibet since his election campaign.
In April 2008, he was joined by Hillary Clinton, then his rival for the Democratic nomination and now his Secretary of State, in calling on George W Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony in protest at the bloody repression of a popular uprising in Tibet.
"If the Chinese do not take steps to help stop the genocide in Darfur and to respect the dignity, security, and human rights of the Tibetan people, then the President should boycott the opening ceremonies," they said.
Mrs Clinton has been at the forefront of a new approach, called "strategic reassurance", which seeks a more amicable partnership with the emerging power.
On her first trip to China in February she said public pressure on China over human rights was ill-advised as she "knew what the Chinese were going to say".
Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, the Washington-based special envoy to the Dalai Lama, issued a brief statement, saying: "We came to this arrangement because we believe that it is in our long-term interests."
A White House official said the administration and the Tibetans had "agreed the timing would be best after the visit".
"Both sides attach importance to a strong US-China relationship," the official said. "There are benefits in that to our goals for Tibet, as we have been working to resume discussions between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama’s representatives.”
The Tibetan leader's ten meetings with US presidents have played an important role in maintaining his international profile, even though they have never been filmed or followed by a press conference.
The exception was 2007, when George W Bush conferred the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress's highest civilian award, on the Dalai Lama in front of the cameras.
Frank Wolf, a Republican congressman and outspoken critic of China's human rights record, said: "What would a Buddhist monk or Buddhist nun in Drapchi prison think when he heard that President Obama, the president of the United States, is not going to meet with the Dalai Lama?
"It's against the law to even have a picture of the Dalai Lama. I can almost hear the words of the Chinese guards saying to them that nobody cares about you in the United States."
Ms Richardson said treating human rights as separate from other issues guaranteed failure "across the board".
"If there is no explicit agreement to stop locking up environmental activists and whistle blowers then any environmental agreement will be weakened.
"If the press in China is muzzled it won't investigate industrial safety and you will have more toxic toys coming to the United States," she said.
-
I found this speaker/author to be well-informed. - Doug
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/10/22/concerns_about_americas_foreign_policy_drift.html
Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before. You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors. You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier. With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action. And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country's word.
So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith.
It is certainly not a model of diplomacy when the leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic are informed of such a decision at the last minute in midnight phone calls. It took a long time and lot of political courage in those countries to arrange for our interceptor system in Poland and the radar system in the Czech Republic. Our Polish and Czech friends are entitled to wonder how strategic plans and promises years in the making could be dissolved, just like that - with apparently little, if any, consultation. Seventy years to the day after the Soviets invaded Poland, it was an odd way to mark the occasion.
You hardly have to go back to 1939 to understand why these countries desire - and thought they had - a close and trusting relationship with the United States. Only last year, the Russian Army moved into Georgia, under the orders of a man who regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. Anybody who has spent much time in that part of the world knows what Vladimir Putin is up to. And those who try placating him, by conceding ground and accommodating his wishes, will get nothing in return but more trouble.
What did the Obama Administration get from Russia for its abandonment of Poland and the Czech Republic, and for its famous "Reset" button? Another deeply flawed election and continued Russian opposition to sanctioning Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
In the short of it, President Obama's cancellation of America's agreements with the Polish and Czech governments was a serious blow to the hopes and aspirations of millions of Europeans. For twenty years, these peoples have done nothing but strive to move closer to us, and to gain the opportunities and security that America offered. These are faithful friends and NATO allies, and they deserve better. The impact of making two NATO allies walk the plank won't be felt only in Europe. Our friends throughout the world are watching and wondering whether America will abandon them as well.
Big events turn on the credibility of the United States - doing what we said we would do, and always defending our fundamental security interests. In that category belong the ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need to counter the nuclear ambitions of the current regime in Iran.
Candidate Obama declared last year that he would be willing to sit down with Iran's leader without preconditions. As President, he has committed America to an Iran strategy that seems to treat engagement as an objective rather than a tactic. Time and time again, he has outstretched his hand to the Islamic Republic's authoritarian leaders, and all the while Iran has continued to provide lethal support to extremists and terrorists who are killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Islamic Republic continues to provide support to extremists in Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, the regime continues to spin centrifuges and test missiles. And these are just the activities we know about.
I have long been skeptical of engagement with the current regime in Tehran, but even Iran experts who previously advocated for engagement have changed their tune since the rigged elections this past June and the brutal suppression of Iran's democratic protestors. The administration clearly missed an opportunity to stand with Iran's democrats, whose popular protests represent the greatest challenge to the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979. Instead, the President has been largely silent about the violent crackdown on Iran's protestors, and has moved blindly forward to engage Iran's authoritarian regime. Unless the Islamic Republic fears real consequences from the United States and the international community, it is hard to see how diplomacy will work.
Next door in Iraq, it is vitally important that President Obama, in his rush to withdraw troops, not undermine the progress we've made in recent years. Prime Minister Maliki met yesterday with President Obama, who began his press availability with an extended comment about Afghanistan. When he finally got around to talking about Iraq, he told the media that he reiterated to Maliki his intention to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq. Former President Bush's bold decision to change strategy in Iraq and surge U.S. forces there set the stage for success in that country. Iraq has the potential to be a strong, democratic ally in the war on terrorism, and an example of economic and democratic reform in the heart of the Middle East. The Obama Administration has an obligation to protect this young democracy and build on the strategic success we have achieved in Iraq.
We should all be concerned as well with the direction of policy on Afghanistan. For quite a while, the cause of our military in that country went pretty much unquestioned, even on the left. The effort was routinely praised by way of contrast to Iraq, which many wrote off as a failure until the surge proved them wrong. Now suddenly - and despite our success in Iraq - we're hearing a drumbeat of defeatism over Afghanistan. These criticisms carry the same air of hopelessness, they offer the same short-sighted arguments for walking away, and they should be summarily rejected for the same reasons of national security.
Having announced his Afghanistan strategy last March, President Obama now seems afraid to make a decision, and unable to provide his commander on the ground with the troops he needs to complete his mission.
President Obama has said he understands the stakes for America. When he announced his new strategy he couched the need to succeed in the starkest possible terms, saying, quote, "If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban - or allows al-Qaeda to go unchallenged - that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." End quote.
Five months later, in August of this year, speaking at the VFW, the President made a promise to America's armed forces. "I will give you a clear mission," he said, "defined goals, and the equipment and support you need to get the job done. That's my commitment to you."
It's time for President Obama to make good on his promise. The White House must stop dithering while America's armed forces are in danger.
Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling, while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy, endangers them and hurts our cause.
Recently, President Obama's advisors have decided that it's easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President's chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn't asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy.
In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama's team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt. The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision - a good one, I think - and sent a commander into the field to implement it.
Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced. It's time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.
It's worth recalling that we were engaged in Afghanistan in the 1980's, supporting the Mujahadeen against the Soviets. That was a successful policy, but then we pretty much put Afghanistan out of our minds. While no one was watching, what followed was a civil war, the takeover by the Taliban, and the rise of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. All of that set in motion the events of 9/11. When we deployed forces eight years ago this month, it was to make sure Afghanistan would never again be a training ground for the killing of Americans. Saving untold thousands of lives is still the business at hand in this fight. And the success of our mission in Afghanistan is not only essential, it is entirely achievable with enough troops and enough political courage.
Then there's the matter of how to handle the terrorists we capture in this ongoing war. Some of them know things that, if shared, can save a good many innocent lives. When we faced that problem in the days and years after 9/11, we made some basic decisions. We understood that organized terrorism is not just a law-enforcement issue, but a strategic threat to the United States.
At every turn, we understood as well that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. We had a lot of blind spots - and that's an awful thing, especially in wartime. With many thousands of lives potentially in the balance, we didn't think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all.
The intelligence professionals who got the answers we needed from terrorists had limited time, limited options, and careful legal guidance. They got the baddest actors we picked up to reveal things they really didn't want to share. In the case of Khalid Sheik Muhammed, by the time it was over he was not was not only talking, he was practically conducting a seminar, complete with chalkboards and charts. It turned out he had a professorial side, and our guys didn't mind at all if classes ran long. At some point, the mastermind of 9/11 became an expansive briefer on the operations and plans of al-Qaeda. It happened in the course of enhanced interrogations. All the evidence, and common sense as well, tells us why he started to talk.
The debate over intelligence gathering in the seven years after 9/11 involves much more than historical accuracy. What we're really debating are the means and resolve to protect this country over the next few years, and long after that. Terrorists and their state sponsors must be held accountable, and America must remain on the offensive against them. We got it right after 9/11. And our government needs to keep getting it right, year after year, president after president, until the danger is finally overcome.
Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after 9/11 was a fading memory. Part of our responsibility, as we saw it, was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America ... and not to let 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse.
Eight years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive - and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed. So you would think that our successors would be going to the intelligence community saying, "How did you did you do it? What were the keys to preventing another attack over that period of time?"
Instead, they've chosen a different path entirely - giving in to the angry left, slandering people who did a hard job well, and demagoguing an issue more serious than any other they'll face in these four years. No one knows just where that path will lead, but I can promise you this: There will always be plenty of us willing to stand up for the policies and the people that have kept this country safe.
On the political left, it will still be asserted that tough interrogations did no good, because this is an article of faith for them, and actual evidence is unwelcome and disregarded. President Obama himself has ruled these methods out, and when he last addressed the subject he filled the air with vague and useless platitudes. His preferred device is to suggest that we could have gotten the same information by other means. We're invited to think so. But this ignores the hard, inconvenient truth that we did try other means and techniques to elicit information from Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and other al-Qaeda operatives, only turning to enhanced techniques when we failed to produce the actionable intelligence we knew they were withholding. In fact, our intelligence professionals, in urgent circumstances with the highest of stakes, obtained specific information, prevented specific attacks, and saved American lives.
In short, to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to disregard the program's legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country's name and in our country's cause. What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed.
For all that we've lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings - and least of all can that be said of our armed forces and intelligence personnel. They have done right, they have made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.
Last January 20th, our successors in office were given the highest honors that the voters of this country can give any two citizens. Along with that, George W. Bush and I handed the new president and vice president both a record of success in the war on terror, and the policies to continue that record and ultimately prevail. We had been the decision makers, but those seven years, four months, and nine days without another 9/11 or worse, were a combined achievement: a credit to all who serve in the defense of America, including some of the finest people I've ever met.
What the present administration does with those policies is their call to make, and will become a measure of their own record. But I will tell you straight that I am not encouraged when intelligence officers who acted in the service of this country find themselves hounded with a zeal that should be reserved for America's enemies. And it certainly is not a good sign when the Justice Department is set on a political mission to discredit, disbar, or otherwise persecute the very people who helped protect our nation in the years after 9/11.
There are policy differences, and then there are affronts that have to be answered every time without equivocation, and this is one of them. We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on our own guys.
We cannot hope to win a war by talking down our country and those who do its hardest work - the men and women of our military and intelligence services. They are, after all, the true keepers of the flame.
-
Pravda on the Hudson
Biden Dismisses Cheney’s Criticisms Over Afghanistan Sign in to Recommend
PETER BAKER
Published: October 23, 2009
PRAGUE — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had a blunt response on Friday to the latest broadsides from former Vice President Dick Cheney: “Who cares?”
In the latest exchange between old and new administrations, Mr. Biden rebuffed his predecessor’s criticism about President Obama’s handling of Afghanistan as “absolutely wrong.” And Mr. Biden rejected the last review of the war conducted by the White House under former President George W. Bush and Mr. Cheney as “irrelevant.”
The dismissive reply, which came at the end of Mr. Biden’s three-day swing through Eastern Europe during an interview with reporters traveling with him, underscored the weariness in the current White House with Mr. Cheney’s periodic assaults. At the same time, advisers to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden consider the former vice president a useful public foil and have not shied away from escalating the debate by taking him on directly.
At the heart of the dispute is a fundamental disagreement on national security, from how to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan to how to protect Americans at home from possible terrorist attacks. In a speech in Washington this week, Mr. Cheney complained that Mr. Obama was “dithering” in deciding whether to send more troops to Afghanistan and had committed a “strategic blunder” in scrapping the last administration’s missile defense plan in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Biden spent much of this week in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic assuring leaders in the region that the cancellation of Mr. Bush’s antimissile shield in favor of a more mobile replacement was not a concession to Russia, as Mr. Cheney and others contended. Mr. Biden secured an agreement with the Czech Republic on Friday to participate in the new missile defense system, as he earlier did with Poland.
Asked about Mr. Cheney’s criticism during a half-hour interview at the American ambassador’s residence here, Mr. Biden responded indirectly at first, saying leaders in the region now agree that the Obama plan will be more effective. “They believe that the new architecture is better,” the vice president said.
But as he warmed to the discussion, he became sharper in his rebuttals of Mr. Cheney. “I think that is absolutely wrong,” he said of the “dithering” charge. “I think what the administration is doing is exactly what we said it would do. And what I think it warrants doing. And that is making an informed judgment based upon circumstances that have changed.”
Mr. Biden shrugged off Mr. Cheney’s point that the old administration had left behind a review of Afghanistan.
“Who cares what — ” he said, and then stopped himself to find another way to put it. (“I can see the headline now,” said the famously free-wheeling vice president. “I’m getting better, guys.”)
But he went on to dismiss the Bush-Cheney review as inadequate. “That’s why the president asked me to get in the plane in January and go to Afghanistan,” Mr. Biden said. “I came back with a different review.”
Moreover, he said, the Bush-Cheney review is now dated. “A whole lot has changed in the last year,” Mr. Biden said. “Let’s assume they left us a review that was absolutely correct. Is that review relevant and totally applicable to today in light of the changes that have taken place in the region, in Afghanistan itself? So I think that is sort of irrelevant. Not sort of — I think it’s irrelevant.”
The interview was the first time Mr. Biden had publicly talked about Afghanistan in the weeks since the president began intensively rethinking his strategy and considering Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for about 40,000 more troops. Mr. Biden has been a forceful skeptic of General McChrystal’s request and an advocate for keeping troop levels roughly the same while focusing attention on hunting down Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Mr. Biden said that Mr. Obama had lived up to a pre-election pledge to take his vice president’s views seriously and added that he would not be upset if the president rejected them at the end of the Afghanistan policy review. “He has sought my opinion not generically but in detail,” Mr. Biden said. “And if he reaches a different conclusion than I do, that’s O.K. He’s the president.”
The vice president acknowledged that at every stop on his trip through Eastern Europe he ran into uncertainty from allies about whether America was going to stay the course in Afghanistan. “What they wanted to know was, ‘Are you leaving?’ ” he said, adding that they were satisfied with his reassurances that America was not withdrawing.
Mr. Biden wrapped up his trip on Friday with meetings with Czech leaders. Jan Fischer, the prime minister, said his country would participate in the new antimissile shield. “I used the opportunity to express our readiness as a NATO member to participate because the new architecture is going to be NATO based and the Czech Republic is ready to participate,” Mr. Fischer said.
Mr. Biden said a high-level defense team would visit Prague next month to discuss how to structure that participation. While Poland agreed to host SM-3 interceptors, the Czech Republic might help with research and development or by hosting a command and control center. Yet the Czech commitment remains uncertain since Mr. Fischer is a caretaker prime minister until elections next spring.
Still, securing Polish and Czech involvement in the new system may go a long way toward reassuring the region of America’s commitment to its security. Both Poland and the Czech Republic were supposed to host parts of the Bush system and the Obama administration did not inform them of his decision until just before the announcement. As news of his decision was leaking last month, Mr. Obama scrambled to reach Mr. Fischer by telephone after midnight to tell him first.
Mr. Biden acknowledged that the announcement was not handled well. “Could it have been done better?” he asked. “Yeah. Obviously it could have been done better.” He added, “That’s the reason for the trip.”
He said Eastern European leaders were reassured. “There is an understandable reason for the anxiety here. You’ve got a new administration.” But he added, “Missile architecture was more sort of a metaphor for ‘Are we committed?’ ”
-
George Friedman and Peter Zeihan | Tuesday, 27 October 2009
tags : Biden, Iran, Obama, Russia, StratforRussia, Iran and the Biden speech
The Obama Administration's aggressive diplomacy in Eastern Europe could sink its hopes for a peaceful resolution of its conflict with Iran.
This article was first published on the Stratfor website. George Friedman, is chairman and CEO of Stratfor. Peter Zeihan is a Stratfor analyst.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden toured several countries in Central Europe last week, including the Czech Republic and Poland. The trip comes just a few weeks after the United States reversed course and decided not to construct a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system in those two countries. While the system would have had little effect on the national security of either Poland or the Czech Republic, it was taken as a symbol of U.S. commitment to these two countries and to former Soviet satellites generally. The BMD cancellation accordingly caused intense concern in both countries and the rest of the region.
While the Obama administration strongly denied that the decision to halt the BMD deployment and opt for a different BMD system had anything to do with the Russians, the timing raised some questions. Formal talks with Iran on nuclear weapons were a few weeks away, and the only leverage the United States had in those talks aside from war was sanctions. The core of any effective sanctions against Iran would be placing limits on Iran's gasoline imports. By dint of proximity to Iran and massive spare refining capability, the Russians were essential to this effort -- and they were indicating that they wouldn't participate. Coincidence or not, the decision to pull BMD from Poland and the Czech Republic did give the Russians something they had been demanding at a time when they clearly needed to be brought on board.
The Biden Challenge
That's what made Biden's trip interesting. First, just a few weeks after the reversal, he revisited these countries. He reasserted American commitment to their security and promised the delivery of other weapons such as Patriot missile batteries, an impressive piece of hardware that really does enhance regional security (unlike BMD, which would grant only an indirect boost). Then, Biden went even further in Romania, not only extending his guarantees to the rest of Central Europe, but also challenging the Russians directly. He said that the United States regarded spheres of influence as 19th century thinking, thereby driving home that Washington is not prepared to accept Russian hegemony in the former Soviet Union (FSU). Most important, he called on the former satellites of the Soviet Union to assist republics in the FSU that are not part of the Russian Federation to overthrow authoritarian systems and preserve their independence.
This was a carefully written and vetted speech: It was not Biden going off on a tangent, but rather an expression of Obama administration policy. And it taps into the prime Russian fear, namely, that the West will eat away at Russia's western periphery -- and at Russia itself -- with color revolutions that result in the installation of pro-Western governments, just as happened in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004-2005. The United States essentially now has pledged itself to do just that, and has asked the rest of Central Europe to join it in creating and strengthening pro-Western governments in the FSU. After doing something Russia wanted the United States to do, Washington now has turned around and announced a policy that directly challenges Russia, and which in some ways represents Russia's worst-case scenario.
What happened between the decision to pull BMD and Biden's Romania speech remains unclear, but there are three possibilities. The first possibility is that the Obama administration decided to shift policy on Russia in disappointment over Moscow's lack of response to the BMD overture. The second possibility is that the Obama administration didn't consider the effects of the BMD reversal. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the one had nothing to do with the other, and it is possible that the Obama administration simply failed to anticipate the firestorm the course reversal would kick off in Central Europe and to anticipate that it would be seen as a conciliatory gesture to the Russians, and then had to scramble to calm the waters and reassert the basic American position on Russia, perhaps more harshly than before. The third possibility, a variation on the second scenario, is that the administration might not yet have a coordinated policy on Russia. Instead, it responds to whatever the most recent pressure happens to be, giving the appearance of lurching policy shifts.
The why of Washington decision-making is always interesting, but the fact of what has now happened is more pertinent. And that is that Washington now has challenged Moscow on the latter's core issues. However things got to that point, they are now there -- and the Russian issue now fully intersects with the Iranian issue. On a deeper level, Russia once again is shaping up to be a major challenge to U.S. national interests. Russia fears (accurately) that a leading goal of American foreign policy is to prevent the return of Russia as a major power. At present, however, the Americans lack the free hand needed to halt Russia's return to prominence as a result of commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Kremlin inner circle understands this divergence between goal and capacity all too well, and has been working to keep the Americans as busy as possible elsewhere.
Distracting Washington While Shoring Up Security
The core of this effort is Russian support for Iran. Moscow has long collaborated with Tehran on Iran's nuclear power generation efforts. Conventional Russian weapon systems are quite popular with the Iranian military. And Iran often makes use of Russian international diplomatic cover, especially at the U.N. Security Council, where Russia wields the all-important veto.
Russian support confounds Washington's ability to counter more direct Iranian action, whether that Iranian action be in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq or the Persian Gulf. The Obama administration would prefer to avoid war with Iran, and instead build an international coalition against Iran to force it to back down on any number of issues of which a potential nuclear weapons program is only the most public and obvious. But building that coalition is impossible with a Russia-sized hole right in the center of the system.
The end result is that the Americans have been occupied with the Islamic world for some time now, something that secretly delights the Russians. The Iranian distraction policy has worked fiendishly well: It has allowed the Russians to reshape their own neighborhood in ways that simply would not be possible if the Americans had more diplomatic and military freedom of action. At the beginning of 2009, the Russians saw three potential challenges to their long-term security that they sought to mitigate. As of this writing, they have not only succeeded, they have managed partially to co-opt all three threats.
First, there is Ukraine, which is tightly integrated into the Russian industrial and agricultural heartland. A strong Ukrainian-Russian partnership (if not outright control of Ukraine by Russia) is required to maintain even a sliver of Russian security. Five years ago, Western forces managed to short-circuit a Kremlin effort to firm up Russian control of the Ukrainian political system, resulting in the Orange Revolution that saw pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko take office. After five years of serious Russian diplomatic and intelligence work, Moscow has since managed not just to discredit Yushchenko -- he is now less popular in most opinion polls than the margin of error -- but to command the informal loyalty of every other candidate for president in the upcoming January 2010 election. Very soon, Ukraine's Western moment will formally be over.
Russia is also sewing up the Caucasus. The only country that could challenge Russia's southern flank is Turkey, and until now, the best Russian hedge against Turkish power has been an independent (although certainly still a Russian client) Armenia. (Turkish-Armenian relations have been frozen in the post-Cold War era over the contentious issue of the Armenian genocide.) A few months ago, Russia offered the Turks the opportunity to improve relations with Armenia. The Turks are emerging from 90 years of near-comatose international relations, and they jumped at the chance to strengthen their position in the Caucasus. But in the process, Turkey's relationship with its heretofore regional ally, Azerbaijan (Armenia's archfoe), has soured. Terrified that they are about to lose their regional sponsor, the Azerbaijanis have turned to the Russians to counterbalance Armenia, while the Russians still pull all Armenia's strings. The end result is that Turkey's position in the Caucasus is now far weaker than it was a few months ago, and Russia still retains the ability to easily sabotage any Turkish-Armenian rapprochement.
Even on the North European Plain, Russia has made great strides. The main power on that plain is the recently reunified Germany. Historically, Germany and Russia have been at each other's throats, but only when they have shared a direct border. When an independent Poland separates them, they have a number of opportunities for partnership, and 2009 has seen such opportunities seized. The Russians initially faced a challenge regarding German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel is from the former East Germany, giving her personal reasons to see the Russians as occupiers. Cracking this nut was never going to be easy for Moscow, yet it succeeded. During the 2009 financial crisis, when Russian firms were snapping like twigs, the Russian government still provided bailout money and merger financing to troubled German companies, with a rescue plan for Opel even helping Merkel clinch re-election. With the Kremlin now offering to midwife -- and in many cases directly subsidize -- investment efforts in Russia by German firms such as E.On, Wintershall, Siemens, Volkswagen and ThyssenKrupp, the Kremlin has quite literally purchased German goodwill.
Washington Seeks a Game Changer
With Russia making great strides in Eurasia while simultaneously sabotaging U.S. efforts in the Middle East, the Americans desperately need to change the game. Despite its fiery tone, this desperation was on full display in Biden's speech. Flat-out challenging the Central Europeans to help other FSU countries recreate the revolutions they launched when they broke with the Soviet empire in 1989, specifically calling for such efforts in Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia, is as bald-faced a challenge as the Americans are currently capable of delivering. And to ensure there was no confusion on the point, Biden also promised -- publicly -- whatever support the Central Europeans might ask for. The Americans have a serious need for the Russians to be on the defensive. Washington wants to force the Russians to focus on their own neighborhood, ideally forgetting about the Iranians in the process. Better yet, Washington would like to force the Russians into a long slog of defensive actions to protect their clients hard up on their own border. The Russians did not repair the damage of the Orange Revolution overnight, so imagine how much time Washington would have if all of the former Soviet satellites started stirring up trouble across Russia's western and southern periphery.
The Central Europeans do not require a great deal of motivation. If the Americans are concerned about a resurgent Russia, then the Central Europeans are absolutely terrified -- and that was before the Russians started courting Germany, the only regional state that could stand up to Russia by itself. Things are even worse for the Central Europeans than they seem, as much of their history has consisted of vainly attempting to outmaneuver Germany and Russia's alternating periods of war and partnership.
The question of why the United States is pushing this hard at the present time remains. Talks with the Iranians are under way; it is difficult to gauge how they are going. The conventional wisdom holds that the Iranians are simply playing for time before allowing the talks to sink. This would mean the Iranians don't feel terribly pressured by the threat of sanctions and don't take threats of attack very seriously. At least with regard to the sanctions, the Russians have everything to do with Iran's blase attitude. The American decision to threaten Russia might simply have been a last-ditch attempt to force Tehran's hand now that conciliation seems to have failed. It isn't likely to work, because for the time being Russia has the upper hand in the former Soviet Union, and the Americans and their allies -- motivated as they may be -- do not have the best cards to play.
The other explanation might be that the White House wanted to let Iran know that the Americans don't need Russia to deal with Iran. The threats to Russia might infuriate it, but the Kremlin is unlikely to feel much in the form of clear and present dangers. On the other hand, blasting the Russians the way Biden did might force the Iranians to reconsider their hand. After all, if the Americans are no longer thinking of the Russians as part of the solution, this indicates that the Americans are about to give up on diplomacy and sanctions. And that means the United States must choose between accepting an Iranian bomb or employing the military option.
And this leaves the international system with two outcomes. First, by publicly ending attempts to secure Russian help, Biden might be trying to get the Iranians to take American threats seriously. And second, by directly challenging the Russians on their home turf, the United States will be making the borderlands between Western Europe and Russia a very exciting place.
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/11/15/video-46-handshakes-one-bow/
Smart power!
-
This could have gone on the Nuclear War thread too , , ,
China and the Brewing Iranian Crisis
PRESSURE CONTINUED TO BUILD in the showdown over Iran’s nuclear program, with the end-of-the-year deadline approaching for international negotiations to yield concrete results or have Iran face U.S.-led sanctions (or possibly military strikes). Attempting to underscore the urgency of the matter for Israel, head of Israeli military intelligence Amos Yadlin claimed Tuesday that Tehran has gathered enough materials in the past year to build a nuclear weapon.
Meanwhile, conflicting reports have emerged in the past two days about a planned face-to-face meeting of the P-5+1 group of major negotiators — the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China and Germany. The meeting was allegedly to be held on the sidelines of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen on Dec. 18 or in Brussels on Dec. 22, but has been replaced with a conference call scheduled for the latter date. Interestingly, all reports agree that the change of plans came at the behest of Chinese diplomats, who have thus far played a neutral role in the negotiations. It is unclear whether the Chinese adjusted the meeting for genuine scheduling reasons or to avoid U.S. demands to adopt sanctions against Iran. With the deadline weeks away and Iranian defiance already fully demonstrated, perhaps Beijing felt it would be doing everyone a favor by deemphasizing a meeting doomed to produce no results.
“China’s interests require that it not incur the wrath of superior outside forces.”
Regardless, the uncertainty raises the subject of China’s involvement in the brewing Iranian crisis. China’s core interests lie in maintaining regime stability and internal security, primarily through a steadily growing economy that keeps its massive population fed and employed. In foreign policy, this interest means promoting international trade that benefits the export-driven Chinese economy, while taking trade-conducive, non-confrontational stances on controversies and developing a wide range of diplomatic partners.
More importantly, China’s interests require that it not incur the wrath of superior outside forces — for instance, the United States — that could deal crushing blows to the economy, whether through trade barriers against Chinese exports or naval power that could threaten critical supply lines of energy and raw materials.
Given these core interests, Beijing’s stance on U.S. involvement in the Middle East and South Asia makes sense. Beijing is content with the current configuration of U.S. forces in the region, as the wars and subsequent surges in Iraq and Afghanistan keep the United States tied down and constrained. Though ultimately the U.S. Navy, not land forces, poses the chief threat against China, the two wars nevertheless ensure that Washington continues the status quo with China rather than create unnecessary distractions for itself. This enables China to focus on managing its growing economy and allaying internal socio-political tensions without the United States breathing down its neck.
The Iranian crisis, however, poses a far less predictable threat than the Afghan surge. Beijing has repeatedly stated that it prefers diplomatic solutions and rejects sanctions and war. The Chinese have maintained this standard line throughout the latter part of 2009 when it became clear that a crisis — including a higher potential for U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran — was just around the corner. At the same time, Beijing participated in the latest round of negotiations (initiated by the Obama administration). Beijing has urged Iran to cooperate, and has endorsed the International Atomic Energy Agency’s resolution against Iran’s defiance of nuclear transparency.
In other words, the Chinese are playing it both ways. On one hand, they do not want war — or sanctions stringent enough to trigger war — that would further destabilize the inherently unstable Middle East. This is especially true of the Persian Gulf, the source of most of China’s crude oil. The commerce-threatening nature of any Iranian war would put pressure on China’s energy-hungry economy during an exceedingly inauspicious economic period.
On the other hand, the Chinese are not particularly fond of nuclear proliferation that would also destabilize the region, so they nudge Iran to negotiate. If the United States were to strike a deal with Russia bringing Moscow into a gasoline sanctions regime against Iran, then China would not make itself conspicuous (or anger the United States) by resisting. At present, however, the United States has not met Russia’s demands, and Russia has refused to join in sanctions. Therefore, China cannot be blamed for dashing Washington’s efforts. Beijing can claim there is no international consensus and continue to call for further dialogue.
The Chinese position is to gauge which way the wind is blowing and only then set off in that direction. It will not go out on a limb for Iran, nor will it do so for Israel or the United States. China is watching and waiting — a tactic it shares with Iran, the United States and Russia. The Israelis alone find the situation increasingly unbearable — and yet the Israelis have a guarantee from the United States to do something about Iran. There can be no doubt that a crisis is building.
-
America is losing the free world
By Gideon Rachman
Published: January 5 2010 02:00 | Last updated: January 5 2010 02:00
Ever since 1945, the US has regarded itself as the leader of the "free world". But the Obama administration is facing an unexpected and unwelcome development in global politics. Four of the biggest and most strategically important democracies in the developing world - Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey - are increasingly at odds with American foreign policy. Rather than siding with the US on the big international issues, they are just as likely to line up with authoritarian powers such as China and Iran.
The US has been slow to pick up on this development, perhaps because it seems so surprising and unnatural. Most Americans assume that fellow democracies will share their values and opinions on international affairs. During the last presidential election campaign, John McCain, the Republican candidate, called for the formation of a global alliance of democracies to push back against authoritarian powers. Some of President Barack Obama's senior advisers have also written enthusiastically about an international league of democracies.
But the assumption that the world's democracies will naturally stick together is proving unfounded. The latest example came during the Copenhagen climate summit. On the last day of the talks, the Americans tried to fix up one-to-one meetings between Mr Obama and the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India - but failed each time. The Indians even said that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had already left for the airport.
So Mr Obama must have felt something of a chump when he arrived for a last-minute meeting with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, only to find him already deep in negotiations with the leaders of none other than Brazil, South Africa and India. Symbolically, the leaders had to squeeze up to make space for the American president around the table.
There was more than symbolism at work. In Copenhagen, Brazil, South Africa and India decided that their status as developing nations was more important than their status as democracies. Like the Chinese, they argued that it is fundamentally unjust to cap the greenhouse gas emissions of poor countries at a lower level than the emissions of the US or the European Union; all the more so since the industrialised west is responsible for the great bulk of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
Revealingly, both Brazilian and Chinese leaders have made the same pointed joke - likening the US to a rich man who, after gorging himself at a banquet, then invites the neighbours in for coffee and asks them to split the bill.
If climate change were an isolated example, it might be dismissed as an important but anomalous issue that is almost designed to split countries along rich-poor lines. But, in fact, if you look at Brazil, South Africa, India and Turkey - the four most important democracies in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the greater Middle East - it is clear that none of them can be counted as a reliable ally of the US, or of a broader "community of democracies".
In the past year, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil has cut a lucrative oil deal with China, spoken warmly of Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, and congratulated Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad on his "victory" in the Iranian presidential election, while welcoming him on a state visit to Brazil.
During a two-year stint on the United Nations Security Council from 2006, the South Africans routinely joined China and Russia in blocking resolutions on human rights and protecting authoritarian regimes such as Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan and Iran.
Turkey, once regarded as a crucial American ally in the cold war and then trumpeted as the only example of a secular, pro-western, Muslim democracy, is also no longer a reliable partner for the west. Ever since the US-led invasion of Iraq, opinion polls there have shown very high levels of anti-Americanism. The mildly Islamist AKP government has engaged with America's regional enemies - including Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran - and alarmed the Americans by taking an increasingly hostile attitude to Israel.
India's leaders do seem to cherish the idea that they have a "special relationship" with the US. But even the Indians regularly line up against the Americans on a range of international issues, from climate change to the Doha round of trade negotiations and the pursuit of sanctions against Iran or Burma.
So what is going on? The answer is that Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and India are all countries whose identities as democracies are now being balanced - or even trumped - by their identities as developing nations that are not part of the white, rich, western world. All four countries have ruling parties that see themselves as champions of social justice at home and a more equitable global order overseas. Brazil's Workers' party, India's Congress party, Turkey's AKP and South Africa's African National Congress have all adapted to globalisation - but they all retain traces of the old suspicions of global capitalism and of the US.
Mr Obama is seen as a huge improvement on George W. Bush - but he is still an American president. As emerging global powers and developing nations, Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey may often feel they have more in common with a rising China than with the democratic US.
gideon.rachman@ft.com
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/cd24b6ac-f999-11de-8085-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=ebe33f66-57aa-11dc-8c65-0000779fd2ac,print=yes.html
-
Why pander to the empty suit president leading the US into decline? China understands power politics and continues to put pieces into play on the global chessboard.
-
George Friedman of Statfor argues powerfully that geo politics will determine more about a nations alliances than political structures. I think he overstates his case, but he makes it well.
I just tried laying my hands on his statement of the US's five imperatives but did not succeed. :oops:
-
Friedman is a smart guy, but some of his analysis is a not much more than a geopolitical just so story.
-
Don't underestimate the value and worth of leaders and the ability of keen politicians to sense strength and weakness. The Iranians played Carter for a sucker but did not dare do the same with Reagan. When the North Vietnamese tried to play cute at the negotiation tables, Nixon brought then back with carpet bombing. Would Obama dare that?
The attitude of the American Left is to pander to the "weak" as a way to buy their votes. In international politics this translates in preferring Hamas (the weak) over Israel (the strong), for example. They might be weak but not dumb so they milk the American Left to the last drop.
Did you guys by any chance see this idiotic piece of news?
Iran accepts Clinton non-deadline on nuclear talks
By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press Writer – Tue Jan 5, 7:41 am ET
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran said Tuesday it welcomes Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's comments that there is no hard-and-fast deadline for starting nuclear dialogue.
On Monday, Clinton said the Obama administration remained open to negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, though it will move toward tougher sanctions if Iran does not respond positively. She stressed there was no hard-and-fast deadline for Iran.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100105/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_us
What kind of BS is that? We'll start talking right after we nuke Israel! With amateurs like Clinton running America, America's enemies are having a field day.
If you guys don't regain your country, there won't be much left to save after eight years of Obama.
Not that it's entirely related but let me tell you some Venezuelan news. We are having a shortage of rainfall and the Lake Guri, which feeds our main hydroelectric power plants is rather low. Guess what the solution is. They are shutting down the steel and aluminum plants in Guayana, they are cutting electricity to shopping malls at 9 PM to save water. Who the hell cares about unemployment? Who the hell cares about all the disruption? It's a bunch of rank amateurs running the country. I recall perfectly some of the campaign issues back in 1997. Some right of center candidates were stressing the importance of improving the public administrations. The left wing candidates -- the ones that won -- said that elections were about politics, not about administration. Now we have the results, no water, no electricity, no movies after 9 PM, no steel, no aluminum. My country is going to hell in a hand-basket of left wing politics. Yours will too if you let the Left keep on ruining it.
Denny Schlesinger
-
Obama is a one term president. Still, the US and the world will pay dearly for his 4 years of destruction. Israel may well not exist by the end of his term, as an example.
-
From 7/10/2009
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/10/obama-gives-iran-deadline-nuclear-program/
Obama gives Iran deadline on nuclear program
L'AQUILA, Italy -- President Obama said Friday that Iran faces a September deadline to show good-faith efforts to halt its nuclear weapons program, and said the statement issued by the world's leading industrial nations meeting here this week means the international community is ready to act.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/iran_deadline_passes_without_n.html
January 02, 2010
Iran deadline passes without notice
Ethel C. Fenig
It is now January 2, 2010 in Teheran, Washington DC and Hawaii. In other words it is past the absolutely, positively final deadline that President Barack Obama (D) offered to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to come clean by halting Iran's nuclear weapons program before Obama gets really, really angry and does something drastic like not be so engaging.
Ok, Ahmadinejad may be busy, what with countering the riots against him with deadly, bloody suppression, but not too busy to negotiate the purchase of still yet more uranium from Kazakhstan for Iran's uranium enrichment facilities.
Oh sure, the UN Security Council demanded a halt to this work but this is the UN Security Council and Iran so this edict can--and will--be ignored without any consequences.
But what about Obama's deadline? Will this too be ignored without consequences?
-
Obama is a one term president.
So we all hope. But remember, if the Right vote is divided between Republicans and the Tea Party, the Left wins.
Beware another Bull Moose Party.
-
Hopefully no one is stupid enough to try to make the tea party movement into a formal political party.
-
Wrong thread for this discussion. Please use "The Way Forward for the American Creed"-- where I will be glad to entertain the notion of a Tea Party.
-
The Obama Administration has with good reason taken flak for its approach to terrorism since the Christmas Day near-bombing over Detroit. So permit us to laud an antiterror success in the Commander in Chief's first year in office.
Though you won't hear him brag about it, President Obama has embraced and ramped up the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. As tactic and as a technology, drones are one of the main U.S. advantages that have emerged from this long war. (IEDs are one of the enemy's.) Yet their use isn't without controversy, and it took nerve for the White House to approve some 50 strikes last year, exceeding the total in the last three years of the Bush Administration.
From Pakistan to Yemen, Islamic terrorists now fear the Predator and its cousin, the better-armed Reaper. So do critics on the left in the academy, media and United Nations; they're calling drones an unaccountable tool of "targeted assassination" that inflames anti-American passions and kills civilians. At some point, the President may have to defend the drone campaign on military and legal grounds.
The case is easy. Not even the critics deny its success against terrorists. Able to go where American soldiers can't, the Predator and Reaper have since 9/11 killed more than half of the 20 most wanted al Qaeda suspects, the Uzbek, Yemeni and Pakistani heads of allied groups and hundreds of militants. Most of those hits were in the last four years.
"Very frankly, it's the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership," CIA Director Leon Panetta noted last May. The agency's own troubles with gathering human intelligence were exposed by last week's deadly bombing attack on the CIA station near Khost, Afghanistan.
Critics such as counterinsurgency writers David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum allege that drones have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. The U.N. Human Rights Council's investigator on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, has warned the Administration that the attacks could fall afoul of "international humanitarian law principles."
Civilian casualties are hard to verify, since independent observers often can't access the bombing sites, and estimates vary widely. But Pakistani government as well as independent studies have shown the Taliban claims are wild exaggerations. The civilian toll is relatively low, especially if compared with previous conflicts.
Never before in the history of air warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones. Even if al Qaeda doesn't issue uniforms, the remote pilots can carefully identify targets, and then use Hellfire missiles that cause far less damage than older bombs or missiles. Smarter weapons like the Predator make for a more moral campaign.
As for Mr. Alston's concerns, the legal case for drones is instructive. President Bush approved their use under his Constitutional authority as Commander in Chief, buttressed by Congress's Authorization for the Use of Military Force against al Qaeda and its affiliates after 9/11. Gerald Ford's executive order that forbids American intelligence from assassinating anyone doesn't apply to enemies in wartime.
International law also allows states to kill their enemies in a conflict, and to operate in "neutral" countries if the hosts allow bombing on their territory. Pakistan and Yemen have both given their permission to the U.S., albeit quietly. Even if they hadn't, the U.S. would be justified in attacking enemy sanctuaries there as a matter of self-defense.
Who gets on the drone approved "kill lists" is decided by a complex interagency process involving the CIA, Pentagon and White House. We hear the U.S. could have taken out the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki after his contacts with Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hassan came to light in November, missing the chance by not authorizing the strike. Perhaps al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship gave U.S. officials pause, but after he joined the jihad he became an enemy and his passport irrelevant.
Tellingly, after the attempted bombing over Detroit, the Administration rushed to leak that Yemenis, with unspecified American help, might have killed al-Awlaki in mid-December in a strike on al Qaeda forces. Al-Awlaki, who also was also in contact with the Nigerian bomber on Northwest Flight 253, may have survived.
While this aggressive aerial bombing is commendable against a dangerous enemy, it also reveals the paradox of President Obama's antiterror strategy. On the one hand, he's willing to kill terrorists in the field, but he's unwilling to hold these same terrorists under the rules of war at Guantanamo if we capture them in the field. We can kill them as war fighters, but if they're captured they become common criminals.
Our own view is that either "we are at war," as Mr. Obama said on Thursday, or we're not.
-
Decimating the enemy sounds like a good idea! Making him feel unsafe even at home is just perfect. Al Qaeda: there is no sanctuary!
Denny Schlesinger
-
Kill the enemy and disrupt their networks and you make it much harder for them to carry out large scale attacks against you.
-
By ELIOT A. COHEN
If the first year of President Barack Obama's foreign policy were a law firm in Charles Dickens's London, it would have a name like Bumble, Stumble and Skid.
It began with apologies to the Muslim world that went nowhere, a doomed attempt to beat Israel into line, utopian pleas to abolish nuclear weapons, unreciprocated concessions to Russia, and a curt note to the British to take back the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office. It continued with principled offers of serious negotiation to an Iranian regime too busy torturing, raping and killing demonstrators, and building new underground nuclear facilities, to take them up. Subsequently Beijing smothered domestic coverage of a presidential visit but did give the world the spectacle of the American commander in chief getting a talking-to about fiscal responsibility from a Communist chieftain.
The lovely town of Copenhagen staged not one, but two humiliations: the first when the Olympic Committee delivered the bad news that the president's effort to play hometown booster had failed utterly, before he even landed back in the U.S.; the second when the Chinese once again poked the U.S. in the eye by sending minor officials to meet with Mr. Obama, as they, the Indians and Brazilians tried to shoulder him out of cozy meetings aimed at sabotaging his environmental policy. Even smitten foreign admirers—in the case of the Nobel Prize, some addled Norwegian notables—managed to make him look bad.
It was nonetheless a year of international displays of presidential ego, sometimes disguised as cosmic modesty ("I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war"), but mainly of one slip after another. The decision to reinforce our military in Afghanistan came after an excruciating dither that undermined the confidence of our allies. Mr. Obama's loose talk of withdrawal beginning in 18 months then undid much of the good in his decision to send troops.
Some of these follies stemmed from the inevitable glitches of a new administration settling in—the foreign-policy equivalent of the White House social secretary failing to keep party crashers out. Some of them resulted from sheer naivete, much from the puerile vendetta Mr. Obama waged against the previous administration's record, a bad rhetorical habit that fogged the brains of people who should know better. One hopes that his advisers, and the president himself, recognize the weight of the query reportedly posed last April by the most formidable contemporary leader of a free country, Nicolas Sarkozy: "Est-il faible?" (Is he weak?). If a year from now world leaders think the answer is "yes," the U.S. will be in deep trouble.
In at least one way, Mr. Obama resembles his predecessor: He has enormous self-confidence. But where George W. Bush's certainty stemmed from moral conviction, Mr. Obama's arises from a sense of intellectual superiority. Given the centrality of his intelligence to his own self-perception, how might he use it to redeem a record of, at the moment, fairly unrelieved failure?
Much of foreign policy consists of a rough and ready game of adaptation to unforeseen, occasionally awful events. Indeed, Mr. Obama has been fortunate that his first year in office did not witness a real foreign-policy crisis. We have yet to see how he will meet that test. But there are large questions that require some high intellectual effort that he might consider tackling.
The first is explaining to the American people, and indeed to the world, what kind of war we are waging against Islamist movements. Neither Mr. Obama nor the predecessor he still complains of have been able to get beyond the trope of "extremists who have perverted a great religion." J. K. Rowling has given her readers a more thorough understanding of Lord Voldemort than the West's leaders have given their populations of whom we fight, what really animates them, and what the challenges that lie ahead will be. In particular, Mr. Obama has not articulated an effective policy of dealing with enemies who are neither criminals nor soldiers. Instead, he has tried to walk down both sides of a street at once, trying some in courts and keeping others in Guantanamo (or, in the future, a Gitmo North in Illinois) for handling by military tribunals.
The second problem is Iraq, the war that the president opposed, but the success of which is a matter of cardinal importance. The U.S. must have a broad policy for the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Such a policy should—must—work Iraq into a broader pattern of relationships. The emergence of a free Iraq offers great opportunities. A relatively stable, representative and secular Iraq would help counterbalance Iran, support moderate regimes such as Jordan, and fuel a world economy that, however climate conscious, will need oil. Simply to talk about "responsibly leaving Iraq to its people" is, in fact, irresponsible. Iraq will need care and attention to stay on its current fragile trajectory to success, but it is also an opportunity not to be neglected.
Part of un-Bushism as foreign policy has been a self-inflicted muteness by this most articulate of politicians on the topic of democracy, freedom and human rights. American foreign policy has always been a long and difficult dialogue between realpolitik and our values, our pursuit of our own interests, and our deliberate efforts to spread freedom abroad. Saying that the U.S. will "bear witness" to abuses and brutality around the world is, in effect, to say that we will send flowers to funerals. Mr. Obama needs to say something considerably more serious. In the case of Iran, for example, he could make it altogether unambiguous that we stand with those risking their lives to confront and, if fortune favors them, overthrow a dangerous, indeed evil regime.
Finally, all the globalist talk of this past year has obscured the importance of our alliances, which are evolving, but above all, need tending. New and rising allies—as different as the United Arab Emirates and Colombia—need to be identified and described as such. But more importantly, they, as well as old allies, need to hear from the U.S. president the importance we attribute to them and a conceptual description of how they fit into our policy.
It's a large agenda, but then, Mr. Obama likes to give speeches. And it still leaves plenty—articulating the need for and meaning of American primacy, for example—for 2011.
Mr. Cohen was counselor of the Department of State from 2007 to 2009. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
-
A nice scholarly interview on the major themes in American foreign policy
http://www.pjtv.com/v/2941
-
A nice scholarly interview on the major themes in American foreign policy
http://www.pjtv.com/v/2941
Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Wilsonian and Jacksonian are the four idealized foreign policy drivers but then reality gets in the way: "Backyardian."
Eisenhower let the Russian invade Hungary in 1956 but Kennedy did not let them set up missiles in Cuba. Eastern Europe is Russia's back yard while the Caribbean is America's back yard. Those are hard facts on the ground.
Russia let America invade Grenada but did not let America set up missiles in Poland. Just the mirror image of the above Eisenhower/Kennedy policies. Backyardianism at work.
Denny Schlesinger
-
Friday, February 26, 2010 STRATFOR.COM Diary Archives
stratfor
The Iranian Saga Continues
THURSDAY WITNESSED A SERIES OF NEW WRINKLES in the ongoing Iran saga. For those readers who have been in a coma for the last three months, here is the abbreviated background.
Israel is a state so small that it could not likely survive a nuclear strike. It feels that Iran’s civilian nuclear power program is simply a mask for a more nefarious weapons project and wants it stopped by severe sanctions if possible, and military force if necessary. As Israel lacks the muscle to achieve this itself, it is attempting to pressure the Americans to handle the issue. Israel is reasonably confident it can so pressure Washington, simply because while Israel lacks the punch to certifiably end the Iranian program, it most certainly has the ability to start a war. Since Iran’s best means of retaliating would be to interrupt oil shipments in the Persian Gulf, the United States would have no choice but to get involved, regardless of its independent desires.
Ergo it was with significant interest that we watched the State Department’s daily press briefing, where State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters the following: “It is not our intent to have crippling sanctions that have a significant impact on the Iranian people. Our actual intent is actually to find ways to pressure the government while protecting the people.” The same day, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was in Washington reiterating Israeli policy in support of the very same so-called “crippling sanctions.” While it may seem little more than semantics, the terminology here matters, especially to Israel — reports from Israel indicate that the Israeli Prime Minister’s office intends to follow up on the issue to ensure that the rejection of crippling sanctions does not constitute a policy shift.
Our first thought was not far from the Israelis’ — that the Americans were taking a step back from sanctions. But when we re-evaluated, we noted that in recent weeks many of the other players that would be required to make sanctions work — Germany, Russia and China most notably — have been acting a bit peculiar. We are hardly to the point where we think that the various players are getting down to the brass tacks of sanctions details, but there is little doubt that the Americans have been making incremental progress in that direction. Still, they are far from achieving sanctions that would meet Israel’s definition of “crippling.”
“If there is a single state that must be on board for sanctions to work, it is Russia.”
Which made us even more interested to see sanctions-busting rhetoric out of none other than Brazil. Brazil and Iran are literally about as far as two states can be from each other on this planet, but Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is on a bit of an Iran kick. Iran is hoping that when Lula travels to Iran for a formal state visit in May he will go beyond the rhetoric and invite Iranian banks to operate in Brazil, an action that allows them to partially circumvent whatever financial sanctions are already in place.
STRATFOR is admittedly puzzled by this preoccupation with Iran, as it does not seem to grant Brazil (or Lula) any benefit. Lula is not a rabid leftist, but instead a relatively moderate statesman. Brazil and Iran hold minimal bilateral trade or investment interests. Brazilian energy powerhouse Petroleos Brasilieros (Petrobras) recently left projects in Iran, ostensibly because of lack of opportunity (though the threat of U.S. retaliation hovered in the air). And any possible political gains are questionable at least. While we acknowledge that twisting the American tail can earn major kudos in international fora, getting in the way of what is becoming a core American foreign policy initiative can be a dangerous place to be. Additionally, Lula is on his way out of the presidency and does not need to curry favor with an already enthusiastic Brazilian public. In fact, some groups in Brazil have openly challenged his Iranian policy. U.S. State Department senior personnel, including Under Secretary of State William J. Burns as well as his boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have already blocked out time to convince Lula to walk away from this fight.
Yet even if the United States can convince states such as Brazil — not to mention China — that tough words on Iran must give way to tough action, it is not as if Iran lacks its own means of reshaping the equation. Most notably, Iranian influence would be felt in Iraq.
On Thursday, Washington leaked that the man in charge of implementing military strategy in Iraq, Gen. Raymond Odierno, had asked for additional American forces to remain in Iraq beyond U.S. President Barack Obama’s August withdrawal deadline. Specifically, Odierno fears — with a substantial number of reasons — that the northern city of Kirkuk could explode into violence if U.S. forces leave too soon.
The Kurds have been the sectarian group in Iraq that has proven most helpful to the Americans, and they hope that in time Kirkuk will serve not only as Iraq’s northern oil capital, but as the Kurdish regional capital as well. If the U.S. commander in charge of the withdrawal has already petitioned the president for more troops in the part of the country that is most secure, one can only imagine what the situation is like in the south where Iran’s influence is palpable.
Finally, let us end with a point on those as yet unrealized sanctions. If there is a single state that must be on board for them to work, it is Russia. Russia has sufficient financial access to the Western world to sink any banking sanctions, plus sufficient spare refining capacity and access to transport infrastructure to make any gasoline sanctions a politically expensive exercise in futility.
But Russia does not work for free, and Thursday Moscow clarified just how important it thinks it has become. Thursday Russia explicitly extended its nuclear umbrella to Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, the five other states in its Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). While CSTO is a pale, pale shadow of its NATO counterpart, the Kremlin’s announcement was a not-so-subtle reminder that Russia not only has nuclear weapons — as opposed to any, at present, purely theoretical Iranian nuclear weapons — but that (at least on paper) it is willing to use such weapons to protect what the Kremlin sees as its turf.
Ultimately the Russians are willing to toss the Iranians aside, but only if the price is right. Thursday they gave a pretty clear idea of just what that price is: full American acquiescence to their desired sphere of influence. And with Russian influence continuing to rise in the former Soviet Union — earlier this week Ukrainian authorities certified the election of a pro-Moscow president, fully overturning the Orange Revolution of five years ago — it is a price that is likely to only increase in the months ahead.
-
------------
....................
The trouble is that Israel's strategic problem is usually presented in reductive terms: Iran (in the standard view) represents an existential threat to Israel in that it might get nuclear weapons; this would give it the capacity to destroy Israel, and therefore Israel must nip the existential threat in the bud. In this narrow framework, pushing back Iran's nuclear development by six to 18 months hardly seems worth the cost.
Iran's perceived attempt to acquire nuclear weapons, though, is not Israel's problem as such; the problem is that Israel is the ally of a superpower that does not want to be a superpower, headed by a president with a profound emotional attachment to a nostalgic image of the Third World. If America were in fact acting like a superpower, the problem would not have arisen in the first place, for the United States would use its considerably greater resources to destroy Iran's nuclear program.
Rather than focus on the second-order effect - the consequences of Iran's possible acquisition of nuclear weapons - Israeli analysts should consider the primary issue, namely the strategic zimzum [2] of the United States. The correct questions are: 1) can Israel act as a regional superpower independently of the United States, and 2) what would Israel do to establish its regional superpower status?
The answer to the first question obviously depends on the second. To act as a regional superpower, Israel would have to take actions that shift the configuration of forces in its favor. No outside analyst has sufficient information to judge the issue - with the best of information a great deal of uncertainty is inevitable - but there are several reasons to believe that an Israeli attack on Iran would establish the Jewish state as an independent superpower and compel the United States to adjust its policy to Israel's strategic requirements.
First, the Sunni Arab states have a stronger interest than Israel's to stop Iran from possibly going nuclear. Israel, after all, possesses perhaps two hundred deliverable nuclear devices, including some very big thermonuclear ones, and is in position to wipe Iran off the map. But none of Iran's Arab rivals is in such a position. The Saudis have done everything but take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post to encourage the Obama administration to attack Iran. Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, warned on February 15 that sanctions were a long-term measure while the world faces a short-term threat from Iran. Egypt reportedly has allowed Israeli missile ships to pass through the Suez Canal en route to the Persian Gulf.
Secondly, Russia well might prefer to deal with Israel as an independent regional power than as an ally of the United States. A stronger Israeli presence in the region also might contribute to Russia's market share in missiles and eventually fighter aircraft. Russian-Israeli cooperation in a number of military fields has improved markedly during the past year, including the first-ever sale of Israeli weapons to Russia (drones) and Israeli help for the Russian-Indian "fifth generation" fighter project.
Third, the United States would have to respond to a new strategic situation in the Middle East were Israel to inflict even moderate damage on Iran's nuclear program. The consequences would include, among other things:
Aggressive retaliation by Iran against American targets in Iraq. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have opposed bombing of Iran for years in part because they fear that Iran could inflict significant casualties on American forces.
Stronger Iranian support for the Taliban. Washington's plan for Afghanistan depends in part on the fanciful notion that Iran will be persuaded to support the Shi'ite Hazara minority against the Pashtun Taliban. Iran has always played both sides and in the event of an Israeli strike would shift resources towards whatever America liked the least.
Greater tensions between Pakistan and Iran. Iran's credibility in the region depends on its perception of being the protector of Pakistan's 35 million Shi'ites, the second-largest concentration outside of the 70 million people of Iran.
To the extent Washington has a Middle East policy, it seems to involve playing balance-of-power games on the scale of the Mad Hatter's tea party, as I wrote at year-end (The life and premature death of the Pax Obamicana Asia Times Online, December 24, 2009). Whatever Washington thought it was doing would come unstuck in the wake of an Israeli strike against Iran. Rather than attempt to lead events - in no particular direction - Washington would have no choice except to follow until it arrived at its own foreign policy at some unspecified future date. Although Washington would scream like a scalded pig, Israel's influence is more likely to rise than to fall in the aftermath.
There are numerous variables I cannot possibly estimate, of which the most important have to do with the technical feasibility of a long-distance strike. The political variables are too fuzzy to pin down. The strategic framework in which a unilateral Israel strike on Tehran makes sense is one in which all depends on Israel's capacity to improvise and dominate the situation through a combination of force and unpredictability.
Once again, the words of my favorite character in American literature - Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op - come to mind: "Plans are all right sometimes ... And sometimes just stirring things up is all right - if you're tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes to the top."
Full text:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LB18Ak01.html
-
Thinking About the Unthinkable: A U.S.-Iranian Deal
March 1, 2010
By George Friedman
The United States apparently has reached the point where it must either accept that Iran will develop nuclear weapons at some point if it wishes, or take military action to prevent this. There is a third strategy, however: Washington can seek to redefine the Iranian question.
As we have no idea what leaders on either side are thinking, exploring this represents an exercise in geopolitical theory. Let’s begin with the two apparent stark choices.
Diplomacy vs. the Military Option
The diplomatic approach consists of creating a broad coalition prepared to impose what have been called crippling sanctions on Iran. Effective sanctions must be so painful that they compel the target to change its behavior. In Tehran’s case, this could only consist of blocking Iran’s imports of gasoline. Iran imports 35 percent of the gasoline it consumes. It is not clear that a gasoline embargo would be crippling, but it is the only embargo that might work. All other forms of sanctions against Iran would be mere gestures designed to give the impression that something is being done.
The Chinese will not participate in any gasoline embargo. Beijing gets 11 percent of its oil from Iran, and it has made it clear it will continue to deliver gasoline to Iran. Moscow’s position is that Russia might consider sanctions down the road, but it hasn’t specified when, and it hasn’t specified what. The Russians are more than content seeing the U.S. bogged down in the Middle East and so are not inclined to solve American problems in the region. With the Chinese and Russians unlikely to embargo gasoline, these sanctions won’t create significant pain for Iran. Since all other sanctions are gestures, the diplomatic approach is therefore unlikely to work.
The military option has its own risks. First, its success depends on the quality of intelligence on Iran’s nuclear facilities and on the degree of hardening of those targets. Second, it requires successful air attacks. Third, it requires battle damage assessments that tell the attacker whether the strike succeeded. Fourth, it requires follow-on raids to destroy facilities that remain functional. And fifth, attacks must do more than simply set back Iran’s program a few months or even years: If the risk of a nuclear Iran is great enough to justify the risks of war, the outcome must be decisive.
Each point in this process is a potential failure point. Given the multiplicity of these points — which includes others not mentioned — failure may not be an option, but it is certainly possible.
But even if the attacks succeed, the question of what would happen the day after the attacks remains. Iran has its own counters. It has a superbly effective terrorist organization, Hezbollah, at its disposal. It has sufficient influence in Iraq to destabilize that country and force the United States to keep forces in Iraq badly needed elsewhere. And it has the ability to use mines and missiles to attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf shipping lanes for some period — driving global oil prices through the roof while the global economy is struggling to stabilize itself. Iran’s position on its nuclear program is rooted in the awareness that while it might not have assured options in the event of a military strike, it has counters that create complex and unacceptable risks. Iran therefore does not believe the United States will strike or permit Israel to strike, as the consequences would be unacceptable.
To recap, the United States either can accept a nuclear Iran or risk an attack that might fail outright, impose only a minor delay on Iran’s nuclear program or trigger extremely painful responses even if it succeeds. When neither choice is acceptable, it is necessary to find a third choice.
Redefining the Iranian Problem
As long as the problem of Iran is defined in terms of its nuclear program, the United States is in an impossible place. Therefore, the Iranian problem must be redefined. One attempt at redefinition involves hope for an uprising against the current regime. We will not repeat our views on this in depth, but in short, we do not regard these demonstrations to be a serious threat to the regime. Tehran has handily crushed them, and even if they did succeed, we do not believe they would produce a regime any more accommodating toward the United States. The idea of waiting for a revolution is more useful as a justification for inaction — and accepting a nuclear Iran — than it is as a strategic alternative.
At this moment, Iran is the most powerful regional military force in the Persian Gulf. Unless the United States permanently stations substantial military forces in the region, there is no military force able to block Iran. Turkey is more powerful than Iran, but it is far from the Persian Gulf and focused on other matters at the moment, and it doesn’t want to take on Iran militarily — at least not for a very long time. At the very least, this means the United States cannot withdraw from Iraq. Baghdad is too weak to block Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, and the Iraqi government has elements friendly toward Iran.
Historically, regional stability depended on the Iraqi-Iranian balance of power. When it tottered in 1990, the result was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The United States did not push into Iraq in 1991 because it did not want to upset the regional balance of power by creating a vacuum in Iraq. Rather, U.S. strategy was to re-establish the Iranian-Iraqi balance of power to the greatest extent possible, as the alternative was basing large numbers of U.S. troops in the region.
The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 assumed that once the Baathist regime was destroyed the United States would rapidly create a strong Iraqi government that would balance Iran. The core mistake in this thinking lay in failing to recognize that the new Iraqi government would be filled with Shiites, many of whom regarded Iran as a friendly power. Rather than balancing Iran, Iraq could well become an Iranian satellite. The Iranians strongly encouraged the American invasion precisely because they wanted to create a situation where Iraq moved toward Iran’s orbit. When this in fact began happening, the Americans had no choice but an extended occupation of Iraq, a trap both the Bush and Obama administrations have sought to escape.
It is difficult to define Iran’s influence in Iraq at this point. But at a minimum, while Iran may not be able to impose a pro-Iranian state on Iraq, it has sufficient influence to block the creation of any strong Iraqi government either through direct influence in the government or by creating destabilizing violence in Iraq. In other words, Iran can prevent Iraq from emerging as a counterweight to Iran, and Iran has every reason to do this. Indeed, it is doing just this.
The Fundamental U.S.-Iranian Issue
Iraq, not nuclear weapons, is the fundamental issue between Iran and the United States. Iran wants to see a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq so Iran can assume its place as the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf. The United States wants to withdraw from Iraq because it faces challenges in Afghanistan — where it will also need Iranian cooperation — and elsewhere. Committing forces to Iraq for an extended period of time while fighting in Afghanistan leaves the United States exposed globally. Events involving China or Russia — such as the 2008 war in Georgia — would see the United States without a counter. The alternative would be a withdrawal from Afghanistan or a massive increase in U.S. armed forces. The former is not going to happen any time soon, and the latter is an economic impossibility.
Therefore, the United States must find a way to counterbalance Iran without an open-ended deployment in Iraq and without expecting the re-emergence of Iraqi power, because Iran is not going to allow the latter to happen. The nuclear issue is simply an element of this broader geopolitical problem, as it adds another element to the Iranian tool kit. It is not a stand-alone issue.
The United States has an interesting strategy in redefining problems that involves creating extraordinarily alliances with mortal ideological and geopolitical enemies to achieve strategic U.S. goals. First consider Franklin Roosevelt’s alliance with Stalinist Russia to block Nazi Germany. He pursued this alliance despite massive political outrage not only from isolationists but also from institutions like the Roman Catholic Church that regarded the Soviets as the epitome of evil.
Now consider Richard Nixon’s decision to align with China at a time when the Chinese were supplying weapons to North Vietnam that were killing American troops. Moreover, Mao — who had said he did not fear nuclear war as China could absorb a few hundred million deaths — was considered, with reason, quite mad. Nevertheless, Nixon, as anti-Communist and anti-Chinese a figure as existed in American politics, understood that an alliance (and despite the lack of a formal treaty, alliance it was) with China was essential to counterbalance the Soviet Union at a time when American power was still being sapped in Vietnam.
Roosevelt and Nixon both faced impossible strategic situations unless they were prepared to redefine the strategic equation dramatically and accept the need for alliance with countries that had previously been regarded as strategic and moral threats. American history is filled with opportunistic alliances designed to solve impossible strategic dilemmas. The Stalin and Mao cases represent stunning alliances with prior enemies designed to block a third power seen as more dangerous.
It is said that Ahmadinejad is crazy. It was also said that Mao and Stalin were crazy, in both cases with much justification. Ahmadinejad has said many strange things and issued numerous threats. But when Roosevelt ignored what Stalin said and Nixon ignored what Mao said, they each discovered that Stalin’s and Mao’s actions were far more rational and predictable than their rhetoric. Similarly, what the Iranians say and what they do are quite different.
U.S. vs. Iranian Interests
Consider the American interest. First, it must maintain the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The United States cannot tolerate interruptions, and that limits the risks it can take. Second, it must try to keep any one power from controlling all of the oil in the Persian Gulf, as that would give such a country too much long-term power within the global system. Third, while the United States is involved in a war with elements of the Sunni Muslim world, it must reduce the forces devoted to that war. Fourth, it must deal with the Iranian problem directly. Europe will go as far as sanctions but no further, while the Russians and Chinese won’t even go that far yet. Fifth, it must prevent an Israeli strike on Iran for the same reasons it must avoid a strike itself, as the day after any Israeli strike will be left to the United States to manage.
Now consider the Iranian interest. First, it must guarantee regime survival. It sees the United States as dangerous and unpredictable. In less than 10 years, it has found itself with American troops on both its eastern and western borders. Second, it must guarantee that Iraq will never again be a threat to Iran. Third, it must increase its authority within the Muslim world against Sunni Muslims, whom it regards as rivals and sometimes as threats.
Now consider the overlaps. The United States is in a war against some (not all) Sunnis. These are Iran’s enemies, too. Iran does not want U.S. troops along its eastern and western borders. In point of fact, the United States does not want this either. The United States does not want any interruption of oil flow through Hormuz. Iran much prefers profiting from those flows to interrupting them. Finally, the Iranians understand that it is the United States alone that is Iran’s existential threat. If Iran can solve the American problem its regime survival is assured. The United States understands, or should, that resurrecting the Iraqi counterweight to Iran is not an option: It is either U.S. forces in Iraq or accepting Iran’s unconstrained role.
Therefore, as an exercise in geopolitical theory, consider the following. Washington’s current options are unacceptable. By redefining the issue in terms of dealing with the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there are three areas of mutual interest. First, both powers have serious quarrels with Sunni Islam. Second, both powers want to see a reduction in U.S. forces in the region. Third, both countries have an interest in assuring the flow of oil, one to use the oil, the other to profit from it to increase its regional power.
The strategic problem is, of course, Iranian power in the Persian Gulf. The Chinese model is worth considering here. China issued bellicose rhetoric before and after Nixon’s and Kissinger’s visits. But whatever it did internally, it was not a major risk-taker in its foreign policy. China’s relationship with the United States was of critical importance to China. Beijing fully understood the value of this relationship, and while it might continue to rail about imperialism, it was exceedingly careful not to undermine this core interest.
The major risk of the third strategy is that Iran will overstep its bounds and seek to occupy the oil-producing countries of the Persian Gulf. Certainly, this would be tempting, but it would bring a rapid American intervention. The United States would not block indirect Iranian influence, however, from financial participation in regional projects to more significant roles for the Shia in Arabian states. Washington’s limits for Iranian power are readily defined and enforced when exceeded.
The great losers in the third strategy, of course, would be the Sunnis in the Arabian Peninsula. But Iraq aside, they are incapable of defending themselves, and the United States has no long-term interest in their economic and political relations. So long as the oil flows, and no single power directly controls the entire region, the United States does not have a stake in this issue.
Israel would also be enraged. It sees ongoing American-Iranian hostility as a given. And it wants the United States to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat. But eliminating this threat is not an option given the risks, so the choice is a nuclear Iran outside some structured relationship with the United States or within it. The choice that Israel might want, a U.S.-Iranian conflict, is unlikely. Israel can no more drive American strategy than can Saudi Arabia.
From the American standpoint, an understanding with Iran would have the advantage of solving an increasingly knotty problem. In the long run, it would also have the advantage of being a self-containing relationship. Turkey is much more powerful than Iran and is emerging from its century-long shell. Its relations with the United States are delicate. The United States would infuriate the Turks by doing this deal, forcing them to become more active faster. They would thus emerge in Iraq as a counterbalance to Iran. But Turkey’s anger at the United States would serve U.S. interests. The Iranian position in Iraq would be temporary, and the United States would not have to break its word as Turkey eventually would eliminate Iranian influence in Iraq.
Ultimately, the greatest shock of such a maneuver on both sides would be political. The U.S.-Soviet agreement shocked Americans deeply, the Soviets less so because Stalin’s pact with Hitler had already stunned them. The Nixon-Mao entente shocked all sides. It was utterly unthinkable at the time, but once people on both sides thought about it, it was manageable.
Such a maneuver would be particularly difficult for U.S. President Barack Obama, as it would be widely interpreted as another example of weakness rather than as a ruthless and cunning move. A military strike would enhance his political standing, while an apparently cynical deal would undermine it. Ahmadinejad could sell such a deal domestically much more easily. In any event, the choices now are a nuclear Iran, extended airstrikes with all their attendant consequences, or something else. This is what something else might look like and how it would fit in with American strategic tradition.
-
Second post of the day-- the post is by BBG, but I think it better belongs in this thread:
The real Arab stuff-What are realistic, moderate Arabic-speaking rulers thinking? [about Obama]
Jerusalem Post ^ | 3-1-10 | BARRY RUBIN
Hussain Abdul Hussain gets it. He’s one of the most interesting Arab journalists who also write in English. In his latest article “Lonely Obama vs. popular Iran”, published in the Huffington Post, he points out what the most realistic people and more moderate rulers in the Arabic-speaking world are thinking.
Theme one: Popularity isn’t so important in the Middle East. “A common perception is that under President Barack Obama, America’s image has improved, and perhaps its friends have increased. But such claims are unfounded, as the opposite proves to be true. International relations, however, are about interests, not sweet talk. As [George W.] Bush went out recruiting allies, and making enemies, Obama lost America’s friends while failing to win over enemies.”
Theme two: What is important is that allies believe you will support and protect them. Obama isn’t doing that. Example A, Iraq. “After losing more than 4,300 troops in battle and spending [a huge amount of money] since 2003, America today cannot find a single politician or group that would express gratitude to Americans for ridding Iraq of its ruthless tyrant Saddam Hussein, and allowing these politicians to speak out freely. On the contrary, shy of making their excellent backdoor ties with Washington known since they fear Obama will depart Iraq and never look back, Iraqi politicians started expressing dissatisfaction with the United States in public.”
Example B, Lebanon. Before Obama took office, more than one-third of the entire population – most of them Sunni Muslims – demonstrated against Hizbullah and Syrian occupation. And the Druse leader Walid Jumblatt said on televisionthat he was proud to be part of America’s plan to spread democracy in the Middle East. But “by the time Obama had made it to the White House, support of America’s allies in Lebanon waned since Obama was determined to appease their foes in Syria and Iran. [Said] Hariri [leader of the moderate forces] and Jumblatt [his former close ally] were forced to abandon their fight for Lebanon’s democracy and freedom” and seek to make a deal with Syria and Hizbullah instead.
Example C, Iran. The people revolted against the autocratic regime and staged mass demonstrations, “but Obama’s Washington was busy sending one letter of appeasement after another to Iran’s tyrants, and accordingly failed to side with the Green Revolution for democracy and freedom. When Obama did show support for the Green movement, it was too little and too late.”
AMONG THOSE worried about a similar lack of US support are Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the small Gulf states, the three North African states, most of Lebanon and those Turks who don’t want to live under an Islamist regime.
Theme three: Iran helps its allies. Hence, Iran has more allies, while the US has fewer. Iran is going up; the US is going down. “Now compare America’s friends around the Middle East to Iran’s cronies, and you can immediately understand why Washington is in trouble, both diplomatically and on a popular level, while Iran is confident as it marches toward producing a nuclear weapon and expanding its influence across the Middle East.”
Iranian ally A, Hizbullah: “Since 1981, Iran has been funding its Lebanese ally Hizbullah, never defaulting on any of its pledged payments. Hizbullah went from an embryonic group into a state within a state, boasting a membership of several thousands and maintaining a private army, schools, hospitals, orphanages, satellite TV and a number of other facilities that have won it the hearts of Lebanon’s Shi’ites, and have given Hizbullah an absolute command over them.”
Iranian ally B, Syria: “Iran has maintained a flow of cash and political support toward Syria for a similar amount of time. Obama has been begging Syria to switch sides and abandon Iran. Judging by the mishaps that always seem to befall America’s friends with time, Syria does not seem likely to change, but is rather playing an Obama administration desperate for whatever it can claim as success in its foreign policy.”
As if to prove the point, immediately after a big American delegation visited Damascus to restore full relations and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Congress that US policy is seeking to detach Syria from its alliance with Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Syria and the two leaders made strong anti-American statements while pledging eternal partnership.
Here’s the headline in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat: “Syria and Iran defy Clinton in show of unity.”
And in the Syrian government’s newspaper Tishrin a column explained that if the US wanted a deal with Iran and Syria to achieve peace in the region that would have to include Israel’s elimination.
Iranian ally C, Iraqi insurgents: “In Iraq, Iran does not only fund and train militias and violent groups, but it also funds electoral campaigns of Iraqi politicians, loyal media groups and political parties, thus expanding its influence over Iraq exponentially. Spending billions more than Iran in Iraq, America has seen its money spent to no or little effect.”
And here’s the bottom line: “The comparison between Iran and Obama’s America is simple. While Teheran never let down an ally, offering them consistent financial and political support, Washington’s support of its allies around the world has always been intermittent, due to changes with administrations and an ever swinging mood among American voters, pundits and analysts.
“So while Iran has created a mini-Islamic republic in Lebanon, and is on its way to doing the same in Iraq, America has failed in keeping friends or maintaining influence both in Lebanon and in Iraq.
“And while Teheran brutally suppressed a growing peaceful revolution for change inside Iran, Washington’s pacifism did not win any favors with the Iranian regime, or with its opponents in the Green Revolution.
“While Iran knows how to make friends, Obama’s America has become an expert in losing them.”
Yes! That’s what it’s all about. You know, it’s an interesting point. Obama and company says we should listen to Muslim and Arab voices.
Okay, but which ones? Not, as they are doing, to the apologists for radicalism and the purveyors of conventional nonsense (all that matters is the Arab-Israeli conflict, America should just make concessions, you need to understand how Islamism isn’t a threat, etc.). If you want to know what a dozen Arab governments think and fear – and Israelis, too – this is the real stuff.
The writer is Director at the Global Research in International Affairs Center (GLORIA) (http://www.gloria-center.org) and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal (MERIA). He blogs at The Rubin Report (http://rubinreports.blogspot.com)
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=169867
-
By FOUAD AJAMI
President Obama's "war of necessity" in Afghanistan increasingly has to it the mark of a military campaign disconnected from a bigger political strategy.
Yes, it is true, he "inherited" this war. But in his fashion he embraced it and held it up as a rebuke to the Iraq war. The spectacle of Afghan President Hamid Karzai going rogue on the American and NATO allies who prop up his regime is of a piece with other runaway clients in far-off lands learning that great, distant powers can be defied and manipulated with impunity. After all, Mr. Karzai has been told again and again that his country, the safe harbor from which al Qaeda planned and carried out 9/11, is essential to winning the war on terror.
Some months ago, our envoy to Kabul, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, saw into the heart of the matter in a memo to his superiors. Mr. Eikenberry was without illusions about President Karzai. He dismissed him as a leader who continues to shun "responsibility for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance or development. He and his circle don't want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending war on terror and for military bases to use against surrounding powers."
View Full Image
David Klein
.The Eikenberry memorandum lays to rest once and for all the legend of Afghanistan as a "graveyard of empires." Rather than seeking an end to the foreign military presence, the Afghans and their leader seek to perpetuate it. It spares them the hard choice of building a nation-state, knitting together feuding ethnicities and provinces, and it brings them enormous foreign treasure.
Mr. Karzai may be unusually brazen and vainglorious in his self-regard. He may have been acting out of a need to conciliate the Pashtun community from which he hails and which continues to see him as the front man for a regime that gives the Tajiks disproportionate power and influence. But his conduct is at one with the ways of Afghan warlords and chieftains.
Still, this recent dust-up with Mr. Karzai—his outburst against the West, his melodramatic statement that he, too, could yet join the Taliban in a campaign of "national resistance," his indecent warning that those American and NATO forces soldiering to give his country a chance are on the verge of becoming foreign occupiers—is a statement about the authority of the Obama administration and its standing in Afghanistan and the region.
Forgive Mr. Karzai as he tilts with the wind and courts the Iranian theocrats next door. We can't chastise him for seeking an accommodation with Iranian power when Washington itself gives every indication that it would like nothing more than a grand bargain with Iran's rulers.
In Afghanistan, and throughout the Middle East, populations long in the path, and in the shadow, of great foreign powers have a good feel for the will and staying power of those who venture into their world. If Iran's bid for nuclear weapons and a larger role in the region goes unchecked, and if Iran is now a power of the Mediterranean (through Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Beirut), the leaders in Kabul, whoever they are, are sure to do their best to secure for themselves an Iranian insurance policy.
From the very beginning of Mr. Obama's stewardship of the Afghan war, there was an odd, unsettling disjunction between the centrality given this war and the reluctance to own it in full, to stay and fight until victory (a word this administration shuns) is ours.
Consider the very announcement of the Obama war strategy last November in Mr. Obama's West Point address. The speech was at once the declaration of a "surge" and the announcement of an exit strategy. Additional troops would be sent, but their withdrawal would begin in the summer of 2011.
The Afghans, and their interested neighbors, were invited to do their own calculations. Some could arrive at a judgment that the war and its frustrations would mock such plans, that military campaigns such as the one in Afghanistan are far easier to launch than to bring to a decent conclusion, that American pride and credibility are destined to leave America entangled in Afghan troubles for many years to come. (By all indications, Mr. Karzai seems to subscribe to this view.)
Others could bet on our war weariness, for Americans have never shown an appetite for the tribal and ethnic wars of South Asia and the Middle East. The shadow of our power lies across that big region, it is true. But we blow in and out of these engagements, generally not staying long enough to assure our friends and frighten our enemies.
Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who recast Pakistani politics away from that country's secular beginnings and plunged into the jihad and its exertions, once memorably observed that being an ally of the United States was like sitting on the bank of a great river where the ground is lush and fertile, but that every four to eight years the river changes course and the unsuspecting friend of American power finds himself in a barren desert. Mr. Obama has not given the protagonists in the Afghan war the certainty that he is in it for the long haul.
In word and deed, Mr. Obama has given a sense of his priorities. The passion with which he pursued health-care reform could be seen at home and abroad as the drive of a man determined to remake the American social contract. He aims to tilt the balance away from liberty toward equality. The very ambition of his domestic agenda in health care and state intervention in the economy conveys the causes that stir him.
Granted, Mullah Omar and his men in the Quetta Shura may not be seasoned observers of Washington's ways. But they (and Mr. Karzai) can discern if America is marking time, giving it one last try before casting Afghanistan adrift. It is an inescapable fact that Mr. Obama hasn't succeeded in selling this Afghan venture—or even the bigger war on terror itself—to his supporters on the left. He fights the war with Republican support, but his constituency remains isolationist at heart.
The president has in his command a great fighting force and gifted commanders. He clearly hopes they will succeed. But there is always the hint that this Afghan campaign became the good, worthwhile war by default, a cause with which to bludgeon his predecessor's foray into Iraq.
All this plays out under the gaze of an Islamic world that is coming to a consensus that a discernible American retreat in the region is in the works. America's enemies are increasingly brazen, its friends unnerved. Witness the hapless Lebanese, once wards of U.S. power, now making pilgrimages, one leader at a time, to Damascus. They, too, can read the wind: If Washington is out to "engage" that terrible lot in Syria, they better scurry there to secure reasonable terms of surrender.
The shadow of American power is receding; the rogues are emboldened. The world has a way of calling the bluff of leaders and nations summoned to difficult endeavors. Would that our biggest source of worry in that arc of trouble was the intemperate outburst of our ally in Kabul.
Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).
-
Obama's Working Dinner in Prague
AS THE WORLD WATCHES KYRGYZSTAN PRESIDENT Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s rule go up in flames, an important meeting scheduled for Thursday is receiving surprisingly little media attention. U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with 11 Central and Eastern European leaders in Prague on that day. Obama will have what the U.S. administration is calling a “working dinner” with the leaders at the U.S. Embassy in Prague, just a few hours after the ceremony to sign the replacement for the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at Prague Castle.
The working dinner is not receiving much media attention in the United States or Central Europe, mainly due to the coverage that the START ceremonies are garnering. Other domestic issues in Central Europe, especially upcoming elections in four of the 11 countries, are also getting a fair amount of recognition. Nonetheless, the dinner is a notable event, and the first time a U.S. president is exclusively meeting with 11 leaders from Central Europe in a forum not related to either NATO or the European Union.
The main goal of the “working dinner” is to give Central European leaders an opportunity for some face time with the U.S. president. It is not going to result in any specific joint communique or policy conclusion, but rather provide a stage for Central European leaders to voice some of their concerns. According to STRATFOR sources in the region, topics for debate will range from joint efforts in Afghanistan and upcoming revisions to the NATO Strategic Concept, to relations with Russia and regional security issues in Central Asia and the Balkans.
From the U.S. perspective, the purpose of the meeting is to reassure Central Europe’s leadership of the U.S. commitment without having to actually make a substantive effort to involve the United States in the region when Washington is still embroiled in Afghanistan and is in the process of extracting itself from Iraq. Poland and Romania are asking for the Ballistic Missile Defense systems that come with American boots on the ground, the Baltic States want a more substantive NATO military presence to counter increasing Russian pressures in the Baltic Sea and all want to see some sort of a response from Washington to the reversal of pro-Western forces in neighboring Ukraine. If Obama can reassure Central Europe by hosting a dinner at the U.S. Embassy in Prague, then he has accomplished his task at a low cost.
The symbolism of the dinner will not be lost on Central Europe’s neighbors, particularly Western Europe and Russia. Obama irritated Western Europe earlier this year when he decided not to attend the upcoming U.S.-EU summit because, as was semi-officially explained by the White House, he had better things to do. That he now has time for Central Europeans exclusively is definitely going to send a message to Berlin and Paris. The fact that the meeting comes on the heels of the Greek financial crisis and during a period of marked European disunity over how to handle it will also not be lost on Germany and France. Central Europeans are increasingly becoming frustrated at the closeness between Berlin, Paris and Moscow, and are beginning to have their economic interests (EU membership) diverge from their security interests (alliance with the United States via NATO). Obama’s meeting with the Central European leadership can be interpreted as the United States further driving a wedge — whether willingly or not — between those two interests.
“The symbolism of the dinner will not be lost on Central Europe’s neighbors, particularly Western Europe and Russia. “
Russia will not be pleased either. It has enjoyed a relatively free hand in Central and Eastern Europe while Washington has been embroiled in its Middle East adventures, and does not want to see the United States commit more attention to the region. But it will also not appreciate Obama so clearly giving Central Europe’s leaders — many of whom the Kremlin would openly describe as Russophobes — his attention on the same day that was supposed to have all the world’s media tuned to the pomp and circumstance of the START signing.
That is why we find the timing of the crisis in Kyrgyzstan…curious.
Kyrgyzstan was not really entrenched in the pro-United States or pro-Russian influence, but has essentially been available to the highest bidder. This has left Moscow irritated with Bishkek — especially with the now outgoing President Bakiyev — but it has never forced Russia to target Kyrgyzstan outright. Moscow has always felt that it would have to do little to influence the impoverished, landlocked country whose only significant export — hydroelectric power generated from rivers flowing down its mountains — is literally drying up.
That said, we are noticing traces of Russian influence in the Kyrgyz opposition movements now assuming power. Also, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has already come out to essentially praise the removal of “nepotistic” Bakiyev who had “fallen in the same trap” as his predecessor.
When it comes to protesters and government-topplers, the Russian media has traditionally been less than charitable, typically calling them “hooligans” or “criminals.” However, during the current Kyrgyz crisis, the Russian media has altered its language by referring to the protesters as “human rights activists” who are part of “NGO” groups. This is reminiscent of the language that the Western media has used to describe protesters of color revolutions it has supported in the past. It is also similar to the language that Russia typically reserves for pro-Kremlin groups operating on the other side of the NATO borders, particularly the Baltic States. This is not the first time Russia has used Western norms and language to describe events that are to its benefit. For example, Russia referred to its August 2008 Georgian intervention as “humanitarian,” mirroring the “responsibility to protect” doctrine espoused by NATO during its bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.
It is also notable that the outgoing Kyrgyz government started blaming the Russian media for its coverage of Kyrgyzstan’s unrest and problems with corruption weeks before the crisis developed. This tells us that, at a minimum, Russia most likely knew what was about to occur. There is the possibility that they took an active roll in the events in Kyrgyzstan, but it is not yet clear whether the current unrest has been at all instigated by Moscow, or whether the Kremlin is simply moving to capitalize on an otherwise indigenously sparked unrest.
The fact that we have witnessed the reversals of two ostensibly pro-Western color revolutions — the Orange (in Ukraine) and Tulip (in Kyrgyzstan) — within three months of each other this year will not be lost on the dinner coterie in Prague.
-
I often find Thomas Friedman to be rather fatuous, and so hesitate to post this, but WTH, this seemed interesting to me:
Attention: Baby on Board Recommend
Twitter
comments
(124)
E-Mail
Send To Phone
Print
Share
Close
LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: April 13, 2010
There are many differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, but they do resemble each other in one critical way. In both countries, the “bad guys,” the violent jihadists, are losing. And in both countries, it still is not clear if the “good guys” will really turn out to be good.
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Go to Columnist Page »
Related
Times Topics: Iraq | AfghanistanReaders' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (124) »
And the big question the Obama team is facing in both countries is: Should we care? Should we care if these countries are run by decent leaders or by drug-dealing, oil-stealing extras from “The Sopranos” — as long as we can just get out? At this stage, alas, we have to care — and here’s why.
I’ve read a lot of analyses lately criticizing President Obama and Vice President Biden for coming down so hard on Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s corruption. Karzai’s the best we’ve got, goes the argument. He’s helped us in our primary objective of degrading Al Qaeda and done good things, like opening schools for girls. Sure, he stole his election, but he is still more popular than anyone else in Afghanistan and would have won anyway. (Then why did he have to steal it? Never mind.)
This line echoes the realist arguments during the cold war as to why we had to support various tyrants. What mattered inside their countries was not important, the argument went. What mattered is where they lined up outside in our great struggle against Soviet Communism.
The Bush team took this kind of “neo-realist” approach to Afghanistan. It had no desire to do state-building there. Once Karzai was installed, President Bush ignored the corruption of Karzai and his cronies. All the Bush team wanted was for Karzai to hold the country together so the U.S. could use it as a base to go after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Frankly, this low-key approach made a lot of sense to me because I never thought Afghanistan was that important. But, unfortunately, the Karzai government became so rotten and incapable of delivering services that many Afghans turned back to the Taliban.
So the Obama team came with a new strategy: We have to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan if we are going to keep Al Qaeda in check there and in Pakistan — and the only way to do that is by clearing them out of the towns and installing decent Afghan police, judges and bureaucrats — i.e., good governance — in the Taliban’s wake. Obama’s view is that, to some degree, idealism is the new realism in Afghanistan: To protect our hard-core interests, to achieve even our limited goals of quashing Al Qaeda and its allies, we have to do something that looks very idealistic — deliver better governance for Afghans.
I still wish we had opted for a less intrusive alternative; I’m still skeptical about the whole thing. But I understand the logic of the Obama strategy and, given that logic, he was right to chastise Karzai — even publicly. If decent governance is the key to our strategy, it is important that Afghans see and hear where we stand on these issues. Otherwise, where will they find the courage to stand up for better governance? We need to bring along the whole society. Never forget, the Karzai regime’s misgovernance is the reason we’re having to surge anew in Afghanistan. Karzai is both the cause and the beneficiary of the surge. I’m sure the surge will beat the bad guys, but if the “good guys” are no better, it will all be for naught.
In the cold war all that mattered was whether a country was allied with us. What matters in Obama’s war in Afghanistan is whether the Afghan people are allied with their own government and each other. Only then can we get out and leave behind something stable, decent and self-sustaining.
Unlike Afghanistan, the war in Iraq was, at its core, always driven more by idealism than realism. It was sold as being about W.M.D. But, in truth, it was really a rare exercise in the revolutionary deployment of U.S. power. The immediate target was to topple Saddam’s genocidal dictatorship. But the bigger objective was to help Iraqis midwife a democratic model that could inspire reform across the Arab-Muslim world and give the youth there a chance at a better future. Again, the Iraq story is far from over, but one does have to take heart at the recent elections there and the degree to which Iraqi voters favored multiethnic, modernizing parties.
So, while Obama came to office looking at both Iraq and Afghanistan as places where we need to be focused more on protecting our interests than promoting our ideals, he’s finding himself, now in office, having to promote a more idealist approach to both. The world will be a better place if it works, but it will require constant vigilance. When Karzai tries to gut an independent election commission, that matters. When the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, refuses to accept a vote count certified by the U.N. that puts him in second place, that matters.
As I have said before, friends don’t let friends drive drunk — especially when we’re still in the back seat alongside an infant named Democracy.
-
A Question of Stability
THE IRAQI MINISTRY OF DEFENSE TOOK CONTROL of the military facility inside the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad known as Camp Phoenix (where American Gen. David Petraeus’ office once was) on Thursday. It is the latest in a series of developments — like the relatively peaceful elections last month — that both Washington and Baghdad would characterize as cause for cautious optimism as the United States inches toward withdrawing nearly half the troops it has remaining in the country before the end of August.
The U.S. drawdown is predicated upon the idea that the Iraqis will have a sufficiently competent security system (whether formal military or not) to hold itself in some semblance of order. Despite an almost astonishingly stable security environment by 2007 standards, the near-term fate of Iraq is far from certain. In theory, in less than five months, the exact composition of the Iraqi government will have taken shape and the United States will have only around 50,000 troops in the country (there are already far fewer American troops in Iraq than any time since the invasion in 2003). On the surface, this is plausible enough. There are certainly promising signs for Iraq: Sunnis participated in this election en masse; Iyad Allawi — whose non-sectarian al-Iraqiyah list won the most seats, and who is maneuvering to try and become the prime minister — speaks for many of them; and the politicking for a ruling parliamentary coalition has thus far proceeded without much violence.
But beneath the surface there are a series of more fundamental – and inherently interrelated – issues that have implications not only for Iraq, but the wider region. The first issue is perhaps the most obvious one: Can this political maneuvering and negotiation yield a government that is capable of governing the country? That is certainly a possibility, but the conclusion is far from certain. If there is such a government, will it be able to wield the country’s security forces effectively? And are these forces capable enough and committed enough to impose Baghdad’s will as the United States continues to draw down its troop levels? There have been promising signs here, too. But the security environment in the country recently has been quite permissive (compared to more intense sectarian violence in years past) and the United States has continued to bolster its efforts.
“The foundation of the American strategy in the Middle East for decades has been to use Iraq and Iran to counterbalance each other.”
How these questions are answered depends a great deal upon the durability of Iraq’s current stability, and the delicate balance of power that has characterized the country recently. A relatively stable Iraq does not challenge the ruling coalition in Baghdad or the country’s security forces nearly as much as a resurgence of ethno-sectarian violence.
Iran is at the center of the stability question. Tehran continues to exercise decisive influence in the country, and it retains the ability to reignite significant ethno-sectarian violence if it finds cause to do so. But many Shia are more or less comfortable with expanding Persian influence in the country. Indeed, some members of Iraq’s political parties are actually in Iran jockeying for position in potential Iraqi governing coalitions. So Tehran may get what it wants – a government in Baghdad amenable to Persian interests – without violence.
Whether Iraq again flirts with ethno-sectarian chaos or not, the foundation of the American strategy in the Middle East for decades has been to use Iraq and Iran to counterbalance each other. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it destroyed that balance of power and was never able to rebuild Iraq to the point where it could again serve as a counterweight to Iran. Even if the United States ultimately finds itself with a stable Iraq, and is able to execute a smooth drawdown of all American combat forces, the fate of the balance of power in the region remains in question. It has only been the immense American military presence in Iraq that allowed Washington to counterbalance Tehran’s influence there in recent years. The ultimate question is: What becomes of the region if Persian power in Mesopotamia again becomes relatively unchecked, potentially making U.S.-Iranian relations the pivot of the entire region?
-
There are several substantive points in the following piece with which I disagree, but the piece presents its points in a fair and reasoned way.
These are themes worthy of our consideration. Lets discuss:
==========================
Bankrupt Empire
by Doug Bandow
The United States government is effectively bankrupt. Washington no longer can afford to micromanage the world. International social engineering is a dubious venture under the best of circumstances. It is folly to attempt while drowning in red ink.
Traditional military threats against America have largely disappeared. There’s no more Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, Maoist China is distant history and Washington is allied with virtually every industrialized state. As Colin Powell famously put it while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: “I’m running out of enemies. . . . I’m down to Kim Il-Sung and Castro.” However, the United States continues to act as the globe’s 911 number.
Unfortunately, a hyperactive foreign policy requires a big military. America accounts for roughly half of global military outlays. In real terms Washington spends more on “defense” today than it during the Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War.
U.S. military expenditures are extraordinary by any measure. My Cato Institute colleagues Chris Preble and Charles Zakaib recently compared American and European military outlays. U.S. expenditures have been trending upward and now approach five percent of GDP. In contrast, European outlays have consistently fallen as a percentage of GDP, to an average of less than two percent.
The difference is even starker when comparing per capita GDP military expenditures. The U.S. is around $2,200. Most European states fall well below $1,000. Adding in non-Pentagon defense spending—Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Department of Energy (nuclear weapons)—yields American military outlays of $835.1 billion in 2008, which represented 5.9 percent of GDP and $2,700 per capita.
Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations worries that the increased financial obligations (forget unrealistic estimates about cutting the deficit) resulting from health-care legislation will preclude maintaining such oversize expenditures in the future, thereby threatening America’s “global standing.” He asks: Who will "police the sea lanes, stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combat terrorism, respond to genocide and other unconscionable human rights violations, and deter rogue states from aggression?"
Of course, nobody is threatening to close the sea lanes these days. Washington has found it hard to stop nuclear proliferation without initiating war, yet promiscuous U.S. military intervention creates a powerful incentive for nations to seek nuclear weapons. Armored divisions and carrier groups aren’t useful in confronting terrorists. Iraq demonstrates how the brutality of war often is more inhumane than the depredations of dictators. And there are lots of other nations capable of deterring rogue states.
The United States should not attempt to do everything even if it could afford to do so. But it can’t. When it comes to the federal Treasury, there’s nothing there. If Uncle Sam was a real person, he would declare bankruptcy.
The current national debt is $12.7 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office figures that current policy—unrealistically assuming no new spending increases—will run up $10 trillion in deficits over the coming decade. But more spending—a lot more spending—is on the way.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain as active as ever, underwriting $5.4 trillion worth of mortgages while running up additional losses. The Federal Housing Administration’s portfolio of insured mortgages continues to rise along with defaults. Exposure for Ginnie Mae, which issues guaranteed mortgage-backed securities, also is jumping skyward. The FDIC shut down a record 140 banks last year and is running low on cash. Last year the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation figured its fund was running a $34 billion deficit. Federal pensions are underfunded by $1 trillion. State and local retirement funds are short about $3 trillion.
Outlays for the Iraq war will persist decades after the troops return as the government cares for seriously injured military personnel; total expenditures will hit $2 trillion or more. Extending and expanding the war in Afghanistan will further bloat federal outlays.
Worst of all, last year the combined Social Security/Medicare unfunded liability was estimated to be $107 trillion. Social Security, originally expected to go negative in 2016, will spend more than it collects this year, and the “trust fund” is an accounting fiction. Medicaid, a joint federal-state program, also is breaking budgets. At their current growth rate, CBO says that by 2050 these three programs alone will consume virtually the entire federal budget.
Uncle Sam’s current net liabilities exceed Americans’ net worth. Yet the debt-to-GDP ratio will continue rising and could eventually hit World War II levels. Net interest is expected to more than quadruple to $840 billion annually by 2020.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says: “It’s not something that is ten years away. It affects the markets currently.” In March, Treasury notes commanded a yield of 3.5 basis points higher than those for Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
Moody’s recently threatened to downgrade federal debt: “Although AAA governments benefit from an unusual degree of balance sheet flexibility, that flexibility is not infinite.” In 2008, Tom Lemmon of Moody’s warned: “The underlying credit rating of the U.S. government faces the risk of downgrading in the next ten years if solutions are not found to our growing Medicare and Social Security unfunded obligations.”
This is all without counting a dollar of increased federal spending due to federalizing American medicine.
The United States faces a fiscal crisis. If America’s survival was at stake, extraordinary military expenditures would still be justified. But not to protect other nations, especially prosperous and populous states well able to defend themselves. Boot warns: “it will be increasingly hard to be globocop and nanny state at the same time.” America should be neither.
The issue is not just money. The Constitution envisions a limited government focused on defending Americans, not transforming the rest of the world. Moreover, if Washington continues to act as globocop, America’s friends and allies will never have an incentive to do more.
The United States will be a world power for decades. But it can no afford to act as if it is the only power. America must begin the process of becoming a normal nation with a normal foreign policy.
-
I have always been opposed to using the military as police force. I served my time there, and I always hated seeing the "feed the masses" type missions. The mission of the military is to kill the people preventing the masses from feeding themselves. The MIC is also enamored of the BIG Hardware, and LARGE program type contracts required by the cold war era. The fact is we can now do a whole lot more, for cheaper, and without big programs. A lot of the soldiers field gear has been getting overhaulled in this manner. A lot of troops started bringing their own gear instead of the GI stuff and it caused some to finally notice. The landwarrior program is way more of a starwars type technology developer than an actual develop for deployment program now. I see our best direction for the military being ongoing r&d where we design things like the stealth fighter and build a squadron or 2 for training and proof we can do it. The main part of the budget however should go to things like the CMP where the citizens are trained to shoot, and to troop training where our vetrans have the best possible trainingby the time they get out. An trained and armed populace is probably the best defense against any terrorist attack we would ever have.
A hardcore cadre of professionals like we had before WW2 would be on hand for jobs like Grenada and Panama actions that were in and out in a month or so. There simply would not be the resources or troops to get mired in mission creep situations like Somalia and Iraq. It is about taking out the bad guy not about nation building, let the locals sort it out. The army cadre would include stuff like THAAD and the Ground based lasers, which would be there for threats like an enemy VLS system equipped ship pulling up and volleying its magazine (our Aegis destroyers carry 60 missiles). The airborne laser would be able to deal with stuff further out, like ballistic missiles, and be an airforce cadre job.
As far as budget........where to start.........I would go for a full revamp of the taxation system. Make a straight percentage of earnings from top to bottom. People and corporations use the exact same accounting method to finf their earnings. The tax form would include a list of what congress want to spend money on. Everyone would make check marks on what they wanted to fund. If a program ends up unfunded, congress has just been vetoed by the people, end of program. The various programs will simply have to do the best they can given their funding. Make the various bureaucrats earn their tax money, that would keep thing fairly lean. I would see no problem with various departments "Infomercialing" about what they are doing, and why their project is important. THAT would open up the process considerably wouldn't it?
The deficit.......suffer thru paying it off, and never allow it again by instituting the above rework.
-
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 21, 2010
It is perfectly obvious that Iran's latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran's nuclear program.
It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.
But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran's program.
The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.
That picture -- a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam -- is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.
They've watched President Obama's humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.
They've watched America acquiesce to Russia's re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia's de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama "reset" policy).
They've watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab Levant -- sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the United States and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. "engagement."
They've observed the administration's gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez organizes his anti-American "Bolivarian" coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chávez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.
This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.
Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It's the perfect fulfillment of Obama's adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" (guess who's been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any "world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another." (NATO? The West?)
Given Obama's policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the United States retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There's nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America's rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies.
-
WEST POINT, N.Y. — President Obama previewed a new national security strategy rooted in diplomatic engagement and international alliances on Saturday as he essentially repudiated his predecessor’s emphasis on unilateral American power and the right to wage pre-emptive war.
President Obama and West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck stood for the national anthem before Mr. Obama addressed graduates of the United States Military Academy on Saturday. More Photos »
Eight years after President George W. Bush came to the United States Military Academy to set a new security doctrine after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Obama used the same setting to offer a revised vision vowing no retreat against enemies while seeking “national renewal and global leadership.”
“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system,” the president told graduating cadets. “But America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation. We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don’t.”
Mr. Obama said the United States would “be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well,” while also trying to “build new partnerships and shape stronger international standards and institutions.” He added: “This engagement is not an end in itself. The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times.”
The president’s address was aimed not just at 1,000 young men and women in gray and white uniforms in Michie Stadium who could soon face the perils of Afghanistan or Iraq as Army lieutenants, but also at an international audience that in some quarters grew alienated during the Bush era.
While the president never mentioned his predecessor’s name, the contrast between Mr. Bush’s address in 2002 and Mr. Obama’s in 2010 underscored the ways a wartime America has changed — and the ways it has not. This was the ninth West Point class to graduate since hijackers smashed planes into New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Most of those commissioned on Saturday were 12 at the time.
When Mr. Bush addressed their predecessors, he had toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan and was turning attention to Iraq. “If we wait for threats to fully materialize,” he said then, “we will have waited too long.” As Mr. Obama took the stage on a mild, overcast day, the American war in Iraq was winding down, but Afghanistan had flared out of control and terrorists were making a fresh effort to strike inside the United States.
“This war has changed over the last nine years, but it’s no less important than it was in those days after 9/11,” Mr. Obama said. Recalling his decision announced here six months ago to send 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan, Mr. Obama said difficult days were ahead, but added, “I have no doubt that together with our Afghan and international partners, we will succeed in Afghanistan.”
Mr. Obama all but declared victory in Iraq, praising the military, but not Mr. Bush, for turning it around. “A lesser Army might have seen its spirit broken,” he said. “But the American military is more resilient than that.”
At home, Mr. Obama attributed the failure of efforts to blow up an airplane over Detroit and a car packed with explosives in Times Square to the intense American pursuit of radical groups abroad. “These failed attacks show that pressure on networks like Al Qaeda is forcing them to rely on terrorists with less time and space to train,” he said.
And he defended his revised counterterrorism policies that critics say have weakened America’s defenses. “We should not discard our freedoms because extremists try to exploit them,” he said. “We cannot succumb to division because others try to drive us apart.”
The speech offered a glimpse of his first official national security strategy, to be released this week, including four principles: to build strength abroad by building strength at home through education, clean energy and innovation; to promote “the renewed engagement of our diplomats” and support international development; to rebuild alliances; and to promote human rights and democracy abroad.
But even as he tried to distinguish his strategy from Mr. Bush’s, Mr. Obama faced the same daunting realization and expressed it with a line Mr. Bush used repeatedly: “This is a different kind of war,” he said. “There will be no simple moment of surrender to mark the journey’s end, no armistice or banner headline.”
-
As Sarkozy asked in a spontaneous moment, “C’est debile?” Oui, oui, monsieur il est debile.
Here’s how things stack up for me at the moment:
Our policy in Afghanistan is utterly incoherent. BO (President Obama) says we are there because it is a vital war of national self-defense. This is why we will leave it up to Karzai and the central government as we begin to leave in a year. The Wackostans will return to their wicked ways in full measure. The ISI will act accordingly. Pakistan’s nuke program, if it has not already slipped its leash, will do so once again. BO has thrown away everything in Iraq. Iran will dominate via the Shias. Turkey, will work with Iran to screw the Kurds. This may be part of why Turkey just assisted and enabled Iran’s fraudulent pretense at meeting objections to its enrichment program. Iran will go nuke. Russia, having given up nothing in return for our pulling the rug from under Poland and the Czechs, will finish re-establishing its dominance over East Europe, and central Asia. Its action in and against Georgia has ensured that no pipelines will be built through Georgia. Thus central Asian gas will not be able to get to Europe outside of Russian control. Central Europe, especially Germany, will increasingly be subject to Russian whims. With Iran going nuke, and BO and the US’s proven track record of being an unreliable umbrella, the Arab mid-east will seek to go nuke as well. Turkey will seek to re-assert its historical regional dominance and influence. The farce it just pulled off at Israel’s expense is the sign that a very large and very important decision has been made. If Israel’s blockade against arms in Gaza is broken, Iran will have Israel surrounded: via Hezbollah, thanks to Israel’s bellicus interruptus of a few years ago, it how has some 50,000 rockets which reach most of Israel. In Gaza it will be able to reach what it cannot from Lebanon. It certainly will be able to reach Israel’s nuke reactor. The US presence in Iraq will soon be meaningless. Israel’s extermination is likely to be attempted. In the meantime, back in the USA the laws of gravity and of supply and demand will assert themselves and our final economic bubble will burst. We will all be Californians. In search of purchasing the Latino vote, BO and Congress will grant amnesty to 10-20 million illegals, plus visas to some 20-50 million more family members. They will vote Democratic, and the Republican Party will become as dead a letter for the entire nation as it already is for New England and the Atlantic States.
Have a nice day.
-
Gee, who could have seen this coming? :roll:
-
Speaking of someone who could hold his own in a debate with The One, meet Prof. Hanson. Please set aside 37 minutes and watch/listen to this interview. Good questions with great answers on issues that that include Islam in Europe, defending Europe, the lack of a future for the E.U., Asia, Thomas Friedman's comments on China, the situation inside Mexico, California, the border, Russia, Iran, the possibility of taking out Iran's nuclear capability, etc.
Well informed, very clear thinking, logical, common sense answers and observations to wide ranging questions and issues today from around the globe.
Townhall has parts of this in segments. This link has the interview in its entirety.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/10/027451.php
-
The World Looks at Obama After the U.S. Midterm Election
November 4, 2010
By George Friedman
The 2010 U.S. midterm elections were held, and the results were as expected: The Republicans took the House but did not take the Senate. The Democrats have such a small margin in the Senate, however, that they cannot impose cloture, which means the Republicans can block Obama administration initiatives in both houses of Congress. At the same time, the Republicans cannot override presidential vetoes alone, so they cannot legislate, either. The possible legislative outcomes are thus gridlock or significant compromises.
U.S. President Barack Obama hopes that the Republicans prove rigidly ideological. In 1994, after the Republicans won a similar victory over Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich attempted to use the speakership to craft national policy. Clinton ran for re-election in 1996 against Gingrich rather than the actual Republican candidate, Bob Dole; Clinton made Gingrich the issue, and he won. Obama hopes for the same opportunity to recoup. The new speaker, John Boehner, already has indicated that he does not intend to play Gingrich but rather is prepared to find compromises. Since Tea Party members are not close to forming a majority of the Republican Party in the House, Boehner is likely to get his way.
Another way to look at this is that the United States remains a predominantly right-of-center country. Obama won a substantial victory in 2008, but he did not change the architecture of American politics. Almost 48 percent of voters voted against him. Though he won a larger percentage than anyone since Ronald Reagan, he was not even close to the magnitude of Reagan’s victory. Reagan transformed the way American politics worked. Obama did not. In spite of his supporters’ excitement, his election did not signify a permanent national shift to the left. His attempt to govern from the left accordingly brought a predictable result: The public took away his ability to legislate on domestic affairs. Instead, they moved the country to a position where no one can legislate anything beyond the most carefully negotiated and neutral legislation.
Foreign Policy and Obama’s Campaign Position
That leaves foreign policy. Last week, I speculated on what Obama might do in foreign affairs, exploring his options with regard to Iran. This week, I’d like to consider the opposite side of the coin, namely, how foreign governments view Obama after this defeat. Let’s begin by considering how he positioned himself during his campaign.
The most important thing about his campaign was the difference between what he said he would do and what his supporters heard him saying he would do. There were several major elements to his foreign policy. First, he campaigned intensely against the Bush policy in Iraq, arguing that it was the wrong war in the wrong place. Second, he argued that the important war was in Afghanistan, where he pledged to switch his attention to face the real challenge of al Qaeda. Third, he argued against Bush administration policy on detention, military tribunals and torture, in his view symbolized by the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
In a fourth element, he argued that Bush had alienated the world by his unilateralism, by which he meant lack of consultation with allies — in particular the European allies who had been so important during the Cold War. Obama argued that global hostility toward the Bush administration arose from the Iraq war and the manner in which Bush waged the war on terror. He also made clear that the United States under Bush had an indifference to world opinion that cost it moral force. Obama wanted to change global perceptions of the United States as a unilateral global power to one that would participate as an equal partner with the rest of the world.
The Europeans were particularly jubilant at his election. They had in fact seen Bush as unwilling to take their counsel, and more to the point, as demanding that they participate in U.S. wars that they had no interest in participating in. The European view — or more precisely, the French and German view — was that allies should have a significant degree of control over what Americans do. Thus, the United States should not merely have consulted the Europeans, but should have shaped its policy with their wishes in mind. The Europeans saw Bush as bullying, unsophisticated and dangerous. Bush in turn saw allies’ unwillingness to share the burdens of a war as meaning they were not in fact allies. He considered so-called “Old Europe” as uncooperative and unwilling to repay past debts.
The European Misunderstanding of Obama
The Europeans’ pleasure in Obama’s election, however, represented a massive misunderstanding. Though they thought Obama would allow them a greater say in U.S. policy — and, above all, ask them for less — Obama in fact argued that the Europeans would be more likely to provide assistance to the United States if Washington was more collaborative with the Europeans.
Thus, in spite of the Nobel Peace Prize in the early days of the romance, the bloom wore off as the Europeans discovered that Obama was simply another U.S. president. More precisely, they learned that instead of being able to act according to his or her own wishes, circumstances constrain occupants of the U.S. presidency into acting like any other president would.
Campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, Obama’s position on Iraq consisted of slightly changing Bush’s withdrawal timetable. In Afghanistan, his strategy was to increase troop levels beyond what Bush would consider. Toward Iran, his policy has been the same as Bush’s: sanctions with a hint of something later.
The Europeans quickly became disappointed in Obama, especially when he escalated the Afghan war and asked them to increase forces when they wanted to withdraw. Perhaps most telling was his speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, where he tried to reach out to, and create a new relationship with, Muslims. The problem with this approach was that that in the speech, Obama warned that the United States would not abandon Israel — the same stance other U.S. presidents had adopted. It is hard to know what Obama was thinking. Perhaps he thought that by having reached out to the Muslim world, they should in turn understand the American commitment to Israel. Instead, Muslims understood the speech as saying that while Obama was prepared to adopt a different tone with Muslims, the basic structure of American policy in the region would not be different.
Why Obama Believed in a Reset Button
In both the European and Muslim case, the same question must be asked: Why did Obama believe that he was changing relations when in fact his policies were not significantly different from Bush’s policies? The answer is that Obama seemed to believe the essential U.S. problem with the world was rhetorical. The United States had not carefully explained itself, and in not explaining itself, the United States appeared arrogant.
Obama seemed to believe that the policies did not matter as much as the sensibility that surrounded the policies. It was not so much that he believed he could be charming — although he seemed to believe that with reason — but rather that foreign policy is personal, built around trust and familiarity rather than around interests. The idea that nations weren’t designed to trust or like one another, but rather pursued their interests with impersonal force, was alien to him. And so he thought he could explain the United States to the Muslims without changing U.S. policy and win the day.
U.S. policies in the Middle East remain intact, Guantanamo is still open, and most of the policies Obama opposed in his campaign are still there, offending the world much as they did under Bush. Moreover, the U.S. relationship with China has worsened, and while the U.S. relationship with Russia has appeared to improve, this is mostly atmospherics. This is not to criticize Obama, as these are reasonable policies for an American to pursue. Still, the substantial change in America’s place in the world that Europeans and his supporters entertained has not materialized. That it couldn’t may be true, but the gulf between what Obama said and what has happened is so deep that it shapes global perceptions.
Global Expectations and Obama’s Challenge
Having traveled a great deal in the last year and met a number of leaders and individuals with insight into the predominant thinking in their country, I can say with some confidence that the global perception of Obama today is as a leader given to rhetoric that doesn’t live up to its promise. It is not that anyone expected his rhetoric to live up to its promise, since no politician can pull that off, but that they see Obama as someone who thought rhetoric would change things. In that sense, he is seen as naive and, worse, as indecisive and unimaginative.
No one expected him to turn rhetoric into reality. But they did expect some significant shifts in foreign policy and a forceful presence in the world. Whatever the criticisms leveled against the United States, the expectation remains that the United States will remain at the center of events, acting decisively. This may be a contradiction in the global view of things, but it is the reality.
A foreign minister of a small — but not insignificant — country put it this way to me: Obama doesn’t seem to be there. By that he meant that Obama does not seem to occupy the American presidency and that the United States he governs does not seem like a force to be reckoned with. Decisions that other leaders wait for the United States to make don’t get made, the authority of U.S. emissaries is uncertain, the U.S. defense and state departments say different things, and serious issues are left unaddressed.
While it may seem an odd thing to say, it is true: The American president also presides over the world. U.S. power is such that there is an expectation that the president will attend to matters around the globe not out of charity, but because of American interest. The questions I have heard most often on many different issues are simple: What is the American position, what is the American interest, what will the Americans do? (As an American, I frequently find my hosts appointing me to be the representative of the United States.)
I have answered that the United States is off balance trying to place the U.S.-jihadist war in context, that it must be understood that the president is preoccupied but will attend to their region shortly. That is not a bad answer, since it is true. But the issue now is simple: Obama has spent two years on the trajectory in place when he was elected, having made few if any significant shifts. Inertia is not a bad thing in policy, as change for its own sake is dangerous. Yet a range of issues must be attended to, including China, Russia and the countries that border each of them.
Obama comes out of this election severely weakened domestically. If he continues his trajectory, the rest of the world will perceive him as a crippled president, something he needn’t be in foreign policy matters. Obama can no longer control Congress, but he still controls foreign policy. He could emerge from this defeat as a powerful foreign policy president, acting decisively in Afghanistan and beyond. It’s not a question of what he should do, but whether he will choose to act in a significant way at all.
This is Obama’s great test. Reagan accelerated his presence in the world after his defeat in 1982. It is an option, and the most important question is whether he takes it. We will know in a few months. If he doesn’t, global events will begin unfolding without recourse to the United States, and issues held in check will no longer remain quiet.
-
Issues aren't in check and they are only quiet as the US MSM hasn't really covered them. China and Russia have already long concluded that the US is no longer willing to stop them. Hillary's 3 party talks invitation to resolve the disputed islands claimed by Japan and China was rejected with obvious contempt by China.
-
As was noted in the China thread, China's claims to the islands in question appear to have genuine legitimacy. As I see it, the true point was not the posturing of hosting three party talks, the true point/question was whether the US would consider itself treaty bound to defend Japan if these islands were attacked.
-
The G-20 Summit and the Importance of East Asia
The G-20 summit convenes Nov. 11 in Seoul, South Korea, where the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies will gather to discuss the most pressing global economic issues of the day. While there is no shortage of topics to discuss, there are two dominant themes that directly involve two major players, the United States and China. The first is the U.S.-led call for countries that have trade surpluses, most notably China and Japan, to export less and build up their domestic consumption. The second is currency devaluation, highlighted by the U.S. decision to engage in quantitative easing (essentially the digital equivalent of printing money) to the tune of $600 billion.
These themes affect each country represented at the G-20 — and to a certain extent nearly every country in the world. Moreover, due to the fundamental structural and performance differences of the G-20 countries — more specifically, trade surplus countries are opposed to U.S. demands — these topics are certain to be intensely debated.
But currency devaluation and trade are not the only reasons that Seoul, and the Asia Pacific region as a whole, is an important place to watch to gauge the temperature of some of the world’s major players. This region, not coincidentally, has drawn the attention of two countries for reasons that are only partially related to the rapid economic growth and dynamism that has come to mark East Asia over the past few decades, reasons that are more geopolitical in nature.
“There are many dynamics that will shape, and limit, the form of engagement that Russia and the United States will have with East Asia.”
One of these countries is the United States. Over the past decade, much of the United States’ attention and resources have been focused on the Middle East and South Asia. But as the United States extricates itself from Iraq (however tentatively) and is in the process of beginning a similar withdrawal from Afghanistan starting in 2011, there are other potential threats and challengers emerging in Eurasia that await Washington. One of these is China, which has become increasingly assertive in its Southeast Asian periphery and further abroad as Beijing seeks to secure the resources it needs to keep its economy churning. China’s economic policies, such as maintaining a weak yuan, and its strengthening position on the global stage have led to growing friction with the United States.
In the meantime, the United States has begun to slowly re-engage with, and strengthen new partnerships and alliances in, East Asia — a region that China would rather the United States stay out of. Indeed, it is not an accident that U.S. President Barack Obama’s Asia tour, which includes trips to India and Indonesia, comes at the same time as the G-20 summit. Obama will follow the summit by attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Japan, in effect forming an arch around China that notably excludes China itself.
The other country whose attention has returned to the region is Russia. East Asia was a region of tremendous importance for Russia throughout the Cold War, but the Soviet Union’s collapse saw much of Russia’s political, economic and military ties to this region shrivel. The aftermath of the Cold War left Russia focusing first on rebuilding itself and then on rebuilding its influence in Europe, its western theater. And now there have been many signs of an eastward gaze from Moscow — Russia has been increasing its oil and natural gas exports to the region, and Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said that East Asia could soon match the European market for Russian energy, which for all its extensive, financial and technical limitations shows how enthusiastically Russia views prospects in the region.
But Moscow’s return to the region has not entirely been benevolent. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev was recently the first Russian president to visit the southern Kuril Islands, which are controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan, a source of strained relations with Tokyo. Russia also is in the process of building up its military in the region, from nuclear submarines to missile systems, increasing Japanese fears further. This antagonism with Japan is one of many issues that has actually driven Russia closer to the Chinese, though the two still have fundamental differences.
There are many dynamics that will shape, and limit, the form of engagement that Russia and the United States will have with East Asia. But it is clear that East Asia has become the center of a strategic and geopolitical focus for many reasons, and it is no coincidence that U.S. attention, Russian re-engagement, and the G-20 — both the site and the issues that it will see discussed — all coalesce around the same location.
-
By STEPHEN PETER ROSEN
Enough is enough. Every day, the events of the real world reveal that the American foreign policy establishment is wearing nothing but the emperor's new clothes—policies that make proper people murmur "how Nobel-worthy" while looking around to see if anyone else notices something odd.
Respectable wise men, in and out of government, talk of the importance of arms control and a nuclear-free world, when the reality is that Iran, North Korea and other countries have made the acquisition of nuclear weapons their highest priority. The government of Russia has committed itself to a military posture in which tactical nuclear weapons play a larger role in war fighting and war termination.
The bitter truth is that a world with fewer nuclear weapons really is in the interest of the United States. That is why it won't happen: Too many countries believe that a nuclear-free world will leave the conventional military superiority of the U.S. unchallengeable.
View Full Image
David Gothard
.The wise men call on China to help us restrain the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, while the Chinese official press praises North Korea for its toughness after its artillery attacks. American officials piously intone that we will not reward bad behavior. They point to the deployment of carrier forces that everyone knows are determined not to fire one round in anger. Meanwhile, the U.S. government prepares the ground for new rounds of talks in which rewards for North Korea will be carefully discussed.
The relative decline and overextension of American military power makes the prospect of using military power against U.S. allies increasingly a matter of "It just might work," rather than "Don't even think about it." American allies must, as reasonable men and women, consider whether to strike out on their own, either by increasing their own military power or by seeking accommodations with those who oppose the U.S.
So what is to be done? We have no good options, we are told, with the subtext being "Get used to North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons." But we do have options.
In the near term, we must allow our allies to acquire the weapons they need for their own defense. The U.S. government should reverse its decision not to sell F-22s to Japan. It should aid the expansion of the Japanese submarine force by transferring relevant military technologies, and it also should encourage Japanese production of anti-missile interceptors for foreign sale.
If we deploy American military power, we must do it like we mean it. If North Korea and Iran want nuclear weapons, and China does nothing to stop them, we can reintroduce tactical nuclear weapons onto American aircraft carriers and attack submarines in the Pacific. We should put on round-the-clock shifts the production lines of weapons that would be needed in the event of war with Iran or North Korea (such as the long-range version of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile).
The U.S. can also ask the United Nations for a resolution authorizing air strikes against North Korea in the event of any future attack on the people or territory of South Korea or Japan. China will then stand up and be counted on one side or the other.
Such measures would provide some immediate reassurance to our allies that we will fight if we must, if they are attacked again. Of course, they won't make the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs go away. To deal with those, we must have a longer-term program.
The U.S. will need offensive as well as defensive forces that can thwart foreign aggression, even though aggressors have nuclear weapons. This is neither impossible nor paradoxical. Countries have defeated the U.S. since we developed nuclear weapons. Israel has been attacked repeatedly even though it has had nuclear weapons since 1967. What is very hard, and may be impossible, is to get other countries to allow the U.S. military to use bases on their territory when their enemies have nuclear weapons and they do not.
Over the next 10 years, the U.S. needs to increase its ability to conduct non-nuclear war from undersea, from ships out of range of missile attack, and from bases on American soil by means of long-range missiles and aircraft, manned or unmanned. The U.S. must be able to use cyber warfare and other unconventional means, and to defend itself from retaliatory attacks in kind. The U.S. military must also be prepared to operate in an environment in which other countries have used nuclear weapons. This means having not only missile defenses, but also protection against the electromagnetic pulses generated by nuclear weapons, which can paralyze modern electronics.
This will not be cheap, but it will be less expensive if we help our democratic allies arm themselves—by transferring technologies to them, by working with them, and by encouraging them to help each other.
This isn't a recipe for World War III with China or anybody else. It is a realistic response to a world in which countries are developing nuclear weapons not to fight other countries but to coerce them. Our goal should be a world in which countries can live peacefully without fear of being coerced militarily. It is an old-school response that doesn't seek war, but that also doesn't aspire to utopian goals.
Mr. Rosen is professor of national security and military affairs at Harvard.
-
Good article above.
I was thinking over the weekend that our response to aggression has become predictable. And that allows us to be manipulated.
Without fail we speak of dealing with threats in predictable ways:
Start with the public announcement of "concern", "top priority", "outrage", "will discuss with allies", etc.
Then the UN security coucil route.
Then threat of sanctions.
Then bribery attempts.
Then some mild sanctions.
Then stronger sanctions.
Then more strong sanctions.
Then getting "allies" to go along with more sanctions.
Being predictable is a huge weakness.
Suppose we just shut the hell up. Give a stern and resolute warning or two. If that doesn't work show we mean what we say.
And out of no where we bomb the living daylights out of one of our enemies.
Make 'em into a parking garage. (Think of Reagan bombing Qhadafis compound in what '86?)
Sure they will hate us and there will be eternal pacts of revenge. (Think of Lockerbie)
But we will be respected. Not feared. Just respected. (Qhaddafi surely changed after he saw video of Saddam being dragged out of hole didn't he?)
-
Who Fears the Russian Bear?
The global focus on Tuesday returned to the North European Plain, specifically east of the Oder and north of the Pripyat Marshes, where Russia, Poland, Belarus and the three Baltic states continue to share what is the geopolitical version of an awkward Soviet-era communal apartment. Russian envoy to NATO Dmitri Rogozin, referring to the leaked U.S. diplomatic cables revealing NATO plans to defend the three Baltic states from Russia, asked that the plans be formally withdrawn at the next NATO-Russia meeting. Rogozin pointed out that the recently penned NATO 2010 Strategic Concept speaks of a “true strategic partnership” — a direct quote from the mission statement — between the alliance and Russia and that the supposed “anti-Russian” military plan to defend the Baltics is incompatible with the document. Referring to the plan, Rogozin rhetorically asked, “Against who else could such a defense be intended? Against Sweden, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, against polar bears, or against the Russian bear?”
Rogozin was being sardonic for dramatic effect — Moscow is not actually surprised that NATO has an active war plan against it. Russia completed joint exercises — called “Zapad” (meaning west in Russian) — with Belarus at the end of 2009 that placed 13,000 troops on the borders of the Baltic states and had as its supposed aim the simulation of the liberation of Kaliningrad from NATO forces. Russian defense establishment sources referred to the exercise as a “drill,” as in something that the Russian military routinely prepares for. Russia purposefully allowed the simulation scenario of Zapad to leak, emphasizing to the Baltic states and Poland that it is very much the bear to be feared in the region.
” Polish officials do not have the luxury of dismissing American horse-trading with the Russians over Polish security as a “one-off” affair.”
STRATFOR therefore highly doubts that Rogozin was astonished by the revelation of the defense plans, particularly as the Russian SVR — the foreign intelligence service — does not need WikiLeaks to collect intelligence from the NATO headquarters in Brussels. Moscow is using the recently adopted Strategic Concept as a way to emphasize to the Balts and the rest of Central Europe that the NATO alliance is inconsistent with its security needs — particularly that any security guarantees offered by the alliance are undermined by the very Strategic Concept of that alliance just penned in Lisbon. And ultimately, Western European — and specifically German — lobbying for inclusion of Russia as a “strategic partner” should be the writing on the wall for the region: Its fate was to either adopt a neutral posture and accept Russian security hegemony or keep being pressured by Moscow.
The countries of the region, Poland and the Balts specifically, are therefore — politically as well as geographically — stuck between a Russia that threatens them and a Germany that refuses to offer security guarantees. Berlin instead prefers to develop its own relations with Moscow and dismiss Baltic and Polish insecurities as paranoia, arguing that Russia is best countered with investments, integration into the European economy and offers of security dialogue. Warsaw and the Baltics are therefore left to look expectantly toward the United States for bilateral security guarantees.
The problem, however, is that the United States is distracted, by both its domestic politics and the management of its Middle East entanglements. Furthermore, Poland feels spurned, especially by Washington’s decision first to pull out on the initial ballistic missile defense (BMD) plans in September 2009 and then, on a rotational basis, to deploy an unarmed Patriot missile battery to the country with a minimal contingent of 20-30 personnel, when Warsaw hoped for an armed deployment with a more robust — and more importantly, permanent — U.S. military presence.
In this context, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk— symbolically returning from a Monday meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin —referred to the WikiLeaks controversy as a “problem” for Poland because the various dispatches referring to Polish-American relations reveal “illusions over the character of relations between different states.” If we understand Tusk correctly, he essentially hints that the current public Polish-American relationship is an “illusion” and that, in reality, the U.S. security guarantees are insufficient.
It is difficult to disagree with Tusk if we place ourselves in the shoes of Polish policymakers. The United States ultimately decided to back away from the initial BMD version and supposedly also the armed Patriots because it needed Russian help on a number of issues in the Middle East, particularly pressuring Tehran with U.N. sanctions and making sure that Russia does not sell the S-300 air defense system to Iran. To Warsaw, the American decision illustrates that it placed its own interests — in a tangential region of no concern to Central Europe — above the security relationship with Poland. And what is worse, Washington trades Polish security for concessions with Russia in the Middle East.
To Americans, Poland looks like a country with no options. Sure, it feels spurned, but where will the Poles turn? As it did prior to WWII, Germany is making deals with Russia, and French and British security guarantees are unreliable. The United States, remembering its history of fighting wars to defend small allies for the sake of its credibility, would say that the Poles should know better than to doubt American guarantees. An alliance with Poland is therefore not one that needs to be micromanaged. In fact, the guarantees provided by Washington should be seen as sufficient, if not generous. Poland will get over the American spurn and go about pursuing its only option of being a solid American ally. That pretty much sums up Washington’s view on the matter.
That may sound harsh, but there is much truth in that statement. Poland is not going to cease being an American ally — not considering its current geopolitical circumstances. But Polish officials also do not have the luxury of dismissing American horse-trading with the Russians over Polish security. For Poles, it isn’t a “one-off” affair easily reassured with: “But, we’ll be there when it matters.” No nation can make that sort of a bet, not with its security and not when it has a history of seeing Western powers fail to live up to their security guarantees that far east on the North European Plain.
Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski will travel to the United States on Wednesday, a day after he spent two days with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and half of the Russian Cabinet, inaugurating the supposed new era in Polish-Russian relations. But when Komorowski travels to Washington, he will expect the Americans to have an answer to Warsaw’s burning question of the moment — what exactly is Washington’s global security strategy and where does Poland fit? Because, as Rogozin so aptly stated, Poland is not looking for assurances against Sweden, Finland, Greenland, Iceland or against polar bears…but very much so against the Russian bear.
-
Second post of the morning. It presents similar deep conceptual questions:
Iran to place missiles in Venezuela according to an article in Die Welt.
http://www.hudson-ny.org/1714/iran-missiles-in-venezuela#_ftn1
-
Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Thu, December 16, 2010 -- 6:00 AM ET
-----
Afghan Report Sees Troop Withdrawal on Schedule for July
http://www.nytimes.com?emc=na
======================================
So, the bug out is on schedule. As promised to the Muslim world by Ahmadinjad (too cranky to look up proper spelling) the US essentially is being run out of the mid-east. The Dems chorus of defeatist chorus against The Surge in Iraq persuaded all there that we were leaving and so they aligned themselves accordingly and now our CiC, elected to fight "the right war" in Afg, after having sabotaged any chance of success by telling the enemy we were leaving, begins our departure. China challenges throughout SE Asia. Even our long time ally the Philippines (along with many, many other countries) bows its head in submission by not going to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies this year. The time is coming when we will be run out of Taiwan. In addition to the peace at any price elements of our political spectrum, the isolationist/libertarian spirit of our polity-animated the results of a a decade of piss-poor leadership and results as well as a genuine spending crisis, calls for cuts in military spending even as the Chinese challenge our Navy in the western Pacific and the Russians put missiles in Venezuela and our 2,000 mile border with Mexico is a narco war zone. Europe's currency (hence economic union?) teeters and we may well be only a economic step or two behind. :cry: :cry: :cry:
The Adventure continues, , ,
-
This Pravda on the Hudson piece I find quite interesting and hope it will excite some comment here. Combined with some things on Glenn Beck's fascinating show last night, it begins to appear that Baraq & Company have a hand or three in what is going on.
==========
Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings
By MARK LANDLER
Published: February 16, 2011
WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.
Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said.
The 18-page classified report, they said, grapples with a problem that has bedeviled the White House’s approach toward Egypt and other countries in recent days: how to balance American strategic interests and the desire to avert broader instability against the democratic demands of the protesters.
Administration officials did not say how the report related to intelligence analysis of the Middle East, which the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, acknowledged in testimony before Congress, needed to better identify “triggers” for uprisings in countries like Egypt.
Officials said Mr. Obama’s support for the crowds in Tahrir Square in Cairo, even if it followed some mixed signals by his administration, reflected his belief that there was a greater risk in not pushing for changes because Arab leaders would have to resort to ever more brutal methods to keep the lid on dissent.
“There’s no question Egypt was very much on the mind of the president,” said a senior official who helped draft the report and who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss its findings. “You had all the unknowns created by Egypt’s succession picture — and Egypt is the anchor of the region.”
At the time, officials said, President Hosni Mubarak appeared to be either digging in or grooming his son, Gamal, to succeed him. Parliamentary elections scheduled for November were widely expected to be a sham. Egyptian police were jailing bloggers, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had returned home to lead a nascent opposition movement.
In Yemen, too, officials said Mr. Obama worried that the administration’s intense focus on counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda was ignoring a budding political crisis, as angry young people rebelled against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an autocratic leader of the same vintage as Mr. Mubarak.
“Whether it was Yemen or other countries in the region, you saw a set of trends” — a big youth population, threadbare education systems, stagnant economies and new social network technologies like Facebook and Twitter — that was a “real prescription for trouble,” another official said.
The White House held weekly meetings with experts from the State Department, the C.I.A. and other agencies. The process was led by Dennis B. Ross, the president’s senior adviser on the Middle East; Samantha Power, a senior director at the National Security Council who handles human rights issues; and Gayle Smith, a senior director responsible for global development.
The administration kept the project secret, officials said, because it worried that if word leaked out, Arab allies would pressure the White House, something that happened in the days after protests convulsed Cairo.
Indeed, except for Egypt, the officials refused to discuss countries in detail. The report singles out four for close scrutiny, which an official said ran the gamut: one that is trying to move toward change, another that has resisted any change and two with deep strategic ties to the United States as well as religious tensions. Those characteristics would suggest Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen.
By issuing a directive, Mr. Obama was also pulling the topic of political change out of regular meetings on diplomatic, commercial or military relations with Arab states. In those meetings, one official said, the strategic interests loom so large that it is almost impossible to discuss reform efforts.
The study has helped shape other messages, like a speech Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave in Qatar in January, in which she criticized Arab leaders for resisting change.
“We really pushed the question of who was taking the lead in reform,” said an official. “Would pushing reform harm relations with the Egyptian military? Doesn’t the military have an interest in reform?”
Mr. Obama also pressed his advisers to study popular uprisings in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to determine which ones worked and which did not. He is drawn to Indonesia, where he spent several years as a child, which ousted its longtime leader, Suharto, in 1998.
While the report is guiding the administration’s response to events in the Arab world, it has not yet been formally submitted — and given the pace of events in the region, an official said, it is still a work in progress.
-
Good thing Obama wore a kippa at AIPAC, otherwise I'd think that he was pro-muslim and anti-Israel. :roll:
Gee, some of us saw this coming.....
-
Indeed!
That said, there is the stubborn, dilema of this:
"a greater risk in not pushing for changes because Arab leaders would have to resort to ever more brutal methods to keep the lid on dissent."
How do you address this question?
-
Well, let's figure out the path that will lead to a lesser loss of life and human suffering. Arab nations seized by jihadists that then wage an apocalyptic war against Israel, or some forcefully put down demonstrations/riots?
The Shah wasn't great on human rights, but when the mullahs seized Iran, the violation of human rights, like mass executions was much worse. Oh, and that nuclear crisis thing....
-
I get that BUT
a) does that not lead to situations where ultimately such a strategy blows up amidst revolution and/or chaos?
b) does that not lead to a diminishment of our moral power in the world? (Do you believe in moral power at all?)
c) does that not lead to weak support from the American people?
d) does it bother your sleep at all?
-
I get that BUT
a) does that not lead to situations where ultimately such a strategy blows up amidst revolution and/or chaos?
**No. How long has N. Korea starved and brutalized it's people? Oppression is the default state of human government. What western civilization did was an abberation from the norms of human history.
b) does that not lead to a diminishment of our moral power in the world? (Do you believe in moral power at all?)
**Like the fierce moral urgency for change that put Obama into office? Bwahahahaha!
c) does that not lead to weak support from the American people?
**How many bother to look up from their reality shows to bother to figure out the difference between Iraq and Iran?
d) does it bother your sleep at all?
**What bothers my sleep is the things I see coming.
-
"Hey, what possible harm could occur from wading into this mob? They're protesting for democracy! They're muslims, and we all know islam is a religion of peace and women are treated with reverence!"
MARC: Is this fair? How do you know that she thinks like this?
-
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4029879,00.html
US clueless about Egypt?
Senate hearing turns into farce as American ignorance on Egypt situation revealed; specific agenda of Muslim Brotherhood unclear, top official says, has trouble responding to question on group’s attitude to peace with Israel
-
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 4, 2011
Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the United States has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism.
From Baghdad to Benghazi
Iran might not be the big winner of Mideast uprisings
A strange moral inversion, considering that Hussein's evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gaddafi's. Gaddafi is a capricious killer; Hussein was systematic. Gaddafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a "Republic of Fear."
Moreover, that systemized brutality made Hussein immovable in a way that Gaddafi is not. Barely armed Libyans have already seized half the country on their own. Yet in Iraq, there was no chance of putting an end to the regime without the terrible swift sword (it took all of three weeks) of the United States.
No matter the hypocritical double standard. Now that revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush's freedom agenda, it's not just Iraq that has slid into the memory hole. Also forgotten is the once proudly proclaimed "realism" of Years One and Two of President Obama's foreign policy - the "smart power" antidote to Bush's alleged misty-eyed idealism.
It began on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first Asia trip, when she publicly played down human rights concerns in China. The administration also cut aid for democracy promotion in Egypt by 50 percent. And cut civil society funds - money for precisely the organizations we now need to help Egyptian democracy - by 70 percent.
This new realism reached its apogee with Obama's reticence and tardiness in saying anything in support of the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. On the contrary, Obama made clear that nuclear negotiations with the discredited and murderous regime (talks that a child could see would go nowhere) took precedence over the democratic revolutionaries in the street - to the point where demonstrators in Tehran chanted, "Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them."
Now that revolution has spread from Tunisia to Oman, however, the administration is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom.
Iraq, of course, required a sustained U.S. military engagement to push back totalitarian forces trying to extinguish the new Iraq. But is this not what we are being asked to do with a no-fly zone over Libya? In conditions of active civil war, taking command of Libyan airspace requires a sustained military engagement.
Now, it can be argued that the price in blood and treasure that America paid to establish Iraq's democracy was too high. But whatever side you take on that question, what's unmistakable is that to the Middle Easterner, Iraq today is the only functioning Arab democracy, with multiparty elections and the freest press. Its democracy is fragile and imperfect - last week, security forces cracked down on demonstrators demanding better services - but were Egypt to be as politically developed in, say, a year as is Iraq today, we would think it a great success.
For Libyans, the effect of the Iraq war is even more concrete. However much bloodshed they face, they have been spared the threat of genocide. Gaddafi was so terrified by what we did to Saddam & Sons that he plea-bargained away his weapons of mass destruction. For a rebel in Benghazi, that is no small matter.
Yet we have been told incessantly how Iraq poisoned the Arab mind against America. Really? Where is the rampant anti-Americanism in any of these revolutions? In fact, notes Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, the United States has been "conspicuously absent from the sloganeering."
It's Yemen's president and the delusional Gaddafi who are railing against American conspiracies to rule and enslave. The demonstrators in the streets of Egypt, Iran and Libya have been straining their eyes for America to help. They are not chanting the antiwar slogans - remember "No blood for oil"? - of the American left. Why would they? America is leaving Iraq having taken no oil, having established no permanent bases, having left behind not a puppet regime but a functioning democracy. This, after Iraq's purple-fingered exercises in free elections seen on television everywhere set an example for the entire region.
Facebook and Twitter have surely mediated this pan-Arab (and Iranian) reach for dignity and freedom. But the Bush Doctrine set the premise.
-
W's policy of spreading Democracy is somehow not complimented by the Soros. I agree with Charles in previous post that Saddam was far worse than Ghaddafi:
***Billionaire George Soros told Fareed Zakaria that if President Bush and Dick Cheney were in charge now, the Egyptian revolution would have been much more violent. But instead, Obama has been successful because he sees the revolution in terms of people asserting their right to freedom and continues to refuse to “instigate” the coming regime change.***
All of a sudden all of the libs (and McCain) are calling for the US to jump into Libya???
They can't seem to get their heads on straight.
-
Well, I think we should kill Ka-daffy. No as far as nation-building though.
-
On a recent cross country drive I had a nice 3 hour opportunity to be lectured on the radio by Prof. Walter E. Williams of George Mason University who made the point that nearly everything good about the American system has to do with preventing rule by democracy i.e. the majority. We are a constitutional Republic and all the little intricacies of our Republic like the electoral college, different branches of government, the bill of rights, independent judiciary, the bicameral legislature, the limits on congressional powers, individual rights, states rights, due process, etc. etc are all intended to be protections against rule by democracy. The word democracy is not found in our constitution where the key provisions start with the phrase "Congress shall make no law..."
Bush never could articulate the value of tax cuts, but world peace rests on ability of someone to start articulating the difference between mob rule 'spreading democracy across the Middle East' and advancing liberty with true consent of the governed. Case in point, if majorities emerge in Egypt to authorize the burning of Coptic churches, is that consent of the governed - for the Coptic Christians??
This looks like Libertarian Issues, but he is talking directly how what we have learned here applies to our American foreign policy toward change in the Middle East. We keep saying it wrong and then hope they get it right. Instead we lead falsely by example. Obama opposes limits on government at every turn, for example by forcing health care change on everyone because 50.1% want that (really about 44%).
------
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/11/DemocracyVersusLiberty
Democracy Versus Liberty
BY WALTER WILLIAMS, FEBRUARY 23, 2011
It is truly disgusting for me to hear politicians, national and international talking heads and pseudo-academics praising the Middle East stirrings as democracy movements. We also hear democracy as the description of our own political system. Like the founders of our nation, I find democracy and majority rule a contemptible form of government.
You say, "Whoa, Williams, you really have to explain yourself this time!"
I'll begin by quoting our founders on democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, "there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual." At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph said, "... that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy." John Adams said, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." Alexander Hamilton said, "We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real Liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship."
The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the two most fundamental documents of our nation -- the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Our Constitution's Article IV, Section 4, guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." If you don't want to bother reading our founding documents, just ask yourself: Does our pledge of allegiance to the flag say to "the democracy for which it stands," or to "the Republic for which it stands"? Or, did Julia Ward Howe make a mistake in titling her Civil War song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"? Should she have titled it "The Battle Hymn of the Democracy"?
What's the difference between republican and democratic forms of government? John Adams captured the essence when he said, "You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe." That means Congress does not grant us rights; their (Marc: sic) job is to protect our natural or God-given rights.
For example, the Constitution's First Amendment doesn't say Congress shall grant us freedom of speech, the press and religion. It says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."
Contrast the framers' vision of a republic with that of a democracy. Webster defines a democracy as "government by the people; especially: rule of the majority." In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. As in a monarchy, the law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws do not represent reason. They represent force. The restraint is upon the individual instead of government. Unlike that envisioned under a republican form of government, rights are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government.
To highlight the offensiveness to liberty that democracy and majority rule is, just ask yourself how many decisions in your life would you like to be made democratically. How about what car you drive, where you live, whom you marry, whether you have turkey or ham for Thanksgiving dinner? If those decisions were made through a democratic process, the average person would see it as tyranny and not personal liberty. Is it no less tyranny for the democratic process to determine whether you purchase health insurance or set aside money for retirement? Both for ourselves, and our fellow man around the globe, we should be advocating liberty, not the democracy that we've become where a roguish Congress does anything upon which they can muster a majority vote.
-
That is a very good piece there Doug, well-prefaced by your comments.
Question raised: Given the Natural Rights basis for our Consitution, how do we articulate that in a way that can fly on the international stage, especially viz the Muslim world?
-
The concept of natural rights is utterly incompatible with islamic theology.
-
"Given the Natural Rights basis for our Constitution, how do we articulate that in a way that can fly on the international stage, especially viz the Muslim world?"
"The concept of natural rights is utterly incompatible with islamic theology."
---------------
How you win that argument in the Middle East is what they call above my pay grade, what I am saying is that, win or lose, you start making that argument, like Williams did, clearly, loudly and consistently - to everyone that will listen.
If the leader of the free world believed in the American principles - it would start there. It should come from the Vice President too, it should come from the Secretary of State. It should come in a Cairo-2 speech and it should come from the leader of the opposition party in the United States / next President of the United States - whoever wants to step forward and take on that role. It should come from the General Secretary of the United Nations and from every member of the Security Council. Communist China like Obama may have a problem with hypocrisy, but give it a try - let's proclaim some principles larger than the false choice of mob-rule or dictatorship.
Crafty wrote 'natural rights' rather than God-given rights. Call them common sense or human rights if we want, we don't need to know or agree on the origin (IMO). Use logic for persuasion. Freedom to be Muslim inside your being and to associate with like minded and to not have to hide your beliefs comes from the same freedom of religion that an atheist, a Jew and a Christian also need to be free. Either you have that freedom or you don't. You don't take a majority vote religion and then force what can't be forced on all, you allow it's free expression in all its forms - universally, in order to secure your own. Someone should make these arguments, we used to call that role 'leader of the free world' - cf. "Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!"
I wrote previously about Egypt that we had a team that helped draft a constitution in other difficult places, Iraq and in Afghanistan, with some success and I'm sure some failure and some lessons learned. We could be offering expertise to all sides behind scenes while laying out the broad principles publicly.
Maybe we lose these argument and all hell breaks loose. That is different than not trying.
-
Not really sure where to put this one
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49755779/Economic-Warfare-Risks-and-Responses-by-Kevin-D-Freeman
-
Will history look back at W as being a foreign policy giant??
"A strange moral inversion, considering that Hussein's evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gaddafi's."
Exactly! It wasn't about morality it was about politics.
***From Baghdad to Benghazi
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 4, 2011
Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the United States has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism.
From Baghdad to Benghazi
A strange moral inversion, considering that Hussein's evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gaddafi's. Gaddafi is a capricious killer; Hussein was systematic. Gaddafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a "Republic of Fear."
Moreover, that systemized brutality made Hussein immovable in a way that Gaddafi is not. Barely armed Libyans have already seized half the country on their own. Yet in Iraq, there was no chance of putting an end to the regime without the terrible swift sword (it took all of three weeks) of the United States.
No matter the hypocritical double standard. Now that revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush's freedom agenda, it's not just Iraq that has slid into the memory hole. Also forgotten is the once proudly proclaimed "realism" of Years One and Two of President Obama's foreign policy - the "smart power" antidote to Bush's alleged misty-eyed idealism.
It began on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first Asia trip, when she publicly played down human rights concerns in China. The administration also cut aid for democracy promotion in Egypt by 50 percent. And cut civil society funds - money for precisely the organizations we now need to help Egyptian democracy - by 70 percent.
This new realism reached its apogee with Obama's reticence and tardiness in saying anything in support of the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. On the contrary, Obama made clear that nuclear negotiations with the discredited and murderous regime (talks that a child could see would go nowhere) took precedence over the democratic revolutionaries in the street - to the point where demonstrators in Tehran chanted, "Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them."
Now that revolution has spread from Tunisia to Oman, however, the administration is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom.
Iraq, of course, required a sustained U.S. military engagement to push back totalitarian forces trying to extinguish the new Iraq. But is this not what we are being asked to do with a no-fly zone over Libya? In conditions of active civil war, taking command of Libyan airspace requires a sustained military engagement.
Now, it can be argued that the price in blood and treasure that America paid to establish Iraq's democracy was too high. But whatever side you take on that question, what's unmistakable is that to the Middle Easterner, Iraq today is the only functioning Arab democracy, with multiparty elections and the freest press. Its democracy is fragile and imperfect - last week, security forces cracked down on demonstrators demanding better services - but were Egypt to be as politically developed in, say, a year as is Iraq today, we would think it a great success.
For Libyans, the effect of the Iraq war is even more concrete. However much bloodshed they face, they have been spared the threat of genocide. Gaddafi was so terrified by what we did to Saddam & Sons that he plea-bargained away his weapons of mass destruction. For a rebel in Benghazi, that is no small matter.
Yet we have been told incessantly how Iraq poisoned the Arab mind against America. Really? Where is the rampant anti-Americanism in any of these revolutions? In fact, notes Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, the United States has been "conspicuously absent from the sloganeering."
It's Yemen's president and the delusional Gaddafi who are railing against American conspiracies to rule and enslave. The demonstrators in the streets of Egypt, Iran and Libya have been straining their eyes for America to help. They are not chanting the antiwar slogans - remember "No blood for oil"? - of the American left. Why would they? America is leaving Iraq having taken no oil, having established no permanent bases, having left behind not a puppet regime but a functioning democracy. This, after Iraq's purple-fingered exercises in free elections seen on television everywhere set an example for the entire region.
Facebook and Twitter have surely mediated this pan-Arab (and Iranian) reach for dignity and freedom. But the Bush Doctrine set the premise.
-
"America is always talking about democracy and we want democracy to come to Bahrain. . . . We want them to practice what they preach, that's all."
–Mohammed Ansari, Bahraini
Sometimes it's a heavy load, being America.
And it won't stop unless some day the United States finds a reason to unburden itself of the heavy lift posed by the world's aspiring peoples. With the Middle East protests, we may be there.
Less than a week into the massive Cairo street demonstrations, a prominent U.S. foreign policy expert pushed back against supporting them: "No one really knows a great deal about the protesters."
When all at once the people of Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Bahrain, Algeria and even Iran (a Feb. 20 protest by tens of thousands was barely noticed) summoned the courage to take to the streets for greater freedom, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment seemed like stunned deer staring into the incandescent images on television and wondering, Who are these people?
The U.S. needs to produce more than rhetoric on behalf of 10 active democracy protests in the Middle East.
Writing on behalf of de minimis support for the Libyans in these pages Tuesday, Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said: "It is one thing to acknowledge Moammar Gadhafi as a ruthless despot, which he has demonstrated himself to be. But doing so does not establish the democratic bona fides of those who oppose him." A little digging surely would find something similar said in 1770 about the Massachusetts rabble.
The we-have-no-clue-who-they-are excuse is utterly lame. Scholars at places like the American Enterprise Institute, the Carnegie Middle East Center and elsewhere have been writing in detail for years about these people, pleading with the policy establishment to recognize how volatile the "stability" status quo had become.
It's clear, however, from the tortured, unfocused U.S. reaction to these events that policy toward these nations below the level of kings had become a second-level priority. How did so many people become an afterthought?
The reason, in a phrase, is the Arab-Israeli peace process. It sucked the oxygen out of thinking about the Middle East. With every secretary of state dutifully saddling up to solve the endless riddle, the "peace process" reduced everything and everyone in the region to spear-carriers for this obsession. The populations of unemployed youth building and festering across the region became an inconsequential blur, an Arab lumpenproletariat. "We don't know who they are." And whoever they were had to wait until some U.S. president harvested another Nobel Prize by "solving" the Palestinian problem.
Well, they didn't wait. They exploded in January 2011.
None of this is to gainsay the interests of the world economy in the region. But America's leaders should not let that become an excuse to forget who they are and where they came from. Soviet-era dissidents have said and written that among the things that sustained them was that their heads were filled with the ideas drawn from America's freedoms.
What a mess the Founding Fathers and Continental Army made for the grinders at the State Department, this week producing exquisite calibrations of America's interests. We now read in news analyses and opinion columns long lists of reasons why helping the Libyan rebels would backfire. What this means is that U.S. intervention won't come until, as in Srebrenica or Kosovo, Gadhafi's killings escalate from mere slaughter to mass murder. Europe acquiesced in the Balkan genocide, but the U.S. could not, an important distinction of global status.
What is happening here is not just another crisis to work through the bureaucracies until the storm passes. The stakes for the U.S. in how these uprisings are resolved extend beyond the Middle East. They've put on the table the core arguments the U.S. will need to mount in its defense against the competitive challenge of China's market authoritarianism. If U.S. timidity is seen as U.S. acquiescence to a system of "reformed" Middle East autocracies, the debate between the American and Chinese models is over. The world's people will see, rightly, that the Chinese are winning the argument, and the U.S. will spend the next 50 years watching other nations back away from its system.
"Defining moment" may be an overworked phrase, but this one qualifies. With these protests, the trains of history have left the station. The U.S. needs to issue a more public, unequivocal statement of support for authentic representative government. And find an active policy to go with it.
Only a U.S. president can lead this fight. But he has to (truly) believe in it. There is a school of thought, popular around the Obama foreign-policy team, that the world would be better off without the myth of American exceptionalism and burdens like these that come with it. If this government can't summon more than rhetoric or a U.N. resolution on behalf of 10 up-and-running democratic movements in the Middle East, that exceptionalism will wither. I'm guessing the world won't be better for it.
===========================
America's response to the Libyan crisis is stuck in repeat mode. The Obama Administration keeps insisting that a "full spectrum of possible responses" are in play to stop Moammar Gadhafi's war on his people. And in virtually the next breath, it rules out one credible option after another.
An egregious example concerns the possible supply of military assistance to Libyan rebels. White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Monday that "providing weapons" to the opposition was among a "range of options." The next day State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley shot this option down.
"It would be illegal for the United States to do that," Mr. Crowley said, citing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1970, which sanctions the Gadhafi regime and only passed with U.S. support on February 26. "It's quite simple. In [the resolution] there is an arms embargo that affects Libya, which means it's a violation for any country to provide arms to anyone in Libya."
One question is how the State Department allowed such a resolution to pass in the first place. President Obama has said he wants Gadhafi to leave, yet his own diplomats negotiate and approve a U.N. embargo that reduces his options in achieving that goal. Why are we still paying Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice?
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in particular should understand that arms embargoes always benefit the better armed side in a conflict. This had terrible consequences in Bosnia during her husband's Presidency in the 1990s, when the Muslims couldn't fight back against Serb militias stocked with weapons from Belgrade. Likewise in Libya, opposition forces seem to be outgunned on the ground and vulnerable from the air. Multiple air strikes were reported yesterday in Ras Lanuf, an oil port in eastern Libya, and Gadhafi's tanks have been leveling the western city of Zawiya.
Security Council resolutions are open to interpretation, so it's also revealing that Mrs. Clinton's spokesman chose to accept an especially broad reading of the Libyan embargo. The relevant paragraph of Resolution 1970 bans "the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer to the Libya Arab Jamahiriya, from or through their territories or by their nationals . . . of aircraft, arms and related material of all types." The resolution also forbids "technical assistance, training, financial or other assistance, related to military activities."
By Mr. Crowley's reading, the resolution covers any military support whatsoever by America or anyone else to the forces of the provisional opposition council set up in the eastern coastal city of Benghazi. In other words, America's hands are tied by the U.N.
But another reasonable reading would distinguish between the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, another name for the Gadhafi regime, and the territory of Libya. The rebels don't recognize the regime. Nor does the U.S. now that it has called for Gadhafi to leave power. The resolution doesn't explicitly say the "territory of Libya." This would leave the door open for Washington and its allies to supply the opposition with arms and still abide by the letter of the Security Council.
The next paragraph of Resolution 1970 offers another out for the U.S. It permits "supplies of non-lethal military equipment intended solely for humanitarian or protective use, and related technical assistance or training." Protection can be defined in various ways to cover the needs of the rebel forces and the civilian population.
We don't think the U.S. should ever let the U.N. control its actions, but we suggest these loopholes because the Obama Administration puts so much stock in the U.N.'s legal imprimatur. The White House may finally have retained some new lawyers, because yesterday Mr. Carney tried to split the difference with State: "We believe that the arms embargo contains within it the flexibility to allow for a decision to arm the opposition, if that decision were made."
Once the lawyers have been satisfied, maybe the Administration will even make a decision.
-
In Search of Monsters
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 12, 2011
The Iraq war hawks urging intervention in Libya are confident that there’s no way Libya could ever be another Iraq.
Of course, they never thought Iraq would be Iraq, either.
All President Obama needs to do, Paul Wolfowitz asserts, is man up, arm the Libyan rebels, support setting up a no-fly zone and wait for instant democracy.
It’s a cakewalk.
Didn’t we arm the rebels in Afghanistan in the ’80s? And didn’t many become Taliban and end up turning our own weapons on us? And didn’t one mujahadeen from Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, go on to lead Al Qaeda?
So that worked out well.
Even now, with our deficit and military groaning from two wars in Muslim countries, interventionists on the left and the right insist it’s our duty to join the battle in a third Muslim country.
“It is both morally right and in America’s strategic interest to enable the Libyans to fight for themselves,” Wolfowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.
You would think that a major architect of the disastrous wars and interminable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq would have the good manners to shut up and take up horticulture. But the neo-con naif has no shame.
After all, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets last month, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
Gates boldly batted back the Cakewalk Brigade — which includes John McCain, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry — bluntly telling Congress last week: “Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that’s the way it starts.”
Wolfowitz, Rummy’s No. 2 in W.’s War Department, pushed to divert attention from Afghanistan and move on to Iraq; he pressed the canards that Saddam and Osama were linked and that we were in danger from Saddam’s phantom W.M.D.s; he promised that the Iraq invasion would end quickly and gleefully; he slapped back Gen. Eric Shinseki when he said securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops; and he claimed that rebuilding Iraq would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues.
How wrong, deceptive and deadly can you be and still get to lecture President Obama on his moral obligations?
Wolfowitz was driven to invade Iraq and proselytize for the Libyan rebels partly because of his guilt over how the Bush I administration coldly deserted the Shiites and Kurds who were urged to rise up against Saddam at the end of the 1991 gulf war. Saddam sent out helicopters to slaughter thousands. (A NATO no-fly zone did not stop that.)
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is also monstrous, slaughtering civilians and hiring mercenaries to kill rebels.
It’s hard to know how to proceed, but in his rush, Wolfowitz never even seems to have a good understanding of the tribal thickets he wants America to wade into. In Foreign Affairs, Frederic Wehrey notes that “for four decades Libya has been largely terra incognita ... ‘like throwing darts at balloons in a dark room,’ as one senior Western diplomat put it to me.”
Leslie Gelb warns in The Daily Beast that no doubt some rebels are noble fighters, but some “could turn out to be thugs, thieves, and would-be new dictators. Surely, some will be Islamic extremists. One or more might turn into another Col. Qaddafi after gaining power. Indeed, when the good colonel led the Libyan coup in 1969, many right-thinking Westerners thought him to be a modernizing democrat.”
Reformed interventionist David Rieff, who wrote the book “At the Point of a Gun,” which criticizes “the messianic dream of remaking the world in either the image of American democracy or of the legal utopias of international human rights law,” told me that after Iraq: “America doesn’t have the credibility to make war in the Arab world. Our touch in this is actually counterproductive.”
He continued: “Qaddafi is a terrible man, but I don’t think it’s the business of the United States to overthrow him. Those who want America to support democratic movements and insurrections by force if necessary wherever there’s a chance of them succeeding are committing the United States to endless wars of altruism. And that’s folly.”
He quotes John Quincy Adams about America: “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy ... she is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
As for Wolfowitz, Rieff notes drily, “He should have stayed a mathematician.”
-
Just as there are long term, potentially negative consequences for acting, there can be the same for failing to act. Power vacuums never go unfilled.
-
NFZ is/was? but one option. Simply supplying food, water, ammo? is/was? another-- the larger point is whether the US would help or not against a nasty dictator when the people were genuinely rising up.
Answering that question needs to be seen in the background context of the US's geo-political situation in the mid-east and the war with Islamic Fascism.
If we do not stand for democracy, freedom, and "the people" against a murderous thug like Kaddaffy (who has murdered hundreds of our people by the way- think Lockerbie and other attacks) what meaning then for an Arab world deciding whether to see the struggle as Islam vs the Infidels or Civilization vs. Barbarism?
Anyway, it looks like Baraq has answered that question. I suspect we (and the civilized world) are going to profoundly regret the trajectory of his approach to Iraq, Afpakia, Israel, Iran, Egypt, Bahrain, and Libya.
-
Yup. I'm sure the left and MSM will insist it's all Bush's fault.
-
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2011/03/17/%E2%80%9Cwhere-are-the-americans%E2%80%9Da-tale-of-two-tsunamis/
“Where are the Americans?”A tale of two tsunamis
March 17, 2011 - 4:49 am - by Roger Kimball
On December 26, 2004, an undersea megathrust earthquake precipitated one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. With a magnitude of between 9.1 and 9.3, it was the third largest quake ever recorded. The resulting tsunamis, moving walls of water up to 100 feet high, slammed ashore in some 14 countries bordering the Indian Ocean killing some 230,000 people. By December 29, President George W. Bush had outlined a huge relief effort. He said it was an “international coalition,” but the vital center of the coalition was the United States Navy.
“The U.S. military responded quickly, sending ships, planes, and relief supplies to the region. Coordinated by Joint Task Force 536, established at Utapao, Thailand, the Navy and the Marine Corps shifted assets from the Navy’s Pacific Command within days. The rapid response once again illustrated the flexibility of naval forces when forward deployed.
The Navy deployed four Patrol Squadron (VP) 4 P-3 Orion patrol aircraft from Kadena, Japan, to Utapao to fly reconnaissance flights in the region and five VP-8 P-3s began flying missions out of Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory. The Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) Carrier Strike Group [including Shoup (DDG 86), Shiloh (CG 67), Benfold (DDG 65) and USNS Ranier (T AOE 7)] and the Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) Expeditionary Strike Group [including Duluth (LPD 6), Milius (DDG 69), Rushmore (LSD 47), Thach (FFG 43), Pasadena (SSN 752) and USCG Munro (WHEC 724)] steamed to Indonesia from the Pacific Ocean. Marine Corps disaster relief assessment teams from Okinawa, Japan, flew in to Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and were later joined by U.S. Navy Environmental and Preventive Medicine Units from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Lastly, a total of eleven ships under the Military Sealift Command (MSC) proceeded to the region from Guam and Diego Garcia.”
At the U.N., meanwhile, Kofi Annan interrupted his holiday to go to New York where he held a “media availability” on the crisis. Annan, who frequently registered his “horror” and sadness at the event, appealed to the “international community” for aid. Annan talked. The United States Navy said little but carried out scores of rescue operations and aid deliveries.
On March 11, 2010, an undersea megathrust earthquake erupted off the East coast of Tohoku, Japan. With a magnitude of about 9, it was the worst earthquake ever to hit Japan. It triggered a tsunami some 30 feet high which devastated coastal areas. As of this writing, 10,000 are reported dead (some reports estimate the final figure will climb to 100,000) and 500,000 have been displaced. Property damage is enormous. The disaster severely damaged several nuclear power stations in the prefecture of Fukushima. To date, engineers have been only partially successful in cooling the nuclear fuel and containing radiation. Within hours of the disaster, President Barack Hussein Obama . . . went golfing. Later, he had dinner with admirers from the liberal media. The next day, he outlined his predictions about who would win this year’s men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
At Powerline, John Hinderaker, citing a story from the Daily Mail, quotes an associate professor at Chiba University:
“I think the death toll is going to be closer to 100,000 than 10,000. Where is the sense of urgency? We need somebody to take charge. We’ve had an earthquake followed by fire, then a tsunami, then radiation, and now snow. It’s everything. There is nothing left. The world needs to step in. Where are the Americans? The Japanese are too proud to ask, but we need help and we need it now.”
“Where the Americans?” That’s the sixty-four-dollar question. Chaos in Egypt: “Where are the Americans?” Gadaffi in Libya: “Where are the Americans?” Devastation in Japan: “Where are the Americans?” I am in London for a few days. At a dinner party last night, that was once again the question: “Where are the Americans?” On Tuesday, U.S. debt jumped $72 billion — in one day. What are the Americans doing about it? President Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury insisted that Congress raise the debt limit so that the government could borrow more. “Where are the Americans?” President Obama has managed the impossible-seeming feat of making a President of France appear as decisive and effective. Nicolas Sarkozy was the first Western leader to recognize the Libyan opposition. “Where are the Americans?”
Many months ago, I wondered in the space whether Obama’s behavior betoken incompetence or malevolence (noting, however, that the “or” need not be exclusive: he might e both incompetent and malevolent). On the domestic front, Obama’s activity is marked by arrogance, self-absorption, and policies that increase the power of government at the expense of local or individual initiative. In foreign affairs, his behavior is marked by contempt for America and moral paralysis —
“Weakness, incoherence, drift, indecision,” observes John Hinderaker, are “the hallmarks of the Obama administration.” The community organizer and junior Senator is simply out of his depth.
Obama had not been in office long before comparisons with Jimmy “misery index” Carter began cropping up. We now know that a reprise of that disastrous administration would be, as Glenn Reynolds has frequently observed, the best-case scenario. “Where are the Americans?” Conrad Black had the best analogy: looking for Obama is like the children’s game “Where’s Waldo?” The difference is that when your little one actually finds the dopey-looking fellow with the striped shirt, spectacles, and sock-like hat, he’s won the game. The philosopher Rudolph Canap used to make fun of Heidegger for treating the word “nothing” as a transitive verb: “das Nichts nichtet,” “nothing noths,” he was fond of saying “nothing,” that is to say , begets vacancy. Carnap thought it was nonsense. Barack Obama shows that it is brute political reality. Barack Obama: President Nothing.
-
"Just as there are long term, potentially negative consequences for acting, there can be the same for failing to act. Power vacuums never go unfilled."
Well, that is the problem. Khaddafi, Qaddafi, Gaddafi, or however it is spelled, leaves and what replaces him?
Again we have a vaccuum and the US is in the middle. I don't know. I tend to agree with those who feel we have enough on our plate. On this point I agree with Gates.
Or just kill the Ghaddafi and get it over with.
-
Or just kill the Ghaddafi and get it over with.
Bingo!
-
CCP: "Or just kill the Ghaddafi and get it over with."
GM: "Bingo!"
There was a nice, longer explanation by GM recently to ya about how we don't just do the hit and run, scorched earth type of hit. True, that was the thinking behind Iraq and Afghanistan. It started with or was articulated by Powell. If we break it, we have to fix it. But IraQ and Afghanistan were certainly already broken. I believe we had a right to act with either a hit and run or the full 10 years and running plan.
With Ghadafy, no one seemed to question Reagan much for an attempted assassination of a foreign leader - who executed the Lockerbie mass murder. We missed and still accomplished the mission - scaring the #*@& out of him. From my point of view, if we are right in our information, that these people like Saddam, Moammar are murderous thugs, it is okay with me to take them out without full followup. The concept in law and morality is that innocent people are facing imminent death, a concept with equal standing to self defense, if I understand correctly.
Regarding no-fly zone, I believe it was presumed candidate of no substance Palin who called for exactly that on Feb. 23, how many innocent deaths ago? http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/150645-the-palin-doctrine-obama-follows-mama-grizzly-to-war-in-libya
-
I don't think there is anyone that wants us to buy into going neck deep into Libya, but there is plenty reason to whack Ka-daffy. He's earned an airstrike.
-
"no one seemed to question Reagan much for an attempted assassination of a foreign leader"
Good point. Except for some hypocrite-Hollywood types I believe the sense was Reagan finally did the common sense thing.
I don't recall people sitting around ringing their hands wondering who would have replaced him if the attempt had succeeded.
We have a murderer slaughtering his own people. If the "Colonel" (why not "general" or "admiral" anyway?) and his son got executed their regime would collapse.
Could it actually be any worse?
-
Well, it could always be worse, but I'm willing to take the risk.
-
America's founders gave the powers of Commander in Chief to the President because they knew that war had to be prosecuted with determination, discipline and the national interest foremost in mind. By marked contrast, the use of force against Libya looks like the first war by global committee, with all the limitations and greater risk that entails.
We support the military action, even if it is much belated, and the good news is that the first allied salvos from the air seem to have achieved initial success. They have knocked Gadhafi's air force out of the battle and stopped his ground forces from advancing further into the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. Allied planes have also hit Gadhafi's armor and troop columns, which ought to give his mercenaries in particular reason to ask if the pay is worth the risk.
***
But the war's early prosecution also raises concern about its leadership, its limited means and strategic goals. On none of these have coalition members been clear or unified, starting with President Obama.
It isn't even clear who is commanding operation Odyssey Dawn. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wasn't able to provide a clear answer as he worked the Sunday news circuit. Mr. Obama said on Saturday the U.S. will "contribute our unique capabilities at the front end of the mission"—presumably B-2 bombers and command and control—but he added that the no-fly zone "will be led by our international partners."
Will that be the French, who said yesterday they have a handful of planes flying over Libya? It won't be the Qatar air force, which is chipping in four fighters. It isn't even clear whether the NATO commander will be allowed to lead the mission, though the military alliance is equipped for precisely this kind of effort. The danger here is that if no one is in charge, then no one is accountable for success or failure.
It also isn't clear what the military and strategic goal of this operation really is. Reuters quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as saying on Friday that the goal was "Number one: Stop the violence, and number two: We do believe that a final result of any negotiations would have to be the decision by Colonel Gadhafi to leave."
Yet President Obama offered only the first aim in his statements on Friday and Saturday: "We are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal—specifically, the protection of civilians in Libya." He even suggested that if Gadhafi honors the U.N. demand for a cease fire, then the allies would stop fighting short of ousting him from Tripoli. On Sunday French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe explicitly rejected the goal of ousting Gadhafi.
Gadhafi is weak enough, and Libya is a puny enough military power, that even a limited use of force might lead to his ouster. Perhaps the officers around him will mutiny, though they would also have to defeat the Gadhafi sons who control their own mercenary bands and could be prosecuted for war crimes if they leave Libya.
Certainly Gadhafi showed no sign of retreat Sunday, promising "a long war" and revenge against the U.S., France and the United Kingdom. He already knows, thanks to the limits of U.N. resolution 1973, that he needn't fear any foreign troops parachuting into Tripoli. He received further encouragement from Arab League chief Amr Moussa, who only a day into the allied bombing denounced civilian casualties and claimed this wasn't the kind of no-fly zone the Arabs had in mind. Mr. Moussa is running to be president of Egypt, but U.S. military action should never be hostage to such a fair-weather ally.
The danger for the region, and U.S. interests, will be if Gadhafi can exploit divisions on the global war committee and achieve a military stalemate. He could then remain in control of a rump part of Libya and still create mayhem.
Even Admiral Mullen conceded that the war could end in a stalemate with Gadhafi staying in power. "Certainly, I recognize that's a possibility," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "It's hard to know exactly how this turns out." When America's top uniformed officer says he doesn't know what the goal of a military engagement is, you know he's not getting clear direction from political figures in the U.S., or the global committee, or whoever is really in charge.
Mr. Obama's own chief terrorism adviser, John Brennan, warned late last week that Gadhafi "has the penchant to do things of a very concerning nature," including the possible use of his stockpiles of mustard gas. If Gadhafi poses such a threat, as we agree he does, then it is essential that this war end with a new government in Tripoli.
That means not agreeing to a premature cease fire that treats the opposition as no different from Gadhafi's troops. It means aiding the rebels—with intelligence and other arms in addition to air cover—to rout Gadhafi's forces. At the very least, the U.S. ought to recognize the National Council in Benghazi as a provisional Libyan government, which will enhance its international standing and ability to arm itself. We also see nothing in U.N. Resolution 1973 that would bar the U.S. from assisting the rebels with advisers as we helped Afghans topple the Taliban in 2001.
***
The other problem with war by global committee is that it diminishes the role of the U.S. Congress. As he ran for President in 2008, Mr. Obama made much of his opposition, in contrast to Mrs. Clinton, to the 2002 Iraq war resolution in Congress. Yet so far regarding Libya he has been far more solicitous of the U.N., the Europeans and the Arab League than he has of domestic political consent.
We believe that, as Commander in Chief, Mr. Obama has the authority under the Constitution to order U.S. forces to act as he has in Libya. But as a simple prudential matter, a U.S. President needs to respect and bring along Congressional leaders in support of such action. All the more because members of his own party will be the first to revolt if a stalemate ensues or the TV pictures get ugly. Republicans tend to defer on principle to Presidential war decisions, but Mr. Obama also cannot afford to take them for granted.
The worst offense a Commander in Chief can make is to commit U.S. military force and the credibility that goes with it in half-hearted fashion. Now that he's taken the U.S. to war against Libya, Mr. Obama needs to make American interests his main priority, and that means ensuring that the result includes a rapid end to the long, brutal rule of Moammar Gadhafi.
-
If I'm Ka-daffy, I just play possum, suspend overt offensives while playing the arab/global media with innocent victim of western imperialism stories. Wait for the west to get tired and leave.
-
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/20/uk-libya-britain-cuts-idUKTRE72J2OR20110320
(Reuters) - Britain's military is capable of taking part in a swift campaign against Libya, but prolonged fighting could stretch its armed forces and raise pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to rethink deep defence cuts.
Despite its role in Afghanistan and severe financial pressures, senior British ministers and military chiefs say they can comfortably help to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya.
However, if the operation grows or drags on for months, it could strain areas such as the support crews that arm and refuel planes and perform airborne reconnaissance.
Britain's involvement in the first stage of the strikes against Libya appeared to be relatively limited, with planes flying from one UK airbase and one submarine firing Tomahawk missiles, analysts noted.
__________________________________________________
France eyes five billion euro defence cuts
14 June 2010, 13:05 CET
(PARIS) - France will trim about five billion euros (6.1 billion dollars) from its defence budget, Defence Minister Herve Morin said Monday.
The defence budget cuts over the next three years are part of overall belt-tightening measures in the wake of the Greek debt crisis.
-
Look out Ka-daffy, France is sending this:
FRANCE'S CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRCRAFT CARRIER TO LEAVE FOR LIBYA ON SUNDAY FROM FRANCE-ARMY SPOKESMAN
A little background on France's only aircraft carrier:
French aircraft carrier set to defend Britain breaks down
The flagship French aircraft carrier which is set to play a key role in defending Britain over the next decade has broken down.
French fighter jets could be stationed on Britain's new aircraft carrier as the two nations' navies become
French Rafale fighters prepare for take-off on the deck of the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier Photo: AFP
By Peter Allen in Paris 7:00AM GMT 31 Oct 2010
As President Nicolas Sarkozy prepares to use a historic London summit to announce the use of RAF jets off the Charles de Gaulle, his naval chiefs have told him she is no longer seaworthy.
"She's meant to be heading to Afghanistan to support the war there but is instead in home port with a faulty propulsion system," said a French Navy source.
"This is a carrier which is meant to be defending not only France but also Britain over the next decade. As far as the London summit is concerned, her breaking down could not come at a worse time."
Following Britain's strategic defence review last week, it looks certain that the UK and France will each have just one operational aircraft carrier each towards the end of the decade.
But Britain will have to rely solely on the Charles de Gaulle until at least 2020 while the Queen Elizabeth, a new carrier, is being built.
This follows the announcement of the scrapping of the carrier Ark Royal and its Harrier Jump Jets.
In the meantime, the Charles de Gaulle will be reconfigured to carry British planes, including the new Joint Strike Fighter jets.
But the French carrier's captain, Hugues du Plessis d'Argentré, confirmed that the 16-year-old vessel was not as efficient as she used to be, despite a three year refit.
He said "common sense" had forced him to temporarily abandon his latest mission to Afghanistan.
His ship's nuclear reactor would have to be given time to "cool down" before vital repairs were carried out, said Captain Du Plessis d'Argentré.
He added: "We're looking at between three, four, five weeks," suggesting that it might even be Christmas before the carrier could resume its mission.
The French Navy has, like Britain's, been subjected to savage cuts, with Captain Du Plessis d'Argentré admitting that the cost of the Charles de Gaulle's repairs would be well into eight figures.
British and French TV crews were originally meant to broadcast from the carrier on Tuesday, when David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy meet at Lancaster Gate for their first bilateral summit.
But on Saturday a French Navy spokesman admitted: "Unfortunately the Charles de Gaulle is no longer available for broadcasters. This is of course embarrassing, but repairs will soon be under way."
The countries are set to embark on an unprecedented level of co-operation over the use of aircraft carriers and other military hardware.
Confirming the sharing of carriers, France's defence minister Hervé Morin said: "The idea is an exchange of capacity and an interdependence. It's a new approach."
Critics have slammed the plans, however, suggesting that Britain should not be partly placing its defence capability in the hands of the French, who do not share the same record for military efficiency.
Policy splits could also threaten British defences. When Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac last launched an Anglo-French defence initiative in St Malo in 1998 it came unstuck when France refused to back the invasion of Iraq.
Britain's defence review cut the Royal Navy's surface fleet to just 19 ships, with Mr Cameron now resigned to sharing equipment with the French.
A Ministry of Defence spokesman said earlier this week: "The UK and France are facing the realities of the tough financial climate and it is in our best interests to work together to deliver the capabilities that both our nations need. Closer co-operation is in both our countries' interests."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8098896/French-aircraft-carrier-set-to-defend-Britain-breaks-down.html
____________________________________________________________________
French 'calamity' carrier heads for sea - again
By Julian Coman in Paris 12:00AM GMT 11 Mar 2001
ONE of the most embarrassing sagas in French maritime history took a further twist last week when France's most accident-prone warship began the countdown to another attempt to take to the high seas.
In the Ministry of Defence and on the quayside at Toulon, where the 40,000-ton aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle had been dry-docked, sceptical observers crossed their fingers and prayed for a fair wind.
The idea of France's first nuclear-powered carrier was dreamt up in 1986. It soon became a pet project of the then president, Francois Mitterrand. The ship that was built has proved, however, to be a humiliating and expensive naval failure. Fifteen years and £7 billion later, it has still to complete its first successful tour of service and has suffered a series of mishaps.
An attempt to go to sea in November ended characteristically in disaster somewhere in the Bermuda triangle. A substantial part of a 19-ton propeller broke off, obliging the carrier to limp back to southern France.
Since then, naval engineers have worked round the clock for three months in preparation for the next bid for seaworthiness. Last Tuesday, the vessel moved into the bay of Toulon proper. Its 1,950 crew are hoping for an April sailing, although no one was celebrating prematurely.
Related Articles
Frustration with the carrier has become palpable. Some of the more mutinous sailors of the Charles de Gaulle have taken to calling it "the damned ship [le bateau maudit]". The French minister of defence, Alain Richard, has promised to take whoever was responsible for the latest propeller debacle to court. He has even admitted that the Charles de Gaulle has become a subject of "ridicule".
It is not hard to understand why. The propeller incident was only one of a growing list of examples of mishap, misjudgment and mismanagement of the ship that was intended to be a symbol of French military prestige in the 21st century. "If you look back on the history of this ship," said one senior naval official, "it has just been a catalogue of errors."
Even the ship's name caused trouble. In 1986, President Mitterrand decided to call it the Richelieu, after the cardinal. In 1989, however, the Gaullist Jacques Chirac became prime minister. Mr Chirac believed that such a potent symbol of national pride should be named after the general who inspired his own political beliefs.
After a ferocious row, Mr Chirac prevailed. While the arguments raged, however, construction was falling further behind schedule. As economic recession began to bite in the 1990s, the project was starved of funding. On four occasions, work on the ship was suspended altogether. It was clear that the 1996 deadline for active service was wildly unrealistic.
Mr Chirac, then president of France, made a virtue out of necessity and decided that the Charles de Gaulle should become a millennium project, ready for service in 2000. After years of neglect, technical work and development began to be conducted at breakneck speed. By the late 1990s, the carrier was ready for its first proper sea tests, at which point things began to go even more awry.
The ship's flight decks, it became clear, were too short to accommodate the American Hawkeye radar aircraft that France had bought for the vessel. In addition, the decks had been painted with a substance that eroded the arrest wires used to slow the aircraft as they landed.
The ship's electronics circuits were malfunctioning, while its personnel, it emerged, were being exposed to unacceptable levels of radiation. The ship was simply not fit to sail. After many months of repairs, the Charles de Gaulle was relaunched last year on a cruise to Guadaloupe. Then the propeller problems began.
The firm that made the propellers, Atlantic Industries, went bankrupt in 1999. When the ship sails next month, it will borrow two propellers from older carriers. This time, the voyage must be a success. "If repeated mishaps don't finish a ship off, ridicule does," said Mr Richard. The French navy's communications officer in Toulon, Pierre Olivier is issuing similarly warnings. "Nothing must be left to chance for this trip," he said. "Everything must be in order this time."
-
NEW YORK – Oil prices climbed Monday as energy experts warned that Libya's oil exports could be off the world market longer than expected, and countries including the U.S. enforced a no-fly zone over Libya.
Traders also fretted about other uprisings in the Middle East and how much they could affect production from OPEC heavyweights, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Those two countries produce 12.4 million barrels of oil per day.
Benchmark West Texas crude for May delivery gained $1.24 to settle at $103.09 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The April contract, which ends Tuesday, rose $1.36 to $102.43 per barrel.
Prices climbed after another violent weekend in Libya. Moammar Gadhafi vowed a "long war" as allied forces smashed his air defenses. On Monday, a top French official said international intervention could last "a while."
-
Forces not providing air support for rebels-general
WASHINGTON, March 21 | Mon Mar 21, 2011 12:25pm EDT
WASHINGTON, March 21 (Reuters) - U.S. and coalition military forces enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya are there to protect civilians and not to provide close-air support for opposition forces fighting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the head of U.S. Africa Command said on Monday.
U.S. Army General Carter Ham said the military mission in Libya was "very clear" and he was not concerned that the objectives would grow and change in the coming days. He said he had no orders to directly attack the Libyan leader.
-
But still not cheap.
With U.N. coalition forces bombarding Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi from the sea and air, the United States’ part in the operation could ultimately hit several billion dollars -- and require the Pentagon to request emergency funding from Congress to pay for it.
The first day of Operation Odyssey Dawn had a price tag that was well over $100 million for the U.S. in missiles alone. And the U.S. military, which remains in the lead now in its third day, has pumped millions more into air- and sea-launched strikes targeting air-defense sites and ground-force positions along Libya’s coastline.
The ultimate total that the United States spends will hinge on the length and scope of the strikes as well as on the contributions of its coalition allies. But Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said on Monday that the U.S. costs could “easily pass the $1 billion mark on this operation, regardless of how well things go.”
The Pentagon has the money in its budget to cover unexpected contingencies and can also use fourth-quarter dollars to cover the costs of operations now. “They’re very used to doing this operation where they borrow from Peter to pay Paul,” said Gordon Adams, who served as the Office of Management and Budget’s associate director for national security during the Clinton administration.
However, there comes a point when there simply isn’t enough cash to pay for everything. The White House said on Monday it was not prepared to request emergency funding yet, but former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim estimated that the Defense Department would need to send a request for supplemental funding to Capitol Hill if the U.S. military’s share of Libya operations expenses tops $1 billion.
"The operation in Libya is being funded with existing resources at this point. We are not planning to request a supplemental at this time," said Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget.
Such a request would likely be met with mixed reactions in a Congress focused on deficit reduction. And while many key lawmakers have been agitating for action in Libya, others have been more reluctant and have urged the Obama administration to send them a declaration of war.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/costs-of-libya-operation-already-piling-up-20110321
-
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/ceasefire-is-victory-for-gaddafi/?singlepage=true
Ceasefire Is Victory for Gaddafi
Limiting our objective to a ceasefire allows a deranged Gaddafi to remain, does not protect the rebels, and requires a lengthy military obligation.
-
Maybe we should forget "doctrines". Every situation is unique and to tie us down with doctrines doesn't really make sense.
Maybe we simply do what is best for the US period in each given situation.
I am of the opinion we should either go arrest the Colonel for war crimes (using new evidence he ordered Lockerbie), or simply assasinate him.
To go about these military/political rituals for this ONE guy is nuts.
That said I don't see how he can survive long unless we let him. And letting him do that for political reasons just doesn't seem worth it. Either kill the guy or attempt to arrest him. IF necessary to appease the libs arrest the guy and have the mock war crimes trial drag on for years while the ACLU gives him all the lawyers he needs and go through the silly spectacle of giving him them the motions of a justice system and then hang him anyway.
-
Well, arresting him would probably be as easy as the arrest of Saddam was.
Killing him is a better option, especially given that he's pinned down in Tripoli. Oh wait, he isn't anymore, is he?
I guess we missed our chance.
So, who of the "Coalition of the Ailing" drops out first?
-
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/151191-white-house-suggests-regime-change-is-goal-of-libya-mission
The White House suggested Tuesday the mission in Libya is one of regime change, despite emphatic statements from President Obama and military brass that the goal is not to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power.
According to a White House readout of a Monday night call between Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the two leaders "underscored their shared commitment to the goal of helping provide the Libyan people an opportunity to transform their country, by installing a democratic system that respects the people’s will."
The term "installing" suggests the goal of regime change.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for clarification.
-
Well, this should be quick, cheap and bloodless.
Anyone seen the “Mission Accomplished” banner? Barry wants it for a photo op.
-
"Maybe we should forget "doctrines".Every situation is unique..."- CCP
My doctrine is full of caveats. In Iraq, I would say that if your neighbor's house is on fire, and you are standing there with a fire hose, then it might make sense to help out. That assumes that by neighbor they share some form of positive humanity, by fire hose that means something that helps put out the fire, not makes the fire worse etc. It doesn't mean that when you are done you also build them a new house.
I agree with the Lockerbie charge if we have evidence / access to witnesses. Murder in our law does not have a statute of limitations. This also was terror so he can sit for trial in Obama's Guantanamo if captured.
OTOH, the 'Rebels' stronghold is also the area of largest per capita recruitment for al Qaida to Iraq: "A 2007 US Military Academy study of information on al-Qaida forces in Iraq indicate that by far, Eastern Libya made the largest per capita contribution to al-Qaida forces in Iraq. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/03/22/americas_descent_into_strategic_dementia_109310.html
Like Saddam in hiding and what GM wrote about catching him, if we were going to go in by executive order without consultation or declaration from congress, then we could have done that on Feb.23 when the resigned governor of Alaska suggested it, better yet before the uprising with an element of surprise, instead of with advance notice and 3 1/2 weeks to hide.
-
So, how soon do we go hat-in-hand to China for more money, so we can continue our military campaign in Libya, which is costing China money because of increased oil prices?
-
And I thought we were only fighting for democracy and freedom.... And doing what's right... :-o
Frankly, I just wish we would stay out of the entire mess...
By Dr. Kristin Diwan – Special to CNN
The international community is intervening to stop killing in Libya. But it is standing by as the Bahraini government - aided by the Saudis and broader Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) - suppresses its own people with brutal force.
Bahraini opposition groups have petitioned the United Nations to intervene on their behalf. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed his "deepest concern" at the use of "excessive and indiscriminate force ... against unarmed civilians.” Yet there are no plans for U.N.-sponsored action.
Why isn’t the world acting in Bahrain as it did in Libya?
The reasons are political.
Moammar Gadhafi alienated almost everyone in the region and had few international friends. In contrast, Bahrain’s ruling Al-Khalifa family has earned strong support in neighboring Gulf states, along with goodwill from the United States, which has its Fifth Fleet stationed in the country.
In addition, Bahrain's uprising, while cross-sectarian, would empower the Shia majority. Shia empowerment through democratization - which occurred in neighboring Iraq – is feared by the Sunni minority in Bahrain, even by some who would welcome political reforms to make the ruling family more accountable to its populace. Shia empowerment is certainly feared by Saudi Arabia, which is intervening to ensure Bahrain does not fall under Iranian influence.
The U.S. encourages Bahraini’s democratic aspirations and worries that if Bahrain brutally puts down the protests, the demonstrators would turn to Iran for support. The U.S. does not want to see revolution, but rather reform. Among other things, revolution in this region would disrupt oil supplies.
Meanwhile, the countries of the Gulf are eager to suppress the uprising in Bahrain. They would not provide cover for international intervention, as it did by voting for a no-fly zone in the Arab League.
This is because while the Libyan uprising earned sympathy from neighboring Egypt and Tunisia, Bahrain's uprising is feared by its neighbors. Any overthrow of a monarch - or even reform to a genuine constitutional monarchy - would be sure to increase democratic pressure among neighboring monarchs.
A final reason why the United States and the broader international community have been reluctant to even confront Bahrain and the Saudi troops is because the U.S. needs as much GCC support in Libya as possible.
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/22/france-proposes-political-steering-committee-to-take-over-libya-mission/
France proposes “political steering committee” to take over Libya mission
-
Who's in charge? Germans pull forces out of NATO as Libyan coalition falls apart
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:42 PM on 22nd March 2011
* Tensions with Britain as Gates rebukes UK government over suggestion Gaddafi could be assassinated
* French propose a new political 'committee' to oversee operations
* Germany pulls equipment out of NATO coalition over disagreement over campaign's direction
* Italians accuse French of backing NATO in exchange for oil contracts
* No-fly zone called into question after first wave of strikes 'neutralises' Libyan military machine
* U.K. ministers say war could last '30 years'
* Italy to 'take back control' of bases used by allies unless NATO leadership put in charge of the mission
* Russians tell U.S. to stop bombing in order to protect civilians - calls bombing a 'crusade'
Deep divisions between allied forces currently bombing Libya worsened today as the German military announced it was pulling forces out of NATO over continued disagreement on who will lead the campaign.
A German military spokesman said it was recalling two frigates and AWACS surveillance plane crews from the Mediterranean, after fears they would be drawn into the conflict if NATO takes over control from the U.S.
The infighting comes as a heated meeting of NATO ambassadors yesterday failed to resolve whether the 28-nation alliance should run the operation to enforce a U.N.-mandated no-fly zone, diplomats said.
Yesterday a war of words erupted between the U.S. and Britain after the U.K. government claimed Muammar Gaddafi is a legitimate target for assassination.
U.K. government officials said killing the Libyan leader would be legal if it prevented civilian deaths as laid out in a U.N. resolution.
But U.S. defence secretary Robert Gates hit back at the suggestion, saying it would be 'unwise' to target the Libyan leader adding cryptically that the bombing campaign should stick to the 'U.N. mandate'.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1368693/Libya-war-Germans-pull-forces-NATO-Libyan-coalition-falls-apart.html
-
Our Community Organizer in Chief organizes the International Community.
What could go wrong?
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/22/white-house-reassures-congressional-aides-er-were-not-at-war-with-libya/
It's not War-War.
-
http://www.france24.com/en/20110322-france-not-war-libya-fillon-prime-minister-gaddafi-military-intervention-un-resolution
'We are not at war...,’ Fillon says
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/23/obama-exit-strategy-sticking-around/
Obama exit strategy: sticking around
posted at 12:15 pm on March 23, 2011 by Ed Morrissey
Barack Obama tried to convince Univision last night that the US has an exit strategy from the Libya conflict, and that strategy is to, er, stick around and fight. Jake Tapper calls it a Lewis Carroll moment, while others might consider it more Orwellian:
In an interview with Univision Tuesday, President Obama re-defined the term “exit strategy,” and said our exit strategy in Libya would begin this week.
“The exit strategy will be executed this week,” President Obama said, “in the sense that we will be pulling back from our much more active efforts to shape the environment. We will still be in a support role. We will be supplying jamming, intelligence and other assets unique to us.”
Planes in the air? Ships in the Mediterranean? Intelligence being provided? Doesn’t sound like an exit strategy at all.
What it does recall is Lewis Carroll.
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Tapper goes on to heap more scorn on Obama’s sudden embrace of the non-exit exit strategy, so be sure to read it all. And he’s right to do so: an exit strategy is just that: a strategy towards an exit. What Obama is attempting to sell is a handoff of responsibility for military leadership to someone else, anyone else.
It’s not the only point of confusion about Obama’s aims, either. Even before this conflict, people expressed puzzlement over what an Obama Doctrine that would explain his foreign policy would comprise. That ambiguity, sold as “nuance” before the Libya attack, now looks more like a chaotic muddle:
But on Libya, Obama’s opacity is coming back to haunt him, as critics from both parties press him on his rationale for taking action and for a more specific articulation of his vision for American goals and aspirations in the Mideast and elsewhere.
Politico’s Glenn Thrush spins this heavily towards nuance, but calling an ambiguous plan for long-term involvement an “exit strategy” reveals that this President has no idea what he wants or how to get it. Instead of having some semblance of a foreign policy plan, Obama and his team are playing it by ear — an obvious conclusion based on the no-we-won’t-oh-wait-yes-we-will vacillation on Libya that put American forces in position to start a mission whose window for success had already closed.
Update: Jazz Shaw writes today about the blatant hypocrisy at the heart of the UN “R2P” doctrine on which Obama relied.
-
- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
Symposium: The Mismanaged War Against Libya
Posted By Jamie Glazov On March 23, 2011 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments
In this special edition of Frontpage Symposium, we have gathered a distinguished panel to explore what American — and Western — interests are served by the coalition’s war against Libya. Our guests today are:
Michael Ledeen, a noted political analyst and a Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He is the author of The Iranian Time Bomb, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership and Tocqueville on American Character, and he is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal. His latest book is Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West.
Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest official ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. His first book, Red Horizons, was republished in 27 languages. In April 2010, Pacepa’s latest book, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, was prominently displayed at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians held in Washington D.C., as a “superb new paradigmatic work” and a “must read” for “everyone interested in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
Dr. Walid Phares, an expert on the Middle East who teaches Global Strategies in Washington DC. His most recent book is The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East.
and
Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad, Stealth Jihad and The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran.
FP: Walid Phares, Mihai Pacepa, Michael Ledeen and Robert Spencer, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Robert Spencer, let us begin with you. What is your position on the coalition campaign, with U.S. involvement, against Gaddafi?
Spencer: As the U.S. fired over one hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles into Libya Saturday, the objective seems clear. Barack Obama declared that “we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy.” He explained: “Today we are part of a broad coalition. We are answering the calls of a threatened people. And we are acting in the interests of the United States and the world.” But he didn’t explain how acting forcibly to remove Muammar Gaddafi would indeed be in America’s interests. And that is a case that is not as easily made as it might appear to be.
How could removing Gaddafi not be in America’s interests? It is unlikely that he will be succeeded by Thomas Jefferson. The fact that Gaddafi is a reprehensible human being and no friend of the U.S. does not automatically turn his opponents into Thomas Paine.
Obama has affirmed his support for “the universal rights of the Libyan people,” including “the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny,” but he has never specified who in Libya is working to uphold and defend those rights. He has praised “the peaceful transition to democracy” that he says is taking place across the Middle East, and yet the countries where uprisings have taken place have no democratic traditions or significant forces calling for the establishment of a secular, Western-style republics.
Eastern Libya, where the anti-Gaddafi forces are based, is a hotbed of anti-Americanism and jihadist sentiment. A report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center reveals that over the last few years, more jihadists per capita entered Iraq from Libya than from any other Muslim country – and most of them came from the region that is now spearheading the revolt against Gaddafi.
That may explain why Libyan protesters have defaced Gaddafi’s picture with the Star of David, the hated symbol of the Jews, whom the Koran designates as the “strongest in enmity” toward the Muslims. There has been a notable absence among the protesters of anything equivalent to “Don’t Tread On Me” flags or other signs that what the uprising is really all about is establishing the ballot box and the give-and-take of open-society politics. The Libyan protesters have chanted not “Give me liberty or give me death!,” but “No god but Allah!”
Abu Yahia al-Libi, a Libyan who heads up al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, has warmly praised the uprising in his homeland, calling on Libyans to murder the tyrant and crowing: “Now it is the turn of Gaddafi after he made the people of Libya suffer for more than 40 years.” He said that removing Gaddafi as well as other Middle Eastern autocrats was “a step to reach the goal of every Muslim, which is to make the word of Allah the highest” – that is, to establish a state ruled by Islamic law.
And America’s Tomahawk cruise missiles will have helped bring about such a state in Libya.
Pacepa: I fully agree with Robert Spencer.
There are few people on earth who want to see Gaddafi removed from power more than I do. I could write a book about my reasons, and maybe someday I will. Here I will just say that, after I was granted political asylum by President Carter (1978), Gaddafi set a $2 million bounty on my head because I had revealed his secret efforts to arm international terrorists with bacteriological and other weapons of mass destruction. But my personal animus against Gaddafi is my own policy, and it should not have anything to do with the policy of the U.S. Nor should the personal hatred for Gaddafi on the part of other Americans, such as those whose relatives he killed at the La Belle nightclub in West Berlin (1986), in the Pan Am Flight 103 at Lockerbie (1988) or elsewhere, be raised to the level of U.S. foreign policy.
The U.S., policy toward Libya—and any other country—should defend and promote only the interests of the United States. Unfortunately, the current events taking place in Libya show that our administration does not have any coherent foreign policy toward that country, and that U.S. foreign policy simply blows with the prevailing wind.
The name of the wind propelling the current U.S. policy toward Libya is Sarkozy. The president of France has no real policy toward Libya either, and he is also blowing with the wind—the wind of the 2012 presidential elections, where he is seriously threatened by the socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Rattling sabers has always helped French politicians in the short run–in spite of the fact that France has lost every war it ever started.
Just three years ago, President Sarkozy welcomed Gaddafi and his 400-person entourage on a five-day royal visit to Paris, allowing him to set up his Bedouin tent near the Elysée Palace. “Gaddafi is not perceived as a dictator in the Arab world,” Sarkozy explained at the time, adding as further justification: “He is the longest-serving head of state in the region.” Now this justification is Sarkozy’s reason to go to war against Gaddafi. “France has decided to play its part in history,” Sarkozy gravely announced from the steps of the Elysée Palace just before starting the war against Libya. “The Libyan people need our aid and support.”[ii] But he, and the rest of the Western World, still do not really know who those people are that he decided to protect.
All we know for certain about the “freedom fighters” opposing Gaddafi is that they fight with Kalashnikov in hand, and that Kalashnikovs have no history of promoting freedom. A recent article published in the prestigious Le Monde goes a step further, revealing that these “brave Libyan freedom fighters” are dominated by jihadists espousing the same complaints of “Westoxification,” accompanied by the Jew-hatred and broader infidel-hatred that permeates the Arab world.[iii]
President Obama has also praised Gaddafi in the past. According to press reports, last year, around the time Gaddafi called Obama “our son,” the U.S. president earmarked $400,000 for two of Gaddafi’s charities. The money was divided between the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, run by Gaddafi’s son Saif, and the Wa Attasimou, run by Gaddafi’s daughter Aicha.[iv]
Now President Obama is also facing elections, also in 2012, and he is having at least as much difficulty with the electorate as Sarkozi has. A new war would certainly help. Americans are patriots, and their support for our troops might occasion them to move to the back burner their discontent with Obamacare and with this administration’s disastrous spending habits.
The U.S. has made it abundantly clear to Gaddafi that he had better not try any more dirty tricks against us. He got the message and has so far been quiet toward us. There are plenty of evil dictators in the world who kill their own people, and whom we do not attack. The United States is not the police country of the world.
War is a matter of life and death. It should be never used as a way to win elections.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ledeen: A week ago I wrote a little blog wondering what Obama might do to prevent everyone from concluding he’s a wimp. I confessed that this thought worried me quite a bit, as it had in the 1970s when Carter’s name became inseparably tied to “wimp.” Every author falls in love with his own words, but I hope to be forgiven for saying that I was right to worry.
I quite agree with both Robert Spencer and General Pacepa, both of whom remind us of my grandmother’s famous bit of folk wisdom, “things are never so bad that they can’t get worse.” Indeed, both of them raise the truly paradoxical and terrible possibility that we may “win” in Libya, only to find that we have made things worse: worse for American interests, worse for the Libyan people, worse for the whole region, which hardly needs to get even worse.
But that’s not my major concern. What gets my juices flowing is the ongoing failure to see the Middle Eastern cauldron in full context, and that we are bringing American power to bear on Qadaffi, but not on the tyrants in Tehran. As almost everyone with a keyboard has said, we don’t have a major national interest at stake in Libya, but Iran is our main enemy, and is killing Americans every day. So if you want to act decisively in the Middle East, you should be working for regime change in Iran; Libya is a sideshow.
So it’s the wrong war in the wrong place.
That said, I have a lot of sympathy for the view (often attributed to Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton) that America should support citizens fighting for freedom against tyrants. But that does not mean a suspension of strategic judgment, and a failure to recognize which of those fights is most important.
Bits and pieces: I never liked the no-fly-zone idea, and in fact several weeks ago I said about Libya what I had said years before about Darfur: bomb the airforce, destroy the planes of the regime. That takes a few minutes. Then, if you decide you want to support the rebels, or some of them, go ahead. At least you’ve given them a respite from the slaughter.
More: It’s not all bad, you know. This gives hope to the “rebels” we should be supporting–the ones in Syria and Iran. Maybe one of the three Administration Valkyries will call for political support for the dissidents in those two unhappy lands. Obama’s video to the Iranians marks a significant change in rhetoric, he’s abandoned all that sweet talk about “outstretched hands” and told the young Iranians on the streets that “I’m with you.” I don’t quite believe it, but he may now find it much more difficult to appease Tehran. Time will tell.
As you see, I keep coming back to the big context, because that’s the one that really matters. We’re in a big war, the Libya thing is a skirmish.
Phares: We all agree that Colonel Gaddafi is a dictator, that he supported terrorism against the U.S. and France, was responsible for the tragedy of PanAm 103, that he funded, armed and trained radicals in many African countries such as in Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Haute Volta, and in a few Middle Eastern countries, including Lebanon. We all are aware that his regime oppressed his people and tortured and jailed his opponents for four decades. I observed Gaddafi ruling Libya unchecked during and after the Cold War before and after 9/11 and he was received by liberal democracies as a respectable leader.
My first question is: Why has the West been silent so long and why is it so late in taking action against this dictator? Of course it had to do with oil. Western elites were morally and politically encouraging him by buying his oil and empowering him with endless cash as Libyan dissidents were dying in jails.
Now, as missiles are crushing Gaddafi’s air defense systems and tanks, Western governments should be invited for serious self-criticism for having enabled this regime to last that long. Squeezing or even defeating Gaddafi should prompt a comprehensive review of past decades of Western policies towards this regime and its abuses of human rights. The military operation should not end with the departure of Gaddafi from power. It must open the door for an examination of US and European policies that have aligned themselves with Petrodollars interests for over half a century. Such self-criticism was supposed to start with the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, but unfortunately, it hasn’t taken place yet, precisely because of the mega-influence inside the West and the United States by powerful lobbies representing the interests of OPEC, the Arab League and the OIC.
Besides, questions should be raised about the Arab League and OIC endorsement of an action against Gaddafi’s regime. Where were they for decades, when the Libyan dictator used to seize the microphone on their platforms and blast the very democracies they implored to act against him? These organizations catered to the interest of regimes they now are calling for sanctions against. Mr. Amr Moussa, the current secretary general of the Arab League, rises against Gaddafi after having supported him for years, while the latter was oppressing his own people.
In my book, The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East, I call all these regimes and organizations a “brotherhood against democracy.” They have supported each other against democratic movements and minorities everywhere in the region. From Sudan to Lebanon, from Iraq to Libya, the regional organizations were at the service of these regimes, not of the people. As these revolts are ongoing, these inter-regimes’ organizations must be criticized and eventually reformed. Last year, the Arab League and OIC were endorsing Libya’s role in the UN Council on Human Rights. Egypt, Tunisia and Libya’s representatives at the Geneva UN body were shutting up the voices of Libyan dissidents just a few months ago. Now that the uprisings have crumbled the regimes in Cairo and Tunisia, and Tripoli’s ruler is cornered, the negative impact these inter-regime organizations have on dissidents and human rights on international levels must be exposed and their future representation comprehensively reformed.
I do agree with Mr. Spencer that many jihadists have been recruited from Libya, and particularly from its eastern provinces. I also agree with General Pacepa that Western policies towards Gaddafi’s regime were incoherent. And I certainly agree with Dr. Ledeen that US policy should support true democratic forces and uprisings in the region from Iran to the Arab world.
In short I would have advised for a different set of US global strategies in the Middle East. We should have backed the Iranian Green Revolution in 2009, the Cedars Revolution as it struggles against Hezbollah, and Darfur in its liberation drive against the Jihadist regime in Khartoum. In Egypt, we should have clearly sided with the secular youth and Copts, as they asked for a new constitution. In Iraq, we should have been clear in supporting reformist and secular forces.
As far as Libya is concerned, removing Gaddafi is not the question. That should have been done years ago on the grounds of abuse of human rights. The question is who will come next? Clearly, the agenda of the Benghazi leadership is not clear. We know there is a layer of former bureaucrats, diplomats, intellectuals and military dissidents with whom partnership is possible and should be encouraged. But there is another layer below the surface which is made of Islamists, Salafists and in some cases Jihadists.
From a simple observation of the latter’s narrative on al Jazeera, one major component of the opposition is an Islamist force aiming at taking over in Tripoli. Hence, Washington must partner with the secular-democrats and warn that it won’t endorse replacing Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyya with a Jihadi emirate. Why aren’t the most liberal Libyan dissidents received in Washington and made visible? As Mr. Spencer said, the US and NATO military has been tasked to open the highways to Tripoli for the opposition, but we need to insure that on that highway we won’t see the democracy groups eliminated by the next authoritarians.
FP: Walid Phares, Mihai Pacepa, Michael Ledeen and Robert Spencer, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.
Notes:
Joseph A. Harris, “Sarko’s War,” The American Spectator, March 21, 2011.
[ii] Idem.
[iii] Andrew G. Bostom, “Let Muslim Anti-Terrosit States Police Libya,” Human Events, March 21, 2011.
[iv] “Obama Gave $400,000 To Libyan Charities Run By Gaddafi’s Children,” http://slapblog.com/?p=10015, February 24, 2011.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/23/symposium-the-mismanaged-war-against-libya/
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/23/gates-no-timeline-for-end-of-libyan-mission/
Gates: No timeline for end of Libyan mission
posted at 2:15 pm on March 23, 2011 by Ed Morrissey
Barack Obama has repeatedly insisted that the American role in the Libyan war will only last “days, not weeks,” although he has also said that US forces will remain engaged, and that the purpose of the operation is to “install a democratic system” while somehow not aiming at the removal of the dictator at the top. Got all that? Neither has Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who now insists that the Obama administration has “no timeline” for the end of operations in Libya, and he’s not sure how it will all end, either:
-
'Stability" was the watchword of virtually all Middle East policy as far back as anyone can remember. Whether for purposes of avoiding war with Israel, protecting a primary source of world energy, or securing intelligence-sharing relationships to fight al Qaeda, stability had its reasons in the Middle East.
That model of stability ended its long run with the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor in December. It's not coming back.
The future holds three alternative models of stability: The first is Gadhafism, the stability of the fist; the second is the enforcements of Islam; and the last—and most desirable—is economic modernity.
Some in the anti-Gadhafi coalition from Europe and the U.S seem willing to accept an endgame in which Gadhafi retains power. Unrestrained Gadhafism will follow: The stability that the psychopathic colonel imposes after the coalition goes home will make previous repressions look like kindergarten exercises.
This may be an acceptable price to some realists in the Pentagon and Europe and to reluctant soldiers in the White House. The problem is that variants of Gadhafist stability, without the evil clown, are likely to be the new norm among the Middle East's surviving autocrats. This degree of repression is already standard in Iran, which hangs opponents with metronomic regularity.
This week, protests of almost unbelievable pluck and courage emerged in Syria of all places. But the Assad family, back to the Hama massacre of 1982, has a dishonorable tradition of stability through murder and imprisonment. With Saudi assistance, Bahrain's opposition is getting hammered hard.
One might even argue that Mubarak blinked. If Mubarak had known how tough it would be for the West to oppose Gadhafi's bombing of his own people, he might have loosed his army on the Cairo protesters and survived, once past a spate of pro-forma international denunciation. Yemen's President Saleh won't blink.
If Gadhafism survives and spreads, with the West's assent, its tens of millions of victims will have a more rational reason than "oil" to blame the West for their condition. They may go looking for targets.
Pre-modern Islam is eager to impose another form of stability. The snap referendum on constitutional amendments in Egypt showed that the Muslim Brotherhood is building a modus vivendi with the military. Egypt's brass are uncomfortable with the youth movement, whose complaints are mostly economic and thereby a threat to the military's cash flow from crony capitalism.
Associated Press
Moammar Gadhafi
.Some say that the Islamic nations of southeast Asia or even Turkey prove Middle Eastern Islam can co-exist with the world economy. But there is scant evidence. Read the translated sermons of the Brotherhood's current chairman, Mohammed Badie (at MEMRI.org) for a sense of his millennial obsessions.
Gadhafism or ascendant Islam make it likely that the U.S. military will have to return to the region on a large scale—either after another massively homicidal terrorist attack on a Western urban center or a bad miscalculation over Israel. Or when the next street vendor reignites the region.
For reasons of self-protection and self-respect, we need an alternative to the fake stability of Gadhafism or militant Islam. Why not economic modernity?
The protests in these nations are political and economic, but I think they are mostly economic. In a column last month, "Is Egypt Hopeless?" I argued that the autocrats' decades-old model of using public-sector jobs to placate their populations' economic aspirations was falling apart. More recently for National Review, Daniel Doron wrote a more complete summary (which our Pentagon brass should read) of how these nations have stumbled through Cold War socialism, nationalizations, the corruption of their elites, and the destruction of their middle classes to arrive at this year's multi-nation eruption of refusal.
The latest nerve-wracking basket-case is Yemen. Its unemployment rate the past 10 years has been about 35%. For Yemenis under 26, the current rate is 53%. Yemen produces about 300,000 mostly unemployable college graduates annually. No wonder the American-born Anwar al- Awlaki headed to Yemen to recruit.
The outside world has a self-interest in pushing the Middle East's economies toward the 21st century. Without economic upgrades, the underemployment bomb will tick and re-explode—there or here.
Rebuilding from economic failure isn't easy, but it isn't rocket science. One good, achievable idea suggested recently has been a free trade agreement between Egypt and the U.S. and Europe. But if the Obama team won't complete a free trade deal with Colombia, a friend and ally, then Egypt and the rest really are hopeless. Barack Obama's union base is looking like a national security issue.
Many people in U.S. public life don't want to get involved with this Middle East tangle. Alas, the gods do not ordain a timeline for crises. These insurrections—now spread across 11 separate nations—are a big, historic moment, similar in some ways to what happened around Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall fell. The U.S. didn't blow that one. What's needed now is an equivalent level of leadership and strategic thinking to ensure we don't fall on the wrong side of this one.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
-
STRATFOR
Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in a four-part series
publishing in the next few days that will examine the motives and mindset
behind current European intervention in Libya. We begin with an overview and
will follow with an examination of the positions put forth by the United
Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Russia.
Distinct interests sparked the European involvement in Libya. The United
Kingdom and France have issued vociferous calls for intervention in Libya
for the past month, ultimately managing to convince the rest of Europe —
with some notable exceptions — to join in military action, the Arab League
to offer its initial support, and global powers China and Russia to abstain
from voting at the U.N. Security Council.
U.S. President Barack Obama said March 21 that the leadership of the
U.S.-European coalition against Libya would be transitioned to the European
allies “in a matter of days.” While the United States would retain the lead
during Operation Odyssey Dawn — intended to incapacitate Tripoli’s command
and control, stationary air defenses and airfields — Obama explained that
Odyssey Dawn would create the “conditions for our European allies and Arab
partners to carry out the measures authorized by the U.N. Security Council
resolution.” While Obama pointed out that the U.S.-European intervention in
Libya is very much Europe’s war, French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier
Charles de Gaulle (R91) and Italian aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi
(551) arrived in waters near Libya, giving Europeans a valuable asset from
which to increase European air sortie generation rates and time on station.
Before analyzing the disparate interests of European nations in Libya, one
must first take stock of this coalition in terms of its stated military and
political goals.
The Military Response to the ‘Arab Spring’
The intervention in Libya thus far has been restricted to the enforcement of
a no-fly zone and to limited attacks against ground troops loyal to Libyan
leader Moammar Gadhafi in the open. However, the often-understated but
implied political goal seems to be the end of the Gadhafi regime. (Some
French and British leaders certainly have not shied from stressing that
point.)
Europeans are not united in their perceptions of the operation’s goals — or
on how to wage the operation. The one thing the Europeans share is a seeming
lack of an exit strategy from a struggle originally marketed as a no-fly
zone akin to that imposed on Iraq in 1997 to a struggle that is actually
being waged as an airstrike campaign along the lines of the 1999 campaign
against Serbia, with the goal of regime change mirroring that of the 2001
Afghan and 2003 Iraq campaigns.
Underlying Europeans’ willingness to pursue military action in Libya are two
perceptions. The first is that Europeans did not adequately support the
initial pro-democratic protests across the Arab world, a charge frequently
coupled with accusations that many European governments failed to respond
because they actively supported the regimes being challenged. The second
perception is that the Arab world is in fact seeing a groundswell of
pro-democratic sentiment.
The first charge particularly applies to France — the country now most
committed to the Libyan intervention — where Former French Foreign Minister
Michele Alliot-Marie vacationed in Tunisia a few weeks before the
revolution, using the private jet owned by a businessman close to the
regime, and offered then-Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali the
services of French security forces to suppress the rebellion. Though an
extreme example, the French case highlights the close business, energy and
often personal relationships Europeans had with Middle Eastern leaders.
(click here to enlarge image)
In fact, EU states have sold Gadhafi 1.1 billion euros ($1.56 billion) worth
of arms between 2004, when they lifted their arms embargo, and 2011, and
were looking forward to much more in the future. Paris and Rome, which had
lobbied hardest for an end to the embargo, were particularly active in this
trade. As recently as 2010, France was in talks with Libya for the sale of
14 Dassault Mirage fighter jets and the modernization of some of Tripoli’s
aircraft. Rome, on the other hand, was in the middle of negotiating a
further 1 billion euros worth of deals prior to the unrest. British media
meanwhile had charged the previous British government with kowtowing to
Gadhafi by releasing Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan held for the Pan
Am Flight 103 bombing. According to widespread reports, the United Kingdom’s
Labour government released al-Megrahi so that British energy supermajor BP
would receive favorable energy concessions in Libya.
The second perception is the now-established narrative in the West that the
ongoing protests in the Middle East are truly an outburst of pro-democratic
sentiment in the Western sense. From this, there arises a public perception
in Europe that Arab regimes must be put on notice that severe crackdowns
will not be tolerated since the protests are the beginning of a new era of
democracy in the region.
(click here to enlarge image)
These two perceptions have created a context under which Gadhafi’s crackdown
against protesters is simply unacceptable to Paris and London and
unacceptable to domestic public opinion in Europe. Not only would tolerating
Tripoli’s crackdown confirm European leaderships’ multi-decade
fraternization with unsavory Arab regimes, but the eastern Libyan rebels’
fight against Gadhafi has been grafted on to the narrative of Arab
pro-democracy movements seeking to overthrow brutal regimes — even though it
is unclear who the eastern rebels are or what their intentions are for a
post-Gadhafi Libya.
The Coalition
According to U.N. Security Council resolution 1973, the military objective
of the intervention is to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya and to protect
civilians from harm across all of Libya. The problem is that the first goal
in no way achieves the second. A no-fly zone does little to stop Gadhafi’s
troops on the ground. In the first salvo of the campaign — even before
suppression of enemy air defenses operations — French aircraft attacked
Libyan ground troops around Benghazi. The attack — which was not coordinated
with the rest of the coalition, according to some reports — was meant to
signal two things: that the French were in the lead and that the
intervention would seek to protect civilians in a broader mandate than just
establishing a no-fly zone.
(click here to enlarge image)
Going beyond the enforcement of the no-fly zone, however, has created rifts
in Europe, with both NATO and the European Union failing to back the
intervention politically. Germany, which broke with its European allies and
voted to abstain from resolution 1973, has argued that mission creep could
force the coalition to get involved in a drawn-out war. Central and Eastern
Europeans, led by Poland, have been cautious in providing support because it
yet again draws NATO further from its core mission of European territorial
defense and the theater they are mostly concerned about: the Russian sphere
of influence. Meanwhile, the Arab League, which initially offered its
support for a no-fly zone, seemed to renege as it became clear that Libya in
2011 was far more like Serbia 1999 than Iraq in 1997 — airstrikes against
ground troops and installations, not just a no-fly zone. Italy, a critical
country because of its air bases close to the Libyan theater, has even
suggested that if some consensus is not found regarding NATO’s involvement
it would withdraw its offer of air bases so that “someone else’s action did
not rebound on us,” according Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini. In
reality, Rome is concerned that the Franco-British alliance is going to
either reduce Italy’s interests in a post-Ghadafi Libya or fail to finish
the operation, leaving Italy to deal with chaos a few hundred miles across
the Mediterranean.
-
Ultimately, enforcing a humanitarian mandate across the whole of Libya via
air power alone will be impossible. It is unclear how Gadhafi would be
dislodged from power from 15,000 feet in the sky. And while Europeans have
largely toed the line in the last couple of days that regime change is not
the explicit goal of the intervention, French and British leaders continue
to caveat that “there is no decent future for Libya with Gadhafi in power,”
as British Prime Minister David Cameron stated March 21, virtually mirroring
a statement by Obama. But wishing Gadhafi gone will not make it so.
Endgame Scenarios
With the precise mission of the intervention unclear and exact command and
control structures yet to be decided (though the intervention itself is
already begun, a summit in London on March 29 will supposedly hash out the
details) it is no surprise that Europeans seem to lack a consensus as to
what the exit strategies are. Ultimately some sort of NATO command structure
will be enacted, even if it is possible that NATO never gives its political
consent to the intervention and is merely “subcontracted” by the coalition
to make coordination between different air forces possible.
U.S. military officials, on the other hand, have signaled that a divided
Libya between the Gadhafi-controlled west and the rebel-controlled east is
palatable if attacks against civilians stop. Resolution 1973 certainly does
not preclude such an end to the intervention. But politically, it is unclear
if either the United States or Europe could accept that scenario. Aside from
the normative issues the European public may have with a resolution that
leaves a now-thoroughly vilified Gadhafi in power, European governments
would have to wonder whether Gadhafi would be content ruling Tripolitania, a
pared-down version of Libya, given that the bulk of the country’s oil fields
and export facilities are located in the east.
Gadhafi could seek non-European allies for arms and support and/or plot a
reconquest of the east. Either way, such a scenario could necessitate a
drawn-out enforcement of the no-fly zone over Libya — testing already
war-weary European publics’ patience, not to mention government pocketbooks.
It would also require continuous maritime patrols to prevent Gadhafi from
unleashing migrants en masse, a possibility that is of great concern for
Rome. Now that Europe has launched a war against Gadhafi, it has raised the
costs of allowing a Gadhafi regime to remain lodged in North Africa. That
the costs are not the same for all participating European countries —
especially for Italy, which has the most to lose if Gadhafi retains power —
is the biggest problem for creating European unity.
The problem, however, is that an alternative endgame scenario where Gadhafi
is removed would necessitate a commitment of ground troops. It is unclear
that the eastern rebels could play the role of the Afghan Northern Alliance,
whose forces had considerable combat experience such that only modest
special operations forces and air support were needed to dislodge the
Taliban (or, rather, force them to retreat) in late 2001 through early 2002.
Thus, Europe would have to provide the troops — highly unlikely, unless
Gadhafi becomes thoroughly suicidal and unleashes asymmetrical terrorist
attacks against Europe — or enlist the support of an Arab state, such as
Egypt, to conduct ground operations in its stead. The latter scenario seems
far-fetched as well, in part because Libyans historically have as much
animosity toward Egyptians as they do toward Europeans.
What ultimately will transpire in Libya probably lies somewhere in between
the extreme scenarios. A temporary truce is likely once Gadhafi has been
sufficiently neutralized from the air, giving the West and Egypt sufficient
time to arm, train and support the rebels for their long march to Tripoli
(though it is far from clear that they are capable of this, even with
considerable support in terms of airpower, basic training, organization and
military competencies). The idea that Gadhafi, his sons and inner circle
would simply wait to be rolled over by a rebel force is unlikely. After all,
Gadhafi has not ruled Libya for 42 years because he has accepted his fate
with resignation — a notion that should worry Europe’s governments now
looking to end his rule.
-
Has anyone EVER heard someone from any Muslim country get on a "news" network and explicitly THANK the US for investing lives, limb and money to free THEM?
I have yet to hear ONE SINGLE Muslim thank us.
Perhaps they did I just missed it.
-
No, I too have never heard "Thank you".
Therefore I wonder why we spend billions upon billions of dollars (going into debt) and lose thousands of American lives
to supposedly "free" them when they don't even know what they want and definitely are not grateful.
I say forget Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Let's worry about our own problems at home.
-
"Therefore I wonder why..."
Exactly.
We keep making the same mistake over and over again that if we try to do humanitarian things the world will love us.
I say enough stupidity and naivity.
The world want our money. That is it.
We should kill Khaddafy and put the world on notice you murder our citizens (LOckerbie) than *you* are next. Otherwise get the hell out of Libya. Now we are in Iraq/Afghanistan we need to finish the job.
I have no doubt that most Americans have elected a President to look out for our interests not the rest of the thankless planet.
-
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/03/028680.php
Remember how we had to elect Obama to rebuild our relationships with the world?
-
Hat tip to GM for this one:
A congressional study group concluded, after a three-day trip to Grenada, that Reagan's move had been justified. The 14 members of Congress, headed by Democrat Thomas Foley of Washington State, reported to House Speaker Tip O'Neill that most of them felt that the students had been possible targets for a Tehran-type taking of hostages. This caused O'Neill, who had denounced Reagan's decision, to reverse himself. Noting that "a potentially life-threatening situation existed on the island," the Speaker said that the invasion "was justified under these particular circumstances."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,926318-2,00.html
-
It all seems rather mad, doesn't it? The decision to become involved militarily in the Libyan civil war couldn't take place within a less hospitable context. The U.S. is reeling from spending and deficits, we're already in two wars, our military has been stretched to the limit, we're restive at home, and no one, really, sees President Obama as the kind of leader you'd follow over the top. "This way, men!" "No, I think I'll stay in my trench." People didn't hire him to start battles but to end them. They didn't expect him to open new fronts. Did he not know this?
He has no happy experience as a rallier of public opinion and a leader of great endeavors; the central initiative of his presidency, the one that gave shape to his leadership, health care, is still unpopular and the cause of continued agitation. When he devoted his entire first year to it, he seemed off point and out of touch.
This was followed by the BP oil spill, which made him look snakebit. Now he seems incompetent and out of his depth in foreign and military affairs. He is more observed than followed, or perhaps I should say you follow him with your eyes and not your heart. So it's funny he'd feel free to launch and lead a war, which is what this confused and uncertain military action may become.
What was he thinking? What is he thinking?
View Full Image
Barbara Kelley
.Which gets me to Mr. Obama's speech, the one he hasn't given. I cannot for the life of me see how an American president can launch a serious military action without a full and formal national address in which he explains to the American people why he is doing what he is doing, why it is right, and why it is very much in the national interest. He referred to his aims in parts of speeches and appearances when he was in South America, but now he's home. More is needed, more is warranted, and more is deserved. He has to sit at that big desk and explain his thinking, put forward the facts as he sees them, and try to garner public support. He has to make a case for his own actions. It's what presidents do! And this is particularly important now, because there are reasons to fear the current involvement will either escalate and produce a lengthy conflict or collapse and produce humiliation.
Without a formal and extended statement, the air of weirdness, uncertainty and confusion that surrounds this endeavor will only deepen.
The questions that must be answered actually start with the essentials. What, exactly, are we doing? Why are we doing it? At what point, or after what arguments, did the president decide U.S. military involvement was warranted? Is our objective practical and doable? What is America's overriding strategic interest? In what way are the actions taken, and to be taken, seeing to those interests?
Matthew Kaminski of the editorial board explains America's role in the Libyan campaign.
.From those questions flow many others. We know who we're against—Moammar Gadhafi, a bad man who's done very wicked things. But do we know who we're for? That is, what does the U.S. government know or think it knows about the composition and motives of the rebel forces we're attempting to assist? For 42 years, Gadhafi controlled his nation's tribes, sects and groups through brute force, bribes and blandishments. What will happen when they are no longer kept down? What will happen when they are no longer oppressed? What will they become, and what role will they play in the coming drama? Will their rebellion against Gadhafi degenerate into a dozen separate battles over oil, power and local dominance?
What happens if Gadhafi hangs on? The president has said he wants U.S. involvement to be brief. But what if Gadhafi is fighting on three months from now?
On the other hand, what happens if Gadhafi falls, if he's deposed in a palace coup or military coup, or is killed, or flees? What exactly do we imagine will take his place?
Supporters of U.S. intervention have argued that if we mean to protect Libya's civilians, as we have declared, then we must force regime change. But in order to remove Gadhafi, they add, we will need to do many other things. We will need to provide close-in air power. We will probably have to put in special forces teams to work with the rebels, who are largely untrained and ragtag. The Libyan army has tanks and brigades and heavy weapons. The U.S. and the allies will have to provide the rebels training and give them support. They will need antitank missiles and help in coordinating air strikes.
Once Gadhafi is gone, will there be a need for an international peacekeeping force to stabilize the country, to provide a peaceful transition, and to help the post-Gadhafi government restore its infrastructure? Will there be a partition? Will Libyan territory be altered?
None of this sounds like limited and discrete action.
In fact, this may turn out to be true: If Gadhafi survives, the crisis will go on and on. If Gadhafi falls, the crisis will go on and on.
Everyone who supports the Libyan endeavor says they don't want an occupation. One said the other day, "We're not looking for a protracted occupation."
Protracted?
More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns
click here to order her book, Patriotic Grace
.Mr. Obama has apparently set great store in the fact that he was not acting alone, that Britain, France and Italy were eager to move. That's good—better to work with friends and act in concert. But it doesn't guarantee anything. A multilateral mistake is still a mistake. So far the allied effort has not been marked by good coordination and communication. If the conflict in Libya drags on, won't there tend to be more fissures, more tension, less commitment and more confusion as to objectives and command structures? Could the unanticipated results of the Libya action include new strains, even a new estrangement, among the allies?
How might Gadhafi hit out, in revenge, in his presumed last days, against America and the West?
And what, finally, about Congress? Putting aside the past half-century's argument about declarations of war, doesn't Congress, as representative of the people, have the obvious authority and responsibility to support the Libyan endeavor, or not, and to authorize funds, or not?
These are all big questions, and there are many other obvious ones. If the Libya endeavor is motivated solely by humanitarian concerns, then why haven't we acted on those concerns recently in other suffering nations? It's a rough old world out there, and there's a lot of suffering. What is our thinking going forward? What are the new rules of the road, if there are new rules? Were we, in Libya, making a preemptive strike against extraordinary suffering—suffering beyond what is inevitable in a civil war?
America has been through a difficult 10 years, and the burden of proof on the need for U.S. action would be with those who supported intervention. Chief among them, of course, is the president, who made the decision as commander in chief. He needs to sit down and tell the American people how this thing can possibly turn out well. He needs to tell them why it isn't mad.
-
This sums up our problems for the next 100 years pretty well.
The Middle East Crisis Has Just Begun
For the U.S., democracy's fate in the region matters much less than the struggle between the Saudis and Iran
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704050204576218842399053176.html?mod=WSJ_World_RIGHTTopCarousel_1
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Despite the military drama unfolding in Libya, the Middle East is only beginning to unravel. American policy-makers have been spoiled by events in Tunisia and Egypt, both of which boast relatively sturdy institutions, civil society associations and middle classes, as well as being age-old clusters of civilization where states of one form or another have existed since antiquity. Darker terrain awaits us elsewhere in the region, where states will substantially weaken once the carapace of tyranny crumbles. The crucial tests lie ahead, beyond the distraction of Libya.
The United States may be a democracy, but it is also a status quo power, whose position in the world depends on the world staying as it is. In the Middle East, the status quo is unsustainable because populations are no longer afraid of their rulers. Every country is now in play. Even in Syria, with its grisly security services, widespread demonstrations have been reported and protesters killed. There will be no way to appease the region's rival sects, ethnicities and other interest groups except through some form of democratic representation, but anarchic quasi-democracy will satisfy no one. Other groups will emerge, and they may be distinctly illiberal.
Whatever happens in Libya, it is not necessarily a bellwether for the Middle East. The Iranian green movement knows that Western air forces and navies are not about to bomb Iran in the event of a popular uprising, so it is unclear what lesson we are providing to the region. Because outside of Iran, and with the arguable exceptions of Syria and Libya itself, there is no short-term benefit for the U.S. in democratic revolts in the region. In fact, they could be quite destructive to our interests, even as they prove to be unstoppable.
Yemen, strategically located on the Gulf of Aden, as well as the demographic core of the Arabian Peninsula and a haunt of al Qaeda, is more important to American interests than Libya. In Yemen, too, a longtime ruler, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has shot protesters in the street to keep order. Yemen constitutes the most armed populace in the world, with almost four times as many firearms as people. It is fast running out of ground water, and the median age of the population is 17. This is to say nothing of the geographical, political and sectarian divisions in the sprawling, mountainous country. However badly Mr. Saleh has ruled Yemen, more chaos may follow him. Coverage by Al Jazeera can help to overthrow a government like his, but it can't help to organize new governments.
In Jordan, at the other end of the Arabian Peninsula, democratic pressure will force King Abdullah to give more power to the Islamists and to urban Palestinians. The era of a dependable, pro-Western Jordan living in peace with Israel may not go on indefinitely. Bahrain, meanwhile, may descend into a low-level civil war. The country's Shia have legitimate complaints against the ruling Sunni royal family, but their goals will play into Iranian hands.
Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain and the other Gulf states are all individually more important than Libya because they constitute Saudi Arabia's critical near-abroad. In this era of weakening central authority throughout the Middle East, the core question for the U.S. will be which regime lasts longer: Saudi Arabia's or Iran's. If the Saudi monarchy turns out to have more staying power, we will wrest a great strategic victory from this process of unrest; if Iran's theocracy prevails, it will signal a fundamental eclipse of American influence in the Middle East.
Criticize the Saudi royals all you want—their country requires dramatic economic reform, and fast—but who and what would replace them? There is no credible successor on the horizon. Even as Saudi Arabia's youthful population, 40% of which is unemployed, becomes more restive, harmony within the royal family is beginning to fray as the present generation of leaders gives way to a new one. And nothing spells more trouble for a closed political system than a divided elite. Yes, Iran experienced massive antiregime demonstrations in 2009 and smaller ones more recently. But the opposition there is divided, and the regime encompasses various well-institutionalized power centers, thus making a decapitation strategy particularly hard to achieve. The al Sauds may yet fall before the mullahs do, and our simplistic calls for Arab democracy only increase that possibility.
Democracy is part of America's very identity, and thus we benefit in a world of more democracies. But this is no reason to delude ourselves about grand historical schemes or to forget our wider interests. Precisely because so much of the Middle East is in upheaval, we must avoid entanglements and stay out of the domestic affairs of the region. We must keep our powder dry for crises ahead that might matter much more than those of today.
Our most important national-security resource is the time that our top policy makers can devote to a problem, so it is crucial to avoid distractions. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fragility of Pakistan, Iran's rush to nuclear power, a possible Israeli military response—these are all major challenges that have not gone away. This is to say nothing of rising Chinese naval power and Beijing's ongoing attempt to Finlandize much of East Asia.
We should not kid ourselves. In foreign policy, all moral questions are really questions of power. We intervened twice in the Balkans in the 1990s only because Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic had no nuclear weapons and could not retaliate against us, unlike the Russians, whose destruction of Chechnya prompted no thought of intervention on our part (nor did ethnic cleansing elsewhere in the Caucasus, because it was in Russia's sphere of influence). At present, helping the embattled Libyan rebels does not affect our interests, so we stand up for human rights there. But helping Bahrain's embattled Shia, or Yemen's antiregime protesters, would undermine key allies, so we do nothing as demonstrators are killed in the streets.
Of course, just because we can't help everywhere does not mean we can't help somewhere. President Barack Obama has steered a reasonable middle course. He was right to delay action in Libya until the Arab League, the United Nations Security Council, France and Great Britain were fully on board, and even then to restrict our military actions and objectives. He doesn't want the U.S. to own the Libyan problem, which could drag on chaotically for years. President Obama is not feeble, as some have said; he is cunning.
Like former President George H.W. Bush during the collapse of the Soviet Union, he intuits that when history is set in motion by forces greater than our own, we should interfere as little as possible so as not to provoke unintended consequences. The dog that didn't bark when the Berlin Wall fell was the intervention of Soviet troops to restore parts of the empire. The dog that won't bark now, we should hope, is the weakening of the Saudi monarchy, to which America's vital interests are tied. So long as the current regime in Iran remains in place, the U.S. should not do anything to encourage protests in Riyadh.
In the background of the ongoing Middle Eastern drama looms the shadow of a rising China. China is not a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system, as we proclaim it should be; it is a free rider. We are at war in Afghanistan to make it a safe place for China to extract minerals and metals. We have liberated Iraq so that Chinese firms can extract its oil. Now we are at war with Libya, which further diverts us from concentrating on the western Pacific—the center of the world's economic and naval activity—which the Chinese military seeks eventually to dominate.
Every time we intervene somewhere, it quickens the pace at which China, whose leaders relish obscurity in international affairs, closes the gap with us. China will have economic and political problems of its own ahead, no doubt, and these will interrupt its rise. But China is spending much less to acquire an overseas maritime empire than we are spending, with all our interventions, merely to maintain ours.
The arch-realist approach would be to forswear a moral narrative altogether and to concentrate instead on our narrow interests in the Middle East. The problem is that if we don't provide a narrative, others will, notably al Qaeda, whose fortunes will rise as the region's dictators, with their useful security services, struggle to survive. But we should craft our narrative with care. It should focus on the need for political and social reform, not on regime change.
Order is preferable to disorder. Just consider what happened to Iraq after we toppled Saddam Hussein. The U.S. should not want Iraq's immediate past to be a foretaste of the region's future.
-
"Of course, just because we can't help everywhere does not mean we can't help somewhere. President Barack Obama has steered a reasonable middle course. He was right to delay action in Libya until the Arab League, the United Nations Security Council, France and Great Britain were fully on board, and even then to restrict our military actions and objectives. He doesn't want the U.S. to own the Libyan problem, which could drag on chaotically for years. President Obama is not feeble, as some have said; he is cunning"
I agree that Obama is right to keep us out of it unlike Hillary and McCain who can't seem to wait to jump in to "prevent a humanitarian crises".
I don't agree doing anything under the guise of Nato or the UN makes any sense other than creating a huge amount of confusion.
He certainly didn't help specifying Ghaddafi must go than get cold feet realizing that whoever/whatever replaces him could be worse and back off that declaration.
I wouldn't call that cunning as much as stupid and incompetent.
And GHWBush started this whole coalition thing. What a darn mess this has left us with now.
Kaplan is exactly right that China freeloads. And why not? This country is lead by a bunch of suckers and idiots.
Even O'Reilly is talking up this "we are an exceptional nation". Oh really? So that means we were founded on having to be the world's Nanny???
I don't think our founders had any inclination for that.
Hey Bill. Why don't you buy 50 million in arms and pay off some mercenaries to go fight and arm the "rebels" and you stop the "humanitarian cirses".
The rest of the US is broke.
-
By BRET STEPHENS
ABOARD THE NATIONAL AIRBORNE OPERATIONS CENTER—Robert Gates is a compact and unassuming man, but a U.S. Secretary of Defense does not travel in compact or unassuming ways. The National Airborne Operations Center, a.k.a. the "doomsday plane," is a giant, windowless fortress of an aircraft built during the Cold War and designed to survive a nuclear war. In just five days the 67-year-old Secretary has flown it to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Cairo, Tel Aviv (with a stop in Ramallah) and Amman, and held parleys with two presidents, three prime ministers, three ministers of defense and a king.
By the time it's my turn to step into the plane's conference room, Mr. Gates, tieless and in blue jeans, looks bushed. He has just wrapped up a nearly two-hour phone call on Libya with President Obama and the National Security Council. NATO is about to assume primary responsibility for enforcing the no-fly zone. Benghazi has been saved by Western intervention but it's far from clear whether other besieged cities will have equal luck.
I begin by asking Mr. Gates the same question House Speaker John Boehner recently put to Mr. Obama: Is it acceptable for Moammar Gadhafi to remain in power after the military mission concludes?
"This mission was never about regime change," Mr. Gates says. "Certainly it was not one of the military objectives." He recites the mandate of U.N. Security Council resolutions—to establish a no-fly zone and protect civilians—and concludes: "I think we've come pretty close to accomplishing those objectives."
Does that mean "Mission Accomplished"? Even as we spoke, the besieged Libyan city of Misurata was without water and electricity and running low on food and medicine. Yet Mr. Gates is sanguine, though perhaps less about the outcome for Libya than for the U.S. The imposition of the no-fly zone, he says proudly, was "a textbook case."
He appears even more pleased by the benefits to the Pentagon of the transition to NATO control: "The resources that we're going to commit to it are, I think, almost certainly going to diminish," he says, describing a U.S. support role that includes "electronic warfare" and "tanking fighters [aerial refueling] from other countries."
But where does all this leave the Libyan people? Twice Mr. Gates stresses that "at the end of the day this needs to be settled by the Libyans themselves," adding that "I don't think we ever had illusions about the ability to reverse the gains [Gadhafi had made] on the ground, other than stopping him from doing more and stopping him from slaughtering civilians." But he also says that if Gadhafi "were to send a big column toward Benghazi there would be the authority to take it out." The suggestion here is that NATO will not do very much to help the rebels to win, but it will backstop them to keep them from losing.
View Full Image
Zina Saunders
.It's hard to deny the virtues of this approach: It does not overcommit the West, either militarily or financially; it stems the bloodletting even if it doesn't halt it; and it asks the Libyans to win their own freedom. But it's equally difficult to deny its drawbacks, not the least of which is that the longer Gadhafi hangs on to power the longer the crisis will roil Western politics and consume Western resources.
Here again Mr. Gates seems fairly optimistic. "The idea that [Gadhafi] needs to go . . . goes without saying," he says. "But how long it takes, how it comes about, remains to be seen. Whether elements of the army decide to go to the other side, as some small elements have, whether the family cracks—who knows how this is going to play out."
He is less persuasive when he starts naming the various nonmilitary tools, such as economic sanctions and indictments from the International Criminal Court, that the West could use to bring further pressure on Gadhafi. Saddam Hussein survived a dozen years under sanctions and a no-fly zone, and Sudan's Omar Bashir has more or less laughed off the ICC indictments against him for genocide.
A larger consideration for Mr. Gates is how the crisis in Libya fits into American interests. "There are American national security interests and American vital interests where, in my view, we need to act decisively and if necessary act unilaterally," he says. "This is not one of them."
Then again, neither does Mr. Gates think that the crisis in Libya amounts to little more than a strictly humanitarian tragedy, on a par with, say, last year's earthquake in Haiti. "It is a concern of ours if more than a million Egyptians in Libya decide they have to immigrate home. It is a concern if civil war contributes to destabilization in either Tunisia or Egypt." Libya, he concludes, "is not a vital national interest of the United States. But it is an interest."
Mention of Egypt turns the interview to the subject of the broader changes taking place throughout the Middle East. Mr. Gates call them "tectonic . . . frozen for 60 years and now all of a sudden they're all moving." His counsel is to deal with countries as they are and situations as they come—"our reaction in Libya will be very different than our reaction in Tunisia or in Egypt or Bahrain"—but he also sees lessons.
"Maybe the Syrians can take a lesson out of what happened in Egypt, where the army stood aside and let the people demonstrate," he says when I ask what he makes of the growing domestic opposition to the regime of Bashar Assad. But as for whether he would favor regime change in Damascus, he strikes a more cautious note: "No, I'm not going to go that far."
Mr. Gates also rejects the view that the ultimate winner from the upheavals throughout the Middle East is Iran. He notes the "very stark" contrast between the "repression of any dissent, any protest, compared with what is going on in any number of other countries in the region." Over the longer term, he says, "this is a hugely negative message in terms of Iran and what Iran is trying to do."
Still, Mr. Gates awards the Biggest Loser trophy to al Qaeda, which he believes is "being rendered irrelevant, at least in a political sense." Al Qaeda's basic political pitch, and the source of its popular appeal, rests on the idea that the only way of replacing corrupt Muslim governments with better ones is through violence. Now, the examples of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere "show that these are countries that are tolerating demonstrations." In that sort of atmosphere, Mr. Gates seems to think, the appeal of the bullet or bomb is bound to wane, while the appeal of the ballot box will grow.
More Gates optimism. Is it justified? Al Qaeda has never lacked for excuses, or recruits, to mount terrorist attacks, whether against despotisms or democracies. In Egypt, last week's referendum on a package of constitutional reforms that pave the way toward early parliamentary and presidential elections was a huge win for the Muslim Brotherhood, which stands to gain from going to the polls before its secular opponents can organize. The Iranian "political model" may be out of vogue on the Arab street, but that doesn't mean that all of Tehran's regional ventures—including support for Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon—are unsuccessful or unpopular.
As our interview nears its end, I turn to a speech Mr. Gates gave last month to the cadets at West Point. In widely quoted remarks, he said that "Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as Gen. MacArthur so delicately put it." I ask him whether that line should be taken to suggest that the United States should never have entered the wars it is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"To tell you the truth, I wish I hadn't even had that sentence in the speech," he confesses. "I should have taken it out because it was a distraction from the larger message in the speech, which was the importance of the flexibility of the American military to deal with a range of threats."
Mr. Gates clearly seems pained by the subject and eager to clear the record. "I'm the guy who not only increased the end strength of the Army and the Marine Corps, but pressed for the increase in the number of troops in Afghanistan. I totally believe in the mission that we're in in Afghanistan. And so, you know, I was really dismayed to see that what I had said was interpreted as questioning the mission in Afghanistan, because I absolutely do not. I totally believe in it."
Again, Mr. Gates circles back to his point: "I believe we have a winning strategy. So I am totally committed in that respect. And just to repeat, I was just really dismayed that what I said was misinterpreted that way."
Mr. Gates has made it clear that his tenure as secretary will end this year, and his trip last week—particularly in St. Petersburg, where he addressed naval officers and reminisced about the Cold War—had a wistful, valedictory quality. It seems appropriate to ask him to define his legacy.
"I have a feeling I'm going to get asked this question a lot," Mr. Gates says, laughing.
His answer comes in two parts. "When I took this job," he says, everybody—meaning journalists, politicians and so on—had said I would be judged on the outcome in Iraq, and I testified my agenda in this job is Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. And so I think that the partnership with [General] Dave Petraeus and having Iraq be the place it is—that'll be one of the principal evaluations that I think are made of my time in office."
Then he comes to the second part: "The thing that would mean the most to me when I leave this job is if those kids in uniform remember they had a secretary of defense who, from the first day, they knew had their back."
Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's Global View column.
-
Is it true they are calling for NFZ's over Yemen and Syria?!?
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/27/fresh-attacks-in-syria-kill-at-least-12-more-demonstrators/
Escalation?
-
Yemen and Syria would be 2 examples of countries more strategic to our interests than Libya. Egypt, Israel, Bahrain perhaps, Saudi, Jordan, Iran, Pakistan, etc. are more strategic to our interests. Sec. Gates says Libya is not in our vital interest. Tonight the President will imply something else. I am not trivializing the importance of Libya, but can anyone name all the countries more strategic to our interests at this moment than Libya?
Regarding NFZ's in Syria and Yemen, I do not know. Yemen voted for the no fly zone in Libya. My understanding is that the 'rebels' in Yemen are even more clearly al Qaidi affiliates than Libya's rebels and that the leadership is more with us on anti-terror, and less tied to things like shooting done American civilians. In normal times we would be more on the side of the regime than with the rebels (I would think). With Obama in charge, who knows. In that sense an NFZ doesn't make sense. Obama ruled out troops a year ago http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/world/middleeast/11prexy.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss, but again, who knows.
Yemen was once North and South Yemen, the south was a cold war Communist state. Yemen supported Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Now they fight against their own harboring of terrorists and camps. (?) A sea border with Somalia only thickens the plot. Yemen is deserving of its own thread if only we knew enough to post in it.
-
see
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1973.0
cf
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1753.0
-
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/152181-white-house-says-libya-decision-based-on-best-interests-in-region
White House says Libya decision based on 'best interests'
By Michael O'Brien - 03/28/11 12:54 PM ET
No sense of precedent guided President Obama’s decision to intervene in Libya, administration officials said Monday.
"We don’t make decisions about questions like intervention based on consistency or precedent," said Denis McDonough, the administration's deputy national security adviser, amid an off-camera gaggle of reporters. "We make them based on how we can best advance our interests in the region."
-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8412467/Shortage-of-RAF-pilots-for-Libya-as-defence-cuts-bite.html
Since the conflict began, a squadron of 18 RAF Typhoon pilots has enforced the Libya no-fly zone from an air base in southern Italy. However, a shortage of qualified fighter pilots means the RAF may not have enough to replace all of them when the squadron has to rotate in a few weeks.
The situation is so serious that the RAF has halted the teaching of trainee Typhoon pilots so instructors can be drafted on to the front line, according to air force sources. The handful of pilots used for air shows will also be withdrawn from displays this summer.
The shortage has arisen because cuts to the defence budget over the past decade have limited the number of pilots who have been trained to fly the new Typhoon.
There are also fewer newly qualified pilots coming through after the RAF was forced to cut a quarter of its trainee places due to cuts announced in last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review.
The Government’s decision to decommission HMS Ark Royal, Harrier jump jets and the Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft — all of which could have played a role in the Libya conflict — has exacerbated the problem. Serving RAF pilots contacted The Daily Telegraph to warn of the risks to the Libya operation. “We have a declining pool of pilots,” one said. “There’s less people to do twice as much work. If we are not training any more we are going to run out of personnel very soon.”
-
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/03/30/Libya-Whats-Really-behind-the-US-Action.aspx
Libya: What’s Really Behind the U.S. Action
By LIZ PEEK, The Fiscal Times
March 30, 2011Self interest is at the core of diplomacy. Therefore, the acknowledged lack of apparent U.S. self interest in containing Gaddafi’s troops in Libya has led some to question our military intervention in that country. Last night President Obama defended our engagement in Libya, suggesting that the United States is “different” from those countries that can stand by and witness atrocities; unlike others, Mr. Obama said, we have a moral mandate to protect innocent citizens. Naturally, we are led to wonder whether that same obligation extends to Syria or to Bahrain, or to any other country where a desperate government decides to slaughter its own people.
Is there something that President Obama is not telling us? Is it possible that we have a greater vested interest in squashing Gaddafi’s belligerence than we are letting on? Could it be that Gaddafi’s reported threats to bomb his country’s oilfields lit the fuse under the leaders of France and Britain who all but shamed us into climbing aboard? Or was it Gaddafi’s prediction that a flood of immigrants would “swamp” Europe that aroused Sarkozy’s energies?
It is possible that the U.S. is more vulnerable to chaos in Libya than is generally known. Our economic recovery is hanging by a thread — a thread which weaves through the EU and also through Asia. Our modest recovery has been threatened repeatedly — by the government debt crisis in Europe last year and more recently by the tsunami in Japan. Rising oil prices and the prospect of more wide-spread inflation appears to be taking a toll. The recent swoon in consumer confidence presages a fall-off in all-important spending while the housing numbers continue dismal.
Europe’s leaders might have convinced Obama that
Gaddafi’s threats to attack oilfields or create chaos
through disruptive immigration could sow the seeds of a
double dip in Europe.
As important as the consumer is in the U.S., it is also essential that our major export markets remain healthy. As in our country, the OECD members are challenged by fiscal difficulties and more recently by inflation. Consumer prices rose 2.4 percent in the OECD in February — the highest rate of increase since October 2008. Concerns about price hikes are likely fueling anxiety among consumers in Europe as well as in the U.S.
All of these developments mean that the upturn from the banking crisis remains fragile. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke repeatedly has used this uncertainty to argue for the quantitative easing program (QE2) that many view as dangerously encouraging inflation. Bottom line: It is not a stretch to imagine that Europe’s leaders might have convinced President Obama that Gaddafi’s threats to attack oil fields or create chaos through disruptive immigration could sow the seeds of a double dip in Europe.
They could have made the case that a slump would have pulled the U.S. down as well — the worst of all possible preludes to the 2012 election for Mr. Obama. Were that case made, it is equally believable that Obama would engage all possible measures to thwart such a development.
In Europe, Italy is especially vulnerable to threats by Gaddafi to bomb his own oilfields and to unleash a massive wave of illegal immigrants. Because of its location, that country is already dealing with the exodus of large numbers of Tunisians and would be the natural entry point for Libyans as well. Italy, like other countries in the E.U., is already struggling and in no position to support a wave of dependent newcomers. At the same time, Italy has sizeable economic interests in its former colony — its state-owned oil company is the largest in the North African nation.
-
I want to step back from the controversy over Libya and take a look at one definition of what foreign policy is, or rather what its broader purposes might be. Then I want to make a small point.
The other day I came across an extract from a debate that took place in the British House of Commons in July 1864. Benjamin Disraeli, the future prime minister, was arguing that the government's policy in Germany and Denmark was a failure and deserved Parliament's formal censure. In damning Westminster's mismanagement, he drew a pretty good, broad-strokes picture of what a great nation's foreign policy might look like.
First the damning. "Do you see," Disraeli asks, "the kind of capacity that is adequate to the occasion? Do you find . . . that sagacity, that prudence, that dexterity, that quickness of perception" and that mood of "conciliation" that are necessary in the transaction of foreign affairs? No, he suggests, you do not. All these characteristics have been "wanting," and because they are wanting, three results have accrued: The policy of Her Majesty's government has failed, England's "influence in the councils of Europe has been lowered," and that waning of influence has left the prospects for peace diminished.
He stops to define terms: Regarding influence, "I mean an influence that results from the conviction of foreign Powers that our resources are great and that our policy is moderate and steadfast." He seeks the return of a conservative approach. "I do not mean by a Conservative foreign policy a foreign policy that would disapprove, still less oppose, the natural development of nations. I mean a foreign policy interested in the tranquility and prosperity of the world," one condition of which is peace. England should be "a moderating and mediatorial Power." Its interest, when changes in the world are inevitable and necessary, is to assist so that the changes "if possible, may be accomplished without war; or, if war occurs, that its duration and asperity be lessened."
Disraeli's censure motion would narrowly fail and in the end not matter much. But there's something satisfying and refreshing in his clear assertion of basic principles, of beginning points for thinking about foreign policy. A nation, to have influence, must be understood by all to be both very strong and very sober. Prosperity and tranquility are legitimate goals, peace a necessary condition. And there's a paradox as great nations move forward in the world: In order to have a dramatically good influence, you must have a known bias toward the nondramatic, toward the merely prudent and wise. A known bias, that is, toward peaceableness. And here is my small point.
View Full Image
Corbis
Benjamin Disraeli at the Bucks election, 1847.
.All this speaks to something I think we have lost the past 10 years—the generally understood sense in the world that the U.S. has a known bias toward the moderate and peaceable. I don't here argue or debate the many reasons, the history, or the series of actions that have brought this about, only to note: It was a lot to lose! I think we want to get it back, or try to re-establish a good portion of it. Because there is great benefit in seeming to be a big strong nation that is unroiled, unruffled and unbattered by the constant high seas of the world. Passivity isn't an option, and what's called isolationism is an impossibility—we live in the world—but we are too much taken by the idea of dramatic action. We've become almost addicted to it, or that our presidents have.
***
There are always many facts and dynamics that prompt modern leaders toward dramatic and immediate action as opposed to reflection, serious debate, and the long slog of diplomatic effort. But are we fully appreciating that our media, now, seem to force the hand of every leader and require them to decide, move and push forward?
The bias of the media is for action, passion and pictures. It is television producers and website runners who are the greatest lovers of "kinetic" events. They need to fill time. They need conflict and drama. At CBS News years ago there was a producer who called the film, as it then was, of a military or street battle "the bang-bang." The bang-bang was good for a piece. In a good minute-30 report there would be the stand-up opening by the correspondent, the statement of the besieged ruler or the aggrieved rebel, the map with arrows, the bang-bang, and then the closing summation. It was good TV! It is still good TV, and there is more TV than ever.
Every president has to know now that if there is fighting somewhere in the world, if there is suffering somewhere in the world, and the U.S. does not become involved, the scandal of that lack of involvement will become an endless segment on an endless television show full of endless questions. Why the inaction? Why are we doing nothing?
It should be noted that we are fighting now in Libya not because of mass slaughter but because of the threat of mass slaughter. Let's say what the president's supporters can't say and his opponents won't say: If the slaughter had happened, those pictures would have been very bad politically for the president.
Our foreign policy is increasingly driven by the needs of television programmers. I think I'll repeat that: Our foreign policy is more and more being dictated by the people who do the rundowns for tv new shows.
A president who "does nothing" in the face of trouble, who does not respond to the constant agitation of dramatic videotape on television and the Internet, is called weak. He is called cowardly, dithering, unworthy. He is called Jimmy Carter.
More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns
click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace
.So he and his administration feel forced to share the media's bias toward action. No longer are leaders allowed to think what previous generations of political leaders knew, or learned: that when 10 problems are walking toward you on the street, you don't have to rush forward to confront them. It's wiser to wait because, life being messy and unpredictable, half the problems will fall in a ditch or lose their strength before they get to you. The trick is to handle with dispatch ones that do reach you. The talent is in guessing which ones they might be.
I know that this particular challenge to foreign policy sobriety is not new and is in fact at least 30 years old. But with the proliferation of media and technology, it is getting more intense. It will never lessen now. It will only build.
There ought to be a word for something we know that is so much a part of our lives that we forget to know it, we forget to see it, and yet it has a profound impact on the world we live in. We forget to fully factor it in, or we do factor it in but don't notice it is a primary factor.
Every leader now must know the dynamic and be an active bulwark against it. He will have to discuss why we cannot allow our nervous, agitating media to demand our involvement in every fight.
A president has to provide all the pushback. Republicans should keep that in mind, too. They'll have the White House soon enough. Some of their decisions will be at the mercy of television programmers too.
-
---------------------------
April 5, 2011
IMMACULATE INTERVENTION: THE WARS OF HUMANITARIANISM
By George Friedman
There are wars in pursuit of interest. In these wars, nations pursue economic or
strategic ends to protect the nation or expand its power. There are also wars of
ideology, designed to spread some idea of "the good," whether this good is religious
or secular. The two obviously can be intertwined, such that a war designed to spread
an ideology also strengthens the interests of the nation spreading the ideology.
Since World War II, a new class of war has emerged that we might call humanitarian
wars -- wars in which the combatants claim to be fighting neither for their national
interest nor to impose any ideology, but rather to prevent inordinate human
suffering. In Kosovo and now in Libya, this has been defined as stopping a
government from committing mass murder. But it is not confined to that. In the
1990s, the U.S. intervention in Somalia was intended to alleviate a famine while the
invasion of Haiti was designed to remove a corrupt and oppressive regime causing
grievous suffering.
It is important to distinguish these interventions from peacekeeping missions. In a
peacekeeping mission, third-party forces are sent to oversee some agreement reached
by combatants. Peacekeeping operations are not conducted to impose a settlement by
force of arms; rather, they are conducted to oversee a settlement by a neutral
force. In the event the agreement collapses and war resumes, the peacekeepers either
withdraw or take cover. They are soldiers, but they are not there to fight beyond
protecting themselves.
Concept vs. Practice
In humanitarian wars, the intervention is designed both to be neutral and to protect
potential victims on one side. It is at this point that the concept and practice of
a humanitarian war become more complex. There is an ideology undergirding
humanitarian wars, one derived from both the U.N. Charter and from the lessons drawn
from the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia and a range of other circumstances
where large-scale slaughter -- crimes against humanity -- took place. That no one
intervened to prevent or stop these atrocities was seen as a moral failure.
According to this ideology, the international community has an obligation to prevent
such slaughter.
This ideology must, of course, confront other principles of the U.N. Charter, such
as the right of nations to self-determination. In international wars, where the
aggressor is trying to both kill large numbers of civilians and destroy the enemy's
right to national self-determination, this does not pose a significant intellectual
problem. In internal unrest and civil war, however, the challenge of the
intervention is to protect human rights without undermining national sovereignty or
the right of national self-determination.
The doctrine becomes less coherent in a civil war in which one side is winning and
promising to slaughter its enemies, Libya being the obvious example. Those
intervening can claim to be carrying out a neutral humanitarian action, but in
reality, they are intervening on one side's behalf. If the intervention is
successful -- as it likely will be given that interventions are invariably by
powerful countries against weaker ones -- the practical result is to turn the
victims into victors. By doing that, the humanitarian warriors are doing more than
simply protecting the weak. They are also defining a nation's history.
There is thus a deep tension between the principle of national self-determination
and the obligation to intervene to prevent slaughter. Consider a case such as Sudan,
where it can be argued that the regime is guilty of crimes against humanity but also
represents the will of the majority of the people in terms of its religious and
political program. It can be argued reasonably that a people who would support such
a regime have lost the right to national self-determination, and that it is proper
that a regime be imposed on it from the outside. But that is rarely the argument
made in favor of humanitarian intervention. I call humanitarian wars immaculate
intervention, because most advocates want to see the outcome limited to preventing
war crimes, not extended to include regime change or the imposition of alien values.
They want a war of immaculate intentions surgically limited to a singular end
without other consequences. And this is where the doctrine of humanitarian war
unravels.
Regardless of intention, any intervention favors the weaker side. If the side were
not weak, it would not be facing mass murder; it could protect itself. Given that
the intervention must be military, there must be an enemy. Wars by military forces
are fought against enemies, not for abstract concepts. The enemy will always be the
stronger side. The question is why that side is stronger. Frequently, this is
because a great many people in the country, most likely a majority, support that
side. Therefore, a humanitarian war designed to prevent the slaughter of the
minority must many times undermine the will of the majority. Thus, the intervention
may begin with limited goals but almost immediately becomes an attack on what was,
up to that point, the legitimate government of a country.
A Slow Escalation
The solution is to intervene gently. In the case of Libya, this began with a no-fly
zone that no reasonable person expected to have any significant impact. It proceeded
to airstrikes against Gadhafi's forces, which continued to hold their own against
these strikes. It now has been followed by the dispatching of Royal Marines, whose
mission is unclear, but whose normal duties are fighting wars. What we are seeing in
Libya is a classic slow escalation motivated by two factors. The first is the hope
that the leader of the country responsible for the bloodshed will capitulate. The
second is a genuine reluctance of intervening nations to spend excessive wealth or
blood on a project they view in effect as charitable. Both of these need to be
examined.
The expectation of capitulation in the case of Libya is made unlikely by another
aspect of humanitarian war fighting, namely the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Modeled in principle on the Nuremberg trials and the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia, the ICC is intended to try war criminals. Trying to
induce Moammar Gadhafi to leave Libya knowing that what awaits him is trial and the
certain equivalent of a life sentence will not work. Others in his regime would not
resign for the same reason. When his foreign minister appeared to defect to London,
the demand for his trial over Lockerbie and other affairs was immediate. Nothing
could have strengthened Gadhafi's position more. His regime is filled with people
guilty of the most heinous crimes. There is no clear mechanism for a plea bargain
guaranteeing their immunity. While a logical extension of humanitarian warfare --
having intervened against atrocities, the perpetrators ought to be brought to
justice -- the effect is a prolongation of the war. The example of Slobodan
Milosevic of Yugoslavia, who ended the Kosovo War with what he thought was a promise
that he would not be prosecuted, undoubtedly is on Gadhafi's mind.
But the war is also prolonged by the unwillingness of the intervening forces to
inflict civilian casualties. This is reasonable, given that their motivation is to
prevent civilian casualties. But the result is that instead of a swift and direct
invasion designed to crush the regime in the shortest amount of time, the regime
remains intact and civilians and others continue to die. This is not simply a matter
of moral squeamishness. It also reflects the fact that the nations involved are
unwilling -- and frequently blocked by political opposition at home -- from the
commitment of massive and overwhelming force. The application of minimal and
insufficient force, combined with the unwillingness of people like Gadhafi and his
equally guilty supporters to face The Hague, creates the framework for a long and
inconclusive war in which the intervention in favor of humanitarian considerations
turns into an intervention in a civil war on the side that opposes the regime.
This, then, turns into the problem that the virtue of the weaker side may consist
only of its weakness. In other words, strengthened by foreign intervention that
clears their way to power, they might well turn out just as brutal as the regime
they were fighting. It should be remembered that many of Libya's opposition leaders
are former senior officials of the Gadhafi government. They did not survive as long
as they did in that regime without having themselves committed crimes, and without
being prepared to commit more.
In that case, the intervention -- less and less immaculate -- becomes an exercise in
nation-building. Having destroyed the Gadhafi government and created a vacuum in
Libya and being unwilling to hand power to Gadhafi's former aides and now enemies,
the intervention -- now turning into an occupation-- must now invent a new
government. An invented government is rarely welcome, as the United States
discovered in Iraq. At least some of the people resent being occupied regardless of
the occupier's original intentions, leading to insurgency. At some point, the
interveners have the choice of walking away and leaving chaos, as the United States
did in Somalia, or staying for a long time and fighting, as they did in Iraq.
Iraq is an interesting example. The United States posed a series of justifications
for its invasion of Iraq, including simply that Saddam Hussein was an amoral monster
who had killed hundreds of thousands and would kill more. It is difficult to choose
between Hussein and Gadhafi. Regardless of the United States' other motivations in
both conflicts, it would seem that those who favor humanitarian intervention would
have favored the Iraq war. That they generally opposed the Iraq war from the
beginning requires a return to the concept of immaculate intervention.
Hussein was a war criminal and a danger to his people. However, the American
justification for intervention was not immaculate. It had multiple reasons, only one
of which was humanitarian. Others explicitly had to do with national interest, the
claims of nuclear weapons in Iraq and the desire to reshape Iraq. That it also had a
humanitarian outcome -- the destruction of the Hussein regime -- made the American
intervention inappropriate in the view of those who favor immaculate interventions
for two reasons. First, the humanitarian outcome was intended as part of a broader
war. Second, regardless of the fact that humanitarian interventions almost always
result in regime change, the explicit intention to usurp Iraq's national
self-determination openly undermined in principle what the humanitarian interveners
wanted to undermine only in practice.
Other Considerations
The point here is not simply that humanitarian interventions tend to devolve into
occupations of countries, albeit more slowly and with more complex rhetoric. It is
also that for the humanitarian warrior, there are other political considerations. In
the case of the French, the contrast between their absolute opposition to Iraq and
their aggressive desire to intervene in Libya needs to be explained. I suspect it
will not be.
There has been much speculation that the intervention in Libya was about oil. All
such interventions, such as those in Kosovo and Haiti, are examined for hidden
purposes. Perhaps it was about oil in this case, but Gadhafi was happily shipping
oil to Europe, so intervening to ensure that it continues makes no sense. Some say
France's Total and Britain's BP engineered the war to displace Italy's ENI in
running the oil fields. While possible, these oil companies are no more popular at
home than oil companies are anywhere in the world. The blowback in France or Britain
if this were shown to be the real reason would almost certainly cost French
President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron their jobs, and
they are much too fond of those to risk them for oil companies. I am reminded that
people kept asserting that the 2003 Iraq invasion was designed to seize Iraq's oil
for Texas oilmen. If so, it is taking a long time to pay off. Sometimes the lack of
a persuasive reason for a war generates theories to fill the vacuum. In all
humanitarian wars, there is a belief that the war could not be about humanitarian
matters.
Therein lays the dilemma of humanitarian wars. They have a tendency to go far beyond
the original intent behind them, as the interveners, trapped in the logic of
humanitarian war, are drawn further in. Over time, the ideological zeal frays and
the lack of national interest saps the intervener's will. It is interesting that
some of the interventions that bought with them the most good were carried out
without any concern for the local population and with ruthless self-interest. I
think of Rome and Britain. They were in it for themselves. They did some good
incidentally.
My unease with humanitarian intervention is not that I don't think the intent is
good and the end moral. It is that the intent frequently gets lost and the moral end
is not achieved. Ideology, like passion, fades. But interest has a certain enduring
quality. A doctrine of humanitarian warfare that demands an immaculate intervention
will fail because the desire to do good is an insufficient basis for war. It does
not provide a rigorous military strategy to what is, after all, a war. Neither does
it bind a nation's public to the burdens of the intervention. In the end, the
ultimate dishonesties of humanitarian war are the claims that "this won't hurt much"
and "it will be over fast." In my view, their outcome is usually either a withdrawal
without having done much good or a long occupation in which the occupied people are
singularly ungrateful.
North Africa is no place for casual war plans and good intentions. It is an old,
tough place. If you must go in, go in heavy, go in hard and get out fast.
Humanitarian warfare says that you go in light, you go in soft and you stay there
long. I have no quarrel with humanitarianism. It is the way the doctrine wages war
that concerns me. Getting rid of Gadhafi is something we can all feel good about and
which Europe and America can afford. It is the aftermath -- the place beyond the
immaculate intervention -- that concerns me.
This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to
www.stratfor.com.
Copyright 2011 STRATFOR.
-
Why We Should Be Against Armed Humanitarianism by Gene Healy
from Cato Recent Op-eds
Why are we bombing Libya? To prevent a massacre that would have "stained the conscience of the world," President Obama proclaimed in his address to the nation last week.
"As president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action," he said.
Say what you will about the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, at least it was directed at purported threats to American national security. Obama, by contrast, reserves the right to shoot first before the global conscience gets stained. In this vision, the U.S. military serves as a sort of Scotchgard for the World-Soul.
The president allowed that "America cannot use our military whenever repression occurs." But when our interests, values, "unique abilities" and the will of the international community properly align — he'll let us know when that is — we'll act "on behalf of what's right."
But when it comes to armed humanitarianism, deciding what's right may not be quite so simple, argues international relations scholar Alan J. Kuperman, author of The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention. First, generally speaking, "killers are quicker than intervenors"; second, "more intervention might actually lead to a net increase in killing," not just from "collateral damage," but by changing the incentives of actors on the ground.
Take the case of Rwanda. Our failure to intervene there in 1994 is now widely considered a shameful missed opportunity to avert mass murder.
But "had the United States tried to stop the Rwandan genocide," Kuperman writes, "it would have required about six weeks to deploy a task force of 15,000 personnel and their equipment," meaning that "by the time Western governments learned of the Rwandan genocide and deployed an intervention force, the vast majority of the ultimate Tutsi victims would already have been killed."
Indeed, sometimes intervention increases the pace of violence. Serbian forces sped up ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in response to NATO's March 1999 decision to bomb. "Most of their cleansing occurred in the first two weeks, and they managed to force out 850,000 Albanians."
Further complicating matters is what Kuperman calls "the moral hazard of humanitarian intervention." Such interventions can have the perverse effect of encouraging risk-seeking behavior by those expecting rescue.
That happened in the 1990s, Kuperman argues, when the policy of humanitarian intervention "convinced some groups that the international community would intervene to protect them from retaliation, thereby encouraging armed rebellions."
But in the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina's Muslims, for example, intervention occurred three years after secession, by which time an estimated 100,000 had been killed.
Last month, Jackson Diehl chided his Washington Post colleague George Will for asking, "Would not U.S. intervention in Libya encourage other restive peoples to expect U.S. military assistance?"
"Perhaps it would," Diehl replied, "and if a powerful opposition movement appeared in Syria, and asked the West for weapons or air support to finish off the Assad regime, would that be a disaster?"
I don't know, perhaps it would. Diehl, an ardent supporter of the Iraq War, ought to at least entertain the possibility. After all, that war turned out to be far more costly than folks like Diehl imagined at the outset. More than 4,000 Americans and anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 Iraqi civilians have vanished so far in the fog of humanitarian war.
Would Syria present similar risks? Does Libya? Probably not, but one thing is certain: War is a bloody, uncertain business. When you decide to wage one, you need a good reason. Airy doctrines about impending moral stains on the international conscience don't make the grade.
Here, a little less hubris might be more humanitarian.
Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12943
-
China is aggressively crushing dissenters as we speak. NFZ?
NFW.
Selective moral outrage.
-
CCP; is this an example of the "thanks" we get? :?
I still don't understand why we just don't stay home and solve our own domestic problems rather than trying to solve everyone else's.
"Tens of thousands of demonstrators in eastern Baghdad marked the eighth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime with a protest Saturday against the American troop presence there."
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/04/09/iraq.demonstrations/index.html?hpt=T2
-
"I still don't understand why we just don't stay home and solve our own domestic problems rather than trying to solve everyone else's."
I agree JDN.
INjecting Soros into this -
He blames Bush for policies around the world and stating Bush is why people hate Jews? (I presume he is alluding to Wolfowitz). Yet at the same time this mixed up joker states we should be fighting for democracy against autocratic regimes and let peoples all over decide their own leadership. Well if the second sentence is his wish than he should be praising Bush for leading the charge for Demcracy around the world.
Yet the party hack this clown is just won't do it.
Israel is in big trouble thanks to the likes of him. I digress....
-
Eastern Baghdad is Mookie Sadr territory, yes? I read his point is to stop hit burbles coming out of some in the White House about extending the stay of the US Army in Iraq. The US staying longer than promised would be a huge red flag to several powerful groups in Iraq besides Sadr.
-
Given the general chaos and ineptitude from this white house, it's hard to say if keeping troops in Iraq longer is actually a plan or not.
-
WASHINGTON—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed Arab leaders on Tuesday to accelerate economic and political reforms to meet the growing demands of their publics, but refrained from calling for rulers in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria to step down.
Mrs. Clinton's comments illustrate the selective approach the Obama administration continues to employ in responding to the political uprisings that have surged across the Middle East and North Africa since January.
The secretary of state has aggressively called for the resignations of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in recent months, but suggested to Tuesday's gathering of Arab and American policy makers that other Arab rulers might still play a role in their countries' futures if they embrace political and economic liberalization.
"We know that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't make sense in such a diverse region at such a fluid time," Mrs. Clinton told the U.S.-Islamic World Forum. "Going forward, the United States will be guided by careful consideration of all the circumstances on the ground and by our consistent values and interests."
The calls for democratic change in Bahrain and Yemen have placed Washington in a diplomatic bind, as both countries' leaders have provided significant cooperation in combating terrorism and the regional influence of Iran.
Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, which patrols the oil-rich Persian Gulf. And Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has allowed the U.S. to conduct airstrikes inside his country against suspected al Qaeda members.
Still, Bahrain and Yemen have both launched bloody crackdowns on their political oppositions in recent weeks. The relatively subdued U.S. response has drawn criticism from human-rights activists who accuse Washington of employing a double standard in the region.
Mrs. Clinton said the U.S. would continue to press the governments in Manama and San'a to liberalize, but also said they could be part of the solution.
"The United States has a decades-long friendship with Bahrain that we expect to continue long into the future," Mrs. Clinton said. "We have made clear that security alone cannot resolve the challenges facing Bahrain."
The Obama administration also has been restrained in calling for leadership change in Syria, despite President Bashar al-Assad's significant role in challenging U.S. interests in the Mideast. Mr. Assad is Iran's closest Arab ally and directly arms and funds militant groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
In recent weeks, Syrian security forces have killed hundreds of anti-Assad protesters, according to human-rights groups. But Mrs. Clinton was careful in her speech Tuesday not to suggest that Washington is seeking Mr. Assad's ouster. Privately, U.S. officials have voiced concerns that the Syrian leader's fall could lead to sectarian strife.
"President Assad and the Syrian government must respect the universal rights of the Syrian people, who are rightly demanding the basic freedoms that they have been denied," she said.
Mrs. Clinton praised the revolutions that have toppled the decades-old dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. But sShe stressed that both countries must continue with political and economic changes to ensure their political transitions breed democratic governments that meet the needs of their young, rapidly growing populations. She specifically cited the need for the emerging systems to embrace free markets, combat extremism and promote the rights of women and religious minorities.
"The United States will work with people and leaders across the region to create more open, dynamic and diverse economies," Mrs. Clinton said.
Washington's top diplomat said the Obama administration will increasingly provide financial and technical assistance to help Mideast countries transition to democracy. She said a fund has already been created, with $150 million already committed to assisting Egypt. The U.S.'s Overseas Private Investment Corp. has also committed $2 billion to support private-sector investments in the region, Mrs. Clinton said.
-
Worth noting here IMHO is that the rationale for our efforts in Afpakia of preventing the return of AQ training bases for attacks upon the American homeland, is in tatters. AQ now establishes training bases in Yemen, the Horn of Africa, (and with the help of President Baraq in Libya too?-- though this remains to be seen). If we are not going to go in and stop them all (and I suspect no one here is calling for boots on the ground in Yemen!) then what is the point of going into just one (Afpakia)?
Our strategy is utterly incoherent.
Those who wish to comment on this point should please do so either on the US Foreign Policy thread or the Middle East/SNAFU thread.
I wish I had some pity and/or snarky comment, but the cold hard fact is that our attempt to drain the swamps has become pretty much impossible with the "Caliphatezation" of the middle east and our economic decline.
-
April 21, 2011
Iran, Nukes, and China's Inroads to the Middle East: What's Next Mr. President?
By Reza Kahlili
With the Middle East in an uproar, the roles being played by Iran and China are of utmost importance to our national security, economy, and global stability. It is imperative that Americans grasp the significance of this.
President Obama's simple approach to dealing with the Iranian nuclear bomb program was to extend a hand toward the radical mullahs ruling Iran hoping to appease them. Clearly, he thought an apology for what America stands for would motivate the Iranian leaders to change their behavior and find a resolution that would solve our differences. He turned his back on millions of Iranians who took to the streets in protest, legitimizing this very barbaric regime -- a regime that has raped, tortured, and executed tens of thousands of brave Iranians and deprived them of their aspirations for freedom and democracy.
The Iranians instead, once again, outmaneuvered and deceived the Obama administration by promising cooperation. Instead, they bought time to continue their nuclear enrichment to where they now have over 8000 pounds of enriched uranium -- enough for three nuclear bombs.
Today it is quite clear that President Obama's policies vis-à-vis Iran's nuclear program have failed. The negotiations have not worked and the sanctions have proven to be a dismal disaster.
As a result of Obama's obvious weakness, many countries such as Germany, India, Venezuela, China, and others are openly collaborating with the regime by providing backdoor financial channels, arms, and even nuclear material.
The Iranian leaders have detected total confusion, weakness, and incompetence from the White House and have picked up their activities. Iranian agents, who have long infiltrated the region, are helping to incite uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, and other countries in the Middle East. As I revealed recently, there is a secret documentary, "The Coming is Upon Us," which will be distributed shortly in the Middle East among the Muslim population, that is calling for the unification of Arabs, the overthrow of U.S.-backed governments, and promising the destruction of Israel and the demise of the U.S.
Just in the last couple of months, many shipments of arms and explosives have been confiscated by authorities in Turkey, Israel, and others destined for Syria, Hezb'allah, Hamas, Taliban, and North Africa. Also several ships containing nuclear material destined for Iran have been confiscated in South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia, where two containers were confiscated carrying material used for weapons of mass destruction and nuclear armaments. Interestingly, the parts were labeled as boiler parts and loaded in those containers at a port in China!
China, also sensing the weakness of the Obama administration, is helping Iran with its nuclear program exactly as they did with Pakistan with their nuclear bomb. Pakistan recently announced that with the help of China, they were building more nuclear plants, making them the fourth largest nuclear state by the end of this decade.
Reports indicate that the Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov has warned that the recent China and Pakistan strategic agreements are a signal to China's ambitions regarding the vital energy resources of the Middle East. This new strategic agreement between the two allows China access to the Karakoram Highway and therefore its reach to the Arabian Sea. Other reports indicate that even Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf countries have turned to China because of Obama's apparent confusion in dealing with the current crisis in the Middle East.
While China and Iran share a common goal, which is the demise of America's supremacy in the region, they differ on the outcome. China believes, for the first time in a long time, it has been provided a grand opportunity to access the Middle East, secure its energy source, and become the next superpower of the world.
However, the Iranian leaders, who say the destruction of America and the West is at hand, are quite excited about the recent events in the Middle East and believe that the overthrow of U.S.-backed governments are just around the corner. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated just days ago: "Expect more events in the region soon," and on the nuclear issue he went on to say, "And now, after eight years of pressure, the Islamic Iran has won out."
The Iranian leaders today, more than any time in the past, believe that the conditions are prime for the End of Times as predicted in the centuries-old Hadith; that the last Messiah, the Shiites' 12th Imam, Imam Mahdi, will return as promised opening the way for Islam's conquest throughout the world. But, they also fervently believe that in order for that to happen, Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.
It is quite clear that we live in very dangerous times and unless and until our leaders grasp the reality of the events taking place in the Middle East and the world, U.S. supremacy and superiority will be lost for decades to come, perhaps never to recover. Millions of lives could be lost and the world could suffer destruction and depression worse than anything in recent memory!
Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for an ex-CIA spy who requires anonymity for safety reasons. He is the author of A Time to Betray, a book about his double life as a CIA agent in Iran's Revolutionary Guards, published by Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/04/iran_nukes_and_chinas_inroads.html at April 21, 2011 - 02:10:46 PM CDT
-
"If we are not going to go in and stop them all (and I suspect no one here is calling for boots on the ground in Yemen!) then what is the point of going into just one (Afpakia)?
Our strategy is utterly incoherent."
---
I suppose the answer is that we pick our battles to isolate and defeat enemies on our choice of time and location. All-out war simultaneous in all locations may not fit our strengths and capabilities very well much less fit with our limited attention span. Problem is a) we are doing the opposite, responding to nuisances in the least strategic areas (Libya), and completely out of the most crucial areas, and b) we have lost confidence in those who make the choices and set the strategies for us.
If we are forcing them to move, our intelligence at some point should be picking up some of those moves. But that matters only if we take action on the intelligence.
What is strangest about our AfPak strategy is that what is working (allegedly), the tripling of manpower, is what we have pre-decided and declared we won't continue. What we might need most in the long run is at least a small permanent presence to shut down bases as they pop up. That is something we gave up completely in Iraq. (see links below)
My central strategy (broken record, and GM just hit this same point) is that we better get our economic house in order and in full gear if we expect to be able to respond later to what is brewing in the world right now.
Yemen looks like one of those backyard situations for Saudi, just like the Caucasus for Russia, but I have no idea whether Saudi escalation would help or hurt the situation.
------
A nice review(a must read?) at the links below of all our wars and where they stand now, part 1 and part 2:
http://www.businessinsider.com/reviewing-americas-wars-part-1-2011-4
http://www.chrisweigant.com/2011/04/21/reviewing-americas-wars-part-2/
-
Ya quoted (I think he has offered superb insight) on the Afghanistan-Pakistan forum,
"Initially, the American thinking was that an India-Pak nuclear exchange while undesirable, was without risk to the US and so the US turned a blind eye to Chinese proliferation support to Pak. Today, the thinking on Indian defense sites is that the jihadis hate the US and Israel more than they hate India (infact polls show that). Anytime the pakis hate someone more than India, that's a major achievement....ie the nukes may come back and bite us in the US and not India. I for one dont doubt the plausibility of the scenario."
I think this is just one more example of the cost to America for our unbridled support for Israel. Petraeus said the same thing.
I'm not saying whether we should change or not; just appreciate the very high price we have to pay and don't be in denial.
-
A) Citation on the Petraeus quote?
B) I'd say the Paks are more pissed that we told them after 911 we would bomb them back to the stone age if they didn't cooperate with us against AQ and the Taliban and that we regularly intrude upon their sovereignty, yet somehow the Jews get blamed :-P , , , Anyone blaming the Taiwanese for troubles in our relations with China? Anyone blaming the South Koreans for our troubles with the North Koreans?
-
So, if we officially abandoned Israel tomorrow, what happens then, JDN?
-
A) Citation on the Petraeus quote?
B) I'd say the Paks are more pissed that we told them after 911 we would bomb them back to the stone age if they didn't cooperate with us against AQ and the Taliban and that we regularly intrude upon their sovereignty, yet somehow the Jews get blamed :-P , , , Anyone blaming the Taiwanese for troubles in our relations with China? Anyone blaming the South Koreans for our troubles with the North Koreans?
Petraeus? I posted it before on this forum; I'm sure you can find it. If I remember he was testifying before Congress and commented on the price America pays for loyalty to Israel.
As for your explanation of the Pak issue; I think Ya has good insight. But, I think you could replace the word Pak and replace it with any one of many countries, the resentment and hatred of America because of our unwavering association with Israel is the same.
As for the Taiwanese and Koreans, well, they are all either Chinese or Koreans. It's like the West German East German division years ago; it's different than the Israeli issue.
Also, I do think our relationship with Taiwan does strain our relationship with China. Again, like Israel, I am not commenting here if that is good or bad; nor am I advocating abandoning Israel, I am
merely pointing out we pay a price far above the dollars we send and need to recognize that cost in the equation.
Again, my point is not that we should or shouldn't support Israel or Taiwan, but that we appreciate the intangible high cost.
-
"But, I think you could replace the word Pak and replace it with any one of many countries, the resentment and hatred of America because of our unwavering association with Israel is the same."
They hate us because we are disgusting kafirs. We don't beat our women into burkas, we have freedom instead on being "slaves of allah" and we eat pork. Israel is the small satan, we are the great satan. They will not be content until the world bows before islam.
-
"So, if we officially abandoned Israel tomorrow, what happens then...?"
What is the answer to that? I suppose a race by Iran, Syria, Egypt, and who knows who else, to see who can destroy Israel first. Israel would fight back and win for a while, but Israel can't withstand as many casualties and would lose in the end. The regional cooperation in that destruction might lead to some kind of Caliphate that we fear along with a lot of enegy and confidence to keep going. Would we really just sit out while that happens in the name of ... peace?? We wouldn't even go in for evacuations? Unarmed, getting shot at? If we were morally neutral about the destruction of Israel (I hope we aren't!), the question still remains - would they (the Islamic militarists/extemists/jihadists) still hate us and attack us all they can for at least another century? The answer is yes, I think we know that. If yes, then that extra intangible cost for our support of Israel is nil.
And then what, with Israel off the table, for US foreign policy? Then we sit down without preconditions? Argue for sanctions at the U.N.? Hope they don't want western Europe next? (They do!) Abandon Europe next? Then they will like us? Or draw the line there instead and start over?
I look forward to hearing a different, plausible scenario, I but I say that idea doesn't work, isn't an option, and wouldn't make us safer. The issue is not whether to support Israel, only how best to do that.
-
Moving right along... This was an interview I found interesting of Hugh Hewitt with the author of th New Yorker's current piece on the Obama administration's foreign poliy, called "The Consequentialist':
http://www.hughhewitt.com/transcripts.aspx?id=daf95729-9b04-484a-acb3-6c834217a155
New Yorker's Ryan Lizza On Barack Obama Foreign Policy, The Consequentialist
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
HH: I am also talking foreign policy today with Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, and my guest right now, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, whose piece, The Consequentialist in the new New Yorker is turning a lot of heads and causing a lot of comment. Ryan, welcome back, it’s great to have you. ... I have been through this article twice now. And I am completely amazed that you got what you got here, and that the White House hasn’t blown up your car. What is the reaction to this piece?
RL: This is, the reaction is fascinating, because I think perhaps liberals see one thing in this piece, and conservatives see another. And I imagine you’re going to want to talk about this phrase, “leading from behind.”
HH: Yes, in the very last paragraph of the piece. Explain to people how proud they are of leading from behind.
RL: Well Hugh, I think it’s an easy phrase to poke fun of, right?
HH: Right.
RL: Because it’s this paradox, leading from behind, ha ha ha. We don’t want a president who leads from behind. We want a president who leads. And that’s been the tenor of a lot of the commentary about that quote, especially on the right, that there can’t be any such thing as leading from behind. And just before I got on the show, I was writing a blog on it about this, maybe helping explain this concept in a little bit more detail. And I agree that as a political slogan, as I point out in the piece, you know, not the greatest phrase in the world. But the context this came up in is the Obama administration’s response to Libya, okay? And I think you have to look carefully at what they did in Libya to understand why this was their strategy. We went to war, and we are at war, in another Muslim country. Now how do you get the world to go along with the United States wanting to bomb another Muslim country? Do you do it just unilaterally? Does the President just get up and say hey, I want Gaddafi gone, we’re sending in the bombs right now? Or do you work through multilateral institutions, and try to get the U.N. to back you, try and get Arab support, and try not to have the whole effort branded as an American-led enterprise, because you know that that will be used against us in some, in many quarters of the world? And if you look really, really carefully at what they did in Libya, it was essentially a massive bait and switch. The Arab League, and some other Arab states, said oh, yeah, we want a no-fly zone. Well, the no-fly zone was the option on the table at the United Nations. It was the resolution that was proposed by Lebanon, the U.K., and the French. And what Obama did at the very last second, and I think this has really been missed in a lot of the reporting on what went down over Libya, at the last second, they said no, a no-fly zone won’t do anything to save Benghazi, because there are no Libyan planes about to bomb Benghazi, there are tanks on the ground, so what we need is a resolution that gives full authorization for military intervention in Libya. And so essentially the Obama administration very quietly asked for a more hawkish, a more militaristic resolution, and they got it.
HH: But you know, Ryan, if that was…
RL: And I go through all of that, Hugh, just to say that if the way that they got that was by playing down their own role in it, then you have to judge it on the terms of the outcome rather than on the style of leadership.
HH: Well, if they had intended to get there, you have a pretty good argument. But what emerges from The Consequentialist is incoherence, schizophrenia, an up/down, almost manic-depressive engagement with the world. And what really is powerfully condemning of the Obama administration is the light you throw on their Iranian policy, or actually the failure of Iranian policy. And I think buried in The Consequentialist is one revelation that some of Obama’s White House aides regretted having stood idly by why the Iranian regime brutally repressed the Green Revolution. And more than standing idly by, they rebuked the State Department young guy for getting involved with the Twitter controversy. It confirms every conservative’s critique of President Obama’s indifference to the smashing of the Green Revolution. I think that’s one of the huge takeaways of your piece.
RL: I agree. I agree that that’s…to me, that was a very important part of the piece, and to really spell out how there was a major shift in policy. And as they moved from engagement, and almost a certain amount of respect for the Iranian regime, as that whole policy really got upended by the Green Revolution, there is quite a bit, several of his advisors realize and will admit that yeah, they got that wrong, that to the extent that they…now let me explain…from their point of view, their explanation is well, it was really about, the policy of non-interference with the protestors was really about making sure that the regime couldn’t use the U.S. involvement to sort of discredit them. And look, there’s something to be said for that. You have to be careful about the effects. But they, there was regret over that, and I think that’s why when it came to Egypt, they tried to strike a different balance. And you’re absolutely right. I was very surprised to find that this young guy, Jared Cohen, who unilaterally, essentially all by himself, contacted Twitter, and told them to delay a scheduled maintenance upgrade so that the Iranians could continue to use Twitter. It was a very controversial, I mean, inside, someone at the White House referred to it as, when I asked about it, they said oh yeah, you’re talking about Twittergate, right?
HH: You see, that’s quite good reporting. I’m curious, how did you get this much access, because you were with Hillary in Tunis, you were with her in Cairo. You obviously talked to Donilon, you quote him here, and that’s one of the freighted quotes in this piece about we’re over-weighted in the Middle East, and underweighted in China and Asia. And I thought to myself, that’s just perfect gibberish from the new age nonsensical people. But how did they, why did they say yes to you on these requests?
RL: Well look, I think when you’re going in and you’re saying I’m going to do a lengthy review of your foreign policy, and I want you to explain it to me, they have an incentive to explain it. And so they were all, at various parts of the administration, they were very willing to sit down, you know, and talk about this stuff.
HH: Hillary? I mean, when you’re talking, when you’re having breakfast with her, I think it’s in Tunis?
RL: Yes.
HH: And she kind of implores you, what’s the standard? I can just see her saying what am I going to do? I can’t go everywhere in the world.
RL: Well, yeah, and I thought that was a very revealing moment.
HH: It was.
RL: …because she was saying like look, these cases are hard. You can’t, if you, you know, there’s a lot of bad stuff happening in the world. And she pointed out at that point Congo and Cote d’Ivoire, and we can’t intervene everywhere. And I think her point was, you know, what she said is part of her job is to try and build an international consensus to do something about these problems. And that was her point about Libya, is you’ve got to get consensus from the actors in the region. There is this sense in the Obama administration that the U.S. can’t do everything. And I’ll tell you, Hugh, on the right, I think we’re, I think folks in America are sort of schizophrenic about this, because on the one hand, we feel somehow if the U.S. isn’t leading the charge on a big international issue, we feel like you know, that’s not right, we’re supposed to lead on every issue. On the other hand, you talk to a lot of people who think well, why should be bear all the burdens? And I saw that, I saw both of those arguments among conservatives as we went back and forth about what to do in Libya, right?
HH: Right.
RL: Some people saying how are we letting Sarkozy lead this effort, and other people saying you know, why are we getting involved at all.
HH: Well, it’s the Scowcroft-Cheney divide in the Republican Party.
RL: Yes.
HH: But what got me about this piece that’s communicated so well is that the Secretary of State would tell you, however widely regarded you are as a reporter, Ryan, that the biggest problem in the administration is that they don’t have a rule yet articulated. She’s telling you this on the record. It confirms for me they really don’t know what they’re doing, and that the Department of State and the White House are at loggerheads with each other.
RL: Well, I think that they don’t have a…look, Obama himself has said this pretty clearly in some of the TV interviews he did after the Libyan intervention. He said that this doesn’t mean that there’s a new doctrine being laid down about when we do and don’t intervene. And you know, there’s a school of foreign policy thinking that doctrines are the worst thing for a president, because once you have some doctrine, you are straightjacketed when presented with a new crisis or threat. And you know, I think there’s a reluctance by Obama to sort of lay down something that everyone will call a doctrine, because you want to, frankly, as president, you want to have the flexibility to be inconsistent, right? You want to have the flexibility to do something in Libya, and maybe not in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia.
HH: Or Iran or Syria, where we’re getting standing idly by 2.0 underway right now in Syria.
- - - -
HH: A couple of other aspects I can’t cover, it’s a very long article, I’ve linked it at Hughhewitt.com, Ryan Lizza. The President sends a memo out on August 12, 2010, saying you know, we really have got to take a look at these Middle Eastern regimes ruled by autocrats. Things could go wrong there. So he gets a little working group together which reports back the day before Tunisia falls apart. Good timing, that, eh?
RL: Well look, you could look at this…one way to look at that is hey, they were still debating these issues when the Middle East exploded. But another way to look at it is they realized that things weren’t going well in the Middle East. They realized that there were limits to their approach, they’ve realized that Iran policy got short-circuited by the Green Revolution, although remember, Hugh, they did get sanctions on Iran. That was a pretty big step, and they got the Security Council to support sanctions on Iran, so that’s not nothing. And you know, they realized that with elections in Egypt and a few other places coming up, that it was time to look anew at U.S. policy in the Middle East. And Obama basically wanted to know was it now more in our interest to support a bold, political reform message in the Middle East. And that was what that group was discussing.
HH: But you know, Ryan, I’m a member of a faculty, a law school faculty.
RL: Yeah.
HH: So I know what faculty meetings are like. And there are a lot of smart people talking, talking, talking.
RL: Yeah.
HH: In fact, at one point in your piece, you write about all the earnest, young women and men over at the Department of State, talking about Facebook revolutions, and globalization, and they’re talking over at the White House, and they’re having these seminars. Meanwhile, the world is rushing past them. And I’m sure they’re talking about Syria right now, but they don’t have anything to do about it, do they?
RL: You know, I haven’t done enough reporting about Syria to really know. And the issue has obviously gotten much, much more intense over the last few days when Assad has just decided that he’s, you know, he’s going to do anything it takes to stay in power. What are the options in Syria, though, right? I mean, we don’t have leverage with Assad. We had a lot of leverage with Mubarak. It’s one of the cases for engagement with bad guys, is when they get, when they’re at their worst, you at least have some leverage. And one of the things we did with Mubarak is we very strongly sent the message that violence against the protestors was a red line that he shouldn’t cross.
HH: But Ryan…
RL: Whether the U.S. is responsible for him holding back or not, I don’t know. But I’m just saying in Syria, we don’t have a lot of great options, right? Our influence is extremely limited.
HH: No, but in your piece, I mean, the Egyptian reporting is fascinating, because yeah, we sent that message, and we sent a bunch of other messages as well, and then we sent Wisner, and they threw Wisner under the bus, or as he said, to the reelection committee. And at one point, you’re downstairs, the Secretary of State’s upstairs, and there are a bunch of Muslim Brotherhood guys who won’t go upstairs, because they prefer Obama’s policy to that of the Secretary of State. That is in one anecdote the definition of incoherence in a foreign policy, isn’t it?
RL: I disagree. Your takeaway from some of these anecdotes is probably a little bit different than mine. So my view of, so this was a meeting for Egyptian activists. Two of them were sort of self-described moderates or liberals, one of them is a Marxist, and one is Muslim Brotherhood. And they all boycotted Hillary Clinton’s meeting because of something she said very early on in the protests. She said that the Mubarak regime is stable, or Mubarak government is stable. They all remembered that stable comment, and it really pissed them off. And they wouldn’t meet with her over it. Interestingly, I asked the Muslim Brotherhood guy if he would meet with Obama, and his face lit up and said yes. So Hugh, just think about that for a second. On the one hand, it gets at this sort of split between Hillary and Obama. But it’s a split in their perceptions of the two of them. In other words, they thought that Obama was on their side. This is a guy…and isn’t that what we want? We want the guys in the Muslim Brotherhood to think you know what, the U.S. has a president that in some way I can relate to. I don’t see that as a negative. I see that in some ways as a positive.
HH: I’m pretty sure my pal, Frank Gaffney, would say the Muslim Brotherhood is thinking that this guy is a patsy, and we can play him like a rube, and therefore, we’re not going to deal with the tough lady upstairs. We’re going to wait for Obama to wilt under the pressure of public opinion, and his perceived need to be liked by quasi-revolutionary movements.
RL: No, but my view of what they were telling me, and remember, it wasn’t just the Muslim Brotherhood. It was the guys from a selfish U.S. perspective, that you want to see succeed in Egypt. It was the moderates. It was the guys who, the non-religious moderates. They…and remember, all these guys were on the same side. It’s the same anti-Mubarak side. They’re all starting to divide and split and form parties and oppose each other. But for that one moment in Tahrir Square, they were all on the same side, right? So the Muslim Brotherhood guys and the liberals we want to succeed, were all trying to oust Mubarak together. And so where they agreed was that they thought that President Obama was more on the side of the protestors than on the side of Mubarak. And you know, I think the White House very skillfully maneuvered Obama into that sort of public position, even though behind the scenes, things were a lot more complicated with the whole Wisner episode, as you point out.
HH: Let me close by talking about the one passage which really jumped out, and it jumped out because it echoed, I had Mitt Romney on the program, oh, about a week ago, blasting President Obama. I had Tim Pawlenty on yesterday.
RL: Yeah, I saw that. I didn’t see Romney, but I read the Pawlenty excerpt.
HH: Yeah.
RL: He didn’t totally take the bait on the leading from behind, though.
HH: Oh, he was getting there. I ran out of time, though. But he did love the Zbigniew Brzezinski piece, where you quote Zbig as saying about the President, I don’t think he really has a policy that’s implementing his insights and understanding. The rhetoric is always terribly imperative and categorical. You must do this, he must do that, this is unacceptable. Brzezinski added, he doesn’t strategize, he sermonizes. That’s almost verbatim from Romney’s critique eight or nine days ago, and may become a meme along with leading from behind, Ryan Lizza. What are they saying about your piece? Are they happy with it?
RL: I don’t know. Frankly, I haven’t talked to many people in the administration since it’s come out. But you know, all you can do is…
HH: Write what you hear.
RL: Yeah, write what you hear, be fair, but also be tough. It’s our job, to maintain some critical distance.
HH: Was there much conversation about Israel at all? Because it’s not here.
RL: There was some. Hey look, there was some, and look, Zbig, I think Zbig, I didn’t detail this, but I think Zbig Brzezinski’s big issue is Israel. I think he thinks that Obama has mishandled Israel, and has retreated from a policy that Zbig was encouraging, that is to be a little bit tougher on Israel. And so I think that’s part of Zbig’s concern. But in general, as the quote you read suggests, Zbig thinks there’s a gap between the words and actions of the administration.
HH: Ryan Lizza, great piece, thanks for joining me on it. The Consequentialist is in the latest issue of the New York, how the Arab spring remade Obama’s foreign policy. And you’ve got to read it a couple of times. I think you’ll, I know every Republican presidential candidate is going over it and reading it with a fine-toothed comb, as I suspect the House Foreign Affairs Committee will be, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
-
There are assertions in here which are not self-apparent to me; regardless it is a thought provoking piece:
U.S.-Pakistani Relations Beyond Bin Laden
May 10, 2011
By George Friedman
The past week has been filled with announcements and speculations on how Osama bin Laden was killed and on Washington’s source of intelligence. After any operation of this sort, the world is filled with speculation on sources and methods by people who don’t know, and silence or dissembling by those who do.
Obfuscating on how intelligence was developed and on the specifics of how an operation was carried out is an essential part of covert operations. The precise process must be distorted to confuse opponents regarding how things actually played out; otherwise, the enemy learns lessons and adjusts. Ideally, the enemy learns the wrong lessons, and its adjustments wind up further weakening it. Operational disinformation is the final, critical phase of covert operations. So as interesting as it is to speculate on just how the United States located bin Laden and on exactly how the attack took place, it is ultimately not a fruitful discussion. Moreover, it does not focus on the truly important question, namely, the future of U.S.-Pakistani relations.
Posturing Versus a Genuine Breach
It is not inconceivable that Pakistan aided the United States in identifying and capturing Osama bin Laden, but it is unlikely. This is because the operation saw the already-tremendous tensions between the two countries worsen rather than improve. The Obama administration let it be known that it saw Pakistan as either incompetent or duplicitous and that it deliberately withheld plans for the operation from the Pakistanis. For their part, the Pakistanis made it clear that further operations of this sort on Pakistani territory could see an irreconcilable breach between the two countries. The attitudes of the governments profoundly affected the views of politicians and the public, attitudes that will be difficult to erase.
Posturing designed to hide Pakistani cooperation would be designed to cover operational details, not to lead to significant breaches between countries. The relationship between the United States and Pakistan ultimately is far more important than the details of how Osama bin Laden was captured, but both sides have created a tense atmosphere that they will find difficult to contain. One would not sacrifice strategic relationships for the sake of operational security. Therefore, we have to assume that the tension is real and revolves around the different goals of Pakistan and the United States.
A break between the United States and Pakistan holds significance for both sides. For Pakistan, it means the loss of an ally that could help Pakistan fend off its much larger neighbor to the east, India. For the United States, it means the loss of an ally in the war in Afghanistan. Whether the rupture ultimately occurs, of course, depends on how deep the tension goes. And that depends on what the tension is over, i.e., whether the tension ultimately merits the strategic rift. It also is a question of which side is sacrificing the most. It is therefore important to understand the geopolitics of U.S.-Pakistani relations beyond the question of who knew what about bin Laden.
From Cold to Jihadist War
U.S. strategy in the Cold War included a religious component, namely, using religion to generate tension within the Communist bloc. This could be seen in the Jewish resistance in the Soviet Union, in Roman Catholic resistance in Poland and, of course, in Muslim resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, it took the form of using religious Islamist militias to wage a guerrilla war against Soviet occupation. A three-part alliance involving the Saudis, the Americans and the Pakistanis fought the Soviets. The Pakistanis had the closest relationships with the Afghan resistance due to ethnic and historical bonds, and the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had built close ties with the Afghans.
As frequently happens, the lines of influence ran both ways. The ISI did not simply control Islamist militants, but instead many within the ISI came under the influence of radical Islamist ideology. This reached the extent that the ISI became a center of radical Islamism, not so much on an institutional level as on a personal level: The case officers, as the phrase goes, went native. As long as the U.S. strategy remained to align with radical Islamism against the Soviets, this did not pose a major problem. However, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States lost interest in the future of Afghanistan, managing the conclusion of the war fell to the Afghans and to the Pakistanis through the ISI. In the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States played a trivial role. It was the ISI in alliance with the Taliban — a coalition of Afghan and international Islamist fighters who had been supported by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan — that shaped the future of Afghanistan.
The U.S.- Islamist relationship was an alliance of convenience for both sides. It was temporary, and when the Soviets collapsed, Islamist ideology focused on new enemies, the United States chief among them. Anti-Soviet sentiment among radical Islamists soon morphed into anti-American sentiment. This was particularly true after the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait and Desert Storm. The Islamists perceived the U.S. occupation and violation of Saudi territorial integrity as a religious breach. Therefore, at least some elements of international Islamism focused on the United States; al Qaeda was central among these elements. Al Qaeda needed a base of operations after being expelled from Sudan, and Afghanistan provided the most congenial home. In moving to Afghanistan and allying with the Taliban, al Qaeda inevitably was able to greatly expand its links with Pakistan’s ISI, which was itself deeply involved with the Taliban.
After 9/11, Washington demanded that the Pakistanis aid the United States in its war against al Qaeda and the Taliban. For Pakistan, this represented a profound crisis. On the one hand, Pakistan badly needed the United States to support it against what it saw as its existential enemy, India. On the other hand, Islamabad found it difficult to rupture or control the intimate relationships, ideological and personal, that had developed between the ISI and the Taliban, and by extension with al Qaeda to some extent. In Pakistani thinking, breaking with the United States could lead to strategic disaster with India. However, accommodating the United States could lead to unrest, potential civil war and even collapse by energizing elements of the ISI and supporters of Taliban and radical Islamism in Pakistan.
The Pakistani Solution
The Pakistani solution was to appear to be doing everything possible to support the United States in Afghanistan, with a quiet limit on what that support would entail. That limit on support set by Islamabad was largely defined as avoiding actions that would trigger a major uprising in Pakistan that could threaten the regime. Pakistanis were prepared to accept a degree of unrest in supporting the war but not to push things to the point of endangering the regime.
The Pakistanis thus walked a tightrope between demands they provide intelligence on al Qaeda and Taliban activities and permit U.S. operations in Pakistan on one side and the internal consequences of doing so on the other. The Pakistanis’ policy was to accept a degree of unrest to keep the Americans supporting Pakistan against India, but only to a point. So, for example, the government purged the ISI of its overt supporters of radial Islamism, but it did not purge the ISI wholesale nor did it end informal relations between purged intelligence officers and the ISI. Pakistan thus pursued a policy that did everything to appear to be cooperative while not really meeting American demands.
The Americans were, of course, completely aware of the Pakistani limits and did not ultimately object to this arrangement. The United States did not want a coup in Islamabad, nor did it want massive civil unrest. The United States needed Pakistan on whatever terms the Pakistanis could provide help. It needed the supply line through Pakistan from Karachi to the Khyber Pass. And while it might not get complete intelligence from Pakistan, the intelligence it did get was invaluable. Moreover, while the Pakistanis could not close the Afghan Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, they could limit them and control their operation to some extent. The Americans were as aware as the Pakistanis that the choice was between full and limited cooperation, but could well be between limited and no cooperation, because the government might well not survive full cooperation. The Americans thus took what they could get.
Obviously, this relationship created friction. The Pakistani position was that the United States had helped create this reality in the 1980s and 1990s. The American position was that after 9/11, the price of U.S. support involved the Pakistanis changing their policies. The Pakistanis said there were limits. The Americans agreed, so the fight was about defining the limits.
The Americans felt that the limit was support for al Qaeda. They felt that whatever Pakistan’s relationship with the Afghan Taliban was, support in suppressing al Qaeda, a separate organization, had to be absolute. The Pakistanis agreed in principle but understood that the intelligence on al Qaeda flowed most heavily from those most deeply involved with radical Islamism. In others words, the very people who posed the most substantial danger to Pakistani stability were also the ones with the best intelligence on al Qaeda — and therefore, fulfilling the U.S. demand in principle was desirable. In practice, it proved difficult for Pakistan to carry out.
The Breakpoint and the U.S. Exit From Afghanistan
This proved the breakpoint between the two sides. The Americans accepted the principle of Pakistani duplicity, but drew a line at al Qaeda. The Pakistanis understood American sensibilities but didn’t want to incur the domestic risks of going too far. This psychological breakpoint cracked open on Osama bin Laden, the Holy Grail of American strategy and the third rail of Pakistani policy.
Under normal circumstances, this level of tension of institutionalized duplicity should have blown the U.S.-Pakistani relationship apart, with the United States simply breaking with Pakistan. It did not, and likely will not for a simple geopolitical reason, one that goes back to the 1990s. In the 1990s, when the United States no longer needed to support an intensive covert campaign in Afghanistan, it depended on Pakistan to manage Afghanistan. Pakistan would have done this anyway because it had no choice: Afghanistan was Pakistan’s backdoor, and given tensions with India, Pakistan could not risk instability in its rear. The United States thus did not have to ask Pakistan to take responsibility for Afghanistan.
The United States is now looking for an exit from Afghanistan. Its goal, the creation of a democratic, pro-American Afghanistan able to suppress radical Islamism in its own territory, is unattainable with current forces — and probably unattainable with far larger forces. Gen. David Petraeus, the architect of the Afghan strategy, has been nominated to become the head of the CIA. With Petraeus departing from the Afghan theater, the door is open to a redefinition of Afghan strategy. Despite Pentagon doctrines of long wars, the United States is not going to be in a position to engage in endless combat in Afghanistan. There are other issues in the world that must be addressed. With bin Laden’s death, a plausible (if not wholly convincing) argument can be made that the mission in AfPak, as the Pentagon refers to the theater, has been accomplished, and therefore the United States can withdraw.
No withdrawal strategy is conceivable without a viable Pakistan. Ideally, Pakistan would be willing to send forces into Afghanistan to carry out U.S. strategy. This is unlikely, as the Pakistanis don’t share the American concern for Afghan democracy, nor are they prepared to try directly to impose solutions in Afghanistan. At the same time, Pakistan can’t simply ignore Afghanistan because of its own national security issues, and therefore it will move to stabilize it.
The United States could break with Pakistan and try to handle things on its own in Afghanistan, but the supply line fueling Afghan fighting runs through Pakistan. The alternatives either would see the United States become dependent on Russia — an equally uncertain line of supply — or on the Caspian route, which is insufficient to supply forces. Afghanistan is war at the end of the Earth for the United States, and to fight it, Washington must have Pakistani supply routes.
The United States also needs Pakistan to contain, at least to some extent, Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan. The United States is stretched to the limit doing what it is doing in Afghanistan. Opening a new front in Pakistan, a country of 180 million people, is well beyond the capabilities of either forces in Afghanistan or forces in the U.S. reserves. Therefore, a U.S. break with Pakistan threatens the logistical foundation of the war in Afghanistan and poses strategic challenges U.S. forces cannot cope with.
The American option might be to support a major crisis between Pakistan and India to compel Pakistan to cooperate with the United States. However, it is not clear that India is prepared to play another round in the U.S. game with Pakistan. Moreover, creating a genuine crisis between India and Pakistan could have two outcomes. The first involves the collapse of Pakistan, which would create an India more powerful than the United States might want. The second and more likely outcome would see the creation of a unity government in Pakistan in which distinctions between secularists, moderate Islamists and radical Islamists would be buried under anti-Indian feeling. Doing all of this to deal with Afghan withdrawal would be excessive, even if India played along, and could well prove disastrous for Washington.
Ultimately, the United States cannot change its policy of the last 10 years. During that time, it has come to accept what support the Pakistanis could give and tolerated what was withheld. U.S. dependence on Pakistan so long as Washington is fighting in Afghanistan is significant; the United States has lived with Pakistan’s multitiered policy for a decade because it had to. Nothing in the capture of bin Laden changes the geopolitical realities. So long as the United States wants to wage — or end — a war in Afghanistan, it must have the support of Pakistan to the extent that Pakistan is prepared to provide support. The option of breaking with Pakistan because on some level it is acting in opposition to American interests does not exist.
This is the ultimate contradiction in U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and even the so-called war on terror as a whole. The United States has an absolute opposition to terrorism and has waged a war in Afghanistan on the questionable premise that the tactic of terrorism can be defeated, regardless of source or ideology. Broadly fighting terrorism requires the cooperation of the Muslim world, as U.S. intelligence and power is inherently limited. The Muslim world has an interest in containing terrorism, but not the absolute concern the United States has. Muslim countries are not prepared to destabilize their countries in service to the American imperative. This creates deeper tensions between the United States and the Muslim world and increases the American difficulty in dealing with terrorism — or with Afghanistan.
The United States must either develop the force and intelligence to wage war without any assistance — which is difficult to imagine given the size of the Muslim world and the size of the U.S. military — or it will have to accept half-hearted support and duplicity. Alternatively, it could accept that it will not win in Afghanistan and will not be able simply to eliminate terrorism. These are difficult choices, but the reality of Pakistan drives home that these, in fact, are the choices.
-
Pakistan needs to be made an example of, otherwise the lesson to the world is: Use non-state actors to wage mass-casualty terrorism on America and then fund and shelter the terrorists. The worst thing the US will do is kill the non-state actor and cut some funding.
-
By JAY SOLOMON And ADAM ENTOUS
WASHINGTON—When President Barack Obama lays out his vision for the Middle East in a speech Thursday, he will also be tacitly drawing attention to another upheaval: Tumult in the Arab world has accelerated a shift in the standing of Washington's foreign-policy power players.
The Obama White House has moved to exert greater civilian control over the military, challenging the views of the top brass in some areas, officials say. At the same time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's State Department, together with a more assertive White House National Security Council, has taken a lead in crafting America's response to the greatest geopolitical challenge since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Underscoring this shift is Mr. Obama's choice of venue to deliver the address: the State Department. The address Thursday morning—which is late afternoon, Cairo time—will be the president's first major policy address from the home base of U.S. foreign diplomacy.
The military's standing in the White House reflects lingering tensions with some of Mr. Obama's civilian advisers that grew out of a 2009 debate over escalating the war in Afghanistan, according to senior U.S. officials and foreign diplomats.
When popular revolutions began sweeping the Arab world, many in the military, which has been generally cautious about intervention, were reluctant to see longstanding Arab allies, such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, pushed out.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and many military leaders were also particularly cautious about military action in Libya. Some have taken to calling the Libya campaign the "estrogen war" in an implicit critique of Mrs. Clinton and other female administration officials who backed it.
Mrs. Clinton was also an early voice of caution when it came to Egypt. But she moved more quickly to break with autocrats in Yemen and Libya and push for democratic change in Bahrain, while managing to maintain relationships with unhappy Arab allies, U.S. officials say.
Officials in the State Department and the White House, especially those who backed the use of force in Libya, dismiss the estrogen comment as the sexist grousing of military men who lost the argument.
===================
Managing the Turmoil | Some U.S. responses to Arab uprisings
Egypt State Department and Pentagon joined in urging caution about pushing for President Hosni Mubarak's ouster. On peace with Israel, counterterrorism and hostility to Iran, he was a vital U.S. ally. Having invested decades in building ties to the Egyptian army, Pentagon veterans shared Mrs. Clinton's view.
Bahrain The popular uprising in the tiny Persian Gulf sheikdom concerned U.S. military officials, who were fearful of losing their base for the Pentagon's Fifth Fleet, which polices the Gulf, and worried about what might happen if the regime fell. Mrs. Clinton pushed Bahrain to make political changes, chilling relations with Arab states.
Yemen Mrs. Clinton angered President Ali Abdullah Saleh in January by demanding a meeting with activists. In March, Defense Secretary Gates said the Yemeni leader's fate was 'too soon to call,' and praised his government as an ally against al Qaeda. The White House is now pushing Mr. Saleh to resign sooner rather than later.
======================
Libya Mr. Gates, urged caution when considering military intervention. Pentagon officials worried about the department being overstretched. 'This is not a question of whether we or our allies can do this. We can,' Mr. Gates said. 'The question is whether this is a wise thing to do.' The White House chose to proceed.
."Secretary Clinton has become one of the most forceful officials working on the world stage," says Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), a long-serving member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Her influence with the president has been enhanced by her stature."
The next test is Syria, where officials across the administration worry the fall of President Bashar al-Assad could unleash sectarian violence. Some aides to Mrs. Clinton, however, see the unrest as an unrivaled opportunity to diminish the power of Syria's ally, Iran, and rewrite the politics of the region.
Mr. Obama is expected to argue Thursday that the death of Osama bin Laden, paired with the popular uprisings, signals the possibility of a new, open and democratic opportunity for a region that is largely the province of entrenched autocrats.
Mr. Obama will also announce an economic aid plan focused on Egypt and Tunisia, according to senior administration officials, including $1 billion in debt relief and $1 billion in loan guarantees for Egypt, the creation of an Egyptian-American enterprise fund to help promote private investment, and a framework for strengthening trade.
Mr. Obama will speak from the State Department's Benjamin Franklin Room. White House officials say the setting embodies the policy shift the president is trying to achieve.
Even as the U.S. pursues "principally military and intelligence efforts" to fight terrorism and build toward an exit from Afghanistan, "the longer future in the Middle East we believe will have a huge diplomatic component to it," said White House spokesman Jay Carney.
That puts the military in a bind. Many in the Pentagon ascribe to what Washington policy wonks call the "realist" theory of foreign policy, which believes in narrowly defined international goals, not reshaping the world. "We take countries as they are, not as we might wish they could be," said a senior military officer working on the Middle East.
Mrs. Clinton is no idealist, but she has sought to build the State Department into a powerful base, and in recent months has made common cause with a younger group of more idealistic White House officials, according to U.S. officials. Senior U.S. officials say the eruption of political revolts across the Middle East at the beginning of 2011 blindsided the administration.
Mrs. Clinton was forced to fashion the administration's first response to the crisis literally on the fly as she toured Persian Gulf states. In a speech in Qatar, she stunned Arab leaders by saying they risked "sinking into the sand" if they didn't change course.
During the first act of the Arab Spring, however, the State Department and Pentagon joined in pressing caution, especially with Egypt, a vital U.S. ally.
For Mrs. Clinton, a turning point came with the uprising in Bahrain, home to the Pentagon's Fifth Fleet, which polices the oil-rich Gulf. The Pentagon was fearful of losing its basing rights and worried about what might happen if the regime fell.
Mrs. Clinton pushed Bahrain for political change. That chilled relations to the point that neither Bahrain nor Saudi Arabia directly notified the White House in March before deploying thousands of Saudi and Emirati troops to shore up its ruling family, according to the U.S.
The State Department believed it was within hours of a breakthrough that could have pushed Bahrain closer to a deal with the political opposition. Mrs. Clinton was livid.
It was the decision to attack Libya that laid bare the new dynamic most starkly. Pentagon officials worried out loud that France and Britain were playing down the difficulty of removing Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. They were outspoken about the limited effectiveness of a no-fly zone and skeptical about the impact of financial sanctions.
The White House and State Department, however, were under pressure from European and Arab allies. The U.S. put forth to allied countries and Arab states preconditions to military action that included a United Nations resolution, Arab participation and drawing up a plan that went beyond a no-fly zone.
Some officials worried Col. Gadhafi's troops would slaughter rebel forces, an echo of the violence in Rwanda and Srebrenica that occurred on President Bill Clinton's watch. "Senior officials all agreed to the pillars of our Libya policy," said a senior aide to Mrs. Clinton. "If all of these became available to us, could we really stand aside?"
-
Some distinct gaps here e.g. that candidate BO sedulously worked to undermine the efforts GF sees him as now supporting but as always an interesting analysis:
=========
May 24, 2011 | 0902 GMT
Obama and the Arab Spring
By George Friedman
U.S. President Barack Obama gave a speech last week on the Middle East. Presidents make many speeches. Some are meant to be taken casually, others are made to address an immediate crisis, and still others are intended to be a statement of broad American policy. As in any country, U.S. presidents follow rituals indicating which category their speeches fall into. Obama clearly intended his recent Middle East speech to fall into the last category, as reflecting a shift in strategy if not the declaration of a new doctrine.
While events in the region drove Obama’s speech, politics also played a strong part, as with any presidential speech. Devising and implementing policy are the president’s job. To do so, presidents must be able to lead — and leading requires having public support. After the 2010 election, I said that presidents who lose control of one house of Congress in midterm elections turn to foreign policy because it is a place in which they retain the power to act. The U.S. presidential campaign season has begun, and the United States is engaged in wars that are not going well. Within this framework, Obama thus sought to make both a strategic and a political speech.
Obama’s War Dilemma
The United States is engaged in a broad struggle against jihadists. Specifically, it is engaged in a war in Afghanistan and is in the terminal phase of the Iraq war.
The Afghan war is stalemated. Following the death of Osama bin Laden, Obama said that the Taliban’s forward momentum has been stopped. He did not, however, say that the Taliban is being defeated. Given the state of affairs between the United States and Pakistan following bin Laden’s death, whether the United States can defeat the Taliban remains unclear. It might be able to, but the president must remain open to the possibility that the war will become an extended stalemate.
Meanwhile, U.S. troops are being withdrawn from Iraq, but that does not mean the conflict is over. Instead, the withdrawal has opened the door to Iranian power in Iraq. The Iraqis lack a capable military and security force. Their government is divided and feeble. Meanwhile, the Iranians have had years to infiltrate Iraq. Iranian domination of Iraq would open the door to Iranian power projection throughout the region. Therefore, the United States has proposed keeping U.S. forces in Iraq but has yet to receive Iraq’s approval. If that approval is given (which looks unlikely), Iraqi factions with clout in parliament have threatened to renew the anti-U.S. insurgency.
The United States must therefore consider its actions should the situation in Afghanistan remain indecisive or deteriorate and should Iraq evolve into an Iranian strategic victory. The simple answer — extending the mission in Iraq and increasing forces in Afghanistan — is not viable. The United States could not pacify Iraq with 170,000 troops facing determined opposition, while the 300,000 troops that Chief of Staff of the Army Eric Shinseki argued for in 2003 are not available. Meanwhile, it is difficult to imagine how many troops would be needed to guarantee a military victory in Afghanistan. Such surges are not politically viable, either. After nearly 10 years of indecisive war, the American public has little appetite for increasing troop commitments to either war and has no appetite for conscription.
Obama thus has limited military options on the ground in a situation where conditions in both war zones could deteriorate badly. And his political option — blaming former U.S. President George W. Bush — in due course would wear thin, as Nixon found in blaming Johnson.
The Coalition of the Willing Meets the Arab Spring
For his part, Bush followed a strategy of a coalition of the willing. He understood that the United States could not conduct a war in the region without regional allies, and he therefore recruited a coalition of countries that calculated that radical Islamism represented a profound threat to regime survival. This included Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, and Pakistan. These countries shared a desire to see al Qaeda defeated and a willingness to pool resources and intelligence with the United States to enable Washington to carry the main burden of the war.
This coalition appears to be fraying. Apart from the tensions between the United States and Pakistan, the unrest in the Middle East of the last few months apparently has undermined the legitimacy and survivability of many Arab regimes, including key partners in the so-called coalition of the willing. If these pro-American regimes collapse and are replaced by anti-American regimes, the American position in the region might also collapse.
Obama appears to have reached three conclusions about the Arab Spring:
It represented a genuine and liberal democratic rising that might replace regimes.
American opposition to these risings might result in the emergence of anti-American regimes in these countries.
The United States must embrace the general idea of the Arab risings but be selective in specific cases; thus, it should support the rising in Egypt, but not necessarily in Bahrain.
Though these distinctions may be difficult to justify in intellectual terms, geopolitics is not an abstract exercise. In the real world, supporting regime change in Libya costs the United States relatively little. Supporting an uprising in Egypt could have carried some cost, but not if the military was the midwife to change and is able to maintain control. (Egypt was more an exercise of regime preservation than true regime change.) Supporting regime change in Bahrain, however, would have proved quite costly. Doing so could have seen the United States lose a major naval base in the Persian Gulf and incited spillover Shiite protests in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province.
Moral consistency and geopolitics rarely work neatly together. Moral absolutism is not an option in the Middle East, something Obama recognized. Instead, Obama sought a new basis for tying together the fraying coalition of the willing.
Obama’s Challenge and the Illusory Arab Spring
Obama’s conundrum is that there is still much uncertainty as to whether that coalition would be stronger with current, albeit embattled, regimes or with new regimes that could arise from the so-called Arab Spring. He began to address the problem with an empirical assumption critical to his strategy that in my view is questionable, namely, that there is such a thing as an Arab Spring.
Let me repeat something I have said before: All demonstrations are not revolutions. All revolutions are not democratic revolutions. All democratic revolutions do not lead to constitutional democracy.
The Middle East has seen many demonstrations of late, but that does not make them revolutions. The 300,000 or so demonstrators concentrated mainly in Tahrir Square in Cairo represented a tiny fraction of Egyptian society. However committed and democratic those 300,000 were, the masses of Egyptians did not join them along the lines of what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in Iran in 1979. For all the media attention paid to Egypt’s demonstrators, the most interesting thing in Egypt is not who demonstrated, but the vast majority who did not. Instead, a series of demonstrations gave the Egyptian army cover to carry out what was tantamount to a military coup. The president was removed, but his removal would be difficult to call a revolution.
And where revolutions could be said to have occurred, as in Libya, it is not clear they were democratic revolutions. The forces in eastern Libya remain opaque, and it cannot be assumed their desires represent the will of the majority of Libyans — or that the eastern rebels intend to create, or are capable of creating, a democratic society. They want to get rid of a tyrant, but that doesn’t mean they won’t just create another tyranny.
Then, there are revolutions that genuinely represent the will of the majority, as in Bahrain. Bahrain’s Shiite majority rose up against the Sunni royal family, clearly seeking a regime that truly represents the majority. But it is not at all clear that they want to create a constitutional democracy, or at least not one the United States would recognize as such. Obama said each country can take its own path, but he also made clear that the path could not diverge from basic principles of human rights — in other words, their paths can be different, but they cannot be too different. Assume for the moment that the Bahraini revolution resulted in a democratic Bahrain tightly aligned with Iran and hostile to the United States. Would the United States recognize Bahrain as a satisfactory democratic model?
The central problem from my point of view is that the Arab Spring has consisted of demonstrations of limited influence, in non-democratic revolutions and in revolutions whose supporters would create regimes quite alien from what Washington would see as democratic. There is no single vision to the Arab Spring, and the places where the risings have the most support are the places that will be least democratic, while the places where there is the most democratic focus have the weakest risings.
As important, even if we assume that democratic regimes would emerge, there is no reason to believe they would form a coalition with the United States. In this, Obama seems to side with the neoconservatives, his ideological enemies. Neoconservatives argued that democratic republics have common interests, so not only would they not fight each other, they would band together — hence their rhetoric about creating democracies in the Middle East. Obama seems to have bought into this idea that a truly democratic Egypt would be friendly to the United States and its interests. That may be so, but it is hardly self-evident — and this assumes democracy is a real option in Egypt, which is questionable.
Obama addressed this by saying we must take risks in the short run to be on the right side of history in the long run. The problem embedded in this strategy is that if the United States miscalculates about the long run of history, it might wind up with short-term risks and no long-term payoff. Even if by some extraordinary evolution the Middle East became a genuine democracy, it is the ultimate arrogance to assume that a Muslim country would choose to be allied with the United States. Maybe it would, but Obama and the neoconservatives can’t know that.
But to me, this is an intellectual abstraction. There is no Arab Spring, just some demonstrations accompanied by slaughter and extraordinarily vacuous observers. While the pressures are rising, the demonstrations and risings have so far largely failed, from Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak was replaced by a junta, to Bahrain, where Saudi Arabia by invitation led a contingent of forces to occupy the country, to Syria, where Bashar al Assad continues to slaughter his enemies just like his father did.
A Risky Strategy
Obviously, if Obama is going to call for sweeping change, he must address the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Obama knows this is the graveyard of foreign policy: Presidents who go into this rarely come out well. But any influence he would have with the Arabs would be diminished if he didn’t try. Undoubtedly understanding the futility of the attempt, he went in, trying to reconcile an Israel that has no intention of returning to thegeopolitically vulnerable borders of 1967 with a Hamas with no intention of publicly acknowledging Israel’s right to exist — with Fatah hanging in the middle. By the weekend, the president was doing what he knew he would do and was switching positions.
At no point did Obama address the question of Pakistan and Afghanistan or the key issue: Iran. There can be fantasies about uprisings in Iran, but 2009 was crushed, and no matter what political dissent there is among the elite, a broad-based uprising is unlikely. The question thus becomes how the United States plans to deal with Iran’s emerging power in the region as the United States withdraws from Iraq.
But Obama’s foray into Israeli-Palestinian affairs was not intended to be serious; rather, it was merely a cover for his broader policy to reconstitute a coalition of the willing. While we understand why he wants this broader policy to revive the coalition of the willing, it seems to involve huge risks that could see a diminished or disappeared coalition. He could help bring down pro-American regimes that are repressive and replace them with anti-American regimes that are equally or even more repressive.
If Obama is right that there is a democratic movement in the Muslim world large enough to seize power and create U.S.-friendly regimes, then he has made a wise choice. If he is wrong and the Arab Spring was simply unrest leading nowhere, then he risks the coalition he has by alienating regimes in places like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia without gaining either democracy or friends.
-
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2011/05/29/
-
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2011/05/29/
Remember when Obama was going to rebuild America's relationships in the world?
As has been pointed out many times, every Obama promise comes with an expiration date.
-
By MARK HELPRIN
Largely out of touch with the tragedies of war, America sends often principled and self-sacrificing volunteers to suffer and die in our behalf. We call them heroes and salve our consciences in a froth of words. Or, among those of us who will fight only if the Taliban come to Beverly Hills, and probably not even then, congratulate ourselves for being intelligent enough not to volunteer. Then we go about our business, either satisfied that we are appropriately patriotic or assuming that as we face only imagined dangers we need not lose sleep over the unfortunates who pursue them, often unto death, leaving behind broken and grieving families who suffer a pain that never goes away.
On Memorial Day, we pause at the graves of lost soldiers and make speeches that sometimes open to view the heartbreak and love that are their last traces. But this is not enough, because they do not hear, and because those who will have followed in the years to come will not hear. Love is not enough, rationalization not enough, commemoration a thin and insufficient offering. The only just memorial to those who went forth and died for us, and who therefore question us eternally, cannot be of stone or steel or time set aside for speeches and picnics.
We should offer instead a memorial, never ending, of probity and preparation, shared sacrifice, continuing resolve, and the clarity the nation once had in regard to how, where, when, and when not to go to war. This is the least we can do both for America and for the troops we dispatch into worlds of sorrow and death. Once, it came naturally, but no longer, and it must be restored.
First, and despite the times, is the demonstrable fact that throttling defense in the name of economy is economical neither in the long nor the short run. Not if you count the cost of avoidable wars undeterred. Not if you count the cost of major world realignments that lead to overt challenges and adventures. Not if you count the cost—in money, division, demoralization, decline, death, and grief—of lost wars. Is there any doubt that a relatively minor expenditure of money and courage could have kept Germany in its place and prevented the incalculable cost of World War II?
A public that otherwise professes deep loyalty to its troops is in the name of economy stripping down their equipment and resources, making it more likely that they will fight future battles against forces both gratuitously undeterred and against which they may not prevail. This is short sighted, tragic, hardly a memorial, and in fact an irony, in that other than in redeploying a portion of our wealth from luxury to security, military spending has always been a spur to the economy, as history demonstrates and every member of Congress with military facilities or manufactures in his district knows.
Nonetheless, the greatest economy—of lives, money, strategy—is found in neither the diminution nor the accretion of forces but in the wisdom and precision of their deployment and the adoption of feasible goals. It is neither possible nor desirable to build nations while simultaneously trying to conquer them with inadequate force. (Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, the oft-mentioned counter examples of Germany and Japan had been decisively defeated and were heirs to different traditions of governance.)
And what opponents of the United States could not be delighted that the current administration, in the name of unrealizable ideals, has made a project of destabilizing the whole world by abandoning friendly countries and allies because it is too delicate and self-concerned to tolerate that they are at times unsavory? President Obama would undoubtedly praise this in FDR, but apparently to him the co-operative states and allies he has undermined are neither as warm nor as fuzzy as Stalin.
When in defense of our essential interests we do go to war, not only must we carefully determine war aims—and thus dictate to the enemy the time, place, and nature of battle rather than chasing him into the briar patch of his choosing—but we must accomplish them massively, overwhelmingly, decisively, and, if necessary, ruthlessly. For anything other than minor operations this requires the consent of Congress, a declaration of war, and the clear statement and unflinching prosecution of our objectives. Rapid shocks cost less in lives, ours and theirs, than wars that drag inconclusively for a decade. We must make our enemies understand at the deepest level of apprehension that if we are attacked we will be quick and they will be dead.
We can construct a genuine memorial to the patriot graves in Arlington and thousands of other cemeteries only if we abandon the many illusory and destructive assumptions with which the weakness of the present will burden the future.
We will fail to assure the national security if we assume that we will not be drawn into two wars at once; if we do not provide a surplus of material power; if we believe that "conventional" war is a thing of the past; if in the name of false economy we do not apply our full technological potential to our arsenals; if we imagine that technological advance will carry the day in the absence of strategic clarity and the proven principles of warfare; if we make the armed forces a laboratory for the hobby horses of progressivism; and if our political leaders, very few of whom have studied much less known war, commit our troops promiscuously, in service to tangential ideology, with scatterbrained objectives, and without what Winston Churchill called the "continual stress of soul" necessary for proper decision.
Only the dead have seen the end of war, which will not be eradicated but must be suppressed, managed, and minimized. This cannot be accomplished in the absence of resolution, vigilance, and sacrifice. These are the only fitting memorials to the long ranks of the dead, and what we owe to those who in the absence of our care and devotion are sure to join them.
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among
-
Gates and the Pacific: A Historical Strategic Priority
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates left Hawaii for Singapore on Wednesday, bound for the 10th annual Asia Security Summit in Singapore — his last foreign trip before he leaves office at the end of the month. While in Hawaii, Gates signaled that at the summit he will emphasize the long-standing American commitment to the region: “We are a Pacific nation. We will remain a Pacific nation. We will remain engaged.”
This statement does more than reassure allies in the region at a time of personnel transition. It reflects the United States’ historical strategic commitments in the region. As an economic power, American commerce is closely tied to the world’s second- and third-largest economies — China and Japan. As a maritime power, the U.S. Navy has shifted more of its focus to East Asian waters. But while the importance of the Pacific region has grown since the Cold War, it has long been of foundational, fundamental importance to American geopolitical security and grand strategy.
“Rare is the country that does not see its relationship with Washington as at least a hedge against a rising and more assertive Beijing.”
When Gates called the United States “a Pacific nation” Tuesday, he was at the USS Missouri (BB 63), one of the last battleships the Americans built and now a museum at Pearl Harbor. Built and commissioned during World War II, the Missouri shelled Iwo Jima and Okinawa as the United States closed in on the Japanese home islands, and later provided fire support to troops in Korea. Indeed, some 50 years prior to the Missouri’s commissioning, U.S. naval officers began crafting and refining a plan to defeat “orange” — a notional adversary representing imperial Japan. For half a century, debates raged over the defensibility of Guam and ports in the Philippines, over the speed at which a fleet could be assembled to sail for the western Pacific, and what would be required to sustain it in extended combat.
Now, Gates travels to a region that has been neglected amid distraction for the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. He travels to a region where, since Washington’s focus waned following 9/11, North Korea has tested crude atomic devices and China has made enormous strides in building a modern military — including anti-ship ballistic missiles intended to target American aircraft carriers at a range of thousands of kilometers. The status of an American air station on Okinawa has faced intense debate and South Korea is uncomfortable with American deference to China in the midst of North Korean aggression.
But Gates is also visiting a region that has been a strategic U.S. priority since the 19th century — and a theater where the country has long worked to strengthen its position. It was no mistake that the Americans forced Spain to surrender Guam and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, nor was the domination and ultimate annexation of Hawaii or the deployment of U.S. Marines to Beijing a product of happenstance. The result a century later is a robust foundation for American national power in the region.
In terms of commerce, the region’s economic bonds with the American economy continue to grow. In terms of military presence, while the United States may have some operational challenges in certain scenarios, it can call on allies from Australia to Japan and has sovereign-basing options in Hawaii and Guam. Politically, rare is the country that does not see its relationship with Washington as at least a hedge against a rising and more assertive Beijing, particularly as China asserts its maritime claims in the South China Sea. And, it is a region of powerful intra-regional tensions. Countries are more likely to distrust the intentions of those that border them than to share a powerful alliance with them. Even in the absence of deeply entrenched alliances with Australia, Japan and South Korea (not to mention other ties, such as the Philippines on counterterrorism, or with Taiwan, which depends on U.S. military armaments), this patchwork of regional tensions provides considerable flexibility to Washington, allowing it a number of scenarios to play a spoiling role and frustrate the emergence of a single regional hegemon.
-
BRUSSELS—Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a blunt critique of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Friday, arguing the Libya operations demonstrated America's allies suffered from serious gaps in military capabilities because of their failure to spend enough on their own defense.
One of the NATO's most ardent defenders and pointed critics, the outgoing U.S. defense chief scathingly accused Europe of behaving increasingly like a free rider, as budget cuts eat deeper into military spending.
View Full Image
America's European allies, Mr. Gates said, are "apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets."
Although the Libya mission has met its initial military objectives of grounding the Libyan air force and eroding Col. Moammar Gadhafi's ability to mount attacks on his own citizens, the operations have exposed weaknesses in the alliance, Mr. Gates said. While all members of the 28-nation alliance approved the Libya mission, fewer than half are participating, and even a smaller fraction are conducting air-to-ground strike missions.
"Frankly, many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they can't. The military capabilities simply aren't there," he said.
Journal Community
On the day of his speech, Norway—one of just seven NATO nations contributing ground-strike aircraft to the Libya campaign—announced it would pull out of the operation on Aug. 1 and, in the meantime, reduce the number of its strike fighters to four from six.
Norway's Defense Minister Grete Faremo said she expected understanding from allies, because the country's small air force couldn't maintain a large fighter-jet contribution over an extended period.
Norway, along with Denmark, has been praised by U.S. officials for pulling more than its weight over Libya. The two countries have provided 12% of allied strike aircraft yet have struck about one-third of the targets, Mr. Gates said.
In a private meeting with NATO defense ministers Wednesday, Mr. Gates identified Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands as countries that should contribute more to the Libya mission, and urged Germany and Poland, which have so far not contributed, to join the fight.
More
Full Text: Gates's speech on NATO
Dozens Die in Fresh Gadhafi Offensive
NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has expressed his own fears about other allies falling further behind the U.S. and being dependent on American technology. But he was confident allies would provide what was necessary to fulfill the Libya mission, she said.
A spokeswoman for Germany's foreign service said the country makes a considerable contribution to NATO and to NATO-led operations. She said the "large German engagement" in Afghanistan and elsewhere was explicitly praised by President Barack Obama when he met Chancellor Angela Merkel in Washington on June 7.
Officials from the U.K., which has the second-largest defense budget in NATO, said they didn't believe Mr. Gates's comments were directed at them. Nonetheless, U.S. officials have expressed disappointment at a 7.5% cut to defense spending in coming years.
British Defence Secretary Liam Fox has echoed some of Mr. Gates's views, saying other countries are relying too much on a few countries, particularly the U.K. and France, in Libya.
View Full Image
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert delivered a speech in Brussels Friday.
French and British officials have spoken of a three-tier alliance—with the U.S. far ahead of the second tier of Britain and France, and the rest way behind them.
Mr. Gates said he had long worried NATO was developing into a tiered alliance, divided between countries willing to bear the burden of military operations and those who "enjoy the benefits" but won't share the costs. "This is no longer a hypothetical worry," he said. "We are there today. And it is unacceptable."
Mr. Gates blasted the alliance for failing to develop intelligence and reconnaissance assets, forcing NATO to rely on American capabilities to develop targeting lists. "The most advanced fighter aircraft are little use if allies do not have the means to identify, process and strike targets as part of an integrated campaign," Mr. Gates said.
In addition, he said, even in a campaign against a "poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country" allies began running short on munitions after just 11 weeks, forcing the U.S. to step in and help.
NATO officials said ammunition shortages hadn't affected the campaign.
Mr. Gates said the alliance had outperformed his expectations in Afghanistan. But even in the face of increased operations there, NATO defense budgets have fallen, forcing allies to put off critical modernization programs. In the 10 years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. defense spending doubled. European defense spending, Mr. Gates said, fell by 15%. NATO members are supposed to spend 2% of their GDP on defense, but only five of the 28 allies meet that target.
In a question-and-answer session after the speech, Mr. Gates said historical attachments U.S. leaders have had to NATO are "aging out."
"Decisions and choices are going to be made more on what is in the best interest of the United States going forward," he said.
-
The LA Times gets a lot of bad press on this forum, but I think lately they have been trying to represent both sides of many important issues.
One example is two articles presented side by side in the printed newspaper on the establishment of a Palestinian State. John Bolton writing one side.
Regardless of your viewpoint, I think it is helpful to hear and read both to better understand the issues.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-marzook-palestine-20110612,0,4707176.story
-
Well, nice to see Bolton get it right in his customarily pithy manner, and what a disingenous lying sack of excrement the Hamas guy is.
-
While this could be posted in the Afpakia thread I am posting it here because of its focus on the larger international context. IMHO it would be a better piece if it included more analysis of what happens as we leave.
=========
STRATFOR
---------------------------
June 18, 2011
THE WITHDRAWAL DEBATE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
U.S. President Barack Obama met with the outgoing commander of U.S. forces in
Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, and Obama's national security team Thursday to
review the status of the counterinsurgency-focused campaign. At the center of the
discussion was next month's deadline for a drawdown of forces, set by Obama when he
committed 30,000 additional troops at the end of 2009. An announcement on this
initial drawdown is expected within weeks.
The ballpark figure of this first reduction is said to be on the order of 30,000
U.S. troops -- mirroring the 2009 surge -- over the next 12-18 months. This would
leave some 70,000 U.S. troops, plus allied forces, in the country. Any reduction
will ostensibly be founded on oft-cited "conditions-based" decisions by military
commanders, though ultimate authority remains with the White House.
Far more interesting are the rumors -- coming from STRATFOR sources, among many
others -- suggesting that the impending White House announcement will spell out not
only the anticipated reduction, but a restatement of the strategy and objectives of
the war effort (and by implication, the scale and duration of the commitment of
forces and resources). The stage has certainly been set with the killing of Osama
bin Laden, the single most wanted individual in the American war on terror, and the
shuffling of Petraeus, the counterinsurgency-focused strategy’s principal architect
and most ardent defender, to the CIA.
Nearly 150,000 troops cannot and will not be suddenly extracted from landlocked
Central Asia in short order. Whatever the case, a full drawdown is at best years
away. And even with a fundamental shift in strategy, some sort of training,
advising, intelligence and particularly, special-operations presence, could well
remain in the country far beyond the deadline for the end of combat operations,
currently set for the end of 2014.
But a change in strategy could quickly bear significant repercussions, particularly
if a drawdown begins to accelerate more rapidly than originally planned. Even the
most committed allies to the war in Afghanistan are there to support the United
States, often in pursuit of their own political aims, which may be only obliquely
related to anything happening in Afghanistan. While there may not be a rush for the
exit, most are weary and anxious for the war to end. Any prospect of a more rapid
withdrawal will certainly be welcomed news to American allies. (Recall the rapid
dwindling, in the latter years of the Iraq war, of the "coalition of the willing,"
which, aside from a company of British trainers, effectively became a coalition of
one by mid-2009.)
"For Washington, the imperative is to extract itself from these wars and focus its
attention on more pressing and significant geopolitical challenges. For the rest of
the world, the concern is that it might succeed sooner than expected."
More important will be regional repercussions. India will be concerned that a U.S.
withdrawal will leave Washington more dependent on Islamabad to manage Afghanistan
in the long run, thereby strengthening India’s rival to the north. India's concern
over Islamist militancy will only grow. Pakistan's concerns, meanwhile, are far more
fundamental. Afghanistan, on one hand, could provide some semblance of strategic
depth to the rear that the country sorely lacks to the front. On the other hand, it
offers a potential foothold to any potential aggressor, from India to Islamist
militants, intent on striking at the country’s core. Meanwhile, Iran -- though
geographically buffered in comparison to Pakistan -- has its own concerns about
cross-border militancy, particularly regarding the Baloch insurgency within its own
borders. And this, of course, intersects the larger American-Iranian struggle.
Concern about militancy abounds. Potential spillover of militancy in the absence of
a massive American and allied military presence in Afghanistan affects all bordering
countries. Even in the best case scenario, from a regional perspective, a
deterioration of security conditions can be expected to accompany any U.S. drawdown.
The presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan acts as a magnet for all manner of
regional militant entities, though Pakistan has already begun to feel the spillover
effects from the conflict in Afghanistan in the form of the Tehrik-i-Taliban, the
Pakistani version of the Taliban phenomenon, along with an entire playbill of other
militant actors. The presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan consumes much of
those militants’ efforts and strength. As the attraction and pressure of foreign
troops begin to lift, some battle-hardened militants will begin to move homeward or
toward the next perceived frontline, where they can turn their refined operational
skill on new foes.
Others, like Russia, will be concerned about an expansion of the already enormous
flow of Afghan poppy-based opiates into their country. From Moscow’s perspective,
counternarcotics efforts are already insufficient, as they have been sacrificed for
more pressing operational needs, and are likely to further decline as the United
States and its allies begin to extricate themselves from this conflict.
Domestically, Afghanistan is a fractious country. The infighting and civil war that
followed the Soviet withdrawal ultimately killed more Afghans than the Soviets'
scorched-earth policy did over the course of nearly a decade. Much will rest on
whatever political accommodation can be reached between Kabul, Islamabad and the
Taliban as the Americans and their allies shape the political circumstances of their
withdrawal. The durability of that political accommodation will be another question
entirely.
But ultimately, for the last decade, the international system has been defined by a
United States bogged down in two wars in Asia. For Washington, the imperative is to
extract itself from these wars and focus its attention on more pressing and
significant geopolitical challenges. For the rest of the world, the concern is that
it might succeed sooner than expected.
Copyright 2011 STRATFOR.
-
Posted: June 18, 2011
12:40 am Eastern
By Aaron Klein
© 2011 WND
Leon Panetta
CIA Director Leon Panetta, President Obama's nominee to serve as secretary of defense, keynoted the conference of a pro-Soviet, anti-war group during the height of the Cold War.
Panetta also honored the founding member of the group, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF, which was once named by the State Department as a "Soviet front."
On April 11, 1984, Panetta, then a California congressman, entered into the congressional record a tribute in honor of WILPF's founding member, Lucy Haessler.
Find out what's needed to restore America to greatness.
In the record, Panetta praised Haessler as "one of the most dedicated peace activists I have ever known."
Panetta recognized that Haessler traveled to the Soviet Union as a member of the WILPF:
"She has also participated in peace conferences conducted by WILPF and the Woman's International Democracy Foundation in France, the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany," read Panetta's congressional praise.
Panetta hailed Haessler for her activism against the pending deployment of U.S. missiles to counter the Soviet build up:
"She joined thousands of dedicated peace activists where she expressed her concern about the impending deployment of Cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles in Europe," he noted.
Haessler's WILPF took on a pro-Soviet stance. It sponsored frequent exchange visits with the Soviet Women's Committee and against "anti-Sovietism" while calling for President Reagan to "Stop the Arms Race."
Panetta's relationship with Haessler and the WILPF goes back to at least June 1979, when was the keynote speaker of WILPF's Biennial Conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The conference was arranged by Haessler.
WILPF's literature notes the conference honored Ava and Linus Pauling, who were prominent supports of ending nuclear proliferation.
"This successful event elevated Santa Cruz WILPF permanently into the orbit of outstanding WILPF conferences," recalled WILPF life member Ruth Hunter in a tribute to Haessler.
Haessler, meanwhile, was aligned with communist activists. KeyWiki notes that in April 1966, Haessler sponsored a testimonial dinner in New York in honor of pro-communist scientist Herbert Aptheker.
The dinner also marked the second anniversary of the American Institute for Marxist Studies. Most speakers, organizers and sponsors were known members or supporters of the Communist Party USA.
Panetta later stated he was not aware of the WILPF's communist background and was merely praising Haessler's anti-war actions.
The background is the latest concern following Panetta's nomination for Defense Department chief.
Yesterday, WND reported Panetta once proposed allowing Congress to conduct spot checks at its discretion of the country's sensitive intelligence agency.
In 1987, Panetta as a congressman introduced the CIA Accountability Act, which would have made the CIA subject to audits by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Panetta's legislation would have allowed the comptroller general, who directs the GAO, to audit any financial transactions of the CIA and evaluate all of the agency's activities either at his own initiative or at the request of the congressional intelligence committees.
The CIA is the only government agency that contests the authority of the comptroller general to audit its activities, citing the covert aspects of its operation.
Marxist think tank
Earlier this week, WND reported on Panetta's ties to a pro-Marxist think tank accused of anti-CIA activity.
The Institute for Policy Studies, or IPS, has long faced criticism for positions some say attempt to undermine U.S. national security and for its cozy relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
A review of the voting record for Panetta, a member of Congress from 1977 to 1993, during the period in question shows an apparent affinity toward IPS's agenda.
The IPS is funded by philanthropist George Soros' Open Society Institute.
Panetta was reportedly on IPS's official 20th Anniversary Committee, celebrated April 5, 1983, at a time when the group was closely aligned with the Soviet Union.
In his authoritative book "Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies," S. Steven Powell writes: "April 5, 1983, IPS threw a large twentieth-anniversary celebration to raise funds.
"On the fundraising committee for the event were 14 then-current members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including "Leon E. Panetta (D-Calif.), chairman of Budget Process Task Force of the House Committee on Budget (chairman of Subcommittee on Police and Personnel, Ninety-ninth Congress)."
Researcher Trevor Loudon, a specialist on communism, obtained and posted IPS literature documenting members of the 20th Anniversary Committee, which also included Sens. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Gary Hart, D-Colo., with an endorsement by Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore.
Besides Panetta, congressmen on the IPS committee included Les Aspin, D-Wis., George E Brown Jr., D-Calif., Philip Burton, D-Calif., George Crockett, D-Mich., Tom Harkin, D-Iowa and Richard Ottinger, D-N.Y. Besides serving on the IPS committee, Panetta supported the IPS's "Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy Line" in 1983.
Powell wrote that in the 1980s, Panetta commissioned the IPS to produce an "alternative" budget that dramatically cut defense spending.
"The congressional supporters for the Institute for Policy Studies included many of those who biennially commission I.P.S. to produce an 'Alternative' Budget that dramatically cuts defense spending while increasing the spending for social welfare to levels only dreamed of by Karl Marx," wrote Powell in the November 1983 issue of the American Opinion.
"In this pact of I.P.S. intimates [are] such luminaries as ... Leon Panetta (D.-California), Chairman of the Budget Process Task Force," wrote Powell.
Congressional record
Panetta's ties to the IPS have some worried.
"Members of the mainstream news media seem to have no interest in Leon Panetta's past open involvement with the Institute for Policy Studies, an anti-CIA think tank closely linked to the former Soviet Union's KGB spy agency. But they should," writes blogger and former Air Force public affairs officer Bob McCarty.
Writing in the New American earlier this month, Christian Gomez notes, "Careful observation of former Rep. Panetta's record in the U.S. House of Representatives reveals a history of votes perceivable as in contrast with U.S. national security objectives, which if confirmed as Sec. of Defense may compromise U.S. national defense."
Indeed, as Gomez outlined, Panetta voted against the reaffirmation of the Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan and in support of continuing foreign aid to the Sandinista government of communist Nicaragua.
The lawmaker supported extending most-favored nation status to the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states during the height of the Cold War and voted to cede control of the Panama Canal to the pro-Soviet Panamanian government.
Panetta also vocally supported various communist regimes throughout Latin America as well as Soviet-backed paramilitary groups in the region.
He endorsed the IPS-supported bill H.R. 2760, known as the Boland-Zablocki bill, to terminate U.S. efforts to resist communism in Nicaragua.
Panetta slammed what he called President Ronald Reagan's "illegal and extraordinary vicious wars against the poor of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala."
Panetta supported the Soviet satellite government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and was a vocal opponent of Chile's anti-communist government.
On July 19, 1983, on the floor of the House, Panetta condemned what he called the "U.S.-sponsored covert action against Nicaragua," stating that it was "among the most dangerous aspects of the (Reagan]) administration's policy in Central America."
Soviet agents, propaganda
The IPS, meanwhile, has long maintained controversial views and a pro-Marxist line on foreign policy. It was founded in 1963 by two former governmental workers, Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet.
In his 1988 book "Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today," Harvey Klehr, professor of politics and history at EmoryUniversity, said that IPS "serves as an intellectual nerve center for the radical movement, ranging from nuclear and anti-intervention issues to support for Marxist insurgencies."
The FBI labeled the group a "think factory" that helps to "train extremists who incite violence in U.S. cities, and whose educational research serves as a cover for intrigue, and political agitation."
The IPS has been accused serving as a propaganda arm of the USSR and even a place where agents from the Soviet embassy in Washington came to convene and strategize.
In his book "The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View," Ladislav Bittman, a former KGB agent, called the IPS a Soviet misinformation operation at which Soviet insiders worked.
Brian Crozier, director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, described IPS as the "perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB."
The IPS has been implicated in anti-CIA activity. The Center for Security Studies was a 1974 IPS spin-off and sought to compromise the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence agencies, according to Discover the Networks.
The mastheads of two anti-FBI and anti-CIA publications, Counterspy and the Covert Action Information Bulletin, were heavy with IPS members.
Further, the group's former director, Robert Borosage, penned a book shortly out of college attacking the CIA and ran the so-called CIA watchdog, Center for National Security Studies.
The group has been particularly concerned with researching U.S. defense industries and arms sales policies. .
In March 1982, IPS's Arms Race and Nuclear Weapons Project was directed by Bill Arkin, who had been compiling a book of U.S. nuclear weapons data with "everything from where the bombs are stored to where weapons delivery systems are cooked up," according to KeyWiki.
With research by Brenda J. Ellison
-
Haven't had a chance to watch this yet-- it is 35 minutes long-- but it is Allen West, so it promises to be lively :wink:
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p18753.xml
-
I agree with Crafty that separate from the context of the campaign we should discuss and argue this from a policy point of view. He basically argued these same (hawkish) points in rebuttal to Ron Paul in the NH debate - in the 60 seconds provided.
-------------------
Gov. Tim Pawlenty at the Council on Foreign Affairs, 6/28/11: (Link at the end)
I want to speak plainly this morning about the opportunities and the dangers we face today in the Middle East. The revolutions now roiling that region offer the promise of a more democratic, more open, and a more prosperous Arab world. From Morocco to the Arabian Gulf, the escape from the dead hand of oppression is now a real possibility.
Now is not the time to retreat from freedom’s rise.
Yet at the same time, we know these revolutions can bring to power forces that are neither democratic nor forward-looking. Just as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and elsewhere see a chance for a better life of genuine freedom, the leaders of radical Islam see a chance to ride political turmoil into power.
The United States has a vital stake in the future of this region. We have been presented with a challenge as great as any we have faced in recent decades. And we must get it right. The question is, are we up to the challenge?
My answer is, of course we are. If we are clear about our interests and guided by our principles, we can help steer events in the right direction. Our nation has done this in the past -- at the end of World War II, in the last decade of the Cold War, and in the more recent war on terror … and we can do it again.
But President Obama has failed to formulate and carry out an effective and coherent strategy in response to these events. He has been timid, slow, and too often without a clear understanding of our interests or a clear commitment to our principles.
And parts of the Republican Party now seem to be trying to out-bid the Democrats in appealing to isolationist sentiments. This is no time for uncertain leadership in either party. The stakes are simply too high, and the opportunity is simply too great.
No one in this Administration predicted the events of the Arab spring - but the freedom deficit in the Arab world was no secret. For 60 years, Western nations excused and accommodated the lack of freedom in the Middle East. That could not last. The days of comfortable private deals with dictators were coming to an end in the age of Twitter, You Tube, and Facebook. And history teaches there is no such thing as stable oppression.
President Obama has ignored that lesson of history. Instead of promoting democracy – whose fruit we see now ripening across the region – he adopted a murky policy he called “engagement.”
“Engagement” meant that in 2009, when the Iranian ayatollahs stole an election, and the people of that country rose up in protest, President Obama held his tongue. His silence validated the mullahs, despite the blood on their hands and the nuclear centrifuges in their tunnels.
While protesters were killed and tortured, Secretary Clinton said the Administration was “waiting to see the outcome of the internal Iranian processes.” She and the president waited long enough to see the Green Movement crushed.
“Engagement” meant that in his first year in office, President Obama cut democracy funding for Egyptian civil society by 74 percent. As one American democracy organization noted, this was “perceived by Egyptian democracy activists as signaling a lack of support.” They perceived correctly. It was a lack of support.
“Engagement” meant that when crisis erupted in Cairo this year, as tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Tahrir Square, Secretary Clinton declared, “the Egyptian Government is stable.” Two weeks later, Mubarak was gone. When Secretary Clinton visited Cairo after Mubarak’s fall, democratic activist groups refused to meet with her. And who can blame them?
The forces we now need to succeed in Egypt -- the pro-democracy, secular political parties -- these are the very people President Obama cut off, and Secretary Clinton dismissed.
The Obama “engagement” policy in Syria led the Administration to call Bashar al Assad a “reformer.” Even as Assad’s regime was shooting hundreds of protesters dead in the street, President Obama announced his plan to give Assad “an alternative vision of himself.” Does anyone outside a therapist’s office have any idea what that means? This is what passes for moral clarity in the Obama Administration.
By contrast, I called for Assad’s departure on March 29; I call for it again today. We should recall our ambassador from Damascus; and I call for that again today. The leader of the United States should never leave those willing to sacrifice their lives in the cause of freedom wondering where America stands. As President, I will not.
We need a president who fully understands that America never “leads from behind.”
We cannot underestimate how pivotal this moment is in Middle Eastern history. We need decisive, clear-eyed leadership that is responsive to this historical moment of change in ways that are consistent with our deepest principles and safeguards our vital interests.
Opportunity still exists amid the turmoil of the Arab Spring -- and we should seize it.
As I see it, the governments of the Middle East fall into four broad categories, and each requires a different strategic approach.
The first category consists of three countries now at various stages of transition toward democracy – the formerly fake republics in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Iraq is also in this category, but is further along on its journey toward democracy.
For these countries, our goal should be to help promote freedom and democracy.
Elections that produce anti-democratic regimes undermine both freedom and stability. We must do more than monitor polling places. We must redirect foreign aid away from efforts to merely build good will, and toward efforts to build good allies -- genuine democracies governed by free people according to the rule of law. And we must insist that our international partners get off the sidelines and do the same.
We should have no illusions about the difficulty of the transitions faced by Libya, Tunisia, and especially Egypt. Whereas Libya is rich in oil, and Tunisia is small, Egypt is large, populous, and poor. Among the region’s emerging democracies, it remains the biggest opportunity and the biggest danger for American interests.
Having ejected the Mubarak regime, too many Egyptians are now rejecting the beginnings of the economic opening engineered in the last decade. We act out of friendship when we tell Egyptians, and every new democracy, that economic growth and prosperity are the result of free markets and free trade—not subsidies and foreign aid. If we want these countries to succeed, we must afford them the respect of telling them the truth.
In Libya, the best help America can provide to these new friends is to stop leading from behind and commit America’s strength to removing Ghadafi, recognizing the TNC as the government of Libya, and unfreezing assets so the TNC can afford security and essential services as it marches toward Tripoli.
Beyond Libya, America should always promote the universal principles that undergird freedom. We should press new friends to end discrimination against women, to establish independent courts, and freedom of speech and the press. We must insist on religious freedoms for all, including the region’s minorities—whether Christian, Shia, Sunni, or Bahai.
The second category of states is the Arab monarchies. Some – like Jordan and Morocco – are engaging now in what looks like genuine reform. This should earn our praise and our assistance. These kings have understood they must forge a partnership with their own people, leading step by step toward more democratic societies. These monarchies can smooth the path to constitutional reform and freedom and thereby deepen their own legitimacy. If they choose this route, they, too, deserve our help.
But others are resisting reform. While President Obama spoke well about Bahrain in his recent speech, he neglected to utter two important words: Saudi Arabia.
US-Saudi relations are at an all-time low—and not primarily because of the Arab Spring. They were going downhill fast, long before the uprisings began. The Saudis saw an American Administration yearning to engage Iran—just at the time they saw Iran, correctly, as a mortal enemy.
We need to tell the Saudis what we think, which will only be effective if we have a position of trust with them. We will develop that trust by demonstrating that we share their great concern about Iran and that we are committed to doing all that is necessary to defend the region from Iranian aggression.
At the same time, we need to be frank about what the Saudis must do to insure stability in their own country. Above all, they need to reform and open their society. Their treatment of Christians and other minorities, and their treatment of women, is indefensible and must change.
We know that reform will come to Saudi Arabia—sooner and more smoothly if the royal family accepts and designs it. It will come later and with turbulence and even violence if they resist. The vast wealth of their country should be used to support reforms that fit Saudi history and culture—but not to buy off the people as a substitute for lasting reform.
The third category consists of states that are directly hostile to America. They include Iran and Syria. The Arab Spring has already vastly undermined the appeal of Al Qaeda and the killing of Osama Bin Laden has significantly weakened it.
The success of peaceful protests in several Arab countries has shown the world that terror is not only evil, but will eventually be overcome by good. Peaceful protests may soon bring down the Assad regime in Syria. The 2009 protests in Iran inspired Arabs to seek their freedom. Similarly, the Arab protests of this year, and the fall of regime after broken regime, can inspire Iranians to seek their freedom once again.
We have a clear interest in seeing an end to Assad’s murderous regime. By sticking to Bashar al Assad so long, the Obama Administration has not only frustrated Syrians who are fighting for freedom—it has demonstrated strategic blindness. The governments of Iran and Syria are enemies of the United States. They are not reformers and never will be. They support each other. To weaken or replace one, is to weaken or replace the other.
The fall of the Assad mafia in Damascus would weaken Hamas, which is headquartered there. It would weaken Hezbollah, which gets its arms from Iran, through Syria. And it would weaken the Iranian regime itself.
To take advantage of this moment, we should press every diplomatic and economic channel to bring the Assad reign of terror to an end. We need more forceful sanctions to persuade Syria’s Sunni business elite that Assad is too expensive to keep backing. We need to work with Turkey and the Arab nations and the Europeans, to further isolate the regime. And we need to encourage opponents of the regime by making our own position very clear, right now: Bashar al-Assad must go.
When he does, the mullahs of Iran will find themselves isolated and vulnerable. Syria is Iran’s only Arab ally. If we peel that away, I believe it will hasten the fall of the mullahs. And that is the ultimate goal we must pursue. It’s the singular opportunity offered to the world by the brave men and women of the Arab Spring.
The march of freedom in the Middle East cuts across the region’s diversity of religious, ethnic, and political groups. But it is born of a particular unity. It is a united front against stolen elections and stolen liberty, secret police, corruption, and the state-sanctioned violence that is the essence of the Iranian regime’s tyranny.
So this is a moment to ratchet up pressure and speak with clarity. More sanctions. More and better broadcasting into Iran. More assistance to Iranians to access the Internet and satellite TV and the knowledge and freedom that comes with it. More efforts to expose the vicious repression inside that country and expose Teheran’s regime for the pariah it is.
And, very critically, we must have more clarity when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama told AIPAC that he would “always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.” This year, he told AIPAC “we remain committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.” So I have to ask: are all the options still on the table or not? If he’s not clear with us, it’s no wonder that even our closest allies are confused.
The Administration should enforce all sanctions for which legal authority already exits. We should enact and then enforce new pending legislation which strengthens sanctions particularly against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who control much of the Iranian economy.
And in the middle of all this, is Israel.
Israel is unique in the region because of what it stands for and what it has accomplished. And it is unique in the threat it faces—the threat of annihilation. It has long been a bastion of democracy in a region of tyranny and violence. And it is by far our closest ally in that part of the world.
Despite wars and terrorists attacks, Israel offers all its citizens, men and women, Jews, Christians, Muslims and, others including 1.5 million Arabs, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to vote, access to independent courts and all other democratic rights.
Nowhere has President Obama’s lack of judgment been more stunning than in his dealings with Israel.
It breaks my heart that President Obama treats Israel, our great friend, as a problem, rather than as an ally. The President seems to genuinely believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies at the heart of every problem in the Middle East. He said it Cairo in 2009 and again this year.
President Obama could not be more wrong.
The uprisings in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli and elsewhere are not about Israelis and Palestinians. They’re about oppressed people yearning for freedom and prosperity. Whether those countries become prosperous and free is not about how many apartments Israel builds in Jerusalem.
Today the president doesn’t really have a policy toward the peace process. He has an attitude. And let’s be frank about what that attitude is: he thinks Israel is the problem. And he thinks the answer is always more pressure on Israel.
I reject that anti-Israel attitude. I reject it because Israel is a close and reliable democratic ally. And I reject it because I know the people of Israel want peace.
Israeli – Palestinian peace is further away now than the day Barack Obama came to office. But that does not have to be a permanent situation.
We must recognize that peace will only come if everyone in the region perceives clearly that America stands strongly with Israel.
I would take a new approach.
First, I would never undermine Israel’s negotiating position, nor pressure it to accept borders which jeopardize security and its ability to defend itself.
Second, I would not pressure Israel to negotiate with Hamas or a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, unless Hamas renounces terror, accepts Israel’s right to exist, and honors the previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In short, Hamas needs to cease being a terrorist group in both word and deed as a first step towards global legitimacy.
Third, I would ensure our assistance to the Palestinians immediately ends if the teaching of hatred in Palestinian classrooms and airwaves continues. That incitement must end now.
Fourth, I would recommend cultivating and empowering moderate forces in Palestinian society.
When the Palestinians have leaders who are honest and capable, who appreciate the rule of law, who understand that war against Israel has doomed generations of Palestinians to lives of bitterness, violence, and poverty – then peace will come.
The Middle East is changing before our eyes—but our government has not kept up. It abandoned the promotion of democracy just as Arabs were about to seize it. It sought to cozy up to dictators just as their own people rose against them. It downplayed our principles and distanced us from key allies.
All this was wrong, and these policies have failed. The Administration has abandoned them, and at the price of American leadership. A region that since World War II has looked to us for security and progress now wonders where we are and what we’re up to.
The next president must do better. Today, in our own Republican Party, some look back and conclude our projection of strength and defense of freedom was a product of different times and different challenges. While times have changed, the nature of the challenge has not.
In the 1980s, we were up against a violent, totalitarian ideology bent on subjugating the people and principles of the West. While others sought to co-exist, President Reagan instead sought victory. So must we, today. For America is exceptional, and we have the moral clarity to lead the world.
It is not wrong for Republicans to question the conduct of President Obama’s military leadership in Libya. There is much to question. And it is not wrong for Republicans to debate the timing of our military drawdown in Afghanistan— though my belief is that General Petraeus’ voice ought to carry the most weight on that question.
What is wrong, is for the Republican Party to shrink from the challenges of American leadership in the world. History repeatedly warns us that in the long run, weakness in foreign policy costs us and our children much more than we’ll save in a budget line item.
America already has one political party devoted to decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal. It does not need a second one.
Our enemies in the War on Terror, just like our opponents in the Cold War, respect and respond to strength. Sometimes strength means military intervention. Sometimes it means diplomatic pressure. It always means moral clarity in word and deed.
That is the legacy of Republican foreign policy at its best, and the banner our next Republican President must carry around the world.
Our ideals of economic and political freedom, of equality and opportunity for all citizens, remain the dream of people in the Middle East and throughout the world. As America stands for these principles, and stands with our friends and allies, we will help the Middle East transform this moment of turbulence into a firmer, more lasting opportunity for freedom, peace, and progress. http://www.timpawlenty.com/articles/no-retreat-from-freedoms-rise-gov-tim-pawlentys-remarks-at-council-on-foreign-relations
-
Just watched the Allen West speech of my previous post-- well worth the time and quite relevant to this thread-- including the political dimension.
-
By MATT BRADLEY in Cairo and ADAM ENTOUS in Washington
The Obama administration is reaching out to Islamist parties whose political power is on the rise in the wake of Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa.
The tentative outreach effort to religious political groups—the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia—reflects the administration's realization that democracy in the Middle East means dealing more directly with popular Islamist movements the U.S. has long kept at arm's length.
Speaking to reporters in Budapest, Hungary, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Obama administration is seeking "limited contacts" with Muslim Brotherhood members ahead of Egypt's parliamentary and presidential elections slated for later this year.
"You cannot leave out half the population and claim that you are committed to democracy," Mrs. Clinton said.
The Obama administration has been even more aggressive in courting Tunisia's most prominent Islamist party, Ennahda.
Since the fall of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January, the party has sought contact with the West, vowing to respect women's rights and not to impose religious law if it comes to power in elections.
In May, with help from the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, Ennahda party leaders quietly visited Washington for talks at the State Department and with congressional leaders, including Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), according to organizers. U.S. officials described the visit as an opportunity to build bridges with a moderate Islamist party that could serve as a model for groups in other countries in the region.
"We told the Americans that we are a civil, not a religious, party," Hamadi Jebali, secretary general of Ennahda, said in an interview.
He assured U.S. officials that Ennahda wouldn't impose its religious beliefs on more secular Tunisians. "Islamic parties are evolving, both in the Maghreb and elsewhere," Mr. Jebali said.
U.S. officials said the Obama administration was responding to changes in the "political landscape" across the region, but that it would treat parties in different countries in different ways, depending on the degree to which they were open to the West and shunned violence.
"The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing," said one Obama administration official. "It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency."
Before a street-level uprising toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February, U.S. contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood were infrequent and limited to members of parliament affiliated with the group. The Egyptian government banned the 83-year-old organization in 1954 because of its suspected role in an assassination attempt on the Egyptian president, so Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary candidates had to run for parliament as independents.
U.S. officials say Mr. Mubarak, long a close American ally in the turbulent Middle East, objected to previous U.S. efforts to reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood.
When President Barack Obama delivered a speech to the Muslim world in 2009, as many as 10 Brotherhood members were allowed to attend at the U.S. Embassy's invitation, said Shadi Hamid, an Egypt analyst for the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
Muslim Brotherhood officials cautiously welcome the American overture but remained bitter about the long alliance with Mr. Mubarak, a hated figure among Islamists and other opposition groups.
"When we sit on the dialogue table we will discuss why the [Egyptian] people hate the American administration," said Mohamed Al Biltagy, a prominent member of the group's parliamentary bloc before Brotherhood members were swept from Egypt's legislature last November in allegedly fraudulent elections.
U.S. officials played down the implications of the administration's decision to renew contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood. They said any exchanges would likely be held at a lower level at first, reflecting concerns in Congress and the Pentagon about taking any steps that could boost the group's political standing.
Mrs. Clinton said U.S. diplomats who meet with Muslim Brotherhood members will "emphasize the importance of and support for democratic principles, and especially a commitment to nonviolence, respect for minority rights, and the full inclusion of women in any democracy."
U.S.-funded election advisers working in Egypt have met several times with Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Cairo since the fall of the Mubarak regime. "There's no legal prohibition whatsoever," a senior U.S.-paid election adviser said.
The U.S. decision to approach both Egyptian and Tunisian Islamists reflects the strong possibility that they will play a prominent role after elections are held in both countries. Secular parties appear to be struggling to organize themselves, even though secularists drove the popular uprisings.
The election adviser said newly established secular parties in Egypt have in recent weeks stepped up their election preparations, hoping to counter the Muslim Brotherhood's widely perceived organizational advantage. But the adviser said these secular parties were, for the most part, still ill-prepared to make a strong showing if parliamentary elections are held as planned in September.
"We're trying to get people to lower their expectations," the adviser said.
—Keith Johnson in Washington and Amina Ismail in Cairo contributed to this article.
-
By MATT BRADLEY in Cairo and ADAM ENTOUS in Washington
The Obama administration is reaching out to Islamist parties whose political power is on the rise in the wake of Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa.
The tentative outreach effort to religious political groups—the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia—reflects the administration's realization that democracy in the Middle East means dealing more directly with popular Islamist movements the U.S. has long kept at arm's length.
Speaking to reporters in Budapest, Hungary, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Obama administration is seeking "limited contacts" with Muslim Brotherhood members ahead of Egypt's parliamentary and presidential elections slated for later this year.
"You cannot leave out half the population and claim that you are committed to democracy," Mrs. Clinton said.
The Obama administration has been even more aggressive in courting Tunisia's most prominent Islamist party, Ennahda.
What? I thought the Muslim Brotherhood was a secular organization. :roll:
Like Obama hasn't been courting the jihadists since before he ran for president.....
-
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/american-boots-on-ground-in-somalia/
Remember all the howling over Bush's "illegal war"? To quote Glenn Reynolds "They told me if I voted for McCain, there would be endless wars without congressional oversight, and they were right!"
-
Are you saying you have a problem with what happened here?
-
Actually, the AUMF says we get to hunt down AQ and their allies anywhere on the globe. So targeting them in Africa is nothing we haven't been doing since 9/11, although the left screamed about it when Bush was president.
At least some of the Libyan rebels we are supporting are AQ or allied with AQ, so it's not covered by the AUMF from 9/18/01, I'd think.
I'm glad to see Ka-Daffy targeted, but pretending that the WPA is valid law but ignoring it is bogus.
-
So, what was the point of this post?
"http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/american-boots-on-ground-in-somalia/
Remember all the howling over Bush's "illegal war"? To quote Glenn Reynolds "They told me if I voted for McCain, there would be endless wars without congressional oversight, and they were right!""
-
So, what was the point of this post?
"http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/american-boots-on-ground-in-somalia/
Remember all the howling over Bush's "illegal war"? To quote Glenn Reynolds "They told me if I voted for McCain, there would be endless wars without congressional oversight, and they were right!""
After years of listening to the left screaming about "Bush's illegal war", I never miss the opportunity to point out the epic hypocrisy so clearly demonstrated now.
-
My last two posts in the SNAFU thread contain what is IMHO some very important material. The US, as Iran has predicted for some time now, appears to be in the process of being run out of the Middle East altogether. It appears we are out of Afpakia, Iraq, Egypt, and now Saudi Arabia, hence out of all the smaller kingdoms of the Arabian peninsula.
It appears that Baraq has managed to completely rupture the Saudis trust in our will with his handling of their concerns during the uprising against Mubarak in Egypt.
Looking backwards for a moment, in a larger sense it seems to be that all of this was already in the cards when the Dems determined to bring down US efforts in Iraq and Baraq pretend surged in Afpakia.
Bush is not immune here either. A plausible although mistaken case can be made that we should have finished with Afpakia (either leaving altogether or finishing the job) before going into Iraq. This IMHO ignores what would have happened had we not gone into Iraq- which is a longer discussion than I feel up to right now with the Gathering in a few hours. Bush-Rumbo also did a poor job of running the Iraq War, even when taking into account the utter destructiveness of the Dem opposition.
But here we are. What to do now?
One idea that occurs to me is a mutual defense treaty with Israel with a base in Israel.
-
Panetta: US within reach of defeating al-Qaida
FILE - In this June 9, 2011 file photo, Leon Panetta testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington during a hearing on his nomination for defense secretary. Speaking with reporters flying with him on his first visit to Afghanistan since taking over as defense secretary, Panetta said Saturday, July 9, 2011 that the U.S. and its allies are within reach of defeating al-Qaida after killing Osama bin Laden and gaining new insights about the terrorist group's other leading figures. (AP Photo - Manuel Balce Ceneta)
ROBERT BURNS
From Associated Press
July 09, 2011 11:23 AM EDT
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The U.S. and its allies are within reach of defeating al-Qaida after killing Osama bin Laden and gaining new insights about the terrorist group's other leading figures, new U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Saturday.
The former CIA director offered an upbeat assessment about the prospects for ending al-Qaida's threat as he spoke with reporters flying with him on his first visit to Afghanistan since taking over as Pentagon chief July 1.
In a separate interview later, Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said he agreed with Panetta's assessment.
In the aftermath of the May 2 raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan, the U.S. has determined that eliminating "somewhere around 10 to 20 key leaders" of al-Qaida would cripple the network, Panetta said. Those leaders are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa, he added.
"We're within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaida," Panetta said, addressing reporters for the first time since succeeding Robert Gates as defense secretary.
"The key is that, having gotten bin Laden, we've now identified some of the key leadership within al-Qaida, both in Pakistan as well as in Yemen and other areas," he said.
"If we can be successful at going after them, I think we can really undermine their ability to do any kind of planning, to be able to conduct any kind of attack" on the United States. "That's why I think it's within reach. Is it going to take some more work? You bet it is. But I think it's within reach," Panetta said.
In an interview at the main U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, Petraeus said al-Qaida is on the run.
"There has been enormous damage done to al-Qaida," beyond the death of bin Laden, in the areas of western Pakistan where the group is believed operating, Petraeus said. "That has very significantly disrupted their efforts and it does hold the prospect of a strategic defeat, if you will, a strategic dismantling, of al-Qaida."
Asked how he defines a "strategic defeat" for al-Qaida, Petraeus said it means that "they can't carry out strategically important attacks."
Petraeus, who is leaving his post this month and succeeding Panetta at the CIA, said there are small numbers of al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan. He said the al-Qaida "brand" is likely to remain a feature of the global terrain, even if the Pakistan-based core of al-Qaida is unable to carry out large attacks against the West.
Panetta said the 10 to 20 top terrorist figures in al-Qaida's hierarchy who are now the focus of U.S. efforts include Ayman al-Zawahri, the designator successor to bin Laden as al-Qaida's leader.
Panetta said the U.S. believes al-Zawahri is living in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of western Pakistan.
The only other name he mentioned was Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born Muslim cleric living in Yemen. The U.S. has put him on a kill-or-capture list.
"Now is the moment, following what happened with bin Laden, to put maximum pressure on them because I do believe that if we continue this effort we can really cripple al-Qaida as a major threat" to America, he said.
Al-Qaida's attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, triggered the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban government that had sheltered bin Laden. But in the years since, the Taliban has reasserted itself and al-Qaida has managed to operate from havens in neighboring Pakistan.
Al-Qaida affiliates have emerged in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. That's led many in the U.S. to argue for a shift from fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan to targeting al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan and other places.
Asked whether he thought Pakistani authorities knew that bin Laden had been living in their country, Panetta said, "Suspicions, but no smoking gun." The Pakistani government says it did not know bin Laden's whereabouts when Navy SEALs attacked his compound not far from Islamabad.
In Panetta's talks with Petraeus and his successor, Marine Gen. John R. Allen, a central topic was expected to be President Barack Obama's decision on June 22 to withdraw 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan this year and 23,000 more by September 2012. The drawdown is to begin this month, but not all details have been worked out.
Offering an overview of the security situation in Afghanistan, Petraeus said he was encouraged that the number of insurgent attacks in June was down slightly from June 2010 and that the trend is holding thus far in July. This contrasts with intelligence analysts' forecast of an 18 percent to 30 percent increase for 2011, he said.
Panetta also intended to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Karzai's mercurial character and frequent public criticisms of the U.S.-led international military coalition have soured his relations with many U.S. officials, including the current U.S. ambassador. Karl Eikenberry.
Eikenberry is handing off that post this month to Ryan Crocker, a veteran diplomat and former U.S, ambassador to Iraq who was coaxed out of retirement. Crocker reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul after the 2001 toppling of the Taliban
Panetta said he believes he and Obama's "whole new team" of U.S. leaders in Kabul have a good understanding of Karzai.
"Hopefully, it can be the beginning of a much better relationship than what we've had over the last few years," he said.
On a lighter note, he said he has gotten a feel for his new job as defense secretary. He compared it to his official aircraft, a towering military version of the Boeing 747.
"It's big, it's complicated, it's filled with sophisticated technology, it's bumpy, but in the end it's the best in the world."
-
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/20/uk-libya-britain-cuts-idUKTRE72J2OR20110320
(Reuters) - Britain's military is capable of taking part in a swift campaign against Libya, but prolonged fighting could stretch its armed forces and raise pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to rethink deep defence cuts.
Despite its role in Afghanistan and severe financial pressures, senior British ministers and military chiefs say they can comfortably help to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya.
However, if the operation grows or drags on for months, it could strain areas such as the support crews that arm and refuel planes and perform airborne reconnaissance.
Britain's involvement in the first stage of the strikes against Libya appeared to be relatively limited, with planes flying from one UK airbase and one submarine firing Tomahawk missiles, analysts noted.
__________________________________________________
France eyes five billion euro defence cuts
14 June 2010, 13:05 CET
(PARIS) - France will trim about five billion euros (6.1 billion dollars) from its defence budget, Defence Minister Herve Morin said Monday.
The defence budget cuts over the next three years are part of overall belt-tightening measures in the wake of the Greek debt crisis.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/10/us-libya-idUSTRE7270JP20110710
(Reuters) - A French minister said on Sunday it was time for Libya's rebels to negotiate with Muammar Gaddafi's government, but Washington said it stood firm in its belief that the Libyan leader cannot stay in power.
The diverging messages from two leading members of the Western coalition opposing Gaddafi hinted at the strain the alliance is under after more than three months of air strikes that have cost billions of dollars and failed to produce the swift outcome its backers had expected.
French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet signaled growing impatience with the progress of the conflict when he said the rebels should negotiate now with Gaddafi's government and not wait for his defeat.
The rebels have so far refused to hold talks as long as Gaddafi is still in power, a stance which before now none of NATO's major powers has publicly challenged.
"We have .... have asked them to speak to each other," Longuet, whose government has until now been among the most hawkish on Libya, said on French television station BFM TV.
"The position of the TNC (rebel Transitional National Council) is very far from other positions. Now, there will be a need to sit around a table," he said."
Oncle! At least Ka-daffy's forces won't be marching through the Arc de Triomphe........yet.
-
By GORDON ENGLAND, JAMES L. JONES, AND VERN CLARK
All our citizens, and especially our servicemen and women, expect and deserve a thorough review of critical security decisions. After all, decisions today will affect the nation's strategic position for future generations.
The future security environment underscores two broad security trends. First, international political realities and the internationally agreed-to sovereign rights of nations will increasingly limit the sustained involvement of American permanent land-based, heavy forces to the more extreme crises. This will make offshore options for deterrence and power projection ever more paramount in support of our national interests.
Second, the naval dimensions of American power will re-emerge as the primary means for assuring our allies and partners, ensuring prosperity in times of peace, and countering anti-access, area-denial efforts in times of crisis. We do not believe these trends will require the dismantling of land-based forces, as these forces will remain essential reservoirs of power. As the United States has learned time and again, once a crisis becomes a conflict, it is impossible to predict with certainty its depth, duration and cost.
That said, the U.S. has been shrinking its overseas land-based installations, so the ability to project power globally will make the forward presence of naval forces an even more essential dimension of American influence.
What we do believe is that uniquely responsive Navy-Marine Corps capabilities provide the basis on which our most vital overseas interests are safeguarded. Forward presence and engagement is what allows the U.S. to maintain awareness, to deter aggression, and to quickly respond to threats as they arise. Though we clearly must be prepared for the high-end threats, such preparation should be made in balance with the means necessary to avoid escalation to the high end in the first place.
The versatility of maritime forces provides a truly unmatched advantage. The sea remains a vast space that provides nearly unlimited freedom of maneuver. Command of the sea allows for the presence of our naval forces, supported from a network of shore facilities, to be adjusted and scaled with little external restraint. It permits reliance on proven capabilities such as prepositioned ships.
Maritime capabilities encourage and enable cooperation with other nations to solve common sea-based problems such as piracy, illegal trafficking, proliferation of W.M.D., and a host of other ills, which if unchecked can harm our friends and interests abroad, and our own citizenry at home. The flexibility and responsiveness of naval forces provide our country with a general strategic deterrent in a potentially violent and unstable world. Most importantly, our naval forces project and sustain power at sea and ashore at the time, place, duration, and intensity of our choosing.
Given these enduring qualities, tough choices must clearly be made, especially in light of expected tight defense budgets. The administration and the Congress need to balance the resources allocated to missions such as strategic deterrence, ballistic missile defense, and cyber warfare with the more traditional ones of sea control and power projection. The maritime capability and capacity vital to the flexible projection of U.S. power and influence around the globe must surely be preserved, especially in light of available technology. Capabilities such as the Joint Strike Fighter will provide strategic deterrence, in addition to tactical long-range strike, especially when operating from forward-deployed naval vessels.
Postured to respond quickly, the Navy-Marine Corps team integrates sea, air, and land power into adaptive force packages spanning the entire spectrum of operations, from everyday cooperative security activities to unwelcome—but not impossible—wars between major powers. This is exactly what we will need to meet the challenges of the future.
Mr. England is a former secretary of the Navy. Mr. Jones is a former commandant of the Marine Corps. Mr. Clark is a former chief of naval operations.
-
This could be posted elsewhere, but I am posting it here because of how it underelines just how bad the current trajectory is. What are we to do?
----------------
A Diplomatic Defeat for President Obama
and America
by Newt Gingrich
The elite media largely ignored an astounding defeat recently for the United States and for the cause of freedom.
The Iranian dictatorship hosted an anti-terrorism conference in Tehran.
That's right. The world's leading state sponsor of terrorism--the country that funds and trains Hamas and Hezbollah and sends arms to the Taliban--simply stole our language and held a conference that professed to oppose terrorism.
Under the Iranian definition of that term, the United States and Israel are the primary supporters of terrorism in the world.
Amazingly, sixty countries--yes, sixty--participated in the Iranian conference.
In a scene worthy of a Kurt Vonnegut satire, the North Koreans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Palestineans and other enthusiastic supporters of anti-American activities all showed up.
Even more alarmingly, our so-called allies Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were also in attendance. After billions of dollars spent and thousands of Americans lost, these "allies" ignored our requests and dignified the dishonest event and a country that is funding terrorism worldwide.
Cliff May captured the disaster in the National Review.
"A few days ago, the regime that rules Iran, designated by the U.S. State Department as the world's most active state sponsor of terrorism, held what it called the First International Conference on the Global Fight against Terrorism. The U.S. and Israel were singled out as "satanic world powers" with a "black record of terrorist behaviors." This should have been the subject of scorn and ridicule from the "international community." But senior officials from at least 60 countries attended and U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon delivered a message via special envoy expressing his appreciation to Tehran. Apparently he was not bothered by the fact that Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court, was among those attending."
As an example of how bad some of the participants were who showed up to accuse the U.S. of "terrorism," consider the indictment of the Sudanese President: Omar al-Bashir was charged with genocide, with crimes against humanity (including murder, extermination, forcible transfer of civilian populations, torture, and rapes), and with war crimes (including intentional attacks against civilians and pillaging).
This is the company our so-called allies are comfortable with?
Liberals Are Destroying the Bill Of Rights
Bestselling author Frank Miniter exposes the shocking
campaign to destroy our God-given liberties in his new book, Saving the Bill of Rights. Click Here...
To make this outrageous situation even worse, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon sent a special envoy to Tehran to deliver a message supporting the conference.
Perhaps nothing should have surprised us after Iran won a vice-presidency of the U.N. General Assembly recently. An organization founded to preserve peace has now elevated the world's top state sponsor of terrorism to a leadership role.
Unfortunately, also like a Vonnegut novel, these stories represent a reality that is less humorous than it is distressing.
The participation of allies like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in the anti-American charade in Tehran is just the kind of sight that could become more common in the future amid questions about the United States' commitment in the region.
As the Obama Administration's policy--which appears to be "weakness and abandonment"--becomes clearer, allies will revaluate and reorient away from the United States and toward Iran. After all, the U.S. is leaving, and Iran is an increasingly powerful force in the region--and it will soon be armed with nuclear weapons.
The elite media has largely ignored this unfolding disaster. Yet the dangers of this realignment are serious. The radical Islamists that countries like Iran arm, train, and support while claiming to oppose terrorism are no small threat. They aim to destroy the United States and Israel, and to halt the cause of freedom wherever they can.
Radical Islamism is dangerous given weak state sponsors, and it will be even more serious when backed by a large regional power such as Iran is becoming.
The Obama Administration, meanwhile, remains blind to the forces threatening us.
Consider this additional report from Cliff May regarding a young Marine who was charged last month for repeated shooting attacks on the Pentagon and was arrested, in Arlington Cemetery, with explosives materials and literature referencing Al Qaeda:
"Yonathan Melaku was charged in federal court with shooting at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. The officials who arrested him later searched his home and found a videotape in which he is shouting "Allahu Akbar!" They also found a notebook in which he'd written about Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda , the Taliban, and The Path to Jihad, a book of lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Islamic cleric who was widely considered a moderate before he fled to Yemen where he is now a top Al Qaeda commander.
"So it's pretty obvious what Melaku was up to, right? Not if you're a federal employee, it's not. "I can't suggest to you his motivations or intent," James W. McJunkin, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington field office, told reporters at a news conference. "It's not readily apparent yet."
"Many in the mainstream media also expressed befuddlement. A Washington Post story carried the headline: "Pentagon Shooting Subject Not Known to Law Enforcement." (Really? That's the news here?) The article told readers that "a motive for the shootings -- and why Melaku had possible bomb-making materials -- remains elusive." So does that mean we can't rule out a crime of passion -- or a paint-ball competition that got out of hand?"
In case after case, we have leaders who are determined to ignore obvious truths.
Not since the 1930s have our leaders so willfully deceived themselves about a growing threat to our survival.
Your Friend,
-
Petraeus Departs Afghanistan, Wider American Challenges Remain
U.S. Gen. David Petraeus handed over command of the war in Afghanistan to his successor Monday after serving in the post for a little more than a year. Petraeus was appointed in 2010 as a provisional replacement for Gen. Stanley McChrystal .
As STRATFOR has argued, Petraeus’s departure represents anything but a routine personnel change. Despite being a key architect of the current counterinsurgency-focused strategy in Afghanistan and its principal proponent, Petraeus is now the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a post that considerably constrains his ability to influence strategy in Afghanistan. Combined with the death of Osama bin Laden in May — an event with little tactical but enormous symbolic importance — Petraeus’s new appointment gives the White House some room to maneuver in the war effort in Afghanistan. Signs already indicate that the United States is attempting to redefine and reshape the psychology and the perceptions of the Afghan war and its parameters for “success.”
“While the American military focus appeared to shift toward Afghanistan years ago, Washington never solved its fundamental problem in Iraq, even as the United States successfully drew down its forces from the surge levels of 2007-2008.”
However, even as new Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta describes the defeat of al Qaeda as “within reach,” the Taliban insurgency continues to rage. Just before Petraeus handed over command to U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen — a commander no doubt carefully vetted by the White House — Jan Mohammad Khan, the senior Afghan presidential adviser on tribal affairs, was assassinated in his home in Kabul. Khan’s assassination occurred just one week after an apparent family feud within the Karzai clan resulted in the death of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai — the clan’s most powerful ally in the country’s restive southwest. The Taliban continues to perceive itself as winning and shows little inclination toward a negotiated settlement aimed at facilitating an accelerated drawdown of forces.
Nevertheless, the drawdown begins this month with the withdrawal of some 1,000 U.S. National Guard troops and American allies beginning their own reductions. The incipient withdrawal is the first step toward a new reality wherein Washington dedicates far fewer troops and resources to Afghanistan and manages its interests in the country from a greater distance.
While the United States attempts to extricate itself from Afghanistan, Washington is making its final attempts to convince Baghdad to allow a sizeable contingent of troops to remain in Iraq beyond the end of 2011, the deadline for withdrawal stipulated by the current Status of Forces Agreement. While the American military focus appeared to shift toward Afghanistan years ago, Washington never solved its fundamental problem in Iraq, even as the United States successfully drew down its forces from the surge levels of 2007-2008.
That fundamental problem is Iran. U.S. troops leaving Afghanistan will ultimately strengthen Pakistan. A strong Pakistani state — whether that can be resurrected or not is a separate question — and a stable balance of power between India and Pakistan are in the long-term national interests of the United States. However, when the United States invaded Iraq, it destroyed the balance of power between Iran and Iraq. Initially, Washington wanted to establish a pro-American government in Baghdad, but instead it must now try to limit the extent to which the government in Baghdad favors Iran. Tehran has extensively penetrated the political and security apparatus of the Iraqi government. Iranian covert capabilities in Iraq — and within the wider region — are well-established. As the U.S. military leaves, Iran’s overt military capabilities will become the dominant military force in the region.
Even if the United States is able to secure an extended stay for its forces in Iraq, the problem with Iran will remain. An extension would merely bolster a weak American position — one in which the United States (rather than a proxy) is directly responsible for balancing a regional power.
This predicament is why Turkey — Petraeus’s first stop upon leaving Afghanistan — is important. In Ankara, Petraeus discussed counterterrorism and Turkey’s commitment to Afghanistan. However, even if doubled, the fewer than 2,000 troops Turkey contributes to the Afghan war effort will have no decisive impact. Turkey’s importance in current U.S. counterinsurgency efforts is small. Turkey matters because it is the historical pivot between Europe and the Middle East — and outside of Iraq, the natural counterbalance to Iran. Ankara is neither ready nor able to assume such a role within the next few years. Nevertheless, in the long run, Turkey is crucial to American hopes for returning balance to the region and it is the power whose resurgence Iran must fear.
-
By George Friedman
On Dec. 17, 2010, Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire in a show of public protest. The self-immolation triggered unrest in Tunisia and ultimately the resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. This was followed by unrest in a number of Arab countries that the global press dubbed the “Arab Spring.” The standard analysis of the situation was that oppressive regimes had been sitting on a volcano of liberal democratic discontent. The belief was that the Arab Spring was a political uprising by masses demanding liberal democratic reform and that this uprising, supported by Western democracies, would generate sweeping political change across the Arab world.
It is now more than six months since the beginning of the Arab Spring, and it is important to take stock of what has happened and what has not happened. The reasons for the widespread unrest go beyond the Arab world, although, obviously, the dynamics within that world are important in and of themselves. However, the belief in an Arab Spring helped shape European and American policies in the region and the world. If the assumptions of this past January and February prove insufficient or even wrong, then there will be regional and global consequences.
It is important to begin with the fact that, to this point, no regime has fallen in the Arab world. Individuals such as Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak have been replaced, but the regimes themselves, which represent the manner of governing, have not changed. Some regimes have come under massive attack but have not fallen, as in Libya, Syria and Yemen. And in many countries, such as Jordan, the unrest never amounted to a real threat to the regime. The kind of rapid and complete collapse that we saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 with the fall of communism has not happened in the Arab world. More important, what regime changes that might come of the civil wars in Libya and Syria are not going to be clearly victorious, those that are victorious are not going to be clearly democratic and those that are democratic are obviously not going to be liberal. The myth that beneath every Libyan is a French republican yearning to breathe free is dubious in the extreme.
Consider the case of Mubarak, who was forced from office and put on trial, although the regime — a mode of governing in which the military remains the main arbiter of the state — remains intact. Egypt is now governed by a committee of military commanders, all of whom had been part of Mubarak’s regime. Elections are coming, but the opposition is deeply divided between Islamists and secularists, and personalities and ideological divisions in turn divide these factions. The probability of a powerful democratic president emerging who controls the sprawling ministries in Cairo and the country’s security and military apparatus is slim, and the Egyptian military junta is already acting to suppress elements that are too radical and too unpredictable.
The important question is why these regimes have been able to survive. In a genuine revolution, the regime loses power. The anti-communist forces overwhelmed the Polish Communist government in 1989 regardless of the divisions within the opposition. The sitting regimes were not in a position to determine their own futures, let alone the futures of their countries. There was a transition, but they were not in control of it. Similarly, in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown, his military and security people were not the ones managing the transition after the shah left the country. They were the ones on trial. There was unrest in Egypt in January and February 2011, but the idea that it amounted to a revolution flew in the face of the reality of Egypt and of what revolutions actually look like.
Shaping the Western Narrative
There were three principles shaping the Western narrative on the Arab Spring. The first was that these regimes were overwhelmingly unpopular. The second was that the opposition represented the overwhelming will of the people. The third was that once the unrest began it was unstoppable. Add to all that the notion that social media facilitated the organization of the revolution and the belief that the region was in the midst of a radical transformation can be easily understood.
It was in Libya that these propositions created the most serious problems. Tunisia and Egypt were not subject to very much outside influence. Libya became the focus of a significant Western intervention. Moammar Gadhafi had ruled Libya for nearly 42 years. He could not have ruled for that long without substantial support. That didn’t mean he had majority support (or that he didn’t). It simply meant that the survival of his regime did not interest only a handful of people, but that a large network of Libyans benefitted from Gadhafi’s rule and stood to lose a great deal if he fell. They were prepared to fight for his regime.
The opposition to him was real, but its claim to represent the overwhelming majority of Libyan people was dubious. Many of the leaders had been part of the Gadhafi regime, and it is doubtful they were selected for their government posts because of their personal popularity. Others were members of tribes that were opposed to the regime but not particularly friendly to each other. Under the mythology of the Arab Spring, the eastern coalition represented the united rage of the Libyan people against Gadhafi’s oppression. Gadhafi was weak and isolated, wielding an army that was still loyal and could inflict terrible vengeance on the Libyan people. But if the West would demonstrate its ability to prevent slaughter in Benghazi, the military would realize its own isolation and defect to the rebels.
It didn’t happen that way. First, Gadhafi’s regime was more than simply a handful of people terrorizing the population. It was certainly a brutal regime, but it hadn’t survived for 42 years on that alone. It had substantial support in the military and among key tribes. Whether this was a majority is as unclear as whether the eastern coalition was a majority. But it was certainly a substantial group with much to fight for and a great deal to lose if the regime fell. So, contrary to expectations in the West, the regime has continued to fight and to retain the loyalty of a substantial number of people. Meanwhile, the eastern alliance has continued to survive under the protection of NATO but has been unable to form a united government or topple Gadhafi. Most important, it has always been a dubious assertion that what would emerge if the rebels did defeat Gadhafi would be a democratic regime, let alone a liberal democracy, and this has become increasingly obvious as the war has worn on. Whoever would replace Gadhafi would not clearly be superior to him, which is saying quite a lot.
A very similar process is taking place in Syria. There, the minority Alawite government of the Assad family, which has ruled Syria for 41 years, is facing an uprising led by the majority Sunnis, or at least some segment of them. Again, the assumption was that the regime was illegitimate and therefore weak and would crumble in the face of concerted resistance. That assumption proved wrong. The Assad regime may be running a minority government, but it has substantial support from a military of mostly Alawite officers leading a largely Sunni conscript force. The military has benefited tremendously from the Assad regime — indeed, it brought it to power. The one thing the Assads were careful to do was to make it beneficial to the military and security services to remain loyal to the regime. So far, they largely have. The danger for the regime looking forward is if the growing strain on the Alawite-dominated army divisions leads to fissures within the Alawite community and in the army itself, raising the potential for a military coup.
In part, these Arab leaders have nowhere to go. The senior leadership of the military could be tried in The Hague, and the lower ranks are subject to rebel retribution. There is a rule in war, which is that you should always give your enemy room to retreat. The Assad supporters, like the Gadhafi supporters and the supporters of Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, have no room to retreat. So they have fought on for months, and it is not clear they will capitulate anytime soon.
Foreign governments, from the United States to Turkey, have expressed their exasperation with the Syrians, but none has seriously contemplated an intervention. There are two reasons for this: First, following the Libyan intervention, everyone became more wary of assuming the weakness of Arab regimes, and no one wants a showdown on the ground with a desperate Syrian military. Second, observers have become cautious in asserting that widespread unrest constitutes a popular revolution or that the revolutionaries necessarily want to create a liberal democracy. The Sunnis in Syria might well want a democracy, but they might well be interested in creating a Sunni “Islamic” state. Knowing that it is important to be careful what you wish for, everyone seems to be issuing stern warnings to Damascus without doing very much.
Syria is an interesting case because it is, perhaps, the only current issue that Iran and Israel agree on. Iran is deeply invested in the Assad regime and wary of increased Sunni power in Syria. Israel is just as deeply concerned that the Assad regime — a known and manageable devil from the Israeli point of view — could collapse and be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime with close ties to Hamas and what is left of al Qaeda in the Levant. These are fears, not certainties, but the fears make for interesting bedfellows.
Geopolitical Significance
Since late 2010, we have seen three kinds of uprisings in the Arab world. The first are those that merely brushed by the regime. The second are those that created a change in leaders but not in the way the country was run. The third are those that turned into civil wars, such as Libya and Yemen. There is also the interesting case of Bahrain, where the regime was saved by the intervention of Saudi Arabia, but while the rising there conformed to the basic model of the Arab Spring — failed hopes — it lies in a different class, caught between Saudi and Iranian power.
The three examples do not mean that there is not discontent in the Arab world or a desire for change. They do not mean that change will not happen, or that discontent will not assume sufficient force to overthrow regimes. They also do not mean that whatever emerges will be liberal democratic states pleasing to Americans and Europeans.
This becomes the geopolitically significant part of the story. Among Europeans and within the U.S. State Department and the Obama administration is an ideology of human rights — the idea that one of the major commitments of Western countries should be supporting the creation of regimes resembling their own. This assumes all the things that we have discussed: that there is powerful discontent in oppressive states, that the discontent is powerful enough to overthrow regimes, and that what follows would be the sort of regime that the West would be able to work with.
The issue isn’t whether human rights are important but whether supporting unrest in repressive states automatically strengthens human rights. An important example was Iran in 1979, when opposition to the oppression of the shah’s government was perceived as a movement toward liberal democracy. What followed might have been democratic but it was hardly liberal. Indeed, many of the myths of the Arab Spring had their roots both in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and later in Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, when a narrow uprising readily crushed by the regime was widely viewed as massive opposition and widespread support for liberalization.
The world is more complicated and more varied than that. As we saw in the Arab Spring, oppressive regimes are not always faced with massed risings, and unrest does not necessarily mean mass support. Nor are the alternatives necessarily more palatable than what went before or the displeasure of the West nearly as fearsome as Westerners like to think. Libya is a case study on the consequences of starting a war with insufficient force. Syria makes a strong case on the limits of soft power. Egypt and Tunisia represent a textbook lesson on the importance of not deluding yourself.
The pursuit of human rights requires ruthless clarity as to whom you are supporting and what their chances are. It is important to remember that it is not Western supporters of human rights who suffer the consequences of failed risings, civil wars or revolutionary regimes that are committed to causes other than liberal democracy.
The misreading of the situation can also create unnecessary geopolitical problems. The fall of the Egyptian regime, unlikely as it is at this point, would be just as likely to generate an Islamist regime as a liberal democracy. The survival of the Assad regime could lead to more slaughter than we have seen and a much firmer base for Iran. No regimes have fallen since the Arab Spring, but when they do it will be important to remember 1979 and the conviction that nothing could be worse than the shah’s Iran, morally or geopolitically. Neither was quite the case.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t people in the Arab world who want liberal democracy. It simply means that they are not powerful enough to topple regimes or maintain control of new regimes even if they did succeed. The Arab Spring is, above all, a primer on wishful thinking in the face of the real world.
-
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire
August 25, 2011 | 1159 GMT
PRINT Text Resize:
127 14ShareThis290
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
STRATFOREditor’s Note: This installment on the United States, presented in two parts, is the 16th in a series of STRATFOR monographs on the geopolitics of countries influential in world affairs.
Related Special Topic Page
Geopolitical Monographs: In-depth Country Analysis
Like nearly all of the peoples of North and South America, most Americans are not originally from the territory that became the United States. They are a diverse collection of peoples primarily from a dozen different Western European states, mixed in with smaller groups from a hundred more. All of the New World entities struggled to carve a modern nation and state out of the American continents. Brazil is an excellent case of how that struggle can be a difficult one. The United States falls on the opposite end of the spectrum.
The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway, and is the world’s largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.
The North American Core
North America is a triangle-shaped continent centered in the temperate portions of the Northern Hemisphere. It is of sufficient size that its northern reaches are fully Arctic and its southern reaches are fully tropical. Predominant wind currents carry moisture from west to east across the continent.
Climatically, the continent consists of a series of wide north-south precipitation bands largely shaped by the landmass’ longitudinal topography. The Rocky Mountains dominate the Western third of the northern and central parts of North America, generating a rain-shadow effect just east of the mountain range — an area known colloquially as the Great Plains. Farther east of this semiarid region are the well-watered plains of the prairie provinces of Canada and the American Midwest. This zone comprises both the most productive and the largest contiguous acreage of arable land on the planet.
East of this premier arable zone lies a second mountain chain known as the Appalachians. While this chain is far lower and thinner than the Rockies, it still constitutes a notable barrier to movement and economic development. However, the lower elevation of the mountains combined with the wide coastal plain of the East Coast does not result in the rain-shadow effect of the Great Plains. Consequently, the coastal plain of the East Coast is well-watered throughout.
In the continent’s northern and southern reaches this longitudinal pattern is not quite so clear-cut. North of the Great Lakes region lies the Canadian Shield, an area where repeated glaciation has scraped off most of the topsoil. That, combined with the area’s colder climate, means that these lands are not nearly as productive as regions farther south or west and, as such, remain largely unpopulated to the modern day. In the south — Mexico — the North American landmass narrows drastically from more than 5,000 kilometers (about 3,100 miles) wide to, at most, 2,000 kilometers, and in most locations less than 1,000 kilometers. The Mexican extension also occurs in the Rocky Mountain/Great Plains longitudinal zone, generating a wide, dry, irregular uplift that lacks the agricultural promise of the Canadian prairie provinces or American Midwest.
The continent’s final geographic piece is an isthmus of varying width, known as Central America, that is too wet and rugged to develop into anything more than a series of isolated city-states, much less a single country that would have an impact on continental affairs. Due to a series of swamps and mountains where the two American continents join, there still is no road network linking them, and the two Americas only indirectly affect each other’s development.
The most distinctive and important feature of North America is the river network in the middle third of the continent. While its components are larger in both volume and length than most of the world’s rivers, this is not what sets the network apart. Very few of its tributaries begin at high elevations, making vast tracts of these rivers easily navigable. In the case of the Mississippi, the head of navigation — just north of Minneapolis — is 3,000 kilometers inland.
The network consists of six distinct river systems: the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Ohio, Tennessee and, of course, the Mississippi. The unified nature of this system greatly enhances the region’s usefulness and potential economic and political power. First, shipping goods via water is an order of magnitude cheaper than shipping them via land. The specific ratio varies greatly based on technological era and local topography, but in the petroleum age in the United States, the cost of transport via water is roughly 10 to 30 times cheaper than overland. This simple fact makes countries with robust maritime transport options extremely capital-rich when compared to countries limited to land-only options. This factor is the primary reason why the major economic powers of the past half-millennia have been Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Second, the watershed of the Greater Mississippi Basin largely overlays North America’s arable lands. Normally, agricultural areas as large as the American Midwest are underutilized as the cost of shipping their output to more densely populated regions cuts deeply into the economics of agriculture. The Eurasian steppe is an excellent example. Even in modern times it is very common for Russian and Kazakh crops to occasionally rot before they can reach market. Massive artificial transport networks must be constructed and maintained in order for the land to reach its full potential. Not so in the case of the Greater Mississippi Basin. The vast bulk of the prime agricultural lands are within 200 kilometers of a stretch of navigable river. Road and rail are still used for collection, but nearly omnipresent river ports allow for the entirety of the basin’s farmers to easily and cheaply ship their products to markets not just in North America but all over the world.
Third, the river network’s unity greatly eases the issue of political integration. All of the peoples of the basin are part of the same economic system, ensuring constant contact and common interests. Regional proclivities obviously still arise, but this is not Northern Europe, where a variety of separate river systems have given rise to multiple national identities.
(click here to enlarge image)
It is worth briefly explaining why STRATFOR fixates on navigable rivers as opposed to coastlines. First, navigable rivers by definition service twice the land area of a coastline (rivers have two banks, coasts only one). Second, rivers are not subject to tidal forces, greatly easing the construction and maintenance of supporting infrastructure. Third, storm surges often accompany oceanic storms, which force the evacuation of oceanic ports. None of this eliminates the usefulness of coastal ports, but in terms of the capacity to generate capital, coastal regions are a poor second compared to lands with navigable rivers.
There are three other features — all maritime in nature — that further leverage the raw power that the Greater Mississippi Basin provides. First are the severe indentations of North America’s coastline, granting the region a wealth of sheltered bays and natural, deep-water ports. The more obvious examples include the Gulf of St. Lawrence, San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay, Galveston Bay and Long Island Sound/New York Bay.
Second, there are the Great Lakes. Unlike the Greater Mississippi Basin, the Great Lakes are not naturally navigable due to winter freezes and obstacles such as Niagara Falls. However, over the past 200 years extensive hydrological engineering has been completed — mostly by Canada — to allow for full navigation on the lakes. Since 1960, penetrating halfway through the continent, the Great Lakes have provided a secondary water transport system that has opened up even more lands for productive use and provided even greater capacity for North American capital generation. The benefits of this system are reaped mainly by the warmer lands of the United States rather than the colder lands of Canada, but since the Great Lakes constitute Canada’s only maritime transport option for reaching the interior, most of the engineering was paid for by Canadians rather than Americans.
Third and most important are the lines of barrier islands that parallel the continent’s East and Gulf coasts. These islands allow riverine Mississippi traffic to travel in a protected intracoastal waterway all the way south to the Rio Grande and all the way north to the Chesapeake Bay. In addition to serving as a sort of oceanic river, the island chain’s proximity to the Mississippi delta creates an extension of sorts for all Mississippi shipping, in essence extending the political and economic unifying tendencies of the Mississippi Basin to the eastern coastal plain.
Thus, the Greater Mississippi Basin is the continent’s core, and whoever controls that core not only is certain to dominate the East Coast and Great Lakes regions but will also have the agricultural, transport, trade and political unification capacity to be a world power — even without having to interact with the rest of the global system.
(click here to enlarge image)
There is, of course, more to North America than simply this core region and its immediate satellites. There are many secondary stretches of agricultural land as well — those just north of the Greater Mississippi Basin in south-central Canada, the lands just north of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, the Atlantic coastal plain that wraps around the southern terminus of the Appalachians, California’s Central Valley, the coastal plain of the Pacific Northwest, the highlands of central Mexico and the Veracruz region.
But all of these regions combined are considerably smaller than the American Midwest and are not ideal, agriculturally, as the Midwest is. Because the Great Lakes are not naturally navigable, costly canals must be constructed. The prairie provinces of south-central Canada lack a river transport system altogether. California’s Central Valley requires irrigation. The Mexican highlands are semiarid and lack any navigable rivers.
The rivers of the American Atlantic coastal plain — flowing down the eastern side of the Appalachians — are neither particularly long nor interconnected. This makes them much more like the rivers of Northern Europe in that their separation localizes economic existence and fosters distinct political identities, dividing the region rather than uniting it. The formation of such local — as opposed to national — identities in many ways contributed to the American Civil War.
But the benefits of these secondary regions are not distributed evenly. What is now Mexico lacks even a single navigable river of any size. Its agricultural zones are disconnected and it boasts few good natural ports. Mexico’s north is too dry while its south is too wet — and both are too mountainous — to support major population centers or robust agricultural activities. Additionally, the terrain is just rugged enough — making transport just expensive enough — to make it difficult for the central government to enforce its writ. The result is the near lawlessness of the cartel lands in the north and the irregular spasms of secessionist activity in the south.
Canada’s maritime transport zones are far superior to those of Mexico but pale in comparison to those of the United States. Its first, the Great Lakes, not only requires engineering but is shared with the United States. The second, the St. Lawrence Seaway, is a solid option (again with sufficient engineering), but it services a region too cold to develop many dense population centers. None of Canada boasts naturally navigable rivers, often making it more attractive for Canada’s provinces — in particular the prairie provinces and British Columbia — to integrate with the United States, where transport is cheaper, the climate supports a larger population and markets are more readily accessible. Additionally, the Canadian Shield greatly limits development opportunities. This vast region — which covers more than half of Canada’s landmass and starkly separates Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto and the prairie provinces — consists of a rocky, broken landscape perfect for canoeing and backpacking but unsuitable for agriculture or habitation.
So long as the United States has uninterrupted control of the continental core — which itself enjoys independent and interconnected ocean access — the specific locations of the country’s northern and southern boundaries are somewhat immaterial to continental politics. To the south, the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts are a significant barrier in both directions, making the exceedingly shallow Rio Grande a logical — but hardly absolute — border line. The eastern end of the border could be anywhere within 300 kilometers north or south of its current location (at present the border region’s southernmost ports — Brownsville and Corpus Christi — lie on the U.S. side of the border). As one moves westward to the barren lands of New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua and Sonora, the possible variance increases considerably. Even controlling the mouth of the Colorado River where it empties into the Gulf of California is not a critical issue, since hydroelectric development in the United States prevents the river from reaching the Gulf in most years, making it useless for transport.
In the north, the Great Lakes are obviously an ideal break point in the middle of the border region, but the specific location of the line along the rest of the border is largely irrelevant. East of the lakes, low mountains and thick forests dominate the landscape — not the sort of terrain to generate a power that could challenge the U.S. East Coast. The border here could theoretically lie anywhere between the St. Lawrence Seaway and Massachusetts without compromising the American population centers on the East Coast (although, of course, the farther north the line is the more secure the East Coast will be). West of the lakes is flat prairie that can be easily crossed, but the land is too cold and often too dry, and, like the east, it cannot support a large population. So long as the border lies north of the bulk of the Missouri River’s expansive watershed, the border’s specific location is somewhat academic, and it becomes even more so when one reaches the Rockies.
On the far western end of the U.S.-Canada border is the only location where there could be some border friction. The entrance to Puget Sound — one of the world’s best natural harbors — is commanded by Vancouver Island. Most of the former is United States territory, but the latter is Canadian — in fact, the capital of British Columbia, Victoria, sits on the southern tip of that strategic island for precisely that reason. However, the fact that British Columbia is more than 3,000 kilometers from the Toronto region and that there is a 12:1 population imbalance between British Columbia and the American West Coast largely eliminates the possibility of Canadian territorial aggression.
A Geographic History of the United States
It is common knowledge that the United States began as 13 rebellious colonies along the east coast of the center third of the North American continent. But the United States as an entity was not a sure thing in the beginning. France controlled the bulk of the useful territory that in time would enable the United States to rise to power, while the Spanish empire boasted a larger and more robust economy and population in the New World than the fledgling United States. Most of the original 13 colonies were lightly populated by European standards — only Philadelphia could be considered a true city in the European sense — and were linked by only the most basic of physical infrastructure. Additionally, rivers flowed west to east across the coastal plain, tending to sequester regional identities rather than unify them.
But the young United States held two advantages. First, without exception, all of the European empires saw their New World holdings as secondary concerns. For them, the real game — and always the real war — was on another continent in a different hemisphere. Europe’s overseas colonies were either supplementary sources of income or chips to be traded away on the poker table of Europe. France did not even bother using its American territories to dispose of undesirable segments of its society, while Spain granted its viceroys wide latitude in how they governed imperial territories simply because it was not very important so long as the silver and gold shipments kept arriving. With European attentions diverted elsewhere, the young United States had an opportunity to carve out a future for itself relatively free of European entanglements.
Second, the early United States did not face any severe geographic challenges. The barrier island system and local rivers provided a number of options that allowed for rapid cultural and economic expansion up and down the East Coast. The coastal plain — particularly in what would become the American South — was sufficiently wide and well-watered to allow for the steady expansion of cities and farmland. Choices were limited, but so were challenges. This was not England, an island that forced the early state into the expense of a navy. This was not France, a country with three coasts and two land borders that forced Paris to constantly deal with threats from multiple directions. This was not Russia, a massive country suffering from short growing seasons that was forced to expend inordinate sums of capital on infrastructure simply to attempt to feed itself. Instead, the United States could exist in relative peace for its first few decades without needing to worry about any large-scale, omnipresent military or economic challenges, so it did not have to garrison a large military. Every scrap of energy the young country possessed could be spent on making itself more sustainable. When viewed together — the robust natural transport network overlaying vast tracts of excellent farmland, sharing a continent with two much smaller and weaker powers — it is inevitable that whoever controls the middle third of North America will be a great power.
Geopolitical Imperatives
With these basic inputs, the American polity was presented a set of imperatives it had to achieve in order to be a successful nation. They are only rarely declared elements of national policy, instead serving as a sort of subconscious set of guidelines established by geography that most governments — regardless of composition or ideology — find themselves following. The United States’ strategic imperatives are presented here in five parts. Normally imperatives are pursued in order, but there is considerable time overlap between the first two and the second two.
1. Dominate the Greater Mississippi Basin
The early nation was particularly vulnerable to its former colonial master. The original 13 colonies were hardwired into the British Empire economically, and trading with other European powers (at the time there were no other independent states in the Western Hemisphere) required braving the seas that the British still ruled. Additionally, the colonies’ almost exclusively coastal nature made them easy prey for that same navy should hostilities ever recommence, as was driven brutally home in the War of 1812 in which Washington was sacked.
There are only two ways to protect a coastal community from sea power. The first is to counter with another navy. But navies are very expensive, and it was all the United States could do in its first 50 years of existence to muster a merchant marine to assist with trade. France’s navy stood in during the Revolutionary War in order to constrain British power, but once independence was secured, Paris had no further interest in projecting power to the eastern shore of North America (and, in fact, nearly fought a war with the new country in the 1790s).
The second method of protecting a coastal community is to develop territories that are not utterly dependent upon the sea. Here is where the United States laid the groundwork for becoming a major power, since the strategic depth offered in North America was the Greater Mississippi Basin.
Achieving such strategic depth was both an economic and a military imperative. With few exceptions, the American population was based along the coast, and even the exceptions — such as Philadelphia — were easily reached via rivers. The United States was entirely dependent upon the English imperial system not just for finished goods and markets but also for the bulk of its non-agricultural raw materials, in particular coal and iron ore. Expanding inland allowed the Americans to substitute additional supplies from mines in the Appalachian Mountains. But those same mountains also limited just how much depth the early Americans could achieve. The Appalachians may not be the Swiss Alps, but they were sufficiently rugged to put a check on any deep and rapid inland expansion. Even reaching the Ohio River Valley — all of which lay within the initial territories of the independent United States — was largely blocked by the Appalachians. The Ohio River faced the additional problem of draining into the Mississippi, the western shore of which was the French territory of Louisiana and all of which emptied through the fully French-held city of New Orleans.
The United States solved this problem in three phases. First, there was the direct purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. (Technically, France’s Louisiana Territory was Spanish-held at this point, its ownership having been swapped as a result of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 that ended the Seven Years’ War. In October 1800, France and Spain agreed in secret to return the lands to French control, but news of the transfer was not made public until the sale of the lands in question to the United States in July 1803. Therefore, between 1762 and 1803 the territory was legally the territory of the Spanish crown but operationally was a mixed territory under a shifting patchwork of French, Spanish and American management.)
At the time, Napoleon was girding for a major series of wars that would bear his name. France not only needed cash but also to be relieved of the security burden of defending a large but lightly populated territory in a different hemisphere. The Louisiana Purchase not only doubled the size of the United States but also gave it direct ownership of almost all of the Mississippi and Missouri river basins. The inclusion of the city of New Orleans in the purchase granted the United States full control over the entire watershed. Once the territory was purchased, the challenge was to develop the lands. Some settlers migrated northward from New Orleans, but most came via a different route.
(click here to enlarge image)
The second phase of the strategic-depth strategy was the construction of that different route: the National Road (aka the Cumberland Road). This project linked Baltimore first to Cumberland, Md. — the head of navigation of the Potomac — and then on to the Ohio River Valley at Wheeling, W. Va., by 1818. Later phases extended the road across Ohio (1828), Indiana (1832) and Illinois (1838) until it eventually reached Jefferson City, Mo., in the 1840s. This single road (known in modern times as Interstate 40 or Interstate 70 for most of its length) allowed American pioneers to directly settle Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri and granted them initial access to Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. For the better part of a century, it was the most heavily trafficked route in the country, and it allowed Americans not only to settle the new Louisiana Territory but also to finally take advantage of the lands ceded by the British in 1787. With the road’s completion, the original 13 colonies were finally lashed to the Greater Mississippi Basin via a route that could not be challenged by any outside power.
The third phase of the early American expansion strategy was in essence an extension of the National Road via a series of settlement trails, by far the most important and famous of which was the Oregon Trail. While less of a formal construction than the National Road, the Oregon Trail opened up far larger territories. The trail was directly responsible for the initial settling of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. A wealth of secondary trails branched off from the main artery — the Mormon, Bozeman, California and Denver trails — and extended the settlement efforts to Montana, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. The trails were all active from the early 1840s until the completion of the country’s first transcontinental railway in 1869. That project’s completion reduced East Coast-West Coast travel time from six months to eight days and slashed the cost by 90 percent (to about $1,100 in 2011 dollars). The river of settlers overnight turned into a flood, finally cementing American hegemony over its vast territories.
(click here to enlarge image)
Collectively, the Louisiana Purchase, the National Road and the Oregon Trail facilitated the largest and fastest cultural expansion in human history. From beginning to end, the entire process required less than 70 years. However, it should be noted that the last part of this process — the securing of the West Coast — was not essential to American security. The Columbia River Valley and California’s Central Valley are not critical American territories. Any independent entities based in either could not possibly generate a force capable of threatening the Greater Mississippi Basin. This hardly means that these territories are unattractive or a net loss to the United States — among other things, they grant the United States full access to the Pacific trading basin — only that control of them is not imperative to American security.
2. Eliminate All Land-Based Threats to the Greater Mississippi Basin
The first land threat to the young United States was in essence the second phase of the Revolutionary War — a rematch between the British Empire and the young United States in the War of 1812. That the British navy could outmatch anything the Americans could float was obvious, and the naval blockade was crushing to an economy dependent upon coastal traffic. Geopolitically, the most critical part of the war was the participation of semi-independent British Canada. It wasn’t so much Canadian participation in any specific battle of the war (although Canadian troops did play a leading role in the sacking of Washington in August 1814) as it was that Canadian forces, unlike the British, did not have a supply line that stretched across the Atlantic. They were already in North America and, as such, constituted a direct physical threat to the existence of the United States.
Canada lacked many of the United States’ natural advantages even before the Americans were able to acquire the Louisiana Territory. First and most obvious, Canada is far enough north that its climate is far harsher than that of the United States, with all of the negative complications one would expect for population, agriculture and infrastructure. What few rivers Canada has neither interconnect nor remain usable year round. While the Great Lakes do not typically freeze, some of the river connections between them do. Most of these river connections also have rapids and falls, greatly limiting their utility as a transport network. Canada has made them more usable via grand canal projects, but the country’s low population and difficult climate greatly constrain its ability to generate capital locally. Every infrastructure project comes at a great opportunity cost, such a high cost that the St. Lawrence Seaway — a series of locks that link the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and allow full ocean access — was not completed until 1959.
Canada is also greatly challenged by geography. The maritime provinces — particularly Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island — are disconnected from the Canadian landmass and unable to capitalize on what geographic blessings the rest of the country enjoys. They lack even the option of integrating south with the Americans and so are perennially poor and lightly populated compared to the rest of the country. Even in the modern day, what population centers Canada does have are geographically sequestered from one another by the Canadian Shield and the Rocky Mountains.
As time advanced, none of Canada’s geographic weaknesses worked themselves out. Even the western provinces — British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — are linked to Canada’s core by only a single transport corridor that snakes 1,500 kilometers through the emptiness of western and central Ontario north of Lake Superior. All four provinces have been forced by geography and necessity to be more economically integrated with their southern neighbors than with their fellow Canadian provinces.
Such challenges to unity and development went from being inconvenient and expensive to downright dangerous when the British ended their involvement in the War of 1812 in February 1815. The British were exhausted from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and, with the French Empire having essentially imploded, were more interested in reshaping the European balance of power than re-engaging the Americans in distant North America. For their part, the Americans were mobilized, angry and — remembering vividly the Canadian/British sacking of Washington — mulling revenge. This left a geographically and culturally fractured Canada dreading a long-term, solitary confrontation with a hostile and strengthening local power. During the following decades, the Canadians had little choice but to downgrade their ties to the increasingly disinterested British Empire, adopt political neutrality vis-a-vis Washington, and begin formal economic integration with the United States. Any other choice would have put the Canadians on the path to another war with the Americans (this time likely without the British), and that war could have had only one outcome.
With its northern border secured, the Americans set about excising as much other extra-hemispheric influence from North America as possible. The Napoleonic Wars had not only absorbed British attention but had also shattered Spanish power (Napoleon actually succeeded in capturing the king of Spain early in the conflicts). Using a combination of illegal settlements, military pressure and diplomacy, the United States was able to gain control of east and west Florida from Madrid in 1819 in exchange for recognizing Spanish claims to what is now known as Texas (Tejas to the Spanish of the day).
This “recognition” was not even remotely serious. With Spain reeling from the Napoleonic Wars, Spanish control of its New World colonies was frayed at best. Most of Spain’s holdings in the Western Hemisphere either had already established their independence when Florida was officially ceded, or — as in Mexico — were bitterly fighting for it. Mexico achieved its independence a mere two years after Spain ceded Florida, and the United States’ efforts to secure its southwestern borders shifted to a blatant attempt to undermine and ultimately carve up the one remaining Western Hemispheric entity that could potentially challenge the United States: Mexico.
The Ohio and Upper Mississippi basins were hugely important assets, since they provided not only ample land for settlement but also sufficient grain production and easy transport. Since that transport allowed American merchants to easily access broader international markets, the United States quickly transformed itself from a poor coastal nation to a massively capital-rich commodities exporter. But these inner territories harbored a potentially fatal flaw: New Orleans. Should any nation but the United States control this single point, the entire maritime network that made North America such valuable territory would be held hostage to the whims of a foreign power. This is why the United States purchased New Orleans.
But even with the Louisiana Purchase, owning was not the same as securing, and all the gains of the Ohio and Louisiana settlement efforts required the permanent securing of New Orleans. Clearly, the biggest potential security threat to the United States was newly independent Mexico, the border with which was only 150 kilometers from New Orleans. In fact, New Orleans’ security was even more precarious than such a small distance suggested.
Most of eastern Texas was forested plains and hills with ample water supplies — ideal territory for hosting and supporting a substantial military force. In contrast, southern Louisiana was swamp. Only the city of New Orleans itself could house forces, and they would need to be supplied from another location via ship. It did not require a particularly clever military strategy for one to envision a Mexican assault on the city.
The United States defused and removed this potential threat by encouraging the settlement of not just its own side of the border region but the other side as well, pushing until the legal border reflected the natural border — the barrens of the desert. Just as the American plan for dealing with Canada was shaped by Canada’s geographic weakness, Washington’s efforts to first shield against and ultimately take over parts of Mexico were shaped by Mexico’s geographic shortcomings.
In the early 1800s Mexico, like the United States, was a very young country and much of its territory was similarly unsettled, but it simply could not expand as quickly as the United States for a variety of reasons. Obviously, the United States enjoyed a head start, having secured its independence in 1783 while Mexico became independent in 1821, but the deeper reasons are rooted in the geographic differences of the two states.
In the United States, the cheap transport system allowed early settlers to quickly obtain their own small tracts of land. It was an attractive option that helped fuel the early migration waves into the United States and then into the continent’s interior. Growing ranks of landholders exported their agricultural output either back down the National Road to the East Coast or down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and on to Europe. Small towns formed as wealth collected in the new territories, and in time the wealth accumulated to the point that portions of the United States had the capital necessary to industrialize. The interconnected nature of the Midwest ensured sufficient economies of scale to reinforce this process, and connections between the Midwest and the East Coast were sufficient to allow advances in one region to play off of and strengthen the other.
Mexico, in contrast, suffered from a complete lack of navigable rivers and had only a single good port (Veracruz). Additionally, what pieces of arable land it possessed were neither collected into a singular mass like the American interior nor situated at low elevations. The Mexico City region is arable only because it sits at a high elevation — at least 2,200 meters above sea level — lifting it out of the subtropical climate zone that predominates at that latitude.
This presented Mexico with a multitude of problems. First and most obviously, the lack of navigable waterways and the non-abundance of ports drastically reduced Mexico’s ability to move goods and thereby generate its own capital. Second, the disassociated nature of Mexico’s agricultural regions forced the construction of separate, non-integrated infrastructures for each individual sub-region, drastically raising the costs of even basic development. There were few economies of scale to be had, and advances in one region could not bolster another. Third, the highland nature of the Mexico City core required an even more expensive infrastructure, since everything had to be transported up the mountains from Veracruz. The engineering challenges and costs were so extreme and Mexico’s ability to finance them so strained that the 410-kilometer railway linking Mexico City and Veracruz was not completed until 1873. (By that point, the United States had two intercontinental lines and roughly 60,000 kilometers of railways.)
The higher cost of development in Mexico resulted in a very different economic and social structure compared to the United States. Instead of small landholdings, Mexican agriculture was dominated by a small number of rich Spaniards (or their descendants) who could afford the high capital costs of creating plantations. So whereas American settlers were traditionally yeoman farmers who owned their own land, Mexican settlers were largely indentured laborers or de facto serfs in the employ of local oligarchs. The Mexican landowners had, in essence, created their own company towns and saw little benefit in pooling their efforts to industrialize. Doing so would have undermined their control of their economic and political fiefdoms. This social structure has survived to the modern day, with the bulk of Mexican political and economic power held by the same 300 families that dominated Mexico’s early years, each with its local geographic power center.
For the United States, the attraction of owning one’s own destiny made it the destination of choice for most European migrants. At the time that Mexico achieved independence it had 6.2 million people versus the U.S. population of 9.6 million. In just two generations — by 1870 — the American population had ballooned to 38.6 million while Mexico’s was only 8.8 million. This U.S. population boom, combined with the United States’ ability to industrialize organically, not only allowed it to develop economically but also enabled it to provide the goods for its own development.
The American effort against Mexico took place in two theaters. The first was Texas, and the primary means was settlement as enabled by the Austin family. Most Texas scholars begin the story of Texas with Stephen F. Austin, considered to be the dominant personality in Texas’ formation. STRATFOR starts earlier with Stephen’s father, Moses Austin. In December 1796, Moses relocated from Virginia to then-Spanish Missouri — a region that would, within a decade, become part of the Louisiana Purchase — and began investing in mining operations. He swore fealty to the Spanish crown but obtained permission to assist with settling the region — something he did with American, not Spanish, citizens. Once Missouri became American territory, Moses shifted his attention south to the new border and used his contacts in the Spanish government to replicate his Missouri activities in Spanish Tejas.
After Moses’ death in 1821, his son took over the family business of establishing American demographic and economic interests on the Mexican side of the border. Whether the Austins were American agents or simply profiteers is irrelevant; the end result was an early skewing of Tejas in the direction of the United States. Stephen’s efforts commenced the same year as his father’s death, which was the same year that Mexico’s long war of independence against Spain ended. At that time, Spanish/Mexican Tejas was nearly devoid of settlers — Anglo or Hispanic — so the original 300 families that Stephen F. Austin helped settle in Tejas immediately dominated the territory’s demography and economy. And from that point on the United States not so quietly encouraged immigration into Mexican Tejas.
Once Tejas’ population identified more with the United States than it did with Mexico proper, the hard work was already done. The remaining question was how to formalize American control, no small matter. When hostilities broke out between Mexico City and these so-called “Texians,” U.S. financial interests — most notably the U.S. regional reserve banks — bankrolled the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836.
It was in this war that one of the most important battles of the modern age was fought. After capturing the Alamo, Mexican dictator Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna marched north and then east with the intention of smashing the Texian forces in a series of engagements. With the Texians outnumbered by a factor of more than five to one, there was every indication that the Mexican forces would prevail over the Texian rebels. But with no small amount of luck the Texians managed not only to defeat the Mexican forces at the Battle of San Jacinto but also capture Santa Anna himself and force a treaty of secession upon the Mexican government. An independent Texas was born and the Texians became Texans.
However, had the battle gone the other way the Texian forces would not have simply been routed but crushed. It was obvious to the Mexicans that the Texians had been fighting with weapons made in the United States, purchased from the United States with money lent by the United States. Since there would have been no military force between the Mexican army and New Orleans, it would not have required a particularly ingenious plan for Mexican forces to capture New Orleans. It could well have been Mexico — not the United States — that controlled access to the North American core.
But Mexican supremacy over North America was not to be, and the United States continued consolidating. The next order of business was ensuring that Texas neither fell back under Mexican control nor was able to persist as an independent entity.
Texas was practically a still-born republic. The western half of Texas suffers from rocky soil and aridity, and its rivers are for the most part unnavigable. Like Mexico, its successful development would require a massive application of capital, and it attained its independence only by accruing a great deal of debt. That debt was owed primarily to the United States, which chose not to write off any upon conclusion of the war. Add in that independent Texas had but 40,000 people (compared to the U.S. population at the time of 14.7 million) and the future of the new country was — at best — bleak.
Texas immediately applied for statehood, but domestic (both Texan and American) political squabbles and a refusal of Washington to accept Texas’ debt as an American federal responsibility prevented immediate annexation. Within a few short years, Texas’ deteriorating financial position combined with a revenge-minded Mexico hard by its still-disputed border forced Texas to accede to the United States on Washington’s terms in 1845. From that point the United States poured sufficient resources into its newest territory (ultimately exchanging approximately one-third of Texas’ territory for the entirety of the former country’s debt burden in 1850, giving Texas its contemporary shape) and set about enforcing the new U.S.-Mexico border.
Which brings us to the second part of the American strategy against Mexico. While the United States was busy supporting Texian/Texan autonomy, it was also undermining Spanish/Mexican control of the lands of what would become the American Southwest farther to the west. The key pillar of this strategy was another of the famous American trails: the Santa Fe.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Santa Fe Trail was formed not only before the New Mexico Territory became American, or even before Texas became an U.S. state, but before the territory become formally Mexican — the United States founded the trail when Santa Fe was still held by Spanish authority. The trail’s purpose was twofold: first, to fill the region on the other side of the border with a sufficient number of Americans so that the region would identify with the United States rather than with Spain or Mexico and, second, to establish an economic dependency between the northern Mexican territories and the United States.
The United States’ more favorable transport options and labor demography granted it the capital and skills it needed to industrialize at a time when Mexico was still battling Spain for its independence. The Santa Fe Trail started filling the region not only with American settlers but also with American industrial goods that Mexicans could not get elsewhere in the hemisphere.
Even if the race to dominate the lands of New Mexico and Arizona had been a fair one, the barrens of the Chihuahuan, Sonoran and Mojave deserts greatly hindered Mexico’s ability to settle the region with its own citizens. Mexico quickly fell behind economically and demographically in the contest for its own northern territories. (Incidentally, the United States attempted a similar settlement policy in western Canada, but it was halted by the War of 1812.)
The two efforts — carving out Texas and demographically and economically dominating the Southwest — came to a head in the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War. In that war the Americans launched a series of diversionary attacks across the border region, drawing the bulk of Mexican forces into long, arduous marches across the Mexican deserts. Once Mexican forces were fully engaged far to the north of Mexico’s core territories — and on the wrong side of the deserts — American forces made an amphibious landing and quickly captured Mexico’s only port at Veracruz before marching on and capturing Mexico City, the country’s capital. In the postwar settlement, the United States gained control of all the lands of northern Mexico that could sustain sizable populations and set the border with Mexico through the Chihuahuan Desert, as good of an international border as one can find in North America. This firmly eliminated Mexico as a military threat.
3. Control the Ocean Approaches to North America
With the United States having not simply secured its land borders but having ensured that its North American neighbors were geographically unable to challenge it, Washington’s attention shifted to curtailing the next potential threat: an attack from the sea. Having been settled by the British and being economically integrated into their empire for more than a century, the Americans understood very well that sea power could be used to reach them from Europe or elsewhere, outmaneuver their land forces and attack at the whim of whoever controlled the ships.
But the Americans also understood that useful sea power had requirements. The Atlantic crossing was a long one that exhausted its crews and passengers. Troops could not simply sail straight across and be dropped off ready to fight. They required recuperation on land before being committed to a war. Such ships and their crews also required local resupply. Loading up with everything needed for both the trip across the Atlantic and a military campaign would leave no room on the ships for troops. As naval technology advanced, the ships themselves also required coal, which necessitated a constellation of coaling stations near any theaters of operation. Hence, a naval assault required forward bases that would experience traffic just as heavy as the spear tip of any invasion effort.
Ultimately, it was a Russian decision that spurred the Americans to action. In 1821 the Russians formalized their claim to the northwest shore of North America, complete with a declaration barring any ship from approaching within 100 miles of their coastline. The Russian claim extended as far south as the 51st parallel (the northern extreme of Vancouver Island). A particularly bold Russian effort even saw the founding of Fort Ross, less than 160 kilometers north of San Francisco Bay, in order to secure a (relatively) local supply of foodstuffs for Russia’s American colonial effort.
In response to both the broader geopolitical need as well as the specific Russian challenge, the United States issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. It asserted that European powers would not be allowed to form new colonies in the Western Hemisphere and that, should a European power lose its grip on an existing New World colony, American power would be used to prevent their re-entrance. It was a policy of bluff, but it did lay the groundwork in both American and European minds that the Western Hemisphere was not European territory. With every year that the Americans’ bluff was not called, the United States’ position gained a little more credibility.
All the while the United States used diplomacy and its growing economic heft to expand. In 1867 the United States purchased the Alaska Territory from Russia, removing Moscow’s weak influence from the hemisphere and securing the United States from any northwestern coastal approach from Asia. In 1898, after a generation of political manipulations that included indirectly sponsoring a coup, Washington signed a treaty of annexation with the Kingdom of Hawaii. This secured not only the most important supply depot in the entire Pacific but also the last patch of land on any sea invasion route from Asia to the U.S. West Coast.
The Atlantic proved far more problematic. There are not many patches of land in the Pacific, and most of them are in the extreme western reaches of the ocean, so securing a buffer there was relatively easy. On the Atlantic side, many European empires were firmly entrenched very close to American shores. The British held bases in maritime Canada and the Bahamas. Several European powers held Caribbean colonies, all of which engaged in massive trade with the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. The Spanish, while completely ejected from the mainland by the end of the 1820s, still held Cuba, Puerto Rico and the eastern half of Hispaniola (the modern-day Dominican Republic).
All were problematic to the growing United States, but it was Cuba that was the most vexing issue. Just as the city of New Orleans is critical because it is the lynchpin of the entire Mississippi watershed, Cuba, too, is critical because it oversees New Orleans’ access to the wider world from its perch on the Yucatan Channel and Florida Straits. No native Cuban power is strong enough to threaten the United States directly, but like Canada, Cuba could serve as a launching point for an extra-hemispheric power. At Spain’s height of power in the New World it controlled Florida, the Yucatan and Cuba — precisely the pieces of territory necessary to neutralize New Orleans. By the end of the 19th century, those holdings had been whittled down to Cuba alone, and by that time the once-hegemonic Spain had been crushed in a series of European wars, reducing it to a second-rate regional power largely limited to southwestern Europe. It did not take long for Washington to address the Cuba question.
In 1898, the United States launched its first-ever overseas expeditionary war, complete with amphibious assaults, long supply lines and naval support for which American warfighting would in time become famous. In a war that was as globe-spanning as it was brief, the United States captured all of Spain’s overseas island territories — including Cuba. Many European powers retained bases in the Western Hemisphere that could threaten the U.S. mainland, but with Cuba firmly in American hands, they could not easily assault New Orleans, the only spot that could truly threaten America’s position. Cuba remained a de facto American territory until the Cuban Revolution of 1959. At that point, Cuba again became a launching point for an extra-hemispheric power, this time the Soviet Union. That the United States risked nuclear war over Cuba is a testament to how seriously Washington views Cuba. In the post-Cold War era Cuba lacks a powerful external sponsor and so, like Canada, is not viewed as a security risk.
After the Spanish-American war, the Americans opportunistically acquired territories when circumstances allowed. By far the most relevant of these annexations were the results of the Lend-Lease program in the lead-up to World War II. The United Kingdom and its empire had long been seen as the greatest threat to American security. In addition to two formal American-British wars, the United States had fought dozens of skirmishes with its former colonial master over the years. It was British sea power that had nearly destroyed the United States in its early years, and it remained British sea power that could both constrain American economic growth and ultimately challenge the U.S. position in North America.
The opening years of World War II ended this potential threat. Beset by a European continent fully under the control of Nazi Germany, London had been forced to concentrate all of its naval assets on maintaining a Continental blockade. German submarine warfare threatened both the strength of that blockade and the ability of London to maintain its own maritime supply lines. Simply put, the British needed more ships. The Americans were willing to provide them — 40 mothballed destroyers to be exact — for a price. That price was almost all British naval bases in the Western Hemisphere. The only possessions that boasted good natural ports that the British retained after the deal were in Nova Scotia and the Bahamas.
The remaining naval approaches in the aftermath of Lend-Lease were the Azores (a Portuguese possession) and Iceland. The first American operations upon entering World War II were the occupations of both territories. In the post-war settlement, not only was Iceland formally included in NATO but its defense responsibilities were entirely subordinated to the U.S. Defense Department.
4. Control the World’s Oceans
The two world wars of the early 20th century constituted a watershed in human history for a number of reasons. For the United States the wars’ effects can be summed up with this simple statement: They cleared away the competition.
Global history from 1500 to 1945 is a lengthy treatise of increasing contact and conflict among a series of great regional powers. Some of these powers achieved supra-regional empires, with the Spanish, French and English being the most obvious. Several regional powers — Austria, Germany, Ottoman Turkey and Japan — also succeeded in extending their writ over huge tracts of territory during parts of this period. And several secondary powers — the Netherlands, Poland, China and Portugal — had periods of relative strength. Yet the two world wars massively devastated all of these powers. No battles were fought in the mainland United States. Not a single American factory was ever bombed. Alone among the world’s powers in 1945, the United States was not only functional but thriving.
The United States immediately set to work consolidating its newfound power, creating a global architecture to entrench its position. The first stage of this — naval domination — was achieved quickly and easily. The U.S. Navy at the beginning of World War II was already a respectable institution, but after three years fighting across two oceans it had achieved both global reach and massive competency. But that is only part of the story. Equally important was the fact that, as of August 1945, with the notable exception of the British Royal Navy, every other navy in the world had been destroyed. As impressive as the United States’ absolute gains in naval power had been, its relative gains were grander still. There simply was no competition. Always a maritime merchant power, the United States could now marry its economic advantages to absolute dominance of the seas and all global trade routes. And it really didn’t need to build a single additional ship to do so (although it did anyway).
Over the next few years the United States’ undisputed naval supremacy allowed the Americans to impose a series of changes on the international system.
The formation of NATO in 1949 placed all of the world’s surviving naval assets under American strategic direction.
The inclusion of the United Kingdom, Italy, Iceland and Norway in NATO granted the United States the basing rights it needed to utterly dominate the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean — the two bodies of water that would be required for any theoretical European resurgence. The one meaningful European attempt to challenge the new reality — the Anglo-French Sinai campaign of 1956 — cemented the downfall of the European navies. Both London and Paris discovered that they now lacked the power to hold naval policies independent of Washington.
The seizure of Japan’s Pacific empire granted the Americans basing access in the Pacific, sufficient to allow complete American naval dominance of the north and central portions of that ocean.
A formal alliance with Australia and New Zealand extended American naval hegemony to the southern Pacific in 1951.
A 1952 security treaty placed a rehabilitated Japan — and its navy — firmly under the American security umbrella.
Shorn of both independent economic vitality at home and strong independent naval presences beyond their home waters, all of the European empires quickly collapsed. Within a few decades of World War II’s end, nearly every piece of the once globe-spanning European empires had achieved independence.
There is another secret to American success — both in controlling the oceans and taking advantage of European failures — that lies in an often-misunderstood economic structure called Bretton Woods. Even before World War II ended, the United States had leveraged its position as the largest economy and military to convince all of the Western allies — most of whose governments were in exile at the time — to sign onto the Bretton Woods accords. The states committed to the formation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to assist with the expected post-War reconstruction. Considering the general destitution of Western Europe at the time, this, in essence, was a U.S. commitment to finance if not outright fund that reconstruction. Because of that, the U.S. dollar was the obvious and only choice to serve as the global currency.
But Bretton Woods was about more than currency regimes and international institutions; its deeper purpose lay in two other features that are often overlooked. The United States would open its markets to participating states’ exports while not requiring reciprocal access for its own. In exchange, participating states would grant the United States deference in the crafting of security policy. NATO quickly emerged as the organization through which this policy was pursued.
From the point of view of the non-American founders of Bretton Woods, this was an excellent deal. Self-funded reconstruction was out of the question. The bombing campaigns required to defeat the Nazis leveled most of Western Europe’s infrastructure and industrial capacity. Even in those few parts of the United Kingdom that emerged unscathed, the state labored under a debt that would require decades of economic growth to recover from.
It was not so much that access to the American market would help regenerate Europe’s fortunes as it was that the American market was the only market at war’s end. And since all exports from Bretton-Woods states (which the exception of some Canadian exports) to the United States had to travel by water, and since the U.S. Navy was the only institution that could guarantee the safety of those exports, adopting security policies unfriendly to Washington was simply seen as a nonstarter. By the mid-1950s, Bretton Woods had been expanded to the defeated Axis powers as well as South Korea and Taiwan. It soon became the basis of the global trading network, first being incorporated into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and in time being transformed into the World Trade Organization. With a single policy, the Americans not only had fused their economic and military policies into a single robust system but also had firmly established that American dominance of the seas and the global economic system would be in the interest of all major economies with the exception of the Soviet Union.
5. Prevent any Potential Challengers from Rising
From a functional point of view the United States controls North America because it holds nearly all of the pieces that are worth holding. With the possible exception of Cuba or some select sections of southern Canada, the rest of the landmass is more trouble than it is worth. Additionally, the security relationship it has developed with Canada and Mexico means that neither poses an existential threat to American dominance. Any threat to the United States would have to come from beyond North America. And the only type of country that could possibly dislodge the United States would be another state whose power is also continental in scope.
As of 2011, there are no such states in the international system. Neither are there any such powers whose rise is imminent. Most of the world is simply too geographically hostile to integration to pose significant threats. The presence of jungles, deserts and mountains and the lack of navigable rivers in Africa does more than make Africa capital poor; it also absolutely prevents unification, thus eliminating Africa as a potential seedbed for a mega-state. As for Australia, most of it is not habitable. It is essentially eight loosely connected cities spread around the edges of a largely arid landmass. Any claims to Australia being a “continental” power would be literal, not functional.
In fact, there are only two portions of the planet (outside of North America) that could possibly generate a rival to the United States. One is South America. South America is mostly hollow, with the people living on the coasts and the center dominated by rainforests and mountains. However, the Southern Cone region has the world’s only other naturally interconnected and navigable waterway system overlaying arable land, the building blocks of a major power. But that territory — the Rio de la Plata region — is considerably smaller than the North American core and it is also split among four sovereign states. And the largest of those four — Brazil — has a fundamentally different culture and language than the others, impeding unification.
State-to-state competition is hardwired into the Rio de la Plata region, making a challenge to the United States impossible until there is political consolidation, and that will require not simply Brazil’s ascendency but also its de facto absorption of Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina into a single Brazilian superstate. Considering how much more powerful Brazil is than the other three combined, that consolidation — and the challenge likely to arise from it — may well be inevitable but it is certainly not imminent. Countries the size of Argentina do not simply disappear easily or quickly. So while a South American challenge may be rising, it is extremely unlikely to occur within a generation.
The other part of the world that could produce a rival to the United States is Eurasia. Eurasia is a region of extremely varied geography, and it is the most likely birthplace of an American competitor that would be continental in scope. Geography, however, makes it extremely difficult for such a power (or a coalition of such powers) to arise. In fact, the southern sub-regions of Eurasia cannot contribute to such formation. The Ganges River Basin is the most agriculturally productive in the world, but the Ganges is not navigable. The combination of fertile lands and non-navigable waterways makes the region crushingly overpopu
-
From Daily Beast and Newsweek, hardly right wing publications:
We’re All Cheneyites Now
Aug 28, 2011 10:01 AM EDT
The dark lord of American politics has a new book out, fiercely defending his Legacy. Lay down your arms, Dick. You won the fight.
On the Fourth of July, Dick Cheney surprised his friends and neighbors in Jackson, Wyo., by coming downtown for the parade, an annual procession featuring a rollerblading moose and a wagon of farmers tossing raw corn—the Wyoming equivalent of Mardi Gras beads—into the crowd. Cheney didn’t stay long and he didn’t say much. Mostly he chatted with folks about fishing (the water’s too damn high this year) and posed for a few pictures. But it was enough to reassure people that the former vice president, who had been rarely spotted during a year that combined recuperation from radical heart surgery with the burden of producing a lengthy memoir, was still on the scene.
This week, his book, In My Time, is scheduled to arrive in bookstores. Simon & Schuster paid Cheney a multimillion-dollar advance, and recouping it means mounting the kind of intensive marketing effort that would tax the energy of a much younger, healthier author. But much more than money is involved. After 40 years in the contentious center ring of American politics, this is Cheney’s last rodeo.
When he signed the deal in 2009, he was in bunker mentality—an embattled ideologue gearing up to defend a deeply unpopular terrorism policy under constant attack from the left. As his tome arrives in bookstores at summer’s end, the battlefield has changed dramatically. His defense brief lands after the court of public opinion has ruled—in his favor. President Obama has largely adopted the Cheney playbook on combating terrorism, from keeping Gitmo open to trying suspected enemies of the state in military tribunals. Obama’s drone war, which has quadrupled the number of attacks in the past two years, reflects Cheney’s whatever-it-takes approach. The leftist wrath once trained on Bush’s veep is aimed at the Democratic incumbent these days. Even the Bush-Cheney pro-democracy doctrine, born as a substitute rationale for the Iraq War after the failure to find WMD, is bearing fruit, toppling dictators from Cairo to Tripoli. The dirty little secret of the last few years is that the man George Bush called “Big Time” won. We’re all Cheneyites now.
cheney-om06
Former Vice President Dick Cheney., David Hume Kennerly / Contour-Getty Images
But he’s still fighting the good fight—taking shots in the book at members of the national-security team who didn’t share his Manichaean view. George Tenet let the president down by bailing under fire, in Cheney’s telling; Condi Rice was wobbly on Iraq and suspect in her dealings with North Korea (Rice can return fire this fall, when her own book comes out). He’s rough on Colin Powell: “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government.”
But then it’s no real surprise that he’s drifted far from Powell politically. Two years ago, he said on Face the Nation that he was closer to Rush Limbaugh than the general. He won the lasting admiration of conservatives for speaking out against Obama at the height of his popularity, while 43 maintained a studious silence.
On May 2, as the final version of In My Time was coming together, American SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Cheney praised President Obama, but the hit meant going back to the book for “updating” as his editor, Mary Matalin, put it. Whatever edits Cheney made, they didn’t require a change of mind about how to deal with America’s enemies. As the anniversary of 9/11 draws near, and In My Time hits the bookstores, Dick Cheney will have one more moment on the national stage to remind people that the policies of today were shaped by his strategic vision. And then, if his HeartMate II keeps pumping and the water recedes, he can go back home and fish in peace.
-
Mexico - President Calderon calls for U.S. action following attack in Monterrey
Following the attack on Casino Royal, which killed more than 50 in Monterrey on 25 August 2011, Mexican President Felipe Calderon addressed the nation on 26 August 2011, condemning the attacks and calling them acts of terrorism. Calderon placed some blame on the United States, citing the fact that the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of drugs and leading weapons retailer, stating that these activities finance the criminal activity plaguing Mexico. Calderon implored both the U.S. President and Congress to take action to prevent the transfer of profits from drug sales back to Mexico and also to curb the criminal sale of high-powered assault rifles.
MARC: Better talk to the BATF about the last point , , ,
Mexico - U.S. increases role in war against drugs in Mexico
The United States is expanding their role in the war on drugs in Mexico, allowing Mexican authorities to stage cross border helicopter raids in the U.S., in addition to staging drones to eavesdrop on cartel’s cell phone communications and to capture video of drug processing labs and smuggling units. While U.S. authorities maintain these are not joint operations, rather Mexican operations staged in U.S. territory, cooperation is increasing despite historical tensions between the two nations.
-
By FOUAD AJAMI
The Arabic word shamata has its own power. The closest approximation to it is the German schadenfreude—glee at another's misfortune. And when the Twin Towers fell 10 years ago this week, there was plenty of glee in Arab lands—a sense of wonder, bordering on pride, that a band of young Arabs had brought soot and ruin onto American soil.
The symbols of this mighty American republic—the commercial empire in New York, the military power embodied by the Pentagon—had been hit. Sweets were handed out in East Jerusalem, there were no tears shed in Cairo for the Americans, more than three decades of U.S. aid notwithstanding. Everywhere in that Arab world—among the Western-educated elite as among the Islamists—there was unmistakable satisfaction that the Americans had gotten their comeuppance.
There were sympathetic vigils in Iran—America's most determined enemy in the region—and anti-American belligerence in the Arab countries most closely allied with the United States. This occasioned the observation of the noted historian Bernard Lewis that there were pro-American regimes with anti-American populations, and anti-American regimes with pro-American populations.
I traveled to Jeddah and Cairo in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In the splendid homes of wealthy American-educated businessmen, in the salons of perfectly polished men and women of letters, there was no small measure of admiration for Osama bin Laden. He was the avenger, the Arabs had been at the receiving end of Western power, and now the scales were righted. "Yes, but . . . ," said the Arab intellectual class, almost in unison. Those death pilots may have been zealous, but now the Americans know, and for the first time, what it means to be at the receiving end of power.
Very few Arabs believed that the landscape all around them—the tyrannical states, the growing poverty, the destruction of what little grace their old cities once possessed, the war across the generations between secular fathers and Islamist children—was the harvest of their own history. It was easier to believe that the Americans had willed those outcomes.
In truth, in the decade prior to 9/11, America had paid the Arab world scant attention. We had taken a holiday from history's exertions. But the Arabs had hung onto their belief that a willful America disposed of their fate. The Arab regimes possessed their own sources of power—fearsome security apparatuses, money in the oil states, official custodians of religion who gave repression their seal of approval.
Enlarge Image
CloseAFP/Getty Images
Demonstrators in Instanbul hold a Syrian flag in support of the protests in Syria.
.But it was more convenient to trace the trail across the ocean, to the United States. Mohammed Atta, who led the death pilots, was a child of the Egyptian middle class, a lawyer's son, formed by the disappointments of Egypt and its inequities. But there was little of him said in Egypt. The official press looked away.
There was to be no way of getting politically conscious Arabs to accept responsibility for what had taken place on 9/11. Set aside those steeped in conspiracy who thought that these attacks were the work of Americans themselves, that thousands of Jews had not shown up at work in the Twin Towers on 9/11. The pathology that mattered was that of otherwise reasonable men and women who were glad for America's torment. The Americans had might, but were far away. Now the terrorism, like a magnet, drew them into Arab and Muslim lands. Now they were near, and they would be entangled in the great civil war raging over the course of Arab and Muslim history.
The masters and preachers of terror had told their foot soldiers, and the great mass on the fence, that the Americans would make a run for it—as they had in Lebanon and Somalia, that they didn't have the stomach for a fight. The Arabs barely took notice when America struck the Taliban in Kabul. What was Afghanistan to them? It was a blighted and miserable land at a safe distance.
But the American war, and the sense of righteous violation, soon hit the Arab world itself. Saddam Hussein may not have been the Arab idol he was a decade earlier, but he was still a favored son of that Arab nation, its self-appointed defender. The toppling of his regime, some 18 months or so after 9/11, had brought the war closer to the Arabs. The spectacle of the Iraqi despot flushed out of his spider hole by American soldiers was a lesson to the Arabs as to the falseness and futility of radicalism.
It is said that "the east" is a land given to long memory, that there the past is never forgotten. But a decade on, the Arab world has little to say about 9/11—at least not directly. In the course of that Arab Spring, young people in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the dreaded dictators. And in Libya, there is the thrill of liberty, delivered, in part, by Western powers. In the slaughter-grounds of Syria, the rage is not directed against foreign demons, but against the cruel rulers who have robbed that population of a chance at a decent life.
America held the line in the aftermath of 9/11. It wasn't brilliant at everything it attempted in Arab lands. But a chance was given the Arabs to come face to face, and truly for the first time, with the harvest of their own history. Now their world is what they make of it.
Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-chair of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
-
I read Crafty's Stratfor's Turkey Post with great interest. It made me think if I substituted the word "America" for Turkey it had many of the same meanings. Also, if I substituted "America" for Turkey and "Taiwan" for Israel, again, the article makes some good points. It truly is more like two "who have interests and the question is will those interest realign?" And like Israel/Turkey our interests are "not as deep as they were 20 or 30 years ago.
America needs to look after her interests; period.
"The region in which Turkey operates is no longer threatened by the Soviet Union. It doesn’t have a common interest with Israel in fighting the Soviets. Turkey is living in a world that is increasingly Islamist as opposed to secular. It’s accommodating itself to it. Israel, in the meantime, has its own interests in trying to preserve what it thinks are its territorial interests, and they simply don’t coincide with what Turkey is saying. Therefore, these are two countries that were once linked with common interests. Those interests have withered, and the relationship is seriously in trouble.
Colin: In this context, do you think Israel and Turkey can repair their relationship and, if they can, what will that new relationship be?
George: Well this is not like a marriage that gets repaired or unrepaired. These are more like businesses who have interests and the question is: will those interest realign? And there are certainly some common interests, though they’re not as deep as they were 20 or 30 years ago. Because the foundation of the relationship has changed, the nature of the relationship is going to change. Also, the tolerance on the part of each side is going to change."
-
I agree JDN, time to cut Japan loose. The Chinese need to get revenge for the horrors of Nanjing, Manchuria and Unit 731, why should we get involved?
Not our problem, right?
-
Many people on the right in Japan say the same thing. An armed nuclear Japan would be a force to be reckoned with in Asia. They argue we need
Japan and our massive bases there more than they need us. Also, it's to our strategic advantage to have bases in Japan. Do you know how valuable the extensive land is that Japan allows us to use? It's worth untold billions upon billions of dollars. And rather than us pay Japan, Japan pays us billions of dollars. Where else do we have such a good deal? In contrast we give foreign aid to Taiwan and Israel, Think about it; Japan gives money to us.
Not to mention our massive trade with Japan, their huge holding of our debt, etc. I'm missing something. So how is Japan again relevant or equivalent to Taiwan and Israel? :-o
I'm curious GM: if my wife was Peruvian instead of being Japanese would you bring up Peru as an opposing arguement? :? It would be about as relevant as this post of yours. Or not.... :-(
Or should we talk about your wife...
-
Just pointing out your hypocrisy.
If Japan were Jewish, I doubt you'd be such an advocate for them.
-
:?
Hypocrisy?
Frankly, I don't know what religion Japan is. And I'm not necessarily an advocate for them; I can give you good and bad. But if they were Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian it would have nothing to do with the issue except how it affects America. The key is whether the relationship is mutually beneficial. As the Stratfor piece points out, it's a business relationship, not a marriage. So we need to be practical, not emotional.
-
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNdPPEwguDQ[/youtube]
Methinks Japan better rediscover Bushido quickly.
We may have de-militarized them a bit too much. The Japanese Navy makes Obama's "mom jeans" look masculine.
-
The US would not need Turkey for anti-Iranian missile defense if Baraq had not pussed out on the AMD batteries in eastern Europe.
Anyway, more to the point, it makes perfect sense to me that the best thing the US could do would be to sign a mutual defense treaty with Israel. Reliable and highly capable ally (e.g. two nuke enemies-- Iraq and Syria-- nipped in the bud), permanent base of operations in the mid-east, end to any doubt about viability of Israel's survival, great intel, foxy women, and much more.
-
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw-noKVTZJ4[/youtube]
Good thing we don't have any cuts for the defense budget, right?
-
If it comes down to a dance-off, Japan will totally crush the PLAN.
I bet the normally hostile towards the military Bay Area is now going to push for a Port Call from The Japanese Navy. So they got that going for them....
-
GM; Funny. :-) But I suggest you ask China? Or Korea? Or anyplace else in Asia....
What would China say if Japan decided to remilitarize, join the nuclear club, and become nationalistic?
Would they be laughing?
That said, you have to admit, they can dance. :-D
-
I'd say they should be doing this now, but they won't. Remember, PLA generals have threatened a nuclear exchange with us, you think they'd hesitate to trade nukes with their most hated enemy?
Make no mistake, the Chinese HATE the Japanese as much as the muzzies and europeans hate Jews. Much like Israel, Japan has no strategic depth and a nuclear exchange would mean the end of Japan.
-
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RSPjMBhM-Y[/youtube]
"Peaceful rise". :roll:
The PLA has come a long way since they were "A million guys with rifles".
-
"Thread Nazi" here again. The preceding posts I think would do just fine on the China-US thread or the Military thread.
I picture this thread as being more about "the vision thing"; e.g. "The US's unipolar moment is over. Now what?"
-
"The US's unipolar moment is over. Now what?"
Si vis pacem, para bellum
-
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2011/07/Defending-Defense-Warning-Hollow-Force-Ahead
The Effect of Ever More Defense Budget Cuts
on U.S. Armed Forces
A joint project of
American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, and
The Heritage Foundation
National security is neither a “sacred cow” nor just another federal budget line item. Providing for the common defense of the American people and our homeland is the primary responsibility of policymakers in Washington. However, in an effort to protect social entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the health care reform law from serious deficit and debt reduction efforts, President Obama has proposed not only to raise taxes, but also to cut another $400 billion more from future national security spending. As Obama said on June 29, 2011, “[Outgoing Secretary of Defense] Bob Gates has already done a good job identifying $400 billion in cuts, but we’re going to do more.”
It appears the President wants to do much more when it comes to cutting defense. This week, Obama praised the latest in a series of plans to cut military spending by roughly $900 billion or more. He said the most recent plan that proposes cutting $886 billion from defense is “broadly consistent” with his own approach for getting the country’s finances under control. Although this plan, like the others, is light on details of how it would actually achieve trillions in overall spending cuts, it is clear that there is a willingness within the administration and among some members of Congress to slash defense well beyond the President’s earlier mark of $400 billion.
So far, the debate over long-term defense spending cuts has been a war among accountants—an abstract numbers game played with little regard for its concrete effect on the future of America’s armed forces and national security. This backgrounder describes the likely results of the significant defense spending reductions now being considered: a “hollow force” characterized by fewer personnel and weapon systems, slowed military modernization, reduced readiness for operations, and continued stress on the all-volunteer force. If realized, this modern day “hollow force” will be less capable of securing America’s interests and preserving the international leadership role that rests upon military preeminence.
Myth: Proposed cuts represent a small part of future military spending.
Fact: When adjusted for inflation, President Obama’s April 2011 proposal to cut $400 billion in long-term national security spending accounts for anywhere between 5%-to-8% of projected defense spending over a 12-year-period. For many, this appears to be only a marginal reduction in the Pentagon’s budget.
However, the President’s $400 billion in cuts is best understood as a floor—rather than as a ceiling—for reductions to baseline defense spending. If news reports are accurate, senior Obama administration officials and key members of Congress appear open to cutting the military’s future budget even more deeply. More likely, the cuts will occur over ten fiscal years starting in February 2012 when the President’s 2013 defense budget request arrives on Capitol Hill.
Moreover, it is worth recalling that Obama has already presided over two rounds of reductions to defense spending. In 2009, $330 billion was cut from future procurement programs and, in 2010, another $78 billion was sliced from the Pentagon’s budget. Add these to Obama’s new $400 billion in proposed cuts, and overall reductions to defense spending will surpass $800 billion—with perhaps even more cuts to come. Combined with the “procurement holiday” of the Clinton years and the “hollow growth” of the Bush years,[1] when it comes to military modernization the Pentagon already finds itself in a deep hole. New cuts will create an even deeper hole.
Other factors will exacerbate the effect of Obama’s $400 billion in defense cuts. First, estimated long-term defense “savings” are premised, in part, on the Obama administration’s assumptions about a total withdrawal from Iraq, a greatly reduced role in Afghanistan by 2014, and the absence of unforeseen crises and contingencies in the future.[2] Second, estimates of future defense spending requirements assume annual inflation will grow at just 2 percent, a rate that is wildly optimistic and in contradiction to the long-term tendency of defense inflation to outpace civilian inflation.[3] Third, without significant reform, costs for military health care—which already represent 9 percent of Pentagon spending—are on course to double by 2030.[4] And fourth, even before the administration began making cuts to national security spending, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had already predicted that the Pentagon’s research and procurement accounts would fall to just 28 percent of total defense spending.[5]
Myth: Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals will alleviate the military’s manpower problems and allow the armed forces to control personnel spending.
Fact: As recent U.S. military commitments outside of Afghanistan and Iraq have shown, the pace of operations is likely to remain high. President Obama has maintained every foreign policy commitment set by his predecessors and added to the military’s missions. The President surged forces twice in Afghanistan, started a new operation in Libya, sent troops to Japan and Haiti for disaster relief operations, and kept 1,200 National Guard troops at America’s southwest border.
The demand for military personnel may not decline.
The future posture and operational tempo of U.S. forces abroad are far from certain. In Iraq, current administration policy and defense planning are premised on a complete withdrawal by the end of 2011. That could quickly change, however. The government in Baghdad has indicated openness to a continuing American military presence after 2011. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently urged the Iraqis to consider allowing at least 10,000 U.S. troops to remain.
In Afghanistan, Secretary Panetta has noted that, even after the “surge” drawdown scheduled to run through 2012, 70,000 U.S. troops will remain. While Afghan security forces are scheduled to “take the lead” in security missions after 2014, it is likely that a significant U.S. military presence in the country will still be required. To be sure, it would not be responsible to base future U.S. planning in Afghanistan on the assumption of continued large-scale NATO assistance. At minimum, the United States should be prepared to retain brigade-sized forces in Kabul and in all the current NATO regional commands, including a larger presence in the Pashtun south and east, while continuing efforts to build Afghan military capability. For such objectives, an estimate of 40,000 troops in Afghanistan past 2014 is conservative.
Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan would represent only a part of U.S. posture in the greater Middle East—a historically unstable region now in the throes of a further transition and facing the prospect of an accelerated regional nuclear arms race sparked by Iran. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have attempted to reposture and redeploy U.S. forces to the Pacific, though the efforts have been slowed due to wartime needs, limited construction funds, and political uncertainties.
Importantly, recent history tells us to expect the unexpected. The last four U.S. presidents—two Republicans, two Democrats—have each sent America’s military into harm’s way for wars that were not anticipated.
Even if the U.S. military quickly clarifies its operational picture, it still will face, in addition to the rapid rise in health and benefits costs, expected increases in military pay. According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis, costs for base military pay will likely rise by $5 billion more than planned in the next five years.[6] “Two of the big places the money is, is in pay and benefits,” lamented Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[7]
In sum, the size and disposition of today’s forces do not account for likely realities and unforeseen contingencies, and the military’s personnel accounts will continue to consume an increasing share of the Pentagon budget. Cuts to the military’s top-line budget will exacerbate all these troubles.
Myth: U.S. armed forces will continue to enjoy a technological advantage over any and all adversaries.
Fact: The Pentagon has nearly skipped a generation of modernization programs while, at the same time, failing to “transform” U.S. forces for the future. The defense budget growth of the past decade was largely on consumables related to current operations. All of the defense cuts over the past two years mortgaged the future to pay for the present.
Today America’s military flies the same basic planes (e.g., F-15, F-16 and F/A-18 fighters; B-52, B-1 and B-2 bombers and a variety of support aircraft), sails the same basic ships (e.g., Trident ballistic missile and Los Angeles-class attack submarines, Aegis-equipped destroyers and cruisers, Nimitz-class aircraft carriers), and employs the same basic ground systems (e.g., Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Black Hawk and Apache helicopters) that it did at the end of the Cold War. The White House and Congress prematurely terminated, or never brought to production, follow-on systems such as the F-22 fighter, the Seawolf-class sub, or the Comanche helicopter. As a result, tens of billions have been invested on development with little fielded reward.
The F-35 fighter remains the sole major pillar of post-Cold War procurement—yet even that has been whittled away and now stands in danger. In his final day at the Pentagon, Secretary Gates said that purchases of F-35 fighters “might be cut back as part of the Pentagon’s new budget review.”[8] Indeed, he had already placed the Marine Corps’ variant of the F-35 on a two-year “probation.”[9] At the same time, while the Air Force has reduced its total F-35 procurement plans to about 1,700 aircraft, it has also identified a fighter shortfall of about 800 aircraft. The Air Force thus finds itself forced to extend the life of its existing F-15 and F-16 fleets. The Navy is in the same boat, and is extending its buy of F-18s fighters.[10] Even these efforts to maintain an aging legacy fleet and buy additional fourth-generation tactical fighters are at risk due to budget cuts already underway.
No doubt, supposedly transformational systems like remotely-piloted vehicles have made immense contributions to the irregular warfare efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That said, the original vision of a new regime of high-technology conventional systems to offset Chinese military modernization has yet to be realized. The so-called “Next Generation Bomber,” the symbol of the defense transformation program, was originally planned for 2018 production, but then that date slipped with the 2010 budget cuts. Indeed, the project was directed to “close up shop” and has been subsumed in a broader long-range strike effort and a new program office created within the Air Force.[11]
This dilemma—shortfalls of modernization and failures of transformation—plagues all of the military services. The looming budget cuts will diminish the number of current procurements like the F-35 fighter, while also delaying the day when more revolutionary capabilities will be developed and fielded.
Myth: Even if the future force is smaller, it will be well prepared for future crises and contingencies.
Fact: The U.S. military is on an almost-inevitable—and unsustainable—path toward a 21st-century form of “hollowness” that will leave it less prepared for unforeseen crises and contingencies in the future.
The long-term geopolitical trends reflect protracted and persistent irregular wars in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation in unstable regions, and a rising China that continues to modernize its military with the aim of undermining American dominance in the Asia-Pacific theater. In contrast, the military has struggled to recapitalize our own forces, has fought two major wars with only incremental increases in manpower, is beset with rising personnel costs, and faces the prospect of rising operational and maintenance costs as it operates aging and worn-out systems.
The Defense Department and Congress have worked hard to ensure that troops sent into harm’s way are well prepared and equipped; however, the military’s superb performance on the battlefield masks the true state of overall readiness.[12] There is not a service—Reserves and National Guard included—which has not reported serious readiness shortfalls in the past few years. As an example, over half the Navy’s deployed aircraft is not ready for combat.
It is also important to consider the state of non-deployed U.S. forces, the country’s strategic reserve. Here the contrasts are increasingly stark. For example, the recent congressional testimony of Marine Lt. Gen. Frank Panter provides insight into the large-scale problem that all services face: “We continue to globally source equipment for Afghanistan and to meet other equipment requirements as we rapidly respond to emerging threats in the Middle East and elsewhere around the globe.”
In other words, the Marines are stripping equipment from units across the world to sustain those in the fight. Panter added: “The supply rating of units at home station hovers around 65 percent.” The Marines also discovered that their basic tables of organization and equipment were too small—that is, they didn’t have enough equipment to begin with before a decade of combat operations had ensued.
The result, combined with the fact that those in ground combat units are the most frequently deployed Marines and soldiers, is “a reduced ability of equipment to outfit and train our non-deployed units.”[13] As the Corps scrapes the global barrel to outfit units now fighting, those units recovering or preparing for deployment are unable to conduct sustainment training and must accept a risky, just-enough approach to high-end training immediately before going to war. The long-term effect of just-in-time readiness is therefore a growing bill just for “reset”—that is, the cost of restoring the Marines’ gear to its pre-war condition that puts aside the costs of it for the future. Indeed, the Marines now estimate their reset costs at $10.6 billion, of which about $5 billion remains unfunded.
While no comprehensive analysis for long-term readiness has been undertaken, the rough overall pattern is apparent: the future of American national security is being mortgaged to fight today’s wars and reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount. As a result, America’s armed forces, which have been stretched thin for nearly a decade, will likely be asked in the years ahead to do the same or more with even less if defense spending is cut once again.
The Defending Defense Project is a joint effort of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Foreign Policy Initiative to promote a sound understanding of the U.S. defense budget and the resource requirements to sustain America’s preeminent military position. To learn more about the effort, contact Mackenzie Eaglen (Mackenzie.eaglen@heritage.org), Robert Zarate (rzarate@foreignpolicyi.org) or Richard Cleary (richard.cleary@aei.org).
-
:cry: :cry: :cry:
-
Editor's Note: We asked a group of leading national security thinkers to respond to the question: Did the United States overreact to the 9/11 attacks? Here are their answers:
We Had to Address State Sponsors of Terror
We Can't Reform the Arab World
Afghanistan Should Have Been the Focus
Resilience vs. Revenge
Right Cause, Wrong Response
Even Obama Embraces Drones
Islamist Extremists Are Losing
..We Had to Address State Sponsors of Terror
By Paul Wolfowitz
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans were put in concentration camps. That there was no comparable overreaction after 9/11, and that we have been able to preserve a free and open society, owes much to the fact that for 10 years there has been no repetition of those terrible attacks.
Preventing further attacks required the U.S. to drop its law-enforcement approach to terrorism and recognize that we were at war. Consider the difference between Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—the mastermind of 9/11 who told us much of what we now know about al Qaeda—and his nephew Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center who can't be questioned (even most courteously) without his lawyer present and has told us nothing of significance. Or consider the difference between the ineffective retaliatory bombing of Afghanistan in 1998 and the 2001 response that brought down the Taliban regime.
Enlarge Image
CloseReuters
The Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001
.We went to war with Germany in 1941 not because it had attacked Pearl Harbor but because it was dangerous. After 9/11, we had to do more to deal with state sponsors of terrorism than simply place them on a prohibited list, especially if they had connections to biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein—who was defying numerous United Nations resolutions and was the only head of a government to praise 9/11, warning that Americans should "suffer" so they will "find the right path"—presented such a danger.
That we made mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq does not prove that we overreacted. (Costly mistakes were also made in World War II: sending poorly prepared troops to North Africa, failing to plan for the hedgerows beyond the beaches at Normandy, failing to anticipate the German counterattack in Belgium.) The real question is whether a significantly different response would have produced a better result.
Would massive strategic bombing of Afghanistan—the 1998 response on a larger scale—been enough to defeat al Qaeda? Would the failing sanctions against Iraq not have collapsed and left us today with a Saddam Hussein committed, as he told his FBI interrogator, "to reconstitute his entire WMD program"—chemical, biological and even nuclear? What about the Libyan WMDs that Moammar Gadhafi gave up after he saw Saddam's fate?
Unfortunately, after it turned out we had been wrong about the existence of WMD stockpiles in Iraq, some accused President Bush of having overreacted or, even worse, of having lied. Others charged that our overreaction "gave democracy a bad name." Nonsense. Tens of thousands of Arabs today are risking their lives in Syria and elsewhere, not for bin Laden's dream of a heavenly paradise but for freedom and democracy.
Mr. Wolfowitz, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, served as deputy U.S. secretary of defense from 2001-05.
Back to Top
.We Can't Reform the Arab World
By Mark Helprin
When this war was brought to us, deliberations should have centered upon the aims and execution of our response. Instead, we debated its justice, and thus "whether or not" rather than "how best." The question here at issue echoes this, as if to inquire about the power of a shot rather than if it has hit its target. The answer is that in the absence of strategic clarity we have lurched from one extreme to another.
We underreacted in failing to declare war and put the nation on a war footing, and thus overreacted in trumpeting hollow resolution. We underreacted in attempting quickly to subdue and pacify, with fewer than 200,000 soldiers, 50 million famously recalcitrant people in notoriously difficult terrain halfway around the world. We are left with 10,000 American dead here and abroad, a bitterly divided polity, a broken alliance structure, emboldened rivals abroad, and two fractious nations hostile to American interests with little changed from what they were before.
We overreacted by attempting to revolutionize the political culture—and therefore the religious laws with which it is inextricably bound—of a billion people who exist as if in another age. The "Arab Spring" is less a confirmation of this illusion than its continuance. If you think not, just wait.
We underreacted when we allowed our military capacities other than counterinsurgency to atrophy while China strains for military parity—something that the architects of our national security a decade ago thought laughable, now deny, and soon will hopelessly admit.
Rather than embarking upon the reformation of the Arab world, we should have fully geared up, sacrificed for, and resolved upon war. Then struck hard and brought down the regimes sheltering our enemies, set up strongmen, charged them with extirpating terrorists, and withdrawn from their midst to hover north of Riyadh in the network of bases the Saudis have built within striking distance of Baghdad and Damascus. There we might have watched our new clients do the work that since 9/11 we have only partially accomplished, and at a cost in lives, treasure, and heartbreak far greater than necessary.
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt, 1983) and "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt, 1992).
Back to Top
.Afghanistan Should Have Been the Focus
By Robert C. McFarlane
The 9/11 attacks gave evidence of a well-financed, operationally capable organization committed to waging unrestricted war on Americans. It was imperative that our response eliminate those who planned the attack and destroy their capability to carry on. Yet our understandable haste in launching that counterattack on al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts foreclosed thorough analysis of at least two fundamental matters:
First, the enormous complexity, time and resources involved in forging a functional government, let alone an effective security system, in a diverse alien culture. And second, the latent tensions and instability that had been brewing for over a decade in Pakistan, the key ally on whom we would have to rely for logistic and intelligence support.
Related Video
Editorial page editor Paul Gigot and deputy editorial page editor Dan Henninger reflect on 9/11.
..More deliberate consideration of such factors could have limited our mission to the destruction of al Qaeda and the formation of a coalition government in Afghanistan (that alone a daunting challenge). It also could have foreclosed consideration of launching a second concurrent war in Iraq, where similar challenges were bound to emerge. Iraq posed no threat to us: The decision to invade it was inspired by quixotic zeal and towering hubris—the belief that we could easily establish there a functioning and prosperous democracy as a model to be adopted throughout the Muslim world.
However ill-conceived politically, the war in Iraq has been executed extremely well militarily. After eight and a half years, we have helped the Iraqis dislodge a tyrant and take the first steps toward a pluralistic, accountable future. In short, much of that original purpose could well be achieved in the years ahead—if we don't forfeit the potential gains out of fatigue and overreach.
The U.S. has also made gains in its national security institutions, notably in special operations and intelligence. Given the relationship of these capabilities to the threats we will continue to face—plus our nation's fiscal realities—the impending restructuring of our military is beginning to take shape.
Mr. McFarlane, who served as President Reagan's national security adviser, is a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Back to Top
.Resilience vs. Revenge
By Anne-Marie Slaughter
It is possible to ask whether we overreacted to 9/11 only because of the hard and steady work of countless state, municipal and federal counterterrorism officials who have succeeded in preventing its repeat, or something even worse. After a decade without any such attacks (albeit with some near misses), and increasingly frequent and invasive security procedures permeating our daily lives, the costs of our reaction may be more immediately evident than the benefits. But another attack would change that calculus overnight.
One way in which Americans have overreacted, however, is emotionally—by assuming, as we so often do, that our experience of terrorism was qualitatively different from the experience of Europeans, Indonesians, Indians, Africans and others. We have since watched and admired the courage and determination of the British after coordinated attacks on subways and buses in July 2005, and of the Indians after the 10 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks in Mumbai in November 2008.
The world likewise watched the many acts of bravery and heroism on 9/11, from firefighters and police to the group of passengers who rushed the cockpit on United Flight 93. But as a society we were unable to resume business as usual in the way that the British and Indians and many others have done. Because the sensation of vulnerability to violent attack on American soil was so new to us, we gave the terrorists the satisfaction of knowing that they had changed our lives dramatically.
The lesson here is the power of resilience over revenge. As emotionally satisfying as the killing of Osama bin Laden and the attacks on other al Qaeda leaders are, in the long run they are a less effective response to terrorism than enhancing the resilience of our infrastructure, our economy and our people. If we are prepared for an attack and can return to normal as quickly as possible. even while grieving—with our planes flying, our markets open, and our heads high—we can diminish the impact and hence the value of that attack in the first place.
Ms. Slaughter, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, served as the director of Policy Planning at the State Department from 2009-11.
Back to Top
.Right Cause, Wrong Response
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
It was natural that the brutal murder of 2,700 Americans would provoke not only public outrage but precipitate a very strong national response. Unfortunately, that response lacked strategic coherence and political wisdom. A vaguely generalized global war on jihadist terror made it easier for the terrorists to portray America as hostile to all of Islam, while the U.S. military response eventually devolved into two separate campaigns.
At the time, I strongly supported the decision to go into Afghanistan in order to wipe out the culprits and to overthrow the regime that sheltered them. But I also urged, both in a high-level meeting and in a note to the secretary of defense, that we shouldn't repeat the mistake made by the Soviets, who became bogged down in an ideologically driven effort to remake Afghanistan by force of arms.
I also argued in this newspaper shortly after 9/11 that the U.S. should focus on the political dimension of the terrorist challenge, seeking to isolate the terrorists by gaining the support of Arab governments through broader regional cooperation.
The Bush administration didn't heed these warnings. Making matters worse, it then downgraded the military effort in Afghanistan with the largely solitary U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was undertaken without the political benefit of Arab allies that the U.S. enjoyed back in 1991. The U.S. government sought support for that additional war through top-level demagogy about the potential "mushroom cloud," and by claims of biological agents allegedly secreted in mobile trailers. Neither such nuclear nor biological weapons turned out to have existed. The resulting damage to U.S. credibility handicaps American diplomacy to this day, especially in regard to Iran.
At home, meanwhile, acts of prejudice against American Muslims became more frequent, while abroad anti-American sentiments in Muslim countries became more widespread. Ten years after 9/11, the future of Afghanistan is still in doubt, Iran is increasingly influential in Iraq, and U.S. influence in the Middle East is at its lowest point since America's major entry into the region after World War II.
The cause was right; the response was inept.
Mr. Brzezinski was national security adviser in the Carter administration.
Back to Top
.Even Obama Embraces Drones
By Leon Wieseltier
We responded to the atrocities of September 11 with a mess of reactions. Some of them were excessive, some of them were not.
The excess was Iraq. If our leaders launched that war because they were certain that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, then their incompetence was historically scandalous. If they launched it as a "demonstration war," to frighten enemies who might be emboldened by the terrorist triumph on September 11 to attack us again, then they failed: The war opened a new anti-American front for al Qaeda in the Middle East.
I was deceived in my support of the Iraq war, but I rejoice in the dictator's destruction, and in the stirrings of Iraqi democracy despite the best efforts of Islamists and Iranians to thwart it. Good outcomes may come of bad origins.
Yet our other military responses to September 11 seem to me justified. I have no difficulty with the "war on terrorism," as a concept or a policy. We appear to have almost completely decimated al Qaeda, or at least Osama bin Laden's main branch of it. President Obama's relentless drone campaign against terrorist havens in Pakistan, and his somewhat surprising willingness to use covert operations as an instrument in that struggle, stands as one of his few accomplishments in foreign policy.
I believe in ferocity in self-defense; in intelligent ferocity. Now new formations of al Qaeda have been established in southern Arabia and eastern Africa—this is not surprising: jihadist culture is not primarily a response to our responses—and we must confront them, too.
As a corollary of our proper retaliation against al Qaeda, moreover, we emancipated Afghanistan from a primitive theocratic tyranny. But the president's current plan in Afghanistan seems incoherent to me, and I have given up on Afghanistan's willingness to fight for itself. We have worked at it for 10 years, but there is no Afghan Spring. From the standpoint of counterterrorism, the Af-Pak problem is more Pak than Af.
And I have one other anxiety: that we will overreact to our "overreaction." If we conclude, as we are everywhere counseled to do, that the time has come for the United States to recede from the forefront of history, we will compromise and injure ourselves, and our allies, and all freedom-seeking people around the world.
Mr. Wieseltier is literary editor of the New Republic.
Back to Top
.Islamist Extremists Are Losing
By Joe Lieberman
It has become fashionable to characterize the American response to the attacks of 9/11 as an overreaction, but this view is profoundly mistaken. The U.S. response to the attacks, and to the broader challenge of Islamist extremism, has been necessary and justified. We were right to recognize that 9/11, made us a "nation at war" with an enemy that is real, evil and violent, and we were right to put this conflict at the top of our national security agenda. Had we not done so, it is likely we would not have the luxury today of debating whether we overreacted.
That we have gone a decade without another major terrorist strike on American soil hasn't been for lack of trying by our enemies. Our increased security has required bipartisan determination across two presidencies, far-reaching reforms to our homeland security institutions, and difficult, dangerous work by countless heroic individuals around the world. We have taken the offensive overseas with focus and ferocity our enemies did not expect, building the most capable and lethal counterterrorism forces in human history. The result is that violent Islamist extremists have achieved no significant victories in the last decade.
Have we made mistakes since 9/11? Of course—just as every nation always has in war. But as we look back over the past 10 years, a lot more went right than wrong.
Among the lessons of the past decade is that we still live in a dangerous and unpredictable world. Despite the gains we have made, current geopolitical realities do not justify either a sense of complacency or closure about the world-wide war we are in. Our nation will face surprises again. In order to stay safe at home, the U.S. must remain engaged abroad, and—despite budgetary pressures—make the necessary investments to keep our military and other instruments of national power strong.
In addition, contrary to the current national pessimism, America has demonstrated since 9/11 that we remain a remarkably strong and resilient country, with people who are capable of bravery, ingenuity and resolve. When we pull together, we are able to achieve things no other country in the world can—and the best example of this is the new "greatest generation" who have chosen to serve our country in uniform during this past decade.
We do not know how long this conflict will last, but we can be certain of how it will end—in the triumph of our values, with the ideology of Islamist extremism joining fascism and communism on the ash heap of history.
Mr. Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut.
-
In the last few days I have made some snarky comments about Baraq's policies concerning BMD in Central Europe and Turkey. Some informatin new to me is contained in the following.
=============================================
Ballistic Missile Defense and Security Guarantees in Central Europe
Romanian President Traian Basescu announced Thursday that he plans to sign an agreement with the United States committing Washington to deploy ballistic missile defense (BMD) interceptors and American troops on Romanian soil. Basescu laid out both the number of U.S troops who would be deployed – 200 – and the specific interceptor — the RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 (SM3). A land-based launcher for this successful sea-based interceptor is still in development, and while the newest version of the SM3 failed in its first test Thursday, the sea-based Aegis SM3 system has proven the most capable of U.S. BMD systems.
“For Warsaw and Prague, the BMD installations have nothing at all to do with ballistic missiles and everything to do with the American security guarantee.”
The Romanian president’s announcement cements Romania’s segment of the U.S. “European phased adaptive approach” — Washington’s replacement for the previous BMD scheme pursued under the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush. The previous plan envisioned a version of the interceptors already operational in Alaska and California (though with a questionable track record) and their concrete silos in Poland, while an X-band radar installation would have been placed in the Czech Republic. Warsaw and especially Prague had high hopes for the Bush-era plan and still remain frustrated with its 2009 cancellation.
Their hopes had little to do with the threat of ballistic missiles — and certainly nothing to do with the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles that Washington used to justify the system in the first place. Tehran and its crude stockpile of missiles could not be farther from Central European minds. What countries like Poland and the Czech Republic seek is a long-term U.S. military personnel presence, and Washington’s consequent imperative to defend them. For Warsaw and Prague, in other words, the BMD installations have nothing at all to do with ballistic missiles and everything to do with the American security guarantee.
The withdrawal of the previous scheme, under pressure from a resurgent Russia, was precisely what the Central Europeans feared and why they desired fixed American military installations. Washington’s broken commitment has already cost it a measure of credibility, in terms of its allies’ perceptions, in the durability of the American security guarantee. This U.S. credibility question has played no small part in the emergence of the proposal for a Visegrad battlegroup independent of NATO and the United States.
The perception of the U.S. security guarantee is precisely what remains at stake with this new phased adaptive approach. However, it is not clear that all parties view the approach in the same way. If the credibility of the American security guarantee is in question, it is partly because of the lessons Washington took from the failure to place fixed installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. The United States learned that flexibility and redundancy are desirable in any deal. With the immense political pressure from the Kremlin on potential host countries and populations, as well as on more pressing American interests elsewhere in the world, expanding the range of options is certainly preferable. Consequently, while the United States has laid out a coherent scheme for the phased adaptive approach, improvements in weapons technology have allowed the inclusion of more mobile and dispersed components. Washington has also created a degree of ambiguity by waiting to formally sign specific deals.
This equivocation strengthens the plans to deploy a viable BMD system in Europe to defend the continental United States against an Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile (a weapon that does not yet exist). However, the consequence is a dimmed perception of American reliability among allies from Estonia to Romania, who are desperately seeking a firm, unambiguous demonstration of America’s commitment. To these allies, a U.S. demonstration of support is most important not when it is politically convenient, but when it is politically difficult.
This predicament is not lost on Russia. Both Moscow and Beijing have been refining their positions in order to make firm, unambiguous demonstrations of American commitment as politically inconvenient and difficult as possible. The issue was discussed Wednesday between Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and the U.S. Defense attache in Moscow.
For Moscow, the problem of BMD is twofold. Details aside, Washington is flirting with the Central Europeans who, unlike their Western brethren, are highly concerned about Russia’s military capabilities. A significantly more aggressive U.S. BMD stance would greatly challenge Moscow. Longer-term, as Russia’s population declines, it will come to rely increasingly on its nuclear arsenal to guarantee its sovereignty, security and territorial integrity. Therefore, no matter what assurances Moscow gleans from Washington concerning the current European scheme, the inexorable improvement in American BMD technology will increasingly challenge those promises.
-
Not really fitting in any other thread, I put it here:
Summary
Russia and Iran appear to be working together to counterbalance an apparently strengthening strategic relationship between the United States and Turkey — something neither Moscow nor Tehran wants. Though the relationship between Russia and Iran largely is one of convenience and not of mutual trust, the two powers appear to be boosting their nuclear cooperation and energy ties as leverage against a U.S.-Turkish alliance.
Analysis
After numerous delays, the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant was officially launched in Iran on Sept. 12 at an inauguration ceremony attended by Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko and Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy firm. On the same day, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Fereidoun Abbasi, told Press TV that Iran and Russia will cooperate on future nuclear projects beyond Bushehr – a claim that was later confirmed by Russia. Also on Sept. 12, Russia announced that its natural gas firm Gazprom, despite having previously withdrawn from a project, ostensibly out of respect for international sanctions on Iran, might take part in developing Iran’s Azar oil field and would let Iran know its decision within the month.
Russia and Iran intend with this set of developments to signal to the United States that, despite some recent rough patches, ties between the two are stronger than ever. The events of Sept. 12 stand in stark contrast to what took place less than two weeks ago, when Iran threatened to sue Russia over Moscow’s failure to deliver the S-300 strategic air defense system, complained about delays in the Bushehr project and banned Gazprom from participating in the Azar project.
Of course, much of the cooperation displayed on Sept. 12 is still limited to political atmospherics: Iran remains wholly dependent on Russian staff and expertise to actually run Bushehr (not to mention any other projects that are proposed down the line), while Gazprom is unlikely to have the technical expertise to develop the Azar field on its own. Moreover, Russia is still holding back from more controversial maneuvers involving Iran, such as the potential sale of the S-300 air defense system.
A Convenient Relationship
The relationship between Russia and Iran is primarily one of convenience. Though Russia is not particularly interested in seeing a robust Iran that could end up posing a threat to Moscow, it regularly uses its relations with Iran as leverage against the West. Iran, meanwhile, sees Russia as its only major external patron, albeit one that it can never entirely trust to provide substantive support against outside threats.
Russia, during preparations for negotiations with the United States on the boundaries of a U.S.-led security framework in Europe, has looked to use Iran as leverage. The major concern during the U.S.-Russian dialogue is ballistic missile defense (BMD), which the United States declares is intended to defend against threats like Iran but is using to extend security commitments in Central Europe, with the strategic aim of containing Russia. Selectively amplifying the Iran threat is one of several ways Moscow intends to enhance its clout when it comes to the negotiating table with Washington and its allies in Central Europe.
But Iran was not necessarily ready to play along right away. Though Iran typically avoids actions that give the impression its external support is waning, Tehran made an exception when airing its grievances against Moscow in recent weeks. This is likely a reflection of Iran’s more confident position in the region, owed in large part to its strong status in Iraq and the low current potential for American or Israeli strikes against it. The less Iran feels vulnerable to external threats, the more open it can be about its distrust toward Russia.
The U.S.-Turkish Alignment
However, Iran is by no means free of worries, especially when it comes to its increasingly competitive relationship with Turkey. Iran is trying to counter a growing U.S.-Turkish alignment, which in turn is aimed against a perceived increase in the threat posed by Iran. Events in Syria and Iraq are already pushing Turkey (albeit subtly) into a more confrontational stance against Iran. Tehran appears to be using the common threat of Kurdish militancy as a foundation to maintain some level of cooperation with Ankara, but the strain in Turkish-Iranian ties will become increasingly difficult to conceal with time.
Turkey may also be a growing concern for Russia because of its potential role in the United States’ BMD strategy. Of great concern to both Iran and Russia is the potential for a stronger alignment of interests, between the United States and Turkey, and against Iran and Russia. BMD encapsulates this dynamic, which was on view when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Sept. 4 that Turkey was officially committed to hosting the X-band radar portion of the United States’ planned BMD system. Though Turkey tried to downplay the decision by claiming BMD was not directed at any of its neighbors in particular, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned Turkey on Sept. 9 against allowing “enemies” to set up missile shields against Iran.
Russia also likely took note of this announcement as it seeks to keep its relations with Turkey on an even keel and prevent the further expansion of Washington’s BMD plans. In the current negotiations with Washington over BMD, Russia even explicitly said that if talks do not go well, Russian envoy to NATO Dmitri Rogozin would go to Iran to discuss the security situation regarding the United States’ BMD plans. This warning could allude to Russia’s threat to deliver S-300 strategic defense systems to Iran. Russia, though, will likely show a great deal of restraint when it comes to the actual delivery of those systems. Right now, Moscow is more focused on simply airing the Iranian threat.
Russia and Iran therefore both have incentive to put their cooperation on display. Iran, as it asserts itself in the region and deals with strains in its relationship with Turkey, wants to show it retains strong international backers. Moscow knows that Iran is the lever it can pull if BMD negotiations with the United States go awry. Meanwhile, Tehran shares with Moscow a concern about the strengthening relationship between the United States and Turkey. While Iran and Russia may typically share a simple relationship of convenience, they appear to be warming up to each other now.
Read more: Russia and Iran Improve Relations as U.S.-Turkish Alignment Grows | STRATFOR
-
Woof,
What goes around comes around; Obama's treatment of Israel in the policy arena begins to bite him on the butt. 8-)
Op-Ed: Jewish Vote Key To Weiner’s Seat – And Swing States Too
(Monday, June 13th, 2011)
[By Yossi Gestetner]
Reports and analysis in recent days suggest that it would be a long-shot for Republicans to win Anthony Weiner’s House seat; New York’s 9′Th Congressional District which covers sections of Queens and Brooklyn.
Well, if Republicans do not reach out directly to some voters in the district addressing the issues they care most, then indeed it is a long shot for Republicans to win that seat. If Republicans fail to reach out directly to the mass amount of Jewish voters in Weiner’s district – as Republican Jane Corwin of NY 26 failed to do in a district that has enough Jewish votes to flip the outcome of the just held special election – then indeed, winning NY-9 would be a long shot.
Advertise On YWN »
Main stream political consultants go with the long-standing belief that “Jews Vote for Democrats,” and as such, campaigns don’t bother reaching out to this community in an effective way. Indeed, if one looks at overall Jewish voting patterns in the USA, the above quote holds true. But in many recent elections, Orthodox Jewish and Hasidic voters in New York and elsewhere (masses of them residing in Weiner’s district), have taken a pattern of their own: In some cases, 70% of them vote Republican on State-wide and Federal-level seats!
Senator John McCain in 2008 and Governor Chris Christie in New Jersey a year later are two most notable examples of Republican candidates who won large percentages of the Orthodox Jewish and Hasidic Vote. In New York’s Assembly District 48 – the Orthodox/Hasidic stronghold of Borough Park, Brooklyn – Republican Gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino with all his failings won a similar amount of votes than the incumbent Jewish NY Senator Charles Schumer who ran against an unknown, non-campaigner Jay Townsend. In that AD, Paladino came in considerably weaker than other State-wide Republican candidates who actively sought the Jewish Vote: Don Donovan for Attorney General and Joe DioGuardi for U.S. Senate (I worked for the latter during the Primary and the General elections).
It is not a done deal that Orthodox and Hasidic Jews will vote to the Right in State-wide or Federal elections. A Federal-level incumbent such as Weiner, who receives on average a total of 67,000 votes in off year elections, may retain in his district a larger percent of the Jewish Vote than other candidates. However, many Jewish voters, thinking that the Democrat will ‘anyway win,’ don’t participate in the election. This presents a large pool of untapped voters that Republicans can try and reach, in addition to chip away at a large number of current Jewish Weiner’s voters for the following reason:
Orthodox Jewish and Hasidic voters are extremely tuned in to the political discourse of this country. This holds especially true by those who are age 18 through 35. Many if not most of them grew up in immigrant households who voted Democrat in order to support politicians that hand out social programs, but these 18-35′ers see that the Democrats’ agenda has failed to provide them or their parents a reputable and independent living. In addition, it is a Democrat – New York Governor Cuomo – who is cutting social programs, which in turns shows to the Jewish Communality that relying on Government is not a sustainable thing.
These voters – many still in need of Government Assistance due to the system being rigged against those who try growing on their own, such as my self – want the pro-growth, pro-business, pro-family, pro-strong defense agenda of the Conservative Republicans. As a result, Orthodox Jewish and Hasidic voters flock to Republicans, and many more are fans of Conservative Talk Show Hosts.
Jewish voters in America – of all stripes – have more on their mind than just Israel, Israel and Israel. While being pro-Israel is important to many Jews, these communities have concerns that are closer to home and closer to their pocket than Israel. In fact, the history of Democrats being weak on foreign relations and defense is a minus to Israel, yet Jews still vote for Democrats. Why? Because other issues obviously matter more. As such, Republicans who want the support of Jewish voters should address issues beyond a focus on Israel. By doing so, Republican candidates – specially candidates in swing states where a mere 5,000 Jewish voters can swing the election – will find an ever-growing community that is welcome to these ideas and ready to vote Republican in larger numbers.
Yossi Gestetner is a New York-Based PR Consultant in the Orthodox Jewish/Hasidic Communities. He can be reached yossi@yossigestetner.com
----------------and the vote is in--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Turner dispatches David Weprin, dealing embarrassing blow to President Obama, DemocratsArticleComments (56)ShareBob Turner dispatches David Weprin, dealing embarrassing blow to President Obama, Democrats
BY Lisa Colangelo, Alison Gendar and Jonathan Lemire
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Originally Published:Wednesday, September 14th 2011, 12:09 AM
Updated: Wednesday, September 14th 2011, 3:22 AM
Jefferson Siegel for NewsBob Turner and wife Peggy celebrate Tuesday night's victory over David Weprin (below).
Aaron Showalter for NewsTake our PollTurner beats Weprin
Do you blame President Obama for David Weprin's loss to Bob Turner?
Yes. Weprin's defeat is an indictment of Obama's economic policies.
No. Weprin did a bad job on the campaign trail.
Not sure, but redistricting may eliminate the seat next year anyway.
Related NewsHammond: In NY-9, voters are the losersFrantic last-minute rallying for Weiner seatWeiner seat winner may be redistricting loser Dems call in Bubba to boost WeprinWinner of Weiner seat could lose districtEditorials: Dance of the duds
Republican Bob Turner scored a shocking victory late Tuesday night to capture disgraced ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner's congressional seat - and delivered what many political pros say is a stinging rebuke of President Obama.
Turner was named the winner by The Associated Press just before midnight. By the end of the night, the GOPer was ahead 54% to 46% - with about 86% of the Brooklyn-Queens district reporting.
His Democratic opponent, David Weprin, refused to concede, claiming there were many votes - including absentee ballots - still to be counted in a race that became a massive embarrassment for the Democratic Party.
SPECIAL ELECTION COVERAGE
The contest garnered national attention as partisan operatives and pundits cast it as a referendum on the increasingly unpopular Obama - who won the district with 55% of the vote in 2008.
"We've been asked by people of this district to send a message to Washington and I hope they hear it loud and clear," said Turner to a joyous crowd of supporters moments after he was declared the winner.
Turner, who deemed himself a "citizen candidate," said the election delivered a verdict that the American people were "unhappy" with the direction of the country.
"This message will resound for a whole year," said Turner, eyeing the 2012 elections. "We've lit one candle today and it'll be a bonfire."
The national GOP was downright giddy. "Even in the heart of New York City, in a traditionally liberal district, voters have turned on the President and his Congressional allies," party boss Reince Priebus said.
Turner, however, may not have long to enjoy his victory - the district may be phased out of existence next year as part of census-mandated congressional redistricting.
The seat opened up when Weiner resigned in disgrace in June amid a sexting scandal that made him a national punchline.
He served seven terms - and most insiders initially expected the Democrats would easily hold the seat.
When Gov. Cuomo called for a special election instead of a primary, the Queens Democratic party - led by Rep. Joe Crowley - tapped Weprin, an assemblyman who previously was a city councilman.
He was challenged by Turner, a cable executive who helped create the Jerry Springer show. He had a solid showing in a 2010 loss to Weiner.
Turner pulled ahead in several pre-election polls in a district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans - and where the GOP has not won in nearly a century.
The national Democratic Party, nervous about a humiliating defeat, pumped in last-minute cash to prop up a Weprin campaign that had been riddled with gaffes.
Weprin's poll numbers turned south after he had no clue about the size of the national debt during a meeting with the Daily News Editorial Board.
Weprin guessed $4 trillion - about $10 trillion off - and immediately handed Turner a cudgel, which the GOPer wielded to bash Weprin as out of touch on an issue that has consumed Washington all summer.
Another turning point came when former mayor Ed Koch crossed party lines and supported Turner to protest Obama's policies toward Israel - a move that seemed to resonate in the heavily-Jewish district.
Weiner voted for Weprin early Tuesday and, when asked if he thought it would be his fault if Turner won, the former Congressman told Reuters, "It is always bad when a district goes Republican. All 435 should be Democrat."
jlemire@nydailynews.com
P.C.
-
As usual, Stratfor's grasp of economics is rather specious and glib, but as usual, the comments on geopolitics are not.
Obama's Dilemma: U.S. Foreign Policy and Electoral Realities
September 20, 2011
By George Friedman
STRATFOR does not normally involve itself in domestic American politics. Our focus is on international affairs, and American politics, like politics everywhere, is a passionate business. The vilification from all sides that follows any mention we make of American politics is both inevitable and unpleasant. Nevertheless, it’s our job to chronicle the unfolding of the international system, and the fact that the United States is moving deeply into an election cycle will affect American international behavior and therefore the international system.
The United States remains the center of gravity of the international system. The sheer size of its economy (regardless of its growth rate) and the power of its military (regardless of its current problems) make the United States unique. Even more important, no single leader of the world is as significant, for good or bad, as the American president. That makes the American presidency, in its broadest sense, a matter that cannot be ignored in studying the international system.
The American system was designed to be a phased process. By separating the selection of the legislature from the selection of the president, the founders created a system that did not allow for sudden shifts in personnel. Unlike parliamentary systems, in which the legislature and the leadership are intimately linked, the institutional and temporal uncoupling of the system in the United States was intended to control the passing passions by leaving about two-thirds of the U.S. Senate unchanged even in a presidential election year, which always coincides with the election of the House of Representatives. Coupled with senatorial rules, this makes it difficult for the president to govern on domestic affairs. Changes in the ideological tenor of the system are years in coming, and when they come they stay a long time. Mostly, however, the system is in gridlock. Thomas Jefferson said that a government that governs least is the best. The United States has a vast government that rests on a system in which significant change is not impossible but which demands a level of consensus over a period of time that rarely exists.
This is particularly true in domestic politics, where the complexity is compounded by the uncertainty of the legislative branch. Consider that the healthcare legislation passed through major compromise is still in doubt, pending court rulings that thus far have been contradictory. All of this would have delighted the founders if not the constantly trapped presidents, who frequently shrug off their limits in the domestic arena in favor of action in the international realm, where their freedom to maneuver is much greater, as the founders intended.
The Burden of the Past
The point of this is that all U.S. presidents live within the framework in which Barack Obama is now operating. First, no president begins with a clean slate. All begin with the unfinished work of the prior administration. Thus, George W. Bush began his presidency with an al Qaeda whose planning and implementation for 9/11 was already well under way. Some of the al Qaeda operatives who would die in the attack were already in the country. So, like all of his predecessors, Obama assumed the presidency with his agenda already laid out.
Obama had a unique set of problems. The first was his agenda, which focused on ending the Iraq war and reversing social policies in place since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. By the time Obama entered office, the process of withdrawal from Iraq was under way, which gave him the option of shifting the terminal date. The historic reversal that he wanted to execute, starting with healthcare reform, confronted the realities of September 2008 and the American financial crisis. His Iraq policy was in place by Inauguration Day while his social programs were colliding with the financial crisis.
Obama’s campaign was about more than particular policies. He ran on a platform that famously promised change and hope. His tremendous political achievement was in framing those concepts in such a way that they were interpreted by voters to mean precisely what they wanted them to mean without committing Obama to specific policies. To the anti-war faction it meant that the wars would end. To those concerned about unilateralism it meant that unilateralism would be replaced by multilateralism. To those worried about growing inequality it meant that he would end inequality. To those concerned about industrial jobs going overseas it meant that those jobs would stay in the United States. To those who hated Guantanamo it meant that Guantanamo would be closed.
Obama created a coalition whose expectations of what Obama would do were shaped by them and projected on Obama. In fact, Obama never quite said what his supporters thought he said. His supporters thought they heard that he was anti-war. He never said that. He simply said that he opposed Iraq and thought Afghanistan should be waged. His strategy was to allow his followers to believe what they wanted so long as they voted for him, and they obliged. Now, this is not unique to Obama. It is how presidents get elected. What was unique was how well he did it and the problems it caused once he became president.
It must first be remembered that, contrary to the excitement of the time and faulty memories today, Obama did not win an overwhelming victory. About 47 percent of the public voted for someone other than Obama. It was certainly a solid victory, but it was neither a landslide nor a mandate for his programs. But the excitement generated by his victory created the sense of victory that his numbers didn’t support.
Another problem was that he had no programmatic preparation for the reality he faced. September 2008 changed everything in the sense that it created financial and economic realities that ran counter to the policies he envisioned. He shaped those policies during the primaries and after the convention, and they were based on assumptions that were no longer true after September 2008. Indeed, it could be argued that he was elected because of September 2008. Prior to the meltdown, John McCain had a small lead over Obama, who took over the lead only after the meltdown. Given that the crisis emerged on the Republicans’ watch, this made perfect sense. But shifting policy priorities was hard because of political commitments and inertia and perhaps because the extremities of the crisis were not fully appreciated.
Obama’s economic policies did not differ wildly from Bush’s — indeed, many of the key figures had served in the Federal Reserve and elsewhere during the Bush administration. The Bush administration’s solution was to print and insert money into financial institutions in order to stabilize the system. By the time Obama came into power, it was clear to his team that the amount of inserted money was insufficient and had to be increased. In addition, in order to sustain the economy, the policy that had been in place during the Bush years of maintaining low interest rates through monetary easing was extended and intensified. To a great extent, the Obama years have been the Bush years extended to their logical conclusion. Whether Bush would have gone for the stimulus package is not clear, but it is conceivable that he would have.
Obama essentially pursued the Bush strategy of stabilizing the banks in the belief that a stable banking system was indispensible and would in itself stimulate the economy by creating liquidity. Whether it did or it didn’t, the strategy created the beginnings of Obama’s political problem. He drew substantial support from populists on the left and suspicion from populists on the right. The latter, already hostile to Bush’s policies, coalesced into the Tea Party. But this was not Obama’s biggest problem. It was that his policies, which both seemed to favor the financial elite and were at odds with what Democratic populists believed the president stood for, weakened his support from the left. The division between what he actually said and what his supporters thought they heard him say began to widen. While the healthcare battle solidified his opposition among those who would oppose him anyway, his continuing response to the financial crisis both solidified opposition among Republicans and weakened support among Democrats.
A Foreign Policy Problem
This was coupled with his foreign policy problem. Among Democrats, the anti-war faction was a significant bloc. Most Democrats did not support Obama with anti-war reasons as their primary motivator, but enough did make this the priority issue that he could not win if he lost this bloc. This bloc believed two things. The first was that the war in Iraq was unjustified and harmful and the second was that it emerged from an administration that was singularly insensitive to the world at large and to the European alliance in particular. They supported Obama because they assumed not only that he would end wars — as well as stop torture and imprisonment without trial — but that he would also re-found American foreign policy on new principles.
Obama’s decision to dramatically increase forces in Afghanistan while merely modifying the Bush administration’s timeline for withdrawing from Iraq caused unease within the Democratic Party. But two steps that Bush took held his position. First, one of the first things Obama did after he became president was to reach out to the Europeans. It was expected that this would increase European support for U.S. foreign policy. The Europeans, of course, were enthusiastic about Obama, as the Noble Peace Prize showed. But while Obama believed that his willingness to listen to the Europeans meant they would be forthcoming with help, the Europeans believed that Obama would understand them better and not ask for help.
The relationship was no better under Obama than under Bush. It wasn’t personality or ideology that mattered. It was simply that Germany, as the prime example, had different interests than the United States. This was compounded by the differing views and approaches to the global financial crisis. Whereas the Americans were still interested in Afghanistan, the Europeans considered Afghanistan a much lower priority than the financial crisis. Thus, U.S.-European relations remained frozen.
Then Obama made his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo, where his supporters heard him trying to make amends for Bush’s actions and where many Muslims heard an unwillingness to break with Israel or end the wars. His supporters heard conciliation, the Islamic world heard inflexibility.
The European response to Obama the president as opposed to Obama the candidate running against George Bush slowly reverberated among his supporters. Not only had he failed to end the wars, he doubled down and surged forces into Afghanistan. And the continued hostility toward the United States from the Islamic world reverberated among those on the Democratic left who were concerned with such matters. Add to that the failure to close Guantanamo and a range of other issues concerning the war on terror and support for Obama crumbled.
A Domestic Policy Focus
His primary victory, health-care reform, was the foundation of an edifice that was never built. Indeed, the reform bill is caught in the courts, and its future is as uncertain as it was when the bill was caught in Congress. The Republicans, as expected, agree on nothing other than Obama’s defeat. The Democrats will support him; the question is how enthusiastic that support will be.
Obama’s support now stands at 41 percent. The failure point for a president’s second term lurks around 35 percent. It is hard to come back from there. Obama is not there yet. The loss of another six points would come from his Democratic base (which is why 35 is the failure point; when you lose a chunk of your own base, you are in deep trouble). At this point, however, the president is far less interested in foreign policy than he is in holding his base together and retaking the middle. He did not win by a large enough margin to be able to lose any of his core constituencies. He may hope that his Republican challenger will alienate the center, but he can’t count on that. He has to capture his center and hold his left.
That means he must first focus on domestic policy. That is where the public is focused. Even the Afghan war and the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq are not touching nerves in the center. His problem is twofold. First, it is not clear that he can get anything past Congress. He can then argue that this is Congress’ fault, but the Republicans can run against Congress as well. Second, it is not clear what he would propose. The Republican right can’t be redeemed, but what can Obama propose that will please the Democratic core and hold the center? The Democratic core wants taxes. The center doesn’t oppose taxes (it is merely uneasy about them), but it is extremely sensitive about having the taxes eaten up by new spending — something the Democratic left supports. Obama is trapped between two groups he must have that view the world differently enough that bridging the gap is impossible.
The founders gave the United States a government that, no matter how large it gets, can’t act on domestic policy without a powerful consensus. Today there is none, and therefore there can’t be action. Foreign policy isn’t currently resonating with the American public, so any daring initiatives in that arena will likely fail to achieve the desired domestic political end. Obama has to hold together a coalition that is inherently fragmented by many different understandings of what his presidency is about. This coalition has weakened substantially. Obama’s attention must be on holding it together. He cannot resurrect the foreign policy part of it at this point. He must bet on the fact that the coalition has nowhere else to go. What he must focus on is domestic policy crafted to hold his base and center together long enough to win the election.
The world, therefore, is facing at least 14 months with the United States being at best reactive and at worse non-responsive to events. Obama has never been a foreign policy president; events and proclivity (I suspect) have always drawn him to domestic matters. But between now and the election, the political configuration of the United States and the dynamics of his presidency will force him away from foreign policy.
This at a time when the Persian Gulf is coming to terms with the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the power of Iran, when Palestinians and Israelis are facing another crisis over U.N. recognition, when the future of Europe is unknown, when North Africa is unstable and Syria is in crisis and when U.S. forces continue to fight in Afghanistan. All of this creates opportunities for countries to build realities that may not be in the best interests of the United States in the long run. There is a period of at least 14 months for regional powers to act with confidence without being too concerned about the United States.
The point of this analysis is to try to show the dynamics that have led the United States to this position, and to sketch the international landscape in broad strokes. The U.S. president will not be deeply engaged in the world for more than a year. Thus, he will have to cope with events pressed on him. He may undertake initiatives, such as trying to revive the Middle East peace process, but such moves would have large political components that would make it difficult to cope with realities on the ground. The rest of the world knows this, of course. The question is whether and how they take advantage of it.
-
A good, neutral summary of the Obama years, interesting points throughout.
Friedman writes, "it could be argued that [Obama] was elected because of September 2008. Prior to the meltdown, John McCain had a small lead over Obama, who took over the lead only after the meltdown. Given that the crisis emerged on the Republicans’ watch, this made perfect sense." This isn't quite right. The 2008 election was the Dems to lose all the way through. McCain enjoyed a Palin euphoria at the very start of September (anyone remember that?) that solidified his shaky base and intrigued others but wore off quickly. The general accumulated hatred toward Bush extended to McCain and then McCain was front and center displaying his lack of economic knowledge and competence during the crisis. A lot like Obama Sept 2011, McCain was calling for a cancellation of a debate for a crisis that he had no insights on or plan any different or better than anyone else's. The right answer economically in that election was clearly not a sharp left turn; it was just that there was no sharp turn in any other direction available.
Friedman writes of the anti-war left, but in fact that has turned out to be the anti-Bush/Republican war left. They have been amazingly silent and tolerant of what in large part has been the continuation of the Bush foreign policy in the major conflicts. Can anyone imagine what the uproar to the Libya conflict would have been under a Republican. And it is not only the left who has war fatigue 10 years into this, really more like 20 in the case of Iraq.
The beginning of the toppling of Saddam proved to other tyrants that the U.S. could take decisive, surgical, successful actions against them as well. The reality of these drawn out conflicts now with low support is that we are actually less capable today of bold, decisive action.
If Obama's hands are politically tied on foreign policy for 14 months (in Friedman's analysis), all major regional players, rivals and enemies across the globe know it. That does not bode well for events overseas in that time. The key issues and circumstances that will dominate the next election are not all known yet. There are always surprises and as he correctly points out, facts on the ground here are encouraging new surprises there.
-
From the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush: Rethinking the Region
October 17, 2011
By George Friedman
The territory between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush has been the main arena for the U.S. intervention that followed the 9/11 attacks. Obviously, the United States had been engaged in this area in previous years, but 9/11 redefined it as the prime region in which it confronted jihadists. That struggle has had many phases, and it appears to have entered a new one over the past few weeks.
Some parts of this shift were expected. STRATFOR had anticipated tensions between Iran and its neighboring countries to rise as the U.S. withdrew from Iraq and Iran became more assertive. And we expected U.S.-Pakistani relations to reach a crisis before viable negotiations with the Afghan Taliban were made possible.
(Click here to enlarge image)
However, other events frankly surprised us. We had expected Hamas to respond to events in Egypt and to the Palestine National Authority’s search for legitimacy through pursuit of U.N. recognition by trying to create a massive crisis with Israel, reasoning that the creation of such a crisis would strengthen anti-government forces in Egypt, increasing the chances for creating a new regime that would end the blockade of Gaza and suspend the peace treaty with Israel. We also thought that intense rocket fire into Israel would force Fatah to support an intifada or be marginalized by Hamas. Here we were clearly wrong; Hamas moved instead to reach a deal for the exchange of captive Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, which has reduced Israeli-Hamas tensions.
Our error was rooted in our failure to understand how the increased Iranian-Arab tensions would limit Hamas’ room to maneuver. We also missed the fact that given the weakness of the opposition forces in Egypt — something we had written about extensively — Hamas would not see an opportunity to reshape Egyptian policies. The main forces in the region, particularly the failure of the Arab Spring in Egypt and the intensification of Iran’s rise, obviated our logic on Hamas. Shalit’s release, in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, marks a new stage in Israeli-Hamas relations. Let’s consider how this is related to Iran and Pakistan.
The Iranian Game
The Iranians tested their strength in Bahrain, where Shiites rose up against their Sunni rulers with at least some degree of Iranian support. Saudi Arabia, linked by a causeway to Bahrain, perceived this as a test of its resolve, intervening with military force to suppress the demonstrators and block the Iranians. To Iran, Bahrain was simply a probe; the Saudi response did not represent a major reversal in Iranian fortunes.
The main game for Iran is in Iraq, where the U.S. withdrawal is reaching its final phase. Some troops may be left in Iraqi Kurdistan, but they will not be sufficient to shape events in Iraq. The Iranians will not be in control of Iraq, but they have sufficient allies, both in the government and in outside groups, that they will be able to block policies they oppose, either through the Iraqi political system or through disruption. They will not govern, but no one will be able to govern in direct opposition to them.
In Iraq, Iran sees an opportunity to extend its influence westward. Syria is allied with Iran, and it in turn jointly supports Hezbollah in Lebanon. The prospect of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq opened the door to a sphere of Iranian influence running along the southern Turkish border and along the northern border of Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi View
The origins of the uprising against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad are murky. It emerged during the general instability of the Arab Spring, but it took a different course. The al Assad regime did not collapse, al Assad was not replaced with another supporter of the regime, as happened in Egypt, and the opposition failed to simply disintegrate. In our view the opposition was never as powerful as the Western media portrayed it, nor was the al Assad regime as weak. It has held on far longer than others expected and shows no inclination of capitulating. For one thing, the existence of bodies such as The International Criminal Court leave al Assad nowhere to go if he stepped down, making a negotiated exit difficult. For another, al Assad does not see himself as needing to step down.
Two governments have emerged as particularly hostile to al Assad: the Saudi government and the Turkish government. The Turks attempted to negotiate a solution in Syria and were rebuffed by Assad. It is not clear the extent to which these governments see Syria simply as an isolated problem along their border or as part of a generalized Iranian threat. But it is clear that the Saudis are extremely sensitive to the Iranian threat and see the fall of the al Assad regime as essential for limiting the Iranians.
In this context, the last thing that the Saudis want to see is conflict with Israel. A war in Gaza would have given the al Assad regime an opportunity to engage with Israel, at least through Hezbollah, and portray opponents to the regime as undermining the struggle against the Israelis. This would have allowed al Assad to solicit Iranian help against Israel and, not incidentally, to help sustain his regime.
It was not clear that Saudi support for Syrian Sunnis would be enough to force the al Assad regime to collapse, but it is clear that a war with Israel would have made it much more difficult to bring it down. Whether Hamas was inclined toward another round of fighting with Israel is unclear. What is clear is that the Saudis, seeing themselves as caught in a struggle with Iran, were not going to hand the Iranians an excuse to get more involved than they were. They reined in any appetite Hamas may have had for war.
Hamas and Egypt
Hamas also saw its hopes in Egypt dissolving. From its point of view, instability in Egypt opened the door for regime change. For an extended period of time, it seemed possible that the first phase of unrest would be followed either by elections that Islamists might win or another wave of unrest that would actually topple the regime. It became clear months ago that the opposition to the Egyptian regime was too divided to replace it. But it was last week that the power of the regime became manifest.
The Oct. 9 Coptic demonstration that turned violent and resulted in sectarian clashes with Muslims gave the government the opportunity to demonstrate its resolve and capabilities without directly engaging Islamist groups. The regime acted brutally and efficiently to crush the demonstrations and, just as important, did so with some Islamist elements that took to the streets beating Copts. The streets belonged to the military and to the Islamist mobs, fighting on the same side.
One of the things Hamas had to swallow was the fact that it was the Egyptian government that was instrumental in negotiating the prisoner exchange. Normally, Islamists would have opposed even the process of negotiation, let alone its success. But given what had happened a week before, the Islamists were content not to make an issue of the Egyptian government’s deal-making. Nor would the Saudis underwrite Egyptian unrest as they would Syrian unrest. Egypt, the largest Arab country and one that has never been on good terms with Iran, was one place where the Saudis did not want to see chaos, especially with an increasingly powerful Iran and unrest in Syria stalled.
Washington Sides with Riyadh
In the midst of all this, the United States announced the arrest of a man who allegedly was attempting, on behalf of Iran, to hire a Mexican to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States. There was serious discussion of the significance of this alleged plot, and based on the evidence released, it was not particularly impressive.
Nevertheless — and this is the important part — the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama decided that this was an intolerable event that required more aggressive measures against Iran. The Saudis have been asking the United States for some public action against Iran both to relieve the pressure on Riyadh and to make it clear that the United States was committed to confronting Iran alongside the Saudis. There may well be more evidence in the alleged assassination plot that makes it more serious than it appeared, but what is clear is that the United States intended to use the plot to increase pressure on Iran — psychologically at least — beyond the fairly desultory approach it had been taking. The administration even threw the nuclear question back on the table, a subject on which everyone had been lackadaisical for a while.
The Saudi nightmare has been that the United States would choose to reach an understanding with Iran as a way to create a stable order in the region and guarantee the flow of oil. We have discussed this possibility in the past, pointing out that the American interest in protecting Saudi Arabia is not absolute and that the United States might choose to deal with the Iranians, neither regime being particularly attractive to the United States and history never being a guide to what Washington might do next.
The Saudis were obviously delighted with the U.S. rhetorical response to the alleged assassination plot. It not only assuaged the Saudis’ feeling of isolation but also seemed to close the door on side deals. At the same time, the United States likely was concerned with the possibility of Saudi Arabia trying to arrange its own deal with Iran before Washington made a move. With this action, the United States joined itself at the hip with the Saudis in an anti-Iranian coalition.
The Israelis had nothing to complain about either. They do not want the Syrian regime to fall, preferring the al Assad regime they know to an unknown Sunni — and potentially Islamist — regime. Saudi support for the Syrian opposition bothers the Israelis, but it’s unlikely to work. A Turkish military intervention bothers them more. But, in the end, Iran is what worries them the most, and any sign that the Obama administration is reacting negatively to the Iranians, whatever the motives (and even if there is no clear motive), makes them happy. They want a deal on Shalit, but even if the price was high, this was not the time to get the United States focused on them rather than the Iranians. The Israelis might be prepared to go further in negotiations with Hamas if the United States focuses on Iran. And Hamas will go further with Israel if the Saudis tell them to, which is a price they will happily pay for a focus on Iran.
The U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan
For the United States, there is another dimension to the Iran focus: Pakistan. The Pakistani view of the United States, as expressed by many prominent Pakistanis, is that the United States has lost the war against the Afghan Taliban. That means that any negotiations that take place will simply be about how the United States, in their words, will “retreat,” rather than about Pakistani guarantees for support against jihadists coupled with a U.S. withdrawal process. If the Pakistanis are right, and the United States has been defeated, then obviously, their negotiating position is correct.
For there to be any progress in talks with the Taliban and Pakistan, the United States must demonstrate that it has not been defeated. To be more precise, it must demonstrate that while it might not satisfy its conditions for victory (defined as the creation of a democratic Afghanistan), the United States is prepared to indefinitely conduct operations against jihadists, including unmanned aerial vehicle and special operations strikes in Pakistan, and that it might move into an even closer relationship with India if Pakistan resists. There can be no withdrawal unless the Pakistanis understand that there has been no overwhelming domestic political pressure on the U.S. government to withdraw. The paradox here is critical: So long as Pakistan believes the United States must withdraw, it will not provide the support needed to allow it to withdraw. In addition, withdrawal does not mean operations against jihadists nor strategic realignment with India. The United States needs to demonstrate just what risks Pakistan faces when it assumes that the U.S. failure to achieve all its goals means it has been defeated.
The Obama administration’s reaction to the alleged Iranian assassination plot is therefore a vital psychological move against Pakistan. The Pakistani narrative is that the United States is simply incapable of asserting its power in the region. The U.S. answer is that it is not only capable of asserting substantial power in Afghanistan and Pakistan but also that it is not averse to confronting Iran over an attempted assassination in the United States. How serious the plot was, who authorized it in Iran, and so on is not important. If Obama has overreacted it is an overreaction that will cause talk in Islamabad. Obviously this will have to go beyond symbolic gestures but if it does, it changes the dynamic in the region, albeit at the risk of an entanglement with Iran.
Re-evaluating the Region
There are many moving parts. We do not know exactly how far the Obama administration is prepared to take the Iran issue or whether it will evaporate. We do not know if the Assad regime will survive or what Turkey and Saudi Arabia will do about it. We do not know whether, in the end, the Egyptian regime will survive. We do not know whether the Pakistanis will understand the message being sent them.
What we do know is this: The crisis over Iran that we expected by the end of the year is here. It affects calculations from Cairo to Islamabad. It changes other equations, including the Hamas-Israeli dynamic. It is a crisis everyone expected but no one quite knows how to play. The United States does not have a roadmap, and neither do the Iranians. But this is a historic opportunity for Iran and a fundamental challenge to the Saudis. The United States has put some chips on the table, but not any big ones. But the fact that Obama did use rhetoric more intense than he usually does is significant in itself.
All of this does not give us a final answer on the dynamics of the region and their interconnections, but it does give us a platform to begin re-evaluating the regional process.
-
Well, we're out.
Not that the candidates with the Republican nomination will have much to say, but I am with Krauthammer in his comments last night on the Bret Baier Report: This is not a good thing. Team Baraq had various opportunities to get negotiations going in a timely manner and achieve our military's desired end of keeping some 25,000 troops there-- which would have been a very useful thing viz Iran- but instead communicated to all concerned no real desire to stay and so an insufficient numbers of Iraqi players wanted to take the chance of standing up in favor of us staying.
Opposition to going into Iraq was a reasonable position to take, but once we were in, ranks should have closed in support of success ESPECIALLY with the success of The Surge-- a success Baraq has had tremendous ego difficulty in admitting, let alone celebrating.
Instead Candidate Clinton and Candidate Baraq competed to declare who would get us out faster. Various Iraqi players took note and acted accordingly-- not unlike what is happening in Afpakia right now.
As noted in the Middle East FUBAR thread in the last couple of days, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and other players are drawing similar conclusions. Who in the Republican campaign is articulating anything that prevents Baraq from claiming all this as success? No one. Who in the Republican campaign is saying anything about Libya that would not or does sound churlish or opportunistic? Prediction: No one will point out that Kadaffy may well have had nukes by now but for his being intimidated into coughing up his nuke program by Bush's Iraq campaign.
I repeat a point I have made previously. No Republican is addressing the fundamental issues of foreign affairs; of what the guiding concepts should be as we return to a multi-polar world. No one is addressing the implications of the (unconstitutional?) budget "super committee" and its looming failure to come up with something and the resulting additional $500 Billion in military cuts on top of the cuts ($400B?) already in the pipeline.
-
The deluge of commentary following President Barack Obama's announcement that all American troops are leaving Iraq by year's end largely missed the most important strategic implication: The winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan clears the way for the U.S. to shift its focus to Asia and, in particular, China, the part of the world that likely matters most in the long run.
If we're lucky, this shift might even lead to a more sophisticated debate in the 2012 presidential campaign about the U.S. approach to China, which has been pretty sterile so far.
Whatever the merits of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of their consequences has been to divert America's gaze from the direction it had been heading—toward the Asia-Pacific region and its gathering economic strength. It would be folly, of course, to think this means Iraq and Afghanistan now can be forgotten; the specter of a potentially nuclear-capable Iran stepping into a vacuum is enough to require continued American involvement.
But there's no doubt that economic pressures alone will produce a shift eastward. On Monday, in fact, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was visiting Asia, asserting that the U.S. now is at "a turning point" that will allow a strategic rebalancing toward Asia.
Similarly, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has in recent days said such a shift is coming. In a speech in New York on the need to use diplomatic power to address America's economic ailments, she declared that in the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan, "the world's strategic and economic center of gravity is shifting east, and we are focusing more on the Asia Pacific region."
In a new article in Foreign Policy magazine, she calls for "a substantially increased investment—diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region."
She defined that region to include India and Indonesia, but most of the focus will be on China and its complicated economic relationship with the U.S. It's safe to say that many Americans fear the rising economic power of China, worrying that their country is either losing ground to Chinese industrial might or, worse, becoming subservient to Beijing because of a reliance on Chinese investment to finance America's federal deficits.
Yet one of the opportunities in the coming shift of focus to the east is the chance for America's political leaders—and political candidates—to explain to the citizenry that China is not, in fact, 10 feet tall. China faces considerable economic problems of its own, a recognition of which might at least reduce the atmosphere of economic fear and anxiety that has crept across America.
Indeed, there is emerging a whole new school of China skeptics who think that country's economic potential is being exaggerated and its own problems downplayed. In a commentary distributed last week, Jerry Jasinowski, an economist and former president of the National Association of Manufacturers, declared that "there is growing evidence that China's challenge to U.S. manufacturing has peaked, and its competitive advantage is in decline."
Mr. Jasinowski cited in particular a recent report from the Boston Consulting Group that the cost of producing goods in China is rising as wages, raw materials, real estate and energy all escalate in price there. Meantime, Mr. Jasinowski notes, American manufacturers have become more competitive amidst the painful economic adjustment now under way. Over time, he argued, when the cost of shipping goods from China is taken into account, making and buying American will become more attractive again.
If the competitive playing field is being brought closer to level, one goal of American statecraft is to push harder toward that goal by compelling China to play more by international economic rules. In particular, that means sustained pressure to end manipulation of its currency's value and protecting intellectual property. One of the goals of American diplomats, in fact, is to convince China its own long-term interest lies in a fair international system. "If a big country like China doesn't play to the rules, the global system will be hurt and ultimately so will China, which depends heavily on it," says Undersecretary of State Robert Hormats.
Which leads to the nascent presidential campaign. There already is plenty of China-bashing there, thanks in large measure to Republican hopeful Mitt Romney, who is promising a tougher line against China. He's proposed imposing duties in China in direct retaliation for currency manipulation and intellectual property theft, and last week even won applause at a debate by suggesting that China somehow be compelled to pick up the tab for foreign aid the U.S. now disperses.
But there are other ways to advance American interests, including making common cause with Asian and Latin American nations feeling bullied by the Chinese. Indeed, the best discussion might be about how to better compete with China, not to punish it.
-
This piece is by Thomas Friedman. That is to say much of it is specious, full of non-sequiturs, and inconvenient facts e.g. the unremittingly destructive, hateful, and sometimes quasi-treasonous opposition and destruction waged by the Dems, Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, and Communists against our success during the Bush administration that mysertiosly :roll: disappeared once his glibness took office AND perhaps it may stimulate our thinking here.
I continue to think our side is frequently incoherent and often opportunistic. The damage being done by Baraq et al is historic, yet many of us simply carp.
==============
Who would have predicted it? Barack Obama has turned out to be so much more adept at implementing George W. Bush’s foreign policy than Bush was, but he is less adept at implementing his own. The reasons, though, are obvious.
In his own way, President Obama has brought the country to the right strategy for Bush’s “war on terrorism.” It is a serious, focused combination of global intelligence coordination, targeted killing of known terrorists and limited interventions — like Libya — that leverage popular forces on the ground and allies, as well as a judicious use of U.S. power, so that we keep the costs and risks down. In Libya, Obama saved lives and gave Libyans a chance to build a decent society. What they do with this opportunity is now up to them. I am still wary, but Obama handled his role exceedingly well.
No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations. Instead, they each turned out to be like a bad subprime mortgage — a small down payment with a huge balloon five years down the road. They thought they would be able to “flip” the house before the balloon came due. But partly because of their incompetence and lack of planning, it took much longer to flip the house to new owners and the price America paid was huge. Iraq may still have a decent outcome — I hope so, and it would be important — but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.
So let’s be clear: Up to now, as a commander in chief in the war on terrorism, Obama and his national security team have been so much smarter, tougher and cost-efficient in keeping the country safe than the “adults” they replaced. It isn’t even close, which is why the G.O.P.’s elders have such a hard time admitting it.
But while Obama has been deft at implementing Bush’s antiterrorism policy, he has been less successful with his own foreign policy. His Arab-Israeli diplomacy has been a mess. His hopes of engaging Iran foundered on the rocks of, well, Iran. He’s made little effort to pull together a multilateral coalition to buttress the Arab Awakening, in places like Egypt, to handle the postrevolution challenges. His ill-considered decision to double down on Afghanistan could prove fatal. He is in a war of words with Pakistan. His global climate policy is an invisible embarrassment. And the coolly calculating Chinese and Russians, while occasionally throwing him a bone, pursue their interests with scant regard to Obama’s preferences. Why is that?
Here I come to defend Obama not to condemn him.
True, he was naïve about how much his star power, or that of his secretary of state, would get others to swoon in behind us. But Obama’s frustrations in bagging a big, nonmilitary foreign policy achievement are rooted in a much broader structural problem — one that also explains why we have not produced a history-changing secretary of state since the cold war titans Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker.
The reason: the world has gotten messier and America has lost leverage. When Kissinger was negotiating in the Middle East in the 1970s, he had to persuade just three people to make a deal: an all-powerful Syrian dictator, Hafez al-Assad; an Egyptian pharaoh, Anwar Sadat; and an Israeli prime minister with an overwhelming majority, Golda Meir.
To make history, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by contrast, need to extract a deal from a crumbling Syrian regime, a crumbled Egyptian regime, a fractious and weak Israeli coalition and a Palestinian movement broken into two parts.
We don’t even bother anymore to negotiate with the flimsy civilian government in Pakistan. We just go right to its military, which only wants to perpetuate the conflict with India — and exploit Afghanistan as a chip in that war — to justify the Pakistani Army’s endless consumption of so many state resources.
Making history through diplomacy “depends on making deals with other governments,” says Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert (and co-author with me on “That Used to Be Us”). “But now, to make such deals, we actually have to build the governments we want to negotiate with — and we can’t do that.” Indeed, in so many hot spots today, we have to do nation-building before we can do diplomacy. So many states propped up by the cold war are failing.
And where states are stronger — like Russia, China and Iran — we have less leverage because leverage is ultimately a function of economic strength. And while many of America’s companies are still strong, our government is mired in debt. When a nation is in debt as deep as we are — with severe defense cuts inevitable — its bark is always bigger than its bite.
The best way for us to gain leverage on Russia and Iran would be with an energy policy that reduced the price and significance of oil. The only way to gain more leverage on China is if we increase our savings and graduation rates — and export more and consume less. That isn’t in the cards.
So, Mama, tell your children not to grow up to be secretary of state or a foreign policy president — not until others have done more nation-building abroad and we’ve done more nation-building at home.
-
Our retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan might look good to the uninformed now, but when the reality of putting 2 wins in the global jihad's pocket sets in....
-
For some years now, often under the influence of YA, I have been posting here of the incoherence of the US strategy in Afpakia. Today there are some major entries on today's Afpakia thread, with YA leading the way, as usual.
This is profoundly serious stuff. Serious wars are made of such things.
Yet where is a coherent conversation from the Republican preidential candidates? (Newt Gingrich excepted). Instead opportunistic pandering abounds as President Baraq surges out of Afg with a surge that was about half of what the generals wanted. Likewise Iraq. And this week we see our words after busting the Iranian assassination plan for Washington revealed as bluster as we refuse to do what would really hit Iran hard, which is to go after its central bank, , , and Al Qaeda flags fly in Libya.
Where is the serious conversation that needs to be had?!? :x :x :x
-
John Bolton.
Just sayin......
Yet where is a coherent conversation from the Republican preidential candidates?
I'm sure polling has the public focused on the economy and foreign policy way down the list of priorities.
-
SO WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The nation is in peril of throwing away so very much more than it realizes. Truth needs to be spoken!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-
Pakistan along with the entire middle east is a dangerous place. I knew that years ago, but more dangerous now, especially the more that you know. People don't know what to do about it so it is hard to judge the candidates if they did offer plans and ideas.
If Iraq goes to hell on our exit, the lesson is what? Either that we should have kept a strong presence longer or that we should have left anarchy after deposing Saddam, as with Libya and Egypt now, let them sort it out and take actions again and again in the future. And same for Afghanistan?
Crafty you have good ideas of how to split Pakistan differently and I have a proposal for Kashmir, but that doesn't mean anyone there would accept our ideas.
"Serious wars are made of such things." - Yes. The main answer to all this danger we cannot control is to prepare for war, hopefully to avoid war. Step one is end American weakness at home; most of these Republicans believe at least vaguely in a strong defense. I would add that any of these nominees will need if elected an American military that does not rely on funding from a returned Pelosi-Reid congress.
"I'm sure polling has the public focused on the economy and foreign policy way down the list of priorities."
When we think it is all domestic policy, it turns out to be foreign policy or war, and vice versa. It is very possible that we don't yet know what the most important event or crisis of Obama years will be.
Foreign policy may weigh heavily in the general election debates. Was the 3am call the one where they decided not to take the Libyan war to congress? The Republican candidates mostly look readier than Obama did in 2007, but not ready. We will get more serious after we find out if comparing an anonymous person's height to that of your wife is a deal breaker for Commander in Chief.
"(Newt Gingrich excepted)" Very strong in the video! That doesn't make his other problems go away, just Murphy's law that he would be strongest on depth and delivery, Perry's economic plan best (JMO) and then the nominee will be one of the others.
-
It just seems more "apra po" (sp?) here. I am left wondering which is worse. Say something disparaging about a gay, a Muslim or the Corrupt Afghan leadership. Which is more politically incorrect? I dunno. Even Fareed Zakaria called the Pakistani shakedown of the US a "protection racket" this weekend. Pakistani leaders essentially telling us give us your money or if you think our situation is bad now just wait and see how bad it will get. As noted on the board before me where is the Republican position on this? Yes as GM implied we need John Bolton. The only one I can listen to who seems to make sense out of this mess. Wolfowitz is leading us to God's knows where. We must stop listening to him that is obvious:
****U.S. General Fired for Verbal Attack on Afghan Leader
By Justin Fishel
July 26: Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a gathering with high ranking Afghan military officials at the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan.
A top U.S. general in Afghanistan was fired Friday for making disparaging remarks about Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government.
Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, deputy commander of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, made the remarks in an interview with Politico that was published Thursday.
Fuller told Politico that major players in the Afghan government are "isolated from reality." Fuller reacted angrily to claims from Karzai that Afghanistan would side with Pakistan if it were to go to war with the United States.
Fuller called Karzai's statements "erratic," adding, "Why don't you just poke me in the eye with a needle! You've got to be kidding me … I'm sorry, we just gave you $11.6 billion and now you're telling me, 'I don't really care'?"
Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), released a statement Friday saying Fuller was to be relieved of his duties, "effective immediately."
"These unfortunate comments are neither indicative of our current solid relationship with the government of Afghanistan, its leadership, or our joint commitment to prevail here in Afghanistan", Allen said.
"The Afghan people are an honorable people, and comments such as these will not keep us from accomplishing our most critical and shared mission-bringing about a stable, peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan."
Pentagon officials who spoke to Fox News on the condition of anonymity agree that Fuller seemed to go off the rails in the Politico interview, admitting he showed extremely poor judgment. The fish line didn't help his cause:
"You can teach a man how to fish, or you can give them a fish," Fuller said. "We're giving them fish while they're learning, and they want more fish! [They say,] 'I like swordfish, how come you're giving me cod?' Guess what? Cod's on the menu today."
Fuller is not the only loose-lipped general to sink his own ship. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, once the commander of ISAF, was fired by President Obama himself after the Rolling Stone published disparaging remarks he and his staff made about members of the administration.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/11/04/us-general-fired-for-verbal-attack-on-karzai/?test=latestnews#ixzz1cqCiOXpD****
-
I would think that John Bolton will be available to the contenders and to the nominee as natl security adviser, or sec of state or as VP.
It seems that most of the wisdom in foreign policy today needs to be applied behind the scenes, for example if we are aggressively strengthening our relationship with India while keeping a few billion and a pretend relationship with Pakistan, why should they know more then they need to about that. If we are working quietly with factions inside Egypt, below the radar would probably be more effective than publicly made demands. Somehow I doubt though that we are doing much along those lines but a lot comes down to electing the right people here and trusting them to act in our best interests.
The worst parts of Obama's foreign policy came at the beginning when he projected weakness. America doesn't belong over here and America will soon retreat. The drone strikes and OBL operation projected strength. The Libya from behind and from above maneuver probably projects wisdom to some, but we will see. The withdrawal deadlines from Iraq and Afghanistan project that this administration is shifting into campaign mode over security interests. Are we saying there is no longer an American security interest in these locations? If so, why did we stay 3+ years into the new administration and what changed? Are we saying mission accomplished? That implication seems to bring with it strings of bad luck.
People were quite war weary at the last election, also by the time the Libya operation began. Talking tough now like we are going to open a plethora of new war theaters is not going to play well past the hawk segment of the base. People will I think will prefer a calmness of strength, a restraint in policy that is not coming from weakness, ignorance or fear.
It is hard to believe that with a trillion or so invested and thousands of American lives lost that we aren't able or interested in negotiating permanent bases to allow some future security benefit to come from our effort.
Was China selling or offering weapons to Kadhafy DURING our war? If so, what are the consequences to them for that? (nothing) That was one problem with Huntsman not getting traction with his foreign policy experience, I have yet to meet or read someone who knows if we have a foreign policy toward the world's second largest power or what it is.
-
By MITT ROMNEY
The International Atomic Energy Agency's latest report this week makes clear what I and others have been warning about for too long: Iran is making rapid headway toward its goal of obtaining nuclear weapons.
Successive American presidents, including Barack Obama, have declared such an outcome to be unacceptable. But under the Obama administration, rhetoric and policy have been sharply at odds, and we're hurtling toward a major crisis involving nuclear weapons in one of the most politically volatile and economically significant regions of the world.
Things did not have to be this way. To understand how best to proceed from here, we need to review the administration's extraordinary record of failure.
As a candidate for the presidency in 2007, Barack Obama put forward "engagement" with Tehran as a way to solve the nuclear problem, declaring he would meet with Iran's leaders "without preconditions." Whether this approach was rooted in naïveté or in realistic expectations can be debated; I believe it was the former. But whatever calculation lay behind the proposed diplomatic opening, it was predictably rebuffed by the Iranian regime.
After that repudiation, a serious U.S. strategy to block Iran's nuclear ambitions became an urgent necessity. But that is precisely what the administration never provided. Instead, we've been offered a case study in botched diplomacy and its potentially horrific costs.
In his "reset" of relations with Russia, President Obama caved in to Moscow's demands by reneging on a missile-defense agreement with Eastern European allies and agreeing to a New Start Treaty to reduce strategic nuclear weapons while getting virtually nothing in return. If there ever was a possibility of gaining the Kremlin's support for tougher action against Tehran, that unilateral giveaway was the moment. President Obama foreclosed it.
Enlarge Image
CloseIIPA/Getty Images
.Another key juncture came with the emergence of Iran's Green Revolution after the stolen election of 2009. Here—more than a year before the eruption of the Arab Spring—was a spontaneous popular revolt against a regime that has been destabilizing the region, supporting terrorism around the world, killing American soldiers in Iraq, and attacking the U.S. for three decades. Yet President Obama, evidently fearful of jeopardizing any further hope of engagement, proclaimed his intention not to "meddle" as the ayatollahs unleashed a wave of terror against their own society. A proper American policy might or might not have altered the outcome; we will never know. But thanks to this shameful abdication of moral authority, any hope of toppling a vicious regime was lost, perhaps for generations.
In 2010, the administration did finally impose another round of sanctions, which President Obama hailed as a strike "at the heart" of Iran's ability to fund its nuclear programs. But here again we can see a gulf between words and deeds. As the IAEA report makes plain, the heart that we supposedly struck is still pumping just fine. Sanctions clearly failed in their purpose. Iran is on the threshold of becoming a nuclear power.
Recent events have brought White House fecklessness to another low. When Iran was discovered plotting to kill Saudi Arabia's ambassador by setting off a bomb in downtown Washington, the administration responded with nothing more than tough talk and an indictment against two low-level Iranian operatives, as if this were merely a common criminal offense rather than an act of international aggression. Demonstrating further irresolution, the administration then floated the idea of sanctioning Iran's central bank, only to quietly withdraw that proposal.
Barack Obama has shredded his own credibility on Iran, conveyed an image of American weakness, and increased the prospect of a cascade of nuclear proliferation in the unstable Middle East.
The United States needs a very different policy.
Si vis pacem, para bellum. That is a Latin phrase, but the ayatollahs will have no trouble understanding its meaning from a Romney administration: If you want peace, prepare for war.
I want peace. And if I am president, I will begin by imposing a new round of far tougher economic sanctions on Iran. I will do this together with the world if we can, unilaterally if we must. I will speak out forcefully on behalf of Iranian dissidents. I will back up American diplomacy with a very real and very credible military option. I will restore the regular presence of aircraft carrier groups in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf region simultaneously. I will increase military assistance to Israel and coordination with all of our allies in the region. These actions will send an unequivocal signal to Iran that the United States, acting in concert with allies, will never permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.
Only when the ayatollahs no longer have doubts about America's resolve will they abandon their nuclear ambitions.
Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
-
In the wake of the latest IAEA report on Iran, STRATFOR CEO George Friedman and special guest Robert Kaplan discuss potential threats to world oil supplies from the Persian Gulf, and U.S. President Barack Obama’s limited options.
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Related Links
• Iran’s Nuclear Program and its Nuclear Option
Colin: Few will be surprised by the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran. Its finding that the Tehran regime has computer models that can only be used to develop a nuclear weapon has triggered a new wave of speculation on the prospects of an Israeli strike. But there may be other more pressing concerns as U.S. forces leave Iraq.
Welcome to Agenda with George Friedman, and joining also this week is a special guest — the writer and defense expert Robert Kaplan.
The obvious question as we move to a point where Israeli bombers can fly in clear skies over Iraq, or soon will be able to be, is this “high noon” for Iran?
Robert: Not necessarily, because just the fact that they are moving closer to developing a weapons capacity for their nuclear material does not mean that they can miniaturize, put it on a warhead and send it somewhere. It could be a long way from that. Of course it is a much more acute threat for Israel than it is for the United States. You also have to consider the possibility that so what if Iran has three or four nuclear weapons with no air defense system, relative to what the Americans can do. But what does that mean? Isn’t the 100 nuclear weapons in Pakistan a much greater threat? Or would the Saudis respond by parking Pakistani nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia, thereby fusing the South Asian and the greater Middle East crisis into one? There are a lot of questions out there and they will continue to play out. But this is nothing particularly new at this point.
Colin: So George, there’s all this talk of an Israeli strike, and we’ve heard it before, is it just rhetoric?
George: We are at a critical point. The critical point is not about nuclear weapons. The critical point is that the U.S. is completing its withdrawal from Iraq. We’ve seen recently the arrests of Sunnis in Iraq by the Maliki government and the Iranians are increasing their power. The balance of power is shifting in the region. The United States and Israel both want the Iranians to pull back and as has happened several times before, they increased the drumbeat of the threat of nuclear weapons in order to create a psychological situation where the Iranians would reconsider their position. The problem that you have here is that the Israelis really don’t have the ability to carry out the kind of strikes we are talking about. They certainly have nuclear weapons if they want to use nuclear weapons on some of the facilities near Tehran. The more interesting question is do they have the ability to carry out the multiday attacks on multiple sites with a relatively small air force? The answer is they may be but they cannot deal with something else. What if the Iranians respond by putting mines in the Straits of Hormuz?
Colin: And this is critical, isn’t it, because 40 percent of the world’s sea-bound oil goes through the Straits. The Iranians have the longest coastline along the Straits of Hormuz and along the whole Persian Gulf.
Robert: The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps navy, which is separate from the Iranian navy, is developing a very impressive asymmetric warfare capability of suicide boats that can ram into everything from merchant tankers to destroyers. Keep in mind in this “hot house” media environment where the world is all together, simply pinprick attacks on destroyers of other nations will garner incredible media news. It will seem to be an attack on an American Navy that has been inviolate since World War II in fact.
George: This is really crucial, that the psychological effect is substantial. But the effect on markets in this case is substantial. If the perception was that the Iranians have the ability to mine the Straits or some other way threaten these extremely expensive tankers that are up to a billion dollars including their cargo, which has to be insured, could really be threatened. The price of oil would rise dramatically and stock markets would tumble in a situation where Europe is in a major crisis and the financial system of the world is shaky. If we suddenly wound up with $200, $300 or $400 for a barrel of oil, the global landscape could be reshaped forever.
Robert: Keep in mind that personalities enter into this a bit. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been seen for years and even decades in fact seen as a very flawed personality in and of himself, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his viewpoints. As we enter into a presidential election season in the United States where even someone like President Obama would be forced not to criticize Israel publicly, the Israelis thinking cynically — and all governments think cynically — would say this is a window of opportunity for us to bomb Iran, with fewer American domestic repercussions.
George: That may be but it’s very important that there is one domestic American repercussion. If the oil is cut off, the effect on the United States would be enormous and Israel will be blamed for a massive recession or depression.
Robert: But as I was saying, Netanyahu has the kind of personality where he would risk that.
Colin: This will be a catastrophe given the situation that could evolve in the Persian Gulf. What kind of advice is Obama’s defense department giving him? Given that he is a man of great caution, I think what would you expect him to be doing?
George: I think it is very clear what they are saying to him — bluff. He is going out very publicly, which you don’t do if you are planning a major attack, and very publicly bluffing.
Robert: The U.S. Defense Department does not have the appetite for war with Iran. Remember, all Iranians, not just the regime, supports Iran being a nuclear power. Ten years from now we might have closer relations with Tehran than we have with Riyadh. The last thing we want to do is alienate even the Iranians who are sympathetic to us. Iran is a crucial country. It fronts not just the oil-rich Persian Gulf but also the oil-rich Caspian Sea. No other country does that. It has a window onto Central Asia, which no other country in the Middle East has. So it’s enormously important. We are playing for high long-term stakes with Iran, which may be a future ally of the United States.
George: We have to also recognize that with their increased power in Iraq, with the probability that the al Assad regime in Syria — Iranian allies — can survive, and with Hezbollah in Lebanon, we are looking at a situation where Iranian influences could stretch from the Afghan border to the Mediterranean. This is an enormously dangerous situation and it’s not really about nuclear weapons.
Robert: Afghanistan to the Mediterranean approximates the ancient Persian empire of antiquity. Remember, Persia — Iran — as a linguistic cultural force extends from Alawite Syria eastward right up to the Indus River in Pakistan.
Colin: George and Robert, we need to leave it there. Thank you very much. That is George Friedman and special guest Robert Kaplan ending Agenda for this week.
-
Dispatch: The Broader Significance of U.S.-Australian Military Cooperation
November 17, 2011 | 1909 GMT
Click on image below to watch video:
Director of Military Analysis Nathan Hughes discusses the political nature of the timing of the announced military cooperation deal between the United States and Australia and the broader realignment of U.S. military expansion and wider governmental efforts in the region.
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Related Links
• Washington’s Deal with Australia Highlights Growing Competition with Beijing
During his visit to Australia, U.S. President Barack Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard formally announced a significant expansion of American military activity in, and cooperation with, Australia set to begin as early as 2012. Though the timing of the announcement itself is clearly political, the agreement is part of a wider realignment of U.S. military forces, as well as broader national efforts that span the entire region.
It was no accident that Obama and Gillard chose to formally announce the new deal during the American president’s stopover in Australia which fell between the APEC summit in Hawaii last weekend and the 2011 East Asian Summit in Indonesia this coming weekend, where he will meet with regional leaders. After years of focus on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is not only in the process of rebalancing its global posture, but it is now resuming its reorientation towards the Pacific and East Asia that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In this most recent deal, increasing contingents of American Marines will train on large Australian proving grounds with 2,500-strong task forces expected to start rotating through by 2016. Royal Australian Air Force bases in the north and west of Australia will host American fighters, bombers, tankers and transport aircraft while Royal Australian Navy bases in Darwin and near Perth, already regular ports of call for American warships, will expand their capacity to host and support U.S. ships and submarines. Of particular significance here, is the more established presence and support capacity that there Australian facilities provide so close to the strategic Strait of Malacca.
Overall, this is a process that has been underway since the collapse of the Soviet Union but that was in many ways sidelined by the American response to the Sept. 11 attacks. The U.S. Navy, in particular, has continued the reorientation of its forces to the Pacific, but that process is intensifying across all services and across the American government. This includes updating the American military’s posture for post-Cold War realities and also responding to increasingly assertive and aggressive Chinese military efforts, particularly in the South China Sea and with anti-access and area denial capabilities. Indeed, the relevance and value of the distance of Australia and the further dispersal of facilities on which American forces rely is particularly relevant in this regard.
But from Washington’s perspective, this is all about returning to a more balanced global posture, prioritizing East Asia and the Pacific and rationalizing its presence and efforts there. But to Beijing this looks a lot like the United States essentially doubling down with its closest allies and partners in what China can only assume is a potential attempt at encirclement.
At stake is everything in-between. The American relationship with Australia, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan is settled by comparison, though the United States appears to be making a big push in the region for reassuring these allies and partners. What really concerns China is the foundation this creates for the U.S. to expand engagement with countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and India and others in the years ahead.
-
I really like this.
Let's put a "ring of steel" around the Pacific. If China wants to fight a demographic balancing war, let them push into the Stans, or take Siberia from Russia.
-
Beijing and Washington's Contrasting Interests in East Asia
U.S. President Barack Obama arrived in Bali, Indonesia, Thursday for the East Asia Summit (EAS) — the first time an American president has attended the annual summit, now in its sixth year. He arrived from Australia, where he had just formalized an agreement with Canberra to expand U.S. military activity in and cooperation with Australia. That visit followed the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Hawaii the previous week, which Obama hosted. This has all the signs of a meticulously orchestrated political itinerary, but reflects a much deeper and more fundamental shift in the region.
“The United States cannot ignore the enormity and the long-term trajectory of Asian economic activity.”
EAS has expanded in its short existence to include almost every country in the region. Washington has not only reversed its longstanding wariness of multilateral East Asian forums, but it has embraced EAS specifically and deliberately. The United States wants EAS to serve as a decision-making body for policy in the region. Obama’s attendance is emblematic of an American strategy to address significant geopolitical realities.
The United States, which has depended heavily on maritime commerce since before its founding and which now controls long stretches of coast on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, is drawn to Asian affairs by geography and economic interest. In 1980, the volume of trade across the Pacific matched for the first time in history that of trade across the Atlantic — and by 1990, had increased over transatlantic trade by half. The economic crises that followed, in Japan and in wider Asia, slowed this trend but did not reverse it. The United States cannot ignore the enormity and the long-term trajectory of Asian economic activity.
In fact, it is really the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that has been the anomaly. The United States obviously never left the region, but its attention was drawn elsewhere. With Washington focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, China found a vacuum in which it could maneuver just as Russia did in its own periphery, without drawing American attention commensurate with the strategic value of the region. But the United States is now in the process of extracting itself from entanglements that have consumed its attention and resources for a decade. And just as for Russia, that window of opportunity is beginning to close for China.
Essentially, the United States is signaling to everyone that it is turning its attention back to the region: rebalancing and rationalizing its military presence while strengthening its engagement and involvement with longstanding partners and allies.
China and its potential response are impossible to ignore, regardless of Washington’s intentions. Obama’s formal address to the Australian parliament in Canberra was dominated by the topic of China. And as the power that has taken full advantage of the decade of American distraction — more so than any other country in the region — China is preparing to counter the United States’ intentions as Washington returns to the scene.
Many countries in the region — particularly those that have been on the receiving end of China’s more assertive behavior (particularly in the South China Sea) — have begun to find the idea of an increased American presence in the region desirable as a counterbalance to China.
China perceives itself as acting within its rights, as the region’s natural power, to carve out its own space. More simply, China views itself as acting in defense of its own national interests. The United States perceives itself as returning to a region filled with key trading partners and longstanding allies to continue to advocate for specific interests — its own and those of its allies and partners. And while the Pacific Ocean is enormous, East Asia is becoming an increasingly crowded place.
-
Our middel east policy perhaps should focus mostly on Iran. Perhaps we should withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrate all our efforts on Iran. Unless by staying in Afghan we are better positioned to deal with Iran.
Iran is leading the middle east towards nuclear war.
GM posts imagine what an attack on Iran would do to the oil chain of supply to the world.
I say imagine what Iran with nucs can do to that chain anytime it will want.
We are weak against Pakistan because THEY have nucs. Once Iran starts to get several nuclear devices even without missle delivery capability forget it. Game over.
Al Qaeda is a joke. The threat certainly needs to be taken seriously but we need to change focus away from this to Iran - just my take.
-
Very worthwhile read! Timely if not too late.
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/11/calling-things-by-their-proper.php
Calling things by their proper names
November 25, 2011, 10:20 AM
Maliki and the dwarf.jpg
(http://www.carolineglick.com/e/assets_c/2011/11/Maliki%20and%20the%20dwarf-thumb-470x380-2855.jpg)
Next month, America's long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the departure of the last US forces from the country.
Amazingly, the approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have weighed in on the likely consequences of President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw on the US's hard won gains in that country.
After some six thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.
The general stupor was broken last week with The Weekly Standard's publication of an article titled, "Defeat in Iraq: President Obama's decision to withdraw US troops is the mother of all disasters."
The article was written by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan and Marisa Cochrane Sullivan. The Kagans contributed to conceptualizing the US's successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, popularly known as "the surge," that president George W. Bush implemented in 2007.
In their article, the Kagans and Sullivan explain the strategic implications of next month's withdrawal. First they note that with the US withdrawal, the sectarian violence that the surge effectively ended will in all likelihood return in force.
Iranian-allied Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is purging the Iraqi military and security services and the Iraqi civil service of pro-Western, anti- Iranian commanders and senior officials. With American acquiescence, Maliki and his Shi'ite allies already managed to effectively overturn the March 2010 election results. Those elections gave the Sunni-dominated Iraqiya party led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi the right to form the next government.
Due to Maliki's actions, Iraq's Sunnis are becoming convinced they have little to gain from peacefully accepting the government.
The strategic implications of Maliki's purges are clear. As the US departs the country next month it will be handing its hard-won victory in Iraq to its greatest regional foe - Iran.
Repeating their behavior in the aftermath of Israel's precipitous withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies are presenting the US withdrawal from Iraq as a massive strategic victory.
They are also inventing the rationale for continued war against the retreating Americans. Iran's Hezbollah-trained proxy, Muqtada al-Sadr, has declared that US Embassy personnel are an "occupation force" that the Iraqis should rightly attack with the aim of defeating.
The US public's ignorance of the implications of a post-withdrawal, Iranian-dominated Iraq is not surprising. The Obama administration has ignored them and the media have largely followed the administration's lead in underplaying them.
For its part, the Bush administration spent little time explaining to the US public who the forces fighting in Iraq were and why the US was fighting them.
US military officials frequently admitted that the insurgents were trained, armed and funded by Iran and Syria. But policy-makers never took any action against either country for waging war against the US. Above the tactical level, the US was unwilling to take any effective action to diminish either regime's support for the insurgency or to make them pay a diplomatic or military price for their actions.
As for Obama, as the Kagans and Sullivan show, the administration abjectly refused to intervene when Maliki stole the elections or to defend US allies in the Iraqi military from Maliki's pro-Iranian purge of the general officer corps. And by refusing to side with US allies, the Obama administration has effectively sided with America's foes, enabling Iranian-allied forces to take over the US-built, trained and armed security apparatuses in Iraq.
ALL OF these actions are in line with the US's current policy towards Egypt. There, without considering the consequences of its actions, in January and February the Obama administration played a key role in ousting the US's most dependable ally in the Arab world, president Hosni Mubarak.
Since Mubarak was thrown from office, Egypt has been ruled by a military junta dubbed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Because SCAF is comprised of the men who served as Mubarak's underlings throughout his 30-year rule, it shares many of the institutional interests that guided Mubarak and rendered him a dependable US ally. Specifically, SCAF is ill-disposed toward chaos and Islamic radicalism.
However, unlike Mubarak, SCAF is only in power because the mobs of protesters in Tahrir Square demanded that Mubarak stand down to enable civilian, majority rule in Egypt. Consequently, the military junta is much less able to keep Egypt's populist forces at bay.
Throughout Mubarak's long reign, the most popular force in Egypt was the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. The populism unleashed by Mubarak's ouster necessarily rendered the Brotherhood the most powerful political force in Egypt. If free elections are held in Egypt next week as planned and if their results are honored, within a year Egypt will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the outcome Obama all but guaranteed when he cut the cord on Mubarak.
Recognizing the danger a Brotherhood government would pose to the army's institutional interests, in recent weeks the generals began taking steps to delay elections, limit the power of the parliament and postpone presidential elections.
Their moves provoked massive opposition from Egypt's now fully legitimated and empowered populist forces. And so they launched what they are dubbing "the second Egyptian revolution."
And the US doesn't know what to do.
In late 2010, foreign policy professionals on both sides of the aisle in Washington got together and formed a group called the Working Group for Egypt. This group, with members as seemingly diverse as Elliott Abrams from the Bush administration and the Council on Foreign Relations, and Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, chose to completely ignore the fact that the populist forces in Egypt are overwhelmingly jihadist. They lobbied for Mubarak's overthrow in the name of "democracy" in January and February. Today they demand that Obama side with the rioters in Tahrir Square against the military. And just as he did in January and February, Obama is likely to follow their "bipartisan" advice.
FROM IRAQ to Egypt to Libya to Syria, as previous mistakes by both the Bush and Obama administrations constrain and diminish US options for advancing its national interests, America is compelled to make more and more difficult choices. In Libya, after facilitating Muammar Gaddafi's overthrow, the US is faced with the prospect of dealing with an even more radical regime that is jihadist, empowered and already transferring arms to terror groups and proliferating nonconventional weapons. If the Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment acknowledge the hostile nature of the new regime and refrain from supporting it, they will be forced to admit they sided with America's enemies in taking down Gaddafi.
While Gaddafi was certainly no Mubarak, at worst he was an impotent adversary.
In Syria, not only did the US refuse to take any action against President Bashar Assad despite his active sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq, it failed to cultivate any ties with Syrian regime opponents. The US has continued to ignore Syrian regime opponents to the present day. And now, with Assad's fall a matter of time, the US is presented with a fairly set opposition leadership, backed by Islamist Turkey and dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The liberal, pro-American forces in Syria, including the Kurds, have been shut out of the post-Assad power structure.
And in Egypt, after embracing "democracy" over its ally Mubarak, the US is faced with another unenviable choice. It can either side with the weak, but not necessarily hostile military junta which is dependent on US financial aid, or it can side with Islamic extremists who seek its destruction and that of Israel and have the support of the Egyptian people.
HOW HAS this situation arisen? How is it possible that the US finds itself today with so few good options in the Arab world after all the blood and treasure it has sacrificed? The answer to this question is found to a large degree in an article by Prof. Angelo Codevilla in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled "The Lost Decade."
Codevilla argues that the reason the US finds itself in the position it is in today owes to a significant degree to its refusal after September 11, 2001, to properly identify its enemy. US foreign policy elites of all stripes and sizes refused to consider clearly how the US should best defend its interests because they refused to identify who most endangered those interests.
The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn't want the US to fight. Moreover, because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world's hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US appeasement of its enemies.
For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US's enemy because it feared the Left.
And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic - terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat a tactic because a tactic isn't an enemy. It's just a tactic.
And as its war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became spectacular. Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious extremism.
The lion's share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn't want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after September 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war-fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public, thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.
Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left's ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America's worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey's Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.
And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro- American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington's irresponsibility.
There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.
-
THAT is a piece worth reading more than once.
-
http://www.jammiewf.com/2011/obama-goes-book-shopping-buys-descent-into-chaos-the-u-s-and-the-disaster-in-pakistan-afghanistan-and-central-asia/
Obama Goes Book Shopping, Buys “Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia”
Posted by Jammie on Nov 26, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Considering the big news today, maybe he’s just trying to stay up to speed on current events.
The president took his daughters, Malia and Sasha, along on a shopping run to a bookstore a few blocks from the White House.
He says he made the visit because it’s “small business Saturday” and he wanted to support a small business.
The retail industry is encouraging shoppers to patronize mom-and-pop businesses on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It’s a counterpoint to Black Friday and the sales and special deals offered by department stores and other large retailers.
The Obamas walked out with a selection of books including “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever” and “Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.”
Come to think of it, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” seems more appropriate for him.
-
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/23/inside-the-ring-415466687/
-
Let's see. Great One was going to improve our relationships abroad.
Have our relations improved with Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, China, N. Korea, Venezuela, Russia, Lybia, Egypt, Israel, PLO, or anyhwere? I haven't seen the left wing media come out with some obscure foreign polling data claiming some other country, continent or region's people love Obama or the US lately.
Great One's charm was going to get everyone to love us.
All we needed was to get rid of Republicans and the world would be one big happy Pepsi generation.
Humanity will never be a Pepsi generation, the progressive's dream.
Why, even in our country alone no one can agree on anything and we fight and squabble over the money and our personal interests all day long - same as everywhere - same as every time in human history.
-
CCP: "Great One was going to improve our relationships abroad."
Being liked, it was thought, is to be more like them. Unarmed, vulnerable, broke, waiting for others to solve problems, lead from behind, talk of American excesses, capitalism excesses, fossil fuel excesses, apology tour, bowing, bone-headed gifts, etc etc
As I was (twice) reading the Caroline Glick piece, 'Call it by its proper name', I was recalling how all the pundits, advisers, media, experts, opponents, foreign leaders etc. just couldn't stand it when Pres. Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire. I think they had 100 million deaths on their hands - worse than Hitler, offered zero freedom, locked people in, took over nearly half the world, still expanding, constantly threatening us, how can you call that an evil empire? A focus group pollster or friendship counselor would never have approved of that. Our own allies were outraged.
June 12 1987 Reagan said "Tear down this wall" - against all advice. Nov 9 1989 the wall came down.
Wanting to be liked often leads you in the wrong direction. I would prefer to be respected.
-
This seems to me a piece most worthy of our discussion.
================
Egypt and the Idealist-Realist Debate in U.S. Foreign Policy
December 6, 2011
By George Friedman
The first round of Egyptian parliamentary elections has taken place, and the winners were two Islamist parties. The Islamists themselves are split between more extreme and more moderate factions, but it is clear that the secularists who dominated the demonstrations and who were the focus of the Arab Spring narrative made a poor showing. Of the three broad power blocs in Egypt — the military, the Islamists and the secular democrats — the last proved the weakest.
It is far from clear what will happen in Egypt now. The military remains unified and powerful, and it is unclear how much actual power it is prepared to cede or whether it will be forced to cede it. What is clear is that the faction championed by Western governments and the media will now have to accept the Islamist agenda, back the military or fade into irrelevance.
One of the points I made during the height of the Arab Spring was that the West should be careful of what it wishes for — it might get it. Democracy does not always bring secular democrats to power. To be more precise, democracy might yield a popular government, but the assumption that that government will support a liberal democratic constitution that conceives of human rights in the European or American sense is by no means certain. Unrest does not always lead to a revolution, a revolution does not always lead to a democracy, and a democracy does not always lead to a European- or American-style constitution.
In Egypt today, just as it is unclear whether the Egyptian military will cede power in any practical sense, it is also unclear whether the Islamists can form a coherent government or how extreme such a government might be. And as we analyze the possibilities, it is important to note that this analysis really isn’t about Egypt. Rather, Egypt serves as a specimen to examine — a case study of an inherent contradiction in Western ideology and, ultimately, of an attempt to create a coherent foreign policy.
Core Beliefs
Western countries, following the principles of the French Revolution, have two core beliefs. The first is the concept of national self-determination, the idea that all nations (and what the term “nation” means is complex in itself) have the right to determine for themselves the type of government they wish. The second is the idea of human rights, which are defined in several documents but are all built around the basic values of individual rights, particularly the right not only to participate in politics but also to be free in your private life from government intrusion.
The first principle leads to the idea of the democratic foundations of the state. The second leads to the idea that the state must be limited in its power in certain ways and the individual must be free to pursue his own life in his own way within a framework of law limited by the principles of liberal democracy. The core assumption within this is that a democratic polity will yield a liberal constitution. This assumes that the majority of the citizens, left to their own devices, will favor the Enlightenment’s definition of human rights. This assumption is simple, but its application is tremendously complex. In the end, the premise of the Western project is that national self-determination, expressed through free elections, will create and sustain constitutional democracies.
It is interesting to note that human rights activists and neoconservatives, who on the surface are ideologically opposed, actually share this core belief. Both believe that democracy and human rights flow from the same source and that creating democratic regimes will create human rights. The neoconservatives believe outside military intervention might be an efficient agent for this. Human rights groups oppose this, preferring to organize and underwrite democratic movements and use measures such as sanctions and courts to compel oppressive regimes to cede power. But they share common ground on this point as well. Both groups believe that outside intervention is needed to facilitate the emergence of an oppressed public naturally inclined toward democracy and human rights.
This, then, yields a theory of foreign policy in which the underlying strategic principle must not only support existing constitutional democracies but also bring power to bear to weaken oppressive regimes and free the people to choose to build the kind of regimes that reflect the values of the European Enlightenment.
Complex Questions and Choices
The case of Egypt raises an interesting and obvious question regardless of how it all turns out. What if there are democratic elections and the people choose a regime that violates the principles of Western human rights? What happens if, after tremendous Western effort to force democratic elections, the electorate chooses to reject Western values and pursue a very different direction — for example, one that regards Western values as morally reprehensible and aims to make war against them? One obvious example of this is Adolph Hitler, whose ascent to power was fully in keeping with the processes of the Weimar Republic — a democratic regime — and whose clearly stated intention was to supersede that regime with one that was popular (there is little doubt that the Nazi regime had vast public support), opposed to constitutionalism in the democratic sense and hostile to constitutional democracy in other countries.
The idea that the destruction of repressive regimes opens the door for democratic elections that will not result in another repressive regime, at least by Western standards, assumes that all societies find Western values admirable and want to emulate them. This is sometimes the case, but the general assertion is a form of narcissism in the West that assumes that all reasonable people, freed from oppression, would wish to emulate us.
At this moment in history, the obvious counterargument rests in some, but not all, Islamist movements. We do not know that the Islamist groups in Egypt will be successful, and we do not know what ideologies they will pursue, but they are Islamists and their views of man and moral nature are different from those of the European Enlightenment. Islamists have a principled disagreement with the West on a wide range of issues, from the relation of the individual to the community to the distinction between the public and private sphere. They oppose the Egyptian military regime not only because it limits individual freedom but also because it violates their understanding of the regime’s moral purpose. The Islamists have a different and superior view of moral political life, just as Western constitutional democracies see their own values as superior.
The collision between the doctrine of national self-determination and the Western notion of human rights is not an abstract question but an extremely practical one for Europe and the United States. Egypt is the largest Arab country and one of the major centers of Islamic life. Since 1952, it has had a secular and military-run government. Since 1973, it has had a pro-Western government. At a time when the United States is trying to end its wars in the Islamic world (along with its NATO partners, in the case of Afghanistan), and with relations with Iran already poor and getting worse, the democratic transformation of Egypt into a radical Islamic regime would shift the balance of power in the region wildly.
This raises questions regarding the type of regime Egypt has, whether it is democratically elected and whether it respects human rights. Then there is the question of how this new regime might affect the United States and other countries. The same can be said, for example, about Syria, where an oppressive regime is resisting a movement that some in the West regard as democratic. It may be, but its moral principles might be anathema to the West. At the same time, the old repressive regime might be unpopular but more in the interests of the West.
Then pose this scenario: Assume there is a choice between a repressive, undemocratic regime that is in the interests of a Western country and a regime that is democratic but repressive by Western standards and hostile to those interests. Which is preferable, and what steps should be taken?
These are blindingly complex questions that some observers — the realists as opposed to the idealists — say not only are unanswerable but also undermine the ability to pursue national interests without in any way improving the moral character of the world. In other words, you are choosing between two types of repression from a Western point of view and there is no preference. Therefore, a country like the United States should ignore the moral question altogether and focus on a simpler question, and one that’s answerable: the national interest.
Egypt is an excellent place to point out the tension within U.S. foreign policy between idealists, who argue that pursuing Enlightenment principles is in the national interest, and realists, who argue that the pursuit of principles is very different from their attainment. You can wind up with regimes that are neither just nor protective of American interests. In other words, the United States can wind up with a regime hostile to the United States and oppressive by American standards. Far from a moral improvement, this would be a practical disaster.
Mission and Power
There is a temptation to accept the realist argument. Its weakness is that its definition of the national interest is never clear. The physical protection of the United States is obviously an issue — and given 9/11, it is not a trivial matter. At the same time, the physical safety of the United States is not always at stake. What exactly is our interest in Egypt, and does it matter to us whether it is pro-American? There are answers to this but not always obvious ones, and the realists frequently have trouble defining the national interest. Even if we accept the idea that the primary objective of U.S. foreign policy is securing the national interest irrespective of moral considerations, what exactly is the national interest?
It seems to me that two principles emerge. The first is that having no principles beyond “interest” is untenable. Interest seems very tough-minded, but it is really a vapid concept when you drill into it. The second principle is that there can be no moral good without power. Proclaiming a principle without having the power to pursue it is a form of narcissism. You know you are doing no good, but talking about it makes you feel superior. Interest is not enough, and morality without power is mere talk.
So what is to be done about Egypt? The first thing is to recognize that little can be done, not because it would be morally impermissible but because, practically, Egypt is a big country that is hard to influence, and meddling and failing is worse than doing nothing at all. Second, it must be understood that Egypt matters and the outcome of this affair, given the past decade, is not a matter to which the United States can afford to be indifferent.
An American strategy on Egypt — one that goes beyond policy papers in Washington — is hard to define. But a number of points can be deduced from this exercise. First, it is essential to not create myths. The myth of the Egyptian revolution was that it was going to create a constitutional democracy like Western democracies. That simply wasn’t the issue on the table. The issue was between the military regime and an Islamist regime. This brings us to the second point, which is that sometimes, in confronting two different forms of repression, the issue is to select the one that is most in the national interest. This will force you to define the national interest, to a salutary effect.
Washington, like all capitals, likes policies and hates political philosophy. The policies frequently fail to come to grips with reality because the policymakers don’t grasp the philosophical implications. The contradiction inherent in the human rights and the neoconservative approach is one thing, but the inability of the realists to define with rigor what the national interest is creates policy papers of monumental insignificance. Both sides create polemics as a substitute for thought.
It’s in places like Egypt where this reality is driven home. One side really believed that Egypt would become like Minnesota. The other side knew it wouldn’t and devised a plan to be tough-minded — but not tough-minded enough to define what the point of the plan was. This is the crisis of U.S. foreign policy. It has always been there, but given American power, it is one that creates global instability. One part of the American regime wants to be just; the other part wants to be tough. Neither realizes that such a distinction is the root of the problem. Look at the American (and European) policy toward Egypt and I think you can see the predicament.
The solution does not rest in slogans or ideology, or in soft versus hard power. It rests in clarity on both the moral mission of the regime and its ability to understand and wield power effectively. And this requires the study of political philosophy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his distinction between the “general will” and the “will of all,” might be a good place to start. Or reading the common sense of Mark Twain might be a more pleasant substitute.
-
The road to hell is paved with....
The first rule of foreign policy should be to not make things worse than they were. A rule almost totally violated by this administration on a global basis.
-
Our country is falling apart and now this is a priority:
By Margaret Talev
(Updates with quote from memorandum, reaction from gay rights advocacy group beginning in third paragraph.)
Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration will weigh how countries treat gays and lesbians in making decisions about foreign aid, according to a presidential memorandum released by the White House.
President Barack Obama said in the document he’s directing all agencies engaged abroad to make sure U.S. diplomacy and aid programs “promote and protect” the rights of gays and lesbians.
“The struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons is a global challenge, and one that is central to the United States commitment to promoting human rights,” Obama wrote in the memorandum.
Directing all agencies engaged abroad to promote the human rights of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender people reflects “our deep commitment to advancing the human rights of all people,” he wrote.
The memorandum directs all agencies engaged abroad to improve refugee and asylum protections for gay, bisexual and transgender people. It also calls for strengthening U.S. efforts to oppose foreign governments criminalizing homosexuality, bisexuality or transgender behavior.
Annual Reports
U.S. foreign aid programs will increase government and civil society engagement to promote gay rights, the memorandum says. The State Department will lead an interagency group tracking U.S. responses to “serious incidents that threaten the human rights of LGBT persons abroad.” Agencies are to report on their progress in six months, and then on an annual basis.
Joe Solmonese, president of the gay rights advocacy group Human Rights Campaign in Washington, said in a statement that the presidential memorandum is important as the first U.S. government strategy dealing with rights related to sexual orientation of people in other countries.
“Today’s actions by President Obama make clear that the United States will not turn a blind eye when governments commit or allow abuses to the human rights of LGBT people,” he said.
--Editors: Joe Sobczyk, Terry Atlas
To
-
“Today’s actions by President Obama make clear that the United States will not turn a blind eye when governments commit or allow abuses to the human rights of LGBT people,” he said.
Sure. Unless it's done in the name of sharia law, then he'll go full Hellen Keller. Pretty desperate to shore up his base, isn't he?
-
Well I dunno. If Muslims in Muslim countries want to live by Sharia let them. What do I care.
But not in this country. Here we live by US law period.
Desperate to shore up his base? Probably. Fundraising time. Go after the big monied part of the GLBT crowd.
I have to wonder if he is really raising the kind of money being claimed.
-
Returning now to the subject matter of this thread in general :lol: and the Stratfor piece I posted earlier today in particular, , ,
-
Crafty I cannot think of anything to add to Freidman's piece.
He eloquently argues the dilemnas that exist that we face in the world.
Trying to sort through all this can take an entire career - with no clear pathway forward.
-
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=248256
Our World: An ally no more
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
05/12/2011
Instead of warning Egypt against breaking its treaty with the Jewish state, US officials chose to criticize Israel instead.
With vote tallies in for Egypt’s first round of parliamentary elections in it is abundantly clear that Egypt is on the fast track to becoming a totalitarian Islamic state. The first round of voting took place in Egypt’s most liberal, cosmopolitan cities. And still the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists received more than 60 percent of the vote. Run-off elections for 52 seats will by all estimates increase their representation.
And then in the months to come, Egyptian voters in the far more Islamist Nile Delta and Sinai will undoubtedly provide the forces of jihadist Islam with an even greater margin of victory.
Until the US-supported overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world. The Egyptian military is US-armed, US-trained and US-financed.
The Suez Canal is among the most vital waterways in the world for the US Navy and the global economy.
Due to Mubarak’s commitment to stemming the tide of jihadist forces that threatened his regime, under his rule Egypt served as a major counter-terror hub in the US-led war against international jihad.
GIVEN EGYPT’S singular importance to US strategic interests in the Arab world, the Obama administration’s response to the calamitous election results has been shocking. Rather than sound the alarm bells, US President Barack Obama has celebrated the results as a victory for “democracy.”
Rather than warn Egypt that it will face severe consequences if it completes its Islamist transformation, the Obama administration has turned its guns on the first country that will pay a price for Egypt’s Islamic revolution: Israel.
Speaking at the annual policy conclave in Washington sponsored by the leftist Brookings Institute’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hammered Israel, the only real ally the US has left in the Middle East after Mubarak’s fall. Clinton felt it necessary – in the name of democracy – to embrace the positions of Israel’s radical Left against the majority of Israelis.
The same Secretary of State that has heralded negotiations with the violent, fanatical misogynists of the Taliban; who has extolled Saudi Arabia where women are given ten lashes for driving, and whose State Department trained female-hating Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the lead-up to the current elections in Egypt accused Israel of repressing women’s rights. The only state in the region where women are given full rights and legal protections became the focus of Clinton’s righteous feminist wrath.
In the IDF, as in the rest of the country, religious coercion is forbidden. Jewish law prohibits men from listening to women’s voices in song. And recently, when a group of religious soldiers were presented with an IDF band that featured female vocalists, keeping faith with their Orthodox observance, they walked out of the auditorium. The vocalists were not barred from singing. They were not mistreated. They were simply not listened to.
And as far as Clinton is concerned, this is proof that women in Israel are under attack. Barred by law from forcing their soldiers from spurning their religious obligations, IDF commanders were guilty of crimes against democracy for allowing the troops to exit the hall.
But Clinton didn’t end her diatribe with the IDF’s supposed war against women. She continued her onslaught by proclaiming that Israel is taking a knife to democracy by permitting its legislators to legislate laws that she doesn’t like. The legislative initiatives that provoked the ire of the US Secretary of State are the bills now under discussion which seek to curtail the ability to foreign governments to subvert Israel’s elected government by funding non-representative, anti-Israel political NGOs like B’Tselem and Peace Now.
In attacking Israel in the way she did, Clinton showed that she holds Israel to a unique standard of behavior. Whereas fellow Western democracies are within their rights when they undertake initiatives like banning Islamic headdresses from the public square, Israel is a criminal state for affording Jewish soldiers freedom of religion. Whereas the Taliban, who enslave women and girls in the most unspeakable fashion are worthy interlocutors, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which supports universal female genital mutilation is moderate, Israel is an enemy of democracy for seeking to preserve the government’s ability to adopt policies that advance the country’s interests.
The unique standard to which Clinton holds the Jewish state is the standard of human perfection.
And as far as she is concerned, if Israel is not perfect, then it is unworthy of support. And since Israel, as a nation of mere mortals can never be perfect, it is necessarily always guilty.
CLINTON’S ASSAULT on Israeli democracy and society came a day after Panetta attacked Israel’s handling of its strategic challenges. Whereas Clinton attacked Israel’s moral fiber, Panetta judged Israel responsible for every negative development in the regional landscape.
Panetta excoriated Israel for not being involved in negotiations with the Palestinians. Israel, he said must make new concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them of its good faith. If Israel makes such gestures, and the Palestinians and the larger Islamic world spurn them, then Panetta and his friends will side with Israel, he said.
Panetta failed to notice that Israel has already made repeated, unprecedented concessions to the Palestinians and that the Palestinians have pocketed those concessions and refused to negotiate. And he failed to notice that in response to the repeated spurning of its concessions by the Palestinians and the Arab world writ large, rather than stand with Israel, the US and Europe expanded their demands for further Israeli concessions.
Panetta demanded that Israel make renewed gestures as well to appease the Egyptians, Turks and Jordanians. He failed to notice that it was Turkey’s Islamist government, not Israel, that took a knife to the Turkish-Israeli strategic alliance.
As for Egypt, rather than recognize the strategic implications for the US and Israel alike of Egypt’s transformation into an Islamic state, the US Defense Secretary demanded that Israel ingratiate itself with Egypt’s military junta. Thanks in large part to the Obama administration, that junta is now completely beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood.
As for Jordan, again thanks to the US’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its aligned groups in Libya and Tunisia, the Hashemite regime is seeking to cut a deal with the Jordanian branch of the movement in a bid to save itself from Mubarak’s fate. Under these circumstances, there is no gesture that Israel can make to its neighbor to the east that would empower King Abdullah to extol the virtues of peace with the Jewish state.
Then there is Iran, and its nuclear weapons program.
Panetta argued that an Israeli military strike against Iran would lead to regional war. But he failed to mention that a nuclear armed Iran will lead to nuclear proliferation in the Arab world and exponentially increase the prospect of a global nuclear war.
Rather than face the dangers head on, Panetta’s message was that the Obama administration would rather accept a nuclear-armed Iran than support an Israeli military strike on Iran to prevent the mullocracy from becoming a nuclear-armed state.
Clinton’s and Panetta’s virulently anti-Israeli messages resonated in an address about European anti-Semitism given last week by the US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman. Speaking to a Jewish audience, Gutman effectively denied the existence of anti-Semitism in Europe. While attacks against European Jews and Jewish institutions have become a daily occurrence continent-wide, Gutman claimed that non-Muslim anti- Semites are essentially just all-purpose bigots who hate everyone, not just Jews.
As for the Muslims who carry out the vast majority of anti-Jewish attacks in Europe, Gutman claimed they don’t have a problem with good Jews like him. They are simply angry because Israel isn’t handing over land to the Palestinians quickly enough. If the Jewish state would simply get with Obama’s program, according to the US ambassador, Muslim attacks on Jews in Europe would simply disappear.
Gutman of course is not a policymaker. His job is simply to implement Obama’s policies and voice the president’s beliefs.
But when taken together with Clinton’s and Panetta’s speeches, Gutman’s remarks expose a distressing intellectual and moral trend that clearly dominates the Obama administration’s foreign policy discourse. All three speeches share a common rejection of objective reality in favor of a fantasy.
In the administration’s fantasy universe, Israel is the only actor on the world stage. Its detractors, whether in the Islamic world or Europe, are mere objects. They are bereft of judgment or responsibility for their actions.
There are two possible explanations for this state of affairs – and they are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that the Obama administration is an ideological echo chamber in which only certain positions are permitted. This prospect is likely given the White House’s repeated directives prohibiting government officials from using terms like “jihad,” “Islamic terrorism,” “Islamist,” and “jihadist,” to describe jihad, Islamic terrorism, Islamists and jihadists.
Restrained by ideological thought police that outlaw critical thought about the dominant forces in the Islamic world today, US officials have little choice but to place all the blame for everything that goes wrong on the one society they are free to criticize – Israel.
The second possible explanation for the administration’s treatment of Israel is that it is permeated by anti-Semitism. The outsized responsibility and culpability placed on Israel by the likes of Obama, Clinton, Panetta and Gutman is certainly of a piece with classical anti-Semitic behavior.
There is little qualitative difference between accusing Israeli society of destroying democracy for seeking to defend itself against foreign political subversion, and accusing Jews of destroying morality for failing to embrace foreign religious faiths.
So too, there is little qualitative difference between blaming Israel for its isolation in the face of the Islamist takeover of the Arab world, and blaming the Jews for the rise of anti-Semites to power in places like Russia, Germany and Norway.
In truth, from Israel’s perspective, it really doesn’t make a difference whether these statements and the intellectual climate they represent stem from ideological myopia or from hatred of Jews.
The end result is the same in either case: Under President Obama, the US government has become hostile to Israel’s national rights and strategic imperatives. Under Obama, the US is no longer Israel’s ally.
caroline@carolineglick.com
-
Yet the recent Zogby poll (Zogby is a well known fan of the Palestinians and anit Israel) shows Brockster's popularity to be on the rise in Israel to around 54%.
Sure I believe that. :roll:
Bob Grant has to be right - he suspects there are some big liberal machers pushing the Democrat party agenda in Israel as well as perception there and here. Nothing new there though.
How else can one explain this?
It has to be all propaganda bulls''t
-
Generally I see the purpose of this thread as being for the discussion of deeper underlying themes.
The specific point I bring up here is that it was reported on Bret Baier tonight that three plans were presented to the President to destroy or capture the drone in Iranian hands. He turned all of them done on the grounds that they might be taken as an act of war.
Given all that the Iranians have done to cause American deaths in Iraq and Afpakia, plotting to assassintate in our capital, and much much more (and yes we do things too, thank God!) this seems to me yet another manifestation of the underlying disease of of vaginitis.
The costs here will be heavy. This is the sort of thing where we desperately need to keep an edge on the Chinese. For me conceptually it overlaps with profound yet virtually unmentioned abandonment of our current edge in space-- and edge the Chinese already see as a weak link in that we depend upon it and if they can take it out we will be blind, deaf, and mute. :cry: :x
-
What were the three plans?
-
As we would hope would be the case (but often is not) we don't know.
I get the point of the question, but the logic of the CiC's answer communicates that the plans themselves were not the issue, not pissing off Iran was.
-
OK, but since we don't know, there could be plans in the works. This is the same president who smiled at jokes about his inability to find bin Laden as the plans to kill him were being launched. This is the same country that was the target of Stuxnet (something I am confident pissed Iran off). I get your concern/lack of confidence/etc. but...
-
Plans in the works?!? IT IS ALREADY TO FG LATE!!! The Chinese (and Russians) are already all over this!!!
Baraq's obsequiousness to Iran is already a matter of public record. This latest episode of vaginitis is but another example.
As for Stuxnet, my vote is for the Israelis having done it, not Baraq.
-
http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/print/content/view/print/433442
Doomsday war games: Pentagon's 3 nightmare scenarios
Pentagon planners have plenty to deal with these days – Iran in search of nuclear-weapons technology, suicide bombings in Afghanistan, and the final pullout of US troops in Iraq potentially leaving behind a security vacuum in the Middle East. But in war games in Washington this week, US Army officials and their advisers debated three nightmare scenarios in particular. Here are the doomsday visions that Pentagon planners have been poring over:
By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer
posted December 7, 2011 at 9:07 am EST
1.Collapse of Pakistan
Members of the Azad Welfare Society burn a replica US flag Sunday during a rally to condemn NATO air strikes on Pakistani troops.
(Anjum Naveed/AP)
Following the assassination of the Pakistani president in a scenario that begins in 2013, Pakistan begins to descend into chaos. It is a time of great uncertainty, in which Pakistan’s “Islamist Army faction and its militant Muslim allies” decide to act.
Their plan, according to the war game: “to exploit that country’s growing civil disorder to seize power and create a radical Islamist state.” Compounding this chaos is the confusion over who will gain control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal, estimated to number 80 to 120. These weapons are believed to be located at a half-dozen or so sites around the country.
At least one site is occupied by Islamist units. “Both US and other national intelligence services have concluded that sympathetic elements of the ISI [Pakistan's spy agency] have provided Islamist officers leading the breakaway army units with the activation codes needed to arm the nuclear weapons under their control,” notes the scenario, which is drawn from "7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century" by Andrew Krepinevich, a former staffer in the Office of Net Assessments, the Pentagon’s futuristic and highly influential internal think tank.
If this were to happen, “there may be little to prevent these weapons from being used.”
The principal targets of such weapons would be United States, and US citizens draw little comfort, the scenario adds, from the efforts of US government officials to emphasize the difficulties involved in transporting nuclear weapons halfway around the world, which would be necessary, they add, in order to target an American city.
US forces have considered a preemptive strike on the area where the weapons are thought to be located, but Islamist forces have warned of the “horrific consequences” that would result if any foreign power attempted to do this. While the crisis in Pakistan “comes as a shock to most Americans,” the scenario notes, “to many observers, including senior government officials, it is hardly a surprise at all. To them, the greatest surprise is that Pakistan did not implode sooner.”
2.Rise of militant China
US Navy and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ships sail in formation during Annual Exercise 2011, an annual bilateral field-training exercise.
(US Navy Photo/REUTERS/File)
It is the year 2013, and “what experts are calling the greatest aggregation of naval power the world has ever seen is assembling in a long arc several hundred miles off the maritime approaches to China.” The leaders of the United States and Japan are debating what to do next “in what many fear may be the opening gambits in a new world war.”
The People’s Liberation Army is blockading Taiwan – and diplomats know that a blockade is an act of war. That’s why they are calling it a “quarantine,” and US allies, including Japan, are contemplating a retaliatory “counterquarantine” against Chinese ports.
Defense analysts conclude that a series of internal crises in China has brought the world’s great naval powers to the cusp of war. China’s economic growth has slowed dramatically. This has worried Chinese leadership, which “needs a rapidly growing economy to ensure its legitimacy,” according to the scenario, also drawn from "7 Deadly Scenarios" by Mr. Krepinevich, who now is the executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
At the same time, China’s young male population is rising, the result of China’s one-child policy and widespread selective abortions that favor male offspring.
Now girls are at a premium, leaving many young men unmarried and suffering “from low self-esteem, and feel[ing] alienated from (and rejected by) ‘mainstream’ society. Some scholars, studying the consequences of historical cases of profound sex-ratio imbalances, argue that this situation may set the stage for high levels of internal stability,” the scenario warns.
"They also ominously note that at times governments faced with this prospect have attempted to redirect that frustration against external rivals.”
A succession of US administrations, “distracted by the Long War with radical Islamist states and groups, and enjoying the short-term economic benefits of trade with China, failed to take the growing Chinese military machine seriously.” Yet “for those who looked closely, the warning signs have been there.”
China has pursued cyberwarfare “to introduce a wide range of viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other cyber ‘weapons’ into the information grids” of the United States, especially US military computer networks. China has also expanded its fleet of submarines specially equipped to “cut undersea fiber-optic cables that provide data links both to US military forces and to the civilian economy.”
Then, in quick succession, America suffers two major cyberstrikes. One penetrates the Pentagon’s major link to troop supply lines. The other hits the New York Stock Exchange, resulting “in a termination of trading for nearly two days.” Now Pentagon planners must decide how to respond.
3.Collapse of North Korea
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il (r.) and his son Kim Jong-un (l.) pose for photographs with the visiting Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang during their meeting in Pyongyang Oct. 24.
(REUTERS)
Authoritarian dictators can repress their populations for decades, but now the regime of Kim Jong-il “is embarking on the most difficult challenge that such regimes face: succession,” according to a scenario by Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Lind, published in the fall issue of the journal International Security.
Yet “the transition from apparent stability to collapse can be swift.” A government collapse in North Korea “could unleash a series of catastrophes on the peninsula with potentially far-reaching regional and global effects.”
This could trigger a massive outflow of the nation’s 24 million people, many of whom are severely malnourished, across the border into South Korea. With the food shortages could come civil war.
Equally troubling, “North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction could find their way out of the country and onto the global black market.” As a result, the consequences of a “poorly planned response to a government collapse in North Korea are potentially calamitous.”
North Korea has 1.2 million active duty military troops. What’s more, China will likely send its forces to aid in humanitarian efforts, as well. “The specter of Chinese forces racing south while US and South Korean troops race north is terrifying given the experience of the Korean War, a climate of suspicion among the three countries, and the risk of escalation to the nuclear level.”
Based on the most optimistic assumptions, according to the scenario, as many as 400,000 ground forces would be required to stabilize North Korea – more than the US commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
This would strain US forces, but the Pentagon noted in its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review that the “instability or collapse of a WMD-armed state is among our most troubling concerns. Such an occurrence could lead to a rapid proliferation of WMD material, weapons, and technology, and could quickly become a global crisis posing a direct physical threat,” the scenario warns, “to the United States and all other nations.”
-
http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/12/18/a-coming-war-threat-terrorists-are-developing-a-safe-haven-in-egypt-to-attack-israel/?singlepage=true
Coming War Threat: Terrorists Developing a Safe Haven in Egypt to Attack Israel
December 18, 2011 - 12:01 pm - by Barry Rubin
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech….
–William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”
Or, in other words, do these writers, policymakers, and “experts” care what happens in the Middle East? War? Bloodshed? Repression? Christians fleeing; women being turned into chattel? Just a possible boost to their careers and a test for their theories. A good luncheon topic. But this is real, all too real.
First, a word on contingencies. Governments and political analysts are supposed to examine likely problems in order that they can be evaded or minimized. The time to be alarmed is not when problems become visible but when governments refuse to recognize their existence. Western regimes and analysts are generally taking a best-possible-case view on Egypt and other developing issues in the region. I’m tempted to say they are taking a fantasy view. They dismiss not just worst-case but highly likely case scenarios. Now that’s what’s alarming.
In the Sinai Peninsula, Hamas is building support bases and arms-manufacturing facilities including those for building rockets. Over time, these rockets will no doubt be upgraded. In other words, Egypt is becoming a safe haven for anti-Israel terrorism. We know that these attacks will come from the Gaza Strip. The only question is whether at some point they will come directly across the Egypt-Israel border.
Israel had a long experience with three comparable situations. In the 1950-56 era, Egypt was a safe haven for terror attacks into Israel; in the 1967-1970 period, Jordan played this role. During the 1970s and 1980s, even down to today, Lebanon did so, with the safe haven in Syria. The difference was that Israel did attack into Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and even occasionally into Syria in reponse to this situation.
Such an attack into Egypt in response to Egyptian involvement in attacks through the Gaza Strip is unthinkable given what an Egypt-Israel war would look like. And that doesn’t mean there won’t be sporadic attacks across the Egypt-Israel border also that would present similar problems.
There is a pattern here.
Israel, of course, is quickly building a border fence, paid for by a 2 percent cut in the budgets of government agencies, and thus the salaries of government employees.
Meanwhile, too, Libyan weapons, including Russian-made anti-plane rockets that can be fired by one man, are also making their way into the Gaza Strip. From there, or from Egyptian territory, one of them could be fired at an Israeli passenger plane on the Tel Aviv-Eilat route.
Israel has permitted more Egyptian military units to enter Sinai even though this was restricted by their peace treaty. But that doesn’t mean those forces will do anything, or at least do much, against these activities. After all, would Egypt’s army dare suppress Hamas though it is seen by most Egyptians — and soon by a majority in Egypt’s parliament — as heroic? What! Will they act as bodyguards for the evil Zionist entity that is allegedly committing genocide right next door? (That last sentence was a paraphrase of what a leading Egyptian “moderate” claimed in speaking to an American university audience.)
And let’s not forget that there are corrupt officers and also officers who sympathize with Hamas. What if they just don’t follow orders from Cairo?
So Israel’s first step is to go to the Egyptian army and ask that it do something. If it says “yes,” well and good. But what if it doesn’t do much or anything? Have you noticed that even now, the army keeps backing down to the Brotherhood? For example, the military junta claimed a share in writing the new Constitution and when the Brotherhood rejected this, the generals then pulled back. The parliament dominated by the Brotherhood and Salafists will write the Constitution without outside interference.
What does this tell us about the army’s future willingness or ability to stop the Islamists from running wild, attacking Israel, etc.?
There will also be the large Salafist contingent in parliament to keep happy. The Salafists will build networks to protect and help Hamas and small groups that might want to attack Israel from Egypt. Indeed, large parts of the Sinai are already developing toward anarchy and becoming a safe haven zone for international terrorists.
Next, what happens when there is an Islamist parliament, a president who is either Islamist or dependent on Brotherhood support, and an Islamist constitution? Who is going to order Egypt’s army to crack down on Hamas and to close its facilities? Nobody.
And finally, what happens when Israel goes to the United States and asks President Obama to put pressure on Egypt to close down Hamas operations? Just guess.
Here’s a wonderful example of how this system works in another country. In Lebanon, Hizballah is creating its own secure strategic communications network without any government sanction. In one place, local people attacked workers building Hizballah facilities in their village. The Lebanese communications minister refused to interfere, supporting Hizballah’s actions. He explained that the Lebanese government accepted the project since almost anything was justified since Hizballah was fighting Israel. The opposition publication, NowLebanon, responded that this is “a phone network that will be used by Iran and Syria (let’s not mince words) to carry out its regional ambitions.”
But Lebanon’s government has no interest in restricting any war-making activities on Israel. So what can we expect in Egypt?
What counter-forces are going to make the problems go away? The army does not have to close Hamas facilities to maintain its own interests. Nor does it have to do so to keep U.S. aid. There is nothing that is going to block this from happening unless Hamas makes the huge mistake of interfering in Egyptian politics and becoming involved with those staging armed struggle within Egypt. Hizballah made that mistake a few years ago.
Want to know how Middle East politics really work? A couple of years ago Israel noted that the Egypt-Gaza smuggling level had gone way down. Western media praised Egypt for acting. In fact, what had happened was that Egyptian officers on the border had demanded a higher price in bribes; the smugglers had refused, so the officers had cracked down until they got more money at which point they opened the gates again.
I repeat: to point out the likelihood of such contingencies is of vital importance. The Israeli government is aware of these things and working to deal with them. What kind of planning and thinking for such dangerous situations is going on in the West? Little or none, because they don’t take these things seriously.
Also please read my article, “How Can Israel Please the American Government, Media, and “Experts”? It Can’t”
-
That's rather pithy :-)
-
Could go under Glibness or media issues. Is the coalition between the DNC and the MSM showing some cracks? I chose 'US Foreign Policy' thread for the serious points presented.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-foreign-initiatives-have-faltered/2012/01/05/gIQAeCqAkP_story.html
Obama’s foreign initiatives have been failures
By Jackson Diehl (Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor)
The political writers tell us that President Obama’s foreign affairs record will be one of his strengths with voters in the 2012 campaign. The logic is pretty simple; Obama himself summed it up in 11 words at the Pentagon last week: “We’ve ended our war in Iraq. We’ve decimated al-Qaeda’s leadership.”
That may well be enough in a year when foreign policy is a low priority for voters. Of course, there could be unexpected crises; a confrontation with Iran that sends U.S. gasoline prices soaring, for example. But even some foreseeable disasters might not hurt much: Will independents in Ohio or Florida really be swayed if Iraqis go back to slaughtering one another?
To those voters, Obama looks relatively good, for now, on the big problems he inherited: the wars and al-Qaeda. What could go missing is a discussion about the president’s performance on his own priorities for foreign affairs — the initiatives he chose to launch.
If so, Obama will be fortunate. As he heads into the last year of his first term, the president’s biggest failures have been his own ideas.
The easiest one to document — and the one most likely to draw Republican attention next fall — is the busted Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Obama arrived in office afire with the ambition to create a Palestinian state within two years. But his diplomacy was based on a twofold misunderstanding: that the key to successful negotiations was forcing Israel to stop all settlement construction — and that the United States had the leverage to make that happen.
Veterans of the Middle East “peace process” shook their heads in wonderment as what at first appeared to be a rookie error evolved into a two-year standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There was only one possible explanation for this persistence in futility: The president himself was fixed on it.
Obama’s next big project was global nuclear arms control — an initiative so impressive to Norwegians that it won him the Nobel Peace Prize before he could act on it. Yet the results to date hardly seem prizeworthy. The New Start nuclear arms agreement with Russia merely ratifies warhead reductions already underway in Russia, while imposing a modest cut on the U.S. arsenal. More ambitious multilateral initiatives by Obama — to control nuclear materials, for example — have made little progress, despite an elaborate summit the president hosted in 2010.
Here again there appears to be a disconnect between Obama’s 1970s-vintage ideas and the real world of the early 21st century. There’s nothing wrong, and modest good, in extending Cold War nuclear conventions with Russia, or extracting highly enriched uranium from Ukraine and Chile. But the most dangerous proliferation threats emanate from countries that don’t attend summits or sign international treaties, such as North Korea and Iran. In terms of nuclear capability, both are ahead of where they were in 2009.
This brings us to Obama’s most distinctive — and most ill-fated — idea, and the one most identified with his 2008 campaign: the determination to “engage” with U.S. adversaries such as Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Obama promised “direct diplomacy” — even one-to-one meetings — with the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong Il. More broadly he made the case that the United States could benefit by reaching out to autocratic regimes, while dropping the George W. Bush administration’s moralizing “freedom agenda.”
In his first year Obama dispatched two letters to Khamenei while keeping his distance from the revolutionary Green movement. He shook hands with Hugo Chavez. He launched a “reset” of relations with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and dispatched envoys to reason with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. He delivered a sweeping address to the Muslim world from Cairo.
The results have been meager. Khamenei spurned the U.S. outreach. Relations with Putin warmed for a time but now have grown cold again. In Egypt and across the Middle East, the president’s popularity is lower today than when he gave the Cairo address.
That’s largely because, in pursuing “engagement,” Obama has mishandled the biggest international development of his presidency: the popular revolutions against autocracy. Detente with dictators can sometimes yield results, but Obama’s outreach turned out to be spectacularly ill-timed. Following the failure to back Iran’s Green movement, the strategy caused the administration to lag in supporting the popular uprisings in Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and elsewhere.
The consequences of all this are not yet clear. To voters and maybe even to history they may be trumped by the dismantling of al-Qaeda. Taken together, what they describe is a president who has been a good counterterrorism commander, who has ended a war he promised to end — and whose signature initiatives have flopped.
-
Annual Forecast 2012
January 11, 2012 | 0609 GMT
Stratfor
There are periods when the international system undergoes radical shifts in a short time. The last such period was 1989-1991. During that time, the Soviet empire collapsed. The Japanese economic miracle ended. The Maastricht Treaty creating contemporary Europe was signed. Tiananmen Square defined China as a market economy dominated by an unchallenged Communist Party, and so on. Fundamental components of the international system shifted radically, changing the rules for the next 20 years.
We are in a similar cycle, one that began in 2008 and is still playing out. In this period, the European Union has stopped functioning as it did five years ago and has yet to see its new form defined. China has moved into a difficult social and economic phase, with the global recession severely affecting its export-oriented economy and its products increasingly uncompetitive due to inflation. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq has created opportunities for an Iranian assertion of power that could change the balance of power in the region. The simultaneous shifts in Europe, China and the Middle East open the door to a new international framework replacing the one created in 1989-1991.
Our forecast for 2012 is framed by the idea that we are in the midst of what we might call a generational shift in the way the world works. The processes are still under way, and we will therefore have to consider the future of Europe, China and the Middle East in some detail before drawing a conclusion. The 2012 forecast is unique in that it is not a forecast for one year in a succession of years, all basically framed by the same realities. Rather, it is a year in which the individual forecasts point to a new generational reality and a redefinition of how the world works.
2012 may not be the conclusion of this transformative process. Neither was 1991 the conclusion. However, just as 1991 was the year in which it became clear that the old world of the Cold War no longer functioned, 2012 is the year in which it will become clear that the Post-Cold War world has come to an end, being replaced by changed players and changed dynamics.
Europe
The European Union and eurozone will survive 2012, and Europe's financial crisis will stabilize, at least temporarily. However, Stratfor expects Europe to continue its long, painful slide into deepening recession. We expect accelerating capital flight out of peripheral European countries as investors in Europe and farther afield lose confidence in the European system. We expect financial support measures to be withdrawn on occasion to maintain pressure on governments to implement fiscal reforms, which will lead to financial scares.
However, the driving force behind developments in Europe in 2012 will be political, not economic. Germany, seeing an opportunity in the ongoing financial crisis, is using its superior financial and economic position to attempt to alter the eurozone's structure to its advantage. The core of this "reform" effort is to hardwire tight financial controls into as many European states as possible, both in a new intergovernmental treaty and in each state's national constitution. Normally, we would predict failure for such an effort: Sacrificing budgetary authority to an outside power would be the most dramatic sacrifice of state sovereignty yet in the European experiment -- a sacrifice that most European governments would strongly resist. However, the Germans have six key advantages in 2012.
First, there are very few scheduled electoral contests, so the general populace of most European states will not be consulted on the exercise. Of the eurozone states, only France, Slovakia and Slovenia face scheduled national elections. Out of these three, France is by far the most critical: The Franco-German partnership is the core of the European system, and any serious breach between the two would herald the end of the European Union. If Germany is to compromise on its efforts for anyone, it will be for France, and if France needs another country in order to secure its own position in Europe, it needs Germany. Consequently, the two have chosen to collaborate rather than compete thus far, and we expect their partnership to survive the year. Luckily for the German effort, French elections will be at the very beginning of the ratification process, so any possible modifications to the German plan will come early.
Second, Germany only needs the approval of the 17 eurozone states -- rather than the 27 members of the full European Union -- to forward its plan with credibility. That the United Kingdom has already opted out is inconvenient for those seeking a pan-European process, but it does not derail the German effort.
Third, the process of approving a treaty such as this will take significant time, and some aspects of the reform process can be pushed back. European leaders are expected to sign the new treaty in March, and the rest of the year and some of 2013 will be used to seek ratification by individual countries. Amending national constitutions to satisfy Germany will be the bitterest part of the process, but much of that can be put off until 2013, and judgment by European institutions over how the revision process was handled comes still later. Such delays allow political leaders the option of pushing back the most politically risky portions of the process for months or years.
Fourth, the Germans are willing to apply significant pressure. Nearly all EU states count Germany as the largest destination for their exports, and such exports are critical for local employment. In 2011, Germany used its superior economic and financial position as leverage to help ease the elected leaderships of Greece and Italy out of office, replacing them with unelected former EU bureaucrats who are now working to implement aspects of the German program. Similar pressures could be brought to bear against additional states in 2012.
Those most likely to clash with Germany are Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands and Spain. Ireland wants the terms of its bailout program to be softened and is threatening a national referendum that could derail the ratification process. Finland's laws require parliamentary approval by a two-thirds majority for some aspects of ratification. The normally pro-European government of the Netherlands is a weak coalition that can only rule with the support of other parties, one of which is strongly euroskeptic. Spain must attempt the most painful austerity efforts of any non-bailout state if the reform process is to have credibility -- and it must do so amid record-high unemployment and a shrinking economy. Also, if Greece decides to hold new elections in 2012, European stakeholders will attempt to ensure that the new government in Athens does not end its collaboration with the European Central Bank (ECB), European Commission and International Monetary Fund. None of these issues will force an automatic confrontation, but all will have to be managed to ensure successful ratification, and the Germans have demonstrated that they have many tools with which to compel other governments.
Fifth, the Europeans are scared, which makes them willing to do things they would not normally do -- such as implementing austerity and ratifying treaties they dislike. Agreeing to sacrifice sovereignty in principle to maintain the European economic system in practice will seem a reasonable trade. The real political crisis will not come until the sacrifice of sovereignty moves from the realm of theory to application, but that will not occur in 2012. In many ways, the political pliability of European governments now is all about staving off unbearable economic catastrophe for another day.
The economic deferment of that pain is the sixth German advantage. Here, the primary player is the ECB. The financial crisis has two aspects: Over-indebted European governments are lurching toward defaults that would collapse the European system, and European banks (the largest purchasers of European government debt) are broadly insolvent -- their collapse would similarly break apart the European system. In December, the ECB indicated that it was willing to put up 20 billion euros ($28 billion) a week for sovereign bond purchases on secondary markets to support struggling eurozone governments, while extending low-interest, long-term liquidity loans to European banks in unlimited volumes. The bond program is large enough to potentially purchase three-fourths of all expected eurozone government debt issuances for 2012, while the first day of the loan program extended 490 billion euros in fresh credit to ailing banks.
Together these two measures make a eurozone financial meltdown highly unlikely in 2012, but they will greatly degrade European competitiveness and efficiency. That will be a problem for another time, though. For now, ECB actions are buying economic and political breathing room: economic in that austerity efforts can be somewhat softer than they would otherwise need to be, and political in that there is a feeling that Germany is willing to compromise somewhat on the issues of budgetary discipline today in order to achieve its broader goals of budgetary control tomorrow. Therefore, while the financial support is not exactly buying good will from other European states, it is certainly buying time.
As the ratification process proceeds, European hostility toward Germany and Brussels will increase. Internationally, the key theme will be states attempting to protect themselves from what they see as a growing -- and unwelcome -- German intrusion into their internal affairs. At the national level, the deepening recession will translate into general anger toward the government's announced austerity measures. The relative dearth of elections will deny that anger its normal release valve of centrist opposition parties, emboldening nationalist and extremist movements and leading to social unrest.
Political and financial turbulence will persist within this framework as Germany negotiates the new treaty with other eurozone countries. Though the core of these negotiations is a highly contentious abdication of national fiscal sovereignty, Europe is highly likely to adopt the new treaty since a perceived failure would dramatically accelerate the collapse of EU political structures and implementation will not happen in 2012.
Former Soviet Union
Russia's Challenges
In 2012, the Kremlin will face numerous challenges: social unrest, restructuring Russia's political makeup (both inside and outside of the Kremlin) and major economic shifts due to the crisis in Europe. The social unrest seen at the end of 2011 will continue festering throughout the presidential elections in 2012. Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin will have to reshape the political landscape from one dominated by his party to one that accounts for the increasing support for the nationalists and a new class of young, liberal activists. Simultaneously, Putin will restructure his inner circle of Kremlin loyalists, who have allowed infighting to divert their attention from their roles in tackling Russia's social unrest and financial problems. None of this will significantly diminish Putin's authority. The Kremlin will also have to adjust its economy in 2012 to accommodate changes in previous plans involving billions of dollars in investments from Europe in some of Russia's most strategic sectors. The crisis in Europe means any such investments will be significantly reduced, so the Kremlin will have to restructure the economic plans for its modernization and privatization programs and fund many of the projects itself. Putin will be able to navigate through these obstacles, though they will take up much of the Kremlin's attention. None of these factors will fundamentally change Russia's direction either domestically or in its foreign policy.
Russian Resurgence
Russia will continue building its influence in its former Soviet periphery in 2012, particularly by institutionalizing its relationships with many former Soviet states. Russia will build upon its Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan as it evolves into the Common Economic Space (CES). This larger institution will allow the scope of Russia's influence over Minsk and Astana, as well as new member countries such as Kyrgyzstan and possibly Tajikistan, to expand from the economic sphere into politics and security as Moscow lays the groundwork for the eventual formation of the Eurasian Union, which it is hoping to start around 2015.
As Ukraine's chances to grow closer to the European Union decrease, Kiev will realize that Moscow is the only outside power it can turn to. Russia will be able to take advantage of Ukraine's inability to maneuver and will gain access to strategic Ukrainian assets, possibly including minority control in its natural gas transit system. However, Ukraine will continue to resist the institutionalization of Russia's influence via the CES by maintaining a degree of cooperation with the West.
In the Baltic countries -- which, unlike other former Soviet states, are committed members of NATO and the European Union -- Russia's ultimate goal is to neutralize the countries' pro-Western and anti-Russian policies, a goal it will make progress toward in Latvia in 2012. It will face setbacks in Lithuania, but Lithuania will not be able to seriously challenge Russia's maneuvers in the region because of ongoing difficulties for its primary supporters: NATO and the European Union.
Russia and the West
Russia will continue managing various crises with the West -- mainly the United States and NATO -- while shaping its relationships in Europe. Moscow and Washington will continue their standoff over ballistic missile defense and U.S. support for Central Europe, and Moscow will react to the ongoing row by increasing security pressure on Central Europe and bolstering its economic presence in the region. Russia will use these crises as an opportunity to deepen divisions among the Europeans, between the Europeans and the United States, and within NATO while promoting the perception that Russia is being forced to act aggressively. The security situation will become tenser, and Russia will attempt to push these crises with the United States to the brink without actually rupturing relations -- a difficult balance.
Russia will also use the financial and political crises in Europe to bolster its influence in strategic countries and sectors. Moscow and Berlin will continue their close relationship, especially in the areas of economics and security, but Russia will focus more on Central Europe in areas of security and energy and in picking up assets. There is no real counter to Russia in Europe, as the Europeans will be absorbed with domestic and EU issues. But this does not mean Russia has a free pass, as it must still manage the domestic effects of its neighbors' crisis.
Central Asia
Numerous factors will undermine Central Asia's stability in 2012, but they will not lead to a major breaking point in the region this year. Protests over deteriorating economic conditions will occur throughout the region, particularly in Kazakhstan, though these will be contained to the region and will not result in overly disruptive violence. Serious issues in Kazakhstan's banking sector could lead to a financial crisis, though the government will be able to manage the difficulties and contain it during 2012 by using the oil revenues it has saved up.
The more pressing problem is the rising Islamist militancy in the region. Sporadic attacks will continue in Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan could see an increase in attacks. However, these attacks will not achieve their strategic goal of overthrowing regimes or coalesce into a transnational movement capable of destabilizing the region. In addition to these security tensions, looming successions for the longtime leaders in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will create political tensions, but barring the death of either leader, no major political upheavals are expected.
Middle East
Iran and the Saudi Dilemma
Iran's efforts to expand its influence will be the primary issue for the Middle East in 2012. The U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq has rendered Iran the pre-eminent military power in the Persian Gulf, but Tehran cannot count on the United States being as constrained beyond this year, and Turkey, Iran's natural regional counterweight, is rising steadily, albeit slowly. Iran's efforts to consolidate and extend its regional influence must therefore accelerate this year before its window of opportunity closes. Iran will still be operating under heavy constraints, however, and will therefore be unable to fundamentally alter the politics of the region in its favor.
Iran's regional expansion will be felt most deeply by Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royals now doubt that the United States has the ability or the willingness to fully guarantee Riyadh's interests. Adding to Saudi Arabia's vulnerabilities, the Gulf Cooperation Council states fear that if Iran is not contained within Iraq, it will exploit continued Shiite unrest in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia's Shia-concentrated, oil-rich Eastern Province. In 2012, Saudi Arabia will lead efforts to shore up and consolidate the defenses of Gulf Cooperation Council members to try to ward off the threat posed by Iran, but such efforts will not be a sufficient replacement for the United States and the role it plays as a security guarantor. A critical part of Iran's regional agenda for the year will be to force Riyadh into an accommodation that benefits Iran and allows Saudi Arabia some reprieve. This could lead to temporary truces between the two adversaries, but given Iran's constraints and limited timetable, Saudi Arabia is more likely to stay committed to the U.S. security framework in the region -- for lack of better options.
Turmoil in Iraq and Syria
The effects of Iran's expansion efforts will be most visible in Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, Iran's main challenge is to consolidate Shiite power among several competing groups. As Iraq's fractured Shiite leadership tries to solidify its influence with Iranian support, Iraq's Sunni and Kurdish factions increasingly will be put on the defensive. This ethno-sectarian struggle and the security vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal will degrade Iraq's overall security conditions. Meanwhile, Turkey will attempt to contain the spread of Iranian influence in northern Iraq by building up political, economic, military and intelligence assets.
In Syria, the ultimate goal of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States will be to disrupt Iran's Shiite arc of influence by trying to crack Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime. However, without direct foreign military intervention, the Syrian regime is unlikely to collapse. Al Assad will continue to struggle in trying to stamp out domestic unrest. The regime's limited options to deal with the crisis will force Syria to further rely on Iran for support, which will allow Tehran to reinforce its presence in the Mediterranean.
Stratfor cannot rule out the remote possibility that the al Assad clan will be coerced into a political exit. Such an outcome would risk inciting a sectarian struggle within the regime. Iran's goal is for Syria to maintain a regime -- regardless of who leads it -- that will remain favorable to Iranian interests, but Iran's ability to influence the situation is limited, and finding a replacement to hold the regime together will be difficult. It should be noted that the battle for Syria cannot take place without spilling over into Lebanon. In that regard, Lebanon faces a difficult year as proxy battles intensify between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Levant.
Turkey's Struggles
Overwhelmed by instability in its periphery, Turkey will continue to face significant challenges to its regional ascendency. Despite its rhetoric, Turkey will not undertake significant overt military action in Syria unless the United States leads the intervention -- a scenario Stratfor regards as improbable -- though it will continue efforts to mold an opposition in Syria and counterbalance Iranian influence in Iraq. Ankara will thus work to maintain a decent bilateral relationship with Tehran despite growing tensions between the two. Economic conditions in Europe will slow Turkey's economic growth, Kurdish militancy in Turkey will remain a significant threat, and concerns over Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's health could turn the government's focus inward as it tries to work through a contentious set of proposed constitutional changes. On the foreign policy front, Turkey will try to influence the rise of political Islamists, particularly in Egypt and Syria, but Ankara's own constraints will prevent it from taking meaningful steps in that regard.
Egypt's Political Transition
Egypt's turbulent political transition likely will give rise to a parliament with a significant Islamist presence, thereby complicating the ruling military elite's hold on power. However, the democratic transition will be a partial one at best; the country's fractious opposition and impotent parliament will continue to suffer from internal divisions and will be unable to overrule the military on issues of national strategic importance. Thus, the military will remain the de facto authority of the state.
Concerns over the country's struggling economy will outweigh the military's concerns over its political opposition. Egypt's preoccupation with its economic and political issues will undermine its ability to patrol its Sinai buffer, leading to increased tensions with Israel. However, both sides will continue to maintain the peace treaty that has been the foundation of Israeli-Egyptian relations for the past generation.
The Hamas Agenda
Hamas will take advantage of the slowly growing political clout of Islamists throughout the region in hopes of presenting itself to neighboring Arab governments and the West as a pragmatic and reconcilable political alternative to Fatah. These moves will help protect Hamas from the potential regime crisis in Syria (where its politburo is based) and bolster its relationships with Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Hamas will be on alert for tactical opportunities to undermine security in the Sinai Peninsula with the hope of creating a crisis between Egypt and Israel.
Egypt's preoccupations and Hamas' expanded room to maneuver will incentivize the Jordanian leadership to strengthen its ties with Hamas. It will also allow Jordan to manage its own unrest by building more credibility among Islamists, leverage its relations with Fatah and keep a tab on Hamas' actions as the Jordanian monarchs adjust to changing regional dynamics.
East Asia
Three things will shape events in East Asia: China's response to the economic crisis and possible social turmoil amid a leadership transition; the European Union's debt crisis and economic slowdown sapping demand for East Asia's exports; and regional interaction with the U.S. re-engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.
The 2008 financial crisis exposed the inherent weaknesses of the Chinese economy, which, like its East Asian powerhouse predecessors, largely was based on a growth model driven by exports and government-led investment. While Beijing had been aware for some time of the need to shift toward a more balanced economic model, the continued slump in Europe and fears of another global slowdown have forced the government to face the challenges of economic restructuring now, rather than constantly staving them off. Even in the best of times, the redirection of an economy the size of China's would be difficult, but the pressure for change comes amid a leadership transition, when Beijing is particularly sensitive to any disruptions. With the politburo lineup changing in October and the new state leaders taking office in early 2013, the Communist Party of China (CPC) is focused on maintaining social stability to preserve the legacy of the outgoing leadership and solidify the legitimacy of the incoming leadership.
A rapid drop in economic growth poses a serious threat to China in 2012; a modest slowdown is widely expected this year due to the weakening export sector, a slump in the real estate market, and investment and risks to the banking system. Beijing is betting the decline will remain at a manageable level -- at least for a year of transition. The sharp drop in demand from Europe will harm the export sector in particular, with growth likely reduced to single digits. This declining external demand will threaten the already weakened export-oriented manufacturing industry, which has experienced rising costs in labor, raw materials and utilities as well as appreciating currency on top of its already thin-to-nonexistent profit margins. China will seek to compensate in part by refocusing on exports to the United States and expanding in emerging markets in Southeast Asia, Latin America or Africa, though this will not fully make up for the drop-off from Europe. Moreover, growing trade protectionism because of the economic downturn and political considerations -- especially the upcoming U.S. election season -- will likely put Chinese manufacturers at the center of trade frictions, making their position even more vulnerable. Beijing will employ traditional tools including targeted credit, tax reductions and direct subsidies to mitigate the risks of rising unemployment and bankruptcy in the financially strained manufacturing sector.
While Beijing knows that rolling out another massive fiscal stimulus and bank loans as it did in 2008-2009 is unsustainable and would put the economy at risk, it sees few other short-term options and thus will use government-led investment to sustain growth in 2012. Beijing will resume and launch a number of large infrastructure projects even at the expense of overcapacity and lack of productivity. However, accounting for around 10 percent of gross domestic product and a quarter of fixed investment, the decline in the real estate sector due to Beijing's tightening measures since 2010 represents one of the largest threats to Beijing's effort to stabilize growth. With affordable housing projects -- Beijing's plan to offset the negative consequences from falling real estate prices and weakening investment -- unlikely to reach their designated goal, Beijing may have to selectively relax its real estate tightening policy in 2012 while trying to avoid overcompensating by causing a sharp market rebound or property price inflation. The ruling Communist Party had promised it would bring these issues under control; its failure to do so could undermine the Party's credibility.
The continued high-level credit boom combined with the need to work out nonperforming loans (NPL) from the 2008-2009 stimulus will bring China into heightened NPL risk. The actual NPL ratio may rise as high as 8-12 percent in the next few years. At least 4.6 trillion yuan ($729 billion) out of a government-estimated local debt of 10.7 trillion yuan is set to mature within two years, and Beijing expects 2.5 trillion to 3 trillion yuan of the total risk to turn sour. The NPL risk, the 2.1 trillion-yuan debt from investment in the railway system and the massive informal lending from the shadow banking system that grew significantly during Beijing's credit tightening pose a systemic risk to the banking sector. Beijing may have to take some pre-emptive actions, such as refinancing measures or capital injections, in 2012 to ensure Chinese banks are able to maintain confidence in China's financial system. China's leaders, faced with near-term stabilizing options and long-term deep reforms, will choose the former, postponing the crisis but amplifying it when it becomes unavoidable in the future.
Given the economic uncertainty and political sensitivity surrounding the leadership transition, political elites in Beijing will attempt consensus at the highest levels. As it learned from the Tiananmen Square incident, CPC factional infighting exploited at a sensitive time is a serious risk, and we expect to see measures to ensure ideological and cultural control throughout the Party and down through the rest of society. Meanwhile, the priority to ensure a smooth transition means Beijing will be much less tolerant of actions that could spread instability, though Beijing is also cultivating pre-emptive methods for social control, such as community-level management or providing carefully controlled outlets for expressing grievances to better manage the country's social frustration, which will likely be exacerbated by the deteriorating economic situation.
Internationally, China will continue to accelerate its resource acquisition and outward investment strategy. As domestic problems mount, China may use external disputes to ease public dissatisfaction. Anticipating U.S. economic and trade pressure due to the electoral season and strategic encroachment in China's periphery, Beijing will focus its attention on reducing miscalculation and stressing interdependence in its relations with Washington while clarifying its response to the U.S engagement. Meanwhile, China will balance nationalistic initiatives with maintaining neighborly relations -- particularly with the South China Sea claimant countries, India and Japan -- and countering perceived moves by the United States to constrain China's economic influence in the region and lines of supply. The South China Sea claimant countries, including Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, will respond by accelerating their military purchases, taking advantage of the U.S. re-engagement efforts to hedge against China.
Most Asian countries -- which showed a strong economic recovery throughout 2010 and early 2011 -- will experience reduced growth amid the global economic slowdown. As the most important economic partner to many countries, China will increase its economic assistance and trade to Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries to leverage its influence. Beijing hopes to again project economic power in the region through aid, the import of consumer goods, currency swaps and regional trade agreements, but Beijing's role may also face challenges by renewed interest from other nations -- for example, the United States and Japan.
The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has increased uncertainty on the Korean Peninsula. The first six months of the year will be critical as the unity of the regime is tested amid the leadership transfer. The leadership structure between civilian and military elements was established in recent years to strengthen the role of the Workers' Party of Korea as one of the pillars of power and to rebalance the military's role, but the process was not yet complete at the time of Kim's death. North Korean leaders are unlikely to fundamentally change the direction of Pyongyang's foreign policy in the near term. Their attention initially will be focused internally, and they will seek to avoid any sudden shift in policy that could destabilize the regime or significantly increase foreign pressure. China will look to make a push to ensure even greater influence on the Korean Peninsula during the transition period. In addition, bilateral discussions with the United States on resuming the six-party nuclear talks were showing progress before Kim's death, and Pyongyang is likely to restart these discussions sometime during the year.
South Asia
The U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan will not maintain sufficient force levels long enough to militarily defeat the Taliban -- and their various factions -- or pacify the country. But the Taliban will not be in a position to drive the United States and its allies from the country by force. Force structure choices must be made in 2012 to define the war effort through 2014, but the United States and its allies will continue to combat the Taliban in 2012 even as Afghan forces increasingly bear the brunt of the war effort. The United States will continue to consider a political accommodation with the Taliban, but such accommodation is unlikely to be reached this year.
The most important development in South Asia is Pakistan's ongoing political evolution. While other states, including Iran, are interested in shaping the future political landscape of Afghanistan, Pakistan continues to be at the heart of the Afghan war. As such, U.S.-Pakistani tensions will intensify in 2012 as the United States reaches an understanding with Pakistan, which will have to deal with the situation in the region after the United States leaves. Political, religious, ethnic and ideological tensions will intensify inside the country, and these will affect Pakistan, Afghanistan and U.S.-Pakistani relations moving forward.
Latin America
Mexico
Through the first half of 2012, Mexico will be enmeshed in campaigning for its July 1 presidential election. The country faces the possible end of what will be 12 years of rule by the National Action Party (PAN). Faced with public condemnation of rising violence, the PAN has lost a great deal of credibility over the past five years, something likely to benefit the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the newly unified Revolutionary Democratic Party. We expect no major legislative action under the administration of outgoing President Felipe Calderon as the three main parties compete for public approval. The new president takes office Dec. 1, meaning most of the new administration's major policy moves will not occur until 2013.
Regardless of any change in party, Mexico's underlying challenges will remain. The country's drug war rages on, with Los Zetas having consolidated control over most of Mexico's eastern coastal transportation corridor and the Sinaloa cartel having done the same in the west. Both cartels have a significant, growing presence in Central America and relations with South American organized crime. We expect the cartels to intensify their efforts to extend control over regional supply chains in 2012, although the Mexican cartels will remain dependent on relationships with local organized crime in other transit and producing countries. Despite significant territorial control in Mexico by Sinaloa and Los Zetas, numerous smaller criminal entities are still struggling for access to key transport hubs such as Acapulco. Meanwhile, the two main cartels will continue to attack each other in critical transit cities such as Veracruz and Guadalajara.
Continued inter-cartel competition among Mexico's diverse criminal groups will prevent any kind of alliance between Los Zetas and Sinaloa that allows them to abandon violence in favor of more profitable smuggling conditions. Similarly, the government faces severe constraints on its counter-cartel activities. It cannot afford to be seen publicly backing away from attempts to rein in violence. At the same time, any significant uptick in military offensives against the cartels carries the risk of intensifying the violence. The government will therefore attempt to emphasize social and economic policies while maintaining its current, high-tempo counter-cartel strategy.
Brazil
Brazil will spend 2012 focused on mitigating shocks to trade and capital flows from the crisis in Europe. However, with only 10 percent of Brazil's gross domestic product dependent on exports, Brazil is much less vulnerable than many other developing countries. In politics, Brazil will remain focused on trying to strike a balance between growth and inflation during the expected slowdown with judicious fiscal outlays and monetary expansion. Brazil will thus remain primarily focused on domestic issues through 2012. Trade protectionism will play a strong role in efforts to shield vulnerable industries. With global trade slowing, China will look for alternative export markets; these two trends will drive increased bilateral tensions between China and Brazil over the next year. Key Brazilian domestic issues will include ongoing city and border security initiatives; social welfare programs; infrastructure construction; and the development of, and politics surrounding, Brazil's petroleum reserves.
Venezuela
Uncertainty surrounding the health of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez makes it difficult to forecast the precise direction of Venezuelan politics in 2012. There will certainly be continued speculation about a potential successor from the Chavista elite, and growing dissatisfaction with the status quo among Chavez's base will be a prominent political force. Meanwhile, the political opposition parties -- which at this point appear prepared to unite behind a single candidate to be selected in February -- will make their most credible play for power in a decade. Under these conditions, the 2012 election will serve as a disruptor of Venezuelan politics. While the exact details of the outcome are unpredictable, 2012 will likely see some sort of power transition away from Chavez.
Regardless of who holds power at the end of the year, 2012 will continue to be characterized by growing domestic economic uncertainty, periodic infrastructure failure and poor distribution of basic goods. Dissatisfaction with these and other socio-economic issues will drive further protests, but the majority of political action will be centered on the election.
Cuba
Cuba's slow and cautious transitional measures can be expected to continue in 2012. Key reforms such as making credit and private property available to individuals are under way, and similar reforms, including attempts to loosen travel restrictions, can be expected in the next year. Cuba's ultimate international challenge is to balance the liberalization demands of the United States with its need for subsidized Venezuelan oil. A sudden disruption of these shipments is unlikely, but a political shift in Venezuela could force Cuba to reach out to the United States as a much more powerful -- but also more politically invasive -- economic partner.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Somalia
In 2012, a containment strategy will solidify against Somali jihadists -- both the transnationalist group al Shabaab and its nationalist rival, the Somali Islamic Emirate. This strategy will have three elements. The first will feature African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) forces consolidating their presence in Mogadishu. These forces include peacekeepers from Uganda, Burundi and Djibouti, and additional forces from Sierra Leone will be deployed soon.
In the second part of the strategy, Kenyan troops will strengthen the cordon along the Kenyan border with southern Somalia. The 4,000 Kenyan troops there, nominally part of AMISOM, will hold territory and interdict Somali jihadists moving about the area. Lastly, Ethiopian forces will fortify a cordon along Ethiopia's border with central Somalia, also attempting to hold the territory and interdict jihadists.
To deny the Somali militias propaganda material, AMISOM, the Kenyans and the Ethiopians will not push deep into Somali territory to engage the jihadists. Instead, local militias employing guerrilla tactics will fight the jihadists within the containment zone. The combined efforts will successfully disrupt the jihadists' lines of supply, but they will not bring about their defeat. The United States will continue covert action in the Somali theater. U.S. special operations forces and unmanned aerial vehicles will collect and share intelligence with the Somali government and its allies. Additionally, U.S. forces in East Africa and the Horn of Africa will remain poised to strike high-value Somali jihadists or senior al Qaeda targets, should the opportunity arise.
Nigeria
Nigeria will see sustained militant violence in its northern region. Aggrieved political elites in the north, believing the government of President Goodluck Jonathan stole political power from them, will seek to use the Boko Haram militant group to their advantage. As part of their campaign to regain political power in 2015 national elections, these northern politicians will provide Boko Haram with arms and funding while protecting it politically.
This will enable the group to carry out frequent attacks on Nigerian government and civilian targets in its core area of operations in the country's northeast and northwest. Boko Haram will also conduct operations in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, but these will be rare. Boko Haram's statements will be jihadist and fierce, but the nature of its support will prevent it from carrying out attacks that would trigger an international response and result in a loss of leverage for northern Nigeria's political elite, such as transnational operations or attacks against foreign political or commercial facilities in Nigeria.
The Niger Delta in the south will also see a slow but steady return to militant violence. Though the Jonathan administration has stated that it will serve only from 2011 to 2015, divisions will start to emerge within the Jonathan camp over whether a single term is sufficient. Like their peers in northern Nigeria, political elites in the Niger Delta region, including Jonathan, will start reactivating alliances with regional militant groups such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).
Attacks by MEND or other Niger Delta militants in 2012 will be infrequent and ultimately will not threaten oil production. However, they will form the basis for a counter-campaign by the Niger Delta political elite to demand political patronage while the region's elite decides whether to run for the ruling party's nomination for the presidency in the next elections.
Sudan
Domestic opposition in Sudan and South Sudan will prevent both governments from signing a legally binding oil revenue-sharing accord. Instead, they will accept the continuation of ad hoc agreements regarding the distribution of oil revenues. Additionally, U.N. peacekeepers will maintain their deployments in South Sudan and Darfur to respond to border clashes between militias on both sides of the Sudan-South Sudan border. It will take much of the year, but Khartoum and Juba will settle into an informal understanding over border demarcation.
South Africa
South Africa will remain focused on internal rivalries that will inhibit its ability to consolidate its influence in the southern African region. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) will contend with internal rivalries as it moves toward a leadership convention and election in December 2012. South African President Jacob Zuma will be working to secure a second term as ANC president, a post that would effectively make him the party's candidate for South African president in 2014 elections. Simultaneously, the Zuma camp will work to ensure that no rival faction in the ANC gains enough momentum to challenge Zuma.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
When I was taking International Relations at Penn with William Quandt (formerly Kissinger's aide on the NSC for the mid-east desk) he spoke of Kissinger's conceptual construct of a militarily bi-polar and economically multi-polar world.
With the collapse of the Soviet Empire we have had a uni-polar moment, both militarily and economically.
That is now done.
Whither the world now and what concepts should guide the US?
-
View today's fresh analysis on our site:
The European Crisis in 2012
Geopolitical Calendar: Week of Jan. 16, 2012
Denmark's European Union Presidency
Nigeria Lifts Popular Fuel Subsidy
Obstacles for Egypt's Islamists After Elections
Video: The Middle East in 2012
Graphic of the Day: Somali Pirate Activity, 2008-2011
For the past six years, Stratfor has published an annual forecast on al Qaeda and the jihadist movement. Since our first forecast in January 2006, we have focused heavily on examining and documenting the change of jihadism from a phenomenon involving primarily the core al Qaeda group to one based primarily on the broader, decentralized jihadist movement -- and the lesser threat the latter poses.
The central theme of last year's forecast was that the al Qaeda core would continue to be marginalized on the physical battlefield and would struggle to remain relevant on the ideological battlefield. While we did not forecast the May 2 killing of Osama bin Laden, his death certainly furthered the downward trend we predicted for the al Qaeda core organization. Due to the al Qaeda core's struggles, we forecast that regional jihadist franchise groups would continue to be at the vanguard of the physical battle and would eclipse the al Qaeda core in the ideological realm. We also noted that grassroots operatives would remain a persistent, albeit low-level, threat for 2011.
The past year saw hundreds of attacks and thwarted plots planned by jihadist actors in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But in terms of transnational plots and attacks, activity was down considerably compared to 2010. As we forecast, almost all of these plots involved grassroots operatives or militants from regional jihadist groups rather than militants dispatched by the al Qaeda core leadership. For 2012, we anticipate that these trends will continue and, given bin Laden's death, the core al Qaeda group will not only continue to degrade but struggle to survive. Like the past two years, jihadism in 2012 will be defined by the activities of the franchise groups and the persistent grassroots threat.
Definitions
Contemporary vernacular imbues "al Qaeda" with a number of definitions, and the al Qaeda label is applied, often incorrectly, to several distinct actors. Therefore, we need to define what we refer to as jihadism, al Qaeda and the various agents in the jihadist movement to understand jihadism as a phenomenon.
Jihadism
In Arabic, "jihad" means to "struggle" or "strive for" something. The word commonly refers to an armed struggle, and one engaged in such a struggle is called a "mujahid" (mujahideen in the plural). Mainstream Muslims do not consider "jihadist" an accurate term for those who claim to fight on their behalf. In fact, those called jihadists in the Western context are considered deviants by mainstream Muslims. Therefore, the jihadist label reflects this perception of deviancy. We therefore use the term jihadist to refer to militant Islamists who profess the violent overthrow of existing regimes in favor of global or regional Islamic polities. We use the term "jihadism" to refer to the ideology propagated by jihadists.
Al Qaeda, al Qaeda Prime or al Qaeda Core
Stratfor views what most people refer to as "al Qaeda" as a decentralized global jihadist network rather than a monolithic entity. This network consists of three distinct and quite different elements. The first is the vanguard al Qaeda organization, which we frequently refer to as al Qaeda prime or the al Qaeda core. The al Qaeda core is the small organization founded by bin Laden and currently led by Ayman al-Zawahiri and a small circle of trusted associates.
Although al Qaeda trained thousands of militants in its camps in Afghanistan, most of those trained were either grassroots operatives or members of other militant groups who never became members of the core group. Indeed, most of the trainees received only basic guerrilla warfare instruction, and only a select few were designated to receive training in terrorist tradecraft skills, such as bombmaking. Of the few who received this advanced training, fewer still were selected to join the al Qaeda core organization.
The al Qaeda core was designed to be a small and elite organization stationed at the forefront of the physical battlefield. Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States and its allies have applied intense pressure on this core organization. This pressure has resulted in the death or capture of many al Qaeda cadres and has ensured that the group remain small due to operational security concerns. The remnants of this insular group are lying low in Pakistan near the Afghan border, and this isolation has significantly degraded the group's ability to conduct attacks. Accordingly, the al Qaeda core has been relegated to producing propaganda and providing guidance and inspiration to other jihadist elements. With the death of bin Laden, the burden of the propaganda efforts will fall to al-Zawahiri, Abu Yahya al-Libi and, to a lesser extent, native English speaker Adam Gadahn. Despite the disproportionate amount of media attention it receives, the al Qaeda core constitutes only a very small portion of the larger jihadist movement and has not conducted a successful terrorist attack for years.
Franchise Groups
The second element of jihadism associated with al Qaeda is a worldwide network of local or regional terrorist or insurgent groups. These groups have been influenced by the al Qaeda core's philosophy and guidance and have adopted a similar jihadist ideology. In many cases, members of these groups received training in al Qaeda camps in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of these groups have publicly claimed allegiance to bin Laden and the al Qaeda core, becoming what we refer to as franchise groups. These include such organizations as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Notably, even though these groups adopt the al Qaeda label, they are locally owned and operated. As such, some group leaders, like Nasir al-Wahayshi of AQAP, maintain relations and are philosophically aligned with the al Qaeda core. Others, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of the al Qaeda franchise in Iraq, can be at odds with the al Qaeda core's leadership and philosophy.
Other regional groups may adopt some or all of al Qaeda's jihadist ideology and cooperate to some degree with the core group. But for a variety of reasons, they maintain even more independence than the franchise groups. They are more akin to allies than true members of the al Qaeda movement.
Grassroots Jihadists
The third and broadest element of the global jihadist network encompasses what we refer to as grassroots jihadists. These are individuals who are inspired by the al Qaeda core -- or, increasingly, by the franchise groups -- but who may have little or no actual connection to these groups. Some grassroots operatives, such as Najibullah Zazi, who pleaded guilty to charges related to a New York City Subway bomb plot in 2009, travel to places like Pakistan, Somalia or Yemen, where they receive training from jihadist franchise groups. Other grassroots jihadists, like accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, may communicate but have no physical interaction with members of a franchise group. Some grassroots militants have no direct contact with other jihadist elements. Lastly, some would-be grassroots militants seek out contact with other jihadist elements but accidentally make contact with government informants. In recent years, such cases have been occurring more frequently, resulting in sting operations and arrests.
Moving down the hierarchy from the al Qaeda core to the grassroots operatives, there is a decline in operational capability and expertise in what we refer to as terrorist tradecraft -- the skills required to effectively plan and execute a terrorist attack. The operatives belonging to the al Qaeda core generally are better trained than their regional affiliates, and both of these elements tend to be far better trained than grassroots operatives, who must travel abroad to obtain training.
While these various elements of the jihadist network are distinct, the Internet brings them together, especially at the grassroots level. Videos, websites and online magazines indoctrinate aspiring militants in the jihadist ideology and provide a forum for like-minded individuals and groups.
2011 Forecast in Review
As noted above, the heart of our jihadist forecast for 2011 was the idea that the efforts of the U.S. government and its allies would continue to marginalize the al Qaeda core on the physical battlefield, which would in turn cause the organization to continue to struggle for relevance on the ideological battlefield. We concluded that the regional jihadist franchise groups would remain at the forefront of the physical battlefield and assume a more prominent position in the ideological battlefield. While the franchise groups have indeed subsumed the al Qaeda core, many groups, such as al Shabaab and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), are weaker than they were a year ago.
We did not see a successful attack attributed to the al Qaeda core in 2011, though there is evidence to suggest the group had never stopped planning. For example, in April German authorities arrested a Moroccan-born man, Abdeladim el-K (German privacy law prevents suspects from being fully identified), who they claim was sent to Germany by al Qaeda operational leader Atiyah Abd al-Rahman to conduct an attack. German police on Dec. 15 also arrested a man who reportedly was inspired by el-K and who was allegedly attempting to continue el-K's attack plans.
2011 differed from previous years in that there were no transnational attacks from franchise or affiliate groups. AQAP conducted an attack in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in August 2009, attempted an attack on a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009, and attempted to bomb cargo planes in October 2010, but was quiet last year, as were the TTP and AQIM. The Caucasus Emirate, a jihadist group loosely affiliated with al Qaeda, was active in the Caucasus and conducted some attacks in Moscow, but those attacks were not categorically transnational. Likewise, al Shabaab carried out some attacks in northern Kenya following the Kenyan invasion of southern Somalia, but we consider those attacks more regional than transnational despite their occurring across a national border.
In our 2011 forecast, we also noted our belief that, due to the accessibility of U.S. and European societies and the ease of conducting attacks against them, we would see more grassroots plots, if not successful attacks, there than attacks by the other jihadist elements. This forecast was accurate. Of the 12 plots against the West in 2011 that we classify as jihadist (down from 20 in 2010), one plot was connected to the al Qaeda core, 11 to grassroots elements (down from 15 in 2010) and none to franchise groups (down from 4 in 2010). The one plot connected to the al Qaeda core involved an operational planner who linked up with grassroots militants in Germany.
We also forecast that, because of the nature of the jihadist threat, soft targets would continue to be attacked in 2011 and that additional plots targeting aircraft would take place. We saw the continued focus on soft targets, but aside from the March 2 attack against U.S. Air Force personnel outside the Frankfurt airport and the Caucasus Emirate's suicide bombing attack at the arrival terminal of Moscow's Domodedovo airport in January, we did not see plots directed at aircraft. Instead, we saw aviation-related plots often focused on soft targets outside airport security.
In addition, we predicted an increase in plots and attacks involving firearms and other weapons rather than improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The shooting in Frankfurt, the thwarted knife attack against cartoonist Lars Vilks in Goteborg, Sweden, and several thwarted plots in the United States, including those in Seattle, Alabama, New York and Killeen, Texas, all evidence our prediction.
Our regional forecasts for 2011 were accurate, especially for the United States, Europe, North Africa and Indonesia. Our biggest miss was underestimating how involved AQAP would become in Yemen's internal conflict as different groups challenged President Ali Abullah Saleh's rule and how this involvement would distract the group from conducting transnational attacks.
Forecast for 2012
We anticipate that the al Qaeda core will continue to struggle in the physical and ideological arenas. The group still has prolific spokesmen in al-Zawahiri, al-Libi and Gadahn, but in 2011 the group issued remarkably few messages. The remaining leaders appear to be lying low following the deaths of bin Laden, al-Rahman and others.
Even though AQAP lost important English-speaking ideological figures when Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were killed (Khan was the editor of AQAP's English-language Inspire magazine) the group's main operational and ideological leadership remain at large. Among this leadership are the group's emir, Nasir al-Wahayshi, operational commander Qasim al-Raymi, and innovative bombmaker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri.
The remaining ideological leaders include the group's mufti, or religious leader, Saudi-born Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish. With a degree in Islamic law, fighting experience with bin Laden at Tora Bora and time served in Guantanamo Bay, al-Rubaish has impeccable jihadist credentials. The influential head of AQAP's Shariah Council, a Yemeni imam named Adel bin Abdullah al-Abab, is among AQAP's ideologues. While AQAP is unlikely to ever recreate what Samir Khan accomplished with Inspire magazine, the group's al-Malaheim Media is still active, and its Arabic-language offerings continue. Those messages frequently are translated into English on such websites as the Ansar Al-Mujahideen English forum.
Moreover, the English-language statements of al-Awlaki and the editions of Inspire magazine remain on the Internet with a readership that numbers in the thousands. Indeed, an article from the first edition of Inspire, "How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom," was linked to thwarted grassroots plots in Texas and New York in 2011. We believe that the threat from grassroots jihadists will persist for the foreseeable future.
We disagree with those who claim that the unrest in the Arab world will end jihadism. The overthrow of the Gadhafi regime in Libya and the democratic movements in Tunisia and Egypt will provide alternative outlets to jihadism for dissent, and other Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, will undercut jihadism ideologically. But the small core of hard-line jihadists will remain undeterred; this group will continue to propagate its ideology and recruit new adherents.
Recruitment will be more difficult in the current environment, and while this may hasten the eventual decline of jihadism, it will not kill the ideology this year. In addition to persisting in such lawless places as Yemen, Somalia and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, jihadism will maintain its niche in the West, and grassroots jihadists will continue to be radicalized and mobilized in the United States, Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
Regional Forecasts
The United States and Europe
The al Qaeda core and franchise groups will continue to struggle attacking the United States and Europe directly and will continue to reach out to grassroots operatives who have the ability to travel to the West. Otherwise, they will attempt to recruit aspiring jihadists living in the West. This means we will likely see more thwarted or botched plots involving poorly trained operatives and simple attacks like the shooting in Frankfurt. While such attacks can and do kill people, they are not spectacular events as 9/11 and the 2008 Mumbai attacks were. This trend also means that travel to places like Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or contact with jihadist planners there, will continue to be an operational weakness that Western intelligence agencies can exploit. Such was the case in Birmingham, England, where 12 suspected plotters were arrested in September and November. Individuals seeking to acquire weapons and explosives will also remain vulnerable to detection.
While Nasir al-Wahayshi's appeal for aspiring jihadists to avoid contacting franchise groups and traveling overseas in search of training is sound, it has been difficult for jihadists to follow. This is evidenced by the fact that we have seen very few plots or attacks in which the planners were true lone wolves who had absolutely no contact with outside jihadists -- or with government agents they believed to be jihadists. While the leaderless resistance model can be difficult for law enforcement to guard against, its downside for jihadists is that it takes a unique type of individual to be a true and effective lone wolf.
Since we believe most plots in the United States and Europe in 2012 will involve grassroots jihadists, we also believe that soft targets -- public gatherings and mass transportation hubs, for example -- will continue to be the most popular target set. In places like Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia, we believe hotels and housing compounds will be more attractive targets than U.S. embassies or consulates, which are much more difficult to successfully attack. With a thwarted plot against a cartoonist involved in the Mohammed cartoon controversy taking place as recently as September, we do not see any end to that threat.
We predict that al-Wahayshi's advice will go unheeded and that grassroots jihadists in the United States will continue to plan and conduct simple attacks using firearms and other weapons. We do not foresee difficult and elaborate attacks employing explosives.
Pakistan
The government of Pakistan has been busily trying to divide the TTP and channel the group's efforts toward other targets in the region, such as foreign forces in Afghanistan and India. Islamabad has had some success in that regard, but we anticipate that some factions of the TTP will continue to target the Pakistani state. In any case, we expect to see fewer and smaller attacks in Pakistan in 2012 than in 2011.
Afghanistan
We will need to keep a close eye on the leadership of the Afghan Taliban and their dialogue with the Karzai government. The current conflict between the Taliban and Afghan and NATO forces will lessen somewhat if the Taliban become more involved in the political process, but we do not anticipate the militant group renouncing violence altogether. With some Pakistani jihadist groups vowing to target foreign forces in Afghanistan, acts of terrorism may increase against foreigners in Kabul and Kandahar. Given the intensity of foreign counterterrorism operations and the ongoing insurgency, jihadist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan will have little opportunity to set their sights on targets beyond the immediate region.
India
India continues to face the threat of Kashmir-based militant groups as well as transnational jihadist groups supported by state and non-state elements within Pakistan. These groups include the Haqqani network and residual elements of Lashkar-e-Taiba, all of which will continue to plan attacks inside India and against Indian interests in nearby countries, such as Afghanistan. India also faces a persistent but smaller threat from domestic jihadist groups like Indian Mujahideen.
Central Asia
For the first time in modern history, Kazakhstan in 2011 was the site of multiple suspected jihadist attacks, including three suicide attacks. Jund al-Khalifa, a Kazakh al Qaeda franchise group, emerged last summer, and we anticipate that it will continue its activities in 2012. Other groups, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, are active in the region, but because these groups are weak and disorganized and operate largely from the area along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, they do not pose a major threat to the region's governments.
Caucasus
The Russians have hit the Caucasus Emirate very hard, arresting or killing several key leaders. The group was already suffering from internal divisions at the beginning of 2011; consequently, it did not pose a strategic threat to Russia last year. However, the jihadist group will continue to attack Russian and local government security forces in the Caucasus and will continue its attempts to take the fight to the heart of Moscow -- especially since Caucasus Emirate leader Doku Umarov and dissenting Chechen insurgent leaders resolved their differences last summer. Low-level attacks against soft targets can be expected in the coming year. With the 2014 Winter Olympics being held in Sochi, we anticipate the Russians will focus a great deal of effort on weakening the jihadist groups in the region.
Yemen
As noted above, AQAP has lost some important English-speaking ideologues, yet the group maintains much of its militant capability. Yemen, where AQAP is based, increasingly is seen as a destination to which foreign jihadists travel to fight and receive training. With the government in Sanaa struggling to retain power in 2011, AQAP was able to take advantage of the instability of the Saleh regime, which was cracking down on protests and fighting throughout the country, and seized portions of southern Yemen. The group also has become very adept at using ambushes, roadside IEDs and sticky bombs to assassinate government officials and military officers. AQAP's experience could later be applied elsewhere if the group is able to again expand its focus beyond Yemeni government targets.
As the crisis in Yemen is resolved and the government turns its attention to regaining control of the country, we anticipate severe clashes between AQAP and government forces. If AQAP declines to fight and withdraws to its remote hideaways, the group may resume operations against foreigners in Sanaa and Aden and conduct transnational attacks. Given AQAP's tactical advances, such attacks might be more deadly than similar attacks in the past.
Iraq
While the Islamic State of Iraq was greatly damaged by Sunni cooperation with the Americans, the U.S. military withdrawal will change that dynamic. The power struggle between Sunnis and Shia could allow the Islamic State of Iraq to regenerate because the Sunni sheikhs not only tolerate the organization, but support it as a tool against the Shia and their powerful Iranian supporters. Given the tense political situation and the still-unresolved ethno-sectarian balance of power, there will be plenty of opportunity for terrorist attacks.
North Africa
In northern Algeria, AQIM has continued to resist the al Qaeda core's targeting philosophy, instead concentrating on attacking government and security targets. In a sense, AQIM essentially functions as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat but with a different name. The Algerian government has hit AQIM very hard in its traditional mountain strongholds east of Algiers, and the ideological rift over whether to follow al Qaeda's dictates also has hurt the group. Increased abductions of Westerners and clashes with security forces in the Sahara-Sahel are not convincing evidence of AQIM's expanding reach -- nor are incompetent attacks to the south of Algeria. Much of this expanded activity in the south is the result of rivalries between sub-commanders and attempts at raising money via kidnapping and banditry for survival. This is a sign of weakness and lack of cohesion, not strength.
A cell of Moroccan militants allegedly linked to AQIM conducted a successful bombing attack in April against a cafe in Marrakech, Morocco, that killed 17 people, but it was a relatively unsophisticated attack against a soft target. Moroccan authorities claim to have arrested those responsible for the attack.
AQIM elements in the mountains east of Algiers remain weak and ineffective. Even the IEDs the group has employed have been somewhat weak, indicating that the group is running out of explosives. Some of the factions in the Sahel allegedly have received weapons from Libya, but aside from some landmines we have not seen signs of advanced weaponry, such as shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles or anti-tank guided missiles.
On the whole, AQIM is a shadow of what it was five years ago. It will continue to kidnap victims in the Sahel -- or acquire kidnapped foreigners from ethnic Tuareg rebels in Mali and Niger -- and conduct the occasional small attack, but it still is not a unified militant organization that poses a regional, much less transnational, threat.
Libya
Former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) fought against the Gadhafi regime, and the group's leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj, is now the commander of the Tripoli Military Council. (Belhadj and the LIFG renounced jihadism in March as part of a deradicalization program run by Seif al-Islam Gadhafi.) With the fall of the regime in Libya and the current struggle for power among the various militias -- some of these militias, like the Tripoli Military Council, are Islamist -- jihadists have been presented an opportunity. It will be important to monitor Libya to see if the jihadist elements are able to make any gains there.
Egypt
The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak has created an opening for Egyptian citizens to participate in the political process. This will help dilute jihadist sentiment in the country. A faction of former militant group Gamaah al-Islamiyah is even taking part in the elections. However, while Mubarak was deposed, the military regime is still in place. The small core of hard-line jihadists is unlikely to embrace the change and will continue its struggle. Indeed, jihadist elements have attacked a number of oil pipelines in the months since Mubarak fell. We anticipate that attacks against pipelines and security forces will continue, and 2012 could also see a return of attacks against tourists in the Sinai if the authorities are unable to weaken the jihadists there.
If the military regime is unwilling to relinquish power to the newly elected parliament, the resultant conflict and disillusionment with the democratic process could convince people to turn to jihadism as a viable political alternative.
Somalia
Divisions between Somali jihadists weakened al Shabaab in 2011, with rifts emerging between factions with nationalist goals and those aligned with al Qaeda with transnationalist goals. Al Shabaab has lost much of its territory in Mogadishu, and though it still has assets in the capital city and can conduct attacks and occasional raids there, it no longer controls large sections of the city. The Kenyan invasion of southern Somalia, the increased presence of African Union Mission in Somalia peacekeepers in Mogadishu and continuing pressure from U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle operations has forced al Shabaab to retrench. Aside from some low-level attacks in northern Kenya, the group cannot plan or conduct attacks outside Somalia. We do not see al Shabaab being defeated in 2012, but we believe that they will be unable to conduct a spectacular attack outside their immediate region.
Nigeria
Boko Haram made huge operational leaps in 2011; the group now employs vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) instead of small IEDs and small arms and machetes. This indicates that at least some element of the group has received outside training, likely from AQIM or al Shabaab (there have been reports of both). Boko Haram also became a transnational threat when it conducted a VBIED attack against a United Nations compound in Abuja that killed at least 21 people. Boko Haram has made threats to conduct attacks in the Niger Delta, but so far it has been unable to strike outside northern Nigeria or the capital. Despite its operational advancement, Boko Haram is still far from being a true transnational threat. The group may attempt to increase its operational range inside Nigeria, but we expect it to remain predominantly focused on northern Nigeria. We also believe that Boko Haram would strike other Nigerian cities, such as Lagos, before embarking on transnational attacks.
Indonesia
The Indonesian government has continued to hit the remnants of Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad and other jihadist elements hard, and it is unlikely that Indonesian jihadists will be able to regroup and conduct large-scale terrorist attacks in 2012. However, they will likely continue low-level attacks against soft targets, such as Christian churches in places like Poso, to incite sectarian violence. Non-jihadist Islamist groups -- Front Pembela Islam, for example -- may also incite riots and contribute members to other jihadist groups.
Conclusion
While the al Qaeda core has been marginalized and heavily damaged, the ideology of jihadism continues to survive and win new converts, albeit at progressively lower numbers. As long as this ideology is able to spread, the war its adherents are waging will continue. While jihadists do not pose a strategic geopolitical threat on a global, regional or national scale, they nonetheless are capable of killing scores of people. For that reason alone, the jihadist threat remains in 2012.
-
By ROBERT KAGAN
History shows that world orders, including our own, are transient. They rise and fall, and the institutions they erect, the beliefs and "norms" that guide them, the economic systems they support—they rise and fall, too. The downfall of the Roman Empire brought an end not just to Roman rule but to Roman government and law and to an entire economic system stretching from Northern Europe to North Africa. Culture, the arts, even progress in science and technology, were set back for centuries.
Many of us take for granted how the world looks today. But it might look a lot different without America at the top. The Brookings Institution's Robert Kagan talks with Washington bureau chief Jerry Seib about his new book, "The World America Made," and whether a U.S. decline is inevitable.
.Modern history has followed a similar pattern. After the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, British control of the seas and the balance of great powers on the European continent provided relative security and stability. Prosperity grew, personal freedoms expanded, and the world was knit more closely together by revolutions in commerce and communication.
With the outbreak of World War I, the age of settled peace and advancing liberalism—of European civilization approaching its pinnacle—collapsed into an age of hyper-nationalism, despotism and economic calamity. The once-promising spread of democracy and liberalism halted and then reversed course, leaving a handful of outnumbered and besieged democracies living nervously in the shadow of fascist and totalitarian neighbors. The collapse of the British and European orders in the 20th century did not produce a new dark age—though if Nazi Germany and imperial Japan had prevailed, it might have—but the horrific conflict that it produced was, in its own way, just as devastating.
If the U.S. is unable to maintain its hegemony on the high seas, would other nations fill in the gaps? On board the USS Germantown in the South China Sea, Tuesday.
Would the end of the present American-dominated order have less dire consequences? A surprising number of American intellectuals, politicians and policy makers greet the prospect with equanimity. There is a general sense that the end of the era of American pre-eminence, if and when it comes, need not mean the end of the present international order, with its widespread freedom, unprecedented global prosperity (even amid the current economic crisis) and absence of war among the great powers.
American power may diminish, the political scientist G. John Ikenberry argues, but "the underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive." The commentator Fareed Zakaria believes that even as the balance shifts against the U.S., rising powers like China "will continue to live within the framework of the current international system." And there are elements across the political spectrum—Republicans who call for retrenchment, Democrats who put their faith in international law and institutions—who don't imagine that a "post-American world" would look very different from the American world.
If all of this sounds too good to be true, it is. The present world order was largely shaped by American power and reflects American interests and preferences. If the balance of power shifts in the direction of other nations, the world order will change to suit their interests and preferences. Nor can we assume that all the great powers in a post-American world would agree on the benefits of preserving the present order, or have the capacity to preserve it, even if they wanted to.
Take the issue of democracy. For several decades, the balance of power in the world has favored democratic governments. In a genuinely post-American world, the balance would shift toward the great-power autocracies. Both Beijing and Moscow already protect dictators like Syria's Bashar al-Assad. If they gain greater relative influence in the future, we will see fewer democratic transitions and more autocrats hanging on to power. The balance in a new, multipolar world might be more favorable to democracy if some of the rising democracies—Brazil, India, Turkey, South Africa—picked up the slack from a declining U.S. Yet not all of them have the desire or the capacity to do it.
What about the economic order of free markets and free trade? People assume that China and other rising powers that have benefited so much from the present system would have a stake in preserving it. They wouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
A Romney Adviser Read by Democrats
Robert Kagan's new book, "The World America Made," is finding an eager readership in the nation's capital, among prominent members of both political parties.
Around the time of President Barack Obama's Jan. 24 State of the Union Address, Washington was abuzz with reports that the president had discussed a portion of the book with a group of news anchors.
Mr. Kagan serves on the Foreign Policy Advisory Board of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but more notably, in this election season, he is a foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.
The president's speech touched upon the debate over whether America is in decline, a central theme of Mr. Kagan's book. "America is back," he declared, referring to a range of recent U.S. actions on the world stage. "Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about," he continued. "America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs—and as long as I'm president, I intend to keep it that way."
Says Mr. Kagan: "No president wants to preside over American decline, and it's good to see him repudiate the idea that his policy is built on the idea that American influence must fade."
.
======
Unfortunately, they might not be able to help themselves. The creation and survival of a liberal economic order has depended, historically, on great powers that are both willing and able to support open trade and free markets, often with naval power. If a declining America is unable to maintain its long-standing hegemony on the high seas, would other nations take on the burdens and the expense of sustaining navies to fill in the gaps?
Even if they did, would this produce an open global commons—or rising tension? China and India are building bigger navies, but the result so far has been greater competition, not greater security. As Mohan Malik has noted in this newspaper, their "maritime rivalry could spill into the open in a decade or two," when India deploys an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean and China deploys one in the Indian Ocean. The move from American-dominated oceans to collective policing by several great powers could be a recipe for competition and conflict rather than for a liberal economic order.
And do the Chinese really value an open economic system? The Chinese economy soon may become the largest in the world, but it will be far from the richest. Its size is a product of the country's enormous population, but in per capita terms, China remains relatively poor. The U.S., Germany and Japan have a per capita GDP of over $40,000. China's is a little over $4,000, putting it at the same level as Angola, Algeria and Belize. Even if optimistic forecasts are correct, China's per capita GDP by 2030 would still only be half that of the U.S., putting it roughly where Slovenia and Greece are today.
Getty Images/The Bridgeman Art Library
Multipolar systems have historically been neither particularly stable nor particularly peaceful. Nearly a halfmillion combatants died in the Crimean War (depicted in "The Taking of Malakoff" by Horace Vernet, pictured here.)
.As Arvind Subramanian and other economists have pointed out, this will make for a historically unique situation. In the past, the largest and most dominant economies in the world have also been the richest. Nations whose peoples are such obvious winners in a relatively unfettered economic system have less temptation to pursue protectionist measures and have more of an incentive to keep the system open.
China's leaders, presiding over a poorer and still developing country, may prove less willing to open their economy. They have already begun closing some sectors to foreign competition and are likely to close others in the future. Even optimists like Mr. Subramanian believe that the liberal economic order will require "some insurance" against a scenario in which "China exercises its dominance by either reversing its previous policies or failing to open areas of the economy that are now highly protected." American economic dominance has been welcomed by much of the world because, like the mobster Hyman Roth in "The Godfather," the U.S. has always made money for its partners. Chinese economic dominance may get a different reception.
Another problem is that China's form of capitalism is heavily dominated by the state, with the ultimate goal of preserving the rule of the Communist Party. Unlike the eras of British and American pre-eminence, when the leading economic powers were dominated largely by private individuals or companies, China's system is more like the mercantilist arrangements of previous centuries. The government amasses wealth in order to secure its continued rule and to pay for armies and navies to compete with other great powers.
Although the Chinese have been beneficiaries of an open international economic order, they could end up undermining it simply because, as an autocratic society, their priority is to preserve the state's control of wealth and the power that it brings. They might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs because they can't figure out how to keep both it and themselves alive.
Finally, what about the long peace that has held among the great powers for the better part of six decades? Would it survive in a post-American world?
Most commentators who welcome this scenario imagine that American predominance would be replaced by some kind of multipolar harmony. But multipolar systems have historically been neither particularly stable nor particularly peaceful. Rough parity among powerful nations is a source of uncertainty that leads to miscalculation. Conflicts erupt as a result of fluctuations in the delicate power equation.
War among the great powers was a common, if not constant, occurrence in the long periods of multipolarity from the 16th to the 18th centuries, culminating in the series of enormously destructive Europe-wide wars that followed the French Revolution and ended with Napoleon's defeat in 1815.
The 19th century was notable for two stretches of great-power peace of roughly four decades each, punctuated by major conflicts. The Crimean War (1853-1856) was a mini-world war involving well over a million Russian, French, British and Turkish troops, as well as forces from nine other nations; it produced almost a half-million dead combatants and many more wounded. In the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the two nations together fielded close to two million troops, of whom nearly a half-million were killed or wounded.
The peace that followed these conflicts was characterized by increasing tension and competition, numerous war scares and massive increases in armaments on both land and sea. Its climax was World War I, the most destructive and deadly conflict that mankind had known up to that point. As the political scientist Robert W. Tucker has observed, "Such stability and moderation as the balance brought rested ultimately on the threat or use of force. War remained the essential means for maintaining the balance of power."
There is little reason to believe that a return to multipolarity in the 21st century would bring greater peace and stability than it has in the past. The era of American predominance has shown that there is no better recipe for great-power peace than certainty about who holds the upper hand.
President Bill Clinton left office believing that the key task for America was to "create the world we would like to live in when we are no longer the world's only superpower," to prepare for "a time when we would have to share the stage." It is an eminently sensible-sounding proposal. But can it be done? For particularly in matters of security, the rules and institutions of international order rarely survive the decline of the nations that erected them. They are like scaffolding around a building: They don't hold the building up; the building holds them up.
Enlarge Image
CloseUS Great Seal/Illustration by The Wall Street Journal
International orderis not an evolution; it is an imposition. It will last only as long as those who favor it retain the will and capacity to defend it.
.Many foreign-policy experts see the present international order as the inevitable result of human progress, a combination of advancing science and technology, an increasingly global economy, strengthening international institutions, evolving "norms" of international behavior and the gradual but inevitable triumph of liberal democracy over other forms of government—forces of change that transcend the actions of men and nations.
Americans certainly like to believe that our preferred order survives because it is right and just—not only for us but for everyone. We assume that the triumph of democracy is the triumph of a better idea, and the victory of market capitalism is the victory of a better system, and that both are irreversible. That is why Francis Fukuyama's thesis about "the end of history" was so attractive at the end of the Cold War and retains its appeal even now, after it has been discredited by events. The idea of inevitable evolution means that there is no requirement to impose a decent order. It will merely happen.
But international order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others—in America's case, the domination of free-market and democratic principles, together with an international system that supports them. The present order will last only as long as those who favor it and benefit from it retain the will and capacity to defend it.
There was nothing inevitable about the world that was created after World War II. No divine providence or unfolding Hegelian dialectic required the triumph of democracy and capitalism, and there is no guarantee that their success will outlast the powerful nations that have fought for them. Democratic progress and liberal economics have been and can be reversed and undone. The ancient democracies of Greece and the republics of Rome and Venice all fell to more powerful forces or through their own failings. The evolving liberal economic order of Europe collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s. The better idea doesn't have to win just because it is a better idea. It requires great powers to champion it.
If and when American power declines, the institutions and norms that American power has supported will decline, too. Or more likely, if history is a guide, they may collapse altogether as we make a transition to another kind of world order, or to disorder. We may discover then that the U.S. was essential to keeping the present world order together and that the alternative to American power was not peace and harmony but chaos and catastrophe—which is what the world looked like right before the American order came into being.
—Mr. Kagan is a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. Adapted from "The World America Made," published by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright © 2012 by Robert Kagan.
-
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-02-15/un-security-council-syria-reform/53107952/1
The U.N.Security Council's inability to pass a resolution condemning Syria is the latest failure of the institution at preventing mass violence. In 1994, the council voted to pull peacekeepers out of Rwanda shortly before its genocide. The same body declared safe havens for Bosnian Muslims in 1993, only to stand by as Serbs slaughtered thousands of them.
-
February 18, 2012
The Myth and Danger of Non-Interventionism
By Josh Holler
When it comes to analyzing non-interventionism, it's helpful to identify the two extremes of the spectrum of debate. On one hand, the United States could mind its own business, withdraw its troops entirely from military bases worldwide, cash in the savings, and live prosperously as America once did in its infant years. On the other hand, the U.S. can continue the advancement of freedom and democracy through its imperialistic ideals, spend money into oblivion, and dominate the world in a fashion indicative of a hegemony. The friction between these two paradigms has been present for many years, and more so recently in light of the U.S.'s economic situation.
Simply put, the first approach of returning to a period of isolationism is not an option for the United States, and no reasonable person should argue for it. Yet non-interference is a proposed and advocated position that draws upon the history of prosperity in the U.S. when it adhered to the founding fathers' wisdom and did not get involved with foreign affairs.
According to Huntington1, the most recent period of isolation the United States ever experienced was between 1815 and 1914. The reality of the matter, though, is that while the United States may have seemed "isolated," it was actually incredibly active in the world theater. Its activities included developing relations, interfering fairly regularly in other nations' affairs for various reasons, and establishing trade that would lead to globalization.
Contrary to the labeling of an isolated period, the actual presence of the U.S. is captured most accurately by Meade in his book Special Providence:
As early as 1832, the United States sent a fleet to the Falkland Islands to reduce an Argentine garrison that had harassed American shipping. The Mexican War was, of course, the greatest example of American intervention, but by the Civil War, American forces had seen action in Haiti (1799, 1800, 1817-21), Tripoli (1815), the Marquesas Islands (1813-14), Spanish Florida (1806-10, 1812, 1813, 1814, 1816-18, 1817), what is now the Dominican Republic (1800), Curacao (1800), the Galapagos Islands (1813), Cuba (1822), Puerto Rico (1824), Argentina (1833, 1852, 1853), and Peru (1835-36). Between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, marines were sent to Cuba, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Columbia, and Haiti.2
This is by no means an exhaustive list of America's presence in other countries during the "isolated" time period, either. The intervention into Guangzhou (1843), Liberia (1860), Japan (1863), Panama (1863), and China (1900)2 only add to a long list of foreign endeavors illustrating that the U.S. has never been isolated or a nation of non-interferers.
So the belief in the myth of a past "non-interference America" is not a very sophisticated or educated one. Some relatively quiet periods do exist in U.S. foreign affairs from time to time, but these hardly characterize the history of America in these matters at all.
Over the course of history, the myth of isolationism has snuck its way into increasing popularity and belief, evolving into the current paradigm and school of thought that is non-interventionism or non-interference. A number of politicians in the U.S. today wish to switch U.S. foreign policy to this framework. Ron Paul, a devoted non-interventionist, has been notorious for his inaccurate claims that the U.S. has been subject to terrorist attacks because of the many U.S. bases throughout the world. According to this belief, if the U.S. followed a non-interventionist policy, 9/11 would have never happened.
Yet Paul and others who subscribe to this view have serious facts to wrestle with. First is that these other nations, such as Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, that are very much non-interferers in our modern world, are also subject to terrorist attacks. These countries are not "occupiers," in Ron Paul's parlance, but somehow they fall subject to attacks nonetheless. Secondly, the U.S. leaving its bases and involvement in Beirut as well as Somalia after suffering losses in attacks and conflicts has only encouraged radical Islamists rather than caused them to cease. In the theoretical framework of non-interventionists, this should have appeased those wishing to visit harm upon America.
In light of 9/11, however, it is highly probable that radical Islamists had already been at war with the U.S. since before any base went up in Beirut or Somalia. Said Islamists would sooner declare a fatwa than accept a withdrawal of troops. In the specific cases mentioned above, the U.S., in their eyes, was perceived to lack the resolve to fight after lives were lost and the stakes were raised.
The power-projection that the U.S. possesses is what aids so greatly in protecting America, freedom, and democracy throughout the world. If the U.S. withdraws its troops everywhere, it sacrifices an important role in shaping the world in a positive way. This does not mean that interference is always the answer, however, It requires good judgment and prudence to choose from the forms, quantity, and variations of statecraft. This includes the "use of assets or the resources and tools (economic, military, intelligence, [and] media)"3.
If the U.S. steps aside as the principal shaper of the world, who will step up to fulfill the role? China is already on the rise, advancing its economy greatly in the past decade. Its military, already quite large, is growing in its diversity of logistic capability and mobility.
China already possesses nuclear weapons and now its first aircraft carrier. It did not take long for China to move from a coastal force to having a small fleet. How long will their "good will missions" last until they want to further expand their own power projection? The possible foundation for this is already in the works.
By constantly undermining the Western powers on the U.N. Security Council, the Chinese have also sent messages in the new scramble for Africa that they do not care about the state of a developing country as long as it benefits them. Namibia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe are but a few of these nations that have seen significant investments and loans enter their country while their resources leave to China.
It is a strong trend in history that a nation that is democratic before economic prosperity tends to keep its democracy and improve upon it. Likewise, a nation that economically attempts to stand up before it lays the foundation for democracy faces high likelihood of having its resources exploited by the foreign investors, and by its own leaders. In addition to this, the power of the government lies in the hands of a few, and the majority of the people suffer bitterly as a result.
Take a look at oil-rich nations such as Nigeria, Turkmenistan, and now Syria that have been unable to achieve democracy or substantial freedom. How long will it take for these nations to achieve any form of democracy or basic freedoms if they are constantly exploited by un-democratic countries such as China? The foreign policy of China is the antithesis of the U.S.'s own when considering the fact that China is unresolved and apathetic when it comes to pressuring Syria to stop killing its own people. A regime that has killed five thousand is likely supported by Iran and has not received hard sanctions against it on account of China possessing veto power in the U.N. Security Council.
Should it come as a surprise that the 1989 protest in Tiananmen Square is censored in Chinese textbooks and, until recently, was also censored by Google? The People's Republic of China has even censored its American Idol knock-off because the people voted for a winner. The presence of the underground church and its endured suppression cast doubt upon the future of freedoms in China, as evaluated by Freedom House.
No, the U.S. must maintain its role in the world, not stepping down or backing away from its important part. The number-one problem the U.S. faces, though, is the challenge of the economy. This is a very valid point and a dark reality that the U.S. must come to terms with. The military and the defense department should not be the first to be put on the chopping block of funding cuts.
If frivolous spending is occurring, then yes, of course, get rid of it, be wise, and invest well. However, there already exist many ways to cut spending significantly and bring certainty back to employers and the economy. The Heritage Foundation lists 10 of these examples, in which there is significant government waste and flexibility already within the budget to make cuts (not to mention repealing ObamaCare), and not one of them includes the military.
Being a responsible steward of money is good not just for the U.S., but also for the world. The successes of the U.S. become the successes of others in the world; in the same manner, so do the failures. Those who advocate for billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid can take lessons from this; many occurrences take place in which the foreign aid that is given does more harm than good. This requires a true understanding of the reality of a problem, including the willingness to work through NGOs and appropriate forms of statecraft. Simply throwing money around is not enough.
Another point of criticism of interventionism comes in opposition to the notion of nation-building and the failures that are "guaranteed" in this regard. Iraq and Afghanistan are the most recent examples of this. Perhaps the first time a nation seeks freedom and just governance, it will fail, but nations such as the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and the United States have all taken their own unique routes to achieve a form of freedom and governance -- none of which worked the first time. To that effect, past failures and present challenges should not prevent the U.S. from supporting other nations that have an opportunity to achieve freedom. It takes leadership and calculated risks to pick and choose battles while exercising the wisdom to know how and when to intervene.
Yet another common rejection to the U.S.'s involvement in foreign affairs comes from non-interventionists invoking the founding fathers' warnings of foreign entanglements. Interestingly, the Constitution gave the basis for the U.S. to engage in foreign affairs to begin with. The Articles of Confederation did not allow for a unified diplomacy, effective foreign policy with other nations, or even the ability to make war (more accurately, it did not grant the power to levy taxes, making the ability to raise and maintain an army very difficult). Jefferson, who warned of entanglements, could not avoid foreign policy altogether himself. He simply urged caution, as Washington did, when it comes to foreign entanglements. This was the placement not of an absolute to never be involved with the world, but rather of an absolute to seek a higher standard than others. And when the U.S. falls short, be encouraged by the fact that the U.S.'s aims are higher than the rest.
The modern world is globalized, connected, and increasingly dangerous. The U.S. should be careful but not timid, while being willing to engage oppression and tyranny whenever and wherever they may appear. Circling the wagons would be unjust for freedom, democracy, and humanity everywhere. Missed opportunities and failed attempts have happened in Somalia, Rwanda, Iran, Bosnia, and most recently in Iraq with the Christians. Responsibility, good judgment, and a resolve to learn and adapt to new challenges -- not the neutrality of non-interventionism -- should be characteristic of the U.S.'s foreign policy stance.
To sit back and watch genocide occur is of the same neutrality that led to Hitler's rise to power. As Elie Wiesel said, "[n]eutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." A belief in practicing non-interference is indicative of the appeasement which Reagan warned about; it is perilous, and just as foolish as devastating an economy and weakening a country from within.
Josh Holler served as an Infantry Marine with 1st Battalion 7th Marine Regiment on two tours to Iraq. He is currently on the board of directors for Uganda N.O.W. Outreach and is pursuing a degree in international relations from Wheaton College. You can follow him on twitter @Josh Holler.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1Ross, Dennis. "Preface: X." Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008.
2Huntington, Samuel P. "American Ideals versus American Institutions." Political Science Quarterly 97.1 (1982): 1-37.
3Mead, Walter Russell. "Chapter 1: The American Foreign Policy Tradition." Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. New York: Knopf, 2001. 24-25.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/the_myth_and_danger_of_non-interventionism.html
-
An interesting read, GM. Thank you.
-
The State of the World: Explaining U.S. Strategy
By George Friedman | February 28, 2012
The fall of the Soviet Union ended the European epoch, the period in which European power dominated the world. It left the United States as the only global power , something for which it was culturally and institutionally unprepared. Since the end of World War II, the United States had defined its foreign policy in terms of its confrontation with the Soviet Union. Virtually everything it did around the world in some fashion related to this confrontation. The fall of the Soviet Union simultaneously freed the United States from a dangerous confrontation and eliminated the focus of its foreign policy.
In the course of a century, the United States had gone from marginal to world power. It had waged war or Cold War from 1917 until 1991, with roughly 20 years of peace between the two wars dominated by the Great Depression and numerous interventions in Latin America. Accordingly, the 20th century was a time of conflict and crisis for the United States. It entered the century without well-developed governmental institutions for managing its foreign policy. It built its foreign policy apparatus to deal with war and the threat of war; the sudden absence of an adversary inevitably left the United States off balance.
After the Cold War
The post-Cold War period can be divided into three parts. A simultaneous optimism and uncertainty marked the first, which lasted from 1992 until 2001. On one hand, the fall of the Soviet Union promised a period in which economic development supplanted war. On the other, American institutions were born in battle, so to speak, so transforming them for a time of apparently extended peace was not easy. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both pursued a policy built around economic growth, with periodic and not fully predictable military interventions in places such as Panama, Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo.
These interventions were not seen as critical to U.S. national security. In some cases, they were seen as solving a marginal problem, such as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega's drug trafficking. Alternatively, they were explained as primarily humanitarian missions. Some have sought a pattern or logic to these varied interventions; in fact, they were as random as they appeared, driven more by domestic politics and alliance pressures than any clear national purpose. U.S. power was so overwhelming that these interventions cost relatively little and risked even less.
The period where indulgences could be tolerated ended on Sept. 11, 2001. At that point, the United States faced a situation congruent with its strategic culture. It had a real, if unconventional, enemy that posed a genuine threat to the homeland. The institutions built up during and after World War II could function again effectively. In an odd and tragic way, the United States was back in its comfort zone, fighting a war it saw as imposed on it.
The period from 2001 until about 2007 consisted of a series of wars in the Islamic world. Like all wars, they involved brilliant successes and abject failures. They can be judged one of two ways. First, if the wars were intended to prevent al Qaeda from ever attacking the United States again in the fashion of 9/11, they succeeded. Even if it is difficult to see how the war in Iraq meshes with this goal, all wars involve dubious operations; the measure of war is success. If, however, the purpose of these wars was to create a sphere of pro-U.S. regimes, stable and emulating American values, they clearly failed.
By 2007 and the surge in Iraq, U.S. foreign policy moved into its present phase. No longer was the primary goal to dominate the region. Rather, it was to withdraw from the region while attempting to sustain regimes able to defend themselves and not hostile to the United States. The withdrawal from Iraq did not achieve this goal; the withdrawal from Afghanistan probably will not either. Having withdrawn from Iraq, the United States will withdraw from Afghanistan regardless of the aftermath. The United States will not end its involvement in the region, and the primary goal of defeating al Qaeda will no longer be the centerpiece.
President Barack Obama continued the strategy his predecessor, George W. Bush, set in Iraq after 2007. While Obama increased forces beyond what Bush did in Afghanistan, he nevertheless accepted the concept of a surge -- the increase of forces designed to facilitate withdrawal. For Obama, the core strategic problem was not the wars but rather the problem of the 1990s -- namely, how to accommodate the United States and its institutions to a world without major enemies.
The Failure of Reset
The reset button Hillary Clinton gave to the Russians symbolized Obama's strategy. Obama wanted to reset U.S. foreign policy to the period before 9/11, a period when U.S. interventions, although frequent, were minor and could be justified as humanitarian. Economic issues dominated the period, and the primary issue was managing prosperity. It also was a period in which U.S.-European and U.S.-Chinese relations fell into alignment, and when U.S.-Russian relations were stable. Obama thus sought a return to a period when the international system was stable, pro-American and prosperous. While understandable from an American point of view, Russia, for example, considers the 1990s an unmitigated disaster to which it must never return.
The problem in this strategy was that it was impossible to reset the international system. The prosperity of the 1990s had turned into the difficulties of the post-2008 financial crisis. This obviously created preoccupations with managing the domestic economy, but as we saw in our first installment , the financial crisis redefined the way the rest of the world operated. The Europe, China and Russia of the 1990s no longer existed, and the Middle East had been transformed as well.
During the 1990s, it was possible to speak of Europe as a single entity with the expectation that European unity would intensify. That was no longer the case by 2010. The European financial crisis had torn apart the unity that had existed in the 1990s, putting European institutions under intense pressure along with trans-Atlantic institutions such as NATO. In many ways, the United States was irrelevant to the issues the European Union faced. The Europeans might have wanted money from the Americans, but they did not want 1990s-style leadership.
China had also changed. Unease about the state of its economy had replaced the self-confidence of the elite that had dominated during the 1990s in China. Its exports were under heavy pressure, and concerns about social stability had increased. China also had become increasingly repressive and hostile, at least rhetorically, in its foreign policy.
In the Middle East, there was little receptivity to Obama's public diplomacy. In practical terms, the expansion of Iranian power was substantial. Given Israeli fears over Iranian nuclear weapons, Obama found himself walking a fine line between possible conflict with Iran and allowing events to take their own course.
Limiting Intervention
This emerged as the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. Where previously the United States saw itself as having an imperative to try to manage events, Obama clearly saw that as a problem. As seen in this strategy, the United States has limited resources that have been overly strained during the wars. Rather than attempting to manage foreign events, Obama is shifting U.S. strategy toward limiting intervention and allowing events to proceed on their own.
Strategy in Europe clearly reflects this. Washington has avoided any attempt to lead the Europeans to a solution even though the United States has provided massive assistance via the Federal Reserve. This strategy is designed to stabilize rather than to manage. With the Russians, who clearly have reached a point of self-confidence, the failure of an attempt to reset relations resulted in a withdrawal of U.S. focus and attention in the Russian periphery and a willingness by Washington to stand by and allow the Russians to evolve as they will. Similarly, whatever the rhetoric of China and U.S. discussions of redeployment to deal with the Chinese threat, U.S. policy remains passive and accepting.
It is in Iran that we see this most clearly. Apart from nuclear weapons, Iran is becoming a major regional power with a substantial sphere of influence. Rather than attempt to block the Iranians directly, the United States has chosen to stand by and allow the game to play out, making it clear to the Israelis that it prefers diplomacy over military action, which in practical terms means allowing events to take their own course.
This is not necessarily a foolish policy. The entire notion of the balance of power is built on the assumption that regional challengers confront regional opponents who will counterbalance them. Balance-of-power theory assumes the leading power intervenes only when an imbalance occurs. Since no intervention is practical in China, Europe or Russia, a degree of passivity makes sense. In the case of Iran, where military action against its conventional forces is difficult and against its nuclear facilities risky, the same logic applies.
In this strategy, Obama has not returned to the 1990s. Rather, he is attempting to stake out new ground. It is not isolationism in its classic sense, as the United States is now the only global power. He appears to be engineering a new strategy, acknowledging that many outcomes in most of the world are acceptable to the United States and that no one outcome is inherently superior or possible to achieve. The U.S. interest lies in resuming its own prosperity; the arrangements the rest of the world makes are, within very broad limits, acceptable.
Put differently, unable to return U.S. foreign policy to the 1990s and unwilling and unable to continue the post-9/11 strategy, Obama is pursuing a policy of acquiescence. He is decreasing the use of military force and, having limited economic leverage, allowing the system to evolve on its own. Implicit in this strategy is the existence of overwhelming military force, particularly naval power.
Europe is not manageable through military force, and it poses the most serious long-term threat. As Europe frays, Germany's interests may be better served in a relationship with Russia. Germany needs Russian energy, and Russia needs German technology. Neither is happy with American power, and together they may limit it. Indeed, an entente between Germany and Russia was a founding fear of U.S. foreign policy from World War I until the Cold War. This is the only combination that could conceivably threaten the United States. The American counter here is to support Poland, which physically divides the two, along with other key allies in Europe, and the United States is doing this with a high degree of caution.
China is highly vulnerable to naval force because of the configuration of its coastal waters, which provides choke points for access to its shores. The ultimate Chinese fear is an American blockade, which the weak Chinese navy would be unable to counter, but this is a distant fear. Still, it is the ultimate American advantage.
Russia's vulnerability lies in the ability of its former fellow members of the Soviet Union, which it is trying to organize into a Eurasian Union, to undermine its post-Soviet agenda. The United States has not interfered in this process significantly, but it has economic incentives and covert influence it could use to undermine or at least challenge Russia. Russia is aware of these capabilities and that the United States has not yet used them.
The same strategy is in place with Iran. Sanctions on Iran are unlikely to work, as they are too porous and China and Russia will not honor them. Still, the United States pursues them not for what they will achieve but for what they will avoid -- namely, direct action. The assumption underlying U.S. quiescence, rhetoric aside, is that regional forces, the Turks in particular, will be forced to deal with the Iranians themselves, and that patience will allow a balance of power to emerge.
The Risks of Inaction
U.S. strategy under Obama is classic in the sense that it allows the system to evolve as it will, thereby allowing the United States to reduce its efforts. On the other hand, U.S. military power is sufficient that should the situation evolve unsatisfactorily, intervention and reversal is still possible. Obama has to fight the foreign policy establishment, particularly the U.S. Defense Department and intelligence community, to resist older temptations. He is trying to rebuild the foreign policy architecture away from the World War II-Cold War model, and that takes time.
The weakness in Obama's strategy is that the situation in many regions could suddenly and unexpectedly move in undesirable directions. Unlike the Cold War system, which tended to react too soon to problems, it is not clear that the current system won't take too long to react. Strategies create psychological frameworks that in turn shape decisions, and Obama has created a situation wherein the United States may not react quickly enough if the passive approach were to collapse suddenly.
It is difficult to see the current strategy as a permanent model. Before balances of power are created, great powers must ensure that a balance is possible. In Europe, within China, against Russia and in the Persian Gulf, it is not clear what the balance consists of. It is not obvious that the regional balance will contain emerging powers. Therefore, this is not a classic balance-of-power strategy. Rather it is an ad hoc strategy imposed by the financial crisis and its impact on psychology and by war-weariness. These issues cannot be ignored, but they do not provide a stable foundation for a long-term policy, which will likely replace the one Obama is pursuing now.
-
Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood: Unexpected Adversaries
March 6, 2012
ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images
A demonstrator steps on an ostrich egg with a drawing of Saudi King Abdullah on March 17 in Ankara
Summary
The political gains of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have breathed new life into long-suppressed political Islamist forces across the Arab world. While it may appear on the surface that Saudi Arabia is supportive of the political rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, its Sunni co-religionists, a quiet but growing dispute between Saudi Arabia and Turkey over the increasing regional clout of the Muslim Brotherhood reveals the Saudi royal family's long-standing aversion to the world's oldest and largest Islamist movement.
Analysis
In Egypt's first parliamentary elections since the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood's (MB's) Freedom and Justice Party won just under half of the seats available. The party, and by extension the MB, are expected to take a leading role in the next Egyptian government.
At first glance, an Islamist movement taking power in one of the Arab world's most significant countries would seem to be a development that Saudi Arabia -- a country where Islam is central to the state's cultural and political identity -- would welcome enthusiastically. However, Riyadh is increasingly worried about the political movement's growing popularity throughout the region, and the consequences that the rise of a republican form of Islamism may bring for the Saudi royal family's absolute monarchy.
Competing Intellectual Roots
The ideological and political divide between the Saudi political establishment and the MB is rooted in each of their histories. The majority of Saudi Arabia's citizenry adheres to Wahhabism, an ideology founded by Muhammad ibn Abdel-Wahhab, who sought to purify the creed and religious practices of Muslims in 18th-century Arabia. Wahhabism was based on ibn Abdel-Wahhab's austere interpretation of the teachings of the Salaf (the companions of the Prophet Mohammed and the subsequent two generations). Wahhabis thus prefer the term Salafists to describe their following. In the Salafist view, any deviation from the prophet's core religious principles represented a contamination of the religion and was rejected outright.
An alliance was forged in 1744 between ibn Abdel-Wahhab and the patriarch of the Saudi ruling family, Muhammad bin Saud, effectively dividing the religious and political domains of the Saudi state. With the al Saud family running the political affairs of the state, the descendants and associates of ibn Abdel-Wahhab were able to exert their authority through the religious establishment without needing to engage in political activity.
The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, took a more adaptive approach toward Islam. Blending modern Western political thought with Islamic tradition, the movement that the MB founded saw Islamic ideology as a political remedy to the ills that had afflicted the Islamic world in the preceding several centuries. By 1928, when Hassan al-Banna founded the MB in Egypt, it had more than two generations of Islamic political thought in the late Ottoman period to draw on in making the case that a political ideology embedded in Islam constituted the necessary response to European secularism. This would help revive the Islamic world and effectively compete with the West. In contrast to the largely apolitical Salafists, the MB Islamists actively sought the creation of Islamic states throughout the Arab and Muslim world to counter the rise of secular Arab nationalism.
Threats to the Saudi Monarchy
When the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was firmly established in 1932, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was still in its nascent stages and thus did not pose a threat to the Saudi royal family. However, by the late 1940s the MB not only had emerged as a major social and political movement in Egypt, but it was also spreading as an organization across the Arab world. At this point, the Saudi royal family started to view the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood's variant of Islamism with suspicion. After all, the Brotherhood's call for a republican form of Islamic governance stood in stark contrast to the monarchical system from which the Saudi royals derived their power.
But before they could deal with MB-style Islamism, the Saudi royals had an even bigger threat to address. The founding of the Egyptian republic in 1952 under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser marked the advent of secular left-wing Arab nationalism in the region. With Soviet backing, Nasser made it his mission to export his ideology to the Arab world. Nasserism threatened to rip the carefully balanced foundation of the Saudi kingdom out from under the Saudi royals. At the same time, the secular-nationalist movement also impeded the rise of the political Islamists and drove many of the MB groups in the Arab world underground.
The spread of Nasserism thus led to a strange, temporary alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi royal family. The Saudi royal family tried to use the Muslim Brotherhood to counter Nasserism across the Arab world, while many MB leaders fled to the Saudi kingdom for refuge. Among these leaders was Muhammad Qutb, the brother of MB figure Sayyid Qutb, who was one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of the 20th century and was executed in Egypt in 1966.
An exchange of ideas between the two camps was almost inevitable, as Salafists and MB Islamists joined in fighting Soviet-backed Nasserism throughout the Islamic world. Afghanistan was perhaps the most visible battleground, where volunteer fighters from both the Salafist and MB Islamist trends shared ideas, resulting in some degree of synthesis of thought. The MB ideology more or less retained its basic character during this time, but Salafism, which had been largely devoid of political philosophy, became heavily influenced by the ideas of prominent figures like Sayyid Qutb, thereby diluting the Salafist support network in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the most notable example of this dynamic was the relationship between Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian religious scholar affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and the leader of the Arab fighters in 1980s Afghanistan. Through Azzam's mentoring, bin Laden's Salafist ideas underwent a radical transformation. It was not until Ayman al-Zawahiri began mentoring bin Laden in the early 1990s that bin Laden began to embrace jihadism.
The Spread of Islamism to the Kingdom
The Saudi monarchy witnessed its first major Islamist challenge in 1979, when the Iranian revolution led to the foundation of an Islamic republic. This was the first modern example of an Islamic state, the creation of which supported the Muslim Brotherhood's premise that a state can be ruled under Islamic norms. Though the Saudi royals were concerned that the Iranian revolution would inspire similar transformations across the Islamic world, they could take comfort in the fact that the ethno-sectarian makeup of the mainly Persian Shiite state would limit its ability to export its Islamist model to the mostly Sunni Arab world. The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, during which the region was largely split along ethno-sectarian lines, also helped Saudi Arabia contain the Islamist threat from Iran.
What the Saudi royals could not prevent was the spread of Islamist ideas in the kingdom itself. This became clear in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. After Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait in an attempt to change the regional balance of power, the Saudis relied heavily on the United States to ensure Saudi Arabia's national security. The monarchy was harshly criticized by many in the Saudi religious establishment as well as civil society because the war had laid bare the inherent weakness of the kingdom. Calls for reform grew in intensity among a group of Sunni religious scholars who sought the rights to critique the government, widen the sphere of policy-making beyond the royal family and hold the Saudi rulers accountable for their policy decisions. This reformist trend was referred to as the Sahwah, or awakening.
The Saudi royals first attempted to appease these Salafist scholars as well as the non-religious voices of dissent by issuing the Basic Law, the country's first attempt at and closest thing to a constitutional framework, in 1992. The move only emboldened the reformists, eventually leading in 1994 to a government crackdown on the dissenters, which led to the arrest of many prominent ulema, or religious scholars. The crackdown exacerbated rifts within the Salafist establishment. Those who remained loyal to the kingdom and remained strict adherents to traditional Salafist ideas were pitted against those who had taken a critical stance on the monarchy. The former accused the latter of being Islamist deviants and branded them Ikhwanis and Qutbis, negative references to the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb, respectively.
Though the Salafist splits endured in the early 1990s, the Saudi royal family contained the Sahwah trend at home and was relieved to see the MB kept under tight control by the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian regimes. However, another Islamist threat was developing under the leadership of bin Laden, whose move to engage in armed rebellion against corrupt regimes and their international patron, the United States, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Sayyid Qutb.
Bin Laden had already broken with the al Saud family over its decision to allow half a million U.S. troops to be stationed in the kingdom during the Gulf War. At the same time, a large number of celebrated Saudi veterans of the 1979-1989 insurgency in Afghanistan were returning home with ideas that fused together jihad, Islamic governance and an intense anger toward the al Saud family for allowing U.S. troops to use their country as a base from which to kill Muslims in Iraq. In the early 1990s, bin Laden still engaged in debates with the monarchy over its policies, but the monarchy cast aside bin Laden's transnational jihadist views as another deviant, and thus illegitimate, extension of the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamist ideology.
Post-9/11 Complications
The 9/11 attacks put the Saudi royal family in the uncomfortable position of having to answer to the West for al Qaeda's radical interpretation of Salafism. The United States, unlikely to see the nuances of Salafism as the Saudis did, saw the radical fringe of Salafism espoused by al Qaeda as the Saudi kingdom's responsibility to contain.
By 2003, Saudi Arabia had become a major target of the jihadist movement and saw an urgent need to drastically reform Salafism in the kingdom to both keep the royal family standing and crush the jihadist threat. A major effort was initiated by the kingdom to reinforce its historical alliance with the ulema. The message was fairly simple: If al Qaeda's rebellion succeeded on the Arabian Peninsula, the Saudi royals would not be able to hold the Western powers back from intervening, thereby creating an even bigger crisis of legitimacy for the royal family and the ulema that could break apart the foundation of the Saudi state.
The bulk of the ulema received the message. The same religious, tribal, security and commercial channels that al Qaeda relied on to build its network were turned on the group when religious leaders aligned with the royal family led a campaign to expose al Qaeda's ideological deviance from traditional Salafist thought and rapidly undercut the legitimacy of the jihadist movement in the kingdom.
But the Saudis still faced a major legitimacy issue. The Saudi government's efforts to reform Salafism were designed to exclude any notion of political reform that would threaten the monarchy. The jihadist movement had already made the case that political dialogue with the Saudi rulers to avoid rebellion was impossible when there were no political institutions in the kingdom to work through to begin with. At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood used the rise of al Qaeda to distinguish itself as the legitimate Islamist mainstream while labeling the Salafists, al Qaeda and their affiliates as the radical fringe.
Where they were permitted to participate, Islamist political forces across the region began rising to power via elections. In 2002 alone, MB-style Islamist political forces in Turkey, Morocco and Pakistan made substantial gains in polls. In 2005 candidates from the still-banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, running as independents, won 25 percent of the parliamentary seats. That same year, the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood took the majority of seats won by Sunnis in the second post-Saddam Hussein parliamentary elections. Even a militant strand of MB ideology, Hamas, swept the polls in the Gaza Strip when it made its electoral debut in 2006.
In a more isolated case in Bahrain, where the Sunni monarchy rules over a mostly Shiite population, the Saudi and Bahraini royals resorted to supporting both Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood in the broader strategic interest of countering the main Shiite parliamentary bloc.
Saudi Arabia was thus caught between the jihadists of al Qaeda and the Islamist political movements that derived from the Brotherhood. Further complicating matters for the kingdom were the repeated calls by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other U.S.-backed Arab allies to move toward democratic reforms. From the Saudi point of view, a democratic opening would only help the MB by legitimizing their Islamist political ideology and undermining the monarchy. Saudi Arabia was able to manage this array of challenges in the 2000s, but the Arab unrest that defined the region in 2011 is once again threatening to unhinge Saudi Arabia's containment strategy toward Islamism.
The Saudi Response to the 'Arab Spring'
The spread of Arab unrest from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula has compounded the number of threats facing the Saudi kingdom. At the most basic level, Saudi Arabia has been deeply disconcerted by the fall of long-standing autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. These were all leaders who emerged from the Nasserist tradition, but the very idea that these once-stalwart regimes have succumbed to domestic pressures has made the Saudi royal family nervous for itself and its fellow Arab monarchies. The last thing Saudi Arabia wanted to hear in the midst of the unrest was more democratic pronouncements from the United States that would embolden the Saudi reformist camp.
Yemen's political crisis, which Saudi Arabia had no choice but to mediate, has reopened fissures in the state and provided jihadists from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with an opportunity to try to revive their militant nodes in the Saudi kingdom and greater space for the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood, the al-Islah party.
Then there is the issue of Iran. The spread of Shiite unrest in the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, where it threatens the minority Sunni monarchy in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province, has reinforced a Saudi imperative to contain Iran's regional rise. Once the unrest spread to Syria, a close ally of the Iranian regime, Saudi Arabia (along with Turkey, the United States, Qatar and other Arab states) recognized a historic opportunity to dislodge Iran from the Levant. The challenge Saudi Arabia faces is that its containment strategy against Iran in Syria runs counter to Saudi Arabia's imperative to contain Islamism as a political ideology.
The Muslim Brotherhood has factored prominently into nearly every case of Arab unrest. The strength of the MB branches varies greatly from country to country, but even after decades of political repression, the MB and its affiliates have been able to maintain the largest and most organized civil society networks. When power vacuums are created in autocratic states, the MB networks are typically best positioned to convert public support for their social services into votes. This dynamic was most clearly illustrated in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood's political wing emerged as the single-largest party in the parliament. More liberal incarnations of the MB in Tunisia and Morocco also made significant political gains in 2011.
The unrest in Syria represents yet another complication for the Saudi regime. Saudi Arabia is certainly enticed by the prospect of undercutting Iran's leverage in the Levant, but it also cannot ignore the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood as a powerful force in the opposition movement. The Sunni armed resistance operating under the label of the Free Syrian Army takes care to publicly distance itself from any Islamist ideology in the hopes of attracting Western support, but local anecdotes and the limited polling that has been done by journalists embedded among Sunni protesters has so far revealed strong support for the MB should the political struggle come to a vote.
Saudi Arabia is thus caught between a geopolitical imperative to contain Iran and a domestic strategic imperative to contain Islamism as a political force. This dilemma has put Saudi Arabia directly at odds with Turkey, the rising regional counterweight to Iran and Saudi Arabia's co-collaborator in backing the Syrian Sunni opposition against the al Assad regime. Turkey's own liberal Islamism, shaped by Sufi Islamic culture, Ottoman religious values and Kemalist secularism, is distinct from the MB's conservative model of Arab Islamism and allows far more room for secularist practices, but the two strands share a basic ideological principle in using Islam as a path toward governance. Whereas Turkey is actively trying to mold the MB in Syria according to its own moderate Islamist vision, Saudi Arabia would like nothing more than to see the MB marginalized in the Syrian opposition.
Saudi Arabia has resorted to its old tactics of funneling support to Salafists to serve as a counter to the MB Islamists. In Egypt, for example, the Salafist bloc surprised much of the Egyptian populace and wider region when it came out with more than a quarter of the seats in both the upper and lower houses of parliament, coming second only to the Brotherhood. Saudi Arabia reportedly played an important role in providing funding and support to the Salafist bloc. In Syria, Saudi Arabia is also likely to channel its support to Salafist groups to compete with Turkey's backing of the MB.
The strategy of supporting Salafists comes with risks, however. The Salafists were latecomers to politics, whereas the MB was born as a political movement, and the Salafists lack the broad appeal of the MB Islamists and their affiliates. The Salafists, in sticking to a more puritanical strain of thought, have not engaged in the same intellectual rigor that the Islamists have in evolving their political ideology. In the classical Salafist view, it is anathema to think of the law of man supplanting the law of God. Though the Salafists have proved capable of making notable political gains in Egypt and can at the very least undermine the MB's ability to dominate the broader Islamist political scene, they alone cannot compete effectively with the MB ideology.
Moreover, there are a range of Salafists in the Levant who have embraced jihadism and have been utilized by various state intelligence agencies in the region to carry out attacks. These Salafist-jihadists may be a useful tool for Saudi Arabia to use to try to destabilize and ultimately topple the Syrian regime in order to counter Iran. However, given the evolution of Salafist-jihadists, especially over the past decade, it is unlikely that Saudi Arabia's control over Salafists in the Levant is as tight as it would like it to be.
Divisions among foreign backers of the Syrian opposition constitute one of many impediments to the mission in Syria. The United States and other Western stakeholders are already unnerved by the idea of secularism giving way to Islamism in Syria. They are certainly not going to be supportive of a Saudi strategy that favors more radical Salafists over those who at least present themselves as moderates. Turkey is also much closer to the Syrian situation than Saudi Arabia, and Turkey is not going to pull back from its agenda to see the MB rise in Syria as a dominant political force.
The Risks of Accommodating MB-Style Islamists
Whether or not the Saudi royals are ready for the challenge, the MB Islamists are on the rise and have far more room to expand their political legitimacy than they did one year ago. In the past, Saudi Arabia could rely on its shared interests with Arab regimes, particularly in Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, to keep Islamists tightly contained. Now, even in cases where the regimes have remained intact, Arab leaders are having to make political concessions to Islamists for fear of creating a larger conflict at home and inviting more pressure from the West to undergo democratic reforms.
Saudi Arabia is still deliberating how exactly to manage this Islamist threat. Debates are likely under way within the royal family over whether Saudi Arabia has no other choice but to reach an accommodation with some of the more viable MB-like Islamist organizations. Such an accommodation would allow Saudi Arabia a means of influencing the political evolution of the states in question and would theoretically develop a unified Sunni bulwark against Iran.
But this problem is not just confined to the foreign policy sphere. If Saudi Arabia decided to work with the MB abroad, it would be only a matter of time before the royal family faced an emboldened reformist movement at home. The reformist trend, largely based in the Red Sea coastal region of Hejaz, is backed by such Saudi notables as business tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and has the potential to develop into a broader movement.
The Saudi royals are deeply divided over how to manage this issue when it emerges in Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah and the al Faisal clan have been more open to the idea of limited Salafist democratization, but the king's most likely successor, Crown Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz of the Sudeiri clan, has taken a far more conservative approach toward reforms and wants to see the religious and political affairs of the state clearly delineated, in line with the kingdom's founding principles. Complicating matters further, those currently debating this topic among the current Saudi leadership are all very old and, in some cases, approaching their deathbed. When the second generation of Saudi rulers takes over in the next decade, it is unlikely to agree on how to divide power, much less how to manage a growing Islamist threat to the monarchy.
The rise of political Islamists challenges the historical Saudi claim that their ulema-backed political system is the authentic model of governance, whereas parliamentary elections and Islam simply cannot coexist. Indeed, the political gains of the MB and its affiliates across the region have exposed the obsolescence of the Saudi model and have raised questions about the future moves of the nontraditional Salafists who carry political ambitions. To date, the dominant question confronting Saudi Arabia has been whether it can manage a division of power within the monarchy once the sons of the kingdom's founder are gone. An equally critical question for the longer term is whether the Saudi royals will be able to manage what may be an inevitable transition to a legitimate constitutional monarchy.
-
This is the sort of big overview piece that this thread is about. Though it has some glib moments, there are points worthy of reflection.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204909104577233073232254742.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
By Walter Russell Mead
The Middle East is on fire. As waves of populist, ethnic and religious unrest sweep the region, long-established regimes totter like ninepins, violent conflicts explode in once-quiet countries, and all the rules seem up for grabs.
The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is on life support and Iran is marching steadily toward obtaining a nuclear weapon. And even as President Obama assures us that he has Israel's back and "will not countenance" Iran getting a nuclear weapon, as he did this week, his administration speaks about "leading from behind" and of a "pivot toward Asia."
Many observers see all this as reflecting a sharp decline in American power. But the reality is more complicated and less dramatic. The reality is that the United States remains the paramount power in the region and will remain committed to it for a long time to come.
In all the tumult and upheaval, it's easy to miss the main point: America's interests in the Middle East remain simple and in relatively good shape. The U.S. wants a balance of power in the region that prevents any power or coalition of powers inside or outside the region from being able to block the flow of oil to world markets by military means. It wants Israel to be secure. And in the middle to long term, it hopes to see the establishment of stable, democratic governments that can foster economic growth and peace.
If it must, the U.S. will act directly and on its own to achieve these goals. But given its global responsibilities and the multitude of issues in which it is concerned, the U.S. by nature is a burden-sharing rather than a limelight-hogging power. It prefers to work with allies and partners, preferably regional partners.
Enlarge Image
ClosePaul Corio/Inxart.com
.In today's Middle East, core U.S. goals enjoy wide, even unprecedented support. As the Sunni Arab world joins hands with Europe, pushes back against Iran, and works to overthrow Syria's Bashar al-Assad, a strong coalition has formed around Washington's most urgent regional priority—the Iranian drive for regional hegemony capped by its nuclear program.
France and the Arab League cursed the U.S. when it invaded Iraq in 2003; in 2011 they seconded and promoted the overthrow of Libya's Gadhafi. Turkey hesitated but joined. Now, as the crisis in Syria sharpens once again, U.S. objectives command enormous support across the region.
If this is decline, we could use more of it.
Yet those who believe the U.S. can now turn its full attention on Asia, ignoring the unhappy Middle East, miss the degree to which U.S. interests remain deeply bound up in the fate of the region. In recent weeks, rising Middle East tensions have helped drive up the price of gasoline in the U.S. More price increases will anger voters, scare consumers, and could well knock the nascent U.S. economic recovery on its head.
For President Obama, those developments would pretty much doom his re-election efforts. The same will be true of his successors. Even as the U.S. reduces its direct dependence on Middle East oil, the global nature of the world oil market, and the effect of supply insecurity in other major markets, which affect our economy given the globalization of commerce, means that American presidents will simply not be able to set this region off to the side. It is easier to pivot toward Asia than to pivot away from the Middle East. The reality is that the U.S. will have to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The U.S. government first began to play a major role in Middle East power politics after World War II. (As late as World War I, the U.S. stayed resolutely away, refusing to declare war on the Ottoman Empire and rejecting proffered League of Nations mandates over Armenia and Palestine.) That role has never been particularly pleasant. During much of the Cold War, public opinion in much of the Middle East favored the Soviets. America's relations with Israel were never popular in the Arab nations. Friendly regimes left over from the British era toppled in many countries, yielding to radical and anti-American juntas and dictators.
The U.S. changed alliances many times during the Cold War. Egypt started out as a pro-Western country, shifted to radical socialist nationalism, and came back to the West in the late 1970s. Iraq and Iran turned from staunch allies of the U.S. to bitter opponents. The Gulf states and the Saudis had little love for the U.S., but their interests lay so close to ours that most of the time alliances prospered even if friendship soured.
Today the grounds of alliance are once again shifting, and in unpredictable ways. Turkey and the U.S. are closer than they were three years ago; Egypt and the U.S. are further apart. The Saudis if anything are impatient with U.S. moderation on Iran; here they and the Israelis are reciting from the same book of prayers.
Should political conditions change in Iran, the kaleidoscope could change again. Before 1979, the U.S. and Iran were close allies; new leadership in Tehran might seek to rebuild the relationship. The Sunni world will likely divide if the Iranian threat diminishes, and as usual, some Sunni states will want U.S. support to protect them from others.
For now at least, the past looks like a good predictor for the next phase of American engagement with the Middle East. Often hated, rarely loved, the U.S. remains indispensable to the region's balance of power and to the security of the vulnerable oil-producing states on the Gulf. There are many people in the Middle East who would like the U.S. to bow out of the region, and there are many people in the U.S. who would like very much to leave.
For now, both groups must learn to accept disappointment.
Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College. His blog, Via Meadia, appears at the American Interest Online.
-
Second post of the day.
Obviously I could post this in the Israel thread, or the Miiddle East FUBAR thread, but I post it here for its discussion of balance of power geopolitics for the US.
====================================
A senior Hamas leader said Tuesday that the Palestinian Islamist movement would not fight against Israel on behalf of Iran, the Guardian reported. The British daily quoted Gaza-based Hamas politburo member Salah al-Bardawil as saying, "If there is a war between two powers, Hamas will not be part of such a war." Al-Bardawil went on to say that Hamas has never given its "complete loyalty" to Iran, and that their relationship "had been based on common interests."
Stratfor has never put much stock in the speculation that Hamas would automatically jump into the fray if Israel were to conduct a military strike against Iran's nuclear program. However, Hamas publicly stating that it will not fight against Israel on behalf of Iran is extremely significant.
First and most obviously, it means that Israel may not have to worry as much about attacks against its southern flank in the event that Israel takes military action against Iran. But even more significant, the statement underscores Hamas' efforts to join the mainstream of Sunni Arab politics in the wake of the Middle East unrest and the electoral gains of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere. Not only is Hamas being courted by different Arab states, particularly Egypt and Jordan, it is trying to take advantage of the emerging climate within the region to gain recognition as a legitimate political entity.
In order to do so, the group appears to have come to the conclusion that it must distance itself from some of its patrons. In January, Hamas began criticizing the Iranian-allied Syrian regime after the crackdown on protesters, and in February the group moved its politburo-in-exile out of Damascus. With Hamas now declaring its unwillingness to fight on Iran's behalf, these moves are signs of the significant obstacles in Iran's path as it attempts to become a major player in the Middle East.
While Iran can exploit many divisions and rivalries throughout the region, ultimately the Islamic republic's influence is necessarily limited by facts outside its control. Iran’s dominant ethnicity, culture and language is Persian, and its dominant religious sect is Shia Islam. This places severe constraints on the degree to which it can penetrate a largely Sunni Arab Middle East. Likewise, there are many Arab actors who share certain interests with Iran, but they are not ready to unequivocally align with the Iranians due to the damage this sort of alliance could do to their relations with the West and elsewhere.
This situation works well for those who seek to contain an assertive Iran, i.e., the United States, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Arab states in general. From Washington's perspective, the rise of Sunni Islamist groups (mostly the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded forces) in the Arab world serves as a strong counter to Iranian expansionism. Conversely, Sunni Arab Islamism is at odds with American interests in the region, and Iran's own efforts to contain that movement serve U.S. interests.
This emerging fault line between Arab Sunni Islamism on one side and Iran and its Arab allies on the other is extremely unstable and liable to change, with the Syrian regime's long-term prospects for survival very much in question. However, the fault line does exist and is not going anywhere. With the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq complete and the removal of several reliable allies from power during the so-called Arab Spring -- chief among them Hosni Mubarak in Egypt -- U.S. influence in the region appears to be waning. However, the careful manipulation of actors on either side of that fault line could give the United States the tools it needs to secure its interests in the Middle East in the decades ahead.
-
By MELIK KAYLAN
Now that Vladimir Putin has allowed the Russian electorate to rubber-stamp him back into power, he can return with redoubled purpose to his consistently regressive interference in world affairs. That nobody is surprised at his obdurate defense of the regimes in Tehran and Damascus speaks volumes. Dictators support dictators, don't they?
At this point Mr. Putin apparently doesn't mind much that anyone should include him in that category. After all, if Putinism could be defined by any single principle, if it had a formula, it would have at its core the "power now people later" approach common to all strongmen. Less than 10 years before he ordered the 2008 invasion of Georgia in order to "protect" the separatist South Ossetians, he "solved" the Chechnya problem by ordering the scorched-earth obliteration of its capital, Grozny, where more civilians were killed than at Sreberniza and Homs combined.
And yet one shouldn't suspect Mr. Putin of sentimentality. He doesn't favor dictators for mere principle's sake. Iron-hard strategic calculations underpin his support for the Syria-Iran axis.
Russia is rebuilding its Soviet-era naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus, which allows Moscow to reassert a plausible Mediterranean threat to NATO. Syria also provides Iran with a front line against Israel via Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that too can be a most effective anti-Western arrowhead for Russia. When I covered the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, I learned that a year earlier Israel had stopped providing Tbilisi with antitank and anti-aircraft missiles because the Russians had threatened to supply Hezbollah with the same.
But in the end, the pivotal consideration in Mr. Putin's efforts to re-establish his country's superpower status centers on Iran. Syria is a domino. Without its Syrian ally, Iran would be almost totally isolated and crucially weakened. That Moscow cannot allow.
Why is Iran so central to Mr. Putin's global pretensions? Take a look at the Caspian Sea area map and the strategic equations come into relief. Iran acts as a southern bottleneck to the geography of Central Asia. It could offer the West access to the region's resources that would bypass Russia. If Iran reverted to pro-Western alignment, the huge reserves of oil and gas landlocked in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and the like could flow directly out to the world without a veto from Moscow.
According to an Oct. 16, 2008, Wall Street Journal report, Turkmenistan is "one of the world's hydrocarbon provinces" with enough natural gas to supply Europe's annual needs three times over. Similarly, Kazakhstan's Tengiz oil field is considered one of the world's largest. As things stand, these countries depend on Russian pipelines for their national income.
At stake here is not merely the liberation of a vast landmass from the Kremlin's yoke. The damage to Russian leverage would amount to a seismic shift in the global balance of power equal to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
Russia's gas and oil leverage over Turkey, Ukraine and much of Europe would evaporate. The Silk Road countries would finally reclaim their history since it was diverted forcibly toward Moscow in the 19th century. Their nominal post-Soviet independence would become a reality. Perhaps most irksome for Mr. Putin and his kind, large swaths of the non-Russian zone would prosper disproportionately in comparison to neighboring Russian Federation provinces.
After some 12 years in the Kremlin, Mr. Putin has failed to deliver prosperity and a hopeful future to much of his population. In return for their sacrifice, he has fed them inflated dreams of empire and superpower nostalgia which he has deliberately identified with his own judoka personality cult.
This is not a scenario in which free peoples voluntarily choose their destinies and alliances. They bow to what's good for them as determined by a kind of paternal supreme power.
If the mystique of Russian hegemony were to deflate, if formerly subject colonies suddenly rose to stability and affluence—as is happening in Georgia—Mr. Putin's threadbare illusionism would fall apart entirely. He would never recover from the triumph of freedom in Syria and Iran.
Mr. Kaylan is a writer in New York.
-
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/21/big_lies_about_jerusalem_washington_jews_White_House?page=full
-
By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
The world balance of power is changing. Countries like China, India, Turkey and Brazil are heard from more frequently and on a wider range of subjects. The European Union's most ambitious global project—creating a universal treaty to reduce carbon emissions—has collapsed, and EU expansion has slowed to a crawl as Europe turns inward to deal with its debt crisis. Japan has ceded its place as the largest economy in Asia to China and appears increasingly on the defensive in the region as China's hard and soft power grow.
The international chattering class has a label for these changes: American decline. The dots look so connectable: The financial crisis, say the pundits, comprehensively demonstrated the failure of "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have sapped American strength and, allegedly, destroyed America's ability to act in the Middle East. China-style "state capitalism" is all the rage. Throw in the assertive new powers and there you have it—the portrait of America in decline.
Actually, what's been happening is just as fateful but much more complex. The United States isn't in decline, but it is in the midst of a major rebalancing. The alliances and coalitions America built in the Cold War no longer suffice for the tasks ahead. As a result, under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, American foreign policy has been moving toward the creation of new, sometimes difficult partnerships as it retools for the tasks ahead.
From the 1970s to the start of this decade, the world was in what future historians may call the Trilateral Era. In the early '70s, Americans responded to the defeat in Vietnam and the end of the Bretton Woods era by inviting key European allies and Japan to join in the creation of a trilateral system. Western Europe, Japan and the U.S. accounted for an overwhelming proportion of the international economy in the noncommunist world. With overlapping interests on a range of issues, the trilateral powers were able to set the global agenda on some key questions.
Currency policy, the promotion of free trade, integrating the developing world into the global financial system, assisting the transition of Warsaw Pact economies into the Western World—the trilateralists had a lot to show for their efforts.
Enlarge Image
CloseCorbis
.The system worked particularly well for America. Europe and Japan shared a basic commitment to the type of world order that Americans wanted, and so a more cooperative approach to key policy questions enlisted the support of rich and powerful allies for efforts that tallied pretty closely with key long-term American goals.
It is this trilateral system—rather than American power per se—that is in decline today. Western Europe and Japan were seen as rising powers in the 1970s, and the assumption was that the trilateral partnership would become more powerful and effective as time passed. Something else happened instead.
Demographically and economically, both Japan and Europe stagnated. The free-trade regime and global investment system promoted growth in the rest of Asia more than in Japan. Europe, turning inward to absorb the former Warsaw Pact nations, made the fateful blunder of embracing the euro rather than a more aggressive program of reform in labor markets, subsidies and the like.
The result today is that the trilateral partnership can no longer serve as the only or perhaps even the chief set of relationships through which the U.S. can foster a liberal world system. Turkey, increasingly turning away from Europe, is on the road to becoming a more effective force in the Middle East than is the EU. China and India are competing to replace the Europeans as the most important non-U.S. economic actor in Africa. In Latin America, Europe's place as the second most important economic and political partner (after the U.S.) is also increasingly taken by China.
The U.S. will still be a leading player, but in a septagonal, not a trilateral, world. In addition to Europe and Japan, China, India, Brazil and Turkey are now on Washington's speed dial. (Russia isn't sure whether it wants to join or sulk; negotiations continue.)
New partnerships make for rough sledding. Over the years, the trilateral countries gradually learned how to work with each other—and how to accommodate one another's needs. These days, the Septarchs have to work out a common approach.
It won't be easy, and success won't be total. But even in the emerging world order, the U.S. is likely to have much more success in advancing its global agenda than many think. Washington is hardly unique in wanting a liberal world system of open trade, freedom of the seas, enforceable rules of contract and protection for foreign investment. What began as a largely American vision for the post-World War II world will continue to attract support and move forward into the 21st century—and Washington will remain the chairman of a larger board.
Despite all the talk of American decline, the countries that face the most painful changes are the old trilateral partners. Japan must live with a disturbing rival presence, China, in a region that, with American support, it once regarded as its backyard. In Europe, countries that were once global imperial powers must accept another step in their long retreat from empire.
For American foreign policy, the key now is to enter deep strategic conversations with our new partners—without forgetting or neglecting the old. The U.S. needs to build a similar network of relationships and institutional linkages that we built in postwar Europe and Japan and deepened in the trilateral years. Think tanks, scholars, students, artists, bankers, diplomats and military officers need to engage their counterparts in each of these countries as we work out a vision for shared prosperity in the new century.
The American world vision isn't powerful because it is American; it is powerful because it is, for all its limits and faults, the best way forward. This is why the original trilateral partners joined the U.S. in promoting it a generation ago, and why the world's rising powers will rally to the cause today.
Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College. His blog, Via Meadia, appears at the American Interest Online.
-
John Bolton: Obama taking credit for killing bin-Laden is like Nixon taking credit for landing on the moon
Posted by The Right Scoop The Right Scoop on April 20th, 2012 in Politics | 58 Comments
Bolton weighs in on Obama taking credit for Bush’s successes with regard to the killing of bin-Laden, saying that the only thing Obama really did was get out of the way. The intelligence that led us to bin-Laden came from the very thing Obama railed against and thus banned when becoming president, enhanced interrogations. So for him to take credit for killing bin-Laden, Bolton says, is like Nixon taking credit for America landing on the moon.
The entire interview is great as Bolton also weighs in on much more of Obama’s foreign policy, Iran, N.Korea, Russia, intelligence, START, defense budgets, international law, sovereignty, problems growing around the world.
http://www.therightscoop.com/bolton-obama-taking-credit-for-killing-bin-laden-is-like-nixon-taking-credit-for-landing-on-the-moon/
-
I don't know if this is official policy but this thinking strikes me as the most fuddled, mixed up, unclear, mixed message foreign policy thinking I have ever seen:
Blog'The War on Terror Is Over'
9:29 PM, Apr 23, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
In the wake of the Arab Spring, the Obama administration is grappling with how to handle Islamists, radical adherents to Islam. Particularly, the issue has come to the fore in regards to Egypt, which, as Reuel Marc Gerecht notes, "is now certain" to elect "an Islamist" as its leaders the next time the Egyptian people go to the polls.
But some in the Obama administration are now seeing things differently.
"The war on terror is over," a senior official in the State Department official tells the National Journal. "Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism."
This new outlook has, in the words of the National Journal, come from a belief among administration officials that "It is no longer the case, in other words, that every Islamist is seen as a potential accessory to terrorists."
The National Journal explains:
The new approach is made possible by the double impact of the Arab Spring, which supplies a new means of empowerment to young Arabs other than violent jihad, and Obama's savagely successful military drone campaign against the worst of the violent jihadists, al Qaida.
For the president himself, this new thinking comes from a "realiz[ation that] he has no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and other relatively 'moderate' Islamist groups emerging as lead political players out of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere."
This new outlook is radically different than what was expressed under President George W. Bush immediately after September 11, 2001. "Over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity," Bush said on November 6, 2001. "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror."
For President Barack Obama, it would seem, one can be both with us and against us--or not with us, but not quite against us.
© Copyright 2012 The Weekly Standard LLC - A Weekly Conservative Magazine & Blog. All Rights Reserved.
-
"The war on terror is over," a senior official in the State Department official tells the National Journal. "Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism."
Can you imagine that in WWII, with Hitler dead, we'd be ok with the emergence of a "legitimate nazism"? :roll:
-
So you equate "legitimate Islamism" with "legitimate Naziism"?
-
Yes. It's not accidental they were allied in WWII and there is still a relationship between neonazis and "islamists" today.
-
""It is no longer the case, in other words, that every Islamist is seen as a potential accessory to terrorists."
NO ONE ever said every single follower of Islam is a terrorist or potential terrorist. Did not these idiots hear Bush W say LOUD AND CLEAR that we are not at war with Islam?
The problem is many still do wish us all dead. Try figuring out which ones do and which ones don't.
-
Not every muslim is an islamist/jihadist, but every islamist/jihadist is a muslim. Thus, the bloody borders of islam across the planet.
-
As a Jew I can't think of a single Muslim country where I would feel at ease and I can think of more than a few where being a Jew would be a death sentence.
Perhaps we understand the word differently, but for me Islamist is something even more than Islam-- e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt instead of the Turkey that until not too long ago could ally with Israel.
Returning to CCP's interesting post, thanks in part to Baraq's efforts, Islamism IS becoming the fact in places where it wasn't the fact before. What posture is the US to take?
-
Strange to me that in Egypt the ruler we helped take down was our ally. Not so for the thugs in Syria. There is no world leadership when the US is absent.
Krauthammer: "...a coherent case for hands off could be made. That would be an honest, straightforward policy. Instead, the president, basking in the sanctity of the Holocaust Museum, proclaims his solemn allegiance to a doctrine of responsibility — even as he stands by and watches Syria burn."
---------------
While Syria Burns
If the U.S. is not prepared to intervene, we should be candid about it.
By Charles Krauthammer
Last year, President Obama ordered U.S. intervention in Libya under the grand new doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect.” Moammar Gaddafi was threatening a massacre in Benghazi. To stand by and do nothing “would have been a betrayal of who we are,” explained the president.
In the year since, the government of Syria has more than threatened massacres. It has carried them out. Nothing hypothetical about the disappearances, executions, indiscriminate shelling of populated neighborhoods. More than 9,000 are dead.
Obama has said that we cannot stand idly by. And what has he done? Stand idly by.
Yes, we’ve imposed economic sanctions. But as with Iran, the economic squeeze has not altered the regime’s behavior. Monday’s announced travel and financial restrictions on those who use social media to track down dissidents is a pinprick. No Disney World trips for the chiefs of the Iranian and Syrian security agencies. And they might now have to park their money in Dubai instead of New York. That’ll stop ’em.
Obama’s other major announcement — at Washington’s Holocaust Museum, no less — was the creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board.
I kid you not. A board. Russia flies plane loads of weapons to Damascus. Iran supplies money, trainers, agents, more weapons. And what does America do? Supports a feckless U.N. peace mission that does nothing to stop the killing. (Indeed, some of the civilians who met with the peacekeepers were summarily executed.) And establishes an Atrocities Prevention Board.
With multi-agency participation, mind you. The liberal faith in the power of bureaucracy and flowcharts, of committees and reports, is legend. But this is parody.
Now, there’s an argument to be made that we do not have a duty to protect. That foreign policy is not social work. That you risk American lives only when national security and/or strategic interests are at stake, not merely to satisfy the humanitarian impulses of some of our leaders.
But Obama does not make this argument. On the contrary. He goes to the Holocaust Museum to commit himself and his country to defend the innocent, to affirm the moral imperative of rescue. And then does nothing of any consequence.
His case for passivity is buttressed by the implication that the only alternative to inaction is military intervention — bombing, boots on the ground.
But that’s false. It’s not the only alternative. Why aren’t we organizing, training, and arming the Syrian rebels in their sanctuaries in Turkey? Nothing unilateral here. Saudi Arabia is already planning to do so. Turkey has turned decisively against Assad. And the French are pushing for even more direct intervention.
Instead, Obama insists that we can only act with support of the “international community,” meaning the U.N. Security Council — where Russia and China have a permanent veto. By what logic does the moral legitimacy of U.S. action require the blessing of a thug like Vladimir Putin and the butchers of Tiananmen Square?
Our slavish, mindless self-subordination to “international legitimacy” does nothing but allow Russia — a pretend post-Soviet superpower — to extend a protective umbrella over whichever murderous client it chooses. Obama has all but announced that Russia (or China) has merely to veto international actions — sanctions, military assistance, direct intervention — and the U.S. will back off.
For what reason? Not even President Clinton, a confirmed internationalist, would acquiesce to such restraints. With Russia prepared to block U.N. intervention against its client, Serbia, Clinton saved Kosovo by summoning NATO to bomb the hell out of Serbia, the Russians be damned.
If Obama wants to stay out of Syria, fine. Make the case that it’s none of our business. That it’s too hard. That we have no security/national interests there.
In my view, the evidence argues against that, but at least a coherent case for hands off could be made. That would be an honest, straightforward policy. Instead, the president, basking in the sanctity of the Holocaust Museum, proclaims his solemn allegiance to a doctrine of responsibility — even as he stands by and watches Syria burn.
If we are not prepared to intervene, even indirectly by arming and training Syrians who want to liberate themselves, be candid. And then be quiet. Don’t pretend the U.N. is doing anything. Don’t pretend the U.S. is doing anything. And don’t embarrass the nation with an Atrocities Prevention Board. The tragedies of Rwanda, Darfur, and now Syria did not result from lack of information or lack of interagency coordination, but from lack of will.
-
Funny how Buraq has empowered jihadists around the globe as president. Sure would be interesting to see the Rashid Khalidid speech he gave.....
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/04/28/friday-night-news-dump-obama-bypasses-congress-funds-palestinian-authority/comment-page-1/#comments
Friday night news dump: Obama bypasses Congress, funds Palestinian Authority
posted at 4:26 pm on April 28, 2012 by Ed Morrissey
Isn’t it funny what you can find out on Friday evening about what our executive branch does? For instance, Agence France-Presse reported last night that Barack Obama bypassed Congress to send $192 million to the Palestinian Authority, claiming that national security required the US to put money into Mahmoud Abbas’ pocket:
President Barack Obama has signed a waiver to remove curbs on funding to the Palestinian Authority, declaring the aid to be “important to the security interests of the United States.”
A $192 million aid package was frozen by the US Congress after the Palestinians moved to gain statehood at the United Nations last September.
But in a memo sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, published by the White House, the president said it was appropriate to release funds to the authority, which administers the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In signing the waiver, Obama instructed Clinton to inform Congress of the move, on the grounds that “waiving such prohibition is important to the national security interests of the United States.”
Congress deliberately froze those funds, and not just because of the statehood demand through UNESCO. Hamas, a terrorist organization, reconciled with Fatah and has rejoined the PA, which means we’re putting almost $200 million into the hands of a terrorist organization. The language of the Palestinian Accountability Act could not be clearer: “[N]o funds available to any United States Government department or agency … may be obligated or expended with respect to providing funds to the Palestinian Authority.” Obama literally waived that statutory language off yesterday afternoon.
The Times of Israel reported on the official White House explanation of why Obama did so:
The AFP news agency quoted White House spokesman Tommy Vietor as saying the $192 million aid package would be devoted to “ensuring the continued viability of the moderate PA government under the leadership of [Palestinian Authority] President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.”
Vietor added that the PA had fulfilled its major obligations, such as recognizing Israel’s right to exist, renouncing violence and accepting the Road Map for Peace.
Have they? They certainly haven’t done so since Hamas rejoined the PA in February. Hamas has refused to change its charter to recognize Israel or renounce violence, and certainly they have rejected the Road Map for Peace, which has been lying dead for years thanks to the PA’s refusal to seriously implement it. When Hamas broadcasts its recognition of Israel in Arabic — something that the PA has never done, to my knowledge — then perhaps the Obama administration’s claims can be taken seriously.
Andy McCarthy calls this a “triple play,” and slams this claim by Vietor as fantasy:
In the real world, the very immoderate PA has reneged on all its commitments. In addition to violating its obligations by unilaterally declaring statehood, the PA has also agreed to form a unity government with Hamas, a terrorist organization that is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The PA continues to endorse terrorism against Israel as “resistance.” Moreover, the PA most certainly does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. Back in November, for example, Adil Sadeq, a PA official writing in the official PA daily,Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, declared that Israelis
“have a common mistake, or misconception by which they fool themselves, assuming that Fatah accepts them and recognizes the right of their state to exist, and that it is Hamas alone that loathes them and does not recognize the right of this state to exist. They ignore the fact that this state, based on a fabricated [Zionist] enterprise, never had any shred of a right to exist…”
In sum, everything Obama is saying about Palestinian compliance is a lie. Even if we were not broke, we should not be giving the PA a dime. To borrow money so we can give it to them is truly nuts.
The White House knows it, too — which is why we only found out through the Friday night news dump.
-
This thread is for big picture themes of US foreign policy.
The latest details of Baraq's anti-Israel policies belong in the Israel thread please.
-
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/03/president_paul
Ron Paul's treatment by mainstream media, other Republican hopefuls, and the punditry makes me think the W.B. Yeats lines "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" also describe the year 2012 in the United States. Indeed, Paul's experience in the nomination campaign suggests U.S. politics lacks reasoned substance, common sense, and an understanding of what America's Founding Fathers intended.
Open up any newspaper to see the mess America has sunk itself into around the world: for example, facing off with China over a lone, non-American dissident whose safety has no relation to U.S. security. Yet today, Paul's call for staying out of other people's wars unless genuine U.S. national interests are at stake is deemed radical, immoral, even anti-American. Amazing.
-
Well, I'm hoping that will kick off a discussion , , , one for which I have insufficient energy at the moment due to being on what I hope will be the final couple of days of something nasty I picked up in Europe.
I will say for the moment that I take a contrary view of this matter concerning the Chinese dissident as my comments in the US-China thread have already noted.
I will also note the lack of notice that has been given to a Russian general threatening to militarily attack the US anti-missile bases in the works for eastern Europe. THIS IS EXTRAORDINARY AND SHOULD BE NOTED ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM AS SUCH. The silence from Baraq & Hillary is deafening.
It occurs to me that on a deeper level the two events are rather related.
-
Scheuer and Paul are entitled to their view of non-intervention and voters deserve that as an option to current policy. The competing view is peace through strength and, as suggested with Chinese dissident, help those when we can around the world gain their liberty.
Should the US have intervened in WWII? In hindsight, yes (MHO). In hindsight then, when? Perhaps sooner, at least for European nations like France watching Hitler 'not threatening their national security'. We lost nearly a half million Americans as it was, 60 million people killed overall. If that could have been stopped sooner, it should have been.
Paul: bin Laden and al Qaida attack because we violate their sovereignty with our presence in their lands.
Some truth, and some not. He operated from Afghanistan. Our presence there (prior to embassy bombing, USS Cole, 9/11) was to protect their sovereignty. He is from Saudi. In 1990 we moved in and protected their sovereignty. Many other examples of Americans on the side of Arabs and Muslims that OBL rhetoric (and Ron Paul) ignore. Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo come to mind, along with examples from WWII. It was Arab Muslims we were trying to free in Iraq. Not take their oil. We were blamed for encouraging an uprising previously and leaving them for slaughter. Saddam is now out; it isn't a 51st state and we pay full price for oil.
They kill because we breathe. We exist, we are infidels.
They kill because we protect Israel. To not protect Israel is unthinkable. MHO. What other allies do we not stand by? And how would that increase our security? Nonsense. Give them just that one victory/takeover in Israel, wherever and they will stop. Like Hitler??
Weakness is what Hitler saw in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland. Strength is what Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev saw in America - in varying degrees over time. Peace through weakness and non intervention is not as effective as peace through strength. Just an opinion - backed up in history.
Scheuer: "Nearly alone among Republicans and Democrats, Paul knows... the founders' warning against nonessential intervention in foreigners' affairs would be ruinous for America."
Thomas Jefferson is considered one of the Founders, wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as the first Secretary of State under Washington, second Vice President under Adams and third President of the United States. Jefferson immediately into his Presidency stood up to the Muslim militants and went to war with them over commercial shipping lanes, analogous to the free flow of oil out of the gulf today, not over genuine U.S. national security interests at our shore as defined by Ron Paul.
We were wrong to restore Kuwait. We were wrong to enforce the surrender agreement made by Saddam. We are wrong to defend Israel and were wrong in Desert Shield to stop Saddam from continuing his march. Then what?
What struck me about the Libertarians versus conservatives/neocons (and Democrats) during the Iraq war debate was their interest was only in our liberty, not anyone else's. But a lesson of our liberty is that it was won only with crucial help from overseas. The founders knew that.
The world is safer with east Europe free and Putin's Russia down to one republic than it would be if Soviet expansionism was allowed to continue. That was not very long ago and would NOT have been stopped without the credible threat of American interventionism.
Paul says we are attacked by bin Laden because we are in the Middle East, and he says bin Laden attacked us to draw us into the Middle East. Which is it? He says the mission was to kill one man. He does not acknowledge that our mission was the prevention of future attacks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAUzG-mV4p4
-
From Crafty on the Afpakia thread: "Further discussion really needs to address the deeper questions of American foreign policy, but for now for this thread I will say that IMHO Baraq has thrown away the last chance to get it right and that a truly heavy price will be paid much sooner and much more costly than is generally realized.
Pakistan has the world's fourth largest nuke stockpile and it is already a quasi-jihadi state. With Iran on its trajectory and the Russians threatening to take out our missile defenses in eastern Europe and Iran and Russia cozying up to the Chavez narco state in Venezuela and various accumulating Chinese moves in Latin America and the Carribean, we may be getting to Ron Paul's Fortress America much sooner than anyone realizes or cares for , , ,"
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/03/the_next_war
The conventional wisdom has it wrong. It is, in fact, likely that in the next decade, the United States will once again launch a military intervention, though with a smaller footprint than in years past. The threat from terrorist camps in weak, failed, or rogue states such as Yemen; the danger of civil wars or internecine conflicts that threaten stability in countries such as Sudan and South Sudan, and humanitarian crises that could cost tens of thousands of lives in places such as Syria and Somalia will not allow the option of intervention to be taken off the table.
-
Henninger: The Great Human-Rights Reversal
The Democratic left has conceded human rights to the conservatives. By DANIEL HENNINGER
It's a question that keeps coming up: Is it just everyone's imagination or has the human-rights agenda been demoted by Barack Obama?
The unflattering word often associated with Mr. Obama and human rights is "ambivalence." When Iranian students took to the streets in 2009, enduring beatings from security men, the president's muted reaction was noted. So too with the Arab Spring and when Libyans revolted against Moammar Gadhafi. Yes, the administration responded in time but, again, with "ambivalence."
Now comes a human-rights advocate from central casting: the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who showed up unannounced on Uncle Sam's Beijing doorstep. The U.S. government appeared displeased with Mr. Chen's ill-timed decision to go over the wall.
Liberals and Democrats who work on human-rights issues won't like to hear this, but with the Obama presidency, human rights has completed its passage away from the political left, across the center and into its home mainly on the right—among neoconservatives and evangelical Christian activists.
Conservatives didn't capture the issue. The left gave it away.
The official formulation of the left's revision of human rights came two months into the Obama presidency, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's widely noted comment in Beijing that the new administration would be going in a different direction: "Our pressing on those issues [human rights] can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis."
Human-rights groups went ballistic, perhaps on hearing their cause would compete for the president's time with the "global climate change crisis." Whether Iran, Libya or China, human rights as understood for a generation was on the back burner, with the heat off.
Human rights became an explicit concern of U.S. presidents under Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter in 1977 was not a man of the left. On foreign policy he was a starry-eyed liberal. He elevated the State Department's human-rights office to assistant-secretary status and gave the job to a fellow stargazer, Pat Derian.
Enlarge Image
CloseZuma Press
U.S. Embassy officials in transit with Chen Guangcheng (right).
.Most of Mr. Carter's human-rights initiatives fell apart, but the idea didn't die. In varying degrees, his successors all made human rights part of their formal agenda. Worth noting here is that in the late 1990s, Christian evangelical groups (the "religious right") began a successful effort to create an office of religious freedom inside the State Department. Today these Christian groups are the primary human-rights workers on behalf of Chinese and North Korean dissidents and refugees.
The big disruption, the event that drove the Democratic left off the human-rights train, was George W. Bush's "freedom agenda."
More than any previous president, George Bush joined human-rights issues to the support of democracy, including in Iraq. With the Bush presidency, human rights and democracy-promotion were combined into a single issue. That in turn joined two groups working these veins for years—neoconservatives and religious human-rights groups. The left went into opposition.
The standard, almost official explanation for this administration's equivocations on human rights is that the current generation of Democratic foreign-policy intellectuals want the U.S. to pursue its goals inside the "pragmatic" framework of international institutions or alliances, rather than "going it alone." Progressive realpolitik.
Thus Barack Obama supported the Libyan rebels only after public opinion believed France, Britain and such were along for the ride. Under Mr. Obama, the U.S. joined the U.N. Human Rights Council.
There's more to the turn than this.
Barack Obama is not a traditional, internationalist Democrat in the mold of such party elders as John Kerry or Joe Biden. Mr. Obama is a man of the left. His interests are local. The Democratic left can only be understood on any subject if placed inside one, unchanging context: the level of public money available for their domestic policy goals.
It's never enough. And standing between them and Utopia is a five-sided monument to American power across the Potomac.
Whether a U.S. president is arguing on behalf of a single human-rights dissident (Chen Guangcheng), a whole nation's anti-authoritarian aspirations (Syria, Libya, Iraq) or against nuclear-weapons programs (Iran, North Korea), the possibility of exercising U.S. military assets sits inevitably in the background. Across the entire, 60-year postwar period, that reality and the spending necessary to maintain it has been the real source of the left's "ambivalence" toward the projection of American power into the world.
The intellectual arguments on behalf of subsuming U.S. interests inside international agencies and the like is mainly about diluting formerly bipartisan justifications for maintaining postwar spending levels on the American military.
The Obama White House put a bull's-eye on the defense budget from the start. This February, Mr. Obama proposed cutting $487 billion over 10 years, atop the threatened automatic sequester of $500 billion. That's their untapped pot of domestic gold.
Such a strategy implies a drawdown of U.S. capability to lead in the world. For the left and Barack Obama, the trade-off in terms of revenue feedbacks into domestic spending is worth it. As such, the human-rights problem of a Chen Guangcheng in faraway Shandong is a distracting footnote to the new Democratic generation's larger purposes.
Liberals discomfited by this will have to come to terms with the fact that it will take a different kind of Democratic presidency to alter their party's stated equivalence between human-rights aspirants and climate change.
-
Speaking of redundancy, Jim Webb is now saying congress should authorize the use of federal funds, declare wars, etc.
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2012/may/14/tdopin01-webb-is-right-ar-1912177/
Sen. Jim Webb is wrong on certain issues, but not on this one.
By: Richmond Times-Dispatch Opinion Staff
Published: May 14, 2012
Virginia Sen. Jim Webb has introduced legislation requiring the president to obtain congressional say-so before sending American troops abroad for humanitarian interventions where U.S. interests are not directly threatened.
Few people should find any grounds to challenge such a notion. Even Barack Obama has said that "the President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."
Of course, Obama made those comments as a candidate. Since assuming the presidency he has taken a rather different tack — especially with regard to Libya, where — Webb says — he "failed to provide Congress with a compelling rationale" based on U.S. security interests for ordering military intervention.
-
I find myself wondering if there is conflict here with the inherent nature of the Commander in Chief Power from the C. There's good reason we don't want the Congress as CinC.
-
Please see today's entry on the Venezuela thread concerning growing alliance with Iran and the attendant risks to the US.
-
George W. Bush: The Arab Spring and American Ideals
We do not get to choose if a freedom revolution should begin or end in the Middle East or elsewhere. We only get to choose what side we are on
By GEORGE W. BUSH
These are extraordinary times in the history of freedom. In the Arab Spring, we have seen the broadest challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet communism. The idea that Arab peoples are somehow content with oppression has been discredited forever.
Yet we have also seen instability, uncertainty and the revenge of brutal rulers. The collapse of an old order can unleash resentments and power struggles that a new order is not yet prepared to handle.
Some in both parties in Washington look at the risks inherent in democratic change—particularly in the Middle East and North Africa—and find the dangers too great. America, they argue, should be content with supporting the flawed leaders they know in the name of stability.
But in the long run, this foreign policy approach is not realistic. It is not within the power of America to indefinitely preserve the old order, which is inherently unstable. Oppressive governments distrust the diffusion of choice and power, choking off the best source of national prosperity and success.
This is the inbuilt crisis of tyranny. It fears and fights the very human attributes that make a nation great: creativity, enterprise and responsibility. Dictators can maintain power for a time by feeding resentments toward enemies—internal or external, real or imagined. But eventually, in societies of scarcity and mediocrity, their failure becomes evident.
America does not get to choose if a freedom revolution should begin or end in the Middle East or elsewhere. It only gets to choose what side it is on.
The day when a dictator falls or yields to a democratic movement is glorious. The years of transition that follow can be difficult. People forget that this was true in Central Europe, where democratic institutions and attitudes did not spring up overnight. From time to time, there has been corruption, backsliding and nostalgia for the communist past. Essential economic reforms have sometimes proved painful and unpopular.
It takes courage to ignite a freedom revolution. But it also takes courage to secure a freedom revolution through structural reform. And both types of bravery deserve our support.
This is now the challenge in parts of North Africa and the Middle East. After the euphoria, nations must deal with questions of tremendous complexity: What effect will majority rule have on the rights of women and religious minorities? How can militias be incorporated into a national army? What should be the relationship between a central government and regional authorities?
Problems once kept submerged by force must now be resolved by politics and consensus. But political institutions and traditions are often weak.
We know the problems. But there is a source of hope. The people of North Africa and the Middle East now realize that their leaders are not invincible. Citizens of the region have developed habits of dissent and expectations of economic performance. Future rulers who ignore those expectations—who try returning to oppression and blame shifting—may find an accountability of their own.
As Americans, our goal should be to help reformers turn the end of tyranny into durable, accountable civic structures. Emerging democracies need strong constitutions, political parties committed to pluralism, and free elections. Free societies depend upon the rule of law and property rights, and they require hopeful economies, drawn into open world markets.
This work will require patience, creativity and active American leadership. It will involve the strengthening of civil society—with a particular emphasis on the role of women. It will require a consistent defense of religious liberty. It will mean the encouragement of development, education and health, as well as trade and foreign investment. There will certainly be setbacks. But if America does not support the advance of democratic institutions and values, who will?
In promoting freedom, our methods should be flexible. Change comes at different paces in different places. Yet flexibility does not mean ambiguity. The same principles must apply to all nations. As a country embraces freedom, it finds economic and social progress. Only when a government treats its people with dignity does a nation fulfill its greatness. And when a government violates the rights of a citizen, it dishonors an entire nation.
There is nothing easy about the achievement of freedom. In America, we know something about the difficulty of protecting minorities, of building a national army, of defining the relationship between the central government and regional authorities—because we faced all of those challenges on the day of our independence. And they nearly tore us apart. It took many decades of struggle to live up to our own ideals. But we never ceased believing in the power of those ideals—and we should not today.
Mr. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, is the founder of the Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. This op-ed is adapted from a speech he delivered May 15 at the Bush Institute's Celebration of Human Freedom.
-
Significant piece published yesterday in the New Statesman by Hillary Clinton, explaining policy, bragging about her efforts and their record etc.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/07/hillary-clinton-art-smart-power
The art of smart power
As the balance of world power shifts, the US is developing a novel range of diplomatic, social, economic, political and security tools to fix the world’s complex new geopolitical problems.
By Hillary Clinton Published 18 July 2012
I haven't read it all yet. Will come back and post the text after I have.
-
Islam, Democracy and the Long View of History
The U.S. had no trouble living with the Arab autocrats. It did so, as George W. Bush once put it in a memorable speech, for six long decades.
By FOUAD AJAMI
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Cairo Tuesday to meet Egypt's new Islamist president, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi, and the country's top general, Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi. After the meeting, the secretary told reporters, "It's clear that Egypt, following the revolution, is committed to putting into place a democratic government."
Such patience and reassurance is wise in the wake of an Arab Spring that brought forth democratic elections for the first time in generations. It should be remembered that the U.S. had no trouble living with the Arab autocrats. It did so, as George W. Bush once put it in a memorable speech to the National Endowment for Democracy in 2003, for six long decades—all in the name of stability. The terrible band of jihadists who struck America on 9/11 shattered that compact with the autocrats.
We are now called upon to figure out the terms of a new accommodation, and suddenly many of us are without historical patience. The Islamists in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco have stepped forth. They didn't make that Arab Awakening of 2011 but had become its beneficiaries. Their leaders had not been on the Rolodex of Goldman Sachs, they were not clients of Washington lobbying firms. They had no favors to dispense. Suddenly history broke their way.
My generation of Arabs, who came to politics amid the high hopes of secular nationalism in the 1950s and '60s, had no use for religious politics. We didn't know these men, let alone the women in oddly stylish headscarves. For a fleeting moment, in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution led by Col. Gamal Abdul Nasser in July 1952, the Brotherhood was confident that it would partake of the New Order. It had infiltrated the officer corps, and the men in uniform, they thought, would be their instrument in bringing about the "reign of virtue."
But the Nasserist state, and its tributaries and enthusiasts in other Arab lands, had no room for what we would now call political Islam. The Brotherhood was decimated by the Nasser regime, and in 1966, its inspirational leader, Sayyid Qutb, was sent to the gallows.
It was secular nationalism's heady moment. The modern world beckoned in all domains. There was new literature and art and culture, lively media, the promise of mighty armies and an industrial economy. But the promises of pan-Arabism were to go unfulfilled. The reckoning came in June 1967 with a defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War—days from which two generations of Arabs never quite recovered.
Yet those six days were a boon for Islamists. They didn't quarrel with fate. The deliverance that came their way was a gift of their dreaded enemy—the Jewish state that put the Arab armies to flight, and put on cruel display the fraud of so much of what their leaders had claimed. The return of the Islamists had truly begun. The broad middle classes of the Arab world were in play, their economic and psychological gains shattered. The Arabs, said the Islamists, had forsaken God, and this devastating defeat by Israel had the hand of God in it.
The intervening decades were the time of the despots—charisma quit the world of the Arabs. The rulers now had the whip. They banished politics. Mass terror made its appearance, Syria under Hafez al-Assad and Iraq under Saddam Hussein turned into slaughterhouses. In Algeria a barbarous war was fought between the Islamists and Le Pouvoir, the cabal of ruling generals.
We shall never know for certain the impact of Saddam Hussein's ouster in 2003 on the Arab revolutions that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and soon, one hopes, Syria. The spectacle of Saddam—the knight of Arabism, the self-appointed gendarme of the Persian Gulf—flushed out of his spider hole doubtless was a trauma for rulers and their accomplices, and a vicarious spectacle of liberation for those among the Arabs who yearned to see the demise of their own dictators.
The Islamist leaders with cardigan sweaters and close cropped beards were not exactly the heirs of the old Brotherhood. They had emerged out of the professional syndicates—engineers and physicians figured prominently in their ranks, as did worldly businessmen. There were those who returned from exile in the West, those with modern degrees earned in Western universities. Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Tunisian Islamists, belongs to the first category, while Egypt's Mohammed Morsi, who holds a doctorate in engineering from the University of Southern California, belongs to the second.
The skeptics see them as opportunists who hijacked the democratic process. Yet what choice do we have but to accept the democratic claims of these new Islamists? We can't send the mukhabarat (secret police) after them, as past dictators did. We have to grant them time.
At any rate, the Islamists don't have the political world to themselves. In Morocco, for example, some space was created for the Islamists, and one, Abdellah Benkirane, heads the cabinet. But Morocco remains a monarchy with more than three centuries of rule behind it, where the king claims descent from the Prophet and wields religious, political and military authority.
In Tunisia, the Islamist Nahda Party received a plurality of the votes—and cut a deal with two secular parties to divide the power—and the burdens.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has the presidency, but the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces emptied that office of much of its power. The "deep state"—the security forces, the vast apparatus of the ministry of interior—has not been dismantled.
In Libya, the Islamists contested a parliamentary election but they lost out to an older force—tribalism. The coalition that prevailed was headed by a technocrat, Mahmoud Jibril, with a doctorate in political science from the University of Pittsburgh, who was carried to power by the allegiance of his tribe and a broad "liberal" coalition.
We are not the only ones watching. Ordinary Arab men and women will be on the lookout for any cracks in the Islamists' edifice. They will look for evidence of corruption, for the possibility of sons and daughters and nephews and in-laws inheriting the new world. It will be hard for the Islamists to hide—their beards and their worry beads and their affirmations of faith shall not acquit them.
Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author most recently of "The Syrian Rebellion," just out by Hoover Press.
-
Endless War by Robert D. Kaplan
August 1, 2012 | 0900 GMT
Print 6 2 17 10
Text Size
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
Special operations forces have become U.S. President Barack Obama's weapon of choice in dealing with a variety of threats, notably those posed by al Qaeda militants in Yemen and in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. They likely also have been active on the Syrian-Turkish frontier. This is not surprising. In fact, it is a natural, organic development that has been ongoing since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The end of the Cold War signaled a decline in mass infantry conflict, as the hundreds of thousands of NATO and Warsaw Pact troops concentrated in Central Europe dissipated rapidly in the early 1990s. Coming to the fore after a century of conventional land engagements in Europe was a kind of warfare that struck journalists as something new but was in fact very old: low-level, endless warfare that is inextricable from political unrest and the everyday workings of diplomacy. It is warfare where the battlefield is vast -- fighting occurs in deserts and in Third World slum cities -- but where the number of armed combatants is small compared to conventional formations. Killing the enemy is easy in this sort of warfare; it is identifying and then finding the enemy that is the challenge. In this kind of warfare, conscript soldiers are much less valuable than highly skilled professional operators, men who look down on draft-era armies and refer to themselves as "warriors," just like the guerrilla insurgents they are fighting. From 2002 to 2006, I was embedded intermittently with these men in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.
And I learned what President Obama has learned: The face of postmodern warfare is the avoidance of headlines. The sooner you deploy special operations forces to a place, the easier and the cheaper it is to deal with the problem. You want to deploy there when the country is still on page 11 in the news, before it moves up to page two in the headlines. For by that time there is little you can do without great expense and political risk. That is why special operations forces are currently deployed in dozens of places around the world simultaneously, something they have been doing since Bill Clinton was president in the early post-Cold War era.
Obama also figured out that the public wants protection on the cheap. The public wants protection without large-scale and controversial infantry deployments. It wants things -- killing, actually -- done quietly. The public grasps what the media often does not: that if you want purity, you'll get anarchy. Thus, the combination of unmanned aerial vehicles and special operations forces to efficiently kill people, even as one avoids putting boots on the ground in places like Libya and Syria, is precisely what the public wants, even if it cannot articulate it as I am. That is partly why U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney will have quite a challenge in denigrating Obama's foreign policy.
But the fact that Obama has used special operations forces to great effect does not mean that the special operations community is without its own problems and challenges.
To begin with, the public confuses special operations forces with commandos, which, in turn, connote daring raids, or what the special operations community refers to as "direct action" or "kinetics." This is the special operations forces of Hollywood heroics. However, the truth as I learned it is far more mundane. Much of what special operations forces personnel do is train indigenous forces, or "indigs," as they call them. Training elite units of our Third World allies accomplishes three goals. First, it allows those militaries to solve their own security problems, lessening the load on the United States. Second, it helps professionalize foreign militaries, which is an essential part of stabilizing young democracies. Last, it provides valuable intelligence as to what is going on in these places.
One challenge, though, is linguistics. While Special Operations Command has made great strides over the past decade, special operations forces are not where they need to be in terms of speaking local languages, which facilitates training and bonding with allied indigenous forces. In Southern Command (Latin America), where the foreign language is overwhelmingly Spanish, this is not an issue. But in Pacific Command, where a plethora of languages is spoken throughout the area of responsibility, it is an issue.
Indeed, Southern Command is the model the American military, and especially special operations forces, must follow to further equip the Pentagon to fight in an era of low-level, never-ending conflict. It was the Latin American theater of the Cold War that conceptualized the manner in which the United States must now operate globally in the post-Cold War era.
Because of Latino immigration patterns in the United States, many special operations personnel during and after the Cold War speak Spanish. Moreover, because Spanish is an easy language to learn relative to others such as Arabic and Chinese, this further facilitates communications between special operations forces and indigenous forces in Southern Command. But here is what's really laudable about Southern Command, and why it should be a model for every other area of responsibility: Because Southern Command received little money to fight communism during the Cold War compared to NATO in Europe and Pacific Command in Asia, it was forced to evolve an economy-of-force approach. This approach emphasized intensive intelligence gathering, broad use of special operations personnel and coercive diplomacy -- all replacements for the heavy ground troop concentrations used in Germany, Japan and South Korea. The results were not always pretty. The United States received harsh media criticism throughout the Cold War for propping up Latin American dictators, for example. But the economy-of-force strategy worked to preserve American dominance throughout the Western Hemisphere. And it was not necessarily wrong. For it prevented the emergence of Marxist dictatorships that would have been worse than the regimes that were preserved by a host of tactics.
El Salvador in the 1980s constituted the ultimate economy-of-force exercise. No more than a few dozen special operations trainers were on the ground at any one time teaching the Salvadoran military to slow down a communist insurgency, even as the Salvadorans transformed themselves from a 12,000-man, ill-disciplined constabulary force to a 60,000-man professional army. El Salvador showed that you didn't need many people to help turn the tide of these small wars, but the ones you did have should be the best. That is another lesson of low-level, endless conflict: the need to emphasize quality of manpower over quantity.
The further articulation of special operations forces beyond the Southern Command model could feature such innovations as the introduction of women and the use of humanitarian relief operations to further aid in intelligence gathering. A future 12-man, U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) A-team, for example, could be composed of both men and women who hail from exotic immigrant communities in the United States and thus speak difficult foreign languages. Such a team would be comfortable interacting with charity relief workers and training foreign fighters while occasionally taking part in direct action.
And so Obama, a liberal Democrat, is doing more than his share to evolve a 21st-century economy-of-force model, which owes much to the techniques the U.S. military honed in Cold War Latin America. This is not a president turning away from his liberal values but a president who is merely adapting to a historical phase of conflict, characterized by chronic political instability and low-level violence in the Middle East and other parts of the developing world. America's values cannot be promoted in a vacuum; they must follow from the projection of its power. But the American people are not comfortable with the large-scale use of force. The frequent use of special operations forces follows as a consequence.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
Read more: Endless War by Robert D. Kaplan | Stratfor
-
Third post of the day
The Election, the Presidency and Foreign Policy
July 31, 2012 | 0900 GMT
Print 1244 103 3479 275
Text Size
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stratfor
By George Friedman
The American presidency is designed to disappoint. Each candidate must promise things that are beyond his power to deliver. No candidate could expect to be elected by emphasizing how little power the office actually has and how voters should therefore expect little from him. So candidates promise great, transformative programs. What the winner actually can deliver depends upon what other institutions, nations and reality will allow him. Though the gap between promises and realities destroys immodest candidates, from the founding fathers' point of view, it protects the republic. They distrusted government in general and the office of the president in particular.
Congress, the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve Board all circumscribe the president's power over domestic life. This and the authority of the states greatly limit the president's power, just as the country's founders intended. To achieve anything substantial, the president must create a coalition of political interests to shape decision-making in other branches of the government. Yet at the same time -- and this is the main paradox of American political culture -- the presidency is seen as a decisive institution and the person holding that office is seen as being of overriding importance.
Constraints in the Foreign Policy Arena
The president has somewhat more authority in foreign policy, but only marginally so. He is trapped by public opinion, congressional intrusion, and above all, by the realities of geopolitics. Thus, while during his 2000 presidential campaign George W. Bush argued vehemently against nation-building, once in office, he did just that (with precisely the consequences he had warned of on the campaign trail). And regardless of how he modeled his foreign policy during his first campaign, the 9/11 attacks defined his presidency.
Similarly, Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to redefine America's relationship with both Europe and the Islamic world. Neither happened. It has been widely and properly noted how little Obama's foreign policy in action has differed from George W. Bush's. It was not that Obama didn't intend to have a different foreign policy, but simply that what the president wants and what actually happens are very different things.
The power often ascribed to the U.S. presidency is overblown. But even so, people -- including leaders -- all over the world still take that power very seriously. They want to believe that someone is in control of what is happening. The thought that no one can control something as vast and complex as a country or the world is a frightening thought. Conspiracy theories offer this comfort, too, since they assume that while evil may govern the world, at least the world is governed. There is, of course, an alternative viewpoint, namely that while no one actually is in charge, the world is still predictable as long as you understand the impersonal forces guiding it. This is an uncomfortable and unacceptable notion to those who would make a difference in the world. For such people, the presidential race -- like political disputes the world over -- is of great significance.
Ultimately, the president does not have the power to transform U.S. foreign policy. Instead, American interests, the structure of the world and the limits of power determine foreign policy.
In the broadest sense, current U.S. foreign policy has been in place for about a century. During that period, the United States has sought to balance and rebalance the international system to contain potential threats in the Eastern Hemisphere, which has been torn by wars. The Western Hemisphere in general, and North America in particular, has not. No president could afford to risk allowing conflict to come to North America.
At one level, presidents do count: The strategy they pursue keeping the Western Hemisphere conflict-free matters. During World War I, the United States intervened after the Germans began to threaten Atlantic sea-lanes and just weeks after the fall of the czar. At this point in the war, the European system seemed about to become unbalanced, with the Germans coming to dominate it. In World War II, the United States followed a similar strategy, allowing the system in both Europe and Asia to become unbalanced before intervening. This was called isolationism, but that is a simplistic description of the strategy of relying on the balance of power to correct itself and only intervening as a last resort.
During the Cold War, the United States adopted the reverse strategy of actively maintaining the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere via a process of continual intervention. It should be remembered that American deaths in the Cold War were just under 100,000 (including Vietnam, Korea and lesser conflicts) versus about 116,000 U.S. deaths in World War I, showing that far from being cold, the Cold War was a violent struggle.
The decision to maintain active balancing was a response to a perceived policy failure in World War II. The argument was that prior intervention would have prevented the collapse of the European balance, perhaps blocked Japanese adventurism, and ultimately resulted in fewer deaths than the 400,000 the United States suffered in that conflict. A consensus emerged from World War II that an "internationalist" stance of active balancing was superior to allowing nature to take its course in the hope that the system would balance itself. The Cold War was fought on this strategy.
The Cold War Consensus Breaks
Between 1948 and the Vietnam War, the consensus held. During the Vietnam era, however, a viewpoint emerged in the Democratic Party that the strategy of active balancing actually destabilized the Eastern Hemisphere, causing unnecessary conflict and thereby alienating other countries. This viewpoint maintained that active balancing increased the likelihood of conflict, caused anti-American coalitions to form, and most important, overstated the risk of an unbalanced system and the consequences of imbalance. Vietnam was held up as an example of excessive balancing.
The counterargument was that while active balancing might generate some conflicts, World War I and World War II showed the consequences of allowing the balance of power to take its course. This viewpoint maintained that failing to engage in active and even violent balancing with the Soviet Union would increase the possibility of conflict on the worst terms possible for the United States. Thus, even in the case of Vietnam, active balancing prevented worse outcomes. The argument between those who want the international system to balance itself and the argument of those who want the United States to actively manage the balance has raged ever since George McGovern ran against Richard Nixon in 1972.
If we carefully examine Obama's statements during the 2008 campaign and his efforts once in office, we see that he has tried to move U.S. foreign policy away from active balancing in favor of allowing regional balances of power to maintain themselves. He did not move suddenly into this policy, as many of his supporters expected he would. Instead, he eased into it, simultaneously increasing U.S. efforts in Afghanistan while disengaging in other areas to the extent that the U.S. political system and global processes would allow.
Obama's efforts to transition away from active balancing of the system have been seen in Europe, where he has made little attempt to stabilize the economic situation, and in the Far East, where apart from limited military repositioning there have been few changes. Syria also highlights his movement toward the strategy of relying on regional balances. The survival of Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime would unbalance the region, creating a significant Iranian sphere of influence. Obama's strategy has been not to intervene beyond providing limited covert support to the opposition, but rather to allow the regional balance to deal with the problem. Obama has expected the Saudis and Turks to block the Iranians by undermining al Assad, not because the United States asks them to do so but because it is in their interest to do so.
Obama's perspective draws on that of the critics of the Cold War strategy of active balancing, who maintained that without a major Eurasian power threatening hemispheric hegemony, U.S. intervention is more likely to generate anti-American coalitions and precisely the kind of threat the United States feared when it decided to actively balance. In other words, Obama does not believe that the lessons learned from World War I and World War II apply to the current global system, and that as in Syria, the global power should leave managing the regional balance to local powers.
Romney and Active Balancing
Romney takes the view that active balancing is necessary. In the case of Syria, Romney would argue that by letting the system address the problem, Obama has permitted Iran to probe and retreat without consequences and failed to offer a genuine solution to the core issue. That core issue is that the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq left a vacuum that Iran -- or chaos -- has filled, and that in due course the situation will become so threatening or unstable that the United States will have to intervene. To remedy this, Romney called during his visit to Israel for a decisive solution to the Iran problem, not just for Iran's containment.
Romney also disagrees with Obama's view that there is no significant Eurasian hegemon to worry about. Romney has cited the re-emergence of Russia as a potential threat to American interests that requires U.S. action on a substantial scale. He would also argue that should the United States determine that China represented a threat, the current degree of force being used to balance it would be insufficient. For Romney, the lessons of World Wars I and II and the Cold War mesh. Allowing the balance of power to take its own course only delays American intervention and raises the ultimate price. To him, the Cold War ended as it did because of active balancing by the United States, including war when necessary. Without active balancing, Romney would argue, the Cold War's outcome might have been different and the price for the United States certainly would have been higher.
I also get the sense that Romney is less sensitive to global opinion than Obama. Romney would note that Obama has failed to sway global opinion in any decisive way despite great expectations around the world for an Obama presidency. In Romney's view, this is because satisfying the wishes of the world would be impossible, since they are contradictory. For example, prior to World War II, world opinion outside the Axis powers resented the United States for not intervening. But during the Cold War and the jihadist wars, world opinion resented the United States for intervening. For Romney, global resentment cannot be a guide for U.S. foreign policy. Where Obama would argue that anti-American sentiment fuels terrorism and anti-American coalitions, Romney would argue that ideology and interest, not sentiment, cause any given country to object to the leading world power. Attempting to appease sentiment would thus divert U.S. policy from a realistic course.
Campaign Rhetoric vs. Reality
I have tried to flesh out the kinds of argument each would make if they were not caught in a political campaign, where their goal is not setting out a coherent foreign policy but simply embarrassing the other and winning votes. While nothing suggests this is an ineffective course for a presidential candidate, it forces us to look for actions and hints to determine their actual positions. Based on such actions and hints, I would argue that their disagreement on foreign policy boils down to relying on regional balances versus active balancing.
But I would not necessarily say that this is the choice the country faces. As I have argued from the outset, the American presidency is institutionally weak despite its enormous prestige. It is limited constitutionally, politically and ultimately by the actions of others. Had Japan not attacked the United States, it is unclear that Franklin Roosevelt would have had the freedom to do what he did. Had al Qaeda not attacked on 9/11, I suspect that George W. Bush's presidency would have been dramatically different.
The world shapes U.S. foreign policy. The more active the world, the fewer choices presidents have and the smaller those choices are. Obama has sought to create a space where the United States can disengage from active balancing. Doing so falls within his constitutional powers, and thus far has been politically possible, too. But whether the international system would allow him to continue along this path should he be re-elected is open to question. Jimmy Carter had a similar vision, but the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan wrecked it. George W. Bush saw his opposition to nation-building wrecked by 9/11 and had his presidency crushed under the weight of the main thing he wanted to avoid.
Presidents make history, but not on their own terms. They are constrained and harried on all sides by reality. In selecting a president, it is important to remember that candidates will say what they need to say to be elected, but even when they say what they mean, they will not necessarily be able to pursue their goals. The choice to do so simply isn't up to them. There are two fairly clear foreign policy outlooks in this election. The degree to which the winner matters, however, is unclear, though knowing the inclinations of presidential candidates regardless of their ability to pursue them has some value.
In the end, though, the U.S. presidency was designed to limit the president's ability to rule. He can at most guide, and frequently he cannot even do that. Putting the presidency in perspective allows us to keep our debates in perspective as well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
Read more: The Election, the Presidency and Foreign Policy | Stratfor
-
Interesting Strat as usual. Missing it seems in the summary of the Obama record was the decision to cancel missile defense installations in Eastern Europe where it appeared that appeasement of the Russians trumped the commitments made to Czech, Poland, Belarus and our own security. Isn't that active regional unbalancing?
We were left to wonder what we received back for this major turnaround in strategy. The answer it appears was nothing. Just that he will have more flexibility to make even deeper disarmament concessions after the election.
-
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/24/the_50_most_powerful_republicans_on_foreign_policy?page=full
Interesting list.
-
Cheney: Cairo, Benghazi and Obama Foreign Policy
In too many parts of the world, America is no longer viewed as a reliable ally or an enemy to be feared. .
By Liz Cheney
It has certainly been a terrible 48 hours. In Libya, violent extremists killed American diplomats. In Cairo, mobs breached the walls of the U.S. Embassy, ripped down the American flag and replaced it with the al Qaeda flag.
In response to the attack in Cairo, diplomats there condemned not the attackers but those who "hurt the religious feelings of Muslims." The president appeared in the Rose Garden less than 24 hours later to condemn the Libya assault and failed even to mention the attack in Egypt. The message sent to radicals throughout the region: If you assault an American embassy but don't kill anyone, the U.S. president won't complain.
Though the administration's performance in the crisis was appalling, it wasn't surprising—it is the logical outcome of three-and-a-half years of Obama foreign policy.
In March 2009, at an Americas summit meeting in Mexico City, President Obama listened as Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega delivered a venomous diatribe against America. Mr. Obama stood to speak and accepted Mr. Ortega's version of history. "I'm very grateful," Mr. Obama said, "that President Ortega didn't blame me for things that happened when I was three months old."
In April 2009, in France, Mr. Obama proclaimed that America must make deep cuts in its nuclear arsenal because only then would the country have "the moral authority to say to Iran, don't develop a nuclear weapon, to say to North Korea, don't proliferate nuclear weapons." Embracing the leftist fallacy that the key to world peace is for the U.S. to pre-emptively disarm, the president has reportedly begun reviewing options to take our nuclear stockpile to levels not seen since 1950. These are steps you take only if you believe that America—not her enemies—is the threat.
In June 2009, Mr. Obama went to Cairo and said, "The fear and anger" after 9/11 "led us to act contrary to our ideals." But the men and women who led this nation then, and the military and intelligence professionals who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others, did not act contrary to our ideals. They kept this nation safe.
Enlarge Image
Close
Reuters
Protesters destroy an American flag pulled down from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Sept. 11.
.
Mr. Obama didn't thank them. He slandered them on foreign soil, and he revealed to al Qaeda the techniques we used to interrogate terrorists—techniques that generated intelligence that saved lives and prevented further attacks on the nation. And he failed to put any alternative interrogation program in place. When Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the "underwear bomber") was captured on Mr. Obama's watch, he was read the Miranda rights.
The president wrapped up his 2009 world tour with a speech at the United Nations, where he explained: "No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed." He has worked hard these past three years to ensure that the U.S. is not "elevated" above others, and he has succeeded.
In too many parts of the world, America is no longer viewed as a reliable ally or an enemy to be feared. Don't take my word for it. Ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Even as his country faces an existential threat from Iran, he can't get a meeting with President Obama. Ask the Poles and Czechs, two allies we abandoned when we canceled missile-defense systems that the president feared would offend the Russians. Ask the Iranian people who took to the streets to fight for their freedom, only to find Mr. Obama standing silently with the mullahs.
Nor do our adversaries any longer fear us. Ask the mobs in Cairo who attacked our embassy, or the Libyan mobs who killed our diplomats at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Ask the Iranians, who make unhindered daily progress toward obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The Obama administration has been unable or unwilling to stop the Iranians. The one apparently successful cyberwarfare effort against Iran was leaked to the New York Times—leaked, according to the Times journalist, by "members of the president's national security team who were in the room" for the key deliberations. Did members of the president's inner circle really walk out of the White House situation room and brief a journalist on one of our most highly classified programs? No one has been held to account, and the American people still don't know if Mr. Obama approved this leak.
If you really want to know whether our adversaries fear us, ask the Russians, whose thuggish President Putin essentially endorsed Mr. Obama recently. Perhaps Mr. Putin is banking on the missile defense "flexibility" Mr. Obama promised he would have after the election.
The president says he "ended the war in Iraq" and is "ending the war in Afghanistan." If only wishing made it so. A better description of what Mr. Obama is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is rushing for the exits. On his watch, we walked away from years of battle and sacrifice in Iraq, leaving no stay-behind force and an Iraq mired in violence under the heavy influence of Iran. In Afghanistan, the president gave hope to our enemies by announcing a date certain for withdrawal. He has ignored many of the most important recommendations of his commanders on the ground. He is so busy retreating that we are likely to leave in a our wake a failed state where the Taliban and terrorist organizations like al Qaeda can once again operate.
While the threats to America grow, the president prepares to make devastating cuts to America's military. Cuts that would be "a disaster," in the words of the president's own secretary of defense. The president has said he would veto any attempt to stop these cuts.
Apologizing for America, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies and slashing our military are the hallmarks of Mr. Obama's foreign policy. The Obama economy, with its high unemployment, massive debt and out-of-control spending, has rightly demanded our attention. As we head to the polls in November, we cannot ignore what is an even more dismal national-security record. An America already weakened by four years of an Obama presidency will be unrecognizable after eight.
-
The death of a dictator and the death of an ambassador
George Friedman | 19 September 2012
Last week, four American diplomats were killed when armed men attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The attackers' apparent motivation was that someone, apparently American but with an uncertain identity, posted a video on YouTube several months ago that deliberately defamed the Prophet Mohammed. The attack in Benghazi was portrayed as retribution for the defamation, with the attackers holding all Americans equally guilty for the video, though it was likely a pretext for deeper grievances. The riots spread to other countries, including Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen, although no American casualties were reported in the other riots. The unrest appears to have subsided over the weekend.
Benghazi and the Fall of Gadhafi
In beginning to make sense of these attacks, one must observe that they took place in Benghazi, the city that had been most opposed to Moammar Gadhafi. Indeed, Gadhafi had promised to slaughter his opponents in Benghazi, and it was that threat that triggered the NATO intervention in Libya. Many conspiracy theories have been devised to explain the intervention, but, like Haiti and Kosovo before it, none of the theories holds up. The intervention occurred because it was believed that Gadhafi would carry out his threats in Benghazi and because it was assumed that he would quickly capitulate in the face of NATO air power, opening the door to democracy.
That Gadhafi was capable of mass murder was certainly correct. The idea that Gadhafi would quickly fall proved incorrect. That a democracy would emerge as a result of the intervention proved the most dubious assumption of them all. What emerged in Libya is what you would expect when a foreign power overthrows an existing government, however thuggish, and does not impose its own imperial state: ongoing instability and chaos.
The Libyan opposition was a chaotic collection of tribes, factions and ideologies sharing little beyond their opposition to Gadhafi. A handful of people wanted to create a Western-style democracy, but they were leaders only in the eyes of those who wanted to intervene. The rest of the opposition was composed of traditionalists, militarists in the Gadhafi tradition and Islamists. Gadhafi had held Libya together by simultaneously forming coalitions with various factions and brutally crushing any opposition.
Opponents of tyranny assume that deposing a tyrant will improve the lives of his victims. This is sometimes true, but only occasionally. The czar of Russia was clearly a tyrant, but it is difficult to argue that the Leninist-Stalinist regime that ultimately replaced him was an improvement. Similarly, the Shah of Iran was repressive and brutal. It is difficult to argue that the regime that replaced him was an improvement.
There is no assurance that opponents of a tyrant will not abuse human rights just like the tyrant did. There is even less assurance that an opposition too weak and divided to overthrow a tyrant will coalesce into a government when an outside power destroys the tyrant. The outcome is more likely to be chaos, and the winner will likely be the most organized and well-armed faction with the most ruthless clarity about the future. There is no promise that it will constitute a majority or that it will be gentle with its critics.
The intervention in Libya, which I discussed in The Immaculate Intervention, was built around an assumption that has little to do with reality -- namely, that the elimination of tyranny will lead to liberty. It certainly can do so, but there is no assurance that it will. There are many reasons for this assumption, but the most important one is that Western advocates of human rights believe that, when freed from tyranny, any reasonable person would want to found a political order based on Western values. They might, but there is no obvious reason to believe they would.
The alternative to one thug may simply be another thug. This is a matter of power and will, not of political philosophy. Utter chaos, an ongoing struggle that leads nowhere but to misery, also could ensue. But the most important reason Western human rights activists might see their hopes dashed is due to a principled rejection of Western liberal democracy on the part of the newly liberated. To be more precise, the opposition might embrace the doctrine of national self-determination, and even of democracy, but go on to select a regime that is in principle seriously opposed to Western notions of individual rights and freedom.
While some tyrants simply seek power, other regimes that appear to Westerners to be tyrannies actually are rather carefully considered moral systems that see themselves as superior ways of life. There is a paradox in the principle of respect for foreign cultures followed by demands that foreigners adhere to basic Western principles. It is necessary to pick one approach or the other. At the same time, it is necessary to understand that someone can have very distinct moral principles, be respected, and yet be an enemy of liberal democracy. Respecting another moral system does not mean simply abdicating your own interests. The Japanese had a complex moral system that was very different from Western principles. The two did not have to be enemies, but circumstances caused them to collide.
The NATO approach to Libya assumed that the removal of a tyrant would somehow inevitably lead to a liberal democracy. Indeed, this was the assumption about the Arab Spring in the West, where it was thought that that corrupt and tyrannical regimes would fall and that regimes that embraced Western principles would sprout up in their place. Implicit in this was a profound lack of understanding of the strength of the regimes, of the diversity of the opposition and of the likely forces that would emerge from it.
In Libya, NATO simply didn't understand or care about the whirlwind that it was unleashing. What took Gadhafi's place was ongoing warfare between clans, tribes and ideologies. From this chaos, Libyan Islamists of various stripes have emerged to exploit the power vacuum. Various Islamist groups have not become strong enough to simply impose their will, but they are engaged in actions that have resonated across the region.
The desire to overthrow Gadhafi came from two impulses. The first was to rid the world of a tyrant, and the second was to give the Libyans the right to national self-determination. Not carefully considered were two other issues: whether simply overthrowing Gadhafi would yield the conditions for determining the national will, and whether the national will actually would mirror NATO's values and, one should add, interests.
Unintended Consequences
The events of last week represent unintended and indirect consequences of the removal of Gadhafi. Gadhafi was ruthless in suppressing radical Islamism, as he was in other matters. In the absence of his suppression, the radical Islamist faction appears to have carefully planned the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. The attack was timed for when the U.S. ambassador would be present. The mob was armed with a variety of weapons. The public justification was a little-known video on YouTube that sparked anti-American unrest throughout the Arab world.
For the Libyan jihadists, tapping into anger over the video was a brilliant stroke. Having been in decline, they reasserted themselves well beyond the boundaries of Libya. In Libya itself, they showed themselves as a force to be reckoned with -- at least to the extent that they could organize a successful attack on the Americans. The four Americans who were killed might have been killed in other circumstances, but they died in this one: Gadhafi was eliminated, no coherent regime took his place, no one suppressed the radical Islamists, and the Islamists could therefore act. How far their power will grow is not known, but certainly they acted effectively to achieve their ends. It is not clear what force there is to suppress them. It is also not clear what momentum this has created for jihadists in the region, but it will put NATO, and more precisely the United States, in the position either of engaging in another war in the Arab world at a time and place not of its choosing, or allowing the process to go forward and hoping for the best.
As I have written, a distinction is frequently drawn between the idealist and realist position. Libya is a case in which the incoherence of the distinction can be seen. If the idealist position is concerned with outcomes that are moral from its point of view, then simply advocating the death of a tyrant is insufficient. To guarantee the outcome requires that the country be occupied and pacified, as was Germany or Japan. But the idealist would regard this act of imperialism as impermissible, violating the doctrine of national sovereignty. More to the point, the United States is not militarily in a position to occupy or pacify Libya, nor would this be a national priority justifying war. The unwillingness of the idealist to draw the logical conclusion from their position, which is that simply removing the tyrant is not the end but only the beginning, is compounded by the realist's willingness to undertake military action insufficient for the political end. Moral ends and military means must mesh.
Removing Gadhafi was morally defensible but not by itself. Having removed him, NATO had now adopted a responsibility that it shifted to a Libyan public unequipped to manage it. But more to the point, no allowance had been made for the possibility that what might emerge as the national will of Libya would be a movement that represented a threat to the principles and interests of the NATO members. The problem of Libya was not that it did not understand Western values, but that a significant part of its population rejected those values on moral grounds and a segment of the population with battle-hardened fighters regarded them as inferior to its own Islamic values. Somewhere between hatred of tyranny and national self-determination, NATO's commitment to liberty as it understood it became lost.
This is not a matter simply confined to Libya. In many ways it played out throughout the Arab world as Western powers sought to come to terms with what was happening. There is a more immediate case: Syria. The assumption there is that the removal of another tyrant, in this case Bashar al Assad, will lead to an evolution that will transform Syria. It is said that the West must intervene to protect the Syrian opposition from the butchery of the al Assad regime. A case can be made for this, but not the simplistic case that absent al Assad, Syria would become democratic. For that to happen, much more must occur than the elimination of al Assad.
Wishful Thinking vs. Managing the Consequences
In 1958, a book called The Ugly American was published about a Southeast Asian country that had a brutal, pro-American dictator and a brutal, communist revolution. The novel had a character who was a nationalist in the true sense of the word and was committed to human rights. As a leader, he was not going to be simply an American tool, but he was the best hope the United States had. An actual case of such an ideal regime replacement was seen in 1963 in Vietnam, when Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam was killed in a coup. He had been a brutal pro-American dictator. The hope after his death was that a decent, nationalist liberal would replace him. There was a long search for such a figure; he never was found.
Getting rid of a tyrant when you are as powerful as the United States and NATO are, by contrast, is the easy part. Saddam Hussein is as dead as Gadhafi. The problem is what comes next. Having a liberal democratic nationalist simply appear to take the helm may happen, but it is not the most likely outcome unless you are prepared for an occupation. And if you are prepared to occupy, you had better be prepared to fight against a nation that doesn't want you determining its future, no matter what your intentions are.
I don't know what will come of Libya's jihadist movement, which has showed itself to be motivated and capable and whose actions resonated in the Arab world. I do know that Gadhafi was an evil brute who is better off dead. But it is simply not clear to me that removing a dictator automatically improves matters. What is clear to me is that if you wage war for moral ends, you are morally bound to manage the consequences.
-
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/10/08/text-of-romney-speech-on-foreign-policy-at-vmi/
My initial impression of the speech is good.
-
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/10/08/text-of-romney-speech-on-foreign-policy-at-vmi/
My initial impression of the speech is good.
Some commentary:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/The_Battle_for_Mitt_Romneys_Soul?page=full
-
The key point is that our current foreign policy is in shambles and the threats are growing.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/10/08/text-of-romney-speech-on-foreign-policy-at-vmi/
My initial impression of the speech is good.
Some commentary:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/The_Battle_for_Mitt_Romneys_Soul?page=full
-
It’s Not Just About Us
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 9, 2012 157 Comments
Mitt Romney gave a foreign policy speech on Monday that could be boiled down to one argument: everything wrong with the Middle East today can be traced to a lack of leadership by President Obama. If this speech is any indication of the quality of Romney’s thinking on foreign policy, then we should worry. It was not sophisticated in describing the complex aspirations of the people of the Middle East. It was not accurate in describing what Obama has done or honest about the prior positions Romney has articulated. And it was not compelling or imaginative in terms of the strategic alternatives it offered. The worst message we can send right now to Middle Easterners is that their future is all bound up in what we do. It is not. The Arab-Muslim world has rarely been more complicated and more in need of radical new approaches by us — and them.
Ever since the onset of the Arab awakening, the U.S. has been looking for ways to connect with the Arab youths who spearheaded the revolutions; 60 percent of the Arab world is under age 25. If it were up to me, I’d put Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, in charge of American policy in the Arab-Muslim world. Because we need to phase out of the cold war business of selling arms there to keep “strongmen” on our side and in power, and we need to get into the business of sponsoring a “Race to the Top” in the Arab-Muslim world that, instead, can help empower institutions and strong people, who would voluntarily want to be on our side.
Look at the real trends in the region. In Iraq and Afghanistan, sadly, autocracy has not been replaced with democracy, but with “elective kleptocracy.” Elective kleptocracy is what you get when you replace an autocracy with an elected government before there are accountable institutions and transparency, while huge piles of money beckon — in Iraq thanks to oil exports, and in Afghanistan thanks to foreign aid.
Meanwhile, in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq and Libya, we have also seen the collapse of the “Mukhabarat states” — Mukhabarat is Arabic for internal security services — but not yet the rise of effective democracies, with their own security organs governed by the rule of law. As we saw in Libya, this gap is creating openings for jihadists. As the former C.I.A. analyst Bruce Riedel put it in a recent essay in The Daily Beast, “The old police states, called mukhabarat states in Arabic, were authoritarian dictatorships that ruled their people arbitrarily and poorly. But they were good at fighting terror. ... These new governments are trying to do something the Arab world has never done before — create structures where the rule of law applies and the secret police are held accountable to elected officials. That is a tall order, especially when terrorists are trying to create chaos.”
At the same time, the civil war between Sunni Muslims, led by the Saudis, and Shiite Muslims, led by Iran, is blazing as hot as ever and lies at the heart of the civil war in Syria. In addition, we also have a struggle within Sunni Islam between puritanical Salafists and more traditional Muslim Brotherhood activists. And then there is the struggle between all of these Islamist parties — who argue that “Islam is the answer” for development — and the more secular mainstream forces, who may constitute the majority in most Mideast societies but are disorganized and divided.
How does the U.S. impact a region with so many cross-cutting conflicts and agendas? We start by making clear that the new Arab governments are free to choose any path they desire, but we will only support those who agree that the countries that thrive today: 1) educate their people up to the most modern standards; 2) empower their women; 3) embrace religious pluralism; 4) have multiple parties, regular elections and a free press; 5) maintain their treaty commitments; and 6) control their violent extremists with security forces governed by the rule of law. That’s what we think is “the answer,” and our race to the top will fund schools and programs that advance those principles. (To their credit, Romney wants to move in this direction and Obama’s Agency for International Development is already doing so.)
But when we’re talking to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the new government in Libya, we cannot let them come to us and say: “We need money, but right now our politics is not right for us to do certain things. Give us a pass.” We bought that line for 50 years from their dictators. It didn’t end well. We need to stick to our principles.
This is going to be a long struggle on many fronts. And it requires a big shift in thinking in the Arab-Muslim world, argues Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., from “us versus them to us versus our own problems.” And from “we are weak and poor because we were colonized” to “we were colonized because we were weak and poor.” Voices can be heard now making those points, says Haqqani, and I think we best encourage them by being very clear about what we stand for. The Middle East only puts a smile on your face when change starts with them, not us. Only then is it self-sustaining, and only then can our help truly amplify it.
-
It’s Not Just About Us
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 9, 2012 157 Comments
"Mitt Romney gave a foreign policy speech on Monday that could be boiled down to one argument: everything wrong with the Middle East today can be traced to a lack of leadership by President Obama...
What a bunch of BS. I don't agree with Friedman and ripping Romney as a takeoff point did nothing to advance Friedman's own ideas for the Middle East, none of which Romney would likely dispute. The opening rip just serves to please his bosses and keep him published over at NY Pravda IMO.
The Romney speech laid out guiding principles for foreign policy and made clear distinctions between that approach and the current administration, as he has been called on to do. I wonder if Friedman saw the speech and I wonder how quickly the terrorists would be to drop their jihad and "embrace religious pluralism" and his education proposals if only they could read his column.
Gov. Romney has been upfront calling terrorism what it is and believes America can best deal with whatever is coming next from a position of strength. Building ships and submarines that we hope we will never need to use are good examples. Pres. Obama has been in denial that people out there want to destroy us, deceitful when they do, and he wishes to dismantle our unique superpower strength.
Will the principles laid out by Romney instantly fix Egypt or Syria? Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan? No. And neither did the apologize and blame America, surrender and disarm agenda of the opponent, but it does leave us in greater danger.
News flash to Thomas Friedman from the old neighborhood, we are in the heat of a Presidential campaign and it is Gov. Romney's job to spell out his similarities and differences with the incumbent. The first 100 days may not include peace on earth or Muslim countries "educating their people up to the most modern standards" and "empowering their women" but it will include a clear policy shift. Like it or not.
Had Romney centered his speech on Friedman's lofty wish list, he would have been ripped even worse, more likely laughed off the stage.
Running for leader of the free world is not as easy as it looks.
-
This is not one of those times.
It’s Not Just About Us
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 9, 2012 157 Comments
-
The Emerging Doctrine of the United States
October 9, 2012 | 0900 GMT
Print 783 177 1331 311
Text Size
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stratfor
By George Friedman
Over the past weekend, rumors began to emerge that the Syrian opposition would allow elements of the al Assad regime to remain in Syria and participate in the new government. Rumors have become Syria's prime export, and as such they should not be taken too seriously. Nevertheless, what is happening in Syria is significant for a new foreign doctrine emerging in the United States -- a doctrine in which the United States does not take primary responsibility for events, but which allows regional crises to play out until a new regional balance is reached. Whether a good or bad policy -- and that is partly what the U.S. presidential race is about -- it is real, and it flows from lessons learned.
Threats against the United States are many and complex, but Washington's main priority is ensuring that none of those threats challenge its fundamental interests. Somewhat simplistically, this boils down to mitigating threats against U.S. control of the seas by preventing the emergence of a Eurasian power able to marshal resources toward that end. It also includes preventing the development of a substantial intercontinental nuclear capability that could threaten the United States if a country is undeterred by U.S. military power for whatever reason. There are obviously other interests, but certainly these interests are fundamental.
Therefore, U.S. interest in what is happening in the Western Pacific is understandable. But even there, the United States is, at least for now, allowing regional forces to engage each other in a struggle that has not yet affected the area's balance of power. U.S. allies and proxies, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan, have been playing chess in the region's seas without a direct imposition of U.S. naval power -- even though such a prospect appears possible.
Lessons Learned
The roots of this policy lie in Iraq. Iran and Iraq are historical rivals; they fought an extended war in the 1980s with massive casualties. A balance of power existed between the two that neither was comfortable with but that neither could overcome. They contained each other with minimal external involvement.
The U.S. intervention in Iraq had many causes but one overwhelming consequence: In destroying Saddam Hussein's regime, a regime that was at least as monstrous as Moammar Gadhafi's or Bashar al Assad's, the United States destroyed the regional balance of power with Iran. The United States also miscalculated the consequences of the invasion and faced substantial resistance. When the United States calculated that withdrawal was the most prudent course -- a decision made during the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration -- Iran consequently gained power and a greater sense of security. Perhaps such outcomes should have been expected, but since a forced withdrawal was unexpected, the consequences didn't clearly follow and warnings went unheeded.
If Iraq was the major and critical lesson on the consequences of intervention, Libya was the smaller and less significant lesson that drove it home. The United States did not want to get involved in Libya. Following the logic of the new policy, Libya did not represent a threat to U.S. interests. It was the Europeans, particularly the French, who argued that the human rights threats posed by the Gadhafi regime had to be countered and that those threats could quickly and efficiently be countered from the air. Initially, the U.S. position was that France and its allies were free to involve themselves, but the United States did not wish to intervene.
This rapidly shifted as the Europeans mounted an air campaign. They found that the Gadhafi regime did not collapse merely because French aircraft entered Libyan airspace. They also found that the campaign was going to be longer and more difficult than they anticipated. At this point committed to maintaining its coalition with the Europeans, the United States found itself in the position of either breaking with its coalition or participating in the air campaign. It chose the latter, seeing the commitment as minimal and supporting the alliance as a prior consideration.
Libya and Iraq taught us two lessons. The first was that campaigns designed to topple brutal dictators do not necessarily yield better regimes. Instead of the brutality of tyrants, the brutality of chaos and smaller tyrants emerged. The second lesson, well learned in Iraq, is that the world does not necessarily admire interventions for the sake of human rights. The United States also learned that the world's position can shift with startling rapidity from demanding U.S. action to condemning U.S. action. Moreover, Washington discovered that intervention can unleash virulently anti-American forces that will kill U.S. diplomats. Once the United States enters the campaign, however reluctantly and in however marginal a role, it will be the United States that will be held accountable by much of the world -- certainly by the inhabitants of the country experiencing the intervention. As in Iraq, on a vastly smaller scale, intervention carries with it unexpected consequences.
These lessons have informed U.S. policy toward Syria, which affects only some U.S. interests. However, any U.S. intervention in Syria would constitute both an effort and a risk disproportionate to those interests. Particularly after Libya, the French and other Europeans realized that their own ability to intervene in Syria was insufficient without the Americans, so they declined to intervene. Of course, this predated the killing of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, but it did not predate the fact that the intervention in Libya surprised planners by its length and by the difficulty of creating a successor regime less brutal than the one it replaced. The United States was not prepared to intervene with conventional military force.
That is not to say the United States did not have an interest in Syria. Specifically, Washington did not want Syria to become an Iranian puppet that would allow Tehran's influence to stretch through Iraq to the Mediterranean. The United States had been content with the Syrian regime while it was simply a partner of Iran rather than Iran's subordinate. However, the United States foresaw Syria as a subordinate of Iran if the al Assad regime survived. The United States wanted Iran blocked, and that meant the displacement of the al Assad regime. It did not mean Washington wanted to intervene militarily, except possibly through aid and training potentially delivered by U.S. special operations forces -- a lighter intervention than others advocated.
Essential Interests
The U.S. solution is instructive of the emerging doctrine. First, the United States accepted that al Assad, like Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi, was a tyrant. But it did not accept the idea that al Assad's fall would create a morally superior regime. In any event, it expected the internal forces in Syria to deal with al Assad and was prepared to allow this to play out. Second, the United States expected regional powers to address the Syrian question if they wished. This meant primarily Turkey and to a lesser degree Saudi Arabia. From the American point of view, the Turks and Saudis had an even greater interest in circumscribing an Iranian sphere of influence, and they had far greater levers to determine the outcome in Syria. Israel is, of course, a regional power, but it was in no position to intervene: The Israelis lacked the power to impose a solution, they could not occupy Syria, and Israeli support for any Syrian faction would delegitimize that faction immediately. Any intervention would have to be regional and driven by each participant's national interests.
The Turks realized that their own national interest, while certainly affected by Syria, did not require a major military intervention, which would have been difficult to execute and which would have had an unknown outcome. The Saudis and Qataris, never prepared to intervene directly, did what they could covertly, using money, arms and religiously motivated fighters to influence events. But no country was prepared to risk too much to shape events in Syria. They were prepared to use indirect power rather than conventional military force. As a result, the conflict remains unresolved.
This has forced both the Syrian regime and the rebels to recognize the unlikelihood of outright military victory. Iran's support for the regime and the various sources of support for the Syrian opposition have proved indecisive. Rumors of political compromise are emerging accordingly.
We see this doctrine at work in Iran as well. Tehran is developing nuclear weapons, which may threaten Israel. At the same time, the United States is not prepared to engage in a war with Iran, nor is it prepared to underwrite the Israeli attack with added military support. It is using an inefficient means of pressure -- sanctions -- which appears to have had some effect with the rapid depreciation of the Iranian currency. But the United States is not looking to resolve the Iranian issue, nor is it prepared to take primary responsibility for it unless Iran becomes a threat to fundamental U.S. interests. It is content to let events unfold and act only when there is no other choice.
Under the emerging doctrine, the absence of an overwhelming American interest means that the fate of a country like Syria is in the hands of the Syrian people or neighboring countries. The United States is unwilling to take on the cost and calumny of trying to solve the problem. It is less a form of isolationism than a recognition of the limits of power and interest. Not everything that happens in the world requires or justifies American intervention.
If maintained, this doctrine will force the world to reconsider many things. On a recent trip in Europe and the Caucasus, I was constantly asked what the United States would do on various issues. I responded by saying it would do remarkably little and that it was up to them to act. This caused interesting consternation. Many who condemn U.S. hegemony also seem to demand it. There is a shift under way that they have not yet noticed -- except for an absence that they regard as an American failure. My attempt to explain it as the new normal did not always work.
Given that there is a U.S. presidential election under way, this doctrine, which has quietly emerged under Obama, appears to conflict with the views of Mitt Romney, a point I made in a previous article. My core argument on foreign policy is that reality, not presidents or policy papers, makes foreign policy. The United States has entered a period in which it must move from military domination to more subtle manipulation, and more important, allow events to take their course. This is a maturation of U.S. foreign policy, not a degradation. Most important, it is happening out of impersonal forces that will shape whoever wins the U.S. presidential election and whatever he might want. Whether he wishes to increase U.S. assertiveness out of national interest, or to protect human rights, the United States is changing the model by which it operates. Overextended, it is redesigning its operating system to focus on the essentials and accept that much of the world, unessential to the United States, will be free to evolve as it will.
This does not mean that the United States will disengage from world affairs. It controls the world's oceans and generates almost a quarter of the world's gross domestic product. While disengagement is impossible, controlled engagement, based on a realistic understanding of the national interest, is possible.
This will upset the international system, especially U.S. allies. It will also create stress in the United States both from the political left, which wants a humanitarian foreign policy, and the political right, which defines the national interest broadly. But the constraints of the past decade weigh heavily on the United States and therefore will change the way the world works.
The important point is that no one decided this new doctrine. It is emerging from the reality the United States faces. That is how powerful doctrines emerge. They manifest themselves first and are announced when everyone realizes that that is how things work.
.
Read more: The Emerging Doctrine of the United States | Stratfor
-
Freidman is a smart guy, perhaps too smart in that he can always weave a cohent theme out of chaos. I call B.S.
There isn't a coherent foreing policy doctrine from Obama/Clinton. It's a mishmash of leftist though, campaign slogans and incompitance.
-
I couldn't agree more with G M here. Friedman is grasping for straws and creating a coherent "doctrine" out of thin air. Even if one were to assume that there is a coherent theme driving the present administration's foreign policy (and I for the record do not), it's much more plausible that it is simply - as Dinesh D'Souza posits in his excellent film "2016" - anti-colonialism and a desire to see the U.S. diminished in stature on the world stage.
-
WW2 left the US in a unique position. Not only were we the victor, alone of the major economies of the world we were undiminished. Thanks not only to the role of the US economy and the US dollar but also due to the influence of the English empire, English became the lengua franca of the world. With expansionist communist empires on the march, our military friendship was highly valued. As Henry Kissinger noted in the 1970s, we lived in a bi-polar world militarily and a multi-polar world economically. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the early 90s for a time there was a uni-polar world, both militarily and ecnomically.
For reasons we can discuss at length, this is no longer the case and IMHO not likely to return.
IMHO some of us here are still thinking that uni-polar is an option. Romney sometimes sounds like this and may well get badly dinged in the upcoming debate as Rayn was IMHO when Biden said "We are leaving" and Ryan hedged. Don't think Team Obama hasn't noticed this and is not preparing His glibness to drive hard on this point!
IMHO the American people are war weary and understandably unimpressed with Washington's efforts at uni-polarism. According to Michael Yon, whom I have honored with threads of his own (for Iraq IIRC and for Afpakia) we were badly losing the war in Afpakia by the end of the Bush presidency. IMHO Bush's strategy there was incoherent AND he did not pay attention. I did not envy the hand Obama was dealt in Afpakia. However, having promised to win it as an essential war of national self-defense Baraq's half-assed "Surge Light" was and is a ticket to failure. The incoherence continues. We are being run out of town, and across the political spectrum everyone is ready to come home. No one wants to stay any longer. No one sees success as an option.
Iraq is a more complex story. As is well supported on these pages I thought going into Iraq a good idea. Still do-- the problem was that a) Bush and Rumbo did a poor job of leading the war and b) America was badly stabbed in the back by the American left. Still, the Surge pulled things out, but Baraq has managed to throw that away. I thought Ryan quite on target with his repeated observation in his debate about how Biden blew closing the deal with Iraq to stay with 30,000 troops. Baraq's offer of 3,000 was a deliberate joke intended to communicate a lack of seriousness and naturally the Iraqis got the memo. Now, Iran flies supplies to Assad in Syria through Iraqi air space and we have de minimis land based military options to go after Iran's nukes; indeed we cannot even deliver Iraqi air space to the Isrealis (as we sabotage Israel's deal with Azerbaijian, but I digress).
Romney-Ryan are quite right about weakness inviting trouble, but IMHO they currently run the risk of sounding like a return to Bush Doctrine. Politically this is a loser. Romney had best get this in time for the debate.
-
Just because the American public is tired of the global jihad doesn't mean it's going away.
-
A fair point and a POV which we share.
So, in twenty five words or less, what is the US strategy and how do we articulate it in a way that gets Romney into the White House?
-
Romney will fight the global jihad rather than empower it.
-
This is a critical point that ought to be made (G M's), but as neither Romney nor Ryan appear to have a solid grasp of the global jihadist objective or how it is steadily being advanced, I seriously doubt either of them will put it in those terms, as spot-on as that statement is. David Horowitz made this point brilliantly in his book a few years back titled "The Art of Political War," in which he argued that the Left is quite adept at coming up with simple catch-phrases such as "tax cuts for the rich" that the bumbling, inept Republicans never seem to be able to match. Kudos to G M for coming up with such an excellent, succinct way of framing the issue.
Frankly, however - I'm not nearly as concerned about this issue in the upcoming debate as Crafty seems to be, since despite the mainstream media's efforts to cover for him, Obama's failure on foreign policy appears to be becoming more obvious and more dangerous by the day. I don't think this will be lost on the voters who watch the second and third debates (historically many fewer than the first one.)
-
GM:
Ummm , , , my doggy nose tells me that is not a winner for a population that on the whole does not get global jihad. When someone says to you "We freed Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya and look at the thanks we got. I say it's time to come home" what do you say?
Obj:
Check out what Biden did with Iraq "We/I've seen this before. "They" will let us do there fighting for them and the time comes to tell them "We're going home by date X so you need to start getting your excrement together now because whether you do or not, we're leaving by date X."
Contrast that with Ryan's "Well we'd confer with our generals" from which most people will infer there is NOT a date X. In that the huge majority of the American people have correctly concluded that there is no prospect of Afpakia being an endless clusterfcuk wherein our troops are killed by those wearing the uniforms of those whom we help, politically this is a losing proposition and Baraq and the Pravdas will readily use this to distract e.g. from the surprisingly strong attention that is starting to be given to Baraq's lies about the AQ kill of our ambassador to Libya.
What does GM's formulation tell us specifically about what a Romney administration would do?
-
"what is the US strategy and how do we articulate it in a way that gets Romney into the White House?"
"Romney will fight the global jihad rather than empower it."
"What does GM's formulation tell us specifically about what a Romney administration would do?"
---------
I don't expect big new specifics at this point and Crafty is right that people are war weary.
Romney is articulating clear differences in the principles he will use to guide him in the job.
1) Romney will rebuild America's economic strength and Obama won't. America in decline economically erodes the influence of our foreign policy around the world and takes from our ability to shape events that affect our security.
2) Romney believes in peace through strength, including military strength. He was very clear in his belief that we want to build and maintain military capability to prevent war, not to prosecute it. Obama believes the opposite, that our strength provokes countries like Iran to build weapons and threaten neighbors. The President sent his 'off-mic' message to Putin that he will disarm dramatically in his imagined second term. Weakness invites trouble; how many times do we need to learn this lesson?!
3) Romney recognizes enemies and terrorists for what they are. Obama has believed that terrorists and jihadists hate only a George Bush led America, not an apologetic, surrendering America.
4) Romney recognizes allies including Israel. Obama sees the parties in the Middle East as morally equivalent while one side promises to destroy the other.
5) Romney will not surrender foreign policy to world government. See Dick Morris' new book on what powers the Obama administration would surrender to the UN if it could win Senate ratification, including many, many global taxes, taking money from America and moving our foreign aid decisions to the world body of unelected, corrupt globalcrats.
6) Romney will want daily intelligences briefings, face to face, including serious follow up discussions. Obama is too smart to need them.
7) Romney represents a break from the dishonesty the American people received over the Fast and Furious scandal and the cover up of the deadly security void in Benghazi.
8 ) Romney's advisers are more likely to read the forum and learn of the YA-Crafty plan for splitting up Afghanipakistan.
The above does not immediately solve the Syrian crisis, move the new Egyptian government to religious tolerance or cause terrorists anywhere to lay down their arms. From the campaign point of view, Romney needs to demonstrate he is as ready as anyone can be to take on the role of Commander in Chief in an unstable and dangerous world.
-
Questions/points:
1) "America in decline economically erodes the influence of our foreign policy around the world and takes from our ability to shape events that affect our security." Is this true in absolute or relative terms? As in, if the rest of the world also is in an economic decline, and the US is too, to what extent is this statement fact?
2) "Obama has believed that terrorists and jihadists hate only a George Bush led America, not an apologetic, surrendering America." In my mind, this is a curious overstatement given his use of drones against terrorists, and well beyond the war zones fought during the Bush presidency. (Note, not "wrong" just overstatement.)
3) "Romney's advisers are more likely to read the forum and learn of the YA-Crafty plan for splitting up Afghanipakistan." I would love presidential advisors to read the forum!
-
GM:
Ummm , , , my doggy nose tells me that is not a winner for a population that on the whole does not get global jihad. When someone says to you "We freed Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya and look at the thanks we got. I say it's time to come home" what do you say?
Until next time? Fighting the global jihad isn't an elective war and we will continue to be retaught that lesson until it sinks in. The future holds things that will make 9/11 look like a fresh spring morning. Complacency kills.
-
At this moment in time what you/we are going to hear back is "Well, if we weren't in their countries, there would not be a problem. Besides, who cares if Syria, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon et al have a big war? Let Allah sort it out, it has nothing to do with us."
-
Questions/points:
1) "America in decline economically erodes the influence of our foreign policy around the world and takes from our ability to shape events that affect our security." Is this true in absolute or relative terms? As in, if the rest of the world also is in an economic decline, and the US is too, to what extent is this statement fact?
Because we fight far away from our shores and with very expensive force multipliers. We value our troops and try to preserve every one while a potential opponent like China wouldn't blink at losing 100,000 troops to inflict 10,000 casulaties on us. They can fight on the "cheap" while we cannot.
2) "Obama has believed that terrorists and jihadists hate only a George Bush led America, not an apologetic, surrendering America." In my mind, this is a curious overstatement given his use of drones against terrorists, and well beyond the war zones fought during the Bush presidency. (Note, not "wrong" just overstatement.)
He painted himself into a corner as far as using drones because he can't have SOCOM grabbing prisoners, so it's his "Look strong" headfake while he quietly loses the war.
3) "Romney's advisers are more likely to read the forum and learn of the YA-Crafty plan for splitting up Afghanipakistan." I would love presidential advisors to read the forum!
That would help them a great deal.
-
At this moment in time what you/we are going to hear back is "Well, if we weren't in their countries, there would not be a problem. Besides, who cares if Syria, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon et al have a big war? Let Allah sort it out, it has nothing to do with us."
What countries were we in in 1993 when the WTC was attacked the first time? What countries were we in on 9/11? What countries were we in when the Barbary Pirates were kidnapping Americans for their slave trade and President Jefferson had to send the Marines to the "shores of Tripoli"?
We aren't in the middle east because we like falafel.
-
G M's points are well-taken. Crafty - I certainly understand what you are saying - but as G M points out - this is NOT an elective war. We abdicate our responsibility here at the virtually certain cost of thousands - if not tens of thousands - of innocent American lives. The horror of 9-11 is nothing compared to what the jihadists would REALLY like to pull off - an EMP, dirty bomb, or suitcase nuke detonated in one of our cities. Make no mistake - they are working towards all of these objectives. American war-weariness is no excuse for suicidal behavior.
-
I'm afraid my point is partially misunderstood. We are in agreement on the essentials. My point is focused on presenting it persuasively to regular voters.
-
I'm afraid my point is partially misunderstood. We are in agreement on the essentials. My point is focused on presenting it persuasively to regular voters.
The "Honey Boo-boo/Kardashian" fans that support the weight loss industry to the tune of 60 billion a year while responding to marketing like "Lose ugly fat without dieting or exercise" are not going to be moved by any presentation we might devise. Unfortunately, a large percentage of our population is as attached to reality as Timothy Leary at a Hunter S. Thompson barbeque and equipped with the survival potential of a teacup poodle on an prescription of immunosupressant medication.
-
Agreed that a goodly percentage of the American population is quite deserving of all the condescension that you dish out. OTOH, there are a lot of regular, sincere, patriotic Americans who understandably might wonder WTF you are talking about with regard to Afpakia. After a strong beginning Bush made a clusterfcuk of our strategy and Baraq added his unique brand of cognitive disssonance to said clusterfcuk. There is NOTHING coherent on the bell curve horizon of American politics with regard to Afpakia and quite understandably there is near zero confidence in the competence of our government-- Republican or Democrat led as the case may be. As for the YA-Crafty Doctrine, anyone who were to try running on it would not even get out of the starting blocks at this point.
-
Bigdog: "Is this true [America in decline economically erodes the influence...and takes from our ability to shape events] in absolute or relative terms? As in, if the rest of the world also is in an economic decline, and the US is too, to what extent is this statement fact?"
Good question. I say both relative and absolute terms. The relative position mostly but other nations in decline does not help us build ships. My point is that in the campaign, the candidate who can produce economic growth is in a stronger position to build military capability and deterrence. Only one really wants economic growth and only one wants a stronger military. The other enjoys some of the perks of a strong military, use of Air Force One, the best drones in the world, the Navy Seal Six team at your proposal for political purposes etc.
"this is a curious overstatement [Obama believed terrorists and jihadists hate only a George Bush led America, not an apologetic, surrendering America] given his use of drones against terrorists, and well beyond the war zones fought during the Bush presidency."
Yes! My unwritten thought is that the Obama administration foreign policy is bipolar. What I posted was half the story; what you point out is the opposing half. He also got tougher on terrorists and enemies when he kept Guantanamo open, when they moved a trial out of civilian court in NYC, when he kept the fighting going in Iraq before giving up the gains, when he kept the fighting going in Afghanistan even though our withdrawal/surrender is on an announced date-certain, the drones and of course the bin Laden kill. (Can you imagine the outrage from Dems and media if Dick Cheney was the President ordering the drone strikes or OBL kill of the last 4 years.) But then our President mentions a screwed up pretend filmmaker 6 times in his UN speech presumably as the cause of the deadly consulate attack. Mentioning the film 5 times would not have made the point, his advisers believed. The film provoked otherwise reasonable folks a day off of work playing with the rocket propelled grenades, he imagines aloud to the world.
GM: using drones...his "Look strong" headfake while he quietly loses the war.
There is no real need to know what he is thinking, just that he must go. I would guess drone strikes are not his strategy but people who know more than him say high value target and he doesn't dare say no, like the OBL hit. These conflicting strategies oppose each other. He knew not to spike the football on killing bin Laden, then for political reasons he spiked it and spiked it and spiked it. Same for losing the war. It isn't a loss if he was never trying to win. We were doing time in Afghanistan, a part of his job he despised and gave almost no attention - like growing the economy. He mostly works out war policy with people like Valerie Jarret and Axelrod IMHO as his commanders on the ground in the crucial hold-on-to-power game.
Likewise is partly true for Romney. He doesn't need a foreign policy until January. He doesn't need one at all if he doesn't get elected.
I think Barack Obama would be far more comfortable and effective criticizing reckless drone hits of Mitt Romney than approving and defending them himself.
Soon hopefully he can do that.
Crafty: "As for the YA-Crafty Doctrine, anyone who were to try running on it would not even get out of the starting blocks at this point."
Better that you say that than one of us. :wink:
-
I suppose I could post this the the 2012 Presidential thread, but I post it here because the question presented deserves a less transitory thread than this one.
Most of us are agreed on many points criticizing BO's foreign policy, but we need to offer the American people an articulation of what we would do different. Would we have kept Mubarak in? Would we, a la Sen. McCain, have gone into Libya and would we arm Syrian rebels? Would we attack Iran? Would we stay or go in Afg? etc etc.
-
The Islamist Threat Isn't Going Away
America's foreign policy hasn't improved its image in the Arab world..
By MICHAEL J. TOTTEN
President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney wrapped up their trilogy of presidential debates on Monday this week and spent most of the evening arguing foreign policy. Each demonstrated a reasonable grasp of how the world works and only sharply disagreed with his opponent on the margins and in the details. But they both seem to think, 11 years after 9/11, that calibrating just the right policy recipe will reduce Islamist extremism and anti-Americanism in the Middle East. They're wrong.
Mr. Romney said it first, early in the debate: "We're going to have to put in place a very comprehensive and robust strategy to help the world of Islam . . . reject this violent extremism." Later Mr. Obama spoke as though this objective is already on its way to being accomplished: "When Tunisians began to protest," he said, "this nation, me, my administration, stood with them earlier than just about any other country. In Egypt, we stood on the side of democracy. In Libya, we stood on the side of the people. And as a consequence, there is no doubt that attitudes about Americans have changed."
The Middle East desperately needs economic development, better education, the rule of law and gender equality, as Mr. Romney says. And Mr. Obama was right to take the side of citizens against dictators—especially in Libya, where Moammar Gadhafi ran one of the most thoroughly repressive police states in the world, and in Syria, where Bashar Assad has turned the country he inherited into a prison spattered with blood. But both presidential candidates are kidding themselves if they think anti-Americanism and the appeal of radical Islam will vanish any time soon.
First, it's simply not true that attitudes toward Americans have changed in the region. I've spent a lot of time in Tunisia and Egypt, both before and after the revolutions, and have yet to meet or interview a single person whose opinion of Americans has changed an iota.
Second, pace Mr. Romney, promoting better education, the rule of law and gender equality won't reduce the appeal of radical Islam. Egyptians voted for Islamist parties by a two-to-one margin. Two-thirds of those votes went to the Muslim Brotherhood, and the other third went to the totalitarian Salafists, the ideological brethren of Osama bin Laden. These people are not even remotely interested in the rule of law, better education or gender equality. They want Islamic law, Islamic education and gender apartheid. They will resist Mr. Romney's pressure for a more liberal alternative and denounce him as a meddling imperialist just for bringing it up.
Anti-Americanism has been a default political position in the Arab world for decades. Radical Islam is the principal vehicle through which it's expressed at the moment, but anti-Americanism specifically, and anti-Western "imperialism" generally, likewise lie at the molten core of secular Arab nationalism of every variety. The Islamists hate the U.S. because it's liberal and decadent. (The riots in September over a ludicrous Internet video ought to make that abundantly clear.) And both Islamists and secularists hate the U.S. because it's a superpower.
Everything the United States does is viewed with suspicion across the political spectrum. Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, the director of Egypt's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, admitted as much to me in Cairo last summer when I asked him about NATO's war against Gadhafi in Libya. "There is a general sympathy with the Libyan people," he said, "but also concern about the NATO intervention. The fact that the rebels in Libya are supported by NATO is why many people here are somewhat restrained from voicing support for the rebels." When I asked him what Egyptians would think if the U.S. sat the war out, he said, "They would criticize NATO for not helping. It's a lose-lose situation for you."
So we're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't. And not just on Libya. An enormous swath of the Arab world supported the Iraqi insurgency after an American-led coalition overthrew Saddam Hussein. Thousands of non-Iraqi Arabs even showed up to fight. Yet today the U.S. is roundly criticized all over the region for not taking Assad out in Syria.
The U.S. has decent relations with Tunisia's elected coalition government, yet nearly every liberal Tunisian I interviewed a few months ago looks at that and sees a big conspiracy between Americans and Islamists. The Islamists, of course, see U.S. plots against them. We can't win.
We can't even win when we stand against Israel. President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried that during the Suez Crisis in 1956. He backed Egypt, not Israel, and not Britain or France. How did Egypt and its ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser pay back the U.S.? By forging an alliance with Moscow and making Egypt a Soviet client state for two decades.
Libyans are the big exception. They're more pro-American than their neighbors, and they're less prone to extremism. American flags are a common sight there—absolutely unheard of everywhere else in the Arab world. The Islamists lost the post-Gadhafi elections. The only demonstrations there recently were against the terrorist cell that assassinated U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others at the American consulate in Benghazi. Just a few weeks later, another group of demonstrators forced an Islamist militia to flee town by overrunning their headquarters.
Here Mr. Obama deserves credit. After all, he helped get rid of Gadhafi. But Libyans were already something of an exception. They were force-fed anti-American propaganda daily for decades, but it came from a lunatic and malevolent tyrant they hated. Libyans and Americans were quietly on the same side longer than most people there have been alive. Libya has at least that much in common with Eastern Europe during the communist period. Unfortunately, that just isn't true of anywhere else.
When he was elected president in 2008, Mr. Obama thought he could improve America's relations with the Arab world by not being George W. Bush, by creating some distance between himself and Israel, and by delivering a friendly speech in Cairo. He was naïve. He should know better by now, especially after the unpleasantness last month in the countries where he thinks we're popular.
It's not his fault that the Middle East is immature and unhinged politically. Nobody can change that right now. This should be equally obvious to Mr. Romney even though he isn't president. No American president since Eisenhower could change it, nor can Mr. Romney. We may be able to help out here and there, and I wholeheartedly agree with him that we should. But Arab countries will mostly have to work this out on their own.
It will take a long time.
Mr. Totten is a contributing editor at World Affairs and City Journal, and is the prize-winning author of "Where the West Ends" (Belmont Estate, 2012) and "The Road to Fatima Gate" (Encounter, 2011).
-
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_triumph_of_failure_mSz3uMSEdFkmN1We9hm0WM
-
By a warrior scholar.
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff1206s.pdf
-
Some great points in there and some with which I differ. Iraq war total will be $6 trillion is quite an assertion. Raising a tax rate is not synonymous with raising revenue. Some parts of the title American Decline I think he doesn't address, economic decline to me is central to why our influence is on a path of decline. I would confront it economically.
He doesn't claim to have any easy answer, but makes a good series of points that we know how to fight, not how to win or how to end wars. He makes a strong argument for less intervention. It is not clear to me what we should have done instead.
I should add, glad that you posted it. BD has a reading list wider than some of the rest of us!
By a warrior scholar.
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff1206s.pdf
-
I have high regard for GF, but have always doubted his grasp of economics- in which he is frequently banally Keynesian. That said, as always, he is a worthy of serious consideration.
The point about the central role of energy in particular strikes me as sound. The US has been blessed by our free market with a turn of events of profound implications-- indeed I can imagine the middle east becoming profoundly less relevant with the profound exception of the nuke issue. This change in our energy hand also bodes poorly for Russia, which faces deep demographic challenges. Like GF I too have doubted the solidity of the Chinese economic model.
================================
By George Friedman
President Barack Obama has won re-election. However, in addition to all of the constraints on him that I discussed last week, he won the election with almost half the people voting against him. His win in the Electoral College was substantial -- and that's the win that really matters -- but the popular vote determines how he governs, and he will govern with one more constraint added to the others. The question is whether this weakens him or provides an opportunity. That is not determined by his policies but by the strategic situation, which, in my view, gives the United States some much-needed breathing room.
The Structure of the International System
At the moment, the international system is built on three pillars: the United States, Europe and China. Europe, if it were united, would be very roughly the same size as the United States in terms of economy, population and potential military power. China is about a third the size of the other two economically, but it has been the growth engine of the world, making it more significant than size would indicate.
The fundamental problem facing the world is that two of these three pillars are facing existential crises, while the third, the United States, is robust only by comparison. Europe is in recession and, faced with a banking and sovereign debt crisis, is trying to reconcile the divergent national interests that were supposed to merge into a united Europe. China, dependent on exports to maintain its economy, is confronting the fact that many of its products are no longer competitive in the international market because of rising costs of labor and land. The result is increasing tension within the ruling Communist Party over the direction it should take.
The United States has a modestly growing economy and, rhetoric aside, does not face existential political problems. Where the European Union's survival is in serious question and the ability of China to resume its rate of growth is in doubt, the United States does not face a political crisis on the same order as the other two. The fiscal cliff is certainly there, but given American political culture, all crises signify the apocalypse. It is much easier to imagine a solution to the United States' immediate political problems than it is to imagine how Europe or China would solve their challenges.
We have written extensively on why we think the European and Chinese crises are insoluble, and I won't repeat that here. What I am saying is not that Europe or China will disappear into a black hole but that each will change its behavior substantially. Europe will not become a united entity but will return to the pursuit of the interests of individual nations, though still in a wealthy continent. China will continue to be a major economic power, but its term as the leading growth engine in the world will end, causing institutional crises. Again, these powers will not fall off the map, but they will radically change their behaviors and expectations.
Since power is relative, this leaves the United States with no significant challenger for international primacy, not because the United States is particularly successful but because others are even less so. The United States has a decision to make right now. As the leading power, should it attempt to preserve the political order that has existed for the past 20 years or allow it to pass into history? Perhaps a better question to ask is whether the United States has the power to preserve a united Europe and a high-growth China, and if so, is the current configuration of the world worth preserving from the U.S. point of view?
The United States has done nothing to stabilize either Europe or China. Even given U.S. resources, it is not clear that there is anything it could do. Europe's financial requirements outstrip its political ability to act in a united manner. Europe does not need U.S. leadership and the United States does not need to shoulder the European burden. The only solution for the European crisis is that a third party underwrites debtors' economic needs and thereby preserves creditors' interests. Even given the possible impact on the United States, adopting Europe is neither possible nor desirable.
The same is true with China. China has twisted its economy into an irrational form out of a desire to avoid unemployment. The Chinese Communist Party is afraid of instability, which would certainly follow unemployment. The irrationality of the Chinese economy, a combination of inefficient businesses kept operating by loans that are unlikely to be paid and exports that are barely profitable, is not an economic phenomenon but a political one. The United States would not underwrite China's excesses even if it could. Nor will Beijing withdraw money from U.S. government bonds because it has nowhere else to put it -- Europe is becoming less reliable, and it cannot invest it in China. That is China's core problem -- its economy can't absorb more money, and that is a profoundly unhealthy situation.
When we consider the core architecture of the international system, it becomes readily apparent that the United States can do nothing to preserve it. The strategy of allowing nature to take its course is not so much an option chosen as it is a reality imposed. What will evolve from this will evolve on its own. Europe will return to the order that existed prior to World War II: sovereign nation states pursuing their own interests, collaborating and competing. China will remain an inward-looking country, trying to preserve its institutions in a new epoch. The United States will observe.
Iran's Regional Influence
A similar situation has emerged with Iran. From 2003 onward, when the United States destroyed the balance of power between Iraq and Iran, Iran has been an ascendant power. With the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, Iran became the most influential foreign power there. But Iran has overreached and is itself in crisis.
The overreach took place in Syria. As the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad came under attack, the Iranians threw their resources and prestige behind the effort to save it. That effort has failed in the sense that while al Assad retains a great deal of power in Syria, it is as a warlord, not the government. He no longer governs but uses his forces to compete with other forces. Syria has started to look like Lebanon, with a weak and sometimes invisible government and armed, competing factions.
Iran simply didn't have the resources to stabilize the al Assad regime. For the United States, an Iranian success in Syria would have created a sphere of influence stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean. The Iranian failure, undoubtedly aided by U.S. and others' covert assistance to al Assad's enemies, ended this threat. Had the sphere of influence materialized, it would have brought pressure to the northern border of Saudi Arabia. The United States, whose primary interest was the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf as part of the global economic system, would have faced the decision of intervening to protect the Saudis, something the United States did not want to do, or accepting Iran as the dominant regional power.
The United States might have had to negotiate a radical reversal of policy as it did with China in the 1970s. Indeed, I suspect that attempts to reach out to Iran were made. But Iran committed the gravest of mistakes. It failed to recognize how shallow its power was and how vulnerable it was to countermeasures. The collapse of its position in Syria has opened the door to pressure in Iraq. Add to this that the financial sanctions on Iran finally had some impact, sending the economy into a tailspin, and we have seen a historic reversal since the summer; Iran has gone from a regional power with a nuclear program to a country with declining influence, domestic economic problems and a nuclear program. Given that it is more threatening to have one or two operational nuclear weapons openly deployed than to have a perpetual threat of a nuclear weapon, Iran is not in a powerful position.
Russia and Energy
Russia, of course, remains a robust power, but like the others it suffers from an underlying disease. In Georgia, Russia saw the election of a prime minister deeply opposed to the presidency of Mikhail Saakashvili, whom the Russians see as an enemy. Russian influence, particularly via its intelligence service, is not trivial. But Russia has a deep problem. Its national power rests on a single, massive base: energy exports. These have been of enormous value financially and in terms of influencing the politics of its neighbors. Indeed, Russia's interest in Georgia had as much to do with pipelines as with governments; Georgia is Azerbaijan's route for energy exports to Europe.
But it is not clear how long Russia's energy power will last. It is built on the absence of significant energy in the rest of Europe. However, new technologies have made it likely that Europe will find energy resources that don't depend on Russia or third-party pipelines. If that happens, Russia's political and financial positions will weaken dramatically. Russia has a weakening hand, and it can't control the thing that weakens it: new technologies.
The U.S. energy situation also will improve dramatically under most scenarios, and it can be expected to be able to supply most of its energy needs from Western Hemispheric sources within a few years. A decline in dependence on energy resources drawn from the Eastern Hemisphere reduces the need of the United States to intervene there and particularly reduces the need to concern itself with the Persian Gulf. That will be a sea change in how the global system works.
I will examine each of these issues in detail in the coming weeks, but the United States, not necessarily through any action of its own, is in fact facing a world with two characteristics: All competing powers have problems more severe than the United States, and shifts in energy technology -- and energy has been the essence of geopolitics since the industrial revolution -- favor the United States dramatically. A world with declining threats and decreasing dependence gives the United States breathing room. This isn't to say that the threat of Islamist terrorism has disappeared -- and I doubt that that threat will dissipate -- but it will remain a permanent danger, able to harm many but not able to pose an existential threat to the United States.
It is the breathing space that is most important. The United States needs to regroup. It needs to put the "war on terror" into perspective and rethink domestic security. It needs to rethink its strategy for dealing with the world from its unique position and align its economy and military capabilities with a new definition of its interests, and it needs to heal its own economy.
The logic of what it must do -- selective engagement where the national interest is involved, with the least use of military force possible -- is obvious. How this emerges and is defined depends on the environment. Dispassionate thought was not possible between 9/11 and today, nor would it be possible if we saw the pillars of the international system increasing their unity and power. But that is not what is happening. What is happening is a general decline in power, greater than the decline of the United States. And that provides room. This will frame Obama's foreign policy choices.
-
A Flock of Doves
With Kerry at State, Hagel at Defense would be dangerous. .
President Obama began to unveil his second-term national security team on Friday, choosing John Kerry as the next Secretary of State. The Massachusetts Senator shares the President's view of diminished American power and influence, which should only compound skepticism about the mooted selection of Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon.
Mr. Obama has found his mirror-image in Mr. Kerry, who for 30 years has been one of the Democratic Party's leading doves. The Senator's antiwar activism after Vietnam is well known and may have cost him the Presidency in 2004. But that shouldn't bar him from State, where his job will be diplomacy at the behest of the President.
The bigger question is how much fortitude Mr. Kerry will show in pursuing U.S. interests. His instincts have typically been to oppose the use of American force abroad and to engage adversaries as if they share our own peaceful goals. Like Joe Biden, he resisted Ronald Reagan's policies that ended the Cold War, opposed the Gulf War in 1990, supported the Iraq war but then changed his mind, and opposed the 2007 surge that salvaged Iraq.
In his remarks Friday, Mr. Obama said Mr. Kerry's "entire life has prepared him for this role," which is true, if not always reassuring. He has traveled widely and knows many world leaders personally. In the 1990s, he helped open diplomatic relations with Hanoi and more recently has worked difficult portfolios in Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.
But the case of Syria reveals the limitations of his worldview. In 2008 when anti-Bush antipathy was at its height, he called for "engagement" with dictator Bashar Assad. A year later he and his wife dined out in Damascus with the Assads. In April 2010, he called Syria "an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region." He has since changed his mind and denounced Mr. Assad, but he'll have to be tougher-minded to succeed at State.
***
Which brings us to Mr. Hagel, whom the White House has leaked as a possible Defense Secretary. The idea seems to be that the former GOP Senator from Nebraska would bring a bipartisan note to foreign policy, but that logic usually applies when the choice shares the other party's views. Though he fought admirably in Vietnam (and has two Purple Hearts), Mr. Hagel's security views have more closely resembled a George McGovern strain of Republicanism.
In the Senate, Mr. Hagel steered more to foreign policy than defense issues, and on those he steered left. "Politically, who among us is going to stand up and defend Iran or Libya?" he told the Senate in June 2001. He proceeded to defend both, calling sanctions against the Tehran and Gadhafi regimes "an absolute charade," "ill-considered" and "breaching the spirit of multilateralism so necessary to achieve success."
The biggest question for the next Defense chief may be what to do about Iran, but Mr. Hagel has never worried much about its nuclear ambitions. In a 2008 speech, he said the U.S. needs to offer Iran "some kind of security guarantee" to get its help in striking an Israel-Palestinian peace deal. His ideas for "some easy to do breakthroughs" with Tehran included opening a diplomatic post or restoring commercial flights—without preconditions. He opposed sanctions on Tehran in 2004, 2007 and 2008.
These views might be acceptable in a Secretary of State, but they are troubling at the Pentagon in an Administration that lacks hawkish voices in general. In the first term, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and David Petraeus provided a counterweight to Mr. Obama's natural instincts to avoid U.S. leadership. Mr. Hagel is to the left of Mr. Kerry.
In the months after 9/11, he warned of "a dangerous arrogance and a sort of 'Pax Americana' vision, which holds that we are more powerful, richer, and smarter than the rest of the world."
His neo-isolationism became more urgent in the last decade, noting that the U.S. could do little good in Egypt or the Middle East in general. "I think we've got to be very wise and careful on this and continue to work with the multilateral institutions in the lead in Syria," he told Foreign Policy in May. He wanted the U.S. to engage Mr. Assad in 2008, but not to intervene to stop the Syrian dictator from killing his own people.
On military issues, the former Senator has been a notable critic of missile defenses and he wanted to halt their development as long as Russia is opposed. This is no small matter because Vladimir Putin wants to use arms-control talks to curtail U.S. missile defenses in the next four years.
Mr. Hagel supported the decision to oust Saddam Hussein but later became a critic and in 2007 he opposed the troop surge that saved the U.S. from defeat. Mr. Hagel called the surge proposal "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it's carried out." The surge stopped the sectarian bloodletting and enabled the U.S. drawdown.
By far the biggest risk is the role Mr. Hagel might play on military spending. Gutting the Pentagon has been a liberal goal since the 1960s, and Mr. Obama will have a new opening given the budget crisis. Mr. Gates and current Pentagon chief Leon Panetta have followed the President's orders but have resisted when the White House wanted to go too far. Mr. Gates made a special point of warning Americans not to repeat our frequent mistake of winding down the military when wars end. We regret it as new threats emerge.
Now is an especially dangerous moment, after a decade of wearing out ships and planes built as part of the Reagan buildup. A legitimate fear is that Mr. Obama wants Mr. Hagel, with his military record and GOP pedigree, to provide the political cover to shrink the Pentagon so he can finance ObamaCare and other entitlements.
Mr. Obama can do better than Mr. Hagel—for example, by choosing former Defense Under Secretary Michele Flournoy, or perhaps Colin Powell. If he does nominate Mr. Hagel, the Senate will have to prevent the Administration's senior security ranks from being dominated by a flock of doves who think the world is better off with a militarily weaker America.
-
(http://www.rightwingnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/obamakerry.jpg)
-
Hey! That would be fair only if Gigolo John earned it!
-
Johnston and Palti-Guzman: The Foreign Policy Uses of an Energy Bounty
The White House will effectively decide whether the U.S. becomes a global gas superpower..
By ROBERT JOHNSTON And LESLIE PALTI-GUZMAN
WSJ
The United States is poised to become a global gas superpower. Thanks to innovation and investment in shale-gas technology, the production of natural gas in America has surged by 20% since 2006. But this story is about to enter a new phase—one in which success will depend on whether and how well the White House prepares the way for exports of America's energy bounty.
American gas production has grown so much that the global market is now intently focused on the "U.S. LNG export play," or shipments of liquefied natural gas overseas. The export demand is a win for U.S. gas producers, who are struggling with weak prices at home due to a domestic glut. Yet the surge of U.S. natural gas into global gas markets will have major implications for U.S. policy abroad, too. As the Obama administration considers energy-policy priorities for its second term, LNG exports could also be an attractive new tool in the State Department foreign-policy box.
A boom in U.S. gas exports would help rebalance relationships between producers and consumers, largely to the advantage of America's allies. The current market consensus is that the U.S. will export about six billion cubic feet per day of natural gas (also measurable as 45 million tons of LNG) by 2020. That's the equivalent of about 8% of current U.S. gas production or 16% of global LNG production. Globally, that would place America just behind the world's largest current LNG exporters, Australia and Qatar.
Liquefied natural gas (along with the shale-gas revolution) has brought the U.S. to the top of the list of global gas-reserves holders. Some contracts are being made already and as exports begin in 2016 after export facilities are completed, the U.S. will compete with other large gas-reserve holders such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela. The geopolitical impact of American gas exports will be felt in many ways.
For instance, the rise of a major alternative supplier diminishes the likelihood of cartel behavior by rival suppliers such as Iran and Russia. These countries were among the key founding members of the Gas Exporting Country Forum, often described as a potential "gas OPEC." Although today there is already more gas produced and exported by countries outside the GECF than by its members, this trend will be accentuated by U.S. gas exports.
Furthermore, the rise of American LNG exports makes it easier for Washington to convince allies not to do business with rogue states, particularly Iran. With the prospect of American LNG imports, India, for example, now has more attractive alternatives to the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline. Pipelines are like a marriage, where the partners may be locked into supply and pricing arrangements that can last decades. A reliable and stable supplier of LNG such as the U.S. eliminates the need for risky long-term infrastructure projects and contracts.
With U.S. gas exports set to add to the global supply, there is also less interest in riskier Iranian and Venezuelan LNG export projects, which may now never materialize, as they would have to compete with more advanced U.S., Canadian, East and West African projects. Russia's Gazprom OGZPY -0.41%is now positioning itself in anticipation of more competition from the U.S. In the past two months, Gazprom announced that it is launching a gas program in eastern Russia with the development of the Chayanda field and new export infrastructures to increase its market share in Asia. Gazprom also is investing in the offshore section of the South Stream pipeline from Russia under the Black Sea to Bulgaria, to bypass Ukraine and focus instead on locking in European market share.
Yet in Europe, American LNG exports will be a welcome source of diversification to cut energy dependence on Russia. Gas from the U.S. could be as important for Europeans as the planned Nabucco West pipeline that will bring 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas into Europe. U.S. LNG will also play a central role in helping the U.K. reduce its dependence on Qatar—a risk to watch closely, especially in light of the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, which is the only sea access to Qatar.
In Asia, Japan and India are enthusiastic about the potential of U.S. LNG. News reports that say diplomats of both countries have urged the Department of Energy and the State Department to authorize enough production and export projects to satisfy their goals of importing cheaper gas from the U.S. In post-Fukushima Japan, American LNG is part of a new acquisition strategy designed to yield a more diversified supply portfolio, both in terms of sources and pricing.
Another appeal of new U.S. LNG supply is that American gas prices are linked to Henry Hub futures, a benchmark system (named after a major distribution hub in Louisiana) where prices reflect supply and demand. In the rest of the world, however, most gas sales until now have been contracted at a price calculated as a certain percentage of the oil price. As a result, buyers are currently paying a premium for oil-market risks that have little to do with global gas supply and demand. Exports of LNG from the U.S. could further encourage the decoupling of international gas prices from oil prices, and push down gas-market prices.
This pressure on traditional LNG pricing mechanisms in Asia—where buyers are especially burdened by the premium for oil-market risks that have little to do with the global LNG market—will take time and will not only be the result of U.S. LNG exports. But the prospect of buying gas from America has already improved the bargaining position of European and Asian importers, largely to the benefit of U.S. allies. Negotiations on sales-purchase agreements for many such projects are under way, ahead of final investment decisions by project developers in Australia, Canada, the U.S. and East Africa.
Unlike in many other major gas-producing nations, the U.S. government does not dictate investment decisions or contractual arrangements by American oil and gas companies. Yet through its power to permit exports of U.S. gas and set the regulatory and environmental framework for domestic production, the White House will effectively say yea or nay to the emergence of the U.S. as a global gas superpower. The world is waiting for its answer.
Mr. Johnston is director of global energy and natural resources at Eurasia Group, where Ms. Palti-Guzman is a global gas analyst.
-
What the 'Lobby' Knows About Animus for Israel
The Jewish state, as the 'little Satan,' is a stand-in for the 'big Satan' and Western values. .
By RUTH R. WISSE
The confirmation process for those slated to guide American foreign policy can profitably be used to clear up at least one point of confusion. What's at issue is not the degree of their affection for Jews or for Israel—despite the consternation caused by the nomination for defense secretary of Chuck Hagel, who said in 2006: "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here, but I'm a United States senator. I'm not an Israeli senator."
The Nebraskan's imputation of excessive Jewish influence in Washington is less worrisome than his failure to recognize why the "lobby" exists. Never mind the Jews: Opposition to Israel camouflages a much more virulent hostility to America. How does an American statesman assess the anti-Jews who attack Israel as a proxy for this country?
Let's start with basics: The cause of the long-running Arab war against the Jewish homeland is not Israel, it is Arab leaders' need for war against a "foreign intruder." Seven Middle East countries rallied their citizens by forming the Arab League in 1945 to prevent the creation of Israel. Failing in that effort, the Arab League eventually expanded to 21 members, which organized their domestic and foreign politics against the Jewish state. When Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Egypt was suspended from the league, expelled from the Islamic Conference and ousted from other regional and financial institutions. Re-admission for Egypt came only after the assassination of Sadat and his successor's abrogation of almost every term of the treaty.
Opposition to Israel is the only glue of pan-Arabism and the strongest common bond of otherwise warring Muslim constituencies. Even those inclined to end the war are afraid of the consequences (including assassination) of giving up hostilities.
Like the anti-Semitism from which it derives, anti-Zionism is less about the Jews than about the larger aims of those aggressing against the Jews. When the League of Anti-Semites formed in Germany in the 1870s, its primary goal was to prevent the spread of liberal democracy. Rather than denounce a freer, more open society, the league called democracy the ruse that allowed Jews to conquer Germany from within.
In the same way, anti-Zionism today unites conservatives and radicals in the Middle East against all that Israel represents—religious pluralism, individual rights and freedoms, liberal democracy, and Western ideas of progress. Jews and Israel are merely a convenient face or emblem for the huger bastions of those same ideals. Israel, "little Satan," is a handier target than the "big Satan."
The Arab war against Israel has cost thousands of Jewish lives, but its damage to Palestinians is arguably greater, destroying the moral fabric of a society that was once relatively prosperous and culturally advanced. Anti-Jewish politics works by misdirection, drawing attention away from real concerns toward the alleged Jewish violator. Thus, Arab leaders who tried to deny Jews their country accused Jews of denying Arabs their country. To make the charge stick, the leaders have kept Palestinian Arabs in perpetual refugee status while millions of other refugees around the world—including 800,000 Jews from Arab lands—were resettled and started their lives anew.
Many societies have identified Jews as the threatening alien, but Palestinian Arabs are the first people ever to shape their national identity exclusively around opposition to the Jews. The special ingredient that sets Palestinian nationalism apart from that of surrounding Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan—and reputedly makes it the strongest form of Arab nationalism—is the usurpation of Jewish symbols and history. The most important date in the Palestinian calendar is not any Arab or Muslim holiday or event, but the day of Israel's founding, commemorated as Nakba, the catastrophe that ostensibly spurred the creation of Arab Palestine. Commemorated as "Palestine's endless Holocaust," Nakba simultaneously libels the Jewish homeland and demeans the Shoah by appropriating the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews.
A new logo for the Palestinian political party Fatah claims the entire map of Israel. Fatah's rival, Hamas, is led by Khalid Mashaal, who recently called for the liberation of "Gaza today and tomorrow Ramallah and after that Jerusalem then Haifa and Jaffa." Clearly, both factions remain more intent on destroying their neighbor than on bettering Palestinian lives.
A perfumer in Gaza has named his new fragrance "M-75" after the "pleasant and attractive" missiles used by Hamas to attack Israel. A Facebook FB +1.24%page for Fatah shows a mother strapping her child into a suicide belt; when he asks his mother why him and not her, the mother says that she must bear more children to sacrifice for Palestine. Civil war in Syria, turmoil in Egypt, crisis in Iran and an Islamist threat to Jordan—all follow from the same ruinous politics of grievance and blame.
Chuck Hagel does not have to like Jews, but if he expects to defend the United States, he needs to understand the nature and scope of the war against Israel, including its corrupting effect on Arab societies. The alignment between Israel and America is dictated by those who burn the flags of both countries on the same pyre. By contrast, those who lobby for Israel's protection axiomatically have America's back.
Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of "Jews and Power" (Schocken, 2007).
-
Though I disagree with some of the comments on Iraq, overall an excellent piece in my opinion; I would add that it addresses questions that I have been asking here for some time and exemplifies exactly why the Reps have lost their dominance with the American electorate when it comes to foreign affairs and why Obama is forgiven so much. -- Marc
=============================
Avoiding the Wars That Never End
George Friedman | 16 January 2013
Last week, US President Barack Obama announced that the United States would transfer the primary responsibility for combat operations in Afghanistan to the Afghan military in the coming months, a major step toward the withdrawal of US forces. Also last week, France began an intervention in Mali designed to block jihadists from taking control of the country and creating a base of operations in France's former African colonies.
The two events are linked in a way that transcends the issue of Islamist insurgency and points to a larger geopolitical shift. The United States is not just drawing down its combat commitments; it is moving away from the view that it has the primary responsibility for trying to manage the world on behalf of itself, the Europeans and its other allies. Instead, that burden is shifting to those who have immediate interests involved.
Insecurity in 9/11's Wake
It is interesting to recall how the United States involved itself in Afghanistan. After 9/11, the United States was in shock and lacked clear intelligence on al Qaeda. It did not know what additional capabilities al Qaeda had or what the group's intentions were. Lacking intelligence, a political leader has the obligation to act on worst-case scenarios after the enemy has demonstrated hostile intentions and capabilities. The possible scenarios ranged from additional sleeper cells operating and awaiting orders in the United States to al Qaeda having obtained nuclear weapons to destroy cities. When you don't know, it is both prudent and psychologically inevitable to plan for the worst.
The United States had sufficient information to act in Afghanistan. It knew that al Qaeda was operating in Afghanistan and that disrupting the main cell was a useful step in taking some action against the threat. However, the United States did not immediately invade Afghanistan. It bombed the country extensively and inserted limited forces on the ground, but the primary burden of fighting the Taliban government was in the hands of anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan that had been resisting the Taliban and in the hands of other forces that could be induced to act against the Taliban. The Taliban gave up the cities and prepared for a long war. Al Qaeda's command cell left Afghanistan and shifted to Pakistan.
The United States achieved its primary goal early on. That goal was not to deny al Qaeda the ability to operate in Afghanistan, an objective that would achieve nothing. Rather, the goal was to engage al Qaeda and disrupt its command-and-control structure as a way to degrade the group's ability to plan and execute additional attacks. The move to Pakistan at the very least bought time, and given continued pressure on the main cell, allowed the United States to gather more intelligence about al Qaeda assets around the world.
This second mission -- to identify al Qaeda assets around the world -- required a second effort. The primary means of identifying them was through their electronic communications, and the United States proceeded to create a vast technological mechanism designed to detect communications and use that detection to identify and capture or kill al Qaeda operatives. The problem with this technique -- really the only one available -- was that it was impossible to monitor al Qaeda's communications without monitoring everyone's. If there was a needle in the haystack, the entire haystack had to be examined. This was a radical shift in the government's relationship to the private communications of citizens. The justification was that at a time of war, in which the threat to the United States was uncertain and possibly massive, these measures were necessary.
This action was not unique in American history. Abraham Lincoln violated the Constitution in several ways during the Civil War, from suspending the right to habeas corpus to blocking the Maryland Legislature from voting on a secession measure. Franklin Roosevelt allowed the FBI to open citizens' mail and put Japanese-Americans into internment camps. The idea that civil liberties must be protected in time of war is not historically how the United States, or most countries, operate. In that sense there was nothing unique in the decision to monitor communications in order to find al Qaeda and stop attacks. How else could the needle be found in the haystack? Likewise, detention without trial was not unique. Lincoln and Roosevelt both resorted to it.
The Civil War and World War II were different from the current conflict, however, because their conclusions were clear and decisive. The wars would end, one way or another, and so would the suspension of rights. Unlike those wars, the war in Afghanistan was extended indefinitely by the shift in strategy from disrupting al Qaeda's command cell to fighting the Taliban to building a democratic society in Afghanistan. With the second step, the US military mission changed its focus and increased its presence massively, and with the third, the terminal date of the war became very far away.
But there was a broader issue. The war in Afghanistan was not the main war. Afghanistan happened to be the place where al Qaeda was headquartered on September 11, 2001. The country was not essential to al Qaeda, and creating a democratic society there -- if it were even possible -- would not necessarily weaken al Qaeda. Even destroying al Qaeda would not prevent new Islamist organizations or individuals from rising up.
A New Kind of War
The main war was not against one specific terrorist group, but rather against an idea: the radical tendency in Islamism. Most Muslims are not radicals, but any religion with 1 billion adherents will have its share of extremists. The tendency is there, and it is deeply rooted. If the goal of the war were the destruction of this radical tendency, then it was not going to happen. While the risk of attacks could be reduced -- and indeed there were no further 9/11s despite repeated attempts in the United States -- there was no way to eliminate the threat. No matter how many divisions were deployed, no matter how many systems for electronic detection were created, they could only mitigate the threat, not eliminate it. Therefore, what some called the Long War really became permanent war.
The means by which the war was pursued could not result in victory. They could, however, completely unbalance US strategy by committing massive resources to missions not clearly connected with preventing Islamist terrorism. It also created a situation where emergency intrusions on critical portions of the Bill of Rights -- such as the need to obtain a warrant for certain actions -- became a permanent feature. Permanent war makes for permanent temporary measures.
The break point came, in my opinion, in about 2004. Around that time, al Qaeda was unable to mount attacks on the United States despite multiple efforts. The war in Afghanistan had dislodged al Qaeda and created the Karzai government. The invasion of Iraq -- whatever the rationale might have been -- clearly produced a level of resistance that the United States could not contain or could contain only by making agreements with its enemies in Iraq. At that point, a radical rethinking of the war had to take place. It did not.
The radical rethinking had to do not with Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather with what to do about a permanent threat to the United States, and indeed to many other countries, posed by the global networks of radical Islamists prepared to carry out terrorist attacks. The threat would not go away, and it could not be eliminated. At the same time, it did not threaten the existence of the republic. The 9/11 attacks were atrocious, but they did not threaten the survival of the United States in spite of the human cost. Combating the threat required a degree of proportionality so the fight could be maintained on an ongoing basis, without becoming the only goal of US foreign policy or domestic life. Mitigation was the only possibility; the threat would have to be endured.
Washington found a way to achieve this balance in the past, albeit against very different sorts of threats. The United States emerged as a great power in the early 20th century. During that time, it fought three wars: World War I, World War II and the Cold War, which included Korea, Vietnam and other, smaller engagements. In World War I and World War II, the United States waited for events to unfold, and in Europe in particular it waited until the European powers reached a point where they could not deal with the threat of German hegemony without American intervention. In both instances, it intervened heavily only late in the war, at the point where the Germans had been exhausted by other European powers. It should be remembered that the main American push in World War II did not take place until the summer of 1944. The American strategy was to wait and see whether the Europeans could stabilize the situation themselves, using distance to mobilize as late as possible and intervene decisively only at the critical moment.
The critics of this approach, particularly prior to World War II, called it isolationism. But the United States was not isolationist; it was involved in Asia throughout this period. Rather, it saw itself as being the actor of last resort, capable of acting at the decisive moment with overwhelming force because geography had given the United States the option of time and resources.
During the Cold War, the United States modified this strategy. It still depended on allies, but it now saw itself as the first responder. Partly this could be seen in US nuclear strategy. This could also be seen in Korea and Vietnam, where allies played subsidiary roles, but the primary effort was American. The Cold War was fought on a different set of principles than the two world wars.
The Cold War strategy was applied to the war against radical Islamism, in which the United States -- because of 9/11 but also because of a mindset that could be seen in other interventions -- was the first responder. Other allies followed the United States' lead and provided support to the degree to which they felt comfortable. The allies could withdraw without fundamentally undermining the war effort. The United States could not.
The approach in the US-jihadist war was a complete reversal from the approach taken in the two world wars. This was understandable given that it was triggered by an unexpected and catastrophic event, the reponse to which flowed from a lack of intelligence. When Japan struck Pearl Harbor, emotions were at least as intense, but US strategy in the Pacific was measured and cautious. And the enemy's capabilities were much better understood.
Stepping Back as Global Policeman
The United States cannot fight a war against radical Islamism and win, and it certainly cannot be the sole actor in a war waged primarily in the Eastern Hemisphere. This is why the French intervention in Mali is particularly interesting. France retains interests in its former colonial empire in Africa, and Mali is at the geographic center of these interests. To the north of Mali is Algeria, where France has significant energy investments; to the east of Mali is Niger, where France has a significant stake in the mining of mineral resources, particularly uranium; and to the south of Mali is Ivory Coast, where France plays a major role in cocoa production. The future of Mali matters to France far more than it matters to the United States.
What is most interesting is the absence of the United States in the fight, even if it is providing intelligence and other support, such as mobilizing ground forces from other African countries. The United States is not acting as if this is its fight; it is acting as if this is the fight of an ally, whom it might help in extremis, but not in a time when US assistance is unnecessary. And if the French can't mount an effective operation in Mali, then little help can be given.
This changing approach is also evident in Syria, where the United States has systematically avoided anything beyond limited and covert assistance, and Libya, where the United States intervened after the French and British launched an attack they could not sustain. That was, I believe, a turning point, given the unsatisfactory outcome there. Rather than accepting a broad commitment against radical Islamism everywhere, the United States is allowing the burden to shift to powers that have direct interests in these areas.
Reversing a strategy is difficult. It is uncomfortable for any power to acknowledge that it has overreached, which the United States did both in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is even more difficult to acknowledge that the goals set by President George W. Bush in Iraq and Obama in Afghanistan lacked coherence. But clearly the war has run its course, and what is difficult is also obvious. We are not going to eliminate the threat of radical Islamism. The commitment of force to an unattainable goal twists national strategy out of shape and changes the fabric of domestic life. Obviously, overwatch must be in place against the emergence of an organization like al Qaeda, with global reach, sophisticated operatives and operational discipline. But this is very different from responding to jihadists in Mali, where the United States has limited interests and fewer resources.
Accepting an ongoing threat is also difficult. Mitigating the threat of an enemy rather than defeating the enemy outright goes against an impulse. But it is not something alien to American strategy. The United States is involved in the world, and it can't follow the founders' dictum of staying out of European struggles. But the United States has the option of following U.S. strategy in the two world wars. The United States was patient, accepted risks and shifted the burden to others, and when it acted, it acted out of necessity, with clearly defined goals matched by capabilities. Waiting until there is no choice but to go to war is not isolationism. Allowing others to carry the primary risk is not disengagement. Waging wars that are finite is not irresponsible.
The greatest danger of war is what it can do to one's own society, changing the obligations of citizens and reshaping their rights. The United States has always done this during wars, but those wars would always end. Fighting a war that cannot end reshapes domestic life permanently. A strategy that compels engagement everywhere will exhaust a country. No empire can survive the imperative of permanent, unwinnable warfare. It is fascinating to watch the French deal with Mali. It is even more fascinating to watch the United States wishing them well and mostly staying out of it. It has taken about 10 years, but here we can see the American system stabilise itself by mitigating the threats that can't be eliminated and refusing to be drawn into fights it can let others handle.
-
Second post of the morning: I could put this in the Communicating with Islam thread, but I am putting it here so it can be paired with the George Friedman piece immediately preceding this post. I note that there is quite a bit here with which I am not in agreement, but post it nonetheless:
=========================
What do we mean by Islamism?
Denis MacShane | 18 January 2013
In 1940, Alec Douglas-Home broke his back in an accident and had to spend months in a complete plaster and immobilised. The future British Prime Minister dedicated the time, so he claimed later, to reading the Works of Marx and it was this lecture that turned him against communism and all its works.
In truth, the old Etonian aristocrat didn’t need to dig too deeply into the concept of alienation and surplus value to decide that anything linked to Marxism was a threat to his class, but it is important to read about the theory and experience that gives rise then to political practice that can shape the world.
In the middle of the last century therefore a study of Marxism was useful. Today, a study of Islamism is also essential if one is to make sense of so much of the problems and perils of today’s world.
An openDemocracy headline described what was happening in Egypt as 'Islamist Fascism'. Secular Tunisians have described what is happening in their country – as the historic UGTT trade union finds itself being slowly crushed by the Islamist Government (whose leader was recently awarded the Chatham House International Man of the Year prize at Banqueting House) – as a slow-burn Iranian style 'revolution'. Sadly we no longer have Fred Halliday to issue prescient warnings about the fears that the Arab spring revolutions may be devouring their own children and are now entering a period of establishing a new authoritarianism.
What we do have, which may be some small help, are two important books: “Radical: My Journey from Islamist Extremism to a Democratic Awakening” by Maajid Nawaz and “Encounters with Islam” by Malise Ruthven, both important discussions into the phenomenon of contemporary Islamist ideology. Nawaz tells a remarkable story about his indoctrination as a young student from Southend into Islamist politics in the 1990s. This was a lost decade as the British political class simply failed to notice what was happening under its own eyes. An ideology that would justify the most atrocious violence and torture, including the beheading of captured opponents, with a horrific record of oppressing women and homophobia, matched with a contempt and denigration for any of the rights that progressives have fought for through the ages, notably freedom of expression, was allowed to penetrate British universities and many young minds.
Our universities, where students were usually alert to any expression of extreme right white politics, appeared not to notice the extreme right politics of Islamist ideology.
Nawaz goes into pitiless detail exposing the activities of Hizb ut Tahrir. Like the English Defence League, this Islamist organisation, he says, preach relentless hate. For Nawaz, the spread of HT was intimately connected to the Conservative Government’s indifference to the genocidal massacre of Muslims in Bosnia. We still have had no apology from William Hague, who was in John Major’s Cabinet and who is now Foreign Secretary, for his involvement in the collective British Tory decision to allow the mobs of Milosevic to carry out their slaughter of European Muslims. Eight thousand imprisoned men were taken out one by one, their hands tied by plastic handcuffs, and Serbs shot them in the head to push them into a carefully excavated mass grave.
I was in the House of Commons when Sir Malcolm Rifkind, our Foreign Secretary, washed his hands at the despatch box, like any Pontius Pilate, to explain why Britain would not lift a finger to intervene to stop the massacre of Muslims.
For some young British Muslims at colleges and universities, this was a moment when they crossed the line to become HT activists. Nawaz tells of a conference at the LSE where a student, Omar Sheikh, listened to Islamist preachers. He was so convinced that he went to Pakistan and there took part in the kidnapping of the American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl. Pearl had his throat cut in order to promote Islamist ideology. Sheikh is still in prison in Pakistan for this crime.
Nawaz, himself from a pious, gentle Pakistani origin family in Southend, loved Hip Hop music and girls but turned his back on such pleasures to become an activist and then one of the leaders of HT. He studied Arabic and law and went round Britain, as well as Denmark and then to Pakistan to set up new Islamist cells. The chief goal was the overthrow of the Pakistan Government to replace it by an Islamist Junta in preparation to bring about the return of the caliphate using Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to this end.
Some people did and do write about these problems with the depth they deserve. Those who traced anti-Semitism carefully could not fail to be horrified at the rise of Islamism. But others – Melanie Philips in the Daily Mail for example – broadened a justified concern about Islamist anti-Semitism into an uncontrolled stream of consciousness against Muslims and the religion of Islam itself. We all know the result. Islamism, the ideology and Islamists, the preachers of hate and death, flourished because their early opponents focused on the wrong target, namely the Muslim faith and its followers.
Nawaz saw one ‘answer’ to Islamism when he was arrested in Egypt. Although never tortured himself – the soggy old British diplomatic service came to his rescue as a British citizen – he witnessed unbearable and unspeakable acts of cruelty by the Egyptian regime against its Islamist opponents. One evil begets another.
Now, like so many who in their youth were blinded by Stalinism or Trotskyism, Nawaz has left behind the shores of fundamentalist belief and extremist politics to advise and coach and coax fellow British Muslims who might be tempted to take the path he did twenty years ago not to do so. Anybody who cares about the future of Britain should read this book, and they will get even more from Nawaz’s account when read alongside an illuminating, thoughtful and prescient collection of essays on Islam by Malise Ruthven.
Ruthven, pronounced Riven, is like the late and still very much lamented Fred Halliday, a scholar, investigative reporter, and insightful essayist all wrapped in one. As Ruthven points out, when commentators write glibly of Muslim states they usually mean a rather narrow range of Arab authoritarian nations. There is a much wider Islam diffused through many preachers, some strands close to Unitarian or Quaker versions of Christianity. I once heard a leader of the Muslim Council of Britain declare that he could not condemn or call for the outright abolition of lapidation – the stoning to death of women who sleep with a man not their husband – because to do so would be to go against the teaching of the Qur’an. I could hardly believe my ears, hearing this in London from a fluent young man often treated on Newsnight and other BBC outlets as an authority on the Muslim condition in Britain. He seems to me to be as close to this as a fundamentalist Presbyterian is to the condition of Scotland or a member of the Plymouth Brethren is to the condition of Christianity in England.
Ruthven also looks at the efforts by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to rewrite the universal declaration of human rights in order to conform to their idea of their faith and what they see as the different rights of men and women. He helps to give us the tools to expose such assertions for what they are, like Stalin’s 1936 constitution or the arguments by Russian diplomats in the 1950s and 1960s that their version of human rights was every bit of good as that of progressive democrats.
Ruthven proposes Jew-hate as one of the organising elements of both contemporary Islamism and much of the organised politics of many majority Muslim states.
He condemns George W Bush for his language about crusades and above all, for announcing a “war on terror”. This, he says, immediately raised the status of ideological murdering criminals to that of enemy combatants. In contrast, in Northern Ireland, the murderers linked to the extreme right-wing IRA were continually treated as criminals and put in prison as such, rather than afforded the martyr status that Bush has given Islamists by defining the campaign against them as a war.
Both Nawaz and Ruthven have written significant books, which add greatly to our store of knowledge on the new ideology of Islamism. Twenty-odd years ago I wrote a pamphlet for the NUJ asking why there were no black or Asian or Muslim reporters in our newspapers or working for the BBC. To some extent that problem has been put right. But we are still far from having an adequate journalism or political understanding of the meaning of contemporary Islamism, nor an honest debate over the tragedies that British and Western policy have caused. It should in political terms be possible to hold a reasoned and progressive debate.
But then the hate remains.
Recently, I was helping organise and speak at a protest against the English Defence League when they came to Rotherham. One man walked past me with hate on his face snarling the words “Zionist filth.” The EDL is an openly anti-Semitic organisation whose leaders have endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Was this an EDL man thus condemning me? No. It was a British Asian, not one I recognised from my former constituency of Rotherham, but one whose mind was as equally poisoned by lies as those who believe EDL ideology.
I would love to give both him and the EDL members copies of both books, as well as the money men behind the EDL. But even if they were to read them, would the important and essential messages that Narwaz and Ruthven express have any impact at all?
Denis MacShane was a parliamentary private secretary and Minister at the Foreign Office and a Council of Europe delegate 1997-2010 and travels extensively in the Balkans. His book Why Kosovo Still Matters is published by Haus Publishing. This article has been republished from opendemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence.
-
I'd love to see some responses to the George Friedman piece , , ,
-
I'd love to see some responses to the George Friedman piece , , ,
GF is putting a pretty gloss on Buraq giving a huge win to AQ and the muslim brotherhood.
-
Friedman:
"But the United States has the option of following U.S. strategy in the two world wars. The United States was patient, accepted risks and shifted the burden to others, and when it acted, it acted out of necessity, with clearly defined goals matched by capabilities."
This analogy is totally flawed. We defeated Germany and Japan by destroying them. We bombed the hell out of Germany and Japan. How does that compare to fighting a war on a guerilla's terms?
"with clearly defined goals matched by capabilities." and a plan and time frame to end it.
The descending Colon policy
WE had plans in Iraq. Get rid of Saddam and establish a Democracy. We did do that. It is debatable whether it was worth the effort, or whether it will be long term success or not.
In Afghanistan our goal was to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
I must think he is concluding we simply don't have the capability to defeat our enemies today. And if he means by finding arresting gently placing all "enemy combatants" into a comfortable prison while sparing every other person and entity in the same geography with perfect precision he is right. If we fight wars like police actions rather than wars we will be dragged into these things for long periods.
-
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_ALGERIA_KIDNAPPING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-01-19-09-51-18
Must be one of those "spontaneous protests" we keep hearing about. I wonder how many white house staffers are frantically surfing youtube right now for a video to blame for this.
-
Oh thee of thread drift :lol: please post at http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1184.0 :-D
-
Oh thee of thread drift :lol: please post at http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1184.0 :-D
But isn't this the "smart power" we were promised in 2008?
-
Continuing the conversation:
Obama's You're-On-Your-Own World George McGovern wanted America to "Come Home." In Obama's second term, he may just get his wish.
By BRET STEPHENS
Isn't it fitting that, as a final order of business in President Obama's first term, the United States would haggle with France over the federal equivalent of a $2.15 check?
Last week, the Journal reported that the administration was asking the French to pay for the limited logistical support—mainly cargo flights and aerial refueling—that the U.S. had agreed to provide the French mission to Mali.
"French officials said they were particularly 'perplexed' last week when the U.S. . . . insisted on getting reimbursed for the costs," the Journal's Adam Entous and David Gauthier-Villars reported Sunday. "Other countries including Canada have offered to transport French military equipment and troops to Mali free of charge, according to French, European and Canadian officials. As a result, France is considering not using the U.S."
By week's end, however, the administration had agreed to cover the costs, estimated at around $600,000 a flight for 30 flights. Considering that the federal government spends just over $10 billion a day, or $115,000 a second, we're talking about less than three minutes' worth of the government's time.
Is the effort worth it? "France expects the U.S. to do more to fight militants who have vowed to hit at Western interests and conducted an attack in Algeria that left at least 23 hostages dead, including at least one American citizen," French officials told the Journal. Considering that, before France's intervention, the local branch of al Qaeda was on the verge of overrunning a country larger than Texas and California combined, one might think the French had a point.
Enlarge Image
Close
Associated Press
George McGovern, who called in 1972 for America to "Come Home."
.
In fact, the latest death toll from Algeria is 37 hostages killed, including three Americans. But don't expect the administration to do more than what it did in reaction to the attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, which was nothing. The current administration excuse for its nonfeasance is that any assistance might help the government of Mali, which (horrors) seized power in March in a military coup. From scruples such as these did Jimmy Carter allow the shah of Iran to fall.
Then again, at least Mr. Carter's scruples were sincere. Not so for Mr. Obama, for whom "engagement" has become a code word for avoidance. Thus we "engage" Iran diplomatically to avoid harder choices about its nuclear ambitions, just as we engage the U.N. to avoid doing anything about Syria. Meanwhile, the message to U.S. allies that gets louder by the year is that it's a you're-on-your-own world as far as this administration is concerned. Good night, good luck, buena suerte, viel Glück, hazz sa'eed and bonne chance.
That is the meaning behind the administration's refusal to lift a finger against the Assad regime. Or its perfect indifference to Iraq detaching itself from America's orbit and entering Iran's. Or its endless indulgence of Iran's nuclear bids. Or its haste to make a full exit from Afghanistan. Or, now, its reluctance to acknowledge, much less respond to, al Qaeda's new reach in Africa.
It is also the meaning of Chuck Hagel's nomination to be secretary of defense. His veteran's credentials and nominal GOP affiliation provide cover for a president who, as somebody once said, wants America to Come Home "from military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation." That wasn't Dwight Eisenhower speaking, by the way.
Given how often U.S. forces have come to grief in faraway and forlorn countries like Mali, Americans will probably shrug off the thought that we aren't doing enough to help our French friends. Aren't we sick of always jumping to their aid when they don't always exactly jump to ours? And why have they so neglected their defenses that they can't even deploy a few thousand troops to a country that, to them, isn't all that far away? If life were a debate society, the argument would be a good one. As a matter of politics, the administration's resistance to any kind of military action is probably smart, at least for the short term.
But Americans need to think carefully about what the retreat from Pax Americana will mean in the long term.
The last time Americans made that choice, in the 1920s and '30s, U.S. foreign policy consisted of promoting feckless disarmament treaties, slashing defense spending, dishing out high-toned disdain for the wicked ways of the world and trying to fix what ailed us at home. What followed was a long season of global disorder, when bandit states understood that the major democratic powers had neither the will nor the means to check their ambitions, and the smaller states feared that, in the event of crisis, they were on their own. As it turned out, they were.
We're not yet there today. But when an American president thinks he can declare that "a decade of war is now ending," as he said in the inaugural address, and as if the choice were his to make, it means we're getting closer. France has now discovered that the United States doesn't have its back. It is a realization that will dawn soon, if it hasn't already, on other free nations who have relied—perhaps for too long—on their faith that, in the face of terror, they would always have America by their side.
-
second post of the day
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/fantasies-about-radical-islam/
Most things that we read in the popular media about radical Islam are fantasies. They are promulgated in the mistaken belief that such dogmas will appease terrorists, or at least direct their ire elsewhere. But given the recent news — murdering in Algeria, war in Mali, the Syrian mess, and Libyan chaos — let us reexamine some of these more common heresies. Such a review is especially timely, given that Mr. Brennan believed that jihad is largely a personal quest for spiritual perfection; Mr. Kerry believed that Bashar Assad was a potentially moderating reformer; and Mr. Hagel believed that Iran was not worthy of sanctions, Hezbollah was not deserving of ostracism, and Israel is equally culpable for the Middle East mess.
1. Contact with the West Moderates Radical Muslims
In theory, residence in the West could instruct young Muslim immigrants on the advantages of free markets, constitutional government, and legally protected freedoms. But as we saw with many of the 9/11 hijackers, for a large subset of Muslim expatriates, a strange schizophrenia ensues: they enjoy — indeed, seek out — the material bounty of the West. But in the abstract, far too many either despise what wealth and affluence do to the citizenry (e.g., gay marriage, feminism, religious tolerance, secularism, etc.) or try to dream up conspiracy theories to explain why their adopted home is better off than the native one that they abandoned.
Finally, foreign students, journalists, and religious expatriates tend to congregate around American campuses and in liberal big cities. There, they are more often nursed on American race/class/gender critiques of America, and so apparently believe that their own anti-Americanism must naturally be shared by millions of Americans from Bakersfield to Nashville. Take Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new theocratic president. He should appreciate the U.S. It gave him refuge from persecution in Egypt. It allowed unfettered expression of his radical anti-American views. It schooled him in meritocratic fashion and offered him secure employment at the CSU system, despite his foreign national status. It gave citizenship to two of his daughters (apparently retained). But the result is that Mr. Morsi is an abject anti-Semite (“apes and pigs”) and anti-American. He does not believe terrorists caused 9/11. He wants the imprisoned, murderous blind sheik, who was the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing, sent home to Egypt. And he is pushing Egypt into a Sunni version of Iran.
2. The West Must Atone for Its Past Behavior
I have noted elsewhere both the fantasies found in Barack Obama’s Cairo speech and their general irrelevance to the Muslim world. Polls from Pakistan to Palestine — both recipients of massive U.S. aid — show that the U.S. is as unpopular under Obama as it was under Bush. All small nations have writs against large ones, especially the globally ubiquitous U.S. But America must be seen in comparison to … what? Russia’s artillery and missile barrage that leveled Muslim Grozny (which the UN declared the most destroyed city in the world)? China, which outlaws free expression of Islam and persecutes Muslim minorities? Both are largely left alone by al-Qaeda, due to their unapologetic attitudes, possible unpredictable response, and inability to offer attackers a globalized media forum.
In contrast, no single nation lets in more Muslim immigrants than does the U.S. No non-Muslim nation gives more foreign aid than does the U.S. to the Muslim world — Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. No nation has so sought to save Muslims from dictatorial violence — whether bombing European Christians to save Muslims in the Balkans; jawboning Kuwaitis to spare Palestinian turncoats in 1991; trying to feed starving Somalis; aiding Muslims fighting Russians in Afghanistan; freeing Kuwaitis from Saddam; rebuilding Iraq; rebuilding Afghanistan from Taliban terror; trying to free Libyans from Gadhafi; and on and on.
The sources of radical Islam rage are thus not past U.S. actions. Read The Al Qaeda Reader to chart all the bizarre excuses that bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri alleged were the roots of their anger at the U.S. So why exactly does radical Islam hate us? Mostly because of the age-old wages of insecurity, envy, and a sense of inferiority — and the hunch that such gripes win apologies, attention, and sometimes money. In a globalized world, Muslims see daily that everyone from South Koreans to North Americans are better off. Why? In their view, not because of market economies, meritocracies, gender equality, religious pluralism, consensual government, and the Western menu of personal freedom. To draw that conclusion would mean to reject tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, statism, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theory — and to admit indigenous rather than foreign causation. Instead, it is far easier to blame “them” for turning the majestic Islamic empire of old into the chaos of modern Islam — as well as to fault Arab secularists whose lack of religious zealotry allowed the West to move ahead. All antidotes to these deductive beliefs — foreign aid, democratization, outreach, better communications — have so far proved ambiguous at best.
-
Once upon a time we had a President who supported freedom. On this day in 1985 Pres. Reagan made clear that we support freedom across the globe, we believe in peace through strength, that a strong defense save lives, that supporting freedom fighters around the globe is self-defense, and his unflinching belief in the benefits of free trade.
"Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is the universal right of all God's children." America's "mission" was to "nourish and defend freedom and democracy." More specifically, Reagan declared that, "We must stand by our democratic allies. And we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth." He concluded, "Support for freedom fighters is self-defense."
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F25jYyU1u1o[/youtube]
-
I see today that the budgetary clusterfcuk has led to US to remove one of two aircraft carriers from offshore of Iran.
Not to worry though, SecDef Hagel will put things right. :roll:
-
This could have gone in the American History thread as well:
A World Transformed
February 6, 2013 | 1000 GMT
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
Chief Geopolitical Analyst
Former President George H.W. Bush is aged and ailing. So it is precisely now that we need to voice our appreciation for him -- one of America's greatest one-term presidents, along with James K. Polk. Polk practically doubled the size of the continental United States between 1845 and 1849, becoming the individual embodiment of Manifest Destiny. Bush the elder, rather than make great things happen, prevented great tragedy from occurring. It was what did not happen between 1989 and 1993 in Europe, the Middle East and China that makes the elder Bush a far more significant president in geopolitical terms than, for example, Bill Clinton, who occupied the White House for twice as many years.
Bush was the last American aristocrat and veteran of World War II to serve as president. From a wealthy Connecticut family, educated at the finest private schools in New England, he enlisted in the Navy at 18 in 1942, and as a 20-year-old aviator was shot down over the Bonin Islands south of Japan in 1944. His life thereafter was often a register of both understatement and service.
Bush's subdued, steely character is on full display in A World Transformed (1998). Notice several things about this, perhaps the finest presidential memoir since Ulysses S. Grant's own Personal Memoirs published in 1885. Bush, rather than take all the credit for himself like other presidents, shares authorship with his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. Nor is the book about his presidency per se, but about how he, Scowcroft and Secretary of the State James Baker III negotiated some of history's most momentous crises. There is much else in his presidential term that Bush could have written about in order to get even or tell his side of the story, which he, nevertheless, ignores. He has decided to stay silent about so much in order to sublimate himself to the great historical and geopolitical events overseas with which he was forced to deal, even as he shares full credit with others. That is the measure of the man.
Even within the realm of foreign policy, Bush and Scowcroft in their book purposely neglect the successful 1989 operation in Panama and the revival of the Middle East peace process toward the end of Bush's term: events that, in any case, are of lesser geopolitical significance because Panama was already in the U.S. sphere of influence and the intermittent Arab-Israeli peace process does not affect the balance of power. Moreover, Bush and Scowcroft are not interested in beating their chests over every accomplishment as in other presidential memoirs. Their focus is deliberately narrow, making, counterintuitively, for an epic book.
The lessons of this volume are manifold; let me elucidate the main ones.
Most important: Managing change is more important than provoking it, and one manages change best by concentrating on people rather than on ideas. This is why Bush was so unpopular with the media and the intellectual classes while he was president: They wanted action, ideas, brilliant abstractions; whereas he focused on lots of personal phone calls to world leaders even when there was no crisis, so when a crisis came he had them in his pocket.
To wit, when the Chinese Communists killed large numbers of students at Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, the Bush Administration reprimanded Beijing, which angered the Chinese. But because Bush decided not to break or permanently downgrade relations with Beijing, that angered the intellectuals in New York and Washington. But it was Bush's middle path that safeguarded change in China and helped prevent a more sustained crackdown that might have set China back years. Indeed, by not humiliating Beijing, he encouraged the continuation of economic reforms that would transform the face of China -- and Asia -- for the better. And the Chinese leaders respected his views not only because he was the president but also because of the many years he had already spent in consultation with them while serving in other government positions (as the U.S. chief liaison to China and head of the Central Intelligence Agency).
Because of the way the Communist empire in Europe collapsed -- suddenly, and on the whole peacefully -- it is assumed that this was natural. It wasn't. The Kremlin allowed its empire to collapse because of two overarching reasons: the particular moral character of Mikhail Gorbachev and the calculated restraint of the Bush White House that was careful not to beat its chest over the fall of the Berlin Wall and thus provoke a Soviet military reaction. Bush's greatness was in the dog that didn't bark.
Bush writes: "I understood that the pressure on Gorbachev from hard-liners to intervene would grow, as these once reliable allies [in Eastern Europe] began to pull further away and the Soviet security buffer against the West eroded. The dangers were ahead, and I would have to respond with even greater care as the East Europeans pushed their own way to the future. We could not let the people down -- there could still be more Tiananmens." So rather than conduct a triumphant, Reaganite victory lap around Eastern Europe, Bush was restricted in his travels and in his language. For example, he knew that he could not immediately pledge support for Lithuania the moment it declared independence, because the United States was in a weak position to counter a Soviet military reaction. God bless him! He knew that tragedy is avoided by thinking tragically.
Rather than bridle at the geographic and other constraints imposed on policymakers, Bush was fundamentally aware of them. It was only by respecting geography that he was able to move beyond it.
Not that Bush wasn't bold. He certainly was. People have short memories. I was in Eastern Europe for some of this time and remember vividly. Now it seems altogether natural that West and East Germany be reunited under a NATO umbrella. Then it wasn't. Quite a few argued for the eastern part of Germany to remain neutral. Bush would have none of it. He came to the cause of reunification early, and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl always appreciated him for it. Imagine how unstable Europe would have become had Bush listened to other voices and prevented full-scale reunification -- had he not accepted that the German capital would have to move from Bonn to Berlin? Here was another geopolitical dog that didn't bark.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, there were many voices in Washington urging the president not to get involved militarily. But Bush acted boldly. He liberated Kuwait with force in 1991, even as he was careful not to march all the way to Baghdad and become enmeshed with the internal politics of the Iraqi state. And it was Bush's nuanced position that helped reverse the coup attempt in Moscow later that same year. Unlike the Reagan foreign policy team that went through several national security advisers and got involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, the Bush team of Bush-Baker-Scowcroft represented one of the most professional stewardships of American foreign policy ever. And it was professional because it was based more on geopolitics than on ideas, even as all of these men would be careful never to admit this.
Bush wasn't perfect -- the administration could have been more proactive on Bosnia when Yugoslavia came apart. But in Bush's defense, I would say that so early in this, the first European crisis since the end of the Cold War, it was reasonable to test whether a newly united Europe could deal on its own with an internal eruption.
In historic terms, the elder Bush was the last fully nation-state American to lead America in the world. The presidents who have come after did not serve in the nation's wars, and/or came to adulthood during the 1960s or in a post-Sixties era when American values were called into question in a more global and cosmopolitan environment. Bush senior was different. Because he was so deeply anchored in the nation-state, he was respectful of the interests of other states. That made him cautious and humble. And from such caution and restraint great things happened peacefully in the world.
.
Read more: A World Transformed | Stratfor
-
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/world/obamas-turn-in-bushs-bind-with-defense-policies.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130210&_r=0
WASHINGTON — If President Obama tuned in to the past week’s bracing debate on Capitol Hill about terrorism, executive power, secrecy and due process, he might have recognized the arguments his critics were making: He once made some of them himself.
Multimedia
A Public Discussion of Secret Strikes
.
Interactive Feature
Turmoil in the Sahara
.
Related
News Analysis: Debating a Court to Vet Drone Strikes (February 9, 2013)
Drones Are Focus as C.I.A. Nominee Goes Before Senators (February 8, 2013)
Connect With Us on Twitter
Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines.
Twitter List: Reporters and Editors
.
Enlarge This Image
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Critics of the administration’s defense policies disrupted the confirmation hearing for John O. Brennan, right, on Thursday.
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (129) »
Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country’s core values in the name of security.
The debate is not an exact parallel to those of the Bush era, and Mr. Obama can point to ways he has tried to exorcise what he sees as the excesses of the last administration. But in broad terms, the conversation generated by the confirmation hearing of John O. Brennan, his nominee for C.I.A. director, underscored the degree to which Mr. Obama has embraced some of Mr. Bush’s approach to counterterrorism, right down to a secret legal memo authorizing presidential action unfettered by outside forces.
At the same time, a separate hearing in Congress revealed how far Mr. Obama has gone to avoid what he sees as Mr. Bush’s central mistake. Testimony indicated that the president had overruled his secretaries of state and defense and his military commanders when they advised arming rebels in Syria.
With troops only recently home from Iraq, Mr. Obama made clear that he was so intent on staying out of another war against a Middle East tyrant that he did not want to be involved even by proxy, especially if the proxies might be questionable.
Critics on the left saw abuse of power, and critics on the right saw passivity.
The confluence of these debates suggests the ways Mr. Obama is willing to emulate Mr. Bush and the ways he is not. In effect, Mr. Obama relies on his predecessor’s aggressive approach in one area to avoid Mr. Bush’s even more aggressive approach in others. By emphasizing drone strikes, Mr. Obama need not bother with the tricky issues of detention and interrogation because terrorists tracked down on his watch are generally incinerated from the sky, not captured and questioned. By dispensing with concerns about due process, he avoids a more traditional war that he fears could lead to American boots on the ground.
“I’d argue the shift to more targeted action against A. Q. has been a hallmark of Obama’s approach against terrorism, whereas Iraq was Bush’s signature decision in his global war on terror,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama, using the initials for Al Qaeda.
The Brennan hearing highlighted the convoluted politics of terrorism. Conservatives complained that if Mr. Bush had done what Mr. Obama has done, he would have been eviscerated by liberals and the news media. But perhaps more than ever before in Mr. Obama’s tenure, liberals voiced sustained grievance over the president’s choices.
“That memo coming out, I think, was a wake-up call,” said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union. “These last few days, it was like being back in the Bush days.”
“It’s causing a lot of cognitive dissonance for a lot of people,” he added. “It’s not the President Obama they thought they knew.”
The dissonance is due in part to the fact that Mr. Obama ran in 2008 against Mr. Bush’s first-term policies but, after winning, inherited Mr. Bush’s second-term policies.
By the time Mr. Bush left office, he had shaved off some of the more controversial edges of his counterterrorism program, both because of pressure from Congress and the courts and because he wanted to leave behind policies that would endure. He had closed the secret C.I.A. prisons, obtained Congressional approval for warrantless surveillance and military commissions, and worked to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
So while Mr. Obama banned harsh interrogation techniques, he preserved much of what he inherited, with some additional safeguards; expanded Mr. Bush’s drone campaign; and kept on veterans of the antiterrorism wars like Mr. Brennan. Some efforts at change were thwarted, like his vow to close the Guantánamo prison and to try Sept. 11 plotters in civilian court.
“These are the same issues we’ve been grappling with for years that are uncomfortable given our legal structures and the nature of the threat, but the Obama team is addressing these issues the same way we did,” said Juan Carlos Zarate, who was Mr. Bush’s deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism.
Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor and former Bush national security aide, said Mr. Obama “believed the cartoon version of the Bush critique so that Bush wasn’t just trying to make tough calls how to protect America in conditions of uncertainty, Bush actually was trying to grab power for nefarious purposes.”
“So even though what I, Obama, am doing resembles what Bush did, I’m doing it for other purposes,” Mr. Feaver added.
Others said that oversimplified the situation and ignored modifications that Mr. Obama had enacted. “It is a vast overstatement to suggest that President Obama is channeling President Bush,” said Geoffrey R. Stone, a University of Chicago law professor who hired a young Mr. Obama to lecture there. “On almost every measure, Obama has been more careful, more restrained and more respectful of individual liberties than President Bush was.”
==============================
Page 2 of 2)
“On the other hand,” Mr. Stone added, “at least in his use of drones, President Obama has legitimately opened himself up to criticism for striking the wrong balance” between civil liberties and national security.
Multimedia
A Public Discussion of Secret Strikes
.
Interactive Feature
Turmoil in the Sahara
.
Related
News Analysis: Debating a Court to Vet Drone Strikes (February 9, 2013)
Drones Are Focus as C.I.A. Nominee Goes Before Senators (February 8, 2013)
Connect With Us on Twitter
Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines.
Twitter List: Reporters and Editors
.
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (129) »
Particularly stark has been the secret memo authorizing the targeted killing of American citizens deemed terrorists under certain circumstances without judicial review, a memo that brought back memories of those in which John Yoo, a Justice Department official under Mr. Bush, declared harsh interrogation legal.
That broad assertion of power, even with limits described by administration officials, combined with the initial White House refusal to release even a sanitized summary of the memo touched off protests from left and right. Some called Mr. Obama a hypocrite. But Mr. Yoo himself saw it differently, arguing in The Wall Street Journal that the memo, whatever the surface similarities to his own, betrayed a flawed vision because it presented the issue in law enforcement terms rather than as an exercise of war powers.
Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director under Mr. Bush, said that if Mr. Obama learned one thing from experience it should be that controversial programs require public support to be sustained. “Err on the side of being open, at least with Congress,” he said. “Otherwise you’re going to find yourself in a politically vulnerable position.”
For four years, Mr. Obama has benefited at least in part from the reluctance of Mr. Bush’s most virulent critics to criticize a Democratic president. Some liberals acknowledged in recent days that they were willing to accept policies they once would have deplored as long as they were in Mr. Obama’s hands, not Mr. Bush’s.
“We trust the president,” former Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan said on Current TV. “And if this was Bush, I think that we would all be more up in arms because we wouldn’t trust that he would strike in a very targeted way and try to minimize damage rather than contain collateral damage.”
But some national security specialists said questions about the limits of executive power to conduct war should not depend on the person in the Oval Office.
“That’s not how we make policy,” said Douglas Ollivant, a former national security aide under Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama and now a fellow at the New America Foundation. “We make policy assuming that people in power might abuse it. To do otherwise is foolish
-
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/02/12/few_korea_hands_in_obama_administration_s_asia_leadership_team
Few Korea hands in Obama administration’s Asia leadership team
Posted By Josh Rogin Tuesday, February 12, 2013 - 12:09 PM
As the world wakes up to the reality of a heightened crisis with North Korea following its latest nuclear test, the Obama administration finds itself with remarkably few Korea experts at the top of its Asia policy team.
North Korea confirmed Monday it had detonated a nuclear bomb for the third time, blatantly disregarding United Nations resolutions and the repeated warnings of the international community. The U.N. Security Council scrambled to call a Tuesday meeting on the incident and U.S. President Barack Obama issued a strongly worded statement of condemnation early Tuesday morning.
"This is a highly provocative act that, following its December 12 ballistic missile launch, undermines regional stability, violates North Korea's obligations under numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions, contravenes its commitments under the September 19, 2005 Joint Statement of the Six-Party Talks, and increases the risk of proliferation," Obama's statement said. "North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs constitute a threat to U.S. national security and to international peace and security."
Obama said North Korea's activities warrant "swift and credible action" by the international community but declined to specify what action he intends to pursue. North Korea is the most heavily sanctioned country in the world, and most experts believe only China has substantial leverage to bring to bear on the Hermit Kingdom run by the young dictator Kim Jong Un.
On the Obama administration's Asia team, almost all the senior officials handling the North Korea crisis have specialties outside of Korean affairs, a stark difference from the last two times Pyongyang exploded nuclear weapons in October 2006 and May 2009.
Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, who had extensive experience dealing with the North Korea issue, departed the government last week. His temporary replacement, Principal Deputy Secretary of State Joe Yun, is widely regarded as an excellent official but his background is in Southeast Asia. The State Department's special representative for North Korea policy, Glyn Davies, is a nuclear technology and Europe expert, having most recently served as the U.S. permanent representative to the IAEA in Vienna. State's special envoy to the (defunct) six-party talks, Clifford Hart, is a longtime China hand.
Over at the National Security Staff, Senior Director for Asia Danny Russel (Campbell's potential successor at State) is also a China hand, as is his right hand man Evan Medeiros, an expert on the Chinese military. Syd Seiler, who also works at the NSS, is a Korea specialist and is reported to have traveled to Pyongyang last March. But Seiler is currently on detail from the CIA and is expected to return to his home agency soon.
Over at the Pentagon, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs Mark Lippert, a close friend of Obama's, has little Northeast Asia experience but served as a Naval reservist in Afghanistan. His principal deputy, Peter Lavoy, focuses on Pakistan. The position of deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia has been vacant for almost a year, ever since Japan hand Michael Schiffer moved over to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"There are no people who work Korea at the top levels of the policy team," a senior Washington Asia hand told The Cable. "They've been in the driver's seat, but they don't know where they are going."
In 2006, the George W. Bush administration had former Ambassador to Korea Chris Hill as assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, current Ambassador to Korea Sung Kim as the special envoy to the six-party talks, and Korea hand Victor Cha at the White House.
"Basically, the team they had then -- everybody except Chris Hill was a Korean speaker so they could understand what the other side was saying without an interpreter," the Washington Asia hand said. "It's not like that this time. I think that makes a difference."
In 2009, the Obama administration had Campbell and Kim and State along with Ambassador Stephen Bosworth as the special representative for North Korea policy. It's true that current Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman served as State's North Korea policy coordinator under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, but these days she is consumed with her role as the lead American official dealing with the upcoming nuclear negotiations with Iran.
Some outside experts link the lack of Korea experts at the highest levels of the policy process to an Obama administration North Korea policy that is widely viewed as standoffish and lethargic. Under the rubric "strategic patience," the administration has largely avoided direct interactions with Pyongyang, absent a Feb. 29, 2012 deal known as the "Leap Day Deal," under which the U.S. was going to give food aid to North Korea and receive assurances on missile and nuclear testing.
That deal, which was never clearly understood by both sides, blew up when Kim Jong Il died the day before it was to be announced. The Obama administration hasn't tried to engage North Korea in any serious way since. Experts say the Obama team, short on Korea expertise, has bungled the whole issue.
"You have a predominantly non-Korea expert group. They've been fundamentally wrong on how they thought this was going to unfold," one former North Korea negotiator told The Cable. "The idea that by standing away from North Korea, putting pressure on them when they did bad things, and thinking that was going to change their behavior was fundamentally mistaken. And now that's becoming painfully obvious. For those of us who have been involved in this for decades, this policy has been wrong headed from day one."
Not everyone agrees. One former administration official told The Cable that even when there were Korea experts in charge of Korea policy, there were no great successes in dealing with North Korea.
"The one interesting question is: When we've had great Korea experts at the top levels of the administration, how successful has that been?" the former official said. "I'm not sure you could draw a straight line between Korea expertise and better policy."
As the Obama administration shapes its national security leadership team for the second term, there is also a notable lack of Asia experts at the top, especially considering that the "pivot" or "rebalancing" of American attention to Asia was one of the hallmarks of Obama's first term foreign policy agenda.
There are few Asia experts among the president's top advisors. Secretary of State John Kerry, prospective Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Principal Deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinken, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew, CIA Director nominee John Brennan, Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Jim Miller all have their expertise in other issues or regions.
Cha told The Cable that the senior leadership of the Obama administration needs to move the North Korea issue to the front burner before the crisis gets even worse and he said that leadership has to come from the very top.
"That sense of urgency is important because it pushes the Chinese to do more. The president has to say this is a serious threat to national security and we are going to do something about it," Cha said. "Obama has to set the tone."
-
Thread nazi here-- that would be better in the Korea thread :-D
-
http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2013/02/14/funeral-pyre-of-the-three-valkyries/?singlepage=true
The Funeral Pyre of the Three Valkyries; the Real Obama Doctrine
February 14th, 2013 - 6:52 pm
Not so long ago, when President Obama reluctantly permitted American military power to be used in the Libyan insurrection against Muammar Gaddafi, it was said that he did so when three forceful women convinced him it was a moral imperative. The three — Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice — were dubbed “the Valkyries,” and the “doctrine” they were credited with presenting to the president was “responsibility to protect” (RtoP, as it is called in the United Nations) or “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of innocents facing slaughter from their own rulers.
We were told that, henceforth, Obama and his warrior women would not tolerate large-scale bloodbaths directed by tyrants against civilian populations. No more Cambodias. No more Rwandas. No more Bosnias.
Quite aside from whether or not this was good strategic policy, pundits noted the “man bites dog” aspect of the story. Strong women had imposed their will on the president and his male advisers (all of whom were opposed). Thus Maureen Dowd, for example:
We’ve come a long way from feminist international relations theory two decades ago that indulged in stereotypes about aggression being “male” and conciliation being “female.” And from the days of Helen Caldicott, the Australian pediatrician and nuclear-freeze activist who disapprovingly noted the “psychosexual overtones” of military terminology such as “missile erector” and “thrust-to-weight ratio.” Caldicott wrote in her book “Missile Envy:” “I recently watched a filmed launching of an MX missile. It rose slowly out of the ground, surrounded by smoke and flames and elongated into the air — it was indeed a very sexual sight, and when armed with the ten warheads it will explode with the most almighty orgasm.”
To be sure, the Valkyries of Norse myth didn’t save innocents; their main tasks were to decide which fighters survived the battle, and then rescue the spirits of the bravest slain warriors and accompany them to Valhalla, whence they would rise to fight again alongside Odin in the final battle against the forces of evil. But never mind the technicalities; they were armed and armored, and they were battle maidens, just like Obama’s Furies.
Not only had the American Valkyries imposed their will on Gaddafi, they had also squeezed a doctrine out of a president who had previously dithered his way through the earlier Iranian and Arab uprisings. Or so it was said, by admirers and critics alike.
It didn’t last more than a few hours (the White House even told journalists that the women weren’t even in the room when Obama made his decision). It was a one-off move that was likely prompted more by European (especially French) and anti-Gaddafi Arab insistence than by the arguments of the Valkyries. It was certainly not a principled world view that would become the trademark of our Nobel Prize-winning president. You may have noticed the total silence about “RtoP” when it comes to Syria, where the slaughter has been orders of magnitude greater than anything Gaddafi likely contemplated.
The proof that RtoP was just the flavor of the day, rather than a new dispensation from on high, is the destiny of Obama’s Furies. If you scan the policy-making horizon, you’ll only find a single surviving Valkyrie: Ambassador Rice. And she was most recently in the headlines when she served as Obama’s lead propagandist for the fable that the attack on our facility in Benghazi was a spontaneous demonstration provoked by an evil video, and then withdrew from consideration as Hillary’s successor at the State Department. Hillary is gone. Samantha Powers is gone. And we’re left with an administration that abandons American diplomats under fire, vetoes proposals to support the Syrian opposition, begs Iran for a nuclear deal, and turns its back on oppressed and murdered people most everywhere.
There is an Obama Doctrine, but hardly anyone wants to acknowledge it. He favors anti-American dictators, and he couldn’t care less what they do to their people. That’s the doctrine that checks out: he favored the Muslim Brotherhood over the pro-American Mubarak; the Libyan insurrectionaries over Gaddafi, who had come to terms with the United States; the Iranian tyrants who crushed a pro-democracy uprising; and Assad (who, whatever Kerry and Hegel have said, is an enemy) against a revolution that at least contained pro-American elements, now suffering from Obama’s betrayal.
Samantha Power wrote a fine book about Bill Clinton’s historic failure to stop the Rwandan genocide. Maybe she’ll enlighten us about Obama’s brief flirtation with humanitarian intervention, and his subsequent abandonment of the very idea, along with the women who were its most forceful advocates.
-
Definitely worth bringing this up from the memory hole, but for me the piece closes with some rather hackneyed writing.
I continue to underline the need to think in terms of the implications of the passing of the unilateral moment of American power and what our fundamental strategic principles are to be at this point--
For example, with our private sector created natural gas miracle, apart from nuclear religious fascists, does the middle east even really matter any more. The apparent abdicaton of American leadership in space means that our central nervous system is about to be, if it is not already, vulnerable to a blitzkrieg attack from the Chinese. Our silence here on the Sequester cuts disturbs me. Do we agree to tax increases to avoid them? This is serious stuff! With the massive contraction of the American navy apparently in the pipeline, what substance to our alleged pivot to the South China Sea? Does not the day come when the Chinese blow us off of Taiwain? The US backed up the British, French, and Israelis in the Suez Crisis of 1956 by threatening to sell their bonds. The Chinese already no longer increase their holdings of US treasuries. Will we not be backed down if, given our budgetary lunacies and attendant economic stagnation should the Chinese apply the same pressure to us, especially if we are not confident of our ability to protect our communication network, with depends utterly on dominance in space? We are already the Chinese bitches when it comes to cyber security, they fuck us in the face and we just take it.
As I see it, a fundamental problem here, and it is a point I have alluded to previously but now take a stab at fleshing it out a bit more, is that Bush blundered badly the American unilateral moment. He simply forget to get out of Afpakia after overthrowing the Taliban-- or creating a new political order-- while taking on Iraq with but 150,00 men when General Shinseki advised we needed 400,000 to establish the neocon vision of getting ahead of the curve of change. Instead Bush listened to the glib theories of Rumbo, and let Iraq descend into near total disaster-- In 2004 when opponent Kerry called for increasing army 50,000 to avoid burnout, Bush demurred because he didn't want to admit he underestimated the job-- barely salvaged in a shining moment of a true profile in courage with the Surge-- but by then the nation had lost its confidence and didn't even notice when Obama threw the whole fg thing away by sabotaging the vital mission of establishing a serious long term status of forces agreement. When history is written decades from now, (or much sooner!!!) this I think will be revealed to a profound error of gargantuan consequence. Imagine now dealing with Iran over nukes, dealing with Syria, dealing with North Africa, if we had a proper presence of 30-50000 in Iraq as our generals requested. The move out of Afpakia, now a necessity, would not mean, as it point of fact it does, that the US is being utterly run out of the middle east. The conceptual vapidity of the Valkeries, filling the masculinity vacuum of Obama, completes the picture.
Again, in a multi-polar world where the US has the option of becoming an energy powerhouse of the world economy, does this really matter as we are used to thinking from the OPEC era of the 70s or when Saddam Hussein, with the world's foruth largest army threatened the Arabian peninsula itself? What would be wrong in getting back money from the Chinese by selling them nat gas?!? Not only would the greens be happy at weaning the Chinese off the toxic coal cancer that already reaches the US (look at the skies over the Grand Canyon in this regard, but this then also give us counter pressures in matters pertaining to the China Sea and Taiwan. Just as importantly the relationship takes on the genuinely symbiotic nature of people freely entering into mutally beneficial economic activity. The currency imbalances and the role/stability/value of the dollar in the world, so precarious now, would receive a genuinine improvment of trajectory. This also means that the Chinese depend less on Iran for energy
Stream of consciousness over , , ,
-
"Our silence here on the Sequester cuts disturbs me. Do we agree to tax increases to avoid them? This is serious stuff! With the massive contraction of the American navy apparently in the pipeline, what substance to our alleged pivot to the South China Sea? Does not the day come when the Chinese blow us off of Taiwain?"
Yes, we are screwed and no, signing on with even higher tax rates just makes it worse.
Dick Cheney was on the air last week warning very persuasively of the dire consequences to defense of the sequester. He watched the last two times our military was gutted and the costly and difficult process of rebuilding.
Ralph Peters, an noted hawk, came to the opposite conclusion: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/asking_for_defense_cuts_JMVPBqujQudb1Jc68tKeVP
A number of competing considerations come into play. First is peace through strength (a principle defeated in the last election). Real cuts in capabilities embolden the wrong people and cost us more in the long run. OTOH, defense spending has been extremely wasteful, we are winding down two wars and we are disarming anyway under Obama/Hagel. Perhaps we might use the reality that they will gut readiness anyway to force the domestic cuts now.
"What would be wrong in getting back money from the Chinese by selling them nat gas?!?
Yes, these are the kind of solutions we would pursue if we had our own best interests in mind.
" Not only would the greens be happy at weaning the Chinese off the toxic coal cancer that already reaches the US"
That falsely assumes the main point of environmental extremism is to protect the environment.
"...this then also give us counter pressures in matters pertaining to the China Sea and Taiwan."
I wonder if this excellent idea ever came up in the strategic level meetings that natural gas advocate, Amb. Huntsman, never had with his boss Pres. Obama during the years he was stationed there to dine with the communist politburo.
Your comments on Rumsfeld are a reminder for those who say what difference would Hagel make.
-
Thank you for your comments.
Re "That falsely assumes the main point of environmental extremism is to protect the environment." Not quite my point-- what I intend to communicate here is the political alliance that can be built towards accomplishing this goal with those who normally fight us tooth and nail on everything.
-
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/14/what_george_w_bush_did_right
from the article:
I think it's a tragedy that the foreign policy shortcomings of the Bush administration have conspired to obscure his most positive legacy -- not least because it saved so many lives, but because there's so much that Americans and the rest of the world can learn from it. Both his detractors and supporters tend to view his time in office through the lens of the "war on terror" and the policies that grew out of it. By contrast, only a few Americans have ever heard of PEPFAR, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which President Bush announced in his State of the Union address in 2003.
-
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/john-kerry-makes-country-kyrgyzstan_703214.html
From the article:
"The State Department kindly omitted the error in the official transcript of Wednesday's speech, which Mr Kerry delivered on the eve of his first foreign trip as secretary of state. Mr Kerry's flub was all the more awkward, because Kyrgyzstan is a key ally in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and a major recipient of US aid, which totalled $41 million (£27 million) in 2011."
-
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/25/time-for-pentagon-to-talk-strategy/
I highly recommend this article, authored by a former student!
-
Looks like we have some readers of this forum- indeed of this thread- at the Pentagon too :lol:
-
http://news.yahoo.com/argo-great-52-american-hostages-still-looking-justice-211834586--politics.html
This is a powerful work.
From the article:
"Ben Affleck’s celebrated film, Argo, has spotlighted a desperate CIA scheme that enabled six U.S. Embassy employees to escape post-revolutionary Iran disguised as a Canadian film crew. Holland was part of a far less fortunate group, the 52 Americans who didn’t make it out of the embassy when militants stormed it on Nov. 4, 1979, and were held hostage for 444 days."
-
http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2013/03/14/the-secret-document-that-set-obamas-middle-east-policy/?singlepage=true
The Secret Document That Set Obama’s Middle East Policy
March 14th, 2013 - 9:42 am
“… we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms. … America is not — and never will be — at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security — because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children. And it is my first duty as president to protect the American people.” – President Barack Obama, Cairo, June 2009
“The United States is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise. … Resistance is the only solution. [Today the United States] is withdrawing from Iraq, defeated and wounded, and it is also on the verge of withdrawing from Afghanistan. [All] its warplanes, missiles, and modern military technology were defeated by the will of the peoples, as long as [these peoples] insisted on resistance.” – Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad al-Badri, Cairo, September 2010
What did the president know, and when did he know it? That’s a question made classic by the Watergate scandal. Now, it is possible to trace precisely what Obama knew and when he knew it. And it proves that the installment of power of the Muslim Brotherhood was a conscious and deliberate strategy of the Obama administration, developed before the “Arab Spring” began.
In February 2011, the New York Times ran an extremely complimentary article on President Obama by Mark Landler, who some observers say is the biggest apologist for Obama on the newspaper. That’s quite an achievement. Landler praised Obama for having tremendous foresight, in effect predicting the “Arab Spring.” According to Landler:
President Obama ordered his advisers last August [2010] to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.
Which advisors? The then counter-terrorism advisor and now designated CIA chief John Brennan? National Security Council senior staffer Samantha Power? If it was done by Obama’s own staff, rather than State and Defense, it’s likely that these people were the key authors. Or at least one of them was.
So should U.S. policy help allies avoid such sweeping change by standing firm or by helping them make adjustments? No, explained the report, it should get on the side of history and wield a broom to do the sweeping. The article continued:
Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, [emphasis added] these officials said.
The 18-page classified report, they said, grapples with a problem that has bedeviled the White House’s approach toward Egypt and other countries in recent days: how to balance American strategic interests and the desire to avert broader instability against the democratic demands of the protesters.
As I noted, the article was quite explicitly complimentary (and that’s an understatement) about how Obama knew what was likely to happen and was well prepared for it.
But that’s precisely the problem. It wasn’t trying to deal with change, but was pushing for it; it wasn’t asserting U.S. interests but balancing them off against other factors. In the process, U.S. interests were forgotten.
If Landler was right, then Obama did have a sense of what was going to happen, and prepared. It cannot be said that he was caught unaware. This view would suggest, then, that he thought American strategic interests could be protected, and broader instability avoided by overthrowing U.S. allies as fast as possible and by showing the oppositions that he was on their side. Presumably the paper pointed out the strength of Islamist forces and the Muslim Brotherhood factor, and then discounted any dangers from this quarter.
One could have imagined how other U.S. governments would have dealt with this situation. Here is my imagined passage from a high-level government document:
In light of the likelihood of sweeping political changes, with countries from Bahrain to Yemen ripe for popular revolt, U.S. policy should either help friendly governments retain control or encourage them to make reforms that would increase the scope of freedom in a way that would satisfy popular desires without endangering U.S. interests and long-term stability. In the event that the fall of any given regime seemed likely, U.S. policy should work both publicly and behind the scenes to try to ensure the triumph of moderate, pro-democratic forces that would be able to prevent the formation of radical Islamist dictatorships inimical to U.S. interests, regional peace, and the well-being of the local population.
(Note: again, that is my reconstruction and not a quote from the document.)
Such an approach would have been easy, and in line with historic U.S. policy. We have every reason to believe that the State Department and the Defense Department favored such an approach.
But let’s look at precisely how the White House described the U.S. policy it wanted:
… how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States.
In other words, a popular revolt was going to happen (I’ve seen the cables from the U.S. embassy in Tunisia that accurately predicted an upheaval), but would it succeed or fail? The Obama administration concluded that the revolt should succeed and set out to help make sure that it did so. As for who won, it favored not just moderate Islamic forces — which hardly existed as such — but moderate Islamist forces.
Which didn’t exist at all.
Anyone who says that the United States did not have a lot of influence in these crises doesn’t know what they are talking about. Of course the U.S. government didn’t control the outcome; its leverage was limited. But there’s a big difference between telling the Egyptian army to stay in control, dump Mubarak, and make a mild transition, and we, the United States, will back you — and telling them that Washington wanted the generals to stand aside, let Mubarak be overthrown, and have a thorough regime change. A fundamental transformation, to coin a phrase.
So the Obama administration did not stand beside friendly regimes or help to manage a limited transition with more democracy and reforms. No, it actively pushed to bring down at least four governments — Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen.
It did not push for the overthrow of two anti-American regimes — Iran and Syria — but on the contrary was still striving for good relations with those two dictatorships.
Equally, it did not push for the fall of radical anti-American governments in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
No, it only pushed for the fall of “valuable allies.”
There was no increase in support for dissidents in Iran despite, as we will see in a moment, internal administration predictions of unrest there, too. As for Syria, strong administration support for the dictatorship there continued for months until it was clear that the regime was in serious trouble. It seems reasonable to say that the paper did not predict the Syrian civil war.
Want more evidence about the internal administration document? Here’s another article from the time, which explains:
The White House had been debating the likelihood of a domino effect since youth-driven revolts had toppled President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, even though the American intelligence community and Israel’s intelligence services had estimated that the risk to President Mubarak was low — less than 20 percent, some officials said.
According to senior officials who participated in Mr. Obama’s policy debates, the president took a different view. He made the point early on, a senior official said, that “this was a trend” that could spread to other authoritarian governments in the region, including in Iran. By the end of the 18-day uprising, by a White House count, there were 38 meetings with the president about Egypt. Mr. Obama said that this was a chance to create an alternative to “the al-Qaeda narrative” of Western interference.
Notice that while this suggests the debate began after the unrest started, full credit is given to Obama personally, not to U.S. intelligence agencies, for grasping the truth. This is like the appropriation by the White House of all the credit for getting Osama bin Laden, sort of a cult of personality thing.
We know for a fact that the State Department predicted significant problems arising in Tunisia (from the Wikileaks documents), and perhaps that is true for other countries as well. But if Obama wants to take personal credit for the new U.S. policy that means he also has to take personal blame for the damage it does.
Now I assume what I’m about to say isn’t going to be too popular, but I’ll also bet that history will prove it correct: the revolution in Egypt was not inevitable, and Obama’s position was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And judging from what happened at the time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agrees with me.
The idea of an “alternative to the al-Qaeda narrative” of Western interference is straight John Brennan. What Obama was really saying: So al-Qaeda claims we interfere to put reactionary pro-Western dictators in power just because they’re siding with us? We’ll show them we can put popular Islamist dictators in power, even though they are against us!
If I’m writing this somewhat facetiously, I mean it very seriously.
And here’s more proof from the Washington Post in March 2011, which seems to report on the implementation of the White House paper’s recommendations:
The administration is already taking steps to distinguish between various movements in the region that promote Islamic law in government. An internal assessment, ordered by the White House last month, identified large ideological differences between such movements as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Qaeda that will guide the U.S. approach to the region.
That says it all, doesn’t it?
The implication is that the U.S. government knew that the Brotherhood would take power — and thought this was a good thing.
It continued:
“If our policy can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, we won’t be able to adapt to this change,” the senior administration official said. “We’re also not going to allow ourselves to be driven by fear.”
Might that be John Brennan? I’d bet on it.
What did Obama and his advisors think would happen? That out of gratitude for America stopping its (alleged) bullying and imperialistic ways and getting on the (alleged) side of history, the new regimes would be friendly. The Muslim Brotherhood in particular would conclude that America was not its enemy.
You know, one Brotherhood leader would supposedly say to another: all of these years we thought the United States was against us, but now we see that they are really our friends. Remember Obama’s Cairo speech? He really gets us!
More likely he’d be saying: we don’t understand precisely what the Americans are up to but they are obviously weak, cowardly, and in decline.
In fact, that’s what they did say. Remember that President Jimmy Carter’s attempts to make friends with the new Islamist regime in Iran in 1979 fed a combination of Iranian suspicion and arrogance which led to the hostage crisis, and Tehran daring to take on the United States single-handed. America, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini said at the time, can’t do a damned thing against us.
Incidentally, everyone except the American public — which means people in the Middle East — knows that Obama cut the funding for real democratic groups. His Cairo speech was important not for the points so often discussed (Israel, for example) but because it heralded the age of political Islamism being dominant in the region. Indeed, Obama practically told those people that they should identify not as Arabs, but as Muslims.
In broader terms, what does Obama’s behavior remind me of? President Jimmy Carter pushing Iran’s shah for human rights and other reforms in 1977, and then standing aloof as the revolution unrolled — and went increasingly in the direction of radical Islamists — in 1978.
As noted above, that didn’t work out too well.
Incidentally, the State Department quite visibly did not support Obama’s policy in 2011. It wanted to stand with its traditional clients in the threatened Arab governments, just as presumably there were many in the Defense Department who wanted to help the imperiled militaries with whom they had cooperated for years. And that, by the way, includes the Turkish army, which was being visibly dismantled by the Islamist regime in Ankara.
While the State Department backed down on Egypt, it drew the line on Bahrain. Yes, there is a very unfair system there in which a small Sunni minority dominates a large Shia majority, and yes, too, some of the Shia opposition is moderate, but the assessment was that a revolution would probably bring to power an Iranian satellite government.
But the idea — that they’re going to be overthrown anyway so let’s give them a push — did not apply to Iran or Syria or Hamas-government Gaza or Hizballah-governed Lebanon and not at all to Islamist-governed Turkey.
It makes sense that this basic thinking also applied to Libya, where dictator Muammar al-Qadhafi was hardly a friend of the United States, but had been on better behavior lately. As for Syria, the U.S. government indifference to who actually wins leadership of the new regime seems to carry over from the earlier crises.
Credit should be given to the U.S. government in two specific cases. Once the decision to overthrow Qadhafi was made, the result was a relatively favorable regime in Libya. That was a gain. The problem is that this same philosophy and the fragility of the regime helped produce the Benghazi incident. The other relatively positive situation was Iraq’s post-Saddam government, to which most of the credit goes to Obama’s predecessor but some to his administration. Still, Iraq seems to be sliding — in terms of its regional strategic stance, not domestically — closer toward Iran.
At any rate, the evidence both public and behind the scenes seems to indicate that the Obama administration decided on two principles in early 2011.
– First, let’s help overthrow our friends before someone else does so, and somehow we will benefit from being on the winning side.
– Second, it doesn’t really matter too much who takes power, because somehow they will be better than their predecessors, somehow we will be more popular with them, and somehow U.S. interests will be preserved.
Landler definitely thought he was making Obama look good.
Instead, he was showing us that the bad thinking and disastrous policy was planned and purposeful.
-
A New Reality in U.S.-Israeli Relations
March 19, 2013 | 0900 GMT
By George Friedman
Founder and Chairman
U.S. President Barack Obama is making his first visit to Israel as president. The visit comes in the wake of his re-election and inauguration to a second term and the formation of a new Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Normally, summits between Israel and the United States are filled with foreign policy issues on both sides, and there will be many discussed at this meeting, including Iran, Syria and Egypt. But this summit takes place in an interesting climate, because both the Americans and Israelis are less interested in foreign and security matters than they are in their respective domestic issues.
In the United States, the political crisis over the federal budget and the struggle to grow the economy and reduce unemployment has dominated the president's and the country's attention. The Israeli elections turned on domestic issues, ranging from whether the ultra-Orthodox would be required to serve in Israel Defense Forces, as other citizens are, to a growing controversy over economic inequality in Israel.
Inwardness is a cyclic norm in most countries. Foreign policy does not always dominate the agenda and periodically it becomes less important. What is interesting is at this point, while Israelis continue to express concern about foreign policy, they are most passionate on divisive internal social issues. Similarly, although there continues to be a war in Afghanistan, the American public is heavily focused on economic issues. Under these circumstances the interesting question is not what Obama and Netanyahu will talk about but whether what they discuss will matter much.
Washington's New Strategy
For the United States, the focus on domestic affairs is compounded by an emerging strategic shift in how the United States deals with the world. After more than a decade of being focused on the Islamic world and moving aggressively to try to control threats in the region militarily, the United States is moving toward a different stance. The bar for military intervention has been raised. Therefore, the United States has, in spite of recent statements, not militarily committed itself to the Syrian crisis, and when the French intervened in Mali the United States played a supporting role. The intervention in Libya, where France and the United Kingdom drew the United States into the action, was the first manifestation of Washington's strategic re-evaluation. The desire to reduce military engagement in the region was not the result of Libya. That desire was there from the U.S. experience in Iraq and was the realization that the disposal of an unsavory regime does not necessarily -- or even very often -- result in a better regime. Even the relative success of the intervention in Libya drove home the point that every intervention has both unintended consequences and unanticipated costs.
The United States' new stance ought to frighten the Israelis. In Israel's grand strategy, the United States is the ultimate guarantor of its national security and underwrites a portion of its national defense. If the United States becomes less inclined to involve itself in regional adventures, the question is whether the guarantees implicit in the relationship still stand. The issue is not whether the United States would intervene to protect Israel's existence; save from a nuclear-armed Iran, there is no existential threat to Israel's national interest. Rather, the question is whether the United States is prepared to continue shaping the dynamics of the region in areas where Israel lacks political influence and is not able to exert military control. Israel wants a division of labor in the region, where it influences its immediate neighbors while the United States manages more distant issues. To put it differently, the Israelis' understanding of the American role is to control events that endanger Israel and American interests under the assumption that Israeli and American interests are identical. The idea that they are always identical has never been as true as politicians on both sides have claimed, but more important, the difficulties of controlling the environment have increased dramatically for both sides.
Israel's Difficulties
The problem for Israel at this point is that it is not able to do very much in the area that is its responsibility. For example, after the relationship with the United States, the second-most important strategic foundation for Israel is its relationship -- and peace treaty -- with Egypt. Following the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the fear was that Egypt might abrogate the peace treaty, reopening at some distant point the possibility of conventional war. But the most shocking thing to Israel was how little control it actually had over events in Egypt and the future of its ties to Egypt. With good relations between Israel and the Egyptian military and with the military still powerful, the treaty has thus far survived. But the power of the military will not be the sole factor in the long-term sustainability of the treaty. Whether it survives or not ultimately is not a matter that Israel has much control over.
The Israelis have always assumed that the United States can control areas where they lack control. And some Israelis have condemned the United States for not doing more to manage events in Egypt. But the fact is that the United States also has few tools to control the evolution of Egypt, apart from some aid to Egypt and its own relationship with the Egyptian military. The first Israeli response is that the United States should do something about problems confronting Israel. It may or may not be in the American interest to do something in any particular case, but the problem in this case is that although a hostile Egypt is not in the Americans' interest, there is actually little the United States can do to control events in Egypt.
The Syrian situation is even more complex, with Israel not even certain what outcome is more desirable. Syrian President Bashar al Assad is a known quantity to Israel. He is by no means a friend, but his actions and his father's have always been in the pursuit of their own interest and therefore have been predictable. The opposition is an amorphous entity whose ability to govern is questionable and that is shot through with Islamists who are at least organized and know what they want. It is not clear that Israel wants al Assad to fall or to survive, and in any case Israel is limited in what it could do even if it had a preference. Both outcomes frighten the Israelis. Indeed, the hints of American weapons shipments to the rebels at some point concern Israel as much as no weapons shipments.
The Iranian situation is equally complex. It is clear that the Israelis, despite rhetoric to the contrary, will not act unilaterally against Iran's nuclear weapons. The risks of failure are too high, and the consequences of Iranian retaliation against fundamental American interests, such as the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, are too substantial. The American view is that an Iranian nuclear weapon is not imminent and Iran's ultimate ability to build a deliverable weapon is questionable. Therefore, regardless of what Israel wants, and given the American doctrine of military involvement as a last resort when it significantly affects U.S. interests, the Israelis will not be able to move the United States to play its traditional role of assuming military burdens to shape the region.
The Changing Relationship
There has therefore been a very real if somewhat subtle shift in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Israel has lost the ability, if it ever had it, to shape the behavior of countries on its frontier. Egypt and Syria will do what they will do. At the same time, the United States has lost the inclination to intervene militarily in the broader regional conflict and has limited political tools. Countries like Saudi Arabia, which might be inclined to align with U.S. strategy, find themselves in a position of creating their own strategy and assuming the risks.
For the United States, there are now more important issues than the Middle East, such as the domestic economy. The United States is looking inward both because it has to and because it has not done well in trying to shape the Islamic world. From the Israeli point of view, for the moment, its national security is not at risk, and its ability to control its security environment is limited, while its ability to shape American responses in the region has deteriorated due to the shifting American focus. It will continue to get aid that it no longer needs and will continue to have military relations with the United States, particularly in developing military technology. But for reasons having little to do with Israel, Washington's attention is not focused on the region or at least not as obsessively as it had been since 2001.
Therefore Israel has turned inward by default. Frightened by events on its border, it realizes that it has little control there and lacks clarity on what it wants. In the broader region, Israel's ability to rely on American control has declined. Like Israel, the United States has realized the limits and costs of such a strategy, and Israel will not talk the United States out of it, as the case of Iran shows. In addition, there is no immediate threat to Israel that it must respond to. It is, by default, in a position of watching and waiting without being clear as to what it wants to see. Therefore it should be no surprise that Israel, like the United States, is focused on domestic affairs.
It also puts Israel in a reactive position. The question of the Palestinians is always there. Israel's policy, like most of its strategic policy, is to watch and wait. It has no inclination to find a political solution because it cannot predict what the consequences of either a solution or an attempt to find one would be. Its policy is to cede the initiative to the Palestinians. Last month, there was speculation that increased demonstrations in the West Bank could spark a third intifada. There was not one. There might be another surge of rockets from Gaza, or there might not be. That is a decision that Hamas will make.
Israel has turned politically inward because its strategic environment has become not so much threatening as beyond its control. Enemies cannot overwhelm it, nor can it control what its enemies and potential enemies might do. Israel has lost the initiative and, more important, it now knows it has lost the initiative. It has looked to the United States to take the initiative, but on a much broader scale Washington faces the same reality as Israel with less at stake and therefore less urgency. Certainly, the Israelis would like to see the United States take more aggressive stands and more risks, but they fully understand that the price and dangers of aggressive stands in the region have grown out of control.
Therefore it is interesting to wonder what Obama and Netanyahu will discuss. Surely Iran will come up and Obama will say there is no present danger and no need to take risks. Netanyahu will try to find some way to convince him that the United States should undertake the burden at a time suitable to Israel. The United States will decline the invitation.
This is not a strain in the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the sense of anger and resentment, although those exist on both sides. Rather it is like a marriage that continues out of habit but whose foundation has withered. The foundation was the Israeli ability to control events in its region and the guarantee that where the Israelis fail, U.S. interests dictate that Washington will take action. Neither one has the ability, the appetite or the political basis to maintain that relationship on those terms. Obama has economics to worry about. Netanyahu has the conscription of the ultra-Orthodox on his mind. National security remains an issue for both, but their ability to manage it has declined dramatically.
In private I expect a sullen courtesy and in public an enthusiastic friendship, much as an old, bored married couple, not near a divorce, but far from where they were when they were young. Neither party is what it once was; each suspects that it is the other's fault. In the end, each has its own fate, linked by history to each other but no longer united.
.
Read more: A New Reality in U.S.-Israeli Relations | Stratfor
-
Also posted in the Iraq thread:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/343870/why-did-we-invade-iraq-victor-davis-hanson
On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the back-and-forth recriminations continue, but in all the “not me” defenses, we have forgotten, over the ensuing decade, the climate of 2003 and why we invaded in the first place. The war was predicated on six suppositions.
1. 9/11 and the 1991 Gulf War. The Bush administration made the argument that in the post-9/11 climate there should be a belated reckoning with Saddam Hussein. He had continued to sponsor terrorism, had over the years invaded or attacked four of his neighbors, and had killed tens of thousands of his own people. He was surely more a threat to the region and to his own people than either Bashar Assad or Moammar Qaddafi was eight years later.
In this context, the end of the 1991 Gulf War loomed large: Its denouement had led not to the removal of a defeated Saddam, but to mass slaughter of Kurds and Shiites. Twelve years of no-fly zones had seen periods of conflict, and the enforcement of those zones no longer enjoyed much, if any, international support — suggesting that Saddam would soon be able to reclaim his regional stature. Many of the architects or key players in the 1991 war were once again in power in Washington, and many of them had in the ensuing decade become remorseful about the ending of the prior conflict. The sense of the need to correct a mistake became all the more potent after 9/11. Most Americans have now forgotten that by 2003, most of the books published on the 1991 war were critical, faulting the unnecessary overkill deployment; the inclusion of too many allies, which hampered U.S. choices; the shakedown of allies to help defray the cost; the realist and inhumane ending to the conflict; the ongoing persecution of Shiites, Marsh Arabs, and Kurds; and the continuation of Saddam Hussein in power.
Since there was no direct connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam, take away the security apprehensions following 9/11, and George Bush probably would not have taken the risk of invading Iraq. By the same token, had the 1991 Gulf War ended differently, or had the U.N. and the NATO allies continued to participate fully in the no-fly zones and the containment of Iraq, there likewise would not have been a 2003 invasion. The Iraq War was predicated, rightly or wrongly, on the notion that the past war with Saddam had failed and containment would fail, and that after 9/11 it was the proper time to end a sponsor of global terrorism that should have been ended in 1991 — a decision that, incidentally, would save Kurdistan and allow it to turn into one of the most successful and pro-American regions in the Middle East.
2. Afghanistan. A second reason was the rapid victory in the war in Afghanistan immediately following 9/11. Scholars and pundits had warned of disaster on the eve of the October 2001 invasion. Even if it was successful in destroying the rule of the Taliban, any chance of postwar stability was declared impossible, given the “graveyard of empires” reputation of that part of the world. But the unforeseen eight-week war that with ease removed the Taliban, and the nonviolent manner in which the pro-Western Hamid Karzai later assumed power, misled the administration and the country into thinking Iraq would be a far less challenging prospect — especially given Iraq’s humiliating defeat in 1991, which had contrasted sharply with the Soviet failure in Afghanistan.
After all, in contrast to Afghanistan, Iraq had accessible ports, good weather, flat terrain, a far more literate populace, and oil — facts that in the ensuing decade, ironically, would help to explain why David Petraeus finally achieved success there in a manner not true of his later efforts in Afghanistan.
Since the U.S. had seemingly succeeded in two months where the Soviets had abjectly failed in a decade, and given that we already had once trounced Saddam, it seemed likely that Iraq would follow the success of Afghanistan. History is replete with examples of such misreadings of the past: The French in 1940 believed that they could hold off the Germans as they had for four years in the First World War; the Germans believed the Russians would be as weak at home in 1941 as they had seemed sluggish abroad in Poland and Finland in 1939–40. Had Afghanistan proved as difficult at the very beginning of the war as it did at the end, the U.S. probably would not have invaded Iraq.
3. Everyone on board. A third reason was the overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, in the media, and among the public — for reasons well beyond WMD. In October 2002, both houses of Congress passed 23 writs justifying the removal of Saddam, an update of Bill Clinton’s 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. Senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Harry Reid were among those who not only enthusiastically called for Saddam’s removal, but also warned of intelligence estimates of Saddam’s WMD arsenals. Pundits on both sides, from Thomas Friedman to George Will, likewise supported the invasion, which on the eve of the war enjoyed over 70 percent approval from the American people. Bush, in that regard, had achieved what Clinton had not on the eve of the Serbian War — he had obtained a joint resolution of support from Congress before attacking, and had taken nearly a year in concerted (though failed) attempts to win U.N. approval for Saddam’s removal. Had Bush not gone to Congress, had he made no attempt to go to the U.N., had he had no public support, or had he been opposed by the liberal press, he probably would not have invaded Iraq.
4. WMD. A fourth reason was the specter of WMD. While the Bush administration might easily have cited the persuasive writs of the bipartisan resolutions — genocide against the Kurds, Shiites, and Marsh Arabs; bounties for suicide bombers; sanctuary for terrorists; attempts to kill a former U.S. president; violations of U.N. sanctions and resolutions; etc. — it instead fixated on supposedly unimpeachable intelligence about WMD, a “slam dunk,” according to CIA director George Tenet, a judgment with which most Middle Eastern governments and European intelligence agencies agreed. This concentration on WMD would prove a critical political mistake. Note in passing that the eventual public furor over missing WMD stockpiles (although there is solid evidence that Saddam was perilously close to WMD deployment) did not fully develop with the initial knowledge of that intelligence failure, but only with the mounting violence after a seemingly brilliant victory over Saddam.
The missing vast stockpiles of WMD then became the source of the convenient slogan “Bush lied, thousands died.” Yet had the reconstruction gone well, we would surely not have heard something like “Bush lied — and so there was no need, after all, to depose Saddam and foster consensual government in Iraq.”
The Bush administration apparently believed that, without the worry over WMD, the other writs would not generate enough public urgency for preemption, and thus it would not have invaded Iraq. Note that when Barack Obama talks of “red lines” and “game changers” in Syria that might justify U.S. preemptive action, he is not referring to 70,000 dead, the horrific human-rights record of Bashar Assad, Syria’s past effort to become nuclear, or even the plight of millions of Syrian refugees, but the supposition that Syria is planning to use chemical or biological weapons — a crime Saddam had often committed against his own people, and one that inflames public opinion in the West. As a footnote, we will probably not know the full story of WMD in the region until the Assad regime is gone from Syria — although we are starting to hear the same worries about such Syrian weapons from the Obama administration as we did of Iraqi weapons during the Bush presidency.
5. Nation-building. A fifth reason was the notion of reformulating Iraq, so that instead of being the problem in the region it would become a solution. Since the 1991 war had not ended well, because of a failure to finish off the regime and stay on, and since the aid to the insurgents against the Soviets in Afghanistan had been followed by U.S. neglect and in time the rise of the Taliban, so, in reaction, this time the U.S. was determined to stay. We forget now the liberal consensus that the rise of the Taliban and the survival of Saddam were supposed reflections of past U.S. callousness — something not to be repeated in Iraq.
Finally, America would do the right thing and create a consensual government that might ensure not only the end of Saddam’s atrocities, but also, by its very constitutional existence, pressure on the Gulf monarchies to liberalize and cease their support for terrorism of the sort that had killed 3,000 Americans. While there may well have been neo-cons who believed that the Iraqi democracy would be followed by a true Arab Spring of U.S.-fostered democracy sweeping the Middle East — something akin to the original good blowback of Pakistan’s detaining Dr. Khan, Qaddafi’s surrendering his WMD arsenal, and Syria’s leaving Lebanon, before all this dissipated with Fallujah — most of the Bush administration policymakers believed that democracy was not their first choice, but their last choice, for postwar reconstruction, given that everything else had been tried after past conflicts and just as often failed.
Administration officials were not hoping for Carmel, but for something akin to post-Milosevic Serbia or post-Noriega Panama, as opposed to Somalia or post-Soviet Afghanistan. Note well: Had George Bush simply announced in advance that he would be leaving Iraq as soon as he deposed Saddam, or that he planned to install a less violent relative of Saddam’s to keep order as we departed, Congress probably would not have authorized an invasion of Iraq in the first place. The Iraq War was sold partly on the liberal idealism of at last doing the right thing — after not having done so previously against Saddam or following the Soviets in Afghanistan.
6. Oil! Sixth and last was the issue of oil. Had Iraq been Rwanda, the Bush administration would not have invaded. The key here, however, is to remember the war was not a matter of “blood for oil,” given that the Bush administration had no intention of taking Iraqi oil — a fact proven by the transparent and non-U.S. postwar development of the Iraqi oil and gas fields.
Instead, oil was an issue because Iraq’s oil revenues meant that Saddam would always have the resources to foment trouble in the region, would always be difficult to remove through internal opposition, and would always use petrodollar influence to undermine U.N. resolutions, seek to spike world oil prices, or distort Western solidarity, as the French collusion with Saddam attested. Imagine North Korea with Iraq’s gas and oil reserves: The problem it poses for its neighbors would be greatly amplified and far more likely addressed. Had Iraq simply been a resource-poor Yemen or Jordan, or landlocked without key access to the Persian Gulf, the U.S. probably would not have invaded.
TEN YEARS LATER
The invasion of Iraq was a perfect storm predicated on all these suppositions — the absence of any one of which might well have postponed or precluded the invasion.
That we have forgotten or ignored most of these causes stems not just from the subsequent terrible cost of the war. Instead, our amnesia is self-induced, and derives from the fact that 70 percent of the American people and most of the liberal media commentators supported the invasion, came to reverse that support, and remain hurt or furious at someone other than themselves for their own change of heart — one predicated not on the original conditions of going to war, but on the later unexpected costs in blood and treasure that might have been avoided.
Given that less than a third of the American people initially opposed the war, the subsequent acrimony centered on whether it was better for the nation to give up and depart after 2004, or to stay and stabilize the country. Ultimately the president decided that the only thing worse than fighting a bad war was losing one.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books.
-
http://nationalinterest.org/article/congressional-abdication-8138
From the article:
Importantly and often forgotten these days, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution was also carefully drawn to give Congress, not the president, certain powers over the structure and use of the military. True, the president would act as commander in chief, but only in the sense that he would be executing policies shepherded within the boundaries of legislative powers. In some cases his power is narrowed further by the requirement that he obtain the “Advice and Consent” of two-thirds of the Senate. Congress, not the president, would “raise and support Armies,” with the Constitution limiting appropriations for such armies to no more than two years. This was a clear signal that in our new country there would be no standing army to be sent off on foreign adventures at the whim of a pseudomonarch. The United States would not engage in unchecked, perpetual military campaigns.
-
Question: This matter of no standing army is also found, in effect, in the language of the second amemdment as well. When was a standing army established? Is a standing army unconstitutional? If not, then what are the constitutional implications of this change of direction?
Question: Examples of a psuedomonarch sending off on perpetual foreign adventures?
-
Some of GF's work here is with some themes I have been pushing in this thread:
Beyond the Post-Cold War World
April 2, 2013 | 0901 GMT
Stratfor
By George Friedman
Founder and Chairman
An era ended when the Soviet Union collapsed on Dec. 31, 1991. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union defined the Cold War period. The collapse of Europe framed that confrontation. After World War II, the Soviet and American armies occupied Europe. Both towered over the remnants of Europe's forces. The collapse of the European imperial system, the emergence of new states and a struggle between the Soviets and Americans for domination and influence also defined the confrontation. There were, of course, many other aspects and phases of the confrontation, but in the end, the Cold War was a struggle built on Europe's decline.
Many shifts in the international system accompanied the end of the Cold War. In fact, 1991 was an extraordinary and defining year. The Japanese economic miracle ended. China after Tiananmen Square inherited Japan's place as a rapidly growing, export-based economy, one defined by the continued pre-eminence of the Chinese Communist Party. The Maastricht Treaty was formulated, creating the structure of the subsequent European Union. A vast coalition dominated by the United States reversed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Three things defined the post-Cold War world. The first was U.S. power. The second was the rise of China as the center of global industrial growth based on low wages. The third was the re-emergence of Europe as a massive, integrated economic power. Meanwhile, Russia, the main remnant of the Soviet Union, reeled while Japan shifted to a dramatically different economic mode.
The post-Cold War world had two phases. The first lasted from Dec. 31, 1991, until Sept. 11, 2001. The second lasted from 9/11 until now.
The initial phase of the post-Cold War world was built on two assumptions. The first assumption was that the United States was the dominant political and military power but that such power was less significant than before, since economics was the new focus. The second phase still revolved around the three Great Powers -- the United States, China and Europe -- but involved a major shift in the worldview of the United States, which then assumed that pre-eminence included the power to reshape the Islamic world through military action while China and Europe single-mindedly focused on economic matters.
The Three Pillars of the International System
In this new era, Europe is reeling economically and is divided politically. The idea of Europe codified in Maastricht no longer defines Europe. Like the Japanese economic miracle before it, the Chinese economic miracle is drawing to a close and Beijing is beginning to examine its military options. The United States is withdrawing from Afghanistan and reconsidering the relationship between global pre-eminence and global omnipotence. Nothing is as it was in 1991.
Europe primarily defined itself as an economic power, with sovereignty largely retained by its members but shaped by the rule of the European Union. Europe tried to have it all: economic integration and individual states. But now this untenable idea has reached its end and Europe is fragmenting. One region, including Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, has low unemployment. The other region on the periphery has high or extraordinarily high unemployment.
Germany wants to retain the European Union to protect German trade interests and because Berlin properly fears the political consequences of a fragmented Europe. But as the creditor of last resort, Germany also wants to control the economic behavior of the EU nation-states. Berlin does not want to let off the European states by simply bailing them out. If it bails them out, it must control their budgets. But the member states do not want to cede sovereignty to a German-dominated EU apparatus in exchange for a bailout.
In the indebted peripheral region, Cyprus has been treated with particular economic savagery as part of the bailout process. Certainly, the Cypriots acted irresponsibly. But that label applies to all of the EU members, including Germany, who created an economic plant so vast that it could not begin to consume what it produces -- making the country utterly dependent on the willingness of others to buy German goods. There are thus many kinds of irresponsibility. How the European Union treats irresponsibility depends upon the power of the nation in question. Cyprus, small and marginal, has been crushed while larger nations receive more favorable treatment despite their own irresponsibility.
It has been said by many Europeans that Cyprus should never have been admitted to the European Union. That might be true, but it was admitted -- during the time of European hubris when it was felt that mere EU membership would redeem any nation. Now, Europe can no longer afford pride, and it is every nation for itself. Cyprus set the precedent that the weak will be crushed. It serves as a lesson to other weakening nations, a lesson that over time will transform the European idea of integration and sovereignty. The price of integration for the weak is high, and all of Europe is weak in some way.
In such an environment, sovereignty becomes sanctuary. It is interesting to watch Hungary ignore the European Union as Budapest reconstructs its political system to be more sovereign -- and more authoritarian -- in the wider storm raging around it. Authoritarian nationalism is an old European cure-all, one that is re-emerging, since no one wants to be the next Cyprus.
I have already said much about China, having argued for several years that China's economy couldn't possibly continue to expand at the same rate. Leaving aside all the specific arguments, extraordinarily rapid growth in an export-oriented economy requires economic health among its customers. It is nice to imagine expanded domestic demand, but in a country as impoverished as China, increasing demand requires revolutionizing life in the interior. China has tried this many times. It has never worked, and in any case China certainly couldn't make it work in the time needed. Instead, Beijing is maintaining growth by slashing profit margins on exports. What growth exists is neither what it used to be nor anywhere near as profitable. That sort of growth in Japan undermined financial viability as money was leant to companies to continue exporting and employing people -- money that would never be repaid.
It is interesting to recall the extravagant claims about the future of Japan in the 1980s. Awestruck by growth rates, Westerners did not see the hollowing out of the financial system as growth rates were sustained by cutting prices and profits. Japan's miracle seemed to be eternal. It wasn't, and neither is China's. And China has a problem that Japan didn't: a billion impoverished people. Japan exists, but behaves differently than it did before; the same is happening to China.
Both Europe and China thought about the world in the post-Cold War period similarly. Each believed that geopolitical questions and even questions of domestic politics could be suppressed and sometimes even ignored. They believed this because they both thought they had entered a period of permanent prosperity. 1991-2008 was in fact a period of extraordinary prosperity, one that both Europe and China simply assumed would never end and one whose prosperity would moot geopolitics and politics.
Periods of prosperity, of course, always alternate with periods of austerity, and now history has caught up with Europe and China. Europe, which had wanted union and sovereignty, is confronting the political realities of EU unwillingness to make the fundamental and difficult decisions on what union really meant. For its part, China wanted to have a free market and a communist regime in a region it would dominate economically. Its economic climax has left it with the question of whether the regime can survive in an uncontrolled economy, and what its regional power would look like if it weren't prosperous.
And the United States has emerged from the post-Cold War period with one towering lesson: However attractive military intervention is, it always looks easier at the beginning than at the end. The greatest military power in the world has the ability to defeat armies. But it is far more difficult to reshape societies in America's image. A Great Power manages the routine matters of the world not through military intervention, but through manipulating the balance of power. The issue is not that America is in decline. Rather, it is that even with the power the United States had in 2001, it could not impose its political will -- even though it had the power to disrupt and destroy regimes -- unless it was prepared to commit all of its power and treasure to transforming a country like Afghanistan. And that is a high price to pay for Afghan democracy.
The United States has emerged into the new period with what is still the largest economy in the world with the fewest economic problems of the three pillars of the post-Cold War world. It has also emerged with the greatest military power. But it has emerged far more mature and cautious than it entered the period. There are new phases in history, but not new world orders. Economies rise and fall, there are limits to the greatest military power and a Great Power needs prudence in both lending and invading.
A New Era Begins
Eras unfold in strange ways until you suddenly realize they are over. For example, the Cold War era meandered for decades, during which U.S.-Soviet detentes or the end of the Vietnam War could have seemed to signal the end of the era itself. Now, we are at a point where the post-Cold War model no longer explains the behavior of the world. We are thus entering a new era. I don't have a good buzzword for the phase we're entering, since most periods are given a label in hindsight. (The interwar period, for example, got a name only after there was another war to bracket it.) But already there are several defining characteristics to this era we can identify.
First, the United States remains the world's dominant power in all dimensions. It will act with caution, however, recognizing the crucial difference between pre-eminence and omnipotence.
Second, Europe is returning to its normal condition of multiple competing nation-states. While Germany will dream of a Europe in which it can write the budgets of lesser states, the EU nation-states will look at Cyprus and choose default before losing sovereignty.
Third, Russia is re-emerging. As the European Peninsula fragments, the Russians will do what they always do: fish in muddy waters. Russia is giving preferential terms for natural gas imports to some countries, buying metallurgical facilities in Hungary and Poland, and buying rail terminals in Slovakia. Russia has always been economically dysfunctional yet wielded outsized influence -- recall the Cold War. The deals they are making, of which this is a small sample, are not in their economic interests, but they increase Moscow's political influence substantially.
Fourth, China is becoming self-absorbed in trying to manage its new economic realities. Aligning the Communist Party with lower growth rates is not easy. The Party's reason for being is prosperity. Without prosperity, it has little to offer beyond a much more authoritarian state.
And fifth, a host of new countries will emerge to supplement China as the world's low-wage, high-growth epicenter. Latin America, Africa and less-developed parts of Southeast Asia are all emerging as contenders.
Relativity in the Balance of Power
There is a paradox in all of this. While the United States has committed many errors, the fragmentation of Europe and the weakening of China mean the United States emerges more powerful, since power is relative. It was said that the post-Cold War world was America's time of dominance. I would argue that it was the preface of U.S. dominance. Its two great counterbalances are losing their ability to counter U.S. power because they mistakenly believed that real power was economic power. The United States had combined power -- economic, political and military -- and that allowed it to maintain its overall power when economic power faltered.
A fragmented Europe has no chance at balancing the United States. And while China is reaching for military power, it will take many years to produce the kind of power that is global, and it can do so only if its economy allows it to. The United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War because of its balanced power. Europe and China defeated themselves because they placed all their chips on economics. And now we enter the new era.
.
Read more: Beyond the Post-Cold War World | Stratfor
-
I quite disagree with the notion here that failing to follow through in Iraq left a huge power vacuum, but there is plenty here that makes sense.
=========================
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344840/don-t-intervene-syria-andrew-c-mccarthy?pg=1
Andrew C. McCarthy
Those clamoring for American intervention in Syria — I should say, even more American intervention in Syria — have a lock on two influential drivers of conservative opinion, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. They are also bedfellows on this issue with our Muslim Brotherhood–enthralled president, even if Mr. Obama’s skittishness about going all in has them a bit testy.
All of this puts the media wind at their backs. Repeated often enough and reported uncritically enough, the interventionists’ shallow story has thus become the narrative. And so we have: The Vacuum.
The Vacuum theme goes like this: The Middle East may be in flux, but our threat environment remains frozen in time — a Nineties warp in which Iran, singularly, is the root of all evil. In Syria now, we have a golden opportunity to hand the mullahs a crushing defeat. All we need to do is commit to toppling their client, Bashar al-Assad. Media spin thus suggests that Assad’s minority Alawite regime is responsible for each of the 70,000 killings and half a million displacements that Syrians have endured since the civil war began — as if the Sunni majority, led by the local Brotherhood affiliate with al-Qaeda as the point of its spear, were not carrying out reciprocal mass murders and an anti-Christian pogrom.
Alas, misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya have left the Obama administration gun-shy about leaping with both feet into another Muslim mess. The president thus prefers to “lead from behind” the Sunni supremacist governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. This failure of American will has created The Vacuum: a leadership lacuna in the anti-Assad opposition. Into this purported breach, Islamic supremacists — seemingly out of thin air — have rushed in to hijack the forward march of freedom.
As a result, the narrative continues, untold legions of Muslim moderates, secular democrats, and religious minorities who would otherwise be charting Syria’s democratic destiny are being elbowed aside. Even worse, by failing to intervene forcefully — meaning, to fuel the jihad with high-tech combat weapons and an aerial campaign to soften up Assad’s remaining defenses — the administration is frittering away the opportunity to strike up pragmatic alliances with the Vaccum-filling Islamists. Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought — eager to help the Brotherhood, but too concerned about arms falling into terrorist hands — Obama is forfeiting our chance to influence the outcome.
Right. I mean, look at how ably our decade of heavy investment has steered Iraq and Afghanistan in a pro-American direction. And behold how they love us in Benghazi!
Syria hawks counter such scoffs by putting on their best Paul Krugman: The “freedom” stimulus was not a harebrained idea, it just wasn’t big enough. Put aside the fortune expended and the thousands of American lives sacrificed. It is not the nature of the Middle East but a void of American leadership that has the region waving al-Qaeda’s black flags. The Vacuum turns out to be the best all-purpose rationalization of failure since Barack Obama discovered George W. Bush.
Baghdad, you are to understand, would look like Bayonne right now if only American troops hadn’t skipped town, creating The Vacuum that ceded the place to, er . . . Iraqis.
The Vacuum explains the Benghazi debacle, too. Some amnesia is required: You are not supposed to remember that Eastern Libya has for decades been a hotbed of rabidly anti-American jihadists. History goes back only as far as 2011, when Obama and the interventionists decided Qaddafi — their erstwhile ally — had to go. Presto, Benghazi’s Islamic-supremacist battalions were suddenly our guys, the heroic, freedom-fighting “rebels” — and let’s not dwell on the droves of them that had raced to Iraq for the terror war against our troops.
=============
So how come we didn’t have all that profound influence over the outcome after helping the rebels kill and mutilate Qaddafi? How come our diplomatic posts were attacked? How come our ambassador and three other Americans were murdered? Why, The Vacuum, of course. It’s not that the clock struck twelve and the rebels turned back into jihadists. It’s that by “leading from behind,” Obama left a leadership void that enabled violent jihadists — apparently beamed down from the Starship Enterprise — to grab control before Libya’s rising tide of democracy devotees had a chance to roll in.
Hate to break this to you, but there is no vacuum. The Vacuum is a spring-fever hallucination, another empty grasp at the illusion of Islamic democracy.
Syria, like Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and most of the Middle East, is predominantly Islamist. There need be no leadership vacuums to invite the Islamists in. They are there by the millions. Their supremacist ideology dominates the region.
But that’s not how the interventionists see it. On her way out the door in January, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton clung to the fiction that passes for bipartisan Beltway wisdom. She told a Senate panel that we must distinguish between jihadists and “non-jihadists.” The latter are our hope. Therefore, she maintained, we must be “effective in partnering with the non-jihadists,” even if they fly al-Qaeda’s “black flag.”
Clinton’s words were chosen carefully. The term “non-jihadist” connotes nonviolence. She was trying to distance the administration’s Muslim Brotherhood friends from the terrorists — consistent with the lunatic Beltway consensus that the Brotherhood, whose Palestinian branch is the Hamas terrorist organization, is a nonviolent organization. All right, let’s indulge that whopper — let’s, as Mrs. Clinton likes to say, suspend disbelief. Accepting the Brothers and their followers as “non-jihadists” tells us only what they are not — namely, terrorists. Mrs. Clinton avoided telling us what they are — namely, Islamists.
Islamists are Muslim supremacists who want to impose sharia. The Associated Press has a point in instructing that “Islamist” is not — or, at least, is not necessarily — a synonym for “Islamic fighters” or “militants.” The AP is all wet, though, when it further posits that Islamists are neither “extremists” nor “radicals.” If the vapid term “moderate” means anything, then “extreme” and “radical” precisely describe Islamists. They seek to impose sharia, a totalitarian, liberty-averse social system. They want Israel annihilated (even if they’d have someone else do the honors). They are implacably hostile to the United States — at least while Americans remain champions of freedom and equality. There is nothing moderate about any of this.
Even if you believe these Islamists really are “non-jihadists,” the stubborn fact remains that they wave al-Qaeda’s flag because they want the same thing al-Qaeda wants. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that they prefer to establish a sharia state through political processes rather than violent jihad (in reality, it is political processes leveraged by violent jihad). Islamists still want the opposite of what we want. If we are truly promoting liberty, we can never “partner” with them.
No one is saying there is a total dearth, in Syria and the wider region, of secular democrats, non-Muslims, and Muslim moderates averse to sharia fascism. The point is that these factions are vastly outnumbered. They are, moreover, very far from uniformly pro-American. The radical Left is well represented among them. And even those who long for Western liberty regard us with increasing contempt thanks to the administration’s infatuation with the Brotherhood. So if ousting Assad is your priority, you are stuck with Islamists and jihadists. Unless you’re in favor of a very long-term American occupation of Syria, no one else could get the job done — and, in fact, many secularists and religious minorities prefer Assad, the devil they know, to the prospect of Egypt 2.0.
It is no longer 1996 — the year Iran bombed the Khobar Towers and killed 19 American airmen. The Syria hawks are quite right to argue that Iran remains a major threat to American interests. They are wrong, however, to treat Iran as the only such threat. The Sunni supremacist crescent that the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and their allies would run from Anatolia through the Persian Gulf and across North Africa would be no less hostile to the West than the Shiite competitor Iran is trying to forge. If Assad falls and the Brothers take over, that defeat for Tehran will not be a boon for the United States.
It is not isolationism to insist that American interventions be limited to situations in which a vital American interest must be vindicated. There is no such interest in Syria.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.
-
A Third Way to Address the Iranian Threat
Support the opposition and let Iranians topple a regime they despise..
By MICHAEL LEDEEN
With an Iranian presidential election coming in June, President Obama may be presented with a second chance to get his policy right. In 2009, when massive protests followed Iran's disputed presidential vote, Mr. Obama sat by as the insurrection was brutally put down by the Tehran regime. But the rage against the regime is still intense, and if similar protests explode in June, the White House should be prepared.
The president ought to know from the example of the Arab Spring that seemingly secure despots can be toppled by popular will. The coming elections offer a chance for America to demonstrate its belated support for the Iranian opposition, and Washington would do well to encourage the Iranian people to rise up in the coming months.
Mr. Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have said that Iran is unlikely to produce a nuclear weapon in less than a year. That period gives the U.S., Israel and their allies breathing room to pursue an alternative to the two stark choices of accepting a nuclear Iran or launching a military strike to stop it. A third option is encouraging and supporting the opposition in Iran, where millions of people yearn to be freed of the ayatollahs' oppressive rule.
Like the Soviet Union in its latter days, Iran's regime is hollow and detested by most of its people. Few believed that Soviet rule would end without war, yet it imploded with little violence. At the time, intelligence assessments described the Soviet regime as stable and the economy as relatively healthy—even though unrest was actually rampant, the economy moribund.
Thanks to sanctions and government mismanagement, Iran can't even make a pretense of economic health: Official analyses from the Iranian parliament's research center show that, in a survey of 98 companies, production over the past 12 months has declined 40.3%. Employment has dropped 36.5% over that same year. Inflation is roaring: Finished products cost 87.9% more, and raw materials are up 112%. The country is riddled with strikes and protests from workers who haven't been paid for months.
The Iranian government is also widely viewed within the country as corrupt and illegitimate, having stolen the 2009 elections. The Green Movement, which briefly flourished after the vote, has seen its leaders arrested by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has also shut down scores of newspapers, magazines and websites.
Most Iran watchers believe that the opposition has been crushed, but they held the same view before June 2009, when millions of Iranians took to the streets and fought for months. The supreme leader is so concerned that his security forces prevent even small public gatherings, including the funerals of apolitical artists and musicians. He has repeatedly purged top officers of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, fearing betrayal. The arrest and torture of journalists, bloggers, union leaders and other potential sources of unrest has increased in the past year, too.
The clearest indication of the opposition's strength is the regime's treatment of the Green Movement's two main leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Both have been under house arrest for more than two years, yet neither has been put on trial. Ali Saeedi, the supreme leader's representative to the Revolutionary Guards, admitted last year to an interviewer that the men weren't being prosecuted "because they have supporters and followers."
Yet the opposition persists, routinely striking the regime's most valuable assets. Gas pipelines, ports and oil refineries have been sabotaged and Revolutionary Guards attacked. A source within the opposition tells me that seven Revolutionary Guard officers were ambushed and killed last month on a highway north of Tehran. Opposition leaders have told me that antiregime forces—including the Greens, the trade unions and the major tribes, including Kurds, Baluch and Azeris—are coordinating their actions.
Supporting the Iranian opposition and overturning the Islamic regime wouldn't just be a way for the West to avoid a nuclear confrontation. It would also cut off the lifeblood for terrorist groups around the world.
What can the U.S. do to make this happen? Take a page from the playbook used to stir internal challenges to Moscow's rule.
Leaders in both the executive and legislative branches should publicly call for the end of the regime, just as President Reagan decried the "evil empire." And the Iranian people must hear about it: At present, American broadcasting to Iran focuses heavily on American events and policies, often very critically. A more concerted effort should be made to give Iranians real news about their country. And members of the opposition should be furnished with the hardware to better communicate with each other and the outside world.
The U.S. should also mount a relentless campaign for the release of political prisoners in Iran, naming them in every available international forum. As with Soviet workers' organizations, the U.S. should encourage international trade unions to build a strike fund for their Iranian brothers and sisters.
The essential thing is for the West to be in regular contact with the opposition so its needs will be known. Sources in Iran tell me that no Western nation has communicated with leaders of the Green Movement since the days before the 2009 elections. That is shameful. But it is not too late to get started.
Mr. Ledeen, a scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, is the author of "Virgil's Golden Egg and Other Neapolitan Miracles" (Transaction, 2011).
-
Anarchy and Hegemony
April 17, 2013 | 0901 GMT
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
Chief Geopolitical Analyst
Everyone loves equality: equality of races, of ethnic groups, of sexual orientations, and so on. The problem is, however, that in geopolitics equality usually does not work very well. For centuries Europe had a rough equality between major states that is often referred to as the balance-of-power system. And that led to frequent wars. East Asia, by contrast, from the 14th to the early 19th centuries, had its relations ordered by a tribute system in which China was roughly dominant. The result, according to political scientist David C. Kang of the University of Southern California, was a generally more peaceful climate in Asia than in Europe.
The fact is that domination of one sort or another, tyrannical or not, has a better chance of preventing the outbreak of war than a system in which no one is really in charge; where no one is the top dog, so to speak. That is why Columbia University's Kenneth Waltz, arguably America's pre-eminent realist, says that the opposite of "anarchy" is not stability, but "hierarchy."
Hierarchy eviscerates equality; hierarchy implies that some are frankly "more equal" than others, and it is this formal inequality -- where someone, or some state or group, has more authority and power than others -- that prevents chaos. For it is inequality itself that often creates the conditions for peace.
Government is the most common form of hierarchy. It is a government that monopolizes the use of violence in a given geographical space, thereby preventing anarchy. To quote Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher, only where it is possible to punish the wicked can right and wrong have any practical meaning, and that requires "some coercive power."
The best sort of inequality is hegemony. Whereas primacy, as Kang explains, is about preponderance purely through military or economic power, hegemony "involves legitimation and consensus." That is to say, hegemony is some form of agreed-upon inequality, where the dominant power is expected by others to lead. When a hegemon does not lead, it is acting irresponsibly.
Of course, hegemony has a bad reputation in media discourse. But that is only because journalists are confused about the terminology, even as they sanctimoniously judge previous historical eras by the strict standards of their own. In fact, for most of human history, periods of relative peace have been the product of hegemony of one sort or another. And for many periods, the reigning hegemonic or imperial power was the most liberal, according to the standards of the age. Rome, Venice and Britain were usually more liberal than the forces arranged against them. The empire of the Austrian Hapsburgs in Central and Eastern Europe often protected the rights of minorities and prevented ethnic wars to a much greater degree than did the modern states that succeeded it. The Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the Middle East frequently did likewise. There are exceptions, of course, like Hapsburg Spain, with its combination of inquisition and conquest. But the point is that hegemony does not require tyrannical or absolutist rule.
Stability is not the natural order of things. In fact, history shows that stability such as it exists is usually a function of imperial rule, which, in turn, is a common form of hierarchy. To wit, there are few things messier in geopolitics than the demise of an empire. The collapse of the Hapsburgs, of the Ottoman Turks, of the Soviet Empire and the British Empire in Asia and Africa led to chronic wars and upheavals. Some uncomprehending commentators remind us that all empires end badly. Of course they do, but that is only after they have provided decades and centuries of relative peace.
Obviously, not all empires are morally equivalent. For example, the Austrian Hapsburgs were for their time infinitely more tolerant than the Soviet Communists. Indeed, had the Romanov Dynasty in St. Petersburg not been toppled in 1917 by Lenin's Bolsheviks, Russia would likely have evolved far more humanely than it did through the course of the 20th century. Therefore, I am saying only in a general sense is order preferable to disorder. (Though captivating subtleties abound: For example, Napoleon betrayed the ideals of the French Revolution by creating an empire, but he also granted rights to Jews and Protestants and created a system of merit over one of just birth and privilege.)
In any case, such order must come from hierarchal domination.
Indeed, from the end of World War II until very recently, the United States has performed the role of a hegemon in world politics. America may be democratic at home, but abroad it has been hegemonic. That is, by some rough measure of international consent, it is America that has the responsibility to lead. America formed NATO in Europe, even as its Navy and Air Force exercise preponderant power in the Pacific Basin. And whenever there is a humanitarian catastrophe somewhere in the developing world, it is the United States that has been expected to organize the response. Periodically, America has failed. But in general, it would be a different, much more anarchic world without American hegemony.
But that hegemony, in some aspects, seems to be on the wane. That is what makes this juncture in history unique. NATO is simply not what it used to be. U.S. forces in the Pacific are perceived to be less all-powerful than in the past, as China tests U.S. hegemony in the region. But most importantly, U.S. President Barack Obama is evolving a doctrine of surgical strikes against specific individuals combined with non-interference -- or minimal interference -- in cases of regional disorder. Libya and Syria are cases in point. Gone, at least for the moment, are the days when U.S. forces were at the ready to put a situation to rights in this country or that.
When it comes to the Greater Middle East, Americans seem to want protection on the cheap, and Obama is giving them that. We will kill a terrorist with a drone, but outside of limited numbers of special operations forces there will be no boots on the ground for Libya, Syria or any other place. As for Iran, whatever the White House now says, there is a perception that the administration would rather contain a nuclear Iran than launch a military strike to prevent Iran from going nuclear.
That, by itself, is unexceptional. Previous administrations have been quite averse to the use of force. In recent decades, it was only George W. Bush -- and only in the aftermath of 9/11 -- who relished the concept of large-scale boots on the ground in a war of choice. Nevertheless, something has shifted. In a world of strong states -- a world characterized by hierarchy, that is -- the United States often enforced the rules of the road or competed with another hegemon, the Soviet Union, to do so. Such enforcement came in the form of robust diplomacy, often backed by a threat to use military power. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were noted for American leadership and an effective, sometimes ruthless foreign policy. Since the Cold War ended and Bill Clinton became president, American leadership has often seemed to be either unserious, inexpertly and crudely applied or relatively absent. And this has transpired even as states themselves in the Greater Middle East have become feebler.
In other words, both the hegemon and the many states it influences are weaker. Hierarchy is dissolving on all levels. Equality is now on the march in geopolitics: The American hegemon is less hegemonic, and within individual countries -- Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia and so on -- internal forces are no longer subservient to the regime. (And states like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are not in the American camp to the degree that they used to be, further weakening American hegemony.) Moreover, the European Union as a political organizing principle is also weakening, even as the one-party state in China is under increasing duress.
Nevertheless, in the case of the Middle East, do not conflate chaos with democracy. Democracy itself implies an unequal, hierarchal order, albeit one determined by voters. What we have in the Middle East cannot be democracy because almost nowhere is there a new and sufficiently formalized hierarchy. No, what we have in many places in the Middle East is the weakening of central authority with no new hierarchy to adequately replace it.
Unless some force can, against considerable odds, reinstitute hierarchy -- be it an American hegemon acting globally, or an international organization acting regionally or, say, an Egyptian military acting internally -- we will have more fluidity, more equality and therefore more anarchy to look forward to. This is profoundly disturbing, because civilization abjures anarchy. In his novel Billy Budd (1924), Herman Melville deeply laments the fact that even beauty itself must be sacrificed for the maintenance of order. For without order -- without hierarchy -- there is nothing.
.
Read more: Anarchy and Hegemony | Stratfor
-
Summary
A week after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, the world continues to remain on edge as it watches for signs of another possible attack. But as the Spanish and Canadian governments made pre-emptive arrests of suspected al Qaeda militants, terrorist attacks continue to succeed elsewhere in the world in places such as Libya and Nepal. The different sources of this possible threat -- as seen, for example, in the attack against the French Embassy in Tripoli that was likely launched by al Qaeda, versus the Iranian operative that allegedly targeted the Israeli Embassy in Nepal -- reflect the simple reality that the world continues to be a dangerous place facing a wide variety of risks.
Analysis
On April 23, Spain announced the arrest of two men, one from Morocco and one from Algeria, who are suspected to have links to al Qaeda. In a statement, the Spanish Interior Ministry said the two suspects, who were arrested in an operation carried out in conjunction with French and Moroccan authorities, fit a similar profile to that of the Boston Marathon bombers. However, the two men arrested in Spain share little with the Boston bombers beyond suspected online self-radicalization. Both had been under surveillance by Spanish and French intelligence officials for nearly a year, during which time they had allegedly contacted al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb about attending a training camp in northern Mali.
The same day the arrests in Spain were made public, an explosion outside the French Embassy in Tripoli provided an example of the potential threat al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb poses against European targets. Though no one has claimed responsibility for the attack, the French intervention in Mali could be a motive for al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or another jihadist group to carry out such an attack.
One of driving factors behind France's decision to intervene in Mali was its desire to prevent northern Mali from becoming a training and staging ground for attacks against Western targets. While France has had relative success in preventing the various armed Islamist groups in the region, including al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, from being able to take and hold territory, al Qaeda's January attack on a natural gas facility in Ain Amenas, Algeria, and now the attack on the French Embassy in Tripoli are grim reminders of Western states' inability to prevent every attack against Western targets in the growing security vacuum of North and West Africa.
Meanwhile, Israeli security officials arrested a man in Nepal that they described as an Iranian agent surveiling the Israeli Embassy in Kathmandu. Across the Atlantic, the Canadian government announced its belief that al Qaeda elements in Iran were behind a plot to attack Canada's Via Rail network. Elements of the al Qaeda core have been suspected of residing in Iran following the United States' invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. However, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesperson said there is no evidence of Iranian state sponsorship for the al Qaeda plot in Canada, and Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi vehemently denied the charges.
Despite the doctrinal differences between al Qaeda and Tehran, both represent a persistent threat to various targets across the globe. As a non-state actor, al Qaeda poses a bigger threat because it is not as vulnerable to retaliation as state actors are. Increased surveillance and security coordination among various governments has helped prevent attacks before they happen, as was the case in Canada. But as the explosion in Libya demonstrates, Western governments cannot prevent every attack.
Read more: The Persistent Jihadist and Iranian Threats | Stratfor
-
This is Stratfor, so of course it is thoughtful. That said, I found it rather unsatisfying and disappointing.
8 May 2013
For American Foreign Policy, No Good Options
Robert D. Kaplan
One feels sympathy for U.S. President Barack Obama. Whatever he does in Syria, he is doomed. Had he intervened a year ago, as many pundits demanded, he might presently be in the midst of a quagmire with even more pundits angry at him, and with his approval ratings far lower than they are. If he intervenes now, the results might be even worse. Journalists often demand action for action's sake, seemingly unaware that many international problems have no solution, given the limits of U.S. power. The United States can topple regimes; it cannot even modestly remake societies unless, perhaps, it commits itself to the level of time and expense it did in post-war Germany and Japan.
Indeed, Obama has onerous calculations: If I intervene, which group do I arm? Am I assured the weapons won't fall into the wrong hands? Am I assured the group or groups I choose to help really are acceptable to the West, and even if they are, will they matter in Damascus in the long run? And, by the way, what if toppling Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad through the establishment of a no-fly zone leads to even more chaos, and therefore results in an even worse human rights situation? Do I really want to own that mess? And even were I to come out of it successfully, do I want to devote my entire second term to Syria? Because that's what getting more deeply involved militarily there might entail.
In the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, intervention did not provoke other powers in the region such as Russia, because Russia in the first decade after the Cold War was a weak and chaotic state unable to project its usual historical influence in the Balkans. But intervention in Syria could get the United States into a proxy war with a strengthened Russia and with Iran.
In a media-driven world, holding power is truly thankless. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will have his term in office defined by three things: a withdrawal from Afghanistan, a serious reduction in the defense budget and responses to any overseas emergencies that crop up. There is no good way to accomplish the first two, and the third usually presents the same sort of awful choices the administration now faces in Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry energetically engages in negotiations with Iran and Afghanistan, and with Israel and the Palestinian territories, not because he necessarily wants to, but because he must. Anything less would indicate an abdication of America's responsibility as a great power. And yet the chances of good outcomes in all of those cases are slim.
The overarching theme here is that the media assumes American policymakers have significant control over events overseas, whereas in truth they often have very little. The complex, messy realities of ground-level war and politics in Syria, Iran and Afghanistan – short of aerial and naval bombardments or tens of thousands of boots on the ground – are probably not going to be pivotally shaped by American officials.
During the Cold War, when chaos was relatively limited and much of the globe was divided up into two ideological camps, it was at least possible to formulate creative diplomatic strategies through the mechanical manipulation of this or that country or group of countries against others. But in a world of weak and fragmented democracies, considerable anarchy and anemic alliance systems, it is much harder to manipulate reality. There is no night watchman. No one is in control, even as the media is more relentless than ever. (Indeed, could one imagine in today's media climate a Henry Kissinger or a James Baker constructively and sternly pressuring Israel as they once did?)
A relentless media means policies have little time to mature before they are declared failures. It means there is less secrecy because of so many leaks. And because so much is leaked, government officials themselves have less incentive to be candid, even in private meetings, on account of the assumption that no transcript stays secret forever, whatever the security classification given it. So the quality of discussion inside government deteriorates, even as the public policy climate outside also worsens. In sum, the semi-anarchic, post-Cold War world narrows the space for foreign policy success at the same time that the quality of foreign policy itself wanes.
Adding to the dilemma are the really hard problems – the ones that even the most creative diplomacy cannot solve. Every president of either party going back decades has failed on the issue of North Korea. Meanwhile, each administration gets blamed anew for the failure.
In such a climate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ranks as the model diplomat. She often practiced activity for activity's sake, circling the globe nonstop before adoring cameramen while having no real diplomatic accomplishment to her credit, despite a refreshing tendency to speak boldly on occasion. The media approved of her because she was, well, a celebrity. She did promote one useful idea, though: the "pivot" away from the Middle East and toward the Asia-Pacific region. For that and maybe for that alone will she be remembered. The pivot was less a brilliant idea than a natural, organic evolution of policy intent, given the winding down of two Middle Eastern wars and the rising strategic and economic importance of the Pacific. But as noncontroversial as it should have been, the pivot was attacked in the media as being both too weak-kneed (How come we don't have more warships dedicated to Asia?) and too belligerent (against China).
So what is an American leader to do in such circumstances? How can one be a statesman in the face of reduced American influence in a semi-anarchic world and in the face of an increasingly demanding media?
The answer may be exactly what Obama is doing now in Syria: modestly assisting some of the rebel groups, but essentially avoiding the level of involvement that would make him henceforth responsible for events on the ground. In other words, let Iran get sucked deeper and deeper into the Syrian maelstrom, not the United States. The maintenance cost for Iran in a crumbling Syria will grow, even as Iran enjoys less influence there than it did during the era of a strong al Assad regime. At the same time, intensify the economic and diplomatic aid to Jordan, which, with its relatively small population and small economy, may well be possible to save. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and so forth are all destined to be weak, quasi-chaotic states that the United States cannot put to rights without the kind of gargantuan effort that would undermine its interests elsewhere in the world and at home.
It may be -- barring some military attack on the United States or on a treaty ally that plainly justifies a commensurate military response -- that successful administrations will go unloved during their tenures, even while they are granted grudging respect in the years and decades that follow. This has often been the case in American history. But owing to the nature of the media and the nature of the world overseas, it might become increasingly the norm. Remember that President George W. Bush enjoyed high public approval ratings from the very beginning of his presidency, through 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But it was the very military actions that he took, popular in the media at the time, that led in his second term to becoming a tragically failed president.
The lesson is this: When it comes to foreign affairs, there is usually no way to get good reviews. But once an American leader internalizes this, he might then begin to craft a strategy that is honorable and will ultimately secure his reputation.
-
Nostalgia for NATO
George Friedman | 8 May 2013
Several years ago, I wrote a series of articles on a journey in Europe. It was intended both to be personal and to go beyond recent events or the abstract considerations of geopolitics. This week I begin another journey that will take me from Portugal to Singapore, and I thought that I would try my hand again at reflecting on the significance of my travels.
As I prepare for my journey, I am drawn to a central question regarding the U.S.-European relationship, or what remains of it. Having been in Europe at a time when that relationship meant everything to both sides, and to the world, this trip forces me to think about NATO. I have been asked to make several speeches about U.S.-European relations during my upcoming trip. It is hard to know where to start. The past was built around NATO, so thinking about NATO's past might help me put things in perspective.
On a personal level, my relationship with Europe always passes through the prism of NATO. Born in Hungary, I recall my parents sitting in the kitchen in 1956, when the Soviets came in to crush the revolution. On the same night as my sister's wedding in New York, we listened on the radio to a report on Soviet tanks attacking a street just a block from where we lived in Budapest. I was 7 at the time. The talk turned to the Americans and NATO and what they would do. NATO was the redeemer who disappoints not because he cannot act but because he will not. My family's underlying faith in the power of American alliances was forged in World War II and couldn't be shaken. NATO was the sword of Gideon, albeit lacking in focus and clarity at times.
I had a more personal relationship with NATO. In the 1970s, I played an embarrassingly unimportant role in developing early computerized war games. The games were meant to evaluate strategies on NATO's central front: Germany. At that time, the line dividing Germany was the fault line of the planet. If the world were to end in a nuclear holocaust, it would end there. The place that people thought it would all start was called the Fulda Gap, a not-too-hilly area in the south, where a rapid attack could take Frankfurt and also strike at the heart of U.S. forces. The Germans speak of a watch on the Rhine. For my generation, or at least those millions who served in the armies of NATO, it was Fulda.
In the course of designing war games, I spent some time at SHAPE Technical Center in The Hague. SHAPE stands for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. The name itself is a reminder of the origins of NATO, deep in World War II and the alliance that defeated the Germans. It was commanded by SACEUR -- Supreme Allied Commander Europe -- who was always an American. Over time, the name became increasingly anachronistic, as SACEUR stopped resembling U.S. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and started resembling the chair of a fractious church board, where people showed up for the snacks more than to make decisions.
To me, in the 1970s, SHAPE and SACEUR were acronyms that recalled D-Day and were built around the word "supreme." I was young and in awe, with a sense of history and pride in participating in it. Why I should be proud to participate in what might lead to total catastrophe for humanity seems odd in retrospect, but there is little in any of our lives that does not seem odd in retrospect. However, I was proud that I got to go into a building designated as SHAPE's technical center. I felt at the center of history. History, of course, is deceptive.
Games and Reality
It was never clear to me what those above us (whom we called "EBR," echelons beyond reality) did with the games that were built and played, or with the results, but I believe I learned a great deal about the war that was going to be fought. What cut short my career as a war gamer was my growing realization of the triviality of what we were doing and that the intelligence that we were building the games from was inherently deficient. Moreover, the commanders weren't all that interested in what we were doing. And there was the fact that I was genuinely enjoying and actually looking forward to a war that would test our theories. When the pieces on a map represent human beings and their loss means nothing to you, it is time to leave.
The war gaming was not the problem; properly done, as I hope it is by now, it can aid in victory and save lives. But then, knowing the men (women came later) who would stand and fight at Fulda if the time came, I felt I had been given a frivolous job. There was one thing I got from that job, however: I came into contact with troops from all the armies that might be called to fight. I had a profound sense that they were not just my colleagues but also my comrades. Some didn't like Americans, and others didn't like me, but this is no different than any organization. We were peering into the future, with our fates bound together.
The U.S. and Soviet Views of NATO
The United States believed that the Soviet conquest of Western Europe would integrate Soviet resources and European technology. This same fear led the Americans and Europeans to fight Germany in two wars from two very different perspectives. For my European colleagues, it meant the devastation of their countries, even if NATO won the war. The Dutch, for example, had lived under occupation and even preferred devastation over capitulation. For me, it was an abstract exercise, both in the strange mathematics of the war games and in the more distant consequences of defeat for my country. At the same time, there was a shared sense of urgency that formed the foundation of our relationship: War might come at any moment, and we must consider every possible move by the Soviets, and we must propose solutions.
The Americans were always haunted by Pearl Harbor. This is why 9/11 was such a blow. The historical recollection of the attack out of nowhere was always close. Doctrine said that we would have 30 days' warning of a Soviet attack. I had no idea where this doctrine came from, and I suspected that it came from the fact that we needed 30 days' warning to get ready. The Europeans did not fear the unexpected attack; rather, they dreaded the expected attack for which preparations had not been made. World War II haunted them differently. They were riveted on the fact that they knew what was coming and failed to prepare. The Americans and Europeans were united by paranoia, but their paranoia differed. For the Americans, staying out of alliances and not acting soon enough was what caused the war. The United States was committed to never repeating that mistake. NATO was one of many alliances. The Americans love alliances.
It is interesting to recognize now what the Soviets were afraid of. When World War II came to them, they had no allies. Their one ally, Germany, was the one that betrayed them. The Soviets were both taken by surprise and fought alone until the Americans and British chose to help them. The Soviets had played complex diplomacy with traditional alliances, and when it failed the Soviet Union committed itself to never again depending on others. It had the Warsaw Pact because the West had NATO, but it did not depend on its allies. The Americans threw themselves into alliances as if an alliance solved all problems. The Soviets, however, acted as if allies were the most dangerous things of all.
In the end, when we look back on it, war was much less likely than we felt. The West was not going to invade the East. On the defensive, the Soviets would have annihilated our much smaller force. And, truth be told, no one had the slightest interest in conquering Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union.
As for the Soviets, on paper they were an overwhelming force, but paper is a bad place to think about war. The Soviets did not want a nuclear exchange, and in their view the United States was itching to have one. They knew if they moved westward there would be an exchange. Plus, it turned out, the Soviets would have a great deal of trouble keeping their tanks fueled as they moved to the west. They had a plan for laying plastic pipes from their fuel depots and rolling them out as the tanks advanced. The problem was that the pipes never worked very well, and their fuel depots were slated for annihilation by airstrikes, possibly the day before the war began officially.
All of this is past and I recollect it with a combination of pride -- not for what I did, which was little, but for simply being there -- and chagrin about how little we understood the enemy. Both sides were ready for war. Both sides were expecting actions that the other side had no intentions of undertaking. But all of the plans that we created were, in the end, irrelevant. The only way to win the game -- as the movie War Games said -- was not to play it. Not surprisingly, the leaders -- Eisenhower and Khrushchev, Nixon and Brezhnev, Reagan and Gorbachev -- knew it better than the experts. It has always struck me as the world's great fortune that the two great superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union, who managed the Cold War with meticulous care in retrospect. Imagine the European diplomats of 1914 or 1938 armed with nuclear weapons. It is easy to believe they would not have been as cautious.
NATO's Legacy and Disarray
What NATO provided that was priceless, and the unexpected byproduct of all of this, was a comradeship and unity of purpose on both sides of the North Atlantic. Even the French, who withdrew from NATO's military command under Charles de Gaulle, remained unofficially part of it. There was little question but that if "the balloon went up" -- the enemy took action -- the French would be there, arguing over who would command whom but fighting as hard as the Underground did before D-Day. But through NATO, I got to know Germans at a time when knowing Germans was not easy for me because of what my family went through during the war. I was forced to distinguish Germany from Franz who could play the ukulele.
I had a son in 1976. When I went to Europe, I met an Italian and we became friends. We would talk about what we would tell our families to do if the balloon went up. The conversation -- strange and perhaps pathological as it was -- bound us together. It was not war, it was not peace, but it was a place in the mind where the preparation for war and the anxiety that it generated created strange forms, such as plans for the movement of children in order to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
NATO, far more than a model United Nations or a Fulbright, allowed ordinary Americans and Europeans to know each other and understand that with linked fates, they were comrades in arms. After World War II, that was a profound lesson. Millions of draftees experienced that and took the lesson home.
The end of the Cold War is no great loss, although my youth went with it. Losing the unity of purpose that the Cold War gave Western Europe and the United States is of enormous consequence. For a while, after 1991, the two sides went on as if the alliance could exist even without an enemy. However, NATO started to fragment when it lost its enemy. The passion for a mission gave NATO meaning, and the passion was drained. The alliance continued to fragment when the United States decided to invade Iraq for the second time. The vast majority of countries in NATO supported the invasion -- a forgotten fact -- but France and Germany did not. This damaged the United States' relations with Europe, particularly with the French, who have a way of getting under the skins of Americans while appearing oblivious to it. But the greater damage was within Europe -- the division between those who wanted to maintain close relations with the United States, even if they thought the Iraq War was a bad idea, and those who wanted Europe to have its own voice, distinct from the Americans'.
The 2008 global financial contagion did not divide the Americans and Europeans nearly as much as it divided Europe. The relationship between European countries -- less among leaders than among publics -- has become poisonous. Something terrible has happened to Europe, and each country is holding someone else responsible. As many countries are blaming Germany as Germany is blaming for the crisis.
There can be no trans-Atlantic alliance when one side is in profound disagreement with itself over many things and the other side has no desire to be drawn into the dispute. Nor can there be a military alliance where there is no understanding of the mission, the enemy or obligations. NATO was successful during the Cold War because the enemy was clear, there was consensus over what to do in each particular circumstance and participation was a given. An alliance that does not know its mission, has no meaningful plans for what problems it faces and stages come-as-you-are parties in Libya or Mali, where invitations are sent out and no one RSVPs, cannot be considered an alliance. The committees meet and staffs of defense ministers prepare for conferences -- all of the niceties of an alliance remain. SACEUR is still an American, the Science and Technology Committee produces papers, but in the end, the commonality of purpose is gone.
My European colleagues and I were young, serious and dedicated. These are all dangerous things because we lacked historical perspective (but then, so did many of our elders). What we had together, however, was invaluable: a moment in history, possibly the last, when the West stood shoulder to shoulder in defense of liberal democracy and against tyranny. Still, I look back on the Soviets and then look at al Qaeda and I miss the Soviets. I understood them in a way I can never understand al Qaeda.
So I will be asked to speak about U.S-European relations. I will have to tell the Europeans two things. The first is that there is no American relationship with Europe because Europe is no longer an idea but a continent made up of states with diverse interests. There are U.S.-French relations and U.S.-Russian relations and so on. The second thing I will tell them is that there can be no confederation without a common foreign and defense policy. You can have different tax rates, but if when one goes to war they don't all go to war, they are just nations cooperating as they see fit.
I remember the camaraderie of young enlisted Americans and Europeans, and the solidarity of planning teams. This was the glue that held Europe together. It was not just the commanders and politicians, but the men who would have to cover each other's movement that created the foundations of NATO's solidarity. My recollections are undoubtedly colored with sentimentality, but I do not think I've done the idea an injustice. NATO bound Europe together because it made the nations into comrades. They were able to face Armageddon together. Europe without NATO's solidarity has difficulty figuring out a tax policy. In the end, Europe lost more when NATO fell into disuse than it imagined.
I don't know that NATO can exist without a Cold War. Probably not. What is gone is gone. But I know my nostalgia for Europe is not just for my youth; it is for a time when Western civilization was united. I doubt we will see that again.
George Friedman is the founder and CEO of Stratfor, the global intelligence website. This article has been republished with permission of Stratfor.
-
3 5 76 11
The Classical Realist: Robert D. Kaplan Says History Will Validate Henry Kissinger
The Stratfor Blog
April 25, 2013 | 1105 Print - Text Size +
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Switzerland
JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images
Statesman. Nobel Prize laureate. Alleged War Criminal. Henry Kissinger is a man who arouses fierce condemnation in his critics and fervent defense in his supporters. How he is remembered depends largely on whom you ask. Fortunately, you won't have to ask Stratfor Chief Geopolitical Analyst Robert D. Kaplan -- he recently published an article entitled In Defense of Henry Kissinger in The Atlantic, where he has been a foreign correspondent for almost three decades.
Kaplan's career has brought him face to face with political personages and power brokers the world over. So it comes as little surprise that Kaplan counts Kissinger, who turns 90 this month, as a close friend. But Kaplan's treatise in The Atlantic is informed less by his affection for the former statesman than it is on his accomplishments. Measuredly he writes, "To be uncomfortable with Kissinger is … only natural. But to condemn him outright verges on sanctimony, if not delusion. Kissinger has, in fact, been quite moral -- provided, of course, that you accept the Cold War assumptions of the age in which he operated."
That line goes to the heart of geopolitics. Kissinger's choices, according to Kaplan, were a byproduct of necessity -- namely, the Cold War. Like all decision-makers, Kissinger was constrained by realities beyond his control, particularly in Vietnam, where enviable policy options were hard to come by. Kaplan estimates that Kissinger operated under the auspices of American self-interest, and self-interest, after all, is a fundamental tenet of geopolitics. History thus will probably remember him more kindly later than it does now, for in geopolitics, results often takes years, even decades, to validate the decisions that precede them.
To support his claims, Kaplan compares Kissinger to two former British foreign secretaries whose decisions, while reviled during their respective postings, were later validated by history. In the early 1800s, Viscount Castlereagh helped allow the Bourbon dynasty in France to be restored -- much to the ire of his fellow Britons -- but was also instrumental in defeating Napoleon and in negotiating the treaty that prevented Napoleonic-level violence in Europe for decades. Some years later, Lord Palmerston was harshly criticized at times for a foreign policy agenda that supported foreign rebellions, even though they served British interests. But it was his agenda that guided the United Kingdom as it evolved from a quasi-empire to full-on, global empire. As Kaplan writes, "Decades passed before Palmerston's accomplishments as arguably Britain's greatest diplomat became fully apparent."
Through it all Kaplan is careful to keep Kissinger, and his legacy, in perspective. He doesn't claim his decisions to be morally superior; rather, he praises Kissinger for having the fortitude to make morally compromising decisions that affected millions of lives. For Kissinger is a classical realist, which, according to Kaplan, is "emotionally unsatisfying but analytically timeless."
Read more: The Classical Realist: Robert D. Kaplan Says History Will Validate Henry Kissinger | Stratfor
-
The Future of our Fight against Terrorism
Remarks of President Barack Obama – As Prepared for Delivery
National Defense University
May 23, 2013
As Prepared for Delivery –
It’s an honor to return to the National Defense University. Here, at Fort McNair, Americans have served in uniform since 1791– standing guard in the early days of the Republic, and contemplating the future of warfare here in the 21st century.
For over two centuries, the United States has been bound together by founding documents that defined who we are as Americans, and served as our compass through every type of change. Matters of war and peace are no different. Americans are deeply ambivalent about war, but having fought for our independence, we know that a price must be paid for freedom. From the Civil War, to our struggle against fascism, and through the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War, battlefields have changed, and technology has evolved. But our commitment to Constitutional principles has weathered every war, and every war has come to an end.
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a new dawn of democracy took hold abroad, and a decade of peace and prosperity arrived at home. For a moment, it seemed the 21st century would be a tranquil time. Then, on September 11th 2001, we were shaken out of complacency. Thousands were taken from us, as clouds of fire, metal and ash descended upon a sun-filled morning. This was a different kind of war. No armies came to our shores, and our military was not the principal target. Instead, a group of terrorists came to kill as many civilians as they could.
And so our nation went to war. We have now been at war for well over a decade. I won’t review the full history. What’s clear is that we quickly drove al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, but then shifted our focus and began a new war in Iraq. This carried grave consequences for our fight against al Qaeda, our standing in the world, and – to this day – our interests in a vital region.
Meanwhile, we strengthened our defenses – hardening targets, tightening transportation security, and giving law enforcement new tools to prevent terror. Most of these changes were sound. Some caused inconvenience. But some, like expanded surveillance, raised difficult questions about the balance we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy. And in some cases, I believe we compromised our basic values – by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.
After I took office, we stepped up the war against al Qaeda, but also sought to change its course. We relentlessly targeted al Qaeda’s leadership. We ended the war in Iraq, and brought nearly 150,000 troops home. We pursued a new strategy in Afghanistan, and increased our training of Afghan forces. We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.
Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants. There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure. Fewer of our troops are in harm’s way, and over the next 19 months they will continue to come home. Our alliances are strong, and so is our standing in the world. In sum, we are safer because of our efforts.
Now make no mistake: our nation is still threatened by terrorists. From Benghazi to Boston, we have been tragically reminded of that truth. We must recognize, however, that the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11. With a decade of experience to draw from, now is the time to ask ourselves hard questions – about the nature of today’s threats, and how we should confront them.
These questions matter to every American. For over the last decade, our nation has spent well over a trillion dollars on war, exploding our deficits and constraining our ability to nation build here at home. Our service-members and their families have sacrificed far more on our behalf. Nearly 7,000 Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice. Many more have left a part of themselves on the battlefield, or brought the shadows of battle back home. From our use of drones to the detention of terrorist suspects, the decisions we are making will define the type of nation – and world – that we leave to our children.
So America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society. What we can do – what we must do – is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend. To define that strategy, we must make decisions based not on fear, but hard-earned wisdom. And that begins with understanding the threat we face.
Today, the core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on a path to defeat. Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us. They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston. They have not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11. Instead, what we’ve seen is the emergence of various al Qaeda affiliates. From Yemen to Iraq, from Somalia to North Africa, the threat today is more diffuse, with Al Qaeda’s affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula – AQAP –the most active in plotting against our homeland. While none of AQAP’s efforts approach the scale of 9/11 they have continued to plot acts of terror, like the attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009.
Unrest in the Arab World has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria. Here, too, there are differences from 9/11. In some cases, we confront state-sponsored networks like Hizbollah that engage in acts of terror to achieve political goals. Others are simply collections of local militias or extremists interested in seizing territory. While we are vigilant for signs that these groups may pose a transnational threat, most are focused on operating in the countries and regions where they are based. That means we will face more localized threats like those we saw in Benghazi, or at the BP oil facility in Algeria, in which local operatives – in loose affiliation with regional networks – launch periodic attacks against Western diplomats, companies, and other soft targets, or resort to kidnapping and other criminal enterprises to fund their operations.
Finally, we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States. Whether it’s a shooter at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin; a plane flying into a building in Texas; or the extremists who killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City – America has confronted many forms of violent extremism in our time. Deranged or alienated individuals – often U.S. citizens or legal residents – can do enormous damage, particularly when inspired by larger notions of violent jihad. That pull towards extremism appears to have led to the shooting at Fort Hood, and the bombing of the Boston Marathon.
Lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism. We must take these threats seriously, and do all that we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11. In the 1980s, we lost Americans to terrorism at our Embassy in Beirut; at our Marine Barracks in Lebanon; on a cruise ship at sea; at a disco in Berlin; and on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. In the 1990s, we lost Americans to terrorism at the World Trade Center; at our military facilities in Saudi Arabia; and at our Embassy in Kenya. These attacks were all deadly, and we learned that left unchecked, these threats can grow. But if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.
Moreover, we must recognize that these threats don’t arise in a vacuum. Most, though not all, of the terrorism we face is fueled by a common ideology – a belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West, and that violence against Western targets, including civilians, is justified in pursuit of a larger cause. Of course, this ideology is based on a lie, for the United States is not at war with Islam; and this ideology is rejected by the vast majority of Muslims, who are the most frequent victims of terrorist acts.
Nevertheless, this ideology persists, and in an age in which ideas and images can travel the globe in an instant, our response to terrorism cannot depend on military or law enforcement alone. We need all elements of national power to win a battle of wills and ideas. So let me discuss the components of such a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy.
First, we must finish the work of defeating al Qaeda and its associated forces.
In Afghanistan, we will complete our transition to Afghan responsibility for security. Our troops will come home. Our combat mission will come to an end. And we will work with the Afghan government to train security forces, and sustain a counter-terrorism force which ensures that al Qaeda can never again establish a safe-haven to launch attacks against us or our allies.
Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America. In many cases, this will involve partnerships with other countries. Thousands of Pakistani soldiers have lost their lives fighting extremists. In Yemen, we are supporting security forces that have reclaimed territory from AQAP. In Somalia, we helped a coalition of African nations push al Shabaab out of its strongholds. In Mali, we are providing military aid to a French-led intervention to push back al Qaeda in the Maghreb, and help the people of Mali reclaim their future.
Much of our best counter-terrorism cooperation results in the gathering and sharing of intelligence; the arrest and prosecution of terrorists. That’s how a Somali terrorist apprehended off the coast of Yemen is now in prison in New York. That’s how we worked with European allies to disrupt plots from Denmark to Germany to the United Kingdom. That’s how intelligence collected with Saudi Arabia helped us stop a cargo plane from being blown up over the Atlantic.
But despite our strong preference for the detention and prosecution of terrorists, sometimes this approach is foreclosed. Al Qaeda and its affiliates try to gain a foothold in some of the most distant and unforgiving places on Earth. They take refuge in remote tribal regions. They hide in caves and walled compounds. They train in empty deserts and rugged mountains.
In some of these places – such as parts of Somalia and Yemen – the state has only the most tenuous reach into the territory. In other cases, the state lacks the capacity or will to take action. It is also not possible for America to simply deploy a team of Special Forces to capture every terrorist. And even when such an approach may be possible, there are places where it would pose profound risks to our troops and local civilians– where a terrorist compound cannot be breached without triggering a firefight with surrounding tribal communities that pose no threat to us, or when putting U.S. boots on the ground may trigger a major international crisis.
To put it another way, our operation in Pakistan against Osama bin Laden cannot be the norm. The risks in that case were immense; the likelihood of capture, although our preference, was remote given the certainty of resistance; the fact that we did not find ourselves confronted with civilian casualties, or embroiled in an extended firefight, was a testament to the meticulous planning and professionalism of our Special Forces – but also depended on some luck. And even then, the cost to our relationship with Pakistan – and the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their territory – was so severe that we are just now beginning to rebuild this important partnership.
It is in this context that the United States has taken lethal, targeted action against al Qaeda and its associated forces, including with remotely piloted aircraft commonly referred to as drones. As was true in previous armed conflicts, this new technology raises profound questions – about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under U.S. and international law; about accountability and morality.
Let me address these questions. To begin with, our actions are effective. Don’t take my word for it. In the intelligence gathered at bin Laden’s compound, we found that he wrote, “we could lose the reserves to the enemy’s air strikes. We cannot fight air strikes with explosives.” Other communications from al Qaeda operatives confirm this as well. Dozens of highly skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted that would have targeted international aviation, U.S. transit systems, European cities and our troops in Afghanistan. Simply put, these strikes have saved lives.
Moreover, America’s actions are legal. We were attacked on 9/11. Within a week, Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of force. Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces. We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first. So this is a just war – a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.
And yet as our fight enters a new phase, America’s legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion. To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power – or risk abusing it. That’s why, over the last four years, my Administration has worked vigorously to establish a framework that governs our use of force against terrorists – insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday.
In the Afghan war theater, we must support our troops until the transition is complete at the end of 2014. That means we will continue to take strikes against high value al Qaeda targets, but also against forces that are massing to support attacks on coalition forces. However, by the end of 2014, we will no longer have the same need for force protection, and the progress we have made against core al Qaeda will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.
Beyond the Afghan theater, we only target al Qaeda and its associated forces. Even then, the use of drones is heavily constrained. America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists – our preference is always to detain, interrogate, and prosecute them. America cannot take strikes wherever we choose – our actions are bound by consultations with partners, and respect for state sovereignty. America does not take strikes to punish individuals – we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.
This last point is critical, because much of the criticism about drone strikes – at home and abroad – understandably centers on reports of civilian casualties. There is a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties, and non-governmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars. For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives. To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places –like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold. Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes.
Where foreign governments cannot or will not effectively stop terrorism in their territory, the primary alternative to targeted, lethal action is the use of conventional military options. As I’ve said, even small Special Operations carry enormous risks. Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage. And invasions of these territories lead us to be viewed as occupying armies; unleash a torrent of unintended consequences; are difficult to contain; and ultimately empower those who thrive on violent conflict. So it is false to assert that putting boots on the ground is less likely to result in civilian deaths, or to create enemies in the Muslim world. The result would be more U.S. deaths, more Blackhawks down, more confrontations with local populations, and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars.
So yes, the conflict with al Qaeda, like all armed conflict, invites tragedy. But by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us, and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life. Indeed, our efforts must also be measured against the history of putting American troops in distant lands among hostile populations. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of civilians died in a war where the boundaries of battle were blurred. In Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the courage and discipline of our troops, thousands of civilians have been killed. So neither conventional military action, nor waiting for attacks to occur, offers moral safe-harbor. Neither does a sole reliance on law enforcement in territories that have no functioning police or security services – and indeed, have no functioning law.
This is not to say that the risks are not real. Any U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies, and impacts public opinion overseas. Our laws constrain the power of the President, even during wartime, and I have taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. The very precision of drones strikes, and the necessary secrecy involved in such actions can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites. It can also lead a President and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.
For this reason, I’ve insisted on strong oversight of all lethal action. After I took office, my Administration began briefing all strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan to the appropriate committees of Congress. Let me repeat that – not only did Congress authorize the use of force, it is briefed on every strike that America takes. That includes the one instance when we targeted an American citizen: Anwar Awlaki, the chief of external operations for AQAP.
This week, I authorized the declassification of this action, and the deaths of three other Americans in drone strikes, to facilitate transparency and debate on this issue, and to dismiss some of the more outlandish claims. For the record, I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen – with a drone, or a shotgun – without due process. Nor should any President deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.
But when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team
That’s who Anwar Awlaki was – he was continuously trying to kill people. He helped oversee the 2010 plot to detonate explosive devices on two U.S. bound cargo planes. He was involved in planning to blow up an airliner in 2009. When Farouk Abdulmutallab – the Christmas Day bomber – went to Yemen in 2009, Awlaki hosted him, approved his suicide operation, and helped him tape a martyrdom video to be shown after the attack. His last instructions were to blow up the airplane when it was over American soil. I would have detained and prosecuted Awlaki if we captured him before he carried out a plot. But we couldn’t. And as President, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took out Awlaki.
Of course, the targeting of any Americans raises constitutional issues that are not present in other strikes – which is why my Administration submitted information about Awlaki to the Department of Justice months before Awlaki was killed, and briefed the Congress before this strike as well. But the high threshold that we have set for taking lethal action applies to all potential terrorist targets, regardless of whether or not they are American citizens. This threshold respects the inherent dignity of every human life. Alongside the decision to put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way, the decision to use force against individuals or groups – even against a sworn enemy of the United States – is the hardest thing I do as President. But these decisions must be made, given my responsibility to protect the American people.
Going forward, I have asked my Administration to review proposals to extend oversight of lethal actions outside of warzones that go beyond our reporting to Congress. Each option has virtues in theory, but poses difficulties in practice. For example, the establishment of a special court to evaluate and authorize lethal action has the benefit of bringing a third branch of government into the process, but raises serious constitutional issues about presidential and judicial authority. Another idea that’s been suggested – the establishment of an independent oversight board in the executive branch – avoids those problems, but may introduce a layer of bureaucracy into national-security decision-making, without inspiring additional public confidence in the process. Despite these challenges, I look forward to actively engaging Congress to explore these – and other – options for increased oversight.
I believe, however, that the use of force must be seen as part of a larger discussion about a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy. Because for all the focus on the use of force, force alone cannot make us safe. We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the well-spring of extremism, a perpetual war – through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments – will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.
So the next element of our strategy involves addressing the underlying grievances and conflicts that feed extremism, from North Africa to South Asia. As we’ve learned this past decade, this is a vast and complex undertaking. We must be humble in our expectation that we can quickly resolve deep rooted problems like poverty and sectarian hatred. Moreover, no two countries are alike, and some will undergo chaotic change before things get better. But our security and values demand that we make the effort.
This means patiently supporting transitions to democracy in places like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya – because the peaceful realization of individual aspirations will serve as a rebuke to violent extremists. We must strengthen the opposition in Syria, while isolating extremist elements – because the end of a tyrant must not give way to the tyranny of terrorism. We are working to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians – because it is right, and because such a peace could help reshape attitudes in the region. And we must help countries modernize economies, upgrade education, and encourage entrepreneurship – because American leadership has always been elevated by our ability to connect with peoples’ hopes, and not simply their fears.
Success on these fronts requires sustained engagement, but it will also require resources. I know that foreign aid is one of the least popular expenditures – even though it amounts to less than one percent of the federal budget. But foreign assistance cannot be viewed as charity. It is fundamental to our national security, and any sensible long-term strategy to battle extremism. Moreover, foreign assistance is a tiny fraction of what we spend fighting wars that our assistance might ultimately prevent. For what we spent in a month in Iraq at the height of the war, we could be training security forces in Libya, maintaining peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors, feeding the hungry in Yemen, building schools in Pakistan, and creating reservoirs of goodwill that marginalize extremists.
America cannot carry out this work if we do not have diplomats serving in dangerous places. Over the past decade, we have strengthened security at our Embassies, and I am implementing every recommendation of the Accountability Review Board which found unacceptable failures in Benghazi. I have called on Congress to fully fund these efforts to bolster security, harden facilities, improve intelligence, and facilitate a quicker response time from our military if a crisis emerges.
But even after we take these steps, some irreducible risks to our diplomats will remain. This is the price of being the world’s most powerful nation, particularly as a wave of change washes over the Arab World. And in balancing the trade-offs between security and active diplomacy, I firmly believe that any retreat from challenging regions will only increase the dangers we face in the long run.
Targeted action against terrorists. Effective partnerships. Diplomatic engagement and assistance. Through such a comprehensive strategy we can significantly reduce the chances of large scale attacks on the homeland and mitigate threats to Americans overseas. As we guard against dangers from abroad, however, we cannot neglect the daunting challenge of terrorism from within our borders.
As I said earlier, this threat is not new. But technology and the Internet increase its frequency and lethality. Today, a person can consume hateful propaganda, commit themselves to a violent agenda, and learn how to kill without leaving their home. To address this threat, two years ago my Administration did a comprehensive review, and engaged with law enforcement. The best way to prevent violent extremism is to work with the Muslim American community – which has consistently rejected terrorism – to identify signs of radicalization, and partner with law enforcement when an individual is drifting towards violence. And these partnerships can only work when we recognize that Muslims are a fundamental part of the American family. Indeed, the success of American Muslims, and our determination to guard against any encroachments on their civil liberties, is the ultimate rebuke to those who say we are at war with Islam.
Indeed, thwarting homegrown plots presents particular challenges in part because of our proud commitment to civil liberties for all who call America home. That’s why, in the years to come, we will have to keep working hard to strike the appropriate balance between our need for security and preserving those freedoms that make us who we are. That means reviewing the authorities of law enforcement, so we can intercept new types of communication, and build in privacy protections to prevent abuse. That means that – even after Boston – we do not deport someone or throw someone in prison in the absence of evidence. That means putting careful constraints on the tools the government uses to protect sensitive information, such as the State Secrets doctrine. And that means finally having a strong Privacy and Civil Liberties Board to review those issues where our counter-terrorism efforts and our values may come into tension.
The Justice Department’s investigation of national security leaks offers a recent example of the challenges involved in striking the right balance between our security and our open society. As Commander-in Chief, I believe we must keep information secret that protects our operations and our people in the field. To do so, we must enforce consequences for those who break the law and breach their commitment to protect classified information. But a free press is also essential for our democracy. I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.
Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs. Our focus must be on those who break the law. That is why I have called on Congress to pass a media shield law to guard against government over-reach. I have raised these issues with the Attorney General, who shares my concern. So he has agreed to review existing Department of Justice guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters, and will convene a group of media organizations to hear their concerns as part of that review. And I have directed the Attorney General to report back to me by July 12th.
All these issues remind us that the choices we make about war can impact – in sometimes unintended ways – the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends. And that is why I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.
The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.
And that brings me to my final topic: the detention of terrorist suspects.
To repeat, as a matter of policy, the preference of the United States is to capture terrorist suspects. When we do detain a suspect, we interrogate them. And if the suspect can be prosecuted, we decide whether to try him in a civilian court or a Military Commission. Duringthe past decade, the vast majority of those detained by our military were captured on the battlefield. In Iraq, we turned over thousands of prisoners as we ended the war. In Afghanistan, we have transitioned detention facilities to the Afghans, as part of the process of restoring Afghan sovereignty. So we bring law of war detention to an end, and we are committed to prosecuting terrorists whenever we can.
The glaring exception to this time-tested approach is the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The original premise for opening GTMO – that detainees would not be able to challenge their detention – was found unconstitutional five years ago. In the meantime, GTMO has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law. Our allies won’t cooperate with us if they think a terrorist will end up at GTMO. During a time of budget cuts, we spend $150 million each year to imprison 166 people –almost $1 million per prisoner. And the Department of Defense estimates that we must spend another $200 million to keep GTMO open at a time when we are cutting investments in education and research here at home.
As President, I have tried to close GTMO. I transferred 67 detainees to other countries before Congress imposed restrictions to effectively prevent us from either transferring detainees to other countries, or imprisoning them in the United States. These restrictions make no sense. After all, under President Bush, some 530 detainees were transferred from GTMO with Congress’s support. When I ran for President the first time, John McCain supported closing GTMO. No person has ever escaped from one of our super-max or military prisons in the United States. Our courts have convicted hundreds of people for terrorism-related offenses, including some who are more dangerous than most GTMO detainees. Given my Administration’s relentless pursuit of al Qaeda’s leadership, there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened.
Today, I once again call on Congress to lift the restrictions on detainee transfers from GTMO. I have asked the Department of Defense to designate a site in the United States where we can hold military commissions. I am appointing a new, senior envoy at the State Department and Defense Department whose sole responsibility will be to achieve the transfer of detainees to third countries. I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis. To the greatest extent possible, we will transfer detainees who have been cleared to go to other countries. Where appropriate, we will bring terrorists to justice in our courts and military justice system. And we will insist that judicial review be available for every detainee.
Even after we take these steps, one issue will remain: how to deal with those GTMO detainees who we know have participated in dangerous plots or attacks, but who cannot be prosecuted – for example because the evidence against them has been compromised or is inadmissible in a court of law. But once we commit to a process of closing GTMO, I am confident that this legacy problem can be resolved, consistent with our commitment to the rule of law.
I know the politics are hard. But history will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism, and those of us who fail to end it. Imagine a future – ten years from now, or twenty years from now – when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not a part of our country. Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?
Our sense of justice is stronger than that. We have prosecuted scores of terrorists in our courts. That includes Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit; and Faisal Shahzad, who put a car bomb in Times Square. It is in a court of law that we will try Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is accused of bombing the Boston Marathon. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, is as we speak serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison here, in the United States. In sentencing Reid, Judge William Young told him, “the way we treat you…is the measure of our own liberties.” He went on to point to the American flag that flew in the courtroom – “That flag,” he said, “will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag still stands for freedom.”
America, we have faced down dangers far greater than al Qaeda. By staying true to the values of our founding, and by using our constitutional compass, we have overcome slavery and Civil War; fascism and communism. In just these last few years as President, I have watched the American people bounce back from painful recession, mass shootings, and natural disasters like the recent tornados that devastated Oklahoma. These events were heartbreaking; they shook our communities to the core. But because of the resilience of the American people, these events could not come close to breaking us.
I think of Lauren Manning, the 9/11 survivor who had severe burns over 80 percent of her body, who said, “That’s my reality. I put a Band-Aid on it, literally, and I move on.”
I think of the New Yorkers who filled Times Square the day after an attempted car bomb as if nothing had happened.
I think of the proud Pakistani parents who, after their daughter was invited to the White House, wrote to us, “we have raised an American Muslim daughter to dream big and never give up because it does pay off.”
I think of the wounded warriors rebuilding their lives, and helping other vets to find jobs.
I think of the runner planning to do the 2014 Boston Marathon, who said, “Next year, you are going to have more people than ever. Determination is not something to be messed with.”
That’s who the American people are. Determined, and not to be messed with.
Now, we need a strategy – and a politics –that reflects this resilient spirit. Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony on a battleship, or a statue being pulled to the ground. Victory will be measured in parents taking their kids to school; immigrants coming to our shores; fans taking in a ballgame; a veteran starting a business; a bustling city street. The quiet determination; that strength of character and bond of fellowship; that refutation of fear – that is both our sword and our shield. And long after the current messengers of hate have faded from the world’s memory, alongside the brutal despots, deranged madmen, and ruthless demagogues who litter history – the flag of the United States will still wave from small-town cemeteries, to national monuments, to distant outposts abroad. And that flag will still stand for freedom.
Thank you. God Bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.
-
"And even then, the cost to our relationship with Pakistan – and the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their territory – was so severe that we are just now beginning to rebuild this important partnership."
Ummm, , , any possibility that we should consider Pakistan´s harboring of OBL a real unfriendly act?
"Finally, we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States. Whether it’s a shooter at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin; a plane flying into a building in Texas; or the extremists who killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City – America has confronted many forms of violent extremism in our time. Deranged or alienated individuals – often U.S. citizens or legal residents – can do enormous damage, particularly when inspired by larger notions of violent jihad. That pull towards extremism appears to have led to the shooting at Fort Hood, and the bombing of the Boston Marathon."
Ummm , , , I am getting a whiff of moral equivalence here , , , Jihad APPEARS to led to Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon?!?
"Lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism. We must take these threats seriously, and do all that we can to confront them."
"In many cases, this will involve partnerships with other countries. Thousands of Pakistani soldiers have lost their lives fighting extremists."
Now that we are leaving Afghanistan, why continue the already specious notion that Pakistan is a partner?
"the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces."
So why do we so often treat them as criminals instead of enemy combatants?
"Even after we take these steps, one issue will remain: how to deal with those GTMO detainees who we know have participated in dangerous plots or attacks, but who cannot be prosecuted – for example because the evidence against them has been compromised or is inadmissible in a court of law. But once we commit to a process of closing GTMO, I am confident that this legacy problem can be resolved, consistent with our commitment to the rule of law."
Ummm , , , why aren´t they prisoners of war?
-
"As I said earlier, this threat is not new. But technology and the Internet increase its frequency and lethality. Today, a person can consume hateful propaganda, commit themselves (sic) to a violent agenda, and learn how to kill without leaving (sic) their home. To address this threat, two years ago my Administration did a comprehensive review, and engaged with law enforcement. The best way to prevent violent extremism is to work with the Muslim American community – which has consistently rejected terrorism – to identify signs of radicalization, and partner with law enforcement when an individual is drifting towards violence. And these partnerships can only work when we recognize that Muslims are a fundamental part of the American family. Indeed, the success of American Muslims, and our determination to guard against any encroachments on their civil liberties, is the ultimate rebuke to those who say we are at war with Islam."
Too bad he doesn't feel this way about American conservatives. Imagine the outrage if muslims got treated that way.....
-
http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2013/05/24/obamas-head-in-the-sand-speech-about-terrorism/?singlepage=true
Obama’s Head-in-the-Sand Speech on Terror
by Barry Rubin
May 24th, 2013 - 4:08 pm
President Barack Obama’s speech at the National Defense University, “The Future of Our Fight against Terrorism,” is a remarkable exercise in wishful thinking and denial.
Essentially, his theme: the only strategic threat to the United States is posed by terrorists carrying out terrorist attacks. In the 6400 words used by Obama, Islam only constituted three of them, and most interestingly, in all three instances the word was used to deny that the United States is at war with Islam. In fact, this is what President George Bush said precisely almost a dozen years ago, after September 11.
If one wanted to come up with a slogan for the Obama Administration it would be that to win the war on terrorism one must lose the war on revolutionary Islamism because only by showing that America is the Islamists’ friend will it take away the incentive to join al-Qaida and attack the United States.
So: why have not hundreds of such denials had the least bit of effect on the course of that war?
To prove that the United States is not at war with Islam, the Obama administration has sided with political Islam throughout the Middle East to the extent that some Muslims think Obama is doing damage to Islam — their kind of Islam.
Along the way, the fight against al-Qaeda resulted in a policy that has — however inadvertently — armed al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria.
Once again, I will try to explain the essence of Obama’s strategy, a simple point that many seem unable to grasp:
Obama views al-Qaeda as a threat because it wants to attack America directly with terrorism. But all other Islamist groups are not seen as a threat by Obama. In fact, Obama believes they can be used to stop al-Qaeda.
This is an abandonment of a strategic perspective. “Islamism” or “political Islam” or any other version of that does not appear even once. Yet this is the foremost revolutionary movement of this era, the main threat in the world to U.S. interests, and even to Western civilization.
Yet, according to Obama:
If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Egypt, that is not a strategic threat but a positive advantage because it is the best organization able to curb al-Qaeda. And that policy proves that the United States is not at war with Islam.
If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Tunisia, that is not a strategic threat but a positive advantage because it is the best organization able to curb al-Qaeda. And that policy proves that the United States is not at war with Islam.
If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Syria, that is not a strategic threat but a positive advantage because it is the best organization able to curb al-Qaeda. And that policy proves that the United States is not at war with Islam.
If a regime whose viewpoint is basically equivalent to the Muslim Brotherhood — albeit far more subtle — dominates Turkey, that is not a strategic threat but a positive advantage because it is the best organization able to curb al-Qaeda. And that policy proves that the United States is not at war with Islam.
These and other strategic defeats do not matter, says Obama:
After I took office, we stepped up the war against al-Qaeda, but also sought to change its course. We relentlessly targeted al-Qaeda’s leadership. We ended the war in Iraq, and brought nearly 150,000 troops home. We pursued a new strategy in Afghanistan, and increased our training of Afghan forces. We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.
And yet: the Taliban is arguably close to taking over Afghanistan, and has spread to Pakistan. The rule of law in Afghanistan is a joke.
And soldiers there know that the Afghan government still uses torture.
Meanwhile, Obama:
Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants. There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure. Fewer of our troops are in harm’s way, and over the next 19 months they will continue to come home. Our alliances are strong, and so is our standing in the world. In sum, we are safer because of our efforts.
Well, it is quite true that security measures within the United States have been largely successful at stopping attacks. But the frequency of attempted attacks has been high. Some of them were foiled by luck, some by the expenditure of one trillion dollars.
Elsewhere, countries have been taken over by radical Islamists who can be expected to fight against American interests in the future.
Obama continues:
So America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.
But he never actually defines it, except to suggest that: a) al-Qaeda has spread to other countries (which does not sound like a victory); and b) its affiliates and imitators are more amateurish.
Indeed, rather than describing a movement and ideology like Communism and fascism, Obama sounds like a comic-book superhero describing life in Gotham City:
Neither I, nor any president, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society.
Yet — his advisor on this issue, CIA director John Brennan, has said that the United States cannot be at war with terror because terror is merely a tactic. Which is it? Is the problem just “the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings,” as if the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas are equivalent to the Newtown, Connecticut shooter?
Obama continues:
What we can do — what we must do — is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend.
In other words, it is not a strategic problem, but a law enforcement problem.
At another point, Obama added:
Deranged or alienated individuals … can do enormous damage, particularly when inspired by larger notions of violent jihad. That pull towards extremism appears to have led to the shooting at Fort Hood, and the bombing of the Boston Marathon.
“Appears”?
So Fort Hood and the Boston bombing are still not considered by the American president as part of a war against America, but perhaps due to that evil that lies in the hearts of men?
And what is the nature of that criminal conspiracy?
Today, the core of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on a path to defeat. Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us. They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston. They have not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11. Instead, what we’ve seen is the emergence of various al-Qaeda affiliates. From Yemen to Iraq, from Somalia to North Africa, the threat today is more diffuse, with al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula — AQAP — the most active in plotting against our homeland.
One would never know, however, that al-Qaeda was always basically decentralized. Al-Qaida in Arabic means “the base,” and what Osama bin Laden did was to create a focal point to start off a global jihad. Bin Laden is dead but he accomplished his short-term objective. Moreover, al-Qaeda’s partner, the Taliban, is doing very well.
Who cares whether they directed the attacks in Benghazi (apparently it wasn’t a video) and Boston? They inspired those attacks.
“Unrest in the Arab World has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria,” says Obama, a man who clearly need not fear the mass media turning his phrase against him. After all, it wasn’t just unrest, but Obama’s policies that armed al-Qaeda in Libya and helped it participate in a successful revolution. And the same point is true in Syria. Indeed, if Bush was responsible for unintentionally magnifying the appeal of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Obama did the same thing in Syria — except Obama didn’t fight them, but instead helped supply the weapons!
At least he called Hizballah a “state-sponsored” terror network, though it might have been nice if he mentioned that the state in question is Iran, which also supported terrorists who killed Americans in Iraq. That is another point that Obama left out and yet could easily have mentioned.
And of course he mentioned Oklahoma City — which happened 20 years ago — in order to suggest that right-wing extremists are also involved in terrorism, and Fort Hood and Boston are due to some vague cause.
Here’s the kicker:
Moreover, we must recognize that these threats don’t arise in a vacuum. Most, though not all, of the terrorism we face is fueled by a common ideology — a belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West, and that violence against Western targets, including civilians, is justified in pursuit of a larger cause. Of course, this ideology is based on a lie, for the United States is not at war with Islam; and this ideology is rejected by the vast majority of Muslims, who are the most frequent victims of terrorist acts.
Yet clearly Obama has no notion — or will not admit to one — of what that “common ideology” might be, except for a misunderstanding about American intentions. Which, presumably, his outreach will correct.
In fact, in the sense that they speak of it, the United States is at war with Islam — the revolutionary sort of Islam, of course. To help any country resist radical political Islam is, in their eyes, opposition to proper Islam. Perhaps this is why the Obama administration seeks to help turn other countries toward Islamist regimes.
Of course, the United States is not at war with Muslims, but not only al-Qaeda but Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists, the Taliban, and dozens of other groups, ideologues, and militants know that America is their enemy. No matter what Obama does, he will not persuade them and their millions of supporters that the United States is their ally. Even though Obama has often actually made America their ally.
It would be like helping Communism in the Cold War to take over countries in order to show that America is not at war with the Russian people; or to do the same with Nazism to show that America is not at war with the German people; or to help Gamal Abdel Nasser or Saddam Hussein to take over the Middle East to prove America is not at war with the Arab or Muslim people.
A more accurate picture is offered by a Saudi writer in al-Sharq al-Awsat:
The most acute [aspect of] the problem is that Obama is laying down the systematic groundwork for the development of extremism and sectarian violence that will make us miss the al-Qaeda of George W. Bush’s era, while deluding himself that he eliminated Al-Qaeda when he killed Osama bin Laden!
-
he Retreat Doctrine
President Obama's speech last week at the National Defense University made clear the governing idea of his foreign policy.
By BRET STEPHENS
Nations in decline—democratic ones, at any rate—tend to be nations in retreat. When Britain informed the Truman administration that it could no longer prop up the governments of Greece and Turkey in the winter of 1947, it had already spent a quarter of its national treasure waging World War II and fought beyond the limit of its endurance. As a country it had a future. As a world power it was through.
Question: Is the inverse true? Is a nation in retreat also in decline?
A couple of weeks ago I scored Barack Obama for having no real foreign policy to speak of. But then the president gave a speech last Thursday at the National Defense University that set my complaint to rights. There is, after all, a method, a purpose, a governing idea.
It's called the Retreat Doctrine.
Or, to put the best gloss on it, it's the idea that retreat, far from being a symptom or harbinger of decline, is the quickest route to national renewal, economic and moral. "We must define the nature and scope of this struggle," Mr. Obama said Thursday, "or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison's warning that 'No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.' "
That's a thought that deserves scrutiny, especially because it resonates on both sides of the political aisle. According to the left, the war on terror has meant degraded civil liberties at home, the destruction of America's good name abroad, thousands of unnecessary deaths in misbegotten wars, "imperial overstretch," and the diversion of scarce resources from worthy government programs.
As for the right, much of it has quietly conceded that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't worth the candle; that the Middle East is a chronic disease to be managed rather than a political problem to be solved; and that a $16.7 trillion debt is a greater threat to national security than some troublemakers in Quetta or Timbuktu.
Enlarge Image
AFP/Getty Images
The Union Jack folds for the last time in Hong Kong, 1997.
And so the Retreat Doctrine takes hold. It's alluring to think that, merely by declaring an end to "continual warfare," we can end continual warfare; that we can define our problems as we'd like them to be, rather than take them as they are and have them define us in turn.
Thus the operating assumption of Mr. Obama's speech, and for that matter his entire presidency: Saying it makes it so. Take terrorism: According to Mr. Obama, its future lies in "localized threats" like the attack in Benghazi that didn't really disturb the peace at home and could be dealt with "smartly and proportionately." That means that America can finally turn a page on the war on terror, in part by sharply restricting the legal authorities under which it has been conducted.
It's nice to know we have a president who thinks he's clairvoyant. And maybe Mr. Obama is right. But nobody knows. What we do know is that the U.S. federal government has just two modes: under-reaction and overreaction. When the default was set to under-react, we got 9/11. We've been over-reacting ever since—and have been spared comparable attacks.
A prudent president might stay the course, to borrow a phrase. The Retreat Doctrine counsels otherwise. "What history advises," Mr. Obama said Thursday, is that "this war, like all wars, must end." That's true to the point of truism, though as far as I know Dwight Eisenhower didn't declare an end to the Cold War in 1958. What history really advises is that America does best when it fights its wars to a successful conclusion. The alternative is to confirm what our enemies suspected all along: We don't have the stomach for the long haul; all they have to do is wait us out.
But what about all the damage the war on terrorism does to other U.S. interests? Mr. Obama denounced his predecessor for having "compromised our basic values." Yet nothing President Bush ever did compared with FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans, or Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Historically speaking, the war on terror has been a model of legal and ethical caution.
Mr. Obama also noted that the war had cost the U.S. "well over a trillion dollars . . . exploding our deficits and constraining our ability to nation-build at home." That sounds like a lot of money, until you consider that federal government outlays since 2002 come to $31.3 trillion and counting. The depressing truth about the war on terror isn't that it has bankrupted us. It's that we fought it on the cheap while gorging on entitlements, ethanol subsidies, bridges to nowhere and ObamaCare.
These realities don't sit well with the Retreat Doctrine—but then, the ultimate purpose of the Doctrine isn't to revitalize America. It's to reduce America, as Britain was reduced after 1947, from world-spanning empire to wan social democracy. At least the British had the excuse of the Somme and the Blitz.
To retreat isn't to decline. But retreat can lead to decline, when a nation develops a taste for it, and when adversaries take advantage of it, and when disasters result from it. Britain had the U.S. at its back when it ceased being a power to be reckoned with. Should that day come for us, who will have ours?
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
-
http://www.rollcall.com/news/frosty_gop_reception_for_obamas_terrorism_policy_shifts-225121-1.html?ET=rollcall:e15735:105450a:&st=email&pos=eam
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/05/the-chesney-conjecture-is-this-what-peace-looks-like/
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/05/the-intersection-of-vague-disclosure-and-reduced-drone-strikes/
-
http://www.rollcall.com/news/frosty_gop_reception_for_obamas_terrorism_policy_shifts-225121-1.html?ET=rollcall:e15735:105450a:&st=email&pos=eam
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/05/the-chesney-conjecture-is-this-what-peace-looks-like/
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/05/the-intersection-of-vague-disclosure-and-reduced-drone-strikes/
The reality is in the 21st century's 5th generation warfare, the battlespace is everywhere and we are all combatants.
-
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/05/27/contrary-to-obama-the-terror-war-has-barely-begun/?singlepage=true
Contrary to Obama, the Terror War Has Barely Begun
The collapse of Middle Eastern states from Libya to Afghanistan vastly increases the
terrorist recruitment pool, while severely restricting the ability of American
intelligence services to monitor and interdict the terrorists. In addition, it
intensifies the despair that motivates Muslims like the Tsarnaev brothers or Michael
Adebolajo to perpetrate acts of terrorism. That makes President Obama’s declaration
that America is winding down the “war on terror”–a misnomer to begin with–the worst
decision by an American commander-in-chief since the Buchanan administration,
perhaps ever.
Last week I took part in a Tablet magazine roundtable on the crack-up of Middle
Eastern states and its strategic implications, along with Edward Luttwak, the New
York Times‘ Robert Worth, Amos Harel of Ha’aretz, Lee Smith of the Weekly Standard,
and Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group. Our group effort was one of
several essays to appear in the past two weeks commenting on the disintegration of
the system of states created after World War I by colonial cartographers. I argued:
In their wisdom, the colonial powers characteristically created multiethnic and
multisectarian entities based on the principle of minority rule. There is a reason
that Syria has labored under brutal minority regimes for half a century, since the
Ba’ath Party coup of 1963 led by the Christian Michel Aflaq, followed by the
Alawite Assad dynasty’s assumption of power in 1971. If you create artificial
states with substantial minorities, as British and French cartographers did after
the First World War, the only possible stable government is a minority government.
That is why the Alawites ran Syria and the minority Sunnis ran Iraq. The minority
regime may be brutal, even horribly brutal, but this arrangement sets up a crude
system of checks and balances. A government drawn from a minority of the population
cannot attempt to exterminate the majority, so it must try to find a modus vivendi.
The majority can in fact exterminate a minority. That is why a majority government
represents an existential threat to the minority, and that is why minorities fight
to the death. This meta-equilibrium is broken and cannot be restored.
Syria’s crack-up is at the top of the agenda, but the breakdown of putative
nation-states extends across nearly all of the Muslim world. As Amos Harel reported
in the Tablet symposium, the prime minister of Libya “has to cross checkpoints
manned by five different militias, on his way home from office.” In place of
regular armies controlled by dictators, Libya is crisscrossed by ethnic and
sectarian militias (including the one that murdered our ambassador last September).
Egypt is on the brink of economic collapse and state failure; Iraq is in the midst
of a low-intensity sectarian war; Syria’s civil war already is being fought out in
Lebanon; and Turkey’s border has become unstable.
A vast number of young men have been drawn into irregular combat. Syria has become
the cockpit of a Sunni-Shi’ite war, with Turkey and the Gulf states funneling money
and jihadists into Syria while Iran sends Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah
irregulars to the aid of the Assad regime. The young men of Libya already are
mobilized into militias; Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood cells and Salafists and football
mobs are not yet armed, but are organized. Iraq’s sectarians are armed to the teeth,
in part thanks to American funding of the “Sunni Awakening” during the 2007-2008
surge. Very large numbers of young men are ready to fight to the death, while the
breakup of the fragile civilian society of these countries draws more and more of
them into the maelstrom. Terrorism has become a way of life in Syria, where both
sides instigate atrocities, in part to intimidate their opponents and in part to
bind their own fighters to the cause by making them complicit in such crimes.
If Afghanistan fed the terrorist pool during the 1980s and the 1990s, the sectarian
wars of the 2010s will increase the prospective pool of terrorists–young men with no
skill except irregular warfare, nothing to return to, nothing to lose, and with no
motivation except fanatical hatred.
Contrary to popular impressions, the most important means at the disposal of
American intelligence services to control terrorism was the cooperation of Arab
intelligence services. I do not mean to deprecate the diligence and sacrifice of the
CIA team that hunted down Osama bin Laden, but the fact is that U.S. intelligence
never had enough Arab speakers to infiltrate terrorist organizations, or enough
translators to process the flood of SIGINT. It also did not have the mandate or the
personnel to employ interrogation techniques which are routine in the Arab world.
America leaned on Arab governments; after the overthrow and execution of Saddam
Hussein, it had considerable credibility to do so. Nasty, dictatorial, oppressive
regimes usually chose to help rather than thwart the U.S. out of fear that they
would be next. That is why it was a good idea to make a horrible example out of one
unfriendly regime (I would have preferred Iran), and why I supported the American
invasion of Iraq (although not the nation-building commitment that followed).
Arab governments are less states than hotels, where the proprietor rents out rooms
without asking too many questions about what happens inside the rooms. It is
possible to twist the proprietor’s arm to kick down the doors when the behavior of
the guests becomes to troublesome. Now many of the states are gone. There is no-one
to lean on. There are no cooperative state intelligence services to control their
own unruly elements and do our dirty work.
The result is an enormous increase in the number of prospective terrorists and a
drastic reduction in our capacity to control them. The motivation for terrorism has
increased correspondingly. Radicalized Muslims must now contemplate the ruin of
their civilization from Tripoli to Kabul. Millions of Syrians are displaced and have
no homes to go back to. Millions of Egyptians are hungry. Not only the suffering,
but the humiliation of the national ruin of Egypt and Syria leave radical Muslims
with little to hope for. The motivation to take as much of the world down with them
has mushroomed in the context of state failure.
It is not simply a matter of non-state actors running out of control. The remaining
states, prominently Iran, have seized the opportunity to increase their ability to
use terror on a grand scale. Iran’s open attempt to turn Syria into a Persian
satrapy–through Hezbollah as well as the infiltration of tens of thousands of
Iranian fighters–is intended to gain control of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal and
to turn Syria into a weapons platform from which to attack Israel. The scattering of
Middle Eastern arsenals (starting with Qaddafi’s shoulder-fired surface-t0-air
missiles), meanwhile, provides terrorists with a quality of weaponry they never
before possessed.
There simply is no historic precedent for this deadly mixture of state and civil
breakdown. American policy has piled blunder atop blunder. I argued in the Tablet
symposium:
American policy considerably worsened the problem though a series of blunders.
America devoted its main attention during the 2000s to nation building in Iraq while
ignoring Iran’s expansionism in the region. By wasting resources and credibility on
Iraqi nation-building and neglecting Iran’s influence, the United States allowed the
Shia government in Baghdad to drift toward the Iranian sphere of influence,
compelling Iraq’s Sunnis to respond. Funding and arming the “Sunni Awakening” during
the 2008 surge gave the Sunnis the means to respond. And encouraging the Muslim
Brotherhood to replace Mubarak was a destabilizing factor. Threatened by Iranian
expansion on one side, and encouraged by the Brotherhood’s success in Egypt on the
other, Syria’s Sunnis decided that the moment had come to overthrow the Assad
regime.
Now we face a military challenge unlike any we have had in the past. Our military
was designed to defeat the Soviet Union. Now we face tens of thousands–perhaps
millions–of anonymous enemies armed with cheap weapons, but advantaged by the
element of surprise and the will to commit suicide in order to damage us. We have
entered a new and terrible epoch of war–and the president has announced that the war
is over.
-
http://www.cfr.org/counterterrorism/obamas-mixed-counterterror-message/p30786
-
BD, you post some awesome stuff, but it would be a help if you would include a sentence or three on what it is and why you are posting it. This applies to everyone btw, including me :oops:
-
Geopolitical Journey: The Search for Belonging and Ballistic Missile Defense in Romania
Geopolitical Weekly
WEDNESDAY, MAY 29, 2013 - 05:00 Print - Text Size +
Stratfor
By George Friedman
During the Cold War, Romania confused all of us. Long after brutality in other communist countries declined, Romania remained a state that employed levels of violence best compared to North Korea today. Nicolae Ceausescu, referred to by admirers as the Genius of the Carpathians, ruled Romania with a ruthless irrationality. Government policies left the country cold and dark, and everyday items readily available just a few kilometers south in Bulgaria were rarities in Romania. At the same time -- and this was the paradox -- Romania was hostile and uncooperative with the Soviets. Bucharest refused to submit to Moscow, and this did not compute for many of us. Resistance to Soviet power, in our minds, meant liberalization, like what we saw in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But not in Romania; Romania played a different game.
Romania is an inward-looking country that longs to be better integrated into the international system -- a difficult posture to maintain. Each time I return to Romania, I watch this struggle unfold. If Bucharest was an exception in the Soviet bloc, it is now finding it much harder than countries such as Poland to adapt to Europe. For Romania, becoming normal means becoming part of Europe, and that means joining the European Union and NATO. The idea of not being fully accepted in Brussels creates real angst in Bucharest. When I point out the obvious difficulties affecting both institutions and suggest that membership may not be the best solution for Romania, I am firmly rebuffed. They remember something I sometimes forget: After the insanity of Ceausescu, they need to be European. No matter how flawed Europe is today, the thought of being isolated as they once were is unbearable.
The United States plays a unique role in the culture of countries like Romania. My parents in Hungary, the country next door to Romania, listened to Voice of America in 1944. When they heard of the Allied landing in Normandy, they thought they were saved from the Germans and Soviets. They were not, but it was the Americans -- noble and invincible in their imaginations -- in whom my parents placed their hope. Throughout the Cold War, Eastern Europeans listened to VOA and imagined liberation from the Soviets. When that liberation finally came in 1989, it was unclear whether and to what degree the Americans had precipitated the Soviet collapse. It remains unclear, but in Eastern Europe and in Romania, the concept of liberation is fixed, and despite all of their concern for the European Union, the United States remains the redeemer.
This region is perhaps the last place in the world where the United States is still seen as noble and invincible. Power is complex -- the more of it you gain, the more ambiguous you become. For a growing power, there is a moment before the exercise of responsibility in which you appear perfect. You have not yet done anything that requires ruthlessness or brutality, but you have shown strength. That was the image of the United States during the two world wars. As the United States started to mature, the world discovered that power distorts even the best of wills. But in Eastern Europe, the original sense of the United States, though certainly tattered and somewhat worn by the complexities of real power, is still a moving force. In my view, the relationship between the United States and Romania needs to be nurtured, not through showcase projects of little impact but through a substantial development of economic and military relations. This might not sound glamorous, but it would address the national security interests of both sides.
Differing Perceptions
My view on Romania's place in the world apparently does not sit well with NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Romanian President Traian Basescu. My discussions with these leaders are a tale worth telling, since they have led me on a true geopolitical journey.
During my visit to Romania, I met with Basescu, Prime Minister Victor Ponta and other notables. I also gave a talk at the National Bank of Romania. During these meetings, I made arguments that are familiar to my readers. I argued that the post-Cold War world is over and that Romania needs to vastly lower its expectations as to what membership in the European Union would mean. I told Romanian leaders they should be relieved that Romania has its own currency. I also argued that NATO has neither a common intent nor the military capability to act jointly, since most of Europe's militaries lack the ability to carry out sustained military operations. NATO is not an alliance but merely a grouping of countries -- a coalition of the willing who for the most part, as seen in Libya and Mali, are not very willing.
I further argued that the Russians are not pursuing their national interests by military force. Rather, Moscow is taking advantage of the weakness of the European Union to foster a web of commercial relationships in the countries of old Eastern Europe, creating an economic fait accompli. It follows that Romania's national security interests would be better served by U.S. investment -- particularly in the strategic energy and mineral sector -- than by reliance on the European Union or NATO.
The Romanians understand the weakness of these alliances. Yet for all of Europe's disarray, Romania's belief in Europe runs deep. Belief in a European economic bloc, and in a North Atlantic alliance that includes the United States, is a fundamental tenet of Romania's political culture. Perhaps the biggest current concern for Romanian leaders, though, and one that dominated many of my conversations, is the development in Europe of a ballistic missile defense system.
The Full Spectrum of Military Support
The United States has allowed a missile defense program based in Europe to become the leading symbol of American commitment to the region. Eastern Europeans in particular see the basing of that system as a sign of American commitment, even if it is not specifically intended to shield the country in which it is based. The theory is that anywhere the United States sets up an installation, American troops will be there to protect it. Washington's thinking on the defense shield has been in flux since the Bush administration. Evolving technology has opened the door for alternative basing, but the Romanians sense another reason for the shift: The Russians object deeply to the program. While their missiles could easily overwhelm the system, the Russians believe, along with Eastern Europeans, that the program is simply the first phase of American deployment along the frontiers of the Russian sphere of influence. The Americans have no wish to confront the Russians over what for Washington is a marginal issue, and they are constantly looking for ways out of the commitment.
This rattles nerves in the region, particularly as the European Union disintegrates. I argued that the missile shield should not be seen as the only measure of American commitment. Romania and other Eastern European countries certainly require substantial military support and assistance. But what they need are anti-air and anti-tank systems, air superiority fighters and logistics -- and they need enough of these things to deal with more mundane but immediate national security threats. The missile defense system addresses one dimension of Romanian security, but it does nothing to address other, more salient dimensions.
I argued that Romania's strategic focus ought to center on acquiring practical conventional systems that could deal with evolving threats. The United States should therefore not be judged by its commitment to missile defense but by its willingness to contribute to the full spectrum of Romania's security needs. Likewise, NATO should not be judged by its commitment to missile defense but by its members' willingness to collaborate and by their armed forces' actual ability to do so.
Real and Perceived Threats
Rasmussen met with the Romanian president a couple of days after I was there, and apparently my views came up. In a public statement, Rasmussen said he disagrees with my assessment. He stressed that Romania will be protected against a potential missile threat and said NATO has adopted a phased adaptive approach to building a missile defense system, with the aim being to cover all populations in Europe and all NATO nations, including Romania. Rasmussen said he expects the third and final phase to be completed by 2018.
The problem with Rasmussen's statement is that he assumes Romania faces a missile threat. Put differently, if I consider the full range of threats that Romania faces, missile attacks are not high on the list. Russia is not about to use them, and this system couldn't block them. The Iranians don't have a ballistic missile system yet, and an offensive option would far more effectively address a threat emanating from Iran. Essentially, missile defense projects spend huge amounts of money without addressing real Romanian national interests. These include internal security against non-state actors, border security and managing the future of Moldova in the event of destabilization in that country.
What interests me most about this exchange is that when I was asked about missile defense, I was not asked about NATO but about the United States. I was also not asked about a European missile shield but about the basing of a component in Romania. What the Romanians wanted was an American military facility in Romania, and they saw American redesigns that might eliminate such a facility as an abandonment of the United States' commitment to Romania. Nevertheless, the Romanian president affirmed Rasmussen's position and explicitly rejected mine.
Rasmussen is the head of NATO, an organization that has few significant projects underway -- and this is a big one. Having someone assert that NATO's centerpiece project ignores the broader requirements of Romanian national security will obviously irritate him, particularly since he knows that the missile defense shield, rather than being part of a NATO strategy, is a substitute for a NATO strategy. NATO has no real strategy right now because there is no political agreement on what that strategy ought to be.
The final argument I made to the Romanians was that only they can ultimately guarantee their national security. The United States can be pushed to participate in accordance with its strategic and economic interests, but it cannot be a substitute for Romanian forces protecting Romanian national interests. That was the way NATO worked during the Cold War, and that is the way it must work now. Only Romanian power can ensure the hard and multiple dimensions of Romanian national security. NATO or the United States can serve as the final recourse, but they cannot be the first option. Therefore, Romania ought to be pursuing support to enhance the basic, unglamorous requirements for adequate self-defense. Bucharest should not concern itself with the basing of a piece of advanced hardware designed for a single scenario if that comes at the expense of being able to handle many other scenarios. Europe as a whole might need missile defense, but Romania and its brother countries that have experienced Soviet occupation need other things far more.
We also discussed the Romanian interest in aligning with Poland and Turkey. These three countries share a history of facing Russian power. All three require and want to build strong commercial relations with the Russians, but they need to ensure that those commercial interests do not reduce national autonomy or undermine national interests. I have written in the past about the Intermarium -- the alliance of nations from the Baltic to the Black Sea -- and for the Romanians, Poland and Turkey are potentially important partners.
My argument against the land-based missile shield is not that it is an inherently bad idea, or that participating at the highest levels is not in the Romanian interest, but that NATO is currently incapable of addressing more pressing security requirements in the region, particularly security for the line that runs along Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. This line represents the eastern frontier of the European peninsula today, and while every country must trade extensively with Russia, they must also be able to protect themselves. American dollars spent limiting Russian hard power in the region will do more to boost Romania's interests than missile defense will, and this will also better align with the interests of the United States. In this discussion, NATO unfortunately does not play a significant role. While a substantial commitment to defend Romania might come from the United States, a regional grouping, whether inside or outside NATO, is first needed in order to create a framework for meaningful collaboration.
Developing a Crucial Relationship
The challenge facing Romania is to create an economic dimension to its political and military relationship with the United States. A multidimensional relationship is inherently more self-sustaining than simply a political-military relationship. The problem is not a lack of projects, of which potentially there are many. The problem is Romanian bureaucracy, which can be paralyzing. In economic relations, predictability, transparency and efficiency are essential. None of these exist in Romania. One of the points I made during the visit was that for Romania, reducing bureaucracy and increasing bureaucratic speed and predictability are matters of national security. The United States, like most countries, finds it easier to support countries where it has an economic interest.
Given the weakness of the European Union and the disarray in NATO, Romania needs to nurture its bilateral relations with the United States, and that requires moving beyond its relationships in Washington. Military affairs are discussed in Washington, D.C.; business is done in Seattle, Houston and Chicago. A geopolitical journey of the United States would begin by explaining the limits of Washington and the power that is present in other American cities. The Romanians must understand the United States as it is and understand that Washington's commitment to a country increases with its business interests. If Romania wants closer military ties in the United States, rationalizing the rules on investment is far more important than missile defense.
It is not clear that the United States understands the strategic significance of Romania or the other Eastern European countries. It is not clear that Romania understands how the United States works or how to draw it into a strategic commitment. The United States spent the last half of the Cold War baffled by Romania, and Romania has spent the time since the fall of communism baffled by the United States. From where I stand, the conversation needs to move away from the American obsession with complex technology, NATO's need for a project that seems significant without addressing serious risks and Romanian fears of exclusion from Europe. The United States and Romania must focus on cold calculations of national interest, including basic matters such as the sale of transport helicopters and the rapid processing of projects by ministries. If a missile defense system is developed along with these things, I have no objection. If it is built instead of these things, then we should all read histories of the Maginot Line.
Read more: Geopolitical Journey: The Search for Belonging and Ballistic Missile Defense in Romania | Stratfor
-
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/the-statesman/309283/
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/24/cold-war-u-s-tells-russia-to-give-back-snowden-or-else/
Cold war: U.S. tells Russia to give back Snowden, or else
posted at 9:01 pm on June 24, 2013 by Allahpundit
Imagine how much worse U.S./Russian relations might be right now if we hadn’t had that “reset.”
Does this mean Snowden really did get on a plane to Russia? Because if it turns out he didn’t and the whole Russia-to-Cuba-to-Ecuador thing was just a ruse, then we should dismantle the NSA on principle. If they can’t locate America’s most wanted man, who can’t bear to be apart from his computer, after he’s absconded with a treasure trove of intelligence, then they’re not so useful that we need to keep this eye in the sky afloat.
“They are on notice with respect to our desires,” Kerry said. “It would be deeply troubling if they have adequate notice and notwithstanding that they make a willful decision to ignore that and not live within the standards of the law.
The U.S. has transferred seven prisoners to Russia over the last two years, Kerry said, and the U.S. expects reciprocity. He also took a shot at China and Russia’s treatment of freedom of speech online…
A State Department official said Monday that as far as the U.S. government knows, Snowden is still in Russia and while the State Department is frantically contacting several governments about Snowden, Russia is the primary focus. The State Department is laying out a range of consequences for the Russians if they don’t cooperate and the Russians seem to be holding Snowden in Moscow while they consider their response to Washington, the official said…
To drive home that point, several senior officials have reached out to their Russian counterparts over the last 24 hours. FBI Director Robert Mueller has called his Russian counterpart at the FSB twice today, an administration official said Monday. Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul, a former senior White House official, have also been working the issue hard with their Russian contacts, the official said.
If I were Putin I’d hand him over, after “debriefing” him and his hard drives thoroughly, of course. What benefit is there to holding him once you’ve gotten what you need from him? They’ve already scored big propaganda points by humiliating Obama and we do, of course, have ways of making life more difficult for Moscow if they drag this out. Better to give him up as a “goodwill” gesture, to ensure that we’ll continue to extradite prisoners that they want and, maybe, be a bit more conciliatory on Syria than we’ve been lately. Frankly, Putin might relish the thought of “partnering” with Obama in seeing someone viewed by many Americans as a heroic dissident sent to prison. That’ll come in handy the next time the State Department accuses Moscow of taking political prisoners and persecuting regime critics.
First, though, comes the “extraction.” And it is, almost certainly, coming:
“Russian intelligence and counter-intelligence will have a lot to ask such a well-informed person. I have no doubt that this will be done,” a Russian special services veteran told the Interfax news agency on Sunday on condition of anonymity.
“I am sure that Snowden will have had a busy evening and a sleepless night,” the source added of the American’s reported stayover Sunday night in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport after landing from Hong Kong.
“Snowden presents a lot of interest for the FSB (security service). He can give information on technical aspects of intercepting data,” said Russian security expert and commentator for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper Pavel Felgenhauer.
“A debriefing in the presence of technical specialists takes a lot of time,” Felgenhauer told AFP, suggesting that interviews with Russian secret services could take place in a third country.
I can’t think of a reason why ruthless intel services like Russia’s and China’s wouldn’t be as rough as they need to be with this guy to get him to turn over what he has. He’s already revealed that the NSA spied on Medvedev at the G20 summit a few years ago and hacked into Chinese computers. Both regimes now have a national interest in finding out what he knows, which they can sell to their respective publics just in case the locals take an interest Snowden’s fate. This is why, for the life of me, I can’t understand why Snowden’s defenders insist that he hasn’t compromised national security in what he’s done. Even if that’s true so far, he claims to know much more than what he’s leaked; Glenn Greenwald’s giddily declared many times that more leaks are coming. National intelligence sources are telling ABC this afternoon that, in fact, if Snowden made public everything he knows, it could deal a “potentially devastating blow” to U.S. security. Follow the last link and read at least the section titled “Technical Roadmap of the U.S. Surveillance Network.” If they’re telling the truth, which is debatable, the security lapse in making this stuff available to an IT guy is unimaginably gigantic.
Is there any scenario, realistically, in which Russia or China or whoever ends up getting him doesn’t put the screws to him to find out what he knows? If someone fled from Russia or China to the U.S. with the kinds of secrets about them that Snowden has about the U.S., wouldn’t you hope/expect the FBI or CIA would “debrief” that guy at length? Either you believe (a) that Snowden doesn’t know much and therefore can’t hurt U.S. interests — and I’m not sure why anyone would think that at this point — or (b) that Snowden knows a lot and therefore it’s extremely dangerous for him to be placing himself within arm’s reach of Russian and Chinese intelligence. Either the whole FISA/PRISM/Snowden storyline is no big deal because it’s all small potatoes or it’s a very big deal, in which case we have a very, very big national-security problem. Pick one.
-
Why Cold War Presidents Were Better
Global Affairs
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - 05:01 Print Text Size
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
For two decades now, there has been a disappointment with American presidents in the realm of foreign affairs. Bill Clinton was seen, fairly or not, as fundamentally unserious: insufficiently decisive on humanitarian tragedies in the Balkans and Rwanda and believing in the delusion that, as he reportedly put it, geoeconomics had replaced geopolitics. George W. Bush was more decisive and skeptical about elite nostrums like geoeconomics uniting the world, but he decided upon invading Iraq and subsequently prosecuted the aftermath of that invasion in such an undisciplined fashion until 2006 that it is hard to see how his reputation will be restored. Barack Obama has all the discipline that Bush lacked, and little of the delusion that marred elements of Clinton's presidency, but absolutely no compelling vision about the world – except to keep it far away so that he can concentrate on the home front.
Now compare Clinton, the younger Bush and Obama with George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman. The difference is profound. The elder Bush helped steer the Cold War to a nonviolent conclusion beneficial to the United States, even as he fought a war with Iraq without a quagmire ensuing. Reagan hastened the end of the Cold War through Wilsonian rhetoric combined with pragmatic diplomacy and targeted defense expenditures. Nixon opened up relations with "Red" China in order to balance against the Soviet Union, even as he restored diplomatic relations with pivotal Arab countries while coming to Israel's rescue during the 1973 war. Kennedy accepted full responsibility for the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, then expertly steered the country through the Cuban missile crisis. Eisenhower, for eight long years, combined toughness with restraint in dealing with the Soviet Union and Communist China. Truman rightly dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in order to avoid a land invasion of Japan, prevented a Communist takeover of Greece and established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Of course, all these men made major mistakes, and some of them would not be suited for -- and thus would not perform well in -- a post-Cold War environment. (For example, Reagan was a man who knew only a few things, but they were the right things to know at the right time in history.) Moreover, the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter were far less distinguished: Johnson got the United States deeply embroiled in Vietnam, and Carter was powerless to prevent pro-Soviet takeovers in Nicaragua, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, to say nothing of the loss of an important American ally in Iran under his watch.
Nevertheless, overall, there is a qualitative difference between Cold War and post-Cold War presidencies. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, presidents have been more distracted, more -- not less -- enslaved to the barons of punditry in the media (whether liberal or neoconservative), and seemingly less cognizant of the realities imposed by geography. During the Cold War, the word "realist" was a mark of distinction in foreign affairs; it was afterward a mark of derision. Nothing could better illustrate the decline of American foreign policy -- both the practice and public discourse of it -- than that.
What made Cold War presidents generally appear more serious than their successors in foreign policy? The Cold War elevated geography, and hence geopolitics, to the highest level. The primacy of geopolitics simply could not be denied, except at a president's reputational peril.
Indeed, the Soviet Union was the world's pre-eminent land power, dominating Eurasia. The United States was the world's pre-eminent sea power, dominating the Western Hemisphere, with power to spare in order to affect the balance of forces in the Eastern Hemisphere. The battlefield was the Rimland of Eurasia, toward which the Soviets wanted to extend influence to the sea: Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Vietnam and Korea. The crucial questions were, henceforth, geographical -- geopolitical, that is. For example, how to prevent the Soviets from extending their reach into Western Europe? How to use the geography and demography of China against that of the Soviet Union?
Ideology and philosophy mattered, but only if they were combined with geography: hence the American fixation with Fidel Castro's Cuba, 145 kilometers (90 miles) from Florida. Yes, that fixation was unhealthy and self-destructive at times; just as getting involved in a massive land war in Asian jungles proved a nightmare. But the map did not just say: Go to war or refuse to be reasonable. Rather, the map for the most part imposed a structure and discipline on Oval Office thinking.
The post-Cold War is less one-dimensionally geographic. But geography still plays a significant role. Russia still seeks to undermine Eastern and Central Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia for the sake of buffer zones. China covets adjacent seas in the Western Pacific as well as the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. Japan, Vietnam and other Pacific nations push back at China for the same geographical reasons. China and India engage in an intensifying, albeit quiet, strategic rivalry. Energy deposits in the Persian Gulf, North America and elsewhere will continue to determine power relationships more than any lofty ideas. Israelis and Palestinians battle in zero-sum style over the same territory. The toppling of a regime in Iraq abets Iranian influence, even as a civil war in Syria may possibly undermine it. A dictatorship dissolves in Libya, indirectly leading to the dissolution of nearby Mali into anarchy. These are all geographical phenomena about which globalization -- with which elites are so fixated -- has relatively little to say.
While it is true that financial markets and electronic communications make the world more integrated, they also make geography more claustrophobic, so that an obscure geopolitical competition in one area echoes worldwide. Every place matters now to a degree it didn't before. Even the militarization of space and cyber warfare have geographical dimensions. After all, cyber attacks by China against the United States are simply another form of warfare directed from one continental-sized country in Asia against another in North America. These are realities that the Pentagon, for one, has deeply internalized.
However, American elites, who help condition the thinking of American leaders, have become spellbound over democratization, humanitarianism and other values-driven enterprises, so that leaders must make excuses for acting geopolitically to a degree they never had to during the Cold War. Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, could justify moving closer to totalitarian China in geopolitical terms, without the risk of embarrassment or the need for excuses. But Obama has been castigated in the media on moral grounds for wanting to improve relations with a far less authoritarian regime in Russia, even though it may make geopolitical sense to do so. It certainly isn't that Obama is dumber than Nixon, or thinks less in terms of geography than Nixon. It's more that he is operating in a less serious public policy climate, and that helps make his public explanations less serious.
It was easier for Cold War presidents to explain their actions geopolitically. Nowadays presidents continue to want to act geopolitically and periodically do so, but more often they have to explain their actions solely in moral terms. Thus, by speaking exclusively in moral terms, they, counterintuitively, lack the courage of their convictions. Reagan's morality was in line with his geopolitics -- eject Red Army troops from Central and Eastern Europe in order to end regime-inflicted poverty and tyranny there. Conversely, Obama speaks out against the tyranny of the al Assad regime in Syria while doing relatively little to undermine it, because he does not want the United States to own, even partially, the responsibility for the ground situation there. But Obama rarely speaks honestly about this. Thus, his policy lacks serious purpose.
Geopolitics is not immoral. Actually, as many a Cold War president showed, it can be quite moral. If a liberal democracy like the United States does not employ geopolitics to its own purposes, illiberal autocracies like China and Iran certainly will -- and will have the field to themselves. Indeed, China is acting and speaking geopolitically in the South and East China seas; Iran is doing likewise in Iraq and Syria. When post-Cold War presidents justify to the American people their actions in geopolitical terms, the public will likely understand and support them, even if some sectors of the elite do not. And from that will flow a more serious, more coherent foreign policy.
Read more: Why Cold War Presidents Were Better | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
-
America Needs Its Frontline Allies Now More Than Ever
Sensing an opening, China, Russia and Iran are testing U.S. resolve and alliances.
WSJ
By A. WESS MITCHELL And JAKUB J. GRYGIEL
While the world was focused on last month's G-8 summit in Northern Ireland, U.S. forces were quietly conducting military exercises to prepare for worst-case scenarios in the Baltic Sea and Pacific Ocean. In the first, U.S. Navy vessels were joined by ships from Poland, the Baltic States and their neighbors in a simulated crisis involving a large but unnamed nearby power. In the second, troops from Canada, New Zealand and Japan joined U.S. troops at Camp Pendleton in California to simulate the retaking of an island captured by a larger (but also unnamed) power.
The exercises highlight the similar predicaments facing U.S. allies in critical regions. In an arc that stretches from Eastern Europe to the Persian Gulf to East Asia, vulnerable states on the outer periphery of U.S. power are re-examining their strategic menus in the face of rising or revisionist powers, most notably China, Russia and Iran.
Many of these smaller states are embarking on major, though largely unnoticed, arms buildups. Singapore is shopping for missiles, Vietnam is buying Kilo-class submarines, Saudi Arabia recently bought 84 F-15 jets, and the Gulf states are expanding their defense budgets.
Even Poland, despite being a member of NATO and thus under the U.S. security umbrella, has embarked on a $40 billion spending spree to acquire everything from anti-ship missiles and drones to a new air-defense system. According to a report published this year by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, frontline U.S. allies now make up five of the top 10 military importers in the world.
As much as armaments, U.S. allies are also collecting new friendships. In Asia, littoral U.S. allies such as Japan, the Philippines and Singapore are forging new security agreements among themselves to contain Chinese military power. In the Middle East, the Gulf states are ratcheting up cooperation as a regional hedge against Iran. And in East-Central Europe, regional networks like the Nordic-Baltic Group and Central Europe's Visegrad Four are providing a backup to NATO and creating bulwarks to Russian influence.
Enlarge Image
image
image
Associated Press
Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force soldiers deplane U.S. Marine MV-22 Osprey during U.S.-Japan joint military drill at the Camp Pendleton in February 2013.
This is not surprising. Historically, small states have been opposed to powers that aim to upset the regional status quo or threaten their political independence and economic well-being.
But the frenzy of activity also shows that all is not well in these regional ecosystems. America's frontline allies are less confident of U.S. strength and fidelity. This is partly a result of recent U.S. policy, which has often seemed to downgrade alliances in favor of accommodation with large, authoritarian powers. At the same time, they see Washington's deepening defense cuts and shrinking Navy and wonder where American power will stand in a few years.
Just as the U.S. appears to be retrenching militarily, the world's rising powers are growing more aggressive. China, Russia and Iran are increasingly conducting targeted probes of U.S. allies in places such as the South China Sea, Georgia and the Strait of Hormuz, employing low-intensity standoffs, diplomatic pressure and violations of sea and airspace to assess the response of America's allies. Some allies may be tempted to bandwagon with rising powers, as vulnerable states—see Finland—have done throughout history.
Such outcomes would not be good for the United States. America benefits strategically from its globe-encompassing array of small allies. Economically, the presence of pro-U.S. states near such global choke-points as the Malacca Strait, the Strait of Hormuz and the Baltic Sea helps to keep open the commercial and energy arteries upon which the global economy depends. Strategically, these states act as built-in stabilizers that suppress conflict and deter large rivals.
Clearly, it is in the U.S. interest to see these alliances flourish in the 21st century. Here's how:
First, Washington should develop a global strategy to better utilize frontline alliances and encourage linkages among them. For a maritime power like America, onshore allies can provide a natural method for containing continental rivals and limiting their ambitions. Far from downgrading these alliances to pursue big-power realpolitik or seeking short-term cost savings by reducing its military presence in their regions, the U.S. should view them as cost-effective tools for managing multi-region competitors.
Second, the Department of Defense should look for ways to further sync U.S. military structures and planning with those of its allies. As Jim Thomas, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has suggested, small allies can create their own version of access-denial strategies—the practice of using high-tech defensive capabilities to prevent a larger adversary from exercising air, land or sea dominance. The combination of these efforts with a judicious mix of U.S. sea power, forward-basing and a strengthened nuclear deterrent could provide a sustainable basis for extending American power despite the domestic pressures of austerity.
Third, the U.S. should seek to strengthen industrial-defense ties with its frontline allies—and among them. Already, groupings are emerging that utilize similar U.S. weapons systems to deter and defend against similar large-power threats. We see this in nascent air-defense linkages between Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Poland. Washington should formally promote these ties, centered on U.S. technologies, encouraging allies to learn from each other and exchange their homegrown systems. Doing so would not only benefit U.S. and allied defense industries but also lower the risk of escalating, regional arms races.
By reassuring and preserving America's frontline allies, these steps will bolster the U.S.-led liberal order in the 21st century and drive up the costs of would-be revisionists at a time of growing geopolitical instability.
Mr. Mitchell is president of the Center for European Policy Analysis. Mr. Grygiel is a senior fellow at CEPA and a senior associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
-
The North American Global Powerhouse
By GEORGE P. SHULTZ
Discussions of rising economies usually focus on Asia, Africa and the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China. But what may well be the most important development of all is often overlooked: the arrival of North America as a global powerhouse. What's going on?
The North American Free Trade Agreement was signed by U.S. President George H.W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas in 1992. It was ratified in the U.S. thanks to the leadership of President Bill Clinton in 1993. Since then, the integration of the three economies has proceeded at a sharp pace. Consider:
The three countries constitute around one-fourth of global GDP, and they have become each other's largest trading partners. Particularly notable is the integration of trade. A 2010 NBER study shows that 24.7% of imports from Canada were U.S. value-added, and 39.8% of U.S. imports from Mexico were U.S. value-added. (By contrast, the U.S. value-added in imports from China was only 4.2%.) This phenomenon of tight integration of trade stands apart from other major trading blocks including theEuropean Union or East Asian economies.
Tighter trade integration has been accompanied by a staggering level of legal movement of people. Total intra-North America movement is 230.8 million annually—over half stemming from same-day travel between the U.S. and Mexico alone. Looking just at overnight tourism, Canadians made 21.3 million trips to the U.S. in 2011 and spent $23.9 billion. U.S. visitors made 11.6 million trips to Canada and spent $7.7 billion. Mexican visitors made 13.5 million trips to the U.S. and spent $9.2 billion. U.S. visitors made 20.1 million trips to Mexico and spent $9.3 billion. (Mexico is the top outbound destination of U.S. travelers.) Legal border crossings for trucks in 2010 amounted to 10.7 million between the U.S. and Canada, and 9.5 million between the U.S. and Mexico.
The three Nafta countries together account for $6.63 trillion in total exports and imports. They have among them free-trade agreements with 50 other countries and there is massive overlap among them. The U.S. is now engaged in negotiations for a free-trade agreement with Europe. Mexico already has such an agreement, and Canada is close to one.
North America, with the U.S. in the lead, is the world's center of creativity and innovation. Any measure will do: new companies formed, Nobel Prizes received, R&D spending, attractiveness to high talent from anywhere, patents issued, and numbers of great universities.
Meanwhile, the energy picture is being transformed by the innovative use of horizontal drilling in the process called fracking. North America is on its way to being a net exporter of energy. The implications for geopolitical developments are vast. North America will have security of supply no matter what happens in the Middle East or elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the North American energy trade is itself notable: $65 billion annually between the U.S. and Mexico and over $100 billion annually between the U.S. and Canada. Cross-border infrastructure and markets for crude oil, refined products, natural gas and electricity increasingly enable the integration of both conventional and emerging forms of energy across the three economies.
Even more important than fracking are the potentials for new ways of producing energy and ideas for using energy more effectively. The promise of these new developments will emerge from the research and development under way at universities and companies in North America. Much of this research is funded by a combination of government and industry money. When good ideas do emerge, the system means that organizations are on hand that know how to scale and commercialize them. Through this R&D, North America can lead the way to a more environment-friendly outlook for the production and use of energy.
The fundamental determinant of productivity of people stems from their education. In the U.S., Canada and Mexico, there is a wide disparity in average K-12 achievement scores, even though, in all three countries, there are plenty of examples of outstanding schooling. In math, Canada is clearly and by far the best of the three countries in K-12 education. The U.S. lags considerably behind Canada, and Mexico is even further behind.
There are continuing efforts in all three countries to improve performance, and the potential for raising living standards is enormous. If the K-12 attainments of students in the U.S. and Mexico were to rise to the level in Canada, the average paycheck in the U.S. could grow by 20% per year. In Mexico, the increase in the average paycheck would be off the charts.
Addictive drugs present our continent, particularly the U.S. and Mexico, with a pressing problem. Every aspect of their use and sale has been criminalized in the U.S. The results are high prison rates in the U.S., high profits for drug dealers, and criminal activity in Mexico, Central and South America as drug cartels, with money and guns from the U.S., wreak havoc in many countries. Deaths in Mexico associated with the drug war have been estimated at around 60,000 over the past five or six years.
The U.S. should vigorously adopt the view expressed by Nancy Reagan in her address to the United Nations in 1988. She said that "if we cannot stem the American demand for drugs, then there will be little hope of preventing foreign drug producers from fulfilling that demand. We will not get anywhere if we place a heavier burden of action on foreign governments than on America's own mayors, judges, and legislators."
There needs to be an open debate on this subject in the U.S. and with our North American partners. We should examine the efforts by other countries and find better ways to deal with this savage problem.
Concerning immigration in North America, it should be noted that with fertility in Mexico declining, and an expanding Mexican economy that is now more than competitive with China in many ways, net immigration of Mexicans to the U.S. last year was zero. Meanwhile, approximately 70% of the people who work on farms in this country are immigrants, legal and illegal. The U.S. needs them. All this underlines the importance of sensible reform in the U.S. immigration system.
People often ask me what Ronald Reagan would think of this or that subject. In the case of immigration, we don't have to speculate. On Jan. 19, 1989, in his last formal statement at the White House, he said:
"We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.
"While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
"This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost."
Mr. Shultz, a former secretary of labor, Treasury and state, and director, Office of Management and Budget, is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
-
By Robert D. Kaplan
In 1968, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies. Forty-five years later, the book remains without question the greatest guide to today's current events. Forget the libraries of books on globalization, Political Order reigns supreme: arguably the most incisive, albeit impolite, work produced by a political scientist in the 20th century. If you want to understand the Arab Spring, the economic and social transition in China, or much else, ignore newspaper opinion pages and read Huntington.
The very first sentences of Political Order have elicited anger from Washington policy elites for decades now -- precisely because they are so undeniable. "The most important political distinction among countries," Huntington writes, "concerns not their form of government but their degree of government." In other words, strong democracies and strong dictatorships have more in common than strong democracies and weak democracies. Thus, the United States always had more in common with the Soviet Union than with any fragile, tottering democracy in the Third World. This, in turn, is because order usually comes before freedom -- for without a reasonable degree of administrative order, freedom can have little value. Huntington quotes the mid-20th century American journalist, Walter Lippmann: "There is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed."
Institutions, therefore, are more important than democracy. Indeed, Huntington, who died in 2008, asserts that America has little to teach a tumultuous world in transition because Americans are compromised by their own "happy history." Americans assume a "unity of goodness": that all good things like democracy, economic development, social justice and so on go together. But for many places with different historical experiences based on different geographies and circumstances that isn't always the case. Americans, he goes on, essentially imported their political institutions from 17th century England, and so the drama throughout American history was usually how to limit government -- how to make it less oppressive. But many countries in the developing world are saddled either with few institutions or illegitimate ones at that: so that they have to build an administrative order from scratch. Quite a few of the countries affected by the Arab Spring are in this category. So American advice is more dubious than supposed, because America's experience is the opposite of the rest of the world.
Huntington is rightly obsessed with the need for institutions. For the more complex a society is, the more that institutions are required. The so-called public interest is really the interest in institutions. In modern states, loyalty is to institutions. To wit, Americans voluntarily pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service and lose respect for those who are exposed as tax cheaters.
For without institutions like a judiciary, what and who is there to determine what exactly is right and wrong, and to enforce such distinctions? Societies in the Middle East and China today reflect societies that have reached levels of complexity where their current institutions no longer suffice and must be replaced by different or improved ones. The Arab Spring and the intense political infighting in China are, in truth, institutional crises. The issue is not democracy per se, because weak democracies can spawn ineffective institutional orders. What individual Arabs and Chinese really want is justice. And justice is ultimately the fruit of enlightened administration.
How do you know if a society has effective institutions? Huntington writes that one way is to see how good their militaries are. Because societies that have made war well -- Sparta, Rome, Great Britain, America -- have also been well-governed. For effective war-making requires deep organizations, which, in turn, requires trust and predictability. The ability to fight in large numbers is by itself a sign of civilization. Arab states whose regimes have fallen -- Egypt, Libya, Syria -- never had very good state armies. But sub-state armies in the Middle East -- Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mehdi Army in Iraq, the various rebel groups in Syria and militias in Libya -- have often fought impressively. Huntington might postulate that this is an indication of new political formations that will eventually replace post-colonial states.
Huntington implies that today's instability -- the riotous formation of new institutional orders -- is caused by urbanization and enlightenment. As societies become more urbanized, people come into close contact with strangers beyond their family groups, requiring the intense organization of police forces, sewage, street lighting, traffic and so forth. The main drama of the Middle East and China over the past half-century, remember, has been urbanization, which has affected religion, morals and much else. State autocrats have simply been unable to keep up with dynamic social change.
Huntington is full of uncomfortable, counterintuitive insights. He writes that large numbers of illiterate people in a democracy such as India's can actually be stabilizing, since illiterates have relatively few demands; but as literacy increase, voters become more demanding, and their participation in democratic groupings like labor unions goes up, leading to instability. An India of more and more literate voters may experience more unrest.
As for corruption, rather than something to be reviled, it can be a sign of modernization, in which new sources of wealth and power are being created even as institutions cannot keep up. Corruption can also be a replacement for revolution. "He who corrupts a system's police officers is more likely to identify with the system than he who storms the system's police stations."
In Huntington's minds, monarchies, rather than reactionary, can often be more dedicated to real reform than modernizing dictatorships. For the monarch has historical legitimacy, even as he feels the need to prove himself through good works; while the secular dictator sees himself as the vanquisher of colonialism, and thus entitled to the spoils of power. Huntington thus helps a little to explain why monarchs such as those in Morocco, Jordan and Oman have been more humane than dictators such as those in Libya, Syria and Iraq.
As for military dictatorships, Huntington adds several twists. He writes, "In the world of oligarchy, the soldier is a radical; in the middle-class world he is a participant and arbiter; as the mass society looms on the horizon he becomes the conservative guardian of the existing order. Thus, paradoxically but understandably," he goes on, "the more backward a society is, the more progressive the role of its military..." And so he explains why Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa underwent a plethora of military coups during the middle decades of the Cold War: The officer corps often represented the most enlightened branch of society at the time. Americans see the military as conservative only because of our own particular stage of development as a mass society.
The logic behind much of Huntington's narrative is that the creation of order -- not the mere holding of elections -- is progressive. Only once order is established can popular pressure be constructively asserted to make such order less coercive and more institutionally subtle. Precisely because we inhabit an era of immense social change, there will be continual political upheaval, as human populations seek to live under more receptive institutional orders. To better navigate the ensuing crises, American leaders would do well to read Huntington, so as to nuance their often stuffy lectures to foreigners about how to reform.
Read more: Huntington on Upheaval | Stratfor
-
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/01/the_mensch_hagel_israel
From the article:
"There's just a strategic opportunity, given Iran's threat, and given the instability in the region that we can try to help try to build a new strategic coalition, with the U.S. acting at the center, and the role Hagel has played is the strategic thinker," said one senior defense official. "I think there is a real amount of engagement and personal diplomacy that he has taken on from the beginning in really less than six months into his time as secretary of defense."
Hagel's success at courting the Israelis is counterintuitive to those who watched Hagel's bruising confirmation battle, in which his allegedly-unkind views on Israel figured prominently.
-
I just read this article and must say I was pleasantly surprised. I hope my hopes are realized.
-
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/08/02/white-house-losing-its-grip-on-the-middle-east/
Secretary of State John Kerry went uncomfortably off-message yesterday in Pakistan, voicing a surprising level of support for Egypt’s military to journalists in Islamabad:
“In effect, they were restoring democracy,” Mr. Kerry said of Egypt’s military to Pakistan’s Geo News during a South Asia tour on Thursday. “The military did not take over, to the best of our judgment—so far, so far—to run the country. There’s a civilian government.”
Obama administration officials tried to walk back the remarks—”He didn’t stick to the script,” an unnamed source growled to the WSJ—but it was too late. The media pounced, the remarks were quickly torn apart on Twitter, and Team Obama is again struggling to regain its balance on Egypt, trying not to call what happened a coup while hoping that the military doesn’t get too much more blood on its hands in restoring order to Cairo and Alexandria.
Let’s get the obvious parts out of the way: No, the Egyptian military is not restoring democracy in Egypt. You can’t “restore” something that never existed, and it takes a lot more than a couple of elections to make a democracy. Democracy requires a host of institutions, tacit agreements, and social norms most of which don’t exist in Egypt. It also depends on a certain basic level of economic progress and prosperity, also not exactly likely to sprout up on the banks of the Nile anytime soon.
The army wasn’t trying to build democracy, either; it was restoring order and protecting the deep state, more or less in accordance with the will of a large number of middle class and urban Egyptians. That’s the beginning and end of it. Americans desperately want somebody to be the pro-democracy good guys. But right now at least, democracy doesn’t seem to be on the menu at the Egypt café.
We don’t want to be too hard on Secretary Kerry. Foreign policy is never easy to do in real time, and the world is in a good deal of disarray at this very moment. But his remarks do point to a deeper problem with the Obama administration’s foreign policy approach—a problem that’s finally starting to bite.
The Obama administration has made a fundamental strategic choice that hasn’t worked out well. Officials decided to support the Muslim Brotherhood in the hope of detoxifying US relations in the Middle East and promoting moderation among Islamists across the world. Between Prime Minister Erdogan’s surging authoritarianism in Turkey and the unmitigated Morsi disaster in Egypt, that policy is pretty much a smoking ruin these days, and a shell-shocked administration is stumbling back to the drawing board with, it appears, few ideas about what to try next.
Adding insult to injury, the Obama administration has conducted itself erratically enough to have lost everyone’s respect in the process. It hastily and indecorously ditched long time ally Mubarak and embraced the Muslim Brotherhood only to drop the Brothers when the going got tough. It’s hard to blame anyone in Egypt right now for thinking that the Americans are worthless friends whose assurances are hollow and who will abandon you the minute you get into trouble. At every point along the way, the administration made the choices it did out of good motives, but it would be difficult to design a line of policy more calculated to undermine American prestige and influence than the one we chose.
Rarely has an administration looked as inconsequential and trifling as the Obama administration did this week as it tried to square the circle. It isn’t using the c-word because it doesn’t want to offend the military, but it bleats ineffectually about human rights in hopes of retaining a few shreds of credibility among the supporters of the ousted President. The armed forces appear to be treating the United States with indifference; our support won’t help and our scolding won’t hurt.
It’s very hard to see how all this has won us friends or influenced people. The kerfuffle with Kerry’s remarks in Pakistan wouldn’t normally amount to much. Even Secretaries of State are human, it is hard to explain complicated ideas in short television interviews, and all of us get our feet in our mouths sometime. But as one more misstep in a long series, it has had more impact than usual.
We’ve said from the beginning that the Arab Spring was going to present the administration with some horrible headaches and impossible choices. George Washington was the first US President to learn just how much trouble a long and complicated revolutionary process in an allied nation could cause. The French revolution split his cabinet, caused him huge political and diplomatic headaches, and so embittered American politics that he felt and feared that he had failed. Those who criticize the President should never forget just how difficult these challenges really are. Flip and vain talking heads are always sure that there are simple, easy alternatives that would make everything work out okay. That is almost never the case, and it certainly isn’t now.
All that said, it’s unlikely that the President and his team can be anything but unhappy with the view as they look across the Atlantic: Edward Snowden is sitting pretty in Moscow with Putin humiliating the administration (once again) by failing to give it advance notice of the decision, Assad is still holding court in Damascus and even predicting victory, there appear no easy outs in Afghanistan, Iran is surging in Iraq, and the promise of the Arab Spring has mostly evaporated. The recent jailbreaks in Iraq, Libya and Pakistan, along with Thursday’s announcement that the US would be temporarily closing its embassies across the Middle East due to an unspecified terrorist threat, suggest al-Qaeda and other fanatical terror organizations are on a roll. Meanwhile, the US is farther than ever from the kind of partnership with relatively liberal and democratic Muslim parties and movements that the Obama administration sees as the best way to tame terror and build a better future. Success in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks would have a large impact, but that prospect, sadly, still seems unlikely.
Fortunately for the administration, the public seems to want to think about the Middle East as little as possible. Yet the President’s poll numbers on foreign policy continue to decline, and much of the foreign policy establishment seems to be tip toeing away from the administration as quickly as it can.
Failure in the Middle East has the potential to wreck the President’s foreign policy world wide. The “pivot to Asia” was predicated on a shift of American attention and resources away from the Middle East. That seems less likely now; many in Asia are wondering what happens to the pivot when the Secretary of State has clearly put the peace process at the center of his priorities. It is not easy to discern a commitment to humanitarian values or human rights in an administration that has passively watched the Syrian bloodbath metastasize and that has put together global surveillance programs that have angered many human rights groups as well as some allied powers.
President Obama still has more than three years left in the White House, but many of the policies that he brought with him or developed early in his tenure have now passed their sell-by dates. Abandoning Iraq, the surge in Afghanistan, intensification of the drone war in Pakistan, alliances with moderate Islamists, and a democracy agenda in the Middle East: sadly, those dogs won’t hunt anymore.
Many in the State Department and the broader foreign policy establishment believe that the relatively small group of trusted aides with whom the President has worked most closely don’t have the depth or experience to manage the country’s international portfolio well. We aren’t going to arbitrate that issue here; such criticisms are often self-serving. But whether he relies on the same aides or reaches out to more and different advisers, the President is going to have to change his approach to the Middle East and, one suspects, to Russia.
-
I liked the emotional balance of that piece as well as the nuts and bolts of its analysis.
-
I liked the emotional balance of that piece as well as the nuts and bolts of its analysis.
Yes. I have noticed Walter Russell Mead in only the last year or so and he has come to be my favorite Democrat - knowledgeable, wise and insightful on a wide range of topics. I haven't figured out where I disagree with yet. He has a nice way of pointing out problems with administration policies without ripping them personally the way the partisans tend to do to each other.
-
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/4/newt-gingrich-rethinks-neoconservative-views/?page=all#pagebreak
The question presented and the willingness to evolve one's thinking are both worthy and at this point in time the conclusion drawn may well be correct, but I would note that IMHO President Bush and SecDef Rumbo did a piss-poor job planning for Iraq. After we overthrew the government, we were utterly unprepared both in thinking and in resources brought to bear for what to do next. Although I do not agree with all of the analysis of the book "Fiasco", by Thomas E. Ricks, the book's analysis, based heavily upon USMC General Zinni's analysis, offered both before and after the invasion, (and mentioned in this forum btw) has considerable merit.
We will never know what would have been the outcome if Rumbo had not been the hubristic know-it-all that he turned out to be and if Bush instead had listened to Chariman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Shinseki about the numbers needed to do the job. Bush also supervised the war badly and avoided for far too long adjusting, instead staying with Rumbo's "No worries, it's only Saddamite dead-enders" and failing to increase US troop levels (a criticism I leveled here several times at the time).
With Baraq's determination to throw away the results of the Surge by purposely failing to establish a troop status agreement with the democratically elected Iraqi government, the democracy that WAS established now appears to be withering away in the face of Iran, a resurgent AQ, and factionalism.
This is the stuff of deep tragedy.
Our uni-polar moment is gone, and what might have been achieved then with competence, is no longer relevant now.
-
There are many foreign policy experts who argue that the idea of unipolarity by the US was myth to begin with, though that wouldn't necessarily undermine the base discussion here.
-
In the 1970s Henry Kissinger wrote of a world that was bi-polar militarily and multi-polar economically. What would you call the state of things after the collapse of the Soviet Empire?
-
What do we call the world, post-American collapse?
-
Fuct.
-
In the 1970s Henry Kissinger wrote of a world that was bi-polar militarily and multi-polar economically. What would you call the state of things after the collapse of the Soviet Empire?
http://books.google.com/books?id=ykKsyNbkAgAC&pg=PA155&lpg=PA155&dq=polarity+buzan+security+studies&source=bl&ots=F9_-q81g8z&sig=s8LoIMxA1v7_U4tS-1TU3o8J9lE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FmgBUoGUJqONygH3-4HQBw&ved=0CCcQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=polarity%20buzan%20security%20studies&f=false
See chapter 11, p. 155-169, with particular focus on 157-164.
-
BD:
My first effort at reading that led to a serious case of MEGO. :lol: Care to summarize?
-
Losing the War
In the last few months we have had at least six events that prove the American strategy in the Middle East is not working.
The evidence is so clear that it demands a serious national conversation about our national security strategy and the system which implements it.
Five of these events were prison breaks. The other was the closing of nineteen American embassies which the government had to temporarily close out of fear and ignorance.
If you connect the dots of these stories you will understand that this is what losing looks like.
Twelve years after the 9/11 attacks, the American strategies of Bush and Obama are losing. Our enemies in the Middle East (and increasingly around the world as they spread by Internet and migration) are winning. The forces of law-abiding civilization are losing.
The key question is whether we will have the courage as a people to insist on a serious investigation of this failure and to seek to understand the requirements of a strategy of success. Countries that are winning do not have to close their embassies in nineteen countries. This is a statement of impotence and incompetence on a grand scale, an admission that the United States cannot even defend its own embassies (and this is after decades of turning our embassies into fortresses isolated from local communities).
These were not nineteen trivial countries. As Jack Copeland notes, "Approximately 25 million barrels of crude oil are produced in these thirteen countries. To put this is in perspective the total consumption was at 79 million barrels per day worldwide."
So the United States has demonstrated that it has to act out of timidity and weakness in countries which produce one third of the world's oil. This is after thousands of Americans killed, many thousands of Americans wounded, and trillions spent in the Middle East. Twelve years of the wrong strategies on a bipartisan basis have led to this failure.
Lets look at another symptom of losing-- major prison breaks have been occurring throughout the Middle East.
Afghanistan, April 25, 2011. The London Telegraph reported: "Taliban insurgents dug a 1,050-foot (320-metre) tunnel underground and into the main jail in Kandahar city and whisked out more than 450 prisoners, most of whom were Taliban fighters, officials and insurgents have claimed."
Afghanistan, June 8, 2012. CBS News reported: “Taliban fighters blew a hole in the side of a prison in northern Afghanistan Thursday night, allowing 31 inmates to escape.”
Iraq, July 22, 2013. Reuters reported a prison break at Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison on the outskirts if Baghdad: “‘The number of escaped inmates has reached 500, most of them were convicted senior members of al Qaeda and had received death sentences,’ Hakim Al-Zamili, a senior member of the security and defense committee in parliament, told Reuters."
Libya, July 27, 2013. CNN reported that 1,200 prisoners broke out of a Benghazi jail in an attack linked to Al Qaeda: “A riot inside Al-Kuifiya prison erupted when a number of masked gunmen launched an attack from outside the prison facility. As a result, more than 1,000 prisoners escaped.”
Pakistan, July 30, 2013. Sixteen months of planning led to a successful prison break. McClatchy reported: "The operation was completed in two hours, 40 minutes, and the militants were gone before the military arrived and surrounded the prison. The 250 prisoners they’d freed included about 40 experienced but otherwise not extraordinary militant commanders who’ve been repatriated to their parent factions in the tribal areas, as part of a quid pro quo for those factions’ logistical support of the operation, the activists said.
"Similar tactics were adopted during a July 25 assault on an office of the military’s Inter Services Intelligence directorate in the southern town of Sukkur. That attack killed nine ISI operatives in an area that had previously not seen terrorist activity."
So nearly 2,500 prisoners escape in four different countries. In case some apologists suggest this was just a coincidence consider the Associated Press report that "Interpol, the French-based international policy agency, has also issued a global security alert in connection with suspected al-Qaida involvement in several recent prison escapes including those in Iraq, Libya and Pakistan."
So after 12 years of intense effort, two overt wars, dozens of minor skirmishes in Somalia, Libya, Mali and other countries, widespread use of drones to kill people, and a massive investment in power projection and intelligence gathering, the fact is our enemies are widespread, growing and increasingly dangerous.
The House and Senate should launch hearings into the growing defeat facing the United States and we should have the courage to face the facts and think through the consequences.
Isolationism and withdrawal will not work. The very existence of the United States and the free, open culture of America is a mortal threat to radical Islamists. There is no practical act of withdrawal which will make America so unimportant that terrorists and propagandists will not want to replace our civilization with their belief system.
Massive intervention will not work. I warned for years that we could turn Iraq into a Western democracy if we were prepared to stay as long as we have in South Korea (now 63 years and still engaged) and if we were prepared to be as ruthless as we were in post-Nazi Germany and post-Imperial Japan.
It was clear we were not prepared to do either. Our limited engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan will disappear as a rock in the desert is gradually covered by the sand.
We need a fundamentally new strategy that recognizes the scale of the threat and the limitations of our military, financial, and political powers.
Such a strategy does not exist today.
In fact, neither Republicans seeking to sustain the Bush interventionism nor the Democrats seeking to defend the Obama “lead from behind” model are prepared to even have the discussion.
Hopefully the disaster of having to close nineteen embassies, the danger of having 2,500 escaped prisoners, and the daily reports of violence in Mali, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc. will convince our elected leaders that they need to open a serious in depth analysis of what is really happening, what we thought would happen, and what we have to consider in developing a new strategy and a new system of implementation.
Your Friend,
Newt Gingrich
-
In the 1970s Henry Kissinger wrote of a world that was bi-polar militarily and multi-polar economically. What would you call the state of things after the collapse of the Soviet Empire?
A post of Denny S. in this thread 3 1/2 years ago pointed us to the concept of "Backyardianism".
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1864.msg34583#msg34583
"Eisenhower let the Russian invade Hungary in 1956 but Kennedy did not let them set up missiles in Cuba. Eastern Europe is Russia's back yard while the Caribbean is America's back yard. Those are hard facts on the ground.
Russia let America invade Grenada but did not let America set up missiles in Poland. Just the mirror image of the above Eisenhower/Kennedy policies. Backyardianism at work."
------
Perhaps America is/was the power of the world of last resort, but around China the power is China. Russia never stopped pursuing back its influence and domination over former Soviet republics and as far as it can reach in other directions. The EU may have no army but works its influence to pull 28 nations in a common direction. Iran in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain. Pakistan in Afghan, Kashmir. Around Venezuela, the wannabe influence was Chavez.
-
Bambi Meets Godzilla In The Middle East
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
"What Americans often miss is that while democratic liberal capitalism may be where humanity is heading, not everybody is going to get there tomorrow. This is not simply because some leaders selfishly seek their own power or because evil ideologies take root in unhappy lands. It is also because while liberal capitalist democracy may well be the best way to order human societies from an abstract point of view, not every human society is ready and able to walk that road now."
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/08/18/bambi-meets-godzilla-in-the-middle-east/
-
Egyptian Realities vs. American Fantasies
The gap between Egyptian realities and the opinions of American leaders of both
parties is simply amazing.
The American leaders seem to live in a fantasy world in which America is all
powerful, our definition of legitimacy is unchallengeable, and our right to take
risks with the lives of other people is unquestioned.
Both Democratic and Republican leaders (and their allies in the news media) seem to
have no sense of the realities facing the Egyptian military.
Put yourselves in the shoes of the senior officers of the Egyptian military.
Two years ago they watched the Obama Administration abandon President Hosni Mubarak.
Mubarak had been President of Egypt for 30 years and throughout that time had
supported the United States -- through two wars in Iraq, the decade of war in
Afghanistan, and an amazing number of other contingencies. His reward for being a
faithful ally was abandonment and imprisonment.
The Obama desertion of Mubarak almost certainly reminded the Egyptian military of
President Jimmy Carter's desertion of the Shah of Iran. In November of 1978
President Carter toasted the Shah as a great ally. A few months later, the Americans
pressured him to give in to the "reformers." The Shah was driven from his country
and died overseas. His generals were imprisoned and many executed. Their families
fled Iran. Today, 34 years later, the "reformers" have consolidated their
dictatorship and are trying to build a nuclear weapon.
The United States invaded Iraq and left behind a high level of violence.
The United States helped drive Qaddafi from power and has left Libya in shambles.
The United States has wrung its hands and publicly dithered while Assad has worked
with the Iranians and the Russians to consolidate his control over Syria.
American senators and American secretaries of state can fly to Cairo to offer advice
and advocate idealistic but impractical reforms. When they are done lecturing
Egyptians, they fly home to safety.
The senior officers of the Egyptian military know that they will still be there when
the Americans leave. Indeed, many of them remember the Americans abandoning their
allies in South Vietnam.
Most senior American officials do not understand this and assume their prestige is
unquestionable.
Cutting off American aid will have no effect. (I favor cutting it off because it is
no longer furthering American interests.) The Saudis and their Persian Gulf allies
have already committed $10 in new aid for every dollar of American aid.
The senior officers of the Egyptian military know that their lives and their
families' lives depend on defeating the Muslim Brotherhood.
They know that Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all followed hard line policies against
the Muslim Brotherhood and it worked.
They know that the Algerian Army rejected an Islamist election victory in 1991 and
fought an eleven year civil war to impose order on Algeria. More than 44,000
Algerians were killed in the campaign to defeat Islamists. Westerners were
horrified. The Algerian Army won.
The hardest-line example of survival through repression was Hafez Assad of Syria who
survived in power for 30 years (from 1970 to his death in 2000). Assad was
relentlessly tough in fighting the Muslim Brotherhood. When they tried to
assassinate him in 1980 he retaliated by executing over 600 prisoners. When the city
of Hama sought to rebel he crushed it so thoroughly that it became a model of
horrifying repression. Tom Friedman of the New York Times coined the term "Hama
Rules". In Hama that meant literally destroying entire neighborhoods to eliminate
opposition. That brutal operation cost 20,000 Syrians their lives but Assad stayed
in power.
The United States must rethink its entire policy in the Middle East.
We have to recognize that on a bipartisan basis for the last 12 years we have tried
to create and impose an American fantasy in Middle Eastern realities.
Egypt is a good place to begin rethinking this policy.
Your Friend,
Newt
-
WSJ
The Failed Grand Strategy in the Middle East
By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
In the beginning, the Hebrew Bible tells us, the universe was all "tohu wabohu," chaos and tumult. This month the Middle East seems to be reverting to that primeval state: Iraq continues to unravel, the Syrian War grinds on with violence spreading to Lebanon and allegations of chemical attacks this week, and Egypt stands on the brink of civil war with the generals crushing the Muslim Brotherhood and street mobs torching churches. Turkey's prime minister, once widely hailed as President Obama's best friend in the region, blames Egypt's violence on the Jews; pretty much everyone else blames it on the U.S.
The Obama administration had a grand strategy in the Middle East. It was well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued.
Unfortunately, it failed.
The plan was simple but elegant: The U.S. would work with moderate Islamist groups like Turkey's AK Party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to make the Middle East more democratic. This would kill three birds with one stone. First, by aligning itself with these parties, the Obama administration would narrow the gap between the 'moderate middle' of the Muslim world and the U.S. Second, by showing Muslims that peaceful, moderate parties could achieve beneficial results, it would isolate the terrorists and radicals, further marginalizing them in the Islamic world. Finally, these groups with American support could bring democracy to more Middle Eastern countries, leading to improved economic and social conditions, gradually eradicating the ills and grievances that drove some people to fanatical and terroristic groups.
President Obama (whom I voted for in 2008) and his team hoped that the success of the new grand strategy would demonstrate once and for all that liberal Democrats were capable stewards of American foreign policy. The bad memories of the Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter presidencies would at last be laid to rest; with the public still unhappy with George W. Bush's foreign policy troubles, Democrats would enjoy a long-term advantage as the party most trusted by voters to steer the country through stormy times.
It is much too early to anticipate history's verdict on the Obama administration's foreign policy; the president has 41 months left in his term, and that is more than enough for the picture in the Middle East to change drastically once again. Nevertheless, to get a better outcome, the president will have to change his approach.
Syrian activists inspect bodies in Damascus on Aug. 21, following an alleged chemical attack. Instability has spread from Syria into neighboring countries.
With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America's two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria.
America's Middle East policy in the past few years depended on the belief that relatively moderate Islamist political movements in the region had the political maturity and administrative capability to run governments wisely and well. That proved to be half-true in the case of Turkey's AK Party: Until fairly recently Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whatever mistakes he might make, seemed to be governing Turkey in a reasonably effective and reasonably democratic way. But over time, the bloom is off that rose. Mr. Erdogan's government has arrested journalists, supported dubious prosecutions against political enemies, threatened hostile media outlets and cracked down crudely on protesters. Prominent members of the party leadership look increasingly unhinged, blaming Jews, telekinesis and other mysterious forces for the growing troubles it faces.
Things have reached such a pass that the man President Obama once listed as one of his five best friends among world leaders and praised as "an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend on a wide range of issues" is now being condemned by the U.S. government for "offensive" anti-Semitic charges that Israel was behind the overthrow of Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi.
The Saturday Essay
Compared with Mr. Morsi, however, Mr. Erdogan is a Bismarck of effective governance and smart policy. Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were quite simply not ready for prime time; they failed to understand the limits of their mandate, fumbled incompetently with a crumbling economy and governed so ineptly and erratically that tens of millions of Egyptians cheered on the bloody coup that threw them out.
Tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists and incompetent bumblers make a poor foundation for American grand strategy. We would have done business with the leaders of Turkey and Egypt under almost any circumstances, but to align ourselves with these movements hasn't turned out to be wise.
The White House, along with much of the rest of the American foreign policy world, made another key error in the Middle East: It fundamentally misread the nature of the political upheaval in Egypt. Just as Thomas Jefferson mistook the French Revolution for a liberal democratic movement like the American Revolution, so Washington thought that what was happening in Egypt was a "transition to democracy." That was never in the cards.
What happened in Egypt was that the military came to believe that an aging President Hosni Mubarak was attempting to engineer the succession of his son, turning Egypt from a military republic to a dynastic state. The generals fought back; when unrest surged, the military stood back and let Mr. Mubarak fall. The military, incomparably more powerful than either the twittering liberals or the bumbling Brotherhood, has now acted to restore the form of government Egypt has had since the 1950s. Now most of the liberals seem to understand that only the military can protect them from the Islamists, and the Islamists are learning that the military is still in charge. During these events, the Americans and Europeans kept themselves endlessly busy and entertained trying to promote a nonexistent democratic transition.
The next problem is that the Obama administration misread the impact that its chosen strategies would have on relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia—and underestimated just how miserable those two countries can make America's life in the Middle East if they are sufficiently annoyed.
The break with Israel came early. In those unforgettable early days when President Obama was being hailed by the press as a new Lincoln and Roosevelt, the White House believed that it could force Israel to declare a total settlement freeze to restart negotiations with the Palestinians. The resulting flop was President Obama's first big public failure in foreign policy. It would not be the last. (For the past couple of years, the administration has been working to repair relations with the Israelis; as one result, the peace talks that could have started in 2009 with better U.S. management are now under way.)
The breach with Saudis came later and this one also seems to have caught the White House by surprise. By aligning itself with Turkey and Mr. Morsi's Egypt, the White House was undercutting Saudi policy in the region and siding with Qatar's attempt to seize the diplomatic initiative from its larger neighbor.
Many Americans don't understand just how much the Saudis dislike the Brotherhood and the Islamists in Turkey. Not all Islamists are in accord; the Saudis have long considered the Muslim Brotherhood a dangerous rival in the world of Sunni Islam. Prime Minister Erdogan's obvious hunger to revive Turkey's glorious Ottoman days when the center of Sunni Islam was in Istanbul is a direct threat to Saudi primacy. That Qatar and its Al Jazeera press poodle enthusiastically backed the Turks and the Egyptians with money, diplomacy and publicity only angered the Saudis more. With America backing this axis—while also failing to heed Saudi warnings about Iran and Syria—Riyadh wanted to undercut rather than support American diplomacy. An alliance with the Egyptian military against Mr. Morsi's weakening government provided an irresistible opportunity to knock Qatar, the Brotherhood, the Turks and the Americans back on their heels.
The fourth problem is that the administration seems to have underestimated the vitality and adaptability of the loose group of terrorist movements and cells. The death of Osama bin Laden was a significant victory, but the effective suppression of the central al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan was anything but a knockout blow. Today a resurgent terrorist movement can point to significant achievements in the Libya-Mali theater, in northern Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. The closure of 20 American diplomatic facilities this month was a major moral victory for the terrorists, demonstrating that they retain the capacity to affect American behavior in a major way. Recruiting is easier, morale is higher, and funding is easier to get for our enemies than President Obama once hoped.
Finally, the administration, rightfully concerned about the costs of intervention in Syria, failed to grasp early enough just how much it would cost to stay out of this ugly situation. As the war has dragged on, the humanitarian toll has grown to obscene proportions (far worse than anything that would have happened in Libya without intervention), communal and sectarian hatreds have become poisonous almost ensuring more bloodletting and ethnic and religious cleansing, and instability has spread from Syria into Iraq, Lebanon and even Turkey. All of these problems grow worse the longer the war goes on—but it is becoming harder and costlier almost day by day to intervene.
But beyond these problems, the failure to intervene early in Syria (when "leading from behind" might well have worked) has handed important victories to both the terrorists and the Russia-Iran axis, and has seriously eroded the Obama administration's standing with important allies. Russia and Iran backed Bashar al-Assad; the president called for his overthrow—and failed to achieve it. To hardened realists in Middle Eastern capitals, this is conclusive proof that the American president is irredeemably weak. His failure to seize the opportunity for what the Russians and Iranians fear would have been an easy win in Syria cannot be explained by them in any other way.
This is dangerous. Just as Nikita Khrushchev concluded that President Kennedy was weak and incompetent after the Bay of Pigs failure and the botched Vienna summit, and then proceeded to test the American president from Cuba to Berlin, so President Vladimir Putin and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei now believe they are dealing with a dithering and indecisive American leader, and are calibrating their policies accordingly. Khrushchev was wrong about Kennedy, and President Obama's enemies are also underestimating him, but those underestimates can create dangerous crises before they are corrected.
If American policy in Syria has been a boon to the Russians and Iranians, it has been a godsend to the terrorists. The prolongation of the war has allowed terrorist and radical groups to establish themselves as leaders in the Sunni fight against the Shiite enemy. A reputation badly tarnished by both their atrocities and their defeat in Iraq has been polished and enhanced by what is seen as their courage and idealism in Syria. The financial links between wealthy sources in the Gulf and jihadi fighter groups, largely sundered in the last 10 years, have been rebuilt and strengthened. Thousands of radicals are being trained and indoctrinated, to return later to their home countries with new skills, new ideas and new contacts. This development in Syria looks much more dangerous than the development of the original mujahedeen in Afghanistan; Afghanistan is a remote and (most Middle Easterners believe) a barbarous place. Syria is in the heart of the region and the jihadi spillover threatens to be catastrophic.
One of the interesting elements of the current situation is that while American foreign policy has encountered one setback after another in the region, America's three most important historical partners—Egypt's military, Saudi Arabia and Israel—have all done pretty well and each has bested the U.S. when policies diverged.
Alliances play a large role in America's foreign policy success; tending the Middle Eastern alliances now in disarray may be the Obama administration's best hope now to regain its footing.
As the Obama administration struggles to regain its footing in this volatile region, it needs to absorb the lessons of the past 4½ years. First, allies matter. Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian military have been America's most important regional allies both because they share strategic interests and because they are effective actors in a way that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and smaller states aren't. If these three forces are working with you, then things often go reasonably well. If one or more of them is trying to undercut you, pain comes. The Obama administration undertook the hard work necessary to rebuild its relationship with Israel; it needs to devote more attention to the concerns of the Egyptian generals and the House of Saud. Such relationships don't mean abandoning core American values; rather they recognize the limits on American power and seek to add allies where our own unaided efforts cannot succeed.
Second, the struggle against terror is going to be harder than we hoped. Our enemies have scattered and multiplied, and the violent jihadi current has renewed its appeal. In the Arab world, in parts of Africa, in Europe and in the U.S., a constellation of revitalized and inventive movements now seeks to wreak havoc. It is delusional to believe that we can eliminate this problem by eliminating poverty, underdevelopment, dictatorship or any other "root causes" of the problem; we cannot eliminate them in a policy-relevant time frame. An ugly fight lies ahead. Instead of minimizing the terror threat in hopes of calming the public, the president must prepare public opinion for a long-term struggle.
Third, the focus must now return to Iran. Concern with Iran's growing power is the thread that unites Israel and Saudi Arabia. Developing and moving on an Iran strategy that both Saudis and Israelis can support will help President Obama rebuild America's position in the shifting sands. That is likely to mean a much tougher policy on Syria. Drawing red lines in the sand and stepping back when they are crossed won't rebuild confidence.
President Obama now faces a moment similar to the one President Carter faced when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The assumptions that shaped key elements of his foreign policy have not held up; times have changed radically and policy must shift. The president is a talented leader; the world will be watching what he does.
Mr. Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of the American Interest.
-
Geography Rules: It's All About Spheres of Influence
Global Affairs
Wednesday, August 21, 2013 - 04:42 Print Text Size
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
The media is preoccupied with democracy, human rights and other values-driven elements that reflect the discourse of foreign policy among elites and that often have little to do with the actual motivations of governments behind closed doors. So what is really going on in the world, what really motivates governments? In fact, the globe is a venue for struggles over geographic spheres of influence to the same extent it has been in former ages. Once that reality is accepted, relatively little that happens in the world is surprising.
Take the Middle East. The United States has a security problem in the Middle East because the so-called Arab Spring, rather than lead to democracy, has led to anarchy. The anarchy unleashed has provided opportunities for disease germs such as al Qaeda. Otherwise, the United States is engaged in a balance-of-power struggle with Iran for geographic influence in the Levant. The Iranian leadership uses the language of Islam, even as it also thinks like the pagan Persians of antiquity, in terms of a desired sphere of influence stretching from the Mediterranean to the Central Asian plateau. But as long as the sea lines of communication remain secure and transnational terrorists are containable and kept away from America's or Israel's borders, for example, whether places like Egypt or Libya or Yemen struggle for years on end with enfeebled governments matters only modestly to Washington and is, in any case, something Washington cannot do that much about.
While the media is preoccupied with Middle Eastern chaos, the more significant geopolitical changes occurring in the globe involve the sphere of influence Russia is trying to carve out from the Baltics to the Caucasus, including Central and Eastern Europe, and the one China is trying to carve out in the Western Pacific and Indian oceans as far away as Africa.
Europe's sustained economic crisis and Russia's surfeit of cash from energy revenues has created an opportunity for the Kremlin to establish pipelines and buy up infrastructure, as well as employ other forms of financial pressure, in order to gain political leverage with regimes as far-flung as Hungary, Bulgaria and Azerbaijan, not to mention quite a few others. The Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union are not re-emerging, but a more traditional, soft sphere of influence based on historical Russian geography and empire building is. The media is, by and large, absent regarding this story. The media condemns Russian President Vladimir Putin as a human rights violator who did not return an American defector. But just how often in history has Russia had a sympathetic ruler? Far more important, Putin has what, in terms of Russia's history, is a legitimate geographical vision that he is trying to implement. Hungary's drift to quasi-authoritarianism under Prime Minister Viktor Orban as a possible means to accommodate Putin, and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev's balancing act between Russia, Iran, Turkey and the United States -- in which he has lately shifted back somewhat toward Russia -- constitutes a register of global geopolitics more telling than any individual development recently in the Arab world.
China, even as its rate of economic growth slows, is continuing to both enlarge and modernize its navy while expanding its commercial interests around the southern navigable rimland of Eurasia. China has been putting money or displaying interest in deep-water port projects in Kenya, Tanzania and Bangladesh, following its hands-on construction and financing of other Indian Ocean ports in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. In addition, China has established a resource-extraction empire throughout sub-Saharan Africa to link up with these budding, western Indian Ocean ports. The Venetian, Dutch and British maritime commercial empires all had their beginnings in less demonstrable form. At the same time, China is trying to develop a full-spectrum naval presence in East Asian waters -- from nuclear submarines to small fishing boats with potential for intelligence gathering. James Holmes, Toshi Yoshihara, Andrew Erickson and many other scholars at the U.S. Naval War College and other places have been meticulously chronicling these developments. China's maritime forces, both warships and other sea platforms, are designed to do what has been a traditional role of world navies throughout modern history: affect perceptions of power by meshing maritime movements with diplomatic, political and economic activity. (For it is in the creative combination of both hard and soft power that true strategy emerges.) If China calibrates its naval expansion well, it will never have a shooting war with the United States -- or with anybody else for that matter -- even as the perception of its influence expands over two oceans.
Russian and Chinese expansion, as Stratfor has reminded readers, may be unsustainable over the long term. Russia faces demographic challenges, even as it may not dominate the energy market to the degree that it has, owing to hydrocarbon discoveries elsewhere. China's economic slowdown may very well in the future reduce its ability to keep strengthening its military -- at least at the level that it has for decades. Russia and China both face structural problems in their economies and political arrangements that do not augur well for the future. But for the moment, while the American elite fixates on Middle Eastern anarchy about which it can do little, the two Eurasian behemoths are attempting to push out their zones of geographic influence.
Beyond the geographic power play by Russia in Greater Europe, and China's nascent attempt at a two-ocean commercial strategy, there are the smaller great games being engaged between China and India in Greater South Asia, between Russia and China in Central Asia, between China and Japan in northeast Asia and between China and smaller powers in Southeast Asia.
In Greater South Asia, China and India compete for influence in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar. China built a new deep-water port for Sri Lanka and helped its Sinhalese Buddhist regime win a civil war against Hindu Tamils by supplying it with arms while the West did almost nothing. But Sri Lanka's very proximity to India, and its inextricable links with it through the Tamil community, means China cannot ultimately dominate Sri Lanka. Bangladesh holds the key to the opening of trade routes beneficial to both southwestern China and India's poor and troubled northeast. Thus, both Beijing and New Delhi compete for influence in Dhaka. Nepal has a long and badly policed border with India so that influence in Kathmandu is vital for New Delhi, even as China has been attempting to establish a military and diplomatic bridgehead there. Myanmar, once part of British India and home to an Indian middleman-minority before World War II, is where China has built a port and pipeline for natural gas. Here is where India's and China's geographic interests truly crosshatch, and thus why both are active there: with India involved in its own port and pipeline projects.
In Central Asia, where Russia has military and economic links with several former Soviet republics, China has been investing in concessions for minerals and hydrocarbons, even as it has been constructing pipelines and trying to build a rail system from the former Soviet Central Asian republics to western China. Indeed, the scholars Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen of the United Services Institute in London and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington have documented in detail how China, despite obstacles, is constructing an "inadvertent empire" in Central Asia.
As for maritime East Asia, from Japan in the north to Indonesia in the south, China has been steadily expanding its influence in recent years and decades through its naval, economic and political reach. China's perceived aggression has been an element in the waning of Japanese quasi-pacifism and the rebirth of nationalism in Japan, with probable military consequences. Chinese-Japanese sparring over islands in the East China Sea has to be seen in this light. The same with island disputes in the energy-rich South China Sea: the result of expanding Chinese naval power, even as the military and institutional capacities of countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines have grown, too, over the course of the decades. Rather than grope toward a post-historical nirvana in which nationalism wanes and the power of the individual waxes triumphant, capitalist prosperity in Asia since the 1970s has culminated in military expansion and thus a simmering battle for space and power.
In short, Eurasia from Europe to the Pacific is engaged in various king-of-the-hill turf battles, in which geography is paramount and ideas relatively insignificant.
Read more: Geography Rules: It's All About Spheres of Influence | Stratfor
-
GAFFNEY: America’s vanishing deterrent
Syria’s chemical weapons serve as a reminder that few are following the U.S. in disarming
By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
The Washington Times
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
President Obama appears to be poised to embroil the United States in a new war in Syria in response to the recent, murderous use of chemical weapons there. Ill-advised as this step is, it is but a harbinger of what is to come as reckless U.S. national security policies and postures meet the hard reality of determined adversaries emboldened by our perceived weakness.
The focus at the moment is on what tactical response the president will make to punish Syrian dictator Bashar Assad for his alleged violation of Mr. Obama’s glibly declared “red line” barring the use of such weapons of mass destruction. There seems to be little serious thought given at the moment to what happens next: What steps Mr. Assad and his allies, Iran and Hezbollah, may take against us, our interests and allies; what the repercussions will be of the United States further helping the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda forces who make up the bulk of Mr. Assad’s domestic opposition; and the prospects for a far wider war as a result of the answers to both of these questions.
Even more wanting is some serious reflection about decisions made long before Mr. Obama came to office — but that are consonant with his own deeply flawed predilections about deterrence. More than two decades ago, President George H.W. Bush decided he would “rid the world of chemical weapons.” The United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention has had the predictable result that the United States has eliminated all such arms in its arsenal, leaving only bad guys like Mr. Assad with stockpiles of Sarin nerve gas and other toxic chemical weapons.
No one can say for sure whether the threat of retaliation in kind would have affected recent calculations about the use of such weapons in Syria. What we do know is that they have been used, evidently repeatedly, in the absence of such a deterrent.
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama seems determined to repeat this dangerous experiment with America’s nuclear forces. He has made it national policy to rid the world of these weapons. As with our chemical stockpile, Mr. Obama seems determined to set an example in the hope that others will follow.
This policy has set in motion a series of actions whose full dimensions are not generally appreciated. All planned steps to modernize our nuclear arsenal have either been canceled or deferred off into the future, which probably amounts to the same thing. Consequently, we will, at best, have to rely indefinitely on a deterrent made up of very old weapons. Virtually all of them are many years beyond their designed service life, and most are deployed aboard ground-based missiles, submarines and bombers that are also approaching or in that status as well.
Another symptom of the deteriorating condition of our nuclear arsenal is the fact that the Air Force has taken disciplinary action for the second time in the past few months against some of those responsible for the operations of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. There are surely specific grounds for these punishments. We are kidding ourselves, though, if we fail to consider the devastating impact on the morale and readiness of such personnel when they are told, at least implicitly, by the commander in chief that their mission is not only unimportant — it is one he wishes to terminate as soon as practicable.
Does this seem far-fetched? Recall that eliminating outright our land-based missile force is something Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel personally endorsed prior to taking office. That may be the result if the president succeeds in reducing our nuclear forces to just 1,000 deployed weapons. As of now, it is unclear whether he intends to take that step only if the Russians agree or will do so unilaterally if they don’t. Another uncertainty is whether Congress will go along with such rash cuts.
What is clear is that with no more serious debate than has been applied to the implications of becoming embroiled in another war in the Middle East — this time with a country armed with chemical weapons against which we can threaten no in-kind retaliation — the United States has been launched on a trajectory toward a minimal nuclear deterrent.
Fortunately, a group of the nation’s pre-eminent nuclear strategists and practitioners under the leadership of the National Institute for Public Policy has just published a powerful indictment of this misbegotten policy initiative titled “Minimum Deterrence: Examining the Evidence.” It lays bare the faulty assumptions that underpin the Obama denuclearization agenda — not least the fact that the other nuclear powers, including all the threatening ones, are not following the president’s lead.
Some say America can no longer afford a strong and effective deterrent. We may be about to test that proposition in Syria. Heaven help us if we compound the error there by continuing our slide toward a minimum nuclear deterrent posture, en route to a world rid only of our nuclear weapons.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan. He is president of the Center for Security Policy (SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program “Secure Freedom Radio.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/27/americas-vanishing-deterrent/#ixzz2dHllEjoi
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
-
http://breakingdefense.com/2013/09/03/fix-these-national-security-cracks-intel-recruiting-imet-pacific-pivot/
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/357420/democrats-smart-power-lies-ruins-jim-geraghty
The Democrats’ ‘Smart Power’ Lies in Ruins
By Jim Geraghty
September 3, 2013 7:19 AM
Welcome back from Labor Day weekend. From the first Morning Jolt of the week:
Democrats Suddenly Realize What They Miscalculated About the World: Everything
As we await Congress’s decision on authorizing the use of U.S. military force in Syria, Democrats are suddenly realizing that their foreign-policy brain-trust completely misjudged the world.
Being nicer to countries like Russia will not make them nicer to you. The United Nations is not an effective tool for resolving crises. Some foreign leaders are beyond persuasion and diplomacy. There is no “international community” ready to work together to solve problems, and there probably never will be.
You can pin this on Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Susan Rice, but most of all, the buck stops with the president. Those of us who scoffed a bit at a state senator ascending to the presidency within four years on a wave of media hype and adoration are not quite so shocked by this current mess. We never bought into this notion that getting greater cooperation from our allies, and less hostility from our enemies, was just a matter of giving this crew the wheel and letting them practice, as Hillary Clinton arrogantly declared it, “smart power.” (These people can’t even label a foreign-policy approach without reminding us of how highly they think of themselves.) They looked out at the world at the end of the Bush years, and didn’t see tough decisions, unsolvable problems, unstable institutions, restless populations, technology enabling the impulse to destabilize existing institutions, evil men hungry for more power, and difficult trade-offs. No, our problems and challengers were just a matter of the previous hands running U.S. foreign policy not being smart enough.
(https://www.nationalreview.com/sites/default/files/uploaded/Obama%20on%20Resolute.jpg)
How stressed is Obama? He’s starting to climb onto the Resolute desk during phone calls. To the right, Vice President Biden thinks about squirrels.
Well, here we are, five years later. Anthony H. Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, yesterday:
When Samuel Beckett wrote “Waiting for Godot,” he was not writing an instruction manual on strategy for American Presidents. Unfortunately, however, that seems to be the instruction manual President Obama has read. He has suddenly transformed a rushed call for immediate action into a waiting game where it is not clear what he or the U.S. is waiting for, and where much of the action may come to border on tragicomedy…
The President needs to show real leadership, not overreaction, sudden reversal, and uncertainty. We need the President to shape a broad policy for the Syrian civil war even more than we need a far clearer policy for preventing the use of chemical weapons. More broadly, we need leadership to deal with Iran, its moves towards nuclear weapons and any new options created by Iran’s election. We need clear decisions over how the U.S. will deal with Afghanistan as it pulls out its combat troops. We need a clear definition of what “rebalancing” in Asia really means. We need a clear concept for our future national security posture and spending, and our defense strategy, rather than a food fight over defense spending alone. This is the 21st century. It is not a play and we cannot wait for Godot.
Lest you think this is some Bush-team cheerleader, back in 2006, Cordesman was writing:
As a Republican, I would never have believed that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would waste so many opportunities and so much of America’s reputation that they would rival Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy for the worst wartime national security team in United States history.
Honest to God, the self-described smart set told us, again and again, Obama would bring a calmer world, just by showing up. (In their defense, the Nobel Committee did practically gve him the Nobel Peace Prize based on attendance.)
Let’s recall how Andrew Sullivan hyperventilated about how Obama would calm anti-American tensions in the Middle East just by showing his face:
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.
This was not some drunken screed (as far as we know); this was a cover piece in The Atlantic magazine. The chattering classes considered this serious thought back in December 2007. Events have proven that ultimately, the president’s hue and middle name don’t really matter. Anti-Americanism is driven by the United States’s role in the world as a secular, Judeo-Christian, economic, cultural and military superpower and the fact that so many other nations and cultures require a scapegoat, rival, or demon figure.
The mega-hype continued into 2009. Here’s Lee Hamilton, former Democratic congressman and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, in April 2009:
President Obama’s accomplishments, as listed by Hamilton, include: “Re-energizing our efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, commencing the withdrawal from Iraq, dramatically shifting nuclear-weapons policy, including support for the CTBT and cooperation with Russia, changing policies towards Cuba, an opening to Iran, working with our partners to de-nuclearize the Korean Peninsula, pushing peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and Syria, helping Mexico fight the drug cartels and more.”
Think about it. Hamlton genuinely believed those were his accomplishments! Note the ATF and DOJ were sending guns to the Mexican drug cartels back when he was saying that.
Now Kerry tells us, “because of the guaranteed Russian obstructionism of any action through the UN Security Council, the UN cannot galvanize the world to act as it should.”
No @%, Senator Global Test. The United Nations could rarely, if ever, galvanize the world. Maybe back after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait back in 1990. Now, whenever there’s a crisis in the world, Russia and China see an opportunity – to make a few bucks through arms sales, to build a relation with a client state, to expand their sphere of influence, or to just antagonize us for the sake of antagonizing us.
The United Nations did not suddenly become an ineffective debating society with little or no influence on the real crises in the world. It has been that for years, and some of us noticed this long before the current crew did.
(This doesn’t stop some of the Democrats’ alleged foreign-policy geniuses from reflexively uttering their rote talking points. Friday night, on Chris Hayes’s show, Bill Richardson said, “I would try to get some kind of ban on arm shipments, send Assad to the International Court of Justice, that the Security Council can do, a condemnation statement. I would continue this U.N. effort.” Keep banging your head against the wall! Sooner or later those bricks will break!)
The whole “reset button” ceremony with Hillary Clinton and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov was a formal commemoration of the incoming administration’s naïveté. The “famously stormy” relationship between Condi Rice and Lavrov was not a matter of Rice not being diplomatic enough or nice enough or trying hard enough. It reflected that Vladimir Putin and most of Russia’s highest levels of government defined their interests as opposing our interests.
But no one could have foreseen that, right? Russian implacability on Syria was completely a shock to all the experts, right? Could anybody have seen this coming? Oh, wait:
“[Russia] is without question our number one geopolitical foe, they fight for every cause for the world’s worst actors.” – Mitt Romney, March 26, 2012.
But hey, that guy thought negotiating with the Taliban was foolish, too.
This crew, so certain of their charm, persuasiveness, and diplomatic mettle somehow failed to persuade the British government or people that the effort against Assad is worth joining.
When it hits the fan elsewhere in the world, the EU is not going to come running with peacekeepers. There is nobody else but us.
-
Syria and the Byzantine Strategy
By Robert Kaplan
In March 1984, I was reporting from the Hawizeh Marshes in southern Iraq near the Iranian border. The Iran-Iraq War was in its fourth year, and the Iranians had just launched a massive infantry attack, which the Iraqis repelled with poison gas. I beheld hundreds of young, dead Iranian soldiers, piled up and floating in the marshes, like dolls without a scar on any of them. An Iraqi officer poked one of the bodies with his walking stick and told me, "This is what happens to the enemies of Saddam [Hussein]." Of course, the Iranians were hostile troops invading Iraqi territory; not civilians. But Saddam got around to killing women and children, too, with chemical weapons. In March 1988, he gassed roughly 5,000 Kurds to death. As a British reporter with me in the Hawizeh Marshes had quipped, "You could fit the human rights of Iraq on the head of a pin, and still have room for the human rights of Iran."
The reaction of the Reagan administration to the gassing to death of thousands of Kurdish civilians by Saddam was to keep supporting him through the end of his war with Iran. The United States was then in the midst of a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and as late as mid-1989 it wouldn't be apparent that this twilight struggle would end so suddenly and so victoriously. Thus, with hundreds of thousands of American servicemen occupied in Europe and northeast Asia, using Saddam's Iraq as a proxy against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran made perfect sense.
The United States has values, but as a great power it also has interests. Ronald Reagan may have spoken the rousing language of universal freedom, but his grand strategy was all of a piece. And that meant picking and choosing his burdens wisely. As a result, Saddam's genocide against the Kurds, featuring chemical weapons, was overlooked.
In fact, the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, coterminous with the life of the Reagan administration, was a boon to it. By tying down two large and radical states in the heart of the Middle East, the war severely reduced the trouble that each on its own would certainly have caused the region for almost a decade. This gave Reagan an added measure of leeway in order to keep his focus on Europe and the Soviets -- and on hurting the Soviets in Afghanistan. To wit, only two years after the Iran-Iraq War ended, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Peace between Iran and Iraq was arguably no blessing to the United States and the West.
Likewise, it might be argued that the Syrian civil war, now well into its second year, has carried strategic benefits to the West. The analyst Edward N. Luttwak, writing recently in The New York Times, has pointed out that continued fighting in Syria is preferable to either of the two sides winning outright. If President Bashar al Assad's forces were to win, then the Iranians and the Russians would enjoy a much stronger position in the Levant than before the war. If the rebels were to win, it is entirely possible that Sunni jihadists, with ties to transnational terrorism, will have a staging post by the Mediterranean similar to what they had in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan until 2001, and also similar to what they currently have in Libya. So rather than entertain either of those two possibilities, it is better that the war continue.
Of course, all of this is quite cold-blooded. The Iran-Iraq War took the lives of over a million people. The Syrian civil war has so far claimed reportedly 110,000 lives. Even the celebrated realist of the mid-20th century, Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago, proclaimed the existence of a universal moral conscience, which sees war as a "natural catastrophe." And it is this very conscience that ultimately limits war's occurrence. That is what makes foreign policy so hard. If it were simply a matter of pursuing a state's naked interests, then there would be few contradictions between desires and actions. If it were simply a matter of defending human rights, there would similarly be fewer hard choices. But foreign policy is both. And because voters will only sustain losses to a nation's treasure when serious interests are threatened, interests often take precedence over values. Thus, awful compromises are countenanced.
Making this worse is the element of uncertainty. The more numerous the classified briefings a leader receives about a complex and dangerous foreign place, the more he may realize how little the intelligence community actually knows. This is not a criticism of the intelligence community, but an acknowledgment of complexity, especially when it concerns a profusion of armed and secretive groups, and an array of hard-to-quantify cultural factors. What option do I pursue? And even if I make the correct choice, how sure can I be of the consequences? And even if I can be sure of the consequences -- which is doubtful -- is it worth diverting me from other necessary matters, both foreign and domestic, for perhaps weeks or even months?
Luttwak himself offers partial relief to such enigmas through a meticulous and erudite study of one of the greatest survival strategies in history. In "The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire" (2009), he demonstrates the properties by which Byzantium, despite a threatened geographic position, survived for a thousand years after the fall of Rome. This Byzantine strategy, in its own prodigiously varied and often unconscious way, mirrored Morgenthau's realism, laced as it is with humanism.
The Byzantines, Luttwak writes, relied continuously on every method of deterrence. "They routinely paid off their enemies....using all possible tools of persuasion to recruit allies, fragment hostile alliances, subvert unfriendly rulers..." He goes on: "For the Romans...as for most great powers until modern days, military force was the primary tool of statecraft, with persuasion a secondary complement. For the Byzantine Empire it was mostly the other way around. Indeed, the shift of emphasis from force to diplomacy is one way of differentiating Rome from Byzantium..." In other words, "Avoid war by every possible means in all possible circumstances, but always act as if it might start at any time [his italics]." The Byzantines bribed, connived, dissembled and so forth, and as a consequence survived for centuries on end and fought less wars than they would have otherwise.
The lesson: be devious rather than bloody. President Barack Obama's mistake is not his hesitancy about entering the Syrian mess; but announcing to the Syrians that his military strike, if it occurs, will be "narrow" and "limited." Never tell your adversary what you're not going to do! Let your adversary stay awake all night, worrying about the extent of a military strike! Unless Obama is being deliberately deceptive about his war aims, then some of the public statements from the administration have been naïve in the extreme.
A Byzantine strategy, refitted to the postmodern age, would maintain the requisite military force in the eastern Mediterranean, combined with only vague presidential statements about the degree to which such force might or might not be used. It would feature robust, secret and ongoing diplomacy with the Russians and the Iranians, aware always of their interests both regionally and globally, and always open to deals and horse-trades with them. The goal would be to engineer a stalemate-of-sorts in Syria rather than necessarily remove al Assad. Reducing the intensity of fighting would thus constitute a morality in and of itself, even as it would keep either side from winning outright. For if the regime suddenly crumbled, violence might only escalate, and al Qaeda might even find a sanctuary close to Israel and Jordan.
Such a strategy might satisfy relatively few of the cognoscenti. Though, the American public -- which has a more profound, albeit badly articulated sense of national survival -- will surely tolerate it. The Congressional debate that preceded the Iraq War did not save President George W. Bush from obloquy when that war went badly. The lack of such a debate would not hurt Obama were he to successfully execute the methods described in Luttwak's book.
-
Henninger: The Laurel and Hardy Presidency
After the Syrian slapstick, it's time to sober up U.S. foreign policy.
By
DANIEL HENNINGER
After writing in the London Telegraph that Monday was "the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began," former British ambassador Charles Crawford asked simply: "How has this happened?"
On the answer, opinions might differ. Or maybe not. A consensus assessment of the past week's events could easily form around Oliver Hardy's famous lament to the compulsive bumbler Stan Laurel: "Here's another nice mess you've gotten us into!"
In the interplay between Barack Obama and John Kerry, it's not obvious which one is Laurel and which one is Hardy. But diplomatic slapstick is not funny. No one wants to live in a Laurel and Hardy presidency. In a Laurel and Hardy presidency, red lines vanish, shots across the bow are word balloons, and a display of U.S. power with the whole world watching is going to be "unbelievably small."
The past week was a perfect storm of American malfunction. Colliding at the center of a serious foreign-policy crisis was Barack Obama's manifest skills deficit, conservative animosity toward Mr. Obama, Republican distrust of his leadership, and the reflexive opportunism of politicians from Washington to Moscow.
It is Barack Obama's impulse to make himself and whatever is in his head the center of attention. By now, we are used to it. But this week he turned himself, the presidency and the United States into a spectacle. We were alternately shocked and agog at these events. Now the sobering-up has to begin.
The world has effectively lost its nominal leader, the U.S. president. Is this going to be the new normal? If so—and it will be so if serious people don't step up—we are looking at a weakened U.S president who has a very, very long three years left on his term.
The belief by some that we can ride this out till a Reagan-like rescue comes in the 2016 election is wrong. Jimmy Carter's Iranian hostage crisis began on Nov. 4, 1979. One quick year later, the American people turned to Ronald Reagan. There will be no such chance next year or the year after that—not till November 2016.
The libertarian lurch on foreign policy among some Republicans is a dead end. Libertarians understand markets. But left alone, the global market in aggression won't clear. Like a malign, untreated tumor, it will grow. You can't program it to kill only non-Americans. The world's worst impulses run by their own logic. What's going to stop them now?
A congressional vote against that Syria resolution was never going to include a sequester for the Middle East. Iran's 16,600 uranium-enrichment centrifuges are spinning. Iran's overflights of Iraq to resupply Damascus with heavy arms and Quds forces will continue until Assad wins. Turkey and Saudi Arabia, U.S. allies, will start condominium talks with Iran, a U.S. enemy. Israel will do what it must, if it can.
On Wednesday the Russian press reported that the Putin government has sold state-of-the-art S-300 anti-aircraft missiles and batteries to Iran, a system with the capability to create a no-fly zone along the Syrian-Lebanon border. It should be running like clockwork by 2016. Europe will consider a reset with the new status quo.
There also isn't going to be a continuing resolution that defines limits for China the next 40 months. Articles now appear routinely describing how the U.S. "pivot" toward Asia is no longer believed by Asians. What if, after watching this week's Syrian spectacle, China next year lands a colony of fishermen on the Diaoyu Islands, known as the Senkakus to their Japanese claimants?
China on Tuesday warned India about setting up new military posts along their disputed 4,000-kilometer border. Is North Korea's Kim Jong Un on hold till 2016? There isn't going to be a House vote to repeal al Qaeda, which can still threaten U.S. personnel or assets around the world.
The White House, Congress and Beltway pundits are exhaling after the president of Russia took America off the hook of that frightful intervention vote by offering, in the middle of a war, to transfer Syria's chemical weapons inventory to the U.N.—a fairy tale if ever there was one. Ask any chemical-weapons disposal specialist.
Syria looks lost. The question now is whether anyone who participated in the fiasco, from left to right, will adjust to avoid a repeat when the next crisis comes.
The president himself needs somehow to look beyond his own instinct on foreign policy. It's just not enough. The administration badly needs a formal strategic vision. Notwithstanding her piece of Benghazi, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who gave a surprisingly tough speech Monday on the failure of the U.N. process and America's role now, may be the insider to start shaping a post-Syria strategy. (That lying C^&*! NFW!!!) Somebody has to do it. Conservative critics can carp for three years, which will dig the hole deeper, or contribute to a way forward.
Allowing this week to become the status quo is unthinkable. A 40-month run of Laurel and Hardy's America will endanger everyone.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
-
Strategy, Ideology and the Close of the Syrian Crisis
Geopolitical Weekly
Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - 04:04 Print Text Size
Stratfor
By George Friedman
It is said that when famed Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich heard of the death of the Turkish ambassador, he said, "I wonder what he meant by that?" True or not, serious or a joke, it points out a problem of diplomacy. In searching for the meaning behind every gesture, diplomats start to regard every action merely as a gesture. In the past month, the president of the United States treated the act of bombing Syria as a gesture intended to convey meaning rather than as a military action intended to achieve some specific end. This is the key to understanding the tale that unfolded over the past month.
When President Barack Obama threatened military action in retaliation for what he claimed was the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, he intended a limited strike that would not destroy the weapons. Destroying them all from the air would require widespread air attacks over an extensive period of time, and would risk releasing the chemicals into the atmosphere. The action also was not intended to destroy Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime. That, too, would be difficult to do from the air, and would risk creating a power vacuum that the United States was unwilling to manage. Instead, the intention was to signal to the Syrian government that the United States was displeased.
The threat of war is useful only when the threat is real and significant. This threat, however, was intended to be insignificant. Something would be destroyed, but it would not be the chemical weapons or the regime. As a gesture, therefore, what it signaled was not that it was dangerous to incur American displeasure, but rather that American displeasure did not carry significant consequences. The United States is enormously powerful militarily and its threats to make war ought to be daunting, but instead, the president chose to frame the threat such that it would be safe to disregard it.
Avoiding Military Action
In fairness, it was clear at the beginning that Obama did not wish to take military action against Syria. Two weeks ago I wrote that this was "a comedy in three parts: the reluctant warrior turning into the raging general and finding his followers drifting away, becoming the reluctant warrior again." Last week in Geneva, the reluctant warrior re-appeared, put aside his weapons and promised not to attack Syria.
When he took office, Obama did not want to engage in any war. His goal was to raise the threshold for military action much higher than it had been since the end of the Cold War, when Desert Storm, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and other lesser interventions formed an ongoing pattern in U.S. foreign policy. Whatever the justifications for any of these, Obama saw the United States as being overextended by the tempo of war. He intended to disengage from war and to play a lesser role in general in managing the international system. At most, he intended to be part of the coalition of nations, not the leader and certainly not the lone actor.
He clearly regarded Syria as not meeting the newly raised standard. It was embroiled in a civil war, and the United States had not been successful in imposing its will in such internal conflicts. Moreover, the United States did not have a favorite in the war. Washington has a long history of hostility toward the al Assad regime. But it is also hostile to the rebels, who -- while they might have some constitutional democrats among their ranks -- have been increasingly falling under the influence of radical jihadists. The creation of a nation-state governed by such factions would re-create the threat posed by Afghanistan and leading to Sept. 11, and do so in a country that borders Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon. Unless the United States was prepared to try its hand again once again at occupation and nation-building, the choice for Washington had to be "none of the above."
Strategy and the specifics of Syria both argued for American distance, and Obama followed this logic. Once chemical weapons were used, however, the reasoning shifted. Two reasons explain this shift.
WMD and Humanitarian Intervention
One was U.S. concerns over weapons of mass destruction. From the beginning of the Cold War until the present, the fear of nuclear weapons has haunted the American psyche. Some would say that this is odd given that the United States is the only nation that has used atomic bombs. I would argue that it is precisely because of this. Between Hiroshima and mutual assured destruction there was a reasonable dread of the consequences of nuclear war. Pearl Harbor had created the fear that war might come unexpectedly at any moment, and intimate awareness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki generated fear of sudden annihilation in the United States.
Other weapons capable of massive annihilation of populations joined nuclear weapons, primarily biological and chemical weapons. Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw the scientific work of the Manhattan Project, employed the term "weapon of mass destruction" to denote a class of weapons able to cause destruction on the scale of Hiroshima and beyond, a category that could include biological and chemical weapons.
The concept of weapons of mass destruction eventually shifted from "mass destruction" to the weapon itself. The use and even possession of such weapons by actors who previously had not possessed them came to be seen as a threat to the United States. The threshold of mass destruction ceased to be the significant measure, and instead the cause of death in a given attack took center stage. Tens of thousands have died in the Syrian civil war. The only difference in the deaths that prompted Obama's threats was that chemical weapons had caused them. That distinction alone caused the U.S. foreign policy apparatus to change its strategy.
The second cause of the U.S. shift is more important. All American administrations have a tendency to think ideologically, and there is an ideological bent heavily represented in the Obama administration that feels that U.S. military power ought to be used to prevent genocide. This feeling dates back to World War II and the Holocaust, and became particularly intense over Rwanda and Bosnia, where many believe the United States could have averted mass murder. Many advocates of American intervention in humanitarian operations would oppose the use of military force in other circumstances, but regard its use as a moral imperative to stop mass murder.
The combined fear of weapons of mass destruction and the ideology of humanitarian intervention became an irresistible force for Obama. The key to this process was that the definition of genocide and the definition of mass destruction had both shifted such that the deaths of less than 1,000 people in a war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives resulted in demands for intervention on both grounds.
The pressure on Obama grew inside his administration from those who were concerned with the use of weapons of mass destruction and those who saw another Rwanda brewing. The threshold for morally obligatory intervention was low, and it eventually canceled out the much higher strategic threshold Obama had set. It was this tension that set off the strange oscillations in Obama's handling of the affair. Strategically, he wanted nothing to do with Syria. But the ideology of weapons of mass destruction and the ideology of humanitarian intervention forced him to shift course.
An Impossible Balance
Obama tried to find a balance where there was none between his strategy that dictated non-intervention and his ideology that demanded something be done. His solution was to loudly threaten military action that he and his secretary of state both indicated would be minimal. The threatened action aroused little concern from the Syrian regime, which has fought a bloody two-year war. Meanwhile, the Russians, who were seeking to gain standing by resisting the United States, could paint Washington as reckless and unilateral.
Obama wanted all of this to simply go away, but he needed some guarantee that chemical weapons in Syria would be brought under control. For that, he needed al Assad's allies the Russians to promise to do something. Without that, he would have been forced to take ineffective military action despite not wanting to. Therefore, the final phase of the comedy played out in Geneva, the site of grave Cold War meetings (it is odd that Obama accepted this site given its symbolism), where the Russians agreed in some unspecified way on an uncertain time frame to do something about Syria's chemical weapons. Obama promised not to take action that would have been ineffective anyway, and that was the end of it.
In the end, this agreement will be meaningful only if it is implemented. Taking control of 50 chemical weapons sites in the middle of a civil war obviously raises some technical questions on implementation. The core of the deal is, of course, completely vague. At the heart of it, the United States agreed not to ask the U.N. Security Council for permission
to attack in the event the Syrians renege. It also does not clarify the means for evaluating and securing the Syrian weapons. The details of the plan will likely end up ripping it apart in the end. But the point of the agreement was not dealing with chemical weapons, it was to buy time and release the United States from its commitment to bomb something in Syria.
There were undoubtedly other matters discussed, including the future of Syria. The United States and Russia both want the al Assad regime in place to block the Sunnis. They both want the civil war to end, the Americans to reduce the pressure on themselves to aid the Sunnis, the Russians to reduce the chances of the al Assad regime collapsing. Allowing Syria to become another Lebanon (historically, they are one country) with multiple warlords -- or more precisely, acknowledging that this has already happened -- is the logical outcome of all of this.
Consequences
The most important outcome globally is that the Russians sat with the Americans as equals for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Russians sat as mentors, positioning themselves as appearing to instruct the immature Americans in crisis management. To that end, Putin's op-ed in The New York Times was brilliant.
This should not be seen merely as imagery: The image of the Russians forcing the Americans to back down resonates all along the Russian periphery. In the former Soviet satellites, the complete disarray in Europe on this and most other issues, the vacillation of the United States, and the symbolism of Kerry and Lavrov negotiating as equals will shape behavior for quite awhile.
This will also be the case in countries like Azerbaijan, a key alternative to Russian energy that borders Russia and Iran. Azerbaijan faces a second consequence of the administration's ideology, one we have seen during the Arab Spring. The Obama administration has demonstrated a tendency to judge regimes that are potential allies on the basis of human rights without careful consideration of whether the alternative might be far worse. Coupled with an image of weakness, this could cause countries like Azerbaijan to reconsider their positions vis-a-vis the Russians.
The alignment of moral principles with national strategy is not easy under the best of circumstances. Ideologies tend to be more seductive in generalized terms, but not so coherent in specific cases. This is true throughout the political spectrum. But it is particularly intense in the Obama administration, where the ideas of humanitarian intervention, absolutism in human rights, and opposition to weapons of mass destruction collide with a strategy of limiting U.S. involvement -- particularly military involvement -- in the world. The ideologies wind up demanding judgments and actions that the strategy rejects.
The result is what we have seen over the past month with regard to Syria: A constant tension between ideology and strategy that caused the Obama administration to search for ways to do contradictory things. This is not a new phenomenon in the United States, and this case will not reduces its objective power. But it does create a sense of uncertainty about what precisely the United States intends. When that happens in a minor country, this is not problematic. In the leading power, it can be dangerous.
Read more: Strategy, Ideology and the Close of the Syrian Crisis | Stratfor
-
Noonan: A New Kind of 'Credibility' Gap
Americans and their leaders have different ideas about what that word means.
By
PEGGY NOONAN
Washington
An accomplished American diplomat once said that there are two templates of American foreign-policy thinking. The first is Munich and the second is Vietnam.
When America does not move militarily as some people wish it to, they say, "This is another Munich"—appeasement that in the end will summon greater violence and broader war. When America moves militarily as some people do not wish it to, they say, "This is Vietnam,"—a jumping in where we do not belong and cannot win.
This is serviceable as a rough expression of where our foreign policy debates tend to go. But I suspect the past 12 years' experience in the Mideast has left us with a new template: "It's Chinatown," from the classic movie. This is where you try to make it better and somehow make it worse, in spite of your best efforts. This is a place where the biggest consequences are always unintended.
Surely this is part of the reason for the clear and quick public opposition to a U.S. strike in Syria, and it echoed in the attention paid to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates's statement this week that such a move "would be throwing gasoline on a very complex fire in the Middle East."
This week I spoke to a few U.S. senators about the meaning of the Syria drama. They were a mix—some had given supportive soundings early on; all had been taken aback by the public reaction, the wave of calls and emails. There was gossip. Apparently some White House staffers have a new nickname for the president: "Obam-me," because it's all about him and his big thoughts. I guess the second-term team is not quite as adoring as the first.
Two senators spoke of their worry about what the Syria mess—the threat, the climbdown, the lunge at a lifeline, the face-saving interviews—signaled to the world about U.S. credibility. If an American president says there's a red line and the red line is crossed, there can be no question: America must act. No one said this but I think I correctly inferred a suggestion that the American people may not be willing right now to appreciate the fact that in a world full of bad guys the indispensable nation must show it is serious.
Enlarge Image
image
image
©2012 Krista Rossow
The United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.
It seems to me U.S. credibility is a key issue in the Syria drama, but the problem is not that the U.S. public is newly unconcerned with it. The problem is that the public now sees the issue of U.S. credibility very differently from the way many lawmakers understand it.
For weeks I've been going back in my mind to a talk I had with a deeply accomplished, America-loving foreign policy expert. He too felt credibility was at issue. He said the other leaders of the world are no longer certain we are a great military power. I started to answer but someone joined us and the conversation turned. But I wanted to say no, the world thinks we are a great military power. They know all about the missiles and tanks and satellites, they've seen our soldiers. They know our might. The world is no longer certain we are a great nation, which is a different problem.
The world knows a lot about us, and in ways removed from specific military actions. Their elites come here, and increasingly their middle class. They know our unemployment problem—it's not a secret. They take the train from New York to Washington and see the abandoned factories. They know about our budget problems, they know who holds our bonds. They read about the kids who are bored so they killed the visiting Australian baseball player, and the kids so bored they killed a World War II veteran. They read about the state legislator who became a hero because she tried to make sure babies can be aborted at nine months—they see the fawning interviews. They go home with the story of the guy who spent his time watching violent videos and then, amazingly, acted out his visions of violence at the Washington Navy Yard. They notice our mass killings are no more than two-day stories.
And of course it isn't only "the world" that sees this—Americans see it. And they are worried about their country. Deep down they, too, wonder if we are still a great nation or will be able to remain one. They think our economy is in a shambles and our government incapable, at the moment, of creating the conditions that will allow it to come back. They fear our culture is rotting our children's heads.
And so, asked to support a strike that could spark a response that could start a real war they say no, not now and not in Chinatown. But this is not a turning inward, it is not about fortress America. They do not think they are protecting an unsullied beacon of light from the machinations and manipulations of the cynical Old World. They have fewer illusions than their policy makers do!
They are not "armchair isolationists." If you've ever taken a walk in one of our cities or suburbs—if you've ever taken a walk in America—you know we have all the people in the world here. You can barely get them off the phone back home with Islamabad, Galway and Lagos. Longtime Americans deal every day, in the office and the neighborhood, with immigrants and others from every culture and country. And so many of the new Americans are trying desperately to adhere to America, to find reasons to adhere. They are not unaware of the larger world. They came from the larger world. They're trying to love where they are.
They know this place is in need of help and attention. They care about it. That impulse should be encouraged and lauded, not denigrated as narrow-minded or backward. They're trying to be practical. They're Americans trying to take stock in their nation and concluding: "We have got to get ourselves in order, we have got to turn our attention to getting stronger. Then we will be fully credible in the world."
What I am saying is that the old, Washington definition of credibility, which involves the projection of force in pursuit of ends it thinks necessary, and the American people's definition of credibility, which is to become stronger and allow the world, and the young, to understand you are getting stronger, are at variance. And that will have implications down the road.
The public's sense of U.S. credibility, and how it is best secured and projected, probably began to vary more broadly from Washington's when the Great Recession hit home, five years ago this week.
Political leaders have got to start twigging on to this. It's not as if it just happened. They can argue for any foreign military action they think necessary, but the American people will not be of a mind to support it until they think someone is really trying to clean up America.
A diplomat might say, "But the world will not go on vacation while America gets its act together!" True enough, and that fact will demand real shrewdness from America's leaders, who the past few weeks got quite a lesson in how Americans on the ground view American priorities.
-
The world misses the old America, the one before the crash—the crashes—of the past dozen years.
That is the takeaway from conversations the past week in New York, where world leaders gathered for the annual U.N. General Assembly session. Our friends, and we have many, speak almost poignantly of the dynamism, excellence, exuberance and leadership of the nation they had, for so many years, judged themselves against, been inspired by, attempted to emulate, resented. As for those who are not America's friends, some seem still confused, even concussed, by the new power shift. What is their exact place in it? Will it last? Will America come roaring back? Can she? Does she have the political will, the human capital, the old capability?
It is a world in a new kind of flux, one that doesn't know what to make of America anymore. In part because of our president.
"We want American leadership," said a member of a diplomatic delegation of a major U.S. ally. He said it softly, as if confiding he missed an old friend.
Enlarge Image
image
imageChad Crowe.
"In the past we have seen some America overreach," said the prime minister of a Western democracy, in a conversation. "Now I think we are seeing America underreach." He was referring not only to foreign policy but to economic policies, to the limits America has imposed on itself. He missed its old economic dynamism, its crazy, pioneering spirit toward wealth creation—the old belief that every American could invent something, get it to market, make a bundle, rise. The prime minister spoke of a great anxiety and his particular hope. The anxiety: "The biggest risk is not political but social. Wealthy societies with people who think wealth is a given, a birthright—they do not understand that we are in the fight of our lives with countries and nations set on displacing us. Wealth is earned. It is far from being a given. It cannot be taken for granted. The recession reminded us how quickly circumstances can change." His hope? That the things that made America a giant—"so much entrepreneurialism and vision"—will, in time, fully re-emerge and jolt the country from the doldrums.
The second takeaway of the week has to do with a continued decline in admiration for the American president. Barack Obama's reputation among his fellow international players has deflated, his stature almost collapsed. In diplomatic circles, attitudes toward his leadership have been declining for some time, but this week you could hear the disappointment, and something more dangerous: the sense that he is no longer, perhaps, all that relevant. Part of this is due, obviously, to his handling of the Syria crisis. If you draw a line and it is crossed and then you dodge, deflect, disappear and call it diplomacy, the world will notice, and not think better of you. Some of it is connected to the historical moment America is in.
But some of it, surely, is just five years of Mr. Obama. World leaders do not understand what his higher strategic aims are, have doubts about his seriousness and judgment, and read him as unsure and covering up his unsureness with ringing words.
A scorching assessment of the president as foreign-policy actor came from a former senior U.S. diplomat, a low-key and sophisticated man who spent the week at many U.N.-related functions. "World leaders are very negative about Obama," he said. They are "disappointed, feeling he's not really in charge. . . . The Western Europeans don't pay that much attention to him anymore."
The diplomat was one of more than a dozen U.S. foreign-policy hands who met this week with the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani. What did he think of the American president? "He didn't mention Obama, not once," said the former envoy, who added: "We have to accept the fact that the president is rather insignificant at the moment, and rely on our diplomats." John Kerry, he said, is doing a good job.
Had he ever seen an American president treated as if he were so insignificant? "I really never have. It's unusual." What does he make of the president's strategy: "He doesn't know what to do so he stays out of it [and] hopes for the best." The diplomat added: "Slim hope."
This reminded me of a talk a few weeks ago, with another veteran diplomat who often confers with leaders with whom Mr. Obama meets. I had asked: When Obama enters a room with other leaders, is there a sense that America has entered the room? I mentioned De Gaulle—when he was there, France was there. When Reagan came into a room, people stood: America just walked in. Does Mr. Obama bring that kind of mystique?
"No," he said. "It's not like that."
When the president spoke to the General Assembly, his speech was dignified and had, at certain points, a certain sternness of tone. But after a while, as he spoke, it took on the flavor of re-enactment. He had impressed these men and women once. In the cutaways on C-Span, some the delegates in attendance seemed distracted, not alert, not sitting as if they were witnessing something important. One delegate seemed to be scrolling down on a BlackBerry, one rifled through notes. Two officials seated behind the president as he spoke seemed engaged in humorous banter. At the end, the applause was polite, appropriate and brief.
The president spoke of Iran and nuclear weapons—"we should be able to achieve a resolution" of the question. "We are encouraged" by signs of a more moderate course. "I am directing John Kerry to pursue this effort."
But his spokesmen had suggested the possibility of a brief meeting or handshake between Messrs. Obama and Rouhani. When that didn't happen there was a sense the American president had been snubbed. For all the world to see.
Which, if you are an American, is embarrassing.
While Mr. Rouhani could not meet with the American president, he did make time for journalists, diplomats and businessmen brought together by the Asia Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. Early Thursday evening in a hotel ballroom, Mr. Rouhani spoke about U.S.-Iranian relations.
He appears to be intelligent, smooth, and he said all the right things—"moderation and wisdom" will guide his government, "global challenges require collective responses." He will likely prove a tough negotiator, perhaps a particularly wily one. He is eloquent when speaking of the "haunted" nature of some of his countrymen's memories when they consider the past 60 years of U.S.-Iranian relations.
Well, we have that in common.
He seemed to use his eloquence to bring a certain freshness, and therefore force, to perceived grievances. That's one negotiating tactic. He added that we must "rise above petty politics," and focus on our nations' common interests and concerns. He called it "counterproductive" to view Iran as a threat; this charge is whipped up by "alarmists." He vowed again that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb, saying this would be "contrary to Islamic norms."
I wondered, as he spoke, how he sized up our president. In roughly 90 minutes of a speech followed by questions, he didn't say, and nobody thought to ask him.
-
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21586832-west-thought-it-was-winning-battle-against-jihadist-terrorism-it-should-think-again
Al-Qaeda returns
The new face of terror
The West thought it was winning the battle against jihadist terrorism. It should think again
Sep 28th 2013 |From the print edition
..
A FEW months ago Barack Obama declared that al-Qaeda was “on the path to defeat”. Its surviving members, he said, were more concerned for their own safety than with plotting attacks on the West. Terrorist attacks of the future, he claimed, would resemble those of the 1990s—local rather than transnational and focused on “soft targets”. His overall message was that it was time to start winding down George Bush’s war against global terrorism.
Mr Obama might argue that the assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi by al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, the Shabab, was just the kind of thing he was talking about: lethal, shocking, but a long way from the United States. Yet the inconvenient truth is that, in the past 18 months, despite the relentless pummelling it has received and the defeats it has suffered, al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies have staged an extraordinary comeback. The terrorist network now holds sway over more territory and is recruiting more fighters than at any time in its 25-year history (see article). Mr Obama must reconsider.
Back from the dead
It all looked different two years ago. Even before the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, al-Qaeda’s central leadership, holed up near the Afghan border in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, was on the ropes, hollowed out by drone attacks and able to communicate with the rest of the network only with difficulty and at great risk. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), its most capable franchise as far as mounting attacks on the West is concerned, was being hit hard by drone strikes and harried by Yemeni troops. The Shabab was under similar pressure in Somalia, as Western-backed African Union forces chased them out of the main cities. Above all, the Arab spring had derailed al-Qaeda’s central claim that corrupt regimes supported by the West could be overthrown only through violence.
All those gains are now in question. The Shabab is recruiting more foreign fighters than ever (some of whom appear to have been involved in the attack on the Westgate). AQAP was responsible for the panic that led to the closure of 19 American embassies across the region and a global travel alert in early August. Meanwhile al-Qaeda’s core, anticipating the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan after 2014, is already moving back into the country’s wild east.
Above all, the poisoning of the Arab spring has given al-Qaeda and its allies an unprecedented opening. The coup against a supposedly moderate Islamist elected government in Egypt has helped restore al-Qaeda’s ideological power. Weapons have flooded out of Libya and across the region, and the civil war in Syria has revived one of the network’s most violent and unruly offshoots, al-Qaeda in Iraq, now grandly renamed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.
The struggle to depose the Assad regime has acted as a magnet for thousands of would-be jihadists from all over the Muslim world and from Muslim communities in Europe and North America. The once largely moderate and secular Syrian Free Army has been progressively displaced by better-organised and better-funded jihadist groups that have direct links with al-Qaeda. Western intelligence estimates reckon such groups now represent as much as 80% of the effective rebel fighting force. Even if they fail to advance much from the territory they now hold in the north and east of the country, they might end up controlling a vast area that borders an ever more fragile-looking Iraq, where al-Qaeda is currently murdering up to 1,000 civilians a month. That is a terrifying prospect.
No more wishful thinking
How much should Western complacency be blamed for this stunning revival? Quite a bit. Mr Obama was too eager to cut and run from Iraq. He is at risk of repeating the mistake in Afghanistan. America has been over-reliant on drone strikes to “decapitate” al-Qaeda groups: the previous defence secretary, Leon Panetta, even foolishly talked of defeating the network by killing just 10-20 leaders in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The general perception of America’s waning appetite for engagement in the Middle East, underlined by Mr Obama’s reluctance to support the moderate Syrian opposition in any useful way has been damaging as well.
A second question is how much of a threat a resurgent al-Qaeda now poses to the West. The recently popular notion that, give or take the odd home-grown “lone wolf”, today’s violent jihadists are really interested only in fighting local battles now looks mistaken. Some of the foreign fighters in Syria will be killed. Others will be happy to return to a quieter life in Europe or America. But a significant proportion will take their training, experience and contacts home, keen to use all three when the call comes, as it surely will. There is little doubt too that Westerners working or living in regions where jihadism is strong will be doing so at greater risk than ever.
The final question is whether anything can be done to reverse the tide once again. The answer is surely yes. When Mr Bush declared his “war on terror”, his aim was the removal of regimes that sponsored terrorism. Today, the emphasis should be supporting weak (and sometimes unsavoury) governments in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Niger and elsewhere that are trying to fight al-Qaeda. Even Kenya and Nigeria could do with more help. That does not mean a heavy bootprint on the ground, but assistance in intelligence, logistics and even special forces and air support. Most of all, it means more help to train local security forces, to modernise administrations and to stabilise often frail economies.
The most dismaying aspect of al-Qaeda’s revival is the extent to which its pernicious ideology, now aided by the failures of the Arab spring, continues to spread through madrassas and mosques and jihadist websites and television channels. Money still flows from rich Gulf Arabs, supposedly the West’s friends, to finance these activities and worse. More pressure should be brought to bear on their governments to stop this. For all the West’s supposedly huge soft power, it has been feeble in its efforts to win over moderate Muslims in the most important battle of all, that of ideas.
-
As usual, the Economist writes in a way that sounds sage, makes some good points, and profoundly misses others.
In the last category for me is that Egypt REJECTED the MB when it asked the military to take over and supported its suppression of the MB. Unfortunately His Glibness failed to realize (and with him, the Economist) that this is pretty much EXACTLY what we have been hoping for-- an Arab people rejecting Islamic Fascism in a forceful manner.
-
As usual, the Economist writes in a way that sounds sage, makes some good points, and profoundly misses others.
In the last category for me is that Egypt REJECTED the MB when it asked the military to take over and supported its suppression of the MB. Unfortunately His Glibness failed to realize (and with him, the Economist) that this is pretty much EXACTLY what we have been hoping for-- an Arab people rejecting Islamic Fascism in a forceful manner.
They didn't, they just rejected Morsi-nomics.
-
A fair point, but at least the Coptics and the "modern worldists" rejected Islamo-Fascism.
-
A fair point, but at least the Coptics and the "modern worldists" rejected Islamo-Fascism.
And face death as a result. Both are a distinct minority and reaping very bitter fruits from the "Arab Spring".
-
I but point out that for a goodly percentage of those supporting the overthrow of the MB were doing so not merely as a matter of economics.
-
I but point out that for a goodly percentage of those supporting the overthrow of the MB were doing so not merely as a matter of economics.
Any polling that shows that?
-
by Robert D. Kaplan
John Kerry has made his choice. Chaos in the Middle East is more important to him than historic power shifts in Asia and Europe. Passion, rather than geopolitical vision, drives this secretary of state. And it is a very derivative passion that drives him: one that has its origin in media obsessions.
Kerry, it seems, will be tied down in two major negotiations in coming months: one with the Russians about overseeing the elimination of Syrian President Bashar al Assad's chemical weapons, and the other with the Israelis and Palestinians to get them to agree on terms for a comprehensive peace. The first negotiation grants Russia a pivotal role in the Middle East, thereby undoing decades of American grand strategy -- but now necessary to rescue President Barack Obama's credibility after the president, in an undisciplined moment, threatened war over Assad's use of chemical weapons. Oh, by the way, the deal is probably for the most part unworkable because of the logistical complexities of removing dozens of chemical weapons sites from a war zone. The second negotiation has only a small prospect of success, even as its strategic value for the United States is arguably over-rated: for the United States is already the dominant outside power in geographical Palestine, even without a peace treaty. Perhaps Kerry will get a reprieve of sorts if serious negotiations commence over Iran's nuclear program; at least then he will be involved in a regional discussion that has undeniable value.
Kerry, to be sure, will likely be making official visits to other theaters, including Asia and Europe. But he will fool nobody in those regions. The Asians know that he has much less interest in their region than did his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, who traveled back and forth to Asia throughout her tenure -- giving the world's economic and demographic hub more attention than any secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. China, with its growing military, can breathe a bit easier now as the Americans look once again to be distracted in the Middle East. As for those in Central and Eastern Europe, they know that the Obama administration's open-door policy to the Russians in the Middle East will only encourage Russian assertiveness, however subtle, in their region. The Obama administration's message to countries like Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Azerbaijan is one of neglect combined with weakness.
Indeed, the only strategic innovation of Obama's presidency thus far has been his "pivot" to Asia. The pivot meant that rather than withdraw inward following two wars in the Middle East -- a policy of quasi-isolationism that served America poorly throughout its history -- America would instead shift its focus to a more important region of the world. You may not agree with the pivot, or with its assumptions, but in the uncreative world of State Department bureaucracy it does count as a major innovation. Kerry has now undermined it.
But can't the Pentagon fill in for the State Department in Asia? After all, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey, both being thoroughly practical men who clearly want no part of a war in Syria, would be only too happy to focus on the balance of military power in Asia, given China's latent aggression. And isn't the pivot anyway mere empty atmospherics? The answer to both suggestions is a qualified "no."
Precisely because Kerry is so focused on the Middle East and continues to threaten consequences if Assad does not turn over his chemical weapons, the Pentagon will continue to be distracted by war plans for Syria. Hagel and Dempsey simply can't focus on Asia to the extent that they want and need to. Moreover, power, especially in the media age, is often the power to persuade and to coerce, which, in turn, is based on ground-level presence, both military and diplomatic. If your diplomacy is, relative to another region, absent, then people doubt the level of your commitment. And when the level of your commitment is doubted, your power declines. For diplomacy is often a matter of subtexts and intangibles. So if you are a country threatened by a militarily rising China -- like Japan or Vietnam or the Philippines -- you know that Hillary Clinton was a more reliable friend than is John Kerry with his occasional drive-by visit.
Middle Eastern chaos is tragic in human terms but so far limited in its effect on the world economy, and, in any case, is something that the United States can do very little about. Meanwhile, Russia is increasing its influence in Central and Eastern Europe and China's military growth threatens to upset the regional power balance. These are more important phenomena about which America can do more to help. Russia will not always be so dominant in world energy markets and China's slowly unraveling economy may at some point threaten its military rise: but these are middle- and long-term possibilities that America and its allies cannot count on for the moment.
Of course, it is possible for Kerry to use a Syrian chemical weapons deal with Russia in order open a wider negotiating track with Moscow, one in which Washington and the Kremlin might reach understandings on Europe, the Caucasus, and the Far East -- with Russia restraining itself a bit more in Europe, balancing against Turkey and Iran in the Caucasus, and balancing against China in the Far East. But that is a somewhat fantastic hypothetical, which to be even partially achieved would require considerable American leverage. And Kerry, rather than communicate leverage, has signaled only an obsession with the human rights consequences of Syrian chaos, even as the Russians must now doubt Washington's threats to ever use force against Damascus. Rather than an overarching strategy to deal with encroaching Russian and Chinese power in Eurasia, Kerry has instead demonstrated strategic incoherence: the sacrificing of considerable geopolitical consequences for the sake of an American president's domestic reputation.
Again, it is a matter of all-important perceptions. When Henry Kissinger invited the Russians to participate in Middle East peace talks in December 1973 in Geneva, it was clear that he was giving them only the appearance of influence without the substance. For the substance he had already worked out through shuttle diplomacy in the region. Contrarily, Kerry has the air of desperation about him, with no choice left but to grasp the offer of Russian power in both its form and substance.
Few can be as frightened over this spectacle as the leaders in the eastern half of Greater Europe, from the Baltic states to the Caucasus. Here Russian intimidation is often expressed in terms of decisions on pipeline routes and hydrocarbon prices. Ukraine, for example, dependent on Russia for energy, was able to look to the United States for support in the 1990s and early 2000s; now it has little choice but to look more to Germany, knowing that Germany must -- because of its geography -- maintain its own balance of power between the West and Russia. Truly, the Obama administration's perceived lack of cunning in the Middle East will continue to have ripple effects around the globe.
Talleyrand, the Napoleonic era statesman who was opposed to stern morals in foreign policy, is credited with the notion that in affairs of state a blunder is worse than a crime. So here we have a secretary of state who plays the role of a moralist, trying to rescue his president following a colossal blunder: that of threatening force without being serious about it. The United States is so geographically well endowed that it can afford years of mediocre foreign policy and even occasional incompetent foreign policy without having its security fundamentally undermined. But it is America's allies, not so geographically endowed, who suffer.
Read more: Kerry's Middle East Obsession | Stratfor
-
Second post of the day:
Fourth Quarter Forecast 2013
Forecast
Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - 06:06 Print Text Size
At the beginning of the year, we outlined how U.S. foreign policy increasingly would be defined by its restraint as the United States attempts to reorient its priorities away from the Middle East. At the same time, we noted that the Syrian chemical weapons issue would be the wild card that would challenge this policy of restraint and compel the United States to cobble together a coalition in haste. That forecast materialized in the third quarter, with the United States trying -- and failing -- to build a coalition for an intervention that it was not particularly enthused about. Both Iran and Russia were quick to seize on the opportunity, and out of the diplomatic fog emerged two aggressive negotiating tracks that will feature prominently in the final months of 2013.
Related Links
Stratfor's Annual Forecast 2013
Stratfor's Second Quarter Forecast 2013
Stratfor's Third Quarter Forecast 2013
While both Iran and the United States are serious about pursuing a dialogue, the transition from making positive gestures to negotiating substantial concessions will be difficult. Iran will expect some give-and-take from the United States on sanctions in negotiating the nuclear issue, but the U.S. president will have a limited range of choices for highly visible concessions he can make independently without having to consult an obstinate Congress. A nervous Saudi Arabia and Israel, meanwhile, will exercise their respective levers to undermine the negotiation, though they will face limits as the United States and Iran try to fast-track the talks while Iranian President Hasan Rouhani still carries support at home.
The United States simultaneously will try to sustain another highly ambitious negotiation with Syria and Russia to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons stockpile. Political, logistical and security complications will arise this quarter in planning and carrying out an operation of this magnitude, though neither Washington nor Moscow will allow the plan to collapse. Russia, while trying to manage rising economic pressure at home, will ensure its heavy involvement in both the Syrian and Iranian negotiating tracks to keep the United States dependent on Moscow for managing the Middle East.
Russia will then use that leverage to make sure the United States keeps its distance from an intensifying competition between Russia and Europe this quarter over a number of former Soviet states. Ukraine, the most critical state in this competition, will likely end up balancing any favorable actions toward the European Union with energy concessions to Russia.
Germany will stay out of that fight, focusing instead on battles within the eurozone after a relatively quiet summer. Headline statistics out of Europe on marginal growth improvements and the debate over a banking union will lead many observers to conclude that the crisis is abating, but we will instead be focused intently on the amount of consumer debt quietly piling up in Europe as unemployment levels remain critically high and banks continue to refrain from lending in the buildup to the next phase of the crisis.
Developing economies vulnerable to short-term capital outflows will get some reprieve from a U.S. decision to delay or at least move more slowly in its policy to taper quantitative easing, but the structural deficiencies exposed in the last quarter for many of these economies are now on full display. A number of Southeast Asian states will try tactical adjustments to prepare themselves internally for the coming capital crunch, but the reforms will necessarily remain shallow to manage social unrest and populist demands. Even as India tries to pass long-awaited legislation to encourage more stable and long-term foreign direct investment, those measures may end up being too little, too late for New Delhi and other governments trying to implement long-deferred structural reforms under mounting political pressures.
Middle East
Locator - Middle East
Iran Seeks an Opening for Dialogue
As we saw last quarter, Iran has attempted to use a U.S.-Russian diplomatic framework for Syria to edge itself into a more comprehensive dialogue with the United States. Under the direction of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, and with the approval of the supreme leader, the Iranian government will make conciliatory gestures on a political settlement for Syria and on the Iranian nuclear program in laying the groundwork for a diplomatic rapprochement. The United States will move cautiously toward dialogue, beginning in a multilateral setting, but the U.S. president will also be sensitive to Rouhani's limited timetable to show progress in the negotiation back home. The attempt to fast-track the talks will eventually run into hurdles, and the U.S. president faces limits in what he can concede, particularly on energy sanctions, without the consent of an intractable U.S. Congress. For this quarter at least, the negotiation will move forward.
Given Washington's cautious approach to talks, Iran will try to diplomatically re-engage the United Kingdom to build a Western channel to Washington. Iran will also make quiet diplomatic outreaches to Saudi Arabia as it tries to convince Riyadh that a U.S.-Iranian accommodation is inevitable. Saudi Arabia does not face enough pressure from Iran at this stage to enter a negotiation with its main adversary and will instead focus its efforts in boosting weapons, money and fighters to the Syrian rebels from the Arabian Peninsula to compensate for U.S. inaction. Saudi Arabia, along with the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, will draw negative attention to Iranian and Hezbollah activity in the region in an effort to undermine a U.S.-Iranian dialogue.
The Plan for Syria
The U.S.-Russian diplomatic plan to strip Syria of its chemical weapons will encounter a number of political and logistical hurdles this quarter, particularly in forging a cease-fire and providing adequate protection for weapons inspectors. Nonetheless, the United States will rhetorically maneuver around these obstacles to sustain the diplomatic option and thus avoid another ill-fated campaign to rouse support for a military response against Syria.
Another large-scale chemical weapons attack would be a deal-breaker for the plan, but the Syrian regime likely will avoid such a provocation and focus instead on using this period of diplomatic limbo to attack rebel positions using conventional assets. As we emphasized last quarter, the regime will be constrained in this multi-pronged offensive, resulting in an overall stalemate on the battlefield. Though Syrian rebel factions will try to derail the U.S.-Russian diplomatic initiative through attacks and propaganda, they will remain too weak and divided to undermine the plan and force a military intervention. In fact, rebel frustrations over U.S. inaction in Syria will only heighten rebel infighting this quarter and complicate external considerations to arm seemingly moderate factions.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Middle East
Europe
Former Soviet Union
East Asia
South Asia
Latin America
Sub-Saharan Africa
The Syrian Conflict's Other Effects in the Region
Spillover sectarian violence in Lebanon will remain steady in the coming months. Hezbollah will concentrate its fighters along the Syria-Lebanon border and boost its security presence in its neighborhood strongholds to counter Sunni militant provocations. Israel will maintain a pre-emptive military posture to target any attempts by the Syrian regime to transfer advanced weapons systems to Hezbollah.
Turkey will try to balance this quarter between maintaining a stable relationship with Iran in the evolving diplomatic environment and maintaining its support for the Syrian rebels. The Syrian regime will in turn try to enhance its working relationship with Kurdish factions in Syria, Iraq and Turkey to sabotage Turkey's broader containment strategy with the Kurds. Turkey's ongoing struggle in trying to push forward its shaky peace agreement with the Kurdistan Workers' Party and continued economic stress will be exploited by the ruling Justice and Development Party's political opponents, preventing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan from trying to reshape the Turkish presidency through a constitutional referendum with Kurdish backing.
Iraq's Sectarian Tensions to Continue
Sunni militant violence in Iraq will remain at a relatively high but steady level as the overall regional jihadist focus stays on the Syrian battlefield. In northern Iraq, Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government will advance construction on a pipeline and alternate pumping and metering station designed to circumvent Baghdad's veto on Kurdish exports and investment deals with foreign firms. As the project enters its final stage, the long-standing political impediments to the plan will overshadow any announcements on the pipeline's near-completion. Turkey will not be able to convince Baghdad to accept its proposed payment mechanism for exports. Moreover, heightened intra-Kurdish political competition and potential unrest will limit the ability of a divided Kurdish leadership to challenge Baghdad on energy exports this quarter.
Egypt's Military Tries to Combat Militancy
In Egypt, the military's ongoing crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood will radicalize more Islamists and result in a steady increase in low-level attacks on police stations and other state infrastructure across Egypt. An increase in religious violence by radical Islamists against Coptic Christians will be exploited by the military to justify further crackdowns. At the same time, Salafist-jihadists will sustain near-daily attacks against security forces in the Sinai Peninsula. Some of these groups will continue to expand their target set and launch attacks in mainland Egypt and tourist areas. These attacks will be more infrequent, but will have the potential to inflict more casualties and structural damage.
In trying to contain the Salafist-jihadist threat and keep the Islamist political landscape divided, the Egyptian military will maintain relations with Salafist political groups and former jihadists and try to keep them politically engaged with the government and constitutional committee. Political friction within the committee over the drafting of the Constitution will extend the process into next year, prolonging the political transition.
The Egyptian military's growing distraction with Islamist militancy will increase pressure on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where it will see its influence challenged by competing Palestinian and jihadist factions. Faced with limited means to force Egypt or Israel into a negotiation to reopen its borders, Hamas will remain caught between efforts to threaten the Egyptian military by facilitating attacks in the Sinai and an imperative to not completely alienate Cairo.
North Africa: Tensions in Libya, a Succession in Algeria
In Libya, Tripoli will face significant challenges to its authority from regional power centers in Zintan, Misurata and Benghazi. At the same time, the local city councils will struggle in trying to rein in competing militias and tribal groups in their respective regions, resulting in a highly fragmented political landscape overall. Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan will also face external pressure to stabilize the country's political and security environment enough to revive Libya's oil production. However, oil production will continue to fluctuate significantly this quarter as power struggles on multiple levels persist.
Ailing Algerian President Abdulaziz Bouteflika will proceed with the final steps of his succession plan this quarter. Constitutional amendments, including the creation of a vice presidential position, can be expected. Any objections to this carefully choreographed succession plan will be mitigated by increases in social spending.
As Algeria maintains relative calm on the domestic front, it will gradually deepen its involvement in its periphery in response to growing political instability and militancy in both Tunisia and Libya. As Stratfor highlighted in the annual forecast, Algeria will use security cooperation with its neighbors and its energy relationships with the West to strengthen its regional role. In Tunisia, in particular, Algeria will mediate a slow-moving political negotiation, in which the embattled Ennahda party will try to avoid replicating the mistakes of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in seeking a compromise with its political rivals. Morocco, meanwhile, will be inwardly focused as it attempts to balance the implementation of political and subsidy reforms.
Europe
Locator - Europe
Europe Focuses on Finances
After a period of relative paralysis in the lead-up to the German elections over the summer, Europe will be thrown back into a lively debate over the creation of a banking union, the expansion of credit to small and medium-sized companies and the granting of additional financial assistance to crisis countries. The debate itself will expose growing polarization on the Continent as economic pressures migrate north, but little headway will be made in addressing the structural roots of the crisis.
As a first step toward creating a banking union, the European Union agreed last quarter on a centralized bank supervision authority (due to start in 2014). Over the next three months, EU leaders will probably arrive at a generic agreement on the decision-making process for bank resolutions in the eurozone, the so-called Single Resolution Mechanism. However, critical points regarding its implementation will be deferred until next year.
After a quiet summer, high unemployment and lack of credit for small and medium-sized companies will again top the EU agenda. Member states and institutions (such as the European Central Bank and the EU Commission) will issue various proposals designed to fight unemployment and dearth of credit, especially in the eurozone periphery. Though some positive economic indicators will give the impression that the crisis is abating, Stratfor expects unemployment to remain critically high during the quarter and credit for households and companies to remain tight, particularly in the periphery.
EU members will approve their budgets for 2014, which will lead to political friction at the state level. Most countries will push for a relaxation of fiscal consolidation measures, seeking to avoid an escalation in social unrest. The budgets for next year will still primarily involve spending cuts, but they will not be as deep as initially thought. While we expect the European Union to criticize some countries for their lack of reforms, no meaningful sanctions will be applied.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Middle East
Europe
Former Soviet Union
East Asia
South Asia
Latin America
Sub-Saharan Africa
Europe and the Syrian Crisis
France and the United Kingdom, which have been the most vocal EU member states in trying to pressure Syria, will join the United States in its attempt to sustain the diplomatic proposal to destroy Syria's chemical weapons. European member states will lend their diplomatic support for the plan and may pledge to send funds or technical experts and equipment, but will not be willing to play a leading role in providing the security necessary for such a mission. Moreover, after the traumatic experience at the British and French parliaments, London and Paris will not provide troops without formal parliamentary approval. Increased rebel infighting in Syria will complicate and likely delay any proposals to upgrade support for rebel factions with arms shipments.
As the economic crisis in Europe lingers and the civil war in Syria continues, the high flow of Syrian refugees into southern Europe will pressure southern European countries politically and economically. These countries will push for an EU-wide solution for the refugee issue, but to no avail. Nationalist (and, to some extent, center-right) parties in the European Union are likely to use the refugee situation to increase their anti-immigration rhetoric.
The Eurozone's Core: Germany and France
As we identified in the annual forecast, the economic crisis will continue spreading northward in Europe. After relatively positive news in the second quarter, economic performance will remain modest in Germany, weak in France and contracting in the Netherlands.
In the general elections held Sept. 22, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party secured a strong presence in the German parliament, but not enough seats to form a government by itself. Coalition talks with smaller parties will take place during the first weeks of the quarter. As a result, the decision-making process in Germany is likely to be frozen for several weeks, thus delaying the debate over structural reforms at the European level during the first half of the quarter.
France will approve a pension reform this quarter. While this could spark additional protests from some unions, we do not expect demonstrations to derail the approval of the reform. The EU Commission will keep pushing France to apply deep structural reforms, but Paris will keep its gradual and slow approach to reforms, favoring increased taxes over spending cuts.
Peripheral Eurozone: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland
Ireland, Portugal and Greece (three countries that previously received bailouts) will push for additional assistance from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The Irish and Portuguese bailouts end in January and June 2014, respectively, and Dublin and Lisbon will push for extra assistance to secure a safe transition once their programs end. Ireland will probably reach an agreement on a precautionary credit line this quarter, but we do not expect a formal agreement with Portugal in the next three months.
Negotiations between the so-called troika (the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank) and Greece for additional financial assistance for 2014 will take place during the quarter, but an agreement is unlikely this year. Greece will be under pressure to apply additional reforms, including privatizations and layoffs in the public sector, which will spark protests in Athens and other cities. As we predicted in our annual forecast, Athens will continue to struggle to meet its lenders' demands, but the troika will still be lenient and will release further aid tranches under the current program.
In all the bailout countries, visits by troika inspectors will lead to clashes over structural reforms and conditionality between national governments and their international lenders. The lenders will grow more resistant to offering additional financial help as parties aim to show they are protective of their taxpayers, who feel the effects of the crisis as it moves north. Following a trend that we identified in our annual forecast, we expect the European Union and International Monetary Fund to be flexible with crisis countries, and bailout tranches will be disbursed where needed. This will prevent a major financial crisis in the eurozone in the next three months.
The Italian government will remain extremely fragile and under the long-standing threat of collapse. This will undermine its ability to apply substantial economic reforms. The Italian economy will continue to contract during the quarter. While the situation in Italy will generate concerns in the European Union and the financial markets, the European Central Bank's promise of intervention in sovereign markets will be enough to prevent a substantial escalation of the eurozone crisis because of Italy during the quarter.
In Spain, the pace of economic decline will slow, and unemployment levels will probably stabilize, but significant job creation is unlikely during the quarter. The Spanish government is likely to approve a reform of the pension system during the quarter as it seeks to reduce public spending. Any resulting protests will not impede Madrid from proceeding with the reform. As a corruption scandal involving the Popular Party deepens, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy will reshuffle his Cabinet in an effort to refresh his government's image. However, this will do little to improve the ruling party's popular support.
Beyond the Eurozone: Hungary, Poland and the United Kingdom
In a continuation of Hungary's unorthodox economic policies, Budapest will apply a plan to convert foreign-denominated loans into forints. Additionally, as the elections scheduled for early 2014 approach, Budapest will intensify its populist and anti-European Union rhetoric and increase public spending. EU officials and banks operating in Hungary will protest these measures and rhetoric, but we do not expect any substantial sanctions against Budapest.
The political situation in Poland will remain fragile during this quarter, as Prime Minister Donald Tusk attempts to strengthen his government through new alliances with smaller parties and independent lawmakers. Tusk will try to stabilize the government with a Cabinet reshuffle, but its popularity is likely to remain low. Moreover, former members of the ruling Civic Platform party will establish new factions, and the opposition and labor unions will intensify their rallies against the government's economic policies. Despite these pressures, Tusk will be able to remain in power during the quarter.
In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron will use criticism of the European Union to try to appease the more rebellious members of his coalition and compensate for a drop in support following his government's failure to approve a military intervention in Syria. Intra-coalition frictions will remain high, but Cameron's government will survive the quarter. On the EU level, Cameron's government will continue its anti-immigration rhetoric and its push for a re-evaluation of its links with the European Union.
Former Soviet Union
Locator - Former Soviet Union
Diplomacy Over Syria
The United States and Russia will sustain a diplomatic arrangement over Syria through this quarter. The details of the U.S.-Russian plan for the elimination of chemical weapons in Syria are still vague enough that both the United States and Russia can manipulate the plan to avoid another major standoff. Russia will manage the diplomatic negotiations in such a way that Washington will remain dependent on Moscow for the sustainability of the plan.
The Kremlin will try to play up its diplomatic success in striking an agreement with the United States over Syria to divert attention away from a deteriorating economic situation at home. Moscow can also leverage the negotiations over Syria to keep Washington from bolstering Europe's efforts to expand its influence into a number of former Soviet states.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Middle East
Europe
Former Soviet Union
East Asia
South Asia
Latin America
Sub-Saharan Africa
Russia-EU Competition in the Periphery
The fourth quarter will be important for the intensifying competition between Russia and the European Union for influence in the Russian periphery. A summit of the Eastern Partnership in Vilnius at the end of November is designed to increase political and economic cooperation between the European Union and the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The European Union has expressed hopes that several countries will either initial or sign association and free trade agreements during the summit, but Russia will take steps to dissuade the target states from further integration with Europe. Moldova and Georgia are likely to move forward with the EU agreements, while Ukraine -- the most important state in the competition -- will balance any movement toward the Europeans with concessions to Russia, particularly in the energy sector. Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan -- states with which Russia has increased ties -- will not enter into association and free trade agreements with Europe.
Caught in the middle of the EU push toward Russia's periphery is Germany, which is more cautious about such EU integration projects than Poland or Lithuania. Berlin has shown in the past that it will block any major Western move to integrate certain former Soviet states into its alliances, as it did when Germany blocked NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008. Poland will take the lead among Central European states in making an appeal for the United States to become more involved in the region, but, to the Poles' disappointment, the United States will be more cautious in balancing against Russia this quarter.
Domestic Russian Issues
The Kremlin will be heavily focused in the fourth quarter on its economic situation. The country's gross domestic product has dropped with each passing quarter this year. Russia's economic troubles have not reached the level of its 2009 financial crisis, though stagnation has already set in due to tight financial conditions facing the private sector (exacerbated by capital flight and high interest rates), a significant drop in export values, relatively high inflation and significantly decreased investment into Russia. As a result, the government has revised its growth expectations down to 1.8 percent from 3.4 percent for 2013. This will represent a significant slowdown from 2011 and 2012, when growth was above 4 percent.
Starting in the late third quarter, the Kremlin maintained high interest rates in order to control inflation and began implementing other policies, such as pricing caps in energy and transportation. An increase in hiring in the public sector has compensated for job losses in the private sector. These policy shifts will continue into the fourth quarter. The most important driver of growth in the fourth quarter will be increased investment, primarily through the implementation of stimulus packages that will see the Kremlin pump billions into expanding ports, roads and railways. Even as private businesses struggle, the Russian government still has the cash to spend due to high oil prices.
The Kremlin will also debate in the fourth quarter how it will trim at least 5 percent of the 2013 government budget through possible cuts to military expenditures or by tapping Russia's reserve funds, which total $685 billion. The government will also revise downward its budget and spending in the fourth quarter for 2014-2016, as the Kremlin is anticipating drops in future energy revenues. The Kremlin's policies to keep the Russian economy stable in the short term will have negative long-term consequences, particularly in future investment in the energy sector and in military industrial procurement -- both sectors that the Kremlin uses to expand its influence beyond its borders.
With only four months until the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, the Kremlin will remain highly cautious on domestic security issues. Crackdowns against suspected militants in the Russian Caucasus republics will continue. Russian security forces in Moscow, the primary transit point for most travelers attending the Olympics, will broaden their target set to include militants, criminals and illegal migrants in crackdowns.
Shifting Geopolitics in the Caucasus
Presidential elections in Azerbaijan and Georgia this quarter will underscore the regional shift in Moscow's favor that Stratfor has tracked in previous forecasts. The Georgian elections likely will end the decade-long hold on power that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's camp has maintained, resulting in a closer relationship between Georgia and Russia. This reorientation, combined with the beginning of Armenia's integration with Russia via the Customs Union, will compel Azerbaijan to cooperate more closely with Russia on political and energy matters.
Central Asian Instability
Central Asia will continue to see low-level violence and political instability in the fourth quarter. Particularly at risk is Tajikistan, which will hold presidential elections in November. These elections will test stability in the country from a security perspective and could re-aggravate regional divisions (especially in the rebel strongholds in the east) amid concerns over the implications of the drawdown of U.S. and NATO forces from neighboring Afghanistan.
East Asia
Locator - East Asia
China Launches its Reform Agenda
As we wrote in the annual forecast, China will struggle to balance between the competing domestic needs for economic growth and reforming its economic model. By letting annual gross domestic product growth slip to the mid-7 percent range this year, the Communist Party of China has attempted to show its greater tolerance for the short-term effects of slower growth (such as rising unemployment) for the sake of shifting from an economic model overly reliant on exports and state-led investment to one grounded in greater domestic consumption.
But the fourth quarter, like the third, will show that such tolerance has its limits. In the coming months, Beijing will shift between measures to prop up weak sectors and other measures to tighten monetary and credit policy and better control the increasingly volatile shadow lending and real estate markets. The ability to tighten may be aided in the near term by the seasonal uptick in external demand for Chinese exports, temporarily relieving some of the pressures on Chinese manufacturers pinched between rising costs and competition from overseas. Nonetheless, this will not forestall the deeper trend of decline in China's export sector, nor will it remove the economy's continued reliance on state-led investment. In the fourth quarter, the government will ease credit conditions as needed to maintain stability and growth in the short term, even if doing so runs counter to long-term efforts to rebalance the economy.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Middle East
Europe
Former Soviet Union
East Asia
South Asia
Latin America
Sub-Saharan Africa
The Chinese government's ongoing tactical struggle to balance investment-led growth against small, targeted reform initiatives will be overshadowed in the fourth quarter by the Third Plenum of the Communist Party. At the November meeting, President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang will introduce the reform platform that will guide their administration's domestic policy over the next five years. The reforms will include relaxing the hukou system to improve living conditions for migrant workers and create a more flexible, mobile labor force; adjusting the fiscal relationship between central and local governments to give locals more responsibility over their budgets; and enacting financial liberalization to make capital allocation more efficient.
Beijing will be slow and cautious in implementing each of these new policies, and any concrete effects probably will not be felt until well into 2014. Regardless, the Plenum meeting in November will be an important moment for the Party to establish the direction and credibility, both at home and abroad, of its planned reforms. It will also help clarify the nature and scope of economic reform that the administration deems possible within the constraints of a one-party system.
Regional Responses to China's Transition
As we forecast at the beginning of the year, China's transition away from its two-decade reign as the world's leading low-end manufacturer will have enormous ripple effects in the region. The fourth quarter will provide a microcosm of those effects.
The region's emerging economies, including Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia, will continue trying to capitalize on the gradual shift of manufacturing investment away from China. But they are facing a more immediate challenge as exports and commodity prices fall, since these were key factors in the region's prosperity over the past decade. China's slower growth rates are thus forcing another turnaround to growth prospects.
Adding to the pressure is the ongoing concern over the United States' eventual withdrawal of easy monetary policies. While the Federal Reserve decided to delay the withdrawal of quantitative easing in September, the inevitable transition will pressure countries to begin adjusting their policies now.
In the next quarter, Indonesia will face weakening energy exports while currency volatility continues to threaten its efforts to bring down inflation and policymakers become increasingly preoccupied with elections scheduled for 2014. Falling external demand is exacerbating Thailand's slowing economy, which has already entered a technical recession, creating another challenge for the ruling party as it struggles with national divisions.
Malaysia, while better situated in the current correction cycle, nonetheless needs to cope with its rising deficit while managing internal party politics and rising ethno-political divisions. For Vietnam, despite signs of recovery, the ruling party will struggle to maintain stability while pressing forward with restructuring efforts centering on improving efficiency in state corporations and clearing debts away from the financial sector.
Japan's Revitalization
In the coming quarter, Japan will take advantage of a rare moment of government unity and public support to pursue domestic reforms and burnish its international prestige. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will balance his proposed structural reforms with measures to maintain short-term growth. Under his party's leadership, the parliament will vote on bills intended to spur corporate investment and internal competition, including a plan to break up the power sector oligopoly over the next decade.
Japanese diplomacy will seek to improve relations particularly with India, Russia, and emerging markets in Europe and the Asia-Pacific states as Tokyo attempts to expand infrastructure exports, energy investments and free trade deals. Meanwhile, Tokyo will speed up military normalization by boosting defense spending, creating a National Security Council to coordinate diplomacy and military affairs, and broadening its range of military activities with the United States and other allies.
The government will also ignite debate as it discusses a new national security strategy, revisions to defense guidelines and a reinterpretation of the Constitution that allows for collective self-defense. These policies face resistance from vested interests opposed to structural reform, public disagreement on the scope of military expansion and ongoing problems managing nuclear issues. But the Abe administration will maintain policy momentum this quarter and project an image of a revitalized Japan.
Balancing Against China's Assertiveness
In the fourth quarter, two themes will give prominence to the regional responses to China's military modernization and territorial assertiveness identified in our annual forecast. First, U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to the Asia-Pacific region will demonstrate Washington's commitment to the region through its trade and security agenda. Second, China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will continue to address their maritime disputes through the slow process of negotiating on an official Code of Conduct for the South China Sea.
The Obama administration will show determination in developing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a key trade framework, when the president attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. As a number of highly sensitive particulars remain unresolved, the negotiations and framework will require a host of compromises and concessions. But Washington is courting the Southeast Asian nations and other regional partners with its trade agenda as it positions itself to take a greater role in the region, per its "pivot" strategy.
Washington will also continue to work with allies to enhance its security presence in the region. The fourth quarter will see a U.S. agreement with the Philippines that could allow U.S. forces to gain greater access to the Philippines' military bases and to step up training and exercises. The growing U.S. military presence could further complicate the maritime environment in the long term. In the fourth quarter, despite the slow process on the Code of Conduct between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, rhetorical exchanges and tensions in the East and South China seas will continue to dominate the security environment, particularly ahead of regional summits.
Developments in Myanmar and Cambodia
Myanmar has continued to open up its nascent economy in a way that has gained credibility with international investors. In a move critical to the country's economic transformation, Naypyidaw will push forward its proposed cease-fire with ethnic armies in the fourth quarter. But as the rainy season draws to a close, freeing up the military option for Napyidaw, the slow progress of cease-fire negotiations is likely to translate into an offensive against a few ethnic armies. Thus, Naypyidaw will not abandon its dual strategy of military offensives and peace negotiations.
In Cambodia, a political settlement is likely to alleviate the current political deadlock and tense security situation. Nonetheless, the opposition's strong showing in recent elections could open a longer-term rise in political tensions as the ruling party struggles to retain political domination while winning back public support and accommodating the interests of the opposition, which has gained prominence and support.
South Asia
New Delhi's Economic Challenges
Economic issues will dominate India's concerns in the fourth quarter as the country continues to face significant domestic political gridlock ahead of national elections in 2014. Agricultural output and hydropower projects will benefit from this year's bumper seasonal monsoon rains, but inflation, especially of key food prices for goods such as onions, will continue to challenge the ruling United Progressive Alliance's attempts to manage the domestic economy amid lagging foreign investor interest and the fluctuating value of the rupee.
The U.S. Federal Reserve's decision not to taper off quantitative easing will bring some relief to India and other emerging markets, but New Delhi will struggle to stymie inflows of hot money in lieu of the more permanent infrastructure and development investment it needs. The United Progressive Alliance government will attempt to pass more foreign direct investment liberalization reforms and economic measures through the winter session of parliament, but strong resistance from opposition political forces led by the Bharatiya Janata Party ahead of 2014 elections will reduce the effectiveness of these measures.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Middle East
Europe
Former Soviet Union
East Asia
South Asia
Latin America
Sub-Saharan Africa
India's External Relations
Beyond its borders, India will continue to work with countries within its periphery -- Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh and Nepal -- in an attempt to prevent the erosion of its sphere of influence. Most of these countries will balance against Indian attempts to influence their domestic policy by pursuing development and trade plans with China.
New Delhi will reinforce security forces along its eastern border to limit the effects of Bangladesh's domestic destabilization, specifically the steady outflow of illegal immigrants, on the security and social stability of West Bengal and northeastern India.
New Delhi and Islamabad will continue a slow but deliberate dialogue as the NATO drawdown of troops in Afghanistan approaches, though no breakthroughs should be expected. Iran's efforts to renegotiate the current unfavorable terms in its energy deals with India amid its diplomatic outreach to the United States could contribute to some friction in the Indo-Iranian relationship even as the countries maintain robust energy ties.
A stabilizing domestic economy -- even temporarily -- will again allow for Indian state and private energy firms to pursue energy assets abroad. As India continues to normalize relations with China, New Delhi is expected to resume negotiations with Japan and Australia regarding nuclear cooperation, trade and regional issues of mutual concern, namely energy and China.
Growing Instability in Bangladesh
The current government's term expires Oct. 25, ushering in another period of uncertainty in Bangladesh's difficult post-independence history. The ruling Awami League has seen some of its support falter since it was elected in 2008 with a landslide of popular support. However, it has made military-backed caretaker regimes -- once a hallmark of Bangladesh's political system -- unconstitutional, and the upper body of the Supreme Court is currently made up entirely of Awami League nominees. Thus, the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party will attempt to create a level of public unrest and political instability sufficient to force the army to re-enter the political scene and oversee fresh elections and the transition period between the outgoing ninth and future 10th parliament session.
The ruling Awami League will most likely attempt a negotiation with the military and opposition that aims for fresh elections and a transitional period on its own terms to prevent a military intervention. Though elections can take place anytime within 90 days following the dissolution of the current government, conditions probably will not allow a vote to be held before the end of 2013.
Clashes between supporters of the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, including Islamist groups such as the recently sanctioned Jamaat-e-Islami, can be expected in the fourth quarter. Bangladesh's textiles and manufacturing operations could be affected, but long-term disruptions in production and exports are unlikely. Both sides of the political spectrum rely on the garments sector's significant contributions to the Bangladeshi economy.
Sri Lanka's Balancing Act
The strong local showing of the Tamil National Alliance in September's provincial council elections will force the Rajapaksa administration to balance between northern demands for greater autonomy and the ruling Sinhalese imperative to maintain firm control over the entirety of the island. This will complicate President Mahinda Rajapaksa's efforts to modify the Constitution's 13th Amendment, which allows for significant self-rule under the provincial council system. Colombo will try to undermine Tamil autonomy through indirect channels, such as the Supreme Court, and by working to maintain a strong security presence in the north and east. At the same time, Colombo will balance this strategy with offers of economic and infrastructure development, funded by foreign investors including China, to better integrate Tamil areas with the rest of the island.
As India moves closer to its own national elections, Sri Lanka's internal Sinhalese-Tamil divide will become a rallying point for politicians seeking votes in India's state of Tamil Nadu. New Delhi and Colombo will manage these domestic pressures as both sides try to redefine a relationship strained by India's decadeslong support of northern Tamil militant separatists.
Pakistan's Troubled Negotiations with the Taliban
Pakistan's attention will be split in the fourth quarter between trying to manage the cross-border Taliban insurgency and the country's deepening economic problems. Islamabad will struggle to facilitate a negotiated settlement between the Afghan Taliban and Kabul while engaging in a dialogue with its own Taliban rebels. It will be harder for Islamabad to try to negotiate with the Pakistani Taliban, as militants in Pakistan are likely to step up attacks in an attempt to boost their leverage in talks. The Pakistani establishment will also be divided in how to proceed with talks; the army, which is undergoing a leadership transition, will resist Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's plan.
A small boost in relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan after Islamabad's recent release of a former deputy of Mullah Mohammed Omar, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, will help facilitate negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. However, that negotiation will still be constrained by an intensification in President Hamid Karzai's efforts to put forth a preferred candidate for the presidential elections scheduled for April 2014.
The Sharif government in Pakistan will put forth proposals to improve tax collection and power generation, but progress on both of these fronts will remain limited. Building upon the Sept. 5 signing of a three-year, $6.7 billion International Monetary Fund package, the government will also unveil a new national strategy to modernize the economy in an attempt to attract foreign investment. Militant violence, however, will largely keep investors away, especially given the uncertainty of post-2014 Afghanistan.
Latin America
Locator - Latin America
Mexico's Push for Reforms
As anticipated, Mexico's ruling party -- the Institutional Revolutionary Party -- presented its tax and energy proposals to the public in the third quarter. While tax reform will likely pass in the coming months, reaching a conclusive agreement on the comparatively more controversial energy reform will likely extend into 2014. The leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party will unsuccessfully try to sink the bill, while the conservative National Action Party will condition its support on the passage of electoral reform.
Stratfor suggested in the annual forecast that the energy reform could result in the implementation of production-sharing agreements. According to the Institutional Revolutionary Party's proposal, profit-sharing, not production-sharing, agreements will be the middle-ground licensing scheme to balance the interests of more left-leaning elements within the party with those of the National Action Party, with which an alliance is necessary for approval.
Mexico will continue to see a fragmentation and reorganization of its major organized crime networks, particularly among the Zetas and the Gulf cartel, both of which have had top commanders killed or arrested in recent months. Stratfor originally forecast that the government would attempt to increase control over the local-level law enforcement bodies by implementing the so-called "Mando Unico," or "Unified Command," and by rolling out a new gendarmerie in 2013. Nationwide implementation of the Mando Unico is highly unlikely in the next three months. The rolling-out of the gendarmerie has been delayed and is unlikely to occur by the end of the year.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Middle East
Europe
Former Soviet Union
East Asia
South Asia
Latin America
Sub-Saharan Africa
Colombia Continues Talks with Rebels, Farmers
Neither a definitive peace deal nor a complete breakdown in the negotiations with Colombia's largest rebel group -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- is likely to occur by the end of the year. Negotiators may reach a deal on the second point of negotiation -- political participation -- but the rebels will continue to drag out the process as long as possible while continuing to attack energy infrastructure and the military in the periphery. The Colombian government will continue preparing to initiate formal peace talks with the country's second-largest rebel group -- the National Liberation Army -- though a breakthrough by the end of the year is unlikely.
In the previous quarter, we underestimated the momentum behind the Colombian agricultural producers' protests. The protests have moderated but could reappear in the final quarter if the government does not make good on its promises. The government will do everything in its power to reduce social unrest ahead of the legislative elections in March 2014 and the presidential elections in May 2014, but will not heed protesters' calls to reverse the recently implemented free trade agreements with the United States and European Union.
Venezuela Struggles with Economic Woes
The Maduro administration in Venezuela will spend the remainder of 2013 attempting to stabilize the country's dire economic situation and ameliorate persistent challenges such as food shortages, declining central bank reserves, limited access to foreign currency, crumbling infrastructure and high inflation. The government will make piecemeal adjustments to the economic system but will ultimately stop short of radically changing the direction of the economy.
One of these measures will be the development of yet another currency exchange system, the details of which will likely be announced by year's end. This mechanism will complement the Commission for the Administration of Currency Exchange and Complementary System Administration of Foreign Exchange mechanisms already in place and attempt to allocate foreign exchange more effectively, at a more market-determined rate. Nevertheless, foreign exchange will remain scarce, and high inflation will persist.
With broad support in the National Assembly, President Nicolas Maduro may try to pass an enabling law by the end of the year, which will grant him extraordinary powers and the ability to pass decrees without the approval of the National Assembly. Even if Maduro decides to pass the controversial law, it will not free him from the fundamental political and economic constraints inherited from his predecessor.
Brazil Focuses on Economic Stability
Brazil's policymakers will spend the fourth quarter of 2013 focusing on the country's economy amid a turbulent global economic environment. The stewards of the Brazilian economy will attempt to prevent increasing inflation and currency fluctuations, even at the expense of economic growth. The Central Bank of Brazil will continue to intervene in the currency derivative markets where necessary to shore up the value of the real, especially so if the U.S. Federal Reserve begins its slow taper of quantitative easing, and will likely raise the benchmark interest rate if inflation remains high. The government may raise the price of subsidized fuel to ease pressures on state-controlled energy firm Petroleo Brasileiro.
In the fourth quarter, the Brazilian government will continue its efforts to attract investment into its energy and infrastructure sectors. The country will hold its long-anticipated auction of pre-salt hydrocarbon deposits Oct. 21. This is the first round of pre-salt licensing since the new regulatory framework was put into place and will serve as a litmus test for future investor interest. In late November, Brazil will hold its first auction of unconventional shale gas deposits onshore, and in December, the government will attempt to auction off its several road and rail concessions to improve its transportation infrastructure. While these auctions will continue to face bureaucratic hurdles and delays and could struggle to attract sufficient investor interest, they nonetheless bring the country one step closer to increasing energy production and decreasing the country's infrastructure deficit.
Argentina Faces Elections, Tough Economic Climate
Argentina will hold its midterm parliamentary elections Oct. 27, signaling an inflection point in the country's domestic politics. Due to the underwhelming performance of the ruling party in the August primaries, the prospect of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's Front for Victory party gaining the two-thirds majority needed to allow for Fernandez' re-election is now negligible. This legislative election will begin a two-year process culminating in the 2015 elections characterized by intense political maneuvering as both the Fernandez camp and opposition factions position themselves for the succession.
In the wake of the elections, with less urgency to keep growth up and prices down, the Argentine government will make minor adjustments to long-neglected economic issues to prevent an economic crisis from further damaging the president's legacy and the electoral chances of her successor. Nevertheless, Central Bank reserves will continue falling, the currency will remain distorted, monetary expansion will continue to fuel high inflation, and public spending will remain high.
Finally, the government will continue to negotiate with energy firms to stimulate investment in the sector and attempt to increase domestic production. Despite the Neuquen provincial legislature's approval of Chevron's $1.2 billion investment and a raft of financial incentives in August, the response from international energy firms has been and will continue to be lukewarm as a result of general wariness about the Argentine government's role in the economy and energy sector. Select deals could be signed, but a general reversal in investor sentiment on the Argentine market is unlikely in 2013.
Mercosur Changes Stall
In the annual and third quarter forecast, Stratfor posited both that Paraguay would rejoin Mercosur after the inauguration of now-President Horacio Cartes, and that Ecuador and Bolivia would become Mercosur's new members. While both trends are still developing, our timing appears to be off. Paraguay's re-entry has been approved by the customs union's full members, but the country has delayed re-entry. Because Paraguay still enjoys Mercosur's trade benefits, the urgency to rejoin as a full member was considerably less than we anticipated. Ecuador and Bolivia's progress toward Mercosur membership has been slower than predicted and is not likely to occur in 2013. In the fourth quarter, Brazil will continue its efforts to reach a trade agreement with the European Union. Brazil is expected to present to the rest of Mercosur a proposal for a Mercosur-EU trade agreement in October. Even if this is tactic is unsuccessful, Brazil will push Mercosur to make tariff reductions on raw materials to bring down industrial costs.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
South Africa Manages Strikes Ahead of Elections
South Africa's ruling African National Congress will use the fourth quarter to build up its re-election campaign ahead of national elections scheduled for April 2014. The country will wrap up its strike season with wage agreements in the mining sector (no agreement has been reached for coal miners as of yet) and other industrial sectors. There may be a brief strike or two in the early weeks of the quarter, but these will be manageable. The government will use wage agreements that balance labor and private industry interests to show voters it is the best-qualified political manager of the country's economy. Political rhetoric by South African opposition parties will attempt to portray the African National Congress as failing to fulfill socioeconomic expectations, but the ruling party will counter these claims as insubstantial and coming from narrow elite interests.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Middle East
Europe
Former Soviet Union
East Asia
South Asia
Latin America
Sub-Saharan Africa
Nigeria Prepares for Party Primary Elections
Nigeria will see heightened political rhetoric geared toward political party leadership primaries to be held next year. The ruling People's Democratic Party will likely hold its primary in December 2014 ahead of national elections in April 2015, but political frictions and campaigning will commence well ahead of those dates. The political future of incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan will be at the center of the political debate as rifts within the ruling party persist in the fourth quarter. To avoid losing political influence, Jonathan will conduct a campaign as if he is running for re-election. Although he will not formally announce his candidacy, he will promote his right to stand for re-election. Jonathan will also be hesitant to push through controversial legislation, notably the Petroleum Industry Bill, as he seeks to avoid further opposition to his administration.
The political debate will extend into the militant sphere, as politically motivated violence continues unabated in the oil-producing Niger Delta region and in northern Nigeria. Neither the Niger Delta militants nor Boko Haram militants operating in the north are expected to launch attacks outside of their core areas of operation.
Mozambique Anticipates Violence Ahead of Vote
Mozambique also will see a rise in political agitation and low-level violence ahead of national elections, which are scheduled for October 2014. The ruling Mozambique Liberation Front party faces an emerging challenge to its authority because of the recent development of significant natural resources -- coal and natural gas -- in territory controlled by the opposition Mozambique National Resistance party. The government wants to profit from these resources through definitive investment decisions, especially by international energy companies in the offshore natural gas sector, which will be made during the fourth quarter. Although violence will be infrequent, popular agitation including protests stirred up by the Mozambique National Resistance will lead the ruling party to begin adjusting its unilateral decision-making style to include opposition concerns and inclusion in government decision-making and spending.
East Africa Focuses on Infrastructure
East African countries will advance plans for infrastructure projects that facilitate greater economic integration. Because of the amount of capital required and the length of time it takes to rehabilitate and construct new infrastructure ranging from ports to rail to roads, planning for projects in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda will advance, but the projects will remain in early stages of development. Greater regional coordination will lead the "northern corridor" from Kenya's port at Mombasa to the Great Lakes region to see more advanced planning and development than the "southern corridor" linking Tanzania's ports at Dar es Salaam and Bagamoyo with central Africa.
A Relative Calm in Mali
Mali will see a calmer security situation in the final quarter of the year. Considerable foreign political, economic and security support will continue during the quarter and beyond, as will governance consultations within Mali among ethnic groups. Jihadists in Mali will not be able to unite into a strategic threat, though surviving members of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb could still carry out infrequent attacks in the Sahel and Maghreb regions.
Sudan, South Sudan Reach an Understanding
Sudan and South Sudan will maintain cautious cooperation with each other as crude oil drilled in South Sudan is exported via Sudanese pipelines. There will be an attempt in the fourth quarter to resolve the issue of sovereignty over the disputed Abyei region, with a possible referendum in Abyei as early as October. Sudan will try to retain influence over the region, and especially its oil revenues, through efforts to inflate the population of pro-Sudanese voters in the region and through Abyei's longer-term dependence on pipelines running through Sudan.
Operations Against al Shabaab Continue in Somalia
In Somalia, Kenyan and African Union peacekeepers will increase their efforts to degrade the capabilities of al Shabaab militants. Kenyan and other African military forces in Somalia, supported by foreign intelligence providers, will try to hunt down al Shabaab leader Abdi Ahmed Godane following Godane's likely instigation of the September attack on Kenya's Westgate shopping mall. Al Shabaab could attempt guerrilla attacks on soft targets in Somalia this quarter, but will mostly avoid large-scale confrontations to try to preserve its leadership and fighting capabilities.
-
Third post of the day:
I'm really laying on a heavy reading load in this thread today!
Jude Wanniski is the extraordinary supply side economist who wrote "The Way the World Works", a book which influenced not only me greatly but was also called by the WSJ, where he wrote during the heyday of its editorial page in the 80s and 90s, as "one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century". Unfortunately towards the end of his life (2005?) he veered towards crackpottery, anti-semitism, and was a propagandist for Saddam Hussein in the run up to his overthrow. Nonetheless his earlier writings, which were untainted by such nonsense, retain their value.
Marc
============================================
August 24, 1995
AN AMERICAN EMPIRE
By Jude Wanniski
The end of the Cold War in 1991 marked not only the end of the Soviet experiment in communism, but also the dawn of a unique epoch in the history of civilization. For the first time since all of humankind lived in the Garden of Eden, there is now only one nation alone on earth that clearly sits atop the global pyramid of power. Throughout the history of the world, there have always been several national experiments in political economy underway at the same time. Even at the peak of the Roman Empire`s dominance of its portion of the civilized world, other empires thrived in Asia, Africa and in the western hemisphere. In a quest for an ideal, each was experiencing a variant form of governance, testing separate evolutions of social, cultural and economic organization. In the Pax Britannica of the 19th century, England was the dominant imperial power in its realm, on which the sun never set. Neither the United States nor Russia were under its sway, however. The U.S. was engaged in its own experiment in political economy, while czarist Russia was still attempting to make dynastic capitalism work.
These trial-and-error strivings for perfection continue today around the planet, but for the moment the United States alone dominates the entire world`s experimentation in organization. Without exception, every nation-state looks up to the United States as the undisputed leader in history`s long march. Each wishes to know what we have in mind. How shall we proceed to organize ourselves in this new American empire? What is the nature of the new world order that accompanies the first singular leader in all of history? How shall we go about determining the limitations on our powers and the extent of our responsibilities? The questions are different than any we have ever encountered, requiring that our people think about the world differently than we ever have before. There is no historic guidebook to help us at this frontier of boundless opportunity. All the rules have been written for a world of adversarial divisions. This means we must think through with extraordinary care the steps we take and the paths we choose. Major missteps can only mean we will lose this preeminence and find new power pyramids forming to challenge our leadership. To avoid that possible occurrence, we might first do well to think through where we have been.
At the start of the 20th century, the newer democratic structures of the United Kingdom, France and the United States were still in competition with the dynastic forms that had prevailed throughout the history of civilization, chiefly in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Russia, China and Japan. The First World War essentially ended dynastic rule as a serious competitor to democratic rule. The world was left with three major forms of democracy, according to its broadest definition -- a system that theoretically allows any citizen, including those of the lowest birth, to rise to political leadership of the nation. In other words, leadership emerging from the common pool. Prior to the industrial revolution that began in the 18th century, there were never sufficient resources to educate entire populations from birth in preparation for leadership. The masses permitted themselves to be taxed in order to finance the educations of a small elite, who would be able to guide them through adversity. This pattern was broken with the French Revolution, coincident with popular rebellion against the use of the increased national wealth to finance a leisure class instead of relevant political leadership. As more national wealth was freed to educate a larger share of the population, the selection pool for political leadership was broadened. In the West, religious leadership was drawn from the common pool beginning with Moses, a man of ordinary birth who by a quirk of fate was educated by the dynastic elite to where he could liberate his people. With the birth of Christ, the masses demonstrated that from among them a spiritual messiah could arise without the help of a dynastic elite.
From the French Revolution through the 19th century, there was an acceleration of the process, by which the selection pool for leadership positions in all aspects of society was broadened. Ordinary people demonstrated a willingness to die in battle in order to preserve the gains of this expansion of democracy. At the armistice of WWI, the United States found itself atop one of the three power pyramids, representing the nations considered the capitalist democracies. The Soviet Union emerged as the leader of the socialist democracies. Germany emerged as the leader of the fascist democracies. The term democracy seems discordant when linked with socialism and fascism, because we equate democracy with competitive elections in multi-party systems. Yet socialist and fascist democracies draw their leadership from the broad, common pool. The difference is that their competitive elections occur in one-party systems, with individuals advancing up the ranks as they do in corporate democracies. Alas, except where mandatory retirement rules are observed, such corporate democrats who rise to the top tend to stay there until removed by death or force of arms. WWI was supposed to be the war that would end all wars, making the world safe for democracy. The assumption was that democracies would always find ways to settle their national differences with peaceful instruments. The Wilsonian concept of a League of Nations, which embodied that ideal, obviously assumed too much. Our own democracy almost did not survive the differences, north and south, on the slavery question.
The three power pyramids were unable to contain their differences and were driven to the use of force, first in World War II, in which the capitalist and socialist powers teamed to defeat the fascist. This left the two remaining power pyramids to compete. The coincident discovery of the atomic bomb in the United States -- led by émigrés from the fascist states -- changed the history of warfare, making it impossible for the two remaining power blocs to settle their differences through direct confrontation. In the Cold War, so named to distinguish this new form of global antagonism, lower levels of force were used in the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan as well as in lesser skirmishes in Africa and South America. The Cold War ended with the economic exhaustion of the socialist democracies. Gueorgui Markossov, who was political counselor of the Soviet Embassy in Washington as the Cold War came to an end, believes the single event that most discouraged his superiors in Moscow was their observation that even as the U.S. budget deficit was rising during the Reagan arms buildup, taxes had been cut and interest rates were falling. "It seemed like magic," says Markossov, now an official with the International Monetary Fund in Washington.
With this triumph, the United States and its style of democratic capitalism now extends its reach, its example and its influence to every corner of the planet, without any apparent threat to its national security. Our ever-vigilant national security watchdogs continue to imagine potential military threats, but in each instance these appear to be relatively trivial residual problems of the Cold War. Having faced down a Soviet menace of 10,000 nuclear warheads, our military leaders are not really worried about a bomb being acquired by a North Korea or Iran or some other straggler from the Cold War chess games. The chief reason Americans admire General Colin Powell, I think, is that he understands these pipsqueak adversaries will not use weapons of mass destruction against us unless we try to annihilate them. It was this wisdom that led Powell to call off the "turkey shoot" in Iraq, refusing to heed the urgings of our most ferocious hawks that we mow down Saddam Hussein`s Republican Guard, capture Baghdad and destroy Saddam himself.
It was enough that we demonstrate a willingness to shed American blood to end Iraq`s aggression against its neighbors, once it became clear that Iraq`s neighbors themselves were prepared to shed the blood of their children to halt the aggression. If President George Bush had rejected General Powell`s advice, we might well have achieved our objectives with small additional loss of American lives. The lesson would have been double-edged, however. Observing the awesome, unforgiving might of the United States, every little country in the world would have been forced to think about acquiring a weapon of mass destruction, with which to threaten an America bent on annihilation of their leaders and armed forces in similar circumstances. Just as we understood in the Cold War that our weakness could be provocative to an adventurous and expansive USSR, every nation-state would be alarmed by an American government that displayed carelessness in its use of force. If our own citizens reacted violently against our federal government, following Waco and Ruby Ridge, why should we expect foreigners to exercise restraint? A bullying Uncle Sam invites private militias at home and defensive secret weapons projects abroad.
The concept of empire throughout history has had at its core a central authority`s protection of a diversity of people. Empires were always meant to embrace and harmonize myriad cultures, religions, ethnicities, languages. Smaller and weaker groupings of people willingly submit to a central authority if the advantages of membership outweigh the costs. The just application of a protective cloak is paramount in such relationships and remains so today. The Soviet Union, the "Evil Empire," as President Reagan termed it in 1982, began with an idyllic vision of harmony and diversity, in a communal dictatorship of the proletariat. Its decline and fall resulted from the central authority`s ascending taxation of individual freedoms even as collective benefits steadily declined. On the other hand, since its unconditional surrender in August 1945, Japan has been relatively comfortable under the protective cloak of the American imperium. There are inevitable frictions having to do with commercial engagements and burden sharing. At times these seem to strain to the breaking point, especially as our government tests Tokyo`s submissiveness. Invariably, though, the Japanese people to this point have been satisfied with the justice available in our imperium. It was our government that backed down earlier this year in our latest trade confrontation, when Tokyo refused to dictate our terms to their auto industry. In addition, their own democracy is transparent enough to persuade us that there is no hidden intent in Japan to develop weapons of mass destruction.
For the American Empire to succeed in producing a Pax Americana in the 21st century, we must first recognize that a posture appropriate in a world at war is inappropriate in a world at peace. In the past half century of Cold War, diplomacy was always an important adjunct to our military might. In reorganizing our thoughts for this unique epoch, it is military might that must play the ancillary role to that of creative diplomacy. Japan, for example, has less reason to bend to our will for military considerations. For that matter, so does the rest of the world. The considerations are now more subtle, having to do with the trust we can command in managing the peace. The face the United States presents to the entire world should be smiling, open, generous rather than glowering, dark, and threatening. (Father is in the background, ready to discipline if necessary; Mother is in the foreground, offering to teach.) House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is struggling to find his way in this direction, refers to himself as a "cheap hawk." Jack Kemp, another global optimist, says he is a "heavily armed dove." Yet neither has really broken from the Cold War perspective that has shaped their political careers. They are still quick to rattle sabers and the B-2 flying brontosaurus. This widespread perspective is not satisfied that U.S. spending on national defense is greater than the rest of the world combined. Old habits die hard.
-
Pasting here Big Dog's post from Rants and Interesting Thought Pieces.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-the-nation-state.html?ref=opinion
From the article:
One scenario, “Nonstate World,” imagined a planet in which urbanization, technology and capital accumulation had brought about a landscape where governments had given up on real reforms and had subcontracted many responsibilities to outside parties, which then set up enclaves operating under their own laws.
The imagined date for the report’s scenarios is 2030, but at least for “Nonstate World,” it might as well be 2010: though most of us might not realize it, “nonstate world” describes much of how global society already operates. This isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.
------------
In a similar vein note Michael Yon's predictions for Afghanistan http://www.michaelyon-online.com/afghanistan-a-bigger-monster.htm#comments
-
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/10/14/2003574456
-
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/10/14/2003574456
Obama is doing it as fast as he can.
-
I recommend serious attention be given to this piece; it articulates many of the very points that led me to start this thread:
========================================================================
In the immediate future, I do not think the United States will be intervening abroad on the ground — not in the Middle East or, for that matter, many places in other parts of the world. The reason is not just a new Republican isolationism, or the strange but growing alliance between left-wing pacifists and right-wing libertarians.
Some of the new reluctance to intervene abroad is due to disillusionment with Iraq and Afghanistan, at least in the sense that the means — a terrible cost of American blood and treasure — do not seem yet to be justified by the ends of the current Maliki and Karzai governments. Few Americans are patient enough to hear arguments that a residual force in Iraq would have preserved our victory there (Marc: A key point of mine!!!) or that Afghanistan need not revert to the Taliban next year. Their attitude to the Obama administration’s unfortunate abdication of both theaters is mostly, “I am unhappy that we look weak getting out, but nonetheless happier that we are getting out.”
There is not much optimism left that either of those two nations will, over the coming decades, evolve along the lines of South Korea, from a stable free-market authoritarianism to true consensual government. Endemic ingratitude also seems to matter to the public. Most Americans don’t feel that either Iraqis or Afghans appreciated us very much for ridding them of Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. For that matter, do Egyptians, Jordanians, or Palestinians seem thankful for U.S. aid?
We are broke and owe $17 trillion in long-term debt, which makes it harder, psychologically, to borrow the money to intervene in Syria. The lack of money, like mental exhaustion and ingratitude, is an additional catalyst for inaction. Obama certainly is not just an isolationist who welcomes a U.S. recessional; he is also an isolationist who understands that his do-nothing policy is not all that unpopular with a broke and underemployed public.
The American people do not worry so much now over the traditional Western interests in the Middle East as they did in the past. China is now the largest importer of Middle Eastern oil. It pays almost nothing for the safe commercial environment of the Persian Gulf ensured by the U.S. military. If North America proves to be energy-independent by 2020, the U.S. will be largely immune from embargoes and boycotts. OPEC in general, and its Arab franchises in particular, are no longer so critical to the security of the United States. It is becoming an untenable situation when a democratic United States continues to keep safe the sea-lanes of the autocratic and sometimes anti-American Persian Gulf to ensure oil for an autocratic and sometimes anti-American China. That does not mean that the oil-rich Persian Gulf will not be vitally important to the world at large, or of strategic interest to our rivals and enemies — only that it will be more difficult to invest U.S resources in the Middle East with the traditional urgency.
Mediterranean Europe is a mess, largely because of the fiscal imbalances brought on by the euro. Amid financial collapse, Greece and Cyprus increasingly look to Israel and Russia to counter Turkey in lieu of the old, engaged United States. In any case, Athens, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, and Tripoli don’t seem to be centers of innovation or wealth creation. For that matter, almost the entire rim of the Mediterranean, with the exception of Israel, is stagnating.
Other than Israel, and NATO members Greece and Turkey, we have almost no allies in the region. Note in that regard that Greece is bankrupt and still conspiracist and anti-American, and Turkey is increasingly Islamist.
But more important, the removal of tyrants so far has not led to much social, economic, or political improvement, much less an upswing in pro-American sentiment. Egypt and Libya are as bad off after the demise of their tyrants as they were before. Assad’s opponents don’t seem all that much better than the monster in Damascus. Maliki, once freed of U.S. overseers, increasingly reverts to tribal politics. Afghanistan may go the way of Vietnam once we leave. Successful nation-building requires a sizable and long-term U.S. ground presence, something apparently politically toxic for the foreseeable future.
The threat of a rival global hegemon in the Middle East like the Soviet Union is gone. China seems unable so far to craft regional power over its oil suppliers. Al-Qaeda is ascendant, but it is hard to know whether it thrives better under dictators who stealthily pay it subsidies to direct its violence westward, or under the tribal postwar chaos that follows the Western-inspired downfall of tyrants.
==========================================
The U.S. has kept out of Syria, not because we suddenly became isolationist, but rather because Obama had not a clue about what he was doing, and by 2013 there are fewer U.S. strategic interests in the region, at least in comparison with other areas of the world. Those that remain — maintaining Israel’s safety and the sanctity of the Suez Canal, forestalling Iranian nuclear proliferation, protecting Europe’s southern strategic flank — don’t seem to require ground intervention as much as traditional sea and air patrolling. If the borders of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union changed without a major American intervention other than in the Balkans, then few Americans believe that the current upheaval over colonial-era demarcation lines in the Middle East demands our stewardship. Intervening in Libya and considering it in Syria more likely hindered rather than enhanced U.S. readiness to preempt a nuclear Iran.
Advertisement
A similar diffidence seems to be occurring with respect to Latin America — an area, we are always lectured, that is on the verge of becoming the new regional powerhouse. Argentina is a basket case. The “new era” of democratization and free-market economics seems undermined by statist authoritarians in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Brazil and Argentina often sound as anti-American as our worst enemies — and in the Age of Obama, no less. If Mexico were in the Middle East, its level of violence would earn calls for U.S. humanitarian intervention in the manner of Libya and Syria.
Of course, much of Latin America’s hostility to the United States is just loud talk, given its growing cultural and commercial ties with the U.S. and its bizarre need to export millions of its people to a country it so publicly rebukes — as if to say, “I hate you so much that I’ve sent you my children to care for.” In general, the American people do not see any crisis in Latin America that warrants intervention. We mostly declaim that we want good will and prosperity, while privately we hope that Mexico refrains from sending another 15 million of its unwanted citizens illegally across our border.
In truth, our vital interests seem confined to two areas: Europe and East Asia. The EU can survive without the euro’s being used in all its participant countries. And to the degree it cannot, NATO, the fact of a nuclear France and Britain, and German commercial self-interest all ensure a continued peace within the continent, and not much worry about invasion from the south or east.
What America should be concerned about is the ascendance of China in the neighborhood of our close allies Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, and to a lesser extent the countries of Southeast Asia. Yet the U.S. already has a sizable presence in the Pacific, and Obama has promised to augment it. We should be concerned that our key allies — should they doubt this administration’s adherence to past commitments (a legitimate concern) — could easily become nuclear, and in a frighteningly rapid and effective manner. In any case, in times of regional crisis, other than at the 38th parallel, our allies and interests can largely be defended by air and sea. There seems little likelihood in the immediate future of a Pacific war fought along the lines of Vietnam.
Terror is still with us. Tomorrow terrorists could topple a U.S. skyscraper or bring down American airliners. This kind of aggression would trigger a U.S. response, but even such an act would probably not result in another Afghanistan-like invasion. A sustained bombing campaign would probably suffice, not because it would necessarily be more effective than boots on the ground, but because there is less evidence these days that a ground insertion would be all that much more useful in the long term.
There will be more Rwandas, Srebrenicas, and Syrias in the immediate future, along with more calls to do something — and fewer American interventions in response. That reluctance is not necessarily because we are broke, tired, isolationist, or indifferent to moral concerns, although we are becoming all of that. Rather, Americans are not sure that we have the security interests we once had in the Middle East and elsewhere, and our elites do not have the wisdom to explain how our projected aims, methodologies, and desired results will improve life for the supposed beneficiaries of limited U.S. intercessions. In short, the more humanitarian crises develop, the less we are convinced that we could make things better by intervening — or, even if we could, that those whom we thought we were helping would actually believe that we did.
-
Hat tip to Big Dog, pasting this here from the Drones thread.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/22/winston_churchill_military_technology_lasers_cyborgs_drones?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full
-
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Man in the White House
Posted By Robert Spencer On October 23, 2013
When the State Department announced early in October that it was cutting hundreds of millions in military and other aid to Egypt, it was yet another manifestation of Barack Obama’s unstinting support for the Muslim Brotherhood, a support that has already thrown Egypt back into the Russian orbit. The aid cut was essentially giving the Egyptian people a choice between Muslim Brotherhood rule and economic collapse. Nothing else could have been expected from Obama, who has been a Brotherhood man from the beginning.
Obama’s support for the Brotherhood goes back to the beginning of his presidency. He even invited Ingrid Mattson, then-president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), to offer a prayer at the National Cathedral on his first Inauguration Day – despite the fact that ISNA has admitted its ties to the Brotherhood. The previous summer, federal prosecutors rejected a request from ISNA to remove its unindicted co-conspirator status. Obama didn’t ask Mattson to explain ISNA’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. On the contrary: he sent his Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett to be the keynote speaker at ISNA’s national convention in 2009.
Even worse, in April 2009, Obama appointed Arif Alikhan, the deputy mayor of Los Angeles, as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security. Just two weeks before he received this appointment, Alikhan (who once called the jihad terror group Hizballah a “liberation movement”) participated in a fundraiser for the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Like ISNA, MPAC has links to the Muslim Brotherhood. In a book entitled In Fraternity: A Message to Muslims in America, coauthor Hassan Hathout, a former MPAC president, is identified as “a close disciple of the late Hassan al-Banna of Egypt.” The MPAC-linked magazine The Minaret spoke of Hassan Hathout’s closeness to al-Banna in a 1997 article: “My father would tell me that Hassan Hathout was a companion of Hassan al-Banna….Hassan Hathout would speak of al-Banna with such love and adoration; he would speak of a relationship not guided by politics or law but by a basic sense of human decency.”
Al-Banna, of course, was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, an admirer of Hitler and a leader of the movement to (in his words) “push the Jews into the sea.”
Terror researcher Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project has documented MPAC’s indefatigable and consistent opposition to virtually every domestic anti-terror initiative; its magazine The Minaret has dismissed key counterterror operations as part of “[t]he American crusade against Islam and Muslims.” For his part, while Alikhan was deputy mayor of Los Angeles, he blocked a Los Angeles Police Department project to assemble data about the ethnic makeup of mosques in the Los Angeles area. This was not an attempt to conduct surveillance of the mosques or monitor them in any way. LAPD Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing explained that it was actually an outreach program: “We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities.” But Alikhan and other Muslim leaders claimed that the project manifested racism and “Islamophobia,” and the LAPD ultimately discarded all plans to study the mosques.
And early in 2009, when the Muslim Brotherhood was still outlawed in Egypt, Obama met with its leaders. He made sure to invite Brotherhood leaders to attend his notorious speech to the Islamic world in Cairo in June 4, 2009, making it impossible for then-President Hosni Mubarak to attend the speech, since he would not appear with the leaders of the outlawed group.
Then on January 31, 2011, when the Mubarak regime was on the verge of falling in the Arab Spring uprising, a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Frank Wisner, met secretly in Cairo with Issam El-Erian, a senior Brotherhood leader. That meeting came a week after a Mubarak government official announced the regime’s suspicions that Brotherhood and other opposition leaders were coordinating the Egyptian uprising with the Obama State Department.
Early in February, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, tried to allay concerns about a Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Egypt by claiming, preposterously, that the group was “largely secular.” Although the subsequent torrent of ridicule compelled the Obama camp to issue a correction, the subtext of Clapper’s statement was clear: the Obama Administration had no problem with Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt, and was not only going to do nothing to stop it, but was going actively to enable it.
And so in June 2011, the Administration announced that it was going to establish formal ties with the Brotherhood. The U.S.’s special coordinator for transitions in the Middle East, William Taylor, announced in November 2011 that the U.S. would be “satisfied” with a Muslim Brotherhood victory in the Egyptian elections. In January 2012, Obama announced that he was speeding up the delivery of aid to Egypt, just as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns held talks with Brotherhood leaders – a move apparently calculated to demoralize the Brotherhood’s opposition in the Egyptian elections.
Not surprisingly, when Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi was declared the winner of Egypt’s 2012 presidential election, Obama immediately called Morsi to congratulate him. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hurried to Cairo to meet with Morsi in July 2012, as anti-Brotherhood protesters gathered outside the U.S. Embassy complex there. The Obama administration’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt had been so glaringly obvious that foes of the Brotherhood regime pelted her motorcade with tomatoes and shoes for delivering that country up to the rule of the Brotherhood. Protestors held signs reading “Message to Hillary: Egypt will never be Pakistan”; “To Hillary: Hamas will never rule Egypt” and “If you like the Ikhwan [Brotherhood], take them with you!”
Obama invited Morsi to visit the U.S., although by September 2012, when Morsi had called for the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the 1993 World Trade Center jihad attack plotter, as well as for restrictions on the freedom of speech, and persecution of Egyptian Christians had increased dramatically, Obama quietly canceled the proposed meeting.
Meanwhile, Obama’s foreign policy displayed a decided pro-Brotherhood orientation. Former U.S. prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has listed a great many strange collaborations between Obama’s State Department and Muslim Brotherhood organizations, including:
• Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.
• The State Department collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.
• The State Department excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey — which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel — in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
• The State Department and the administration hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gamaa al-Islamiyya), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.
Once in power in Egypt, the Brotherhood government drafted a new constitution, enshrining Islamic law as the highest law of the land, restricting the freedom of speech and denying equality of rights for women. The Associated Press reported that the constitution reflected the “vision of the Islamists, with articles that rights activists, liberals and Christians fear will lead to restrictions on the rights of women and minorities and civil liberties in general.”
AP reported that the constitution’s wording gave the Muslim Brotherhood “the tool for insisting on stricter implementation of rulings of Shariah,” and that “a new article states that Egypt’s most respected Islamic institution, Al-Azhar, must be consulted on any matters related to Shariah, a measure critics fear will lead to oversight of legislation by clerics.”
Cairo’s Al-Azhar is the foremost exponent of Sunni orthodoxy. Its characterization of what constitutes that orthodoxy carries immense weight in the Islamic world. It hews to age-old formulations of Islamic law mandating second-class dhimmi status for non-Muslims, institutionalized discrimination against women, and sharp restrictions on the freedom of speech, particularly in regard to Islam. Al-Azhar’s having a role in the government of Egypt and its administration of Sharia meant the end of any remaining freedom in Egyptian society.
While forcing this constitution on Egyptians, the Morsi regime became increasingly brutal toward dissenters. In a move reminiscent of Communist governments, the Brotherhood regime had opposition leaders investigated for high treason. Morsi even tried to arrogate dictatorial powers for himself, although he backed off after protests. Huge crowds came out to protest against the Morsi regime – a clear indication that if Obama had backed the Brotherhood because he thought it represented the popular will of the vast majority of Egyptians, he was dead wrong. Yet as all this was happening, Hillary Clinton demonstrated how out of touch the Obama Administration was with what was really happening in Egypt when she said, according to Fox News, that “the U.S. must work with the international community and the people in Egypt to ensure that the revolution isn’t hijacked by extremists.”
The Arab Spring “revolution” was “hijacked by extremists” as soon as the Muslim Brotherhood regime took power. Yet as the turmoil in Egypt increased, Obama responded not by admonishing the Muslim Brotherhood regime to respect the human rights of all its citizens, but by shipping over twenty F-16 fighter jets to Egypt, as part of an aid package amounting to over a billion dollars. A Republican congressional aide noted at the time that “the Morsi-led Muslim Brotherhood government has not proven to be a partner for democracy as they had promised, given the recent attempted power grab.” The Obama Administration responded by downplaying the significance of the Brotherhood’s increasing authoritarianism, speaking blandly about “Egypt’s democratic transition and the need to move forward with a peaceful and inclusive transition that respects the rights of all Egyptians.”
It was no surprise last summer, then, when millions of Egyptians took to the streets to protest against the Brotherhood regime and it was suddenly and unexpectedly toppled from power, that numerous anti-Brotherhood protesters held signs accusing Obama of supporting terrorists. One foe of the Brotherhood made a music video including the lyrics: “Hey Obama, support the terrorism/Traitor like the Brotherhood members/Obama say it’s a coup/That’s not your business dirty man.” A protestor in Tahrir Square held up a sign saying, “Obama you jerk, Muslim Brotherhoods are killing the Egyptians.” Signs like that one became commonplace at anti-Morsi protests; another read, “Hey Obama, your bitch is our dictator.”
Yet as the anti-Muslim Brotherhood riots reached their peak, Obama responded by sending a group of American soldiers to Egypt to help with riot control.
As an Egyptian newspaper crowed about the influence of Muslim Brotherhood operatives within the Obama Administration, it was no surprise that Obama would want them in power in Egypt as well. By cutting off aid in October 2013, he was strong-arming the Egyptians until they would have no choice but to agree – or turn to the Russians, as Egypt’s military regime has recently said it might do. Egypt has been an American ally, but is now returning to the sphere of influence of a resurgent Russia – thanks to Barack Obama’s uncritical support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Egypt, albeit imperfect, was a reliable and pivotal ally of the U.S. in the Middle East for three decades. With the Camp David Accords it kept an uneasy but unmistakable peace with Israel, while the Sadat and Mubarak regimes kept a lid on the Brotherhood and Salafist forces that were clamoring for Egypt to declare a new jihad against the Jewish State. Egypt’s unwillingness to go to war with Israel during that period stymied the anti-Israel bloodlust in neighboring Muslim countries as well, for Egypt’s size, position, and history give it a unique stature in the Islamic world.
All that is gone now. Egypt is on the way to renewing its alliance with Russia, which led it to mount two wars against Israel, in 1967 and 1973. Obama has alienated America’s allies and emboldened her enemies, all in a vain attempt to appease a group that was never going to be a friend of the U.S. in the first place. If he didn’t have so many other blots on his record, this could be the most dangerous aspect of his legacy.
-
US foreign policy from the founders’ perspective
How does Thomas Jefferson's principle of neutrality guide the United States now?
George Friedman | 24 October 2013
comment 7 | print |
founders
Last week I discussed how the Founding Fathers might view the American debt crisis and the government shutdown. This week I thought it would be useful to consider how the founders might view foreign policy. I argued that on domestic policy they had clear principles, but unlike their ideology, those principles were never mechanistic or inflexible. For them, principles dictated that a gentleman pays his debts and does not casually increase his debts, the constitutional provision that debt is sometimes necessary notwithstanding. They feared excessive debt and abhorred nonpayment, but their principles were never completely rigid.
Whenever there is a discussion of the guidelines laid down by the founders for American foreign policy, Thomas Jefferson's admonition to avoid foreign entanglements and alliances is seen as the founding principle. That seems reasonable to me inasmuch as George Washington expressed a similar sentiment. So while there were some who favored France over Britain during the French Revolutionary Wars, the main thrust of American foreign policy was neutrality. The question is: How does this principle guide the United States now?
A Matter of Practicality
Like all good principles, Jefferson's call for avoiding foreign entanglements derived from practicality. The United States was weak. It depended heavily on exports, particularly on exports to Britain. Its navy could not guarantee the security of its sea-lanes, which were in British hands and were contested by the French. Siding with the French against the British would have wrecked the American economy and would have invited a second war with Britain. On the other hand, overcommitting to Britain would have essentially returned the United States to a British dependency.
Avoiding foreign entanglements was a good principle when there were no other attractive strategies. Nonetheless, it was Jefferson himself who engineered a major intrusion into European affairs with the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. Initially, Jefferson did not intend to purchase the entire territory. He wanted to own New Orleans, which had traded hands between Spain and France and which was the essential port for access between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri river system. Jefferson sensed that Napoleon would sell New Orleans to finance his war in Europe, but he was surprised when Napoleon countered with an offer to sell all of France's North American holdings for $15 million. This would change the balance of power in North America by blocking potential British ambitions, opening the Gulf route to the Atlantic to the United States and providing the cash France needed to wage wars.
At the time, this was not a major action in the raging Napoleonic Wars. However, it was not an action consistent with the principle of avoiding entanglement. The transaction held the risk of embroiling the United States in the Napoleonic Wars, depending on how the British reacted. In fact, a decade later, after Napoleon was defeated, the British did turn on the United States, first by interfering with American shipping and then, when the Americans responded, by waging war in 1812, burning Washington and trying to seize New Orleans after the war officially ended.
Jefferson undertook actions that entangled the United States in the affairs of others and in dangers he may not have anticipated -- one of the major reasons for avoiding foreign entanglements in the first place. And he did this against his own principles.
The reason was simple: Given the events in Europe, a unique opportunity presented itself to seize the heartland of the North American continent. The opportunity would redefine the United States. It carried with it risks. But the rewards were so great that the risks had to be endured. Avoiding foreign entanglements was a principle. It was not an ideological absolute.
Jefferson realized that the United States already was involved in Europe's affairs by virtue of its existence. When the Napoleonic Wars ended, France or Britain would have held Louisiana, and the United States would have faced threats east from the Atlantic and west from the rest of the continent. Under these circumstances, it would struggle to survive. Therefore, being entangled already, Jefferson acted to minimize the danger.
This is a very different view of Jefferson's statement on avoiding foreign entanglements than has sometimes been given. As a principle, steering clear of foreign entanglements is desirable. But the decision on whether there will be an entanglement is not the United States' alone. Geographic realities and other nations' foreign policies can implicate a country in affairs it would rather avoid. Jefferson understood that the United States could not simply ignore the world. The world got a vote. But the principle that excessive entanglement should be avoided was for him a guiding principle. Given the uproar over his decision, both on constitutional and prudential grounds, not everyone agreed that Jefferson was faithful to his principle. Looking back, however, it was prudent.
The Illusion of Isolationism
The U.S. government has wrestled with this problem since World War I. The United States intervened in the war a few weeks after the Russian czar abdicated and after the Germans began fighting the neutral countries. The United States could not to lose access to the Atlantic, and if Russia withdrew from the war, then Germany could concentrate on its west. A victory there would have left Germany in control of both Russian resources and French industry. That would have created a threat to the United States. It tried to stay neutral, then was forced to make a decision of how much risk it could bear. The United States opted for war.
Isolationists in World War II argued against involvement in Europe (they were far more open to blocking the Japanese in China). But the argument rested on the assumption that Germany would be blocked by the Soviets and the French. The alliance with the Soviets and, more important, the collapse of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union, left a very different calculation. In its most extreme form, a Soviet defeat and a new Berlin-friendly government in Britain could have left the Germans vastly more powerful than the United States. And with the French, British and German fleets combined, such an alliance could have also threatened U.S. control of the Atlantic at a time when the Japanese controlled the western Pacific.
A similar problem presented itself during the Cold War. In this case, the United States did not trust the European balance of power to contain the Soviet Union. That balance of power had failed twice, leading to alliances that brought the United States into the affairs of others. The United States calculated that early entanglements were less risky than later entanglements. This calculation seemed to violate the Jeffersonian principle, but in fact, as with Louisiana, it was prudent action within the framework of the Jeffersonian principle.
NATO appeared to some to be a violation of the founders' view of a prudent foreign policy. I think this misinterprets the meaning of Jefferson's and Washington's statements. Avoiding entanglements and alliances is a principle worth considering, but not to the point of allowing it to threaten the national interest. Jefferson undertook the complex and dangerous purchase of Louisiana because he thought it carried less risk than allowing the territory to remain in European hands.
His successors stumbled into war partly over the purchase, but Jefferson was prepared to make prudent judgments. In the same way, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, realizing that avoiding foreign entanglements was impossible, tried to reduce future risk.
Louisiana, the two world wars and the Cold War shared one thing: the risks were great enough to warrant entanglement. All three could have ended in disaster for the United States. The idea that the oceans would protect the United States was illusory. If one European power dominated all of Europe, its ability to build fleets would be extraordinary. Perhaps the United States could have matched it; perhaps not. The dangers outweighed the benefits of blindly adhering to a principle.
A General Role
There is not an existential threat to the United States today. The major threat is militant Islamism, but as frightening as it is, it cannot destroy the United States. It can kill large numbers of Americans. Here the Jeffersonian principle becomes more important. There are those who say that if the United States had not supported Israel in the West Bank or India in Kashmir, then militant Islamism would have never been a threat. In other words, if we now, if not in the past, avoided foreign entanglements, then there would be no threat to the United States, and Jefferson's principles would now require disentanglement.
In my opinion the Islamist threat does not arise from any particular relationship the United States has had, nor does it arise from the celebration of the Islamic principles that Islamists hold. Rather, it arises from the general role of the United States as the leading Western country. The idea that the United States could avoid hostility by changing its policies fails to understand that like the dangers in 1800, the threat arises independent of U.S. action.
But militant Islamism does not threaten the United States existentially. Therefore, the issue is how to apply the Jeffersonian principle in this context. In my opinion, the careful application of his principle, considering all the risks and rewards, would tell us the following: It is impossible to completely defeat militant Islamists militarily, but it is possible to mitigate the threat they pose. The process of mitigation carries with it its own risks, particularly as the United States carries out operations that don't destroy militant Islamists but do weaken the geopolitical architecture of the Muslim world -- which is against the interests of the United States. Caution should be exercised that the entanglement doesn't carry risks greater than the reward.
Jefferson was always looking at the main threat. Securing sea-lanes and securing the interior river systems was of overwhelming importance. Other things could be ignored. But the real challenge of the United States is defining the emerging threat and dealing with it decisively. How much misery could have been avoided if Hitler had been destroyed in 1936? Who knew how much misery Hitler would cause in 1936? These thoughts are clear only in hindsight.
Still, the principle is the same. Jefferson wanted to avoid foreign entanglements except in cases where there was substantial benefit to American national interests. He was prepared to apply his principle differently then. The notion of avoiding foreign entanglements must therefore be seen as a principle that, like all well-developed principles, is far more complex than it appears. Foreign entanglements must be avoided when the ends are trivial or unattainable. But when we can get Louisiana, the principle of avoidance dictates involvement.
As in domestic matters, ideology is easy. Principles are difficult. They can be stated succinctly, but they must be applied with all due sophistication.
U.S. Foreign Policy from the Founders' Perspective is republished with permission of Stratfor.
-
WASHINGTON — Each Saturday morning in July and August, Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s new national security adviser, gathered half a dozen aides in her corner office in the White House to plot America’s future in the Middle East. The policy review, a kind of midcourse correction, has set the United States on a new heading in the world’s most turbulent region.
At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.
That includes Egypt, which was once a central pillar of American foreign policy. Mr. Obama, who hailed the crowds on the streets of Cairo in 2011 and pledged to heed the cries for change across the region, made clear that there were limits to what the United States would do to nurture democracy, whether there, or in Bahrain, Libya, Tunisia or Yemen.
The president’s goal, said Ms. Rice, who discussed the review for the first time in an interview last week, is to avoid having events in the Middle East swallow his foreign policy agenda, as it had those of presidents before him.
“We can’t just be consumed 24/7 by one region, important as it is,” she said, adding, “He thought it was a good time to step back and reassess, in a very critical and kind of no-holds-barred way, how we conceive the region.”
Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.
The blueprint drawn up on those summer weekends at the White House is a model of pragmatism — eschewing the use of force, except to respond to acts of aggression against the United States or its allies, disruption of oil supplies, terrorist networks or weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, it does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest.
For Ms. Rice, whose day job since she started July 1 has been a cascade of crises from Syria to the furor over the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities, the review was also a way to put her stamp on the administration’s priorities.
The debate was often vigorous, officials said, and its conclusions will play out over the rest of Mr. Obama’s presidency.
Scrawling ideas on a whiteboard and papering the walls of her office with notes, Ms. Rice’s team asked the most basic questions: What are America’s core interests in the Middle East? How has the upheaval in the Arab world changed America’s position? What can Mr. Obama realistically hope to achieve? What lies outside his reach?
The answer was a more modest approach — one that prizes diplomacy, puts limits on engagement and raises doubts about whether Mr. Obama would ever again use military force in a region convulsed by conflict.
For Ms. Rice, 48, who previously served as ambassador to the United Nations, it is an uncharacteristic imprint. A self-confident foreign policy thinker and expert on Africa, she is known as a fierce defender of human rights, advocating military intervention, when necessary. She was among those who persuaded Mr. Obama to back a NATO air campaign in Libya to avert a slaughter of the rebels by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
But Mr. Obama drove the process, officials said, asking for formal briefings in the Situation Room and shorter updates during his daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office. He gave his advisers a tight deadline of the United Nations’ speech last month and pushed them to develop certain themes, drawing from his own journey since the hopeful early days of the Arab Spring.
In May 2011, he said the United States would support democracy, human rights and free markets with all the “diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal.” But at the United Nations last month, he said, “we can rarely achieve these objectives through unilateral American action — particularly with military action.”
==========================================
Critics say the retooled policy will not shield the United States from the hazards of the Middle East. By holding back, they say, the United States risks being buffeted by crisis after crisis, as the president’s fraught history with Syria illustrates.
“You can have your agenda, but you can’t control what happens,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The argument that we can’t make a decisive difference, so we’re not going to try, is wrongheaded.”
Other analysts said that the administration was right to focus on old-fashioned diplomacy with Iran and in the Middle East peace process, but that it had slighted the role of Egypt, which, despite its problems, remains a crucial American ally and a bellwether for the region.
“Egypt is still the test case of whether there can be a peaceful political transition in the Arab world,” said Richard N. Haass, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “But here, the administration is largely silent and seems uncertain as to what to do.”
The White House did not declare the Egyptian military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi last July a coup, which would have required cutting off all aid to the government. Instead, it signaled its displeasure by temporarily holding up the delivery of some big-ticket military equipment, delegating the announcement to the State Department.
Ms. Rice and other officials denied that Egypt had been sidelined, arguing that the policy was calculated to preserve American influence in Cairo. They also said the United States would continue to promote democracy, even if there were limits on what it could do, not to mention constraints on what the president could ask of a war-weary American public. “It would have been easy to write the president’s speech in a way that would have protected us from criticism,” said Philip H. Gordon, the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council. “We were trying to be honest and realistic.”
Mr. Gordon took part in the Saturday sessions, along with two of Ms. Rice’s deputies, Antony J. Blinken and Benjamin J. Rhodes; the national security adviser to the vice president, Jake Sullivan; the president’s counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco; a senior economic official, Caroline Atkinson; and a handful of others.
It was a tight group that included no one outside the White House, a stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan review in 2009, which involved dozens of officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Rice said she briefed Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel over weekly lunches.
Some priorities were clear. The election of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran presents the West with perhaps its last good chance to curb its nuclear program. Mr. Rouhani has a mandate to ease sanctions on Iran and has signaled an eagerness to negotiate.
But other goals appear to have been dictated as much as by personnel as by policy. After vigorous debate, the group decided to make the Middle East peace process a top priority — even after failing to broker an agreement during the administration’s first term — in part because Mr. Kerry had already thrown himself into the role of peacemaker.
More than anything, the policy review was driven by Mr. Obama’s desire to turn his gaze elsewhere, notably Asia. Already, the government shutdown forced the president to cancel a trip to Southeast Asia — a decision that particularly irked Ms. Rice, who was planning to accompany Mr. Obama and plunge into a part of the world with which she did not have much experience.
“There’s a whole world out there,” Ms. Rice said, “and we’ve got interests and opportunities in that whole world.”
-
Stephens: Axis of Fantasy vs. Axis of Reality
France, Israel and Saudi Arabia confront an administration conducting a make-believe foreign policy.
By
Bret Stephens
updated Nov. 11, 2013 7:42 p.m. ET
When the history of the Obama administration's foreign policy is written 20 or so years from now, the career of Wendy Sherman, our chief nuclear negotiator with Iran, will be instructive.
In 1988, the former social worker ran the Washington office of the Dukakis campaign and worked at the Democratic National Committee. That was the year the Massachusetts governorcarried 111 electoral votes to George H.W. Bush's 426. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Sherman was briefly the CEO of something called the Fannie Mae Foundation, supposedly a charity that was shut down a decade later for what the Washington Post WPO -0.47% called "using tax-exempt contributions to advance corporate interests."
From there it was on to the State Department, where she served as a point person in nuclear negotiations with North Korea and met with Kim Jong Il himself. The late dictator, she testified, was "witty and humorous," "a conceptual thinker," "a quick problem-solver," "smart, engaged, knowledgeable, self-confident." Also a movie buff who loved Michael Jordan highlight videos. A regular guy!
Enlarge Image
Benjamin Netanyahu with America's top diplomat. Reuters
Later Ms. Sherman was to be found working for her former boss as the No. 2 at the Albright-Stonebridge Group before taking the No. 3 spot at the State Department. Ethics scolds might describe the arc of her career as a revolving door between misspending taxpayer dollars in government and mooching off them in the private sector. But it's mainly an example of failing up—the Washingtonian phenomenon of promotion to ever-higher positions of authority and prestige irrespective of past performance.
This administration in particular is stuffed with fail-uppers—the president, the vice president, the secretary of state and the national security adviser, to name a few—and every now and then it shows. Like, for instance, when people for whom the test of real-world results has never meant very much meet people for whom that test means everything.
That's my read on last weekend's scuttled effort in Geneva to strike a nuclear bargain with Iran. The talks unexpectedly fell apart at the last minute when French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius publicly objected to what he called a "sucker's deal," meaning the U.S. was prepared to begin lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for tentative Iranian promises that they would slow their multiple nuclear programs.
Not stop or suspend them, mind you, much less dismantle them, but merely reduce their pace from run to jog when they're on Mile 23 of their nuclear marathon. It says something about the administration that they so wanted a deal that they would have been prepared to take this one. This is how people for whom consequences are abstractions operate. It's what happens when the line between politics as a game of perception and policy as the pursuit of national objectives dissolves.
The French are not such people, believe it or not, at least when it comes to foreign policy. Speculation about why Mr. Fabius torpedoed the deal has focused on the pique French President François Hollande felt at getting stiffed by the U.S. on his Mali intervention and later in the aborted attack on Syria. (Foreign ministry officials in Paris are still infuriated by a Susan Rice tirade in December, when she called a French proposal to intervene in Mali "crap.")
But the French also understand that the sole reason Iran has a nuclear program is to build a nuclear weapon. They are not nonchalant about it. The secular republic has always been realistic about the threat posed by theocratic Iran. And they have come to care about nonproliferation too, in part because they belong to what is still a small club of nuclear states. Membership has its privileges.
This now puts the French at the head of a de facto Axis of Reality, the other prominent members of which are Saudi Arabia and Israel. In this Axis, strategy is not a game of World of Warcraft conducted via avatars in a virtual reality. "We are not blind, and I don't think we're stupid," a defensive John Kerry said over the weekend on "Meet the Press," sounding uncomfortably like Otto West (Kevin Kline) from "A Fish Called Wanda." When you've reached the "don't call me stupid" stage of diplomacy, it means the rest of the world has your number.
Now the question is whether the French were staking out a position at Geneva or simply demanding to be heard. If it's the latter, the episode will be forgotten and Jerusalem and Riyadh will have to reach their own conclusions about how to operate in a post-American Middle East. If it's the former, Paris has a chance to fulfill two cherished roles at once: as the de facto shaper of European policy on the global stage, and as an obstacle to Washington's presumptions to speak for the West.
A decade ago, Robert Kagan argued that the U.S. operated in a Hobbesian world of power politics while Europe inhabited the Kantian (and somewhat make-believe) world of right. That was after 9/11, when fecklessness was not an option for the U.S.
Under Mr. Obama, there's been a role reversal. The tragedy for France and its fellow members of its Axis is that they may lack the power to master a reality they perceive so much more clearly than the Wendy Shermans of the world, still failing up.
-
The U.S.-Iran Talks: Ideology and Necessity
Geopolitical Weekly
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - 04:12 Print Text Size
Stratfor
By George Friedman
The talks between Iran and the Western powers have ended but have not failed. They will reconvene next week. That in itself is a dramatic change from the past, when such talks invariably began in failure. In my book The Next Decade, I argued that the United States and Iran would move toward strategic alignment, and I think that is what we are seeing take shape. Of course, there is no guarantee that the talks will yield a settlement or that they will evolve into anything more meaningful. But the mere possibility requires us to consider three questions: Why is this happening now, what would a settlement look like, and how will it affect the region if it happens?
Precedents
It is important to recognize that despite all of the other actors on the stage, this negotiation is between the United States and Iran. It is also important to understand that while this phase of the discussion is entirely focused on Iran's nuclear development and sanctions, an eventual settlement would address U.S. and Iranian relations and how those relations affect the region. If the nuclear issue were resolved and the sanctions removed, then matters such as controlling Sunni extremists, investment in Iran and maintaining the regional balance of power would all be on the table. In solving these two outstanding problems, the prospect of a new U.S.-Iranian relationship would have to be taken seriously.
But first, there are great obstacles to overcome. One is ideology. Iran regards the United States as the Great Satan. The United States regards Iran as part of the Axis of Evil. For the Iranians, memories of a U.S.-sponsored coup in 1953 and Washington's support for the Shah are vivid. Americans above the age of 35 cannot forget the Iranian hostage crisis, when Iranians seized some 50 U.S. Embassy employees. Iran believes the United States has violated its sovereignty; the United States believes Iran has violated basic norms of international law. Each views the other as barbaric. Add to this that the ideology of radical Islamism regards the United States as corrupt and evil, and the ideology of the United States sees Iran as brutal and repressive, and it would seem that resolution is impossible.
From the American side, there is precedent for reconciling national differences: China. When the United States reached out to China in the 1970s, Beijing was supplying weapons to the North Vietnamese, who used them against American troops. China's rhetoric about U.S. imperialism, replete with "running dogs," portrayed the United States as monstrous. The United States saw China, a nuclear power, as a greater threat for nuclear war than the Soviet Union, since Mao had openly stated -- and seemed to mean it -- that communists ought to welcome nuclear war rather than fear it. Given the extremism and brutality of the Cultural Revolution, the ideological bar seemed insurmountable.
But the strategic interests of both countries superseded ideology. They did not recognize each other, but they did need each other. The relative power of the Soviet Union had risen. There had been heavy fighting between China and the Soviet Union along the Ussuri River in 1969, and Soviet troops were heavily deployed along China's border. The United States had begun to redeploy troops from Europe to Southeast Asia when it became clear it was losing the Vietnam War.
Each side was concerned that if the Soviet Union chose to attack China or NATO separately, it could defeat them. However, if China and the United States collaborated, no Soviet attack would be possible, lest Moscow start a two-front war it couldn't win. It was not necessary to sign a treaty of military alliance or even mention this possibility. Simply meeting, talking and establishing diplomatic relations with China would force the Soviet Union to consider the possibility that Washington and Beijing had a tacit understanding -- or that even without an understanding, an attack on one of them would trigger a response by the other. After all, if NATO or China were defeated, the Soviets would be able to overpower the other at its discretion. Therefore, by moving the relationship from total hostility to minimal accommodation, the strategic balance changed.
In looking at Iran, the most important thing to note is the difference between its rhetoric and its actions. If you listened to Iranian government officials in the past, you would think they were preparing for the global apocalypse. In truth, Iranian foreign policy has been extremely measured. Its one major war, which it fought against Iraq in the 1980s, was not initiated by Iran. It has supported third parties such as Hezbollah and Syria, sending supplies and advisers, but it has been extremely cautious in the use of its own overt power. In the early days of the Islamic republic, whenever Tehran was confronted with American interests, it would pull closer to the Soviet Union, an atheistic country making war in neighboring Afghanistan. It needed a counterweight to the United States and put ideology aside, even in its earliest, most radical days.
New Strategic Interests
Ideology is not trivial, but ultimately it is not the arbiter of foreign relations. Like all countries, the United States and Iran have strategic issues that influence their actions. Iran attempted to create an arc of influence from western Afghanistan to Beirut, the key to which was preserving and dominating the Syrian regime. The Iranians failed in Syria, where the regime exists but no longer governs much of the country. The blowback from this failure has been an upsurge in Sunni militant activity against the Shiite-dominated regime.
But the arc of influence was interrupted elsewhere, particularly Iraq, which has proved to be the major national security challenge facing Iran. Coupled with the failures in Syria, the degradation of Iraq has put Iran on the defensive when, just one year earlier, it was poised to change the balance of power in its favor.
At the same time, Iran found that its nuclear program had prompted a seriously detrimental sanctions regime. Stratfor has long argued that the Iranian nuclear program was primarily a bargaining chip to be traded for guarantees on its security and recognition of its regional power. It was meant to appear threatening, not to be threatening. This is why, for years, Iran was "only months" away from a weapon. The problem was that despite its growing power, Iran could no longer withstand the economic repercussions of the sanctions regime. In light of Syria and Iraq, the nuclear program was a serious miscalculation that produced an economic crisis. The failures in foreign policy and the subsequent economic crisis discredited the policies of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, changed the thinking of the supreme leader and ultimately led to the electoral victory of President Hassan Rouhani. The ideology may not have changed, but the strategic reality had. Rouhani for years had been worried about the stability of the regime and was thus critical of Ahmadinejad's policies. He knew that Iran had to redefine its foreign policy.
The United States has also been changing its strategy. During the 2000s, it tried to deal with Sunni radicals through the direct use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States could not continue to commit its main force in the Islamic world when that very commitment gave other nations, such as Russia, the opportunity to maneuver without concern for U.S. military force. The United States did have a problem with al Qaeda, but it needed a new strategy for dealing with it. Syria provided a model. The United States declined to intervene unilaterally against the al Assad regime because it did not want to empower a radical Sunni government. It preferred to allow Syria's factions to counterbalance each other such that neither side was in control.
This balance-of-power approach was the alternative to direct military commitment. The United States was not the only country concerned about Sunni radicalism. Iran, a Shiite power ultimately hostile to Sunnis, was equally concerned about jihadists. Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional rival, at times opposed Islamist radicals (in Saudi Arabia) and supported them elsewhere (in Syria or Iraq). The American relationship with Saudi Arabia, resting heavily on oil, had changed. The United States had plenty of oil now and the Saudis' complex strategies simply no longer matched American interests. On the broadest level, a stronger Iran, aligned with the United States, would counter Sunni ambitions. It would not address the question of North Africa or other smaller issues, but it would force Saudi Arabia to reshape its policies.
The Arab Spring also was a consideration. A mainstay of Washington's Iran policy was that at some point there would be an uprising that would overthrow the regime. The 2009 uprising, never really a threat to the regime, was seen as a rehearsal. If there was likely to be an uprising, there was no need to deal with Iran. Then the Arab Spring occurred. Many in the Obama administration misread the Arab Spring, expecting it to yield more liberal regimes. That didn't happen. Egypt has not evolved, Syria has devolved into civil war, Bahrain has seen Saudi Arabia repress its uprising, and Libya has found itself on the brink of chaos. Not a single liberal democratic regime emerged. It became clear that there would be no uprising in Iran, and even if there were, the results would not likely benefit the United States.
A strategy of encouraging uprisings no longer worked. A strategy of large-scale intervention was unsustainable. The idea of attacking Iran was unpalatable. Even if the administration agreed with Israel and thought that the nuclear program was intended to produce a nuclear weapon, it was not clear that the program could be destroyed from the air.
Therefore, in the particular case of Iran's nuclear program, the United States could only employ sanctions. On the broader issue of managing American interests in the Middle East, the United States had to find more options. It could not rely entirely on Saudi Arabia, which has dramatically different regional interests. It could not rely entirely on Israel, which by itself could not solve the Iranian problem militarily. These realities forced the United States to recalibrate its relationship with Iran at a time when Iran had to recalibrate its relationship with the United States.
All Things Possible
The first U.S.-Iranian discussions would obviously be on the immediate issue -- the nuclear program and sanctions. There are many technical issues involved there, the most important of which is that both sides must show that they don't need a settlement. No one negotiating anything will simply accept the first offer, not when they expect the negotiations to move on to more serious issues. Walking away from the table for 10 days gives both sides some credibility.
The real negotiations will come after the nuclear and sanctions issues are addressed. They will pertain to U.S.-Iranian relations more broadly. Each side will use the other to its advantage. The Iranians will use the United States to repair its economy, and the Americans will use the Iranians to create a balance of power with Sunni states. This will create indirect benefits for both sides. Iran's financial woes will be an opportunity for American companies to invest. The Americans' need for a balance of power will give Iran weight against its own enemies, even after the collapse of its strategy.
The region will of course look different but not dramatically so. The balance of power idea does not mean a rupture with Saudi Arabia or Israel. The balance of power only works if the United States maintains strong relationships on all sides. The Saudis and Israelis will not like American rebalancing. Their choices in the matter are limited, but they can take comfort from the fact that a strictly pro-Iranian policy is impossible for the United States. The American strategy with China in the 1970s was to try to become the power that balanced the Soviet Union and China. After meeting with the Chinese, Henry Kissinger went to Moscow. Thus, in terms of bilateral relationships, U.S.-Saudi and U.S.-Israeli relations can stay the same. But it now creates another relationship and option for the United States. In the end, Iran is still a secondary power and the United States is the primary power. Iran will take advantage of the relationship, and the United States will manage it.
It is hard to imagine this evolution, considering what the United States and Iran have said about each other for the past 34 years. But relations among nations are not about sentiment; they are about interest. If Roosevelt could ally with Stalin, and Nixon with Mao, then it is clear that all things are possible in U.S. foreign policy. For their part, the Persians have endured for millennia, espousing many ideologies but doing what was necessary to survive and prosper. All of this may well fall apart, but there is a compelling logic to believe that it will not, and it will not be as modest a negotiation as it appears now.
Read more: The U.S.-Iran Talks: Ideology and Necessity | Stratfor
-
Editor's Note: The following is the second installment of a series examining the global jihadist movement. Click here for Part 1.
Last week's Security Weekly was the first in a series of analyses intended to gauge the current status of the jihadist movement. The introduction to the first part discussed the two standards that will be used to assess the jihadist movement. The first scale is the goals and objectives of the movement itself and the second gauge is insurgent and terrorist theory. An analysis of the jihadists' goals noted that almost all jihadists -- whether they are transnational or nationalist in ideology -- seek to establish an Islamic polity along the lines of a medieval emirate. This goal is not only a matter of rhetoric, but action -- several jihadist groups have attempted to establish emirates. Once established, the emirate would be ruled under an extremely austere interpretation of Sharia, as seen in Afghanistan under the Taliban, which was the first jihadist emirate. Transnational jihadists also seek to expand beyond the creation of an emirate to re-establish the caliphate.
Insurgency is armed rebellion, and militant organizations waging insurgencies will often utilize terrorism as a tool in that rebellion. There are many conflicting definitions of terrorism, but for our purposes we will loosely define it as politically motivated violence against noncombatants. By definition, all insurgencies employ violence, but not all of them employ terrorism. Therefore, while the two concepts are often complementary, they are not synonymous. In the specific case of the jihadist movement, we have seen them utilize terrorism as an element of their various insurgent campaigns. However, in order to fully understand them, we must approach these two complementary concepts -- and the theory behind them -- separately.
This week's security weekly will examine insurgent theory and terrorism theory to see how they can be used to measure the jihadist movement.
Insurgency, the Long War
Insurgency, sometimes called guerrilla warfare or irregular warfare, has been practiced for centuries in a variety of different regions and by a number of actors from different cultures. One of these historical examples was the Prophet Mohammed, who is seen by the jihadists as a model for their military campaigns. After Mohammed left Mecca and established the first Islamic polity in Medina, his forces began to conduct asymmetrical military operations against their stronger Meccan foes, attacking their commercial caravans and conducting hit-and-run attacks until they were able to amass the power necessary to conquer Mecca and expand the Islamic state to include a large section of the Arabian Peninsula.
In the 20th century, insurgent theory was codified by leaders such as Russia's Vladimir Lenin, China's Mao Zedong, Vietnam's General Vo Nguyen Giap and Latin America's Che Guevara. But at its core, the theory is based on the historic concepts of declining battle when the enemy has superior forces and attacking at a time and place where the insurgents can mass sufficient forces to strike where the enemy is weak. The insurgents take a long view of the armed struggle and seek to survive and fight another day rather than allowing themselves to be fixed and destroyed by their enemy. They may lose some battles, but if they cause losses for their enemy, forcing them to expend men and resources disproportionately while remaining alive themselves to continue the insurgency, it is a victory for them. Time is on the side of the insurgent in an asymmetrical style of battle, and they hope that a long war will serve to exhaust and demoralize their enemy.
There are varying conceptual differences between figures such as Mao, Lenin and Guevara regarding how to best advance a given political situation in order to strengthen an insurgent's position and recruit forces. For example, Mao believed in extensive political preparation among the peasant citizenry before launching an armed struggle. In contrast, Guevara believed that a small vanguard (or foco) of guerrillas could begin to conduct attacks without extensive political priming and that the armed struggle itself could shape public opinion and raise popular support for the cause. These differences are largely based upon what worked in a specific insurgency situation. However, looking at the bigger picture, all insurgent theorists promote the concept of insurgent leaders working to build their military forces so that they can engage in progressively larger military engagements while simultaneously degrading their enemy's capabilities. Starting with small-scale attacks (sometimes utilizing terrorism), they want to move up from hit-and-run raids to conventional combat, eventually seeking to achieve military parity and then superiority with the enemy so that they can conquer and hold territory.
In the case of an insurgency against a foreign occupier, it is not always necessary to follow this progression and achieve military parity with them. Local insurgents invariably have superior intelligence as well as the advantage of fundamental interest. Put another way, a foreign occupier nearly always has less interest in a particular piece of territory than the locals who call it home. If the insurgents resist long enough and cause enough expenditure of blood and treasure, often the occupier can be forced to leave, even if the insurgents are taking disproportionately heavier casualties.
As noted above, the jihadists seek to emulate what they believe to be the pattern of the Prophet Mohammed and his followers, who progressed from caravan raids, to irregular warfare, to the capture of Mecca and eventually the formation of a vast empire conquered and realized by conventional military forces.
Given insurgent theory and the example of Mohammed, we are in a position to look at the various jihadist groups and gauge their current status -- and more important, their trajectory -- based upon their stage of insurgency. Has the group progressed from small-scale attacks to irregular warfare? Have they regressed? Have they conquered and held territory? Have they lost it?
Terrorist Theory
Terrorism tends to be a tool of the weak. It is often used as a way to conduct armed conflict against a militarily stronger enemy when the organization launching the armed struggle is not yet at a stage where insurgent or conventional warfare is viable. Marxist, Maoist and Focoist groups often seek to use terrorism as the first step in an armed struggle. In some ways, al Qaeda also followed a type of Focoist vanguard strategy by using terrorism to shape public opinion and raise popular support for their cause. Terrorism can also be used to supplement insurgency or conventional warfare when it is employed to keep the enemy off balance and distracted, principally by conducting strikes against vulnerable targets in the enemy's rear. The Afghan Taliban employ terrorism in this manner. Such attacks against "soft" targets require a disproportionate allocation of resources to defend against. While costly in terms of materiel and manpower, such an allocation is absolutely necessary if the security forces wish to prevent the targeted population from feeling terrorized.
Used as a tool by any organization conducting an armed struggle -- whether that organization is Marxist, Maoist or jihadist -- terrorist attacks are most effective when employed in a manner that is guided by an overarching strategy, one that seeks to achieve the organization's military (and ultimately political) objectives. Because of this, a hierarchical organizational structure, with direct lines of command and control, is the best model for terrorists to use in a perfect world -- as it is for any military organization for that matter. However, conditions on the ground often prohibit the use of a hierarchical organization, the most significant inhibitor in the field being the aggressiveness of security forces.
In a location where the security forces are weak and disorganized, it is quite possible for terror groups to utilize a hierarchical command model. But in places where the security forces are competent and aggressive, the terrorists' job is harder. A proficient security force can become quite successful at collecting intelligence on a militant organization, perhaps even to the extent of penetrating the organization with agents, or developing informants from within. Such intelligence operations permit the security forces to quickly identify and round up members of the group, using their own established hierarchy as a targeting framework.
Practicing good operational security can help a militant organization protect itself from the intelligence collection efforts of the security forces, but those measures can only go so far. If the security forces are capable and aggressive, they can still find ways to infiltrate the organization. One way militant groups have countered such aggressive intelligence efforts is to move away from a hierarchical configuration and toward a cellular structure in which small teams or cells work independently and do not have links to each other.
In some organizations, the cells can be totally independent and self-contained operationally, conducting all their activities internally based on direction received from their central command. Other organizations will employ functional cells that conduct the different sorts of tasks required for a terrorist operation. In such an operational model, there might be finance and logistics cells, command cells, bomb-making cells, propaganda cells, recruitment cells, surveillance cells, assault cells and so on. The idea is that if one cell is compromised, the damage will be contained and will not allow the authorities to identify the entire organization. But still, these various cells are linked by a common command element and directed in their operations.
However, even cellular organizations are vulnerable to intelligence penetration. Because of this fact, some terrorist theorists have proposed an operational model called leaderless resistance, in which independent cells and individuals conduct attacks without direction from a central command.
The concept of leaderless resistance is really quite old, but its modern form was perhaps best articulated and documented by a series of American white supremacist leaders following the 1988 Fort Smith Sedition Trial. While the 13 white supremacist leaders charged in the Fort Smith case were eventually acquitted, testimony and evidence from that trial demonstrated that the white supremacist movement had been heavily infiltrated by American law enforcement agencies. Some of the leaders of those penetrated groups began to advocate leaderless resistance as a way to avoid heavy government intelligence activity.
In 1989, William Luther Pierce, the leader of a neo-Nazi group called the National Alliance and one of the Fort Smith defendants, published a fictional book under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald titled Hunter, which dealt with the exploits of a fictional lone wolf named Oscar Yeager. Pierce dedicated the book to convicted serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin and he clearly intended it to serve as an inspiration and model for lone-wolf operatives. Pierce's earlier book, The Turner Diaries, was based on a militant operational theory involving a clandestine organization, while Hunter represented a distinct break from that approach. (Coincidentally, Franklin was executed by the state of Missouri as this article was being written.)
In 1990, Richard Kelly Hoskins, an influential "Christian Identity" ideologue, published a book titled Vigilantes of Christendom in which he introduced the concept of the "Phineas Priesthood." According to Hoskins, a Phineas Priest is a lone-wolf militant chosen by God and set apart to be God's "agent of vengeance" upon the earth. Phineas Priests also believe their attacks will serve to ignite a wider "racial holy war" that will ultimately lead to the salvation of the white race.
In 1992, another of the Fort Smith defendants, former Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam, published an essay in his magazine The Seditionist that provided a detailed roadmap for moving the white hate movement toward the leaderless resistance model. Beam's roadmap called for lone wolves and small "phantom" cells to engage in violent action to protect themselves from detection.
The leaderless resistance model was advocated not only by the American far right though. Influenced by their anarchist roots, left-wing extremists also moved in the phantom direction and movements such as the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front adopted operational models that were very similar to the leaderless-resistance doctrine prescribed by Beam.
Upon seeing the success the United States and its allies were having against the al Qaeda core and the wider jihadist network following 9/11, jihadist military theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri began to promote a leaderless resistance model for jihadists in late 2004. This was based on the jihadist concept of individual jihad. As if to prove his own point about the dangers of maintaining a high profile and communicating with other jihadists, al-Suri was reportedly captured in November 2005 in Pakistan. It is believed that he was released from prison in Syria in late 2011 or early 2012.
Al-Suri's concept of leaderless resistance was embraced by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the al Qaeda franchise group in Yemen, in 2009. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula called for this type of strategy in both its Arabic-language media and its English-language magazine, Inspire, which published long excerpts of al-Suri's theories pertaining to individual jihad. The magazine also endeavored to equip aspiring do-it-yourself jihadists with practical material, such as bomb-making instructions. Inspire's bomb-making directions have been used in a number of plots, including the Boston Marathon Bombing.
In 2010, the al Qaeda core also embraced the idea, with U.S.-born spokesman Adam Gadahn echoing the call for Muslims to adopt the leaderless resistance model.
However, in the jihadist realm, as in the white-supremacist realm before it, the shift to leaderless resistance is an admission of weakness rather than a sign of strength. Jihadists recognized that they have been extremely limited in their ability to successfully attack the West. And while jihadist groups openly welcomed recruits in the past, they are now telling them it is too dangerous to travel because of the steps taken by the United States and its allies to combat the transnational terrorist threat. The advice is that they should instead conduct attacks in the Western countries where they live.
The net result is that we can use terrorist theory as a way to measure the status of a particular jihadist group. Are they able to operate as a hierarchical organization, or do they have to work in a cellular structure? Can they project their power by conducting attacks across transnational boundaries, or is their reach confined to a specific city, country or region?
Next week we will apply these measures of insurgent and terrorism theory to a variety of jihadist groups. By also incorporating the objectives of the jihadist movement (as examined in part one of this series) as a benchmark, we will be able to see exactly where these groups stand in relation to each other and interrogate their relative condition and status.
Read more: Gauging the Jihadist Movement, Part 2: Insurgent and Terrorist Theory | Stratfor
-
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/12/01/
-
Pasting this here from the Incorrect thread
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-woe-to-us-allies/2013/12/05/cdf511ca-5de1-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html
-
http://nationalreview.com/article/365292/worlds-new-outlaws-victor-davis-hanson
-
The New York Times Destroys Obama
Caroline Glick | Jan 04, 2014
Caroline Glick
The New York Times just delivered a mortal blow to the Obama administration and its Middle East policy. Call it fratricide. It was clearly unintentional. Indeed, is far from clear that the paper realizes what it has done.
Last Saturday the Times published an 8,000-word account by David Kirkpatrick detailing the terrorist strike against the US Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. In it, Kirkpatrick tore to shreds the foundations of President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism strategy and his overall policy in the Middle East.
Obama first enunciated those foundations in his June 4, 2009, speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University. Ever since, they have been the rationale behind US counterterror strategy and US Middle East policy.
Obama’s first assertion is that radical Islam is not inherently hostile to the US. As a consequence, America can appease radical Islamists. Moreover, once radical Muslims are appeased, they will become US allies, (replacing the allies the US abandons to appease the radical Muslims).
Obama’s second strategic guidepost is his claim that the only Islamic group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is the faction of al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and must be destroyed through force.
The administration has dubbed the Zawahiri faction of al-Qaida “core al-Qaida.” And anyone who operates in the name of al-Qaida, or any other group that does not have courtroom-certified operational links to Zawahiri, is not really al-Qaida, and therefore, not really a terrorist group or a US enemy.
These foundations have led the US to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan. They are the rationale for the US’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. They are the basis for Obama’s allegiance to Turkey’s Islamist government, and his early support for the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.
They are the basis for the administration’s kneejerk support for the PLO against Israel.
Obama’s insistent bid to appease Iran, and so enable the mullocracy to complete its nuclear weapons program. is similarly a product of his strategic assumptions. So, too, the US’s current diplomatic engagement of Hezbollah in Lebanon owes to the administration’s conviction that any terror group not directly connected to Zawahiri is a potential US ally.
From the outset of the 2011 revolt against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, it was clear that a significant part of the opposition was composed of jihadists aligned if not affiliated with al-Qaida. Benghazi was specifically identified by documents seized by US forces in Iraq as a hotbed of al-Qaida recruitment.
Obama and his advisers dismissed and ignored the evidence. The core of al-Qaida, they claimed, was not involved in the anti-Gaddafi revolt. And to the extent jihadists were fighting Gaddafi, they were doing so as allies of the US.
In other words, the two core foundations of Obama’s understanding of terrorism and of the Muslim world were central to US support for the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.
With Kirkpatrick’s report, the Times exposed the utter falsity of both.
Kirkpatrick showed the mindset of the US-supported rebels and through it, the ridiculousness of the administration’s belief that you can’t be a terrorist if you aren’t directly subordinate to Zawahiri.
One US-supported Islamist militia commander recalled to him that at the outset of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion, “Teenagers came running around… [asking] ‘Sheikh, sheikh, did you know al-Qaida? Did you know Osama bin Laden? How do we fight?”
In the days and weeks following the September 11, 2012, attack on the US installations in Benghazi in which US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed, the administration claimed that the attacks were not carried out by terrorists. Rather they were the unfortunate consequence of a spontaneous protest by otherwise innocent Libyans.
According to the administration’s version of events, these guileless, otherwise friendly demonstrators, who killed the US ambassador and three other Americans, were simply angered by a YouTube video of a movie trailer which jihadist clerics in Egypt had proclaimed was blasphemous.
In an attempt to appease the mob after the fact, Obama and then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton shot commercials run on Pakistani television apologizing for the video and siding with the mob against the movie-maker, who is the only person the US has imprisoned following the attack. Then-ambassador to the UN and current National Security Adviser Susan Rice gave multiple television interviews placing the blame for the attacks on the video.
According to Kirkpatrick’s account of the assault against the US installations in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, the administration’s description of the assaults was a fabrication. Far from spontaneous political protests spurred by rage at a YouTube video, the attack was premeditated.
US officials spotted Libyans conducting surveillance of the consulate nearly 15 hours before the attack began.
Libyan militia warned US officials “of rising threats against Americans from extremists in Benghazi,” two days before the attack.
From his account, the initial attack – in which the consulate was first stormed – was carried out not by a mob, but by a few dozen fighters. They were armed with assault rifles. They acted in a coordinated, professional manner with apparent awareness of US security procedures.
During the initial assault, the attackers shot down the lights around the compound, stormed the gates, and swarmed around the security personnel who ran to get their weapons, making it impossible for them to defend the ambassador and other personnel trapped inside.
According to Kirkpatrick, after the initial attack, the organizers spurred popular rage and incited a mob assault on the consulate by spreading the rumor that the Americans had killed a local. Others members of the secondary mob, Kirkpatrick claimed, were motivated by reports of the video.
This mob assault, which followed the initial attack and apparent takeover of the consulate, was part of the predetermined plan. The organizers wanted to produce chaos.
As Kirkpatrick explained, “The attackers had posted sentries at Venezia Road, adjacent to the [consulate] compound, to guard their rear flank, but they let pass anyone trying to join the mayhem.”
According to Kirkpatrick, the attack was perpetrated by local terrorist groups that were part of the US-backed anti-Gaddafi coalition. The people who were conducting the surveillance of the consulate 15 hours before the attack were uniformed security forces who escaped in an official car. Members of the militia tasked with defending the compound participated in the attack.
Ambassador Stevens, who had served as the administration’s emissary to the rebels during the insurrection against Gaddafi, knew personally many of the terrorists who orchestrated the attack. And until the very end, he was taken in by the administration’s core belief that it was possible to appease al-Qaida-sympathizing Islamic jihadists who were not directly affiliated with Zawahiri.
As Kirkpatrick noted, Stevens “helped shape the Obama administration’s conviction that it could work with the rebels, even those previously hostile to the West, to build a friendly, democratic government.”
The entire US view that local militias, regardless of their anti-American, jihadist ideologies, could become US allies was predicated not merely on the belief that they could be appeased, but that they weren’t terrorists because they weren’t al-Qaida proper.
As Kirkpatrick notes, “American intelligence efforts in Libya concentrated on the agendas of the biggest militia leaders and the handful of Libyans with suspected ties to al-Qaida. The fixation on al-Qaida might have distracted experts from more imminent threats.”
But again, the only reason that the intelligence failed to notice the threats emanating from local US-supported terrorists is because the US counterterrorist strategy, like its overall Middle East strategy, is to seek to appease all US enemies other than the parts of al-Qaida directly commanded by Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Distressingly, most of the discussion spurred by Kirkpatrick’s article has ignored the devastating blow he visited on the intellectual foundations of Obama’s foreign policy. Instead, the discussion has focused on his claim that there is “no evidence that al-Qaida or other international terrorist group had any role in the assault,” and on his assertion that the YouTube video did spur to action some of the participants in the assault.
Kirkpatrick’s claim that al-Qaida played no role in the attack was refuted by the Times’ own reporting six weeks after the attack. It has also been refuted by congressional and State Department investigations, by the UN and by a raft of other reporting.
His claim that the YouTube video did spur some of the attackers to action was categorically rejected last spring in sworn congressional testimony by then-deputy chief of the US mission to Libya Gregory Hicks.
Last May Hicks stated, “The YouTube video was a non-event in Libya. The video was not instigative of anything that was going on in Libya. We saw no demonstrators related to the video anywhere in Libya.”
Kirkpatrick’s larger message – that the reasoning behind Obama’s entire counterterrorist strategy and his overall Middle East policy is totally wrong, and deeply destructive – has been missed because his article was written and published to whitewash the administration’s deliberate mischaracterization of the events in Benghazi, not to discredit the rationale behind its Middle East policy and counterterrorism strategy. This is why he claimed that al-Qaida wasn’t involved in the attack. And this is why he claimed that the YouTube video was a cause for the attack.
This much was made clear in a blog post by editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who alleged that the entire discourse on Benghazi is promoted by the Republicans to harm the Democrats, and Kirkpatrick’s story served to weaken the Republican arguments. In Rosenthal’s words, “The Republicans hope to tarnish Democratic candidates by making it seem as though Mr. Obama doesn’t take al-Qaida seriously.”
So pathetically, in a bid to defend Obama and Clinton and the rest of the Democrats, the Times published a report that showed that Obama’s laser-like focus on the Zawahiri-controlled faction of al-Qaida has endangered the US.
By failing to view as enemies any other terror groups – even if they have participated in attacks against the US – and indeed, in perceiving them as potential allies, Obama has failed to defend against them. Indeed, by wooing them as future allies, Obama has empowered forces as committed as al-Qaida to defeating the US.
Again, it is not at all apparent that the Times realized what it was doing. But from Israel to Egypt, to Iran to Libya to Lebanon, it is absolutely clear that Obama and his colleagues continue to implement the same dangerous, destructive agenda that defeated the US in Benghazi and will continue to cause US defeat after US defeat.
-
As I have stated here previously various times, I do not read, let alone cite Debka. However, 12 Tribes is doing so in this case AND the hypothesis is consistent with what Stratfor has been predicting for years, often to much disapproval around here:
http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/us-forms-military-partnership-with-iran-for-first-time?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+US+Forms+Military+Partnership+with+Iran+for+First+Time&utm_campaign=20140105_m118592078_1%2F5%3A+Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+US+Forms+Military+Partnership+with+Iran+for+First+Time&utm_term=US+Forms+Military+Partnership+with+Iran+for+First+Time
-
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/15/senior-uk-defense-advisor-obama-is-clueless-about-what-he-wants-to-do-in-the-world.html
-
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/15/senior-uk-defense-advisor-obama-is-clueless-about-what-he-wants-to-do-in-the-world.html
Funny how some of us saw this coming in 2008.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368971/obamas-recessional-victor-davis-hanson
Does Barack Obama have a strategy? He is often criticized for being adrift.
Nonetheless, while Obama has never articulated strategic aims in the manner of Ronald Reagan or the two Bushes, it is not therefore true that there is no “Obama Doctrine.” Indeed, now that he has been in office five years, we can see an overarching common objective in otherwise baffling foreign-policy misadventures.
Advertisement
Collate the following: large defense cuts, the president’s suspicions that he is being gamed by the military, the pullout from the anti-missile defense pact in Eastern Europe, the pressure on Israel to give new concessions to its neighbors, the sudden warming up with an increasingly Islamist Turkey, the failed reset with Russia, radical nuclear-arms-reduction talks, the abject withdrawal of all U.S. peacekeeping forces in Iraq, the timetable withdrawals in Afghanistan, the new worries of our Asian and Middle Eastern allies, the constant euphemisms on the war on terror, the stepped-up drone attacks, the lead-from-behind removal of Moammar Qaddafi, the pullaway from Mubarak in Egypt, the support for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the pink lines in Syria, the Iranian missile deal, the declaration that al-Qaeda was on the run and the war on terror essentially ending, the Benghazi coverup, and on and on.
Does such American behavior display any consistent strategic coherence?
I think it most certainly does.
The Obama administration believes that past administrations’ strategic objectives and the methods of achieving them not only were flawed, but led to the sort of world that is not in our interests as defined by the Obama team. The contemporary world landscape is an unfair place. “Have” nations exploit the “have-nots,” in large part because of the rigged postwar system of free-market commerce, alliances, and politics that the United States created. While it would be dangerous and indeed impossible to abruptly disown our responsibilities — we can still hunt down bin Laden, kill terrorists with drones, and jawbone rogue dictators — we can begin to withdraw our sponsorship from the mess that, in a variety of ways, we were responsible for.
Our past and most secure alliances — the special relationships with Britain and Israel especially — are now seen as having alienated more people than they encouraged. Islamist movements in Turkey and Egypt were either inevitable or justified, given historical grievances against the West and the fact that they reflect grass-roots indigenous support.
Arbitrary American axioms — an enemy Iran was going to get the bomb to threaten the Middle East; a good Israel was a force for democracy and prosperity in an otherwise unhinged Middle East; the Persian Gulf monarchies were corrupt and anti-American, but not as corrupt and anti-American as the likely alternatives to them — were simplistic and outdated.
China and Russia were needlessly estranged, given that they both sought reform, only to be gratuitously alienated by the bullying United States. Anti-Americanism was fed not by envy or the fact that the nation’s superpower responsibilities were easily caricatured, but rather by our often haughty behavior and a long history of global misdeeds. Obama in his Cairo speech, in his apology tour, and through his subordinates was not shy about voicing these reappraisals of the American past.
Most Americans are proud that we won the Cold War; Obama wonders whether we had to fight it as we did. Most Americans believe Islamists hate us for who we are and what we represent. Obama believes that we may have earned such enmity. Most Americans believe that the world outside the U.S. can be a pretty wretched place; Obama believes either that it is not so wretched, or that its wretchedness is mostly due to the American omnipresence.
What were the president’s methods of achieving this repositioning of the United States?
==============================
Obama sought to assure the world that he would restrict the use of the American military. In practical fact that meant he would not use it unless the target was so weak as to nearly capitulate upon contact, or the target was at odds with a revolutionary uprising (Iran’s theocracy excepted).
Obama’s drone assassinations have been more than four times the Bush total, but they have been largely stealthy and unreported, and they came at no cost in American life. Libya was a misadventure, but American led Britain and France only from behind. We never had any intention of using force in Syria; the miscalculation lay in Obama’s blustering that he might use force and that his pseudo red lines, like his deadlines with Iran, were real.
Advertisement
Summed up, the Obama Doctrine is a gradual retreat of the American presence worldwide — on the theory that our absence will lead to a vacuum better occupied by regional powers that know how to manage their neighborhood’s affairs and have greater legitimacy in their own spheres of influence. Any damage that might occur with the loss of the American omnipresence does not approximate the harm already done by American intrusiveness. The current global maladies — Islamist terrorism, Middle Eastern tensions, Chinese muscle-flexing, Russian obstructionism, resurgence of Communist autocracy in Latin America — will fade once the United States lowers its profile and keeps out of other nations’ business.
The methods to achieve this recessional are tricky — as they are for any aging sheriff, guns drawn, who hobbles slowly out of a crowded saloon on his last day on the job. American withdrawal must be facilitated by the semblance of power. That is, rhetoric, loud deadlines and red lines, and drones can for now approximate the old U.S. presence, as America insidiously abandons its 70-year role as architect of a global system that brought the world unprecedented security and prosperity. “No option is off the table” tells most foreign leaders that very probably no option ever was on it.
Finally, what is the ideology that fuels the Obama doctrine — both its objectives and its methods?
For Obama, America abroad is analogous to the 1 percent at home. We need not squabble over the reasons why the wealthiest Americans enjoy unequal access to the things money can buy, or why America, of all nations, finds itself with unmatched global clout and influence. The concern is only that such privilege exists; that it is unfair; that it has led to injustice for the majority; and that it must be changed.
Obama, of course, cannot issue a global tax aimed at the United States. He cannot easily expand U.S. foreign aid as a sort of reparations. And he cannot craft the international equivalent of Obamacare. But he does seek the same sort of redistributive readjustment to America’s presence abroad that he does to some Americans at home — in the interests of fairness, equality, and social justice.
Just as the United States would be a lot better place if a few million were not so rich, so too the world would be better off if the United States — and to a lesser extent Europe — were not so powerful and interventionist.
For every foreign concern, there is a greater domestic concern. Each Marine posted abroad, each GPS-guided bomb, each new frigate does not add to our deterrence and thus help keep the peace. Instead, such investments only raise the likelihood that unnecessary tensions will follow — and, meanwhile, precious dollars are diverted from far more important domestic constituencies who rightly object that a cruise missile means hundreds of new food-stamp applicants denied.
That the American public is supposedly exhausted after two wars and a variety of interventions, and that it is struggling with $17 trillion in debt and expanding entitlements, suggest that the Obama Doctrine, for all its radicalism, will not necessarily be seen as such by the public — any more than Depression-era American isolationism, after the disappointment with the aftermath of World War I, was considered unwise in an ever more dangerous world.
In short, Obama has a strategy. He has found a means of advancing it. He believes in the ideological basis for seeing it succeed. And he assumes that the public, for a variety of reasons, is quite supportive of it.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
-
http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/america-use-private-contractors-assassinate-terrorists/#axzz2syiD7NHY
-
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20140217-the-entertainment-industry-understands-the-rare-earth-crisis-why-doesn-t-everybody-else
From the article:
U.S. dependence on rare earths imports substantially exceeds our dependence on imported petroleum. In 2011, the United States imported 45 percent of the petroleum we consumed, but we imported 100 percent of the rare earth materials we consumed that same year — and rare earths are far more essential to a wider variety of industries than petroleum is. China controls the production, refining, and processing of over 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements despite only controlling about half of the world’s rare earth resources. In the 1980s, there were approximately 25,000 American rare earth-related jobs; now we barely have 1,500. The United States must take action now to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of rare earth materials and bring back jobs.
-
The American Public's Indifference to Foreign Affairs
Geopolitical Weekly
Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - 04:13 Print Text Size
Stratfor
By George Friedman
Last week, several events took place that were important to their respective regions and potentially to the world. Russian government officials suggested turning Ukraine into a federation, following weeks of renewed demonstrations in Kiev. The Venezuelan government was confronted with violent and deadly protests. Kazakhstan experienced a financial crisis that could have destabilized the economies of Central Asia. Russia and Egypt inked a significant arms deal. Right-wing groups in Europe continued their political gains.
Any of these events had the potential to affect the United States. At different times, lesser events have transfixed Americans. This week, Americans seemed to be indifferent to all of them. This may be part of a cycle that shapes American interest in public affairs. The decision to raise the debt ceiling, which in the last cycle gripped public attention, seemed to elicit a shrug.
The Primacy of Private Affairs
The United States was founded as a place where private affairs were intended to supersede public life. Public service was intended less as a profession than as a burden to be assumed as a matter of duty -- hence the word "service." There is a feeling that Americans ought to be more involved in public affairs, and people in other countries are frequently shocked by how little Americans know about international affairs or even their own politics. In many European countries, the state is at the center of many of the activities that shape private life, but that is less true in the United States. The American public is often most active in public affairs when resisting the state's attempts to increase its presence, as we saw with health care reform. When such matters appear settled, Americans tend to focus their energy on their private lives, pleasures and pains.
Of course, there are times when Americans are aroused not only to public affairs but also to foreign affairs. That is shaped by the degree to which these events are seen as affecting Americans' own lives. There is nothing particularly American in this. People everywhere care more about things that affect them than things that don't. People in European or Middle Eastern countries, where another country is just a two-hour drive away, are going to be more aware of foreign affairs. Still, they will be most concerned about the things that affect them. The French or Israelis are aware of public and foreign affairs not because they are more sophisticated than Americans, but because the state is more important in their lives, and foreign countries are much nearer to their homes. If asked about events far away, I find they are as uninterested and uninformed as Americans.
The United States' geography, obviously, shapes American thinking about the world. The European Peninsula is crowded with peoples and nation-states. In a matter of hours you can find yourself in a country with a different language and religion and a history of recent war with your own. Americans can travel thousands of miles using their own language, experiencing the same culture and rarely a memory of war. Northwestern Europe is packed with countries. The northeastern United States is packed with states. Passing from the Netherlands to Germany is a linguistic, cultural change with historical memories. Traveling from Connecticut to New York is not. When Europeans speak of their knowledge of international affairs, their definition of international is far more immediate than that of Americans.
American interest is cyclical, heavily influenced by whether they are affected by what goes on. After 9/11, what happened in the Islamic world mattered a great deal. But even then, it went in cycles. The degree to which Americans are interested in Afghanistan -- even if American soldiers are still in harm's way -- is limited. The war's outcome is fairly clear, the impact on America seems somewhat negligible and the issues are arcane.
It's not that Americans are disinterested in foreign affairs, it's that their interest is finely calibrated. The issues must matter to Americans, so most issues must carry with them a potential threat. The outcome must be uncertain, and the issues must have a sufficient degree of clarity so that they can be understood and dealt with. Americans may turn out to have been wrong about these things in the long run, but at the time, an issue must fit these criteria. Afghanistan was once seen as dangerous to the United States, its outcome uncertain, the issues clear. In truth, Afghanistan may not have fit any of these criteria, but Americans believed it did, so they focused their attention and energy on the country accordingly.
Context is everything. During times of oil shortage, events in Venezuela might well have interested Americans much more than they did last week. During the Cold War, the left-wing government in Venezuela might have concerned Americans. But advancements in technology have increased oil and natural gas production in the United States. A left-wing government in Venezuela is simply another odd Latin government, and the events of last week are not worth worrying about. The context renders Venezuela a Venezuelan problem.
It is not that Americans are disengaged from the world, but rather that the world appears disengaged from them. At the heart of the matter is geography. The Americans, like the British before them, use the term "overseas" to denote foreign affairs. The American reality is that most important issues, aside from Canada and Mexico, take place across the ocean, and the ocean reasonably is seen as a barrier that renders these events part of a faraway realm. Terrorists can cross the oceans, as can nuclear weapons, and both can obliterate the barriers the oceans represent. But al Qaeda has not struck in a while, nuclear threats are not plausible at the moment, and things overseas simply don't seem to matter.
Bearing Some Burdens
During the Cold War, Americans had a different mindset. They saw themselves in an existential struggle for survival with the communists. It was a swirling global battle that lasted decades. Virtually every country in the world had a U.S. and Soviet embassy, which battled each other for dominance. An event in Thailand or Bolivia engaged both governments and thus both publics. The threat of nuclear war was real, and conventional wars such as those in Korea and Vietnam were personal to Americans. I remember in elementary school being taught of the importance of the battle against communism in the Congo.
One thing that the end of the Cold War and the subsequent 20 years taught the United States was that the world mattered -- a mindset that was as habitual as it was reflective of new realities. If the world mattered, then something must be done when it became imperiled. The result was covert and overt action designed to shape events to suit American interests, perceived and real. Starting in the late 1980s, the United States sent troops to Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Kuwait. The American public was engaged in all of these for a variety of reasons, some of them good, some bad. Whatever the reasoning, there was a sense of clarity that demanded that something be done. After 9/11, the conviction that something be done turned into an obsession. But over the past 10 years, Americans' sense of clarity has become much more murky, and their appetite for involvement has declined accordingly.
That decline occurred not only among the American public but also among American policymakers. During the Cold War and jihadist wars, covert and overt intervention became a standard response. More recently, the standards for justifying either type of intervention have become more exacting to policymakers. Syria was not a matter of indifference, but the situation lacked the clarity that justified intervention. The United States seemed poised to intervene and then declined. The American public saw it as avoiding another overseas entanglement with an outcome that could not be shaped by American power.
We see the same thing in Ukraine. The United States cannot abide a single power like Russia dominating Eurasia. That would create a power that could challenge the United States. There were times that the Ukrainian crisis would have immediately piqued American interest. While some elements of the U.S. government, particularly in the State Department, did get deeply involved, the American public remained generally indifferent.
From a geopolitical point of view, the future of Ukraine as European or Russian helps shape the future of Eurasia. But from the standpoint of the American public, the future is far off and susceptible to interference. (Americans have heard of many things that could have become a major threat -- a few did, most didn't.) They were prepared to bet that Ukraine's future would not intersect with their lives. Ukraine matters more to Europeans than to Americans, and the United States' ability to really shape events is limited. It is far from clear what the issues are from an American point of view.
This is disconcerting from the standpoint of those who live outside the United States. They experienced the United States through the Cold War, the Clinton years and the post-9/11 era. The United States was deeply involved in everything. The world got used to that. Today, government officials are setting much higher standards for involvement, though not as high as those set by the American public. The constant presence of American power shaping regions far away to prevent the emergence of a threat, whether communist or Islamist, is declining. I spoke to a foreign diplomat who insisted the United States was weakening. I tried to explain that it is not weakness that dictates disengagement but indifference. He couldn't accept the idea that the United States has entered a period in which it really doesn't care what happens to his country. I refined that by saying that there are those in Washington that do care, but that it is their profession to care. The rest of the country doesn't see that it matters to them. The diplomat had lived in a time when everything mattered and all problems required an American position. American indifference is the most startling thing in the world for him.
This was the position of American isolationists of the early 20th century. ("Isolationist" admittedly was an extremely bad term, just as the alternative "internationalist" was a misleading phrase). The isolationists opposed involvement in Europe during World War II for a number of reasons. They felt that the European problem was European and that the Anglo-French alliance could cope with Germany. They did not see how U.S. intervention would bring enough power to bear to make a significant difference. They observed that sending a million men to France in World War I did not produce a permanently satisfactory outcome. The isolationists were willing to be involved in Asia, as is normally forgotten, but not in Europe.
I would not have been an isolationist, yet it is hard to see how an early American intervention would have changed the shape of the European war. France did not collapse because it was outnumbered. After France's collapse, it was unclear how much more the United States could have done for Britain than it did. The kinds of massive intervention that would have been necessary to change the early course of the war were impossible. It would have taken years of full mobilization to be practical, and who expected France to collapse in six weeks? Stalin was certainly surprised.
The isolationist period was followed, of course, by the war and the willingness of the United States to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty," in the words of John F. Kennedy. Until very recently, that sweeping statement was emblematic of U.S. foreign policy since 1941.
The current public indifference to foreign policy reflects that shift. But Washington's emerging foreign policy is not the systematic foreign policy of the pre-World War II period. It is an instrumental position, which can adapt to new circumstances and will likely be changed not over the course of decades but over the course of years or months. Nevertheless, at this moment, public indifference to foreign policy and even domestic events is strong. The sense that private life matters more than public is intense, and that means that Americans are concerned with things that are deemed frivolous by foreigners, academics and others who make their living in public and foreign policy. They care about some things, but are not prepared to care about all things. Of course, this overthrows Kennedy's pledge in its grandiosity and extremity, but not in its essence. Some burdens will be borne, so long as they serve American interests and not simply the interests of its allies.
Whether this sentiment is good or bad is debatable. To me, it is simply becoming a fact to be borne in mind. I would argue that it is a luxury, albeit a temporary one, conferred on Americans by geography. Americans might not be interested in the world, but the world is interested in Americans. Until this luxury comes to an end, the United States has ample assistant secretaries to give the impression that it cares. The United States will adjust to this period more easily than other governments, which expect the United States to be committed to undertaking any burden. That may come in the future. It won't come now. But history and the world go on, even overseas.
Read more: The American Public's Indifference to Foreign Affairs | Stratfor
-
We've hit the idiocracy tipping point. Panem et kardashians.
-
Well, it is not exactly like we have been well led for quite some time.
Bush 1 snatched stalemate from victory in Gulf-1.
Clinton acted only when it did not matter and did so indecisively and let Saddam get rid of the inspectors
Bush 2 flinched in going after OBL in Tora Bora and took his eye off the ball in Afpakia and chose an utterly incoherent strategy and left Baraq a hideous hand in Afpakia. He led quite badly on Iraq, getting it right after trying all the wrong options.
Baraq threw it all away in Iraq, , , , and Egypt, and Libya, and and and
I can't say the American people doubt the competence of our foreign affairs leadership without reason.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371300/lessons-world-war-i-victor-davis-hanson
-
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/5-questions-and-answers-that-tell-you-everything-you-need-to-know-about-u-s-response-to-the-ukraine-crisis/
-
second post
The Stepping Stones to the Ukraine Crisis
March 3, 2014 10:35 am / victorhanson
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner
Each step to the present Ukrainian predicament was in and of itself hardly earth-shattering and was sort of framed by Obama’s open-mic assurance to Medvedev to tell Vladimir that he would more flexible after the election.
Limbic viz Flickr
Limbic viz Flickr
Indeed, Obama, as is his wont, always had mellifluous and sophistic arguments for why we had to take every soldier out of Iraq after the successful surge; why we needed to drop missile defense with the Poles and Czechs; why we needed both a surge and simultaneous deadline to end the surge in Afghanistan; why we first issued serial deadlines to Iran to ask them to please stop proliferation, then just quit the sanctions altogether just as they started to work; why we needed to “lead from behind” in Libya; why the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular and legitimate and then later not so much so; why we issued redlines and bragged about Putin’s “help” to eliminate WMD in Syria, and were going to bomb and then not bomb and then maybe bomb; why we kept pressuring Israel; why we cozied up to an increasingly dictatorial Turkey; why we reached out to Cuba and Venezuela; and why we sometimes embarrassed old allies like Britain, Canada, and Israel.
Amid such a landscape of deadlines begetting redlines begetting step-over lines always came the unfortunate pontificating — the Cairo mytho-history speech, the adolescent so-called apology tour, the sermon about “exceptionalism,” — and also the dressing down delivered to a mute Obama by a pompous Daniel Ortega, the bows and hugs, and Obama’s constant apologies for past American sins. Again all this was trivial — and yet in aggregate not so trivial for the lidless eye of a Putin.
Amid both the deeds and the facts came the serial $1 trillion annual deficits, the surge in borrowing for redistributionist payouts, the monetary expansion and zero-interest rates, and finally the vast cuts in the military budget, all of which fleshed out the caricature of a newly isolationist and self-indulgent America, eager to talk, bluster, or threaten its way out of its traditional postwar leadership role.
Again, each incident in and of itself was of little import. None were the stuff of crises. But incrementally all these tiny tesserae began forming a mosaic, fairly or not, of the Obama administration as either weak or clueless or perhaps both.
Accordingly, Mr. Putin, in empirical fashion, after factoring in the rhetoric and the facts, has decided that it is time, in the fashion of 1979–80, to move with probable impunity. Others are, of course, watching what Obama derides as Cold War chess games. Should Iran now go full bore on its nuclear program? Should China test Japanese waters and airspace a bit more aggressively? Should North Korea try to gain new concessions from its nuclear lunacy? Should the failed Communists of Latin America try forcibly exporting their miseries to neighbors? And all are operating on the shared assumption that the American reaction will be another “outrageous,” “unacceptable,” “don’t cross this line,” or another solemn Kerry lecture about the existential threats of global warming.
For some, like the now furrow-browed Europeans who once giddily lapped up the Victory Column pabulum, there is irony. For the Baltic states, Georgians, the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, and the South Koreans, there is increased anxiety about regional strains of Putanism spreading to their own backyards. And among our allies such as the British, Israelis, Canadians, and Australians, there is still polite bewilderment.
This will probably end in either two ways : Either Barack Obama will have his 1980 Jimmy Carter revelatory moment as something like an “Obama Doctrine,” or we could see some pretty scary things in the next three years as regional thugs cash in their chips and begin readjusting the map in their areas of would-be influence.
-
The Leaderless Doctrine
MARCH 10, 2014
David Brook
We’re in the middle of a remarkable shift in how Americans see the world and their own country’s role in the world. For the first time in half a century, a majority of Americans say that the U.S. should be less engaged in world affairs, according to the most recent Pew Research Center survey. For the first time in recorded history, a majority of Americans believe that their country has a declining influence on what’s happening around the globe. A slight majority of Americans now say that their country is doing too much to help solve the world’s problems.
At first blush, this looks like isolationism. After the exhaustion from Iraq and Afghanistan, and amid the lingering economic stagnation, Americans are turning inward.
But if you actually look at the data, you see that this is not the case. America is not turning inward economically. More than three-quarters of Americans believe the U.S. should get more economically integrated with the world, according to Pew.
America is not turning inward culturally. Large majorities embrace the globalization of culture and the internationalization of colleges and workplaces. Americans are not even turning inward when it comes to activism. They have enormous confidence in personalized peer-to-peer efforts to promote democracy, human rights and development.
What’s happening can be more accurately described this way: Americans have lost faith in the high politics of global affairs. They have lost faith in the idea that American political and military institutions can do much to shape the world. American opinion is marked by an amazing sense of limitation — that there are severe restrictions on what political and military efforts can do.
This sense of limits is shared equally among Democrats and Republicans, polls show. There has been surprisingly little outcry against the proposed defense cuts, which would reduce the size of the U.S. Army to its lowest levels since 1940. That’s because people are no longer sure military might gets you very much.
These shifts are not just a result of post-Iraq disillusionment, or anything the Obama administration has done. The shift in foreign policy values is a byproduct of a deeper and broader cultural shift.
The veterans of World War II returned to civilian life with a basic faith in big units — big armies, corporations and unions. They tended to embrace a hierarchical leadership style.
The Cold War was a competition between clearly defined nation-states.
Commanding American leaders created a liberal international order. They preserved that order with fleets that roamed the seas, armies stationed around the world and diplomatic skill.
Over the ensuing decades, that faith in big units has eroded — in all spheres of life. Management hierarchies have been flattened. Today people are more likely to believe that history is driven by people gathering in the squares and not from the top down. The liberal order is not a single system organized and defended by American military strength; it’s a spontaneous network of direct people-to-people contacts, flowing along the arteries of the Internet.
The real power in the world is not military or political. It is the power of individuals to withdraw their consent. In an age of global markets and global media, the power of the state and the tank, it is thought, can pale before the power of the swarms of individuals.
This is global affairs with the head chopped off. Political leaders are not at the forefront of history; real power is in the swarm. The ensuing doctrine is certainly not Reaganism — the belief that America should use its power to defeat tyranny and promote democracy. It’s not Kantian, or a belief that the world should be governed by international law. It’s not even realism — the belief that diplomats should play elaborate chess games to balance power and advance national interest. It’s a radical belief that the nature of power — where it comes from and how it can be used — has fundamentally shifted, and the people in the big offices just don’t get it.
It’s frankly naïve to believe that the world’s problems can be conquered through conflict-free cooperation and that the menaces to civilization, whether in the form of Putin or Iran, can be simply not faced. It’s the utopian belief that politics and conflict are optional.
One set of numbers in the data leaps out. For decades Americans have been asked if they believe most people can be trusted. Forty percent of baby boomers believe most people can be trusted. But only 19 percent of millennials believe that. This is a thoroughly globalized and linked generation with unprecedentedly low levels of social trust.
We live in a country in which many people act as if history is leaderless. Events emerge spontaneously from the ground up. Such a society is very hard to lead and summon. It can be governed only by someone who arouses intense moral loyalty, and even that may be fleeting.
-
An interesting trip down memory lane.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373025/obama-ike-redivivus-victor-davis-hanson
-
Crimea: The Revenge of Geography?
Global Affairs
Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - 03:00 Print Text Size
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
The Obama administration claims it is motivated by the G-8, interdependence, human rights and international law. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a more traditional historical actor. He is motivated by geopolitics. That is why he temporarily has the upper hand in the crisis over Ukraine and Crimea.
Geopolitics, according to the mid-20th century U.S. diplomat and academic Robert Strausz-Hupe, is "the struggle for space and power," played out in a geographical setting. Geopolitics is eternal, ever since Persia was the world's first superpower in antiquity. Indeed, the Old Testament, on one level, is a lesson in geopolitics. Strausz-Hupe, an Austrian immigrant, wanted to educate the political elite of his adopted country so that the forces of good could make better use of geopolitics than the forces of evil in World War II.
Adherence to geopolitics allowed the British geographer and liberal educator Sir Halford J. Mackinder in a 1904 article, "The Geographical Pivot of History," to accurately forecast the basic trend lines of the 20th century: how the European power arrangement of the Edwardian age would give way to one encompassing all of Eurasia, with a battle between Western sea power and Russian land power. Geopolitics was at the heart of 19th-century America's bout of imperialism in the Greater Caribbean: By dominating its nearby sea the United States came, in turn, to dominate the Western Hemisphere, enabling it to affect the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere -- the story of the 20th century. Geopolitics was at the heart of World War II, with the German military machine's lunge for the oil of the Caucasus and the Japanese military machine's lunge for the oil and raw materials of Southeast Asia. Geopolitics was at the heart of the Cold War, with U.S. bases and allies guarding the southern Eurasian rimland from Greece and Turkey to South Korea and Japan against the Soviet Union. The celebrated diplomat George Kennan's "containment" strategy was, in significant part, a geopolitical one.
It isn't that geography and geopolitics supersede everything else, including Western values and human agency. Not at all! Rather, it is that geography in particular is the starting point for understanding everything else. Only by respecting geography in the first place can Western values and human ingenuity overcome it. It is not one or the other, but the sequence of understanding which is crucial.
To wit, the late military historian John Keegan explains that Great Britain and the United States could champion freedom only because the sea protected them "from the landbound enemies of liberty." Alexander Hamilton observed that had Britain not been an island, its military establishment would have been just as overbearing as those of continental Europe, and Britain "would in all probability" have become "a victim to the absolute power of a single man."
Likewise, the Berlin Wall may have fallen in 1989, but Russia is still big and right next door to Central and Eastern Europe. And Russia remains illiberal and autocratic because, unlike Britain and America, it is not an island nation, but a vast continent with few geographical features to protect it from invasion. Putin's aggression stems ultimately from this fundamental geographical insecurity. Though, this does not doom him to be a reactionary. A far-sighted ruler would see that only civil society can ultimately save Russia. But Russia's geographical setting does place Putin in an understandable context.
Geographical facts are often simple, brutal, obvious -- not interesting or inspiring or intellectually engaging in any sense -- but they are no less true as a consequence. It is not a matter of denying them, but of overcoming them. George H. W. Bush intuited such truths and thus was careful not to offend Soviet sensibilities, even as the Soviet empire was collapsing in Europe, for fear of providing Moscow with a pretext to crack down more than it did in the Baltic states, next door to the Kremlin. The elder Bush administration was aware, amid all the euphoria surrounding the events of 1989, that geography was still depressingly relevant, if not determinative.
Putin is for the moment in a strong position in Ukraine because Ukraine simply matters to him more than it matters to the United States or even to Europe. And it matters more to him because of geography. Ukraine, for all the familiar reasons, is central to the destiny of European Russia, to Russia's history and identity and particularly to Russia's access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean via the Black Sea. And because Russia's Black Sea Fleet is based on the Crimean Peninsula, Putin feels he cannot just stand by and watch his fleet become subject to an emerging, overtly pro-Western state in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, geography dictates that Ukraine has a long border with Russia and is not separated from it by any formidable geographical features. Thus, even as Putin needs Ukraine and Crimea more than the West does, he also has more leverage over Ukraine and Crimea than the West does. Because of geography, natural gas deposits are primarily in Russia rather than in Ukraine. And thus Ukraine is dependent on Russia for not only trade, but energy, too. (Ukraine's shale reserves are mainly in the eastern, pro-Russian part of the country.)
Because of geography, the Baltic states, Poland and Moldova are threatened: They are contiguous to Russia and Ukraine, with no natural impediments to protect them. In the Baltic states in particular, there are Russian minorities useful to Putin, for the flat geography of the North European Plain has enabled the flow of peoples and changeability of borders over the centuries (even if most of the Russian speakers in the Baltics ended up there during the Soviet period).
Again, these are obvious, elementary school facts, but ones that are central to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the West and Russia in the current crisis. Only from such facts can a useful narrative of the crisis emerge, and ways found to trump Putin's geographical advantage. The Baltic states, Poland and Moldova are in danger primarily because of where they happen to be located. Ukraine, despite its pro-Western upheaval, cannot ultimately be entirely independent of Russia because of where it happens to be located.
And Ukraine and Crimea are but prologue to a reality across the globe.
In Asia, the crises in the South and East China seas are all about geography -- lines on the map in blue water and where they should be drawn. This is traditional geopolitics, stunningly unaffected by the advance of Western liberal thought. In the Middle East, Israel faces the tyranny of distance in its planning for any military strike against Iran -- the fundamental fact of the Israel-Iran conflict. Tunisia and Egypt, while politically troubled, are nevertheless cohesive, age-old clusters of civilization -- natural outgrowths of geography, in other words. This keeps them viable as states, unlike Libya, Syria and Iraq, which are geographically illogical within their present borders and thus have collapsed in various degrees following the weakening or toppling of their dictatorships.
Geography is no less relevant to the 21st century than it has been throughout history. Communications technology has not erased geography; rather, it has only made it more claustrophobic, so that each region of the earth interacts with every other one as never before. Intensifying this claustrophobia is the growth of cities -- another geographical phenomenon. The earth is smaller than ever, thanks to technology. But like a tiny wristwatch with all of its mechanisms, you have to disaggregate its geographical parts and features in order to understand how it works.
Thus, any international relations strategy must emanate initially from the physical terrain upon which we all live. And because geopolitics emanates from geography, it will never go away or become irrelevant. Strausz-Hupe had it right. If liberal powers do not engage in geopolitics, they will only leave the playing field to their enemies who do. For even evolved liberal states, such as those in America and Europe, are not exempt from the battle for survival. Such things as the G-8, human rights and international law can and must triumph over geography. But that is only possible if geopolitics becomes part of the strategy of the West.
Read more: Crimea: The Revenge of Geography? | Stratfor
-
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/03/16/the-cold-ashes-of-republican-foreign-policy/?singlepage=true
Noonan
http://patriotpost.us/opinion/24051
-
The damage to world order from Vladimir Putin's invasion of Crimea will echo for years, but one of the biggest casualties deserves more attention: the cause of nuclear nonproliferation. One lesson to the world of Russia's cost-free carve-up of Ukraine is that nations that abandon their nuclear arsenals do so at their own peril.
This story goes back to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia's nuclear arsenal was spread among the former Soviet republics that had become independent nations. Ukraine had some 1,800 nuclear weapons, including short-range tactical weapons, air-launched cruise missiles and bombers. Only Russia and the U.S. had more at the time, and Ukraine's arsenal was both modern and highly survivable in the event of a first strike.
Russian forces wait outside the Ukrainian firefighters brigade headquarters. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The U.S. was rightly concerned that these warheads could end up in the wrong hands, and the Clinton Administration made controlling them a foreign-policy priority. The result was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in which Ukraine agreed to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and return its nuclear arsenal to Russia in exchange for security "assurances" by Russia, the U.S. and United Kingdom. Those included promises to respect Ukraine's independence and sovereignty within its existing borders, as well as refraining from threatening or using force against Ukraine.
Officials in Kiev clearly had the potential for Russian aggression in mind when they sought those assurances, which is one reason they wanted other nations to co-sign as well. China and France later added somewhat weaker assurances in separate attachments to the Budapest Memo.
Ukraine also wanted to take many years to turn over its weapons, but the U.S. wanted quicker action and by 1996 Ukraine had given up its entire nuclear arsenal. It was an important victory for nonproliferation—a success rooted in the world's post-Cold War confidence in American power and deterrence.
Contrast that with the current crisis. President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron have blasted Russia for its clear violation of the Budapest accord, but those U.S. and U.K. assurances have been exposed as meaningless. That lesson isn't lost on Ukraine, but it also won't be lost on the rest of the world.
Had Kiev kept its weapons rather than giving them up in return for parchment promises, would Vladimir Putin have been so quick to invade Crimea two weeks ago? It's impossible to know, but it's likely it would have at least given him more pause.
Ukraine's fate is likely to make the world's nuclear rogues, such as Iran and North Korea, even less likely to give up their nuclear facilities or weapons. As important, it is likely to make nonnuclear powers and even close U.S. allies wonder if they can still rely on America's security guarantees.
Japan and South Korea are sure to consider their nuclear options as China presses its own territorial claims. South Korean public opinion is already in favor of an independent nuclear deterrent. And several Middle East countries, notably Saudi Arabia, are already contemplating their nuclear options once Iran becomes a nuclear power. Ukraine's fate will only reinforce those who believe these countries can't trust American assurances.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that President Obama has made nuclear nonproliferation one of his highest priorities. In April 2009 in Prague, he promised to lead a crusade to rid the world of nuclear weapons with treaties and the power of America's moral example. But documents and "assurances" have never kept any country safe from the world's predators. Only comparable military power or the protection of a superpower like the U.S. can do that. When the superpower's assurances are called into question, the world becomes a far more dangerous place.
On present trend Mr. Obama's legacy won't be new limits on the spread of nuclear weapons. Instead he'll be the President who presided over, and been a major cause of, a new era of global nuclear proliferation.
To underscore the point, next week Mr. Obama will travel to The Hague to preach the virtues of nonproliferation at his third global Nuclear Security Summit. Also expected: Vladimir Putin.
-
second post
March 19, 2014 7:16 p.m. ET
By the time the second World Trade Center tower collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, the whole world was watching it. We may assume that Vladimir Putin was watching. Mr. Putin, a quick calculator of political realities, would see that someone was going to get hit for this, and hit hard.
He was right of course. The Bush presidency became a war presidency that day, and it pounded and pursued the Islamic fundamentalists of al Qaeda without let-up or apology.
During that time, it was reported that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer in East Germany, deeply regretted the fall of the Soviet Union's empire and despised the Americans who caused it to fall. But no one cared what Mr. Putin thought then. Russia's power was a sliver of its former size. Besides, Mr. Putin's hurt was salved with the limitless personal wealth that flowed from doing business with the West. Conventional wisdom clicked in easily: Capitalism's surplus was enough to sate any rational autocrat.
In 2008, the American people elected a new president, and Vladimir Putin, a patient feline, would have noticed that President Obama in his speeches was saying that American power would be used "in concert" with other nations and institutions, such as the United Nations. What would have made Mr. Putin's eye jump was the decision by George Bush's successor not just to leave Iraq but without leaving a residual U.S. military presence to help the new government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Sometime in the first Obama term, opinion polls began to report that the American people were experiencing what media shorthand came to call "fatigue" with the affairs of the world. The U.S. should "mind its own business." The America-is-fatigued polling fit with Mr. Obama's stated goal to lead from behind. A close observer of American politics also could notice that Republican politicians, the presumptive heirs of Reagan, began to recalibrate their worldview inward to accommodate the "fatigue" in the opinion polls.
We are of course discussing Vladimir Putin's path to the forced annexation of Crimea. And possibly in time a move on the independence of Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan or Moldova. This narrative has one more point of Putin demarcation: Syria.
Last September, every foreign chancery in the world concluded that the United States would bomb Bashar Assad's airfields with Tomahawk missiles in reprisal for killing nearly 1,500 Syrians with chemical weapons, including sarin gas. Vladimir Putin placed a bet. He suggested to the American president that in lieu of the U.S. bombing Assad's airfields, their two nations, in concert, could remove all of Syria's chemical weapons. Mr. Obama accepted and stood down from bombing Assad. Six months later Vladimir Putin invaded and annexed Crimea.
This moment is not about Barack Obama. By now we know about him. This is about Vladimir Putin and the self-delusions of Western nations and their famous "fatigue." Vladimir Putin is teaching the West and especially the United States that fatigue is not an option.
Sometimes world affairs go off the grid. Diplomats may give reasons why it is not in the interests of Mr. Putin or Russia to take this course. Vice President Biden told the Poles in Warsaw Monday that Mr. Putin's seizure of Crimea was "flawed logic." It is difficult for men embedded in a world of rational affairs to come to grips with Mr. Putin's point of view: He doesn't care what they think.
The solitary but thrilling world of Vladimir Putin's mind is the one inhabited by the Assads, Saddams, bin Ladens, Kims, Gadhafis and Khomeinis of the world, and when it really runs out of control, or is allowed to, by a Stalin, Hitler, or Mao. Whether one man's grandiosity will burst across borders is not about normal logic. It is about personal power and forcing the obeisance of other nations.
Vladimir Putin re-proves that sometimes a bad person gains control of the instruments of national power. Their populations do nothing or can't, because they are disarmed by thugs with overwhelming firepower. Or, as on Russian TV now, they are marinated in anti-U.S. propaganda. Today even second-rate megalomaniacs gain access to high-tech weaponry, including missiles and nuclear bombs.
Running alongside these old realities is a new phenomenon, surely noticed by Mr. Putin: The nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality. Barack Obama says so, as does the International Monetary Fund. Western Europe amid the Ukraine crisis is a case study of nations redistributing themselves and perhaps NATO into impotence.
Because no modern Democrat can be credible on this, some Republican presidential candidate will have to explain the high price of America's fatigue. Fatigue will allow global disorder to displace 60 years of democratic order. If the U.S. doesn't lead, the strongmen win because for them it's easier. They don't lead people; they coerce them. Ask the millions free for now in the old countries of the Iron Curtain.
-
third post of the day
A Gas Export Strategy
Opponents don't understand energy markets or price expectations.
March 19, 2014 7:28 p.m. ET
The latest excuse for not exporting America's domestic energy resources to reduce Vladimir Putin's political influence is that it's too late to save Crimea. The anti-fossil-fuel left always has a reason not to drill, but their argument this time defies economic logic.
The U.S. oil and gas revolution has handed President Obama a powerful policy tool, and one way to wield it would be for the Energy Department to approve immediately the 25 applications for liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals. Opponents, including the White House, claim the timing is wrong because the first U.S. LNG export facility isn't due online until next year; others are even further off; Ukraine doesn't have a facility to receive and convert LNG back to gas; and U.S. LNG exports are most likely destined for Asia in any event.
Asked how the U.S. could liberate Europe from Russian gas, White House press secretary and geostrategist Jay Carney opined that exports are a "complicated process and more of a long-term proposition." For people who don't understand markets, supply and demand expectations may be complicated. For anyone else, this is easy.
The growth of LNG—which can ship internationally—has created a more global natural gas market. That market is forward-looking, and any clear signal that the U.S. intends to boost its exports will contribute to expectations about lower future prices. Even if some U.S. gas flows to Asia, the global supply will increase.
This is especially important to the many European nations that are currently dependent on Russia for 70% to 100% of their gas. Jaroslav Zajicek, deputy chief of mission for the Czech Republic, told a House hearing last year that his country has found that even the decline in U.S. gas imports in recent years has freed up more gas for Europe, lowered prices, and thus "weakened" the "Russian negotiating position during contract-renewal talks."
Europe has an extensive pipeline network, which means that U.S. gas making it to any port of entry would reduce overall European dependence on Russia. Spain has an LNG receiving terminal that can add fuel to the European pipeline, while countries like Lithuania (100% dependent on Russian gas) are racing to get a floating LNG import terminal online by the end of the year.
The ambassadors of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia recently wrote to House Speaker John Boehner with a plea for more gas, noting that technology allows them to reverse gas flows back to Ukraine. In 2013 alone, Ukraine imported from Poland and Hungary almost two billion cubic meters of gas. With Russia unilaterally raising gas prices on the Ukraine, the more ability Europe has to undermine those price hikes, the more limited the Russian influence.
Another excuse for doing nothing is that even if Energy approves all 25 applications, the projects must still endure federal and local environmental and safety reviews. True enough. Yet this misses that blanket approval would let the market sort which facilities are best positioned for an efficient regulatory review, project financing and contracts. The Energy bureaucracy's current approach—plodding through each application on a first-come-first-serve basis—means that the best projects may be at the end of the queue.
Blanket approval would have an equally important psychological impact. The Russian economy—and Mr. Putin's political cronies—are highly dependent on petro dollars. His gas stranglehold has also given Mr. Putin enormous political leverage over former Soviet satellites. Every dollar of U.S. gas that flows to the world market is one less dollar flowing to Mr. Putin's economy and his energy blackmail racket. Mr. Putin would get the message that even if he can swallow Ukraine, his future leverage will decline.
Martin Dempsey, as dovish a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as America has had, told a House hearing last week: "An energy independent [U.S.] and net exporter of energy as a nation has the potential to change the security environment around the world—notably in Europe and in the Middle East. And so, as we look at our strategies for the future, I think we've got to pay more and particular attention to energy as an instrument of national power. And because it will very soon in the next few years potentially become one of our more prominent tools."
Mr. Obama has been told all this by his military advisers, American CEOs, foreign leaders and Members of Congress. He knows more gas exports are in the U.S. national interest. The case is so overwhelming that the White House "timing" excuse can only be explained as cover for the President's unwillingness to offend his green money-men who hate fossil fuels. He is letting partisan politics interfere with U.S. economic and strategic interests.
-
The snarkiness of my subject line aside, there are some points of interest in here apart from it as a study in a certain mindset. For example, what are the implications of cyberwar? If China has a hold of our infrastructure via planted stuxnet type viruses and is dumping its holdings of our bonds thus spiking our interest rates, what is our motive and what relevance our military in deciding whether to fight for free passage in the South China Sea? Economic leverage does matter, and increasingly so-- and interdependence cuts both ways.
Though I think he gets it wrong, the reference to Pinker's thesis is worth considering, and is well in line with thought processes explored by Konrad Lorenz in his On Aggression and The Waning of Humanness.
Anyway, Mr. Smartypants pants out a paean to "smart power".
Obama’s 21st-century power politics
by Fareed Zakaria,
Published: March 27
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought to the fore an important debate about what kind of world we live in. Many critics charge that the Obama administration has been blind to its harsh realities because it believes, as the Wall Street Journal opined, in “a fantasy world of international rules.” John McCain declared that “this is the most naive president in history.” The Post’s editorial board worried that President Obama misunderstands “the nature of the century we’re living in.”
Almost all of these critics have ridiculed Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that changing borders by force, as Russia did, is 19th-century behavior in the 21st century. Well, here are the facts. Scholar Mark Zacher has tallied up changes of borders by force, something that was once quite common. Since World War I, he notes, that practice has sharply declined, and in recent decades, that decline has accelerated. Before 1950, wars between nations resulted in border changes (annexations) about 80 percent of the time. After 1950, that number dropped to 27 percent. In fact, since 1946, there have been only 12 examples of major changes in borders using force — and all of them before 1976. So Putin’s behavior, in fact, does belong to the 19th century.
The transformation of international relations goes well beyond border changes. Harvard’s Steven Pinker has collected war data in his superb book “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” In a more recent essay, he points out that “after a 600-year stretch in which Western European countries started two new wars a year, they have not started one since 1945. Nor have the 40 or so richest nations anywhere in the world engaged each other in armed conflict.” Colonial wars, a routine feature of international life for thousands of years, are extinct. Wars between countries — not just major powers, not just in Europe — have also dropped dramatically, by more than 50 percent over the past three decades. Scholars at the University of Maryland have found that the past decade has seen the lowest number of new conflicts since World War II.
Many aspects of international life remain nasty and brutish, and it is easy to sound tough and suggest that you understand the hard realities of power politics. But the most astonishing, remarkable reality about the world is how much things have changed, especially since 1945.
It is ironic that the Wall Street Journal does not recognize this new world because it was created in substantial part through capitalism and free trade.Twenty years ago, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, as hardheaded a statesman as I have ever met, told me that Asian countries had seen the costs of war and the fruits of economic interdependence and development — and that they would not choose the former over the latter.
This is not an academic debate. The best way to deal with Russia’s aggression in Crimea is not to present it as routine and national interest-based foreign policy that will be countered by Washington in a contest between two great powers. It is to point out, as Obama did eloquently this week in Brussels, that Russia is grossly endangering a global order that has benefited the entire world.
Compare what the Obama administration has managed to organize in the wake of this latest Russian aggression to the Bush administration’s response to Putin’s actions in Georgia in 2008. That was a blatant invasion. Moscow sent in tanks and heavy artillery; hundreds were killed, nearly 200,000 displaced. Yet the response was essentially nothing. This time, it has been much more serious. Some of this difference is in the nature of the stakes, but it might also have to do with the fact that the Obama administration has taken pains to present Russia’s actions in a broader context and get other countries to see them as such.
((What specious twaddle!!! By 2008 the US had no bandwidth because it was fighting not one but two wars of the sort that FZ seems to think don't happen because of Pinker's book. Bush's polling was in the 20s! You think he could have gone to the American people and asked for a third war-- this time with Russia?!? And, two major wars notwithstanding, FZ thinks Bush do nothing! And he Baraq a man of action because he "has taken pains to present Russia’s actions in a broader context and get other countries to see them as such"? Are you fg kidding me?!?))
You can see a similar pattern with Iran. The Bush administration largely pressured that country bilaterally ((because the Germans in particular and the French too were so fg venal in their desire to make money by undercutting the sanctions Bush wanted , , ,). The Obama administration was able to get much more effective pressure because it presented Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to global norms of nonproliferation, persuaded the other major powers to support sanctions, enacted them through the United Nations and thus ensured that they were comprehensive and tight. ((Ummm details details-- the US Congress, especially the Reps, had to push Obama to do this. Obama has LOOSENED the noose in return for nothing and has appointed a Sec Def who is taking US military spending down to less than 3% GDP while opposing sanctions on Iran from the beginning. Again, are you fg kidding me?!?))
This is what leadership looks like in the 21st century. ((And a profound tragedy it is.))
There is an evolving international order with new global norms making war and conquest increasingly rare ((due e.g. to US arms standing at the Berlin Wall and its analogues)). We should strengthen, not ridicule, it. Yes, some places stand in opposition to this trend — North Korea, Syria, Russia. The people running these countries believe that they are charting a path to greatness and glory. But they are the ones living in a fantasy world.
-
As pax Americana fades, expect those stats to change in the other direction.
Zakaria makes Thomas Friedman look smart in comparison. At least Friedman makes up his own hack phrases.
-
The Outlaw Vladimir Putin
Moscow's flouting of treaties, international law and the Geneva Conventions is raising world-wide dangers.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
April 8, 2014 7:26 p.m. ET
President Obama has repeatedly described Russia's annexation of Crimea as illegal and illegitimate, but he also has sought to minimize the strategic significance of Vladimir Putin's land grab. In fact, Moscow's actions—including threatening "civil war" if Ukraine resists the orchestrated seizures of government buildings and uprisings in eastern Ukraine by ethnic Russian separatists this week—are more than isolated instances of law breaking. Russia's behavior, and its legal and institutional justifications, are dangerously destabilizing the existing international system. What is the likely result? The use of force around the world will be encouraged, and the incentive to acquire nuclear weapons magnified.
The three basic principles of international law, reflected in the United Nations Charter and long-standing custom, are the equality of all states, the sanctity of their territorial integrity, and noninterference by outsiders in their internal affairs. Yet Moscow now insists that it has unique rights and privileges to protect the interests of Russian-speaking populations outside its borders and has special prerogatives regarding "historically Russian" territories that were not included in the Russian Federation upon the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991.
David Gothard
Regarding Ukraine, these claims have been translated into a set of specific demands that Moscow has made in speeches by Mr. Putin and others, in articles sanctioned by the Kremlin, and in discussions between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Secretary of State John Kerry. The demands include that Ukraine postpone its planned May elections, change its constitution to provide for regional autonomy (making eastern Ukraine more vulnerable to Russia's capture), and dramatically weaken the national government in Kiev. Moscow insists that Ukraine make Russian the country's second "official" language and ban certain nationalist political parties.
Moscow also says Ukraine must become a neutral, non-allied and essentially demilitarized state—a status known during the Cold War as "Finlandization," after terms that the Soviet Union imposed on Finland as the price of its "independence."
Mr. Putin's demands clearly violate the principle of nonintervention in internal affairs enshrined in the U.N. Charter and customary international law.
Moscow's use of troops that have removed their Russian insignia, coupled with explicit denials that its military forces were even engaged in operations in Crimea, violates the Geneva Conventions. The failure to promptly repatriate captured Ukrainian troops and equipment after the invasion of Crimea was complete, and ended, and Russia's attempt to coerce Ukrainian soldiers to join the Russian military, are also major violations.
The laws of war are already under assault from terrorist organizations, whose fighters routinely operate out of uniform to blend into the civilian population. Having a major power like Russia engage in similar conduct further erodes respect for these vital norms—and encourages such rogue behavior by other governments and by rebel movements.
Moscow's disregard of its treaty commitments has also gravely undermined the cause of nuclear nonproliferation. In particular: The takeover of Crimea shreds the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, by which Ukraine agreed to give up its formidable nuclear arsenal in exchange for commitments from Russia, Britain and the U.S. to respect its political independence and territory.
Now Russia has demonstrated that military force in general, and nuclear weapons in particular, may well remain the only reliable means of protection against hostile actions by larger, more powerful states. If the Russian takeover of Crimea continues to meet with only a tepid international response, the message is clear: Security commitments among states are worthless. This development is certain to have profoundly destabilizing consequences world-wide.
Thus it is hard to comprehend the Pentagon's announcement Tuesday that the U.S. would drastically reduce its nuclear-weapons capability to comply with the New START treaty with Russia. America is reducing its ability to defend itself in order to honor a treaty with a country that has just flagrantly violated a treaty.
In the event that the U.S. and its allies decide to abandon the minimalist and ineffective approach they have taken so far, several options for challenging Russia's bogus claims come to mind. These measures are not a substitute for strong leadership, but they at least offer the prospect of countering what so far has been a one-sided conflict.
As a start, the Obama administration should seek a U.N. General Assembly resolution requesting the International Court of Justice's opinion on the legality of the Russian annexation of Crimea. Russia would have no veto over such a request. Since the General Assembly has already voted overwhelmingly to declare the annexation illegal, this should easily be achieved. If the International Court of Justice concurs that the annexation is illegal, that would eviscerate Moscow's bogus international-law arguments and could serve as the basis for future legal claims against Russia and Russian entities.
The U.S. and its allies should also challenge the legality of Russia's actions in every conceivable legal venue, whether domestic or international. Since Moscow has justified its annexation by claiming Ukrainian governmental corruption and repression against Russian speakers, Western governments should give high-profile publicity to whatever evidence of Russian official corruption they possess, and to evidence that unrest in Crimea and eastern Ukraine has been fostered by Russian military and intelligence agents.
Nongovernmental organizations, which cast themselves as guardians of the international order, have a role to play in condemning and challenging in courts of law and in public opinion Russia's actions against Ukraine. This would also offer NGOs the opportunity to show their neutral commitment to maintaining the international order, as many of these groups claimed to be doing in challenging the legality of American actions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula.
More than arcane legal principles are at stake. Western failure to champion a narrative of international rights and wrongs, rooted in the language of law and legitimacy, would be tragic. Meeting Russia's aggression with passivity undermines already weakened domestic support for a robust and engaged foreign policy in the U.S. and other Western countries, and it promises to make the world a more lawless and violent place.
Messrs. Rivkin and Casey served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. They are partners in the Washington, D.C., office of Baker Hostetler LLP. Mr. Rivkin is also a senior adviser to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
-
second post
U.S. Defense Policy in the Wake of the Ukrainian Affair
Geopolitical Weekly
Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - 02:59 Print Text Size
Stratfor
By George Friedman
Ever since the end of the Cold War, there has been an assumption that conventional warfare between reasonably developed nation-states had been abolished. During the 1990s, it was expected that the primary purpose of the military would be operations other than war, such as peacekeeping, disaster relief and the change of oppressive regimes. After 9/11, many began speaking of asymmetric warfare and "the long war." Under this model, the United States would be engaged in counterterrorism activities in a broad area of the Islamic world for a very long time. Peer-to-peer conflict seemed obsolete.
There was a profoundly radical idea embedded in this line of thought. Wars between nations or dynastic powers had been a constant condition in Europe, and the rest of the world had been no less violent. Every century had had systemic wars in which the entire international system (increasingly dominated by Europe since the 16th century) had participated. In the 20th century, there were the two World Wars, in the 19th century the Napoleonic Wars, in the 18th century the Seven Years' War, and in the 17th century the Thirty Years' War.
Those who argued that U.S. defense policy had to shift its focus away from peer-to-peer and systemic conflict were in effect arguing that the world had entered a new era in which what had been previously commonplace would now be rare or nonexistent. What warfare there was would not involve nations but subnational groups and would not be systemic. The radical nature of this argument was rarely recognized by those who made it, and the evolving American defense policy that followed this reasoning was rarely seen as inappropriate. If the United States was going to be involved primarily in counterterrorism operations in the Islamic world for the next 50 years, we obviously needed a very different military than the one we had.
There were two reasons for this argument. Military planners are always obsessed with the war they are fighting. It is only human to see the immediate task as a permanent task. During the Cold War, it was impossible for anyone to imagine how it would end. During World War I, it was obvious that static warfare dominated by the defense was the new permanent model. That generals always fight the last war must be amended to say that generals always believe the war they are fighting is the permanent war. It is, after all, the war that was the culmination of their careers, and imagining other wars when they are fighting this one, and indeed will not be fighting future ones, appeared frivolous.
The second reason was that no nation-state was in a position to challenge the United States militarily. After the Cold War ended, the United States was in a singularly powerful position. The United States remains in a powerful position, but over time, other nations will increase their power, form alliances and coalitions and challenge the United States. No matter how benign a leading power is -- and the United States is not uniquely benign -- other nations will fear it, resent it or want to shame it for its behavior. The idea that other nation-states will not challenge the United States seemed plausible for the past 20 years, but the fact is that nations will pursue interests that are opposed to American interest and by definition, pose a peer-to-peer challenge. The United States is potentially overwhelmingly powerful, but that does not make it omnipotent.
Systemic vs. Asymmetric War
It must also be remembered that asymmetric warfare and operations other than war always existed between and during peer-to-peer wars and systemic wars. The British fought an asymmetric war in both Ireland and North America in the context of a peer-to-peer war with France. Germany fought an asymmetric war in Yugoslavia at the same time it fought a systemic war from 1939-1945. The United States fought asymmetric wars in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti and other places between 1900-1945.
Asymmetric wars and operations other than war are far more common than peer-to-peer and systemic wars. They can appear overwhelmingly important at the time. But just as the defeat of Britain by the Americans did not destroy British power, the outcomes of asymmetric wars rarely define long-term national power and hardly ever define the international system. Asymmetric warfare is not a new style of war; it is a permanent dimension of warfare. Peer-to-peer and systemic wars are also constant features but are far less frequent. They are also far more important. For Britain, the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars was much more important than the outcome of the American Revolution. For the United States, the outcome of World War II was far more important than its intervention in Haiti. There are a lot more asymmetric wars, but a defeat does not shift national power. If you lose a systemic war, the outcome can be catastrophic.
A military force can be shaped to fight frequent, less important engagements or rare but critical wars -- ideally, it should be able to do both. But in military planning, not all wars are equally important. The war that defines power and the international system can have irreversible and catastrophic results. Asymmetric wars can cause problems and casualties, but that is a lesser mission. Military leaders and defense officials, obsessed with the moment, must bear in mind that the war currently being fought may be little remembered, the peace that is currently at hand is rarely permanent, and harboring the belief that any type of warfare has become obsolete is likely to be in error.
Ukraine drove this lesson home. There will be no war between the United States and Russia over Ukraine. The United States does not have interests there that justify a war, and neither country is in a position militarily to fight a war. The Americans are not deployed for war, and the Russians are not ready to fight the United States.
But the events in Ukraine point to some realities. First, the power of countries shifts, and the Russians had substantially increased their military capabilities since the 1990s. Second, the divergent interests between the two countries, which seemed to disappear in the 1990s, re-emerged. Third, this episode will cause each side to reconsider its military strategy and capabilities, and future crises might well lead to conventional war, nuclear weapons notwithstanding. Ukraine reminds us that peer-to-peer conflict is not inconceivable, and that a strategy and defense policy built on the assumption has little basis in reality. The human condition did not transform itself because of an interregnum in which the United States could not be challenged; the last two decades are an exception to the rule of global affairs defined by war.
U.S. national strategy must be founded on the control of the sea. The oceans protect the United States from everything but terrorism and nuclear missiles. The greatest challenge to U.S. control of the sea is hostile fleets. The best way to defeat hostile fleets is to prevent them from being built. The best way to do that is to maintain the balance of power in Eurasia. The ideal path for this is to ensure continued tensions within Eurasia so that resources are spent defending against land threats rather than building fleets. Given the inherent tensions in Eurasia, the United States needs to do nothing in most cases. In some cases it must send military or economic aid to one side or both. In other cases, it advises.
U.S. Strategy in Eurasia
The main goal here is to avoid the emergence of a regional hegemon fully secure against land threats and with the economic power to challenge the United States at sea. The U.S. strategy in World War I was to refuse to become involved until it appeared, with the abdication of the czar and increasing German aggression at sea, that the British and French might be defeated or the sea-lanes closed. At that point, the United States intervened to block German hegemony. In World War II, the United States remained out of the war until after the French collapsed and it appeared the Soviet Union would collapse -- until it seemed something had to be done. Even then, it was only after Hitler's declaration of war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that Congress approved Roosevelt's plan to intervene militarily in continental Europe. And in spite of operations in the Mediterranean, the main U.S. thrust didn't occur until 1944 in Normandy, after the German army had been badly weakened.
In order for this strategy, which the U.S. inherited from the British, to work, the United States needs an effective and relevant alliance structure. The balance-of-power strategy assumes that there are core allies who have an interest in aligning with the United States against regional enemies. When I say effective, I mean allies that are capable of defending themselves to a great extent. Allying with the impotent achieves little. By relevant, I mean allies that are geographically positioned to deal with particularly dangerous hegemons.
If we assume Russians to be dangerous hegemons, then the relevant allies are those on the periphery of Russia. For example, Portugal or Italy adds little weight to the equation. As to effectiveness, the allies must be willing to make major commitments to their own national defense. The American relationship in all alliances is that the outcome of conflicts must matter more to the ally than to the United States.
The point here is that NATO, which was extremely valuable during the Cold War, may not be a relevant or effective instrument in a new confrontation with the Russians. Many of the members are not geographically positioned to help, and many are not militarily effective. They cannot balance the Russians. And since the goal of an effective balance-of-power strategy is the avoidance of war while containing a rising power, the lack of an effective deterrence matters a great deal.
It is not certain by any means that Russia is the main threat to American power. Many would point to China. In my view, China's ability to pose a naval threat to the United States is limited, for the time being, by the geography of the South and East China seas. There are a lot of choke points that can be closed. Moreover, a balance of land-based military power is difficult to imagine. But still, the basic principle I have described holds; countries such as South Korea and Japan, which have a more immediate interest in China than the United States does, are supported by the United States to contain China.
In these and other potential cases, the ultimate problem for the United States is that its engagement in Eurasia is at distance. It takes a great deal of time to deploy a technology-heavy force there, and it must be technology-heavy because U.S. forces are always outnumbered when fighting in Eurasia. The United States must have force multipliers. In many cases, the United States is not choosing the point of intervention, but a potential enemy is creating a circumstance where intervention is necessary. Therefore, it is unknown to planners where a war might be fought, and it is unknown what kind of force they will be up against. The only thing certain is that it will be far away and take a long time to build up a force. During Desert Storm, it took six months to go on the offensive.
American strategy requires a force that can project overwhelming power without massive delays. In Ukraine, for example, had the United States chosen to try to defend eastern Ukraine from Russian attack, it would have been impossible to deploy that force before the Russians took over. An offensive against the Russians in Ukraine would have been impossible. Therefore, Ukraine poses the strategic problem for the United States.
The Future of U.S. Defense Policy
The United States will face peer-to-peer or even systemic conflicts in Eurasia. The earlier the United States brings in decisive force, the lower the cost to the United States. Current conventional war-fighting strategy is not dissimilar from that of World War II: It is heavily dependent on equipment and the petroleum to power that equipment. It can take many months to field that force. That could force the United States into an offensive posture far more costly and dangerous than a defensive posture, as it did in World War II. Therefore, it is essential that the time to theater be dramatically reduced, the size of the force reduced, but the lethality, mobility and survivability dramatically increased.
It also follows that the tempo of operations be reduced. The United States has been in constant warfare since 2001. The reasons are understandable, but in a balance-of-power strategy war is the exception, not the rule. The force that could be deployed is seen as overwhelming and therefore does not have to be deployed. The allies of the United States are sufficiently motivated and capable of defending themselves. That fact deters attack by regional hegemons. There need to be layers of options between threat and war.
Defense policy must be built on three things: The United States does not know where it will fight. The United States must use war sparingly. The United States must have sufficient technology to compensate for the fact that Americans are always going to be outnumbered in Eurasia. The force that is delivered must overcome this, and it must get there fast.
Ranges of new technologies, from hypersonic missiles to electronically and mechanically enhanced infantryman, are available. But the mindset that peer-to-peer conflict has been abolished and that small unit operations in the Middle East are the permanent features of warfare prevent these new technologies from being considered. The need to rethink American strategy in the framework of the perpetual possibility of conventional war against enemies fighting on their own terrain is essential, along with an understanding that the exhaustion of the force in asymmetric warfare cannot be sustained. Losing an asymmetric war is unfortunate but tolerable. Losing a systemic war could be catastrophic. Not having to fight a war would be best.
Read more: U.S. Defense Policy in the Wake of the Ukrainian Affair | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
-
Whatever one thinks about the US' role in the world, and whether or not we should be the world's policman, can we just agree on one obvious certainty - under this leadership and mindset the US is going to defend no one.
Under any real threat of aggression, the non-nuclear states of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are going to fold like Asian Ukraines, falling first for the neo-liberal-US 'guarantee' of their security, and second for non-threatening rhetoric of their power hungry neighbors.
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/let-asia-go-nuclear-10238
Let Asia Go Nuclear | The National Interest | April 14, 2014
America’s policy of opposing the proliferation of nuclear weapons needs to be more nuanced. What works for the United States in the Middle East may not in Asia. We do not want Iran or Saudi Arabia to get the bomb, but why not Australia, Japan, and South Korea? We are opposed to nuclear weapons because they are the great military equalizer, because some countries may let them slip into the hands of terrorists, and because we have significant advantage in precision conventional weapons. But our opposition to nuclear weapons in Asia means we are committed to a costly and risky conventional arms race with China over our ability to protect allies and partners lying nearer to China than to us and spread over a vast maritime theater.
None of our allies in Asia possess nuclear weapons. Instead, they are protected by what is called extended deterrence, our vaguely stated promise to use nuclear weapons in their defense if they are threatened by regional nuclear powers, China, North Korea and Russia. ... More at link
--------------
As we build down our arsenal, de-fund our ships, bring home our troops, and focus on our bureaucracy at home, what is Plan B for securing our allies?
-
They are on their own. They know it.
-
Doug's question is a very good one. Those interested in pursuing it please do so in the Nuclear War or WMD thread.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/375215/americas-new-anti-strategy-victor-davis-hanson
-
http://www.defencejobs.gov.au/recruitmentCentre/canIJoin/overseasApplicants/
The Australian Defence Force looks to overseas candidates to fill gaps in our Services, which can't currently be satisfied by standard recruitment.
Who we are looking for
We are looking for serving or ex-serving foreign military personnel, who can directly transfer their job and life skills to whichever Service they join, with limited training and preparation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.stripes.com/news/serving-down-under-australia-offers-military-jobs-to-us-troops-facing-separation-1.176622
Serving Down Under: Australia offers military jobs to US troops facing separation
As the U.S. is looking to trim the number of troops serving in the military, the Austrailian Defence Force is recruiting U.S. servicemembers join its ranks. Many troops, especially enlisted servicemembers, stand to make more money in the Australian military.
David Byron/U.S. Air Force
BySeth Robson
Stars and Stripes
Published: May 8, 2012
Australian air force Squadron Leader Bart Langland, a former U.S. Air Force pilot, deployed to Afghanistan last year with the Australian Defence Force.
Courtesy of Bart Langland
■
Growing US presence in Australia to include aircraft
The U.S. is preparing to add aircraft to its military presence in Australia, which will include 2,500 Marines rotating through the northern port of Darwin starting in 2016.
■US, Kiwi troops wrap up large-scale combat training May 7, 2012
■US, Aussie sailors recover bombs dropped within Great Barrier Reef park boundary September 1, 2013
■Australia exercise to test facilities for expanded US Marine Corps presence August 27, 2013
■Marines to deploy more troops to Pacific under program March 15, 2012
YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — U.S. servicemembers looking at career options in this era of shrinking military budgets and force drawdowns might want to take a look Down Under.
The Australian government is recruiting experienced U.S. enlisted personnel and officers to fill a range of positions — from submariners to doctors — in its military, according to a posting on the Australian Defence Force website.
“The Australian Defence Force looks to overseas candidates to fill gaps in our Services, which can’t currently be satisfied by standard recruitment,” reads the intro for overseas applicants on the Defence Force’s recruitment website. “We recognise that these candidates can bring skills and attributes to the Navy, Army and Air Force that will strengthen their overall operation and success rate.”
The job offers could be tempting for U.S. troops as the Afghan War winds down and the Department of Defense looks to trim billions of dollars and more than 100,000 uniformed personnel from its books.
Read also: The Pacific pivot
At a time when other Western countries have slashed spending, the prosperous Australians have been growing their military. In the past five years, the Australian military has recruited more than 500 personnel from the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Applicants have to meet certain minimum rank levels, as well as medical and interview requirements, Australian defense officials said in an email this week.
Known as the Lucky Country, Australia has had a booming economy for almost two decades due to rising commodity prices and strong Chinese demand for its mining products. It has also seen the Australian dollar rally against the U.S. dollar in recent years, meaning U.S. veterans — especially enlisted — stand to make more money working for the Australia military.
Read also: Last Australian combat troops leave Afghanistan
The U.S. Air Force website lists the annual base pay for an E-5, staff sergeant, with six-years’ service at $31,946. An O-3, captain, with six years’ service makes $63,263.
By comparison, a newly promoted E-5, corporal, in the Australian air force makes $57,277, when converted to U.S. dollars, while newly promoted O-3, flight lieutenant, takes home $66,417.
Squadron Leader Bart Langland has flown under both flags.
Langland served 15 years on active duty for the U.S. Air Force and another five in the reserves before joining the Royal Australian Air Force in March 2008. The veteran F-16 and U2 spy plane pilot is helping train Australian fliers at RAAF Base Williamtown, just north of Sydney.
Read also: Growing US presence in Australia to include aircraft
From an Australian perspective the costs to train and develop fighter pilots are enormous, hence the RAAF greatly benefits from being able to get experienced pilots from the U.S. and other countries, Langland said. Joining the Australian Defence Force took Langland a year and included physical examinations, security checks and getting dual Australian-U.S. citizenship, which the State Department had to approve, he said.
Langland said the job was almost exactly the same as serving with the U.S. Air Force.
“If you walk into an Australian fighter squadron or a U.S. fighter squadron, you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference,” Langland said.
Australia has about 23 million people, less than the population of California, in a country about the same size as the U.S. Naturally, the all-volunteer Australian Defence Force is a lot smaller than the U.S. military but it has dedicated itself to quality over quantity, Langland said.
In recent months, the U.S. and Australia have grown even closer with plans to base thousands of U.S. Marines in the northern Australian town of Darwin.
“Australia has always stood shoulder to shoulder with the U.S.A. and, as such, would count on U.S. support in times of major conflict,” Langland said.
The Australian Air Force trains regularly with U.S. units, although it also trains with partner nations in Southeast Asia, he said.
One notable difference serving in Australia is that the pace of work is slower than in the U.S. Air Force, Langland said, adding that his deployment to Afghanistan last year was voluntary.
Langland’s biggest challenge was moving his wife and three children to Australia, far from relatives. However, he rated the schools near RAAF Williamtown as excellent and the weather and beaches on a par with Southern California.
The family plans to stay in Australia at least five more years, he said.
“I feel that by serving here I am making a difference to Australia and America,” he said.
For more information on the program, go to the Australian Defence Force website.
robsons@pstripes.osd.mil
--------------------
The Australian Defence forces are recruiting U.S. servicemembers to join their ranks. A look at some of the job specialities needed Down Under:
Navy:
■ Principal warfare officers
■ Submarine warfare officers
■ Marine engineering Officers
■ Medical officers
■ Cryptologic systems and electronic warfare specialists
■ Maritime and electronic technicians
■ Combat systems operators
Army:
■ Range of officer roles in the aviation, artillery, engineering, dental, intelligence and signal fields.
■ Range of enlisted roles including groundcrew air support, electricians, ammunition technicians, intelligence specialists and communication specialists.
Air Force:
■ Focus on jet pilots, electronic engineers, surveillance and reconnaissance specialists.
-
Why Obama Can't Explain Himself
Global Affairs
Monday, April 14, 2014 - 16:28 Print Text Size
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
Secretary of State John Kerry evidently runs a tight ship, given the paucity of leaks that emerge from his office. So we know he is organized and disciplined. He is also an energetic risk-taker, jumping into high-wire negotiations with Iran, and forcing the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table -- enterprises that could likely end in failure and ruin his reputation. This is a man with character. By contrast, his predecessor at State, Hillary Clinton, appeared to take few risks and has been accused of using the position of secretary of state merely to burnish her resume in preparation for a presidential run.
But there is one thing that Kerry has not been good at: explaining what he is doing and why to the public. How do these high-wire negotiations fit into a larger strategic plan? What do the Iran talks have to do with those between Israel and Palestine? What is the relationship between the two sets of Middle East negotiations and American strategy in Asia and Europe? The Obama administration has provided the public with little insight on any of these matters.
Why can't the administration explain better what it is doing? I believe the reason is that the administration cannot own up to the philosophical implications of the very policy direction it has chosen. It is as though top officials are embarrassed by their own choices.
The administration has refused to intervene in Syria in a pivotal way, and it has very awkwardly still not managed to make its peace with Egypt's new military dictatorship -- though it does not oppose the new regime in Cairo outright. But it is embarrassed that it has done these things. The Obama team wants to pursue a foreign policy of liberal internationalism, in the tradition of previous Democratic administrations. It wants to topple a murderous dictatorship in Syria. It wants democracy in Egypt. But instead, it finds itself pursuing a foreign policy of conservative realism, in the tradition of previous Republican administrations, like those of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush. It is doing so because realism is about dealing with the facts as they exist on the ground with the goal of preserving American power, whereas liberal internationalism is about taking risks with the facts on the ground in order to seek a better world.
President Barack Obama and Secretary Kerry are afraid that if they intervene militarily in Syria they will help bring to power a jihadist-trending regime there -- or conversely, Syria will disintegrate into even worse anarchy, with echoes of Afghanistan in the 1990s. So they do little. Obama and Kerry must know that the choice in Egypt is not simply between dictatorship and democracy, but between military authoritarianism that can be indirectly helpful to Western interests and an Islamist regime that would be hostile to Western interests. So they quietly, albeit angrily, accept the new order in Cairo. The administration knows that if it wants to pivot toward the Pacific, it must also attempt to put America's diplomatic house in order in the Middle East: thus, it seeks a rapprochement with Iran and a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians.
All of this is reasonable, if uninspiring. But the Obama team has been relatively tongue-tied because it cannot admit to being a liberal Democratic administration pursuing a moderate Republican foreign policy. It is a shame because publicly explaining some of these actions should be relatively easy. In regards to Egypt, all the administration needs to say is, We support democracy where we can and stability where we must. In regards to Syria, it can warn about the unpredictable dangers that come with serious military intervention. It can explain Iran and Israel-Palestine in terms of America's larger goals in the Middle East and Asia. The more peace there is in the Middle East, the more that America can concentrate on Asia -- the geographic center of the world economy.
Though Hillary Clinton was risk averse, unlike Kerry, she did explain what she was doing. Her "pivot" to Asia may have been sniped at by some experts and pundits. But it was a strategic conception that was somewhat original, and she did, in fact, explain it better than Kerry has explained anything. In fact, she authored a long essay about the Asia pivot in the magazine Foreign Policy. That was rare, since original ideas ordinarily do not come out of government.
Obama has good realistic instincts, but thus far he doesn't have a strategy that he has been able to explain to the public. And without a strategy he loses influence, since power in the media age is not only about deeds and capabilities, but about what you rhetorically stand for. Ronald Reagan was a powerful president in significant part because of his soaring rhetoric. (After Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, Reagan would have flown to Poland or the Baltic states and declared, "Mr. Putin, I am standing on hallowed NATO ground!") George W. Bush was a weaker president than he might have been because he was perceived to be inarticulate. Obama is a fine speaker, but he has explained little in the foreign policy realm, and even when he does so he appears to lack passion, as if he is merely reading his lines. This makes his foreign policy weaker, regardless of the inherent strengths of it. And it makes his opponents overseas have less respect for him.
Once again, in a media age, presentation and branding can be 50 percent of everything -- especially if one is on the world stage. If this were not the case, political leaders in both democracies and dictatorships would never give speeches, but would confine their activities strictly to behind-the-scenes meetings.
Obama certainly has material with which to work. Just look at the world today. China and Russia, with all of their problems and limitations, have emerged as major geopolitical rivals of the United States in their respective regions. The Middle East is fundamentally more unstable than it has been in decades, with several state collapses having provided fertile breeding grounds for the most extremist groups. Of course, the United States cannot dominate the world. It cannot kick China out of Asia and Russia out of Europe. And it cannot fix societies like Syria and Libya. But it can intelligently maneuver, affecting power balances everywhere more often than not to its advantage. And one of the ways it can do this is by -- to repeat -- supporting democracy where we can and stability where we must. It can also do this by preserving a measure of global stability through air and sea deployments in the Pacific and Indian oceans. The United States can be the organizing principle for working with Europe against a revanchist Russia. All of these parts fit together. This and much more can be explained to the American people. And doing so would certainly enhance U.S. power, making it less likely to be tested in the first place.
Read more: Why Obama Can't Explain Himself | Stratfor
-
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/04/17/putin-isnt-a-genius-we-are-complete-idiots/?singlepage=true
-
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/04/17/putin-isnt-a-genius-we-are-complete-idiots/?singlepage=true
Smart power!
-
As perceptive and knowledgeable as Spengler invariably is, this rant by him misses quite a bit-- mostly, what SHOULD be done? If the answer is "nothing" then what are the implications of that?
-
Move troops into NATO allies, like Poland. Remember that missile shield? Maybe look at that. Start massive oil production and flood the market and see how pooty-poot likes his suddenly bare coffers and a bunch of angry oligarchs at his back.
Nah, let Biden and Lurch handle it.
What could go wrong?
-
The Disappearance of US Will
Posted By Caroline Glick On April 18, 2014
Originally published at the Jerusalem Post.
The most terrifying aspect of the collapse of US power worldwide is the US’s indifferent response to it.
In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East and beyond, America’s most dangerous foes are engaging in aggression and brinkmanship unseen in decades.
As Gordon Chang noted at a symposium in Los Angeles last month hosted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, since President Barack Obama entered office in 2009, the Chinese have responded to his overtures of goodwill and appeasement with intensified aggression against the US’s Asian allies and against US warships.
In 2012, China seized the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines. Washington shrugged its shoulders despite its mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. And so Beijing is striking again, threatening the Second Thomas Shoal, another Philippine possession.
In a similar fashion, Beijing is challenging Japan’s control over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea and even making territorial claims on Okinawa.
As Chang explained, China’s recent application of its Air-Defense Identification Zone to include Japanese and South Korean airspace is a hostile act not only against those countries but also against the principle of freedom of maritime navigation, which, Chang noted, “Americans have been defending for more than two centuries.”
The US has responded to Chinese aggression with ever-escalating attempts to placate Beijing.
And China has responded to these US overtures by demonstrating contempt for US power.
Last week, the Chinese humiliated Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel during his visit to China’s National Defense University. He was harangued by a student questioner for the US’s support for the Philippines and Japan, and for opposition to Chinese unilateral seizure of island chains and assertions of rights over other states’ airspace and international waterways.
As he stood next to Hagel in a joint press conference, China’s Defense Chief Chang Wanquan demanded that the US restrain Japan and the Philippines.
In addition to its flaccid responses to Chinese aggression against its allies and its own naval craft, in 2012 the US averred from publicly criticizing China for its sale to North Korea of mobile missile launchers capable of serving Pyongyang’s KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missiles. With these easily concealed launchers, North Korea significantly upgraded its ability to attack the US with nuclear weapons.
As for Europe, the Obama administration’s responses to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and to its acts of aggression against Ukraine bespeak a lack of seriousness and dangerous indifference to the fate of the US alliance structure in Eastern Europe.
Rather than send NATO forces to the NATO member Baltic states, and arm Ukrainian forces with defensive weapons, as Russian forces began penetrating Ukraine, the US sent food to Ukraine and an unarmed warship to the Black Sea.
Clearly not impressed by the US moves, the Russians overflew and shadowed the US naval ship. As Charles Krauthammer noted on Fox News on Monday, the Russian action was not a provocation. It was “a show of contempt.”
As Krauthammer explained, it could have only been viewed as a provocation if Russia had believed the US was likely to respond to its shadowing of the warship. Since Moscow correctly assessed that the US would not respond to its aggression, by buzzing and following the warship, the Russians demonstrated to Ukraine and other US allies that they cannot trust the US to protect them from Russia.
In the Middle East, it is not only the US’s obsessive approach to the Palestinian conflict with Israel that lies in shambles. The entire US alliance system and the Obama administration’s other signature initiatives have also collapsed.
After entering office, Obama implemented an aggressive policy in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere of killing al-Qaida operatives with unmanned drones. The strategy was based on the notion that such a campaign, that involves no US boots on the ground, can bring about a rout of the terrorist force at minimal human cost to the US and at minimal political cost to President Barack Obama.
The strategy has brought about the demise of a significant number of al-Qaida terrorists over the years. And due to the support Obama enjoys from the US media, the Obama administration paid very little in terms of political capital for implementing it.
But despite the program’s relative success, according to The Washington Post, the administration suspended drone attacks in December 2013 after it endured modest criticism when one in Yemen inadvertently hit a wedding party.
No doubt al-Qaida noticed the program’s suspension. And now the terror group is flaunting its immunity from US attack.
This week, jihadist websites featured an al-Qaida video showing hundreds of al-Qaida terrorists in Yemen meeting openly with the group’s second in command, Nasir al-Wuhayshi.
In the video, Wuhayshi threatened the US directly saying, “We must eliminate the cross,” and explaining that “the bearer of the cross is America.”
Then there is Iran.
The administration has staked its reputation on its radical policy of engaging Iran on its nuclear weapons program. The administration claims that by permitting Iran to undertake some nuclear activities it can convince the mullahs to shelve their plan to develop nuclear weapons.
This week brought further evidence of the policy’s complete failure. It also brought further proof that the administration is unperturbed by evidence of failure.
In a televised interview Sunday, Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akhbar Salehi insisted that Iran has the right to enrich uranium to 90 percent. In other words, he said that Iran is building nuclear bombs.
And thanks to the US and its interim nuclear deal with Iran, the Iranian economy is on the mend.
The interim nuclear deal the Obama administration signed with Iran last November was supposed to limit its oil exports to a million barrels a day. But according to the International Energy Agency, in February, Iran’s daily oil exports rose to 1.65 million barrels a day, the highest level since June 2012.
Rather than accept that its efforts have failed, the Obama administration is redefining what success means.
As Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz noted, in recent months US officials claimed the goal of the nuclear talks was to ensure that Iran would remain years away from acquiring nuclear weapons. In recent remarks, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the US would suffice with a situation in which Iran is but six months away from acquiring nuclear weapons.
In other words, the US has now defined failure as success.
Then there is Syria.
Last September, the US claimed it made history when, together with Russia it convinced dictator Bashar Assad to surrender his chemical weapons arsenal. Six months later, not only is Syria well behind schedule for abiding by the agreement, it is reportedly continuing to use chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians. The most recent attack reportedly occurred on April 12 when residents of Kafr Zita were attacked with chlorine gas.
The growing worldwide contempt for US power and authority would be bad enough in and of itself. The newfound confidence of aggressors imperils international security and threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
What makes the situation worse is the US response to what is happening. The Obama administration is responding to the ever-multiplying crises by pretending that there is nothing to worry about and insisting that failures are successes.
And the problem is not limited to Obama and his advisers or even to the political Left. Their delusional view that the US will suffer no consequences for its consistent record of failure and defeat is shared by a growing chorus of conservatives.
Some, like the anti-Semitic conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, laud Putin as a cultural hero. Others, like Sen. Rand Paul, who is increasingly presenting himself as the man to beat in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, indicate that the US has no business interfering with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Iran as well is a country the US should be less concerned about, in Paul’s opinion.
Leaders like Sen. Ted Cruz who call for a US foreign policy based on standing by allies and opposing foes in order to ensure US leadership and US national security are being drowned out in a chorus of “Who cares?” Six years into Obama’s presidency, the US public as a whole is largely opposed to taking any action on behalf of Ukraine or the Baltic states, regardless of what inaction, or worse, feckless action means for the US’s ability to protect its interests and national security.
And the generation coming of age today is similarly uninterested in US global leadership.
During the Cold War and in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the predominant view among American university students studying international affairs was that US world leadership is essential to ensure global stability and US national interests and values.
Today this is no longer the case.
Much of the Obama administration’s shuttle diplomacy in recent years has involved sending senior officials, including Obama, on overseas trips with the goal of reassuring jittery allies that they can continue to trust US security guarantees.
These protestations convince fewer and fewer people today.
It is because of this that US allies like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, that lack nuclear weapons, are considering their options on the nuclear front.
It is because of this that Israeli officials are openly stating for the first time that the US cannot be depended on to either secure Israel’s eastern frontier in the event that an accord is reached with the Palestinians, or to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
It is because of this that the world is more likely than it has been since 1939 to experience a world war of catastrophic proportions.
There is a direct correlation between the US elite’s preoccupation with social issues running the narrow and solipsistic gamut from gay marriage to transgender bathrooms to a phony war against women, and America’s inability to recognize the growing threats to the global order or understand why Americans should care about the world at all.
And there is a similarly direct correlation between the growing aggression of US foes and Obama’s decision to slash defense spending while allowing the US nuclear arsenal to become all but obsolete.
America’s spurned allies will take the actions they need to take to protect themselves. Some will persevere, others will likely be overrun.
But with Americans across the ideological spectrum pretending that failure is success and defeat is victory, while turning their backs on the growing storm, how will America protect itself?
-
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117491/obama-and-inconvenience-history-abandoning-ukraine
As biting and perceptive as this piece is in many ways, it simply ignores some profoundly important variables:
a) the mood of the American people with regard to foreign entanglements
b) closely related to that, the lack of leadership from the Republicans with regard to the matrix of issues related in this regard-- for example, we are the calls for reversing the cuts to the military even as we continue lemming-like stampede of spending on other things
c) maybe we should consider why we should be helping out Europe and others yet again when not so long ago they vigorously disparaged us. Even now, Europe resists real sanctions on Russia. I get it-- Russia will shut off the gas and that will be really difficult-- but if they are not willing to stand firm, why exactly should we?
-
Europe can burn for all I care.
-
In which case, why criticize Obama for being weak with regard to Ukraine and east Europe?
-
A thoughtful piece all the way through.
The Return of Geopolitics
The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141211/walter-russell-mead/the-return-of-geopolitics
So far, the year 2014 has been a tumultuous one, as geopolitical rivalries have stormed back to center stage. Whether it is Russian forces seizing Crimea, China making aggressive claims in its coastal waters, Japan responding with an increasingly assertive strategy of its own, or Iran trying to use its alliances with Syria and Hezbollah to dominate the Middle East, old-fashioned power plays are back in international relations.
The United States and the EU, at least, find such trends disturbing. Both would rather move past geopolitical questions of territory and military power and focus instead on ones of world order and global governance: trade liberalization, nuclear nonproliferation, human rights, the rule of law, climate change, and so on. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, the most important objective of U.S. and EU foreign policy has been to shift international relations away from zero-sum issues toward win-win ones. To be dragged back into old-school contests such as that in Ukraine doesn’t just divert time and energy away from those important questions; it also changes the character of international politics. As the atmosphere turns dark, the task of promoting and maintaining world order grows more daunting.
...
What binds these powers together (Iran, Russia, China), however, is their agreement that the status quo must be revised. Russia wants to reassemble as much of the Soviet Union as it can. China has no intention of contenting itself with a secondary role in global affairs, nor will it accept the current degree of U.S. influence in Asia and the territorial status quo there. Iran wishes to replace the current order in the Middle East -- led by Saudi Arabia and dominated by Sunni Arab states -- with one centered on Tehran.
Leaders in all three countries also agree that U.S. power is the chief obstacle to achieving their revisionist goals. Their hostility toward Washington and its order is both offensive and defensive: not only do they hope that the decline of U.S. power will make it easier to reorder their regions, but they also worry that Washington might try to overthrow them should discord within their countries grow. Yet the revisionists want to avoid direct confrontations with the United States, except in rare circumstances when the odds are strongly in their favor (as in Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and its occupation and annexation of Crimea this year). Rather than challenge the status quo head on, they seek to chip away at the norms and relationships that sustain it.
Since Obama has been president, each of these powers has pursued a distinct strategy in light of its own strengths and weaknesses. China, which has the greatest capabilities of the three, has paradoxically been the most frustrated. Its efforts to assert itself in its region have only tightened the links between the United States and its Asian allies and intensified nationalism in Japan. As Beijing’s capabilities grow, so will its sense of frustration. China’s surge in power will be matched by a surge in Japan’s resolve, and tensions in Asia will be more likely to spill over into global economics and politics.
Iran, by many measures the weakest of the three states, has had the most successful record. The combination of the United States’ invasion of Iraq and then its premature withdrawal has enabled Tehran to cement deep and enduring ties with significant power centers across the Iraqi border, a development that has changed both the sectarian and the political balance of power in the region. In Syria, Iran, with the help of its longtime ally Hezbollah, has been able to reverse the military tide and prop up the government of Bashar al-Assad in the face of strong opposition from the U.S. government. This triumph of realpolitik has added considerably to Iran’s power and prestige. Across the region, the Arab Spring has weakened Sunni regimes, further tilting the balance in Iran’s favor. So has the growing split among Sunni governments over what to do about the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots and adherents.
Russia, meanwhile, has emerged as the middling revisionist: more powerful than Iran but weaker than China, more successful than China at geopolitics but less successful than Iran. Russia has been moderately effective at driving wedges between Germany and the United States, but Russian President Vladimir Putin’s preoccupation with rebuilding the Soviet Union has been hobbled by the sharp limits of his country’s economic power. To build a real Eurasian bloc, as Putin dreams of doing, Russia would have to underwrite the bills of the former Soviet republics -- something it cannot afford to do.
Nevertheless, Putin, despite his weak hand, has been remarkably successful at frustrating Western projects on former Soviet territory. He has stopped NATO expansion dead in its tracks. He has dismembered Georgia, brought Armenia into his orbit, tightened his hold on Crimea, and, with his Ukrainian adventure, dealt the West an unpleasant and humiliating surprise. From the Western point of view, Putin appears to be condemning his country to an ever-darker future of poverty and marginalization. But Putin doesn’t believe that history has ended, and from his perspective, he has solidified his power at home and reminded hostile foreign powers that the Russian bear still has sharp claws.
...
Russia sees its influence in the Middle East as an important asset in its competition with the United States. This does not mean that Moscow will reflexively oppose U.S. goals on every occasion, but it does mean that the win-win outcomes that Americans so eagerly seek will sometimes be held hostage to Russian geopolitical interests. In deciding how hard to press Russia over Ukraine, for example, the White House cannot avoid calculating the impact on Russia’s stance on the Syrian war or Iran’s nuclear program. Russia cannot make itself a richer country or a much larger one, but it has made itself a more important factor in U.S. strategic thinking, and it can use that leverage to extract concessions that matter to it.
If these revisionist powers have gained ground, the status quo powers have been undermined. The deterioration is sharpest in Europe, where the unmitigated disaster of the common currency has divided public opinion and turned the EU’s attention in on itself. The EU may have avoided the worst possible consequences of the euro crisis, but both its will and its capacity for effective action beyond its frontiers have been significantly impaired.
The United States has not suffered anything like the economic pain much of Europe has gone through, but with the country facing the foreign policy hangover induced by the Bush-era wars, an increasingly intrusive surveillance state, a slow economic recovery, and an unpopular health-care law, the public mood has soured. On both the left and the right, Americans are questioning the benefits of the current world order and the competence of its architects. Additionally, the public shares the elite consensus that in a post–Cold War world, the United States ought to be able to pay less into the system and get more out. When that doesn’t happen, people blame their leaders. In any case, there is little public appetite for large new initiatives at home or abroad, and a cynical public is turning away from a polarized Washington with a mix of boredom and disdain.
Obama came into office planning to cut military spending and reduce the importance of foreign policy in American politics while strengthening the liberal world order. A little more than halfway through his presidency, he finds himself increasingly bogged down in exactly the kinds of geopolitical rivalries he had hoped to transcend. Chinese, Iranian, and Russian revanchism haven’t overturned the post–Cold War settlement in Eurasia yet, and may never do so, but they have converted an uncontested status quo into a contested one. U.S. presidents no longer have a free hand as they seek to deepen the liberal system; they are increasingly concerned with shoring up its geopolitical foundations.
(more at link)
-
In which case, why criticize Obama for being weak with regard to Ukraine and east Europe?
Because his weakness has set the stage for global instability, which will reach us back here.
-
I get that of course. But if you do not care what happens to Europe is there not some cognitive dissonance somewhere in your thinking?
-
I think GM's comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. As with Caroline Glick's earlier piece with which I agree - I think any rational person who observes the history of civilization can see that weakness is, in fact, provocative. In this age of ICBMs, it's suicidal to adopt a weak, isolationist stance - which is exactly what Obama, and I might add the Democrat Party has done. The Democrat Party has been contemptuous of the military ever since JFK. Their actions and statements during the war in Iraq were downright treasonous - politically calculated as they were to damage G.W. without regard to our national security or the safety of our soldiers. John Kerry is a quisling who has no business being Secretary of State, because he, like Obama - has contempt for America as founded.
-
I get that of course. But if you do not care what happens to Europe is there not some cognitive dissonance somewhere in your thinking?
Asia and the middle east are the areas of concern.
-
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141211/walter-russell-mead/the-return-of-geopolitics
-
Americans Want to Pull Back From World Stage, Poll Finds
Nearly Half Surveyed in WSJ/NBC Poll Back Anti—Interventionist Stance That Sweeps Across Party Lines
By Janet Hook
WSJ
April 30, 2014 12:05 a.m. ET
Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds. Janet Hook reports. Photo: Getty.
Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.
In a marked change from past decades, nearly half of those surveyed want the U.S. to be less active on the global stage, with fewer than one-fifth calling for more active engagement—an anti-interventionist current that sweeps across party lines.
The findings come as the Obama administration said Tuesday that Russia continues to meddle in Ukraine in defiance of U.S. and European sanctions. Pro-Russian militants took over more government buildings in eastern Ukraine, while officials at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said satellite imagery showed no sign that Russia had withdrawn tens of thousands of troops massed near the border. (Read five takeaways from the poll.)
The poll showed that approval of President Barack Obama's handling of foreign policy sank to the lowest level of his presidency, with 38% approving, at a time when his overall job performance drew better marks than in recent months.
A WSJ/NBC News poll shows that approval of President Barack Obama's handling of foreign policy sank to the lowest level of his presidency. Pictured, Mr. Obama at a news conference in Tokyo on April 24. via Bloomberg
Mr. Obama defended his diplomacy-first approach at a news conference Monday in the Philippines, the last stop on a four-nation tour through Asia. He said those who called for a more muscular policy hadn't learned the lessons of the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.
"Why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force after we've just gone through a decade of war at enormous costs to our troops and to our budget?" he said. "And what is it exactly that these critics think would have been accomplished?"
Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said, "After a week of rhetoric from the administration, I had hoped we would have responded to Russia's blatant violations…with more than just a slap on the wrist."
The poll findings, combined with the results of prior Journal/NBC surveys this year, portray a public weary of foreign entanglements and disenchanted with a U.S. economic system that many believe is stacked against them. The 47% of respondents who called for a less-active role in world affairs marked a larger share than in similar polling in 2001, 1997 and 1995. (See poll results over time about America's role in the world.)
Similarly, the Pew Research Center last year found a record 53% saying that the U.S. "should mind its own business internationally" and let other countries get along as best they can, compared with 41% who said so in 1995 and 20% in 1964.
"The juxtaposition of an America that wants to turn inward and away from world affairs, and a strong feeling of powerlessness domestically, is a powerful current that so far has eluded the grasp of Democrats and Republicans," said Democratic pollster Fred Yang, who conducts the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "The message from the American public to their leaders in this poll seems to be: You need to take care of business here at home."
At a press conference in Manila, the president fired back at critics of his foreign-policy decisions, outlining a doctrine based on diplomacy and a cautious approach to the use of force. Via The Foreign Bureau, WSJ's global news update.
The poll results have broad implications for U.S. politics, helping to explain, among other developments, Mr. Obama's hesitance to have the U.S. take the lead in using military force in Libya, the reluctance of Congress to authorize force against Syria and the ascent as a national figure of Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), a potential 2016 presidential candidate who has called for a restrained foreign policy.
Support for Mr. Obama's handling of Russian intervention in Ukraine slipped to 37% in the new poll from 43% in March. But at the same time, a plurality agreed with the statement that Mr. Obama takes "a balanced approach" to foreign policy "depending on the situation," with smaller shares rating him as too cautious or too bold.
Melissa Western, a graphic designer from Chandler, Ariz., who participated in the poll, called Mr. Obama's foreign policy "lackadaisical."
"I'm not saying go to war, but I feel like he has a lot of empty threats," said Ms. Western, an independent who voted for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012. "He's hard to take seriously."
Dora Lovett, a Democratic poll respondent in Ozark, Ark., said Mr. Obama should focus more on domestic issues and less on events abroad. "I just feel like he does more for them than he does for us," she said, citing foreign aid as an example.
As Hillary Clinton weighs a presidential campaign, she currently enjoys generally favorable views from the American public. However, one of her biggest obstacles lies with the image of a political family dynasty that will haunt her and potential competitor, Jeb Bush.
Rx for Keeping Ukraine Independent
Kerry Sees Ukraine Crisis as Putin's
Fed Picks Advance in Senate
What College Towns Tell Us About Midterms
High Court Revives EPA Pollution Rule
Capital Journal Daybreak: Receive the Journal's morning rundown in your inbox
E-Book: The Right Way? Rethink, Reload 2014
Letter From Bureau Chief Jerry Seib
While Mr. Obama's standing as a foreign policy leader has slipped, the poll found his overall job approval rose to 44% from March's record low of 41%.
But the president's standing remains perilously low just six months before the midterm congressional elections, and the poll was riddled with warning signs for his party. Support for his signature health-care law is improving slightly, a result that comes after the announcement that eight million people had picked insurance plans under the law. Still, support for the law remains weak, with 46% saying it is a bad idea and 36% saying it is a good one. "Clearly, the president has better news from his health-care law. But in general, that better news has still left people, by double-digit margins, saying it is a bad idea," said Mr. McInturff, the GOP pollster.
The public is deeply divided over the benefits of international trade and globalization, a challenge for Mr. Obama as he tries to shepherd major trade deals through a reluctant Congress.
The poll found that 48% viewed globalization as bad for the U.S. economy, with 43% calling it a good development. Asked whether they preferred a congressional candidate who argued that free trade was a positive force or one who called it a negative force, 46% favored the pro-trade candidate and 48% the anti-trade candidate.
Opinions on trade and globalization correlated more with income and education than with party affiliation. People with lower incomes and education tended to be the most skeptical of those forces, with support rising in tandem with income and education. "There are huge chunks of Republicans who would be looking at and supporting anti-free trade candidates, and huge chunks of Democrats who are pro-free trade," Mr. McInturff said, adding that both parties face a difficult task in finding their footing on the issue.
For all the poll's warnings to Democrats about the 2014 midterm elections, it offered some good news for the party in its early glances toward the 2016 presidential election. The poll found that potential Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is viewed significantly more positively than two potential Republican contenders.
2014 Poll Tracker
Explore the Wall Street Journal's guide to top Senate and governor races and compare sentiment in national polls. Data provided by Real Clear Politics.
Mrs. Clinton was viewed positively by 48% of those surveyed and negatively by 32%. Both Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Paul were viewed more negatively: Mr. Bush was viewed favorably by 21% and unfavorably by 31%. For Mr. Paul, opinion split 23% to 25%.
—Colleen McCain Nelson and Rebecca Ballhaus contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll was based on nationwide telephone interviews of 1,000 adults, including 341 respondents reached by cellphone. It was conducted from April 23-27, 2014, by the polling organizations of Bill McInturff at Public Opinion Strategies and Fred Yang at Hart Research Associates. The sample was drawn in the following manner: Individuals were selected proportionate to the nation's population in accordance with a probability sample design that gives all landline telephone numbers, listed and unlisted, an equal chance to be included. Adults age 18 or over were selected by a systematic procedure to provide a balance of respondents by sex. The cellphone sample was drawn from a list of cellphone users nationally. Of the 1,000 interviews, 300 respondents were reached on a cellphone and screened to ensure their cellphone was the only phone they had. In addition, 41 respondents were reached on a cellphone but reported also having a landline. The data's margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Sample tolerances for subgroups are larger.
Write to Janet Hook at janet.hook@wsj.com
-
I take this poll with a grain of salt. Number one - WSJ/NBC is not in my opinion a trustworthy polling organization. Particularly not NBC. I'd like to see the actual questions asked. YES - I think most Americans with a brain can see this President is completely incompetent when it comes to foreign policy. After all - name one - just ONE - country with whom we have better relations now than we did when Obama took office.
That does not necessarily translate into Americans believing generally in a "non-interventionist" stance. This president's policies have been an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions both on a domestic and foreign policy stage. Americans understandably are more concerned with their immediate financial security, but we'd be wise NOT to draw sweeping conclusions from this about the overall foreign policy stance of most Americans. The current sentiment, such as it is - doesn't occur in a vacuum. People see what a failure this President is, and don't have any desire to compound the damage.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/376725/foreign-policy-bad-none-victor-davis-hanson
I call this an important read because of its penetrating description of the domestic politics of Obama's foreign (non)policy and why it stymies us so well. Well worth considerable reflection.
-
"Where for example is a bill passed by the House calling for a stronger military budget?" (Discuss if you wish in the American Foreign Policy thread.)
American foreign policy including the defense budget will be heavily discussed in the 2016 Republican primaries. Until then, Republicans in the House voting more money for defense than the Senate and Pres will accept would only cause more money to be spent on things other than defense, IMHO. The pitiful election of 2012 had enormous consequences.
-
I will attempt to state what I see as the essence here:
Quite correctly, the American people have lost confidence in the competence and the integrity of our government, both Rep, Dem, and institutional to act successfully in foreign affairs. Couple that with the change from a uni-polar world to a multi-polar world and the lack of articulation of a vision that addresses that and the net result politically is what we have.
-
I will attempt to state what I see as the essence here:
Quite correctly, the American people have lost confidence in the competence and the integrity of our government, both Rep, Dem, and institutional to act successfully in foreign affairs. Couple that with the change from a uni-polar world to a multi-polar world and the lack of articulation of a vision that addresses that and the net result politically is what we have.
That's right. We were most credible when we built up a formidable arsenal for deterrence than when we went in on the ground, constrained by rules and circumstances, and tried to change societies.
I disagreed with Colin Powell on Iraq that if you break it you must fix it. It was already broken. Our job was shock and awe, to take down the regime for the 23 reasons stated on the military authorization. Let tyrants around the world they may face consequences. But after that it was at our discretion how much, how long or whether to help shape what followed. Staying on was noble but hurt our credibility abroad and our confidence at home, and a few thousand American casualties. Same for the discussions here of what should or should not have been the mission in Afghanistan. Before that, Vietnam.
People are right to be skeptical of our ability to affect change around the world. That does not mean the right answer is to disarm and do nothing in the face of a world plagued with genocide, tyranny, terror and grave and gathering threats. The lessons of WWII in particular I think was for people and nations to recognize threats earlier and rise up to the military challenge sooner.
When this eight year apology tour is over, maybe we can have a leader who is proud and can articulate that during the time that the we were the powerful nation on earth, the United States used its enormous power for good in the world. We freed and protected a lot of people and conquered no new lands. This work isn't done.
-
Good points, Doug - I would add a couple:
1) G.W.'s screw-up was thinking that we had any business (let alone any chance of success) in trying to institute a democratic, human-rights-based government in Iraq. This is a society which has been governed by Islam, which is inherently anti-individual, and until and unless this changes, instituting a democracy there, or in any other Middle Eastern society is a fool's errand. It simply will not happen. As our Founders correctly observed - a civilized society and government depends upon a moral people. Islam's explicit teachings fly in the face of this. Precious few in our government understand this.
2) There is not necessarily a need to commit troops to an arena to have a powerful influence on the despotic leaders there who would make trouble for their own citizens, neighbors and for us. What IS necessary is that those leaders have a healthy respect for the US, knowing that we back up our words with action, and will take a leadership role in punishing bad behavior with economic sanctions and whatever diplomatic tools at our disposal, with our allies. BUT - we do reserve and are not afraid to use our military if necessary. Putin and every other world leader knows that this is NOT presently the case, and they can ignore our wishes with impunity. This is a recipe for disaster. It is in fact a green light to despots the world over which may in fact lead to WWIII. Thank you Barack Obama and the Democrat Party.
-
" G.W.'s screw-up was thinking that we had any business (let alone any chance of success) in trying to institute a democratic, human-rights-based government in Iraq. This is a society which has been governed by Islam, which is inherently anti-individual, and until and unless this changes, instituting a democracy there, or in any other Middle Eastern society is a fool's errand."
I agree with this. I was wrong too because I was for getting rid of that monster Saddam. But so was the hILL :wink: Ten years of "girl power" driven down our throats day in and day out. Perhaps we can form an alliance with White, Black, Asian, Latino men :lol:
-
I think getting rid of Hussein was a good thing, and needed to be done. We should have stopped short, however - of trying to implement a democracy there. THAT was G.W.'s mistake.
-
I confess to being rather stunned in this moment at the preceding comments.
Let's review, as Winston Churchill said "You can count on Americans doing the right thing , , , after they have tried all the wrong ones."
Reality check gents: WE DID ESTABLISH A DEMOCRACY.
a) Elections to elect representatives to write a Constitution;
b) Reps wrote a constitution which was then approved by elections;
c) elections were held under the Constitution;
d) This elected established a government.
Unfortunately His Speciousness through it all away by not establishing a Status of Forces Agreement.
-
A status-of-forces agreement may have helped for a short time, but the inescapable reality is that Sharia Law, which was enshrined in that constitution, is INCOMPATIBLE with individual freedom. No democracy can be maintained by a people who hold fast to Sharia (Islamic) law. The two are mutually exclusive.
The best we could have hoped for would have been that Iraq would be kept somewhat in check from assisting in training terrorists and cooperating with Iran. This would have been an improvement over what we have, granted - but G.W. still wasted lives and treasure after removing Saddam by engaging in this fantasy of statecraft. Unless the U.S. were to OCCUPY Iraq indefinitely this "democracy" would never have lasted in any event.
And no - the Shah did NOT oversee a state run by Sharia.
-
Washington, DC – Yesterday evening, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Chairman Mike Rogers gave the first in his summer speaking series addressing current and future threats facing the United States and the policies needed to confront those threats. Upon receiving the Eisenhower Award from the Business Executives for National Security in Washington, DC, Chairman Rogers delivered a speech titled “Isolationism’s Threat to American Security and Prosperity.” Chairman Rogers highlighted President Dwight Eisenhower’s robust commitment to international engagement and the lessons we can draw for today.
The text of the speech is available at http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/BENS.pdf
-
Obj:
Here we disagree.
Even though it was a fascist ideology under Baathism, Iraq was a rather secular society. Women could drive, be educated, be doctors, etc. and more. It was one of the more literate countries in the Arab world.
Though it has now gone down the memory hole for most, IMO it is well worth remembering the passion and the risks of those who dared to vote and hold up their ink stained finger in defiance of the AQ threats against those voted.
IMHO there was much to work with here.
And what would be wrong with having 35-50,000 US troops sitting in the heart of the mid-east, on Iran's western border, sandwiching Syria w Israel, and leaving Azerbaijan feeling we can be a worthy ally/protector?
-
although IMHO the particulars here can be seen in different ways, the notion of humility of which Peggy writes here seems relevant to me , , ,
Bring Back the Girls—Quietly
America has forgotten how to exercise power without swagger.
ByPeggy Noonan
May 15, 2014 7:13 p.m. ET
At the end of the first Gulf War I saw something that startled me and gave me pause. More than 20 years later I can still see the image in my mind, so vivid was the impression it made.
It was June 8, 1991. America had just won a dazzling victory. We'd won a war in a hundred hours. Saddam Hussein had folded like a cheap suit and slunk out of Kuwait. The troops were coming home and the airwaves were full of joyous reunions. It was good.
Then the startling thing: There was a huge, full-scale military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington—two miles of troops, tanks, helicopters, even missiles. They marched from the Capitol past the White House, where there was a reviewing stand full of dignitaries. An F-117 stealth fighter streamed overhead.
I watched it on the news, from New York. When I saw the tanks, those big heavy bruisers, rolling down the avenue, it looked to me for all the world like a May Day parade in the Brezhnev era—militarist, nationalist, creepy. The journalist Michael Kelly captured some of the feel of it in the afterword of his book, "Martyr's Day." The parade was "a splendid evocation of military might and military discipline," yet he found it "oddly disquieting."
Enlarge Image
MK 41 (VLS Vertical Launching System) Navy Tomahawk Cruise missile rolling along on flatbed truck during Desert Storm gulf war victory parade on June 8, 1991. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
Disquieting was exactly the word. It was all such a rolling brag for a brief engagement we'd won with brains, guts and superior technology. More important, the size and nature of the parade seemed to suggest we were forgetting something: that war is a tragedy. People die in wars, the brave are sacrificed. War is sometimes necessary but always a mark of failure, the last bloody stop after breakdowns of diplomacy and judgment on all sides. War isn't something you throw a fizzy party for while showing off your shining hardware.
We had discovered how to brag. We had discovered how to beat our breasts with triumphalism and rub the world's nose in our superior strength. We'd gotten through World Wars I and II barely saying a word. The parade struck me not as a thanksgiving (it's over, there were limited casualties, we triumphed, thank God) but an assertion: "We're No. 1." But—more disquiet—if you're really No. 1, and know it, you don't have to say it like this, do you?
The world in the 20th century liked the America that could do the job and the Americans who modestly did it. It wouldn't feel so warmly about an America that made such a show of its prowess and power.
Since 9/11 and the wars that followed, we have grown confused about power and its proper uses. America is not eager for huge new military-strategic adventures; America knows it itself has a lot of repair to do, especially of its economy. America has not grown isolationist and in fact has never been more global in its daily life—in its commerce and culture, in its very neighborhoods. But it has grown more modest and sober-minded about what it can and should do.
At the same time, America has to stand, always, for what is right and decent in the world, or it will no longer be America. It needs to be able to do things only it can do at the moment, and do them bravely, successfully—and modestly.
Which gets me to my dream for the schoolgirls.
John McCain has it exactly right. (I don't think I've ever written that sentence.) He told CNN that as soon as the U.S. learned that hundreds of children had been kidnapped and stolen away by a rabid band of terrorists in Nigeria, we should have used "every asset that we have—satellite, drones, any capabilities that we had to go after them." He told the Daily Beast: "I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute I would, without permission of the host country." He added, as only Sen. McCain would: "I wouldn't be waiting for some kind of permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan. " That's Nigeria's hapless president.
Mr. McCain said that if he were president he would have moved already, and that is not to be doubted.
There is nothing wrong with taking action—when possible—that is contained, discrete, swift, targeted, humanitarian and, not least, can be carried through successfully. And then shutting up about it. That might remind the world—and ourselves—who we are. And it might have very helpful effects down the road. "If we do that, the Americans may come." Leave the monsters guessing.
So, my dream: We go in, rescue the kids, get out, go home, and say nothing. Our troops would be happy with that: They like their jobs and like doing good, but the showbiz aspects that sometimes follow their actions only lead to distraction and discord. The White House would have to dummy up too, which would be hard for them. Staffers always want to make a president look good, and Obama staffers seem to think their primary purpose is to aggrandize the president. But there would be no network special with a breathless Brian Williams giving us the tick-tock on how it all went down and how the president kept his cool when all about him others were losing theirs.
What happened would, of course, get around. The world would know in time. But we would say nothing, like dignified people who use their might not for praise or power, but to achieve a measure of decency in the world.
You can't do this kind of thing every time there is a need. But—if it's not too late, if it hasn't been made impossible by the passage of time—you could do it this time.
In the past few weeks, as the story of the kidnapped girls unfolded, the Obama White House reacted as what it is: reflexively political but not really good at reading anything but the feelings of its base. Which, in a narrow way, has proved enough to get them through so far. They probably assume that the American people in general, on hearing of any rescue mission, would say, "Oh no, American involvement in another war—stop, don't do it!"
But that's not what the American people would think. They'd just think of the little girls. "Is it possible to go in there with a few hundred troops and save the girls and get out? Then do it!" And when word reached them that America had done it, they'd feel proud—we saved some children from the beasts who'd taken them.
Americans would feel happy about what we'd done, and good about not bragging about it. Actually we would really be proud but not sickly proud, just morally satisfied. Like we used to when our heads were screwed on right.
I really like the part about doing it as swiftly and silently as possible. I like thinking of the world saying: "Who did this? Who saved the little girls?"
And the answer: "It was the Americans. They had no right! But at least they quickly left. And the children were saved. At the end of the day they are a great people."
-
This could go in the US-Russia or the Ukraine thread, but I'm putting it here because of its larger implications
http://www.vox.com/2014/5/16/5717674/obamas-plan-to-let-putin-hang-himself-is-working
-
This could go in the US-Russia or the Ukraine thread, but I'm putting it here because of its larger implications
http://www.vox.com/2014/5/16/5717674/obamas-plan-to-let-putin-hang-himself-is-working
Ahhh! The stupidity! It burns!
-
The Gift of American Power
Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - 03:01 Print Text Size
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
Despite the East-West territorial clash over the buffer state of Ukraine, despite the sanguinary battles for patches of ground across the swath of the Middle East -- in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq -- and despite the zero-sum territorial conflicts throughout maritime East Asia, the myth persists of a world benignly ruled by multilateral institutions and agreements, by international financial markets that have all escaped geopolitics, and by the geography on which it is based.
Such thinking obviously contains a large measure of truth, but taken too far it creates the dangerous illusion of inexorable progress that is willfully blind to dangers ahead. While geography tells many stories, often contradictory, and can be overcome by human agency -- especially in the form of brave and moral leadership -- a belief in the inevitability of progress is dangerously deterministic. It was such deterministic optimism that made the civilized world less prepared for the two world wars in the 20th century.
As long as the world is ruled by imperfect men and women -- some of whom will be evil, some of whom will be naive and some of whom will be competent yet unable to avoid disputes with other competent leaders whose self-interests and national interests are simply different -- conflict will dominate international relations. And as long as human beings live on this earth they will have disputes over territory that, no matter how bleak or water-starved or lacking in other resources, constitutes holy ground fundamental to their group identity.
This situation will be aggravated by the world population increasing from 7 billion to more than 9 billion by 2050, according to the latest U.N. projections. Most of this increase will occur in the poorest and least stable countries -- those already prone to war. Geography is about to become more precious than ever. Meanwhile, communications technology will make geopolitics increasingly claustrophobic, as events in one part of the world can affect those in another as never before.
Interlocking, catalytic conflict rooted in geography is about to define the 21st century. To wit, Europe lacks the will to enforce meaningful sanctions against Russia because it is too dependent on Russia's webwork of natural gas pipelines -- a fact of geography if ever there was one. This leads to a perception of weakness on the part of the West that can only encourage the Chinese to be even more provocative in pressing territorial claims in the South and East China seas. The Japanese, who contest territory in the East China Sea with China, have specifically warned of the danger that the Western response to Crimea poses to them.
Meanwhile, the collapse of distance wrought by advances in military technology has brought China and India into a strategic competition that has no precedent in their collective histories: Indian space satellites spy on Chinese airfields; Chinese fighter jets have the capability to incorporate India into their arc of operations; Indian missiles can target Chinese cities and Chinese warships are present in the Indian Ocean. The world has shrunk, in other words, even as vast and poverty-wracked cities expand, and group identity -- whether tribal in Africa, sectarian in the Middle East or ethnic and nationalistic in East Asia -- has been dangerously reconstructed by the Internet and other technologies into the most exclusivist, inflexible forms.
But what about all those new global and regional institutions and organizations, to say nothing about the growth and opportunity that has come from financial markets? Aren't they the other, more positive half of reality? They are. But then the question arises: Why have they been able to come into being in the first place? What ultimately undergirds them? The answer is one that many members of the global political and financial aristocracy do not want to hear: raw American power.
Because the American economy is the world's largest, and because the American people have over the course of the decades agreed to employ that prosperity in service to an immense military armature across the globe, stability, such as it exists, and a new and unprecedented global civilization have been able to emerge. Take away that raw American power -- which is first and foremost a geopolitical phenomenon -- and the escape from geopolitics that many proclaim suddenly evaporates.
It is the various U.S. Navy fleets and numbered air forces that are the ultimate guarantor of stability in the key theaters of the globe. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, because it can easily defeat any rival, keeps the peace of East Asia. The spectacular Asian economic boom that commenced in the late Cold War decades is simply impossible to even imagine without the security provided by the U.S. military. Take away the Seventh Fleet and the chances of China and Japan going to war increase dramatically, roiling financial markets in the process. It is the Seventh Fleet that still stands in the way of China being able to Finlandize South Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Wide stretches of the Middle East may be in chaos or semi-chaos, but it is U.S. air and sea power that helps prevent a Persian Gulf war between Iran and Saudi Arabia and provides ultimately for the security of Israel and Jordan. As for Europe, without U.S. military power Russia is more dominant than the European Union on the Continent, and the independence of the Baltic states, Poland and Romania is crushed or dramatically diluted. Geography certainly matters, and Europe's freedom survives best because of the geographical breadth of the U.S. military.
The United States is not a traditional empire because it has no colonies, but its military -- and the diplomatic power that accompanies it -- is deployed in an imperial-like fashion worldwide. The U.S. Navy calls itself a global force for good. That claim would pass the most stringent editorial fact-checking process. Without that very naked American ambition, which allows the Navy and the Air Force to patrol the global commons, the world is reduced to the sum of its parts: a Japan and China, and a China and India, dangerously at odds and on the brink of war; a Middle East in far wider war and chaos; a Europe neutralized and emasculated by Russian Revanchism; and an Africa in even greater disarray. It is not that regional powers cannot act rationally on their own; it is only that without a global hegemon of sorts, local balance-of-power interactions become more fraught with risk and are, therefore, more dangerous.
The 1914 scenario that many proclaim for both Europe and East Asia would become much more than journalistic hype absent American military preponderance. The spread of democracy that many celebrate would be impossible to imagine without the American military's global footprint since, if you project your power, your values will often follow behind you.
It is true that the early 21st century is different from the 20th and 19th centuries. It is different not so much because of a change in human nature, or because of postmodern technology, or because of the disappearance of geopolitics. To the contrary, it is different because the United States, with all of its limitations and all of its mistakes, remains geopolitically dominant.
Great powers are rarely appreciated in their own time, for the benevolent order they spread goes unacknowledged by those who benefit most from what they provide. Global civilization -- and the system of legal norms that arises from it -- survives to a significant extent because the American military remains robust and widely deployed. And that, in turn, is not a situation that is necessarily permanent, or one that can ever be taken for granted.
Read more: The Gift of American Power | Stratfor
-
Third post of the day
WSJ Online
16 May 2014
Essay
Can China Best the West at Statecraft?
A great contest is under way to reinvent the state, and our rivals are looking everywhere but the U.S. for successful models
John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge
Buried in a Shanghai suburb, close to the city's smoggy Inner Ring Road, the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong, or Celap, seems to have a military purpose. Razor wire curls along the fences around the huge compound, and guards stand at its gate. But drive into the campus from the curiously named Future Schedule Street, and you enter what looks like Harvard as redesigned by Dr. No.
In the middle of the academy stands a huge, bright-red building in the shape of a desk, with an equally monumental, scarlet inkwell beside it. Surrounding it are lakes and trees, libraries, a sports center and a series of low, brown dormitory buildings, all designed to look like unfolded books. Celap calls this a "campus," but the organization is too disciplined, hierarchical and businesslike to be a university. The locals are closer to the mark: They call it a "Cadre Training School." This is an organization bent on world domination.
Celap's students are China's future leaders. The egalitarian-looking sleeping quarters mask a strict pecking order, with suites for senior visitors from Beijing. The syllabus eschews ideology in favor of technocratic solutions. The two most common questions, says one teacher, are: What works best? And can it be applied here?
Today, Chinese students and officials hurtle around the world, studying successful models from Chile to Sweden. Some 1,300 years ago, Celap's staff remind you, imperial China sought out the brightest young people to become civil servants. For centuries, these mandarins ran the world's most advanced government—until the Europeans and then the Americans forged ahead. Better government has long been one of the West's great advantages. Now the Chinese want that title back.
Western policy makers should look at this effort the same way that Western businessmen looked at Chinese factories in the 1990s: with a mixture of awe and fear. Just as China deliberately set out to remaster the art of capitalism, it is now trying to remaster the art of government. The only difference is a chilling one: Many Chinese think there is far less to be gained from studying Western government than they did from studying Western capitalism. They visit Silicon Valley and Wall Street, not Washington, D.C.
The West pulled ahead of "the rest" because it created a permanent contest to improve its government machinery. In particular, it pioneered four great revolutions. The first was the security revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, when Europe's princes created modern nation states. As Spain, England and France competed around the globe, they improved statecraft in a way that introverted China never did.
The second great revolution, of the late 18th and 19th centuries, championed liberty and efficiency. Aristocratic patronage systems were replaced with leaner, more meritocratic governments, focused on providing services like schools and police. Under Britain's thrifty Victorians, the world's most powerful country reduced its tax take from £80 million in 1816 to less than £60 million in 1860—even as its population increased by 50%.
This vision of a limited but vigorous state was swept away in the third revolution. In the 20th century, Western government provided people with ever more help: first health care and unemployment pay but eventually college education and what President Lyndon B. Johnson called the Great Society. Despite counterattacks, notably the 1980s half-revolution of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the sprawling welfare state remains the dominant Western model.
In the U.S., government spending increased from 7.5% of GDP in 1913 to 19.7% in 1937, to 27% in 1960, to 34% in 2000 and to 42% in 2011. Voters continue to demand more services, and politicians of all persuasions have indulged them—with the left delivering hospitals and schools, the right building prisons, armies and police forces, and everybody creating regulations like confetti.
In all three of these revolutions, the West led the way. But now, as China's ambitions illustrate, the emerging world is eager to compete again.
And why not? Over the past two years, while the U.S. political system has torn itself apart over Obamacare, China has extended pension coverage to an additional 240 million rural people. Lee Kwan Yew's authoritarian Singapore offers dramatically better education and health care than Uncle Sam, with a state that is a fraction of the U.S.'s size. If you are looking for the future of health care, India's attempt to apply mass-production techniques to hospitals is part of the answer. So too, Brazil's conditional cash transfers are part of the future of welfare. At the very least, the West no longer has a monopoly on ideas.
But it hasn't run out of them—yet. As the economist Herb Stein once wryly observed: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." The same can be said of bloated government in the West. The West's next decade will be dominated by arguments about what sort of state we want—for three key reasons.
The first is that, while Western voters have overloaded the state with demands, they abhor the result. The U.S. Congress regularly scores an approval rating of 10%. In Britain, membership of the Tory Party slid from 3 million in 1950 to 123,000 today, a performance that would have put a private company into receivership. Voters are frustrated.
Second, government is going broke. The U.S. government has run a surplus only five times since 1960; France hasn't had one since 1974-75. And now the demographic challenge of caring for aging populations will push even left-wing parties toward hard choices about what—and whom—they want to save.
The third reason is more positive. Government can be reformed, but only if Western politicians and electorates decide what they want it to do.
Our own answer is, simply, much less. The overloaded modern state is a threat to democracy: The more responsibilities Leviathan assumes, the worse it performs them, and the angrier citizens get. Such a state is also a threat to liberty: When the state takes half of everything that you produce and regulates the smallest details of daily life, it has become a master rather than a servant. Better to do fewer things—and to do them better.
You may disagree. But this is part of a bigger argument that the West must start having now. A great contest is under way to reinvent the state, and the Chinese have the advantage of knowing what the consequences are if they lose.
—Messrs. Micklethwait and Wooldridge are co-authors of The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, just published by Penguin Press. Mr. Micklethwait is editor in chief of the Economist, and Mr. Wooldridge is its management editor and the author of its Schumpeter column.
-
China hasn't been and won't have anymore success with technocrats than the US or europe.
-
he Old Order Collapses, Finally
Global Affairs
Wednesday, May 21, 2014 -
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
There has been something both conclusive and convulsive -- and yet sustaining -- about the crisis in Ukraine that has caused people to believe we have now entered a new chapter in international relations. As other commentators have noted, the old order has collapsed. By that they mean the period erstwhile labeled the Post Cold War.
This is a stunning formulation because it means at face value that all the blood and tragedy in Afghanistan and Iraq were not enough to signal a new phase in history, while the past few months in Ukraine were. But how can that be? The answer is that historical periods evolve very gradually -- over the years, during a decade of fighting in the Middle East, say -- whereas our recognition of these changes may happen only later, in an instant, as when Russia annexed Crimea.
Let me define what others have referred to as the "old order," as well as where I think we stand now.
In Asia, the old order, or the Post Cold War, meant American naval dominance, in essence a unipolar military world where the Chinese were developing a great economy but not yet a great military and the Japanese were safely entrenched inside a semi-pacifistic mindset. That Post Cold War order actually started decaying only a half-decade after the Berlin Wall fell, in the mid-1990s, when Chinese naval development first began to be demonstrably noticed. Over the past two decades Chinese naval power has grown steadily to the point where that American unipolar military order is giving way to a multipolar one, even as Japan, as a response to the Chinese threat, has slipped out of semi-pacifism and has rediscovered nationalism as a default option. The old order, in a word, is collapsing -- though we have only recently noticed it. The recent Chinese-Vietnamese naval standoff in the South China Sea has only punctuated the matter.
In the Middle East, the Post Cold War initially meant that the Americans kept Saddam Hussein's Iraq in check by ejecting him from Kuwait and then suffocating him with a no-fly zone. Saddam's Iraq, in turn, helped keep the mullahs' Iran in check. The American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and America's subsequent acceptance of stalemate in those wars, certainly undermined Washington's credibility and allowed Iran to expand its geopolitical influence. But with the American Navy and Air Force in the eastern Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and elsewhere -- not to mention the deployment of drones and Special Operations Forces to a place like Yemen -- American power is still not wholly to be trifled with. Indeed, the Persian Gulf -- whose security is underwritten by U.S. sea power -- has always been safe for hydrocarbon transport, relatively unaffected by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Of course, state collapses and partial-state collapses in Syria, Libya and Yemen have weakened American influence in those countries, but they have also weakened great power influence there in general. Nevertheless, we can say that as anarchy has increased over the years in the region, the ability of America to influence things has diminished. Thus, we have the slow-motion demise of the old order.
In Europe, the old order began unraveling toward the end of the last decade with the onset of the European Union's fiscal crisis. But because the crisis was for years defined by the media as merely economic, it was naturally seen as, well, an economic event and not also as a geopolitical event -- which it was. In fact, the crisis weakened the European Union's influence in the former satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe, allowing Vladimir Putin's Russia to regain a foothold there: Russia built and enlarged energy pipelines and invested in various infrastructure projects throughout the region. But the old order soldiered on. After all, the expansion of NATO and the European Union into the former satellite states and the three Baltic republics, the nominal independence of Belarus, and the emergence of Ukraine and Moldova as buffer states effectively moved Russia bodily eastward and contained it.
This situation lasted at first because of Boris Yeltsin's weak and chaotic rule in Russia itself. But that began to change toward the turn of the millennium when the more capable Putin took charge and as Europe -- especially Central and Eastern Europe -- became more dependent on Russian natural gas pipelines. The annexation of Crimea, triggered by the fall of the pro-Russian regime in Kiev, signaled to the world that Russia was no longer contained. And thus everyone has come to realize that the old order in Europe is gone, too.
The Ukraine crisis was especially symbolic because, while the Chinese threat in Asia has been noticeable for a while now and instability in the Middle East is considered a given, European security had been taken for granted by too many for too long.
So what has, or will, replace the old order?
Some have suggested a system of regional hegemons: the United States in North America, Brazil in South America, Germany in Europe, Russia in Eurasia, China in Asia and so on. The problem with this scenario is that it implies equality among hegemons where none exists. It also assumes that these hegemons are themselves stable, which they often are not. Brazil has profound institutional problems and social unrest. Russia will not dominate energy markets as much in the future, even as its own population declines. Germany is too entrapped in the Russian economy and energy sector to maintain a forceful foreign policy. China sits atop a vast credit bubble, which is only one of its structural and economic challenges. The United States has its problems, to be sure: partisan gridlock, a broken health care sector, increasing disparity between the poor and wealthy and so forth. But the problems that burden the other hegemons are in a number of cases worse and far more fundamental.
In other words, some of the hegemons themselves may severely stumble in the coming years, for Russia and China both may undergo significant social unrest. It is more likely that post-Putin Russia will be more anarchic than democratic; the same goes for China, if the Communist Party there fundamentally weakens.
And while the United States may be, in a relative sense, the strongest of the hegemons for many years to come, its ability to intervene in world crises may, nevertheless, diminish. American power depends on capable central authority elsewhere -- for where else can an American president apply pressure except upon other rulers? But if central authority itself gives way to weak democracies and anarchy where nobody is really in charge, there will be no address where America can go to demand action. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that the American people are simply more hesitant to underwrite security in distant theaters than they were during the Cold War, when they saw themselves in an existential battle against a rival ideology.
Policy elites have no trouble imagining a world of rival hegemons to replace an American imperial-like system -- because even a world of rival hegemons implies some degree of recognizable order and organization. What they have a more difficult time imagining is a world in which nobody is sufficiently in charge anywhere, where formlessness rules, where hierarchy itself has decayed. This anarchic formlessness combined with postmodern technology may help define the world that ultimately awaits us.
Read more: The Old Order Collapses, Finally | Stratfor
-
Putin Did Americans a Favor
Ukraine is a wake-up call for what a post-American world would look like.
By
Walter Russell Mead
June 1, 2014 6:38 p.m. ET
President Obama last week outlined his foreign-policy vision for the graduating students at the U.S. Military Academy, but a more instructive lesson in foreign affairs has been offered in recent months by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. may ultimately owe Mr. Putin a debt of gratitude for the reality check. His attack on Ukraine and his continuing efforts to destabilize its government are invaluable reminders of both the intractable nature of America's foreign-policy challenges and the potentially terrible consequences for the world if the U.S. fails the test.
As in their daily lives, Americans like both convenience and comfort in foreign policy. We want a foreign policy that is easy to operate and makes us feel good about ourselves and the state of the world. Analysts who say we can have the kind of world we want without doing any heavy lifting are guaranteed a warm reception; woe betide those who say we can't have it all.
American elites are as susceptible to this national—and bipartisan—predilection as anyone else. Liberal and conservative policy makers have consistently underestimated the complexities involved in building the liberal world order sought by every president in the post-Cold War era.
For the liberal wing of the foreign-policy establishment, the most consequential piece of wishful thinking may be the idea that the core elements of the American world order (a liberal economic system, great-power peace and the global primacy of liberal and humanitarian values) can flourish even as U.S. power declines. Our liberal political and economic values are so luminously true and so universally popular, the thinking goes, that emerging powers like the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—the Brics—and established powers like the European Union will take up the slack.
For liberal internationalists and conservative neo-isolationists, this is an attractive idea. Many analysts deem it self-evident that America's relative power in the international system is fated to decline in the 21st century. As countries like India and China continue to develop, we're told, the U.S. cannot hang on forever at the top of the global pecking order. As other countries build their military power and global presence, the U.S. would have to work much harder and spend much more to keep up. Not many Democratic policy wonks want to take that message to their political base.
But if we assume, as these liberals do, that America can rely on the kindness of strangers, the future doesn't look so grim. We can cut defense spending, trim commitments abroad and still feel good about ourselves. We can gradually decline without feeling that we are shirking our duties or endangering our security. The Pax Americana will survive American might; the rule of law will flourish as our power wanes.
Yet Mr. Putin has now thrown a big stink bomb into the middle of the "peaceful and safe decline" celebration. His move on Ukraine sends a strong message: American values and interests are unlikely to thrive if American power is in eclipse. The Pax Americana and the hope of a liberal and humane global system still rest on the weary shoulders of Uncle Sam.
For those willing to see, the signs of what a post-American world would look like are easy to discern. We can look at Bashar Assad's murderous campaign in Syria to see how Iran thinks power should be used. To see what Saudi Arabia thinks about human rights and liberal values, follow events in Egypt and Pakistan. China would become more aggressive in a post-American world, and the chances of Sino-Japanese conflict would increase. South Africa's coldly pragmatic approach to the Mugabe dictatorship in neighboring Zimbabwe speaks eloquently about the prospects of democracy if America diminishes as a presence in Africa. In Europe, only power keeps or can keep Russia from rebuilding its old empire and pushing forward into the former Warsaw Pact states.
Those who think American decline is inevitable must face a tragic truth: The eclipse of American power will be a disaster for our economic interests, for the values we cherish, and in the end for our security at home. What stability, peace and legality now exist in the international system are there because the U.S., with important help from allies and partners, made great sacrifices to build and secure them. The imposing edifice of the liberal world system would soon fall into ruin without that foundation.
The current bout of American weakness, a wobble that has destabilized Europe, the Middle East and Asia, is less about long-term historical decline than about a specific political moment. After two disappointing presidencies, the public is weary of foreign entanglements and deeply skeptical about the ability of either liberal or conservative experts to manage complicated overseas interventions. A foreign-policy establishment that has not exactly covered itself in glory over three presidential terms has lost much of the credibility needed to lead the American people into a new and constructive era. (CD: This is a major point I think-- does WRM address it?)
But thanks to Vladimir Putin and others, Americans are beginning to discover how ugly the world can get when the U.S. takes a breather. In the run-up to elections this fall and in 2016, voters may want to pay close attention to what aspiring candidates have to say about America's role in the world. Freedom and peace world-wide still depend on American energy and engagement.
Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest.
-
http://www.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2014/06/04/groping-for-a-reset/
-
http://online.wsj.com/articles/dick-cheney-and-liz-cheney-the-collapsing-obama-doctrine-1403046522?mod=hp_opinion
The Collapsing Obama Doctrine
Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.
DICK CHENEY And LIZ CHENEY
WSJ
Updated June 17, 2014 7:34 p.m. ET
As the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threaten Baghdad, thousands of slaughtered Iraqis in their wake, it is worth recalling a few of President Obama's past statements about ISIS and al Qaeda. "If a J.V. team puts on Lakers' uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant" (January 2014). "[C]ore al Qaeda is on its heels, has been decimated" (August 2013). "So, let there be no doubt: The tide of war is receding" (September 2011).
Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality. Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America's enemies are not "decimated." They are emboldened and on the march.
The fall of the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Tikrit, Mosul and Tel Afar, and the establishment of terrorist safe havens across a large swath of the Arab world, present a strategic threat to the security of the United States. Mr. Obama's actions—before and after ISIS's recent advances in Iraq—have the effect of increasing that threat.
On a trip to the Middle East this spring, we heard a constant refrain in capitals from the Persian Gulf to Israel, "Can you please explain what your president is doing?" "Why is he walking away?" Why is he so blithely sacrificing the hard fought gains you secured in Iraq?" "Why is he abandoning your friends?" "Why is he doing deals with your enemies?"
In one Arab capital, a senior official pulled out a map of Syria and Iraq. Drawing an arc with his finger from Raqqa province in northern Syria to Anbar province in western Iraq, he said, "They will control this territory. Al Qaeda is building safe havens and training camps here. Don't the Americans care?"
Our president doesn't seem to. Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing. He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America.
When Mr. Obama and his team came into office in 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq had been largely defeated, thanks primarily to the heroic efforts of U.S. armed forces during the surge. Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
The tragedy unfolding in Iraq today is only part of the story. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are resurgent across the globe. According to a recent Rand study, between 2010 and 2013, there was a 58% increase in the number of Salafi-jihadist terror groups around the world. During that same period, the number of terrorists doubled.
In the face of this threat, Mr. Obama is busy ushering America's adversaries into positions of power in the Middle East. First it was the Russians in Syria. Now, in a move that defies credulity, he toys with the idea of ushering Iran into Iraq. Only a fool would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terror.
This president is willfully blind to the impact of his policies. Despite the threat to America unfolding across the Middle East, aided by his abandonment of Iraq, he has announced he intends to follow the same policy in Afghanistan.
Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch. Indeed, the speed of the terrorists' takeover of territory in Iraq has been matched only by the speed of American decline on his watch.
The president explained his view in his Sept. 23, 2009, speech before the United Nations General Assembly. "Any world order," he said, "that elevates one nation above others cannot long survive." Tragically, he is quickly proving the opposite—through one dangerous policy after another—that without American pre-eminence, there can be no world order.
It is time the president and his allies faced some hard truths: America remains at war, and withdrawing troops from the field of battle while our enemies stay in the fight does not "end" wars. Weakness and retreat are provocative. U.S. withdrawal from the world is disastrous and puts our own security at risk.
Al Qaeda and its affiliates are resurgent and they present a security threat not seen since the Cold War. Defeating them will require a strategy—not a fantasy. It will require sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts—not empty misleading rhetoric. It will require rebuilding America's military capacity—reversing the Obama policies that have weakened our armed forces and reduced our ability to influence events around the world.
American freedom will not be secured by empty threats, meaningless red lines, leading from behind, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies, or apologizing for our great nation—all hallmarks to date of the Obama doctrine. Our security, and the security of our friends around the world, can only be guaranteed with a fundamental reversal of the policies of the past six years.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan said, "If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom." President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.
Mr. Cheney was U.S. vice president from 2001-09. Ms. Cheney was the deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs from 2002-04 and 2005-06
-
The Threat Is Blowback
Posted By Caroline Glick On June 20, 2014 - frontpagemag.com
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
Watching the undoing, in a week, of victories that US forces won in Iraq at great cost over many years, Americans are asking themselves what, if anything, should be done.
What can prevent the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – the al-Qaida offshoot that President Barack Obama derided just months ago as a bunch of amateurs – from taking over Iraq? And what is at stake for America – other than national pride – if it does? Muddying the waters is the fact that the main actor that seems interested in fighting ISIS on the ground in Iraq is Iran. Following ISIS’s takeover of Mosul and Tikrit last week, the Iranian regime deployed elite troops in Iraq from the Quds Force, its foreign operations division.
The Obama administration, along with Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, views Iran’s deployment of forces in Iraq as an opportunity for the US. The US, they argue should work with Iran to defeat ISIS.
The idea is that since the US and Iran both oppose al-Qaida, Iranian gains against it will redound to the US’s benefit.
There are two basic, fundamental problems with this idea.
First, there is a mountain of evidence that Iran has no beef with al-Qaida and is happy to work with it.
According to the 9/11 Commission’s report, between eight and 10 of the September 11 hijackers traveled through Iran before going to the US. And this was apparently no coincidence.
According to the report, Iran had been providing military training and logistical support for al-Qaida since at least the early 1990s.
After the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, al-Qaida’s leadership scattered. Many senior commanders – including bin Laden’s son Said, al-Qaida’s chief strategist Saif al-Adel and Suleiman Abu Ghaith – decamped to Iran, where they set up a command center.
From Iran, these men directed the operations of al-Qaida forces in Iraq led by Abu Musab Zarqawi. Zarqawi entered Iraq from Iran and returned to Iran several times during the years he led al-Qaida operations in Iraq.
Iran’s cooperation with al-Qaida continues today in Syria.
According to The Wall Street Journal, in directing the defense of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria, Iran has opted to leave ISIS and its al-Qaida brethren in the Nusra Front alone. That is why they have been able to expand their power in northern Syria.
Iran and its allies have concentrated their attacks against the more moderate Free Syrian Army, which they view as a threat.
Given Iran’s 20-year record of cooperation with al-Qaida, it is reasonable to assume that it is deploying forces into Iraq to tighten its control over Shi’ite areas, not to fight al-Qaida. The record shows that Iran doesn’t believe that its victories and al-Qaida’s victories are mutually exclusive.
The second problem with the idea of subcontracting America’s fight against al-Qaida to Iran is that it assumes that Iranian success in such a war would benefit America. But again, experience tells a different tale.
The US killed Zarqawi in an air strike in 2006.
Reports in the Arab media at the time alleged that Iran had disclosed Zarqawi’s location to the US. While the reports were speculative, shortly after Zarqawi was killed, then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice floated the idea of opening nuclear talks with Iran for the first time.
The Iranians contemptuously rejected her offer. But Rice’s willingness to discuss Iran’s nuclear weapons program with the regime, even as it was actively engaged in killing US forces in Iraq, ended any serious prospect that the Bush administration would develop a coherent plan for dealing with Iran in a strategic and comprehensive way.
Moreover, Zarqawi was immediately replaced by one of his deputies. And the fight went on.
So if Iran did help the US find Zarqawi, the price the US paid for Iran’s assistance was far higher than the benefit it derived from killing Zarqawi.
This brings us to the real threat that the rise of ISIS – and Iran – in Iraq poses to the US. That threat is blowback.
Both Iran and al-Qaida are sworn enemies of the United States, and both have been empowered by events of the past week.
Because they view the US as their mortal foe, their empowerment poses a danger to the US.
But it is hard for people to recognize how events in distant lands can directly impact their lives.
In March 2001, when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas statues in Afghanistan, the world condemned the act. But no one realized that the same destruction would be brought to the US six months later when al-Qaida destroyed the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon.
The September 11 attacks were the blowback from the US doing nothing to contain the Taliban and al-Qaida.
North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic-missile tests, as well as North Korean proliferation of both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to rogue regimes, like Iran, that threaten the US, are the beginnings of the blowback from the US decision to reach a nuclear deal with Pyongyang in the 1990s that allowed the regime to keep its nuclear installations.
The blowback from Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power is certain to dwarf what the world has seen from North Korea so far.
Yet rather than act in a manner that would reduce the threat of blowback from Iraq’s disintegration and takeover by America’s worst enemies, the Obama administration gives every indication that it is doubling down on the disastrous policies that led the US to this precarious juncture.
The only strategy that the US can safely adopt today is one of double containment. The aim of double containment is to minimize the capacity of Iran and al-Qaida to harm the US and its interests.
But to contain your enemies, you need to understand them. You need to understand their nature, their aims, their support networks and their capabilities.
Unfortunately, in keeping with what has been the general practice of the US government since the September 11 attacks, the US today continues to ignore or misunderstand all of these critical considerations.
Regarding al-Qaida specifically, the US has failed to understand that al-Qaida is a natural progression from the political/religious milieu of Salafist/Wahabist or Islamist Islam, from whence it sprang. As a consequence, anyone who identifies with Islamist religious and political organizations is a potential supporter and recruit for al-Qaida and its sister organizations.
There were two reasons that George W. Bush refused to base US strategy for combating al-Qaida on any cultural context broader than the Taliban.
Bush didn’t want to sacrifice the US’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, which finances the propagation and spread of Islamism. And he feared being attacked as a bigot by Islamist organizations in the US like the Council on American Islamic Relations and its supporters on the Left.
As for Obama, his speech in Cairo to the Muslim world in June 2009 and his subsequent apology tour through Islamic capitals indicated that, unlike Bush, Obama understands that al-Qaida is not a deviation from otherwise peaceful Islamist culture.
But unlike Bush, Obama blames America for its hostility. Obama’s radical sensibilities tell him that America pushed the Islamists to oppose it. As he sees it, he can appease the Islamists into ending their war against America.
To this end, Obama has prohibited federal employees from conducting any discussion or investigation of Islamist doctrine, terrorism, strategy and methods and the threat all pose to the US.
These prohibitions were directly responsible for the FBI’s failure to question or arrest the Tsarnaev brothers in 2012 despite the fact that Russian intelligence tipped it off to the fact that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers were jihadists.
They were also responsible for the army’s refusal to notice any of the black flags that Maj. Nidal Hassan raised in the months before his massacre of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, or to take any remedial action after the massacre to prevent such atrocities from recurring.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the progenitor of Islamism. It is the organizational, social, political and religious swamp from whence the likes of al-Qaida, Hamas and other terror groups emerged. Whereas Bush pretended the Brotherhood away, Obama embraced it as a strategic partner.
Then there is Iran.
Bush opted to ignore the 9/11 Commission’s revelations regarding Iranian collaboration with al-Qaida. Instead, particularly in the later years of his administration, Bush sought to appease Iran both in Iraq and in relation to its illicit nuclear weapons program.
In large part, Bush did not acknowledge, or act on the sure knowledge, that Iran was the man behind the curtain in Iraq, because he believed that the American people would oppose the expansion of the US operations in the war against terror.
Obama’s actions toward Iran indicate that he knows that Iran stands behind al-Qaida and that the greatest threat the US faces is Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But here as well, Obama opted to follow a policy of appeasement. Rather than prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, or stem its advance in Syria and Iraq, Obama treats Iran as though it poses no threat and is indeed a natural ally. He blames Iran’s belligerence on the supposedly unjust policies of his predecessors and the US’s regional allies.
For a dual-containment strategy to have any chance of working, the US needs to reverse course. No, it needn’t deploy troops to Iraq. But it does need to seal its border to minimize the chance that jihadists will cross over from Mexico.
It doesn’t need to clamp down on Muslims in America. But it needs to investigate and take action where necessary against al-Qaida’s ideological fellow travelers in Islamist mosques, organizations and the US government. To this end, it needs to end the prohibition on discussion of the Islamist threat by federal government employees.
As for Iran, according to The New York Times, Iran is signaling that the price of cooperation with the Americans in Iraq is American acquiescence to Iran’s conditions for signing a nuclear deal. In other words, the Iranians will fight al-Qaida in Iraq in exchange for American facilitation of its nuclear weapons program.
The first step the US must take to minimize the Iranian threat is to walk away from the table and renounce the talks. The next step is to take active measures to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration appears prepared to do none of these things. To the contrary, its pursuit of an alliance with Iran in Iraq indicates that it is doubling down on the most dangerous aspects of its policy of empowering America’s worst enemies.
It only took the Taliban six months to move from the Bamiyan Buddhas to the World Trade Center. Al-Qaida is stronger now than ever before. And Iran is on the threshold of a nuclear arsenal.
-
As always, Glick is informed, intelligent, and thoughtful.
However with regard to Iran, she does not spell out what I recently saw spelled out elsewhere.
a) Stopping Iran from going nuclear will require war and it will be a major war-- the task is quite difficult, and the blowback would be HUGE ;
b) The American people are in no mood for no action, particularly under this Commander in Chief;
c) The US military is in little mood for action, particularly under this Commander in Chief;
d) The US military's budget is contracting, and the military is in no shape for this and the other theaters requiring our attention at this time (Russia-Europe, South China Sea, various parts of Africa, etc)
Thus, though her diagnosis is excellent, ultimately isn't it irrelevant?
Thus, does not Rand Paul's most recent offering (see his thread here) have appeal of its own?
-
I think Rand Paul's initiative is excellent, however it won't prevent Iran from going nuclear either. What Glick is lamenting is the fact that it now appears inevitable that the Middle East is going to erupt into what promises to become WWIII. It's extremely naive to think that America will not be attacked on her own soil once again - especially after Iran goes nuclear. How these dominoes fall ultimately only God knows. What is certain, however is that the election of an actively anti-American President - has dire consequences. As Ayn Rand famously stated: "One can avoid reality if one chooses to do so - but one cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
-
Rand Paul has endorsed Barack Obama's foreign policy - more so than Hillary has. I don't follow him there.
-
***However with regard to Iran, she does not spell out what I recently saw spelled out elsewhere.
a) Stopping Iran from going nuclear will require war and it will be a major war-- the task is quite difficult, and the blowback would be HUGE ;
b) The American people are in no mood for no action, particularly under this Commander in Chief;
c) The US military is in little mood for action, particularly under this Commander in Chief;
d) The US military's budget is contracting, and the military is in no shape for this and the other theaters requiring our attention at this time (Russia-Europe, South China Sea, various parts of Africa, etc)***
The way I see it we are already at war with the Muslims in the Middle East whether anyone cares to notice.
As Bolton said, "if you think Iran is a problem now just wait till they get nuclear weapons.
There will be dirty bombs in NYC.
-
http://news.yahoo.com/report-polish-minister-says-us-ties-worthless-102515845.html
-
http://news.yahoo.com/report-polish-minister-says-us-ties-worthless-102515845.html
"the country's strong alliance with the U.S. isn't worth anything and is even harmful because it creates a false sense of security."
A gaffe is when a politician is caught on tape telling the truth.
How are those missile defense sites coming?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/world/europe/with-eye-on-north-korea-us-cancels-missile-defense-russia-opposed.html?_r=0
U.S. Cancels Part of Missile Defense That Russia Opposed
Published: March 16, 2013
MOSCOW — The United States has effectively canceled the final phase of a Europe-based missile defense system that was fiercely opposed by Russia and cited repeatedly by the Kremlin as a major obstacle to cooperation on nuclear arms reductions and other issues.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204518504574418563346840666
Sept. 18, 2009 ...President Obama's decision yesterday to scrap a missile-defense agreement the Bush Administration negotiated with Poland and the Czech Republic. Both governments took huge political risks—including the ire of their former Russian overlords—in order to accommodate the U.S., which wanted the system to defend against a possible Iranian missile attack. Don't expect either government to follow America's lead anytime soon.
-
As always, Glick is informed, intelligent, and thoughtful.
However with regard to Iran, she does not spell out what I recently saw spelled out elsewhere.
a) Stopping Iran from going nuclear will require war and it will be a major war-- the task is quite difficult, and the blowback would be HUGE ;
b) The American people are in no mood for no action, particularly under this Commander in Chief;
c) The US military is in little mood for action, particularly under this Commander in Chief;
d) The US military's budget is contracting, and the military is in no shape for this and the other theaters requiring our attention at this time (Russia-Europe, South China Sea, various parts of Africa, etc)
Thus, though her diagnosis is excellent, ultimately isn't it irrelevant?
Thus, does not Rand Paul's most recent offering (see his thread here) have appeal of its own?
I re-read both Iran and Rand Paul threads and am still missing what you refer to.
I have not seen a Rand Paul foreign policy argument that was not filled with straw: we must do absolutely nothing to affect each crisis because all out war is a bad idea.
From Crafty above: "a) Stopping Iran from going nuclear will require war and it will be a major war-- the task is quite difficult, and the blowback would be HUGE ;"
Are there not military steps short of all out war that would significantly set back the Iran nuclear program? I find it hard believe the military of the United States of America could not inflict damage on Iran's ambitions in a relatively short series of strikes, if ordered.
As ccp suggest, isn't our policy of doing nothing about Iran's nuclear ambitions is how we get the greatest "blowback" to the US and Israel, Middle East, Europe, etc.
Like the results from canceling missile defense that offended Putin, maybe by letting Iran and the caliphate go nuclear they will like us!
-
Understand that nuclear 9/11s are coming and plan accordingly. Nothing will be done until it's too late.
-
"From Crafty above: "a) Stopping Iran from going nuclear will require war and it will be a major war-- the task is quite difficult, and the blowback would be HUGE ;"
"Are there not military steps short of all out war that would significantly set back the Iran nuclear program? I find it hard believe the military of the United States of America could not inflict damage on Iran's ambitions in a relatively short series of strikes, if ordered."
"Significantly set back" subtly shifts the standard I set in important ways-- my intention is to speak of "winning", not endless war. Based on serious Stratfor reads I have posted here over the years addressing this exact point it is my opinion that Iran presented a very substantial challenge to US military capabilities when these pieces were written and we were in Iraq in strength, and far more so now that we are nearly out of the mid-east altogether with a substantially diminished and tired military. Most likely we do not know where all of their operations are; they have been diversifying and been digging in quite deep for years-- these are not stupid people.
Unless we go serious nuclear in the first round, there will be a second round-- "Setting the Iranians back" opens up world wide terrorist war-- the Iranians have considerable capabilities in this regard and will use them as they redouble their efforts. Our support in the world would be nearly zero and our opposition its reciprocal. What do you think would happen to the conversation in China between the civilian government and their military?
What political effect would this have on support for Islamic Fascism in the Muslim world?
-
A thoughtful friend writes:
Tribal and ethnic divisions have always been an issue in every Arab nation. In fact, they are also issues throughout Africa and in Af-Pak-India-Sri Lanka.
Coupled with these divisions is the principle of revenge/retribution as opposed to the Western idea of compensation for injury – real and perceived. You see that principle take effect in everything from family honor killings to prescribed punishments for violations of a law to the massacres of opponents in these uprisings.
Moving forward, the issue for the US is whether or not it is in this nation’s own interest to pre-emptively strike ISIS on behalf of the current Iraqi government. After the 9/11 attacks, we went back to Iraq in 2003 as a pre-emptive action to reduce the probability that the Saddam Hussein regime would work covertly with the al Qaida organization to attack us again and to geopolitically restrain Iran by placing military assets on both sides of its borders in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Obama administration has rejected this policy and changed course. It no longer supports the policy of pre-emptive military action against nations that are likely to aid terrorist organizations. Instead, it has resumed a policy of limited attacks against very specific terrorist targets in the context of a law enforcement operation that uses CIA (ostensibly civilian) assets. Also, it has rejected the policy of geopolitical containment of Iran by refusing to negotiate a status of forces agreement (SOFA) with Iraq and by setting firm withdrawal timetables for US military forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The tribal and religious sectarian fracturing of the entire region (especially in Iraq and eventually in Afghanistan) is and will be a consequence of the Bush Administration’s decisions in the aftermath of 9/11 plus the policy changes made by the Obama Administration. Once Obama decided against a SOFA with Iraq, the probability of this violence in Iraq increased significantly. The Obama decisions vis-a-vis Syria, Libya, Egypt and Iran only confirmed to the disruptors that the US would no longer actively seek to keep them down. Likewise, the Obama friction with allies in Israel, Saudi and others was further confirmation of their freedom to act.
As a supporter of our 2003 intervention in Iraq in order to achieve the two goals stated above, I knew and accepted this chaos as a potential outcome even if our military stayed in Iraq under a SOFA. However, the change in US policy under Obama has hastened this process. I would argue, given Biden’s prior statements about a three-state solution for what is now Iraq, this is the ultimate outcome desired by the Obama administration. In other words, Obama just wants to redraw the Sykes-Picot lines; but just like his modus operandi in every other major policy initiative, he does not want the personal responsibility for doing anything specific, so he will let events redraw the lines just like he let Congress and the Supreme Court write and enact the ACA aka Obamacare – and just like the red line in Syria about the use of WMD’s disappeared into the sands upon which it was allegedly drawn.
As to the domestic US political squabbling about the situation, the Bush defenders have to accept that his decision to overthrow Saddam put forces in motion that could have resulted in the current destabilized situation even if his other policy remained in effect. However, the Obama defenders must also accept that his change in policy together with his reactions in Egypt, Libya and Syria have lit the match that has caused the current explosion and has hastened the emergence of current events. The US reaction should be based solely upon what is in this nation’s interest.
-
Second post
The United States Has Unfinished Business in Ukraine and Iraq
Geopolitical Weekly
Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - 03:03 Print Text Size
Stratfor
By George Friedman
In recent weeks, some of the international system's unfinished business has revealed itself. We have seen that Ukraine's fate is not yet settled, and with that, neither is Russia's relationship with the European Peninsula. In Iraq we learned that the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the creation of a new Iraqi political system did not answer the question of how the three parts of Iraq can live together. Geopolitical situations rarely resolve themselves neatly or permanently.
These events, in the end, pose a difficult question for the United States. For the past 13 years, the United States has been engaged in extensive, multidivisional warfare in two major theaters -- and several minor ones -- in the Islamic world. The United States is large and powerful enough to endure such extended conflicts, but given that neither conflict ended satisfactorily, the desire to raise the threshold for military involvement makes logical sense.
U.S. President Barack Obama's speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point sought to raise the bar for military action. However, it was not clear in the speech what Obama meant in practical terms when he said:
"Here's my bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage. If we don't, no one else will. The military that you have joined is and always will be the backbone of that leadership. But U.S. military action cannot be the only -- or even primary -- component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail."
Given events in Ukraine and Iraq, the president's definition of a "nail" in relation to the U.S. military "hammer" becomes important. Military operations that cannot succeed, or can succeed only with such exorbitant effort that they exhaust the combatant, are irrational. Therefore, the first measure of any current strategy in either Ukraine or Iraq is its sheer plausibility.
The Ongoing Ukraine Crisis
In Ukraine, a pro-Russian president was replaced by a pro-Western one. The Russians took formal control of Crimea, where they had always had overwhelming military power by treaty with Ukraine. Pro-Russian groups, apparently supported by Russians, still fight for control in Ukraine's two easternmost provinces. On the surface, the Russians have suffered a reversal in Ukraine. Whether this is truly a reversal will depend on whether the authorities in Kiev are able to rule Ukraine, which means not only forming a coherent government but also enforcing its will. The Russian strategy is to use energy, finance and overt and covert relationships to undermine the Ukrainian government and usurp its power.
It is in the interest of the United States that a pro-Western Ukraine emerges, but that interest is not overwhelming enough to warrant a U.S. military intervention. There is no alliance structure in place to support such an intervention, no military bases where forces have accumulated to carry this out, and no matter how weakened Russia is, the United States would be advancing into a vast country whose occupation and administration -- even if possible -- would be an overwhelming task. The Americans would be fighting far from home, but the Russians would be fighting in their backyard.
Ukraine is not a nail to be hammered. First, its fate is not of fundamental American interest. Second, it cannot be driven into the board. The United States must adopt an indirect strategy. What happens in Ukraine will happen. The place where the United States can act to influence events is in the countries bordering Ukraine -- most notably Poland and Romania. They care far more about Ukraine's fate than the United States does and, having lost their sovereignty to Russia once in the last century, will be forced to resist Russia again. Providing them support with minimal exposure makes sense for the United States.
The Complexities of Iraq
Iraq consists of three major groups: Shia, Sunnis and Kurds. The United States left Iraq in the hands of the Shiite-dominated government, which failed to integrate the Kurds or the Sunnis. The Kurdish strategy was to create and maintain an autonomous region. The Sunnis' was to build strength in their region and wait for an opportune moment. That moment came when, after the recent election, Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki failed to quickly form a new government and seemed intent on recreating the failed government of the past.
The Sunnis did not so much invade as arise, taking control of Sunni areas and to some extent coordinating activities throughout the region. They did not attack the Kurdish region or predominantly Shiite areas. Indeed, the Shia began to mobilize to resist the Sunnis. What has happened is the failure of the central government and the assertion of regional power. There is no native power that can unite Iraq. No one has the strength. The assumption is that the United States could hold Iraq together -- thus the demand by some in Iraq and the United States that the United States massively intervene would make sense.
As in Ukraine, it is not clear that the United States has an overriding interest in Iraq. The 2003 invasion was more than a decade ago, and whatever decisions were made then belong to historians. The Sunni uprising brings with it the risk of increased terrorism and obviously gives terrorists a base from which to conduct attacks against the United States. By that logic, the United States ought to intervene on behalf of the Kurds and Shia.
The problem is that the Shia are linked to the Iranians, and while the United States and Iran are currently wrapped up in increasingly complex but promising negotiations, the focus is on interests and not friendship. The 2003 invasion was predicated on the assumption that the Shia, liberated from Saddam Hussein, would welcome the United States and allow it to reshape Iraq as it desired. It was quickly discovered, however, that the Iraqi Shia, along with their Iranian allies, had very different plans. The U.S. invasion ultimately failed to create a coherent government in Iraq and helped create the current circumstance. As much as various factions would want the United States to intervene on their behalf, the end result would be a multi-sided civil war with the United States in the center, unable to suppress the war with military means because the primary issue is a political one.
That, of course, leaves the possibility of an increased threat of terrorism. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and some of them are prepared to engage in terrorist activity. It is extremely difficult, however, to figure out which are inclined to do so. It is also impossible to conquer 1.6 billion people so as to eliminate the threat of terrorism. Given the vast territory of the Islamic world, Iraq may be a convenience, but occupying it would not prevent Sunni or Shiite terrorism from arising elsewhere. Defeating an enemy army is much easier than occupying a country whose only mode of resistance is the terrorism that you intend to stop. Terrorism can be defended against to some extent -- mitigated, observed perhaps -- but in the end, whether the Sunni regions of Iraq are autonomous or under extremist rule does little to reduce the threat.
The Kurds, Sunnis and Shia are hostile to each other. Saddam controlled the country through the secular institutional apparatus of the Baath Party. Absent that, the three communities continue to be hostile to each other, just as the Sunni community in Syria is hostile to the Alawites. The United States is left with a single viable strategy: to accept what exists -- a tripartite Iraq -- and allow internal hostilities to focus the factions on each other rather than on the United States. In other words, allow an internal balance of power to emerge.
The Limited Use of the U.S. "Hammer"
When we consider Ukraine and Iraq, they are of course radically different, but they have a single thing in common: To the extent that the United States has any interest in the regions, it cannot act with direct force. Instead, it must act with indirect force by using the interests and hostilities of the parties on the ground to serve as the first line of containment. If the United States intervenes at all, it will do so by supporting factions that are of interest to Washington. In Ukraine, this would mean supporting the former Soviet satellite states in Central Europe. In Iraq, it would mean applying sufficient force to prevent the annihilation of any of the country's three major groups, but not enough force to attempt to resolve the conflict.
Americans like to have a moral foundation for their policy; in the cases of Ukraine and Iraq, the foundation is simply a necessity. It is not possible for the United States to use direct force to impose a solution on Ukraine or Iraq. This is not because war cannot be a solution to evil, as World War II was. It is because the cost, the time of preparation and the bloodshed of effective war can be staggering. At times it must be undertaken, but those times are rare. Constant warfare with insufficient forces to impose political solutions in countries where the United States has secondary interests is a prescription for the worst of both worlds: a war that ends in defeat.
Limiting wars to those that are in the national interest and can be won eliminates many wars. It substitutes a much more complex, but no less realist and active, approach to the world. Underwriting nations that find themselves in a position of having to act in a way that supports American interests is one step. Another is creating economic bonds with nations that will shape their behavior. There are other tools besides war.
The simultaneous fighting in Ukraine and Iraq proves two things. First, the United States cannot avoid global involvement because in the end, the globe will involve itself with the United States. Becoming involved earlier is cheaper. Second, global involvement and large-scale warfare are not the same thing. The situation in Ukraine will play itself out, as will the one in Iraq. It will give the United States enough time to determine whether and how much it cares about the outcome. It can then slowly begin asserting itself, minimizing risks and maximizing rewards.
This is not a new strategy for the United States, which has vacillated from pretending it is immune from the world to believing it can reshape it. Dwight Eisenhower was an example of a U.S. president who avoided both of those views and managed to avoid involvement in any major war, which many would have thought unlikely. He was far from a pacifist and far from passive. He acted when he needed to, using all means necessary. But as a general, he understood that while the threat of war was essential to credibility, there were many other tools that allowed Washington to avoid war and preserve the republic.
Eisenhower was a subtle and experienced man. It is one thing to want to avoid war; it is another to know how to do it. Eisenhower did not refuse to act, but instead acted decisively and with minimal risk. Obama's speech at West Point indicated hesitancy toward war. It will be interesting to see whether he has mastered the other tools he will need in dealing with Ukraine and Iraq. It helps to have been a warrior to know how to avoid war.
I once wrote that the United States, stunned in 1991 to discover it was the world's only superpower, emerged into a natural period of adolescence, swinging from a belief in its omnipotence to a sense of worthlessness. I argued that this was a necessary passing phase that ultimately forced the United States toward a coherent path. Today, it is not yet on that path, but it is beginning to find its way. Eisenhower should be borne in mind.
Read more: The United States Has Unfinished Business in Ukraine and Iraq | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/24/report-kurds-offered-to-help-stop-isis-months-ago-but-didnt-hear-back-from-the-white-house/
-
"From Crafty above: "a) Stopping Iran from going nuclear will require war and it will be a major war-- the task is quite difficult, and the blowback would be HUGE ;"
"Are there not military steps short of all out war that would significantly set back the Iran nuclear program? I find it hard believe the military of the United States of America could not inflict damage on Iran's ambitions in a relatively short series of strikes, if ordered."
"Significantly set back" subtly shifts the standard I set in important ways-- my intention is to speak of "winning", not endless war. Based on serious Stratfor reads I have posted here over the years addressing this exact point it is my opinion that Iran presented a very substantial challenge to US military capabilities when these pieces were written and we were in Iraq in strength, and far more so now that we are nearly out of the mid-east altogether with a substantially diminished and tired military. Most likely we do not know where all of their operations are; they have been diversifying and been digging in quite deep for years-- these are not stupid people.
Unless we go serious nuclear in the first round, there will be a second round-- "Setting the Iranians back" opens up world wide terrorist war-- the Iranians have considerable capabilities in this regard and will use them as they redouble their efforts. Our support in the world would be nearly zero and our opposition its reciprocal. What do you think would happen to the conversation in China between the civilian government and their military?
What political effect would this have on support for Islamic Fascism in the Muslim world?
1) The argument here is theoretical. Pres. Obama is not going to do any of this. But it is important for us to say what we would do.
2) The step-down from totally stopping them to significantly setting them back was intentional. Assuming you are right, that we can't find all the facilities and can't hit all the targets... well then what? Assuming nothing imaginable can stop them totally, what hits would set them back significantly and buy us more time.
3) The first round can't be nuclear - and it can't take out enormous Iranian civilian casualties!
4) Hoping you (or obj) can follow up what was referred to as a Rand Paul plan. (I think I mis-understood something.) Rand Paul sees terror safe havens as no threat and thinks Iran going nuclear is none of our business (unless I am mis-understanding him): http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/rand-paul-says-something-non-crazy-about-iran.html Has Rand Paul or his father have ever said our interventions in WWII were warranted" Instead he blamed the US(?): http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2014/04/01/rand_paul_blames_the_us_for_world_war_ii_328970.html
...which is unacceptable if your ancerstors were Jewish and mine were in the first medical team to enter one of the largest, liberated concentration camps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchenwald_concentration_camp
I have no time for the no-threat-to-us argument for homicidal maniacs acquiring nuclear power. We have the only capability in the world to do or to stop certain things, and with that perhaps comes the responsibility to at least consider a pre-emptive blockage of major evil. JMHO
5) Of course there will be consequences (blowback). But it is blowback for attacking compared with blowback for not attacking, not compared with none. See GM and ccp's comment. Paraphrasing, they are going to hit us anyway. They are going to hit us soon. They are going to hit us hard. "Nuclear 9/11s are coming, plan accordingly." "There will be dirty bombs in NYC."
6) Stepping down from total stoppage even further, perhaps this is a 12 or 17 step process. Let's assume the process is partly political and partly a need to negotiate from a position of strength (cf. Khadafy). After negotiations without action have failed, we take strike one. Not our biggest but our most effective first strike. They don't know exactly what the rest of our intelligence is or what our next strike will be. So we head back to the negotiating table. And so on. Let them disrupt, scramble and move facilities, while dealing with the US (and allies?) acting from a position of strength.
7) "Our support in the world would be nearly zero and our opposition its reciprocal." What is a worthwhile use or purpose of any multi-national organization if not nuclear non-proliferation. Are we alone in that? With Israel, are there really only two nations seriously opposed to Iran going nuclear? I thought that was what Saudi wanted. And Kuwait, Qatar, Emirates, Jordan wanted. And former Iraq - Sunni Iraq, and Kurds. Europe sees no threat? India, Japan? What about Russia and China, doesn't another big power just devalue and compete with their power? No one wants to see a war break out but don't they all (almost all) want to see Iran contained?
8.) "What do you think would happen to the conversation in China between the civilian government and their military?" - This is a VERY interesting question, and I don't know where you are going with it. I think you are insinuating things would get worse, and that may be. But since China is already totalitarian and in opposition to our interests nearly everywhere, maybe the next chain of events or tipping of the balance could actually turn things for the better. At some point they can forget about a million man army if a billion people stood up and said enough - is enough.
-
China is more worried.about internal threats than military ones from outside.
-
By Robert D. Kaplan
Eurasia -- from Iberia to the Korean Peninsula -- faces the prospect of epochal change. These disruptions are not always in the headlines, and they obscure vast areas of stability where change is gradual rather than sudden. But at a time of rapid shifts in technology and urban demography, it is to be expected that political identities of the kind that lead to territorial adjustments will undergo transformation. And while in some cases a yearning for liberal democracy will be a driving force of upheaval, in too many cases the driving force will be exclusivist ethnic and sectarian passions anchored in specific geographies. The world's leading opinion pages are consumed by the battle of ideas, but in the early 21st century blood and territory could be more accurate indicators of postmodern geopolitics.
The combination of a transnational European Union and that union's economic decline has helped further ignite calls for Catalan and Scottish separatism from within Spain and the United Kingdom, respectively. Merely the upsurge in talk of such self-determination is serving to enfeeble the reputations of Spain and Great Britain on the world stage. While these divorces -- if they ever occur -- will likely be velvet ones, not so the territorial rearrangements taking place in the Middle East.
Whatever current maps may suggest, Libya no longer exists as a state, and neither do Syria and Iraq. Yemen is barely a state at all, and Kurdistan is long into the process of becoming one. Such dramatic cartographic changes that -- barring a world war -- usually play out over decades and centuries have occurred within the space of just a few years. Though American-led military interventions provided the catalyst for state failures in Libya and Iraq, something more essential was the cause of this epic disruption. That something was suffocating absolutisms, at once fiercely modernizing and fiercely secular, in both Syria and Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Libya. Beneath the carapaces of such centralizing tyrannies lay an utter void of civil society. Thus, as soon as these tyrannies began to buckle the most atavistic ethnic, sectarian and tribal energies came to the fore.
Indeed, as we look at all this it becomes apparent that postmodernism does not necessarily mean a more advanced stage of universal values than modernism. Postmodernism more likely represents a retreat into lethally narrow forms of identity, buttressed by deep religiosity, that are combined with the latest in communications and bomb-making technologies. In this kind of world, optimism is fine so long as it is based on ground-level analysis, not on philosophical abstractions.
East of the Levant we have the soon-to-be-realized specter of an Afghanistan and Pakistan without the stabilizing factor of the U.S. military for the first time in 13 years. Remember that democracy is less about holding elections than about strong institutions, which Afghanistan demonstrably lacks. If Afghanistan becomes a weaker state than it currently is in the coming years, this will further erode the meaning of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border so that the border itself will eventually disappear from future maps. A state only deserves to be fully represented in an atlas if it monopolizes the use of force unto its borders; otherwise the map lies.
Central Asia remains an assemblage of states -- ruled in large measure in a Soviet style -- that are now ripe for disruption as its leaders age, domestic tensions increase, and borders remain averse to ethnic and demographic boundaries. A comparable situation holds true for the calcifying military regime in Myanmar, a country of regionally based ethnic groups in some cases with their own armies. Wherever one looks, it seems, the permanence of frontiers both internal and external cannot be taken for granted.
Meanwhile, in an age of rapidly improving electronic communications, the regime in North Korea cannot have good long-term prospects. In the 20th century, states divided into two parts -- Germany, Vietnam and Yemen -- all reunified under fast-moving, tumultuous circumstances that foreign affairs mandarins had not forecast in advance. A reunified Korean Peninsula, governed from Seoul, that will rearrange the balance of power in northeast Asia and affect the balance of power throughout East Asia simply has to be anticipated at some point.
Finally, there are the two countries that together represent the dominant geography of Eurasia: Russia and China. Both have significant areas inhabited by ethnic minorities often with higher birth rates than the dominant ethnic Russians and Han Chinese. Russia has sizable Muslim regions, primarily in the north Caucasus. As for Ukraine, who knows how mapmakers will depict it in years hence! China has ethnic Mongolians in its north, Muslim Turkic Uighurs in the west and Tibetans in its southwest. In all these cases, resentments against Moscow and Beijing run high. While Western policy elites call for more liberalization to assuage these tensions, the truth may be that it is precisely authoritarianism that is holding these vast states together. Political reform in some vaguely imagined post-Putin era -- or in a post-Communist Party era in China -- may therefore bring not more democracy but more chaos, and new cartographic arrangements. Moreover, if Russia declines in political stability more than China, large areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East are ripe for informal colonization by the much more populous Chinese, again leading to a new map.
The key thing to realize when interpreting Eurasia is how little we know about the realities on the ground rather than how much we know. An era of electronic communication leads to an illusion of knowledge rather than to knowledge itself. How many policy elites know, for instance, to what degree Yemeni chaos is affecting stability in Saudi Arabia's neighboring Asir province? Yet, were Saudi Arabia in the future to become unstable -- affecting world oil and financial markets -- Asir province might have much to do with it. How much do we really know about the situation in the populous and unstable Fergana Valley where several Central Asian countries join? Yet, the Fergana is key to the future of Central Asia. How much do we really know about ethnic militias in Myanmar or about Russia's relationship with ethnic minorities in the fragile state of Moldova? If the breakups of Libya, Syria and Iraq have taught us anything, it is about our degree of ignorance regarding local and tribal realities, not our degree of knowledge or wisdom.
Forecasting begins with geography in the 19th century sense of the word -- that is, an appreciation of landscape, cultural anthropology, natural resources, trade routes and so forth. And geography is now more important than ever. For technology has not negated geography: rather, by shrinking it, it has only made geography more precious. The more we rely on abstract principles of foreign policy and the less we rely on cultural area experts on the ground, the more Eurasia will surprise us. In other words, the more humble we are about what we do know, the less likely we are to be proved wrong.
Read more: Eurasia's Ongoing Crackup | Stratfor
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380903/our-vacuous-foreign-policy-andrew-c-mccarthy
-
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/06/29/is-the-breakup-of-iraq-good-or-bad-for-america/?singlepage=true
“It neither helps us nor hurts us, but exactly the opposite,” Mexican President Luis Echeverria is supposed to have said (“Ni nos benefica ni nos perjudica, sino todo lo contrario”). In the case of Iraq, as so often, it depends: the winner is the side best able to bear the burden of uncertainty. America should be the winner when our prospective enemies fight each other (as I argued in the February 2012 essay reposted below). In the language of option trading (see here), we should be long volatility, but instead are short volatility. That is because neither the Obama administration nor the Republican mainstream can admit that Iraq and Syria are not to be stabilized, and are stuck with the onus of apparent policy failure.
Iraq’s woes surely are good for the Russians and the Iranians. Russia just delivered five Sukhoi 25′s, their nimbler but less powerful competitor to our Warthog close-air-defense fighter (that’s the one the Pentagon proposes to eliminate), the first installment on a $500 million contract for a dozen of them. Russia also is selling $2 billion of arms, including attack helicopters, to Egypt, and with Saudi funding. The Iranians meanwhile have sent in special forces and armaments.
All of this makes our leadership in both parties look like idiots, and that is bad for America. Even those of us who think that our leadership are idiots cringe when it becomes obvious to the rest of the world. The American public by a margin of 71:22 thinks that the Iraq War wasn’t worth it. They are against any sort of intervention because there is no-one they trust to conduct intervention sensibly.
Putin is not smarter than we are. He is simply unburdened by the illusion that most of the countries in the region should or will succeed, and he is willing to stay one jump ahead of the game, maneuvering for advantage as opportunities emerge. We are fettered by Obama’s affirmative-action approach to the Muslim world as articulated in his July 2009 Cairo address and numerous subsequent statements, and the Republicans’ ideological belief that the mere form of parliamentary democracy fixes all problems.
The intrusion of reality benefits the likes of Putin, because Putin is a realist. It hurts us, because we refuse to accept reality. Our leaders live in ideological bubbles; they are incapable of considering the consequence of their errors, because they believe in their respective causes (the innate goodness of Islam or the innate propensity of people towards democracy) with religious intensity.
The U.S. needs to draw a line around its allies — the Gulf states and the kingdom of Jordan — and ensure that the ISIS problem is contained at their borders. What happens inside Iraq is not our concern, although we might want to quietly tweak this or that aspect of the facts on the ground. But it is pointless for another American to die in that miserable place. The Balkans, said Bismarck, wasn’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. All the less so Mesopotamia.
What should we do in Iraq? Be the bad guy in the “Three Musketeers.”
Read my essay on the next page.
Conjuring the ghost of Richelieu
By Spengler
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NB28Dj06.html
“The Pont d’Alma,” I told the taxi driver, and climbed into the back of the Citroen, balancing the big copper spittoon on one knee and the magnum of Chateau Petrus on the other.
“You are to meet someone, monsieur?,” inquired the driver. He must have seen the waders under my trench coat. “Richelieu. Richelieu. Richelieu,” I muttered. “That’s the first time I hear someone ask for it in dactylic hexameter,” the driver said. We pulled up in front of the entrance to the sewers of Paris at the Pont d’Alma – “the bridge of the soul”.
Carefully I descended to the ninth level below the Seine. And 20th-century tiles gave way to 19th-century bricks and 18th-century stonework, through the malodorous filth of the ages, until I found myself in the secret ossarium of the Carthusian monks. So thick was the darkness that the beam from my small flashlight
seemed to lose itself in the gloom. It could not have been cold, but I shivered uncontrollably. Pyramided skulls stared out like a theater audience.
With the spittoon planted into the muck at my feet, I broke the neck off the magnum and poured the fragrant Bordeaux into the copper receptacle. At once the ghosts appeared: A soldier in bloody armor carrying his head under one arm, the Can-Can chorus from Offenbach’s Orpheus, a grisette whom death could not dissuade from flirting, clerks, cooks and clerics.
A sad-faced Jaures and a prim Clemenceau approached the spittoon, but Francois Mitterand bowed them aside. Brandishing the wine bottle’s jagged neck, I fended them off until, at length, a pale figure appeared, a human form with the texture of a jellyfish. The others shrank away reverently as it knelt before the spittoon and inserted a gelatinous head, imbibing the wine until its translucent covering shone scarlet. It extracted its head from the spittoon with an ectoplasmic pop.
“Make it brief,” said Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu. He looked rather like the portrait by Phillipe de Champaigne, but sounded like Maurice Chevalier.
“We are a bit confused about Syria,” I began. “Its leader, Bashar al-Assad, is slaughtering his own people to suppress an uprising. And he is allied to Iran, which wants to acquire nuclear weapons and dominate the region. If we overthrow Assad, Sunni radicals will replace him, and take revenge on the Syrian minorities. And a radical Sunni government in Syria would ally itself with the Sunni minority next door in Iraq and make civil war more likely.”
“I don’t understand the question,” Richelieu replied.
“Everyone is killing each other in Syria and some other places in the region, and the conflict might spread. What should we do about it?”
“How much does this cost you?”
“Nothing at all,” I answered.
“Then let them kill each other as long as possible, which is to say for 30 years or so. Do you know,” the ghastly Cardinal continued, “why really interesting wars last for 30 years? That has been true from the Peloponnesian War to my own century. First you kill the fathers, then you kill their sons. There aren’t usually enough men left for a third iteration.”
“We can’t go around saying that,” I remonstrated.
“I didn’t say it, either,” Richelieu replied. “But I managed to reduce the population of the German Empire by half in the space of a generation and make France the dominant land power in Europe for two centuries.
“Isn’t there some way to stabilize these countries?” I asked.
Richelieu looked at me with what might have been contempt. “It is a simple exercise in logique. You had two Ba’athist states, one in Iraq and one in Syria. Both were ruled by minorities. The Assad family came from the Alawite minority Syria and oppressed the Sunnis, while Saddam Hussein came from the Sunni minority in Iraq and oppressed the Shi’ites.
It is a matter of calculation – what today you would call game theory. If you compose a state from antagonistic elements to begin with, the rulers must come from one of the minorities. All the minorities will then feel safe, and the majority knows that there is a limit to how badly a minority can oppress a majority. That is why the Ba’ath Party regimes in Iraq and Syria – tyrannies founded on the same principle – were mirror images of each other.”
“What happens if the majority rules?,” I asked.
“The moment you introduce majority rule in the tribal world,” the cardinal replied, “you destroy the natural equilibrium of oppression.
“The minorities have no recourse but to fight, perhaps to the death. In the case of Iraq, the presence of oil mitigates the problem.
The Shi’ites have the oil, but the Sunnis want some of the revenue, and it is easier for the Shi’ites to share the revenue than to kill the Sunnis. On the other hand, the problem is exacerbated by the presence of an aggressive neighbor who also wants the oil.”
“So civil war is more likely because of Iran?”
“Yes,” said the shade, “and not only in Iraq. Without support from Iran, the Syrian Alawites – barely an eighth of the people – could not hope to crush the Sunnis. Iran will back Assad and the Alawites until the end, because if the Sunnis come to power in Syria, it will make it harder for Iran to suppress the Sunnis in Iraq. As I said, it is a matter of simple logic. Next time you visit, bring a second bottle of Petrus, and my friend Descartes will draw a diagram for you.”
“So the best thing we can do to stabilize the region is to neutralize Iran?”
“Bingeaux!” Richelieu replied.
“But there are people in the United States, like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who say that attacking Iran would destabilize everything!”
“Such fools would not have lasted a week in my service,” the cardinal sniffed. “Again, it is a matter of simple logic. If Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons is removed by force, upon whom shall it avenge itself? No doubt its irregulars in Lebanon will shoot some missiles at Israel, but not so many as to provoke the Israelis to destroy Hezbollah. Iran might undertake acts of terrorism, but at the risk of fierce reprisals. Without nuclear weapons, Iran becomes a declining power with obsolete weapons and an indifferent conscript army.”
Richelieu’s shade already had lost some color. “What should the United States do in Syria?” I asked.
“As little as possible,” he replied. “Some anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles from Gaddafi’s stockpiles, enough to encourage the opposition and prevent Assad from crushing them, and without making it obvious who sent them.”
“And what will become of Syria?”
The cardinal said sourly, “The same thing will happen to the present occupants of Syria that happened to the previous occupants: the Assyrians, and the Seleucids, and the Byzantines before them. You seem to think the Syrians are at existential risk because they are fighting to the death. On the contrary: they are fighting to the death because they were at existential risk before the first shot was fired. They have no oil. They do not even have water. They manufacture nothing. They cling to ancient hatred as a drowning man grasps a stone.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do about it?” I shouted.
But Richelieu had turned back into a cardinal-shaped jellyfish, and if he gave an answer, I could not hear it. As the he faded, the other ghosts crept out of the stonework and encircled me. Among them I recognized a miracle-working rabbi of Chelm, who screamed, “Spengler! What are you doing here, conjuring spirits of the dead?” I tried to say, “Rabbi, I don’t eat here!” but my lips wouldn’t move and my tongue burned. I woke up with an unspeakable hangover, next to an empty Armagnac bottle and a copy of the Weekly Standard.
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRFsATqLjws#t=93
90 minutes with Bret Stephens. He is quite knowledgeable, thoughtful and insightful.
The Book: http://www.amazon.com/America-Retreat-Isolationism-Coming-Disorder/dp/1591846625
America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder Hardcover – November 18, 2014
by Bret Stephens
A Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist argues that the resurgence of isolationism in the U.S. is an invitation to global disorder of a kind last seen in the 1930s
Americans are weary of acting as the world's policeman, especially in the face of our unending economic troubles at home. President Obama stands for cutting defense budgets, leaving Afghanistan, abandoning Iraq, appeasing Russia, and offering premature declarations of victory over al Qaeda. Meanwhile, some Republicans now also argue for a far smaller and less expensive American footprint abroad.
Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens rejects this view. As he sees it, retreating from our global responsibilities will ultimately exact a devastating price to our security and prosperity. In the 1930s, it was the weakness and vacillation of the democracies that led to war and genocide. Today the regimes in Tehran, Damascus, Beijing, and Moscow continue to test America’s will.
Americans have often been tempted to turn our backs on a world that fails to live up to our idealism and doesn’t easily bend. But succumbing to that temptation always leads to tragedy. The mantle of global leadership is a responsibility we must shoulder for the sake of our freedom, our prosperity, and our safety.
America in Retreat is a warning and manifesto by one of America’s foremost foreign-policy thinkers. It will be hotly debated as the latest crises force our leaders to make difficult choices.
-
EXACTLY the kind of material which this thread is about. I look forward to giving that clip a proper listen.
-
EXACTLY the kind of material which this thread is about. I look forward to giving that clip a proper listen.
It is quite insightful and worth your time IMHO. Look forward to your comments. Bringing the link forward:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRFsATqLjws#t=93
-
At 88 minutes it has taken me a while to get to this. I'm finally starting on it now.
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/07/17/smart-power-state-department-ends-tumultuous-day-with-stirring-relevant-tweet/
-
Chinese ambassador's take on BRICS
Building BRICS
Wei Wei : Sat Mar 23 2013, 03:46 hrs
The 5th BRICS summit is to be held in Durban, South Africa next week. The leaders of China and India will meet again on the sidelines of the summit. It is undoubtedly a good opportunity for the two BRICS members to enhance mutual trust and promote cooperation through high-level interactions.
As the two biggest developing countries and emerging economies, relations between China and India have exceeded the bilateral spectrum and assumed global and strategic dimensions. The BRICS mechanism not only serves as a platform for the China-India relationship to raise its global impact, but also helps advance bilateral ties. The leaders of China and India have maintained close contact within the BRICS mechanism. Last March, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met each other during the 4th BRICS summit. Meanwhile, senior representatives on security affairs, foreign ministers, finance ministers, governors of the central banks of the two countries also met and exchanged views on political, security, economic and trade cooperation under the BRICS framework. We have every reason to believe that closer personal connection will be forged through the meeting between the newly elected Chinese president and the Indian leader in Durban, which would significantly contribute to the mutual trust and bilateral relations between China and India.
Recent years have witnessed the ever-growing national strength of the BRICS countries. The BRICS countries increasingly speak with one voice on international affairs, enjoy higher international standing and make their presence felt in a larger way globally. Now, the five BRICS countries account for 42 per cent of the global population, make up more than 20 per cent of the world GDP and contribute more than half of the world's economic growth. It is also noteworthy that the larger share the BRICS have in the world economy, the more important cooperation among the BRICS members will become. Currently, the BRICS countries are the world's largest market. Each has its own competitive edge in different areas. Some are blessed with abundant natural resources, while others are taking leading roles in manufacturing, IT, biotechnology, telecommunications and aerospace. Among the five BRICS members, China and India are especially complementary in their economies. In this sense, the two should fully tap the huge potentials and deepen substantial cooperation in various fields so as to bring more tangible benefits to the two peoples.
The BRICS countries also play a positive role in addressing issues such as food and energy security, environmental protection and reforms in the global trade system and financial governance. The leaders of the BRICS countries exchange views on important topics relating to sustainable development and discuss possible cooperation areas. Working groups are established and action plans are made on future agricultural cooperation. They have also been working together to tackle climate change and other issues to safeguard the interests of the emerging economies and developing countries. Apart from seeking a larger say in the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other international financial institutions, the BRICS countries are actively pushing for the establishment of new financial institutions of their own. In this regard, China, with the world's largest foreign exchange reserves and India, with a long history of financial services development, have plenty of opportunities for close cooperation and great accomplishment. We believe that closer cooperation within the BRICS in international finance will help put in place a more equitable and fair international economic and financial order. We believe that a strong manufacturing sector and large foreign-trade volumes still fall short of what we need. A greater say in international financial governance better serves our interests. To this end, deeper mutual trust and closer cooperation within the BRICS are needed.
China and India are faced with similar historical tasks and challenges to develop the economy and improve people's livelihood. Since last year, China and India have been conscientiously implementing the Delhi Declaration, which was agreed upon by the 4th BRICS Summit in India. As a result, we have yielded fruitful results in cooperation in economy, finance, trade, culture and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries. The meeting to be held between the newly elected Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian PM Manmohan Singh in the coming BRICS summit would surely further strengthen political mutual trust and deepen the China-India strategic cooperative partnership.
Last but not least, I sincerely wish the 5th BRICS summit great success. China will join hands with India to safeguard the fundamental interests of developing countries, promote solidarity and cooperation among the BRICS countries, and make unremitting efforts for world peace and prosperity.
The writer is Chinese ambassador to India
-
Sadly, the world is waking up to the fact that America of2014 has been fundamentally transformed and acting accordingly.
-
second post
Putin's take...
BRICS key element of emerging multipolar world – Putin
Published time: March 22, 2013 04:55
Edited time: March 22, 2013 08:05
Russian President Vladimir Putin holds hopes that the BRICS group of emerging economies will turn into “a full-scale strategic cooperation mechanism” and become more involved in global politics.
Putin gave an interview to the ITAR-TASS news agency ahead of the March 26-27 BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa. Apart from Russia, the bloc consists of Brazil, India, China and the host country.
ITAR-TASS: BRICS' relatively new phenomenon attracts increased global attention due to the optimistic predictions about its development, especially against the backdrop of global crisis developments in the world economy. What is BRICS' immediate and long-term significance for Russia? Is such a format practical for the development of relations among these countries?
Vladimir Putin: There are a number of long-term factors working on BRICS' success. For the last two decades the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have been in the lead of global economic growth. Thus, in 2012, the average GDP growth rate in the group amounted to 4 per cent, while for the G7 this index was estimated at 0.7 per cent. In addition, GDP of the BRICS countries derived from the national currency purchasing power parity is currently over 27 per cent of the global GDP and its share continues to increase.
BRICS is a key element of the emerging multipolar world. The Group of Five has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to the fundamental principles of the international law and contributed to strengthening the United Nations central role. Our countries do not accept power politics or violation of other countries' sovereignty. We share approaches to the pressing international issues, including the Syrian crisis, the situation around Iran, and Middle East settlement.
Brazilian President Dilma Roussef(L to R), Russian President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Chinese President Hu Jintao and South African President Jacob Zuma pose during a BRICS's Presidents meeting in Los Cabos, Baja California, Mexico on June 18, 2012.(AFP Photo / Roberto Stuckert Filho)
The BRICS’ credibility and influence in the world is translated into its growing contribution to the efforts to stimulate global development. This important matter will be specifically addressed at the BRICS Leaders – Africa Dialogue Forum to be held on the sidelines of the Durban summit.
BRICS members advocate the creation of a more balanced and just system of global economic relations. The emerging markets are interested in long-term sustainable economic growth worldwide and reforms of the financial and economic architecture to make it more efficient. This is reflected in last year's joint decision to contribute $75 billion to the IMF lending program, thus increasing the participation of the fastest growing economies in the Fund's authorized capital.
Russia, as the initiator of the BRICS format and chair at its first summit in Yekaterinburg in 2009, sees the work within this group among its foreign policy priorities. This year, I have approved the Concept of the Russian Federation's Participation in the BRICS group, which sets forth strategic goals we seek to achieve through interaction with our partners from Brazil, China, India and South Africa.
Such cooperation in international affairs, trade, capital exchange and humanitarian sphere facilitates the creation of the most favourable environment for further growth of Russian economy, improvement of its investment climate, quality of life and well-being of our citizens. Our membership in this association helps foster privileged bilateral relations with the BRICS nations based on the principles of good neighbourliness and mutually beneficial cooperation. We believe it crucial to increase Russia's linguistic, cultural and information presence in the BRICS member nations, as well as expand educational exchanges and personal contact.
ITAR-TASS: What are the group’s short-term objectives and how do you see strategic directions for BRICS' economic development?
VP: BRICS identifies what is to be done based on action plans adopted at the group's annual summits. Last year's Delhi Action Plan outlined 17 areas of cooperation, including meetings of Foreign Ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, joint meetings of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors on the sidelines of the G20, World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, as well as contacts between other agencies.
We are currently negotiating a new plan we will discuss at the meeting in Durban. I am confident that it will help us develop a closer partnership. We expect that we will be able to closer coordinate our approaches to key issues on the agenda of the forthcoming G20 summit in St Petersburg, increase our cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking and production, and our efforts to counter terrorist, criminal and military threats in cyberspace.
It is of great importance for Russia to increase its trade and investment cooperation with its BRICS partners and launch new multilateral business projects involving our nations’ business communities. In Durban we intend to announce the formal establishment of the BRICS Business Council designed to support that activity. The summit will be preceded by the BRICS Business Forum, which will bring together more than 900 business community representatives from our countries.
ITAR-TASS: The potential of the BRICS economies brings up not only the question of economic policy coordination but also that of close geopolitical interaction. What is BRICS' geopolitical role and mission in today's world? Does it go beyond the purely economic agenda and should the BRICS countries accept greater responsibility for geopolitical processes? What is their policy with regard to the rest of the world, including its major actors such as the United States, the European Union, Japan… What future do you see for this association in this regard?
VP: First and foremost, the BRICS countries seek to help the world economy achieve stable and self-sustaining growth and reform the international financial and economic architecture. Our major task is to find ways to accelerate global development, encourage flows of capital in real economy and increase employment. This is particularly important in the context of poor global economic growth rates and unacceptably high unemployment. Although this is mainly true of western countries, the BRICS states are also negatively affected; export markets are shrinking, global finance lacks stability, and our own economic growth is slowing down.
At the same time, we invite our partners to gradually transform BRICS from a dialogue forum that coordinates approaches to a limited number of issues into a full-scale strategic cooperation mechanism that will allow us to look for solutions to key issues of global politics together.
The BRICS countries traditionally voice similar approaches to the settlement of all international conflicts through political and diplomatic means. For the Durban summit, we are working on a joint declaration setting forth our fundamental approaches to pressing international issues, i.e. crisis in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and the Middle East.
We do not view BRICS as a geopolitical competitor to western countries or their organisations — on the contrary, we are open to discussion with any country or organisation that is willing to do so within the framework of the common multipolar world order.
ITAR-TASS: Russia and China are important strategic and historic partners. How do you see the significance of such partnership not only for the development of the two countries, but also for the entire system of international relations and the world economy?
VP: Russia and China are two influential members of the international community, they are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and they are among the world’s largest economies. That is why the strategic partnership between us is of great importance on both a bilateral and global scale.
Today the Russian-Chinese relations are on the rise, they are the best in their centuries-long history. They are characterised by a high degree of mutual trust, respect for each other's interests, support in vital issues, they are a true partnership and are genuinely comprehensive.
President of the People’s Republic of China is currently on a state visit to Russia. The fact that the new Chinese leader makes his first foreign trip to our country confirms the special nature of strategic partnership between Russia and China.
In the last five years only, the volume of bilateral trade has more than doubled. China has firmly taken the first place among our trading partners. In 2012 the Russian-Chinese trade turnover increased by 5.2 per cent to constitute $87.5 billion (in 2007 the figure was $40 billion).
The commonality of our approaches to fundamental issues of world order and key international problems has become an important stabilising factor in world politics. Within the framework of the UN, the Group of Twenty, BRICS, the SCO, APEC and other multilateral formats, we are working together, helping to shape a new, more just world order, ensure peace and security, defend basic principles of international law. That is our common contribution to strengthening sustainable global development.
Russia and China show an example of a balanced and pragmatic approach to solving the most critical issues, such as the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, nuclear problem on the Korean Peninsula, situation around Iran’s nuclear program.
ITAR-TASS: Before the BRICS summit your schedule features a working visit to South Africa. What do you expect from the upcoming negotiations with South African party? Will this visit give impetus to the development of bilateral relations?
VP: Russia and South Africa have old ties of friendship and mutual respect. Multifaceted cooperation is developing between our countries, with constructive political dialogue established at the highest level, between governments, ministries and agencies. Interparliamentary, interregional, business and humanitarian contacts are consistently expanding.
During the visit to South Africa we certainly hope to give new impetus to our bilateral relations. The adoption of the Declaration on Strategic Partnership between Russia and South Africa is being prepared; it will confirm the new quality of our relations, determine key areas of joint work in the future. We plan to sign a number of important intergovernmental and interagency documents in Durban: the declaration on strategic partnership, the agreements on cooperation in the energy sector, agriculture, etc.
Trade and economic cooperation will be in the focus of our attention during negotiations. Last year the volume of trade between Russia and South Africa grew by 66 per cent and reached $964 million (in 2011 the figure was $580 million). Big Russian businesses, including such companies as Renova, Norilsk Nickel, Evraz Group, Basic Element, Severstal, Renaissance Capital and Vnesheconombank are actively entering the South African market, they are interested in further expanding their presence in South Africa.
Russia and South Africa can significantly, by many times, increase the volume of bilateral trade and investments, the number of mutually beneficial projects in the mining sector, power industry (including nuclear power), space exploration, military and technical sphere.
We consider it important to develop cooperation in the field of education and culture by strengthening direct ties between universities, promoting Russian language teaching in South African educational institutions, organising film festivals and tours by leading artists, and exchanging museum exhibitions.
We will discuss practical steps to achieve these goals with President Jacob Zuma.
-
Most of us here have tended to a strong US foreign policy, but at the polls in 2016 this may prove a very losing proposition. For several years now I have been underlining here that rudderless nature of US foreign policy. This article addresses this theme:
The Big 2016 Foreign Policy Debates
Rand Paul will fight the GOP hawks, and Joe Biden could run to the left of Hillary Clinton.
By William A. Galston
July 22, 2014 7:19 p.m. ET
These are tough times for internationalists, liberal and conservative alike. George W. Bush's overreach in Iraq undermined public support for the use of American power overseas, and Barack Obama has done nothing to rebuild it. Large majorities of Americans believe that our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was a mistake. A July 21 Politico survey of likely voters in battleground states found that only 39% think that we have a responsibility to do something about the mess we left behind in Mesopotamia.
The survey also found that by a margin of 3 to 1, Americans reject the sweeping vision Mr. Bush enunciated in his second inaugural address and would instead confine the use of American military power to direct threats to our national security. In the same poll, completed before the downing of the Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU -2.17% passenger plane, only 17% thought we should get more involved in the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine.
The desire for some nation-building here at home is palpable and understandable. Nevertheless, the forthcoming presidential campaign is likely to feature an unusually spirited debate—within as well as between the parties—about America's role in the world.
The outline of this debate among Republicans is easy to foresee. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has articulated a coherent message of government restraint abroad as well as at home and has proved adept at making a libertarian-leaning agenda more broadly acceptable to conservatives. The young adults who flocked to his father's rallies seem especially receptive to his critique of military intervention and NSA surveillance. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose political instincts seem to have improved since 2012, has publicly challenged Mr. Paul for his alleged isolationism, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has positioned himself as his generation's torchbearer for a muscular internationalism based on American leadership.
Enlarge Image
Sen. Rand Paul Associated Press
Most Republican contenders are likely to side with their party's national-defense orthodoxy of recent decades. Still, Mr. Paul's self-confidence and political skills could carry him far in a divided field and might even gain him the nomination. That would be an earthquake within the Republican Party and present a tough choice for staunch hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Mr. McCain has publicly said as much.
Although it may not occur, the Democrats are poised for a similar debate. The only significant difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008 was her vote for the Iraq war, which probably cost her the presidential nomination. Little has changed. During her tenure as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was among the administration's toughest voices during internal debates. She supported the use of American air power in Libya, and the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden. (Both Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates opposed it.)
Strong legal support from Mrs. Clinton's State Department for President Obama's expansive use of drones surprised many observers. She was an advocate for the 2009 surge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and favored maintaining a residual American force in Iraq after the end of our combat missions. While not opposed to nuclear negotiations with Iran, she has expressed mistrust about Iranian intentions and has opposed a policy of "containing" a nuclear-armed Tehran if diplomacy fails. As president, it seems reasonable to conclude, Mrs. Clinton would make decisions about using American power based on prudential considerations, not instinctive aversion.
For the record: Even though I opposed the Iraq war from the start, I believe that Hillary Clinton's judgment on defense and foreign policy issues has been right far more often than it was wrong and that she would serve our country well as commander in chief.
But rank-and-file Democrats are no less dovish today than they were in 2008. Although attention has focused recently on the clash between "populist" and "Wall Street" Democrats, the potential for an intraparty debate on foreign policy seems just as real. While Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has consistently denied her intention to run if Mrs. Clinton enters the race, Vice President Biden has made no such pledge. Estes Kefauver, the 1956 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, once remarked that the only known cure for persistent presidential ambition was "embalming fluid."
Mr. Biden is well-positioned to wage a left-leaning campaign on foreign policy as well as economic issues. Although he voted for the Iraq-war authorization in 2002, he argued vehemently against the Bush administration's surge in 2007, proposing instead the quasi-partition of Iraq into autonomous Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite zones. As vice president, he argued just as hard against Gen. David Petraeus's proposal (backed by then-Secretary of State Clinton) for a massive military surge and nation-building policy in Afghanistan. And he has taken U.S. military action against Iran off the table, declaring that "war with Iran is not just a bad option. It would be a disaster."
These issues matter, not just for the U.S., but for the world. During the Cold War, American retreat usually meant Soviet advance. Now it most often means anarchy. The question is whether the American people can be persuaded that they should care.
-
Great article. My guess is that despite it being in The Atlantic, most of you will find it compelling: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/08/yes-it-could-happen-again/373465/
From the article:
Pacifist tendencies in western Europe coexist with views of power held in Moscow and Beijing that Bismarck or Clausewitz would recognize instantly. After the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, the UN General Assembly ratified the concept that governments have a “responsibility to protect” their citizens from atrocities. But in the face of Syria’s bloody dismemberment and Ukraine’s cynical dismantlement, idealism of that kind looks fluffy or simply irrelevant. The Baltic countries are front-line states once again. The fleeting post–Cold War dream of a zone of unity and peace stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok has died. As John Mearsheimer observes in his seminal The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, “Unbalanced multipolar systems feature the most dangerous distribution of power, mainly because potential hegemons are likely to get into wars with all of the other great powers in the system.”
In this context, nothing is more dangerous than American weakness. It is understandable that the United States is looking inward after more than a decade of post-9/11 war. But it is also worrying, because the credibility of American power remains the anchor of global security.
-
Hey, elections have consequences. Who knew electing Bill Ayers' and Rev. Wright's most famous follower would turn out this badly?
Well, some of us did...
-
Woof BD:
Not sure why you would think the piece would not be well-received in these quarters. indeed we might even joke it reads as if by a reader of these forums. :wink:
-
Winds of War, Again
One wishes Barack Obama and John Kerry more luck in Ukraine and the Middle East than Neville Chamberlain had in Munich.
By Daniel Henninger
July 30, 2014 6:56 p.m. ET
If it's true that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, then maybe we're in luck. Many people in this unhappy year are reading histories of World War I, such as Margaret MacMillan's "The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914." That long-ago catastrophe began 100 years ago this week. The revisiting of this dark history may be why so many people today are asking if our own world—tense or aflame in so many places—resembles 1914, or 1938.
Whatever the answer, it is the remembering of past mistakes that matters, if the point is to avoid the high price of re-making those mistakes. A less hopeful view, in an era whose history comes and goes like pixels, would be that Santayana understated the problem. Even remembering the past may not be enough to protect a world poorly led. To understate: Leading from behind has never ended well.
In a recent essay for the Journal, Margaret MacMillan summarized the after-effects of World War I. Two resonate now. Political extremism gained traction, because so many people lost confidence in the existing political order or in the abilities of its leadership. That bred the isolationism of the 1920s and '30s. Isolationism was a refusal to see the whole world clearly. Self-interest, then and now, has its limits.
Which brings our new readings into the learning curves of history up to 1938. But not quite. First a revealing stop in the years just before Munich, when in 1935 Benito Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia.
A woman in the Sudetenland, as Germany's troops arrive, 1939. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Before the invasion, Ethiopia's emperor, Haile Selassie, did what the civilized world expected one to do in the post-World War I world: He appealed for help to the League of Nations. The League imposed on Italy limited sanctions, which were ineffectual.
One might say this was one of history's earlier "red lines." Mussolini blew by it, invading Ethiopia and using mustard gas on its army, as Bashar Assad has done to Syria's rebel population. Mussolini merged Ethiopia with Italy's colonies in east Africa. The League condemned Italy—and dropped its sanctions.
In defeat, Haile Selassie delivered a famous speech to the League in Geneva. He knew they wouldn't help. As he stepped from the podium, he remarked: "It is us today. Tomorrow it will be you."
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, not unlike John Kerry today, shuttled tirelessly between London and wherever Adolf Hitler consented to meet him to discuss a nonviolent solution to Hitler's intention to annex the Sudetenland, the part of Czechoslovakia inhabited by ethnic Germans. Hitler earlier in the year had annexed Austria, with nary a peep from the world "community." Many said the forced absorption of Austria was perfectly understandable.
One may hope Mr. Kerry and President Obama have more success with their stop-the-violence missions to Vladimir Putin, Kiev, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Tehran, Afghanistan and the South China Sea than Neville Chamberlain had with Hitler, who pocketed eastern Ukraine—excuse me, the Sudetenland—and then swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia, which ceased to exist.
But here's the forgotten part. After signing the Munich Agreement on Sept. 29, 1938—an event now reduced to one vile word, appeasement—Chamberlain returned to England in triumph. Many, recalling 1914-18, feared war. Londoners lined the streets to cheer Chamberlain's deal with Hitler. He was feted by King George VI. At 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain said the words for which history remembers him: "I believe it is peace for our time."
Winston Churchill, in a speech to the House of Commons, dissented: "This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup." Hitler, as sometimes happens in history, had negotiated in total bad faith, with no interest in anyone's desire for peace. When World War II ended in 1945, it had consumed more than 50 million people.
The U.S.'s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though fought by a dedicated professional military, are said to have turned America in on itself, as two big wars did to Europe. The idea is that Americans are tired of their world role now. But tireless men like Hitler always finds advantage in other nations' fatigue.
Some note the current paradox of the public's low approval for Mr. Obama's handling of everything from Iraq to Ukraine to Gaza, while the same polls show a reluctance to involve the country in those problems.
But there is no contradiction. The U.S. public's resistance reflects coldblooded logic: Why get involved if the available evidence makes clear that America's president won't stay the course, no matter how worthy the cause?
After returning from Munich, Neville Chamberlain told the British to "go home, and sleep quietly in your beds." After 1914 and 1938, one wishes it could be so now. Wars, in their causes and timing, are unpredictable. What is not impossible is recognizing the winds of war. Doing less than enough, we should have learned, allows these destructive winds to gain strength.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/384163/cost-american-indifference-victor-davis-hanson
PS: Readers here will recognize that I take a harder line than VDH in my criticism with regard to the SOFA failure in Iraq.
-
The Message From That Hillary Interview
She would be the best-prepared president on foreign policy since George H.W. Bush.
By William A. Galston
Aug. 12, 2014 6:57 p.m. ET
Jeffrey Goldberg's interview in the Atlantic magazine with Hillary Clinton has made headlines, with good reason. Her critique of President Obama's Syria policy was pointed and persuasive, as was her assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood's missteps in Egypt.
But what lay beneath the headlines is far more important. The interview revealed a public servant instructed but not chastened by experience, with a clear view of America's role in the world and of the means needed to play that role successfully. If she entered the race and won, she would be better prepared to deal with foreign policy and national defense than any president since George H.W. Bush, whose judgment and experience helped end the Cold War and reunify Germany without a shot being fired.
Although Mrs. Clinton's tart remark that " 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle" has evoked reams of commentary, the words that preceded it are far more important: "Great nations need organizing principles." The former secretary of state expressed enthusiasm for the role the U.S. played in defeating communism and fascism. The question since 1991 has been, what now?
During Bill Clinton's administration, the answer seemed clear enough: Build prosperity by incorporating the workers of Asia, Central Europe and the former Soviet Union into the global economy. The rising tide would create an expanding middle class, which would bolster new democracies and move authoritarian governments toward democracy. So the U.S. should take the lead in promoting open trade and peacefully advocating open government. The winds of history were in our sails.
Mrs. Clinton has thought hard about this, and here is what she told Mr. Goldberg: "The big mistake was thinking" that "the end of history has come upon us, after the fall of the Soviet Union. That was never true, history never stops and nationalisms were going to assert themselves, and then other variations on ideologies were going to claim their space." She cites jihadi Islamism and Vladimir Putin's vision of restored Russian greatness as prime examples. She might well have added China's distinctive combination of political authoritarianism and pell-mell economic growth ("market-Leninism"), which is seen elsewhere as an orderly alternative to democratic messiness.
The rise of violently aggressive anti-democratic ideologies was one rebuttal of the end-of-history theory. Another was the global economic crisis, discrediting the so-called Washington consensus that had dominated world affairs since the early 1990s. Central bankers, it turned out, were not wise enough to eliminate financial panics. Although too much regulation could stifle growth, too little could open the door to reckless risk-taking.
George W. Bush's response to jihadi Islam—global democracy-building backed by American might—came to grief in the sands of Iraq. But a policy built on avoiding that failure, says Mrs. Clinton in the Atlantic, runs risks of its own: "Part of the challenge is that our government too often has a tendency to swing between these extremes" of intervention and non-intervention. She adds: "When you're down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you're not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward." If Mr. Bush's porridge was too hot, Mr. Obama's is too cold.
But moderation is a means to ends, not an end in itself. So what would be the ends, the animating purposes of Mrs. Clinton's foreign policy? Her interview suggests, first, that we must take the fight to jihadi Islamism, which is inherently expansionist. In that connection, she says, she is thinking a lot about "containment, deterrence, and defeat." When unarmed diplomacy cannot succeed, she adds, we should not be afraid to back "the hard men with guns."
Second, we should drive a tough deal with Iran, or none at all. "I've always been in the camp," Mrs. Clinton says, "that held that they did not have a right to enrichment. Contrary to their claim, there is no such thing as a right to enrich."
Third, we should distinguish clearly between groups we can work with and those we can't. For example, Mrs. Clinton would exclude Hamas on the grounds that it is virulently anti-Semitic and dedicated to Israel's destruction. She does not believe that Hamas "should in any way be treated as a legitimate interlocutor." Her commitment to Israel's defense is unswerving, including a willingness to call the rise of European anti-Semitism by its rightful name.
Fourth, the U.S. should vigorously advance the cause of women's rights around the world, not only because justice demands it, but also because the empowerment of women promotes economic growth and social progress.
And finally, because many American values "also happen to be universal values," we should take pride in ourselves and make our case to the world. Today, Mrs. Clinton says, "we don't even tell our story very well." As president, clearly, she would do her best to change that.
-
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-meltdown/
-
:wink:
OTOH from one of my favorite "opinion" thinkers :wink:
Fareed Zakaria: Obama’s disciplined leadership is right for today
By Fareed Zakaria Opinion writer May 29
“Because of his unsure and indecisive leadership in the field of foreign policy, questions are being raised on all sides,” the writer declared, adding that the administration was “plagued by a Hamlet-like psychosis which seems to paralyze it every time decisive action is required.” Is the writer one of the many recent critics of Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Actually, it’s Richard Nixon, writing in 1961 about President John F. Kennedy. Criticizing presidents for weakness is a standard practice in Washington because the world is a messy place and, when bad things happen, Washington can be blamed for them. But to determine what the United States — and Obama — should be doing, we have to first understand the nature of the world and the dangers within it.
From 1947 until 1990, the United States faced a mortal threat, an enemy that was strategic, political, military and ideological. Washington had to keep together an alliance that faced up to the foe and persuaded countries in the middle not to give in. This meant that concerns about resolve and credibility were paramount. In this context, presidents had to continually reassure allies. This is why Dean Acheson is said to have remarked in exasperation about Europe’s persistent doubts about America’s resolve, “NATO is an alliance, not a psychiatrist’s couch!”
But the world today looks very different — far more peaceful and stable than at any point in decades and, by some measures, centuries. The United States faces no enemy anywhere on the scale of Soviet Russia. Its military spending is about that of the next 14 countries combined, most of which are treaty allies of Washington. The number of democracies around the world has grown by more than 50 percent in the past quarter-century. The countries that recently have been aggressive or acted as Washington’s adversaries are getting significant pushback. Russia has alienated Ukraine, Eastern Europe and Western Europe with its recent aggression, for which the short-term costs have grown and the long-term costs — energy diversification in Europe — have only begun to build. China has scared and angered almost all of its maritime neighbors, with each clamoring for greater U.S. involvement in Asia. Even a regional foe such as Iran has found that the costs of its aggressive foreign policy have mounted. In 2006, Iran’s favorability rating in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia was in the 75 percent to 85 percent range, according to Zogby Research. By 2012, it had fallen to about 30 percent.
In this context, what is needed from Washington is not a heroic exertion of American military power but rather a sustained effort to engage with allies, isolate enemies, support free markets and democratic values and push these positive trends forward. The Obama administration is, in fact, deeply internationalist — building on alliances in Europe and Asia, working with institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, isolating adversaries and strengthening the global order that has proved so beneficial to the United States and the world since 1945.
The administration has fought al-Qaeda and its allies ferociously. But it has been disciplined about the use of force, and understandably so. An America that exaggerates threats, overreacts to problems and intervenes unilaterally would produce the very damage to its credibility that people are worried about. After all, just six years ago, the United States’ closest allies were distancing themselves from Washington because it was seen as aggressive, expansionist and militaristic. Iran was popular in the Middle East in 2006 because it was seen as standing up to an imperialist America that had invaded and occupied an Arab country. And nothing damaged U.S. credibility in the Cold War more than Vietnam
-
From Krauthammer who for reasons unclear to me gives Hillary credit for being right and admits only her motives may be questioned :roll:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-on-obamas-foreign-policy-clinton-got-it-right/2014/08/14/e67278b4-23e3-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html
-
Dr. K is a good guy, but sometimes I wonder what he's thinking...
-
On the point in question, her interview is not without merit.
The interview was posted here; if we don't watch out any and all of our candidates will not be able to handle her on this issue.
In a related vein, how would Cruz, or Paul, or ? handle the following?
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/19/is_barack_obama_more_of_a_realist_than_i_am_stephen_m_walt_iraq_russia_gaza?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Flashpoints&utm_campaign=2014_FlashPoints%20%28Manual%29
-
http://breakingdefense.com/2014/08/flynns-last-interview-intel-iconoclast-departs-dia-with-a-warning/?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=203090a327-genflynn_081514&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-203090a327-46602837
-
http://breakingdefense.com/2014/08/flynns-last-interview-intel-iconoclast-departs-dia-with-a-warning/?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=203090a327-genflynn_081514&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-203090a327-46602837
Sounds like a good guy. Sorry he's leaving, but I doubt the buffoons at the white house listened anyway.
-
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/state-dept-rejects-isils-claim-it-is-at-war-with-america/
I'm pretty sure the IS thinks it represents a religion. Funny enough, they cite key religious texts to support their actions.
-
The Neo-Neocons
ISIS makes liberals rediscover the necessity of hard power.
By
Bret Stephens
WSJ
Aug. 25, 2014 7:22 p.m. ET
So now liberals want the U.S. to bomb Iraq, and maybe Syria as well, to stop and defeat ISIS, the vilest terror group of all time. Where, one might ask, were these neo-neocons a couple of years ago, when stopping ISIS in its infancy might have spared us the current catastrophe?
Oh, right, they were dining at the table of establishment respectability, drinking from the fountain of opportunistic punditry, hissing at the sound of the names Wolfowitz, Cheney, Libby and Perle.
And, always, rhapsodizing to the music of Barack Obama.
Not because he is the most egregious offender, but only because he's so utterly the type, it's worth turning to the work of George Packer, a writer for the New Yorker. Over the years Mr. Packer has been of this or that mind about Iraq. Yet he has always managed to remain at the dead center of conventional wisdom. Think of him as the bubble, intellectually speaking, in the spirit level of American opinion journalism.
Thus Mr. Packer was for the war when it began in 2003, although "just barely," as he later explained himself. In April 2005 he wrote that the "Iraq war was always winnable" and "still is"—a judgment that would have seemed prescient in the wake of the surge. But by then he had already disavowed his own foresight, saying, when he was in full mea culpa mode, that the line was "the single most doubtful" thing he had written in his acclaimed book "The Assassins' Gate."
Then the surge began to work, a reality the newly empowered Democrats in Congress were keen to dismiss. (Remember Hillary Clinton lecturing David Petraeus that his progress report required "a willing suspension of disbelief"?) "The inadequacy of the surge is already clear, if one honestly assesses the daily lives of Iraqis," wrote Mr. Packer in September 2007. The title of his essay was "Planning for Defeat."
Next, Mr. Packer pronounced himself bored with it all. "By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left," he wrote a few years later. "Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the improvement that came with the surge, and so, in my nervous system, I never quite registered it." This was Mr. Packer in Robert Graves mode, bidding Good-Bye to All That.
And then came Mr. Obama. Was ever a political love more pure than what Mr. Packer expressed for the commander in chief? Mr. Obama, he wrote in 2012, was "more like J.F.K. than any other president." Or was T.R. the better comparison? "On foreign policy, Obama has talked softly and carried a big stick." He had "devastated the top ranks of Al Qaeda." On Iran, he had done a "masterful job." On Syria, "the Administration was too slow in isolating Assad, but no one has made a case for intervention that has a plausibly good outcome."
As for Iraq, Mr. Obama withdrew "after eight years of war in a way that left the U.S. with almost no influence—but he could have tried to force matters with the Iraqis and left behind far more bitterness."
Elsewhere, Mr. Packer has written that "American wars in Muslim countries created some extremists and inflamed many more, while producing a security vacuum that allowed them to wreak mayhem." This is the idea, central to the Obama administration's vision of the world, that wisdom often lies in inaction, that U.S. intervention only makes whatever we're intervening in worse.
It's a deep—a very deep—thought. And then along came ISIS.
In the current issue of the New Yorker, Mr. Packer has an essay titled "The Common Enemy," which paints ISIS in especially terrifying colors: The Islamic State's project is "totalitarian." Its ideology is "expansionist as well as eliminationist." It has "many hundreds of fighters holding European or American passports [who] will eventually return home with training, skills, and the arrogance of battlefield victory." It threatened a religious minority with "imminent genocide." Its ambitions will not "remain confined to the boundaries of the Tigris and the Euphrates." The administration's usual counterterrorism tool, the drone strike, is "barely relevant against the Islamic State's thousands of ground troops."
"Pay attention to other people's nightmares," he concludes, "because they might be contagious."
Correcto-mundo. Which brings us back to the questions confronting the Bush administration on Sept. 12, 2001. Are we going to fight terrorists over there—or are we going to wait for them to come here? Do we choose to confront terrorism by means of war—or as a criminal justice issue? Can we assume the cancer in the Middle East won't spread so we can "pivot" to Asia and do some more "nation-building at home"? Can we win with a light-footprint approach against a heavy-footprint enemy?
Say what you will about George W. Bush: He got every one of these questions right while Mr. Obama got every one of them wrong. It's a truth that may at last be dawning on the likes of Mr. Packer and the other neo-neocons, not that I expect them ever to admit it.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
-
Liberals and anti-Israelis often admit Israel is being bombed and attacked but blame or accuse Israel of making a disproportionate response. It seems to me this is an entire topic in itself, which we should address regarding US foreign policy.
Isn't disproportionate response the essence of deterrence and deterrence is the essence of national security.
Denying the right to do that is put our national security at risk. (And same obviously for Israel)
Looking it up on Google I see wikipedia calls it "Massive retaliation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_retaliation and Foreign Policy magazine calls it "An eye for a tooth": http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/07/24/an_eye_for_a_tooth_israel_gaza_hamas_deterrence_strategy
Deterrence is tough to achieve against the suicide bomber types but I think we have learned that leadership (such as OBL) value their own live, just not those of the rank and file.
Current example. I.S. is threatening to behead another journalist if US does not end air strikes. Shouldn't it be the other way around. You behead one American and you set your own mission back by years.
Thoughts anyone?
-
Haven't the Israelis proved the only thing the radicals understand is force?
I understand the libs think we just continue to be NICE for decades the radicals or their offspring will eventually learn the life of the love generation. That violence begets violence and Netanyahu's methods only fosters more hate and violence propagating the endless cycle.
While we dither not only did ISIS solidify but Iran is closer to nuclear weapons. If one thinks ISIS is a grave threat with small arms and a few armored vehicles just imagine Iran with nucs.
But don't fear. Hillary will be tough.
And Rand who won't be has no chance of election - thank God.
-
How U.S. Interventionists Abetted the Rise of ISIS
Our Middle Eastern policy is unhinged, flailing about to see who to act against next, with little regard to consequences.
By Rand Paul
WSJ
Aug. 27, 2014 6:35 p.m. ET
As the murderous, terrorist Islamic State continues to threaten Iraq, the region and potentially the United States, it is vitally important that we examine how this problem arose. Any actions we take today must be informed by what we've already done in the past, and how effective our actions have been.
Shooting first and asking questions later has never been a good foreign policy. The past year has been a perfect example.
In September President Obama and many in Washington were eager for a U.S. intervention in Syria to assist the rebel groups fighting President Bashar Assad's government. Arguing against military strikes, I wrote that "Bashar Assad is clearly not an American ally. But does his ouster encourage stability in the Middle East, or would his ouster actually encourage instability?"
The administration's goal has been to degrade Assad's power, forcing him to negotiate with the rebels. But degrading Assad's military capacity also degrades his ability to fend off the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Assad's government recently bombed the self-proclaimed capital of ISIS in Raqqa, Syria.
To interventionists like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, we would caution that arming the Islamic rebels in Syria created a haven for the Islamic State. We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS.
This is not to say the U.S. should ally with Assad. But we should recognize how regime change in Syria could have helped and emboldened the Islamic State, and recognize that those now calling for war against ISIS are still calling for arms to factions allied with ISIS in the Syrian civil war. We should realize that the interventionists are calling for Islamic rebels to win in Syria and for the same Islamic rebels to lose in Iraq. While no one in the West supports Assad, replacing him with ISIS would be a disaster.
Our Middle Eastern policy is unhinged, flailing about to see who to act against next, with little thought to the consequences. This is not a foreign policy.
Those who say we should have done more to arm the Syrian rebel groups have it backward. Mrs. Clinton was also eager to shoot first in Syria before asking some important questions. Her successor John Kerry was no better, calling the failure to strike Syria a "Munich moment."
Some now speculate Mr. Kerry and the administration might have to walk back or at least mute their critiques of Assad in the interest of defeating the Islamic State.
A reasonable degree of foresight should be a prerequisite for holding high office. So should basic hindsight. This administration has neither.
But the same is true of hawkish members of my own party. Some said it would be "catastrophic" if we failed to strike Syria. What they were advocating for then—striking down Assad's regime—would have made our current situation even worse, as it would have eliminated the only regional counterweight to the ISIS threat.
Our so-called foreign policy experts are failing us miserably. The Obama administration's feckless veering is making it worse. It seems the only thing both sides of this flawed debate agree on is that "something" must be done. It is the only thing they ever agree on.
But the problem is, we did do something. We aided those who've contributed to the rise of the Islamic State. The CIA delivered arms and other equipment to Syrian rebels, strengthening the side of the ISIS jihadists. Some even traveled to Syria from America to give moral and material support to these rebels even though there had been multiple reports some were allied with al Qaeda.
Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for the London newspaper, the Independent, recently reported something disturbing about these rebel groups in Syria. In his new book, "The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising," Mr. Cockburn writes that he traveled to southeast Turkey earlier in the year where "a source told me that 'without exception' they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the U.S." It's safe to say these rebels are probably not friends of the United States.
"If American interests are at stake," I said in September, "then it is incumbent upon those advocating for military action to convince Congress and the American people of that threat. Too often, the debate begins and ends with an assertion that our national interest is at stake without any evidence of that assertion. The burden of proof lies with those who wish to engage in war."
Those wanting a U.S. war in Syria could not clearly show a U.S. national interest then, and they have been proven foolish now. A more realistic foreign policy would recognize that there are evil people and tyrannical regimes in this world, but also that America cannot police or solve every problem across the globe. Only after recognizing the practical limits of our foreign policy can we pursue policies that are in the best interest of the U.S.
The Islamic State represents a threat that should be taken seriously. But we should also recall how recent foreign-policy decisions have helped these extremists so that we don't make the same mistake of potentially aiding our enemies again.
Mr. Paul, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Kentucky.
-
http://www.funker530.com/losing-the-war-on-terror-is-winning-us-the-world/
Losing the War On Terror Is Winning Us The World
Will
Recently I drew a lot of flak for a blog I wrote in which I called our allied nations of GWOT, the “Western Empire,” and mentioned that our imminent action on Syria to deal with the Islamic State threat may be one of our own successfully developed and executed plans. I said that we would take what is ours.
I’m going to use just one of the examples of the messages I got, but please don’t anybody think I am berating or disrespecting this man’s opinion, and don’t let it deter you from further commenting. This is for the sake of discussion, so feel free to share your ideas as well.
murphySo this commentor failed to realize that I am not ignorant of the history of western colonialism, I was actually referring to it in the present tense. You’re fooling yourself if you think that colonialism is nothing more than a history subject, which I hope to touch on in this rant.
Also, he mentions that ISIS needs to be destroyed, and the thought of people cheering on Western colonialism is stupid and disappointing. What he’s not understanding is that ISIS, or whatever the name will continue evolving to, is an ideology that will never be wiped out. What’s more, is that the Islamic State’s continued existence of horribleness benefits us by legitimizing our perpetual war. Why wipe them out and leave the resource rich battlefield when we can practice containment? Why create a cure when the money is in the treatment?
If you’re a combat veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, you’ve probably battled with the question, “WTF are we doing here?” I know I have. I started off as a hard charging young Republican off to fight for Toby Kieth’s idea of a free America. Well balls-deep into my second extended deployment, I sat high on the side of a bare rocky mountain staring across the waddi at another bare hillside in the tribal areas of Eastern Afghanistan. I repeatedly asked myself how it could be possible that the key to keeping the free world free was me sitting in a such a desolate part of the world where the local villagers don’t care what’s going on two miles down the river, let alone the goings-on in America. I still killed with the same ferocity because I was born a warrior, and whether the wars were justified or not, the people we were targeting were terrible human beings. However, my belief in the cause had changed.
Then I got out and went to college, and those feelings of betrayal and disenfranchisement grew. No longer was I just living in my little microcosm of just trying to keep my guys alive. I could afford to look at the bigger picture, and I didn’t like what I saw. “Did we really lose the war?” I asked myself. Was I really just a puppet being manipulated for a corrupt, corporation controlled government? Was I the real terrorist? I battled these doubts for years, and when someone would thank me for my service, I would respond graciously, but I wanted to say, “For what? Ruining the economy? Making us more enemies?”
Like many veterans, I was lost. I had no closure, and I just wanted to know what it was all for. I researched for years. Reading the Long War Journal on a daily basis and watching and reading between the lines of anything I could get my hands on concerning GWOT. At first it didn’t make sense. Why would we be giving Pakistan billions of dollars if we know that the ISI is directly funding the Haqqani Network and other terror groups that are fighting us in Afghanistan and attacking India? Why would we be arming and funding al-Qaeda in Libya when they were our sworn enemies in Iraq? Well it’s because we’ve wanted strongman Gaddafi gone, and now he is.
Currently, Libya is an extremist war zone shaping up to be the next Syria. Egypt and UAE just launched airstrikes against Islamist militias in the region in the name of their own security without notifying the US, and Washington is pissed. That’s our pot, and we need it to boil a little longer before we step in to stabilize it. You know, the freedom we keep fighting for.
Look at Syria. The same thing was attempted. A strongman we branded as a dictator and wanted removed, Assad, and coincidentally a hoard (Marc: sic ) of savage Salafists trying to destroy him in the name of Islam and Sharia law. Unlike Libya however, Assad is hanging in there. Watching repeated combat videos, I can’t help but cheer for the man. He represents the least terrible armed entity in the nation. Unfortunately for him, his reign is scheduled for termination by the West, and he will be removed. So as much as I love to see him continuing to hold out, I support his ouster and our guaranteed follow-on mission of battling the Islamist militias in the name of Syrian freedom and security. We will have Syria.
I don’t want to get into too many conspiracy theories, but have you heard the one about al Qaeda being created by the West? I don’t know if that’s true or not, I don’t have the evidence, and if I did I might think it’s just as likely to be misinformation. That’s the world we live in. However, humor that idea for a minute. I think it would be impossible for the CIA to directly control al-Qaeda. If anything, I picture it more like when African villagers make a bunch of large plains animals stampede through a mine field to clear it. Although the people are not directly in control of the escaping animals, they are still using them to achieve their desired effect, all while the animals think they are operating on their own accord.
Considering these Islamists are so extreme in their beliefs that they are willing to execute children, it’s not hard to believe that they’re also not the most skeptical, critical thinkers concerning where their orders are coming from, especially when your leader claims to be a direct descendant of Muhammad, and the word of God. Additionally, these groups need funding and supplies, which makes them susceptible to owed favors and outside influence.
Even if this were true, it doesn’t change the fact that they do pose a serious threat to everybody. Even if they were a creation of the West, it doesn’t change the fact that tens of thousands of Muslims are joining their ranks to be martyred or kill for the ideals of the group. They are very very real, and they are very very bad people. So I guess it’s lucky for us that we have the perfect enemy. A foe so vile, that everyone in the world supports their demise, and therefore gives us justification to be in these resource rich areas all while keeping any other entities that may want the resources far from them. It’s like having a vicious dog to guard your yard. He will attack everyone, including you, but you know how to manipulate and operate around it by throwing the occasional bone, creating a diversion, or kicking its ass. Everyone else just keeps their distance. The region becomes a no-man’s land unless you are the powerful American military or that of her allies.
So back to the commentor. He called my piece “stupid and disappointing coming from a journalistic blog.” Is everyone aware of the current state of so-called journalism? The news media is a propaganda mill fighting over table scraps that are nothing more than generic, sterilized talking points. As far as “disappointing” goes… I think what’s truly disappointing is that nobody seems to be catching on to what our foreign policy is really about. It’s not coincidence that the same thing is happening across the world. We’re not fighting terrorists for the sake of other nations’ freedom. We didn’t fail in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, etc… We are the most powerful nation on Earth. The destabilization of the region was the intended consequence, and we (US backed Western nations) are the benefactors that are now allowed further influence and occupation in the region. As much as you and others want world peace (like that’s a thing or even a possibility), the world has just gotten too small, populations too large, while the resources are finite. We are not at war with Islam or terrorism… we are in an ongoing and rapidly escalating proxy war for resources with China and Russia. There is no way we can afford not to control as much as we can for the sake of appeasing ignorant hypocrites that think the world can be all hugs and rainbows, a notion they learned during a privileged lifetime of opportunity afforded to them by our underhanded neo-colonialistc ways.
The reality of it, is that the world is a cold place, and human beings are inherently violent conquerors. We are a superpower that must take equally super and often ruthless measures to maintain our “super” status, all while allowing clueless, morally superior pacifists to bad mouth the institution that has ensured that the biggest obstacles they face in life are cellular contracts and road construction delays. They have no clue, and therefore no appreciation, that their government and its allies are slitting throats for them to maintain their comfortable way of life.
I’m not a sociopath, and I’m not a shill for the government. In fact, I think the erosion of the Constitution and its amendments here at home is appalling. However, if you think our foreign policy has been a failure, then you’re not seeing it for what it really is… an ingenious masterpiece.
Colonialism is as alive and well as it has ever been, it is just done in the dark. Powerful nations will take what they need, that is what keeps them in power.
So call me delusional, a war-monger, or whatever you want, but for my brothers and sisters in arms, from every nation that has fought side by side with us in the Global War On Terror, I am claiming victory for the Western Empire.
~Will
-
Ukraine, Iraq and a Black Sea Strategy
Geopolitical Weekly
Tuesday, September 2, 2014 - 03:00 Print Text Size
Stratfor
By George Friedman
The United States is, at the moment, off balance. It faces challenges in the Syria-Iraq theater as well as challenges in Ukraine. It does not have a clear response to either. It does not know what success in either theater would look like, what resources it is prepared to devote to either, nor whether the consequences of defeat would be manageable.
A dilemma of this sort is not unusual for a global power. Its very breadth of interests and the extent of power create opportunities for unexpected events, and these events, particularly simultaneous challenges in different areas, create uncertainty and confusion. U.S. geography and power permit a degree of uncertainty without leading to disaster, but generating a coherent and integrated strategy is necessary, even if that strategy is simply to walk away and let events run their course. I am not suggesting the latter strategy but arguing that at a certain point, confusion must run its course and clear intentions must emerge. When they do, the result will be the coherence of a new strategic map that encompasses both conflicts.
The most critical issue for the United States is to create a single integrated plan that takes into account the most pressing challenges. Such a plan must begin by defining a theater of operations sufficiently coherent geographically as to permit integrated political maneuvering and military planning. U.S. military doctrine has moved explicitly away from a two-war strategy. Operationally, it might not be possible to engage all adversaries simultaneously, but conceptually, it is essential to think in terms of a coherent center of gravity of operations. For me, it is increasingly clear that that center is the Black Sea.
Ukraine and Syria-Iraq
There are currently two active theaters of military action with broad potential significance. One is Ukraine, where the Russians have launched a counteroffensive toward Crimea. The other is in the Syria-Iraq region, where the forces of the Islamic State have launched an offensive designed at a minimum to control regions in both countries -- and at most dominate the area between the Levant and Iran.
In most senses, there is no connection between these two theaters. Yes, the Russians have an ongoing problem in the high Caucasus and there are reports of Chechen advisers working with the Islamic State. In this sense, the Russians are far from comfortable with what is happening in Syria and Iraq. At the same time, anything that diverts U.S. attention from Ukraine is beneficial to the Russians. For its part, the Islamic State must oppose Russia in the long run. Its immediate problem, however, is U.S. power, so anything that distracts the United States is beneficial to the Islamic State.
But the Ukrainian crisis has a very different political dynamic from the Iraq-Syria crisis. Russian and Islamic State military forces are not coordinated in any way, and in the end, victory for either would challenge the interests of the other. But for the United States, which must allocate its attention, political will and military power carefully, the two crises must be thought of together. The Russians and the Islamic State have the luxury of focusing on one crisis. The United States must concern itself with both and reconcile them.
The United States has been in the process of limiting its involvement in the Middle East while attempting to deal with the Ukrainian crisis. The Obama administration wants to create an integrated Iraq devoid of jihadists and have Russia accept a pro-Western Ukraine. It also does not want to devote substantial military forces to either theater. Its dilemma is how to achieve its goals without risk. If it can't do this, what risk will it accept or must it accept?
Strategies that minimize risk and create maximum influence are rational and should be a founding principle of any country. By this logic, the U.S. strategy ought to be to maintain the balance of power in a region using proxies and provide material support to those proxies but avoid direct military involvement until there is no other option. The most important thing is to provide the support that obviates the need for intervention.
In the Syria-Iraq theater, the United States moved from a strategy of seeking a unified state under secular pro-Western forces to one seeking a balance of power between the Alawites and jihadists. In Iraq, the United States pursued a unified government under Baghdad and is now trying to contain the Islamic State using minimal U.S. forces and Kurdish, Shiite and some Sunni proxies. If that fails, the U.S. strategy in Iraq will devolve into the strategy in Syria, namely, seeking a balance of power between factions. It is not clear that another strategy exists. The U.S. occupation of Iraq that began in 2003 did not result in a military solution, and it is not clear that a repeat of 2003 would succeed either. Any military action must be taken with a clear outcome in mind and a reasonable expectation that the allocation of forces will achieve that outcome; wishful thinking is not permitted. Realistically, air power and special operations forces on the ground are unlikely to force the Islamic State to capitulate or to result in its dissolution.
Ukraine, of course, has a different dynamic. The United States saw the events in Ukraine as either an opportunity for moral posturing or as a strategic blow to Russian national security. Either way, it had the same result: It created a challenge to fundamental Russian interests and placed Russian President Vladimir Putin in a dangerous position. His intelligence services completely failed to forecast or manage events in Kiev or to generate a broad rising in eastern Ukraine. Moreover, the Ukrainians were defeating their supporters (with the distinction between supporters and Russian troops becoming increasingly meaningless with each passing day). But it was obvious that the Russians were not simply going to let the Ukrainian reality become a fait accompli. They would counterattack. But even so, they would still have moved from once shaping Ukrainian policy to losing all but a small fragment of Ukraine. They will therefore maintain a permanently aggressive posture in a bid to recoup what has been lost.
U.S. strategy in Ukraine tracks its strategy in Syria-Iraq. First, Washington uses proxies; second, it provides material support; and third, it avoids direct military involvement. Both strategies assume that the main adversary -- the Islamic State in Syria-Iraq and Russia in Ukraine -- is incapable of mounting a decisive offensive, or that any offensive it mounts can be blunted with air power. But to be successful, U.S. strategy assumes there will be coherent Ukrainian and Iraqi resistance to Russia and the Islamic State, respectively. If that doesn't materialize or dissolves, so does the strategy.
The United States is betting on risky allies. And the outcome matters in the long run. U.S. strategy prior to World Wars I and II was to limit involvement until the situation could be handled only with a massive American deployment. During the Cold War, the United States changed its strategy to a pre-commitment of at least some forces; this had a better outcome. The United States is not invulnerable to foreign threats, although those foreign threats must evolve dramatically. The earlier intervention was less costly than intervention at the last possible minute. Neither the Islamic State nor Russia poses such a threat to the United States, and it is very likely that the respective regional balance of power can contain them. But if they can't, the crises could evolve into a more direct threat to the United States. And shaping the regional balance of power requires exertion and taking at least some risks.
Regional Balances of Power and the Black Sea
The rational move for countries like Romania, Hungary or Poland is to accommodate Russia unless they have significant guarantees from the outside. Whether fair or not, only the United States can deliver those guarantees. The same can be said about the Shia and the Kurds, both of whom the United States has abandoned in recent years, assuming that they could manage on their own.
The issue the United States faces is how to structure such support, physically and conceptually. There appear to be two distinct and unconnected theaters, and American power is limited. The situation would seem to preclude persuasive guarantees. But U.S. strategic conception must evolve away from seeing these as distinct theaters into seeing them as different aspects of the same theater: the Black Sea.
When we look at a map, we note that the Black Sea is the geographic organizing principle of these areas. The sea is the southern frontier of Ukraine and European Russia and the Caucasus, where Russian, jihadist and Iranian power converge on the Black Sea. Northern Syria and Iraq are fewer than 650 kilometers (400 miles) from the Black Sea.
The United States has had a North Atlantic strategy. It has had a Caribbean strategy, a Western Pacific strategy and so on. This did not simply mean a naval strategy. Rather, it was understood as a combined arms system of power projection that depended on naval power to provide strategic supply, delivery of troops and air power. It also placed its forces in such a configuration that the one force, or at least command structure, could provide support in multiple directions.
The United States has a strategic problem that can be addressed either as two or more unrelated problems requiring redundant resources or a single integrated solution. It is true that the Russians and the Islamic State do not see themselves as part of a single theater. But opponents don't define theaters of operation for the United States. The first step in crafting a strategy is to define the map in a way that allows the strategist to think in terms of unity of forces rather than separation, and unity of support rather than division. It also allows the strategist to think of his regional relationships as part of an integrated strategy.
Assume for the moment that the Russians chose to intervene in the Caucasus again, that jihadists moved out of Chechnya and Dagestan into Georgia and Azerbaijan, or that Iran chose to move north. The outcome of events in the Caucasus would matter greatly to the United States. Under the current strategic structure, where U.S. decision-makers seem incapable of conceptualizing the two present strategic problems, such a third crisis would overwhelm them. But thinking in terms of securing what I'll call the Greater Black Sea Basin would provide a framework for addressing the current thought exercise. A Black Sea strategy would define the significance of Georgia, the eastern coast of the Black Sea. Even more important, it would elevate Azerbaijan to the level of importance it should have in U.S. strategy. Without Azerbaijan, Georgia has little weight. With Azerbaijan, there is a counter to jihadists in the high Caucasus, or at least a buffer, since Azerbaijan is logically the eastern anchor of the Greater Black Sea strategy.
A Black Sea strategy would also force definition of two key relationships for the United States. The first is Turkey. Russia aside, Turkey is the major native Black Sea power. It has interests throughout the Greater Black Sea Basin, namely, in Syria, Iraq, the Caucasus, Russia and Ukraine. Thinking in terms of a Black Sea strategy, Turkey becomes one of the indispensible allies since its interests touch American interests. Aligning U.S. and Turkish strategy would be a precondition for such a strategy, meaning both nations would have to make serious policy shifts. An explicit Black Sea-centered strategy would put U.S.-Turkish relations at the forefront, and a failure to align would tell both countries that they need to re-examine their strategic relationship. At this point, U.S.-Turkish relations seem to be based on a systematic avoidance of confronting realities. With the Black Sea as a centerpiece, evasion, which is rarely useful in creating realistic strategies, would be difficult.
The Centrality of Romania
The second critical country is Romania. The Montreux Convention prohibits the unlimited transit of a naval force into the Black Sea through the Bosporus, controlled by Turkey. Romania, however, is a Black Sea nation, and no limitations apply to it, although its naval combat power is centered on a few aging frigates backed up by a half-dozen corvettes. Apart from being a potential base for aircraft for operations in the region, particularly in Ukraine, supporting Romania in building a significant naval force in the Black Sea -- potentially including amphibious ships -- would provide a deterrent force against the Russians and also shape affairs in the Black Sea that might motivate Turkey to cooperate with Romania and thereby work with the United States. The traditional NATO structure can survive this evolution, even though most of NATO is irrelevant to the problems facing the Black Sea Basin. Regardless of how the Syria-Iraq drama ends, it is secondary to the future of Russia's relationship with Ukraine and the European Peninsula. Poland anchors the North European Plain, but the action for now is in the Black Sea, and that makes Romania the critical partner in the European Peninsula. It will feel the first pressure if Russia regains its position in Ukraine.
I have written frequently on the emergence -- and the inevitability of the emergence -- of an alliance based on the notion of the Intermarium, the land between the seas. It would stretch between the Baltic and Black seas and would be an alliance designed to contain a newly assertive Russia. I have envisioned this alliance stretching east to the Caspian, taking in Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Poland-to-Romania line is already emerging. It seems obvious that given events on both sides of the Black Sea, the rest of this line will emerge.
The United States ought to adopt the policy of the Cold War. That consisted of four parts. First, allies were expected to provide the geographical foundation of defense and substantial forces to respond to threats. Second, the United States was to provide military and economic aid as necessary to support this structure. Third, the United States was to pre-position some forces as guarantors of U.S. commitment and as immediate support. And fourth, Washington was to guarantee the total commitment of all U.S. forces to defending allies, although the need to fulfill the last guarantee never arose.
The United States has an uncertain alliance structure in the Greater Black Sea Basin that is neither mutually supportive nor permits the United States a coherent power in the region given the conceptual division of the region into distinct theaters. The United States is providing aid, but again on an inconsistent basis. Some U.S. forces are involved, but their mission is unclear, it is unclear that they are in the right places, and it is unclear what the regional policy is.
Thus, U.S. policy for the moment is incoherent. A Black Sea strategy is merely a name, but sometimes a name is sufficient to focus strategic thinking. So long as the United States thinks in terms of Ukraine and Syria and Iraq as if they were on different planets, the economy of forces that coherent strategy requires will never be achieved. Thinking in terms of the Black Sea as a pivot of a single diverse and diffuse region can anchor U.S. thinking. Merely anchoring strategic concepts does not win wars, nor prevent them. But anything that provides coherence to American strategy has value.
The Greater Black Sea Basin, as broadly defined, is already the object of U.S. military and political involvement. It is just not perceived that way in military, political or even public and media calculations. It should be. For that will bring perception in line with fast-emerging reality.
Read more: Ukraine, Iraq and a Black Sea Strategy | Stratfor
-
Hanson follows up on my "disproportionate response" post with an excellent "peace through deterrence" article. Never more timely than now.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/387006/only-deterrence-can-prevent-war-victor-davis-hanson
Only Deterrence Can Prevent War
Most aggressors take stupid risks only when they feel they won't be stopped.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Only lunatics from North Korea or Iran once mumbled about using nuclear weapons against their supposed enemies. Now Vladimir Putin, after gobbling up the Crimea, points to his nuclear arsenal and warns the West not to “mess” with Russia.
The Middle East terrorist group the Islamic State keeps beheading its captives and threatening the West. Meanwhile Obama admits to the world that we “don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with such barbaric terrorists. Not long ago he compared them to “jayvees.”
Egypt is bombing Libya, which America once bombed and then left. Vice President Joe Biden once boasted that a quiet Iraq without U.S. troops could be “one of the great achievements” of the administration. Not now.
China and Japan seem stuck in a 1930s time warp as they once again squabble over disputed territory. Why all the sudden wars?
Conflicts rarely break out over needed scarce land — what Adolf Hitler once called “living space” — or even over natural resources. A vast, naturally rich Russia is under-populated and poorly run. It hardly needs more of the Crimea and Ukraine to screw up. The islands that Japan and China haggle over are mostly worthless real estate. Iran has enough oil and natural gas to meet its domestic and export needs without going to war over building a nuclear bomb.
Often states fight about prestigious symbols that their own fears and sense of honor have inflated into existential issues. Hamas could turn its back on Israel and turn Gaza into Singapore — but not without feeling that it had backed down.
Putin thinks that grabbing more of the old Soviet Republics will bring him the sort of prestige that his hero Stalin once enjoyed. The Islamic State wants to return to 7th-century Islam, when the Muslim world had more power and honor.
The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once summed up the Falklands War between his country and Britain as a fight “between two bald men over a comb.” In fact, Britain went to war over distant windswept rocks to uphold the hallowed tradition of the British Navy and the idea that British subjects everywhere were sacrosanct. The unpopular Argentine junta started a war to take Britain down a notch.
But disputes over honor or from fear do not always lead to war. Something else is needed — an absence of deterrence. Most aggressors take stupid risks in starting wars only when they feel there is little likelihood they will be stopped. Hitler thought no one would care whether he gobbled up Poland, after he easily ingested Czechoslovakia and Austria.
Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait believing the U.S. did not intervene in border disputes among Arab countries. Deterrence, alliances, and balances of power are not archaic concepts that “accidentally” triggered World War I, as we are sometimes told. They are the age-old tools of advising the more bellicose parties to calm down and get a grip.
What ends wars?
Not the League of Nations or the United Nations. Unfortunately, war is a sort of cruel laboratory experiment whose bloodletting determines which party, in fact, was the stronger all along. Once that fact is again recognized, peace usually follows.
It took 50 million deaths to remind the appeased Axis that Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1941 were all along far weaker than the Allies of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The Falklands War ended when Argentines recognized that boasting about beating the British was not the same as beating the British.
Each time Hamas builds more tunnels and gets more rockets, it believes this time around it can beat Israel. Its wars end only when Hamas recognizes it can’t.
War as a reminder of who is really strong and who weak is a savage way to run the world. Far better would be for peace-loving constitutional governments to remain strong. They should keep their defenses up, and warn Putin, the Islamic State, Iran, North Korea, and others like them that all a stupid war would accomplish would be to remind such aggressors that they would lose so much for nothing.
Even nuclear powers need conventional deterrence. They or their interests are often attacked — as in the case of Britain by Argentina, the U.S. by al-Qaeda, or Israel by Hamas — by non-nuclear states on the likely assumption that nuclear weapons will not be used, and on the often erroneous assumption that the stronger power may not wish the trouble or have the ability to reply to the weaker.
If deterrence and military readiness seem such a wise investment, why do democracies so often find themselves ill-prepared and bullied by aggressors who then are emboldened to start wars?
It is hard for democratic voters to give up a bit of affluence in peace to ensure that they do not lose it all in war. It is even harder for sophisticated liberal thinkers to admit that after centuries of civilized life, we still have no better way of preventing Neanderthal wars than by reminding Neanderthals that we have the far bigger club — and will use it if provoked.
-
"You want to think he is playing a cool, long game, that there's a plan and he's acting on it. He's holding off stark action to force nations in the region to step up to the plate. The comments of the Saudis and the Emiratis are newly burly. Good, they have military power and wealth, let them move for once. He is teaching our Mideast friends the U.S. is not a volunteer fire department that suits up every time you fall asleep on the couch smoking. In the meantime he is coolly watching new alliances form—wasn't that the Kurds the other day fighting alongside the Iranians?"
A lot of people are going to react well to this "He is teaching our Mideast friends the U.S. is not a volunteer fire department that suits up every time you fall asleep on the couch smoking."
We need to make/address this meme in making our case.
-
Nothing deep here, but for some reason I find it worth posting , , ,
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/09/05/isolationism-interventionism-and-rand-paul-changing-the-debate-of-foreign-politics/
-
Dick Cheney Is Still Right
Obama's return to Iraq reveals how wrong he has been about the world.
Sept. 9, 2014 7:24 p.m. ET
President Obama will lay out his plan to counter the Islamic State on Wednesday night, and we'll judge the strategy on its merits. But the mere fact that Mr. Obama feels obliged to send Americans to fight again in Iraq acknowledges the failure of his foreign policy. He is tacitly admitting that the liberal critique of the Bush Administration's approach to Islamic terrorism was wrong.
Recall that Mr. Obama won the Presidency by arguing that the U.S. had alienated the world and Muslims by recklessly using force abroad. We had betrayed our values by interrogating terrorists too harshly and wiretapping too much. Our enemies hated us not because they hated our values or our influence but because we had provoked them with our interventions.
If we withdrew from the Middle East, especially from Iraq; if we avoided new entanglements, such as in Syria; and if we engaged with our adversaries, such as Iran and Russia, the anti-American furies would subside and the world would be safer. We should nation-build at home, not overseas, and slash the defense budget accordingly.
***
Mr. Obama pursued this vision starting with his Inaugural Address and throughout his first term. He tried to "reset" relations with Russia by dismantling a missile-defense deal with Poland and the Czech Republic. He muted support for the democratic uprising in Iran in 2009 lest it upset the mullahs he needed for a nuclear weapons deal.
When the Syrian revolt erupted in 2011, Mr. Obama called for Bashar Assad to go but did nothing to aid the moderate opposition. In the process he overruled Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CIA director David Petraeus, and his ambassador to Damascus Robert Ford.
The U.S. absence left Syria's battleground to the Russians and Iranians, who helped Assad hang on, and to the Qataris, who have funded Islamic State and the al Qaeda affiliated al-Nusrah. But Mr. Obama was unrepentant, saying as recently as August that it had "always been a fantasy" to think that arming the moderate Syrians would make a difference.
Above all Mr. Obama sought to end the U.S. presence in Iraq. He made a token effort to strike a status of forces agreement past 2011, offering so few troops that the Iraqis thought it wasn't worth the domestic political trouble. Mr. Obama then sold his total withdrawal as a political success, claiming Iraq was "stable" and "self-reliant" and making a centerpiece of his 2012 campaign that "the tide of war is receding." He ridiculed Mitt Romney for warning about Mr. Putin's designs.
Mr. Obama doubled down on his peace-through-withdrawal strategy in the second term, speeding up the U.S. departure from Afghanistan. On May 23, 2013, he summed up his vision and strategy in a sort of victory speech at National Defense University:
"Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants. There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure. Fewer of our troops are in harm's way, and over the next 19 months they will continue to come home. Our alliances are strong, and so is our standing in the world. In sum, we are safer because of our efforts."
Then in January his friends at the New Yorker quoted him as comparing Islamic State to the "jayvee team," and this summer he said Mr. Putin is doomed to fail because countries don't invade others in "the 21st century."
***
So where are we less than a year later? Iran's mullahs continue to resist Mr. Obama's nuclear entreaties, while Mr. Putin carves up Ukraine and threatens NATO. China is breaking the rule of law in Hong Kong, pressing its air-identification zone in the Pacific, and buzzing U.S. aircraft.
Syria is now a terrorist sanctuary from which the Islamic State has conquered a third of Iraq, the first time since 9/11 that jihadists control territory from which they can plan attacks. Al Qaeda's affiliates have expanded across the Middle East and Africa, attacking a mall in Kenya and kidnapping schoolgirls in Nigeria.
Mr. Obama can blame this rising tide of disorder on George W. Bush, but the polls show the American public doesn't believe it. They know from experience that it takes time for bad policy to reveal itself in new global turmoil. They saw how the early mistakes in Iraq led to chaos until the 2007 surge saved the day and left Mr. Obama with an opportunity he squandered. And they can see now that Mr. Obama's strategy has produced terrorist victories and more danger for America.
Mr. Obama's intellectual and media defenders were complicit in all of this, cheering on his flight from world leadership as prudent management of U.S. decline. Even now some of his most devoted acolytes write that Mr. Obama's "caution" has Islamic State's jihadists right where he wants them. It is hard to admit that your worldview has been exposed as out-of-this-world.
We hope tonight's speech shows a more realistic President determined to defeat Islamic State, but whatever he says will have to overcome the doubts about American resolve that he has spread around the world for nearly six years. One way to start undoing the damage would be to concede that Dick Cheney was right all along.
-
The virtue of subtlety: a U.S. strategy against the Islamic State
The American strategy in the Middle East is fixed: allow powers in the region to balance against each other. When that fails, intervene.
George Friedman | 10 September 2014
comment | print |
balance of power
U.S. President Barack Obama said recently that he had no strategy as yet toward the Islamic State but that he would present a plan on Wednesday. It is important for a president to know when he has no strategy. It is not necessarily wise to announce it, as friends will be frightened and enemies delighted. A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.
This is particularly true because, in a certain sense, Obama has a strategy, though it is not necessarily one he likes. Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen. Given the situation, the United States has an unavoidable strategy. There are options and uncertainties for employing it. Let us consider some of the things that Obama does know.
The Formation of National Strategy
There are serious crises on the northern and southern edges of the Black Sea Basin. There is no crisis in the Black Sea itself, but it is surrounded by crises. The United States has been concerned about the status of Russia ever since U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The United States has been concerned about the Middle East since U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced the British to retreat from Suez in 1956. As a result, the United States inherited -- or seized -- the British position.
A national strategy emerges over the decades and centuries. It becomes a set of national interests into which a great deal has been invested, upon which a great deal depends and upon which many are counting. Presidents inherit national strategies, and they can modify them to some extent. But the idea that a president has the power to craft a new national strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of realities crafted by all those who came before him. We are all trapped in circumstances into which we were born and choices that were made for us. The United States has an inherent interest in Ukraine and in Syria-Iraq. Whether we should have that interest is an interesting philosophical question for a late-night discussion, followed by a sunrise when we return to reality. These places reflexively matter to the United States.
The American strategy is fixed: Allow powers in the region to compete and balance against each other. When that fails, intervene with as little force and risk as possible. For example, the conflict between Iran and Iraq canceled out two rising powers until the war ended. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to overturn the balance of power in the region. The result was Desert Storm.
This strategy provides a model. In the Syria-Iraq region, the initial strategy is to allow the regional powers to balance each other, while providing as little support as possible to maintain the balance of power. It is crucial to understand the balance of power in detail, and to understand what might undermine it, so that any force can be applied effectively. This is the tactical part, and it is the tactical part that can go wrong. The strategy has a logic of its own. Understanding what that strategy demands is the hard part. Some nations have lost their sovereignty by not understanding what strategy demands. France in 1940 comes to mind. For the United States, there is no threat to sovereignty, but that makes the process harder: Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary.
The ground where we are talking about applying this model is Syria and Iraq. Both of these central governments have lost control of the country as a whole, but each remains a force. Both countries are divided by religion, and the religions are divided internally as well. In a sense the nations have ceased to exist, and the fragments they consisted of are now smaller but more complex entities.
The issue is whether the United States can live with this situation or whether it must reshape it. The immediate question is whether the United States has the power to reshape it and to what extent. The American interest turns on its ability to balance local forces. If that exists, the question is whether there is any other shape that can be achieved through American power that would be superior. From my point of view, there are many different shapes that can be imagined, but few that can be achieved. The American experience in Iraq highlighted the problems with counterinsurgency or being caught in a local civil war. The idea of major intervention assumes that this time it will be different. This fits one famous definition of insanity.
The Islamic State's Role
There is then the special case of the Islamic State. It is special because its emergence triggered the current crisis. It is special because the brutal murder of two prisoners on video showed a particular cruelty. And it is different because its ideology is similar to that of al Qaeda, which attacked the United States. It has excited particular American passions.
To counter this, I would argue that the uprising by Iraq's Sunni community was inevitable, with its marginalization by Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite regime in Baghdad. That it took this particularly virulent form is because the more conservative elements of the Sunni community were unable or unwilling to challenge al-Maliki. But the fragmentation of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions was well underway before the Islamic State, and jihadism was deeply embedded in the Sunni community a long time ago.
Moreover, although the Islamic State is brutal, its cruelty is not unique in the region. Syrian President Bashar al Assad and others may not have killed Americans or uploaded killings to YouTube, but their history of ghastly acts is comparable. Finally, the Islamic State -- engaged in war with everyone around it -- is much less dangerous to the United States than a small group with time on its hands, planning an attack. In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.
Because the Islamic State operates to some extent as a conventional military force, it is vulnerable to U.S. air power. The use of air power against conventional forces that lack anti-aircraft missiles is a useful gambit. It shows that the United States is doing something, while taking little risk, assuming that the Islamic State really does not have anti-aircraft missiles. But it accomplishes little. The Islamic State will disperse its forces, denying conventional aircraft a target. Attempting to defeat the Islamic State by distinguishing its supporters from other Sunni groups and killing them will founder at the first step. The problem of counterinsurgency is identifying the insurgent.
There is no reason not to bomb the Islamic State's forces and leaders. They certainly deserve it. But there should be no illusion that bombing them will force them to capitulate or mend their ways. They are now part of the fabric of the Sunni community, and only the Sunni community can root them out. Identifying Sunnis who are anti-Islamic State and supplying them with weapons is a much better idea. It is the balance-of-power strategy that the United States follows, but this approach doesn't have the dramatic satisfaction of blowing up the enemy. That satisfaction is not trivial, and the United States can certainly blow something up and call it the enemy, but it does not address the strategic problem.
In the first place, is it really a problem for the United States? The American interest is not stability but the existence of a dynamic balance of power in which all players are effectively paralyzed so that no one who would threaten the United States emerges. The Islamic State had real successes at first, but the balance of power with the Kurds and Shia has limited its expansion, and tensions within the Sunni community diverted its attention. Certainly there is the danger of intercontinental terrorism, and U.S. intelligence should be active in identifying and destroying these threats. But the re-occupation of Iraq, or Iraq plus Syria, makes no sense. The United States does not have the force needed to occupy Iraq and Syria at the same time. The demographic imbalance between available forces and the local population makes that impossible.
The danger is that other Islamic State franchises might emerge in other countries. But the United States would not be able to block these threats as well as the other countries in the region. Saudi Arabia must cope with any internal threat it faces not because the United States is indifferent, but because the Saudis are much better at dealing with such threats. In the end, the same can be said for the Iranians.
Most important, it can also be said for the Turks. The Turks are emerging as a regional power. Their economy has grown dramatically in the past decade, their military is the largest in the region, and they are part of the Islamic world. Their government is Islamist but in no way similar to the Islamic State, which concerns Ankara. This is partly because of Ankara's fear that the jihadist group might spread to Turkey, but more so because its impact on Iraqi Kurdistan could affect Turkey's long-term energy plans.
Forming a New Balance in the Region
The United States cannot win the game of small mosaic tiles that is emerging in Syria and Iraq. An American intervention at this microscopic level can only fail. But the principle of balance of power does not mean that balance must be maintained directly. Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia have far more at stake in this than the United States. So long as they believe that the United States will attempt to control the situation, it is perfectly rational for them to back off and watch, or act in the margins, or even hinder the Americans.
The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them.
It is impossible to forecast how the game is played out. What is important is that the game begins. The Turks do not trust the Iranians, and neither is comfortable with the Saudis. They will cooperate, compete, manipulate and betray, just as the United States or any country might do in such a circumstance. The point is that there is a tactic that will fail: American re-involvement. There is a tactic that will succeed: the United States making it clear that while it might aid the pacification in some way, the responsibility is on regional powers. The inevitable outcome will be a regional competition that the United States can manage far better than the current chaos.
Obama has sought volunteers from NATO for a coalition to fight the Islamic State. It is not clear why he thinks those NATO countries -- with the exception of Turkey -- will spend their national treasures and lives to contain the Islamic State, or why the Islamic State alone is the issue. The coalition that must form is not a coalition of the symbolic, but a coalition of the urgently involved. That coalition does not have to be recruited. In a real coalition, its members have no choice but to join. And whether they act together or in competition, they will have to act. And not acting will simply increase the risk to them.
U.S. strategy is sound. It is to allow the balance of power to play out, to come in only when it absolutely must -- with overwhelming force, as in Kuwait -- and to avoid intervention where it cannot succeed. The tactical application of strategy is the problem. In this case the tactic is not direct intervention by the United States, save as a satisfying gesture to avenge murdered Americans. But the solution rests in doing as little as possible and forcing regional powers into the fray, then in maintaining the balance of power in this coalition.
Such an American strategy is not an avoidance of responsibility. It is the use of U.S. power to force a regional solution. Sometimes the best use of American power is to go to war. Far more often, the best use of U.S. power is to withhold it. The United States cannot evade responsibility in the region. But it is enormously unimaginative to assume that carrying out that responsibility is best achieved by direct intervention. Indirect intervention is frequently more efficient and more effective.
The Virtue of Subtlety: A U.S. Strategy Against the Islamic State is republished with permission of Stratfor.
- See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_virtue_of_subtlety_a_u.s._strategy_against_the_islamic_state#sthash.uJtIKJ0z.dpuf
-
The Weinberger Doctrine
In 1993, the professional concerns of the military led to the resurfacing of the Weinberger Doctrine. This was reinforced by events in 1993 in Somalia (where the objectives of U.S. troop involvement remained unclear) and by the fears of some that the United States would become involved in the conflict in Bosnia-Herzogovina.
The Weinberger Doctrine was established by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in the Reagan administration in 1984 to spell out the conditions under which the U.S. ground combat troops should be committed. (Recall that in the earlier part of the 1980s U.S. marines were sent to Lebanon with tragic consequences and the U.S. invaded Grenada where it was criticized for its political and strategic overkill.)
The elements of the Weinberger Doctrine include the following:
1. No overseas commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be made unless a vital interest of the United States or a U.S. ally is threatened.
2. If U.S. forces are committed, there should be total support - that is, sufficient resources and manpower to complete the mission.
3. If committed, U.S. forces must be given clearly defined political and military objectives. The forces must be large enough to be able to achieve these objectives.
4. There must be a continual assessment between the commitment and capability of U.S. forces and the objectives. These must be adjusted if necessary.
5. Before U.S. forces are committed, there must be reasonable assurances that the American people and their elected representatives support such a commitment.
6. Commitment of U.S. forces to combat must be the last resort.
-
1. No overseas commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be made unless a vital interest of the United States or a U.S. ally is threatened.
2. If U.S. forces are committed, there should be total support - that is, sufficient resources and manpower to complete the mission.
3. If committed, U.S. forces must be given clearly defined political and military objectives. The forces must be large enough to be able to achieve these objectives.
4. There must be a continual assessment between the commitment and capability of U.S. forces and the objectives. These must be adjusted if necessary.
5. Before U.S. forces are committed, there must be reasonable assurances that the American people and their elected representatives support such a commitment.
6. Commitment of U.S. forces to combat must be the last resort.
Much to consider there. This is a different enemy with a different threat than Sec. Weinberger faced or contemplated. Perhaps all of that still applies. Setting objectives and the completion of the mission do not have obvious definitions in a war that looks like it will never end. The only thing obvious is that doing nothing is not an option. There is no question that Israel and other allies are threatened by an expanding ISIS and there is no question that acting sooner is better than acting later to stop them.
Pres. Obama's mission I believe needs to be broken down into objectives that can be achieved within his term. With full use of allies and coalition, we need to take back specific territory from ISIS, degrade their capability to prosecute war and choke off their control over oil and money used for terror and militarism. Meanwhile, a Presidential campaign is starting and the public will part of a full debate over our level of involvement in the future.
Europe and the US, and elsewhere like Russia, India, China, etc. face a large threat of homegrown and imported terror. Now that the US government admits we are in war with an enemy sworn to kill us, our first and most obvious step should be to take control of our own border.
-
World Order. By Henry Kissinger.Penguin Press; 420 pages; $36. Allen Lane; £25. Buy fromAmazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
DESPITE being out of office for almost four decades, Henry Kissinger—who left America’s State Department in 1977—still has remarkable influence. Reading this book, you can see why. As Russia plays grandmother’s footsteps in Ukraine, the Middle East falls prey to anarchy and China tests its growing strength, Mr Kissinger analyses the central problem for international relations today: the need for a new world order. He never quite says so, but he is deeply pessimistic.
“World Order” sets out how the modern state arose almost by accident, from the interminable warfare of early 17th-century Europe. Worn down, the architects of the Peace of Westphalia agreed to disagree. Each state pledged to accept the realities of its neighbours’ values. There was no single prevailing truth. Ambition would be kept in check through an equilibrium of power. As imperialism receded, and colonies turned the arguments of Westphalian self-determination against their distant rulers, the European concept of international order spread until, with American sponsorship, it was eventually enshrined in the apparatus of Bretton Woods and the UN.
Today this order is under attack from all sides. Europe and America have come to demand that states everywhere observe a Western set of liberal values. European power, diminished by two world wars, has disappeared down the rabbit-hole of European Union integration. America, still the pre-eminent superpower, may be able to prevent geopolitics from spinning out of control, but it has become reluctant to act as enforcer and balancer. Asia contains rising states, including India and China, which have no tradition of thinking about power in Westphalian terms and may want to revise the system. And in the Middle East, rampaging Islamists are committing mass murder to impose a caliphate run according to the rules of the Koran.
Mr Kissinger is often presented as an arch-realist: an adherent of the supposedly sophisticated idea that foreign policy is purely about power and interests, and that values and morals are for the feeble-minded. But his world view is more subtle. If a system is built on power, but lacks legitimacy, then it will destroy itself; if it asserts moral truths, but lacks the power to enforce them, then it will unravel. The problem today is that from the perspective of almost all sides, power and legitimacy are out of kilter. The West cannot enforce its disputed view of a liberal order. China may not get what it thinks its growing wealth and power should command. Russia sees Western norms as a Trojan horse for the expansion of Western power—at its own expense. The Islamists reject the whole idea of a temporal, secular order.
What is the solution? Mr Kissinger sketches his answer in only four brief pages. It consists of a vague appeal to strike a new balance between power and legitimacy—which, earlier in “World Order”, he acknowledges is very hard, especially on a world scale, in societies struggling with the anarchic effects of new media.
Mr Kissinger is now a wealthy consultant. His failure to drive the bad news home is like his habit of sugaring his criticism of living statesmen with compliments that are, presumably, designed to spare their client’s embarrassment. (“I want to express here my continuing respect and personal affection for President George W. Bush”, he writes, “who guided America with courage, dignity and conviction in an unsteady time.”) That is a pity, as the wit, clarity and concision of his earlier chapters on Europe, America and jihadism are bracing. Perhaps, though, Mr Kissinger supposes that people can read between the lines: you do not need to be Metternich to grasp that this elder statesman thinks the future is bleak.
-
Wars usually end only when the defeated aggressor believes it would be futile to resume the conflict. Lasting peace follows if the loser is then forced to change its political system into something other than what it was.
Republican Rome learned that bitter lesson through three conflicts with Carthage before ensuring that there was not going to be a fourth Punic War.
Germany fought three aggressive wars before it was finally defeated, occupied and reinvented.
America defeated Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, inflicting such damage that they were all unable to continue their resistance. And then, unlike its quick retreat home after World War I, America occupied -- and still has bases in -- all three.
Does anyone believe that Japan, Italy and Germany would now be allies of the U.S. had the Truman administration removed all American military bases from those countries by 1948?
The controversial Korean War succeeded in saving a non-communist South Korea. The U.S. military inflicted terrible punishment on communist Korean and Chinese aggressors. Then, America occupied South Korea to prevent another attack from the North. The world of Samsung and Kia eventually followed.
There are still American peacekeepers in the Balkans following the 1999 defeat of Slobodan Milosevic and his removal from the Serbian government. Does anyone think that we can now pull all NATO troops out of the Balkans and expect Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Muslims, Slavs, Croats and other assorted nationalities and religions to live peacefully and not involve the world again in their brutal ancient rivalries?
In contrast, examine what has happened when the United States pounded an enemy, then just up and left.
By 1974, South Vietnam was viable. A peace treaty with the North Vietnam was still holding. But after Watergate, the destruction of the Richard Nixon presidency, serial cutoffs of U.S. aid and the removal of all U.S. peacekeeping troops, the North Vietnamese easily walked in and enslaved the south.
It was easy to bomb Moammar Gadhafi out of power -- and easier still for President Obama to boast that he would never send in ground troops to sort out the ensuing mess in Libya. What followed was a Congo-like miasma, leading to the Benghazi attacks on our consulate and the killing of four U.S. personnel.
We can brag that U.S. ground troops did not follow our bombs and missiles into Libya. But the country is now more a terrorist haven than it was under Gadhafi -- and may come back to haunt us still more.
When Obama entered office, Iraq was largely quiet. Six prior years of American blood and treasure had finally led to the end of the genocidal Saddam Hussein regime and the establishment of a constitutional system that was working under the close supervision of American peacekeepers.
Then, for the price of a re-election talking point -- "I ended the war in Iraq" -- Obama pulled out every American peacekeeper. The result is now the chaos of a growing Islamic State.
Apparently, Obama himself recognizes his error. When our troops were still monitoring the Iraqi peace, he and Vice President Joe Biden proclaimed Iraq to be "stable" and their likely "greatest" achievement. But when the country imploded after they had bragged about pulling out troops, Obama blamed the decision on someone else.
The unpopular, costly occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq were not, as charged, neoconservative fantasies about utopian democracy-building. Instead, they were desperate, no-win reactions to past failed policies.
After we armed Islamists to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989, we forgot about the chaotic country. The Clinton administration periodically blew up things with cruise missiles there on rumors of Osama bin Laden's whereabouts. An al-Qaeda base for the 9/11 attacks followed.
After expelling Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait and leaving Iraq in 1991, no-fly-zones, a resurgent and conniving Saddam, and Operation Desert Fox followed. The aim of the second Iraq war of 2003 was to end the conflict for good by replacing Saddam with something better than what we had left after the first war.
It is popular to think that America's threats can be neutralized by occasional use of missiles, bombs and drones without much cost. But blowing apart a problem for a while is different than ending it for good. The latter aim requires just the sort of unpopular occupations that calmed the Balkans, and had done the same in Iraq by 2011.
Obama now promises to destroy the Islamic State in Syria, solely through air power. And he assures that he will safely pull nearly all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan at the end of the year.
More likely, Syria will remain a dangerous mess like Libya, and Afghanistan will end up like Vietnam or Iraq.
Victory on the ground and occupations can end a problem but are unpopular and costly.
Bombing is easy, forgettable, and ends up mostly as a temporary Band-Aid.
If we cannot or will not solve the problem on the ground, end an enemy power, and then reconstitute its government, then it is probably better to steer clear altogether than to blow up lots of people and things -- and simply go home.
-
FIFTY years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized a strategic bombing campaign against targets in North Vietnam, an escalation of the conflict in Southeast Asia that was swiftly followed by the deployment of American ground troops. Last month, President Obama expanded a strategic bombing campaign against Islamic insurgents in the Middle East, escalating the attack beyond Iraq into Syria.
Will Mr. Obama repeat history and commit ground troops? Many analysts believe so, and top officials are calling for it. But the president has expressed skepticism about what American force can accomplish in this kind of struggle, and he has resisted the urgings of hawks inside and outside the administration who want him to go in deeper. Mr. Obama, his supporters say, is a “gloomy realist” who has learned history’s lesson: that American military power, no matter how great in relative terms, is ultimately of limited utility in conflicts that are, at their root, political or ideological in nature.
It’s a powerful, reasoned position, amply supported by the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam. But that history also shows that a president’s attitude and analytical assessment, no matter how gloomily realistic, are not necessarily an antidote to ill-advised military action. Foreign intervention has a logic all to itself.
Today we think of Lyndon Johnson as a man unwaveringly committed to prevailing in Vietnam. But at least at first, he shared Mr. Obama’s pessimism. He and his advisers knew they faced an immense challenge in attempting to suppress the insurgency in South Vietnam. “A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere,” he said privately in early March 1965. “But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam.”
Johnson also knew that the Democratic leadership in the Senate shared his misgivings, and that key allied governments counseled against escalation and in favor of a political solution.
On occasion the president even allowed himself to question whether the outcome in Vietnam really mattered to American and Western security. “What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” he despaired in 1964, even as he was laying plans to expand American involvement. “What’s it worth to this country?”
At other times Johnson was quite capable of arguing for the geopolitical importance of the struggle — he was adept at tailoring his Vietnam analysis to his needs of the moment. But the overall picture that emerges in the administration’s massive internal record for 1964-65 is of a president deeply skeptical that the war could be won, even with large-scale escalation, and far from certain that it was necessary even to try.
So why did Johnson take the plunge? In part because he was hemmed in — not merely by 15 years of steadily growing American involvement in Indochina, but, more important, by his own and his advisers’ use of overheated rhetoric to describe the stakes in Vietnam and their confidence in victory. Moreover, he had personalized the war, and saw any criticism of its progress as an attack on him, compromising his ability to see the conflict objectively.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
We know the results. In the very week in which he professed to see “no daylight” in the struggle, Johnson initiated Operation Rolling Thunder, the graduated, sustained aerial bombardment against North Vietnam; also that week, he dispatched the first combat troops. More soon followed, and by the end of 1965, some 180,000 men were on the ground in South Vietnam. Ultimately, the count would top half a million.
True, it’s hard to imagine Mr. Obama ordering a Johnson-style surge of combat forces to Iraq or Syria. The circumstances on the ground are dissimilar, and he sees the world and America’s role in it differently than Johnson did. By all accounts he is less inclined to personalize foreign policy tests, and less threatened by diverse views among his advisers.
In these respects he is much closer in his sensibility and approach to another Vietnam-era president, John F. Kennedy. He consistently rejected the proposals of civilian aides and military leaders to commit combat forces to Vietnam, but he also significantly expanded American involvement in the conflict during his thousand days in office, complicating the choices open to his successor. Whether he could have continued to walk that line, as Mr. Obama is trying to do, is an unanswerable question.
But the point is not about biography; rather, it’s about the inability of a president, once committed to military intervention, to control the course of events. War has a forward motion of its own. Most of Johnson’s major steps in the escalation in Vietnam were in response to unforeseen obstacles, setbacks and shortcomings. There’s no reason the same dynamic couldn’t repeat itself in 2014.
And there is a political logic, too: Then as now, the president faced unrelenting pressure from various quarters to do more, to fight the fight, to intensify the battle. Then as now, the alarmist rhetoric by the president and senior officials served to reduce their perceived maneuverability, not least in domestic political terms. Johnson was no warmonger, and he feared, rightly, that Vietnam would be his undoing. Nonetheless, he took his nation into a protracted struggle that ended in bitter defeat.
“I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out,” a sullen Johnson told McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, in 1964. One can only hope the same sentiment is not being expressed in the Oval Office today.
Fredrik Logevall is a professor of history at Cornell and the author, most recently, of “Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam.” Gordon M. Goldstein is the author of “Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.”
-
As someone who lived through the Vietnam War, indeed I was in the draft lottery and quite active in the movement against the war, the preceding article has a lot of resonance for me.
We face very a plethora of difficult situations and it can be easy to get lost in the complexities. Herewith my armchair general to cut to the chase:
The original idea was to deny safe havens for Islamo Fascism (IF) to safely train and prepare to attack us.
Hence Afpakia-- this launched at the height of the American uni-polar moment
How has this original idea worked out so far?
It has not. The enemy has, or will soon have, Afpakia, Libya, various pieces of Africa, and ISILstan. (Egypt was almost also on this list despite the hubristic follies of Obama-Clinton.) All these places are now places that IF now has sanctuary to plot, train, and prepare its coming attacks upon us. Thus it seems to me that the logic of denying sanctuary no longer applies.
As is amply documented here, I am of the firm belief that it did not have to be this way and that a large % of the responsibility lies with Obama-Clinton, but in fairness it must be noted that Bush's strategy for Afpakia was incoherent (as I have said here many times for many years) and I do not envy the hand there he handed over to Obama. Bush's many screw-ups in Iraq caused a very close brush with disaster that understandably broke the heart and trust of many Americans before he turned things around-- but turn things around he did and he handed a very good hand to Obama in Iraq-- which Obama petulantly threw away.
Having noted that so that we may learn from it, the question remains: What do we do now that the enemy DOES have sanctuaries?
First it seems quite clear to me that we must realize that it is too late for "fighting them there so we do not have fight them here" as Bush presciently stated in 2004.
Off the top of my head we need to DEFEND THE HOMELAND:
a) Control the borders!!!
b) Have a proper system for promptly and efficiently noting those who overstay their visas; the Feds must overrule the "Sanctuary City" policies of many cities (and states?) just as it overruled Arizona for intruding in the Federal realm (a mistake because AZ was SUPPORTING the enforcement of federal law, not undercutting it) ; illegals caught domestically should be deported instantly-- after reasonable changes in the law regarding those brought here young and who grew up here. No path to citizenship, but yes a path to green card or something like it.
c) Change immigration criteria. I'm hoping the collective here, GM in particular, can help us look up what US policies were regarding the entry of communists and those from communist countries during the Cold War. Perhaps there are some useful analogies and correlations there , , , There are populations more likely to contain IF and immigration from them and visas granted to its citizens should be curtailed.
As noted in my previous posts, we are headed down a path to disaster. Yes IF is an enemy, but who do we hear putting forward a plausible strategy? Certainly not Obama! But that said, it must also be said, are those advocating "boots on the ground" really putting forward something that will work? That is not clear to me. Indeed it is not clear to me that it is clear to them what they have in mind. Certainly NO ONE is putting forward anything about Iran's nukes that sounds plausible to me!!!
In the mood in which I find myself as I write this post and my suggested strategy not likely to be put in effect while it can be, Ron Paul seems closest in this moment to what I am thinking/feeling. He seems to be pivoting towards something around which the American people will be able to rally whereas both Obama and the generals are not.
-
From memory, my wife had to declare she wasn't a member of the communist party on her immigration paperwork some years back. I'll get the specifics when I get back in a week or so.
Kind of ironic, given our current president.
-
I'm thinking there may be a conceptual model there of use to us.
-
We handle a nearly unsolvable situation like the Israeli's who unfortunately have been doing so for decades. That is dealing with a very determined enemy that appears to never want to conciliate.
We deal strongly and when necessary as decisively as we can. Boots on the ground and damage them as much as possible. Leave a few carriers nearby for a redu when needed. All the while gaining and updating intelligence doing our best to keep other countries involved and make it clear that we will defend our citizens and our country even though it means there WILL be collateral damage. Yes some innocent will die or be hurt but make it clear we will do our best to avoid but that our safety comes first.
There are millions of radicals who wish us dead, convert, or scamper off into the sunset. This IS not a police problem. This is a war.
-
This article comes highly recommended to me by someone who was well outside the wire, working with Iraqi interpreters, during lively times. I would quibble with some aspects of his description of the Bush strategy and of what Bush handed over to Obama, but on the whole I think this piece rather deep.
Vainly I note that most of its recommendations parallel mine from August and last month.
https://medium.com/@blake_hall/how-to-defeat-the-islamic-state-de18b0a18354
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390203/ruins-middle-east-victor-davis-hanson
-
Share
Super Chaos?
Global Affairs
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - 03:02 Print Text Size
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
The words anarchy and chaos are everywhere in the news. Iraq has collapsed. Syria collapsed some time ago, as did Libya and Yemen -- even as Yemen now threatens to enter deeper depths of implosion with al-Houthi insurgents having entered and virtually surrounded the capital of Sanaa. Civil war in Lebanon periodically threatens to reignite. Egypt has required a rebirth of authoritarianism to keep order there. Afghanistan and Pakistan are never far from the abyss. Ukraine is a weak state threatened with further Russian military aggression. A wall of disease has been erected in West Africa in states that collapsed into anarchy in the late 1990s and have been limping along ever since. Nigeria faces an Islamic insurgency that is, in turn, indicative of regional tensions between Muslims in the north of the country and Christians in the south. South Sudan, midwifed into existence by Western elites, has been in a circumstance of tribal war. The Central African Republic, beset by religious violence that has killed thousands, can in no sense be called a functioning state. The same can be said of Somalia, though the worst of the threat posed by Islamic extremists there may be past. New shortages of rationed food items in Venezuela may mean more upheaval there. And there are other places around the globe -- called states in the polite language of diplomats and development experts -- that travelers' accounts away from the capital cities reveal are no such thing.
I worried aloud about such a world in a lengthy 1994 essay in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy." The core of my argument was that with European empires gone, not every place in the world will necessarily have the capability to maintain functioning institutions in far-flung countrysides, and that absolute rises in population, ethnic and sectarian divides, and especially environmental degradation (i.e., water shortages) will only make such places harder to govern. My argument only seemed hopeless if you believed in the first place that elites could engineer reality from above. Of course elites can affect destiny at pivotal moments, but the actual character of large geographical swathes of the earth will only be determined by the masses living there.
But what if such chaos as we have seen in small- and some medium-sized states over time happens in larger states? What if, for example, the two dominant territorial forces on the Eurasian mainland, Russia and China, prove deeper into the 21st century to be ungovernable by centralized means? I am not predicting this. I personally do not think this will happen. But I believe it is a worthwhile thought experiment to conduct and entertain. For even the partial unraveling of Russia or China would have dramatic geopolitical effects far beyond their borders. Europe, after all, has throughout its history had its fate substantially determined by eruptions from the east -- in Russia. Southeast Asia, the Korean Peninsula and even the island nation of Japan have often had their fates substantially determined by changes in China. If we do not think the unthinkable, therefore, we are being irresponsible.
The fear of chaos has always been central to Russian history. Russia's landmass encompasses half the longitudes of the earth, with the result that central control must be oppressive merely to be effective. Adding to this sense of oppression is the perennial fear of invasion. Indeed, Russia is a land power with few natural borders in any direction. Oppressive, autocratic regimes have a tendency to foster weak institutions, since rule in such circumstances is personal rather than bureaucratic. Of course, the stories of Russia's impenetrable and inefficient bureaucracy are legion, but this reality has only caused its rulers -- czars and commissars both -- to be even more oppressive in their attempts to overcome it. To wit, the way in which President Vladimir Putin rules Russia is merely a culmination of how Russia has been ruled for more than a millennium. Putin rules in Politburo style, with a somewhat opaque circle of advisers who control all the major levers of power, military and civilian. Natural resource revenues, especially those of oil and natural gas, become tools of central authority in this case.
Russia is not a world of stable, impersonal and rules-based institutions but a world of rank intimidation and of whom you know. If this is the case -- if Putin has created a rule by a camarilla, which by its mere existence weakens institutional checks and balances -- what will happen to Russia after he leaves or is forced from office? Voices in the Western media wax hopeful that Putin can be toppled if he miscalculates on his military intervention in Ukraine. But were that to occur, it is more likely that Russia itself could weaken or fall into chaos, or that an even more brutal dictator would emerge to forestall such chaos. And were there to be a crisis in central authority in Moscow, expect far-flung regions such as Siberia and the Russian Far East to gain more autonomy, formally or informally. In other words, the partial breakup of Russia may be more likely than the emergence of Western democracy in Russia. The years of former President Boris Yeltsin's incompetent rule in the 1990s should be a warning of what to expect from Russian democracy.
The fear of chaos has often been prevalent throughout history in China. For thousands of years, one Chinese dynasty has followed another. But not every dynasty has been able to control all or most of Chinese territory, and between the fall of one dynasty and the rise of another there has periodically been chaos. The Chinese Communist Party is just the latest Chinese dynasty, which itself emerged following a long period of war and chaos. Now this latest dynasty faces a tumultuous economic transition from an Industrial Age, smokestack economy driven by low wages and a massive volume of exports to a postindustrial, cleaner and high-tech economy featuring higher wages and a somewhat lower volume of exports. Chinese President Xi Jinping is using an anti-corruption campaign as a sort of great purge to re-centralize the Party for these economic rigors ahead. It is highly unclear whether he can succeed. Meanwhile, democratic tendencies stir, as we have seen in Hong Kong.
If Xi only partially succeeds, let alone fails, there is the possibility of sustained ethnic unrest at increasing levels among the Muslim Turkic Uighurs in western China and the Tibetans in southwestern China. So do not necessarily expect China to be as stable over the next 30 years as it has been for the last 30.
In sum, just because autocracy has failed does not mean that democracy can work. And just because the tumultuous, dramatic weakening of central control in big states has not happened yet does not mean it is implausible.
Read more: Super Chaos? | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
-
Second post
Responding to a Chronic Terrorist Threat
Security Weekly
Thursday, October 9, 2014 - 03:00 Print Text Size
By Scott Stewart
Last Thursday I had the opportunity to speak at a Risk Management Society meeting in Cleveland, Ohio. During my presentation, I shared some of the points I made in last week's Security Weekly -- namely, that the jihadist movement, which includes groups such as the Islamic State and al Qaeda, is resilient and can recover from losses if allowed to. There is no military solution to the jihadist movement: It is an ideological problem and must be addressed on the ideological battlefield, and thus jihadists are a persistent threat.
In response to these points, an audience member asked me if I thought the United States was wasting its time and treasure in Iraq and Syria (and elsewhere) by going after jihadist groups. After answering the question in person, I decided it would make a good follow-on topic for this week's Security Weekly.
Third-Tier Priority
First, it is important to understand that, historically, the success al Qaeda has had in executing large attacks is not due to the professionalism of its operatives and attack planners. Indeed, as I have previously noted, in addition to foiled attacks such as Operation Bojinka and the Millennium Bomb Plot, al Qaeda operatives were also nearly detected because of sloppy tradecraft and operational security mistakes in successful attacks such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 East African embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole and even the 9/11 attacks.
These mistakes weren't trivial. In the 1993 World Trade Center case, one of the two operational commanders whom al Qaeda sent to New York to assist in the plot, Ahmed Ajaj, was caught entering John F. Kennedy International Airport with a Swedish passport that had its photo replaced in a terribly obvious and amateurish manner. Authorities also found a suitcase full of bombmaking manuals with Ajaj. His partner, Abdel Basit (widely known as Ramzi Yousef), called Ajaj while he was in jail looking to recover the bombmaking instructions. Before the East Africa embassy bombings, authorities had identified the al Qaeda cell responsible and detected their sloppy preoperational surveillance of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. The leader of the group, Wadih el-Hage, was asked to leave Kenya, and he returned to his home in Dallas, where the group continued with its plans for attack in Africa. The perpetrators of the USS Cole bombing attempted to attack the USS The Sullivans in January 2000, but their boat was overloaded with explosives and foundered. Finally, among other mistakes the 9/11 attackers committed, Mohamed Atta had been cited for driving without a valid license and was the subject of an arrest warrant for failing to appear in court on those charges.
Al Qaeda was able to succeed in these attacks because terrorism had become a third-tier priority for the U.S. government in the 1990s, and very few resources were dedicated to fighting terrorism. Even fewer resources were dedicated specifically to the jihadist threat. Thus, significant leads were not followed in each of these cases.
The success of U.S. counterterrorism programs in the post 9/11 era cannot be attributed to the creation of the bloated and redundant bureaucracies of the Department of Homeland Security or the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In fact, any achievements have come despite these organizations and the inefficiencies they have created. The real change is that terrorism is now identified as a significant threat, and countering the terrorist threat has been made the primary mission of every CIA station, FBI field office and NSA listening post on Earth. Indeed, all the tools of national counterterrorism power -- intelligence, law enforcement, foreign policy, economics and the military -- are now heavily focused on the counterterrorism mission.
Though the jihadist threat has persisted since 9/11, the intense pressure applied to jihadists by the combined force of myriad counterterrorism tools has made it difficult for the militants to project their terrorist power into the United States and Europe. These counterterrorism tools will not eradicate jihadism, but the threat jihadists pose regionally and transnationally can be contained and abated with their use. As I mentioned last week, jihadist operatives who possess advanced terrorist tradecraft are hard to replace, and arresting or killing such individuals hampers the ability of jihadist groups to project power regionally and transnationally. Ignoring the jihadist threat and allowing it to again become a third-tier issue will permit the jihadists to operate with relative impunity, as they did in the 1990s.
Ideological Change Is the Key
Another reason to maintain physical pressure on jihadist groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State is that pressure works to counter the groups' claims of divine blessing. That al Qaeda leaders claim to trust in God for protection and then hide as far underground as possible has caused many jihadists to criticize the group. Furthermore, though many jihadists treated the killing of Osama bin Laden as a joyous martyrdom, it caused other jihadists to question why the leader of al Qaeda was living in a comfortable home with his family while others were fighting on the front lines in his name.
When the Islamic State made impressive gains in Iraq and Syria in June, it boasted that it was being blessed by God, was therefore invincible and was going to continue until it conquered the world. It is quite common to hear such statements in Islamic State propaganda, including the following comments made in a video after the massacre of a group of Syrian soldiers who were taken captive after the siege of the Syrian 17th Division base near Raqqa on July 26: "We are your brothers, the soldiers of the Islamic State. God has favored us with His grace and victory by conquering the 17th Division -- a victory and favor through God. We seek refuge in God from our might and power. We seek refuge in God from our weapons and our readiness."
Such claims, when backed by dramatic battlefield successes, can have a discernible impact on many radical Muslims, who begin to wonder if the Islamic State is really becoming as inexorable as it claims to be. This illusion of divine support and invincibility has greatly assisted the group in its efforts to recruit local and foreign fighters, to raise funds and to garner support from regional allies.
Conversely, the blunting of the group's offensive on the battlefield has tempered the Islamic State's boasting. Though reports that U.S. and coalition aircraft missed key targets such as the Islamic State headquarters may reflect that the United States was a bit behind the intelligence curve, they also demonstrate that the Islamic State was abandoning the facilities, fearful of airstrikes. The sight of Islamic State fighters reacting fearfully to coalition aircraft will help slow recruitment efforts and should cause already skeptical jihadists to think twice before joining the group or swearing allegiance to it.
Doubts stemming from battlefield losses about whether God is blessing the Islamic State should also bolster efforts against the group on an ideological front. For example, on Sept. 19, a group of 126 Islamic scholars from across the globe published an open letter to the Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The scholars used the letter to address what they consider to be 24 points of error in the theology espoused by the Islamic State. These errors encompass a number of issues, including the nature of the caliphate; the authority to declare jihad; the practice of takfir, or proclaiming another Muslim to be a nonbeliever; the killing of innocents; the mutilation of corpses; and the taking of slaves.
The letter ends with a plea for al-Baghdadi and his followers: "Reconsider all your actions; desist from them; repent from them; cease harming others and return to the religion of mercy." It is unlikely that many of the hardcore jihadists will do as requested, but as these theological arguments are circulated and discussed, they will help undercut the ideological base of the jihadists and make it harder for them to convince impressionable people to join their cause. The effects of these theological critiques will not just be confined to the Islamic State; they will apply equally to al Qaeda and other groups that hold similar doctrines and commit similar acts.
Moreover, mainstream Muslim theologians have not been the only ones critical of the group. Jihadist ideologues such as Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada have also been critical of the Islamic State's activities and pronouncements.
Fighting the ideological war will undoubtedly be a long process. In the interim, the United States and its allies will have to continue applying pressure to groups such as the Islamic State and al Qaeda in an effort to contain them and limit the chronic threat they pose.
Read more: Responding to a Chronic Terrorist Threat | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
-
The Plantagenet Effect
Global Affairs
Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - 03:03 Print Text Size
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
Every school child should know about the Magna Carta, a document forced upon King John by his feudal barons in 1215 to limit the king's power. But the full majesty of how the march toward constitutional government began in England deep in the Middle Ages is conveyed by Dan Jones, a Cambridge-educated historian, in The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England, published in 2012. (Jones continues the saga in the recently published The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors.) The story of how British democracy developed is an exceedingly slow and cumbersome one. The first meeting of parliament did not happen until 1264, nearly a half-century after the signing of the Magna Carta. And women's suffrage was not instituted until 1918, more than 700 years after the Magna Carta. In short, what we in the West define as a healthy democracy took England the better part of a millennium to achieve. And in reading both of Jones' books, what screams out loud and clear is the political wealth, cultural density and utter formidability of the English tradition achieved as much in war as in peace -- without which the magnificent debates and rhetoric that are on display in parliament in London today would simply not exist.
A functioning democracy is not a product that can be easily exported, in other words, but an expression of culture and historical development that must be constantly nursed and maintained. Britain's democracy did not come from civil society programs taught by human rights workers; it was the offshoot of bloody dynastic politics and uprisings in the medieval and early modern eras.
The United States also has a democracy that is the envy of the world. But as the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington notes, that is because America was born with "political institutions and practices imported from seventeenth-century England." That, too, in one way or another, has been the case with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the other countries of the Anglosphere that also, not coincidentally, have enviable democracies. To say that democracy and the Anglo-Saxon tradition are not inherently related is to deny the record of history; it is also to say that culture, merely because it cannot be quantified and otherwise measured on an academic's chart, does not matter.
Germany and Japan also have well-functioning and stable democracies. But that is only because they were completely destroyed by the United States and Britain in World War II and had their political systems rebuilt and developed from scratch by American occupation forces who then stayed on for many years.
Europe -- from Portugal to Poland and from Norway to Greece -- has many stable democracies that work, if not always as well over the decades as those in the Anglosphere. But these countries are generally heir to what we call Western civilization and bourgeoisie traditions in various forms -- traditions interrupted in cases, rather than erased from memory, by World War II and the Cold War.
India has had a more or less stable, functioning democracy for almost two-thirds of a century. But would that have been the case without British rule under the East India Company and the Raj from the late 18th century to the mid-20th? Of course, British dominance was often cruel and racist. But it also united India through a railway system and provided the building blocks of stable government through its civil service and parliamentary tradition. To say that the success of India's democracy has indigenous causes is reasonable; to say that it has had nothing at all to do with the British tradition is not.
Then there are South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore -- successful and stable democracies all. Singapore's system, as its founder Lee Kuan Yew writes in his memoirs, is inseparable from the British tradition. All three countries are the beneficiaries of Confucian ethical practices that reach back to antiquity. And all three were initially stabilized as functioning modern states by enlightened authoritarians: Lee, Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan and Park Chung Hee in South Korea. Again, democracy did not naturally spring from any of them in full flower but was the product of decades and centuries of political, cultural and social development and conditions.
Elsewhere the situation is murky, though not impossible. The countries of South America have only experienced democracy and the rule of law in recent years and decades, and this discounts the virtual one-man rule that is the case in places such as Ecuador and Bolivia. Venezuela is in semi-chaos. Nobody can argue that Argentina is even remotely well governed. In a number of other Latin American countries, democracy functions on paper while the system is rife with corruption and the rule of law is weak.
Africa often has democracies in name only, since strongmen rule behind a facade of legality. Many places in Africa have had elections but are nowhere near stable. Outside the capital cities there is often nothing resembling civil society or any governing structure whatsoever. Holding elections is easy; building institutions is hard and can take decades or longer.
The Middle East is a disaster zone, save for Israel, Turkey and, to a limited degree, Iran. Morocco, Oman and some of the Gulf countries are stable and civil, but in almost all cases that is because of enlightened authoritarianism, not democracy. Tunisia is democratic but barely stable. Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya are in varying states of war and chaos. Reading the news about these places and then switching to the pages of Jones' books about medieval English dynastic struggles, it is sometimes hard to see how large parts of the early-21st century Middle East are more politically advanced than Plantagenet and Tudor England. The notion that countries such as Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan can accomplish in short order what it took England many hundreds of years to do seems like policy malpractice.
Yes, it might be that Western liberal democracy is the best system for governance that has so far appeared in history; it is quite another thing to say that many places in the world are up to the task at this moment. Or rather, perhaps the better way to phrase it is to say that Western liberal democracy will have to adapt to cultural and historical realities on the ground in areas such as the Middle East. Of course, many places might be defined on paper as democracies, but it is the power relationships behind the scenes that provide the truth about how countries are actually run.
Democracy cannot simply be exported (except in extreme cases such as in the American occupations of Germany and Japan) any more than theoretical reasoning can replace hundreds of years of cultural and historical tradition. In that spirit, books such as The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses provide deeper, more arresting insights into the modern condition than many of the policy papers emanating from Western capitals.
Read more: The Plantagenet Effect | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
-
Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States
Parameters ^ | 1998 | Ralph Peters
Posted on Thursday, 4 September 2003 10:29:11 PM by Voice in your head
© 1998 Ralph Peters
When you leave the classroom or office and go into the world, you see at first its richness and confusions, the variety and tumult. Then, if you keep moving and do not quit looking, commonalties begin to emerge. National success is eccentric. But national failure is programmed and predictable. Spotting the future losers among the world's states becomes so easy it loses its entertainment value.
In this world of multiple and simultaneous revolutions--in technology, information, social organization, biology, economics, and convenience--the rules of international competition have changed. There is a global marketplace and, increasingly, a global economy. While there is no global culture yet, American popular culture is increasingly available and wickedly appealing--and there are no international competitors in the field, only struggling local systems. Where the United States does not make the rules of international play, it shapes them by its absence.
The invisible hand of the market has become an informal but uncompromising lawgiver. Globalization demands conformity to the practices of the global leaders, especially to those of the United States. If you do not conform--or innovate--you lose. If you try to quit the game, you lose even more profoundly. The rules of international competition, whether in the economic, cultural, or conventional military fields, grow ever more homogeneous. No government can afford practices that retard development. Yet such practices are often so deeply embedded in tradition, custom, and belief that the state cannot jettison them. That which provides the greatest psychological comfort to members of foreign cultures is often that which renders them noncompetitive against America's explosive creativity--our self-reinforcing dynamism fostered by law, efficiency, openness, flexibility, market discipline, and social mobility.
Traditional indicators of noncompetitive performance still apply: corruption (the most seductive activity humans can consummate while clothed); the absence of sound, equitably enforced laws; civil strife; or government attempts to overmanage a national economy. As change has internationalized and accelerated, however, new predictive tools have emerged. They are as simple as they are fundamental, and they are rooted in culture. The greater the degree to which a state--or an entire civilization--succumbs to these "seven deadly sins" of collective behavior, the more likely that entity is to fail to progress or even to maintain its position in the struggle for a share of the world's wealth and power. Whether analyzing military capabilities, cultural viability, or economic potential, these seven factors offer a quick study of the likely performance of a state, region, or population group in the coming century.
The Seven Factors
These key "failure factors" are:
Restrictions on the free flow of information.
The subjugation of women.
Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
Domination by a restrictive religion.
A low valuation of education.
Low prestige assigned to work.
Zero-Sum Knowledge
The wonderfully misunderstood Clausewitzian trinity, expressed crudely as state-people-military, is being replaced by a powerful new trinity: the relationship between the state, the people, and information. In the latter phases of the industrial age, the free flow of quality information already had become essential to the success of industries and military establishments. If the internationalizing media toppled the Soviet empire, it was because that empire's battle against information-sharing had hollowed out its economy and lost the confidence of its people. When a sudden flood of information strikes a society or culture suffering an information deficit, the result is swift destabilization. This is now a global phenomenon.
Today's "flat-worlders" are those who believe that information can be controlled. Historically, information always equaled power. Rulers and civilizations viewed knowledge as a commodity to be guarded, a thing finite in its dimensions and lost when shared. Religious institutions viewed knowledge as inflammatory and damnable, a thing to be handled carefully and to advantage, the nuclear energy of yesteryear. The parallel to the world public's view of wealth is almost exact--an instinctive conviction that information is a thing to be gotten and hoarded, and that its possession by a foreign actor means it has been, by vague and devious means, robbed from oneself and one's kind. But just as wealth generates wealth, so knowledge begets knowledge. Without a dynamic and welcoming relationship with information as content and process, no society can compete in the post-industrial age.
Information-controlling governments and knowledge-denying religions cripple themselves and their subjects or adherents. If America's streets are not paved with gold, they are certainly littered with information. The availability of free, high-quality information, and a people's ability to discriminate between high- and low-quality data, are essential to economic development beyond the manufacturing level. Whether on our own soil or abroad, those segments of humanity that fear and reject knowledge of the world (and, often, of themselves) are condemned to failure, poverty, and bitterness.
The ability of most of America's work force to cope psychologically and practically with today's flood of data, and to cull quality data from the torrent, is remarkable--a national and systemic triumph. Even Canada and Britain cannot match it. Much of Japan's present stasis is attributable to that nation's struggle to make the transition from final-stage industrial power to information-age society. The more regulated flow of information with which Japan has long been comfortable is an impediment to post-modernism. While the Japanese nation ultimately possesses the synthetic capability to overcome this difficulty, its structural dilemmas are more informational and psychological than tangible--although the tangible certainly matters--and decades of educational reform and social restructuring will be necessary before Japan returns for another world-championship match.
In China, the situation regarding the state's attempt to control information and the population's inability to manage it is immeasurably worse. Until China undergoes a genuine cultural revolution that alters permanently and deeply the relationship among state, citizen, and information, that country will bog down at the industrial level. Its sheer size guarantees continued growth, but there will be a flattening in the coming decades and, decisively, China will have great difficulty transitioning from smokestack growth to intellectual innovation and service wealth.
China, along with the world's other defiant dictatorships, suffers under an oppressive class structure, built on and secured by an informational hierarchy. The great class struggle of the 21st century will be for access to data, and it will occur in totalitarian and religious-regime states. The internet may prove to be the most revolutionary tool since the movable-type printing press. History laughs at us all--the one economic analyst who would understand immediately what is happening in the world today would be a resurrected German "content provider" named Marx.
For countries and cultures that not only restrict but actively reject information that contradicts governmental or cultural verities, even a fully industrialized society remains an unattainable dream. Information is more essential to economic progress than an assured flow of oil. In fact, unearned, "found" wealth is socially and economically cancerous, impeding the development of healthy, enduring socioeconomic structures and values. If you want to guarantee an underdeveloped country's continued inability to perform competitively, grant it rich natural resources. The sink-or-swim poverty of northwestern Europe and Japan may have been their greatest natural advantage during their developmental phases. As the Shah learned and Saudi Arabia is proving, you can buy only the products, not the productiveness, of another civilization.
States that censor information will fail to compete economically, culturally, and militarily in the long run. The longer the censorship endures, the longer the required recovery time. Even after the strictures have been lifted, information-deprived societies must play an almost-hopeless game of catch-up. In Russia, it will take at least a generation of genuine informational freedom to facilitate an economic takeoff that is not founded hollowly upon resource extraction, middleman profits, and the looting of industrial ruins. Unique China will need even longer to make the next great leap forward from industrial to informational economy--we have at least half a century's advantage. Broad portions of the planet may never make it. We will not need a military to deal with foreign success, but to respond to foreign failure--which will be the greatest source of violence in coming decades.
If you are looking for an easy war, fight an information-controlling state. If you are looking for a difficult investment, invest in an information-controlling state. If you are hunting a difficult conflict, enter the civil strife that arises after the collapse of an information-controlling state. If you are looking for a good investment, find an emerging or "redeemed" state unafraid of science, hard numbers, and education.
A Woman's Place
Vying with informational abilities as a key factor in the reinvigoration of the US economy has been the pervasive entry of American women into the educational process and the workplace. When the stock market soars, thank Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the suffragettes, not just their beneficiary, Alan Greenspan. After a century and a half of struggle by English and American women, the US economy now operates at a wartime level of human-resource commitment on a routine basis.
Despite eternally gloomy headlines, our country probably has the lowest wastage rate of human talent in the world. The United States is so chronically hungry for talent that we drain it from the rest of the planet at a crippling pace, and we have accepted that we cannot squander the genius of half our population. Even in Europe, "over-skilling," in which inherent and learned abilities wither in calcified workplaces, produces social peace at the cost of cultural and economic lethargy, security at the price of mediocrity. The occasional prime minister notwithstanding, it is far rarer to encounter a female executive, top professional, or general officer in that mythologized, "more equitable" Europe than in the United States. Life in America may not be fair, but neither is it stagnant. What we lose in security, we more than compensate for in opportunity.
While Europe sleepwalks toward a 35-hour work-week, we are moving toward the 35-hour day. The intense performance of our economy would be unattainable without the torrent of energy introduced by competitive female job candidates. American women revolutionized the workforce and the workplace. Future social and economic historians will probably judge that the entry of women into our workforce was the factor that broke the stranglehold of American trade unions and gave a new lease on life to those domestic industries able to adapt. American women were the Japanese cars of business labor relations: better, cheaper, dependable, and they defied the rules. Everybody had to work harder and smarter to survive, but the results have been a spectacular recovery of economic leadership and soaring national wealth.
Change that men long resisted and feared in our own country resulted not only in greater competition for jobs, but in the creation of more jobs, and not in the rupture of the economy, but in its assumption of imperial dimensions (in a quirk of fate, already privileged males are getting much richer, thanks to the effects of feminism's triumph on the stock market). Equality of opportunity is the most profitable game going, and American capitalism has realized the wisdom of becoming an evenhanded consumer of skills. Despite serious exclusions and malignant social problems, we are the most efficient society in history. When Europeans talk of the dignity of the working man, they increasingly mean the right of that man to sit at a desk doing nothing or to stand at an idling machine. There is a huge difference between just being employed and actually working.
The math isn't hard. Any country or culture that suppresses half its population, excluding them from economic contribution and wasting energy keeping them out of the school and workplace, is not going to perform competitively with us. The standard counterargument heard in failing states is that there are insufficient jobs for the male population, thus it is impossible to allow women to compete for the finite incomes available. The argument is archaic and wrong. When talent enters a work force, it creates jobs. Competition improves performance. In order to begin to compete with the American leviathan and the stronger of the economies of Europe and the Far East, less-developed countries must maximize their human potential. Instead, many willfully halve it.
The point isn't really the fear that women will steal jobs in Country X. Rather, it's a fundamental fear of women--or of a cultural caricature of women as incapable, stupid, and worrisomely sexual. If, when you get off the plane, you do not see men and women sitting together in the airport lounge, put your portfolio or treaty on the next flight home.
It is difficult for any human being to share power already possessed. Authority over their women is the only power many males will ever enjoy. From Greece to the Ganges, half the world is afraid of girls and gratified by their subjugation. It is a prescription for cultural mediocrity, economic failure--and inexpressible boredom. The value added by the training and utilization of our female capital is an American secret weapon.
Blaming Foreign Devils
The cult of victimhood, a plague on the least-successful elements in our own society, retards the development of entire continents. When individuals or cultures cannot accept responsibility for their own failures, they will repeat the behaviors that led to failure. Accepting responsibility for failure is difficult, and correspondingly rare. The cultures of North America, Northern Europe, Japan, and Korea (each in its own way) share an unusual talent for looking in the mirror and keeping their eyes open. Certainly, there is no lack of national vanity, prejudice, subterfuge, or bad behavior.
But in the clutch we are surprisingly good at saying, "We did it, so let's fix it." In the rest of the world, a plumbing breakdown implicates the CIA and a faltering currency means George Soros--the Hungarian-born American billionaire, fund manager, and philanthropist--has been sneaking around in the dark. Recent accusations of financial connivance made against Mr. Soros and then against the Jews collectively by Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir only demonstrated that Malaysia's ambitions had gotten ahead of its cultural capacity to support them. Even if foreign devils are to blame--and they mostly are not--whining and blustering does not help. It only makes you feel better for a little while, like drunkenness, and there are penalties the morning after.
The failure is greater where the avoidance of responsibility is greater. In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, oil money has masked cultural, social, technical, and structural failure for decades. While the military failure of the regional states has been obvious, consistent, and undeniable, the locals sense--even when they do not fully understand--their noncompetitive status in other spheres as well. It is hateful and disorienting to them. Only the twin blessings of Israel and the United States, upon whom Arabs and Persians can blame even their most egregious ineptitudes, enable a fly-specked pretense of cultural viability.
On the other hand, Latin America has made tremendous progress. Not long ago, the gringos were to blame each time the lights blinked. But with the rise of a better-educated elite and local experience of economic success, the leadership of Latin America's key states has largely stopped playing the blame game. Smaller states and drug-distorted economies still chase scapegoats, but of the major players only Mexico still indulges routinely in the transfer of all responsibility for its problems to Washington, D.C.
Family Values
After the exclusion of women from productive endeavors, the next-worst wastage of human potential occurs in societies where the extended family, clan, or tribe is the basic social unit. While family networks provide a safety net in troubled times, offering practical support and psychological protection, and may even build a house for you, they do not build the rule of law, or democracy, or legitimate corporations, or free markets. Where the family or clan prevails, you do not hire the best man (to say nothing of the best woman) for the job, you hire
-
Cousin Luis. You do not vote for the best man, you vote for Uncle Ali. And you do not consider cease-fire deals or shareholder interests to be matters of serious obligation.
Such cultures tend to be peasant-based or of peasant origin, with the attendant peasant's suspicion of the outsider and of authority. Oligarchies of landed families freeze the pattern in time. There is a preference for a dollar grabbed today over a thousand dollars accrued in the course of an extended business relationship. Blood-based societies operate under two sets of rules: one, generally honest, for the relative; and another, ruthless and amoral, for deals involving the outsider. The receipt of money now is more important than building a long-term relationship. Such societies fight well as tribes, but terribly as nations.
At its most successful, this is the system of the Chinese diaspora, but that is a unique case. The Darwinian selection that led to the establishment and perpetuation of the great Chinese merchant families (and village networks), coupled with the steely power of southern China's culture, has made this example an exception to many rules. More typical examples of the Vetternwirtschaft system are Iranian businesses, Nigerian criminal organizations, Mexican political and drug cartels, and some American trade unions.
Where blood ties rule, you cannot trust the contract, let alone the handshake. Nor will you see the delegation of authority so necessary to compete in the modern military or economic spheres. Information and wealth are assessed from a zero-sum worldview. Corruption flourishes. Blood ties produce notable family successes, but they do not produce competitive societies.
That Old-Time Religion
Religion feeds a fundamental human appetite for meaning and security, and it can lead to powerful social unity and psychological assurance that trumps science. Untempered, it leads to xenophobia, backwardness, savagery, and economic failure. The more intense a religion is, the more powerful are its autarchic tendencies. But it is impossible to withdraw from today's world.
Limiting the discussion to the sphere of competitiveness, there appear to be two models of socio-religious integration that allow sufficient informational and social dynamism for successful performance. First, religious homogeneity can work, if, as in the case of Japan, religion is sufficiently subdued and malleable to accommodate applied science. The other model--that of the United States--is of religious coexistence, opening the door for science as an "alternative religion." Americans have, in fact, such wonderful plasticity of mind that generally even the most vividly religious can disassociate antibiotic drugs from the study of Darwin and the use of birth-control pills from the strict codes of their churches. All religions breed some amount of schism between theology and social practice, but the American experience is a marvel of mental agility and human innovation.
The more dogmatic and exclusive the religion, the less it is able to deal with the information age, in which multiple "truths" may exist simultaneously, and in which all that cannot be proven empirically is inherently under assault. We live in a time of immense psychological dislocation--when man craves spiritual certainty even more than usual. Yet our age is also one in which the sheltering dogma cripples individuals and states alike. The price of competitiveness is the courage to be uncertain--not an absence of belief, but a synthetic capability that can at once accommodate belief and its contradictions. Again, the United States possesses more than its share of this capability, while other societies are encumbered by single dominant religions as hard, unbending--and ultimately brittle--as iron. Religious toleration also means the toleration of scientific research, informational openness, and societal innovation. "One-true-path" societies and states are on a path that leads only downward.
For those squeamish about judging the religion of another, there is a shortcut that renders the same answer on competitiveness: examine the state's universities.
Learning Power and Earning Power
The quality of a state's universities obviously reflects local wealth, but, even more important, the effectiveness of higher education in a society describes its attitudes toward knowledge, inquiry-versus-dogma, and the determination of social standing. In societies imprisoned by dogmatic religions, or in which a caste or class system predetermines social and economic outcomes, higher education (and secular education in general) often has low prestige and poor content. Conversely, in socially mobile, innovative societies, university degrees from quality schools appear indispensable to the ambitious, the status-conscious, and the genuinely inquisitive alike.
There are many individual and some cultural exceptions, but they mostly prove the rule. Many Indians value a university education highly--not as social confirmation, but as a means of escaping a preassigned social position. The privileged of the Arabian Peninsula, on the other hand, regard an American university degree (even from a booby-prize institution) as an essential piece of jewelry, not unlike a Rolex watch. In all cultures, there are individuals hungry for self-improvement and, sometimes, for knowledge. But, statistically, we can know a society, and judge its potential, by its commitment to education, with universities as the bellwether. Not all states can afford their own Stanford or Harvard but, within their restraints, their attempts to educate their populations still tell us a great deal about national priorities and potential. Commitment and content cannot fully substitute for a wealth of facilities, but they go a long way, whether we speak of individuals or continents.
Any society that starves education is a loser. Cultures that do not see inherent value in education are losers. This is even true for some of our own sub-cultures--groups for whom education has little appeal as means or end--and it is true for parts of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arab world. A culture that cannot produce a single world-class university is not going to conquer the world in any sphere.
America's universities are triumphant. Once beyond the silly debates (or monologues) in the Liberal Arts faculties, our knowledge industry has no precedent or peer. Even Europe's most famous universities, on the Rhine or the Seine, are rotting and overcrowded. We attract the best faculty, the best researchers, and the best student minds from the entire world. This is not a trend subject to reversal; rather, it is self-reinforcing.
Yet there is even more to American success in education than four good years at the "College of Musical Knowledge." The United States is also far ahead of other states in the flexibility and utility of its educational system. Even in Europe, the student's fate is determined early--and woe to the late bloomer. You choose your course, or have it chosen for you, and you are more or less stuck with it for life. In Germany, long famous for its commitment to education, the individual who gains a basic degree in one subject and then jumps to another field for graduate work is marked as a Versager, a failure. In the US system, there are second, third, and fourth chances. This flexible approach to building and rebuilding our human capital is a tremendous economic asset, and it is compounded by the trend toward continuing education in mid-life and for seniors.
A geriatric revolution is occurring under our noses, with older Americans "younger" than before in terms of capabilities, interests, and attitudes--and much more apt to continue contributing to the common good. We are headed for a world in the early decades of the next century when many Americans may hit their peak earning years not in their fifties, but in their sixties--then seventies. This not only provides sophisticated talent to the labor pool, but maintains the worker as an asset to, rather than a drain upon, our nation's economy. For all the fuss about the future of social security, we may see a profound attitudinal change in the next generation, when vigorous, high-earning seniors come to regard retirement at today's age as an admission of failure or weakness, or just as a bore. At the same time, more 20-year-old foreigners than ever will have no jobs at all.
Investments in our educational system are "three-fers": they are simultaneously investments in our economic, social, and military systems. Education is our first line of defense. The rest of the world can be divided into two kinds of societies, states, and cultures--those that struggle and sacrifice to educate their members, and those that do not. Guess who is going to do better in the hyper-competitive 21st century?
Workers of the World, Take a Nap!
Related to, but not quite identical with, national and cultural attitudes toward education is the attitude toward work. Now, everyone has bad days at the office, factory, training area, or virtual workplace, and the old line, "It's not supposed to be fun--that's why they call it `work,'" enjoys universal validity. Yet there are profoundly different attitudes toward work on this planet. While most human beings must work to survive, there are those who view work as a necessary evil and dream of its avoidance, and then there are societies in which people hit the lottery and go back to their jobs as telephone linemen. In many subsets of Latin American culture, for example, there are two reasons to work: first to survive, then to grow so wealthy that work is no longer necessary. It is a culture in which the possession of wealth is not conceptually related to a responsibility to work. It is the get-rich-quick, big-bucks-from-Heaven dream of some of our own citizens. The goal is not achievement but possession, not accomplishment but the power of leisure.
Consider any culture's heroes. Generally, the more macho or male-centric the culture, the less emphasis there will be on steady work and achievement, whether craftsmanship or Nobel Prize-winning research, and the more emphasis there will be on wealth and power as the sole desirable end (apart, perhaps, from the occasional religious vocation). As national heroes, it's hard to beat Bill Gates. But even a sports star is better than a major narco-trafficker.
Generally, societies that do not find work in and of itself "pleasing to God and requisite to Man," tend to be highly corrupt (low-education and dogmatic-religion societies also are statistically prone to corruption, and, if all three factors are in play, you may not want to invest in the local stock exchange or tie your foreign policy to successful democratization). The goal becomes the attainment of wealth by any means.
On the other hand, workaholic cultures, such as that of North America north of the Rio Grande, or Japan, South Korea, and some other East Asian states, can often compensate for deficits in other spheres, such as a lack of natural resources or a geographical disadvantage. If a man or woman has difficulty imagining a fulfilling life without work, he or she probably belongs to a successful culture. Work has to be seen as a personal and public responsibility, as good in and of itself, as spiritually necessary to man. Otherwise, the society becomes an "evader" society. Russia is strong, if flagging, on education. But the general attitude toward work undercuts education. When the characters in Chekhov's "Three Sisters" blather about the need to find redemption through work, the prescription is dead on, but their lives and their society have gone so far off the rails that the effect is one of satire. States and cultures "win" just by getting up earlier and putting in eight honest hours and a little overtime.
If you are seeking a worthy ally or business opportunity, go to a mid-level government office in Country X an hour before the local lunchtime. If everybody is busy with legitimate work, you've hit a winner. If there are many idle hands, get out.
Using this Knowledge to Our Advantage
Faced with the complex reality of geopolitics and markets, we must often go to Country X, Y, or Z against our better judgment. Despite failing in all seven categories, Country X may have a strategic location that makes it impossible to ignore. Country Y may have an internal market and regional importance so significant that it would be foolish not to engage it, despite the risks. Country Z may have resources that make a great deal of misery on our part worth the sufferance. Yet even in such situations, it helps to know what you are getting into. Some countries would devour investments as surely as they would soldiers. Others just demand savvy and caution on our part. Yet another might require a local ally or partner to whom we can make ourselves indispensable. Whether engaging militarily or doing business in another country, it gives us a tremendous advantage if we can identify four things: their image of us, their actual situation, their needs, and the needs they perceive themselves as having (the four never connect seamlessly).
There are parallel dangers for military men and businessmen in taking too narrow a view of the challenges posed by foreign states. An exclusive focus on either raw military power or potential markets tells us little about how people behave, believe, learn, work, fight, or buy. In fact, the parallels between military and business interventions grow ever greater, especially since these form two of the legs of our new national strategic triad, along with the export of our culture (diplomacy is a minor and shrinking factor, its contours defined ever more rigorously by economics).
The seven factors discussed above offer a pattern for an initial assessment of the future potential of states that interest us. Obviously, the more factors present in a given country, the worse off it will be--and these factors rarely appear in isolation. Normally, a society that oppresses women will do it under the aegis of a restrictive dominant religion that will also insist on the censorship of information. Societies lacking a strong work ethic rarely value education.
In the Middle East, it is possible to identify states where all seven negatives apply; in Africa, many countries score between four and seven. Countries that formerly suffered communist dictatorships vary enormously, from Poland and the Czech Republic, with only a few rough edges, to Turkmenistan, which scores six out of seven. Latin America has always been more various than Norteamericanos realized, from feudal Mexico to dynamic, disciplined Chile.
Ultimately, our businesses have it easier than our military in one crucial respect: business losses are counted in dollars, not lives. But the same cultural factors that will shape future state failure and spawn violent conflicts make it difficult to do business successfully and legally. We even suffer under similar "rules of engagement," whether those placed on the military to dictate when a soldier may shoot or the legal restraints under which US businesses must operate, imposing a significant disadvantage vis-à-vis foreign competitors.
As a final note, the biggest pitfall in international interactions is usually mutual misunderstanding. We do not understand them, but they do not understand us either--although, thanks to the Americanization of world media, they imagine they do. From mega-deals that collapsed because of Russian rapacity to Saddam's conviction that the United States would not fight, foreign counterparts, rivals, and opponents have whoppingly skewed perceptions of American behaviors. In the end, military operations and business partnerships are like dating--the advantage goes to the player who sees with the most clarity.
We are heading into a turbulent, often violent new century. It will be a time of great dangers and great opportunities. Some states will continue to triumph, others will shift their relative positions, many will fail. The future will never be fully predictable, but globalization means the imposition of uniform rules by the most powerful actors. They are fundamentally economic rules. For the first time, the world is converging toward a homogeneous system, if not toward homogenous benefits from that system. The potential of states is more predictable within known parameters than ever before.
We have seen the future, and it looks like us.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters (USA, Ret.) was assigned, prior to his recent retirement, to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he was responsible for future warfare. Career and personal travels have taken him to 45 countries. He has published and lectured widely on military and international concerns. His seventh novel, The Devil's Garden, was recently released by Avon Books. This is his tenth article for Parameters.
-
Principle, Rigor and Execution Matter in U.S. Foreign Policy
Geopolitical Weekly
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Stratfor
By George Friedman
U.S. President Barack Obama has come under intense criticism for his foreign policy, along with many other things. This is not unprecedented. Former President George W. Bush was similarly attacked. Stratfor has always maintained that the behavior of nations has much to do with the impersonal forces driving it, and little to do with the leaders who are currently passing through office. To what extent should American presidents be held accountable for events in the world, and what should they be held accountable for?
Expectations and Reality
I have always been amazed when presidents take credit for creating jobs or are blamed for high interest rates. Under our Constitution, and in practice, presidents have precious little influence on either. They cannot act without Congress or the Federal Reserve concurring, and both are outside presidential control. Nor can presidents overcome the realities of the market. They are prisoners of institutional constraints and the realities of the world.
Nevertheless, we endow presidents with magical powers and impose extraordinary expectations. The president creates jobs, manages Ebola and solves the problems of the world -- or so he should. This particular president came into office with preposterous expectations from his supporters that he could not possibly fulfill. The normal campaign promises of a normal politician were taken to be prophecy. This told us more about his supporters than about him. Similarly, his enemies, at the extremes, have painted him as the devil incarnate, destroying the Republic for fiendish reasons.
He is neither savior nor demon. He is a politician. As a politician, he governs not by what he wants, nor by what he promised in the election. He governs by the reality he was handed by history and his predecessor. Obama came into office with a financial crisis well underway, along with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. His followers might have thought that he would take a magic wand and make them go away, and his enemies might think that he would use them to destroy the country, but in point of fact he did pretty much what Bush had been doing: He hung on for dear life and guessed at the right course.
Bush came into office thinking of economic reforms and a foreign policy that would get away from nation-building. The last thing he expected was that he would invade Afghanistan during his first year in office. But it really wasn't up to him. His predecessor, Bill Clinton, and al Qaeda set his agenda. Had Clinton been more aggressive against al Qaeda, Bush might have had a different presidency. But al Qaeda did not seem to need that level of effort, and Clinton came into office as heir to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so on back to George Washington.
Presidents are constrained by the reality they find themselves in and the limits that institutions place on them. Foreign policy is what a president wishes would happen; foreign affairs are what actually happen. The United States is enormously powerful. It is not omnipotent. There are not only limits to that power, but unexpected and undesirable consequences of its use. I have in mind the idea that had the United States not purged the Baathists in Iraq, the Sunnis might not have risen. That is possible. But had the Baathists, the party of the hated Saddam Hussein, remained in power, the sense of betrayal felt by Shiites and Kurds at the sight of the United States now supporting Baathists might have led to a greater explosion. The constraints in Iraq were such that having invaded, there was no choice that did not have a likely repercussion.
Governing a nation of more than 300 million people in a world filled with nations, the U.S. president can preside, but he hardly rules. He is confronted with enormous pressure from all directions. He knows only a fraction of the things he needs to know in the maelstrom he has entered, and in most cases he has no idea that something is happening. When he knows something is happening, he doesn't always have the power to do anything, and when he has the power to do something, he can never be sure of the consequences. Everyone not holding the office is certain that he or she would never make a mistake. Obama was certainly clear on that point, and his successor will be as well.
Obama's Goals
All that said, let us consider what Obama is trying to achieve in the current circumstances. It is now 2014, and the United States has been at war since 2001 -- nearly this entire century so far. It has not gone to war on the scale of 20th-century wars, but it has had multidivisional engagements, along with smaller operations in Africa and elsewhere.
For any nation, this is unsustainable, particularly when there is no clear end to the war. The enemy is not a conventional force that can be defeated by direct attack. It is a loose network embedded in the civilian population and difficult to distinguish. The enemy launches intermittent attacks designed to impose casualties on U.S. forces under the theory that in the long run the United States will find the cost greater than the benefit.
In addition to these wars, two other conflicts have emerged. One is in Ukraine, where a pro-Western government has formed in Kiev to the displeasure of Russia, which proceeded to work against Ukraine. In Iraq, a new Sunni force has emerged, the Islamic State, which is partly a traditional insurgency and partly a conventional army.
Under the strategy followed until the chaos that erupted after the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, the response to both would be to send U.S. forces to stabilize the situation. Since 1999 and Kosovo, the United States has been the primary actor in military interventions. More to the point, the United States was the first actor and used military force as its first option. Given the global American presence imposed by the breadth of U.S. power, it is difficult to decline combat when problems such as these arise. It is the obvious and, in a way, easiest solution. The problem is that it is frequently not a solution.
Obama has tried to create a different principle for U.S. operations. First, the conflict must rise to the level that its outcome concerns American interests. Second, involvement must begin with non-military or limited military options. Third, the United States must operate with an alliance structure including local allies, capable of effective operation. The United States will provide aid and will provide limited military force (such as airstrikes) but will not bear the main burden. Finally, and only if the situation is of grave significance and can only be dealt with through direct and major U.S. military intervention, the United States will allow itself to become the main force.
It is a foreign policy both elegant and historically rooted. It is also incredibly complicated. First, what constitutes the national interest? There is a wide spread of opinion in the administration. Among some, intervention to prevent human rights violations is in the national interest. To others, only a direct threat to the United States is in the national interest.
Second, the tempo of intervention is difficult to calibrate. The United States is responding to an enemy, and it is the enemy's tempo of operations that determines the degree of response needed.
Third, many traditional allies, like Germany, lack the means or inclination to involve themselves in these affairs. Turkey, with far more interest in what happens in Syria and Iraq than the United States, is withholding intervention unless the United States is also involved and, in addition, agrees to the political outcome. As Dwight D. Eisenhower learned in World War II, an alliance is desirable because it spreads the burden. It is also nightmarish to maintain because all the allies are pursuing a range of ends outside the main mission.
Finally, it is extraordinarily easy to move past the first three stages into direct interventions. This ease comes from a lack of clarity as to what the national interest is, the enemy's tempo of operations seeming to grow faster than an alliance can be created, or an alliance's failure to gel.
Obama has reasonable principles of operation. It is a response to the realities of the world. There are far more conflicts than the United States has interests. Intervention on any level requires timing. Other nations have greater interests in their future than the United States does. U.S military involvement must be the last step. The principle fits the strategic needs and constraints on the United States. Unfortunately, clear principles frequently meet a murky world, and the president finds himself needing to intervene without clarity.
Presidents' Limited Control
The president is not normally in control of the situation. The situation is in control of him. To the extent that presidents, or leaders of any sort, can gain control of a situation, it is not only in generating principles but also in rigorously defining the details of those principles, and applying them with technical precision, that enables some semblance of control.
President Richard Nixon had two major strategic visions: to enter into a relationship with China to control the Soviet Union, and to facilitate an alliance reversal by Egypt, from the Soviet Union to the United States. The first threatened the Soviet Union with a two-front war and limited Soviet options. The second destroyed a developing Mediterranean strategy that might have changed the balance of power.
Nixon's principle was to ally with nations regardless of ideology -- hence communist China and Nasserite Egypt. To do this, the national interest had to be rigorously defined so that these alliances would not seem meaningless. Second, the shift in relationships had to be carried out with meticulous care. The president does not have time for such care, nor are his talents normally suited for it, since his job is to lead rather than execute. Nixon had Henry Kissinger, who in my opinion and that of others was the lesser strategist, but a superb technician.
The switch in China's alignment became inevitable once fighting broke out with the Soviets. Egypt's break with the Soviets became inevitable when it became apparent to Anwar Sadat that the Soviets would underwrite a war but could not underwrite a peace. Only the United States could. These shifts had little to do with choices. Neither Mao Zedong nor Sadat really had much of a choice.
Where choice exists is in the tactics. Kissinger was in charge of implementing both shifts, and on that level it was in fact possible to delay, disrupt or provide an opening to Soviet counters. The level at which foreign policy turns into foreign affairs is not in the enunciation of the principles but in the rigorous definition of those principles and in their implementation. Nixon had Kissinger, and that was what Kissinger was brilliant at: turning principles into successful implementation.
The problem that Obama has, which has crippled his foreign policy, is that his principles have not been defined with enough rigor to provide definitive guidance in a crisis. When the crisis comes, that's when the debate starts. What exactly is the national interest, and how does it apply in this or that case? Even if he accomplishes that, he still lacks a figure with the subtlety, deviousness and frankly ruthlessness to put it into place. I would argue that the same problem haunted the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations, although their challenges were less daunting and therefore their weakness less visible.
There is a sphere in which history sweeps a president along. The most he can do is adjust to what must be, and in the end, this is the most important sphere. In another sphere -- the sphere of principles -- he can shape events or at least clarify decisions. But the most important level, the level on which even the sweep of history is managed, is the tactical. This is where deals are made and pressure is placed, and where the president can perhaps shift the direction of history.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not had a president who operated consistently and well in the deeper levels of history. This situation is understandable, since the principles of the Cold War were so powerful and then suddenly gone. Still, principles without definition and execution without precision cannot long endure.
"Principle, Rigor and Execution Matter in U.S. Foreign Policy (http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/principle-rigor-and-execution-matter-us-foreign-policy) is republished with permission of Stratfor."
-
Second post
The End of the Middle East?
Global Affairs
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - 03:00 Print Text Size
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
Because geopolitics is based on the eternal verities of geography, relatively little in geopolitics comes to an end. The Warsaw Pact may have dissolved following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but Russia is still big and it still lies next door to Central and Eastern Europe, so a Russian threat to Europe still exists. Japan may have been defeated and flattened by the U.S. military in World War II, but its dynamic population -- the gift of a temperate zone climate -- still projects power in the Pacific Basin and may do so even more in the years to come. The United States may have committed one blunder after another in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, yet through all of these misbegotten wars the United States remains by a yawning margin the greatest military power on earth -- the gift, ultimately, of America being a virtual island nation of continental proportions, as well as the last resource-rich swath of the temperate zone to be settled at the time of the European Enlightenment.
So we come to the Middle East, which, despite all its changes and upheavals in the course of the decades and all the prognostications of a U.S. "pivot" to the Pacific, remains vital to the United States. Israel is a de facto strategic ally of the United States and for over six decades now has remained embattled, necessitating American protection. The Persian Gulf region is still the hydrocarbon capital of the world and thus a premier American interest. Certainly, officials in Washington would like to shift focus to the Pacific, but the Middle East simply won't allow that to happen.
And yet there is an ongoing evolution in America's relationship with the region, and attrition of the same can add up to big change.
For decades the Persian Gulf represented a primary American interest: a place that was crucial to the well-being of the American economy. The American economy is the great oil and automotive economy of the modern age, with interstate highways the principal transport link for an entire continent. And Persian Gulf oil was a key to that enterprise. But increasingly the Persian Gulf represents only a secondary interest to the United States: a region important to the well-being of American allies, to be sure, and to world trade and the world economic system in general, but not specifically crucial to America itself, the war to defeat the Islamic State notwithstanding. However much oil the United States is still importing from the Persian Gulf, the fact is that America will have more energy alternatives at home and abroad in future decades.
Indeed, the United States is on the brink of being, in some sense, energy self-sufficient within Greater North America, from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to the oil fields of Venezuela. U.S. President Barack Obama may veto the Keystone Pipeline System that would bring oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, but industry experts believe that the future will in any case see continued cooperation between the United States and Canada in the energy sector. There is, too, the vast exploitation of shale gas in Texas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. U.S. companies will, in addition, probably be investing more in the Mexican and (eventually) Venezuelan energy industries in the future, following increasing economic liberalization in Mexico City and the possible, eventual passing of the Chavista era in Caracas. All this serves to separate the United States from the Middle East.
While the United States will have less and less need of Middle East hydrocarbons, the Middle East will for years to come be consumed by internal political chaos that itself exposes the limits of American power. In the era of strong authoritarian Arab states, American power was easy to project. It was just a matter of U.S. diplomats brokering peace treaties, separation of forces agreements, secret understandings, and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and some of its neighbors. After all, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and other Arab countries all had just one phone number to call -- that of the dictator or monarch in charge. But whom do you phone now in Tripoli or Sanaa or Damascus (even if Cairo is temporarily back under military dictatorship)? With no one really in charge, it is harder to bring American pressure to bear. Chaos in and of itself stymies U.S. power.
The United States remains a global behemoth. And U.S. power, particularly military power, can accomplish many things. The United States can defend Japan and Taiwan against China, South Korea against North Korea, Poland against Russia, and ultimately Israel against Iran. But one thing American power cannot accomplish, as a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan showed, is to rebuild complex Islamic societies from within. And rebuilding societies from within will be the fundamental challenge faced by the Arab world for at least the next half-decade. Thus, America, in spite of its latest military intervention, becomes less relevant to the region even as the region itself no longer represents quite the primary interest to America that it used to. We should keep this in mind now that the war against the Islamic State threatens to distract us from other theaters.
So in the glacial changes that often define geopolitics, the United States (that is, Greater North America) is moving away from the Middle East. This occurs as the Middle East itself slowly dissolves into a Greater Indian Ocean world.
For as the United States requires fewer and fewer hydrocarbons from the Middle East, China and India require more and more. Their economies may have slowed, but they are still growing. The Persian Gulf can -- in the final analysis -- erupt into a nuclear firestorm and America will survive well, thank you. But China and India will have the greater problem. China does not have a foreign policy so much as a resource-acquisition policy. Not only is it increasingly involved in energy deals with Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, but China is currently trying to build, run or help finance container ports in Tanzania and Pakistan in order to eventually transport both commercial goods from the western rim of the Indian Ocean to the eastern rim and on into China itself. And while all this is happening, Oman, for example, plans to build routes and pipelines from outside the Strait of Hormuz to countries inside the strait, even as China and India have visionary plans to link energy-rich and landlocked Central Asia by pipeline to both western China and the Indian Ocean.
In this evolving strategic geography of the early- and mid-21st century, the Middle East slowly becomes a world defined less by its own conflict and trading system and more by a conflict and trading system that spans the whole navigable southern rimland of the Eurasian supercontinent, with tentacles reaching north into Central Asia. The Indian Ocean thus emerges as the global hydrocarbon interstate linking the oil and gas fields of the Persian Gulf with the urban middle class concentrations of the Indian subcontinent and East Asia.
In such a scenario, the United States does not desert the Middle East, just as China and India do not greatly infiltrate it. But there is movement -- especially psychological -- away from one reality and toward another. And in the process, the Middle East as a clearly defined region of 20th century area studies means less than it used to.
Boiled down to the current newspaper headlines, Obama has not been irresponsible by refusing to get more involved than he has in the sectarian chaos of Syria and deciding for so long to withhold military action against Iran's nuclear facilities. His presidency is simply a sign of the times: a sign of the limits of U.S. power and of the more limited interests the United States has in the Middle East, terrorism excepted. The opening to Iran, as demonstrated by the interim agreement concerning Tehran's nuclear program, is part of this shift. The United States is trying to put its house in order in the Middle East through a rapprochement of sorts with the mullahs so that it can devote more time to other regions. Of course, this has been upended by the war against the Islamic State. But it will remain an overriding American goal nevertheless.
Read more: The End of the Middle East? | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
-
Why Obama Hates Netanyahu
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 30, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com
Obama’s foreign policy was supposed to reboot America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Old allies would become people we occasionally talked to. Old enemies would become new allies. Goodbye Queen, hello Vladimir. Trade the Anglosphere for Latin America’s Marxist dictatorships. Replace allied governments in the Middle East with Islamists and call it a day for the Caliphate.
Very little of that went according to plan.
Obama is still stuck with Europe. The Middle East and Latin American leftists still hate America. The Arab Spring imploded. Japan, South Korea and India have conservative governments.
And then there’s Israel.
The original plan was to sideline Israel by focusing on the Muslim world. Instead of directly hammering Israel, the administration would transform the region around it. The American-Israeli relationship would implode not through conflict, but because the Muslim Brotherhood countries would take its place.
That didn’t work out too well. Instead of gracefully pivoting away, Obama loudly snubbed Netanyahu. A photo of him poking his finger in Netanyahu’s chest captured the atmosphere. Netanyahu delivered a speech that Congress cheered. And Obama came to see him as a domestic political opponent.
The torrent of anti-Israel leaks from the administration is a treatment usually reserved for political opponents. The snide remarks by White House spokesmen and the anonymous personal attacks on Netanyahu in the media echo domestic hate campaigns out of the White House like Operation Rushbo.
Netanyahu wasn’t just the leader of a country that the left hated. He had become an honorary Republican.
When Obama met with him, Netanyahu firmly but politely challenged him on policy. He has kept on doing so ever since, including during his most recent visit. At a time when most leaders had gotten the message about shunning Romney, Netanyahu was happy to give him a favorable reception. Netanyahu clearly wanted Romney to win and Obama clearly wished he could pull a Clinton and replace Netanyahu. But Netanyahu’s economic policies were working in exactly the same way that Obama’s weren’t.
The two men hate each other not only on a personal level, but also on a political level.
Netanyahu had successfully pushed through a modernization and privatization agenda that on this side of the ocean is associated with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. It’s likely what Romney would have done which is one more reason the two men got along so well. Obama’s visible loathing for Romney is of a piece with his hatred for Netanyahu.
He doesn’t just hate them. He hates what they stand for. That’s why Harper and Netanyahu get along so well. It’s part of why Obama and Netanyahu get along so badly.
But the bigger part of the conflict is neither personal nor political. Obama wanted to sideline Israel; instead he’s stuck dealing with it. Hillary’s lack of foreign policy ambition allowed the Jewish State to come through fairly well in Obama’s first term. For Hillary, being Secretary of State was just a stepping stone to the White House by making her rerun candidacy seem fresh. Her relationship with Israel was bad, but her first job was not to make any waves.
John Kerry ambitiously jumped into multiple foreign policy arenas. His bid for a deal between Israel and the PLO was a predictable disaster. And he took Obama along for the ride. It’s unknown if Obama blames Kerry for the mess that ensued when his proposals collapsed into war, but there’s little doubt that he now hates Netanyahu more than ever.
The war dragged Obama deep into the confusing political waters of the region. His attempt to back the Turkish and Qatari empowerment of Hamas in the negotiations ended with Egypt and the Saudis scoring a win. It was hardly Netanyahu’s fault that Obama once again chose to side with a state sponsor of terror, but it’s safer to blame Netanyahu for the humiliation than the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
And then there’s Iran. Netanyahu remains the loudest voice against an Obama agreement to let Iran go nuclear. No matter how many talking heads defend the deal, he blows away all their hot air.
Not only did Obama fail to sideline Israel, but he’s stuck dealing with Netanyahu. And no matter how much he may view Netanyahu as an Israeli Romney, he can’t quite openly treat him like Romney because there are plenty of Jewish Democrats who still haven’t realized his true feelings for Israel.
Both men are stuck together. Egypt hates Obama more than it did before he overthrew its original government. Iraq and Syria are war zones. The Saudis are actively undermining Obama’s policies. Israel is still America’s best ally in the region and that interdependency frustrates him even more.
Obama wanted to destroy the American-Israeli relationship. Instead he’s entangled in it. He blames Netanyahu for the situation even though the mess is mostly of his own making.
Despite the myths about the vast powers of the lobby, Israel has never been at the heart of American foreign policy. And under Obama, it’s been on the outskirts in every sense of the word. Israel is back to being a major concern of American foreign policy mostly because of Obama’s massive failures in every other part of the region and Kerry’s belief that he could somehow succeed where everyone else failed.
Netanyahu’s presence reminds Obama of his own failures. If everything had gone according to plan, America would be experiencing a new age of amity with the Muslim world. Instead he’s stuck bombing Iraq and reaffirming the special relationship with Israel almost as if he were on Bush’s fourth term.
It’s not the way that the international flavor of Hope and Change was supposed to taste.
Obama hates Israel. He hates Netanyahu. And their continuing presence in Washington D.C. reminds him of his inability to transform American foreign policy. Their very existence humiliates him.
He knows that directly lashing out at Israel would alienate the Jewish supporters he still needs. Despite his effort to displace pro-Israel voices with J Street, the Jewish community is still pro-Israel. And so he resorts to passive aggressive behavior like snubbing the Israeli Defense Minister or anonymous officials in the administration taunting Netanyahu as a “coward” and “chickens__t” in the media.
It takes a courageous administration to anonymously call the leader of a tiny country a coward. It’s childish behavior, but this is an administration of children overseen by a man whose response to his opponent’s accurate reading of the world situation was to taunt him about the “1980s” and “horses and bayonets.”
While Obama’s people anonymously taunt Netanyahu as a coward, it’s their boss who acts like a coward, stabbing Israel in the back, slandering its leader anonymously through the media and then trying to sell himself to Jewish donors as the Jewish State’s best friend in the White House.
-
"While Obama’s people anonymously taunt Netanyahu as a coward, it’s their boss who acts like a coward, stabbing Israel in the back, slandering its leader anonymously through the media and then trying to sell himself to Jewish donors as the Jewish State’s best friend in the White House."
So far he succeeds. A few conservative Jews I spoke to about this agree that many American Jews are liberals first - then Jews. Amazing how a group that thrived in the land of opportunity over the last century turns around and pushes statism. Weird but true.
"The original plan was to sideline Israel by focusing on the Muslim world. Instead of directly hammering Israel, the administration would transform the region around it. The American-Israeli relationship would implode not through conflict, but because the Muslim Brotherhood countries would take its place."
No surprise here. We saw before he was President how he sat in that anti-white, anti-semitic, anti-American church of Rev. Wright for 20 plus years without saying a peep.
"taunting Netanyahu as a “coward” and “chickens__t” in the media"
Does this not sound like the same kind of high school basketball court name calling like calling ISIS "JV"? This certainly sounds like it came from the "horses" mouth himself.
"Obama’s foreign policy was supposed to reboot America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Old allies would become people we occasionally talked to. Old enemies would become new allies. Goodbye Queen, hello Vladimir. Trade the Anglosphere for Latin America’s Marxist dictatorships. Replace allied governments in the Middle East with Islamists and call it a day for the Caliphate."
The self Chosen Pied Piper cannot grasp how the world just didn't follow him over the cliff to one world government with him as the World's King. Megalomania is putting in mildly. He just cannot get it.
This definitely is consistent with a personality disorder. He blames everyone else who are his political enemies and just won't support him. Even some Blacks may be waking up to this sickness.
-
"While Obama’s people anonymously taunt Netanyahu as a coward, it’s their boss who acts like a coward, stabbing Israel in the back, slandering its leader anonymously through the media and then trying to sell himself to Jewish donors as the Jewish State’s best friend in the White House."
Projection of their own faults is so common with this crowd. Of what they accuse, almost certainly you will find them doing it. The example above is good, but for the most part I think they are the opposite of chickensh*t. They push through bad policies, like complete abandonment of a war zone, tearing down the whole healthcare system, launching a war against investors and employers, with no fear whatsoever of the consequences.
-
http://pamelageller.com/2014/10/chickenshit-obama-administration-calls-israeli-prime-minister-chickenshit.html/
-
http://pamelageller.com/2014/10/chickenshit-obama-administration-calls-israeli-prime-minister-chickenshit.html/
A IDF commando with combat experience? Says someone from captain momjeans?
-
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4845/who-is-the-real-chickenshit
-
http://www.timesofisrael.com/saving-sergeant-netanyahu/#!
-
The Realist Creed
By Robert Kaplan
All people in foreign policy circles consider themselves realists, since all people consider themselves realistic about every issue they ever talk about. At the same time, very few consider themselves realists, since realism signifies, in too many minds, cynicism and failure to intervene abroad when human rights are being violated on a mass scale. Though everyone and no one is a realist, it is also true that realism never goes away -- at least not since Thucydides wrote The Peloponnesian War in the fifth century B.C., in which he defined human nature as driven by fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos) and honor (doxa). And realism, as defined by perhaps the pre-eminent thinker in the field in the last century, the late Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago, is about working with the basest forces of human nature, not against them.
Why is realism timeless and yet reviled at the same time? Because realism tells the bitterest truths that not everyone wants to hear. For in foreign policy circles, as in other fields of human endeavor, people often prefer to deceive themselves. Let me define what realism means to me.
First of all, realism is a sensibility, a set of values, not a specific guide as to what to do in each and every crisis. Realism is a way of thinking, not a set of instructions as to what to think. It doesn't prevent you from making mistakes. This makes realism more an art than a science. That's why some of the best practitioners of realism in recent memory -- former U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III -- never distinguished themselves as writers or philosophers. They were just practical men who had a knack for what made sense in foreign policy and what did not. And even they made mistakes. You can be an intellectual who has read all the books on realism and be an utter disaster in government, just as you could be a lawyer who has never read one book on realism and be a good secretary of state. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was unique because he was both: an intellectual realist and a successful statesman. But successful statesmen, intellectual or not, must inculcate a set of beliefs that can be defined by what may be called the Realist Creed:
Order Comes Before Freedom. That's right. Americans may think freedom is the most important political value, but realists know that without order there can be no freedom for anyone. For if anarchy reigns and no one is in charge, freedom is worthless since life is cheap. Americans sometimes forget this basic rule of nature since they have taken order for granted -- because they always had it, a gift of the English political and philosophical tradition. But many places do not have it. That is why when dictators are overthrown, realists get nervous: They know that because stable democracy is not assured as a replacement, they rightly ask, Who will rule? Even tyranny is better than anarchy. To wit, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was more humane than Iraq under no one -- that is, in a state of sectarian war.
Work With the Material at Hand. In other words, you can't just go around the world toppling regimes you don't like because they do not adhere to the same human rights standards as you do, or because their leaders are corrupt or unenlightened, or because they are not democrats. You must work with what there is in every country. Yes, there might be foreign leaders so averse to your country's interests that it will necessitate war or sanctions on your part; but such instances will be relatively rare. When it comes to foreign rulers, realists revel in bad choices; idealists often mistakenly assume that there should be good ones.
Think Tragically in Order to Avoid Tragedy. Pessimism has more value than misplaced optimism. Because so many regimes around the world are difficult or are in difficult straits, realists know that they must always be thinking about what could go wrong. Foreign policy is like life: The things you worry about happening often turn out all right, precisely because you worried about them and took protective measures accordingly; it is the things you don't worry about and that happen unexpectedly that cause disaster. Realists are good worriers.
Every Problem Does Not Have a Solution. It is a particular conceit that every problem is solvable. It isn't. Mayhem and human rights violations abound, even as the United States cannot intervene everywhere or take foreign policy positions that will necessarily help. That's why realists are comfortable doing little or nothing in certain instances, even as they feel just as bad as idealists about heartrending situations.
Interests Come Before Values. A nation such as the United States has interests in secure sea lines of communication, access to energy, a soft dominance in the Western Hemisphere and a favorable balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere. These are amoral concerns that, while not necessarily in conflict with liberal values, operate in a different category from them. If Arab dictatorships will better secure safe sea lanes in and out of energy-producing areas than would chaotic democracies, realists will opt for dictatorship, knowing that it is a tragic yet necessary decision.
American Power Is Limited. The United States cannot intervene everywhere or even in most places. Precisely because America is a global power, it must try to avoid getting bogged down in any one particular place. The United States can defend treaty and de facto allies with its naval, air and cyber power. It can infiltrate communications networks the world over. It can, in short, do a lot of things. But it cannot set to rights complex Islamic societies in deep turmoil. So another thing realists are good at -- and comfortable with -- is disappointing people. In fact, one might say that foreign policy at its best is often about disappointing people, not always creating opportunities so much as keeping even worse things from happening.
Passion and Good Policy Often Don't Go Together. Foreign policy requires practitioners among whom the blood runs cold. While loud voices abound about doing something, the person in charge must quietly ask himself or herself, If I do this, what will happen two steps down the road, three steps down the road, and so forth? For passion can easily flip: Those screaming the loudest for intervention today can be the same ones calling your intervention flawed or insufficient after you have embarked on the fateful enterprise.
Reading this list, you might think that realism is immoral. That would be wrong. Rather, realism is imbued with a hard morality of best possible outcomes under the circumstances rather than a soft morality of good intentions. For there is a big difference between being moral and moralistic: The former celebrates difficult choices and the consequences that follow, while the latter abjures them. Realism is a hard road. The policymaker who lives by its dictums will often be rebuked while in office and fondly recalled as a statesman in the years and decades following. Look at George H.W. Bush. But foreign policy realists who have served in high office, I suspect, are more comfortable with the kind of loneliness that comes with rebuke than some of their idealist counterparts. Loneliness is normal for the best policymakers; it is the craving for the adoring crowd that is dangerous.
Robert D. Kaplan is Chief Geopolitical Analyst at Stratfor, a geopolitical intelligence firm, and author of Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific.
-
Strategic Reversal: The United States, Iran, and the Middle East
Analysis
November 24, 2014 | 1114 Print Text Size
Strategic Reversal: The United States, Iran, and the Middle East
Analysis
Editor's Note: With negotiators reportedly extending the Iranian nuclear talks by seven months — with a basic agreement anticipated by March 1, 2015, and a final, comprehensive pact by July — the talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany will remain a geopolitical focal point in 2015. Stratfor founder and Chairman George Friedman predicted this outcome in Chapter 7 of his 2011 book, The Next Decade. To give our subscribers a more comprehensive look at the geopolitical realities that produced the current state of affairs and that will continue to steer the detente process, Stratfor republishes this chapter in its entirety.
Beyond the special case of Israel, the area between the eastern Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush remains the current focus of U.S. policy. As we've noted, the United States has three principal interests there: to maintain a regional balance of power; to make certain that the flow of oil is not interrupted; and to defeat the Islamist groups centered there that threaten the United States. Any step the United States takes to address any one of these objectives must take into account the other two, which significantly increases the degree of difficulty for achieving even one.
Adding to this challenge is that of maintaining the balance of power in three regions of the area: the Arabs and the Israelis, the Indians and the Pakistanis, and the Iraqis and the Iranians. Each of these balances is in disarray, but the most crucial one, that between the Iranians and the Iraqis, collapsed completely with the disintegration of the Iraqi state and military after the U.S. invasion of 2003. The distortion of the India-Pakistan balance is not far behind, as the war in Afghanistan continues to destabilize Pakistan.
As we saw in the last chapter, the weakness of the Arab side has created a situation in which the Israelis no longer have to concern themselves with their opponents' reactions. In the decades ahead, the Israelis will try to take advantage of this to create new realities on the ground, while the United States, in keeping with its search for strategic balance, will try to limit Israeli moves.
The Indo-Pakistani balance is being destabilized in Afghanistan, a complex war zone where American troops are pursuing two competing goals, at least as stated officially. The first is to prevent al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base of operations; the second is to create a stable democratic government. But denying terrorists a haven in Afghanistan achieves little, because groups following al Qaeda's principles (al Qaeda prime, the group built around Osama bin Laden, is no longer fully functioning) can grow anywhere, from Yemen to Cleveland. This is an especially significant factor when the attempt to disrupt al Qaeda requires destabilizing the country, training the incipient Afghanistan army, managing the police force of Afghan recruits, and intruding into Afghan politics. There is no way to effectively stabilize a country in which you have to play such an intrusive role.
Unscrambling this complexity begins with recognizing that the United States has no vital interest in the kind of government Afghanistan develops, and that once again the president cannot allow counter-terrorism to be a primary force in shaping national strategy.
But the more fundamental recognition necessary for ensuring balance over the next ten years is that Afghanistan and Pakistan are in fact one entity, both sharing various ethnic groups and tribes, with the political border between them meaning very little. The combined population of these two countries is over 200 million people, and the United States, with only about 100,000 troops in the region, is never going to be able to impose its will directly and establish order to its liking.
Moreover, the primary strategic issue is not actually Afghanistan but Pakistan, and the truly significant balance of power in the region is actually that between Pakistan and India. Ever since independence, these two countries partitioned from the same portion of the British Empire have maintained uneasy and sometimes violent relations. Both are nuclear powers, and they are obsessed with each other. While India is the stronger, Pakistan has the more defensible terrain, although its heartland is more exposed to India. Still, the two have been kept in static opposition — which is just where the United States wants them.
Obviously, the challenges inherent in maintaining this complex balance over the next ten years are enormous. To the extent that Pakistan disintegrates under U.S. pressure to help fight al Qaeda and to cooperate with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the standoff with India will fail, leaving India the preeminent power in the region. The war in Afghanistan must inevitably spread to Pakistan, triggering internal struggles that can potentially weaken the Pakistani state. This is not certain, but it is too possible to dismiss. With no significant enemies other than the Chinese, who are sequestered on the other side of the Himalayas, India would be free to use its resources to try to dominate the Indian Ocean basin, and it would very likely increase its navy to do so. A triumphant India would obliterate the balance the United States so greatly desires, and thus the issue of India is actually far more salient than the issues of terrorism or nation-building in Afghanistan.
That is why over the next ten years the primary American strategy in this region must be to help create a strong and viable Pakistan. The most significant step in that direction would be to relieve pressure on Pakistan by ending the war in Afghanistan. The specific ideology of the Pakistani government doesn't really matter, and the United States can't impose its views on Pakistan anyway.
Strengthening Pakistan will not only help restore the balance with India, it will restore Pakistan as a foil for Afghanistan as well. In both these Muslim countries there are many diverging groups and interests, and the United States cannot manage their internal arrangements. It can, however, follow the same strategy that was selected after the fall of the Soviet Union: it can allow the natural balance that existed prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to return, to the extent possible. The United States can then spend its resources helping to build a strong Pakistani army to hold the situation together.
Jihadist forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan will probably reemerge, but they are just as likely to do so with the United States bogged down in Afghanistan as with the U.S. gone. The war simply has no impact on this dynamic. There is a slight chance that a Pakistani military, with the incentive of U.S. support, might be somewhat more successful in suppressing the terrorists, but this is uncertain and ultimately unimportant. Once again, the key objective going forward is maintaining the Indo-Pakistani balance of power.
As in the case of stepping back from Israel, the president will not be able to express his strategy for dealing with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India openly. Certainly there will be no way for the United States to appear triumphant, and the Afghan war will be resolved much as Vietnam was, through a negotiated peace agreement that allows the insurgent forces — in this case the Taliban — to take control. A stronger Pakistani army will have no interest in crushing the Taliban but will settle for controlling it. The Pakistani state will survive, which will balance India, thus allowing the United States to focus on other balance points within the region.
The Region's Heartland: Iran and Iraq
The balance of power between Iran and Iraq remained intact until 2003, when the United States invasion destroyed both Iraq's government and army. Since then the primary force that has kept the Iranians in check has been the United States. But the United States has announced that it intends to withdraw its forces from Iraq, which, given the state of the Iraqi government and military, will leave Iran the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. This poses a fundamental challenge both for American strategy and the extremely complex region. Consider the alliances that might occur absent the United States.
Iraq's population is about 30 million. Saudi Arabia's population is about 27 million. The entire Arabian Peninsula's population is about 70 million, but that is divided among multiple nations, particularly between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The latter has about one third of this population, and is far away from the vulnerable Saudi Arabian oil fields. In contrast, Iran alone has a population of 70 million. Turkey has a population of about 70 million. In the broadest sense, these figures and how these populations combine into potential alliances will define the geopolitical reality of the Persian Gulf region going forward. Saudi Arabia's population — and wealth — combined with Iraq's population can counterbalance either Iran or Turkey, but not both. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, it was Saudi Arabia's support for Iraq that led to whatever success that country enjoyed.
While Turkey is a rising power with a large population, it is still a limited power, unable to project its influence as far as the Persian Gulf. It can press Iraq and Iran in the north, diverting their attention from the gulf, but it can't directly intervene to protect the Arabian oil fields. Moreover, the stability of Iraq, such as it is, is very much in Iran's hands. Iran might not be able to impose a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad, but it has the power to destabilize Baghdad at will.
With Iraq essentially neutralized, its 30 million people fighting each other rather than counterbalancing anyone, Iran is for the first time in centuries free from significant external threat from its neighbors. The Iranian-Turkish border is extremely mountainous, making offensive military operations there difficult. To the north, Iran is buffered from Russian power by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and in the northeast by Turkmenistan. To the east lie Afghanistan and Pakistan, both in chaos. If the United States withdraws from Iraq, Iran will be free from an immediate threat from that enormous power as well. Thus Iran is, at least for the time being, in an extraordinary position, secure from overland incursions and free to explore to the southwest.
With Iraq in shambles, the nations of the Arabian Peninsula could not resist Iran even if they acted in concert. Bear in mind that nuclear weapons are not relevant to this reality. Iran would still be the dominant Persian Gulf power even if its nuclear weapons were destroyed. Indeed, a strike solely on Iran's nuclear facilities could prove highly counterproductive, causing Iran to respond in unpleasant ways. While Iran cannot impose its own government on Iraq, it could, if provoked, block any other government from emerging by creating chaos there, even while U.S. forces are still on the ground, trapped in a new round of internal warfare but with a smaller number of troops available.
Iran's ultimate response to a strike on its nuclear facilities would be to try to block the Strait of Hormuz, where about 45 percent of the world's exported seaborne oil flows through a narrow channel. Iran has anti-ship missiles and, more important, mines. If Iran mined the strait and the United States could not clear that waterway to a reasonable degree of confidence, the supply line could be closed. This would cause oil prices to spike dramatically and would certainly abort the global economic recovery.
Any isolated attack on Iran's nuclear facilities — the kind of attack that Israel might undertake by itself — would be self-defeating, making Iran more dangerous than ever. The only way to neutralize those facilities without incurring collateral damage is to attack Iran's naval capability as well, and to use air power to diminish Iran's conventional capability. Such an attack would take months (if it were to target Iran's army), and its effectiveness, like that of all air warfare, is uncertain.
For the United States to achieve its strategic goals in the region, it must find a way to counterbalance Iran without maintaining its current deployment (already reduced to 50,000 troops) in Iraq and without actually increasing the military power devoted to the region. A major air campaign against Iran is not a desirable prospect; nor can the United States count on the reemergence of Iraqi power as a counterweight, because Iran would never allow it. The United States has to withdraw from Iraq in order to manage its other strategic interests. But coupled with this withdrawal, it must think radical thoughts.
In the next decade, the most desirable option with Iran is going to be delivered through a move that now seems inconceivable. It is the option chosen by Roosevelt and Nixon when they faced seemingly impossible strategic situations: the creation of alliances with countries that had previously been regarded as strategic and moral threats. Roosevelt allied the United States with Stalinist Russia, and Nixon aligned with Maoist China, each to block a third power that was seen as more dangerous. In both cases, there was intense ideological rivalry between the new ally and the United States, one that many regarded as extreme and utterly inflexible. Nevertheless, when the United States faced unacceptable alternatives, strategic interest overcame moral revulsion on both sides. The alternative for Roosevelt was a German victory in World War II. For Nixon, it was the Soviets using American weakness caused by the Vietnam War to change the global balance of power.
Conditions on the ground put the United States in a similar position today vis-a-vis Iran. These countries despise each other. Neither can easily destroy the other, and, truth be told, they have some interests in common. In simple terms, the American president, in order to achieve his strategic goals, must seek accommodation with Iran.
The seemingly impossible strategic situation driving the United States to this gesture is, as we've discussed, the need to maintain the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, and to achieve this at a time when the country must reduce the forces devoted to this part of the world.
The principal reason that Iran might accede to a deal is that it sees the United States as dangerous and unpredictable. Indeed, in less than ten years, Iran has found itself with American troops on both its eastern and western borders. Iran's primary strategic interest is regime survival. It must avoid a crushing U.S. intervention while guaranteeing that Iraq never again becomes a threat. Meanwhile, Iran must increase its authority within the Muslim world against the Sunni Muslims who rival and sometimes threaten it.
In trying to imagine a U.S.-Iranian detente, consider the overlaps in these countries' goals. The United States is in a war against some — but not all — Sunnis, and these Sunnis are also the enemies of Shiite Iran. Iran does not want U.S. troops along its eastern and western borders. (In point of fact, the United States does not want to be there either.) Just as the United States wants to see oil continue to flow freely through Hormuz, Iran wants to profit from that flow, not interrupt it. Finally, the Iranians understand that the United States alone poses the greatest threat to their security: solve the American problem and regime survival is assured. The United States understands, or should, that resurrecting the Iraqi counterweight to Iran is simply not an option in the short term. Unless the United States wants to make a huge, long-term commitment of ground forces in Iraq, which it clearly does not, the obvious solution to its problem in the region is to make an accommodation with Iran.
The major threat that might arise from this strategy of accommodation would be that Iran oversteps its bounds and attempts to occupy the oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf directly. Given the logistical limitations of the Iranian army, this would be difficult. Also given that it would bring a rapid American intervention, such aggressive action on the part of the Iranians would be pointless and self-defeating. Iran is already the dominant power in the region, and the United States has no need to block indirect Iranian influence over its neighbors. Aspects of Iran's influence would range from financial participation in regional projects to significant influence over OPEC quotas to a degree of influence in the internal policies of the Arabian countries. Merely by showing a modicum of restraint, Iranians could gain unquestioned preeminence, and economic advantage, while seeing their oil find its way to the market. They could also see substantial investment begin to flow into their economy once more.
Even with an understanding with the United States, Iranian domination of the region would have limits. Iran would enjoy a sphere of influence dependent on its alignment with the United States on other issues, which means not crossing any line that would trigger direct U.S. intervention. Over time, the growth of Iranian power within the limits of such clear understandings would benefit both the United States and Iran. Like the arrangements with Stalin and Mao, this U.S.-Iranian alliance would be distasteful yet necessary, but also temporary.
The great losers in this alliance, of course, would be the Sunnis in the Arabian Peninsula, including the House of Saud. Without Iraq, they are incapable of defending themselves, and as long as the oil flows and no single power directly controls the entire region, the United States has no long-term interest in their economic and political well-being. Thus a U.S.-Iranian entente would also redefine the historic relationship of the United States with the Saudis. The Saudis will have to look at the United States as a guarantor of its interests while trying to reach some political accommodation with Iran. The geopolitical dynamic of the Persian Gulf would be transformed for everyone.
The Israelis too would be threatened, although not as much as the Saudis and other principalities on the Persian Gulf. Over the years, Iran's anti-Israeli rhetoric has been extreme, but its actions have been cautious. Iran has played a waiting game, using rhetoric to cover inaction. In the end, the Israelis would be trapped by the American decision. Israel lacks the conventional capability for the kind of extensive air campaign needed to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. Certainly it lacks the military might to shape the geopolitical alignments of the Persian Gulf region. Moreover, an Iran presented with its dream of a secure western border and domination of the Persian Gulf could become quite conciliatory. Compared to such opportunities, Israel for them is a minor, distant, and symbolic issue.
Until now, the Israelis still had the potential option of striking Iran unilaterally, in hopes of generating an Iranian response in the Strait of Hormuz, thereby drawing the United States into the conflict. Should the Americans and Iranians move toward an understanding, Israel would no longer have such sway over U.S. policy. An Israeli strike might trigger an entirely unwelcome American response rather than the chain reaction that Israel once could have hoped for.
The greatest shock of a U.S.-Iranian entente would be political, on both sides. During World War II, the U.S.-Soviet agreement shocked Americans deeply (Soviets less so, because they had already absorbed Stalin's prewar nonaggression pact with Hitler). The Nixon-Mao entente, seen as utterly unthinkable at the time, shocked all sides. Once it happened, however, it turned out to be utterly thinkable, even manageable.
When Roosevelt made his arrangement with Stalin, he was politically vulnerable to his right wing, the more extreme elements of which already regarded him as a socialist favorably inclined to the Soviets. Nixon, as a right-wing opponent of communism, had an easier time. Obama will be in Roosevelt's position, without the overwhelming threat of a comparatively much greater evil — that is, Nazi Germany.
Obama's political standing would be enhanced by an air strike more than by a cynical deal. An accommodation with Iran will be particularly difficult for him because it will be seen as an example of weakness rather than of ruthlessness and cunning. Iranian president Ahmadinejad will have a much easier time selling such an arrangement to his people. But set against the options — a nuclear Iran, extended air strikes with all attendant consequences, the long-term, multidivisional, highly undesirable presence of American forces in Iraq — this alliance seems perfectly reasonable.
Nixon and China showed that major diplomatic shifts can take place quite suddenly. There is often a long period of back-channel negotiations, followed by a breakthrough driven either by changing circumstances or by skillful negotiations.
The current president will need considerable political craft to position the alliance as an aid to the war on al Qaeda, making it clear that Shiite-dominated Iran is as hostile to the Sunnis as it is to Americans. He will be opposed by two powerful lobbies in this, the Saudis and the Israelis. Israel will be outraged by the maneuver, but the Saudis will be terrified, which is one of the maneuver's great advantages, increasing American traction over its policies. The Israelis can in many ways be handled more easily, simply because the Israeli military and intelligence services have long seen the Iranians as occasional allies against Arab threats, even as the Iranians were supporting Hezbollah against Israel. They have had a complex relationship over the last thirty years. The Saudis will condemn this move, but the pressure it places on the Arab world would be attractive to Israel. Even so, the American Jewish community is not as sophisticated or cynical as Israel in these matters, and its members will be vocal. Even more difficult to manage will be the Saudi lobby, backed as it is by American companies that do business in the kingdom.
There will be several advantages to the United States. First, without fundamentally threatening Israeli interests, the move will demonstrate that the United States is not controlled by Israel. Second, it will put a generally unpopular country, Saudi Arabia — a state that has been accustomed to having its way in Washington — on notice that the United States has other options. For their part, the Saudis have nowhere to go, and they will cling to whatever guarantees the United States provides them in the face of an American-Iranian entente.
Recalling thirty years of hostilities with Iran, the American public will be outraged. The president will have to frame his maneuver by offering rhetoric about protecting the homeland against the greater threat. He will of course use China as an example of successful reconciliation with the irreconcilable.
The president will have to deal with the swirling public battles of foreign lobbies and make the case for the entente. But he will ultimately have to maintain his moral bearings, remembering that in the end, Iran is not America's friend any more than Stalin and Mao were.
If ever there was a need for secret understandings secretly arrived at, this is it, and much of this arrangement will remain unspoken. Neither country will want to incur the internal political damage from excessive public meetings and handshakes. But in the end, the United States needs to exit from the trap it is in, and Iran has to avoid a real confrontation with the United States.
Iran is an inherently defensive country. It is not strong enough to be either the foundation of American policy in the region or the real long-term issue. Its population is concentrated in the mountains that ring its borders, while much of the center of the country is minimally or completely uninhabitable. Iran can project power under certain special conditions, such as those that obtain at the moment, but in the long run it is either a victim of outside powers or isolated.
An alliance with the United States will temporarily give Iran the upper hand in relations with the Arabs, but within a matter of years the United States will have to reassert a balance of power. Pakistan is unable to extend its influence westward. Israel is much too small and distant to counterbalance Iran. The Arabian Peninsula is too fragmented, and the duplicity of the United States in encouraging it to increase its arms is too obvious to be an alternative counterweight. A more realistic alternative is to encourage Russia to extend its influence to the Iranian border. This might happen anyway, but as we will see, that would produce major problems elsewhere.
The only country capable of being a counterbalance to Iran and a potential long-term power in the region is Turkey, and it will achieve that status within the next ten years regardless of what the United States does. Turkey has the seventeenth largest economy in the world and the largest in the Middle East. It has the strongest army in the region and, aside from the Russians and possibly the British, probably the strongest army in Europe. Like most countries in the Muslim world, it is currently divided between secularists and Islamists within its own borders. But their struggle is far more restrained than what is going on in other parts of the Muslim world.
Iranian domination of the Arabian Peninsula is not in Turkey's interest because Turkey has its own appetite for the region's oil, reducing its dependency on Russian oil. Also, Turkey does not want Iran to become more powerful than itself. And while Iran has a small Kurdish population, southeastern Turkey is home to an extremely large number of Kurds, a fact that Iran can exploit. Regional and global powers have been using support for the Kurds to put pressure on or destabilize Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. It is an old game and a constant vulnerability.
In the course of the next decade the Iranians will have to divert major resources in order to deal with Turkey. Meanwhile, the Arab world will be looking for a champion against Shiite Iran, and despite the bitter history of Turkish power in the Arab world during the Ottoman Empire, Sunni Turkey is the best bet.
In the next ten years, the United States must make certain that Turkey does not become hostile to American interests and that Iran and Turkey do not form an alliance for the domination and division of the Arab world. The more Turkey and Iran fear the United States, the greater the likelihood that this will happen. The Iranians will be assuaged in the short run by their entente with the Americans, but they will be fully aware that this is an alliance of convenience, not a long-term friendship. It is the Turks who are open to a longer-term alignment with the United States, and Turkey can be valuable to the United States in other places, particularly in the Balkans and the Caucasus, where it serves as a block to Russian aspirations.
As long as the United States maintains the basic terms of its agreement with Iran, Iran will represent a threat to Turkey. Whatever the inclinations of the Turks, they will have to protect themselves, and to do that, they must work to undermine Iranian power in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab countries to the north of the peninsula — Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. They will engage in this not only to limit Iran but also to improve their access to the oil to their south, both because they will need that oil and because they will want to profit from it.
As Turkey and Iran compete in the next decade, Israel and Pakistan will be concerned with local balances of power. In the long run, Turkey cannot be contained by Iran. Turkey is by far the more dynamic country economically, and therefore it can support a more sophisticated military. More important, whereas Iran has geographically limited regional options, Turkey reaches into the Caucasus, the Balkans, Central Asia, and ultimately the Mediterranean and North Africa, which provides opportunities and allies denied the Iranians. Iran has never been a significant naval power since antiquity, and because of the location of its ports, it can never really be one in the future. Turkey, in contrast, has frequently been the dominant power in the Mediterranean and will be so again. Over the next decade we will see the beginning of Turkey's rise to dominance in the region. It is interesting to note that while we can't think of the century without Turkey playing an extremely important role, this decade will be one of preparation. Turkey will have to come to terms with its domestic conflicts and grow its economy. The cautious foreign policy Turkey has followed recently will continue. It is not going to plunge into conflicts and therefore will influence but not define the region. The United States must take a long-term view of Turkey and avoid pressure that could undermine its development.
As a solution to the complex problems of the Middle East, the American president must choose a temporary understanding with Iran that gives Iran what it wants, that gives the United States room to withdraw, and that is also a foundation for the relationship of mutual hostility to the Sunni fundamentalists. In other words, the president must put the Arabian Peninsula inside the Iranians' sphere of influence while limiting their direct controls, and while putting the Saudis, among others, at an enormous disadvantage.
This strategy would confront the reality of Iranian power and try to shape it. Whether it is shaped or not, the longer-term solution to the balance of power in the region will be the rise of Turkey. A powerful Turkey would counterbalance Iran and Israel, while stabilizing the Arabian Peninsula. In due course the Turks will begin to react by challenging the Iranians, and thus the central balance of power will be resurrected, stabilizing the region. This will create a new regional balance of power. But that is not for this decade.
I am arguing that this is a preferred policy option given the circumstances. But I am also arguing that this is the most logical outcome. The alternatives are unacceptable to both sides; there is too much risk. And when the alternatives are undesirable, what remains — however preposterous it appears — is the most likely outcome.
To see how that would affect wider circles of power and their balance, we turn to the next concern, the balance between Europe and Russia.
Excerpt from the book, The Next Decade, by George Friedman, published by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
Read more: Strategic Reversal: The United States, Iran, and the Middle East | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook
-
The Nazi Romance With Islam Has Some Lessons for the United States
Two new important histories look at Hitler’s fascination with Islam and Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey
By David Mikics|November 24, 2014 12:00 AM|Comments: 46
Both Hitler and Himmler had a soft spot for Islam. Hitler several times fantasized that, if the Saracens had not been stopped at the Battle of Tours, Islam would have spread through the European continent—and that would have been a good thing, since “Jewish Christianity” wouldn’t have gone on to poison Europe. Christianity doted on weakness and suffering, while Islam extolled strength, Hitler believed. Himmler in a January 1944 speech called Islam “a practical and attractive religion for soldiers,” with its promise of paradise and beautiful women for brave martyrs after their death. “This is the kind of language a soldier understands,” Himmler gushed.
Surely, the Nazi leaders thought, Muslims would see that the Germans were their blood brothers: loyal, iron-willed, and most important, convinced that Jews were the evil that most plagued the world. “Do you recognize him, the fat, curly-haired Jew who deceives and rules the whole world and who steals the land of the Arabs?” demanded one of the Nazi pamphlets dropped over North Africa (a million copies of it were printed). “The Jew,” the pamphlet explained, was the evil King Dajjal from Islamic tradition, who in the world’s final days was supposed to lead 70,000 Jews from Isfahan in apocalyptic battle against Isa—often identified with Jesus, but according to the Reich Propaganda Ministry none other than Hitler himself. Germany produced reams of leaflets like this one, often quoting the Quran on the subject of Jewish treachery.
It is not surprising, then, that there are those today who draw a direct line between modern Jew-hatred in the Islamic world and the Nazis. A poster currently at Columbus Circle’s subway entrance proclaims loudly that “Jew-hatred is in the Quran.” The poster features a photograph of Hitler with the notoriously anti-Jewish Mufti al-Husaini of Palestine, who is erroneously labeled “the leader of the Muslim world.” The truth is considerably more complex. The mufti made himself useful to the Nazis as a propagandist, but he had little influence in most Muslim regions. Few Muslims believed Nazi claims that Hitler was the protector of Islam, much less the Twelfth Imam, as one Reich pamphlet suggested.
The Nazis’ anti-Jewish propaganda no doubt attracted many Muslims, as historian Jeffrey Herf has documented, but they balked at believing that Hitler would be their savior or liberator. Instead, they sensed correctly that the Nazis wanted Muslims to fight and die for Germany. As Rommel approached Cairo, Egyptians started to get nervous. They knew that the Germans were not coming to liberate them, but instead wanted to make the Muslim world part of their own burgeoning empire. In the end, more Muslims wound up fighting for the Allies than for the Axis.
Hitler’s failed effort to put Muslim boots on the ground still stands as the most far-reaching Western attempt to use Islam to win a war. Such is the judgment of David Motadel, the author of a new, authoritative book, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War. Motadel’s detailed and fascinating explanation of how and why the Nazis failed to get Muslims on their side is a must-read for serious students of World War II, and it has an important message as well for our own policy in the Middle East.
***
To grasp why the Nazis had such high hopes for Muslim collaboration—and why their hopes failed—we need to go back to the great war that made Hitler the fanatical monster he was. One hundred years ago, a few months into World War I, Germany looked like it might be in trouble. The German offensive had failed to break through at Ypres after a month of bloody fighting. The waves of German soldiers stumbling through no-man’s land slowed to a stop. The kaiser’s army was exhausted, and its commanders suddenly realized that the quick Western Front victory they had dreamed of was impossible. Meanwhile, Russia was massing troops around Warsaw, and the tsar had just declared war on the Ottoman Empire.
There was one bright spot, though. On Nov. 11, 1914, the highest religious authority of the Ottoman caliphate, Sheikh al-Islam Ürgüplü Hayri, issued a call for worldwide jihad against Russia, Britain, and France. Suddenly, the Great War was a holy war. Surely, the Germans dreamed, Muslims would join their side en masse and turn the tide of battle.
In the early years of World War I the German Reich caught Islam fever: Muslims became the great Eastern hope against the Entente. Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German general staff, planned to “awaken the fanaticism of Islam” in the French and British colonies, making the Muslim masses rise up against their European masters. Max von Oppenheim, the German diplomat and orientalist, described Islam as “one of our most important weapons” in his famous position paper of October 1914. Oppenheim wanted to spark a Muslim revolt stretching from India to Morocco that Germany could use for its own purposes. Germany just needed to get the message across, Oppenheim insisted: Russia, Britain, and France were the oppressors of Muslims, whereas the Germans would liberate them.
The German strategy didn’t work. Instead, Britain and France won the game when they capitalized on the Arab uprising against a crumbling Ottoman Empire. T.E. Lawrence, rather than the kaiser, inspired the Arabs. After the war, Britain and France sliced up the Middle East pie between them in the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916.
Germany tried once again to mobilize Islam in WWII. Astonishingly, in 1940 Oppenheim, at that point 80 years old, championed the same plan that had failed so badly in the previous war. Even more surprising, Hitler and Himmler warmly embraced the part-Jewish Oppenheim’s idea: They too thought that Islam would help bring about a Nazi triumph.
“German officials would always refer to global Islam, to pan Islam,” Motadel told me over the phone from his home in Cambridge, England, where he is Research Fellow in History at the University of Cambridge’s Gonville and Caius College. The Nazis spoke of the Muslims as a “bloc” that could be “activated” against the British, the French, and the Soviets. Their belief that Islam was monolithic led them to ignore differences of region, sect, and nationality, which helped to ensure the failure of their efforts.
As Motadel documents, those efforts were indeed considerable. Germans sought out imams who would issue fatwas for their side, and they told their soldiers to be especially careful of religious sensibilities when traveling through Muslim territory. They gave special privileges to Muslims who joined the Wehrmacht: The Nazi leadership even allowed them to follow Muslim dietary laws. Astonishingly, German forces in the East permitted Muslims to practice both circumcision and ritual slaughter, proving more liberal on these two issues than many Europeans are today. At the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans murdered many Muslims because they were mistaken for Jews: They didn’t realize that Muslims were also circumcised. But Berlin soon corrected the error and cautioned troops in the East to make sure to treat Muslims with respect, since they were Germany’s potential allies. In December 1942 Hitler decided he wanted to recruit all-Muslim units in the Caucasus. He distrusted Georgians and Armenians, but the Muslims, he said, were true soldiers.
The Germans assumed that the Muslim world would naturally flock to the Nazi banner, since Muslims like Germans knew that Jews were the enemy, and since Germany was offering them freedom from France, Britain, and Russia. But for the most part, they were wrong. Muslims only embraced the Nazi cause in places where they were desperate to arm themselves against local persecutors, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. In most of the Muslim world, Hitler failed to attract a large following.
North Africa was a miserable failure for German recruitment. “230,000 Muslims fought for the Free French against the Axis from North Africa,” Motadel pointed out to me in our interview, far more than those who enlisted with Germany. The Germans had their millions of leaflets, but they were not the only propagandists in the field. “The Free French mobilized them with anti-colonial rhetoric. The British and French were the ruling powers; they had much more control over propaganda.”
The East was much more favorable than North Africa to the German recruitment drive. The Muslims of the Caucasus and the Crimea had many reasons to choose Germany over Stalin’s Soviet Union. “In the East the Muslim population had really suffered under Stalin, economically and religiously,” Motadel remarked to me. They had nothing to lose, they thought, by siding with “Adolf Effendi.” The Crimean Tatars took a notorious place among Germany’s most loyal and ruthless battalions, fighting both in the East and, near the end of the war, in Romania. The Tatars made the wrong choice: Stalin mercilessly deported many of them to his gulags after the war.
In the Balkans many Muslims turned to Germany in the middle of a brutal civil war, fleeing the rampages of the Croatian Ustase. The infamous all-Muslim Handžar battalion of the SS, organized in the Balkans late in the war, committed many atrocities. In Serbian areas, noted one British officer, the Handžar “massacres all civil population without mercy or regard for age or sex.”
The Nazis made sure, with few exceptions, that the Nuremberg laws could be applied only to Jews, not to those other Semites, the Arabs, nor to Turks and Persians—which paradoxically allowed certain communities of Jews in Muslim regions to also survive the Shoah. In Crimea, two puzzled officers of the Wehrmacht, Fritz Donner and Ernst Seifert, reported on “Near Eastern racial groups of a non-Semitic character who, strangely, have adopted the Jewish faith,” while also noting that “a large part of these Jews on the Crimea is of Mohammedan faith.” What to do? In the end the Reich ruled that the Karaites, traditionally seen as a Turkic people, could be spared, while the Krymchaks should be murdered as Jews, though both these Crimean tribes followed Jewish law. In the northern Caucasus, the Nazis decided that the Judeo-Tats, a tiny Torah-observant island in a sea of Muslims, had only their religion in common with Jews. In effect, they became honorary Muslims and were saved from death. The Karaites were close to the Muslim Crimean Tatars, and the Judeo-Tats also had deep ties to their Muslim neighbors. It was their supposed affinity to Islam that saved the lives of these observant Jews. In these cases the Nazi wish to cultivate the Muslim world even affected to a small degree their anti-Semitic policy—to the Jews’ advantage.
***
Hitler cultivated many parts of the Muslim world, but he was fanatically enthusiastic about only one country: Turkey (the Nazis officially decided in 1936 that the Turks were Aryans). Stefan Ihrig’s brilliant new book Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination demonstrates convincingly that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s conquest of Turkey was the most important model for the Nazis’ remaking of Germany, far more so than Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, which is usually cited as Hitler’s main inspiration. Turkey had taken control of its destiny in manly fashion, in proud defiance of the international community—if only Germany would do the same! So argued many on the German right, including Hitler, during the 10 years between Atatürk’s victory and the Nazi seizure of power.
The victorious Entente had vastly curtailed Ottoman territory under the Treaty of Sèvres after WWI, just as the Treaty of Versailles shrank German territory. But the new nation of Turkey threw off the victors’ shackles and, after Mustafa Kemal (later renamed Atatürk) marched from Ankara westward, the Turks won the right to a homeland in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. The Weimar Republic’s newspapers obsessively celebrated the Turks’ victory and endorsed their claims to the disputed region of Hatay (the Turks’ Alsace-Lorraine), portraying the Turks as more advanced than the Germans, trailblazers on the path to strong nationhood. “If we want to be free, then we will have no choice but to follow the Turkish example in one way or another,” the right-wing military man and journalist Hans Tröbst announced in the newspaper Heimatland in 1923. Nearly every item in Hitler’s playbook can be found in such Weimar-era endorsements of Atatürk: All Turkey had mobilized for the war; strong faith in their leader had saved them.
Ihrig argues that the Turkish treatment of minorities, both under Atatürk and earlier, was the true precursor for Hitler’s murderous policy in the East. Those “bloodsuckers and parasites,” the Greeks and Armenians, had been “eradicated” by the Turks, Tröbst explained in Heimatland. “Gentle measures—that history has always shown—will not do in such cases.” The Turks had achieved “the purification of a nation of its foreign elements on a grand scale.” He added that “Almost all of those of foreign background in the area of combat had to die; their number is not put too low with 500,000.” Here was a chilling endorsement of genocide, and one that surely did not escape Hitler’s eye. Shortly after his articles appeared, Hitler invited Tröbst to give a speech on Turkey to the SA.
From 1923 on, Hitler consistently praised Atatürk in his own speeches as well. Berlin, like Istanbul, was cosmopolitan and decadent. Munich, site of Hitler’s beer-hall putsch, was the place for a German “Ankara government.” When Hitler seized power in 1933 his Völkischer Beobachter cited Atatürk’s victory as the “star in the darkness” that had shone for the beleaguered Nazis in 1923, after the putsch’s failure. Turkey was “proof of what a real man could do”—a man like Atatürk, or Hitler.
The Third Reich produced many idolizing biographies of Atatürk. Six years after the Turkish leader’s death, in late 1944, a delusional Hitler was still dreaming of a postwar alliance between Turkey and Germany. He never got his wish. During the war, Turkey, as a neutral power, kept its distance from the Nazis until it finally declared war against Germany in February 1945.
In Turkey, criticizing Atatürk can still get you three years in jail, though the country’s increasingly unhinged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan broke the law himself last year when he called Atatürk a drunkard. While Erdogan wants to reverse his predecessor’s program for secularizing Turkey, he appears to be imitating Atatürk’s extravagant cult of personality along with his habit of demonizing his enemies. But while Atatürk disdained Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Erdogan is obsessed with Jews. The 2014 Gaza operation, he has remarked, was worse than anything Hitler ever did, and the Israelis have been committing “systematic genocide every day” since 1948. Perhaps if Erdogan had been in power in the 1940s, the Nazis would have found the Muslim ally they so desperately sought.
Weaponizing Islam has often been a temptation for the United States, just as it was for Germany. In its battle against Moscow, Washington recruited Islamic leaders after WWII, most famously Said Ramadan, a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood. The United States even smiled on Saudi Arabia’s funding of radical Islamist organizations, hoping that religion would serve as a bulwark against Soviet Communism. Then the Muslim Brotherhood killed U.S. ally Anwar Sadat, and its follower Ayman al-Zawahiri became, along with Osama Bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida. We supported the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, until the Mujahedeen turned into the Taliban.
We are still trying to turn the Muslim world to our own purposes, but this time by supporting Shiite against Sunni. In addition to courting Erdogan, President Barack Obama hopes to make use of Iran as a stabilizing regional force. In his most recent personal letter to Ayatollah Khamanei, Obama seems to have made a promise: We will repeal sanctions, fight against ISIS, and preserve the rule of Iran’s client Bashar al Assad as long as Iran agrees to a deal on nuclear weapons. But what will the United States get in return? In the best-case scenario—which is far from assured—Iran’s bomb-making abilities will be hindered by the deal they sign. But even an Iran without the bomb cannot be relied on to make the Middle East less conflict-riven, unless we are aiming at the kind of stability famously mocked by Tacitus: They make a desert and call it peace. Iranian actions speak for themselves: support for Hezbollah, with its hundred thousand weapons aimed at Israel, and support for Assad, who has massacred his people endlessly and thrown massive numbers of them into concentration camps. Anyone who looks at the Syrian defector “Caesar” ’s photographs of the thousands of starved, mutilated bodies produced by Syria’s bloodthirsty optometrist-in-chief, which are now on permanent exhibition at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, a few blocks from the White House that has refused to grasp their meaning, will ask the same question: Don’t these Arab bodies, resembling so exactly the bodies of Jews at Auschwitz, have the same call on our conscience?
One thing is certain: If Khamanei and Rouhani are given a larger role in the Middle East, they will not serve U.S. interests, nor those of the majority of Muslims. They will serve their own interests, which are inimical to ours. We still have not learned the major lesson of 20th-century history so adeptly conveyed by Motadel and Ihrig: Western leaders who try to get Islam on their side through propaganda and favors will be unpleasantly surprised.
***
-
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/10/15/obama-foreign-policy-approval-rating-hits-low-water-mark/
-
Happy December 7th everybody. I wonder how long a period FDR meant by "May we never forget!"?
http://www.visionradioproductions.com/node/580
What were the lessons?
Peace comes through strength and deterrence.
There are people and regimes out there who would love to harm us.
Never has this been more true than now.
FDR did not say, may our strength and resolve oscillate with the polling data of current era focus groups!
-
"There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. 'Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard." --George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
-
More than we may realize, the world has been riding a lucky streak since the global financial meltdown in 2008. How so? The years between 2008 and late 2013 were — relatively speaking — a rather benign period of big power politics and geopolitics. This allowed the major economic powers — the United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia, Brazil and Japan — to focus almost exclusively on economic rehabilitation. But now there are strong indications that our vacation from geo-instability is over.
Thomas L. Friedman
Foreign affairs, globalization and technology.
The last time the world witnessed such a steep and sustained drop in oil prices — from 1986 to 1999 — it had some profound political consequences for oil-dependent states and those who depended on their largess. The Soviet empire collapsed; Iran elected a reformist president; Iraq invaded Kuwait; and Yasir Arafat, having lost his Soviet backer and Arab bankers, recognized Israel — to name but a few. Admittedly, other factors were involved in all these events. But, in each case, steep drops in direct or indirect oil revenues played a big role.
If today’s falloff in oil prices is sustained, we’ll also be in for a lot of surprises. Some will have happy endings. Cuba’s decision to bury the hatchet with America had to have been spurred in part by Havana’s fears of losing some or all of the 100,000 barrels of subsidized oil a day it gets from the now cash-strapped Venezuela. Others could be very destabilizing. Today’s world is much more tightly interconnected and interdependent than in the last oil price drop-off, which was before the spread of the Internet. And today’s world has so many more actors — superpowers and superempowered individuals and hackers who can destabilize companies and countries with cyberweapons. See dictionary for “Sony” and “North Korea.”
When I hear President Vladimir Putin of Russia bragging that lower oil revenues won’t affect the Russian people because they are stoic — look what they tolerated in World War II — my reaction is: “Mr. Putin, that was before there was a significant urban middle class in Russia, one you helped to build with trickle-down oil and gas revenues.” A lot more Russians today have gotten used to traveling abroad, owning a car (note Moscow’s traffic jams), consuming Western goods and seeing how the rest of the world lives. Let’s see how stoic they are today. Russia’s former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin was quoted by The Financial Times on Monday as saying, “There will be a fall in living standards. It will be painful. Protest activity will increase.”
The Western sanctions on Putin’s banks, combined with the sudden sharp drop in oil prices and capital flight also triggered by the sanctions, mean that Russia has a dangerous gap between the funds flowing into its economy and what it needs to send out to pay its debts and finance its imports. Putin can’t relieve the pressure without a lifting of Western sanctions. That would require him to reverse his seizure of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine.
If Putin admits his Ukraine adventure was a mistake, he will look incredibly foolish and the long knives will be out for him in the Kremlin. If he doesn’t back down, Russians will pay a huge price. Either way, that system will be stressed with unpredictable spillovers on the global economy. Remember: Russia’s 1998 economic collapse — also triggered by low oil prices and the moratorium it declared on payments to foreign debtors — helped to sink the giant American hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, sparking a near meltdown on Wall Street.
A prolonged drop in oil prices will impact Algeria, Iran and Arab Gulf states, where aging regimes have used high oil prices to increase government salaries to buy quiet from their people during the Arab Spring. Also, in an age when machines and software are ensuring that average is over for workers in developed countries, and everyone needs to be upgrading their skills, what happens to the developing Arab states and Iran, who have used oil money to mask their deficits in knowledge, education and women’s empowerment? Egypt’s military-led government is highly in need of Arab oil money to get through its crisis. A bit of good news: The Islamic State, which depends on oil smuggling, will fail at governing even faster than it already has.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s increasingly tyrannical president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been arresting domestic opponents, is looking like “Vladimir Putin Jr.” Erdogan is a tragic figure because he did much to build Turkey’s economy into a powerhouse. But, today, according to The Financial Times, Turkey now “needs more than $200 billion of foreign financing a year, more than a quarter of gross domestic product, :-o :-o :-o to maintain its current level of growth.” There will be less Arab and Russian oil money for that and, last week, with Erdogan being criticized by the European Union (a big source of investment income) for arresting his opponents, the Turkish lira hit a low against the dollar. Watch that space.
High oil prices covered many sins and fostered many sins. If they stay low again for long, a lot of leaders will have to pay retail for their crazy politics, not wholesale. The political and geopolitical fallouts will be varied — good and bad — but fallout aplenty there will be.
-
There are many threads this could go in but I put it here because of the multi-faceted implications:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/world/europe/oils-swift-fall-raises-fortunes-of-us-abroad.html?emc=edit_th_20141225&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
-
Foreign policy guru Leslie Gelb is no conservative -- he's the former assistant secretary of state for Jimmy Carter. Early on, Gelb championed Barack Obama's administration and the change it brought from the George W. Bush years. But now, the hope has faded. Late to the party, Gelb writes, "The failure of Obama or Biden to show up in Paris made clear that most of the president's team can't be trusted to conduct U.S national security policy and must be replaced -- at once. Here's why America's failure to be represented at the Paris unity march was so profoundly disturbing. It wasn't just because President Obama's or Vice President Biden's absence was a horrendous gaffe. More than this, it demonstrated beyond argument that the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years. It's simply too dangerous to let Mr. Obama continue as is -- with his current team and his way of making decisions. America, its allies, and friends could be heading into one of the most dangerous periods since the height of the Cold War. Mr. Obama will have to excuse most of his inner core, especially in the White House." But even that won't be enough if Obama remains his old, stubborn self. Gelb adds, "In the end, making the national security system work comes down to one factor, one man -- Barack Obama." Indeed it does, and that's why we're in bad shape until at least 2017. Then again, John Kerry took James Taylor to France to sing "You've got a friend," so that should fix it.
-
By
Peggy Noonan
Jan. 29, 2015 6:24 p.m. ET
171 COMMENTS
Something is going on here.
On Tuesday retired Gen. James Mattis, former head of U.S. Central Command (2010-13) told the Senate Armed Services Committee of his unhappiness at the current conduct of U.S. foreign policy. He said the U.S. is not “adapting to changed circumstances” in the Mideast and must “come out now from our reactive crouch.” Washington needs a “refreshed national strategy”; the White House needs to stop being consumed by specific, daily occurrences that leave it “reacting” to events as if they were isolated and unconnected. He suggested deep bumbling: “Notifying the enemy in advance of our withdrawal dates” and declaring “certain capabilities” off the table is no way to operate.
Sitting beside him was Gen. Jack Keane, also a respected retired four-star, and a former Army vice chief of staff, who said al Qaeda has “grown fourfold in the last five years” and is “beginning to dominate multiple countries.” He called radical Islam “the major security challenge of our generation” and said we are failing to meet it.
The same day the generals testified, Kimberly Dozier of the Daily Beast reported that Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a retired director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had told a Washington conference: “You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists.” The audience of military and intelligence professionals applauded. Officials, he continued, are “paralyzed” by the complexity of the problems connected to militant Islam, and so do little, reasoning that “passivity is less likely to provoke our enemies.”
These statements come on the heels of the criticisms from President Obama’s own former secretaries of defense. Robert Gates, in “Duty,” published in January 2014, wrote of a White House-centric foreign policy developed by aides and staffers who are too green or too merely political. One day in a meeting the thought occurred that Mr. Obama “doesn’t trust” the military, “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his.” That’s pretty damning. Leon Panetta , in his 2014 memoir, “Worthy Fights,” said Mr. Obama ”avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.”
No one thinks this administration is the A Team when it comes to foreign affairs, but this is unprecedented push-back from top military and intelligence players. They are fed up, they’re less afraid, they’re retired, and they’re speaking out. We are going to be seeing more of this kind of criticism, not less.
On Thursday came the testimony of three former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger (1973-77), George Shultz (1982-89) and Madeleine Albright (1997-2001). Senators asked them to think aloud about what America’s national-security strategy should be, what approaches are appropriate to the moment. It was good to hear serious, not-green, not-merely-political people give a sense of the big picture. Their comments formed a kind of bookend to the generals’ criticisms.
The seemed to be in agreement on these points:
We are living through a moment of monumental world change.
Old orders are collapsing while any new stability has yet to emerge.
When you’re in uncharted waters your boat must be strong.
If America attempts to disengage from this dangerous world it will only make all the turmoil worse.
Mr. Kissinger observed that in the Mideast, multiple upheavals are unfolding simultaneously—within states, between states, between ethnic and religious groups. Conflicts often merge and produce such a phenomenon as the Islamic State, which in the name of the caliphate is creating a power base to undo all existing patterns.
Mr. Shultz said we are seeing an attack on the state system and the rise of a “different view of how the world should work.” What’s concerning is “the scope of it.”
Mr. Kissinger: “We haven’t faced such diverse crises since the end of the Second World War.” The U.S. is in “a paradoxical situation” in that “by any standard of national capacity . . . we can shape international relations,” but the complexity of the present moment is daunting. The Cold War was more dangerous, but the world we face now is more complicated.
How to proceed in creating a helpful and constructive U.S. posture?
Mr. Shultz said his attitude when secretary of state was, “If you want me in on the landing, include me in the takeoff.” Communication and consensus building between the administration and Congress is key. He added: “The government seems to have forgotten about the idea of ‘execution.’ ” It’s not enough that you say something, you have to do it, make all the pieces work.
When you make a decision, he went on, “stick with it.” Be careful with words. Never make a threat or draw a line you can’t or won’t make good on.
In negotiations, don’t waste time wondering what the other side will accept, keep your eye on what you can and work from there.
Keep the U.S. military strong, peerless, pertinent to current challenges.
Proceed to negotiations with your agenda clear and your strength unquestionable.
Mr. Kissinger: “In our national experience . . . we have trouble doing a national strategy” because we have been secure behind two big oceans. We see ourselves as a people who respond to immediate, specific challenges and then go home. But foreign policy today is not a series of discrete events, it is a question of continuous strategy in the world.
America plays the role of “stabilizer.” But it must agree on its vision before it can move forward on making it reality. There are questions that we must as a nation answer:
As we look at the world, what is it we seek to prevent? What do we seek to achieve? What can we prevent or achieve only if supported by an alliance? What values do we seek to advance? “This will require public debate.”
All agreed the cost-cutting burdens and demands on defense spending forced by the sequester must be stopped. National defense “should have a strategy-driven budget, not a budget-driven strategy,” said Mr. Kissinger.
He added that in the five wars since World War II, the U.S. began with “great enthusiasm” and had “great national difficulty” in ending them. In the last two, “withdrawal became the principal definition of strategy.” We must avoid that in the future. “We have to know the objective at the start and develop a strategy to achieve it.”
Does the U.S. military have enough to do what we must do?
“It’s not adequate to deal with all the challenges I see,” said Mr. Kissinger, “or the commitments into which we may be moving.”
Sequestration is “legislative insanity” said Mr. Shultz. “You have to get rid of it.”
Both made a point of warning against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which Mr. Shultz called “those awful things.” The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was a plaything compared with the killing power of modern nuclear weapons. A nuclear device detonated in Washington would “wipe out” the area. Previous progress on and attention to nuclear proliferation has, he said, been “derailed.”
So we need a strategy, and maybe more than one. We need to know what we’re doing and why. After this week with the retired generals and the former secretaries, the message is: Awake. See the world’s facts as they are. Make a plan.
-
King of Jordan furious over ISIS
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/after-isis-execution-angry-king-abdullah-quotes-clint-eastwood-to-u.s.-lawmakers/article/2559770
Krauthammer: Congress Should Declare War On The Islamic State
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/02/04/krauthammer_congress_should_declare_war_on_the_islamic_state.html
Pentagon intelligence lists Islamic State as threat to US:
http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-global-threats-20150204-story.html
President Obama, ISIS is / is not the JV team of terrorists, pick your quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/09/03/spinning-obamas-reference-to-isis-as-a-jv-team/
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2014/09/07/obama-makes-stunning-reversal-isis-not-a-jv-team/
Previously from this administration: Iraq was my greatest achievement.
It is hard not to merge the US Foreign Policy and Glibness threads.
We can ask or answer the hypothetical question of what we should be doing if not for those last two Presidential elections, and we can ask what we should do with the pieces that are left when he leaves, but US Foreign Policy is linked to having a Commander in Chief, and the world is suffering from a US leadership vacuum.
-
Iraq is his greatest achievement.
-
"We can ask or answer the hypothetical question of what we should be doing if not for those last two Presidential elections, and we can ask what we should do with the pieces that are left when he leaves, but US Foreign Policy is linked to having a Commander in Chief, and the world is suffering from a US leadership vacuum."
Disagree in part.
A big part of what this thread is about is articulating an overarching vision for US foreign policy.
Should we seek to return to the US anchoring world-wide peace? Are we up to that economically? Do we have a government of sufficient competence for that mission?
Can such a vision be articulated (Rubio?) and win?
Should we go "Fortress America"? Pull back to the western hemisphere (no foreign bases in Cuba, Venezuela, etc) in a return to the Monroe Doctrine and in return concede China's dominance of the South China Sea. The Philippines threw us out of our bases there, now they want us to protect them. What about Russia and Europe? Russia and Central Asia? Do we allow the collapse of the EU/Euro and the resulting Russian expansionism? Why should be bother to defend the Euros when they will not spend or act to defend themselves? Good chance that Islamo Fascism continues to spread -- how do we keep it from hitting us?
What to do about Iran's rush to nukes? Are we willing to go to war? I gather the Pentagon is decidedly unenthusiastic about such a course of action , , , Yes, yes, I know sanctions sanctions, but given how close Iran is to the finish line do any of us believe they are likely to work?
It is not enough to yap at Obama asking for him to define a strategy. The man either is not up to it or is against us on some fundamental level. WE NEED TO SAY WHAT WE THINK THE STRATEGY SHOULD BE.
-
Sit back and enjoy the collapse. We are past the point of stopping what is coming.
-
Share
Washington Turns Mistrust Into a Virtue in Negotiations
Geopolitical Diary
February 4, 2015 | 03:14 GMT Text Size Print
More than two weeks after Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif took a 15-minute stroll in Geneva with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Iran's hard-line journalists and politicians are still lambasting the foreign minister for the seemingly innocuous move. As parliament grilled him, Zarif defended himself by arguing he had just taken a midnight flight followed by five hours of intense negotiations and needed fresh air. His opponents, however, charged him with "trampling the blood of martyrs" and of displaying a level of intimacy appropriate only for lovers or "partners of international thievery."
Sideline discussions are part and parcel of any negotiation. Away from the cameras and the microphones, frank discussions can be had and, on occasion, progress made. But as one might expect after more than three decades of mutual enmity, distrust layers Iran's negotiation with the United States. The uproar over the Geneva stroll was a message to Iran's negotiators that they should not assimilate to Western negotiating styles and feign friendship prematurely but should instead treat this negotiation as they would in wartime — without emotion and with minimal sacrifice. For many in Iran, including those who have economically benefited from the sanctions regime, the path toward easing sanctions is long and unclear. And with the U.S. Congress readying a fresh sanctions draft, Washington cannot be trusted to follow through with its end of the bargain.
What is a Geopolitical Diary? George Friedman Explains.
While Iran believes the United States will sacrifice too little in this negotiation, Israel's concern is that the U.S. administration will end up compromising too much, thereby leaving the danger of Iran using diplomatic cover to continue surreptitious work on a nuclear weapons program. With a Republican-majority U.S. Congress now in session, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is gambling that his alliance with a faction of U.S. lawmakers will tie the president's hands, paralyzing the negotiations with Iran. Israel has even gone out of its way to talk up a free trade negotiation with Russia after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, at a time when Washington is trying to economically isolate Moscow. Apparently, Netanyahu's distrust of the U.S. administration is so great that he is willing to boldly and consciously widen the gap between Israel and its only external patron.
Russia, too, has deep misgivings toward Washington. The New York Times reported Sunday that the U.S. administration is closer to supplying Ukraine with weaponry, including anti-tank Javelin missiles. After letting that message marinate with the Kremlin for 48 hours, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes announced Tuesday that the U.S. government will not "in the near future" deliver those weapons. Moscow reciprocated with its own pseudo-conciliatory message the same day, when the Donetsk People's Republic representative at the Minsk talks announced that the militias do not intend to launch an offensive in Mariupol "in the very near future." Moscow and Washington are talking to each other through such signals, telegraphing the various ways they can each ratchet up the pressure while hinting strongly that they would rather not go down that path.
Russia especially would like to avoid a military escalation that risks crippling its economy, yet Russian President Vladimir Putin does not have the luxury of a clear picture of U.S. motives. From his point of view, Russia is already extremely exposed, with the Baltic states in NATO's pocket. Losing Ukraine, not to mention Belarus, would place Russia in an untenable situation. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has shown a willingness to encroach deeper and deeper into the Russian periphery, and now the United States is building up defense relations along Russia's European rim, including the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine. Even under immense economic constraints, the uncertainty over U.S. intentions will drive Russia's actions in the end.
Whether the United States is dealing with Russia, Iran, Israel or Cuba for that matter, mistrust is an unavoidable theme. Although it might seem like a major detriment to U.S. foreign policy, it could in fact be a virtue. The United States' combination of strength and unpredictability compels others to the negotiating table. Israel has no other patron. Iran has to live with the U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. Russia cannot live with U.S. weaponry and forces in Ukraine. On the other hand, the United States will not face an existential crisis if it deepens its involvement in Ukraine, holds out on a negotiation with Iran or reduces aid for Israel. The United States can conduct diplomacy over an evening stroll or in a camera-filled Swiss boardroom. Either way, the global hegemon will reap the benefits of an inevitably asymmetric negotiation.
-
:roll:
The epic goat rope that is our foreign policy isn't a bug, it's a feature!
-
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188772/nuclear-dreams-lee-smith?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=a052955eee-Thursday_February_5_20152_5_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-a052955eee-207249597
Nuclear Dreams: Iran Now Controls Four Arab Capitals, Plus Washington, D.C.
What the burning of a Jordanian pilot reveals about Obama’s flawed Middle East game
By Lee Smith|February 5, 2015 12:00 AM|Comments: 3
Anwar Tarawneh (center), the wife of Jordanian pilot Maaz al-Kassasbeh, who was captured and murdered by Islamic State (IS) group militants on Dec. 24 after his F-16 jet crashed while on a mission against the jihadists over northern Syria. (Khalil Mazraawi/AFP/Getty Images)
By Ron Rosenbaum
With Help From Tehran and Moscow, and Inaction by the U.S., Assad Is Poised To Stay
Thanks to outside forces waging a proxy battle in Syria, 2013 has become a year of attrition rather than endgames
By Jonathan Spyer
Jewish Aleppo, Lost Forever
The Syrian diaspora in Israel watches its once-vibrant ancestral home fall to ruin in the country’s civil war
By Joseph Dana
The point of burning alive Jordanian pilot First Lt. Muath al-Kasasbeh was to outrage onlookers, including his family—but especially the members of his large tribe, the Bararsheh, in southern Jordan. The Jordanian tribes form the core of support for the Hashemite kingdom against the Palestinian West Bankers, who may constitute the country’s majority. The East Bankers are also the bulwarks of Jordan’s internal and external security, with both the armed forces and security services made up almost exclusively of tribal members.
To be sure, Kasasbeh’s clansmen are going to be very angry with the Islamic State for killing him in such a gruesome manner. What IS seems to betting on is that Kasasbeh’s death was so gruesome, and so evocative of the hellfire that awaits false believers, that the dead pilot’s tribe, a pillar of the Hashemite monarchy, is likely going to be shocked into wondering whether King Abdullah has pulled them into the wrong war, on behalf of a frivolous and potentially treacherous ally—the United States.
Right now, the Obama Administration sees the Islamic State as a major threat to U.S. national security—and to the political fortunes of President Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic Party. An episode like the Charlie Hebdo/Hyper Cacher attack played out on the streets of Chicago, say, or New York, would be a catastrophe for the administration, which is why it has enlisted allies like Jordan in its campaign against the deranged jihadists of the fertile crescent.
However, it’s worth understanding how the Hashemites and their loyal tribal subjects understand the new threat. From their perspective, the Islamic State is only one part of a larger regional movement, a Sunni rebellion trying to beat back the Iranian security apparatus that now represses them mercilessly throughout the Levant while controlling four historic Arab capitals—Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and Sana’a. The wider Sunni rebellion against Persian domination comprises not only lunatic foreign fighters (Chechens, Saudis, Swedes, etc.) but also former elements of Saddam Hussein’s regime as well as—and this is the central fact of the Sunni rebellion—Sunni Arab tribes. In other words, Jordan’s Arab tribes have been enlisted to fight Arab tribes who are fighting against Iran and its allies—who are coordinating their anti-Sunni campaign with the United States.
Jordan’s tribes are hardly alone at this moment in their torment and confusion. The United States has alienated its former Sunni tribal allies in Anbar province and throughout Iraq by conducting air strikes on behalf of sectarian Shiite militias loyal to Iran, which murder Sunni tribesmen with seeming impunity whether they are associated with IS or not. Saudi Arabia is aghast at U.S. support for Iran’s role in Yemen, where the Shia Houtha tribesmen backed by Iran now control the country. Israel nearly got into a shooting war last week because of Hezbollah’s ongoing attempt to implant itself on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, where the Iranian-backed sectarian Lebanese Shia militia operates under cover of U.S. airstrikes and implicit political backing that support the regime of Bashar al-Assad, an Iranian client. While Egypt fights a war against IS and al-Qaida-backed tribes in Sinai, the White House shuns the country’s leader Gen. al-Sisi in favor of meeting in Washington with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, who have sworn to overthrow his regime.
That’s a lot of turmoil for America to be stirring up for its erstwhile allies, at a moment where our larger national goal is supposedly a clean exit from the region. So, why is the White House turning the Middle East upside down? Obama is willing to throw away a U.S. framework built by American statesmen, soldiers, businessmen, and educators over the last century because he sees a really big prize out there for the taking—an agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons program that will be the linchpin of a new Middle Eastern order, in which Iran will play a major stabilizing role.
The Dream: An agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons program will be the linchpin of a new Middle Eastern order, in which Iran will play a major stabilizing role.
The Iran deal that Obama has in mind is going to be so awesomely epic and world-changing that it will easily be worth all the chaos the region is now undergoing—from broken alliances and promises, to the high and rising death toll, massive population transfers, the destruction of ancient cities, and the trauma of an entire generation for whom beheadings and human barbeques have become a normal part of life. The United States is on its way out of the Middle East, which is why we need a reliable regional partner like Iran, with the muscle to make its dictates stick. Yes, the dominant partner in that arrangement will obviously be Iran—especially once the Iranians are free of the sanctions that have crippled their oil industry, and can control the oil resources of their client state in Iraq, as well as provide security in the once-and-future Persian Gulf. But Obama would always have the photographs of his triumphant visit to Tehran to remember his role in crafting a new world order from the tribal mayhem of a region in which Americans once fought and died.
***
But, wait a minute. It seems like it was just yesterday that the government of the United States, its armed forces and clandestine service, had an entirely different set of goals in mind—namely, defending American troops and our allies in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf, and Israel from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed, of late the American intelligence community has been reminding us of our recent past through leaks to the Washington Post and Newsweek saying that not all that long ago, in 2008, the agency teamed with the Mossad to kill Hezbollah’s head of operations, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus. The point seems to be that, if the U.S. intelligence community now shares intelligence with Hezbollah and leaks the details of Israeli strikes on Hezbollah convoys, we were once proud to collaborate with our Israeli allies to kill Hezbollah terrorists.
Why does the U.S. intelligence community care about this ancient history? Mughniyeh didn’t just plot the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, among other spectacular terrorist attacks targeting Americans, he also directed the campaign against U.S.-led coalition troops in Iraq waged by Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
Today, however, Shiite militias like Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Kataib Hezbollah, and Badr Corps get indirect air support from U.S. warplanes. Before the White House launched its campaign against ISIS in Syria, it told Iran it wasn’t going to attack its ally Bashar al-Assad there—even though Obama called for the Syrian dictator to step down in August 2011. By going after ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other Syrian rebel units, the White House freed up Assad to use his forces elsewhere.
As former George W. Bush White House aide Michael Doran meticulously lays out in his recently published tour-de-force “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy,” the U.S.-Iran partnership that is reshaping the Middle East has been in the making since Obama first came to office. The most salient point then about the current P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran isn’t the nuclear issue, but the fact that they create a channel to allow both sides to keep talking—which means that all sorts of subjects are going to come up, from Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon to Yemen and maybe even other thorny issues, like Argentina and the Nisman investigation into Iran’s alleged role in the bombing of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and Jewish Community Center in 1994. U.S. response to everything in the region is now tied to the fate of the Iranian nuclear program, which in turn is simply the linchpin of Obama’s larger vision of a partnership between Washington and Tehran.
Obama may dream of a U.S.-Iran partnership and going skiing in the mountains above Tehran. But what does Obama’s grand vision look like these days from the Iranian side? From Iran’s perspective, then, it controls not only four Arab capitals, but it also holds Washington captive. If Obama pushes back, the Iranians walk away from the table, confounding the U.S. president’s dreams of achieving a historic reconciliation—and maybe worse, leaving him vulnerable to Republican majorities in the House and Senate ready to pounce on an epochal diplomatic failure.
But why does Obama’s vision have to fail? First of all, it’s not clear how Iran can accept any permanent agreement with the White House about the nuclear program, or anything else, for that matter. From Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps’ perspective, a deal might empower President Hassan Rouhani at their expense. From Rouhani’s perspective, a deal might make him, a so-called moderate, superfluous as someone who’s already played his role. Most important, there is the point of view of Khamenei, which partakes of the historic rationale of the Islamic Republic. Its founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini promised one thing—not to raise the standard of living or educate women, nor even to hasten the return of the Mahdi, but rather that the life of a genuine Muslim rested on the pillar of resistance against the godless, the arrogant West, especially America. Signing an accord with the Great Satan would undermine the fundamental legitimacy of the regime.
Obama wants a deal with Iran so much in large part because he doesn’t think the United States should be the world’s policeman—and he’s right. Our oil and natural gas industry won’t make us energy independent but it makes us less dependent and we simply don’t need that high a profile in a part of the world that has seldom returned our love. So, why keep shedding blood and spending money—as well as domestic political capital—in the Middle East?
The answer is not that we need to look out for the world’s interests, but that we need to continue protecting our own. A nuclear weapon in the hands of an expansionist regime doesn’t get the United States out of the Middle East. It puts Iran on our doorstep, by turning the clerical regime into an aggressive global nuclear-armed power. There can’t be much question by now about what Iran has in mind for the Middle East, or for other countries that it enlists in its schemes, like Argentina. What Iran wants makes the world a more dangerous place for Americans. The question is not whether there’s a deal to be had with Iran, but if it’s too late to crash the comprehensive agreement the White House has already struck with our new regional partner—whose sickening consequences are plain to see.
-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-emerging-iran-nuclear-deal-raises-major-concerns-in-congress-and-beyond/2015/02/05/4b80fd92-abda-11e4-ad71-7b9eba0f87d6_story.html
-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-emerging-iran-nuclear-deal-raises-major-concerns-in-congress-and-beyond/2015/02/05/4b80fd92-abda-11e4-ad71-7b9eba0f87d6_story.html
No worries, I've been told Iran is a rational actor.
-
Along with Iraq, Syria, Libya and Ukraine, another US Foreign Policy success, if we measure everything upside down.
NYT says the new militant leader was reaching out to the US.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/world/middleeast/yemen-houthi-leader-pledges-to-pursue-power-sharing-accord.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
-
I strongly recommend reviewing Reply #602 in this thread.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/398597/obamas-unconstitutional-attempt-shift-blame-his-losing-isis-strategy-andrew-c?utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_content=d3OAVX&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook#!d3OAVX
-
One hopes the Stupid Party will have a flash of intelligence and use it to recognize this point and make good use of it.
-
Why The World’s Biggest Military Keeps Losing Wars
Tom Streithorst
14 Jan 2015
Before Korea, America never lost a war. Ever since, other than the first Gulf War, it hasn’t won any. In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan America spent trillions of dollars, exploded countless tons of munitions, killed hundreds of thousands of enemy combatants along with innocent civilians and accomplished hardly any of the goals its leaders proclaimed when they sent their soldiers into battle.
America’s inability to translate its immense firepower into meaningful political effect suggests the $500 billion it spends annually on defence is wasted. In a recent article in the Atlantic Magazine, James Fallows asked the previously unmentionable question: how can America spend more on its military than all the other great powers combined and still be unable to impose its will on even moderately sized enemies?
I think the media generally ignores this question because the answers skewers shibboleths revered by both left and right. I spent much of the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a news cameraman embedded with the American military. I like American soldiers, enjoy their company, respect their bravery, their loyalty, their ethos: but hanging out on their Forward Operating Bases, I could see why the world’s most expensive military doesn’t win wars. Here are four factors worth considering, in descending order of importance.
Too much logistics, not enough combat.
They call it the tooth to tail ratio: the number of combat soldiers compared to the number in support roles. More than three-quarters of Americans in Iraq didn’t fight. A ridiculously large number of American soldiers spent their entire tour in Iraq “inside the wire”, barely leaving their huge prefabricated bases that felt more like Arizona than Anbar.
My Baghdad based colleagues and I used to look forward to embeds so we could eat all American cuisine at the mess halls. Pecan pie, sweet ice tea, lobster and steak on Fridays, all shipped halfway around the globe. The logistical tail was wagging the combat dog. In Afghanistan, the Americans had to pay off the Taliban so the supplies could get through.
I never thought I would say this out loud, but Donald Rumsfeld was right about one thing: the American military is too big and bulky. Special Forces are lean and mean and - not coincidentally - more successful. The one triumph of the misbegotten War on Terror was the rapid defeat of the Taliban in the fall of 2001. With almost no regular army involvement, a handful of Special Forces commandos slipped into Afghanistan, liaisoned with Northern Alliance units, and coordinated air strikes against Taliban positions. At the time, the Taliban held all but a few slivers of Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance was outnumbered, outgunned and heading towards ignominious defeat, but the combination of local boots on the ground, elite American scouts and massive American airpower proved unbeatable. Within a month, the Taliban recognized they had lost and faded away, at least for a few years.
The military would be more successful if it was smaller and more concentrated. America should shrink its regular army and focus on elite units who can get in, accomplish a targeted mission, and get out quickly. A smaller footprint solves a multitude of problems, both logistical and political.
Learn the Language
One desert night on a Marine base outside Basra, I chatted with an Egyptian interpreter hired by the US military. Knowing that Cairene Arabic is vastly different from that of Southern Iraq, I asked him if he had any trouble understanding the local dialect. He shook his head. “I have no idea what they are saying. I have a much easier time understanding you.” His English was excellent, which is presumably why he got the job, but his comprehension of Basrawi Arabic was almost nonexistent. But Marine officers, who inevitably spoke no Arabic, depended on him to explain what the locals were trying to tell them. Since the interpreter just made up what he thought his bosses wanted to hear, the Marines were operating with negative intelligence.
The moral: don’t invade a country if you are too lazy to learn the language. If you can’t understand what people are saying, you are operating blind. I’ve been told by American officials that up to 95% of the Iraqis imprisoned in American brigs were probably guilty of nothing. They were ratted out, perhaps by someone who owed them money, and the gullible Americans just locked them up. Imprisoning the innocent created unnecessary enemies for the occupation. In 2003, most Iraqis were pleased at Saddam Hussein’s ouster. They could have been predisposed to support American aims, if the Americans hadn’t alienated so many of them for little reason. It is impossible to successfully conduct a war if you can’t distinguish friend from foe because they all look the same to you. If more American soldiers understood Arabic, their insight and awareness of Iraqi culture could have made a huge difference.
Fear of Casualties
One of the most moving moments of my time in Iraq was a memorial service for a young soldier, nicknamed “Doc”, a 19 year-old medic killed by an improvised explosive device in Diyala Province. Almost all of Camp War Horse showed up for the ceremony. We stared at his boots and dog tags while his comrades remembered his bravery and kindness. As the service came to a close, his Sergeant called roll. He barked out the dead man’s name; the silence was blistering, and unforgettable. Four Generals flew in from Baghdad to pay their respects. As well they should. The death of a young man is always a tragedy. But had generals in the First World War gone to as many funerals, they would never have been able to plot the next battle.
The American military is deeply committed to force protection, to not losing soldiers. Captains tell you proudly their primary goal is to get through the tour without any fatalities. This is an admirable sign of human decency, but it is not particularly bellicose. It is impossible to imagine William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, or Patton focusing above all else on not losing soldiers. Historically, officers are happy to use their men as cannon fodder if it will help them achieve their objectives.
In 1982, Reagan sent Marines into Beirut to try and stop the Civil War. When a car bomb killed 241 of them, he soon withdrew the entire force. In 1993 Clinton sent US soldiers into Somalia for a similar humanitarian purpose. When a few of them were killed and their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the domestic political fallout was such that they too were quickly extracted. Our fear of death sends a message to our enemies. Despite apparent American strength, its enemies know if they have a little patience and inflict a little pain, the Americans will probably leave.
Only go to war if it is worth sacrificing your children. When Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin’s son went to the front, was captured and eventually died in a POW camp. Would Bush have been so happy to invade Iraq had he expected Jenna and Barbara to end up on point in Fallujah? Of course not. And that brings us to the last and most important reason America keeps losing wars.
War as Symbol
From a military perspective, the Tet offensive was a great victory for American arms. For several years the Americans had been desperate for the Viet Cong to stand up and fight, to stop hiding in the shadows. In February 1968, they did. Initially, they were successful. For a few hours they captured the US embassy in Saigon. For a few weeks they conquered the ancient imperial capital of Hue. But soon, the immense firepower of the US army took its toll. The Viet Cong were slaughtered, more than decimated, destroyed as a fighting force for the rest of the war. Tet was a great battlefield success for the US army. It is also the moment the United States lost the Vietnam War.
Vietnam was televised. Civilians watching at home did not see victory, they saw carnage. They recognised that their President had been lying to them when he suggested that victory would be easy, and they wanted out.
Fifty thousand Americans died in Vietnam. So did more than 2 million Vietnamese. If war were a numbers game, America would have been victorious. But war is ultimately a matter of will. The North Vietnamese were willing to suffer more than the Americans were, because victory was more important to them.
Lyndon Johnson only went to war because he feared being accused of “losing” Vietnam by congressional Republicans. Indochina was insignificant to America, important only as a symbol of US resolve, as a message to China and Russia that the US would stand by its allies, no matter the cost.
In 1975, Saigon finally fell. Other than psychologically, the effect on America was negligible. Likewise, in a few years, most Americans won’t know or care who controls Mosul or Helmand or South Waziristan. America lost in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan primarily because it had no real reason to go to war in the first place, no compelling national interest. Were Canada to invade North Dakota or Mexico to invade California, I suspect the US military and people would find the will to win. But the American people, wiser than their bellicose elites, ultimately are unwilling to make sacrifices for mere symbols.
War, What is it good For? Absolutely Nothing
In 1910, Norman Angell wrote The Grand Illusion, a long pamphlet suggesting that a general war between the great powers was impossible. Of course, 1914 proved him wrong, and history professors since then have mocked Angell for his mistimed prophecy. But on a deeper level Angell was just a bit ahead of the curve. He argued that in an intertwined capitalist economy, war was self-destructive. Even the victor would lose.
Angell observed that no German personally profited from the annexation of Alsace in 1870. All land remained in its legitimate owners’ hands. When William conquered Britain, when Cortez conquered Mexico, their soldiers made fortunes. War traditionally was mostly an excuse for plunder. In the modern world, Angell argued, armies slaughtered not prospective slaves but potential customers. Today, in the developed world, war is pointless. China needs America to buy its manufactured goods. America needs China to buy its government debt. No geopolitical dispute can trump their symbiotic ties.
For the developed nations today, going to war is more a signifier than anything else. If their primary interest was oil, American diplomats would have told Saddam to grant exclusive contracts to select oil companies and he would have gladly complied in order to avoid invasion. But Bush, Cheney et al weren’t really interested in Iraq’s oil but rather in an opportunity to demonstrate America’s awesome military power, in order to cow the rest of the Middle East and the world beyond. It didn’t work out as they had hoped.
Had Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen been able to post YouTube videos of the horrific and pointless slaughter on the western front in World War 1, the British public would have sued for peace. In a democracy, with a free media, the horrors of war are a hard sell, especially when war serves little purpose other than to make the country or its leaders look tough. The most fundamental reason America’s huge military can’t win wars is that it doesn’t need to.
http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/why_the_worlds_biggest_military_keeps_losing_wars
-
The Intersection of Three Crises
Geopolitical Weekly
February 24, 2015 | 08:57 GMT
By Reva Bhalla
Within the past two weeks, a temporary deal to keep Greece in the eurozone was reached in Brussels, a cease-fire roadmap was agreed to in Minsk and Iranian negotiators advanced a potential nuclear deal in Geneva. Squadrons of diplomats have forestalled one geopolitical crisis after another. Yet it would be premature, even reckless, to assume that the fault lines defining these issues are effectively stable. Understanding how these crises are inextricably linked is the first step toward assessing when and where the next flare-up is likely to occur.
Germany and the Eurozone Crisis
Germany has once again become the victim of its own power. As Europe's largest creditor, it has considerable political leverage over debtor nations such as Greece, whose entire livelihood now depends on whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel is willing to sign another bailout check. Lest we forget, Germany is exporting the equivalent of about half its GDP, and most of those exports are consumed within Europe. Thus, the institutions Germany relies on to protect its export markets are the very institutions Berlin must battle to protect Germany's national wealth.
Many have characterized the recent Brussels deal as a victory for Berlin over Athens as eurozone finance ministers, including the Portuguese, Spanish and French, stood behind Germany in refusing Greece the right to circumvent its debt obligations. But Merkel is also not about to gamble an unlimited amount of German taxpayer funds on flimsy Greek pledges to cut costs and impose structural reforms on a population that, for now, still views the ruling Syriza party as its savior from austerity. Within four months, Greece and Germany will be at loggerheads again, and Greece will likely still lack the austerity credentials that Berlin needs to convince its own Euroskeptics that it has the institutional heft and credibility to impose Germanic thriftiness on the rest of Europe. The more time Germany buys, the more inflexible the German and Greek negotiating positions become, and the more seriously traders, businessmen and politicians alike will have to take the threat of a so-called Grexit, the first in a chain of events that could shatter the eurozone.
The Role of the Crisis in Ukraine
In order to steer Germany through an escalating eurozone crisis, Merkel needs to calm her eastern front. It is no wonder, then, that she committed herself to multiple sleepless nights and an incessant travel schedule to put another Minsk agreement with Russia on paper. The deal was flawed from the start because it avoided recognizing the ongoing attempts by Russian-backed separatists to smooth out the demarcation line by bringing the pocket of Debaltseve under their zone of control. After several more days of scuffling, the Germans (again leveraging their creditor status — this time, against Ukraine) quietly pushed Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to accept the battlefield reality and move along with the cease-fire agreement. But even if Germany on one side and Russia on the other were able to bring about a relative calm in eastern Ukraine, it would do little in the end to de-escalate the standoff between the United States and Russia.
The Connection Between Ukraine and Iran
Contrary to popular opinion in the West, Russian President Vladimir Putin is not driven by crazed territorial ambitions. He is looking at the map, just as his predecessors have for centuries, and grappling with the task of securing the Russian underbelly from a borderland state coming under the wing of a much more formidable military power in the West. As the United States has reminded Moscow repeatedly over the past several days, the White House retains the option to send lethal aid to Ukraine. With heavier equipment comes trainers, and with trainers come boots on the ground.
From his perspective, Putin can already see the United States stretching beyond NATO bounds to recruit and shore up allies along the Russian periphery. Even as short-term truces are struck in eastern Ukraine, there is nothing precluding a much deeper U.S. probe in the region. That is the assumption that will drive Russian actions in the coming months as Putin reviews his military options, which include establishing a land bridge to Crimea (a move that would still, in effect, leave Russia's border with Ukraine exposed), a more ambitious push westward to anchor at the Dnieper River and probing actions in the Baltic states to test NATO's credibility.
The United States does not have the luxury of precluding any one of these possibilities, so it must prepare accordingly. But focusing on the Eurasian theater entails first tying up loose ends in the Middle East, starting with Iran. And so we come to Geneva, where U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif met again Feb. 22 to work out the remaining points of a nuclear deal before March 31, the date by which U.S. President Barack Obama is supposed to demonstrate enough progress in negotiations to hold Congress back from imposing additional sanctions on Iran. If the United States is to realistically game out scenarios in which U.S. military forces confront Russia in Europe, it needs to be able to rapidly redeploy forces that have spent the past dozen years putting out fires ignited by sprouting jihadist emirates and preparing for a potential conflict in the Persian Gulf. To lighten its load in the Middle East, the United States will look to regional powers with vested and often competing interests to shoulder more of the burden.
A U.S.-Iranian understanding goes well beyond agreeing on how much uranium Iran is allowed to enrich and stockpile and how much sanctions relief Iran gets for limiting its nuclear program. It will draw the regional contours of an Iranian sphere of influence and allow room for Washington and Tehran to cooperate in areas where their interests align. We can already see this in effect in Iraq and Syria, where the threat of the Islamic State has compelled the United States and Iran to coordinate efforts to contain jihadist ambitions. Though the United States will understandably be more cautious in its public statements while it tries to limit Israeli anxiety, U.S. officials have allegedly made positive remarks about Hezbollah's role in fighting terrorism when speaking privately with their Lebanese interlocutors in recent meetings. This may seem like a minor detail on the surface, but Iran sees a rapprochement with the United States as an opportunity to seek recognition for Hezbollah as a legitimate political actor.
A U.S.-Iranian rapprochement will not be complete by March, June or any other deadline Washington sets for this year. Framework agreements on the nuclear issue and sanctions relief will necessarily be implemented in phases to effectively extend the negotiations into 2016, when Congress could allow the core sanctions act against Iran to expire after several months of testing Iranian compliance and after Iran gets past its parliamentary elections. Arrestors could arise along the way, such as the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but they will not deter the White House from setting a course toward normalizing relations with Iran. The United States, regardless of which party is controlling the White House, will rank the threat of a growing Eurasian conflict well ahead of de-escalating the conflict with Iran. Even as a nuclear agreement establishes the foundation for a U.S.-Iranian understanding, Washington will rely on regional powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia to eat away at the edges of Iran's sphere of influence, encouraging the natural rivalries in the region to mold a relative balance of power over time.
Circling Back
Germany needs a deal with Russia to be able to manage an existential crisis for the eurozone; Russia needs a deal with the United States to limit U.S. encroachment on its sphere of influence; and the United States needs a deal with Iran to refocus its attention on Russia. No conflict is divorced from the other, though each may be of a different scale. Germany and Russia can find ways to settle their differences, as can Iran and the United States. But a prolonged eurozone crisis cannot be avoided, nor can a deep Russian mistrust of U.S. intentions for its periphery.
Both issues bring the United States back to Eurasia. A distracted Germany will compel the United States to go beyond NATO boundaries to encircle Russia. Rest assured, Russia — even under severe economic stress — will find the means to respond.
Send us your thoughts on this report.
-
This is the fifth Decade Forecast published by Stratfor. Every five years since 1996 (1996, 2000, 2005, 2010 and now, 2015) Stratfor has produced a rolling forecast. Overall, we are proud of our efforts. We predicted the inability of Europe to survive economic crises, China's decline and the course of the U.S.-jihadist war. We also made some errors. We did not anticipate 9/11, and more important, we did not anticipate the scope of the American response. But in 2005 we did forecast the difficulty the United States would face and the need for the United States to withdraw from its military engagements in the Islamic world. We predicted China's weakness too early, but we saw that weakness when others were seeing the emergence of an economy larger than that of the United States. Above all, we have consistently forecast the enduring power of the United States. This is not a forecast rooted in patriotism or jingoism. It derives from our model that continues to view the United States as the pre-eminent power.
We do not forecast everything. We focus on the major trends and tendencies in the world. Thus, we see below some predictions from our 2010 Decade Forecast:
We see the U.S.-jihadist war subsiding. This does not mean that Islamist militancy will be eliminated. Attempts at attacks will continue, and some will succeed. However, the two major wars in the region will have dramatically subsided if not concluded by 2020. We also see the Iranian situation having been brought under control. Whether this will be by military action and isolation of Iran or by a political arrangement with the current or a successor regime is unclear but irrelevant to the broader geopolitical issue. Iran will be contained, as it simply does not have the underlying power to be a major player in the region beyond its immediate horizons.
The diversity of systems and demographics that is Europe will put the European Union's institutions under severe strain. We suspect the institutions will survive. We doubt that they will work very effectively. The main political tendency will be away from multinational solutions to a greater nationalism driven by divergent and diverging economic, social and cultural forces. The elites that have crafted the European Union will find themselves under increasing pressure from the broader population. The tension between economic interests and cultural stability will define Europe. Consequently, inter-European relations will be increasingly unpredictable and unstable.
Russia will spend the 2010s seeking to secure itself before the demographic decline really hits. It will do this by trying to move from raw commodity exports to process commodity exports, moving up the value chain to fortify its economy while its demographics still allow it. Russia will also seek to reintegrate the former Soviet republics into some coherent entity in order to delay its demographic problems, expand its market and above all reabsorb some territorial buffers. Russia sees itself as under the gun, and therefore is in a hurry. This will cause it to appear more aggressive and dangerous than it is in the long run. However, in the 2010s, Russia's actions will cause substantial anxiety in its neighbors, both in terms of national security and its rapidly shifting economic policies.
The states most concerned — and affected — will be the former satellite states of Central Europe. Russia's primary concern remains the North European Plain, the traditional invasion route into Russia. This focus will magnify as Europe becomes more unpredictable politically. Russian pressure on Central Europe will not be overwhelming military pressure, but Central European psyches are finely tuned to threats. We believe this constant and growing pressure will stimulate Central European economic, social and military development.
China's economy, like the economies of Japan and other East Asian states before it, will reduce its rate of growth dramatically in order to calibrate growth with the rate of return on capital and to bring its financial system into balance. To do this, it will have to deal with the resulting social and political tensions.
From the American point of view, the 2010s will continue the long-term increase in economic and military power that began more than a century ago. The United States remains the overwhelming — but not omnipotent — military power in the world, and produces 25 percent of the world's wealth each year.
The Decade Ahead
The world has been restructuring itself since 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia and the subprime financial crisis struck. Three patterns have emerged. First, the European Union entered a crisis that it could not solve and that has increased in intensity. We predict that the European Union will never return to its previous unity, and if it survives it will operate in a more limited and fragmented way in the next decade. We do not expect the free trade zone to continue to operate without increasing protectionism. We expect Germany to suffer severe economic reversals in the next decade and Poland to increase its regional power as a result.
The current confrontation with Russia over Ukraine will remain a centerpiece of the international system over the next few years, but we do not think the Russian Federation can exist in its current form for the entire decade. Its overwhelming dependence on energy exports and the unreliability of expectations on pricing make it impossible for Moscow to sustain its institutional relations across the wide swathe of the Russian Federation. We expect Moscow's authority to weaken substantially, leading to the formal and informal fragmentation of Russia. The security of Russia's nuclear arsenal will become a prime concern as this process accelerates later in the decade.
We have entered a period in which the decline of the nation-states created by Europe in North Africa and the Middle East is accelerating. Power is no longer held by the state in many countries, having devolved to armed factions that can neither defeat others nor be defeated. This has initiated a period of intense internal fighting. The United States is prepared to mitigate the situation with air power and limited forces on the ground but will not be able or willing to impose a settlement. Turkey, whose southern border is made vulnerable by this fighting, will be slowly drawn into the fighting. By the end of this decade, Turkey will emerge as the major regional power, and Turkish-Iranian competition will increase as a result.
China has completed its cycle as a high-growth, low-wage country and has entered a new phase that is the new normal. This phase includes much slower growth and an increasingly powerful dictatorship to contain the divergent forces created by slow growth. China will continue to be a major economic force but will not be the dynamic engine of global growth it once was. That role will be taken by a new group of highly dispersed countries we call the Post-China 16, which includes much of Southeast Asia, East Africa and parts of Latin America. China will not be an aggressive military force either. Japan remains the most likely contender for the dominant position in East Asia, both because of its geography and because of its needs as a massive importer.
The United States will continue to be the major economic, political and military power in the world but will be less engaged than in the past. Its low rate of exports, its increasing energy self-reliance and its experiences over the last decade will cause it to be increasingly cautious about economic and military involvement in the world. It has learned what happens to heavy exporters when customers cannot or will not buy their products. It has learned the limits of power in trying to pacify hostile countries. It has learned that North America is an arena in which it can prosper with selective engagements elsewhere. It will face major strategic threats with proportional power, but it will not serve the role of first responder as it has in recent years.
It will be a disorderly world, with a changing of the guard in many regions. The one constant will be the continued and maturing power of the United States — a power that will be much less visible and that will be utilized far less in the next decade.
Europe
The European Union will be unable to solve its fundamental problem, which is not the eurozone, but the free trade zone. Germany is the center of gravity of the European Union; it exports more than 50 percent of its GDP, and half of that goes to other EU countries. Germany has created a productive capability that vastly outstrips its ability to consume, even if the domestic economy were stimulated. It depends on these exports to maintain economic growth, full employment and social stability. The European Union's structures — including the pricing of the euro and many European regulations — are designed to facilitate this export dependency.
This has already fragmented Europe into at least two parts. Mediterranean Europe and countries such as Germany and Austria have completely different behavioral patterns and needs. No single policy can suit all of Europe. This has been the core problem from the beginning, but it has now reached an extreme point. What benefits one part of Europe harms another.
Nationalism has already risen significantly. Compounding this is the Ukrainian crisis and Eastern European countries' focus on the perceived threat from Russia. Eastern Europe's concern about Russia creates yet another Europe — four, total, if we separate the United Kingdom and Scandinavia from the rest of Europe. Considered with the rise of Euroskeptic parties on the right and left, the growing delegitimation of mainstream parties and the surging popularity of separatist parties within European countries, the fragmentation and nationalism that we forecast in 2005, and before, is clearly evident.
These trends will continue. The European Union might survive in some sense, but European economic, political and military relations will be governed primarily by bilateral or limited multilateral relationships that will be small in scope and not binding. Some states might maintain a residual membership in a highly modified European Union, but this will not define Europe.
What will define Europe in the next decade is the re-emergence of the nation-state as the primary political vehicle of the continent. Indeed the number of nation-states will likely increase as various movements favoring secession, or the dissolution of states into constituent parts, increase their power. This will be particularly noticeable during the next few years, as economic and political pressures intensify amid Europe's crisis.
Germany has emerged from this mass of nation-states as the most economically and politically influential. Yet Germany is also extremely vulnerable. It is the world's fourth-largest economic power, but it has achieved that status by depending on exports. Export powers have a built-in vulnerability: They depend on their customers' desire and ability to buy their products. In other words, Germany's economy is hostage to the economic well-being and competitive environment in which it operates.
There are multiple forces working against Germany in this regard. First, Europe's increasing nationalism will lead to protectionist capital and labor markets. Weaker countries are likely to adopt various sorts of capital controls, while stronger countries will limit the movement of foreigners — including the citizens of other EU countries — across their borders. We forecast that existing protectionist policies inside the European Union, particularly on agriculture, will be supplemented in coming years by trade barriers created by the weaker Southern European economies that need to rebuild their economic base after the current depression. On a global basis, we can expect European exports to face increased competition and highly variable demand in the uncertain environment. Therefore, our forecast is that Germany will begin an extended economic decline that will lead to a domestic social and political crisis and that will reduce Germany's influence in Europe during the next 10 years.
At the center of economic growth and increasing political influence will be Poland. Poland has maintained one of the most impressive growth profiles outside of Germany and Austria. In addition, though its population is likely to contract, the contraction will most probably be far less than in other European countries. As Germany undergoes wrenching shifts in economy and population, Poland will diversify its own trade relationships to emerge as the dominant power on the strategic Northern European Plain. Moreover, we expect Poland to be the leader of an anti-Russia coalition that would, significantly, include Romania during the first half of this decade. In the second half of the decade, this alliance will play a major role in reshaping the Russian borderlands and retrieving lost territories through informal and formal means. Eventually as Moscow weakens, this alliance will become the dominant influence not only in Belarus and Ukraine, but also farther east. This will further enhance Poland's and its allies' economic and political position.
Poland will benefit from having a strategic partnership with the United States. Whenever a leading global power enters into a relationship with a strategic partner, it is in the global power's interest to make the partner as economically vigorous as possible, both to stabilize its society and to make it capable of building a military force. Poland will be in that position with the United States, as will Romania. Washington has made its interest in the region obvious.
Russia
It is unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form. Russia's failure to transform its energy revenue into a self-sustaining economy makes it vulnerable to price fluctuations. It has no defense against these market forces. Given the organization of the federation, with revenue flowing to Moscow before being distributed directly or via regional governments, the flow of resources will also vary dramatically. This will lead to a repeat of the Soviet Union's experience in the 1980s and Russia's in the 1990s, in which Moscow's ability to support the national infrastructure declined. In this case, it will cause regions to fend for themselves by forming informal and formal autonomous entities. The economic ties binding the Russian periphery to Moscow will fray.
Historically, the Russians solved such problems via the secret police — the KGB and its successor, the Federal Security Services (FSB). But just as in the 1980s, the secret police will not be able to contain the centrifugal forces pulling regions away from Moscow this decade. In this case, the FSB's power is weakened by its leadership's involvement in the national economy. As the economy falters, so does the FSB's strength. Without the FSB inspiring genuine terror, the fragmentation of the Russian Federation will not be preventable.
To Russia's west, Poland, Hungary and Romania will seek to recover regions lost to the Russians at various points. They will work to bring Belarus and Ukraine into this fold. In the south, the Russians' ability to continue controlling the North Caucasus will evaporate, and Central Asia will destabilize. In the northwest, the Karelian region will seek to rejoin Finland. In the Far East, the maritime regions more closely linked to China, Japan and the United States than to Moscow will move independently. Other areas outside of Moscow will not necessarily seek autonomy but will have it thrust upon them. This is the point: There will not be an uprising against Moscow, but Moscow's withering ability to support and control the Russian Federation will leave a vacuum. What will exist in this vacuum will be the individual fragments of the Russian Federation.
This will create the greatest crisis of the next decade. Russia is the site of a massive nuclear strike force distributed throughout the hinterlands. The decline of Moscow's power will open the question of who controls those missiles and how their non-use can be guaranteed. This will be a major test for the United States. Washington is the only power able to address the issue, but it will not be able to seize control of the vast numbers of sites militarily and guarantee that no missile is fired in the process. The United States will either have to invent a military solution that is difficult to conceive of now, accept the threat of rogue launches, or try to create a stable and economically viable government in the regions involved to neutralize the missiles over time. It is difficult to imagine how this problem will play out. However, given our forecast on the fragmentation of Russia, it follows that this issue will have to be addressed, likely in the next decade.
The issue in the first half of the decade will be how far the alliance stretching between the Baltic and Black seas will extend. Logically, it should reach Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea. Whether it does depends on what we have forecast for the Middle East and Turkey.
The Middle East and North Africa
The Middle East — particularly the area between the Levant and Iran, along with North Africa — is experiencing national breakdowns. By this we mean that the nation-states established by European powers in the 19th and 20th centuries are collapsing into their constituent factions defined by kinship, religion or shifting economic interests. In countries like Libya, Syria and Iraq, we have seen the devolution of the nation-state into factions that war on each other and that cross the increasingly obsolete borders of countries.
This process follows the model of Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, when the central government ceased to function and power devolved to warring factions. The key factions could not defeat the others, nor could they themselves be defeated. They were manipulated and supported from the outside, as well as self-supporting. The struggle among these factions erupted into a civil war — one that has quieted but not ended. As power vacuums persist throughout the region, jihadist groups will find space to operate but will be contained in the end by their internal divisions.
This situation cannot be suppressed by outside forces. The amount of force required and the length of deployment would outstrip the capacity of the United States, even if dramatically expanded. Given the situation in other parts of the world, particularly in Russia, the United States can no longer focus exclusively on this region.
At the same time, this evolution, particularly in the Arab states south of Turkey, represents a threat to regional stability. The United States will act to mitigate the threat of particular factions, which will change over time, through the use of limited force. But the United States will not deploy multidivisional forces to the region. At this point, most countries in the area still expect the United States to act as the decisive force even though they witnessed the United States fail in this role in the past decade. Nevertheless, expectations shift more slowly than reality.
As the reality sinks in, it will emerge that, because of its location, only one country has an overriding interest in stabilizing Syria and Iraq, is able to act broadly — again because of its location — and has the means to at least achieve limited success in the region. That country is Turkey. At this point, Turkey is surrounded by conflicts in the Arab world, in the Caucasus and in the Black Sea Basin. But Turkey has avoided taking risks so far.
Turkey will continue to need U.S. involvement for political and military reasons. The United States will oblige, but there will be a price: participation in the containment of Russia. The United States does not expect Turkey to assume a war-fighting role and does not intend one for itself. It does, however, want a degree of cooperation in managing the Black Sea. Turkey will not be ready for a completely independent policy in the Middle East and will pay the price for a U.S. relationship. That price will open the path to extending the containment line to Georgia and Azerbaijan.
We expect the instability in the Arab world to continue through the decade. We also expect Turkey to be drawn in to the south, inasmuch as its fears of fighting so close to its border — and the political outcomes of that fighting — will compel it to get involved. It will intervene as little as possible and as slowly as possible, but it will intervene, and its intervention will eventually increase in size and breadth. Whatever its reluctance, Turkey cannot withstand years of chaos across its border, and there will be no other country to carry the burden. Iran is not in a position geographically or militarily to perform this function, nor is Saudi Arabia. Turkey is likely to try to build shifting coalitions ultimately reaching into North Africa to stabilize the situation. Turkish-Iranian competition will grow with time, but Turkey will keep its options open to work with both Iran and Saudi Arabia as needed. Whatever the dynamic, Turkey will be at the center of it.
This will not be the only region drawing Turkey's attention. As Russia weakens, European influence will begin inching eastward into areas where Turkey has historical interests, such as the northern shore of the Black Sea. We can foresee Turkey projecting its power northward certainly commercially and politically but also potentially in some measured military way. Moreover, as the European Union fragments and individual economies weaken or some nations become oriented toward the East, Turkey will increase its presence in the Balkans as the only remaining power able to do so.
Before this can happen, Turkey must find a domestic political balance. It is both a secular and Muslim country. The current government has attempted to bridge the gap, but in many ways it has tilted away from the secularists, of whom there are many. A new government will certainly emerge over the coming years. This is a permanent fault line in contemporary Turkey. Like many countries, its power will expand in the midst of political uncertainty. Alongside this internal political conflict, the military, intelligence and diplomatic service will need to evolve in size and function during the coming decade. That said, we expect to see an acceleration of Turkey's emergence as a major regional power in the next 10 years.
East Asia
China has ceased to be a high-growth, low-wage economy. As China's economy slows, the process of creating and organizing an economic infrastructure to employ low-wage workers will be incremental. What can be done quickly in a port city takes much longer in the interior. Therefore, China has normalized its economy, as Japan did before it, and as Taiwan and South Korea did in 1997. All massive expansions climax, and the operations of the economies shift.
The problem for China in the next decade are the political and social consequences of that shift. The coastal region has been built on high growth rates and close ties with European and American consumers. As these decline, political and social challenges emerge. At the same time, the expectation that the interior — beyond parts of the more urbanized Yangtze River Delta — will grow as rapidly as the coast is being dashed. The problem for the next decade will be containing these difficulties.
Beijing's growing dictatorial tendencies and an anti-corruption campaign, which is actually Beijing's assertion of its power over all of China, provide an outline of what China would like to see in the next decade. China is following a hybrid path that will centralize political and economic powers, assert Party primacy over the military, and consolidate previously fragmented industries like coal and steel amid the gradual and tepid implementation of market-oriented reforms in state-owned enterprises and in the banking sector. It is highly likely that a dictatorial state coupled with more modest economic expectations will result. However, there is a less likely but still conceivable outcome in which political interests along the coast rebel against Beijing's policy of transferring wealth to the interior to contain political unrest. This is not an unknown pattern in China, and, though we do not see this as the most likely course, it should be kept in mind. Our forecast is the imposition of a communist dictatorship, a high degree of economic and political centralization and increased nationalism.
China cannot easily turn nationalism into active aggression. China's geography makes such actions on land difficult, if not impossible. The only exception might be an attempt to take control of Russia's maritime interests if we are correct and Russia fragments. Here, Japan likely would challenge China. China is building a large number of ships but has little experience in naval warfare and lacks the experienced fleet commanders needed to challenge more experienced navies, including the U.S. Navy.
Japan has the resources to build a significantly larger navy and a more substantial naval tradition. In addition, Japan is heavily dependent on imports of raw materials from Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf. Right now it depends on the United States to guarantee access. But given that we are forecasting more cautious U.S. involvement in foreign ventures and that the United States is not dependent on imports, the reliability of the United States is in question. Therefore, the Japanese will increase their naval power in the coming years.
Fighting over the minor islands producing low-cost and unprofitable energy will not be the primary issue in the region. Rather, an old three-player game will emerge. Russia, the declining power, will increasingly lose the ability to protect its maritime interests. The Chinese and the Japanese will both be interested in acquiring these and in preventing each other from having them. We forecast this as the central, unsettled issue in the region as Russia declines and Sino-Japanese competition increases.
Post-China Manufacturing Hubs
International capitalism requires a low-wage, high-growth region for high rewards on risk capital. In the 1880s it was the United States, for example. China was the most recent region, replacing Japan. No one country can replace China, but we have noted 16 countries with a total population of about 1.15 billion people where entry-level manufacturing has gone after leaving China.
To identify these countries, we looked at three industries. The first was garment manufacturing, particularly low-end and of garment parts like coat linings. Second was the manufacturing of footwear. Third, we looked at cellphone assembly. These industries require low capital investment, and manufacturers move their facilities around rapidly to take advantage of low wages. Industries of this sort, such as inexpensive toys in Japan, served as a foundation for manufacturing sectors to evolve into broader low-wage products in high demand. The workforce, frequently women at first, expanded dramatically as new low-wage industries moved in. The wages were low on a global scale but very attractive on the local scale.
Like China during its takeoff in the late 1970s, these countries tend to be politically unstable, with uncertain rule of law, poor infrastructure and all of the risks advanced industrial businesses try to avoid. But companies from other countries excel in these environments and have built business models around this.
The map of these countries shows that they are concentrated in the Indian Ocean Basin. Another way to look at it is that these are the less developed countries (or regions) in Asia, East Africa and Latin America. Our forecast is that in this next decade, many of these countries — and perhaps some not identified — will collectively take on the role that China had in the 1980s. This would mean that by the end of the decade, they would be entering an intensifying period of growth in a much wider array of products. Mexico, whose economy exhibits potential in both low-end manufacturing and higher-end industry in a cost-competitive environment, stands to benefit substantially from its northern neighbor's investment and healthy level of consumption.
The United States
The United States continues to make up more than 22 percent of the world's economy. It continues to dominate the world's oceans and has the only significant intercontinental military force. Since 1880, it has been on an uninterrupted expansion of economy and power. Even the Great Depression, in retrospect, is a minor blip. This expansion of power is at the center of the international system, and our forecast is that it will continue unabated.
The greatest advantage the United States has is its insularity. It exports only 9 percent of its GDP, and about 40 percent of that goes to Canada and Mexico. Only about 5 percent of its GDP is exposed to the vagaries of global consumption. Thus, as the uncertainties of Europe, Russia and China mount, even if the United States lost half its exports — an extraordinary amount — it would not be an unmanageable problem.
The United States is also insulated from import constraints. Unlike in 1973, when the Arab oil embargo massively disrupted the U.S. economy, the United States has emerged as a significant energy producer. Although it must import some minerals from outside NAFTA, and it prefers to import some industrial products, it can readily manage without these. This is particularly true as industrial production is increasing in the United States and in Mexico in response to the increasing costs in China and elsewhere.
The Americans also have benefited from global crises. The United States is a haven for global capital, and as capital flight has taken hold of China, Europe and Russia, that money has flowed into the United States, reducing interest rates and buoying equity markets. Therefore, though there is exposure to the banking crisis in Europe, it is nowhere near as substantial as it might have been a decade ago, and capital inflows counterbalance that exposure. As for the perennial fear that China will withdraw its money from American markets, that will happen slowly anyway as China's growth slows and internal investment increases. But a sudden withdrawal is impossible. There is nowhere else to invest money. Certainly the next decade will see fluctuations in U.S. economic growth and markets, but the United Stares remains the stable heart of the international system.
At the same time, the Americans have become less dependent on that system and have encountered many difficulties in managing — and particularly, in pacifying — that system. The United States will become more selective in assuming responsibilities politically in the next decade, and even more selective in military interventions.
For a century, the United States has been concerned about the emergence of a hegemon in Europe, and in particular of either an accommodation between Germany and Russia or a conquest of one by the other. That combination, more than any other, might be able to muster a force — between German capital and technology and Russian resources and manpower — capable of threatening American interests. Therefore, in World War I, World War II and the Cold War, the United States was instrumental in preventing this from occurring.
In the world wars, the United States came in late, and though it absorbed fewer casualties than other countries, it nevertheless suffered more than was comfortable for it. In the Cold War, the United States intervened early and, at least in Europe, had no casualties. Based on this, the United States has a core policy imperative that is almost automatic: When a potential European hegemon arises, the United States will act early, as in the Cold War, in building alliances and deploying sufficient force in primarily defensive positions.
This is happening now against Russia. Though we forecast the decline of Russia, Russia poses danger in the short term, particularly with its back against the wall economically. Moreover, whatever we forecast, the United States cannot be certain that Russia will decline and indeed, if it launches a successful expansionary policy (politically, economically or militarily), it may not decline. Therefore, the United States will take measures according to its imperative. It will try to build an alliance system outside of NATO, from the Baltics to Bulgaria, encompassing as many nations as possible. It will try to involve Turkey in the alliance and have it reach to Azerbaijan. It will deploy forces, proportional to the threat, in those countries.
This will be the primary focus in the early part of the decade. In the second part, Washington will focus on trying to assure that Russia's decline does not result in nuclear disaster. The United States will not become involved in trying to solve Europe's problems, it will not have a war with China, and its involvement in the Middle East will be minimal. It will conduct global counterterrorism operations but will do so with the full knowledge that those operations will be only partially effective at best.
The Americans will have an emerging problem. The United States has 50-year cycles that end with significant economic or social problems. One cycle began in 1932 with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and ended with the presidency of Jimmy Carter. It began with a need to rebuild demand for products from idle factories and ended in vast overconsumption, underinvestment and with double-digit inflation and unemployment. Ronald Reagan's presidency laid the groundwork for restructuring American industry through a change in the tax code and by shifting the focus from the urban industrial worker to the suburban professional and entrepreneur.
We are now about 15 years from the end of this cycle, and the next crisis will make itself felt in the second half of the next decade. It is already visible. It is the crisis of the middle class. The problem is not inequality; the problem is the ability of the middle class to live a middle class life. Currently, the median household income in the United States is about $50,000. Depending on the state you live in, this is actually about $40,000. That allows the literal middle to buy a modest home and live frugally outside major metropolitan areas. For the lower middle class, the 25th percentile, this is almost impossible.
There are two causes. One is the rise of the single-parent household. Having two households is twice as expensive. The other problem is that the same incentives that led to the badly needed re-engineering of the American corporation and vastly improved productivity also limited job security and income for the middle class. This is not a political crisis yet. It will become one toward the end of the next decade, but it will not be addressed until the elections of 2028 and 2032. It is a normal, cyclical crisis, but painful nonetheless.
In Context
There is no decade without pain, and even in the most perfect of times, there is suffering. The crises that we expect in the next decade are far from the worst seen in the past century, and they are no worse than those we will see in the next. There is always the expectation that what we know now as reality will define the future. There is also the belief that our pain now is the most extraordinary anguish that has ever been. This is simply narcissism. What we have now will always change — usually sooner than we believe possible. The pains we are having now are merely the normal pains of being human. This is not a comfort, but a reality, and it is in this context that this decade forecast should be read.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414588/bring-back-bush-doctrine-one-addition-andrew-c-mccarthy?utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_content=54f2254b15bb3b1038000001&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook
-
"When I was serving with the U.S. Army in Baghdad during 04-05 I thought we should give the northern region to the Kurds, the west to Kuwait as reparation for the invasion in 91, and the eastern region to Iran in return for stoping their nuclear program."
-
Iran Occupies Iraq
As the U.S. leads from behind, Tehran creates a Shiite arc of power.
ENLARGE
Photo: Getty Images
March 11, 2015 7:21 p.m. ET
554 COMMENTS
While Washington focuses on Iran-U.S. nuclear talks, the Islamic Republic is making a major but little-noticed strategic advance. Iran’s forces are quietly occupying more of Iraq in a way that could soon make its neighbor a de facto Shiite satellite of Tehran.
That’s the larger import of the dominant role Iran and its Shiite militia proxies are playing in the military offensive to take back territory from the Islamic State, or ISIS. The first battle is over the Sunni-majority city of Tikrit, and while the Iraqi army is playing a role, the dominant forces are Shiite militias supplied and coordinated from Iran. This includes the Badr Brigades that U.S. troops fought so hard to put down in Baghdad during the 2007 surge.
The Shiite militias are being organized under a new Iraqi government office led by Abu Mahdi Mohandes, an Iraqi with close ties to Iran. Mr. Mohandes is working closely with the most powerful military official in Iran and Iraq—the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran’s official news agency last week confirmed Western media reports that Gen. Soleimani is “supervising” the attack against Islamic State.
This is the same general who aided the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq. Quds Force operatives supplied the most advanced IEDs, which could penetrate armor and were the deadliest in Iraq. One former U.S. general who served in Iraq estimates that Iran was responsible for about one-third of U.S. casualties during the war, which would mean nearly 1,500 deaths.
Mr. Soleimani recently declared that Islamic State’s days in Iraq are “finished,” adding that Iran will lead the liberation of Tikrit, Mosul and then all of Anbar province. While this is a boast that seeks to diminish the role of other countries, especially the U.S., it reveals Iran’s ambitions and its desire to capitalize when Islamic State is pushed out of Anbar province.
The irony is that critics long complained that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 created a strategic opening for Iran. But the 2007 surge defeated the Shiite militias and helped Sunni tribal sheikhs oust al Qaeda from Anbar. U.S. forces provided a rough balancing while they stayed in Iraq through 2011. But once they departed on President Obama’s orders, the Iraq government tilted again to Iran and against the Sunni minority.
Iran’s military surge is now possible because of the vacuum created by the failure of the U.S. to deploy ground troops or rally a coalition of forces from surrounding Sunni states to fight Islamic State. With ISIS on the march last year, desperate Iraqis and even the Kurds turned to Iran and Gen. Soleimani for help. The U.S. air strikes have been crucial to pinning down Islamic State forces, but Iran is benefitting on the ground.
The strategic implications of this Iranian advance are enormous. Iran already had political sway over most of Shiite southern Iraq. Its militias may now have the ability to control much of Sunni-dominated Anbar, especially if they use the chaos to kill moderate Sunnis. Iran is essentially building an arc of dominance from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut on the Mediterranean.
This advance is all the more startling because it is occurring with tacit U.S. encouragement amid crunch time in the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, competed last week with Gen. Soleimani’s anti-ISIS boasts by touting U.S. bombing. But this week he called Iran’s military “activities” against ISIS “a positive thing.” U.S. civilian officials are publicly mute or privately supportive of Iran.
While Islamic State must be destroyed, its replacement by an Iran-Shiite suzerainty won’t lead to stability. Iran’s desire to dominate the region flows from its tradition of Persian imperialism compounded by its post-1979 revolutionary zeal. This week it elected hardline cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi to choose Iran’s next Supreme Leader.
The Sunni states in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf are watching all of this and may conclude that a new U.S.-Iran condominium threatens their interests. They will assess a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal in this context, making them all the more likely to seek their own nuclear deterrent. They may also be inclined to stoke another anti-Shiite insurgency in Syria and western Iraq.
All of this is one more consequence of America leading from behind. The best way to defeat Islamic State would be for the U.S. to assemble a coalition of Iraqis, Kurds and neighboring Sunni countries led by U.S. special forces that minimized the role of Iran. Such a Sunni force would first roll back ISIS from Iraq and then take on ISIS and the Assad government in Syria. The latter goal in particular would meet Turkey’s test for participating, but the Obama Administration has refused lest it upset Iran.
The result is that an enemy of the U.S. with American blood on its hands is taking a giant step toward becoming the dominant power in the Middle East.
Popular on WSJ
-
Yesterday the House Committee on Homeland Security
(http://homeland.house.gov/hearing/hearing-global-battleground-fight-against-islamist-extremism-home-and-abroad?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=4ab8b29faf-testimony_032515&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-4ab8b29faf-46602837)
, under the leadership of Chairman Michael McCaul, held the first of a series of
very important hearings on the threat of radical Islamism.
As I told the committee in my testimony, it is vital that the United States Congress
undertake a thorough, no-holds-barred review of the long, global war in which we are
now engaged with radical Islamists. This review will require a number of committees
to coordinate since it will have to include Intelligence, Armed Services, Foreign
Affairs, Judiciary, and Homeland Security at a minimum.
There are three key, sobering observations about where we are today which should
force this thorough, no-holds-barred review of our situation.
These three points—which are backed up by the facts—suggest the United States is
drifting into a crisis that could challenge our very survival.
First, it is the case that after 35 years of conflict dating back to the Iranian
seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and the ensuing hostage crisis, the United
States and its allies are losing the long, global war with radical Islamists.
We are losing to both the violent Jihad and to the cultural Jihad.
The violent Jihad has shown itself recently in Paris, Australia, Tunisia, Syria,
Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Nigeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen to name just some
of the most prominent areas of violence.
Cultural Jihad is more insidious and in many ways more dangerous. Cultural Jihad
strikes at our very ability to think and to have an honest dialogue about the steps
necessary for our survival. Cultural Jihad is winning when the Department of Defense
(http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=60536&utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=4ab8b29faf-testimony_032515&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-4ab8b29faf-46602837)
describes a terrorist attack at Fort Hood as “workplace violence”. Cultural Jihad is
winning when the President refers to “random” killings
(http://www.vox.com/a/barack-obama-interview-vox-conversation/obama-foreign-policy-transcript?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=4ab8b29faf-testimony_032515&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-4ab8b29faf-46602837)
in Paris when they were clearly the actions of Islamist terrorists and targeted
against specific groups. Cultural Jihad is winning when the administration censors
training documents and lecturers according to “sensitivity” so that they cannot
describe
(http://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/deputy-attorney-general-james-m-cole-speaks-department-s-conference-post-911?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=4ab8b29faf-testimony_032515&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-4ab8b29faf-46602837)
radical Islamists with any reference to the religious ideology which is the primary
bond that unites them.
In the 14 years since the 9/11 attacks, we have gone a long way down the road of
intellectually and morally disarming in order to appease the cultural Jihadists who
are increasingly aggressive in asserting their right to define how the rest of us
think and talk.
Second, it is the case that, in an extraordinarily dangerous pattern, our
intelligence system has been methodically limited and manipulated to sustain false
narratives while suppressing or rejecting facts and analysis about those who would
kill us.
For example, there is clear evidence the American people have been given remarkably
misleading analysis about Al Qaeda based on a very limited translation and
publication of about 24 of the 1.5 million documents captured in the Bin Laden raid.
A number of outside analysts have suggested that the selective release of a small
number of documents was designed
(http://www.wsj.com/articles/stephen-hayes-and-tomas-joscelyn-how-america-was-misled-on-al-qaedas-demise-1425600796?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=4ab8b29faf-testimony_032515&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-4ab8b29faf-46602837)
to make the case that Al Qaeda was weaker. These outside analysts assert that a
broader reading of more documents would indicate Al Qaeda was doubling in size when
our government claimed it was getting weaker—an analysis also supported by obvious
empirical facts on the ground. Furthermore, there has been what could only be
deliberate foot-dragging in exploiting this extraordinary cache of material.
Both Lt. General Mike Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and
Colonel Derek Harvey, a leading analyst of terrorism, have described the
deliberately misleading and restricted access to the Bin Laden documents.
A number of intelligence operatives have described censorship from above designed to
make sure that intelligence which undermines the official narrative
(http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/21/over-my-dead-body-spies-fight-obama-push-to-downsize-terror-war.html?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=4ab8b29faf-testimony_032515&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-4ab8b29faf-46602837)
simply does not see the light of day.
Congress should explore legislation which would make it illegal to instruct
intelligence personnel to falsify information or analysis. Basing American security
policy on politically defined distortions of reality is a very dangerous habit which
could someday lead to a devastating defeat. Congress has an obligation to ensure the
American people are learning the truth and have an opportunity to debate potential
policies in a fact based environment.
Third, it is the case that our political elites have refused to define our enemies.
Their willful ignorance has made it impossible to develop an effective strategy to
defeat those who would destroy our civilization.
For example, the President’s own press secretary engages in verbal gymnastics to
avoid identifying the perpetrators of violence as radical Islamists. Josh Earnest
said
(https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/13/press-briefing-press-secretary-josh-earnest-1132015?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=4ab8b29faf-testimony_032515&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-4ab8b29faf-46602837)
such labels do not “accurately” describe our enemies and that to use such a label
“legitimizes” them.
This is Orwellian double-speak. The radical Islamists do not need to be
de-legitimized. They need to be defeated. We cannot defeat what we cannot name.
There has been a desperate desire among our elites to focus on the act of terrorism
rather than the motivation behind those acts. There has been a deep desire to avoid
the cultural and religious motivations behind the Jihadists’ actions. There is an
amazing hostility to any effort to study or teach the history of these patterns
going back to the Seventh Century.
Because our elites refuse to look at the religious and historic motivations and
patterns which drive our opponents, we are responding the same way to attack after
attack on our way of life without any regard for learning about what really
motivates our attackers. Only once we learn what drives and informs our opponents
will we not repeat the same wrong response tactics, groundhog day-like, and finally
start to win this long war.
Currently each new event, each new group, each new pattern is treated as though it’s
an isolated phenomenon—as if it’s not part of a larger struggle with a long history
and deep roots in patterns that are 1400 years old.
There is a passion for narrowing and localizing actions. The early focus was Al
Qaeda. Then it was the Taliban. Now it is ISIS. It is beginning to be Boko Haram. As
long as the elites can keep treating each new eruption as a free-standing
phenomenon, they can avoid having to recognize that this is a global, worldwide
movement that is decentralized but not disordered.
There are ties between
(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/minneapolis-has-become-recruiting-ground-for-islamic-extremists/?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=4ab8b29faf-testimony_032515&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-4ab8b29faf-46602837)
Minneapolis and Mogadishu. There are ties between London, Paris and ISIS. Al Qaeda
exists in many forms and under many names. We are confronted by worldwide recruiting
on the internet, with Islamists reaching out to people we would never have imagined
were vulnerable to that kind of appeal.
We have been refusing to apply the insights and lessons of history but our enemies
have been very willing to study, learn, rethink and evolve.
The cultural Jihadists have learned our language and our principles—freedom of
speech, freedom of religion, tolerance—and they apply them to defeat us without
believing in them themselves. We blindly play their game on their terms, and don’t
even think about how absurd it is for people who accept no church, no synagogue, no
temple, in their heartland to come into our society and define multicultural
sensitivity totally to their advantage—meaning, in essence, that we cannot criticize
their ideas.
Our elites have been morally and intellectually disarmed by their own unwillingness
to look at both the immediate history of the first 35 years of the global war with
radical Islamists and then to look deeper into the roots of the ideology and the
military-political system our enemies draw upon as their guide to waging both
physical and cultural warfare.
One of the great threats to American independence is the steady growth of foreign
money pouring into our intellectual and political systems to influence our thinking
and limit our options for action. Congress needs to adopt new laws to protect the
United States from the kind of foreign influences which are growing in size and
boldness.
Sun Tzu, in the Art of War, written 500 years before Christ, warned that "all
warfare is based on deception". We are currently in a period where our enemies are
deceiving us and our elites are actively deceiving themselves—and us. The deception
and dishonesty of our elites is not accidental or uninformed. It is deliberate and
willful. The flow of foreign money and foreign influence is a significant part of
that pattern of deception.
We must clearly define our enemies before we can begin to develop strategies to
defeat them.
We have lost 35 years since this war began.
We are weaker and our enemies are stronger.
Congress has a duty to pursue the truth and to think through the strategies needed
and the structures which will be needed to implement those strategies.
Your Friend,
Newt
-
A World Remade by Fracking
With storage tanks full, panickers have no place to hoard oil in response to Middle East fears.
By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
March 31, 2015 6:52 p.m. ET
91 COMMENTS
If not for fracking, oil would probably be $200 a barrel and gasoline $6.50 in the U.S.
Western economies would likely be in free fall. The grudging U.S. recovery would be in retreat. The modest and possibly illusory green shoots seen in Europe, largely a function of cheap oil and a strong dollar, would wither. Japan would be even more of a write-off than it already is.
Russia would be even more emboldened in its geopolitical predations. Vladimir Putin would be raking in vaster bucks, rather than vastly diminished bucks, for his oil. Europe and the U.S., feeling broke and bedraggled, would be even less eager for confrontation.
Speculating about counterfactuals can be a foolish exercise, but oil traders usually take fright at geopolitical upsets that threaten supplies out of the Middle East. Yemen sits at the narrow Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint through which 3.8 million barrels a day flow from Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea terminals and elsewhere to the world. Yemen’s upheaval comes at the hands of Houthi tribalists backed by Iran, whose military already threatens another key Mideast oil chokepoint, at the exit of the Persian Gulf.
To register panic about all this and drive up prices, however, oil buyers have to be able to hoard oil. That’s becoming all but impossible. A huge amount of surplus production is already sloshing around the world, mostly as a result of U.S. fracking. As a consequence, storage tanks are full to overflowing. Panickers and speculators may well be physically unable to drive up prices significantly if they wanted to.
Even with the world increasingly clear-eyed about the consequences of the fracking revolution, if not the unprecedentedly sharp episodic growth in U.S. output last year, oil still topped $100 a barrel as recently as eight months ago.
To belabor what was once obvious, instability in the Middle East typically has been bullish for oil prices, as witnessed by various Arab-Israeli wars and Iraq’s wars with its neighbors. Saudi jets have already entered the fight to stop Iran’s allies in Yemen. If necessary, Saudi troops will likely intervene on the ground, waging a fight that would also be a fight for the interests of global oil consumers.
A direct confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia over Yemen could be shaping up. Iran is on the march in Iraq and Syria. Much of the Middle East is in chaos. That all this could be happening and yet oil pundits are more concerned about oil dropping to $20 a barrel, because of a lack of storage to accommodate our abundance, testifies to a geopolitical somersault the world is still trying to make sense of.
Fracking overnight has relieved Saudi Arabia of its swing-producer dominance. Fracking overnight has relegated the Middle East to a sideshow, albeit a still-important sideshow, in the world economy.
Things change fast and could change back. A sizable share of the world’s oil still flows from the Persian Gulf and so far production has not been disrupted. Prices would shoot up—they’re already creeping up. But a weight on U.S. fracking would also be lifted. At prices below $50, much fracking becomes long-term unprofitable. But then there’s the flip-side: the flexibility exhibited by the U.S. wildcat sector, allowing drilling to ramp up quickly in response to higher prices, helping to counteract any damage to global growth.
Naturally we come to the potentially least important piece of today’s mélange: the Obama administration’s negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
In its saner moments, the administration allows that the U.S. cannot secure Iranian sanctions for the long run unless it’s also prepared to negotiate over the concerns that led to sanctions being imposed in the first place. Iran wants sanctions lifted and doesn’t intend to abandon its pursuit of nuclear capability. Banish any other thought from your head. Not only are potent swaths of the Iranian elite getting rich directly and indirectly off the nuclear program. The regime would likely fatally discredit itself if it now disavowed a nuclear quest for which it has inflicted so much suffering and penury on the Iranian people.
Not going to happen. So unless the purpose is simply to let Team Obama get out of town without Iran calling its bluff on Iran’s nuclear effort, a useful deal would be one that legitimizes the continuation of sanctions, despite the clamor of the Europeans, Russians and Chinese to resume business with Tehran, once it becomes clear the Iranians aren’t going to deliver.
Such a deal could make sense, but from Israel and Saudi Arabia you hear a different fear. By design or by default, the deal being negotiated would end up formalizing a U.S. tendency to cede its Mideast power broker role to Iran. Why? Because, thanks to fracking, the U.S. just doesn’t care that much about the Middle East anymore.
Popular on WSJ
-
Entirely too glib on Iranian nukes and the nuke arms race now starting, but many points of interest
The Middle Eastern Balance of Power Matures
Geopolitical Weekly
March 31, 2015 | 08:01 GMT
Print
Text Size
Stratfor
By George Friedman
Last week, a coalition of predominantly Sunni Arab countries, primarily from the Arabian Peninsula and organized by Saudi Arabia, launched airstrikes in Yemen that have continued into this week. The airstrikes target Yemeni al-Houthis, a Shiite sect supported by Iran, and their Sunni partners, which include the majority of military forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. What made the strikes particularly interesting was what was lacking: U.S. aircraft. Although the United States provided intelligence and other support, it was a coalition of Arab states that launched the extended air campaign against the al-Houthis.
Three things make this important. First, it shows the United States' new regional strategy in operation. Washington is moving away from the strategy it has followed since the early 2000s — of being the prime military force in regional conflicts — and is shifting the primary burden of fighting to regional powers while playing a secondary role. Second, after years of buying advanced weaponry, the Saudis and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries are capable of carrying out a fairly sophisticated campaign, at least in Yemen. The campaign began by suppressing enemy air defenses — the al-Houthis had acquired surface-to-air missiles from the Yemeni military — and moved on to attacking al-Houthi command-and-control systems. This means that while the regional powers have long been happy to shift the burden of combat to the United States, they are also able to assume the burden if the United States refuses to engage.
Most important, the attacks on the al-Houthis shine the spotlight on a growing situation in the region: a war between the Sunnis and Shiites. In Iraq and Syria, a full-scale war is underway. A battle rages in Tikrit with the Sunni Islamic State and its allies on one side, and a complex combination of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army, Shiite militias, Sunni Arab tribal groups and Sunni Kurdish forces on the other. In Syria, the battle is between the secular government of President Bashar al Assad — nevertheless dominated by Alawites, a Shiite sect — and Sunni groups. However, Sunnis, Druze and Christians have sided with the regime as well. It is not reasonable to refer to the Syrian opposition as a coalition because there is significant internal hostility. Indeed, there is tension not only between the Shiites and Sunnis, but also within the Shiite and Sunni groups. In Yemen, a local power struggle among warring factions has been branded and elevated into a sectarian conflict for the benefit of the regional players. It is much more complex than simply a Shiite-Sunni war. At the same time, it cannot be understood without the Sunni-Shiite component.
Iran's Strategy and the Saudis' Response
One reason this is so important is that it represents a move by Iran to gain a major sphere of influence in the Arab world. This is not a new strategy. Iran has sought greater influence on the Arabian Peninsula since the rule of the Shah. More recently, it has struggled to create a sphere of influence stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. The survival of the al Assad government in Syria and the success of a pro-Iranian government in Iraq would create that Iranian sphere of influence, given the strength of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the ability of al Assad's Syria to project its power.
For a while, it appeared that this strategy had been blocked by the near collapse of the al Assad government in 2012 and the creation of an Iraqi government that appeared to be relatively successful and was far from being an Iranian puppet. These developments, coupled with Western sanctions, placed Iran on the defensive, and the idea of an Iranian sphere of influence appeared to have become merely a dream.
However, paradoxically, the rise of the Islamic State has reinvigorated Iranian power in two ways. First, while the propaganda of the Islamic State is horrific and designed to make the group look not only terrifying, but also enormously powerful, the truth is that, although it is not weak, the Islamic State represents merely a fraction of Iraq's Sunni community, and the Sunnis are a minority in Iraq. At the same time, the propaganda has mobilized the Shiite community to resist the Islamic State, allowed Iranian advisers to effectively manage the Shiite militias in Iraq and (to some extent) the Iraqi army, and forced the United States to use its airpower in tandem with Iranian-led ground forces. Given the American strategy of blocking the Islamic State — even if doing so requires cooperation with Iran — while not putting forces on the ground, this means that as the Islamic State's underlying weakness becomes more of a factor, the default winner in Iraq will be Iran.
A somewhat similar situation exists in Syria, though with a different demographic. Iran and Russia have historically supported the al Assad government. The Iranians have been the more important supporters, particularly because they committed their ally, Hezbollah, to the battle. What once appeared to be a lost cause is now far from it. The United States was extremely hostile toward al Assad, but given the current alternatives in Syria, Washington has become at least neutral toward the Syrian government. Al Assad would undoubtedly like to have U.S. neutrality translate into a direct dialogue with Washington. Regardless of the outcome, Iran has the means to maintain its influence in Syria.
When you look at a map and think of the situation in Yemen, you get a sense of why the Saudis and Gulf Cooperation Council countries had to do something. Given what is happening along the northern border of the Arabian Peninsula, the Saudis have to calculate the possibility of an al-Houthi victory establishing a pro-Iranian, Shiite state to its south as well. The Saudis and the Gulf countries would be facing the possibility of a Shiite or Iranian encirclement. These are not the same thing, but they are linked in complex ways. Working in the Saudis' favor is the fact that the al-Houthis are not Shiite proxies like Hezbollah, and Saudi money combined with military operations designed to cut off Iranian supply lines to the al-Houthis could mitigate the threat overall. Either way, the Saudis had to act.
During the Arab Spring, one of the nearly successful attempts to topple a government occurred in Bahrain. The uprising failed primarily because Saudi Arabia intervened and imposed its will on the country. The Saudis showed themselves to be extremely sensitive to the rise of Shiite regimes with close relations with the Iranians on the Arabian Peninsula. The result was unilateral intervention and suppression. Whatever the moral issues, it is clear that the Saudis are frightened by rising Iranian and Shiite power and are willing to use their strength. That is what they have done in Yemen.
In a way, the issue is simple for the Saudis. They represent the center of gravity of the religious Sunni world. As such, they and their allies have embarked on a strategy that is strategically defensive and tactically offensive. Their goal is to block Iranian and Shiite influence, and the means they are implementing is coalition warfare that uses air power to support local forces on the ground. Unless there is a full invasion of Yemen, the Saudis are following the American strategy of the 2000s on a smaller scale.
The U.S. Stance
The American strategy is more complex. As I've written before, the United States has undertaken a strategy focused on maintaining the balance of power. This kind of approach is always messy because the goal is not to support any particular power, but to maintain a balance between multiple powers. Therefore, the United States is providing intelligence and mission planning for the Saudi coalition against the al-Houthis and their Iranian allies. In Iraq, the United States is providing support to Shiites — and by extension, their allies — by bombing Islamic State installations. In Syria, U.S. strategy is so complex that it defies clear explanation. That is the nature of refusing large-scale intervention but being committed to a balance of power. The United States can oppose Iran in one theater and support it in another. The more simplistic models of the Cold War are not relevant here.
All of this is happening at the same time that nuclear negotiations appear to be coming to some sort of closure. The United States is not really concerned about Iran's nuclear weapons. As I have said many times, we have heard since the mid-2000s that Iran was a year or two away from nuclear weapons. Each year, the fateful date was pushed back. Building deliverable nuclear weapons is difficult, and the Iranians have not even carried out a nuclear test, an essential step before a deliverable weapon is created. What was a major issue a few years ago is now part of a constellation of issues where U.S.-Iranian relations interact, support and contradict. Deal or no deal, the United States will bomb the Islamic State, which will help Iran, and support the Saudis in Yemen, which will not.
The real issue now is what it was a few years ago: Iran appears to be building a sphere of influence to the Mediterranean Sea, but this time, that sphere of influence potentially includes Yemen. That, in turn, creates a threat to the Arabian Peninsula from two directions. The Iranians are trying to place a vise around it. The Saudis must react, but the question is whether airstrikes are capable of stopping the al-Houthis. They are a relatively low-cost way to wage war, but they fail frequently. The first question is what the Saudis will do then. The second question is what the Americans will do. The current doctrine requires a balance between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the United States tilting back and forth. Under this doctrine — and in this military reality — the United States cannot afford full-scale engagement on the ground in Iraq.
Turkey's Role
Relatively silent but absolutely vital to this tale is Turkey. It has the largest economy in the region and has the largest army, although just how good its army is can be debated. Turkey is watching chaos along its southern border, rising tension in the Caucasus, and conflict across the Black Sea. Of all these, Syria and Iraq and the potential rise of Iranian power is the most disturbing. Turkey has said little about Iran of late, but last week Ankara suddenly criticized Tehran and accused Iran of trying to dominate the region. Turkey frequently says things without doing anything, but the development is still noteworthy.
It should be remembered that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hoped to see Turkey as a regional leader and the leader of the Sunni world. With the Saudis taking an active role and the Turks doing little in Syria or Iraq, the moment is passing Turkey by. Such moments come and go, so history is not changed. But Turkey is still the major Sunni power and the third leg of the regional balance involving Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The evolution of Turkey would be the critical step in the emergence of a regional balance of power, in which local powers, not the United Kingdom or the United States, determine the outcome. The American role, like the British role before it, would not be directly waging war in the region but providing aid designed to stabilize the balance of power. That can be seen in Yemen or Iraq. It is extremely complex and not suited for simplistic or ideological analysis. But it is here, it is unfolding and it will represent the next generation of Middle Eastern dynamics. And if the Iranians put aside their theoretical nuclear weapons and focus on this, that will draw in the Turks and round out the balance of power.
-
http://www.occupydemocrats.com/watch-pres-obama-brilliantly-destroys-a-loaded-foxnews-question/
-
Share
Kicking Over the Table in the Middle East
Geopolitical Diary
April 2, 2015 | 22:10 GMT
Text Size
Print
The United States and Iran, along with other members of the Western negotiating coalition, reached an agreement whose end point will be Iran's monitored abandonment of any ambition to build nuclear weapons, coupled with the end of sanctions on Iran's economy. It is not a final agreement. That will take until at least June 30. There are also powerful forces in Iran and the United States that oppose the agreement and might undermine it. And, in the end, neither side is certain to live up the agreement. Nevertheless, there has been an agreement between the Great Satan and a charter member of the Axis of Evil, and that matters. But it matters less for what it says about Iran's nuclear program, or economic sanctions, than for how it affects the regional balance of power, a subject we wrote on in this week's Geopolitical Weekly.
Israel is the country that will be the most visible. It has been vociferous in opposing any deal with Iran. But in the end, this deal affects others less than Israel pretends. First, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's behavior does not indicate that he truly believes in an imminent Iranian nuclear threat. He has been asserting for more than a decade that the Iranians are a year or two away from a nuclear weapon. According to him, they are always a year or two away. It has become a non-falsifiable assertion. No matter what deadline passes, it does not deter Netanyahu.
What is a Geopolitical Diary? George Friedman Explains.
But more important, if Netanyahu actually believed what he said, it is inconceivable that he would not have taken military action, with or without U.S. support, to protect Israel from an existential threat. Israel has a substantial military capability, including tactical nuclear weapons. While its forces are relatively far from Iran, there are other regional powers on the Arabian Peninsula and in the Caucasus who are hostile to Iran and frightened of Iranian nuclear weapons who could, theoretically, allow Israel to base aircraft and special forces out of their countries for an Israeli strike on Iran's facilities.
Netanyahu's statements and Netanyahu's actions — or lack of them — are utterly contradictory. If he meant what he said about the threat, and the United States was not prepared to act, the prime minister of Israel would be derelict in his responsibilities by failing to act. Netanyahu is not a man to neglect his duty. Therefore, he cannot believe what he says. Indeed, what he has wanted consistently was a U.S. attack on Iran, or at least unremitting U.S. hostility toward Iran. His fear of Iran's nuclear program had more to do with limiting a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement than protecting Israel from Iranian nuclear weapons. The latter would have produced different actions. Fear of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement is not unreasonable, and all nations must use what tools they have to shape their environment. But in this case, the Israeli response will be of secondary importance.
Of far greater importance will be the Saudi and Turkish response. Saudi Arabia is the mortal enemy of Iran, not merely over religious issues, but geopolitically. Riyadh understands that it is rich and yet militarily constrained, while Tehran is poor but has more robust military capabilities. This is an uncomfortable position to be in. Obviously, Iran would like to dominate the Arabian Peninsula. The United States has been the guarantor of Saudi national security. The understanding with Iran, if it endures and if it evolves into a broader relationship, threatens the security of the entire Arabian Peninsula. This can also put the United States in a position where the Arabian Peninsula can no longer simply assume U.S. hostility toward Iran or U.S. support of their interests. The airstrikes on Yemen are the first indication of the region having to bear the burden of its strategic interests. There will be more such military initiatives, and the Arabian Peninsula will be wooing the United States rather than the other way around.
The same is true for another country that is far more important: Turkey. During the last few years, Ankara has played a complex game with Washington, supporting those things that were in its own interests and opposing things that were not. This makes perfect sense, but the U.S. relationship with Iran changes the basic dynamic. Last week Turkey made hostile gestures toward Iran. Turkish and Iranian interests are not identical and can easily diverge. It is important for Turkey that the United States keeps its distance from Iran. To this point, the United States wooed Turkey and both countries become reluctant partners. If the United States has a closer relationship with Iran, Turkey, like Saudi Arabia, will have to pay a much higher price for alignment with the United States and bear increasing risks if it is unwilling to pay that price.
The question of Iranian nuclear weapons is more theoretical than real. Iran will become, if not an ally, then possibly a country with which to cooperate on matters, such as what is happening in Iraq. There is a saying in chess: When you are being outplayed, kick over the table and start a new game. The understanding between Washington and Tehran is in itself both incomplete and uncertain. However, if it evolves into something solid, then we can look at this as the day the United States kicked over the table and started a new game.
-
46 minutes of video at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/opinion/thomas-friedman-the-obama-doctrine-and-iran-interview.html?emc=edit_na_20150405&nlid=49641193
The Obama Doctrine and Iran
APRIL 5, 2015
Continue reading the main story Video
The Obama Doctrine and Iran
President Obama talks with Thomas L. Friedman about the calculations that informed the Iran nuclear framework and what they say about his overall approach to foreign policy.
Thomas L. Friedman
In September 1996, I visited Iran. One of my most enduring memories of that trip was that in my hotel lobby there was a sign above the door proclaiming “Down With USA.” But it wasn’t a banner or graffiti. It was tiled and plastered into the wall. I thought to myself: “Wow — that’s tiled in there! That won’t come out easily.” Nearly 20 years later, in the wake of a draft deal between the Obama administration and Iran, we have what may be the best chance to begin to pry that sign loose, to ease the U.S.-Iran cold/hot war that has roiled the region for 36 years. But it is a chance fraught with real risks to America, Israel and our Sunni Arab allies: that Iran could eventually become a nuclear-armed state.
President Obama invited me to the Oval Office Saturday afternoon to lay out exactly how he was trying to balance these risks and opportunities in the framework accord reached with Iran last week in Switzerland. What struck me most was what I’d call an “Obama doctrine” embedded in the president’s remarks. It emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that “engagement,” combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-à-vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities — like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.
President Obama lays out his preference for engagement over isolation in his approach to foreign policy. This is an excerpt of an interview with Thomas L. Friedman.
By A.J. Chavar, Quynhanh Do, David Frank, Abe Sater and Ben Werschkul on Publish Date April 5, 2015. Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times.
“We are powerful enough to be able to test these propositions without putting ourselves at risk. And that’s the thing ... people don’t seem to understand,” the president said. “You take a country like Cuba. For us to test the possibility that engagement leads to a better outcome for the Cuban people, there aren’t that many risks for us. It’s a tiny little country. It’s not one that threatens our core security interests, and so [there’s no reason not] to test the proposition. And if it turns out that it doesn’t lead to better outcomes, we can adjust our policies. The same is true with respect to Iran, a larger country, a dangerous country, one that has engaged in activities that resulted in the death of U.S. citizens, but the truth of the matter is: Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us. ... You asked about an Obama doctrine. The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”
The notion that Iran is undeterrable — “it’s simply not the case,” he added. “And so for us to say, ‘Let’s try’ — understanding that we’re preserving all our options, that we’re not naïve — but if in fact we can resolve these issues diplomatically, we are more likely to be safe, more likely to be secure, in a better position to protect our allies, and who knows? Iran may change. If it doesn’t, our deterrence capabilities, our military superiority stays in place. ... We’re not relinquishing our capacity to defend ourselves or our allies. In that situation, why wouldn’t we test it?”
Continue reading the main story
Obviously, Israel is in a different situation, he added. “Now, what you might hear from Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, which I respect, is the notion, ‘Look, Israel is more vulnerable. We don’t have the luxury of testing these propositions the way you do,’ and I completely understand that. And further, I completely understand Israel’s belief that given the tragic history of the Jewish people, they can’t be dependent solely on us for their own security. But what I would say to them is that not only am I absolutely committed to making sure that they maintain their qualitative military edge, and that they can deter any potential future attacks, but what I’m willing to do is to make the kinds of commitments that would give everybody in the neighborhood, including Iran, a clarity that if Israel were to be attacked by any state, that we would stand by them. And that, I think, should be ... sufficient to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see whether or not we can at least take the nuclear issue off the table.”
He added: “What I would say to the Israeli people is ... that there is no formula, there is no option, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon that will be more effective than the diplomatic initiative and framework that we put forward — and that’s demonstrable.”
The president gave voice, though — in a more emotional and personal way than I’ve ever heard — to his distress at being depicted in Israel and among American Jews as somehow anti-Israel, when his views on peace are shared by many center-left Israelis and his administration has been acknowledged by Israeli officials to have been as vigorous as any in maintaining Israel’s strategic edge.
With huge amounts of conservative campaign money now flowing to candidates espousing pro-Israel views, which party is more supportive of Israel is becoming a wedge issue, an arms race, with Republican candidates competing over who can be the most unreservedly supportive of Israel in any disagreement with the United States, and ordinary, pro-Israel Democrats increasingly feeling sidelined.
President Obama explains why the nuclear deal is the best, and only, option to keep Israel safe from Iran. This is an excerpt of an interview with Thomas L. Friedman.
By A.J. Chavar, Quynhanh Do, David Frank, Abe Sater and Ben Werschkul on Publish Date April 5, 2015. Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times.
“This is an area that I’ve been concerned about,” the president said. “Look, Israel is a robust, rowdy democracy. ... We share so much. We share blood, family. ... And part of what has always made the U.S.-Israeli relationship so special is that it has transcended party, and I think that has to be preserved. There has to be the ability for me to disagree with a policy on settlements, for example, without being viewed as ... opposing Israel. There has to be a way for Prime Minister Netanyahu to disagree with me on policy without being viewed as anti-Democrat, and I think the right way to do it is to recognize that as many commonalities as we have, there are going to be strategic differences. And I think that it is important for each side to respect the debate that takes place in the other country and not try to work just with one side. ... But this has been as hard as anything I do because of the deep affinities that I feel for the Israeli people and for the Jewish people. It’s been a hard period.”
Continue reading the main story
You take it personally? I asked.
“It has been personally difficult for me to hear ... expressions that somehow ... this administration has not done everything it could to look out for Israel’s interest — and the suggestion that when we have very serious policy differences, that that’s not in the context of a deep and abiding friendship and concern and understanding of the threats that the Jewish people have faced historically and continue to face.”
As for protecting our Sunni Arab allies, like Saudi Arabia, the president said, they have some very real external threats, but they also have some internal threats — “populations that, in some cases, are alienated, youth that are underemployed, an ideology that is destructive and nihilistic, and in some cases, just a belief that there are no legitimate political outlets for grievances. And so part of our job is to work with these states and say, ‘How can we build your defense capabilities against external threats, but also, how can we strengthen the body politic in these countries, so that Sunni youth feel that they’ve got something other than [the Islamic State, or ISIS] to choose from. ... I think the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries. ... That’s a tough conversation to have, but it’s one that we have to have.”
That said, the Iran deal is far from finished. As the President cautioned: “We’re not done yet. There are a lot of details to be worked out, and you could see backtracking and slippage and real political difficulties, both in Iran and obviously here in the United States Congress.”
On Congress’s role, Obama said he insists on preserving the presidential prerogative to enter into binding agreements with foreign powers without congressional approval. However, he added, “I do think that [Tennessee Republican] Senator Corker, the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, is somebody who is sincerely concerned about this issue and is a good and decent man, and my hope is that we can find something that allows Congress to express itself but does not encroach on traditional presidential prerogatives — and ensures that, if in fact we get a good deal, that we can go ahead and implement it.”
Since President Obama has had more direct and indirect dealings with Iran’s leadership — including an exchange of numerous letters with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — than any of his predecessors since Iran’s revolution in 1979, I asked what he has learned from the back and forth.
“I think that it’s important to recognize that Iran is a complicated country — just like we’re a complicated country,” the president said. “There is no doubt that, given the history between our two countries, that there is deep mistrust that is not going to fade away immediately. The activities that they engage in, the rhetoric, both anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, is deeply disturbing. There are deep trends in the country that are contrary to not only our own national security interests and views but those of our allies and friends in the region, and those divisions are real.”
Continue reading the main story
But, he added, “what we’ve also seen is that there is a practical streak to the Iranian regime. I think they are concerned about self-preservation. I think they are responsive, to some degree, to their publics. I think the election of [President Hassan] Rouhani indicated that there was an appetite among the Iranian people for a rejoining with the international community, an emphasis on the economics and the desire to link up with a global economy. And so what we’ve seen over the last several years, I think, is the opportunity for those forces within Iran that want to break out of the rigid framework that they have been in for a long time to move in a different direction. It’s not a radical break, but it’s one that I think offers us the chance for a different type of relationship, and this nuclear deal, I think, is a potential expression of that.”
What about Iran’s supreme leader, who will be the ultimate decider there on whether or not Iran moves ahead? What have you learned about him?
President Obama explains why Iran does not need to have nuclear weapons to be a regional powerhouse. This is an excerpt of an interview with Thomas L. Friedman.
By A.J. Chavar, Quynhanh Do, David Frank, Abe Sater and Ben Werschkul on Publish Date April 5, 2015. Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times.
“He’s a pretty tough read,” the president said. “I haven’t spoken to him directly. In the letters that he sends, there [are] typically a lot of reminders of what he perceives as past grievances against Iran, but what is, I think, telling is that he did give his negotiators in this deal the leeway, the capability to make important concessions, that would allow this framework agreement to come to fruition. So what that tells me is that — although he is deeply suspicious of the West [and] very insular in how he thinks about international issues as well as domestic issues, and deeply conservative — he does realize that the sanctions regime that we put together was weakening Iran over the long term, and that if in fact he wanted to see Iran re-enter the community of nations, then there were going to have to be changes.”
Since he has acknowledged Israel’s concerns, and the fact that they are widely shared there, if the president had a chance to make his case for this framework deal directly to the Israeli people, what would he say?
“Well, what I’d say to them is this,” the president answered. “You have every right to be concerned about Iran. This is a regime that at the highest levels has expressed the desire to destroy Israel, that has denied the Holocaust, that has expressed venomous anti-Semitic ideas and is a big country with a big population and has a sophisticated military. So Israel is right to be concerned about Iran, and they should be absolutely concerned that Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon.” But, he insisted, this framework initiative, if it can be implemented, can satisfy that Israeli strategic concern with more effectiveness and at less cost to Israel than any other approach. “We know that a military strike or a series of military strikes can set back Iran’s nuclear program for a period of time — but almost certainly will prompt Iran to rush towards a bomb, will provide an excuse for hard-liners inside of Iran to say, ‘This is what happens when you don’t have a nuclear weapon: America attacks.’
Continue reading the main story
“We know that if we do nothing, other than just maintain sanctions, that they will continue with the building of their nuclear infrastructure and we’ll have less insight into what exactly is happening,” Obama added. “So this may not be optimal. In a perfect world, Iran would say, ‘We won’t have any nuclear infrastructure at all,’ but what we know is that this has become a matter of pride and nationalism for Iran. Even those who we consider moderates and reformers are supportive of some nuclear program inside of Iran, and given that they will not capitulate completely, given that they can’t meet the threshold that Prime Minister Netanyahu sets forth, there are no Iranian leaders who will do that. And given the fact that this is a country that withstood an eight-year war and a million people dead, they’ve shown themselves willing, I think, to endure hardship when they considered a point of national pride or, in some cases, national survival.”
The president continued: “For us to examine those options and say to ourselves, ‘You know what, if we can have vigorous inspections, unprecedented, and we know at every point along their nuclear chain exactly what they’re doing and that lasts for 20 years, and for the first 10 years their program is not just frozen but effectively rolled back to a larger degree, and we know that even if they wanted to cheat we would have at least a year, which is about three times longer than we’d have right now, and we would have insights into their programs that we’ve never had before,’ in that circumstance, the notion that we wouldn’t take that deal right now and that that would not be in Israel’s interest is simply incorrect.”
Because, Obama argued, “the one thing that changes the equation is when these countries get a nuclear weapon. ... Witness North Korea, which is a problem state that is rendered a lot more dangerous because of their nuclear program. If we can prevent that from happening anyplace else in the world, that’s something where it’s worth taking some risks.”
“I have to respect the fears that the Israeli people have,” he added, “and I understand that Prime Minister Netanyahu is expressing the deep-rooted concerns that a lot of the Israeli population feel about this, but what I can say to them is: Number one, this is our best bet by far to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon, and number two, what we will be doing even as we enter into this deal is sending a very clear message to the Iranians and to the entire region that if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there. And I think the combination of a diplomatic path that puts the nuclear issue to one side — while at the same time sending a clear message to the Iranians that you have to change your behavior more broadly and that we are going to protect our allies if you continue to engage in destabilizing aggressive activity — I think that’s a combination that potentially at least not only assures our friends, but starts bringing down the temperature.”
President Obama says that a final nuclear deal would require further engagement, with and monitoring of, Iran. This is an excerpt of an interview with Thomas L. Friedman.
By A.J. Chavar, Quynhanh Do, David Frank, Abe Sater and Ben Werschkul on Publish Date April 5, 2015. Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times.
Continue reading the main story
There is clearly a debate going on inside Iran as to whether the country should go ahead with this framework deal as well, so what would the president say to the Iranian people to persuade them that this deal is in their interest?
If their leaders really are telling the truth that Iran is not seeking a nuclear weapon, the president said, then “the notion that they would want to expend so much on a symbolic program as opposed to harnessing the incredible talents and ingenuity and entrepreneurship of the Iranian people, and be part of the world economy and see their nation excel in those terms, that should be a pretty straightforward choice for them. Iran doesn’t need nuclear weapons to be a powerhouse in the region. For that matter, what I’d say to the Iranian people is: You don’t need to be anti-Semitic or anti-Israel or anti-Sunni to be a powerhouse in the region. I mean, the truth is, Iran has all these potential assets going for it where, if it was a responsible international player, if it did not engage in aggressive rhetoric against its neighbors, if it didn’t express anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiment, if it maintained a military that was sufficient to protect itself, but was not engaging in a whole bunch of proxy wars around the region, by virtue of its size, its resources and its people it would be an extremely successful regional power. And so my hope is that the Iranian people begin to recognize that.”
Clearly, he added, “part of the psychology of Iran is rooted in past experiences, the sense that their country was undermined, that the United States or the West meddled in first their democracy and then in supporting the Shah and then in supporting Iraq and Saddam during that extremely brutal war. So part of what I’ve told my team is we have to distinguish between the ideologically driven, offensive Iran and the defensive Iran that feels vulnerable and sometimes may be reacting because they perceive that as the only way that they can avoid repeats of the past. ... But if we’re able to get this done, then what may happen — and I’m not counting on it — but what may happen is that those forces inside of Iran that say, ‘We don’t need to view ourselves entirely through the lens of our war machine. Let’s excel in science and technology and job creation and developing our people,’ that those folks get stronger. ... I say that emphasizing that the nuclear deal that we’ve put together is not based on the idea that somehow the regime changes.
“It is a good deal even if Iran doesn’t change at all,” Obama argued. “Even for somebody who believes, as I suspect Prime Minister Netanyahu believes, that there is no difference between Rouhani and the supreme leader and they’re all adamantly anti-West and anti-Israel and perennial liars and cheaters — even if you believed all that, this still would be the right thing to do. It would still be the best option for us to protect ourselves. In fact, you could argue that if they are implacably opposed to us, all the more reason for us to want to have a deal in which we know what they’re doing and that, for a long period of time, we can prevent them from having a nuclear weapon.”
Continue reading the main story
There are several very sensitive points in the framework agreement that are not clear to me, and I asked the president for his interpretation. For instance, if we suspect that Iran is cheating, is harboring a covert nuclear program outside of the declared nuclear facilities covered in this deal — say, at a military base in southeastern Iran — do we have the right to insist on that facility being examined by international inspectors?
“In the first instance, what we have agreed to is that we will be able to inspect and verify what’s happening along the entire nuclear chain from the uranium mines all the way through to the final facilities like Natanz,” the president said. “What that means is that we’re not just going to have a bunch of folks posted at two or three or five sites. We are going to be able to see what they’re doing across the board, and in fact, if they now wanted to initiate a covert program that was designed to produce a nuclear weapon, they’d have to create a whole different supply chain. That’s point number one. Point number two, we’re actually going to be setting up a procurement committee that examines what they’re importing, what they’re bringing in that they might claim as dual-use, to determine whether or not what they’re using is something that would be appropriate for a peaceful nuclear program versus a weapons program. And number three, what we’re going to be doing is setting up a mechanism whereby, yes, I.A.E.A. [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors can go anyplace.”
Anywhere in Iran? I asked.
“That we suspect,” the president answered. “Obviously, a request will have to be made. Iran could object, but what we have done is to try to design a mechanism whereby once those objections are heard, that it is not a final veto that Iran has, but in fact some sort of international mechanism will be in place that makes a fair assessment as to whether there should be an inspection, and if they determine it should be, that’s the tiebreaker, not Iran saying, ‘No, you can’t come here.’ So over all, what we’re seeing is not just the additional protocols that I.A.E.A. has imposed on countries that are suspected of in the past having had problematic nuclear programs, we’re going even beyond that, and Iran will be subject to the kinds of inspections and verification mechanisms that have never been put in place before.”
A lot of people, myself included, will want to see the fine print on that. Another issue that doesn’t seem to have been resolved yet is: When exactly do the economic sanctions on Iran get lifted? When the implementation begins? When Iran has been deemed to be complying fully?
“There are still details to be worked out,” the president said, “but I think that the basic framework calls for Iran to take the steps that it needs to around [the Fordow enrichment facility], the centrifuges, and so forth. At that point, then, the U.N. sanctions are suspended; although the sanctions related to proliferation, the sanctions related to ballistic missiles, there’s a set of sanctions that remain in place. At that point, then, we preserve the ability to snap back those sanctions, if there is a violation. If not, though, Iran, outside of the proliferation and ballistic missile issues that stay in place, they’re able to get out from under the sanctions, understanding that this constant monitoring will potentially trigger some sort of action if they’re in violation.”
Continue reading the main story
There are still United States sanctions that are related to Iran’s behavior in terrorism and human rights abuse, though, the president added: “There are certain sanctions that we have that would remain in place because they’re not related to Iran’s nuclear program, and this, I think, gets to a central point that we’ve made consistently. If in fact we are able to finalize the nuclear deal, and if Iran abides by it, that’s a big piece of business that we’ve gotten done, but it does not end our problems with Iran, and we are still going to be aggressively working with our allies and friends to reduce — and hopefully at some point stop — the destabilizing activities that Iran has engaged in, the sponsorship of terrorist organizations. And that may take some time. But it’s our belief, it’s my belief, that we will be in a stronger position to do so if the nuclear issue has been put in a box. And if we can do that, it’s possible that Iran, seeing the benefits of sanctions relief, starts focusing more on the economy and its people. And investment starts coming in, and the country starts opening up. If we’ve done a good job in bolstering the sense of security and defense cooperation between us and the Sunni states, if we have made even more certain that the Israeli people are absolutely protected not just by their own capacities, but also by our commitments, then what’s possible is you start seeing an equilibrium in the region, and Sunni and Shia, Saudi and Iran start saying, ‘Maybe we should lower tensions and focus on the extremists like [ISIS] that would burn down this entire region if they could.’ ”
Regarding America’s Sunni Arab allies, Obama reiterated that while he is prepared to help increase their military capabilities they also need to increase their willingness to commit their ground troops to solving regional problems.
“The conversations I want to have with the Gulf countries is, first and foremost, how do they build more effective defense capabilities,” the president said. “I think when you look at what happens in Syria, for example, there’s been a great desire for the United States to get in there and do something. But the question is: Why is it that we can’t have Arabs fighting [against] the terrible human rights abuses that have been perpetrated, or fighting against what Assad has done? I also think that I can send a message to them about the U.S.’s commitments to work with them and ensure that they are not invaded from the outside, and that perhaps will ease some of their concerns and allow them to have a more fruitful conversation with the Iranians. What I can’t do, though, is commit to dealing with some of these internal issues that they have without them making some changes that are more responsive to their people.”
One way to think about it, Obama continued, “is [that] when it comes to external aggression, I think we’re going to be there for our [Arab] friends — and I want to see how we can formalize that a little bit more than we currently have, and also help build their capacity so that they feel more confident about their ability to protect themselves from external aggression.” But, he repeated, “The biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries. Now disentangling that from real terrorist activity inside their country, how we sort that out, how we engage in the counterterrorism cooperation that’s been so important to our own security — without automatically legitimizing or validating whatever repressive tactics they may employ — I think that’s a tough conversation to have, but it’s one that we have to have.”
President Obama on the “dangers” that arise when lawmakers breach traditional channels of foreign policy. This is an excerpt of an interview with Thomas L. Friedman.
By A.J. Chavar, Quynhanh Do, David Frank, Abe Sater and Ben Werschkul on Publish Date April 5, 2015. Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times.
It feels lately like some traditional boundaries between the executive and legislative branches, when it comes to the conduct of American foreign policy, have been breached. For instance, there was the letter from 47 Republican senators to Iran’s supreme leader cautioning him on striking any deal with Obama not endorsed by them — coming in the wake of Prime Minister Netanyahu being invited by the speaker of the House, John Boehner, to address a joint session of Congress — without consulting the White House. How is Obama taking this?
“I do worry that some traditional boundaries in how we think about foreign policy have been crossed,” the president said. “I felt the letter that was sent to the supreme leader was inappropriate. I think that you will recall there were some deep disagreements with President Bush about the Iraq war, but the notion that you would have had a whole bunch of Democrats sending letters to leaders in the region or to European leaders ... trying to undermine the president’s policies I think is troubling.
“The bottom line,” he added, “is that we’re going to have serious debates, serious disagreements, and I welcome those because that’s how our democracy is supposed to work, and in today’s international environment, whatever arguments we have here, other people are hearing and reading about it. It’s not a secret that the Republicans may feel more affinity with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s views of the Iran issue than they do with mine. But [we need to be] keeping that within some formal boundaries, so that the executive branch, when it goes overseas, when it’s communicating with foreign leaders, is understood to be speaking on behalf of the United States of America, not a divided United States of America, making sure that whether that president is a Democrat or a Republican that once the debates have been had here, that he or she is the spokesperson on behalf of U.S. foreign policy. And that’s clear to every leader around the world. That’s important because without that, what you start getting is multiple foreign policies, confusion among foreign powers as to who speaks for who, and that ends up being a very dangerous — circumstances that could be exploited by our enemies and could deeply disturb our friends.”
As for the Obama doctrine — “we will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities” — the president concluded: “I’ve been very clear that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon on my watch, and I think they should understand that we mean it. But I say that hoping that we can conclude this diplomatic arrangement — and that it ushers a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations — and, just as importantly, over time, a new era in Iranian relations with its neighbors.”
Whatever happened in the past, he said, “at this point, the U.S.’s core interests in the region are not oil, are not territorial. ... Our core interests are that everybody is living in peace, that it is orderly, that our allies are not being attacked, that children are not having barrel bombs dropped on them, that massive displacements aren’t taking place. Our interests in this sense are really just making sure that the region is working. And if it’s working well, then we’ll do fine. And that’s going to be a big project, given what’s taken place, but I think this [Iran framework deal] is at least one place to start.”
-
As always, Pres. Obama is the master of the straw man argument, skillfully shooting down arguments the other side is not making.
“We know that if we do nothing, other than just maintain sanctions, that they will continue with the building of their nuclear infrastructure and we’ll have less insight into what exactly is happening,” - Doing nothing is NOT the only alternative put forward by people more concerned than him about the Iranian nuclear threat!
"America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks" - Permitting Iran to keep its nuclear infrastructure is a calculated risk?!
Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us. - Tell that to the families of servicemen and women blown up by Iran-made IEDs in Iraq. Does he live in a cave? They already are fighting us! They are the world's number one state sponsor of terror. Compare terror budgets, not"defense".
Obama doctrine: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.” - While allowing sworn enemies to grow their capabilities exponentially!
"we’re preserving all our options" - We can "snap" sanctions back on them anytime we want, but "we" now includes unanimous consent agreement with the enemy adversaries of Russia and China. Why don't we put Israel and Taiwan on the P5 security council in place of adversarial, totalitarian regimes, if serious about peace. Options not even on the table would be the obvious ones, to take out these known enemy nuclear sites militarily and to tighten, not loosen, sanctions until the regime drops its support for terror and its commitment to the destruction of both Israel and America.
"What I’m willing to do is to make the kinds of commitments that would give everybody in the neighborhood, including Iran, a clarity that if Israel were to be attacked by any state, that we would stand by them." - Nothing says clarity like another Obama red line. Chemical weapons in Syria, you can keep your health plan, and a thousand other falsehoods come to mind.
“What I would say to the Israeli people is ... that there is no formula, there is no option, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon that will be more effective than the diplomatic initiative and framework that we put forward — and that’s demonstrable.” - Osirak? http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/7/newsid_3014000/3014623.stm
“the one thing that changes the equation is when these countries get a nuclear weapon. ... Witness North Korea, which is a problem state that is rendered a lot more dangerous because of their nuclear program. If we can prevent that from happening anyplace else in the world, that’s something where it’s worth taking some risks.” - Then take some risks!
If there is a different site needing inspection, "obviously a request will have to be made. Iran could object, but what we have done is to try to design a mechanism whereby once those objections are heard, that it is not a final veto that Iran has, but in fact some sort of international mechanism will be in place that makes a fair assessment as to whether there should be an inspection" - Again, subject to a Russia or China veto, and subject to endless delays.
“The conversations I want to have with the Gulf countries is, first and foremost, how do they build more effective defense capabilities,” - Ask them, they all need to go nuclear as Iran does.
"I also think that I can send a message to them about the U.S.’s commitments to work with them and ensure that they are not invaded from the outside" - As we did with Ukraine... And that was a P5 member attacking! And Yemen. We stand with you every step of the way. Oops, we're out.
Not asked and not answered: Why does oil-rich Iran need nuclear facilities for "peaceful energy production" when the US and allies do not?
-
Excellent response Doug!
Continuing to explore additional perspectives, here is something Stratfor wrote five years ago-- though I find it quite glib regarding the nuclear issue, there are a number of ideas worthy of considerable reflection IMHO:
Thinking About the Unthinkable: A U.S.-Iranian Deal
Geopolitical Weekly
March 1, 2010 | 17:03 GMT
Print
Text Size
By George Friedman
The United States apparently has reached the point where it must either accept that Iran will develop nuclear weapons at some point if it wishes, or take military action to prevent this. There is a third strategy, however: Washington can seek to redefine the Iranian question.
As we have no idea what leaders on either side are thinking, exploring this represents an exercise in geopolitical theory. Let's begin with the two apparent stark choices.
Diplomacy vs. the Military Option
The diplomatic approach consists of creating a broad coalition prepared to impose what have been called crippling sanctions on Iran. Effective sanctions must be so painful that they compel the target to change its behavior. In Tehran's case, this could only consist of blocking Iran's imports of gasoline. Iran imports 35 percent of the gasoline it consumes. It is not clear that a gasoline embargo would be crippling, but it is the only embargo that might work. All other forms of sanctions against Iran would be mere gestures designed to give the impression that something is being done.
The Chinese will not participate in any gasoline embargo. Beijing gets 11 percent of its oil from Iran, and it has made it clear it will continue to deliver gasoline to Iran. Moscow's position is that Russia might consider sanctions down the road, but it hasn't specified when, and it hasn't specified what. The Russians are more than content seeing the U.S. bogged down in the Middle East and so are not inclined to solve American problems in the region. With the Chinese and Russians unlikely to embargo gasoline, these sanctions won't create significant pain for Iran. Since all other sanctions are gestures, the diplomatic approach is therefore unlikely to work.
The military option has its own risks. First, its success depends on the quality of intelligence on Iran's nuclear facilities and on the degree of hardening of those targets. Second, it requires successful air attacks. Third, it requires battle damage assessments that tell the attacker whether the strike succeeded. Fourth, it requires follow-on raids to destroy facilities that remain functional. And fifth, attacks must do more than simply set back Iran's program a few months or even years: If the risk of a nuclear Iran is great enough to justify the risks of war, the outcome must be decisive.
Each point in this process is a potential failure point. Given the multiplicity of these points — which includes others not mentioned — failure may not be an option, but it is certainly possible.
But even if the attacks succeed, the question of what would happen the day after the attacks remains. Iran has its own counters. It has a superbly effective terrorist organization, Hezbollah, at its disposal. It has sufficient influence in Iraq to destabilize that country and force the United States to keep forces in Iraq badly needed elsewhere. And it has the ability to use mines and missiles to attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf shipping lanes for some period — driving global oil prices through the roof while the global economy is struggling to stabilize itself. Iran's position on its nuclear program is rooted in the awareness that while it might not have assured options in the event of a military strike, it has counters that create complex and unacceptable risks. Iran therefore does not believe the United States will strike or permit Israel to strike, as the consequences would be unacceptable.
To recap, the United States either can accept a nuclear Iran or risk an attack that might fail outright, impose only a minor delay on Iran's nuclear program or trigger extremely painful responses even if it succeeds. When neither choice is acceptable, it is necessary to find a third choice.
Redefining the Iranian Problem
As long as the problem of Iran is defined in terms of its nuclear program, the United States is in an impossible place. Therefore, the Iranian problem must be redefined. One attempt at redefinition involves hope for an uprising against the current regime. We will not repeat our views on this in depth, but in short, we do not regard these demonstrations to be a serious threat to the regime. Tehran has handily crushed them, and even if they did succeed, we do not believe they would produce a regime any more accommodating toward the United States. The idea of waiting for a revolution is more useful as a justification for inaction — and accepting a nuclear Iran — than it is as a strategic alternative.
At this moment, Iran is the most powerful regional military force in the Persian Gulf. Unless the United States permanently stations substantial military forces in the region, there is no military force able to block Iran. Turkey is more powerful than Iran, but it is far from the Persian Gulf and focused on other matters at the moment, and it doesn't want to take on Iran militarily — at least not for a very long time. At the very least, this means the United States cannot withdraw from Iraq. Baghdad is too weak to block Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, and the Iraqi government has elements friendly toward Iran.
Historically, regional stability depended on the Iraqi-Iranian balance of power. When it tottered in 1990, the result was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The United States did not push into Iraq in 1991 because it did not want to upset the regional balance of power by creating a vacuum in Iraq. Rather, U.S. strategy was to re-establish the Iranian-Iraqi balance of power to the greatest extent possible, as the alternative was basing large numbers of U.S. troops in the region.
The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 assumed that once the Baathist regime was destroyed the United States would rapidly create a strong Iraqi government that would balance Iran. The core mistake in this thinking lay in failing to recognize that the new Iraqi government would be filled with Shiites, many of whom regarded Iran as a friendly power. Rather than balancing Iran, Iraq could well become an Iranian satellite. The Iranians strongly encouraged the American invasion precisely because they wanted to create a situation where Iraq moved toward Iran's orbit. When this in fact began happening, the Americans had no choice but an extended occupation of Iraq, a trap both the Bush and Obama administrations have sought to escape.
It is difficult to define Iran's influence in Iraq at this point. But at a minimum, while Iran may not be able to impose a pro-Iranian state on Iraq, it has sufficient influence to block the creation of any strong Iraqi government either through direct influence in the government or by creating destabilizing violence in Iraq. In other words, Iran can prevent Iraq from emerging as a counterweight to Iran, and Iran has every reason to do this. Indeed, it is doing just this.
The Fundamental U.S.-Iranian Issue
Iraq, not nuclear weapons, is the fundamental issue between Iran and the United States. Iran wants to see a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq so Iran can assume its place as the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf. The United States wants to withdraw from Iraq because it faces challenges in Afghanistan — where it will also need Iranian cooperation — and elsewhere. Committing forces to Iraq for an extended period of time while fighting in Afghanistan leaves the United States exposed globally. Events involving China or Russia — such as the 2008 war in Georgia — would see the United States without a counter. The alternative would be a withdrawal from Afghanistan or a massive increase in U.S. armed forces. The former is not going to happen any time soon, and the latter is an economic impossibility.
Therefore, the United States must find a way to counterbalance Iran without an open-ended deployment in Iraq and without expecting the re-emergence of Iraqi power, because Iran is not going to allow the latter to happen. The nuclear issue is simply an element of this broader geopolitical problem, as it adds another element to the Iranian tool kit. It is not a stand-alone issue.
The United States has an interesting strategy in redefining problems that involves creating extraordinary alliances with mortal ideological and geopolitical enemies to achieve strategic U.S. goals. First consider Franklin Roosevelt's alliance with Stalinist Russia to block Nazi Germany. He pursued this alliance despite massive political outrage not only from isolationists but also from institutions like the Roman Catholic Church that regarded the Soviets as the epitome of evil.
Now consider Richard Nixon's decision to align with China at a time when the Chinese were supplying weapons to North Vietnam that were killing American troops. Moreover, Mao — who had said he did not fear nuclear war as China could absorb a few hundred million deaths — was considered, with reason, quite mad. Nevertheless, Nixon, as anti-Communist and anti-Chinese a figure as existed in American politics, understood that an alliance (and despite the lack of a formal treaty, alliance it was) with China was essential to counterbalance the Soviet Union at a time when American power was still being sapped in Vietnam.
Roosevelt and Nixon both faced impossible strategic situations unless they were prepared to redefine the strategic equation dramatically and accept the need for alliance with countries that had previously been regarded as strategic and moral threats. American history is filled with opportunistic alliances designed to solve impossible strategic dilemmas. The Stalin and Mao cases represent stunning alliances with prior enemies designed to block a third power seen as more dangerous.
It is said that Ahmadinejad is crazy. It was also said that Mao and Stalin were crazy, in both cases with much justification. Ahmadinejad has said many strange things and issued numerous threats. But when Roosevelt ignored what Stalin said and Nixon ignored what Mao said, they each discovered that Stalin's and Mao's actions were far more rational and predictable than their rhetoric. Similarly, what the Iranians say and what they do are quite different.
U.S. vs. Iranian Interests
Consider the American interest. First, it must maintain the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The United States cannot tolerate interruptions, and that limits the risks it can take. Second, it must try to keep any one power from controlling all of the oil in the Persian Gulf, as that would give such a country too much long-term power within the global system. Third, while the United States is involved in a war with elements of the Sunni Muslim world, it must reduce the forces devoted to that war. Fourth, it must deal with the Iranian problem directly. Europe will go as far as sanctions but no further, while the Russians and Chinese won't even go that far yet. Fifth, it must prevent an Israeli strike on Iran for the same reasons it must avoid a strike itself, as the day after any Israeli strike will be left to the United States to manage.
Now consider the Iranian interest. First, it must guarantee regime survival. It sees the United States as dangerous and unpredictable. In less than 10 years, it has found itself with American troops on both its eastern and western borders. Second, it must guarantee that Iraq will never again be a threat to Iran. Third, it must increase its authority within the Muslim world against Sunni Muslims, whom it regards as rivals and sometimes as threats.
Now consider the overlaps. The United States is in a war against some (not all) Sunnis. These are Iran's enemies, too. Iran does not want U.S. troops along its eastern and western borders. In point of fact, the United States does not want this either. The United States does not want any interruption of oil flow through Hormuz. Iran much prefers profiting from those flows to interrupting them. Finally, the Iranians understand that it is the United States alone that is Iran's existential threat. If Iran can solve the American problem its regime survival is assured. The United States understands, or should, that resurrecting the Iraqi counterweight to Iran is not an option: It is either U.S. forces in Iraq or accepting Iran's unconstrained role.
Therefore, as an exercise in geopolitical theory, consider the following. Washington's current options are unacceptable. By redefining the issue in terms of dealing with the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there are three areas of mutual interest. First, both powers have serious quarrels with Sunni Islam. Second, both powers want to see a reduction in U.S. forces in the region. Third, both countries have an interest in assuring the flow of oil, one to use the oil, the other to profit from it to increase its regional power.
The strategic problem is, of course, Iranian power in the Persian Gulf. The Chinese model is worth considering here. China issued bellicose rhetoric before and after Nixon's and Kissinger's visits. But whatever it did internally, it was not a major risk-taker in its foreign policy. China's relationship with the United States was of critical importance to China. Beijing fully understood the value of this relationship, and while it might continue to rail about imperialism, it was exceedingly careful not to undermine this core interest.
The major risk of the third strategy is that Iran will overstep its bounds and seek to occupy the oil-producing countries of the Persian Gulf. Certainly, this would be tempting, but it would bring a rapid American intervention. The United States would not block indirect Iranian influence, however, from financial participation in regional projects to more significant roles for the Shia in Arabian states. Washington's limits for Iranian power are readily defined and enforced when exceeded.
The great losers in the third strategy, of course, would be the Sunnis in the Arabian Peninsula. But Iraq aside, they are incapable of defending themselves, and the United States has no long-term interest in their economic and political relations. So long as the oil flows, and no single power directly controls the entire region, the United States does not have a stake in this issue.
Israel would also be enraged. It sees ongoing American-Iranian hostility as a given. And it wants the United States to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat. But eliminating this threat is not an option given the risks, so the choice is a nuclear Iran outside some structured relationship with the United States or within it. The choice that Israel might want, a U.S.-Iranian conflict, is unlikely. Israel can no more drive American strategy than can Saudi Arabia.
From the American standpoint, an understanding with Iran would have the advantage of solving an increasingly knotty problem. In the long run, it would also have the advantage of being a self-containing relationship. Turkey is much more powerful than Iran and is emerging from its century-long shell. Its relations with the United States are delicate. The United States would infuriate the Turks by doing this deal, forcing them to become more active faster. They would thus emerge in Iraq as a counterbalance to Iran. But Turkey's anger at the United States would serve U.S. interests. The Iranian position in Iraq would be temporary, and the United States would not have to break its word as Turkey eventually would eliminate Iranian influence in Iraq.
Ultimately, the greatest shock of such a maneuver on both sides would be political. The U.S.-Soviet agreement shocked Americans deeply, the Soviets less so because Stalin's pact with Hitler had already stunned them. The Nixon-Mao entente shocked all sides. It was utterly unthinkable at the time, but once people on both sides thought about it, it was manageable.
Such a maneuver would be particularly difficult for U.S. President Barack Obama, as it would be widely interpreted as another example of weakness rather than as a ruthless and cunning move. A military strike would enhance his political standing, while an apparently cynical deal would undermine it. Ahmadinejad could sell such a deal domestically much more easily. In any event, the choices now are a nuclear Iran, extended airstrikes with all their attendant consequences, or something else. This is what something else might look like and how it would fit in with American strategic tradition.
-
Interesting to see that Stratfor also recognizes the defect of needing continuing cooperation from Russia and China on our side, who are not at all on our side, in this flawed framework. - 5 years before it happened.
"Iraq, not nuclear weapons, is the fundamental issue between Iran and the United States."
I would hope this is not true. (Note: That was 5 years ago.) The conflict in Yemen is Iran-backed. Terrorists attacking Israel are Iran-backed. To say having nuclear weapons is a game changer in all these places, Israel, Syria, Saudi, Yemen, Iraq, Iran and more is an understatement.
"Fifth, it must prevent an Israeli strike on Iran for the same reasons it must avoid a strike itself, as the day after any Israeli strike will be left to the United States to manage."
Again note that was 5 years ago. It wouldn't be my objective then or now to stop Israel from striking nuclear sites in Iran, though most certainly that is the Obama objective of having us all see these phony diplomats engaging in Switzerland, or wherever this is. The aftermath of a successful strike would be Iran losing a facility, Arab nations silently applauding, a UN PR mess and everyone including Obama still committed to destroying Israel.
"Now consider the Iranian interest. First, it must guarantee regime survival. It sees the United States as dangerous and unpredictable. In less than 10 years, it has found itself with American troops on both its eastern and western borders."
Again, 5 years elapsed. The US is not a threat to Iran anymore, at least until after the next election. The US is now an advocate for Iran! ISIS is now the threat. Also sanctions and the collapse of oil prices threaten the future of the regime. These economic facts bring a horrible regime to its knees and we can't wait to jump in and bail them out of it.
I also disagree with this:
"The United States did not push into Iraq in 1991 because it did not want to upset the regional balance of power by creating a vacuum in Iraq."
The US did not push further and topple the Saddam-Iraq regime because our mandate was limited by the agreements we made in order to form a large, multinational coalition. The benefits of having such a broad coalition came with limitations as well. The reason given by Stratfor above might also have been true but didn't matter because of promises and limitations already agreed to limited a further move that in hindsight should perhaps have been taken. Now our "coalition partners" include Russia and China with the limits they impose not based on facts or our best interests.
-
Share
World War II and the Origins of American Unease
Geopolitical Weekly
May 12, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
Print
Text Size
By George Friedman
We are at the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. That victory did not usher in an era of universal peace. Rather, it introduced a new constellation of powers and a complex balance among them. Europe's great powers and empires declined, and the United States and the Soviet Union replaced them, performing an old dance to new musical instruments. Technology, geopolitics' companion, evolved dramatically as nuclear weapons, satellites and the microchip — among myriad wonders and horrors — changed not only the rules of war but also the circumstances under which war was possible. But one thing remained constant: Geopolitics, technology and war remained inseparable comrades.
It is easy to say what World War II did not change, but what it did change is also important. The first thing that leaps to mind is the manner in which World War II began for the three great powers: the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. For all three, the war started with a shock that redefined their view of the world. For the United States, it was the shock of Pearl Harbor. For the Soviet Union, it was the shock of the German invasion in June 1941. For the United Kingdom — and this was not really at the beginning of the war — it was shock at the speed with which France collapsed.
Pearl Harbor Jolts the American Mindset
There was little doubt among American leaders that war with Japan was coming. The general public had forebodings, but not with the clarity of its leaders. Still, neither expected the attack to come at Pearl Harbor. For the American public, it was a bolt from the blue, compounded by the destruction of much of the U.S. Pacific fleet. Neither the leaders nor the public thought the Japanese were nearly so competent.
Pearl Harbor intersected with another shock to the American psyche — the Great Depression. These two events shared common characteristics: First, they seemed to come out of nowhere. Both were predictable and were anticipated by some, but for most both came without warning. The significance of the two was that they each ushered in an unexpected era of substantial pain and suffering.
This introduced a new dimension into American culture. Until this point there had been a deep and unsubtle optimism among Americans. The Great Depression and Pearl Harbor created a different sensibility that suspected that prosperity and security were an illusion, with disaster lurking behind them. There was a fear that everything could suddenly go wrong, horribly so, and that people who simply accepted peace and prosperity at face value were naïve. The two shocks created a dark sense of foreboding that undergirds American society to this day.
Pearl Harbor also shaped U.S. defense policy around the concept that the enemy might be identified, but where and when it might strike is unknown. Catastrophe therefore might come at any moment. The American approach to the Cold War is symbolized by Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain. Burrowed deep inside is the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which assumes that war might come at any moment and that any relaxation in vigilance could result in a nuclear Pearl Harbor. Fear of this scenario — along with mistrust of the wily and ruthless enemy — defined the Cold War for Americans.
The Americans analyzed their forced entry into World War II and identified what they took to be the root cause: the Munich Agreement allowing Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. This was not only an American idea by any means, but it reshaped U.S. strategy. If the origin of World War II was the failure to take pre-emptive action against the Germans in 1938, then it followed that the Pacific War might have been prevented by more aggressive actions early on. Acting early and decisively remains the foundation of U.S. foreign policy to this day. The idea that not acting in a timely and forceful fashion led to World War II underlies much American discourse on Iran or Russia.
Pearl Harbor (and the 1929 crash) not only led to a sense of foreboding and a distrust in the wisdom of political and military leaders, but it also replaced a strategy of mobilization after war begins, with a strategy of permanent mobilization. If war might come at any time, and if another Munich must above all be avoided, then the massive military establishment that exists today is indispensible. In addition, the U.S.-led alliance structure that didn't exist prior to World War II is indispensible.
The Soviet Strategic Miscalculation
The Soviet Union had its own Pearl Harbor on June 22, 1941, when the Germans invaded in spite of the friendship treaty signed between them in 1939. That treaty was struck for two reasons: First, the Russians couldn't persuade the British or French to sign an anti-Hitler pact. Second, a treaty with Hitler would allow the Soviets to move their border further west without firing a shot. It was a clever move, but not a smart one.
The Soviets made a single miscalculation: They assumed a German campaign in France would replay the previous Great War. Such an effort would have exhausted the Germans and allowed the Soviets to attack them at the time and place of Moscow's choosing. That opportunity never presented itself. On the contrary, the Germans put themselves in a position to attack the Soviet Union at a time and place of their choosing. That the moment of attack was a surprise compounded the challenge, but the real problem was strategic miscalculation, not simply an intelligence or command failure.
The Soviets had opted for a dynamic foreign policy of shifting alliances built on assumptions of the various players' capabilities. A single misstep could lead to catastrophe — an attack at a time when the Soviet forces had yet to recover from one of Josef Stalin's purges. The Soviet forces were not ready for an attack, and their strategy collapsed with France, so the decision for war was entirely Germany's.
What the Soviets took away from the June 1941 invasion was a conviction that political complexity could not substitute for a robust military. The United States ended World War II with the conviction that a core reason for that war was the failure of the United States. The Soviets ended World War II with the belief that their complex efforts at coalition building and maintaining the balance of power had left them utterly exposed by one miscalculation on France — one that defied the conventional wisdom.
During the Cold War, the Soviets developed a strategy that could best be called stolid. Contained by an American-led coalition, the Soviets preferred satellites to allies. The Warsaw Pact was less an alliance than a geopolitical reality. For the most part it consisted of states under the direct military, intelligence or political control of the Soviet Union. The military value of the block might be limited, and its room for maneuver was equally limited. Nonetheless, Soviet forces could be relied on, and the Warsaw Pact, unlike NATO, was a geographical reality that Soviet forces used to guarantee that no invasion by the United States or NATO was possible. Obviously, the Soviets — like the Americans — remained vigilant for a nuclear attack, but it has been noted that the Soviet system was significantly less sophisticated than that of the Americans. Part of this imbalance was related to technological capabilities. A great deal of it had to do with the fact that nuclear attack was not the Soviet's primordial fear, though the fear must not be minimized. The primordial fear in Moscow was an attack from the West. The Soviet Union's strategy was to position its own forces as far to the west as possible.
Consider this in contrast to the Soviet relations with China. Ideologically, China ought to have been a powerful ally, but the alliance was souring by the mid-1950s. The Soviets were not ideologues. They were geopoliticians, and China represented a potential threat that the Soviets could not control. Ideology didn't matter. China would never serve the role that Poland had to. The Sino-Soviet relationship fell apart fairly quickly.
The Soviet public did not develop the American dread that beneath peace and prosperity lurked the seeds of disaster. Soviet expectations of life were far more modest than those of Americans, and the expectation that the state would avert disaster was limited. The state generated disaster. At the same time, the war revealed — almost from the beginning — a primordial love of country, hidden for decades under the ideology of internationalism, that re-emerged spontaneously. Beneath communist fervor, cynical indifference and dread of the Soviet secret police, the Russians found something new while the Americans found something old.
France's Fall Surprises Britain
As for the British, their miscalculation on France changed little. They were stunned by the rapid collapse of France, but perhaps also relieved that they would not fight in French trenches again. The collapse of France caused them to depend on only two things: One was that the English Channel, combined with the fleet and the Royal Air Force, would hold the Germans at bay. The second was that in due course, the United States would be drawn into the war. Their two calculations proved correct.
However, the United Kingdom was not one of the ultimate winners of the war. It may not have been occupied by the Germans, but it was essentially by the Americans. This was a very different occupation, and one the British needed, but the occupation of Britain by foreign forces, regardless of how necessary and benign, spelled the end of the British Empire and of Britain as a major power. The Americans did not take the British Empire. It was taken away by the shocking performance of the French. On paper, the French had an excellent army — superior to the Germans, in many ways. Yet they collapsed in weeks. If we were to summarize the British sensibility, after defiance came exhaustion and then resentment.
Some of these feelings are gone now. The Americans retain their dread even though World War II was in many ways good to the United States. It ended the Great Depression, and in the aftermath, between the G.I. Bill, VA loans and the Interstate Highway System, the war created the American professional middle class, with private homes for many and distance and space that could be accessed easily. And yet the dread remains, not always muted. This generation's Pearl Harbor was 9/11. Fear that security and prosperity is built on a base of sand is not an irrational fear.
For the Russians, the feelings of patriotism still lurk beneath the cynicism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Russia's sphere of influence have not resulted in particularly imaginative strategic moves. On the contrary, Russian President Vladimir Putin's response to Ukraine was as stolid as Stalin's or Leonid Brezhnev's. Rather than a Machiavellian genius, Putin is the heir to the German invasion on June 22, 1941. He seeks strategic depth controlled by his own military. And his public has rallied to him.
As for the British, they once had an empire. They now have an island. It remains to be seen if they hold onto all of it, given the strength of the Scottish nationalists.
While we are celebrating the end of World War II, it is useful to examine its beginnings. So much of what constitutes the political-military culture, particularly of the Americans, was forged by the way that World War II began. Pearl Harbor and the American view of Munich have been the framework for thinking not only about foreign relations and war, but also about living in America. Not too deep under the surface there is a sense that all good things eventually must go wrong. Much of this comes from the Great Depression and much from Pearl Harbor. The older optimism is still there, but the certainty of manifest success is deeply tempered.
-
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/05/16/smartest-guy-ever-to-become-president-blows-it-again/
Smart power!
-
By
Gerald F. Seib
May 18, 2015 11:37 a.m. ET
0 COMMENTS
The political world was obsessed last week with Jeb Bush’s problems in saying whether he would or wouldn’t have ordered the invasion of Iraq. But a more provocative statement about projection of American power actually came from a fellow presidential contender, Marco Rubio, in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“As president, I will use American power to oppose any violations of international waters, airspace, cyberspace, or outer space,” Sen. Rubio declared. “This includes the economic disruption caused when one country invades another, as well as the chaos caused by disruptions in chokepoints such as the South China Sea or the Strait of Hormuz.”
That expansive formula for using American power to protect economic and well as national-security interests was, in turn, followed over the weekend by Sen. Rand Paul staking out a far less aggressive position at a Republican candidate forum in Iowa. He questioned whether ousting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a good idea under any conditions: “Is Iraq more stable or less stable after Saddam?”
Combine all that with the fact that Democrat Hillary Clinton seems inclined to show that she would be more aggressive than President Barack Obama has been abroad, while also trying to avoid alienating her party’s liberal (and largely anti-interventionist) base, and you can see something very significant breaking out: a wide-open 2016 debate over American intervention in the world.
In this emerging debate, there are no clear lines in either party. “It’s not terribly useful to speak of a Democratic foreign policy or a Republican foreign policy because essentially you have Republican foreign policies, plural, and Democratic foreign policies, plural,” says Richard Haass, a former State Department and White House aide who now is president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
This debate is the logical extension of a tumultuous decade and a half since the terror attacks of 9/11, when the old rule book about American intervention was thrown out without a new one to take its place. Fair or not, a common rap on President George W. Bush was that he was too eager to intervene abroad, and a common rap on President Barack Obama is that he hasn’t been eager enough.
On one level, this isn’t a new debate. “American history has been one of oscillation between two extremes: Pulling back from everything or getting involved in everything as if it’s our fight,” says James Steinberg, former deputy secretary of state who now is dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.
But the backdrop has changed significantly. We now are in a post-Cold War world, where the threats to American security lie as much in nonstate actors as in hostile nations, where economic competition weighs as heavily as military competition, and where the searing experience of long and unresolved wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has shaken easy assumptions about America’s ability to steer events.
On the Republican side, those circumstances have opened a path for the arguments of Mr. Paul, who has found some traction within his usually hawkish party with his argument that the U.S. has been too eager to intervene around the world, especially in the Middle East. In essence, he seeks to take the GOP back to its early 20th century skepticism of America as global cop.
But the same circumstances also have produced the diametrically opposed views Mr. Rubio expressed in his speech last week. He laid out perhaps the most aggressive view of American power projection of any of the 2016 contenders. He said he would be guided as president by three “pillars”—a more robust military, use of American power to guard the global economy and use of that same power to promote American values.
In a question-and-answer session after his speech, Mr. Rubio said his formula referred to diplomatic power as much as military power, and the role he envisions “is not world’s policeman.” Still, his is an aggressive view of using American muscle by any standard. Other Republican candidates fall somewhere in between the Paul and Rubio poles.
For her part, Mrs. Clinton faces some tough decisions. As secretary of state, she pushed for intervention in the civil war in Syria, and, ultimately, became an advocate of an multinational military move into Libya to get rid of Moammar Gadhafi. She’s also been a proponent of keeping military options on the table in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program.
But she’ll also have to defend herself against Republican charges that she and her Obama administration colleagues were too eager to withdraw troops from Iraq, as well as the jibe Mr. Paul delivered from the opposite direction this weekend, that the Libya intervention was misguided.
In short, the debate over global intervention is on. You’ll need a new scorecard to keep it all straight.
Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com
Popular on WSJ
-
Presidential candidates have begun to nibble around the edges of the most important question of 2016, which is what approach we should take toward the world in the 21st century. This of course is not only an international-affairs question. Foreign-policy decisions bring domestic repercussions and effects. Sometimes they are dramatic and sometimes long-lasting.
The political scientist and global risk strategist Ian Bremmer, a foreign-affairs columnist at Time, has written a book asking Americans themselves to decide what our policy should be, and offering what he sees as three central options.
“America,” he writes, “will remain the world’s only superpower for the foreseeable future. But what sort of superpower should it be? What role should America play in the world? What role do you want America to play?”
The world is in flux, its tectonic plates shifting: Old settlements and dispensations are falling away, new ones are having rough births. No one knows what comes next. No American consensus has emerged. President Obama himself has never chosen or declared a foreign-policy vision, which has made nothing better and some things worse.
The worst choice now, says Mr. Bremmer, is to refuse to choose. We can’t just continue improvising—that has become dangerously confusing to our allies, our rivals and ourselves.
So what way do we want to go?
Mr. Bremmer calls the first option “Independent America.” We can’t be the world’s policeman; we’re not Superman. We must “declare independence from the need to solve other people’s problems and . . . finally realize our country’s enormous untapped potential by focusing our attentions at home.” We spend too much on the military, which not only adds to our debt but guarantees our weapons will be used: “Policymakers will find uses for them to justify their expense,” which will “implicate us in crises that are none of our business.”
In this view, our national-security bureaucracy threatens our own freedoms and strains relations with allies. The hidden costs of war include individual anguish, cultural stress and a demand for secrecy that “poisons American democracy.” Drones seem neat and effective, but their use is dangerous: “Our actions in the Middle East and South Asia make us more vulnerable at home, by persuading a new generation of Pakistanis, Yemenis, and others that it’s better to attack Americans who aren’t wearing state-of-the-art body armor.” Not every country wants democracy. “For all the damage a foolish foreign policy inflicts on US interests abroad, the greatest damage is done in the United States.” It follows that we must reorient our thinking: “It is not power that makes America exceptional. It is freedom.”
Is “Independent America” a pleasant term for isolationism? That charge, Mr. Bremmer argues, “is not meant to shed light but to close conversation”—to dismiss “every legitimate reservation that ordinary Americans have” about U.S. foreign-policy excesses and miscalculations. The best way to promote our values around the world is by “perfecting democracy at home.” Among the priorities: protect the U.S. from a terrorist attack “that might push America permanently off course,” protect our borders and infrastructure, clean up and invest in public education, put more money back in taxpayers’ pockets. Stronger at home will mean stronger in the world, which will note our renewal.
The second choice, according to Mr. Bremmer, is “Moneyball America.” The job of U.S. foreign policy is to make the U.S. safer and more prosperous, full stop. Some things must be done in the world, and “it’s in America’s interest for Americans to do them.” But we are not Hercules, and our resources are finite. We must focus our attentions “where they are best able to promise U.S. national security and economic opportunity.”
We should lead international efforts against terrorism, join coalitions of the willing, build partnerships—“Never walk alone”—do more with less, keep our eye on the bottom line. Our military should be state-of-the-art, but we should look to make the arms race into a trade race. Look to America’s value, not its values. There is no bias toward projecting strength; the U.S. should get over its obsession with looking weak. “Those who make American foreign policy and those who implement it must be guided by both discretion and humility.”
At the end of the day, Mr. Bremmer says of the world, “everyone . . . is playing Moneyball.”
The third choice he calls “Indispensable America.” This involves a burly, all-in commitment to international leadership. It has practical and idealistic aspects; it is a long-term project but one consonant with our greatness as a nation. “America can never establish lasting security and prosperity in the interconnected modern world until we have helped others win their freedom.” We are called to “promote and protect” American values globally. “No one else will fill this breach.” We are the world’s only indispensable nation because only we have the means and will to stabilize international politics and the world economy. America is exceptional, and its work is not finished. “America must now think bigger and in more ambitious terms” than ever before. “We must build an entirely new foreign policy” based on the insight that in a globalized world “we can’t succeed unless others succeed too.” Get over ideas like peacetime and wartime: “We live in a world of permanent tension.” We can’t solve every problem, “but this does not excuse us from the responsibility to solve the ones we can.” As to cost, “the United States can pay its debts by simply printing more money.” At the end of the day the dollar will still be the world’s reserve currency—still the safest port in the world economic storm.
As I read, I found myself wondering how a politician would react. I think he’d find it all both too abstract and too concrete. He would want one from column A (independence of action and a shown concern for the home front), one from column B (of course safety and prosperity are paramount) and one from column C (a known willingness to use unquestioned military power can be a handy thing in the world).
Politicians hate to speak about their vision of America’s immediate place and role in the world for several reasons. They have risen in the ad hoc, provisional, moment-to-moment world of daily politics. That life teaches you long-term plans don’t have to be part of your long-term plan. In foreign policy especially, declaring a clear stand wins you committed enemies and tentative friends. Best to dummy up and speak in generalities.
But at a certain point all the candidates for president, even Hillary Clinton, will have to give a sense of what’s in their heads. They hope to guide U.S. foreign policy for the next eight years. It isn’t asking too much to that they speak about where we are and where we ought to be going.
Mr. Bremmer gave his choice at the end of the book. It seemed to me surprising from one who appears to have thrived in the heart of the foreign-policy establishment. He felt the tug of each course but in the end came down for Independent America, and for interesting reasons. Candidates especially could get the book and find out what they are.
-
Share
Strategy in Real Time: Dueling with an Enemy That Moves
Global Affairs
July 1, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
Print
Text Size
By Philip Bobbitt
Strategy is a two-way street. But many commentators act as though formulating a strategy is the same as solving a chess problem. Chess problems are artificially constructed arrangements on a chessboard where the goal is to find a series of moves that leaves the other side no room to evade a checkmate within three or four turns. The sorts of conflicts bedeviling us these days, however, are more like the game of chess itself, in which there is no determinate, continuous series of moves that will guarantee victory every time. Each new contest depends on the actions of the other side, how we react to them, how they respond to our reactions, and so on.
Ignoring this aspect of strategy seems to contribute to the widespread view that victory in warfare amounts to the destruction of the enemy, a facile assumption that is all too unthinkingly held. "Defeating the enemy" may be the definition of victory in football, or even in chess for that matter, but not in warfare. Victory in war is the achievement of the war aim, and if, after Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we still think that victory is simply the devastation of our adversaries, we have a lot of reflecting to do.
The Triage of Terror
In my last column, I referred to the idea of the "triage of terror," which I discuss further in my book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. The wars against terror comprise preventing transnational terrorist attacks, precluding the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for the purposes of compellence rather than deterrence, and protecting civilians from widespread depredation and destruction. Unfortunately, progress in any one of the three theaters of conflict composing the wars on terror often increases the challenges we face in the other theaters. Managing the interrelationship of the three spheres of engagement in a way that prevents success in one arena from grossly exacerbating matters in another — the "triage of terror" — is an important objective of statecraft. For example, a strategy that relies on intervention to suppress the gross violation of human rights through genocide or ethnic cleansing may make states that fear becoming the targets of intervention more anxious to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Strategies that attempt to root out terrorism are often linked to ethnic or sectarian repression or the aggressive repression of human rights. Preemptive counterproliferation strategies by the world's strongest military power could summon burgeoning terrorist armies that challenge the United States through asymmetric means. Understanding the consequences that success in one arena may have for the other wars on terror is a prerequisite for devising an effective strategy in the 21st century.
When asked on "Face the Nation" about the Obama administration's commitment to the War on Terror, CIA Director John Brennan said,
There has been a full-court effort to try to keep this country safe. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, others, these are some of the most complex and complicated issues that I’ve seen in 35 years working on national security issues. So there are no easy solutions. I think the president has tried to make sure that we’re able to push the envelope when we can to protect this country. But we have to recognize that sometimes our engagement and direct involvement will stimulate and spur additional threats to our national security interests.
This rather wise and sober assessment prompted something like a scream from the Council on Foreign Relations, which labeled it an "unprecedented recognition" that U.S. "foreign policy can harm U.S. national security." The commentator added that "the next public interview with the CIA director should begin by asking him which engagements and direct involvements he is referring to," and demanded that "Brennan's unprecedented recognition [be] further explored and commented on by the White House, State Department and Department of Defense."
But of course we know which engagements Brennan was referring to because he told us in the very passage quoted. What he did not say was that our foreign policy harms our national security. Far from being an astounding concession, Brennan's remarks linking our actions to our enemies' responses were a rather insightful and realistic observation that would electrify only a careless listener. To highlight the distinction between "stimulating additional threats" and "harming U.S. national security," let me turn to another concept mentioned in my first column: Parmenides' Fallacy.
Parmenides' Fallacy
This fallacy indulges in the frequent, unthinking assertion that we should compare the present state of affairs with the past in order to evaluate the policies that have gotten us to where we are now. In fact, we should compare our current situation with alternative outcomes that would have arisen from different policies, had they been chosen. This is true for prospective policies as well: It is a sophist's argument to deride a proposed policy (say, social security reform or free trade) by simply saying we will be worse off after the policy is implemented than we are now. That may well be true. But it could be true of even the wisest policy if other alternatives, including doing nothing, would make us even worse off in the future.
Let me give a famous example of Parmenides' Fallacy at work. The turning point in the United States' 1980 presidential race came when Ronald Reagan criticized President Jimmy Carter's record during a debate by asking the American people, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" Though rhetorically devastating, this question is hardly the way to evaluate a presidency. After all, the state of the nation will never stay the same for four years, regardless of who is in office. A more relevant question would have been, "Are you better off now than you would have been if Gerald Ford had remained the president and had had to cope with rising oil prices, the Iranian Revolution, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and soaring interest rates?" In the same way, we should reframe fallacious prospective questions like, "Will we be better off in five years than we are now if we adopt a certain policy?" The better question to ask is, "Will we be better off in five years by adopting this policy than we will be in five years if we do not?"
Real Strategy in Real Time
We are not necessarily harming national security when we take steps to counter threats that cause our enemies to react in a way that creates new threats. That, in fact, is the essence of strategy: It is not to dream up a series of unilateral actions that will inevitably lead to the accomplishment of our goals, but to recognize that each measure we take will invariably lead to countermeasures, and to anticipate the ultimate costs of reactions, both ours and theirs. Everyone has a strategy, Mike Tyson famously said, until he gets punched in the mouth.
An example of such non-strategic thinking is the idea that the United States is chiefly responsible for its problems, since other states have not wreaked the costs on America that we ourselves have undertaken in the name of deterring them. As another commentator recently observed, "if you look at the past 25 years or so, it is abundantly clear that external enemies have done far less damage to the United States than we have done to ourselves." This confident assertion ("it is abundantly clear") is not a clinching argument, indeed it is not an argument at all. It is merely a rhetorical flourish, and a rather indolent one at that. To be an argument, we would have to know what damage our external enemies would have done to us and to our allies if we had not appropriated large sums for defense and intelligence, if we had not prevented the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Libya, and if we had not stopped the ethnic massacres in Europe.
The debate on U.S. strategy is a timely one, and nothing I have said is a defense of U.S. policies, past or present. Rather, it is a lament that the debate is being pursued in the such terms as these, which add little to our assessment of the wisdom of any particular policy including especially those policies that attempt to achieve our war aims.
But the shortcomings of this approach are not merely analytical. There are practical consequences of defining strategy as that which we do, which is to strategy what shadow boxing is to boxing. For this approach often manifests itself in a kind of aphasia: If strategy is what we do, regardless of the actions of others, then there is an inevitable bias toward doing nothing, responding to challenges with a portentous silence. Like aphasia generally it is associated with trauma (like a stroke), and the trauma out of which this silence has emerged is the Vietnam War (for my generation) and perhaps the ill-fated intervention in Iraq for those of a younger age.
This attitude can be seen on yard signs and bumper stickers that read: "Stop War: Get out of ____" (fill in the blank: the Balkans, the Baltics, the Middle East). I suppose some people really do believe that if U.S. forces simply leave the field, conflict will abate (as it did in Vietnam after a good deal of political, religious, class and ethnic "cleansing" by Hanoi) and as may yet happen in Iraq should the war there lead to partition after a truly awful period of sectarian violence.
We should be careful to distinguish between two groups who seek such American restraint. Some simply hold that, but for U.S. intervention, there would be no war in the world. For this group, the specter of American imperialism lurks behind all the conflicts of the 20th century. Others, however, believe that—whatever the ensuing violence that might follow an American withdrawal, or the violence that might continue undiminished in the absence of an American intervention—the use of U.S. force abroad is more damaging than beneficial to American interests.
The irony is that while both these groups criticize U.S. policy for being "unilateralist," they are united in advocating a policy that is unilateral in the extreme, for what act could be more autonomous than removing oneself from conflict regardless of the consequences for others? The first group, who see the conspiratorial reflex of American militarism in every significant conflict around the world might wish to pause and ask themselves whether the world is really better for others—for the peoples of the world who don’t live in the United States—if violence is unchecked by U.S. intervention, for this group professes to be principally concerned about the welfare of other peoples even when American interests are at stake. It should give them pause that polls consistently show that a large majority of Iraqis still support the regime change brought about by the American-led coalition, however angry they are about the feckless occupation that followed.
The second group, however, is my principal concern. Putting irony aside, one can’t help but notice that this perspective ignores the value of U.S. alliances, a value that distinguishes us from our principal potential adversaries in the world and which, in my view, is our greatest strategic asset. Real strategy is not just what we do, but it also encompasses more than what our adversaries do. Real strategy is as much about our allies, our potential allies, our potential enemies, and the great body of states and peoples that could go either way.
The late Sir Michael Quinlan observed that in conflict we are always likely to be surprised. That is because we prepare our defenses for the attacks we anticipate and so inevitably drive our opponents to pursue the tactics and strategies against targets we have not foreseen. We have been so often surprised these last several decades—sometimes happily so, oftentimes not—that it must be alluring to imagine that strategies of non-engagement at the least would spare us those surprises that haunt American policy. This is an enervated fantasy. When we are disengaged—when we are not trying to prepare the field for potential conflict and preclude situations that put us at a disadvantage—every act that threatens us and our allies comes as a surprise.
-
second posthttp://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/01/new-pentagon-strategy-eyes-russia-long-fights-against-jihadists/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=*Editors%20Picks&utm_campaign=2015_EditorsPicks_Promo_Russia_Direct_Jun29%20through%207%2F3%20SO%2071
-
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/07/14/iranian-empire-iran-nuclear-deal/
-
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/07/14/iranian-empire-iran-nuclear-deal/
No worries, we were assured by someone with CREDENTIALS that Iran is a rational actor.
-
"we were assured by someone with CREDENTIALS that Iran is a rational actor"
As noted in a recent post of an article here, *Neither* side of the deal can be trusted.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421120/our-four-horsemen-apocalypse
-
Quantum Geopolitics
Geopolitical Weekly
July 28, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
Print
Text Size
By Reva Bhalla
Forecasting the shape the world will take in several years or decades is an audacious undertaking. There are no images to observe or precise data points to anchor us. We can only create a picture, and a fuzzy one at best. This is, after all, our basic human empirical instinct: to draw effortlessly from the vivid imagery of our present world and past experiences while we squint and hesitate before faint, blobby images of the future.
In the world of intelligence and military planning, it is far less taxing to base speculations on the familiar — to simulate a war game that pivots on an Iranian nuclear threat, a seemingly unstoppable jihadist force like the Islamic State and the military adventurism of Russia in Eastern Europe — than it is to imagine a world in which Russia is weak and internally fragmented, the jihadist menace is contained by its own fractiousness and Iran is allied with the United States against a rising Sunni threat. In the business world, it is much simpler to base trades and strategies on a familiar environment of low oil prices and high interest rates. Strategists in many domains are guilty of taking excessive comfort in the present and extrapolating present-day assumptions to describe the future, only to find themselves unequipped when the next big crisis hits. As a U.S. four-star general once told me in frustration, "We always have the wrong maps and the wrong languages when we go to war."
So how do we break out of this mental trap and develop the confidence to sketch out plausible sets and sequences of unknowns? The four-dimensional world of quantum mechanics may offer some guidance or, at the very least, a philosophical approach to strategic forecasting. Brilliant physicists such as Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie and Erwin Schrodinger have obsessed over the complex relationship between space and time. The debate persists among scientists over how atomic and subatomic particles behave in different dimensions, but there are certain underlying principles in the collection of quantum theories that should resonate with anyone endowed with the responsibility of forecasting world events.
Quantum Principles and Political Entities
Einstein described space-time as a smooth fabric distorted by objects in the universe. For him, the separation between past, present and future was merely a "stubbornly persistent illusion." Building on Einstein's ideas, celebrated U.S. physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, some of whose best ideas came from drawings he scribbled on cocktail napkins in bars and strip clubs, focused on how a particle can travel in waves from point A to point B along a number of potential paths, each with a certain probability amplitude. In other words, a particle will not travel in linear fashion; it will go up, down and around in space, skirting other particle paths and colliding into others, sometimes reinforcing or canceling out another completely. According to Feynman's theory, the sum of all the amplitudes of the different paths would give you the "sum over histories" — the path that the particle actually follows in the end.
The behavior of communities, proto-states and nation-states (at least on our humble and familiar planet Earth) arguably follows a similar path. We have seen statelets, countries and empires rise and fall in waves along varied frequencies. The crest of one amplitude could intersect with the trough of another, resulting in the latter's destruction. One particle path can reinforce another, creating vast trading empires. Latin America, where geopolitical shifts can develop at a tortoise's pace in the modern era, tends to emit long radio-like waves compared to the gamma-like waves of what we know today as a highly volatile Middle East.
Applied Quantum Theories: Turkey
If we apply the nation-state as an organizing principle for the modern era (recognizing the prevalence of artificial boundaries and the existence of both nations without states and states without nations), the possibilities of a state's path are seemingly endless. However, a probability of a state's path can be constructed to sketch out a picture of the future.
The first step is to identify certain constants that have shaped a country's behavior over time, regardless of personality or ideology (an imperative to gain sea access, a mountainous landscape that requires a large amount of capital to transport goods from point A to point B, a fertile landscape that attracts as much competition as it provides wealth). The country's history serves as a laboratory for testing how the state has pursued those imperatives and what circumstances have charted its path. What conditions were in place for the state to fail, to prosper, to avoid getting entangled in the collisions of bigger states, to live in relative peace? We take the known and perceived facts of the past, we enrich them with anecdotes from literature, poetry and song, and we paint a colorful image of the present textured by its past. Then comes the hard part: having the guts to stare into the future with enough discipline to see the constraints and enough imagination to see the possibilities. In this practice, extrapolation is deadly, and an unhealthy obsession with current intelligence can be blinding.
Take Turkey, for example. For years, we have heard political elites in the United States, Eastern Europe and the Middle East lament a Turkey obsessed with Islamism and unwilling or incapable of matching words with action in dealing with regional competitors like Iran and Russia. Turkey was in many ways overlooked as a regional player, too consumed by its domestic troubles and too ideologically predisposed toward Islamist groups to be considered useful to the West. But Turkey's resurgence would not follow a linear path. There have been ripples and turns along the way, distorting the perception of a country whose regional role is, in the end, profoundly shaped by its position as a land bridge between Europe and Asia and the gatekeeper between the Black and Mediterranean seas.
How, then, can we explain a week's worth of events in which Turkey launched airstrikes at Islamic State forces and Kurdish rebels while preparing to extend a buffer zone into northern Syria — actions that mark a sharp departure from the timid Turkey to which the world had grown accustomed? We must look at the distant past, when Alexander the Great passed through the Cilician Gates to claim a natural harbor on the eastern Mediterranean (the eponymous city of Alexandretta, contemporarily known as Iskenderun) and the ancient city of Antioch (Antakya) as an opening into the fertile Orontes River Valley and onward to Mesopotamia. We move from the point when Seljuk Turks conquered Aleppo in the 11th century all the way up to the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I, when a fledgling Turkish republic used all the diplomatic might it could muster to retake the strategic territories of Antioch and Alexandretta, which today constitute Hatay province outlining the Syrian-Turkish border.
We must simultaneously look at the present. A contemporary map of the Syria-Turkey border looks quite odd, with the nub of Hatay province anchored to the Gulf of Iskenderun but looking as though it should extend eastward toward Aleppo, the historical trading hub of the northern Levant, and onward through Kurdish lands to northern Iraq, where the oil riches of Kirkuk lie in what was formerly the Ottoman province of Mosul.
We then take a long look out into the future. Turkey's interest in northern Syria and northern Iraq is not an abstraction triggered by a group of religious fanatics calling themselves the Islamic State; it is the bypass, intersection and reinforcement of multiple geopolitical wavelengths creating an invisible force behind Ankara to re-extend Turkey's formal and informal boundaries beyond Anatolia. To understand just how far Turkey extends and at what point it inevitably contracts again, we must examine the intersecting wavelengths emanating from Baghdad, Damascus, Moscow, Washington, Arbil and Riyadh. As long as Syria is engulfed in civil war, its wavelength will be too weak to interfere with Turkey's ambitions for northern Syria, but a rehabilitated Iran could interfere through Kurdistan and block Turkey farther to the east. The United States, intent on reducing its burdens in the Middle East and balancing against Russia, will reinforce the Turkish wavelength up to a point, while higher frequencies from other Sunni players such as Saudi Arabia will run interference against Turkey in Mesopotamia and the Levant. While Russia still has the capacity to project military power outward, Turkey's moves in Europe and the Caucasus will skirt around Russia for some time, but that dynamic will shift once Russia becomes consumed with its own domestic fissures and Turkey has more room to extend through the Black Sea region.
Thinking Beyond Limitations
This sketch of Turkey is by no means static or deterministic. It is, simply but critically, the product of putting a filter on a lens to bring the state's trajectory into clearer view. The assumptions we form must be tested every day by incoming intelligence that can lead to refinements of the forecast at hand. A quantum interpretation of the world will tell you that nothing is deterministic, and we cannot know for sure that a certain outcome will or will not happen based on the limited information we possess. We can only assign a probability of something happening, and that probability will evolve over time. As Stephen Hawking said, "It seems Einstein was ... wrong when he said, 'God does not play dice.' Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
We can apply the same process to the ebb and flow of the Far East, with a resurgent Japan responding to the reverberations of a powerful China and an artificially divided Korea sandwiched in between. Or, the push and pull between France and Germany on the European mainland as centripetal forces subsume the EU project.
Too often, we see the future as we see the past — through the distorted lens of the present. That is the flaw in our human instinct that we must try to overcome. Constraints will apply, and probabilities will be assigned. But whatever the time, direction or dimension we are operating in when forecasting geopolitical events, we must simultaneously exist in the past, present and the future to prepare for a world that we have yet to know.
-
Balancing Hopes and Fears in the Middle East
Global Affairs
July 29, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
Print
Text Size
By Philip Bobbitt
It's encouraging that reports from Washington suggest the administration has settled on a new strategy for confronting the Islamic State. Our reluctance to commit to a strategy as we sought, unsuccessfully, to find a middle ground that would minimize risks while serving contradictory objectives has been costly to the stability of Iraq and to our goal of removing Bashar al Assad's regime from Syria.
Sometimes it is less appealing to confront one enemy than to avoid advantaging another enemy. Thus England tolerated the rise of Nazi Germany, a growing threat, rather than confront it to the advantage of Bolshevism. In the Middle East, the example is quite exquisite because the phenomenon is double-sided: We cannot truly commit ourselves to the removal of al Assad because we believe his ruin will offer rich opportunities to the Islamic State, and we are equally reluctant to take some aggressive measures against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria because we surmise our success would mean further empowering Iran and increasing Tehran's influence in Baghdad and Damascus. We are paralyzed because we prefer foregoing potential but significant gains to enduring certain losses whose significance is no greater.
I suppose this a kind of strategic "loss aversion." Many studies in behavioral economics have confirmed that a consistent majority of people would rather forego a gain than suffer a loss, even when the outcomes are statistically indistinguishable. For example, psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated that an overwhelming majority of subjects would prefer to avoid a $1.00 surcharge rather than receive a $1.00 discount. Moreover, subjects routinely report that they would rather accept a 50 percent chance of losing $2.00 than a certain loss of $1.00. Similarly, perhaps, states are reluctant to risk giving an uncertain advantage to an enemy, even if inaction means certain gain for another enemy. This irrationality is of more than academic interest when we actually forego potential gains that would exceed our losses.
But, one may object, this can be no more than a metaphor — states don't have "psychologies." Yet their leaders do, and they may identify the wins and losses of the state with their own. Wars fought to defend the national honor may have such a basis (as well as, of course, having practical bargaining effects).
What is Global Affairs?
Then one may object that nothing is lost by inaction because states possessed nothing of materiality. Here the answer is: hope. Some of Samuel Johnson's most acute — and disturbing — insights about human nature occur in his remarks on hope. "Hope," he wrote, "is happiness and its frustration, however frequent, are less dreadful than its extinction." Giving up something is giving up hope, which is much more costly than foregoing a receipt.
This paralysis is nevertheless approvingly encouraged by the counsels of inaction whenever the available options are fraught. "Don't just do something, stand there!" may be one way of characterizing this advice. By avoiding action, at least we avoid making things worse. But this ignores the fact that things may get worse without our help, and indeed inaction may be more costly to our interests because we have not been able to mitigate our losses through action. It may even be the case that the wrong decision — a decision in favor of a course of action that leaves us less well off than we would have been, had we acted otherwise — might still be better for us than inaction. That is often the case where the costs of inaction to the strength of our alliances outweigh the immediate costs of acting. It's often said that our alliance partners do not accord their relations with us more weight when we act recklessly, and that is doubtless true. But on whom would you rely in a crisis: the partner who comes to your aid even when, in the short term, it may not be in his interest, or the partner who carefully weighs the benefits of each action?
This is tricky; after all, didn't the arguments that a withdrawal from Vietnam would undermine our European alliances keep us in South Asia long past a sensible departure date? And how do we measure such imponderables? How does a "gain" for an increasingly assertive Iran measure against a "loss" to the deadly Islamic State?
This example of the phenomenon of "loss aversion" — perhaps it is best thought of as a metaphor rather than as a matter of microeconomic analysis — is also manifesting itself in the debate over the proposed agreement with Iran to restrict its nuclear capabilities. We are rightly concerned that an infusion of more than $50 billion will strengthen the theocratic state in Tehran and find its way into the forces of terror that the Iranian regime has so notably deployed. We are loath to give up a sanctions regime that has been a quite remarkable achievement in its breadth and coherence. Many thoughtful critics would rather forego the conceded benefits of a 15-year hiatus in Iran's nuclear development than lose a sanctions program that restricts so many of the regime's other activities. Alas, we cannot depend upon the endurance of the existing sanctions, and should the treaty fail to be enacted, we are likely to reap the worst of both worlds: an unrestricted program of nuclear development by an Iranian state that has been greatly enriched by the removal of those sanctions that the United States does not control. And here, too, the neglect of the impact on our alliances that is a feature of loss aversion in other contexts could well prove to be the greatest cost of all. By contrast, in the aftermath of the Iran agreement, restoring confidence in their relations with the United States is the first item on our agendas with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf states.
Here, we must depart from the Great Cham, Dr. Johnson. For he warned us to "remember that we only talk of the pleasures of hope; we feel those of possession, and no man in his senses would change the last for the first."
-
Principle vs. Practice: The Unsettled Debate of Geopolitics
Global Affairs
August 12, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
By Ian Morris
In July, I did something a bit unusual, checking in to the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino in Las Vegas so that I could take part in a public debate on war. The occasion was FreedomFest, a libertarian extravaganza that bills itself as "the world's largest gathering of free minds." (More than 2,500 people attended.)
I wasn't completely sure what to expect, but in the end the event exceeded my every expectation. It wasn't just lively, engaged and genuinely open to ideas from all sides, but also full of the frankly bizarre touches that libertarians and Las Vegas both seem to delight in. On my way to see the left-leaning, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman debate the conservative Heritage Foundation's Stephen Moore, I could (and did) stop off in the exhibit hall to buy a Milton Friedman T-shirt and fill my pockets with little tubes of sunscreen proudly labeled "Tea Party Patriot." I saw Grover Norquist, the infamous anti-tax crusader, being interviewed in front of an ad for a strip club; Donald Trump was the headline speaker.
But in addition to being a lot of fun, FreedomFest also forced me to think harder about a serious question.
I had been invited to FreedomFest because I published a book in 2014 called War! What is it Good For? This was an unapologetically realpolitik review of the history of violence across the past 20,000 years, arguing that over the very long term, war has had two big unintended consequences. First, it has been the main method through which people have created bigger societies with more effective governments. Second, the most important activity these governments have engaged in has been to suppress all use of force that they do not themselves sanction. Wars have become bigger and fiercer, but governments have pacified their own populations, with the net result that rates of violent death have slowly declined. If you had lived 10,000 years ago in the Stone Age, you would have stood a 10-20 percent chance of dying violently. Those of us who lived in the 20th century, by contrast — despite the century's two world wars, use of nuclear weapons and multiple genocides — stood just a 1-2 percent chance of dying violently. In the 21st century, that risk has fallen to just 0.7 percent. In effect, war has been putting itself out of business through the mechanism of government. On average, a person alive today is 10 times less likely to die violently than someone who lived in 10,000 B.C.
The decline in rates of violent death has accelerated in the past 200 years, but not, I argued, because we have all become saints. Rather, the world has become safer because it has progressed from conventional governments, exercising political control within recognized borders, to what we might call "globocops," states that have truly worldwide reach. Neither of the two globocops the world has seen so far — Britain in the 19th century and the United States since 1989 — has run a world empire, but neither has needed to; rather, a globocop just needs to raise the costs and lower the benefits of using force to upset the status quo, deterring other governments from doing so.
What is Global Affairs?
For a good 75 years after 1815, Britain played a major part in making sure that the world (and especially Europe) saw far fewer major wars than at any time since the height of the Roman Empire. However, Britain's defense of international free trade made it almost inevitable that other countries would industrialize and grow rich, undermining the globocop's ability to do its job. The further this process went, the greater the risks grew, not only that some power would take a chance on solving its problems with violence, but also that such a gamble might set off a general conflagration. The outcome was the 75-year struggle between 1914 and 1989, which swept away the crumbling British global order and eventually replaced it with a new American version. Since then, the United States has played a major part in making major wars even less common than they were in the 19th century.
The lesson of history, I concluded, is that if you want peace, you should do whatever you can to help preserve the current American-dominated system (or empire, if you prefer that word).
Making this case to a roomful of libertarians was, needless to say, something of a red-rag-to-a-bull experience, and I was none too surprised when the voice of the people told me that I had lost the debate. (Although, I am pleased to say, I did swing enough of the listeners to reduce the initial 2:1 vote against me to a wafer-thin majority.) The debate itself, however, raised a series of issues that I felt I had not thought about enough.
Since my book appeared, I have debated its thesis on several occasions. Sometimes the criticisms focus on details (whether we really know how violent prehistoric societies were, what Roman rule really meant for Britain, what British rule really meant for India, etc.). More often, though, they come down to what I heard a former Palestinian Authority negotiator, Zihad abu Zihad, refer to in Jerusalem during the most recent Gaza war as "the dead baby argument." Israel would inevitably lose the struggle for international support, he argued, because the more lucidly its representatives spoke about strategic imperatives, the right to self defense, or global terrorism, the more insistently Palestinian representatives would show pictures of dead babies. Global strategy cannot compete with moral outrage; Israel therefore loses.
In Las Vegas, I was relieved to find that my opponent, Angela Keaton of Antiwar.com, did not rely on the dead baby argument. However, she got to a very similar place by a different route. Freedom, she argued, is the ultimate human value, which means that American governments are morally wrong to create a monopoly on legitimate violence and then use it to compel the people under its jurisdiction to pay taxes (effectively making them state-owned slaves for part of each working day). It is also wrong to use these tax revenues to pay for its monopoly on force, more wrong still to lure people who lack alternative employment into its armed forces, and most wrong of all to use these armed forces to coerce people in other countries. Even if the end result of government action really is less war (a point Keaton was not willing to concede), all these wrongs can never add up to a right.
It seems to me that the dead baby and freedom arguments are two versions of a single claim: Ethics trump strategy. Moralizing arguments of this kind have a visceral appeal all across the political spectrum, but they seem to run directly counter to the amoral emphasis that Stratfor puts on geopolitics, economics and unintended consequences. Our debate at FreedomFest, I realized, was not really about the past and future of war at all; it was about two apparently incompatible visions of how the world works. In the rather charged atmosphere of Planet Hollywood, it was hard not to feel that one of the biggest questions of the 21st century would be which of these visions would win out in America.
In practice, however, policymakers rarely take either of these ideas to its logical extreme, if only because electorates tend to cling to a commonsense utilitarianism. Whenever winning an argument looks likely to leave us worse off, most people prefer to fudge the issues. Even the most Kissingerian of geopoliticians tend to recognize that values have a place in strategy (a good subject for a future column, perhaps) and that it is usually a mistake to sell out allies or walk away from deeply held beliefs to win a small advantage.
Similarly, libertarians who reject government completely turn into anarchists, and consequently most libertarians instead take positions like that defended by the philosopher Robert Nozick. In his influential 1974 book Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick conceded that there are vital jobs that only a government can do. However, he said, "only a minimal state, limited to enforcing contracts and protecting people against force, theft and fraud, is justified. Any more extensive state violates persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified."
The result is that the great debate between principles tends, in practice, to fragment into multiple smaller and more pragmatic questions. If government is at best a necessary evil, where is the best balance between having too much of it and not having enough? If using force is always wrong, how do we tell whether failing to use it will nevertheless turn out even worse? And how do we justify cutting moral corners in the name of the greater good?
Whether the issue at hand is the Trans-Pacific Partnership or a nuclear deal with Iran, the answers are never obvious; the most productive places to look for them are in geopolitical details and the lessons we can draw from history. This, I think, is something that all sides must in the end agree on. It is also the main reason why, whatever our political inclinations, we should be confident that Stratfor is on the side of the angels after all.
-
When natural gas prices were high and supplies were scarce, Russia had Europe under its thumb.
When oil prices were high and American supplies were scarce, Venezuela and others had a hold on America. And Iran had the world scared sh*tless over its proximity to the Straits of Hormuz. Does anyone remember that?
When Venezuela and Russia were gushing with oil money, puny little Cuba could stick its finger in the US eye. Didn't need the US for anything.
When economic growth here was going gangbusters, China was a big beneficiary of that and had a level of control over our economy.
And when the Euro was stronger than the dollar, the EU had leverage in various negotiations over the US.
Now the facts are reversed. So, a) what are we doing to capitalize on the changing balance of forces around the world? Nothing, of course. And b) What could we and what SHOULD we be doing differently in response to these changing circumstances?
Other than the fact that we don't have a President who would even want any of the problems around the world resolved,
Why don't we turn the heat up on Russia's presence in the Ukraine - right while oil prices dip below 40?
Why aren't we tightening instead of loosening sanctions in Iran while they feel the pressure?
Why don't we make public demands on Cuba to do SOMETHING to free their people? Why don't we reach out with the freedom seeking opposition in Venezuela [and elsewhere] and amplify their voices?
Why don't we make a rescue mission into a portion N.K. while the Chinese attention is turned elsewhere, and shrink their evil dictatorship?
Why don't we reach out to India as a natural ally, a peaceful democracy with similar interests, beyond having them over once in 8 years for dinner?
What else should we be doing while the future of the world lies in the balance?
Even Rahm Emmanuel knew to never let a good crisis go to waste. Did that axiom apply only to political advantage over the Republicans - or could you use it to strengthen our geopolitical position against adversaries?
-
The only enemies the dems see is republican
-
This was supposed to be the Era of No Fences. No walls between blocs. No borders between countries. No barriers to trade. Visa-free tourism. The single market. A global Internet. Frictionless transactions and seamless exchanges.
In short, a flat world. Whatever happened to that?
In the early 1990s, Israel’s then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres published a book called “The New Middle East,” in which he predicted what was soon to be in store for his neighborhood. “Regional common markets reflect the new Zeitgeist,” he gushed. It was only a matter of time before it would become true in his part of the world, too.
I read the book in college, and while it struck me as far-fetched it didn’t seem altogether crazy. The decade from 1989 to 1999 was an age of political, economic, social and technological miracles. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union dissolved. Apartheid ended. The euro and Nafta were born. The first Internet browser was introduced. Oil dropped below $10 a barrel, the Dow topped 10,000, Times Square became safe again. America won a war in Kosovo without losing a single man in combat.
Would Israeli businessmen soon be selling hummus and pita to quality-conscious consumers in Damascus? Well, why not?
Contrast this promised utopia with the mind-boggling scenes of tens of thousands of Middle East migrants, marching up the roads and railways of Europe, headed for their German promised land. The images seem like a 21st-century version of the Völkerwanderung, the migration of nations in the late Roman and early Medieval periods. Desperate people, needing a place to go, sweeping a broad landscape like an unchanneled flood.
How did this happen? We mistook a holiday from history for the end of it. We built a fenceless world on the wrong set of assumptions about the future. We wanted a new liberal order—one with a lot of liberalism and not a lot of order. We wanted to be a generous civilization without doing the things required to be a prosperous one.
In 2003 the political theorist Robert Kagan wrote a thoughtful book, “Of Paradise and Power,” in which he took stock of the philosophical divide between Americans and Europeans. Americans, he wrote, inhabited the world of Thomas Hobbes, in which “true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.”
Europeans, by contrast, lived in the world of Immanuel Kant, in which “perpetual peace” was guaranteed by a set of cultural conventions, consensually agreed rules and a belief in the virtues of social solidarity overseen by a redistributive state.
These differences didn’t matter much as long as they were confined to panel discussions at Davos. Then came the presidency of Barack Obama, which has adopted the Kantian view. For seven years, the U.S. and Europe have largely been on the same side—the European side—of most of the big issues, especially in the Mideast: getting out of Iraq, drawing down in Afghanistan, lightly intervening in Libya, staying out of Syria, making up with Iran.
The result is our metastasizing global disorder. It’s only going to get worse. The graciousness that Germans have shown the first wave of refugees is a tribute to the country’s sense of humanity and history. But just as the warm welcome is destined to create an irresistible magnet for future migrants, it is also bound to lead to a backlash among Germans.
This year, some 800,000 newcomers are expected in Germany—about 1% of the country’s population. Berlin wants an EU-wide quota system to divvy up the influx, but once the migrants are in Europe they are free to go wherever the jobs and opportunities may be. Germany (with 4.7% unemployment) is going to be a bigger draw than France (10.4%), to say nothing of Italy (12%) or Spain (22%).
If Germany had robust economic and demographic growth, it could absorb and assimilate the influx. It doesn’t, so it can’t. Growth has averaged 0.31% a year since 1991. The country has the world’s lowest birthrate. Tolerant modern Germany now looks with justified disdain toward the petty nationalism, burden-shifting and fence-building of the populist Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán. But it would be foolish to think of Hungary as a political throwback rather than as a harbinger. There is no such thing as a lesson from the past that people won’t ignore for the sake of the convenience of the present.
Is there a way out? Suddenly, there’s talk in Europe about using military power to establish safe zones in Syria to contain the exodus of refugees. If U.S. administrations decide on adopting Kant, Europe, even Germany, may have no choice but to reacquaint itself with Hobbes by rebuilding its military and using hard power against unraveling neighbors.
Europeans will not easily embrace that option. The alternative is to hasten the return to the era of fences. Openness is a virtue purchased through strength.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com.
Popular on WSJ
Set your profile to public to comment
There are 240 comments.
All comments will display your real name. Read our commenting rules.
NewestOldestReader Recommended
kenneth coates
kenneth coates 1 minute ago
Obama is a man of zero courage. . To Obama it's much easier to just let human nature evolve in whatever fashion and at whatever level of violence. Unfortunately, other leaders both local and global also subscribed to this cowardly strategy.
Flag ButtonShare
Justin Murray
Justin Murray 5 minutes ago
You might want to check your history closer. We didn't stay out of Syria, it was a Cold War style intervention of arming proxy groups. That's why it was a disaster - we intervened.
Flag ButtonShare
Morry Rotenberg
Morry Rotenberg 7 minutes ago
The fundamental transformation of not only this country but the rest of the world is progressing as promised by our community organizer in chief. Unless the so called opposition party, aka Republicans get a spine and some intelligent leadership there is little hope not only for us but the rest of the previously called free world.
Flag ButtonShare
-
second post
Opinion
Review & Outlook
The West’s Refugee Crisis
What happens in the Middle East doesn’t stay in the Middle East.
9/6/15
The photograph of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who drowned trying to flee to Greece with his brother and mother, has focused the world on Europe’s Middle Eastern refugee crisis. Demands for compassion are easy, but it’s also important to understand how Europe—and the U.S.—got here. This is what the world looks like when the West abandons its responsibility to maintain world order.
The refugees are fleeing horror shows across North Africa and the Middle East, but especially the Syrian civil war that is now into its fifth year. Committed to withdrawing from the region, President Obama chose to do almost nothing. Europe, which has a longer Middle Eastern history than America and is closer, chose not to fill the U.S. vacuum.
The result has been the worst human catastrophe of the 21st-century. What began as an Arab Spring uprising against Bashar Assad has become a civil war that grows ever-more virulent. Radical Islamic factions have multiplied and Islamic State found a haven from which to grow and expand. More than 210,000 Syrians have been killed, and millions have been displaced inside the country or in camps in neighboring countries.
***
The conceit has been that while all of this is tragic, the Middle East has to work out its own pathologies and what happens there will be contained there. But by now we know that what happens in Damascus doesn’t stay in Damascus. First came the terrorist exports, recruited by Islamic State and sent back to bomb and murder in Paris and on trains. Now come the refugees, willing to risk their lives fleeing chaos on the chance of a safe haven in Europe.
The lesson is that while intervention has risks, so does abdication. The difference is that at least intervention gives the West the opportunity to shape events, often for the better, rather than merely cope with the consequences of doing nothing. As difficult as the war in Iraq was, by 2008 the insurgency was defeated and Iraqis were returning to Baghdad. Only after Mr. Obama withdrew entirely from Iraq and ignored Syria did Iraq deteriorate again and Islamic State advance.
Europeans who dislike an America they think is overbearing should note what happens when the world’s policeman decides to take a vacation and let the neighbors fend for themselves. In the modern world of instant communications and easy transportation, the world’s problems will wash up on the wealthy West’s shores one way or another. If Europe isn’t prepared to handle nearby crises, militarily if necessary, be prepared to accept the refugees.
On that latter point, Europeans are by and large generous people who want to help refugees. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has shown leadership in accepting refugees in her country and trying to work out a plan to propose a quota system for the rest of Europe to apportion the asylum claims now besieging the front-line states of Greece, Hungary and Italy. Germany is expected to take 800,000 this year.
Aylan Kurdi’s death might also finally shame more governments into action. Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday announced Britain is abandoning its refusal to bear a heavier load and will accept “thousands” more refugees, most directly from camps on Syria’s borders. One good idea would be to open processing centers closer to where the refugees start their journeys. But without a clear commitment from states to accept more, the temptation of asylum seekers to resort to human traffickers will remain great.
Yet it’s also true that years of bad economic and fiscal policy mean that Europe is now far less able to cope with refugees than many assume. Europe is unable to police its maritime borders effectively, which is why so many human smugglers are using Mediterranean routes. That’s a function of its long-term underinvestment in naval and coast-guard assets. Collective European spending on defense amounted to some $250 billion in 2014, a $7 billion decline from a year earlier, and it’s going down year after year.
Absorbing refugees also requires a robust economy that Europe hasn’t had in years. Most refugees want to go to Germany, but even Germany is growing at a mere 1.6% annual rate. Unemployment looks low (4.7%) but the labor force participation rate is very low, about 60%, according to World Bank figures. For the rest of Europe, the ability to absorb a refugee influx is even worse.
Without economic reform to produce a growth economy, migration on the current scale is going to strain Europe’s welfare state and further encourage the rise of extreme anti-immigration parties like the National Front in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary and the Pegida movement in Germany. It will also begin to threaten such pillars of the modern European Union as its Schengen policy that allows passport-free travel and migration. Schengen has been a crucial economic safety valve that allows young people in particular to move for economic opportunity when their native country is in recession.
***
All of which underscores that the migration crisis is far more than a humanitarian issue. By all means Europe needs to do more to end the immediate human suffering. So does the U.S., which could in particular accept Syrian Christians who are targeted for extinction by Islamists.
But the larger problem is the retreat by Europe and America from promoting, and if necessary enforcing, a world order built on Western ideals. The migration crisis shows that this failure will eventually compromise Western ideals at home as well as abroad.
-
http://www.erickontheradio.com/2015/09/the-blood-on-barack-obamas-hands/?
-
By
Garry Kasparov
Sept. 9, 2015 7:30 p.m. ET
438 COMMENTS
A quick glance at the latest headlines suggests a jarring disconnect from the stream of foreign-policy successes touted by the Obama White House and its allies. President Obama has been hailed by many as a peacemaker for eschewing the use of military force and for signing accords with several of America’s worst enemies. The idea that things will work out better if the U.S. declines to act in the world also obeys Mr. Obama’s keen political instincts. A perpetual campaigner in office, he realizes that it is much harder to criticize an act not taken.
But what is good for Mr. Obama’s media coverage is not necessarily good for America or the world. From the unceasing violence in eastern Ukraine to the thousands of Syrian refugees streaming into Europe, it is clear that inaction can also have terrible consequences. The nuclear agreement with Iran is also likely to have disastrous and far-reaching effects. But in every case of Mr. Obama’s timidity and procrastination, the response to criticism amounts to this: It could have been worse.
Looking at the wreckage of the Middle East, including the flourishing of Islamic State, it takes great imagination to see how things would be worse today if the U.S. had acted on Mr. Obama’s “red line” threat in 2013 and moved against Syria’s Bashar Assad after he defied the U.S. president and used chemical weapons.
Or farther east, one would need to have believed Moscow’s overheated nuclear threats to think that Ukraine would be worse off now if NATO had moved immediately to secure the Ukrainian border with Russia as soon as Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea in 2014.
Over the past year, especially in the past few months, Mr. Obama’s belief that American force in the world should be constrained and reduced has reached its ultimate manifestation in U.S. relations with Iran, Russia and Cuba. Each of these American adversaries has been on the receiving end of the president’s helping hand: normalization with Cuba, releasing Iran from sanctions, treating the Putin Ukraine-invasion force as a partner for peace in the futile Minsk cease-fire agreements.
In exchange for giving up precisely nothing, these countries have been rewarded with the international legitimacy and domestic credibility dictatorships crave—along with more-concrete economic benefits.
When dealing with a regime that won’t negotiate in good faith, the best approach is to use a position of strength to pry concessions from the other side. But instead the White House keeps offering concessions—while helping its enemies off the mat. That such naïveté will result in positive behavior from the likes of Ayatollah Khamenei, Vladimir Putin and the Castro brothers should be beyond even Mr. Obama’s belief in hope and change.
Dictatorships, especially the one-man variety like Russia’s, are unpredictable, but they do operate on logical underlying principles. They often come to power with popular support and a mandate to solve a crisis. Once a firm grip on power is achieved, the junta or supreme leader blames his predecessors for any problems, and he cracks down on rights. With democracy dead and civil society hunted to extinction, the only way left to make a legitimate claim on power is confrontation and conflict. Propaganda is ratcheted up against mythical fifth columnists and the usual scapegoats, like immigrants and minorities.
The next and usually final phase arrives when other tricks have become stale. Domestic enemies are never threatening enough—and eventually there is no one left to persecute, as in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin—so the dictator looks abroad, inevitably finding a “national interest” to defend across a convenient border.
This external-conflict phase is especially dangerous because there are very few examples of aggressor nations moving away from it peacefully. War and revolution are the more frequent ways it burns itself out. The Soviet Union altered its confrontational course after Stalin’s death, but it was a unique and gigantic superpower with enough resources for its leadership to believe that it could compete with the Free World instead of declaring war on it.
As it turned out, the Soviets were wrong, something that more-recent autocrats, including Mr. Putin, no doubt understand. They have watched and learned that their people will eventually begin to compare living standards and see the truth if left unmolested by war and strife. This window on the Free World is even larger in the Internet age, so the conflicts and propaganda have to be even more extreme.
Iran has been operating in the confrontational phase for years, with America and Israel as the main targets, in addition to Tehran’s regional Sunni rivals. Mr. Putin moved into confrontation mode with the invasion of Ukraine and he cannot afford to back down.
The dictatorship that Nicolás Maduro inherited from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela is approaching the final stage as well, as seen from the country’s recent launch of a border and immigrant conflict with Colombia. The emptier the shelves in Venezuelan supermarkets, the more threatening the Colombians must be made to seem. China has relied on tremendous growth to forestall internal unrest for human rights, but if its economy falters substantially, last week’s giant military parade in Beijing will be seen as prelude, not posturing. Taiwan, always in China’s sights, has good reason to be troubled by the West’s feeble responses in Syria and Ukraine.
Power abhors a vacuum, and as the U.S. retreats the space is being filled. After years of the White House leading from behind, Secretary of State John Kerry’s timid warning to the Kremlin this week to stay out of Syria will be as effective as Mr. Obama’s “red line.” Soon Iran—flush with billions of dollars liberated by the nuclear deal—will add even more heft to its support for Mr. Assad.
Dead refugee children are on the shores of Europe, bringing home the Syrian crisis that has been in full bloom for years. There could be no more tragic symbol that it is time to stop being paralyzed by the Obama-era mantra that things could be worse—and to start acting instead to make things better.
Mr. Kasparov, chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, is the author of “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped,” out next month from PublicAffairs.
Popular on WSJ
Set your profile to public to comment
There are 441 comments.
All comments will display your real name. Read our commenting rules.
NewestOldestReader Recommended
Gary McCutcheon
Gary McCutcheon 1 minute ago
It's amazing to me how many writers whose work is published in the WSJ as well as those who comment in this section lump the entire Middle East into one place. Kasparov labels it "...the wreckage of the Middle East." While no one would say there aren't enormous issues taking place within various countries, contrary to what many people seem to think, the entire Middle East isn't on fire. One need only visit Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Oman, and others to see that life goes on in the same manner as in most other countries. People go to work, shop, dine out, socialize, and conduct their lives in much the same way as virtually all the readers of this publication. The hyperbole of so many who have so little understanding of Middle East issues has really gotten old.
Flag ButtonShare
jerome rathskeller
jerome rathskeller 5 minutes ago
Obama should be imprisoned for treason.
Flag ButtonShare
3
Frederick A. Green
Frederick A. Green 4 minutes ago
@jerome rathskeller
Unfortunately, the DOJ and FBI are his lap dogs.
Flag ButtonShare
1
Leon Longchamp
Leon Longchamp 7 minutes ago
The greatest Obamanation of the Obama administration was getting elected by attacking our military and "Bush's War" in Iraq. That was further compounded by Obama's withdraw of troops and signaling to the world that He put his political values ahead of American Values.
America deposed a dictator as brutal as Assad and we facilitated the formation of a Democracy in a Muslim country. Making it work is a difficult task, but it was (and is) a battle worth fighting for. Obama was not up to the task, Obama's failure is one reason that Muslims are fleeing their homeland. They are looking for the security in Democratic countries today.
Obama's actions are a stain American leadership as well as his legacy
Flag ButtonShare
Thomas Yasin
Thomas Yasin 7 minutes ago
Mr. Kasparov makes the common mistake in assuming that America's enemies are Obama's enemies. They're not. Mr. Obama's enemies are Republicans, congressmen, and conservatives.
Flag ButtonShare
4
TIM LUKER
TIM LUKER 3 minutes ago
@Thomas Yasin
Don't forget the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Flag ButtonShare
1
-
Some glib passages IMHO, but also some worthy content:
Coming to Terms With the American Empire
Geopolitical Weekly
April 14, 2015 | 07:54 GMT
Print
Text Size
By George Friedman
"Empire" is a dirty word. Considering the behavior of many empires, that is not unreasonable. But empire is also simply a description of a condition, many times unplanned and rarely intended. It is a condition that arises from a massive imbalance of power. Indeed, the empires created on purpose, such as Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, have rarely lasted. Most empires do not plan to become one. They become one and then realize what they are. Sometimes they do not realize what they are for a long time, and that failure to see reality can have massive consequences.
World War II and the Birth of an Empire
The United States became an empire in 1945. It is true that in the Spanish-American War, the United States intentionally took control of the Philippines and Cuba. It is also true that it began thinking of itself as an empire, but it really was not. Cuba and the Philippines were the fantasy of empire, and this illusion dissolved during World War I, the subsequent period of isolationism and the Great Depression.
The genuine American empire that emerged thereafter was a byproduct of other events. There was no great conspiracy. In some ways, the circumstances of its creation made it more powerful. The dynamic of World War II led to the collapse of the European Peninsula and its occupation by the Soviets and the Americans. The same dynamic led to the occupation of Japan and its direct governance by the United States as a de facto colony, with Gen. Douglas MacArthur as viceroy.
The United States found itself with an extraordinary empire, which it also intended to abandon. This was a genuine wish and not mere propaganda. First, the United States was the first anti-imperial project in modernity. It opposed empire in principle. More important, this empire was a drain on American resources and not a source of wealth. World War II had shattered both Japan and Western Europe. The United States gained little or no economic advantage in holding on to these countries. Finally, the United States ended World War II largely untouched by war and as perhaps one of the few countries that profited from it. The money was to be made in the United States, not in the empire. The troops and the generals wanted to go home.
But unlike after World War I, the Americans couldn't let go. That earlier war ruined nearly all of the participants. No one had the energy to attempt hegemony. The United States was content to leave Europe to its own dynamics. World War II ended differently. The Soviet Union had been wrecked but nevertheless it remained powerful. It was a hegemon in the east, and absent the United States, it conceivably could dominate all of Europe. This represented a problem for Washington, since a genuinely united Europe — whether a voluntary and effective federation or dominated by a single country — had sufficient resources to challenge U.S. power.
The United States could not leave. It did not think of itself as overseeing an empire, and it certainly permitted more internal political autonomy than the Soviets did in their region. Yet, in addition to maintaining a military presence, the United States organized the European economy and created and participated in the European defense system. If the essence of sovereignty is the ability to decide whether or not to go to war, that power was not in London, Paris or Warsaw. It was in Moscow and Washington.
The organizing principle of American strategy was the idea of containment. Unable to invade the Soviet Union, Washington's default strategy was to check it. U.S. influence spread through Europe to Iran. The Soviet strategy was to flank the containment system by supporting insurgencies and allied movements as far to the rear of the U.S. line as possible. The European empires were collapsing and fragmenting. The Soviets sought to create an alliance structure out of the remnants, and the Americans sought to counter them.
The Economics of Empire
One of the advantages of alliance with the Soviets, particularly for insurgent groups, was a generous supply of weapons. The advantage of alignment with the United States was belonging to a dynamic trade zone and having access to investment capital and technology. Some nations, such as South Korea, benefited extraordinarily from this. Others didn't. Leaders in countries like Nicaragua felt they had more to gain from Soviet political and military support than in trade with the United States.
The United States was by far the largest economic power, with complete control of the sea, bases around the world, and a dynamic trade and investment system that benefitted countries that were strategically critical to the United States or at least able to take advantage of it. It was at this point, early in the Cold War, that the United States began behaving as an empire, even if not consciously.
The geography of the American empire was built partly on military relations but heavily on economic relations. At first these economic relations were fairly trivial to American business. But as the system matured, the value of investments soared along with the importance of imports, exports and labor markets. As in any genuinely successful empire, it did not begin with a grand design or even a dream of one. Strategic necessity created an economic reality in country after country until certain major industries became dependent on at least some countries. The obvious examples were Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, whose oil fueled American oil companies, and which therefore — quite apart from conventional strategic importance — became economically important. This eventually made them strategically important.
As an empire matures, its economic value increases, particularly when it is not coercing others. Coercion is expensive and undermines the worth of an empire. The ideal colony is one that is not at all a colony, but a nation that benefits from economic relations with both the imperial power and the rest of the empire. The primary military relationship ought to be either mutual dependence or, barring that, dependence of the vulnerable client state on the imperial power.
This is how the United States slipped into empire. First, it was overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful. Second, it faced a potential adversary capable of challenging it globally, in a large number of countries. Third, it used its economic advantage to induce at least some of these countries into economic, and therefore political and military, relationships. Fourth, these countries became significantly important to various sectors of the American economy.
Limits of the American Empire
The problem of the American Empire is the overhang of the Cold War. During this time, the United States expected to go to war with a coalition around it, but also to carry the main burden of war. When Operation Desert Storm erupted in 1991, the basic Cold War principle prevailed. There was a coalition with the United States at the center of it. After 9/11, the decision was made to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq with the core model in place. There was a coalition, but the central military force was American, and it was assumed that the economic benefits of relations with the United States would be self-evident. In many ways, the post-9/11 wars took their basic framework from World War II. Iraq War planners explicitly discussed the occupation of Germany and Japan.
No empire can endure by direct rule. The Nazis were perhaps the best example of this. They tried to govern Poland directly, captured Soviet territory, pushed aside Vichy to govern not half but all of France, and so on. The British, on the other hand, ruled India with a thin layer of officials and officers and a larger cadre of businessmen trying to make their fortunes. The British obviously did better. The Germans exhausted themselves not only by overreaching, but also by diverting troops and administrators to directly oversee some countries. The British could turn their empire into something extraordinarily important to the global system. The Germans broke themselves not only on their enemies, but on their conquests as well.
The United States emerged after 1992 as the only global balanced power. That is, it was the only nation that could deploy economic, political and military power on a global basis. The United States was and remains enormously powerful. However, this is very different from omnipotence. In hearing politicians debate Russia, Iran or Yemen, you get the sense that they feel that U.S. power has no limits. There are always limits, and empires survive by knowing and respecting them.
The primary limit of the American empire is the same as that of the British and Roman empires: demographic. In Eurasia — Asia and Europe together — the Americans are outnumbered from the moment they set foot on the ground. The U.S. military is built around force multipliers, weapons that can destroy the enemy before the enemy destroys the relatively small force deployed. Sometimes this strategy works. Over the long run, it cannot. The enemy can absorb attrition much better than the small American force can. This lesson was learned in Vietnam and reinforced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq is a country of 25 million people. The Americans sent about 130,000 troops. Inevitably, the attrition rate overwhelmed the Americans. The myth that Americans have no stomach for war forgets that the United States fought in Vietnam for seven years and in Iraq for about the same length of time. The public can be quite patient. The mathematics of war is the issue. At a certain point, the rate of attrition is simply not worth the political ends.
The deployment of a main force into Eurasia is unsupportable except in specialized cases when overwhelming force can be bought to bear in a place where it is important to win. These occasions are typically few and far between. Otherwise, the only strategy is indirect warfare: shifting the burden of war to those who want to bear it or cannot avoid doing so. For the first years of World War II, indirect warfare was used to support the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union against Germany.
There are two varieties of indirect warfare. The first is supporting native forces whose interests are parallel. This was done in the early stages of Afghanistan. The second is maintaining the balance of power among nations. We are seeing this form in the Middle East as the United States moves between the four major regional powers — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey — supporting one then another in a perpetual balancing act. In Iraq, U.S. fighters carry out air strikes in parallel with Iranian ground forces. In Yemen, the United States supports Saudi air strikes against the Houthis, who have received Iranian training.
This is the essence of empire. The British saying is that it has no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests. That old cliche is, like most cliches, true. The United States is in the process of learning that lesson. In many ways the United States was more charming when it had clearly identified friends and enemies. But that is a luxury that empires cannot afford.
Building a System of Balance
We are now seeing the United States rebalance its strategy by learning to balance. A global power cannot afford to be directly involved in the number of conflicts that it will encounter around the world. It would be exhausted rapidly. Using various tools, it must create regional and global balances without usurping internal sovereignty. The trick is to create situations where other countries want to do what is in the U.S. interest.
This endeavor is difficult. The first step is to use economic incentives to shape other countries' behavior. It isn't the U.S. Department of Commerce but businesses that do this. The second is to provide economic aid to wavering countries. The third is to provide military aid. The fourth is to send advisers. The fifth is to send overwhelming force. The leap from the fourth level to the fifth is the hardest to master. Overwhelming force should almost never be used. But when advisers and aid do not solve a problem that must urgently be solved, then the only type of force that can be used is overwhelming force. Roman legions were used sparingly, but when they were used, they brought overwhelming power to bear.
The Responsibilities of Empire
I have been deliberately speaking of the United States as an empire, knowing that this term is jarring. Those who call the United States an empire usually mean that it is in some sense evil. Others will call it anything else if they can. But it is helpful to face the reality the United States is in. It is always useful to be honest, particularly with yourself. But more important, if the United States thinks of itself as an empire, then it will begin to learn the lessons of imperial power. Nothing is more harmful than an empire using its power carelessly.
It is true that the United States did not genuinely intend to be an empire. It is also true that its intentions do not matter one way or another. Circumstance, history and geopolitics have created an entity that, if it isn't an empire, certainly looks like one. Empires can be far from oppressive. The Persians were quite liberal in their outlook. The American ideology and the American reality are not inherently incompatible. But two things must be faced: First, the United States cannot give away the power it has. There is no practical way to do that. Second, given the vastness of that power, it will be involved in conflicts whether it wants to or not. Empires are frequently feared, sometimes respected, but never loved by the rest of the world. And pretending that you aren't an empire does not fool anyone.
The current balancing act in the Middle East represents a fundamental rebalancing of American strategy. It is still clumsy and poorly thought out, but it is happening. And for the rest of the world, the idea that the Americans are coming will become more and more rare. The United States will not intervene. It will manage the situation, sometimes to the benefit of one country and sometimes to another.
-
By Niall Ferguson
Oct. 9, 2015 6:17 p.m. ET
429 COMMENTS
Even before becoming Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger understood how hard it was to make foreign policy in Washington. There “is no such thing as an American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in 1968. There is only “a series of moves that have produced a certain result” that they “may not have been planned to produce.” It is “research and intelligence organizations,” he added, that “attempt to give a rationality and consistency” which “it simply does not have.”
Two distinctively American pathologies explained the fundamental absence of coherent strategic thinking. First, the person at the top was selected for other skills. “The typical political leader of the contemporary managerial society,” noted Mr. Kissinger, “is a man with a strong will, a high capacity to get himself elected, but no very great conception of what he is going to do when he gets into office.”
Second, the government was full of people trained as lawyers. In making foreign policy, Mr. Kissinger once remarked, “you have to know what history is relevant.” But lawyers were “the single most important group in Government,” he said, and their principal drawback was “a deficiency in history.” This was a long-standing prejudice of his. “The clever lawyers who run our government,” he thundered in a 1956 letter to a friend, have weakened the nation by instilling a “quest for minimum risk which is our most outstanding characteristic.”
Let’s see, now. A great campaigner. A bunch of lawyers. And a “quest for minimum risk.” What is it about this combination that sounds familiar?
I have spent much of the past seven years trying to work out what Barack Obama’s strategy for the United States truly is. For much of his presidency, as a distinguished general once remarked to me about the commander in chief’s strategy, “we had to infer it from speeches.”
At first, I assumed that the strategy was simply not to be like his predecessor—an approach that was not altogether unreasonable, given the errors of the Bush administration in Iraq and the resulting public disillusionment. I read Mr. Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—with its Quran quotes and its promise of “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”—as simply the manifesto of the Anti-Bush.
But what that meant in practice was not entirely clear. Precipitate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq, but a time-limited surge in Afghanistan. A “reset” with Russia, but seeming indifference to Europe. A “pivot” to Asia, but mixed signals to China. And then, in response to the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya, complete confusion, the nadir of which was the September 2013 redline fiasco regarding the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria and Mr. Obama’s declaration that “America is not the global policeman.”
An approximation of an Obama strategy was revealed in April last year, at the end of a presidential trip to Asia, when White House aides told reporters that the Obama doctrine was “Don’t do stupid sh--.”
I now see, however, that there is more to it than that.
The president always intended to repudiate more than George W. Bush’s foreign policy. In a 2012 presidential debate with Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama made clear that he was turning away from Ronald Reagan, too. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” he jeered, “because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Mr. Romney’s reference to Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe” now looks prescient, whereas the president’s boast, in a January 2014 New Yorker magazine interview, that he didn’t “really even need George Kennan right now” looks like hubristic rejection of foreign-policy experience itself. Two months later, Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.
Mr. Obama also had his own plan for the Middle East. “It would be profoundly in the interest” of the region’s citizens “if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” Mr. Obama said in that same interview. “If we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between . . . predominantly Sunni Gulf states and Iran.”
Now I see that this was the strategy—a strategy aimed at creating a new balance of power in the Middle East. The deal on Iran’s nuclear-arms program was part of Mr. Obama’s aim (as he put it to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in May) “to find effective partners—not just in Iraq, but in Syria, and in Yemen, and in Libya.” Mr. Obama said he wanted “to create the international coalition and atmosphere in which people across sectarian lines are willing to compromise and are willing to work together in order to provide the next generation a fighting chance for a better future.”
The same fuzzy thinking informed Mr. Obama’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly last week, in which he first said he wanted to “work with other nations under the mantle of international norms and principles and law,” but then added that, to sort out Syria, he was willing to work with Russia and Iran—neither famed for spending time under that particular mantle—so long as they accepted the ousting of yet another Middle Eastern dictator.
A fighting chance for a better future in the Middle East? Make that a better chance for a fighting future.
It is clear that the president’s strategy is failing disastrously. Since 2010, total fatalities from armed conflict in the world have increased by a factor of close to four, according to data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Total fatalities due to terrorism have risen nearly sixfold, based on the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism database. Nearly all this violence is concentrated in a swath of territory stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there is every reason to expect the violence to escalate as the Sunni powers of the region seek to prevent Iran from establishing itself as the post-American hegemon.
Today the U.S. faces three strategic challenges: the maelstrom in the Muslim world, the machinations of a weak but ruthless Russia, and the ambition of a still-growing China. The president’s responses to all three look woefully inadequate.
Those who know the Obama White House’s inner workings wonder why this president, who came into office with next to no experience of foreign policy, has made so little effort to hire strategic expertise. In fairness, Denis McDonough (now White House chief of staff) has some real knowledge of Latin America. While at Oxford, National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote a doctoral dissertation on Zimbabwe. And Samantha Power, ambassador to the U.N., has published two substantial books (one of which—“A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”—she will need to update when she returns to academic life).
But other key players are the sort of people Henry Kissinger complained about more than half a century ago: Michael Froman, the trade representative, was one of Mr. Obama’s classmates at Harvard Law School; Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken is a Columbia J.D.; éminence grise Valerie Jarrett got hers from the University of Michigan. What about Secretary of State John Kerry? Boston College Law School, ’76. Not one of the people who advise the president could claim to have made contributions to strategic doctrine comparable with those made by Mr. Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski before they went to Washington.
Some things you can learn on the job, like tending bar or being a community organizer. National-security strategy is different. “High office teaches decision making, not substance,” Mr. Kissinger once wrote. “It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it.” The next president may have cause to regret that Barack Obama didn’t heed those words. In making up his strategy as he has gone along, this president has sown the wind. His successor will reap the whirlwind. He or she had better bring some serious intellectual capital to the White House.
Mr. Ferguson’s first volume of his Henry Kissinger biography has just been published by Penguin.
-
Share
The Golden Age of Sino-British Relations Is Now
Global Affairs
November 5, 2015 | 08:15 GMT Print
Text Size
By Ian Morris
Last week, a visit to the London School of Economics gave me the opportunity to participate in some fascinating and important discussions on everything from the origins of agriculture to the future of the U.S.-Iranian relationship. And yet as the week went on, I couldn't shake the feeling that a truly momentous shift was unfolding right in front of me. Each morning as I walked through Soho to get to the school, I passed under a big banner announcing, "London Welcomes President Xi Jinping." The Chinese leader had been in town just a week earlier on a visit that British Prime Minister David Cameron had called the beginning of "a golden time" in Sino-British relations.
Britain's leaders have enthusiastically embraced China. Two years ago, Chancellor George Osborne announced that London would become the first Western hub for trading renminbi and that Chinese banks would be allowed to open branches there. Then in June, Britain ignored U.S. objections and signed the Articles of Agreement of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, widely regarded as a Chinese rival to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. During Xi's most recent visit in October, London announced not only that it would ease visa restrictions on rich Chinese tourists but also that the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Group would invest $9 billion in the new Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, despite concerns about China gaining access to nuclear secrets. Meanwhile, negotiations with China continue for a $16 billion investment in High Speed 2, a high-speed rail line linking London to northern England.
What is Global Affairs?
Not everyone in Britain supports its flourishing relationship with China. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond came under criticism in October for failing to challenge Xi on his authoritarianism, and British officials arrested three prominent protesters in London during Xi's visit. I got a taste of the anxiety myself when I drafted a column on the Hinkley Point C negotiations for a British newspaper in 2014, only to have the editor respond that it needed, "less history, more scary stuff about China." But despite this pushback, a major shift seems to be underway in Britain’s strategic posture — one that appears to be just one part of an even bigger change taking place in the global landscape.
An Island at the Edge of the World
Since about 6000 B.C., when melting glaciers finally raised sea levels high enough to create the English Channel, two fundamental facts have dominated Britain's strategic position. First, it is an island at the edge of the European landmass; and second, it projects into the northern Atlantic Ocean.
But insularity has rarely equaled isolation. Both archaeology and DNA show that by 5000 B.C., people, goods and ideas were already moving up and down the "Atlantic facade," stretching from modern-day Spain to Scotland. Southern England was still tightly linked to northern France through ties of ethnicity, economics and culture when Julius Caesar invaded in 55 B.C. However, Britain was still very much the edge of the known world in antiquity and remained so until the 15th century A.D. While the English Channel and North Sea were narrow enough to function as trading highways, the Atlantic Ocean was simply too big for ancient and medieval ships to master. Its vastness formed a barrier that cut the islands off from the real centers of civilization, which stretched from the Mediterranean to China.
This band of civilization had formed the world's demographic, economic and military core since farming began around 9500 B.C., and for millennia Britain served as a subordinate satellite at the band's western end. In the last few centuries B.C., northern France heavily influenced southern England, but in the first few centuries A.D. Rome ruled the whole of England and Wales. Then in the mid-to-late first millennium A.D., Germans and Scandinavians settled and plundered much of Britain, before Norway and Normandy invaded England in 1066. By the start of the second millennium, English monarchs (of partly French descent) began pushing back, and for a few short years after 1422 the infant King Henry VI nominally ruled both France and England. By 1475, though, English King Edward IV had formally renounced all claims to France in exchange for cash.
Technology and, above all, the invention of ocean-going ships eventually transformed Britain's strategic situation. By the 12th century A.D., Chinese shipwrights were building vessels capable of traveling thousands of miles. Arab skippers in the Indian Ocean picked up some of their key ideas and brought them to the Mediterranean. And by the 15th century A.D., Portuguese caravels were nosing their way down the western coast of Africa and across the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1490s, bigger, faster Iberian galleons reached the Americas and passed the Cape of Good Hope to enter the Indian Ocean. The new ships converted the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier around Western Europe to a highway linking it to lands of untold wealth.
Becoming the Center of Global Trade
At first, it seemed as if the new technologies had done little to change Britain's strategic position. Spain and Portugal, which both combined easy access to the Atlantic with strongly centralized monarchies, were better placed than any other country to exploit the maritime highways. The English, along with the French and Dutch, found themselves shut out of the rich pickings in India, South America and the Caribbean and reduced to trading with the parts of North America that the Spaniards did not want. If anything, Britain seemed more vulnerable than ever to domination from the Continent in the 16th century, particularly when Spain tried to invade it in 1588.
In reality, though, the Atlantic economy that ocean-going ships had created had already begun to improve Britain's fortunes. The North Atlantic had become the Goldilocks ideal: big enough that very different kinds of societies and ecological zones flourished around its shores, but small enough that European ships could move quite easily around it, trading at a profit at every turn. In this brave new world, the relatively weak governments of England and Holland became an advantage, because they were less able than the powerful Spanish monarchs to expropriate traders' profits.
Throughout the 16th century, Spanish kings treated the New World and their merchant subjects as a kind of ATM that provided the cash needed to fund wars and dominate Western Europe. But by 1600, they were overextended and bankrupt. English kings, by comparison, struggled to plunder their North American colonists and their traders. Generations of conflict ended in 1688 with a compromise, known as the "Glorious Revolution," that installed a Dutch king and business-friendly institutions in England. Holland, which did not even have kings, went even further in this direction, and the three great wars fought between the English and Dutch from the 1640s to the 1670s had everything to do with intercontinental trade and nothing to do with European empires.
Meanwhile, Britain's insularity continued to dominate its strategic thinking, but the fact that it projected into the North Atlantic was increasingly coming to be more important than its location near the Continent. Understanding this, a handful of 18th-century Britons undertook one of the most profound strategic reorientations in history. Rather than seeing Britain as the western end of Europe and using overseas trade to fund wars that could improve the country's position relative to the Continental powers, they began to see Britain as the hub of an intercontinental trade network. From this perspective, the only reason to fight a war in Europe was to prevent any single power from dominating the Continent, since a dominant land power might then be able to challenge Britain at sea.
The story of how they achieved their goals is too well known to need retelling, but by 1815 Britain had managed to establish a balance of power in Europe and an overseas empire on which the sun never set. Bringing together huge concentrations of capital, precocious industrialization, a vast merchant marine, unrivaled financial expertise, a fleet bigger than any other three navies combined, and an Indian army that could act as a strategic military reserve made Britain the first genuinely global power in history. Unlike any previous empire, Britain derived most of its wealth not from plunder or tax but from its dominant position in global trade, and it used its military and economic muscle to protect free trade and open markets. Long before the "golden time" in Sino-British ties dawned, Britain's relations with China were entirely a product of this muscle. China's emperor rejected a British trade delegation in 1793, but 50 years later his descendant was unable to resist any longer after British ships sank his fleet, seized Hong Kong and moved to blockade the Grand Canal, threatening Beijing with famine. The "unequal treaties" that followed, giving Britain a monopoly over trading rights along much of China's coast, remained in force until the 1940s, and China did not recover Hong Kong until 1997.
The story of how Britain's 19th-century system broke down is even better known. Free trade allowed some of Britain's commercial partners — most important, the United States and Germany — to industrialize their own economies. On the one hand, their growing wealth allowed them to buy more British goods and to raise British revenues even further, but on the other it made them rivals in international markets and rich enough to challenge Britain militarily.
After about 1870, Britain's financial and military lead over its rivals steadily shrank, and with it, the country's ability to police the international order and to deter other great powers from trying to unite Europe. In 1914, Germany's leaders decided that their own strategic position was so parlous that they had no choice but to risk war with the world's policeman. Even if they did not initially aim to master Europe, their war goals rapidly evolved in that direction. Britain and its allies defeated this challenge, but only at a ruinous cost, and a second German offensive (much more explicitly aimed at Continental mastery) could only be overcome with the power of the Soviet Union and the United States.
Same Interests, New Tactics
In 1962, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said, "Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role." But that was not entirely true. Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign secretary, had been nearer the mark in 1848 when he said, "We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual friends … [only] our interests are eternal and perpetual."
For more than 400 years, Britain's strategic interest had been to engage vigorously in global trade while preventing the rise of a single dominant power on the European continent. In the 17th century, that required all-out naval conflicts with the Dutch. In the 18th century, it required all-out naval conflicts with France as well as colonial expeditions and occasional Continental land wars. In the 19th century, it mostly meant policing the world's sea-lanes and trying to conduct the Concert of Europe. Between 1914 and 1945, it meant total air, sea and land wars with Germany and an increasing reliance on the United States; and from 1945 into the 2010s, it meant even deeper dependence on American economic and military strength, combined with a delicate diplomatic dance with what we now call the European Union.
British leaders constantly had to recalibrate the balance between their American and European interests. In the 1950s-1960s, they found themselves leaning too far away from Europe and being shut out of the Franco-German alliance that headed the European Economic Community. In the 1970s, they found themselves leaning too far in the other direction, entering the renamed European Communities on disadvantageous terms in 1973. Since the 1980s, they have leaned away from Europe again, renegotiating their financial contributions in 1984-85, opting out of the euro in 1992, joining the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 against Western Europe's strong objections, and committing in 2013 to an in-out referendum on the European Union within the next four years.
Seen in this light, the dawning of a "golden time" in Sino-British relations takes on new meaning. British interests remain focused, as they have been for centuries, on balancing between Europe and the wider world, but Britain’s special relationship with the United States is just one vehicle for pursuing that balance. There are no eternal allies.
Since about 2010, British governments have begun wondering whether the American alliance is still the best way to maintain their nation's position in the world. Their interest in becoming "China’s strongest partner in the West," as Osborne has put it, need not mean that Britain is drawing further away from Europe, since both U.S. President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart insist that they want to see Britain remain within the European Union. Nor does it need to mean that Britain is turning its back on the United States. But it does, nevertheless, represent a significant rebalancing. Britain, with the world's fifth-biggest economy (in nominal terms) and, by many judgments, its fifth-strongest military, is by any reckoning an important ally of the United States. But the most significant aspect of Britain’s apparent strategic realignment is surely the fact that it is not the only country that is engaging in such activity. Whether we put the blame on the foreign policy vacillations of the Obama administration, the recklessness of the Bush administration, or the steady growth of Chinese economic and military might, even such long-time American allies as Australia, South Korea and Israel are looking for new friends.
The United States has been the world's greatest power for nearly a century, and for more than a quarter of that time it has dominated the international order more completely than any power in history. But there are growing signs that the ground is shifting under our feet, and few are more revealing than the banners with which London welcomed China's president in October.
-
Many Paths to Modernization
Global Affairs
November 11, 2015 | 08:48 GMT Print
Text Size
By Jay Ogilvy
A few columns ago, I proposed a different vision of geopolitics based on Manuel Castells' concept of "the space of flows." The main idea was fairly simple: We need to supplement the literal proximities between the geopolitical entities we call "states" with another set of relationships — namely, the ties that bind some places to others through dense corridors of communication and commerce.
With the help of well-known American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, I'd like to explore yet another form of closeness and distance that could further supplement a new, less literal, geopolitics: economic and cultural similarities. I'll start with Fukuyama's thesis that China and southern Italy are, in a sense, "closer" to one another than are China and Japan or Italy and Israel.
In his book Trust, Fukuyama develops the thesis that low-trust societies — places where people generally have less trust for those who aren't related to them, like China and southern Italy — put so much importance on family and relationships that they often find it difficult to succeed in industries requiring organizations that are larger than just a few families. Products such as handcrafted leather goods and clothing can be fashioned and sold by small groups of people bearing the same last name. But the automobile and aerospace industries demand larger workforces and consequently require a degree of trust among strangers that runs in short supply in southern Italy and western China.
What is Global Affairs?
I add the western qualifier here because western China is the old China, where trust among non-family members is still low. In the past few decades since Trust was published, coastal China has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for creating, organizing and managing some very large enterprises, including shipyards, railroads, aerospace and automobiles. This raises the question: Was Fukuyama's thesis simply wrong? Or have the Chinese learned to trust one another?
Revisiting the 'End of History'
Let's take these questions in turn. It is tempting to think that Fukuyama is wrong again; wasn't he the guy who told us that history was over? But this would be a glib conclusion that badly misreads the case Fukuyama was making in The End of History and the Last Man. To those of us steeped in the tradition Fukuyama draws on — George Friedman included — everyone knows that the phrase "the end of history" does not refer to the cessation of politics. What a ridiculous idea, as if one day we might wake up to a world in which journalists no longer had anything to write about! Fukuyama is not deluded, as countless commentators have made him out to be with sentences starting with, "Contrary to Fukuyama's idea that history is over … "
Instead, "the end of history" refers to a particular reading of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's work by a French scholar named Alexandre Kojeve. In a series of influential lectures in Paris during the 1930s, Kojeve laid out an interpretation of Hegel, according to which Hegel (the thinker) saw himself teaming up with Napoleon (the historical actor) to accomplish a kind of rounding out of history in word and deed. To the extent that Hegel's words brought to self-consciousness Napoleon's uniting of Europe, then the disparate and often senseless acts of history that had occurred up to that point could be understood to have achieved a new level of meaning and maturity.
Kojeve certainly wasn't maintaining that according to Hegel, history was over and nothing would happen anymore. Again, that would be ridiculous. Nor was Fukuyama claiming anything of the kind. Instead he was borrowing this idea, well known to some, to make similar sense of the demise of both communism and fascism in the 20th century. With only democratic capitalism left, the contest between world-dominating ideologies was over. A new maturity, not the shutdown of death, had been achieved. With the violence of adolescence behind us, we could enter into adulthood, with all the headlines and events that "adult" development would engender.
Of course, it is possible to question both Kojeve and Hegel about their reading of Napoleon's significance, just as it is possible to question Fukuyama's view that democratic capitalism has triumphed quite as thoroughly as he claims. After all, China still resists democracy, and since 2008 we have reason to look for another chapter in the history of capitalism. But these are sensible debates about real issues, not facile dismissals of a foolish claim that was never intended to be made in the first place.
So Fukuyama is not wrong again, because he was never wrong to begin with. Nor, I think, is he wrong now to call attention to the figurative "closeness" between southern Italy and China. Their economies, and hence their geopolitical power, are still inhibited by low levels of trust between non-kin. Look at Italy's plight as one of the southern European nations tearing the European Union apart. Look at the near panic induced among many senior Chinese officials who are cowering under the threat of arrest. Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign is unfolding for a reason: The "radius of trust," to use Fukuyama's vivid phrase, is still too often drawn tight around friends and family, even as companies in China get bigger.
Fukuyama on Political Order
Fukuyama's focus on the importance of trust carried into his later two-volume magnum opus, The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014). These magisterial tomes trace the origins and evolution of political organizations from their pre-human roots in primate biology to the present day.
There is no way to adequately summarize more than a thousand pages in less than a thousand words. Still, I want to draw your attention to this work because Fukuyama's framework sheds light on two areas of great interest today: First, the crises in southern Europe and the Middle East, and second, the prospects for democracy in China.
For Greece and Italy, his lesson is fairly simple: Don't assume that once modernization has been achieved, liberal democracy will flourish like mushrooms after a rainstorm. After taking the time to review several histories of nation building and state building — the two are not the same, as Fukuyama shows in great detail — he is able to conclude with authority that there are several paths, not just one, toward modernization and development.
Fukuyama then identifies the six major components of a geopolitical model: economic growth, social mobilization, ideas/legitimacy, democracy, rule of law and the state. By reviewing and comparing the histories of state formation in China, Europe, Russia, Latin America, the United Kingdom, North America and Africa — in other words, the history of the entire world — Fukuyama is able to show how different countries' paths toward modernization have been.
"In Britain and America, economic modernization drove social mobilization which in turn created the conditions for the elimination of patronage and clientelism. In both countries, it was new middle-class groups that sought an end to the patronage system. This might lead some to believe that socioeconomic modernization and the creation of a middle class will by themselves create modern government. But this view is belied by the Greek and Italian cases, societies that are wealthy and modern and yet continue to practice clientelism. There is no automatic mechanism that produces clean, modern government, because a host of other factors is necessary to explain outcomes."
A similar lesson can be drawn with respect to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever one has to say about the wisdom of driving on to Baghdad in the Iraq War, the bungling of the U.S. occupation showed a callow lack of appreciation for that "host of other factors" involved in institution building.
"Results of state building are very disappointing. The United States is scheduled to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in 2016 without having created a functional, legitimate centralized state. Iraq seemed to have more of a state, but the latter's authority in the areas north of Baghdad collapsed in 2014. Repeated interventions and billions of dollars in foreign assistance have yet to create functional governments in either Haiti or Somalia."
The Recurring Threat of Patrimonialism
One theme that shows up throughout Fukuyama's work is the unending tension between the need for objective, neutral and fair rule-based institutions on the one hand, and mankind's age-old tendency to favor family and friends on the other. Even where the rule of law has triumphed after centuries of familial favoritism by tribal leaders, society hasn't managed to eliminate the perpetual threat of "repatrimonialism" — a big word that plays a big role, by Fukuyama's measure.
This brings us back to China, for there as nowhere else we see the contest playing out: Can China move beyond "rule by law," where the legal system is used to level the playing field for everyone except the country's leaders, to "rule of law," where the leadership is not, in patrimonial fashion, above the rules governing everyone else?
The jury is still out, but Fukuyama's framework gives us a helpful lens through which we can read breaking news stories about China. Fukuyama begins his history of statecraft by pointing out that China was the first in the world to transition from warring tribes to a functioning, centralized state under the Qin dynasty in the third century B.C. Much has happened since then, of course, and the paroxysms of the 20th century — from Mao's Long March, through the Cultural Revolution, to Deng Xiaoping's dictum "to get rich is glorious" — may have cut the roots to China's past so thoroughly that no vestige of its long history could last. But in one of his bolder chapters, titled "The Reinvention of the Chinese State," Fukuyama makes the claim that "whether or not participants in that process were aware of what they were doing," Chinese leaders have been engaged in a kind of Confucian repatrimonialization since 1978 that is, in many ways, reminiscent of dynasties past. "The reformers were deliberately seeking to establish a Western-style Weberian bureaucracy, but in doing so they inadvertently recovered some of their own traditions."
So what about the future? Will the growth of the middle class in China generate louder calls for democracy? Or can authoritarian capitalism persist? As of this writing, Fukuyama is on his way home from China, and we will be talking in the coming weeks. I'll convey the outcome of our conversation in my column next month.
-
IMHO this is an EXTREMELY significant development:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/11/25/russia-sending-long-range-missiles-to-syria-ready-to-destroy-any-target-posing-danger-to-our-aircraft/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%2011-26-15%20FINAL-Thanksgiving&utm_term=Firewire
My initial snap impressions:
We just lost dominance of the skies.
Israel just lost dominance of the skies.
Russia-Iranian-Shia Iraq-Syria-Hezbollah arc will solidify.
Iran is going nuclear and will develop further its already significant missile capablilties. Iran will continue to foment in Yemen, Saudi Arabia already cannot handle the pressure and Shia Saudi Arabia, now more brazenly supported by Iran, will get increasingly more restless. This will apply to the tiny countries the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula as well. The position of the House of Saud will become increasingly tenuous-- its' fall is a possibility.
I'm not seeing ANY viable strategy for us in the Middle East.
Russia is now in a position to disrespect a NATO ally Turkey to legally defend the skies of Syria at Syria's request.
Russia is now in a position to fukc further with West/US in Ukraine.
Russia is now in a position to further destabilize NATO further with intimidation tactics with regard to NATO allies Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
France will turn increasingly to alliance with Russia (remember those navy assault ships they were so set upon selling to the Russians?) and left in the middle so too will Germany as it deals with one million new Arab Muslim refugee invaders.
What will happen with the Euro Union? The Euro? Free movement? Will they survive?
Russia is now in a position to nakedly assert its power play in the Arctic.
China will seal its control of the South China Sea.
Islam will destabilize Europe.
American homeland is now in cross hairs of Islamic Fascism.
Happy Thanksgiving , , ,
-
Aside from all the peace and prosperity, my favorite part of the Obama era is the racial healing.
IMHO this is an EXTREMELY significant development:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/11/25/russia-sending-long-range-missiles-to-syria-ready-to-destroy-any-target-posing-danger-to-our-aircraft/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%2011-26-15%20FINAL-Thanksgiving&utm_term=Firewire
My initial snap impressions:
We just lost dominance of the skies.
Israel just lost dominance of the skies.
Russia-Iranian-Shia Iraq-Syria-Hezbollah arc will solidify.
Iran is going nuclear and will develop further its already significant missile capablilties. Iran will continue to foment in Yemen, Saudi Arabia already cannot handle the pressure and Shia Saudi Arabia, now more brazenly supported by Iran, will get increasingly more restless. This will apply to the tiny countries the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula as well. The position of the House of Saud will become increasingly tenuous-- its' fall is a possibility.
I'm not seeing ANY viable strategy for us in the Middle East.
Russia is now in a position to disrespect a NATO ally Turkey to legally defend the skies of Syria at Syria's request.
Russia is now in a position to fukc further with West/US in Ukraine.
Russia is now in a position to further destabilize NATO further with intimidation tactics with regard to NATO allies Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
France will turn increasingly to alliance with Russia (remember those navy assault ships they were so set upon selling to the Russians?) and left in the middle so too will Germany as it deals with one million new Arab Muslim refugee invaders.
What will happen with the Euro Union? The Euro? Free movement? Will they survive?
Russia is now in a position to nakedly assert its power play in the Arctic.
China will seal its control of the South China Sea.
Islam will destabilize Europe.
American homeland is now in cross hairs of Islamic Fascism.
Happy Thanksgiving , , ,
-
Share
Why Turkey Can't Sell a Syrian Safe Zone
Geopolitical Diary
October 7, 2015 | 01:24 GMT Text Size
Print
(Stratfor)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Brussels on Tuesday with an ambitious agenda: to promote the establishment of a "safe zone" in northern Syria. Erdogan can see that the Europeans have no good solutions to their immigration crisis other than to manipulate the route and flow of migrants. The latest idea gaining traction in a host of European capitals is to keep the hundreds of thousands of people trying to cross the Mediterranean off of Europe's shores by bottling them up closer to home instead. Brussels would, of course, pay Ankara to take care of its problem by housing more refugees traveling overland. But Turkey, which already hosts more than 2.5 million Syrians and has spent $7.6 billion on the refugee crisis so far, isn't buying into Europe's offer. Erdogan wants more. Much more.
Now that Turkey has Europe's attention and Russia has blindsided the United States in Syria, Erdogan is attempting to use the chaotic climate to dust off his plans for a Syrian safe zone. The Turkish version of a safe zone entails reinforcing rebel forces that are friendly with Turkey to flush out the Islamic State from a zone measuring 80 kilometers (50 miles) by 40 kilometers in Syria's northern Aleppo province. A no-fly zone, according to the Turkish proposal, would accompany the safe zone. Once the zone is declared safe and free of terrorist activity, refugee camps would be set up and Syrian migrants could live within their country's borders again.
What is a Geopolitical Diary?
The motives behind Turkey's plan are many and thickly layered. Most important, Turkey needs to avoid augmenting the burden migrants are placing on it at home while its economy is deteriorating. Second, Turkey is legitimately threatened by the Islamic State and wants to create as much distance as possible between its borders and those of the self-proclaimed caliphate. But the reasons don't stop there. Turkey can see that its southern neighbor will be fragmented for the foreseeable future. Ankara does not want to eradicate the Islamic State only to see Kurdish forces take its place. Rather, it wants to establish a physical foothold in northern Syria to ensure that the Kurds cannot create a viable autonomous state that could exacerbate Turkey's own Kurdish problem at home.
There is also a broader objective framing Turkey's strategy. A divided Syria undoubtedly creates risk, but it also presents an opportunity for Turkey to expand its sphere of influence in the Levant. This is the main driver behind Turkey's campaign to topple Syrian President Bashar al Assad's government and replace it with a Sunni Islamist-led administration that takes its cues from Ankara. After all, someone would have to provide security to make the zone in northern Syria "safe"; Turkish forces and civilian personnel presumably would take the lead in reinforcing such a corridor, potentially placing Turkish boots back on Arab soil.
Meanwhile, there is a murkier motive to consider. Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party will enter the Nov. 2 elections with a low chance of winning enough votes to regain its majority in parliament. The likelihood of the elections resulting in another hung parliament, coupled with Erdogan's reluctance to share power, raises the potential (albeit in an extreme scenario) for Turkey to use the premise of a military operation in Syria to stave off a third round of elections.
But Russia is botching Turkey's plans. Russia, Turkey and NATO are still arguing over whether two alleged Russian violations of Turkish airspace near the Syrian border were intentional (as Turkey and NATO claim) or accidental (as Russia insists they were). Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said Tuesday that Russia was ready to form a working group and that it would be pleased to host Turkish Defense Ministry officials in Moscow to avoid further misunderstandings in Syria. Ankara has no choice but to interpret Russia's actions as a signal that Moscow is willing to interfere in a Turkish-led safe zone if Ankara tries to push ahead with its plans.
Moscow's strategy has already begun to bear fruit. The European officials who met with Erdogan in Brussels listened politely to his ideas for a safe zone and promised to discuss the idea further. But no European power wants to risk getting mixed up with a brazen Russia on the Syrian battlefield. The Europeans would rather bargain with Erdogan on issues such as visa liberalization for Turkish citizens and Turkey's acceptance of more migrants on the Continent's behalf instead.
The United States has kept Turkey's safe zone plan at arm's length for similar reasons. However, Russia's military adventurism in Syria is accelerating U.S. plans for a rebel offensive that could still at least partially fit with Turkey's interests.
In the coming months, the United States will be focused on the areas east and west of the Euphrates River. To the east, the United States will ramp up its support for Kurdish forces and their allies in preparation for a move toward Raqqa against the Islamic State. Greater U.S. support for Kurdish forces will not please Turkish leaders, but the United States' simultaneous boost in aid for the rebels Turkey has been preparing to the west will. Here, the United States and Turkey will work together to try to carve out a border zone free of the Islamic State's presence. The Americans are avoiding the label of a safe zone to keep the operation from conflating with Turkey's more ambitious agenda. Nonetheless, the United States will be indirectly taking the first crucial steps toward Turkey's ultimate goals for northern Syria.
Of course, Turkey will still have to contend with Russia. Moscow will do whatever it can to play off the fears of the NATO alliance. If a buffer zone were established in Syria and if Turkey, a NATO member, tried to protect the airspace over the zone, who would shoot down the Russian air force in the event that it crossed into the zone? In Brussels, Erdogan reiterated that "an attack on Turkey means an attack on NATO." But if NATO proves too afraid of the consequences of responding to Russian interference, then NATO's credibility will have been dealt a major blow. And that is exactly the outcome the Russians are hoping for.
-
The Escalating Cost of Obama's Foreign Policy Failures
Just Invoice the Next President
By Mark Alexander • December 2, 2015
"There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war." —George Washington, 1793
Many reading these words are serving or have served our country in uniform, or have military or veteran family members. For many of us, the ever-inflating price of Barack Obama's costly foreign policy malfeasance will be paid with the blood and sweat of us or of those we love. Thus, his failures come with a much more visceral price than just rancorous armchair political debates.
While Obama intends to invoice the next administration with the political, economic and human cost of his failures, there are additional revelations this week affirming the political motivations for his failures*.
As anyone capable of evaluating the most rudimentary cause-and-effect outcome can deduce, the rise of the Islamic State is the direct result of Obama's politically motivated retreat from Iraq, the centerpiece of his 2012 re-election campaign. But his suspension of the Long War strategy to defeat radical Islamic terrorists is only temporary. Taking the fight back to our enemy's turf in order to keep it off of our own will be far more difficult now than it was when President George Bush launched Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.
The consequences of Obama's policies will be devastating for years to come.
The legacy of Obama's failed policies, as implemented by his chief water-carrier Hillary Clinton, is the brutal humanitarian crisis now underway in Syria and across the Middle East. While he was fiddling a tune about al-Qa'ida's decimation and Islamist JV teams, even his CIA director, John Brennan, was issuing dire warnings about the metastasizing threat to the West.
According to Brennan, in 2008 al-Qa'ida "had maybe 700 or so adherents left.” But now, as American Enterprise Institute scholar and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen notes, “y the CIA’s own estimate, ISIS has grown on President Obama’s watch from just 700 fighters to between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters. That is an increase of between 2,700 and 4,400%.”
Recall if you will the prophetic warning issued by George W. Bush in July of 2007: “To begin withdrawing from Iraq ... will be dangerous — for Iraq, for the region and for the United States. It will mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qa'ida. It means that we would be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It will mean we would allow terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they had in Afghanistan. It will mean that American troops will have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.”
This week, Obama announced that he intends to resolve our differences with this murderous Islamist army by implementing his utopian "climate change" agenda. As George Will put it, “Everything is said to confirm global warming, and global warming is now said to cause everything else. It is a theory which can no longer be refuted, which means it is no longer a scientific theory.” According to Obama, there is a correlation between a terrorism and a two-degree rise in the temperature over the last 200 years.
Shamefully — and yet predictably — Obama has ceded the lead role in the re-emerging "war on terror" to France and Russia. In the wake of the recent slaughter in Paris, a petulant Obama insisted, "I’m not interested in posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning."
The words of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" protagonist, Aragorn, are instructive here: "Open war is upon you whether you would risk it or not."
Meanwhile, Obama continues to advance his Syrian immigrant plan even though, according to an Islamic-friendly organization, more than 13% of Syrian migrants support the Islamic State. Multiply .13 x 2,000,000 "refugees" and consider the national security implications for the West.
Make no mistake: The same sort of bloody mayhem we witnessed in Paris within hours of Obama's assertion that "we have contained” the Islamic threat is coming to a theater near you. Indeed, a timeline review of the frequency of Islamist attacks in the U.S. clearly shows a sharp increase beginning with Obama's first year in office.
Last year, then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) delivered this domestic terrorism threat assessment: "I’ve never seen it this bad in the 10 years I’ve been on the intelligence committee." Since then, our enemy has only become stronger — and more brazen.
After five military personnel were murdered by an Islamist in Tennessee six months ago, FBI Director James Comey testified, "The tools we are asked to use are increasingly ineffective. ISIL says, 'Go kill, go kill.' I cannot see [the FBI] stopping these indefinitely."
As Obama opens the gates for an Islamic Trojan Horse, Comey issued this disturbing assessment of our inability to recognize ISIL terrorists among Syrian immigrants: "f someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing showing up because we have no record of them."
Recall also Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's grim assessment last year that the direct links between ISIL and domestic terror networks have created “the most diverse array of threats and challenges I’ve seen in my 50-plus years in the [intelligence] business.” He added, “When the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled. ... I don’t know of a time that has been more beset by challenges and crises around the world. I worry a lot about the safety and security of this country. ... The homegrown violent extremists continue to pose the most likely threat to our homeland.”
Now there is evidence that, in addition to the Benghazi political cover-up, the Obama/Clinton team also suppressed critical intelligence retrieved from Osama bin Laden's compound about ties between Iran and al-Qa'ida. Apparently the administration determined that such information would be detrimental to Obama's signature "Iranian nuke deal." (Oh, did I mention that Iran never signed off on that agreement, meaning the inspection schedules are not legally binding?)
According to The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, "From 2011 through 2013, top Obama administration and intelligence officials downplayed and discarded intelligence on al Qaeda and its activities. ... A top DIA official was told directly to stop producing reports based on documents collected during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. And when a member of the House Intelligence Committee sought to investigate these allegations of manipulation, he was misled repeatedly."
Would it surprise anyone to learn that the Obama administration put pressure on U.S. Central Command analysts to paint a rosier picture of the Islamic threat? More than 50 CENTCOM analysts issued formal complaints about the alteration of intelligence, and the DoD's inspector general has opened a full investigation. Indeed, as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) confirmed, "Informants came to me in late 2012 stating that they had information related to the bin Laden raid and the analysis of intelligence," which was buried by the administration.
According to DoD's IG spokesperson Bridget Serchak, "The investigation will address whether there was any falsification, distortion, delay, suppression or improper modification of intelligence information."
When asked about that investigation, Obama declared with a straight face, "What I do know is my expectation, which is the highest fidelity to facts, data — the truth."
Obama's former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who held that post until August of 2014, said this week that intelligence reports were "disregarded" by Obama if they "did not meet a particular narrative that the White House needed” for Obama's re-election. "Intelligence starts and stops at the White House," notes Flynn. "The president sets the priorities and he's the number one customer."
Additionally, Lt. Gen. Flynn went public about Iran's support for terrorist attacks against American military personnel, and he asserts that Obama is in denial about the Islamic threat: "You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists."
In congressional hearings this week, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford, with the candor one would expect from a seasoned Marine, summarily dispensed with Obama's "containment of ISIL" claim: "We have not contained ISIL." He noted, "We’ve started to identify and implement a number of initiatives to move the campaign forward."
According to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, one of those initiatives will be deployment of a "specialized expeditionary targeting force" to Iraq — a.k.a., more "boots on the ground."
For the record, I've also identified "initiatives to move the campaign forward." Unfortunately, we can't implement them until January 2017, and only then if enough American voters wake up to the threat and make their voices heard at the ballot box.
If we don't rejoin the global war on terror, then get prepared for what Osama bin Laden labeled "American Hiroshima." Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist who obtained the only post-9/11 interviews with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, surmised, “Al-Qa'ida and Iran have a long, secret relationship,” and their ultimate goal would be to detonate a series of portable nuclear devices in U.S. urban centers.
The combined threat of ISIL and Iranian nukes, if not neutralized, poses a far more catastrophic threat than that we witnessed on 9/11.
And speaking of ballot boxes, Non Compos Mentis: According to Hillary Clinton, "We're not putting America combat troops back into Syria or Iraq. We are not going to do that. ... I cannot conceive of any circumstances where I would agreed to [put combat troops on the ground]." So, two weeks after the attack in Paris, Clinton can't "conceive of any circumstances" for committing combat troops?
*We often refer to Obama's foreign policy as "failed," but the reality is that Obama is achieving his ulterior objective both foreign and domestic. That objective is socialist parity, and in terms of foreign policy, that means disabling our status as the world's lone superpower in order to allow other nations to fill that void. Foreign and domestic policy "failures"? Sadly, no. This president's policies are achieving precisely his intended objectives.
-
Pasting this interesting article here from the Presidential 2016 thread. It is a serious piece and I will want to give it a serious read, but off the top of my head one of it's key points, that Rubio supported Clinton-Obama's Libya policy is not the way this article presents it. IIRC Rubio said that once Clinton-Obama committed American credibility then it was necessary to follow through which is not at all the same thing as saying he thought it a good idea to begin with.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/14/a-stark-choice-ted-cruzs-jacksonian-americanism-vs-marco-rubios-wilsonian-internationalism/
A Stark Choice: Ted Cruz’s Jacksonian Americanism vs. Marco Rubio’s Wilsonian Internationalism
by STEPHEN K. BANNON & ALEXANDER MARLOW14 Dec 20152,396
I. A Tale of Two Candidates
Here’s a question: During the recent Libya coup—that is, the Obama administration-orchestrated effort to topple Muammar Qaddafi from power in 2011—which prominent American made the following statement:
When an American president says the guy needs to go, you better make sure that it happens because your credibility and your stature in the world is on the line.
Was it a) Hillary Clinton? b) John Kerry? c) Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)2%
?
And the answer is, it was none of them. It was d) Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)79%
, quoted in The Weekly Standardon March 31, 2011. You know, the Senator from Florida. Yes, Rubio is a Republican, not normally thought of as a fan of Obama, but in this instance—and, as we shall see, in many other instances—he eagerly lined up behind Obama.
Lest there be any doubt as to Rubio’s Obamaphile views back in 2011, here’s how the Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes introduced the above-cited quote:
Senator Marco Rubio offered his full-throated support Wednesday for the U.S. intervention in Libya and called on President Barack Obama to be clear that regime change is the objective of America’s involvement.
Indeed, Rubio went further than just supporting Obama in this particular endeavor. He declared that it was vital that Obama succeed, so as to preserve “credibility”—that is, the credibility that Obama would need to launch future endeavors. As journalist Hayes, clearly a Rubio fan, explained four years ago,
In an interview yesterday afternoon, Rubio said that failing to remove Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, after Obama publicly called for him to go, would have grave consequences for America’s reputation in the region and in the world.
Although Obama, with the help of Rubio’s cheerleading, was successful in removing Qaddafi, as we know, the overall mission in Libya has not been so successful; the country has been in chaos ever since Qaddafi’s death. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the 2012 assassination of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi is the direct result of the Obama-Rubio intervention.
So why would Rubio be such a strong supporter of Obama on a key foreign-policy issue? That’s a good question, especially since Rubio is now running for president on a mostly anti-Obama platform.
So yes, by all means, let’s drill down on the question of how Rubio can support Obama so much on critical policy, even as he opposes him politically. We can ask: How does Rubio, in his own mind, make sense of that split?
The answer comes from a deep ideological current in American foreign policy, of which Rubio is a vital part. And this ideological current, as we shall see, elevates bipartisanship to near fetish-like status. Moreover, this current oftentimes seeks to subordinate, even ignore, America’s national interest—in favor, we might say, of abstract and arcane intellectual ideals. We will detail this ideology in Section II.
But first, another quote-quiz. Who said this, on December 5, about ISIS?
We will utterly destroy ISIS. We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. . . . We will do everything necessary so that every militant on the face of the earth will know if you go and join ISIS, if you wage jihad and declare war on America, you are signing your death warrant.
Who said that? Was it a) Donald Trump? Or b) the head of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command? Or c) Bill O’Reilly, or some other tough-talker on Fox News?
Nope, it was d) Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)97%
, campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa.
Thus we can see the contrast: While Rubio was talking about supporting Obama on a complicated mission that seemed—and seems—dubious to most Americans, Cruz was saying something much simpler: Kill the bad guys.
Indeed, Cruz is quite capable of expressing himself in such blunt terms. Yet, as we know, he is no simpleton: Once a national-champion debater, he went to Princeton and Harvard, and law-clerked for the Chief Justice of the United States, William Rehnquist. So his simple words represent a great deal of complicated thought; he, too, can cite a distinct political tradition, which we will come to in Section III.
So yes, we can marvel at the difference between Rubio and Cruz, even as we note their similarities: Both are Cuban-American first-term senators from the Sunbelt, both are 44 years old, and both are smart men. Indeed, both are uniquely articulate advocates for their very divergent foreign-policy traditions.
Rubio, as we shall see in the next section, is a passionate and devoted exponent of the well-established foreign-policy school known as Wilsonianism, which traces its origins back to our 28th President, Woodrow Wilson, who served from 1913 to 1921.
And Cruz, as we shall see in the third section, is an equally passionate and devoted exponent of a much less well-known foreign-policy school, Jacksonianism, which can be linked to our 7th President, Andrew Jackson, who served from 1829 to 1837.
The differences between the two men, Rubio and Cruz, are important, and they deserve our close attention; they speak volumes about the difference in the way they would conduct foreign policy in the White House.
II The Wilsonian Tradition
When we say that Rubio is a Wilsonian, we are simply noting that he has chosen to identify himself with a tradition that emphasizes the high-minded but forceful application of American power around the world, often aimed at advancing democracy and human rights. Wilson was a Democrat and a progressive, but at the same time, he was nothing like, say, George McGovern; McGovern was virtually a pacifist. No, Wilson was not a dove at all—he was perfectly willing to use American military power to achieve his idealistic goals.
Yet Wilson, nevertheless, was an idealist. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he was a brilliant Ph.D. student, then a professor at Princeton, then president of Princeton University. And after a brief stopover as governor of New Jersey, he was elected president of the United States in 1912.
In the White House, Wilson set about improving the world. He launched a series of armed interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean; as he declared in 1913, “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” That turned out to be an impossible mission, but his supporters admired and revered him for his devotion to duty as he saw it—even as critics derided him as a messianic zealot.
Yet the signature aspect of Wilson’s presidency, and of Wilsonianism as we know it today, was a seeming twist on the use of American power: We should use force, but we should not cheer for it, nor wave the flag on its behalf. And that’s what distinguishes Wilsonianism from plain old patriotic nationalism; that’s what makes it so counter-intuitive to Americans. Indeed, this element of Wilsonian policy was, and is, deeply confusing to the average American. Nevertheless, for nearly a century now, leading American intellectuals have loved it—perhaps, in its disdain for traditional patriotic trappings, because it is so different from conventional thinking.
Indeed, we can observe that Wilsonianism, shorn of traditional patriotism, even during wartime, is deeply appealing to elites, here and around the world. That is, the class that is normally embarrassed by patriotic displays usually loves Wilsonianism—because it seems to be higher, more cerebral, more intellectual. Without a doubt, Wilsonianism has snob-appeal.
Yet the yawning gap between elite Wilsonianism and mass-appeal patriotism can make Wilsonianism problematic politically.
The ordinary American, for example, might think that it’s a good idea for the US to win its wars and that it’s an equally good idea to rally ‘round the flag in wartime. Yet Wilsonians tend to have a different view. Back in 1917, President Wilson offered this curious articulation of US war aims in World War One: Yes, America should fight against the Kaiser, and yes, the goal was a military triumph—but the ultimate goal, Wilson told Congress and the country, was “peace without victory.” In other words, American doughboys should fight and die in France, but they shouldn’t savor the patriotic and nationalistic pleasures of such victory.
Yes, you read that right: Wilson wanted to win, but he didn’t want Americans to feel triumphant. He felt that excessive nationalism here in the US would make it harder to build the post-war multilateral peace that he hoped to achieve with the League of Nations, the forerunner to the United Nations.
Wilson’s vision was noble, many thought. And the president himself was astonishingly articulate and erudite. Moreover, he was acutely conscious of doing the right thing, as he saw it. He once said, “Tell me what is right and I will fight for it.” But of course, most of the time, Wilson already knew what was right, or at least he thought he did. And that’s one more reason why his adherents love him: To this day, he epitomizes the I’d-rather-be-right-than-popular spirit that animates many intellectuals.
And so, in the minds of his brainy supporters, it didn’t really matter that the average American didn’t quite get Wilsonianism; indeed, public confusion about Wilsonianism was something of a badge of honor—that is, proof that the Wilsonians were a higher species than mere Americans and their “boorish” values and folkways.
And yet because Wilsonianism was so difficult for the masses to comprehend, it wasn’t particularly popular. As noted here at Breitbart, Wilson’s idealistic vision foundered on the rocks of reality; in the 1918 midterm elections, just days before the Allied victory in the Great War, the opposition Republicans won the Congress, turning out Wilson’s Democrats. And in 1919-20, the roof caved in on the Wilson administration and its grand plans for a new architecture of international organizations.
Yet even so, Wilsonianism has been a strong strain of foreign-policy thinking ever since; the elites seem perpetually entranced by the idea that they are leading America on some grand national mission, the full complexity of which only they can understand.
Nevertheless, even if the details of Wilsonianism are hard to understand, the broad outlines of the doctrine easily lend themselves to sweeping statement. President John F. Kennedy, for example, was an unabashed fan of his predecessor; his 1961 Inaugural address was ringingly Wilsonian, as when he famously declared,
We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
Kennedy’s warmed-over Wilsonianism quickly ran into difficulty in Vietnam, but even so, everybody knows JFK’s famous speech.
Meanwhile, over the last half-century, old-style Wilsonianism has easily blended with a newer dogma, “neoconservatism.”
The neoconservatives, too, are eager to use military force around the world, and they, too, tend to express their policy objectives in non-nationalistic terms. To the neocons, the key issue isn’t that America should win, it’s that America should be right.
And so it is right, for example, that America should advance democracy and freedom around the world. Yet, as we have seen, this emphasis on changing the hearts and minds of foreigners—that is, getting them to embrace democracy and freedom—is far more difficult than merely winning a war. If the goal is simply to kill the other guy, the US military can do that. But if the goal is to transform the thinking of the other guy, well, that’s not what they teach at West Point.
Yet once again, the neoconservatives tend to see American power in abstract terms that oftentimes skip over practical difficulties, including the matter of costs. And interestingly, not all neoconservatives are, in fact, conservative.
For example, in 1996, Bill Clinton’s future Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, challenged then-General Colin Powell to answer her question about the looming commitment of US ground troops, simply for the purpose of helping to liberate Muslims in Kosovo and the Balkans. “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about,” she asked Powell, “if we can’t use it?” In his memoir, Powell wrote that when he heard Albright’s words, he feared that he was going to have an “aneurysm”; “American GIs,” he added, “are not toy soldiers to be moved around on some global game board.”
Yes, Powell, who served two combat tours in Vietnam, had strong feelings about civilians who would over-use US troops in willy-nilly missions. In his mind, the only valid reason for using the US military was to protect the national interest—and he did not see the US national interest at risk in the former Yugoslavia. But Albright and her boss, President Bill Clinton, saw things differently; to them, helping the Muslims in Southern Europe was a wonderful idea.
Interestingly, back then, in the mid-90s, Albright and Clinton had the strong support of many prominent neoconservatives, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)36%
, the editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal, and William Kristol, publisher of The Weekly Standard—the publication that would later admiringly extoll Marco Rubio.
Again, thinking back to the Clinton administration’s Balkan intervention, we are reminded that Wilsonian neoconservatism typically transcends party, as well as patriotism. That is, Wilsonian goals—starting with saving the world—are seen as larger than any mere parochial concern.
So Bill Clinton, the former McGovernite, who actively avoided the draft during the Vietnam era, sprouted into a Wilsonian as president; one could even say he was sort of a neoconservative. In fact, one of the strengths of Wilsonian neoconservatism is that it has a left wing, as well as a right wing. So Bill Clinton was a left-wing neocon, and his successor in the White House, George W. Bush, was a right-wing neocon.
And of course, Bush, who fused his right-wing Wilsonianism with Christian zeal, was infinitely more energetic and ambitious for his ideas than Clinton had been.
Indeed, after 9/11, Bush seemed to think he had a God-given chance to remake the world. And so, as a savvy politician, he was willing to play somewhat to nationalist passions in the wake of the attacks on America; yet ultimately, his Wilsonianism got the best of him. And as a result, he himself chose to communicate in the abstract language of Wilsonianism, fortified with his own born-again Christian theology.
So, on September 17, 2001, Bush assured Americans that “Islam is peace.” Those words must have been confusing to ordinary Americans, who knew that, just six days earlier, Islamic radicals had killed 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
So as a result, as was the case with Wilson nearly a century before, Bush was perfectly willing to send Americans to fight and die for fuzzy abstractions. We might note, in contrast, that during World War Two, Admiral Halsey had told his warriors in the Pacific, “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs”; those were not politically correct words, but they encouraged our fighting men to kill, and thus defeat, the enemy. On the other hand, Bush was making the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan much harder: The mission was never just to kill the enemy; instead, it was to win the enemy over to our way of thinking.
As Bush said in his second inaugural address in 2005, it wasn’t enough for America militarily to defeat the terrorists; instead, we had to bring the terrorists, or at least their societies, around to our point of view. As the re-elected president said:
The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
In other words, Bush was setting a high, even impossible, standard. Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan couldn’t just kill bad guys; instead, they had to fight to expand freedom. So US warriors, trained in the art of kinetic warfare, had, instead, to become warriors for polemic ideology. We can recall that neoconservative intellectuals, well versed in the fine points of argumentation, adored Bush’s message—although the average American still simply scratched his or her head.
Indeed, at the time, back in 2005, Peggy Noonan spoke for many when she published an opinion piece, bluntly titled, “Way Too Much God.” If Noonan, a devout Catholic and one of the more visible champions of religion in the public square, thought that Bush had gotten carried away—well, she undoubtedly spoke for most Americans. Here’s how she put it:
The administration’s approach to history is at odds with what has been described by a communications adviser to the president as the “reality-based community.” A dumb phrase, but not a dumb thought: He meant that the administration sees history as dynamic and changeable, not static and impervious to redirection or improvement. That is the Bush administration way, and it happens to be realistic: History is dynamic and changeable, not static and impervious to redirection or improvement. . . . On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government. This world is not heaven.
No, the world is not heaven. And in fact, it’s heresy to think that this world can be made perfect. But Bush, suffering from what Noonan called “mission inebriation”—her play on “mission creep”—had lost his once-sound perspective.
Thus the American people felt they had no choice but to restrain Bush’s remake-the-world impulses at the ballot box. And so in the 2006 midterm elections, voters put the Democrats back in charge of the House and Senate, and in 2008, they gave the Democrats another big victory in Congress, as well as dramatically awarding the White House to Barack Obama. With the benefit of hindsight, we might say that the voters made a mistake with Obama, but at the time, in their defense, Obama was an unknown, and Bush—and his anointed would-be successor, John McCain—were all too well known.
So George W. Bush’s right-wing Wilsonianism, or neoconservatism—like Woodrow Wilson’s left-wing Wilsonianism nine decades earlier—was soundly rejected at the polls.
Yet, as Obama has proven to be such a huge failure, we can observe that Bush 43 has made something of a comeback. Indeed, in contrast to the foreign-policy mess that we have now, even Bush’s neocon Wilsonianism has started to look pretty good.
In fact, given that the neocons, as a group, are not only highly academically credentialed, but also wealthy, we can see why an ambitious fellow such as Rubio would seek to come climbing onto their bandwagon.
So Rubio might think that he has chosen well. In embracing Wilsonian neoconservatism, he instantly found his speeches lauded by neocon pundits, and his campaign coffers filled by neocon donors—so what’s not to like?
As a result, Rubio was soon positioned as the Great Neocon Hope for the next presidential election. On October 6, 2014, National Review’s Eliana Johnson published an important piece, entitled, “The Neocons Return: Meet their 2016 candidate, Marco Rubio.” And there, big as life, was a picture of Rubio. As Johnson wrote,
Since his election four years ago, the first-term senator has consistently articulated a robust internationalist position closest to that of George W. Bush.
She added:
Rubio’s views are strikingly similar to those that guided George W. Bush as he began navigating the post-9/11 world.
So of course, Rubio supported Obama and Hillary on Libya and Syria. Wilson, too, as well as Bush 43, would have done no less.
Yet we can observe that one of the problems of Wilsonianism/neoconservatism is that in its ideological enthusiasm for remaking the world, it tends to be oblivious to such “small” issues as homeland security and border security. That is, in the minds of the Wilsonians, we should think macro, not micro. Up there in the Olympian heights, the best and the brightest should think about solving the world’s problems, not just tending to America’s little garden.
So yes, in the big-thinking minds of the Wilsonians, traditional American nationalism must yield to high-brow internationalism. After all, the thought-process seems to be, how can one let oneself get lost in the weeds of mere national self-interest, when the fate of the world is at stake?
Thus we come to a vital tool in the Wilsonian “arsenal”: immigration.
To the Wilsonian neocons, immigration to the US is indeed crucial. That is, if the issue is saving the world—and it always is—then part of the save-the-world plan means accommodating, and welcoming, refugee flows.
Yes, refugees from Somalia, Syria, anywhere—they all must come here, so that the US can “show leadership.” That is, we must take immigrants by the thousands, even millions, as a way of pointing other countries, as well, to the virtuous path. And in this way, the Wilsonian thinking goes, America will save the world.
Thus it should come as no surprise that National Review’s Johnson reports that one of Rubio’s mentors is former Bush 43 national-security adviser Stephen Hadley. In the White House, Hadley was a champion of open borders, and just recently, he signed a letter with 19 other foreign policy savants, from both parties, calling for the US to take in Syrian refugees.
Hadley and his fellow Wilsonians seem unable to come to grips with the nagging reality that Uncle Sam does a relentlessly poor job at “vetting.” As The New York Times reported on Saturday, Tafsheen Malik, one-half of the San Bernardino shooting couple, was open about her Islamic zealotry on social media. Yet even so, she passed no fewer than three “background checks.” Most likely, Hadley & Co. don’t really care about background checks: Yes, there will be some tragedies inflicted on Americans as a result of mass immigration, but the internationalist foreign-policy experts see a “greater good” that transcends mere Americans and their petty preoccupation with not getting shot.
In addition, the Wilsonians, always seeking to advance their doctrine of remaking the world, tend to have another troublesome blind spot: To them, concerns over national character and identity are just so much benighted “oldthink.”
That is, as a matter of ideology, the neoconservatives just can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that one culture is different from another culture, and thus, maybe, they shouldn’t be blended together suddenly, as happens with a huge refugee influx. Indeed, that happens to be common sense to traditional conservatives, but to the neoconservatives, well, such thinking is not allowed.
Here we might pause to note that such “post-nationalist” thinking is one reason why the Wilsonian neoconservatives tend to retain substantial support from the political left; as noted, there are left-neocons, as well as right-neocons.
Many progressives, in other words, admire the Wilsonians for their willingness to forsake the normal trappings of conservatism, such as national security and national sovereignty. In the minds of liberals, if the Wilsonians are willing to abandon patriotism and the the preservation of national identity, then they can’t be all bad.
And that’s a further reason why open borders is such a key element of neoconservative thinking: It unites the parties.
We might recall that George W. Bush was a champion of “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka, “amnesty.” Today, leading neocons, including McCain and his senatorial colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)38%
of South Carolina, are staunch supporters not only of expanded refugee programs, but also of “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka, “amnesty.”
And that’s why critics have summed up neocon policy as, “Invade the world/ Invite the world.”
But of course, the neocons would never let a low variable such as public opinion get in the way of their grand plan.
And so, in keeping with state-of-the-art Wilsonian thinking, back in 2013, Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the “Gang of Eight” immigration reform, alongside such prominent Democrats as Sen. Chuck Schumer.
And although Rubio has supposedly backed off from the idea over the last two years, asBreitbart’s Julia Hahn has noted, the Florida Senator continues to push Gang of Eight talking points. Indeed, it’s perfectly fair to say that, were he to be elected president, he would resume the push for “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka, “amnesty.”
Indeed, Rubio has never stopped seeking to advance Wilsonian causes. Here, for example, is Rubio looking for new places to give away foreign aid money, in a speech to the liberal Brookings Institution on April 25, 2012:
In every region of the world, we should always search for ways to use U.S. aid and humanitarian assistance to strengthen our influence, the effectiveness of our leadership, and the service of our interests and ideals.
And just two months later, in June 2012, Rubio expressed his strong support for Obama’s Syria policy, which was indeed a half-hearted attempt to replicate the Libya coup. In his favorite publication, The Wall Street Journal, under the bold headline, “Assad’s Fall Is In America’s Interests,” Rubio wrote,
Empowering and supporting Syria’s opposition today will give us our best chance of influencing it tomorrow, to ensure that revenge killings are rare in a post-Assad Syria and that a new government follows a moderate foreign policy.
Of course, some have said that the Wilsonians are now biting off more than they can chew. One observer here at Breitbart has noted that the Wilsonians don’t seem disciplined when it comes to limiting American commitments. In other words, is it really possible that the US, with about 21 percent of the world’s economic output, and with less than five percent of the world’s population, can really do it all? The Breitbart author mocked the left-Wilsonians of the Obama administration for their attempted five-way containment:
So there we have it: the Quintuple Containment: The US seeking to contain Russia, China, Iran, terror, and the equally dreaded threat of climate change.
We might note that the right-Wilsonians of the Republican Party are more limited in their ambitions; they mostly disdain “climate change.” So for them, America need undertake only a quadruple containment, albeit with more military force applied to each of the remaining four objectives.
And yet we would do well to remember that Wilsonians of both stripes, right and left, put a huge premium on bipartisanship—so who can say for sure that Republican neocons, after all, wouldn’t yet be sucked into a deal on that fifth “threat,” namely “climate change”?
Again, we must remember that bipartisanship is a siren song to Wilsonians. That’s one reason why, for example, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, was such a hero to Republicans. Toward the end of his career, Lieberman was really a “DINO”—Democrat In Name Only—yet even so, Wilsonian neocon Republicans, hungering always for bipartisan cred, continued to trumpet Lieberman as a D.
Thus, because bipartisanship is so important to the neoconservatives, one can never say that Republican Wilsonians wouldn’t be interested, after all, in a “climate change” deal if they thought it would bring in Democratic support on other policy objectives. And by the same token, Democratic Wilsonians, who are totally obsessed with “climate change,” might find themselves supporting wars they wouldn’t otherwise support—if it could mean “building bridges” with Republican Wilsonians on stopping CO2.
Indeed, such bridge-building was the subtext of a remarkable joint opinion piece in the December 9 Politico, co-signed by Danielle Pletka, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, and Brian Katulis, a liberal at the Center for American Progress. In the piece, Pletka and Katulis, good Wilsonians both, lamented the “worrisome bipartisan crisis of U.S. leadership in the world.” And so the two, one on the left, one on the right, proposed to fix that policy gap, with a plan for collaborative action, starting with the US taking in more—many more—refugees. As Pletka and Katulis wrote, in words that must be cheering to the next Tafsheen Malik who wishes to come here and kill Americans,
Calls to close America’s doors to refugees risk undermining who we are as a nation. Instead of slipping into fearful isolationism, Republicans and Democrats should dedicate their efforts to enhancing the background checks on refugees fleeing conflict. This is eminently doable, and there is ample room for the Obama administration to negotiate a reliable system with Congressional leaders. At minimum, we should strive to achieve the Obama administration’s target goal of admitting 10,000 refugees from Syria in the next fiscal year.
And then, Pletka and Katulis added the usual ringing Wilsonian rhetoric:
Why do it? Because we are the richest and freest country in the world. If we lack the moral fortitude to dedicate resources to screen and admit those fleeing the horror of war, we cannot ask other countries to do the same.
That’s Wilsonianism for you: The national interest must come in second to the international interest. And out of that fusion, left and right, it’s not hard to see that the left-Wilsonians could talk the right-Wilsonians into a deal on “climate change.” And so both kinds of Wilsonians would be pulling in the same harness, leading America to oppose all the world’s bad guys and solve all the world’s problems.
III. The Jacksonian Tradition
But of course, not everyone in America is a Wilsonian. There are other traditions, too, in US foreign policy. Two other traditions are Jeffersonian and Hamiltonianism. We can look quickly at both:
The Jeffersonian tradition, of course, is named after Thomas Jefferson, our Third President. It is, in a word, liberal: George McGovern, whom we met earlier, qualifies as a Jeffersonian. To be sure, an historical purist might say that the real Jefferson, in the White House, wasn’t so liberal; after all, he started West Point, defeated the Barbary Pirates, and doubled the size of the US with the Louisiana Purchase. And yet even so, his writings—mostly from the period before he became president—have deeply inspired liberals, libertarians, and other peaceniks. Today, one might be tempted to think of Obama as being in this category, although it would seem, perhaps, that he is too quick to order drone strikes to be a true Jeffersonian. So we might count Obama as a diffident and uncertain Wilsonian; he might seem hesitant and incompetent, although in the end, he is perfectly willing to kill to achieve his policy ends.
As for the Hamiltonian tradition, it comes to us from Alexander Hamilton, our first treasury secretary. The Hamiltonians were, and are, commerce-minded. So when President Coolidge said, “The business of America is business,” that was a great statement of the Hamiltonian credo. A Hamiltonian today, for example, would be strongly in favor of lower taxes, and would also would likely support the Ex-Im Bank. Yet even as Hamiltonianism enjoys a revival on, of all places, Broadway, it’s easy for critics to make fun of “money-grubbing” Hamiltonians. And so while Hamiltonianism has arguably been the default position of the United States throughout its history, it is usually submerged behind one of the other two traditions, Wilsonianism and Jeffersonianism.
So having identified three traditions—Wilsonianism, Jeffersonianism, and Hamiltonianism—we can now espy a fourth, Jacksonianism. If the first category, Wilsonianism, seems best to describe Marco Rubio, it’s this fourth category, Jacksonianism, that seems best to describe Ted Cruz.
So what is Jacksonianism? Although the impulse goes back centuries, the name itself traces only to 1999, when political scientist Walter Russell Mead laid it out in a 13,000-word article in The National Interest. Mead, at the time a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, outlined this fourth tradition, “a warrior tradition,” in honor of Andrew Jackson, our Seventh President, who served in the White House from 1829 to 1837.
Jackson was Scots-Irish, a people whom Mead accurately described as “hardy and warlike,” toughened by life on the frontier. Thus we might say that Jacksonianism is all about ferocity in war.
Just as Jackson himself gained personal power in the early 19th century, so did his “ism,” because, frankly, Jacksonianism is useful in winning wars. And we have had lots of wars that we had to win.
To illustrate the Jacksonian approach to war-fighting, Mead recalled a moment in World War Two in which US armed forces inflicted staggering civilian casualties on Japan—and this was before the A-bomb. As Mead notes, “In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids claimed the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civilians.” He zeroes in on one particular date:
On one night, that of March 9-10, 1945, 234 Superfortresses dropped 1,167 tons of incendiary bombs over downtown Tokyo; 83,793 Japanese bodies were found in the charred remains—a number greater than the 80,942 combat fatalities that the United States sustained in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined.
We can look back and ask: Were we too tough on the Japanese? And that’s a question that Jeffersonians, or Hamiltonians, or even Wilsonians, might ask—but not the Jacksonians. The Jacksonians weren’t the least bit apologetic; in their tough martial worldview, the Japanese needed killin’, and that was all there was to it. Our 34th President, Harry Truman, of Independence, Mo., the man who dropped the A-bomb on Japan, was a Jacksonian. And so it might not be a surprise that Truman was once the Presiding Judge (the equivalent of county executive) of Jackson County, Mo.—which was named, of course, after Andrew Jackson.
In his essay, Mead was moved to observe that this militarily tough tradition simply could not be ignored:
The American war record should make us think. An observer who thinks of American foreign policy only in terms of the commercial realism of the Hamiltonians, the crusading moralism of Wilsonian transcendentalists, and the supple pacifism of the principled but slippery Jeffersonians would be at a loss to account for American ruthlessness at war.
Indeed, surveying Andrew Jackson’s war record, we can see that he left a large impression in US history. Old Hickory, as he was called, was famously brave, famously effective, and famously ferocious—beating Indians and the British, both. His victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 was the greatest American victory in The War of 1812. And a century-and-a-half later, it was still being celebrated; in 1958, the country & western singer Johnny Horton released a Top-40 pop song about the battle.
So yes, even though Jackson, unlike Wilson, was neither a scholar nor a speechmaker, he nevertheless created a tradition. As Mead noted,
Once wars begin, a significant element of American public opinion supports waging them at the highest possible level of intensity. The devastating tactics of the wars against the Indians, General Sherman’s campaign of 1864-65, and the unprecedented aerial bombardments of World War II were all broadly popular in the United States. During both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, presidents came under intense pressure, not only from military leaders but also from public opinion, to hit the enemy with all available force in all available places.
And yet still, if the Jacksonian tradition is less known, well, there’s a reason for that—the Jacksonians aren’t writers:
A principal explanation of why Jacksonian politics are so poorly understood is that Jacksonianism is less an intellectual or political movement than an expression of the social, cultural and religious values of a large portion of the American public. And it is doubly obscure because it happens to be rooted in one of the portions of the public least represented in the media and the professoriat. Jacksonian America is a folk community with a strong sense of common values and common destiny; though periodically led by intellectually brilliant men—like Andrew Jackson himself—it is neither an ideology nor a self-conscious movement with a clear historical direction or political table of organization.
So Mead, himself from South Carolina, which was also Jackson’s home state, took it upon himself to identify the key elements of the “Jacksonian Code”: These were, honor, self-reliance, and military meritocracy. As Mead put it, Jacksonians enjoy “a love affair with weapons.” And oh yes, he concludes, “Finally, courage is the crowning and indispensable part of the Code.”
So we can see, clearly, that Jacksonianism is a good deal different from Wilsonianism; to quote Mead again:
Jacksonian patriotism is not a doctrine but an emotion, like love of one’s family. The nation is an extension of the family. Members of the American folk are bound together by history, culture and a common morality.
In other words, Jacksonianism, based on the ties that bind kith and kin, is light-years away from the austere abstractions of Wilsonianism.
Needless to say, the Jacksonian spirit is big in in places such as Houston—which happens to be Ted Cruz’s hometown.
So let’s talk more about Cruz. Yes, Cruz is an Ivy Leaguer—he went to Princeton, in fact, the same as Wilson—but then, not every Ivy Leaguer comes away with Ivy League values; we might note that Mead went to Yale, and yet he freely volunteers in his National Interest essay that he is a fan of the Jacksonians. Why? Because, as he says, it’s better to win wars than lose them. And Jacksonians, in their single-minded focus on killing the enemy, are good at winning.
And Cruz, too, has that same keep-it-simple spirit. Whereas the Wilsonians are all about trying to master the nuances of the Middle East—never mind that they have never come close to doing so—the Jacksonians see things in starker, and sharper, terms. As Cruz says of Syria,
Instead of getting in the middle of a civil war in Syria, where we don’t have a dog in the fight, our focus should be on killing ISIS.
Yes, when Cruz argues for killing ISIS, he is talking like a Jacksonian.
Let others worry about democracy and human rights and all that jazz; Cruz’s view is, if they need to killed, then they need to be killed. Otherwise, let’s not worry about them.
Indeed, Cruz doesn’t seem the least bit interested in bringing “democracy” to such benighted countries as Iraq or Syria. The Texan is obviously passionate about constitutional democracy for Americans, and for others who yearn for it, but unlike, say, Bush 43, he doesn’t seek to impose “democracy” on hostile peoples at gunpoint.
IV The Wilsonian vs. Jacksonian Tradition in 2016
So we can see the gap between Rubio and the Wilsonians, and Cruz and the Jacksonians. On the one side, Rubio is channeling neoconservatism; on the other side, Cruz is channeling Jacksonian Americanism.
To look at the matter more deeply, we might even say that the Wilsonian neoconservatives have a stubborn belief in the perfectibility of man, whereas, by contrast, the Jacksonians have the more orthodox Christian view: We live in a fallen world, and, as the philosophers say, out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Of course, other factors, too, are likely at play. For example, Marco Rubio’s campaign seems to be extraordinarily well-funded; he won the endorsement, for instance, of Paul Singer, the New York City-based billionaire who combines support for gay marriage, open borders, and Israel into one juicy check-writing package.
To be sure, Rubio is free to seek out support wherever he can, but others are equally free to criticize; in October, Donald Trump tweeted out a jeering reference to Rubio’s relationship to another one of the Republican Party’s biggest donors:
Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!
Of course, Rubio also has his ardent supporters. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example, is solidly in his corner. Yes, that page has made quite an ideological odyssey over the last few decades; in the 70s and 80s, when many believe it was at the height of its influence, the Journal edit page was virtually single-minded in its support for supply-side economics. Yet more recently, while still supporting free markets, it has become preoccupied with neoconservative foreign policy—which is great news for a neocon such as Rubio. Yet others have noticed this shift as well, and so the Journal’s impact has been diminished. As Cruz himself said recently, the Journal should change its name to “The Marco Rubio for President Newspaper.”
In fact, even outside of the Journal, the split between Rubio and Cruz has become evident. Under the headline, “Marco Rubio Gets Benghazi’d By Ted Cruz,” TalkingPointsMemo quoted Cruz as saying, “Senator Rubio emphatically supported Hillary Clinton in toppling [Muammar] Qaddafi in Libya. I think that made no sense.” Cruz added, “The terrorist attack that occurred in Benghazi was a direct result of that massive foreign policy blunder.”
Moreover, Cruz opened up on the Wilsonian neocons:
If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neocons, they have consistently mis-perceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.
As the late Sen. Strom Thurmond liked to say, that puts the hay down where the horse can get it.
Yet Cruz had more to say on the topic. As the Texan told Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle on December 11:
On foreign policy, Sen. Rubio’s foreign policy judgments have been consistently wrong. When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton made the decision to intervene in Libya, to topple Qaddafi, Sen. Rubio chose once again to stand with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. … And the result of that was that Libya was handed over to radical Islamic terrorists and is now a chaotic war zone of battling Islamists. And that is much, much worse for U.S. national security. The tragedy at Benghazi, four Americans murdered including the first American ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since the 1970s under Jimmy Carter, the tragedy of Benghazi was the direct result of the failed foreign policy in Libya that was championed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and supported by Marco Rubio.
To be sure, Rubio has his responses to Cruz, but the plain fact remains: Rubio supported Obama and Clinton on Libya. Moreover, Rubio supported Obama and Clinton on Syria, too. That’s what Wilsonians do: They support whoever is in charge, regardless of party, if the issue is the use of force to “do good” overseas.
And so, for example, we can fully expect that left-Wilsonians—for example, Brian Katulis, whom we cited earlier, in league with the right-Wilsonian Danielle Pletka—would happily support a President Rubio on some new round of foreign-policy adventurism. And as we already know, Katulis-type Democrats stand ready to support a President Rubio in the cause of opening up America’s border to new immigrants—including, one supposes, the next Tafsheen Malik.
So as we have seen, Rubio’s invade-the-world-invite-the-world ideology is perfectly consistent with the Wilsonian tradition.
What remains to be seen, however, is whether or not the Republican Party, which is increasingly enamored of Trump-Cruz-type Jacksonian Americanism, is interested in seeing the elite Wilsonian internationalists regain power—so that they can continue their mission of saving the world.
-
Very informative, historical piece - up to a point. A few observations:
1) The world is VERY different now than in Wilson's or Jackson's time. Someone living on the Tigris or Euphrates probably couldn't hurt us here, from there, back then.
2) An aside: Wilson was a TERRIBLE President for this country for other reasons, setting foreign policy aside.
3) We don't actually know how these candidates would govern by listening to their campaign positioning. I don't find Cruz' talk realistic, carpet bomb but not go further in ISIS land? And with Rubio in Libya for example, he might not have given the go-ahead after talking to his top generals. And he favored taking it to congress, which Hillary and Obama did not. That would also have changed the course of it. The view from the CinC chair is different than from the Senate or the sidelines. Reagan was considered trigger happy in the campaign and governed arguably the opposite, although he did boldly took us into Grenada to rescue ccp!
4) The differences between these two aren't that big. POnly at the margin do they seem to lean in the direction indicated.
5) The stronger we project strength with defense budgets, fleet restoration, nuclear triad, missile defense and real commitments made from the White House, the less we have to use them. See Reagan again, or the Teddy Roosevelt big stick. It is our Nobel prize winning, wavering apologist who escalated the violence with his politically motivated, ill-conceived withdrawal. It was Bill Clinton's expensing of the 'peace dividend' he inherited that was the governing climate while OBL planned 9/11.
6) This is admittedly a hit piece on Rubio. Those two wars in baseball were runners he left on base. Rubio's view is not the same as George W, BHO or HRC. Drawing those parallels shines a limited amount of light on a Rubio administration IMHO.
-
http://sofrep.com/45248/former-green-beret-muslims-not-enemy/#.VnIYkwYY1Ss.facebook
-
http://sofrep.com/45248/former-green-beret-muslims-not-enemy/#.VnIYkwYY1Ss.facebook
Ah, that explains why every muslim country is such a nice place to live.
-
Agree or disagree, the man has earned his right to an opinion.
-
"although he did boldly took us into Grenada to rescue ccp!"
Well it was really something to see supersonic jets missile over one end of island to the other end and disappear over the horizon in no more than a few seconds or another F16 (?) fly overhead and give us the back and forth wing tilt while we were waving from our little hillside.
At the same time however came the bombing of the barracks in Lebanon that saw many marines perish. One ex military tried to tell me he was there and when I asked how he survived he said he was "outside taking a leak".
While it sounds like quite a story I find out later he *may* be a teller of tales though it is possible.
But Reagan knew when to pull out and not dig a deeper hole.
-
As for the Navy Seal's opine in CD's post above I must suggest I have never ever heard anyone of repute say ALL Muslims are terrorists. So where does that come from? Like Santorum said not all Muslims are Jihadists but all Jihadists are Muslim. For Gods sake we all know that so where do these people come from to remind us this when pushing the left's agenda?
And yes the seal *fights* alongside some Muslims who have become his friends just as I *work* alongside many Muslims in healthcare who have become my friends (without fear of having my throat cut). So what does that prove?
He and they, ain't there fighting Jews or Christians or Buddhists, or Hindus.
They are fighting Muslims.
-
Forgive the nit, but a Green Beret, not a SEAL.
Anyway, yes he overstates, but in so doing perhaps he is a reflection. Is the part of what he says that is true present in all of our posts?
-
"Forgive the nit, but a Green Beret, not a SEAL."
No problem. Not all special forces are alike just like all Muslims are not alike.
-
How to crush ISIS
By Ralph PetersDecember 20, 2015 | 8:49pm
Why ISIS is still winning
An American president with no military experience, little grasp of history and an outdated mental map of the Middle East.
Obama today? Yes, but potentially a Republican next year.
Ideology isn’t a strategy, and sound bites don’t win wars. The Islamic State caliphate (ISIS) and its rivals can be annihilated, but only if we have a clear objective, a realistic assessment of the means needed to achieve it and — above all — a president with the vision, courage and fortitude to lead.
What will it take? Here are the requirements for a serious military effort (only a military approach will stop ISIS):
Congress must declare war.
Congress needs to face up to its constitutional responsibilities with a declaration of war against “the Islamic State, al Qaeda, their affiliates and imitators and their supporters, wherever they are found.” War is no longer restricted to state-on-state violence, nor should its conduct depend on a president’s whimsy.
Define the mission.
The goal should be the uncompromising destruction of violent jihadi organizations. It shouldn’t include the reconstruction of artificial borders imposed on the Middle East by long-dead Europeans. Don’t cling to doomed governments.
Say less, do more and keep secrets.
Don’t announce operations or troop deployments for domestic political advantage. In the jihadi World Series, our team has to show up unexpectedly. Crack down on Pentagon leaks.
Stop pretending that war can be waged gently.
Kill the enemy. Accept that there will be civilian casualties and collateral damage. Get the lawyers out of the targeting process and off the battlefield. Rules of engagement should empower our troops, not shield our enemies.
The morbid “humanitarianism” of the left ignores the proven principle that winning fast spares lives. As a result of our reluctance to fight promptly, powerfully and ruthlessly, there are now 300,000 dead in Syria, untold numbers dead in Iraq and rising body counts elsewhere, with millions of refugees. And because our enemies know that we don’t strike populated areas, they base themselves in crowded neighborhoods, guaranteeing more civilian deaths.
Concentrate on effects, not numbers.
Our obsession with troop numbers is political, not practical. In a global war against Islamist fanatics, the troop strength required for missions will fluctuate. A vital operation in one country might require a few dozen special operators for one night, while an operation in another might demand 30,000 troops for three months. Anyway, the resolve with which force is applied is far more important than numbers.
Accomplish the mission and leave.
No nation-building. No occupations-by-another-name. Go in, do the job, get out. If you have to go back and do the job again later on, that’s still cheaper in blood and treasure than hanging around. What are called for are old-fashioned punitive expeditions, not nation-building where there are no nations. Surprise them; slaughter them; leave.
Conventional forces must think unconventionally.
Our forces must become more agile and operate under more-austere conditions. More bullets, fewer bases, no Baskin-Robbins. Mobility, speed and firepower are crucial. Think cavalry, not constabulary; saddle bags, not shipping containers.
Hyperexpensive weapons can be the enemy within.
At present, we’ll use a million-dollar precision-guided munition to take out two low-level terrorists at a checkpoint. As a result, we’ve drained our arsenal. While this is good news for the defense industry, it exposes the fallacy of a weapons-procurement process that assumes a short, decisive war against a compliant enemy.
Don’t make fun of the Russians for using cheap bombs on easy targets. We should be doing it, too. And inexpensive, old-fashioned napalm would be poetic justice for apocalyptic jihadis who burn captives to death.
Choose allies for their utility, not from habit.
In the broken territories formerly known as Syria and Iraq, we need to support those whose interests converge with ours, while cutting our losses where our largesse only helps other enemies. That means tacitly backing a Kurdish state; accepting a new Sunni-Arab (but non-Islamist-extremist) state straddling the old border; and cutting all support for the Iranian-dominated Baghdad government President Obama’s incompetence facilitated.
From Libya to Afghanistan and Pakistan, we must not let ill-drawn lines on old maps tyrannize our foreign policy.
Presidential support of our military.
This is the most important factor of all. Our troops and their leaders need to know that their commander-in-chief won’t betray them based on spurious claims from the media or anti-war activist groups; that he won’t lose his courage and resolve when things get ugly; and that he’ll be our military’s advocate, not its adversary.
Of course, there are myriad practical details to be addressed, from basing rights and overflight issues to the conflicting goals of third parties, such as Iran or Russia. Even in lean operations, logistics rule. And our military must relearn how to fight and win, escaping the thrall of political correctness.
We can defeat ISIS, but first we have to stop defeating ourselves.
Ralph Peters is a retired US Army officer and the author, most recently, of “Valley of the Shadow.”
-
Trump has, in his usual inimitable and inchoate way, raised the possibility of a US-Russia alliance of convenience.
IMHO the notion is not completely devoid of its logic but presents some devilish problems in its details , , ,
Discuss?
-
Trump has, in his usual inimitable and inchoate way, raised the possibility of a US-Russia alliance of convenience.
IMHO the notion is not completely devoid of its logic but presents some devilish problems in its details , , ,
Discuss?
Iran is now (allegedly) returning Uranium to Russia. Even if that were true, someone please explain how that makes us safer.
-
Political leaders must consider whether big ships, small fleet strategy will protect U.S. given new security threats.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/01/06/us-navy-fleet-ship-size-aircraft-carriers-pournelle-column/78238004/
http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2015-07/deadly-future-littoral-sea-control
Or would people rather ponder Ted Cruz's mother's birth certificate and DT's tariffs this direction changing, national security election.
-
Deep implications here. Let us ponder this well.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-new-medieval-map-1452875514
-
Deep implications here. Let us ponder this well.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-new-medieval-map-1452875514
No. Let it burn. Time to pull our troops out and let Europe sink or swim.
-
Which of our presidential candidates thinks similarly to you in this regard?
-
Which of our presidential candidates thinks similarly to you in this regard?
No idea. It's a simple slogan, so it might pop up in Trump's stream of consciousness ramblings that pass for policy statements.
-
What Has and Has Not Changed Since the Arab Spring
Geopolitical Diary
January 26, 2016 | 03:34 GMT Text Size
Print
(Stratfor)
January tends to be an introspective month for the Arab world as the region reflects on the anniversaries of the 2011 Arab Spring, debating what has changed and, perhaps more important, what has not. Five years ago, public protests looked like they would not just change the face of many modern Arab states but fundamentally redefine the politics of the region.
And in some places they did, for better or worse. In countries such as Libya, Syria and Yemen, where popular protests attracted thousands, the Arab Spring left in its wake civil wars that continue to this day and could well endure as proxy battles for competing interests for some time to come. But the countries in which the protests actually began — Egypt and Tunisia — were untouched by the same level of violence that befell their neighbors in the region. Their stability is owed partly to the resilience of governments that only appeared to adopt democratic reform. Still, there are indications that these old and deeply entrenched governments will continue to face challenges to their power.
It does not take deep analysis to show how little actually changed within the power structures of Egypt and Tunisia. True, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali resigned his post as the president of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak did the same in Egypt. That they did so attests to how powerful the protests against them were. But current Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi was part of Ben Ali's administration, and current Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi was a trusted general in his country's powerful military council under Mubarak. Many current ministers and lawmakers in both countries hold similar jobs to the ones they held five years ago.
Part of the reason they were so successful in maintaining power was their willingness to bend — but not break — in the face of the demands of a post-Arab Spring environment. And now, the biggest threat to both governments is external security crises that threaten internal stability. Libyan unrest — rife with militias, factions of al Qaeda and the Islamic State — as well as power vacuums in Sinai, the Sahel, the Algerian mountains, and distant Iraq and Syria have led to attacks on Tunisian and Egyptian soil and have lured young Tunisians and Egyptians to the fight. Containing jihadist threats, which increasingly target important Tunisian and Egyptian tourism sites and security installations, is an important priority for Tunis and Cairo. Egypt has reinforced its security capabilities better than Tunisia has, partly because Tunisian security forces feel underpaid.
The issue of inadequate payment points to economic problems that will shake the foundations of both governments in different ways. Both countries have high youth unemployment rates, as well as rising costs of living. More than 60 percent of young graduates in Tunisia are unable to find work, and youth unemployment hovers at around 30 percent, even as overall unemployment has declined by 3 percent since 2011. In Egypt, youth unemployment is just over 40 percent.
Tunisian protests over the weekend took shape around the same urban centers that kicked off the Arab Spring in 2011, and cries for jobs echo the demands, word for word, made five years ago. Even police officers marched peacefully to the presidential palace in Carthage today, demanding a raise in pay, flanked by the presidential guard in solidarity. Amid these protests, Tunisia's leaders have asked for patience as they remind their constituents that security threats like the Islamic State could become worse if they do not curb unrest.
Just as important to how Egypt and Tunisia manage their economic issues is how they manage their political opposition parties. To maintain legitimacy among outspoken and politically galvanized citizens, Cairo and Tunis worked with opposition parties and Islamists in ways that were unthinkable — and illegal — before the Arab Spring. In Tunisia, the Islamist Ennahda party must work closely with the ruling Nidaa Tounes party if it is to achieve anything at all, something made clear by a closed-door agreement that helped both parties maintain their pre-eminence in Tunisia's volatile political environment. This deal may have compelled some stalwart Nidaa Tounes lawmakers to break from their party to form smaller coalitions recently, but it has also safeguarded Tunisia's political institutions — at least for now. These nascent coalitions could well undermine the relationship between Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes in the future.
The relationship between the Egyptian political establishment and its Islamist opposition, of course, fared much worse. The military council stood by as popular protests pushed out Mubarak as well as his son Gamal, whose ideas on economic reforms directly threatened its interests. It allowed Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi to take the blame for the country's economic and security crises, positioning itself as the saving grace for a large segment of the Egyptian elite unnerved by an Islamist presidency. The military leaders then sidelined the Muslim Brotherhood using the very same techniques it used under Mubarak. And yet Islamist political sentiment remains, and countries with a vested interest in Egyptian stability, including the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are concerned that for all its steadiness, Egypt is not quite as unshakable as it may appear.
Egyptian stability is of particular interest to Saudi Arabia, which has given Cairo loans, grants and energy provisions — in other words, the resources it needs to pacify its citizens. Saudi Arabia has traditionally regarded Islamist parties as threats to its own legitimacy, but Riyadh now realizes it must moderate its stance for the sake of greater regional security, since desired Sunni allies such as Turkey hold Islamist parties in high regard.
And for Egypt, today was an important test of the government's ability to maintain order — a test it appears to have passed, with minimal violence thanks to weeks of arrests leading up to today's commemoration of the Jan. 25 revolution. Perhaps with this milestone behind them, Egyptian leaders can relax on some issues, such as death sentences for certain Muslim Brotherhood members, that present obstacles to Egypt's warming ties with other Sunni states.
-
Opinions
Why is Israel so cautious on the Islamic State? A recent war game explains why.
David Ignatius
Let’s say Islamic State fighters attack an Israeli military patrol along the Syrian border. They try unsuccessfully to kidnap an Israeli soldier, and they kill four others. A Jordanian border post is hit, too, and the Islamic State proclaims it has control of Daraa province in southern Syria.
How do Israel and other key players respond? In a war game played here last week, they retaliated, but cautiously. The players representing Israel and Jordan wanted to avoid a pitched battle against the terrorists — they looked to the United States for leadership.
This simulation exercise was run by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) as part of its annual conference. The outcome illustrated the paradoxical reality of the conflict against the Islamic State: Israel and Jordan act with caution and restraint, hoping to avoid being drawn deeper into the chaotic Syrian war, even as the United States escalates its involvement.
"We all believe that keeping Israel out of the conflict is important," said Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion, a retired officer who served as head of the Israel Defense Forces' planning staff. He led the Israeli team in the simulation. In the war game, Israel retaliated for the killing of its soldiers but avoided major military operations.
Jordan, too, wanted to avoid escalation. The players representing Jordan didn’t want to send their own troops into Syria. They worried about refugees and terrorist sleeper cells inside Jordan. They hoped that the combined military power of Russia and the Syrian regime could suppress the conflict and evict the Islamic State from its foothold in southern Syria. They looked for U.S. leadership but weren’t sure it was dependable.
Which left the United States. Gen. John Allen, the retired Marine who until recently coordinated the US-led coalition's strategy against the Islamic State, played the American hand. The United States viewed Israeli and Jordanian security as a vital national interest, he said, and would send its warplanes to retaliate for any attacks on its allies. U.S. military involvement, in the simulation and in reality, is increasing — partly by default of others.
If you don't like this simulated version of the war, you may like real life even less. There’s growing consensus that the Islamic State poses a severe threat to regional and even international order; one senior former Israeli official described the conflict with the caliphate as "World War III." But most players still want to hold America’s coat while the United States does the bulk of the fighting.
A visit to Israeli military headquarters here confirmed that the war game was an accurate reflection of how Israeli military leaders see the conflict. Rather than attacking Islamic State forces along its northern and eastern borders, Israel pursues a policy of deterrence, containment and even quiet liaison, said a senior Israeli military official. He noted that if Israel wanted to mount an all-out ground attack on Islamic State forces in southern Syria and the Sinai Peninsula, it could wipe them out in three or four hours. "But what would happen the day after?" asked this Israeli military official. "Right now, we think it will be worse. So we try to deter them."
The Israelis don’t want to disturb a hornet's nest in taking on the Islamic State. Is a similarly measured option available to the United States? Most Israeli officials say no. They argue that the United States is a superpower, and that if it wants to maintain leadership in the region, it must lead the fight to roll back the Islamic State.
The theme of the INSS conference was that the rules of the game are changing in the Middle East. States are fragmenting; a self-proclaimed caliphate has taken deep roots in Syria and Iraq and now has a presence in many more countries around the world; a rising, still-revolutionary Iran is using proxy forces to destabilize nearly every Arab state; the old order embodied by the secular dynasties of the Mubaraks, Assads and Gaddafis is shattered.
Israelis disagree among themselves about nearly every political topic, but on the strategic picture, there is basic agreement: As the state system splinters in the Middle East, the instability in this region will be chronic, and it will persist for many years. Escaping this conflict will be impossible. So think carefully how you want to fight a war in what the senior Israeli military official called "the center of a centrifuge."
-
"They looked to the United States for leadership."
Sorry, that country has been fundamentally changed and no longer provides such things.
-
By Daniel Henninger
Jan. 27, 2016 7:00 p.m. ET
Some wonder how history will treat Barack Obama’s presidency. That depends on who writes the histories.
Secretary of State John Kerry’s account will fist-pump the Iran nuclear deal as the central foreign-policy event of the Obama presidency, a triumph for Western diplomacy.
But news photographs in recent weeks are producing a different history. These photos document the abject humiliation of the West by Iran. Americans who plan to vote in their presidential election should look hard at these photos, because the West’s direction after this will turn on the decisions they make.
The first photo is of a hallway in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, a repository of art dating to Western antiquity. Out of what the government of Italy called “respect” for the sensibilities of visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, the museum placed large white boxes over several nude sculptures, including a Venus created in the second century B.C.
Then, because Mr. Rouhani will not attend a meal that serves alcohol to anyone, the nominally Italian government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi declined to serve wine.
They did so for the same reason that beggars grub change in front of Rome’s churches. Freed by the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, Italy’s tin-cup businesses signed about a dozen deals with Mr. Rouhani this week, totaling $18 billion.
Members of the U.S. Navy recently detained by Iran before being released, in an image from Iran’s state-run media. ENLARGE
Members of the U.S. Navy recently detained by Iran before being released, in an image from Iran’s state-run media. Photo: Associated Press
The bowing and scraping to Mr. Rouhani continues this week as France and Germany sign more deals. This is not economic re-normalization. Rather than reform its weak, politically unstable economies, Europe is content to make itself a dependency of the aborning Iranian empire.
The second photo of Western submission depicts what appears to be a glee-filled meeting between the president of Iran and the leader of the world’s Catholics, Pope Francis, who gave Mr. Rouhani 40 minutes of his time.
The Vatican argues this is realpolitik by a pope trying to protect Christians in the Middle East by inducing Iran to play an “important role” in the peace process.
Set aside the “role” Iran has played in the death of a quarter-million Syrians and the refugees now destabilizing Europe. One still may ask: Why such public and jolly photo-ops with this person?
The U.S. State Department’s religious-freedom report says in 2014 Iran executed at least 24 individuals for the crime of moharebeh (enmity against God). And surely that understates the total killed.
The persecuted in Iran include Bahais, Sunni Muslims, Christians (notably evangelicals), Jews, Yarsanis and even Shia groups.
Mr. Rouhani is grinning in this photo because he knows these people can’t move Iran’s culture out of the 16th century.
The third photograph is of 10 sailors from the U.S. Navy who are kneeling in rows, hands on their heads, on the deck of an Iranian boat.
The Obama administration hasn’t provided an explanation for how this “deviation” and capture by Iran in the Persian Gulf happened.
Instead of outrage over Iran’s treatment of the sailors, Sec. Kerry praised the Iranians’ “cooperation and quick response.”
Cooperation? Iran humiliated the sailors by making them kneel in the style of an Islamic State execution ceremony and then humiliated the U.S. by releasing that photo.
Meeting in a congratulatory ceremony with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members who took the sailors, Iranian supremo Ayatollah Khamenei said, “This event should be considered God’s work.”
One is tempted to tip one’s hat to the Khamenei-Rouhani strategy team. Iran took the West’s measure with its nuclear brinkmanship and the West bent.
Some may say the Italians are the Italians, the pope has his reasons, and Barack Obama and John Kerry are just finishing their apology tour. But that understates the long series of political compromises and cultural surrenders that have brought the U.S. and Europe to this point.
Italy’s repudiation of its own heritage to accommodate Iran’s president is a significant symbolic event. The Capitoline’s Venus isn’t just a naked lady carved out of marble. Just as the naked man and woman in Masaccio’s “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden,” painted in 1423 at the dawn of the Renaissance, are hardly figure studies.
In her recently published book arguing a relationship between the Western artistic legacy and democratic evolution, “David’s Sling,” Victoria Gardner Coates says these works “are not isolated aesthetic objects; part of their value as historical evidence derives from their role in the public life of the communities that produced them.”
Unless that public life is forgotten. Western schools may no longer teach the Battle of Thermopylae, but one may assume Hassan Rouhani knows the details of Persia’s historic loss to brave Greece in 480 B.C. as if it were yesterday.
Putting a white box over a Venus to placate a Rouhani is a loss in the Persians’ return trip to the West.
-
*****He noted that if Israel wanted to mount an all-out ground attack on Islamic State forces in southern Syria and the Sinai Peninsula, it could wipe them out in three or four hours. "But what would happen the day after?" asked this Israeli military official. "Right now, we think it will be worse. So we try to deter them."*****
Amazing how these guys with some WW2 type of military equipment can cancel out all the military technology of the West. Can wipe them out in Southern Syria and Sinai in a couple of hours but because of uncertainty about what is next - do nothing.
****The Israelis don’t want to disturb a hornet's nest in taking on the Islamic State. Is a similarly measured option available to the United States? Most Israeli officials say no. They argue that the United States is a superpower, and that if it wants to maintain leadership in the region, it must lead the fight to roll back the Islamic State.****
So what is the US going to do to roll back the Islamic State that would not disturb the "hornet's nest".
Amazing how guerrilla warfare brings us to our needs. We are the most powerful military power in world history and yet we aren't. We still cower because of fear of collateral damage, fear of bad press, fear of reprisals, and worry about what may happen next. We may as well be the Jamaican military. Then at least no one would expect anything. Better then expectations that never deliver.
-
If you believed America's longest war, in Afghanistan, was coming to an end, be advised: It is not.
Departing U.S. commander Gen. John Campbell says there will need to be U.S. boots on the ground "for years to come." Making good on President Obama's commitment to remove all U.S. forces by next January, said Campbell, "would put the whole mission at risk."
"Afghanistan has not achieved an enduring level of security and stability that justifies a reduction of our support. ... 2016 could be no better and possibly worse than 2015."
Translation: A U.S. withdrawal would risk a Taliban takeover with Kabul becoming the new Saigon and our Afghan friends massacred.
Fifteen years in, and we are stuck.
Nor is America about to end the next longest war in its history: Iraq. Defense Secretary Ash Carter plans to send units of the 101st Airborne back to Iraq to join the 4,000 Americans now fighting there,
"ISIS is a cancer," says Carter. After we cut out the "parent tumor" in Mosul and Raqqa, we will go after the smaller tumors across the Islamic world.
When can Mosul be retaken? "Certainly not this year," says the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart.
Vladimir Putin's plunge into the Syrian civil war with air power appears to have turned the tide in favor of Bashar Assad.
The "moderate" rebels are being driven out of Aleppo and tens of thousands of refugees are streaming toward the Turkish border.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is said to be enraged with the U.S. for collaborating with Syrian Kurds against ISIS and with Obama's failure to follow through on his dictate -- "Assad must go!"
There is thus no end in sight to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, nor to the U.S.-backed Saudi war in Yemen, where ISIS and al-Qaida have re-arisen in the chaos.
Indeed, the West is mulling over military intervention in Libya to crush ISIS there and halt the refugee flood into Europe.
Yet, despite America's being tied down in wars from the Maghreb to Afghanistan, not one of these wars were among the three greatest threats identified last summer by Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
"Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security" said Dunford, "If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I would have to point to Russia ... if you look at their behavior, it's nothing short of alarming."
Dunford agreed with John McCain that we ought to provide anti-tank weapons and artillery to Ukraine, for, without it, "they're not going to be able to protect themselves against Russian aggression."
But what would we do if Putin responded by sending Russian troops to occupy Mariupol and build a land bridge to Crimea? Send U.S. troops to retake Mariupol? Are we really ready to fight Russia?
The new forces NATO is moving into the Baltic suggests we are.
Undeniably, disputes have arisen between Russia, and Ukraine and Georgia which seceded in 1991, over territory. But, also undeniably, many Russians in the 14 nations that seceded, including the Baltic states, never wanted to leave and wish to rejoin Mother Russia.
How do these tribal and territorial conflicts in the far east of Europe so threaten us that U.S. generals are declaring that "Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security"?
Asked to name other threats to the United States, Gen. Dunford listed them in this order: China, North Korea, ISIS.
But while Beijing is involved in disputes with Hanoi over the Paracels, with the Philippines over the Spratlys, with Japan over the Senkakus -- almost all of these being uninhabited rocks and reefs -- how does China threaten the United States?
America is creeping ever closer to war with the other two great nuclear powers because we have made their quarrels our quarrels, though at issue are tracts and bits of land of no vital interest to us.
North Korea, which just tested another atomic device and long-range missile, is indeed a threat to us.
But why are U.S. forces still up the DMZ, 62 years after the Korean War? Is South Korea, with an economy 40 times that of the North and twice the population, incapable of defending itself?
Apparently slipping in the rankings as a threat to the United States is that runaway favorite of recent years, Iran.
Last fall, though, Sen. Ted Cruz reassured us that "the single biggest national security threat facing America right now is the threat of a nuclear Iran."
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded," wrote James Madison, "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
Perhaps Madison was wrong.
Otherwise, with no end to war on America's horizon, the prospect of this free republic enduring is, well, doubtful.
-
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2016/02/18/a-syrian-ghost-story-lessons-from-cardinal-richelieu/
A Syrian Ghost Story: Lessons from Cardinal Richelieu
The sketch reposted below first appeared in Asia Times in February 2012. In it, the ghost of Cardinal Richelieu explains balance of power and disequilibrium in the ethnic-patchwork states of the Middle East. I am informed via Ouija board that the Cardinal's analysis and recommendations remain the same.
"The Pont d'Alma," I told the taxi driver, and climbed into the back of the Citroen, balancing the big copper spittoon on one knee and the magnum of Chateau Petrus on the other.
"You are to meet someone, monsieur?," inquired the driver. He must have seen the waders under my trench coat. "Richelieu. Richelieu. Richelieu," I muttered. "That's the first time I hear someone ask for it in dactylic hexameter," the driver said. We pulled up in front of the entrance to the sewers of Paris at the Pont d'Alma - "the bridge of the soul".
Carefully I descended to the ninth level below the Seine. And 20th-century tiles gave way to 19th-century bricks and 18th-century stonework, through the malodorous filth of the ages, until I found myself in the secret ossarium of the Carthusian monks. So thick was the darkness that the beam from my small flashlight seemed to lose itself in the gloom. It could not have been cold, but I shivered uncontrollably. Pyramided skulls stared out like a theater audience.
With the spittoon planted into the muck at my feet, I broke the neck off the magnum and poured the fragrant Bordeaux into the copper receptacle. At once the ghosts appeared: A soldier in bloody armor carrying his head under one arm, the Can-Can chorus from Offenbach's Orpheus, a grisette whom death could not dissuade from flirting, clerks, cooks and clerics.
A sad-faced Jaures and a prim Clemenceau approached the spittoon, but Francois Mitterand bowed them aside. Brandishing the wine bottle's jagged neck, I fended them off until, at length, a pale figure appeared, a human form with the texture of a jellyfish. The others shrank away reverently as it knelt before the spittoon and inserted a gelatinous head, imbibing the wine until its translucent covering shone scarlet. It extracted its head from the spittoon with an ectoplasmic pop.
"Make it brief," said Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu. He looked rather like the portrait by Phillipe de Champaigne, but sounded like Maurice Chevalier.
"We are a bit confused about Syria," I began. "Its leader, Bashar al-Assad, is slaughtering his own people to suppress an uprising. And he is allied to Iran, which wants to acquire nuclear weapons and dominate the region. If we overthrow Assad, Sunni radicals will replace him, and take revenge on the Syrian minorities. And a radical Sunni government in Syria would ally itself with the Sunni minority next door in Iraq and make civil war more likely."
"I don't understand the question," Richelieu replied.
"Everyone is killing each other in Syria and some other places in the region, and the conflict might spread. What should we do about it?"
"How much does this cost you?"
"Nothing at all," I answered.
"Then let them kill each other as long as possible, which is to say for 30 years or so. Do you know," the ghastly Cardinal continued, "why really interesting wars last for 30 years? That has been true from the Peloponnesian War to my own century. First you kill the fathers, then you kill their sons. There aren't usually enough men left for a third iteration."
"We can't go around saying that," I remonstrated.
"I didn't say it, either," Richelieu replied. "But I managed to reduce the population of the German Empire by half in the space of a generation and make France the dominant land power in Europe for two centuries."
"Isn't there some way to stabilize these countries?" I asked.
Richelieu looked at me with what might have been contempt. "It is a simple exercise in logique. You had two Ba'athist states, one in Iraq and one in Syria. Both were ruled by minorities. The Assad family came from the Alawite minority Syria and oppressed the Sunnis, while Saddam Hussein came from the Sunni minority in Iraq and oppressed the Shi'ites.
"It is a matter of calculation - what today you would call game theory. If you compose a state from antagonistic elements to begin with, the rulers must come from one of the minorities. All the minorities will then feel safe, and the majority knows that there is a limit to how badly a minority can oppress a majority. That is why the Ba'ath Party regimes in Iraq and Syria - tyrannies founded on the same principle - were mirror images of each other."
"What happens if the majority rules?," I asked.
"The moment you introduce majority rule in the tribal world," the cardinal replied, "you destroy the natural equilibrium of oppression. The minorities have no recourse but to fight, perhaps to the death. In the case of Iraq, the presence of oil mitigates the problem. The Shi'ites have the oil, but the Sunnis want some of the revenue, and it is easier for the Shi'ites to share the revenue than to kill the Sunnis. On the other hand, the problem is exacerbated by the presence of an aggressive neighbor who also wants the oil."
"So civil war is more likely because of Iran?"
"Yes," said the shade, "and not only in Iraq. Without support from Iran, the Syrian Alawites - barely an eighth of the people - could not hope to crush the Sunnis. Iran will back Assad and the Alawites until the end, because if the Sunnis come to power in Syria, it will make it harder for Iran to suppress the Sunnis in Iraq. As I said, it is a matter of simple logic. Next time you visit, bring a second bottle of Petrus, and my friend Descartes will draw a diagram for you."
"So the best thing we can do to stabilize the region is to neutralize Iran?"
"Bingeaux!" Richelieu replied.
"But there are people in the United States, like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who say that attacking Iran would destabilize everything!"
"Such fools would not have lasted a week in my service," the cardinal sniffed. "Again, it is a matter of simple logic. If Iran's capacity to build nuclear weapons is removed by force, upon whom shall it avenge itself? No doubt its irregulars in Lebanon will shoot some missiles at Israel, but not so many as to provoke the Israelis to destroy Hezbollah. Iran might undertake acts of terrorism, but at the risk of fierce reprisals. Without nuclear weapons, Iran becomes a declining power with obsolete weapons and an indifferent conscript army."
Richelieu's shade already had lost some color. "What should the United States do in Syria?" I asked.
"As little as possible," he replied. "Some anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles from Gaddafi's stockpiles, enough to encourage the opposition and prevent Assad from crushing them, and without making it obvious who sent them."
"And what will become of Syria?"
The cardinal said sourly, "The same thing will happen to the present occupants of Syria that happened to the previous occupants: the Assyrians, and the Seleucids, and the Byzantines before them. You seem to think the Syrians are at existential risk because they are fighting to the death. On the contrary: they are fighting to the death because they were at existential risk before the first shot was fired. They have no oil. They do not even have water. They manufacture nothing. They cling to ancient hatred as a drowning man grasps a stone."
"Isn't there anything we can do about it?" I shouted.
But Richelieu had turned back into a cardinal-shaped jellyfish, and if he gave an answer, I could not hear it. As the he faded, the other ghosts crept out of the stonework and encircled me. Among them I recognized a miracle-working rabbi of Chelm, who screamed, "Spengler! What are you doing here, conjuring spirits of the dead?" I tried to say, "Rabbi, I don't eat here!" but my lips wouldn't move and my tongue burned. I woke up with an unspeakable hangover, next to an empty Armagnac bottle and a copy of the Weekly Standard.
-
Written by DBMA Group Leader Dog Tobias (around here known as "Big Dog")
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/defense/271901-70-years-later-churchills-speech-still-a-blueprint-for-national
http://history1900s.about.com/od/churchillwinston/a/Iron-Curtain.htm
Updated May 12, 2015.
Nine months after Sir Winston Churchill failed to be reelected as Britain's Prime Minister, Churchill traveled by train with President Harry Truman to make a speech. On March 5, 1946, at the request of Westminster College in the small Missouri town of Fulton (population of 7,000), Churchill gave his now famous "Iron Curtain" speech to a crowd of 40,000. In addition to accepting an honorary degree from the college, Churchill made one of his most famous post-war speeches.
In this speech, Churchill gave the very descriptive phrase that surprised the United States and Britain, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." Before this speech, the U.S. and Britain had been concerned with their own post-war economies and had remained extremely grateful for the Soviet Union's proactive role in ending World War II. It was Churchill's speech, which he titled "The Sinews of Peace," that changed the way the democratic West viewed the Communist East.
Though many people believe that Churchill coined the phrase "the iron curtain" during this speech, the term had actually been used for decades (including in several earlier letters from Churchill to Truman). Churchill's use of the phrase gave it wider circulation and made the phrase popularly recognized as the division of Europe into East and West.
Many people consider Churchill's "iron curtain speech" the beginning of the Cold War.
Below is Churchill's "The Sinews of Peace" speech, also commonly referred to as the "Iron Curtain" speech, in its entirety.
"The Sinews of Peace" by Winston Churchill
continue reading below our video
How Does Color Affect How You Feel?
Play
2:53
/
2:53
Fullscreen
I am glad to come to Westminster College this afternoon, and am complimented that you should give me a degree. The name "Westminster" is somehow familiar to me. I seem to have heard of it before. Indeed, it was at Westminster that I received a very large part of my education in politics, dialectic, rhetoric, and one or two other things. In fact we have both been educated at the same, or similar, or, at any rate, kindred establishments.
It is also an honour, perhaps almost unique, for a private visitor to be introduced to an academic audience by the President of the United States. Amid his heavy burdens, duties, and responsibilities - unsought but not recoiled from - the President has travelled a thousand miles to dignify and magnify our meeting here to-day and to give me an opportunity of addressing this kindred nation, as well as my own countrymen across the ocean, and perhaps some other countries too. The President has told you that it is his wish, as I am sure it is yours, that I should have full liberty to give my true and faithful counsel in these anxious and baffling times.
I shall certainly avail myself of this freedom, and feel the more right to do so because any private ambitions I may have cherished in my younger days have been satisfied beyond my wildest dreams. Let me, however, make it clear that I have no official mission or status of any kind, and that I speak only for myself. There is nothing here but what you see.
I can therefore allow my mind, with the experience of a lifetime, to play over the problems which beset us on the morrow of our absolute victory in arms, and to try to make sure with what strength I have that what has been gained with so much sacrifice and suffering shall be preserved for the future glory and safety of mankind.
The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. If you look around you, you must feel not only the sense of duty done but also you must feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining for both our countries. To reject it or ignore it or fritter it away will bring upon us all the long reproaches of the after-time. It is necessary that constancy of mind, persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision shall guide and rule the conduct of the English-speaking peoples in peace as they did in war. We must, and I believe we shall, prove ourselves equal to this severe requirement.
When American military men approach some serious situation they are wont to write at the head of their directive the words "over-all strategic concept." There is wisdom in this, as it leads to clarity of thought. What then is the over-all strategic concept which we should inscribe today? It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands. And here I speak particularly of the myriad cottage or apartment homes where the wage-earner strives amid the accidents and difficulties of life to guard his wife and children from privation and bring the family up in the fear of the Lord, or upon ethical conceptions which often play their potent part.
To give security to these countless homes, they must be shielded from the two giant marauders, war and tyranny. We all know the frightful disturbances in which the ordinary family is plunged when the curse of war swoops down upon the bread-winner and those for whom he works and contrives. The awful ruin of Europe, with all its vanished glories, and of large parts of Asia glares us in the eyes. When the designs of wicked men or the aggressive urge of mighty States dissolve over large areas the frame of civilised society, humble folk are confronted with difficulties with which they cannot cope. For them all is distorted, all is broken, even ground to pulp.
When I stand here this quiet afternoon I shudder to visualise what is actually happening to millions now and what is going to happen in this period when famine stalks the earth. None can compute what has been called "the unestimated sum of human pain." Our supreme task and duty is to guard the homes of the common people from the horrors and miseries of another war. We are all agreed on that.
Our American military colleagues, after having proclaimed their "over-all strategic concept" and computed available resources, always proceed to the next step - namely, the method. Here again there is widespread agreement. A world organisation has already been erected for the prime purpose of preventing war, UNO, the successor of the League of Nations, with the decisive addition of the United States and all that that means, is already at work. We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel. Before we cast away the solid assurances of national armaments for self-preservation we must be certain that our temple is built, not upon shifting sands or quagmires, but upon the rock. Anyone can see with his eyes open that our path will be difficult and also long, but if we persevere together as we did in the two world wars - though not, alas, in the interval between them - I cannot doubt that we shall achieve our common purpose in the end.
I have, however, a definite and practical proposal to make for action. Courts and magistrates may be set up but they cannot function without sheriffs and constables. The United Nations Organisation must immediately begin to be equipped with an international armed force. In such a matter we can only go step by step, but we must begin now. I propose that each of the Powers and States should be invited to delegate a certain number of air squadrons to the service of the world organisation. These squadrons would be trained and prepared in their own countries, but would move around in rotation from one country to another. They would wear the uniform of their own countries but with different badges. They would not be required to act against their own nation, but in other respects they would be directed by the world organisation. This might be started on a modest scale and would grow as confidence grew. I wished to see this done after the first world war, and I devoutly trust it may be done forthwith.
It would nevertheless be wrong and imprudent to entrust the secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb, which the United States, Great Britain, and Canada now share, to the world organisation, while it is still in its infancy. It would be criminal madness to cast it adrift in this still agitated and un-united world. No one in any country has slept less well in their beds because this knowledge and the method and the raw materials to apply it, are at present largely retained in American hands. I do not believe we should all have slept so soundly had the positions been reversed and if some Communist or neo-Fascist State monopolised for the time being these dread agencies. The fear of them alone might easily have been used to enforce totalitarian systems upon the free democratic world, with consequences appalling to human imagination. God has willed that this shall not be and we have at least a breathing space to set our house in order before this peril has to be encountered: and even then, if no effort is spared, we should still possess so formidable a superiority as to impose effective deterrents upon its employment, or threat of employment, by others. Ultimately, when the essential brotherhood of man is truly embodied and expressed in a world organisation with all the necessary practical safeguards to make it effective, these powers would naturally be confided to that world organisation.
Now I come to the second danger of these two marauders which threatens the cottage, the home, and the ordinary people - namely, tyranny. We cannot be blind to the fact that the liberties enjoyed by individual citizens throughout the British Empire are not valid in a considerable number of countries, some of which are very powerful. In these States control is enforced upon the common people by various kinds of all-embracing police governments. The power of the State is exercised without restraint, either by dictators or by compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police. It is not our duty at this time when difficulties are so numerous to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries which we have not conquered in war. But we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.
All this means that the people of any country have the right, and should have the power by constitutional action, by free unfettered elections, with secret ballot, to choose or change the character or form of government under which they dwell; that freedom of speech and thought should reign; that courts of justice, independent of the executive, unbiased by any party, should administer laws which have received the broad assent of large majorities or are consecrated by time and custom. Here are the title deeds of freedom which should lie in every cottage home. Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind. Let us preach what we practise - let us practise what we preach.
I have now stated the two great dangers which menace the homes of the people: War and Tyranny. I have not yet spoken of poverty and privation which are in many cases the prevailing anxiety. But if the dangers of war and tyranny are removed, there is no doubt that science and co-operation can bring in the next few years to the world, certainly in the next few decades newly taught in the sharpening school of war, an expansion of material well-being beyond anything that has yet occurred in human experience. Now, at this sad and breathless moment, we are plunged in the hunger and distress which are the aftermath of our stupendous struggle; but this will pass and may pass quickly, and there is no reason except human folly of sub-human crime which should deny to all the nations the inauguration and enjoyment of an age of plenty. I have often used words which I learned fifty years ago from a great Irish-American orator, a friend of mine, Mr. Bourke Cockran. "There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother; she will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace." So far I feel that we are in full agreement.
Now, while still pursuing the method of realising our overall strategic concept, I come to the crux of what I have travelled here to say. Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organisation will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States. This is no time for generalities, and I will venture to be precise. Fraternal association requires not only the growing friendship and mutual understanding between our two vast but kindred systems of society, but the continuance of the intimate relationship between our military advisers, leading to common study of potential dangers, the similarity of weapons and manuals of instructions, and to the interchange of officers and cadets at technical colleges. It should carry with it the continuance of the present facilities for mutual security by the joint use of all Naval and Air Force bases in the possession of either country all over the world. This would perhaps double the mobility of the American Navy and Air Force. It would greatly expand that of the British Empire Forces and it might well lead, if and as the world calms down, to important financial savings. Already we use together a large number of islands; more may well be entrusted to our joint care in the near future.
The United States has already a Permanent Defence Agreement with the Dominion of Canada, which is so devotedly attached to the British Commonwealth and Empire. This Agreement is more effective than many of those which have often been made under formal alliances. This principle should be extended to all British Commonwealths with full reciprocity. Thus, whatever happens, and thus only, shall we be secure ourselves and able to work together for the high and simple causes that are dear to us and bode no ill to any. Eventually there may come - I feel eventually there will come - the principle of common citizenship, but that we may be content to leave to destiny, whose outstretched arm many of us can already clearly see.
There is however an important question we must ask ourselves. Would a special relationship between the United States and the British Commonwealth be inconsistent with our over-riding loyalties to the World Organisation? I reply that, on the contrary, it is probably the only means by which that organisation will achieve its full stature and strength. There are already the special United States relations with Canada which I have just mentioned, and there are the special relations between the United States and the South American Republics. We British have our twenty years Treaty of Collaboration and Mutual Assistance with Soviet Russia. I agree with Mr. Bevin, the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, that it might well be a fifty years Treaty so far as we are concerned. We aim at nothing but mutual assistance and collaboration. The British have an alliance with Portugal unbroken since 1384, and which produced fruitful results at critical moments in the late war. None of these clash with the general interest of a world agreement, or a world organisation; on the contrary they help it. "In my father's house are many mansions." Special associations between members of the United Nations which have no aggressive point against any other country, which harbour no design incompatible with the Charter of the United Nations, far from being harmful, are beneficial and, as I believe, indispensable.
I spoke earlier of the Temple of Peace. Workmen from all countries must build that temple. If two of the workmen know each other particularly well and are old friends, if their families are inter-mingled, and if they have "faith in each other's purpose, hope in each other's future and charity towards each other's shortcomings" - to quote some good words I read here the other day - why cannot they work together at the common task as friends and partners? Why cannot they share their tools and thus increase each other's working powers? Indeed they must do so or else the temple may not be built, or, being built, it may collapse, and we shall all be proved again unteachable and have to go and try to learn again for a third time in a school of war, incomparably more rigorous than that from which we have just been released. The dark ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction. Beware, I say; time may be short. Do not let us take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late. If there is to be a fraternal association of the kind I have described, with all the extra strength and security which both our countries can derive from it, let us make sure that that great fact is known to the world, and that it plays its part in steadying and stabilising the foundations of peace. There is the path of wisdom. Prevention is better than cure.
A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies. I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin. There is deep sympathy and goodwill in Britain - and I doubt not here also - towards the peoples of all the Russias and a resolve to persevere through many differences and rebuffs in establishing lasting friendships. We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone - Greece with its immortal glories - is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.
Turkey and Persia are both profoundly alarmed and disturbed at the claims which are being made upon them and at the pressure being exerted by the Moscow Government. An attempt is being made by the Russians in Berlin to build up a quasi-Communist party in their zone of Occupied Germany by showing special favours to groups of left-wing German leaders. At the end of the fighting last June, the American and British Armies withdrew westwards, in accordance with an earlier agreement, to a depth at some points of 150 miles upon a front of nearly four hundred miles, in order to allow our Russian allies to occupy this vast expanse of territory which the Western Democracies had conquered.
If now the Soviet Government tries, by separate action, to build up a pro-Communist Germany in their areas, this will cause new serious difficulties in the British and American zones, and will give the defeated Germans the power of putting themselves up to auction between the Soviets and the Western Democracies. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts - and facts they are - this is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.
The safety of the world requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast. It is from the quarrels of the strong parent races in Europe that the world wars we have witnessed, or which occurred in former times, have sprung. Twice in our own lifetime we have seen the United States, against their wishes and their traditions, against arguments, the force of which it is impossible not to comprehend, drawn by irresistible forces, into these wars in time to secure the victory of the good cause, but only after frightful slaughter and devastation had occurred. Twice the United States has had to send several millions of its young men across the Atlantic to find the war; but now war can find any nation, wherever it may dwell between dusk and dawn. Surely we should work with conscious purpose for a grand pacification of Europe, within the structure of the United Nations and in accordance with its Charter. That I feel is an open cause of policy of very great importance.
In front of the iron curtain which lies across Europe are other causes for anxiety. In Italy the Communist Party is seriously hampered by having to support the Communist-trained Marshal Tito's claims to former Italian territory at the head of the Adriatic. Nevertheless the future of Italy hangs in the balance. Again one cannot imagine a regenerated Europe without a strong France. All my public life I have worked for a strong France and I never lost faith in her destiny, even in the darkest hours. I will not lose faith now. However, in a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist centre. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilisation. These are sombre facts for anyone to have to recite on the morrow of a victory gained by so much splendid comradeship in arms and in the cause of freedom and democracy; but we should be most unwise not to face them squarely while time remains.
The outlook is also anxious in the Far East and especially in Manchuria. The Agreement which was made at Yalta, to which I was a party, was extremely favourable to Soviet Russia, but it was made at a time when no one could say that the German war might not extend all through the summer and autumn of 1945 and when the Japanese war was expected to last for a further 18 months from the end of the German war. In this country you are all so well-informed about the Far East, and such devoted friends of China, that I do not need to expatiate on the situation there.
I have felt bound to portray the shadow which, alike in the west and in the east, falls upon the world. I was a high minister at the time of the Versailles Treaty and a close friend of Mr. Lloyd-George, who was the head of the British delegation at Versailles. I did not myself agree with many things that were done, but I have a very strong impression in my mind of that situation, and I find it painful to contrast it with that which prevails now. In those days there were high hopes and unbounded confidence that the wars were over, and that the League of Nations would become all-powerful. I do not see or feel that same confidence or even the same hopes in the haggard world at the present time.
On the other hand I repulse the idea that a new war is inevitable; still more that it is imminent. It is because I am sure that our fortunes are still in our own hands and that we hold the power to save the future, that I feel the duty to speak out now that I have the occasion and the opportunity to do so. I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. But what we have to consider here to-day while time remains, is the permanent prevention of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries. Our difficulties and dangers will not be removed by closing our eyes to them. They will not be removed by mere waiting to see what happens; nor will they be removed by a policy of appeasement. What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed, the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will become.
From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness. For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength. If the Western Democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter, their influence for furthering those principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them. If however they become divided or falter in their duty and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.
Last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honoured to-day; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again. This can only be achieved by reaching now, in 1946, a good understanding on all points with Russia under the general authority of the United Nations Organisation and by the maintenance of that good understanding through many peaceful years, by the world instrument, supported by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and all its connections. There is the solution which I respectfully offer to you in this Address to which I have given the title "The Sinews of Peace."
Let no man underrate the abiding power of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Because you see the 46 millions in our island harassed about their food supply, of which they only grow one half, even in war-time, or because we have difficulty in restarting our industries and export trade after six years of passionate war effort, do not suppose that we shall not come through these dark years of privation as we have come through the glorious years of agony, or that half a century from now, you will not see 70 or 80 millions of Britons spread about the world and united in defence of our traditions, our way of life, and of the world causes which you and we espouse. If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealths be added to that of the United States with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure. On the contrary, there will be an overwhelming assurance of security. If we adhere faithfully to the Charter of the United Nations and walk forward in sedate and sober strength seeking no one's land or treasure, seeking to lay no arbitrary control upon the thoughts of men; if all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association, the high-roads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time, but for a century to come.
* The text of Sir Winston Churchill's "The Sinews of Peace" speech is quoted in its entirety from Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 Volume VII: 1943-1949 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974) 7285-7293.
-
Posting this here as well as in the FUBAR thread:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/198060/what-the-us-is-doing-in-syria?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=5815d686f3-Sunday_March_6_20163_4_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-5815d686f3-207194629
BTW, I would note that Stratfor predicted that the US would come to ally with Iran, in effect is what has happened here.
-
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/198599/obama-foreign-policy?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=7b53e71c5e-Friday_March_18_20163_18_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-7b53e71c5e-207194629
-
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/198599/obama-foreign-policy?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=7b53e71c5e-Friday_March_18_20163_18_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-7b53e71c5e-207194629
Wow. Very tasty koolaid he's been drinking.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433056/foreign-policy-advice-next-president?utm_source=jolt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Jolt03222016&utm_term=Jolt
-
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/21/the-irony-of-obamian-history/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=Flashpoints
-
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/21/the-irony-of-obamian-history/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=Flashpoints
Incompetence and weakness as doctrine.
-
Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, said that if elected, he might halt purchases of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies unless they commit ground troops to the fight against the Islamic State or “substantially reimburse” the United States for combating the militant group, which threatens their stability.
“If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection,” Mr. Trump said during a 100-minute interview on foreign policy, spread over two phone calls on Friday, “I don’t think it would be around.”
He also said he would be open to allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals rather than depend on the American nuclear umbrella for their protection against North Korea and China. If the United States “keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway, with or without me discussing it,” Mr. Trump said.
And he said he would be willing to withdraw United States forces from both Japan and South Korea if they did not substantially increase their contributions to the costs of housing and feeding those troops. “Not happily, but the answer is yes,” he said.
Mr. Trump also said he would seek to renegotiate many fundamental treaties with American allies, possibly including a 56-year-old security pact with Japan, which he described as one-sided.
In Mr. Trump’s worldview, the United States has become a diluted power, and the main mechanism by which he would re-establish its central role in the world is economic bargaining. He approached almost every current international conflict through the prism of a negotiation, even when he was imprecise about the strategic goals he sought. He again faulted the Obama administration’s handling of the negotiations with Iran last year — “It would have been so much better if they had walked away a few times,” he said — but offered only one new idea about how he would change its content: Ban Iran’s trade with North Korea.
Mr. Trump struck similar themes when he discussed the future of NATO, which he called “unfair, economically, to us,” and said he was open to an alternative organization focused on counterterrorism. He argued that the best way to halt China’s placement of military airfields and antiaircraft batteries on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea was to threaten its access to American markets.
“We have tremendous economic power over China,” he argued. “And that’s the power of trade.” He made no mention of Beijing’s capability for economic retaliation.
“We will not be ripped off anymore. We’re going to be friendly with everybody, but we’re not going to be taken advantage of by anybody.”
Donald J. Trump, whose view of the world is “America First.” Read the edited transcript or just the highlights.
Mr. Trump’s views, as he explained them, fit nowhere into the recent history of the Republican Party: He is not in the internationalist camp of the elder President George Bush, nor does he favor George W. Bush’s call to make it the mission of the United States to spread democracy around the world. He agreed with a suggestion that his ideas might best be summed up as “America First.”
“Not isolationist, but I am America First,” he said. “I like the expression.” He said he was willing to reconsider traditional American alliances if partners were not willing to pay, in cash or troop commitments, for the presence of American forces around the world. “We will not be ripped off anymore,” he said.
In the past week, the bombings in Brussels and an accelerated war against the Islamic State have shifted the focus of the campaign trail conversation back to questions of how the candidates would defend the United States and what kind of diplomacy they would pursue around the world.
Mr. Trump explained his thoughts in concrete and easily digestible terms, but they appeared to reflect little consideration for potential consequences around the globe. Much the same way he treats political rivals and interviewers, he personalized how he would engage foreign nations, suggesting his approach would depend partly on “how friendly they’ve been toward us,” not just on national interests or alliances.
At no point did he express any belief that American forces deployed on military bases around the world were by themselves valuable to the United States, though Republican and Democratic administrations have for decades argued that they are essential to deterring military adventurism, protecting commerce and gathering intelligence.
Like Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Trump emphasized the importance of “unpredictability” for an American president, arguing that the country’s traditions of democracy and openness had made its actions too easy for adversaries and allies alike to foresee.
“I wouldn’t want them to know what my real thinking is,” he said about how far he was willing to take the confrontation over the islands in the South China Sea, which are remote and uninhabited but extend China’s control over a major maritime thoroughfare. But, he added, “I would use trade, absolutely, as a bargaining chip.”
Asked when he thought American power had been at its peak, Mr. Trump reached back 116 years to the turn of the 20th century, the era of another unconventional Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, who ended up leaving the party. His favorite figures in American history, he said, include two generals, Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton — though he insisted that, unlike MacArthur, he would not advocate the use of nuclear weapons except as a last resort. (He suggested that MacArthur had pressed during the Korean War to use atomic weapons against China as a means “to negotiate,” adding, “He played the nuclear card, but he didn’t use it.”)
“I wouldn’t want them to know what my real thinking is.”
Mr. Trump, who told us his thinking on foreign policy — up to a point. Read the edited transcript or just the highlights.
Mr. Trump denied that he had had trouble recruiting senior members of the foreign policy establishment to advise his campaign. “Many of them are tied up with contracts working for various networks,” he said, like Fox or CNN.
He disclosed the names of three advisers in addition to five he announced earlier in the week: retired Maj. Gen. Gary L. Harrell, Maj. Gen. Bert K. Mizusawa and retired Rear Adm. Charles R. Kubic. Asked about the briefings he receives and books he has read about foreign policy, he said his main source of information was newspapers, “including yours.”
Until recently, Mr. Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements have largely come through slogans: “Take the oil,” “Build a wall” and ban Muslim immigrants, at least temporarily. But as he has pulled closer to capturing the nomination, he has been called on to elaborate.
Pressed about his call to “take the oil” controlled by the Islamic State in the Middle East, Mr. Trump acknowledged that this would require deploying ground troops, something he does not favor. “We should’ve taken it, and we would’ve had it,” he said, referring to the years in which the United States occupied Iraq. “Now we have to destroy the oil.”
Mr. Trump did not rule out spying on American allies, including foreign leaders like Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, whose cellphone was apparently a target of the National Security Agency. President Obama said that the United States would no longer target her phone but made no such commitments about the rest of Germany, or Europe.
“I’m not sure that I would want to be talking about that,” Mr. Trump said. “You understand what I mean by that.”
Mr. Trump was not impressed with Ms. Merkel’s handling of the migrant crisis, however: “Germany is being destroyed by Merkel’s naïveté, or worse,” he said. He suggested that Germany and the Gulf nations should pay for the “safe zones” he wants to set up in Syria for refugees, and for protecting them once built.
Throughout the two conversations, Mr. Trump painted a bleak picture of the United States as a diminished force in the world, an opinion he has held since the late 1980s, when he placed ads in The New York Times and other newspapers calling for Japan and Saudi Arabia to spend more money on their own defense.
First Draft Newsletter
Subscribe for updates on the 2016 presidential race, the White House and Congress, delivered to your inbox Monday - Friday.
Mr. Trump’s new threat to cut off oil purchases from the Saudis was part of a broader complaint about the United States’ Arab allies, which many in the Obama administration share: that they frequently look to the United States to police the Middle East, without putting their own troops at risk. “We defend everybody,” Mr. Trump said. “When in doubt, come to the United States. We’ll defend you. In some cases free of charge.”
But his rationale for abandoning the region was that “the reason we’re in the Middle East is for oil, and all of a sudden we’re finding out that there’s less reason to be there now.” He made no mention of the risks of withdrawal — that it would encourage Iran to dominate the Gulf, that the presence of American troops is part of Israel’s defense, and that American air and naval bases in the region are key collection points for intelligence and bases for drones and Special Operations forces.
Mr. Trump seemed less comfortable on some topics than others. He called the United States “obsolete” in terms of cyberweaponry, although the nation’s capabilities are generally considered on the cutting edge.
In the morning interview, asked if he would seek a two-state or a one-state solution in a peace accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he said: “I’m not saying anything. What I’m going to do is, you know, I specifically don’t want to address the issue because I would love to see if a deal could be made.”
But in the evening, saying he had been rushed earlier, Mr. Trump reverted to a position he outlined on Monday before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group. “Basically, I support a two-state solution on Israel,” he said. “But the Palestinian Authority has to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”
In his discussion of nuclear weapons — which he said he had learned about from an uncle, John G. Trump, who served on the faculty of M.I.T. and died in 1985 — Mr. Trump seemed fixated on the large nuclear stockpiles amassed in the Cold War. While he referred briefly to North Korean and Pakistani arsenals, he said nothing about a danger that is a cause of great consternation among international leaders: small nuclear weapons that could be fashioned by terrorists.
In criticizing the Iran nuclear deal, Mr. Trump expressed particular outrage at how the roughly $150 billion released to Iran was being spent. “Did you notice they’re buying from everybody but the United States?” he said.
Told that sanctions under United States law still prevent most American companies from doing business with Iran, Mr. Trump said: “So, how stupid is that? We give them the money and we now say, ‘Go buy Airbus instead of Boeing,’ right?”
But Mr. Trump, who has been pushed to demonstrate a basic command of international affairs, insisted that voters should not doubt his foreign policy fluency.“I do know my subject,” he said.
-
Lots to like. I would pull all US troops out of Europe. No point in trying to protect a suicidal culture.
-
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/198721/age-of-the-godfathers?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=9acc8924f8-Sunday_March_27_20153_25_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-9acc8924f8-207194629
In mid-March 2016 the world marked five years since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria. The number of those killed in the fighting approached half a million. About 10 million Syrians, amounting to about half the population of the state, had lost their homes, and about 8 million had become refugees, fleeing abroad to neighboring Arab states, Turkey, and Europe. About three-quarters of Syria’s social and economic infrastructures—including the health, education, transportation, electricity, and water systems, oil and gas fields, and grain storage facilities—had been ruined or destroyed during the war.
Thus, nothing remains of the Syria over which Bashar al-Assad and his opponents began fighting. In the shadow of the ongoing bloodbath the Syrian state disintegrated into a series of semi-state entities: In eastern Syria and western Iraq the ISIS State (the Islamic Caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) emerged; in the west, in the remains of the original Syrian state, a kind of “Syria Minor,” the Assad dynasty remained and remains in control, enjoying Russian patronage and Iranian influence; in the east and north of the Syrian region there are autonomous Kurdish enclaves; and finally, stretching over large parts of northern Syria and in the south, there are enclaves controlled by various rebel groups—headed by the “Support Front for the People of the Syrian lands” (Al-Nusra Front, or Jabhat al-Nusra), an al-Qaida affiliate.
The fact that the civil war in Syria continues to rage and inflict an ever greater human tragedy on the country’s inhabitants is clear evidence of the impotence of the international community. It has not found the strength or the means to bring the bloody conflict to an end. It has shown even less capacity in the matter of punishing those responsible for the crimes committed during the fighting. For example, the international community failed to take action in response to the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons against its own people.
Nevertheless, in Syria and outside of it, indeed, all over the Middle East, during the five years of fighting hopeful eyes continued to be turned mainly to the United States, leader of the “free world” and defender of its values. After all, during the preceding decades it had been customary to consider the United States the “regional policeman,” whose job it was to ensure the region’s stability and protect human rights. But the United States did not come to the aid of Syria and the Syrian people. Rather, outside intervention came from Moscow, which took sides, not so surprisingly, with the Syrian dictator, Assad, whom many view as the main cause of the country’s tragedy. While Russia’s intrusion may lead to the intensification and spread of the violence, it also put Russia on the path to becoming the region’s new policeman, or perhaps its godfather. Furthermore, the situation makes manifest the end of American hegemony in the region, the so-called Pax Americana that endured for nearly a quarter of a century.
***
The Arab Spring that broke out in mid-winter 2010 aroused great hopes in Washington and other Western capitals for a better future for the region’s inhabitants. It turned out, however, to herald something much different. Not only did it turn into a blazing “Islamic Summer,” thanks to the emergence of ISIS, and not only did it wreak havoc on the whole region, but it also brought the era of American influence in the region to an inglorious and bloody end.
The era of Pax Americana has now been replaced by an era of renewed Cold War, even if in a modern version, a war in which Russia competes—with no competitors—for status and influence in the Middle East. Russia is acting on its own, but at the same time it is prepared to cooperate with local godfathers—like Iran and Hezbollah—all of them enemies of the United States and its friends in the region.
In 2009 President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Announcing the prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee declared: “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.” However, ironically, it turned out that during the Obama Administration more people have been killed in the Middle East and around the world than during the administrations of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who became the object of international obloquy for the wars he conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The number of terrorist attacks and the number of victims from them has also increased dramatically under Obama. This would seem to indicate that when the United States gets involved and uses its power in the world, the world becomes a more secure and stable place than it does when the United States retreats, disengages, or chooses to “lead from behind,” as it did in the spring 2011 Libyan affair.
Willy-nilly, Syria’s fate affects all the inhabitants of the region. This is due to the country’s historical and geographical centrality, which distinguish it from the other states that have recently experienced similar destructive and ruinous processes, like Libya and Yemen, or even Iraq and Somalia before them. All these states are located on the margins of the Arab world, and, unlike Syria, they never played any formative and central role in its historical and cultural development. What takes place in Syria can be seen as a kind of reflection of what is happening throughout the whole Middle East or a preview of what is likely to happen there in time. In this connection the following trends should be emphasized.
The first trend is the collapse of the Arab territorial nation states, for which Syria serves as an example and model. The Arab states that have collapsed have done so in the face of social and economic difficulties that their mostly dictatorial and corrupt ruling regimes were incapable of handling. The various states’ generally shaky and fragile national identities, whether Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, or Palestinian, as well as pan-Arab and territorial identities have been overwhelmed by ethnic, family, tribal, local regional, and, above all, Islamic identities. In many cases Islamic identity became the unifying glue and common ground, as proven by the Syrian case. There, groups of Islamic fighters, like the Support Front or ISIS, have managed to survive the war, while organizations working in the name of Syrian patriotism, like the Free Syrian Army, have collapsed and faded away.
The second trend is the collapse, as a direct result of the disintegration of the Arab states, of the regional system, in whose shadow the political and the social order in the region had lasted for the preceding one hundred years. The regional system based upon the Sykes-Picot agreements—which gave life, authority, and legitimacy to a number of Arab territorial states, most of which lacked historical roots and even legitimacy in the eyes of their inhabitants—has collapsed in the face of the disintegration of many of the states created, such as Libya, Iraq, and Syria. The collapse finds especially clear expression in the case of Syria, which is increasingly falling apart into its basic components. Thus, there is nothing surprising in the fact that ever since ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate of ISIS over the territories encompassed by Syria and Iraq, he has boasted that the establishment of this Caliphate amounts to tearing the Sykes-Picot agreements to shreds.
The third trend is that in many cases the collapse of the Arab states has led to the emergence of non-state actors, mostly terrorist organizations or violent groups having a tribal, communal, or Islamic religious identity. Examples of this are ISIS and the Support Front active in Syria and the groups of fighters operating in Libya and Somalia, as well as Hezbollah and Hamas that came on the scene even before them. In addition to the factors just named, the political vacuum that developed in the region served as an invitation to regional and international godfathers, like Iran, Turkey, and, of course, Russia, to enter the field. It is quite likely that Russia and Iran will gain dominance as they sample the muddy waters of the morass the new Middle East has become. Ironically perhaps, the determination and ability of these outsider states to use force without restraint or red lines gives some promise of enduring stability, at least in those areas of interest to them—even as it has dark implications for other areas around the world.
In the face of this gloomy situation, the absence of the United States is more conspicuous than ever. It is absent both as a major player guaranteeing regional stability and as an ally ready to help its partners and friends in the region, as the Obama Administration leans toward appeasing and reaching an agreement with the neighborhood bullies rather than confronting them and attempting to put them in their place.
The major Arab countries remaining intact are Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. In the absence of the United States they have been compelled to face various adversities and challenges at home and abroad on their own, and only with great difficulty have they been able to preserve their cohesiveness and meet the economic needs of their growing populations. Because these states now have very little confidence in Washington’s readiness to assist and protect them in times of crisis, they have become more inclined to resort to force. For example, Saudi Arabia, contrary to its custom in the past, has used force directly in Yemen, and indirectly in Syria as well, mainly because it no longer trusts its American backer.
Under the circumstances, one can expect the use of force and violence to become commonplace in the region—and since, so it seems, the use of chemical weapons in the war in Syria is no longer considered taboo, one can expect greater and greater use of non-conventional weapons. It goes without saying that the effort to acquire nuclear weapons, or at least nuclear capability, will also continue to expand from Iran to other players in the region.
The obvious result of all this is that the Middle East will become a permanently unstable region, subject to frequent convulsions and pervaded with violence and terrorism. It will become a hothouse for radical Islamic ideas and groups that will attract support among the population both within and outside the region.
The shock waves from the crisis in the Middle East have not stopped at the region’s geographical boundaries. Waves of refugees, which will only increase, are knocking on Europe’s gates, while radical Islamic ideology is seeping deeply into Muslim communities all over the world, especially in Europe, and even in the United States. As state frameworks disintegrated and chaos came to prevail in the region, the tide of migration found encouragement and rose sharply, and there is no basis for assuming that it will not continue to rise in the future.
Ironically, America’s withdrawal from playing a role in the Middle East did not save it from being criticized, both within and outside the region, as the main culprit responsible for the present crisis. This stems from the fact that the United States is perceived as the clearest manifestation of the West, and the West is perceived as being guilty of the original sins of imperialism and colonialism, and is therefore seen as the source of the region’s ills. It can be assumed that as the distress and crisis in the region intensify, the resentment of the West and the United States will increase. This being so, the United States is destined to discover what Israel discovered in Lebanon and Gaza: that it is possible to disengage from the Middle East, but the Middle East will not disengage from you
-
http://rightwingnews.com/column-2/debunking-8-anti-war-myths-about-the-conflict-in-iraq/
-
http://rightwingnews.com/column-2/debunking-8-anti-war-myths-about-the-conflict-in-iraq/
Since the media gets it wrong, the history books get it wrong. A lot went wrong in Iraq, but the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was not wrong, IMHO. The details of this are worth saving!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Debunking 8 Anti-War Myths About The Conflict In Iraq
John Hawkins, Jan, 2012
1) George Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.: This is a charge that has been repeated ad nauseum by opponents of the war, but the claim that Bush “lied” about stockpiles of WMDs doesn’t hold up to the least bit of scrutiny.
Once you understand one crucial fact, that: numerous prominent Democrats with access to intelligence data also openly declared and obviously believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, it becomes nearly impossible for a rational person to believe that Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq. We’re not talking about small fry or just proponents of the war either. The aforementioned Democrats include Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards, Robert Byrd, Henry Waxman, Tom Daschle, and Nancy Pelosi among many, many others. Just to hammer the point home, here’s a quote from the 800 pound gorilla of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, that was made on Oct 8, 2002:
“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.”
To believe that George Bush lied about WMDs is to believe that there is a vast conspiracy to lie about WMDs that goes to the highest level of both parties & that stretches across both the pro and anti-war movements.
It’s just not possible — and that’s before we even consider the numerous other pieces of exculpating evidence like: all the non-American intelligence agencies that also believed Saddam had WMDs, CIA Director George Tenet famously saying it was a: “‘slam-dunk’ that Hussein possessed the banned weapons”, the once secret: Downing Street Memo: which certainly proves that our allies in Britain believed Saddam had WMDs…
“For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.”
…and of course, that we did find: warheads designed to carry chemical warfare agents: and artillery shells filled with: mustard gas: &: sarin: (even though they were small in number and weren’t recently made).
When you add it all up, it appears that George Bush, like a lot of other people, was wrong about Saddam Hussein having stockpiles of WMDs. But without question, he did not lie about it.
2) A study released in March of 2003 by a British medical journal, the Lancet, showed that 100,000 civilians had been killed as a result of the US invasion.To be perfectly frank, it’s hard to see how anyone who has even a passing familiarity with statistics could take Lancet’s numbers seriously.: Fred Kaplanfrom Slate explains:
“The authors of a peer-reviewed study, conducted by a survey team from Johns Hopkins University, claim that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless.The report’s authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference’the number of “extra” deaths in the post-invasion period’signifies the war’s toll. That number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:
We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.
Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I’ll spell it out in plain English’which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language’98,000’is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board.
Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W. Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday’s election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet article: It’s a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling.”
Bingo! What Lancet was in effect saying was that they believed 98,000 civilians died, but they might have been off by roughly 90,000 people or so in either direction.
Moreover, other sources at the time were coming in with numbers that were a tiny fraction of the 98,000 figure that the Lancet settled on. From a: New York Times: article on the Lancet study:
“The 100,000 estimate immediately came under attack. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain questioned the methodology of the study and compared it with an Iraq Health Ministry figure that put civilian fatalities at less than 4,000. Other critics referred to the findings of the Iraq Body Count project, which has constructed a database of war-related civilian deaths from verified news media reports or official sources like hospitals and morgues.That database recently placed civilian deaths somewhere between 14,429 and 16,579, the range arising largely from uncertainty about whether some victims were civilians or insurgents. But because of its stringent conditions for including deaths in the database, the project has quite explicitly said, ”Our own total is certain to be an underestimate.”
Via: GlobalSecurity.org, here’s another Iraqi civilian death estimate:
“On 20 October 2003 the Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed in the war. Of these, between 3,200 and 4,300 were noncombatants — that is: civilians who did not take up arms.”
Given all that, how any informed person can buy into Lancet’s numbers is simply beyond me.
3) The Bush Administration claimed Iraq was responsible for 9/11.: It’s always difficult to prove a negative, but that simply never happened.
Many people may believe this was the case because in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore truncated a comment by Condi Rice in order to deliberately give viewers of his movie that false impression. Here’s the quote as it appeared in the film:
“There is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11”
Now here’s the full quote:
“Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It’s not that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York.”
Setting aside Moore’s little deceit, there just aren’t any quotations I’ve ever seen from anyone in the Bush administration saying that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. That’s why, in a piece called “Answering 50 Frequently Asked Questions About The War On Terrorism,” which incidentally was written about a week before the war began, I wrote this:
The Bush administration has never claimed that Iraq was involved in 9/11…
Furthermore, after the war had begun, in September of 2003,: President Bush himself publicly & explicitly said:
“We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks.”
It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
4) The war in Iraq was actually planned by people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz back in 1998 at a think tank called the Project for the New American Century.: The problem with trying to claim that the war in Iraq was preordained during some 1998 PNAC meeting is that the United States government has been trying to find a way to get rid of Saddam Hussein since the Gulf War. In an interview I did with him back in January of 2004,: David Frum, went into detail on this subject:
“The idea that overthrowing Saddam Hussein sprung out of the minds of a few people in Washington forgets an awful lot of history. In the 2000 election, both candidates spoke openly about the need to deal with Saddam Hussein. Al Gore was actually more emphatic on the topic than George Bush was. In 1998, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act. Just to show how conspiratorial they were, they put it in the Congressional record. In 1995, the CIA tried to organize a coup against Saddam Hussein and it failed. The coup was secret, but it has been written about in 5 or 6 books that I know of. In 1991, representatives of President George H. W. Bush went on the radio and urged the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam Hussein. So America’s policy on Saddam has been consistent. What we have been arguing about for years are the methods. First, we tried to encourage a rebellion in Iraq, that didn’t work. Then we tried coups; that didn’t work. Then in 1998, we tried funding Iraqi opposition. That might have worked, but the money never actually got appropriated. Then, ultimately we tried direct military power. The idea that Saddam should go has been the policy of the United States since 1991.”
The reality is just as Frum pointed out: overthrowing Saddam Hussein by hook or crook was the de facto policy of the US government for more than a decade before the war in Iraq and the disagreement was over how to do it. That argument was settled in many people’s minds by 9/11, not by people conspiring in a think tank back in 1998.
5) The war on terror has nothing to do with Iraq.: This is another historical rewrite. The reality is that the pro-war movement in this country since 9/11 has plainly spoken of dealing with Saddam Hussein as part of the war on terrorism almost from the very beginning. Here’s George Bush in a: speech given on 9/20/2001:
“Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success.We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest.
And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
Iraq certainly was a state that harbored and supported terrorists and the approach Bush discussed, the Bush Doctrine, was adopted and talked about often in relation to Iraq during the lead up to the war. As proof, look to a column called “Answering 50 Frequently Asked Questions About The War On Terrorism” that I wrote back on March 13, 2003:
Why are we going to invade Iraq?: Nine days after 9/11, George Bush said,“(W)e will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
That definition fits Iraq and since they happened to be the easiest nation to make a case against at the UN and in the court of World Opinion, they were our next logical target after Afghanistan — although they’re not our last target.”
The war on terrorism cannot be won as long as there are terrorist supporting states out there. So one way or the other, we need to get those rogue regimes out of the business of supporting terrorist groups of international reach. Saddam led one of those regimes and now, happily, he’s gone — perhaps before the US was hit with an Iraqi based terrorist attack:
“I can confirm that after the events of September 11, 2001, and up to the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received … information that official organs of Saddam’s regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the United States and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations.” — Russian President Vladimir Putin as quoted by CNN on June 18, 2004
Even: John Kerry, the flip-flopping Democratic candidate for President last year, seemed to at least agree that the fate of Iraq was crucial to the war on terror:
“Iraq may not be the war on terror itself, but it is critical to the outcome of the war on terror, and therefore any advance in Iraq is an advance forward in that and I disagree with the Governor [Howard Dean].” — John Kerry, 12/15/03
Kerry even pointed out that he thought Saddam might give WMDs to terrorists:
“I would disagree with John McCain that it’s the actual weapons of mass destruction he may use against us, it’s what he may do in another invasion of Kuwait or in a miscalculation about the Kurds or a miscalculation about Iran or particularly Israel. Those are the things that – that I think present the greatest danger. He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat.” — John Kerry, “Face The Nation”, 9/15/02
Now if even John Kerry of all people is willing to admit that Iraq is: “critical to the outcome of the war on terror”: and that Saddam was the kind of guy who might use terrorist groups to attack the US, we should be able to at least agree at this point that it’s not the least bit disingenuous to suggest that Iraq is an important part of the war on terrorism.
6) Saddam Hussein had no ties to terrorism.: It’s amazing to me that today in 2005, people are still trotting out that oft-disproven quip. Christopher Hitchens was also apparently surprised when Ron Reagan, Jr. made a similar assertion recently and you may find his: response to be most enlightening:
“CH:: Do you know nothing about the subject at all? Do you wonder how Mr. Zarqawi got there under the rule of Saddam Hussein? Have you ever heard of Abu Nidal?RR:: Well, I’m following the lead of the 9/11 Commission, which…
CH:: Have you ever heard of Abu Nidal, the most wanted man in the world, who was sheltered in Baghdad? The man who pushed Leon Klinghoffer off the boat, was sheltered by Saddam Hussein. The man who blew up the World Trade Center in 1993 was sheltered by Saddam Hussein, and you have the nerve to say that terrorism is caused by resisting it? And by deposing governments that endorse it? … At this stage, after what happened in London yesterday?…
RR:: Zarqawi is not an envoy of Saddam Hussein, either.
CH:: Excuse me. When I went to interview Abu Nidal, then the most wanted terrorist in the world, in Baghdad, he was operating out of an Iraqi government office. He was an arm of the Iraqi State, while being the most wanted man in the world. The same is true of the shelter and safe house offered by the Iraqi government, to the murderers of Leon Klinghoffer, and to Mr. Yassin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. How can you know so little about this, and be occupying a chair at the time that you do?”
Mr. Hitchens is entirely correct. Saddam provided “safe haven” for: terrorists with “global reach.”: Among them were terrormaster Abu Nidal, Abdul Rahman Yassin, one of the conspirators in the 1993 WTC bombing, “Khala Khadr al-Salahat, the man who reputedly made the bomb for the Libyans that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over…Scotland,”Abu Abbas, mastermind of the October 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and murder of Leon Klinghoffer,” & “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, formerly the director of an al Qaeda training base in Afghanistan” who is now believed to be leading Al-Qaeda’s forces in Iraq.
Without question, Saddam Hussein had extensive ties to terrorism.
7) Saddam Hussein had no ties to Al-Qaeda.: A couple of quotes by the 9/11 Commission, which were often used out of context during the polarizing 2004 election cycle, have fueled the ridiculous claim that Saddam Hussein had no ties with Al-Qaeda. Here’s an excerpt from an article at: MSNBC: called: “9/11 panel sees no link between Iraq, al-Qaida,”: that should give you a good idea of the anti-war spin that was put on the Commission’s comments:
“It said that reports of subsequent contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan ‘do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship,’ and added that two unidentified senior bin Laden associates “have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq.”The report, the 15th released by the commission staff, concluded, ‘We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States.’
However, the spin doesn’t match the reality.
What the 9/11 Commission was trying to get across was that there was no evidence that Saddam and Al-Qaeda collaborated on specific attacks, not that they didn’t have a working relationship.: 9/11 Commission Vice-Chairman (and former Democratic Congressman) Lee Hamiliton: echoed exactly that point in comments that were largely ignored because they didn’t fit the anti-war storyline some people were pushing:
“The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections between Al Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein government. We don’t disagree with that. What we have said is what the governor (Commission Chairman Thomas Kean) just said, we don’t have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative, relationship between Saddam Hussein’s government and these Al Qaeda operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States.”
While there may not be evidence that Saddam and Al-Qaeda cooperated in attacks on the United States, the evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Al-Qaeda worked together is absolutely undeniable.
For example, no one disputes that Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who once ran an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and is leading Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in Iraq today, was in Iraq BEFORE the war started getting medical care. In and of itself, that would seem to strongly suggest a significant connection.
But wait, there’s more!
Consider this comment by former: CIA Director George Tenet: in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 7, 2002:
“Credible reporting states that al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.”
Here’s more from: Richard Miniter, author of “Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror“:
* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq’s Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam’s son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam’s mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.
* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam’s son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.
* Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.
Here’s more from Weekly Standard columnist Stephen Hayes, author of “The Connection : How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America“:
“Evan Bayh, Democrat from Indiana, has described the Iraq-al Qaeda connection as a relationship of “mutual exploitation.” Joe Lieberman said, “There are extensive contacts between Saddam Hussein’s government and al Qaeda.” George Tenet, too, has spoken of those contacts and goes further, claiming Iraqi “training” of al Qaeda terrorists on WMDs and provision of “safe haven” for al Qaeda in Baghdad. Richard Clarke once said the U.S. government was “sure” Iraq had provided a chemical-weapons precursor to an al Qaeda-linked pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Even Hillary Clinton cited the Iraq-al Qaeda connection as one reason she voted for the Iraq War.”
So is there proof that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda worked together to hit targets in the US? No. But, is there extensive evidence that they had ties and worked together at times? Absolutely.
8 ) The Downing Street Memo proves Bush lied to the American people about the war.: The left-side of the blogosphere has been bleating ceaselessly about the Downing Street Memo since the beginning of May which might lead you to wonder why the reaction to the memo has been so tepid in the scandal loving mainstream media. Well, the problem with the DSM is that there’s no “there, there.”
Some of the anti-war crowd’s rantings about the memo have hinged on its acknowledgement of increased bombings in the Iraqi no-fly zones (“spikes of activity”) during the run-up to the war. However, the increased frequency of bombings was common knowledge even back in 2002 (See: here,: here, &: here). We had already been bombing the Iraqis in the no-fly zone and we increased the pace to soften them up a bit just in case we had to go in. It probably saved the lives of some of our soldiers and almost no one except members of Saddam’s government seemed upset about it while it was actually going on. So why should it be a big deal now in 2005? The carping about it at this point is pure political gamesmanship.
Moving on to another jejune point in the memos that has led to hyperventilation among Bush foes, take a look at this line:
“C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable.”
Note that no particular person in the Bush administration said war is “inevitable,” it’s just the perception that C, AKA Sir Richard Dearlove, has. Again, we’re talking about something that was common knowledge back in July of 2002, as even liberal: Michael Kinsley: pointed out in a notably unenthusiastic LA Times column about the DSM:
“Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before. Left-wing Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer casually referred to the coming war as “much planned for.” The New York Times reported Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s response to a story that “reported preliminary planning on ways the United States might attack Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein.” Rumsfeld effectively confirmed the report by announcing an investigation of the leak.A Wall Street Journal Op-Ed declared that “the drums of war beat louder.” A dispatch from Turkey in the New York Times even used the same word, “inevitable,” to describe the thinking in Ankara about the thinking in Washington about the decision “to topple President Saddam Hussein of Iraq by force.”
Why, it almost sounds as if many people who weren’t passing around secret documents saw the invasion of Iraq as “inevitable,” even back then! I guess those “secret” memos aren’t as as chock full of sensitive information as you’d think.
But, let’s move on to the meat of the DSM. Via: Wikipedia, here is the part of the Downing Street Memo that has caused the most “excitement” on the left:
Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Basically the charge here is supposed to be that Bush “fixed” the evidence for the war.
When the word “fixed” is mentioned in the memo, it’s obviously not being used as Americans would use it if they were talking about “fixing” a horse race. Instead, the writer was trying to get across that the Bush administration was attempting to build a solid case to justify its policy publicly. That’s certainly not a unique way of looking at it either. For example,: John Ware, a reporter at the very liberal BBC, seems to have roughly the same interpretation:
“Several well placed sources have told us that Sir Richard Dearlove was minuted as saying: “The facts and the intelligence were being fixed round the policy by the Bush administration.” By ‘fixed’ the MI6 chief meant that the Americans were trawling for evidence to reinforce their claim that Saddam was a threat.”
Furthermore, to even try to interpret the Downing Street Memo as supporting the idea that Bush was making up evidence — presumably about weapons of mass destruction — is extremely difficult to square with the fact that the DSM itself makes it absolutely clear that the British believed Saddam had WMDs. From theDSM:
“For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.”
If the Bush administration and the Brits believed Saddam had WMDs and was capable of using them, what exactly is supposed to have been forged? Nothing of course, because that’s not how the person taking the notes meant it to be interpreted. If he’d known his notes were ever going to be read by the public, I’m sure he would have been more careful about ambiguous phrasing that could be willfully misinterpreted for political gain.
On top of all that, there have already been investigations that have cleared the Bush administration of doing anything shady on the intelligence front. As Cassandra at: Villainous Company: correctly pointed out:
Quote (the DSM) all you want. Is there some evidence to back this up? Say, to refute the conclusions of the Butler Report (British), the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, or the 9/11 Commission, which all concluded that there was no improper manipulation of intelligence? Or are we now willing to disregard the conclusions of three official inquiries on the strength of one (word in an) unattributed set of minutes from a single foreign staff meeting?”
The Downing Street Memo is a lot of hullabaloo over nothing of note.
-
I have a real problem with medical journals publishing political articles.
I recall rarely seeing this prior to around 10 yrs ago. We are seeing this more and more. Also more in American Journals.
Was there a mention of how many Iraqis were killed by Iraqis? As usual it makes it sound like Americans and allies went in there a butchered up to 100K Iraqis.
-
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/instead-of-a-foreign-policy-that-regulates-hubris-obama-demonstrates-his-own/2016/04/04/d6bb3860-fa89-11e5-886f-a037dba38301_story.html?postshare=4691459856390345&tid=ss_tw
-
Challenge: Explain to a liberal or a kid why it was right for the US to drop those bombs at that time and why that does not make us at all like those who wish to bomb us.
Anyone want to take a crack at this?
The purpose of the war from the Japanese point of view was to conquer other lands, kill and enslave people and rule the region. The purpose of the bombings was to end the war and save lives, especially ours; it did exactly that. There is no moral equivalent to terrorists or other aggressors. The proof is in the aftermath, we did not kill anyone after surrender or enslave anyone or take over their lands. Instead we helped them to rebuild and recover.
Winston Churchill frames the math, the battles otherwise would have cost millions in more lives lost - and left the enemy in possession of the weapon and perhaps the world.
Churchill: The decision to use the atomic bomb was taken by President Truman and myself at Potsdam, and we approved the military plans to unchain the dread, pent-up forces. . . There are voices which assert that the bomb should never have been used at all. I cannot associate myself with such ideas. Six years of total war have convinced most people that had the Germans or the Japanese discovered this new weapon, they would have used it upon us to our complete destruction with the utmost alacrity. I am surprised that very worthy people, but people who in most cases had no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves, should adopt the position that rather than throw this bomb, we should have sacrificed a million American, and a quarter of a million British lives in the desperate battles and massacres of an invasion of Japan.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/08/the-weekly-winston-hiroshimanagasaki-edition.php
-----------------------------------------------
Are those numbers above realistic? Look at the lives lost in the war:
Japan had already lost 3.8% of its population in a war of choosing by their Emperor, not us.
The Allies lost nearly 48 million people, compared to fewer than 12 million people on the Axis side.
The reason is because the Axis targeted civilians, the Allies targeted military.
74 percent of Axis deaths were military personnel; only 29 percent of Allied deaths were.
Poland lost an estimated 16 percent of its population, about 5.5 million, around 3 million of whom were Jews.
The Soviet Union, which lost around 14 percent of its population.
Lithuania, Latvia, and Greece all lost between 11.2 and 13.7 percent.
Germany lost 9.4 percent. Thus the chief aggressor, and the loser, is in sixth place.
Italy, despite some horrific fighting there, didn’t make the top 20.
When the Allies (other than the Soviet Union) killed civilians they usually did so from the air. The purpose was to cripple the Axis’ industrial and war machines.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was different. Its purpose was to end the war more or less instantly. It succeeded.
It can’t be equated with the war on civilians waged by the Axis. The American goal was not to exterminate a race, to enslave anyone, to firm up occupation rule, or to replace one population with another.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please see Bill Whittle: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/04/why-we-dropped-the-bomb.php
-
By Ian Morris
No one, it seems, has a nice word to say about Donald Trump's foreign policy thinking.
Nearly every pundit on the planet has taken a swing at his confused and alarming pronouncements. More measured than most, The New York Times began cautiously suggesting that Trump's views "reflect little consideration for potential consequences," but soon hardened its line to denounce Trump's "completely unhinged view of international engagement" as "contradictory and shockingly ignorant." The Atlantic magazine agreed that Trump had "no understanding of the post-war international order," and The Washington Post joined the chorus, concluding that "Donald Trump's ignorance of government policy, both foreign and domestic, is breathtaking." NBC called Trump "completely uneducated about any part of the world," while CNN described him as "wholly unqualified to handle the real issues facing America." Newsweek magazine neatly summed up the consensus: "When it comes to foreign policy, Donald Trump, he's just saying stuff."
At least, this is the kind of thing the foreign policy crowd was saying until recently, but one consequence of this unusual unanimity among the talking heads was that it quickly became difficult for a journalist to get noticed merely by thinking up new ways to denigrate the Donald. Instead, a new attention-grabbing strategy emerged this month: Columnists began pretending to think they had found a method in Trump's madness. In her recent column in Foreign Policy, for instance, Rosa Brooks — while hardly pouring praise on Trump — suggested that beneath the surface bluster, "Trump is, to a great extent, nonetheless articulating a coherent vision of international relations and America's role in the world." CNN, flip-flopping on its earlier criticisms, has gone further, saying that "his opinions also reflect basic common sense."
What is Global Affairs?
Trump's rationalizers claim he is simply a foreign policy realist. Back in 1848, British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston famously said, "We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual friends … [only] our interests are eternal and perpetual." Similarly, the neo-Trumpians argue, the billionaire businessman is just taking a cold, hard look at the geopolitical facts — much as Stratfor tries to do — and consistently putting American interests first.
Of all the stuff Trump is just saying, the revisionists seem most impressed by his views on America's system of overseas alliances. "To Trump," Brooks concludes, "U.S. alliances, like potential business partners in a real-estate transaction, should always be asked: 'What have you done for me lately?'" If an old ally such as Saudi Arabia has no satisfactory answer, Trump proposes, the United States should stop buying its oil. Or if Japan will not pay more toward the costs of American forces in the Western Pacific, those forces should withdraw.
"The old cliches roll easily off the tongue: U.S. alliances and partnerships are vital … And so on," says Brooks; "But this is pure intellectual and ideological laziness." Brooks does not, however, join Fox News in concluding that "Donald Trump is 100 percent correct to insist that our allies should share the burden of collective defense." (They do, of course, already share the burden; Fox News presumably means they should pick up more of the burden.) Nor does she follow CNN's new line that "Washington should stop defending its prosperous, populous allies." Rather, she more thoughtfully observes, "Trump's vision of the world demands a serious, thoughtful and nondefensive response."
The Cost of Abandoning Allies
I want to try my hand at such a response. To my mind, Trump looks less like a realist than like a caricature of a realist, claiming to offer completely transactional international relations, stripped of conventional policymakers' wooly thinking. Realism, though, is not simply a matter of being unsentimental. It is about knowing when an appeal to tradition, values and loyalty will advance a nation's interests and when it will not.
In an earlier Global Affairs column, I mused that "Even the most Kissingerian of geopoliticians tend to recognize that values have a place in strategy (a good subject for a future column, perhaps) and that it is usually a mistake to sell out allies or walk away from deeply held beliefs to win a small advantage." These may be obvious points to make, but the friendships that the United States has built in the 70 years since the end of World War II are worth much more than their weight in gold, and few things will undermine American security quite so quickly as throwing them over for the sake of short-term gains.
Signaling to former allies that past favors, shared values or common struggles no longer count for anything, and that every interaction will now be weighed on the "What have you done for me lately?" scale, is a surefire method for raising the cost of doing business (something a businessman such as Trump presumably wants to avoid). Perhaps Washington can bully Saudi Arabia into doing more against the self-styled Islamic State; but will the gains from that deal offset the costs if the Saudis conclude they can no longer trust America to take the lead against rivals such as Iran?
There is a saying in Chicago that an honest politician is one who, when you buy him, stays bought. A new president who walks away from America's "friends" — however slippery and self-serving she or he might think that some of them are — will run the risk of relearning another old Chicago lesson: that the costs of being seen as a dishonest politician can be fatal.
Appealing to values is certainly not an alternative to cold geopolitical calculation. In what is probably the clearest case of a struggle between right and wrong, Britain and the United States consistently took the moral high ground against Germany and Japan in World War II. Both Western allies were liberal democracies, and neither ever attacked a neutral country (although Britain did consider invading Norway in 1940), herded prisoners of war and members of what they considered lesser races into death camps (although the United States did intern Japanese-Americans), or committed genocide (although the English-speaking Allies did collaborate in killing more than a million German and Japanese civilians in air raids). Germany and Japan (and, of course, the Soviet Union) were totalitarian dictatorships and did all these bad things; and yet despite the stark contrasts, few countries voluntarily joined the Western Allies before 1945, by which time it was clear that Germany and Japan were going to lose.
The truth of the matter is that values and calculation are not alternative approaches to foreign policy; they are always inextricably mixed.
A Balanced Strategy
This simple fact has been hardwired into us by evolution, because people whose genes predispose them to combine ethics and cold calculation in just the right way are more likely to pass their genes on to the next generation than those whose genes predispose them to act differently. Across the seven or eight million years since the evolutionary branch that led toward humans split off from that which led toward the other great apes, people have developed what biologists call an evolutionarily stable strategy — or equilibrium — balancing morality and self-interest.
Even before seven million years ago, however, the last common ancestor shared by all five species of African great apes (eastern and western gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, and humans) already had its own stable strategies, and modern humans' nearest genetic kin — chimpanzees and bonobos — see diplomacy in ways that are similar to, just less sophisticated than, our own.
In 1975, the primatologist Frans de Waal began a six-year study of politics among the chimpanzees of the Netherlands' Arnhem zoo, and since the 1980s numerous scientists have confirmed his findings among wild populations in Africa. Chimpanzees and bonobos both have steep dominance hierarchies in which a handful of alpha individuals (mostly males among chimps, mostly females among bonobos) lead a larger community; and in both species, alliances do more than use brute force to determine power. Primates have evolved to be extremely good at recognizing one another, remembering favors and insults, and calculating whom they can rely on when the chips are down. In fact, one of the most influential theories in physical anthropology holds that the whole reason primate brains more than tripled in size across the three million years separating Australopithecines from us was that apes that kept track of their allies were more likely to pass their genes on to the next generation than those that didn't.
De Waal documented in meticulous detail just how deadly serious this game is. In 1980, two of the Arnhem chimpanzees, Yeroen and Nikkie, manipulated friendships and rivalries to isolate the alpha male, Luit. Only then, when Luit was quite without allies, did Yeroen and Nikkie turn to hard power to dethrone him. In a vicious nighttime attack, they slashed Luit to pieces, biting off his fingers and toes and tearing out his testicles. He bled to death. Within days a new alliance system had formed, in which Nikkie was the top ape and Yeroen was the power behind the throne.
Biology seems to show that you should never turn your back on a friend — unless the gains from doing so clearly outweigh the reputational costs of being known as a dishonest politician. The secret of success lies in being able to judge the costs and benefits accurately.
On the whole, American leaders since 1945 have done a good job at balancing values and calculation. It is probably no coincidence that in addition to having the greatest military and economic dominance in history since 1989, the United States has also led the greatest network of allies in history. The only country that could possibly compare, mid-19th-century Britain, in fact did not even come close to American levels of dominance on either count.
At the end of the day, the brouhaha over Trump's incoherent policy pronouncements is no more than a colorful illustration of a small part of a larger debate over the place of values in international relations. The real argument is not between Trumpian transactionalism and establishment sentimentality, because even self-conscious realists always have to factor idealism into their calculations. (Historian Niall Ferguson was quite right to subtitle the first volume of his recent biography of Henry Kissinger "the Idealist.") What matters is the most old-fashioned virtue of all — good judgment — something that neither candidate Trump nor those who claim to see coherence in his statements have so far displayed. There's no need for us to sink to just saying stuff.
-
This echoes themes I have been discussing here for quite some time and adds some more:
http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/the-post-imperial-moment-15881
-
http://www.city-journal.org/html/missing-action-14343.html
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434913/donald-trump-foreign-policy-sensible-and-plausible
-
Another take on Trump's foreign policy from John Bolton on Breitbart. I wouldn't mind him as SoS. He is definitely an America first kind a guy. However if my memory still serves me correctly he was nominated some years ago and the Democrats refused to pass on it.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/05/bolton-gorka-slam-neocons-hillary/
-
Clinton and Trump: Where Do They Stand on Islamism?
With Trump and Clinton the de facto nominees, it is time for voters to begin weighing the national security policies of each candidate.
By Ryan Mauro
Thu, May 5, 2016
PrintPrint
EmailEmail
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
Related Stories
Headlines
5 Things You Should Know About Turkey's President Erdogan
Prominent Kurdish Activist: Designate MB as Terror Group
Testimony From Christian Whose Home Was Destroyed by ISIS
Clinton and Trump: Where Do They Stand on Islamism?
Donald Trump is the all-but-declared Republican presidential nominee and Hillary Clinton on the cusp of winning the Democratic nomination. It is time for voters to begin weighing the national security consequences of each candidate's potential administration.
You can read our full profiles of the candidates' positions related to Islamist extremism by clicking here for Donald Trump and here for Hillary Clinton. Below is a summary of six policy areas where they differ:
Defining the Threat
Trump defines the enemy as "radical Islam." Clinton defines it variably as "jihadism," "radical Jihadism" "Islamists who are jihadists."
Defeating the Ideology
Trump said in his foreign policy speech that "containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States." His policy proposals include a vague commitment to use the U.S. military more aggressively, deterring terrorists by killing their families, closing down the most radical mosques and banning Muslim immigration into the U.S. until the homeland is secure and an effective vetting process is established.
Trump is adamantly opposed to democracy-promotion and overthrowing regimes; instead, he favors alliances with authoritarian rulers who cooperate on counter-terrorism. He says, "our goal must be to defeat terrorists and promote stability, not radical change."
He criticizes Clinton for supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Bashar Assad in Syria. However, a reputable senior foreign policy adviser to Trump, Dr. Walid Phares, is an expert on combating the Islamist ideology and believes in promoting human rights and civil society.
Clinton's national security platform calls for "defeating ISIS and global terrorism and the ideologies that drive it." Her strategy emphasizes civil society and a foreign policy that promotes freedom, women's rights, free markets, democracy and human rights, all if which she believes are necessary in order to "empower moderates and marginalize extremists."
Clinton says the U.S. needs an "overarching strategy" to defeat the ideology like the U.S. used to win the Cold War. Clinton wants the State Department to better "tell our story" overseas by confronting anti-American propaganda via public engagement.
Clinton's speech on foreign policy and ISIS also includes confronting state sponsors of extremism like Qatar and Saudi Arabia and identifying "the specific neighborhoods and villages, the prisons and schools, where recruitment happens in clusters, like the neighborhood in Brussels where the Paris attacks were planned."
ISIS, Iraq and Syria
Trump says he will appoint effective generals who will quickly crush the Islamic State. He believes the U.S. has "no choice" but to send 20-30,000 troops to fight the Islamic State. He would also attack the families of Islamic State members, bomb oil sites held by the Islamic State and then seize them for U.S. companies to rebuild and own.
He would not support Syrian rebels against the Iran-backed Assad regime; Trump supported Russia's military intervention in Syria to save the dictatorship. Trump believes he can be a partner with Russian President Putin. He says he would establish safe-zones in Syria to stop the flow of refugees, but neighboring Arab countries like Saudi Arabia would have to pay for it.
Clinton's speech on ISIS emphasized her opposition to a large ground campaign by U.S. forces, but she does support President Obama's deployment of about 5,000 troops to Iraq with a limited role. She disagreed with President Obama when she urged U.S. support for Syrian rebels at the beginning of the civil war in order to prevent Islamist extremists from gaining ground.
Clinton also supported using the U.S. Air Force to implement a no-fly zone in Syria and to create safe zones for refugees. Clinton remains committed to ending the civil war in Syria by forcing Assad to resign from power as part of a political transition.
In Iraq, she favors direct U.S. military assistance to Sunni tribes and Kurdish forces fighting ISIS and expanding the U.S. forces' role to include embedding personnel in local Iraqi units and assisting with airstrikes.
Iran
Trump would terminate the nuclear deal with Iran immediately and pledged to "dismantle" Iran's global terrorism network in his speech about Israel and the Middle East. He supports placing severe sanctions on Iran to pressure them into a deal that dismantles their nuclear program and ends their support for terrorism.
Clinton supports the nuclear deal with reservations. She has released a 5-point plan to respond to the deal's negative consequences, Iran's sponsorship of terrorism and human rights abuses of the Iranian regime. She supports expanding sanctions on Iran for these actions.
Neither candidate has explicitly endorsed overthrowing the Iranian regime, but Clinton took a step in that direction in 2010 when she said she hopes there will be "some effort inside Iran, by responsible civil and religious leaders, to take hold of the apparatus of the state." She regrets that she and the Obama Administration did not more forcefully support the 2009 Green Revolution and promises "that won't happen again."
Muslim Brotherhood
Neither candidate has endorsed the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act and concerns have been raised about both candidates' advisers.
One of Clinton's closest aides, Huma Abedin, was the assistant-editor of an Islamist journal with her family members, some of whom have Muslim Brotherhood links. She has not directly said anything extremist and is married to a pro-Israel Jew. Critics point out that although she has a security clearance, her familial ties may influence her advice to Clinton.
In her book, Clinton seems to understand that the Brotherhood is hostile to the U.S., deceptive and closely linked to Hamas. However, she seems to accept Islamist political parties like the Brotherhood as potential democratic partners. Her State Dept. operation in Egypt gave election training to Brotherhood members and a Clinton Foundation member belonged to the Brotherhood.
One of Trump's top campaign aides, Paul Manafort, was a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and a lobbyist for a Pakistani ISI intelligence front in the U.S. that was also closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Trump has never said anything kind about the Muslim Brotherhood and wanted the U.S. to help keep Egyptian President Mubarak in power.
-
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-06/obama-s-foreign-policy-guru-is-the-blob-he-hates=
-
https://vimeo.com/163437751
-
This opens up a can of worms. I actually agree with Obama on this. I don't agree with what the Senate did:
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/280179-senate-passes-bill-allowing-9-11-victims-to-sue-saudi-arabia
-
Agreed, but I don't see how it comes to bite us in the ass if Baraq vetoes-- which he will.
-
Didn't Schumer claim he has 2/3 to over ride a veto?
-
http://www.jpost.com/printarticle.aspx?id=454481
-
Editor's Note: The Global Affairs column is curated by Stratfor's editorial board, a diverse group of thinkers whose expertise inspires rigorous and innovative thought in our analyses. Though their opinions are their own, they inform and sometimes even challenge our beliefs. We welcome that challenge, and we hope our readers do too.
By Ian Morris
Like so many of Stratfor's contributors, I spend a lot of time thinking about geography. In my 2010 book Why the West Rules — For Now, I even suggested that geography has been the main force determining the different fates of each part of the planet for the past 20,000 years. The way this works, I argued, was that geography drives social development, determining what it is possible for the members of each society to do, but at the same time social development drives geography, determining what the space around us means.
Geography is the reason Northwest Europe was, through most of history, a backward periphery. It was a long way away from the real cores of development, which stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to China, and it was sealed off from the rest of the world by an ocean that was too big and too wild to master. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, when people began building reliable oceangoing ships, the meaning of Northwest Europe's geography changed. Development transformed the Atlantic from a barrier into a highway, linking Europe to the rest of the planet and changing it from a periphery into the first truly global core. In the 20th century, however, as development continued to rise, the Pacific Ocean effectively shrank too, thanks to airlines, container ships and the Internet. The result was that East Asia repeated Europe's trick, moving from periphery to core as the Pacific shifted from barrier to highway.
This long-term process, I argued, explained why the West has dominated the planet for the past two or three centuries, why the East is now challenging it and where the world will go next. But as I began traveling around talking about the ideas in my book, one question kept coming up: Is the meaning of geography changing so much that it has ceased to mean anything at all?
A New World in the Making?
Parag Khanna's Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization is in effect an answer to this all-important question. The book, published just a month ago, has won wide attention, its sales reaching a level in the Amazon charts normally reserved for volumes of recipes or self-help, and it has already featured prominently in the Global Affairs space. Khanna himself has written a column for Stratfor explaining what his arguments tell us about China, while Jay Ogilvy has reprinted extensive excerpts from the book. My reason for coming back to Connectography yet again in this week's column is that Khanna's answer to what geography will mean in the 21st century is the most compelling I have seen, yet also the most open to further arguments.
Khanna agrees that geography drives social development and that social development drives what geography means, but he goes one step further by identifying the mechanism through which development feeds back into geography: infrastructure. Humanity, he suggests, is "re-engineering the planet." Another excellent book, the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe's By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia, shows that this process has been going on for at least 6,000 years, beginning with the domestication of the horse in Ukraine and accelerating with the invention of wheeled transport, the building of boats and roads, and the creation of cities. But Khanna's concern is the world since 1989. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the World Wide Web, he says, connectivity has replaced the old Westphalian world of borders with what he calls the "supply chain world."
"Supply chains and connectivity," he says, "not sovereignty and borders, are the organizing principles of humanity in the 21st century … A country cannot change where it is, but connectivity offers an alternative to the destiny of geography." The metaphor he uses to explain what has happened is the map. Old-style maps show the borders, oceans and mountain ranges that divide people; new-style maps show the flows that connect them. Since 1989, the number of separate political units on Earth has grown, but, Khanna suggests, their integration into much larger functional units has proceeded even faster as "countries use shared infrastructure, customs agreements, banking networks, and energy grids to evolve from political to functional spaces."
What is Global Affairs?
But Khanna is not just claiming that aggregation has counted for more than devolution. Rather, he argues, "The aggregation-devolution dynamic is … a dialectic in the sense that the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel truly meant: progression through opposites toward transcendence," the transcendence in question being "a shift from 'us-them' mentalities toward a broader human 'we.'" Political devolution is crucial to this, Khanna suggests, because "once borders are settled, countries search for optimal service areas" tied together by flows of goods and services. "Supply chains," he concludes, "thus diminish the incentives for conflict." The causes of war as we have known them since the creation of a Westphalian world are evaporating. "Alliances have been replaced with dalliances," Khanna says, "based on supply-demand complementarity."
There is a lot more going on in Khanna's book, but I want to concentrate on this core idea, which makes much sense of our shrinking and flattened but also warming and crowded world. But at this point in the story, I believe, stepping back to take a much longer perspective on history has something to add to an account that — as Khanna makes explicit — rarely looks back beyond the 27 years since 1989.
The Evolution of Violence
Connectography analyzes what is simply the latest and most dramatic phase of an ancient story. Life — by which biologists normally mean self-replicating carbon-based organisms, extracting energy from their environment and turning it into more of themselves — came into the world about 3.8 billion years ago in the form of short chains of carbon-based molecules held together by crude membranes. By 3.5 billion years ago, these carbon blobs had evolved to the point that they could combine to form simple cells in which molecules took on specialized functions. By 1.5 billion years ago, cells had evolved to connect and combine sexually, reproducing by sharing the information in the DNA of two cells rather than cloning a single cell. By 600 million years ago, some cells were sharing genetic information so thoroughly that they could combine by the millions to make multicellular organisms. (Our own bodies each contain about 100 billion cells.)
Basically, evolution is connectography all the way down. Borrowing Khanna's language, we might say natural selection produced the "optimal service areas" that most effectively transmitted genetic material through time (this is what the biologist Richard Dawkins meant when he described bodies as "survival machines," infrastructures selected by evolution as the optimal vehicles to preserve DNA). And, just as in the post-1989 world that Khanna describes, connectography has always been about competition as well as cooperation. Cells evolved because carbon-based molecules that cooperated to form them could better compete for access to energy than molecules that did not. Similarly, multicelled survival machines proved competitive against single-celled ones. And in the past 100 million years, some organisms — ants, bees and apes like us — have evolved to become social animals that cooperate as groups and compete against animals that do not share the same tendencies (and, of course, against rival groups).
The first animals to evolve "infrastructure" that functioned specifically to help them compete against other animals were what biologists call proto-sharks, which, around 400 million years ago, started sprouting cartilaginous teeth set in jaws strong enough to tear the flesh of other animals. Proto-sharks had found a shortcut in the great race for energy: They could steal the energy stored in other animals' bodies by eating them, and if they bumped into other proto-sharks competing for the same morsel of food or sexual partner, they could fight. Teeth raised competition to a new level, and other species responded by developing scales for defense, speed for fleeing and teeth (or stingers, or poison sacs, or claws and fangs — nature is ingenious) for fighting back. Violence had evolved.
Almost every species of animal, us included, has by now evolved to be able to use force to settle disputes. Where we humans differ from the other animals, though, is that each of us carries the greatest miracle of connectivity in the known universe: the human brain. This allows us to exercise conscious choice in building institutions, organizations and cultures. Whereas other animals respond to changes in their environments by adapting genetically, gradually turning into new kinds of animals, we can also respond culturally, by choosing to do things differently. Some 20,000 years ago, the average human stood a roughly 1-in-10 chance of dying violently (which are also the odds that the typical chimpanzee, one of our nearest genetic neighbors, still faces). According to the World Health Organization, though, the global rate of violent death is now just 0.7 percent. In some lucky places, such as Denmark, it is barely 0.001 percent. Unlike any other animals that have ever existed, we have reduced our rate of violent death by 90 percent without evolving into a new species.
The story behind this, which I told in detail in my book War! What is it Good For?, is linked to — but not quite the same as — that told in Connectography. For thousands of years people have been creating larger and larger "optimal service areas" but did so primarily through violent conquest. The conquerors, as Thomas Hobbes reasoned in his 17th-century classic Leviathan, then constituted themselves as rulers, wielding enough power to bully their subjects into accepting that only their governments had the legitimate right to use force. As states imposed peace within their territories, the kind of functional geography that Khanna describes also emerged within and even between these empires. Staggering numbers of first-century Roman wine jars, for instance, have been found at Muziris on the Indian coast, while so much Chinese silk flowed into the Roman Empire that geographer Pliny the Elder worried the outward flow of silver to pay for it would destabilize the Roman currency. In the age of the Roman, Mauryan and Han empires, roughly 2,000 years ago, rates of violent death had probably fallen to somewhere around 2 percent, and per capita levels of consumption had risen by perhaps 50 percent.
The process of connectivity and pacification through Leviathans went into overdrive in the past two centuries with the creation of governments — first British, then American — that could operate on an intercontinental scale. Neither was a world government, but like the smaller Leviathans of antiquity, these organizations operated by raising the costs that other governments faced if they resorted to violence. One consequence, though, was that they learned how to harness so much destructive power that by the 1970s there were probably enough nuclear weapons to have killed everyone on Earth. It is perhaps the greatest paradox in history that as the potential to deliver death has gone up, the actual rate of violent death has gone down.
Old Meanings Still Apply
That is the somewhat-good news that we learn from the long-term history of connectography; the downright bad news is that the road so far has been extremely bumpy. The growth of Leviathans and connectivity has regularly generated backlashes that have undone global peace and prosperity. In the third century, empires started coming apart from the Mediterranean to China. Trade routes collapsed, populations crashed and violence spiked back up. In the 13th and 14th centuries, and again in the 20th, Eurasia teetered on the edge of a similar abyss. In each case what rebooted the growth of connectivity, peace and prosperity was the revival of Leviathans.
Khanna implicitly recognizes much of this but still concludes that, "Global order is no longer something that can be dictated or controlled from the top down." But that, I would say, should in fact be the question: Have connectivity and infrastructure really thickened so dramatically that they have rendered political geography insignificant, replacing war as a tool for reordering the world's supply chains? At one point Khanna quotes Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation as saying that "corporations have built the most efficient system of production the world has ever seen, perfectly calibrated to a world in which nothing bad ever happens," and I could not help but feel that Lynn's line applies equally well to Connectography as a whole. Khanna offers us a best-case scenario.
The world is changing, and Khanna is surely right not only that supply chains and cyberspace are taking on lives of their own but also that in the best of all possible worlds, inclusive functional geography will replace exclusive political geography, and the state and war will wither away. "If the United States can recognize the primacy of supply chain geopolitics," he suggests, "it would be less likely to undertake costly military interventions that can do more harm than good." And yet the lesson of history seems to be that the only thing that has consistently discouraged actors from using force to try to solve their problems has been a top-down Leviathan.
Khanna sees the world evolving into "a planetary civilization of coastal megacities," which, he says, "should be more interested in supply chain continuity than imperial hegemony. Trading cities want coast guards and counterterrorism more than foreign occupations and nuclear weapons. They prefer constellations of relationships rather than a single overpowering Leviathan. A world of open melange cultures such as Zanzibar and Oman, Venice and Singapore, would be a more peaceful world than one of Orwellian mega-empires. We should strive toward such a Pax Urbanica."
I think Khanna is right that this is where the post-1989 trends seem to be taking us. But a longer-term perspective suggests, first, that we will get there only if everyone rationally assesses the good of the system as a whole and sticks to on-path behavior and, second, that shorter-term, more selfish assessments regularly upset expectations. Russian President Vladimir Putin did not annex Crimea in 2014 because he had an out-of-date map of political geography rather than a new one of functional spaces; he did it because he knew that the old meanings of geography are still with us, and that allowing a Westward-leaning Ukraine to take Crimea into NATO's orbit would pose an existential threat to Russia. We are not yet free of the Westphalian world.
Connectography is one of the most stimulating and enjoyable books on the ongoing transformation of geography that anyone could ask for, and I wish very much that I'd been able to read it half a dozen years ago while I was writing Why the West Rules — For Now. That said, it only reinforces my view that while geography is changing its meanings faster than ever, we still have a long way to go before it changes so much that it ceases to mean anything at all.
-
https://www.facebook.com/1682260838710014/videos/1704939616442136/?pnref=story
-
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-04-13/once-and-future-superpower
-
CD,
Cannot see entire article due to log in or subscribe requirement. Can it be posted?
-
The Once and Future Superpower
Why China Won’t Overtake the United States
By Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth
Purchase Article
After two and a half decades, is the United States’ run as the world’s sole superpower coming to an end? Many say yes, seeing a rising China ready to catch up to or even surpass the United States in the near future. By many measures, after all, China’s economy is on track to become the world’s biggest, and even if its growth slows, it will still outpace that of the United States for many years. Its coffers overflowing, Beijing has used its new wealth to attract friends, deter enemies, modernize its military, and aggressively assert sovereignty claims in its periphery. For many, therefore, the question is not whether China will become a superpower but just how soon.
But this is wishful, or fearful, thinking. Economic growth no longer translates as directly into military power as it did in the past, which means that it is now harder than ever for rising powers to rise and established ones to fall. And China—the only country with the raw potential to become a true global peer of the United States—also faces a more daunting challenge than previous rising states because of how far it lags behind technologically. Even though the United States’ economic dominance has eroded from its peak, the country’s military superiority is not going anywhere, nor is the globe-spanning alliance structure that constitutes the core of the existing liberal international order (unless Washington unwisely decides to throw it away). Rather than expecting a power transition in international politics, everyone should start getting used to a world in which the United States remains the sole superpower for decades to come.
Lasting preeminence will help the United States ward off the greatest traditional international danger, war between the world’s major powers. And it will give Washington options for dealing with nonstate threats such as terrorism and transnational challenges such as climate change. But it will also impose burdens of leadership and force choices among competing priorities, particularly as finances grow more straitened. With great power comes great responsibility, as the saying goes, and playing its leading role successfully will require Washington to display a maturity that U.S. foreign policy has all too often lacked.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, March 2016.
Kevin Lamarque / REUTERS
U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington, March 2016.
THE WEALTH OF NATIONS
In forecasts of China’s future power position, much has been made of the country’s pressing domestic challenges: its slowing economy, polluted environment, widespread corruption, perilous financial markets, nonexistent social safety net, rapidly aging population, and restive middle class. But as harmful as these problems are, China’s true Achilles’ heel on the world stage is something else: its low level of technological expertise compared with the United States’. Relative to past rising powers, China has a much wider technological gap to close with the leading power. China may export container after container of high-tech goods, but in a world of globalized production, that doesn’t reveal much. Half of all Chinese exports consist of what economists call “processing trade,” meaning that parts are imported into China for assembly and then exported afterward. And the vast majority of these Chinese exports are directed not by Chinese firms but by corporations from more developed countries.
When looking at measures of technological prowess that better reflect the national origin of the expertise, China’s true position becomes clear. World Bank data on payments for the use of intellectual property, for example, indicate that the United States is far and away the leading source of innovative technologies, boasting $128 billion in receipts in 2013—more than four times as much as the country in second place, Japan. China, by contrast, imports technologies on a massive scale yet received less than $1 billion in receipts in 2013 for the use of its intellectual property. Another good indicator of the technological gap is the number of so-called triadic patents, those registered in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2012, nearly 14,000 such patents originated in the United States, compared with just under 2,000 in China. The distribution of highly influential articles in science and engineering—those in the top one percent of citations, as measured by the National Science Foundation—tells the same story, with the United States accounting for almost half of these articles, more than eight times China’s share. So does the breakdown of Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine. Since 1990, 114 have gone to U.S.-based researchers. China-based researchers have received two.
Precisely because the Chinese economy is so unlike the U.S. economy, the measure fueling expectations of a power shift, GDP, greatly underestimates the true economic gap between the two countries. For one thing, the immense destruction that China is now wreaking on its environment counts favorably toward its GDP, even though it will reduce economic capacity over time by shortening life spans and raising cleanup and health-care costs. For another thing, GDP was originally designed to measure mid-twentieth-century manufacturing economies, and so the more knowledge-based and globalized a country’s production is, the more its GDP underestimates its economy’s true size.
A giant economy alone won’t make China the world’s second superpower.
A new statistic developed by the UN suggests the degree to which GDP inflates China’s relative power. Called “inclusive wealth,” this measure represents economists’ most systematic effort to date to calculate a state’s wealth. As a UN report explained, it counts a country’s stock of assets in three areas: “(i) manufactured capital (roads, buildings, machines, and equipment), (ii) human capital (skills, education, health), and (iii) natural capital (sub-soil resources, ecosystems, the atmosphere).” Added up, the United States’ inclusive wealth comes to almost $144 trillion—4.5 times China’s $32 trillion.
The true size of China’s economy relative to the United States’ may lie somewhere in between the numbers provided by GDP and inclusive wealth, and admittedly, the latter measure has yet to receive the same level of scrutiny as GDP. The problem with GDP, however, is that it measures a flow (typically, the value of goods and services produced in a year), whereas inclusive wealth measures a stock. As The Economist put it, “Gauging an economy by its GDP is like judging a company by its quarterly profits, without ever peeking at its balance-sheet.” Because inclusive wealth measures the pool of resources a government can conceivably draw on to achieve its strategic objectives, it is the more useful metric when thinking about geopolitical competition.
But no matter how one compares the size of the U.S. and Chinese economies, it is clear that the United States is far more capable of converting its resources into military might. In the past, rising states had levels of technological prowess similar to those of leading ones. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the United States didn’t lag far behind the United Kingdom in terms of technology, nor did Germany lag far behind the erstwhile Allies during the interwar years, nor was the Soviet Union backward technologically compared with the United States during the early Cold War. This meant that when these challengers rose economically, they could soon mount a serious military challenge to the dominant power. China’s relative technological backwardness today, however, means that even if its economy continues to gain ground, it will not be easy for it to catch up militarily and become a true global strategic peer, as opposed to a merely a major player in its own neighborhood.
Jo Yong-Hak / REUTERS A man looks at the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan in Busan, South Korea, July 2008.
BARRIERS TO ENTRY
The technological and economic differences between China and the United States wouldn’t matter much if all it took to gain superpower status were the ability to use force locally. But what makes the United States a superpower is its ability to operate globally, and the bar for that capability is high. It means having what the political scientist Barry Posen has called “command of the commons”—that is, control over the air, space, and the open sea, along with the necessary infrastructure for managing these domains. When one measures the 14 categories of systems that create this capability (everything from nuclear attack submarines to satellites to transport aircraft), what emerges is an overwhelming U.S. advantage in each area, the result of decades of advances on multiple fronts. It would take a very long time for China to approach U.S. power on any of these fronts, let alone all of them.
For one thing, the United States has built up a massive scientific and industrial base. China is rapidly enhancing its technological inputs, increasing its R & D spending and its numbers of graduates with degrees in science and engineering. But there are limits to how fast any country can leap forward in such matters, and there are various obstacles in China’s way—such as a lack of effective intellectual property protections and inefficient methods of allocating capital—that will be extremely hard to change given its rigid political system. Adding to the difficulty, China is chasing a moving target. In 2012, the United States spent $79 billion on military R & D, more than 13 times as much as China’s estimated amount, so even rapid Chinese advances might be insufficient to close the gap.
Then there are the decades the United States has spent procuring advanced weapons systems, which have grown only more complex over time. In the 1960s, aircraft took about five years to develop, but by the 1990s, as the number of parts and lines of code ballooned, the figure reached ten years. Today, it takes 15 to 20 years to design and build the most advanced fighter aircraft, and military satellites can take even longer. So even if another country managed to build the scientific and industrial base to develop the many types of weapons that give the United States command of the commons, there would be a lengthy lag before it could actually possess them. Even Chinese defense planners recognize the scale of the challenge.
Command of the commons also requires the ability to supervise a wide range of giant defense projects. For all the hullabaloo over the evils of the military-industrial complex and the “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the Pentagon, in the United States, research labs, contractors, and bureaucrats have painstakingly acquired this expertise over many decades, and their Chinese counterparts do not yet have it. This kind of “learning by doing” experience resides in organizations, not in individuals. It can be transferred only through demonstration and instruction, so cybertheft or other forms of espionage are not an effective shortcut for acquiring it.
This is not your grandfather’s power transition.
China’s defense industry is still in its infancy, and as the scholar Richard Bitzinger and his colleagues have concluded, “Aside from a few pockets of excellence such as ballistic missiles, the Chinese military-industrial complex has appeared to demonstrate few capacities for designing and producing relatively advanced conventional weapon systems.” For example, China still cannot mass-produce high-performance aircraft engines, despite the immense resources it has thrown at the effort, and relies instead on second-rate Russian models. In other areas, Beijing has not even bothered competing. Take undersea warfare. China is poorly equipped for antisubmarine warfare and is doing very little to improve. And only now is the country capable of producing nuclear-powered attack submarines that are comparable in quietness to the kinds that the U.S. Navy commissioned in the 1950s. Since then, however, the U.S. government has invested hundreds of billions of dollars and six decades of effort in its current generation of Virginia-class submarines, which have achieved absolute levels of silencing.
Finally, it takes a very particular set of skills and infrastructure to actually use all these weapons. Employing them is difficult not just because the weapons themselves tend to be so complex but also because they typically need to be used in a coordinated manner. It is an incredibly complicated endeavor, for example, to deploy a carrier battle group; the many associated ships and aircraft must work together in real time. Even systems that may seem simple require a complex surrounding architecture in order to be truly effective. Drones, for example, work best when a military has the highly trained personnel to operate them and the technological and organizational capacity to rapidly gather, process, and act on information collected from them. Developing the necessary infrastructure to seek command of the commons would take any military a very long time. And since the task places a high premium on flexibility and delegation, China’s centralized and hierarchical forces are particularly ill suited for it.
THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT
In the 1930s alone, Japan escaped the depths of depression and morphed into a rampaging military machine, Germany transformed from the disarmed loser of World War I into a juggernaut capable of conquering Europe, and the Soviet Union recovered from war and revolution to become a formidable land power. The next decade saw the United States’ own sprint from military also-ran to global superpower, with a nuclear Soviet Union close on its heels. Today, few seriously anticipate another world war, or even another cold war, but many observers argue that these past experiences reveal just how quickly countries can become dangerous once they try to extract military capabilities from their economies.
But what is taking place now is not your grandfather’s power transition. One can debate whether China will soon reach the first major milestone on the journey from great power to superpower: having the requisite economic resources. But a giant economy alone won’t make China the world’s second superpower, nor would overcoming the next big hurdle, attaining the requisite technological capacity. After that lies the challenge of transforming all this latent power into the full range of systems needed for global power projection and learning how to use them. Each of these steps is time consuming and fraught with difficulty. As a result, China will, for a long time, continue to hover somewhere between a great power and a superpower. You might call it “an emerging potential superpower”: thanks to its economic growth, China has broken free from the great-power pack, but it still has a long way to go before it might gain the economic and technological capacity to become a superpower.
China’s quest for superpower status is undermined by something else, too: weak incentives to make the sacrifices required. The United States owes its far-reaching military capabilities to the existential imperatives of the Cold War. The country would never have borne the burden it did had policymakers not faced the challenge of balancing the Soviet Union, a superpower with the potential to dominate Eurasia. (Indeed, it is no surprise that two and a half decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, it is Russia that possesses the second-greatest military capability in the world.) Today, China faces nothing like the Cold War pressures that led the United States to invest so much in its military. The United States is a far less threatening superpower than the Soviet Union was: however aggravating Chinese policymakers find U.S. foreign policy, it is unlikely to engender the level of fear that motivated Washington during the Cold War.
Chinese soldiers in the Spratly Islands, in the contested South China Sea, February 2016.
STRINGER / REUTERS
Chinese soldiers in the Spratly Islands, February 2016.
Stacking the odds against China even more, the United States has few incentives to give up power, thanks to the web of alliances it has long boasted. A list of U.S. allies reads as a who’s who of the world’s most advanced economies, and these partners have lowered the price of maintaining the United States’ superpower status. U.S. defense spending stood at around three percent of GDP at the end of the 1990s, rose to around five percent in the next decade on account of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has now fallen back to close to three percent. Washington has been able to sustain a global military capacity with relatively little effort thanks in part to the bases its allies host and the top-end weapons they help develop. China’s only steadfast ally is North Korea, which is often more trouble than it is worth.
Given the barriers thwarting China’s path to superpower status, as well as the low incentives for trying to overcome them, the future of the international system hinges most on whether the United States continues to bear the much lower burden of sustaining what we and others have called “deep engagement,” the globe-girdling grand strategy it has followed for some 70 years. And barring some odd change of heart that results in a true abnegation of its global role (as opposed to overwrought, politicized charges sometimes made about its already having done so), Washington will be well positioned for decades to maintain the core military capabilities, alliances, and commitments that secure key regions, backstop the global economy, and foster cooperation on transnational problems.
The benefits of this grand strategy can be difficult to discern, especially in light of the United States’ foreign misadventures in recent years. Fiascos such as the invasion of Iraq stand as stark reminders of the difficulty of using force to alter domestic politics abroad. But power is as much about preventing unfavorable outcomes as it is about causing favorable ones, and here Washington has done a much better job than most Americans appreciate.
For a largely satisfied power leading the international system, having enough strength to deter or block challengers is in fact more valuable than having the ability to improve one’s position further on the margins. A crucial objective of U.S. grand strategy over the decades has been to prevent a much more dangerous world from emerging, and its success in this endeavor can be measured largely by the absence of outcomes common to history: important regions destabilized by severe security dilemmas, tattered alliances unable to contain breakout challengers, rapid weapons proliferation, great-power arms races, and a descent into competitive economic or military blocs.
A world of lasting U.S. military preeminence and declining U.S. economic dominance will test the United States’ capacity for restraint.
Were Washington to truly pull back from the world, more of these challenges would emerge, and transnational threats would likely loom even larger than they do today. Even if such threats did not grow, the task of addressing them would become immeasurably harder if the United States had to grapple with a much less stable global order at the same time. And as difficult as it sometimes is today for the United States to pull together coalitions to address transnational challenges, it would be even harder to do so if the country abdicated its leadership role and retreated to tend its garden, as a growing number of analysts and policymakers—and a large swath of the public—are now calling for.
LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION
Ever since the Soviet Union’s demise, the United States’ dramatic power advantage over other states has been accompanied by the risk of self-inflicted wounds, as occurred in Iraq. But the slippage in the United States’ economic position may have the beneficial effect of forcing U.S. leaders to focus more on the core mission of the country’s grand strategy rather than being sucked into messy peripheral conflicts. Indeed, that has been the guiding logic behind President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Nonetheless, a world of lasting U.S. military preeminence and declining U.S. economic dominance will continue to test the United States’ capacity for restraint, in four main ways.
First is the temptation to bully or exploit American allies in the pursuit of self-interested gain. U.S. allies are dependent on Washington in many ways, and leaning on them to provide favors in return—whether approving of controversial U.S. policies, refraining from activities the United States opposes, or agreeing to lopsided terms in mutually beneficial deals—seems like something only a chump would forgo. (Think of the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s frequent claims that the United States always loses in its dealings with foreigners, including crucial allies, and that he would restore the country’s ability to win.) But the basic contract at the heart of the contemporary international order is that if its members put aside the quest for relative military advantage, join a dense web of institutional networks, and agree to play by common rules, then the United States will not take advantage of its dominance to extract undue returns from its allies. It would be asking too much to expect Washington to never use its leverage to seek better deals, and a wide range of presidents—including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Obama—have done so at various times. But if Washington too often uses its power to achieve narrowly self-interested gains, rather than to protect and advance the system as a whole, it will run a real risk of eroding the legitimacy of both its leadership and the existing order.
A silk factory in Sichuan Province, China, July 2013. Even if China's economy overtakes the United States' its military power won't, at least not soon.
China Daily / REUTERS
A silk factory in Sichuan Province, China, July 2013.
Second, the United States will be increasingly tempted to overreact when other states—namely, China—use their growing economic clout on the world stage. Most of the recent rising powers of note, including Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, were stronger militarily than economically. China, by contrast, will for decades be stronger economically than militarily. This is a good thing, since military challenges to global order can turn ugly quickly. But it means that China will mount economic challenges instead, and these will need to be handled wisely. Most of China’s efforts along these lines will likely involve only minor or cosmetic alterations to the existing order, important for burnishing Beijing’s prestige but not threatening to the order’s basic arrangements or principles. Washington should respond to these gracefully and with forbearance, recognizing that paying a modest price for including Beijing within the order is preferable to risking provoking a more fundamental challenge to the structure in general.
The recent fracas over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is a good example of how not to behave. China proposed the AIIB in 2013 as a means to bolster its status and provide investment in infrastructure in Asia. Although its criteria for loans might turn out to be less constructive than desired, it is not likely to do major harm to the region or undermine the structure of the global economy. And yet the United States responded by launching a public diplomatic campaign to dissuade its allies from joining. They balked at U.S. opposition and signed up eagerly. By its reflexive opposition both to a relatively constructive Chinese initiative and to its allies’ participation in it, Washington created an unnecessary zero-sum battle that ended in a humiliating diplomatic defeat. (A failure by the U.S. Congress to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership as negotiated, meanwhile, would be an even greater fiasco, leading to serious questions abroad about U.S. global leadership.)
Third, the United States will still face the temptation that always accompanies power, to intervene in places where its core national interests are not in play (or to expand the definition of its core national interests so much as to hollow out the concept). That temptation can exist in the midst of a superpower struggle—the United States got bogged down in Vietnam during the Cold War, as did the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—and it clearly exists today, at a time when the United States has no peer rivals. Obama has carefully guarded against this temptation. He attracted much criticism for elevating “Don’t do stupid stuff” to a grand-strategic maxim. But if doing stupid stuff threatens the United States’ ability to sustain its grand strategy and associated global presence, then he had a point. Missing, though, was a corollary: “Keep your eye on the ball.” And for nearly seven decades, that has meant continuing Washington’s core mission of fostering stability in key regions and keeping the global economy and wider order humming.
Finally, Washington will need to avoid adopting overly aggressive military postures even when core interests are at stake, such as with China’s increasingly assertive stance in its periphery. It is true that Beijing’s “anti-access/area-denial” capabilities have greatly raised the costs and risks of operating U.S. aircraft and surface ships (but not submarines) near China. How Washington should respond to Beijing’s newfound local military capability, however, depends on what Washington’s strategic goals are. To regain all the military freedom of action the United States enjoyed during its extraordinary dominance throughout the 1990s would indeed be difficult, and the actions necessary would increase the risk of future confrontations. Yet if Washington’s goals are more limited—securing regional allies and sustaining a favorable institutional and economic order—then the challenge should be manageable.
By adopting its own area-denial strategy, the United States could still deter Chinese aggression and protect U.S. allies.
By adopting its own area-denial strategy, for example, the United States could still deter Chinese aggression and protect U.S. allies despite China’s rising military power. Unlike the much-discussed Air-Sea Battle doctrine for a Pacific conflict, this approach would not envision hostilities rapidly escalating to strikes on the Chinese mainland. Rather, it would be designed to curtail China’s ability during a conflict to operate within what is commonly known as “the first island chain,” encompassing parts of Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Under this strategy, the United States and its allies would employ the same mix of capabilities—such as mines and mobile antiship missiles—that China itself has used to push U.S. surface ships and aircraft away from its coast. And it could turn the tables and force China to compete in areas where it remains very weak, most notably, undersea warfare.
The premise of such a strategy is that even if China were able to deny U.S. surface forces and aircraft access to the area near its coast, it would not be able to use that space as a launching pad for projecting military power farther during a conflict. China’s coastal waters, in this scenario, would turn into a sort of no man’s sea, in which neither state could make much use of surface ships or aircraft. This would be a far cry from the situation that prevailed during the 1990s, when China could not stop the world’s leading military power from enjoying unfettered access to its airspace and ocean right up to its territorial border. But the change needs to be put in perspective: it is only natural that after spending tens of billions of dollars over decades, China has begun to reverse this unusual vulnerability, one the United States would never accept for itself.
While this area-denial strategy would help solve a long-term problem, it would do little to address the most immediate challenge from China: the military facilities it is steadily building on artificial islands in the South China Sea. There is no easy answer, but Washington should avoid too aggressive a reaction, which could spark a conflict. After all, these small, exposed islands arguably leave the overall military balance unchanged, since they would be all but impossible to defend in a conflict. China’s assertiveness may even be backfiring. Last year, the Philippines—real islands with extremely valuable basing facilities—welcomed U.S. forces back onto its shores after a 24-year absence. And the United States is now in talks to base long-range bombers in Australia.
To date, the Obama administration has chosen to conduct so-called freedom-of-navigation operations in order to contest China’s maritime claims. But as the leader of the order it largely shaped, the United States has many other arrows in its quiver. To place the burden of escalation on China, the United States—or, even better, its allies—could take a page from China’s playbook and ramp up quasi-official research voyages in the area. Another asset Washington has is international law. Pressure is mounting on China to submit its territorial disputes to arbitration in international courts, and if Beijing continues to resist doing so, it will lose legitimacy and could find itself a target of sanctions and other diplomatic punishments. And if Beijing tried to extract economic gains from contested regions, Washington could facilitate a process along the lines of the proportional punishment strategy it helped make part of the World Trade Organization: let the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in The Hague, determine the gains of China’s illegal actions, place a temporary tariff on Chinese exports to collect exactly that much revenue while the sovereignty claims are being adjudicated, and then distribute them once the matter is settled before the International Court of Justice. Whatever approach is adopted, what matters for U.S. global interests is not the islands themselves or the nature of the claims per se but what these provocations do to the wider order.
Although China can “pose problems without catching up,” in the words of the political scientist Thomas Christensen, the bottom line is that the United States’ global position gives it room to maneuver. The key is to exploit the advantages of standing on the defensive: as a raft of strategic thinkers have pointed out, challenging a settled status quo is very hard to do.
Related Tweets
KNOW THYSELF
Despite China’s ascent, the United States’ superpower position is more secure than recent commentary would have one believe—so secure, in fact, that the chief threat to the world’s preeminent power arguably lies within. As U.S. dominance ebbs slightly from its peak two decades ago, Washington may be tempted to overreact to the setbacks inherent in an admittedly frustrating and hard-to-manage world by either lashing out or coming home—either way abandoning the patient and constructive approach that has been the core of its grand strategy for many decades. This would be a grave mistake. That grand strategy has been far more successful and beneficial than most people realize, since they take for granted its chief accomplishment—preventing the emergence of a much less congenial world.
One sure way to generate a wrong-headed push for retrenchment would be to undertake another misadventure like the war in Iraq. That America has so far weathered that disaster with its global position intact is a testament to just how robust its superpower status is. But that does not mean that policymakers can make perpetual blunders with impunity. In a world in which the United States retains its overwhelming military preeminence as its economic dominance slips, the temptation to overreact to perceived threats will grow—even as the margin of error for absorbing the costs of the resulting mistakes will shrink. Despite what is being said on the campaign trail these days, the United States is hardly in an unusually perilous global situation. But nor is its standing so secure that irresponsible policies by the next president won’t take their toll.
-
Good article but it is important to better know the authors both of whom are university professors (I think). I believe these are the fellows:
http://dartmouth.edu/faculty-directory/stephen-g-brooks
http://dartmouth.edu/faculty-directory/william-c-wohlforth
-
Good article but it is important to better know the authors both of whom are university professors (I think). I believe these are the fellows:
http://dartmouth.edu/faculty-directory/stephen-g-brooks
RELEVANT OCCUPATIONAL EXPERIENCE
Research Analyst, 1991- 1994, Department of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate
School, Monterey, CA (part-time 1991 and 1992, full-time 1993 and 1994).
http://dartmouth.edu/faculty-directory/william-c-wohlforth
Doesn't seem to have even that much.
-
GM,
I think you are alluding to my thoughts as well. I would have thought the author(s) would be someone(s) from the military or intelligence departments.
Not that these guys opinions are not legitimate since they seem to have studied and authored in these areas. But are they really privy to the most up to date information.
I noticed the expected dig at Trump in the article. While they jumped on Obama's band wagon about not "doing stupid stuff" (always easy to say in retrospect when the results are less then desired) they did allude to him taking his "eye off the ball". OTOH while they like Obama avoidance of getting too involved in peripheral conflicts they do not give Trump credit for saying the same thing. Or give him credit for wanting to keep our military strong while Obama makes us weaker.
They criticize Trump for risking pissing off our allies but nothing said about Obama pissing off Israel who I thought was our ally.
They sound university like with comments that most problems are "manageable".
I don't know. I could be wrong but I do not trust university professors on foreign policy. If 90% are liberal I just cannot help but think in the back of my mind their conclusions are influenced by their politics . It would be fair to question my conclusions knowing I am on the right.
-
Typical ivory tower academics who wish to paper over all the damage done by Buraq Hussein. The US military is a shadow of it's former self, as is this country. The next war is unlike any of the previous, and is ongoing as we speak.
-
Is War with China Now Inevitable?
by JERRY HENDRIX May 24, 2016 4:00 AM
At the very least, Obama’s inaction made it more likely. China is acting like it wants a war. It probably doesn’t, but it doesn’t want the United States to know that. China’s communist leaders know they must keep growing the economy and improving the lives of their citizens, or risk revolution and the loss of power. They also know that they are on a clock: Within the next ten years, China’s recently amended one-child policy will invert the country’s economy, forcing that one child to pay the medical and retirement costs of his two parents and four grandparents. Under these circumstances, the state will need to begin allocating additional resources toward the care of its citizens and away from its burgeoning national-security apparatus. China has to lock down its sphere of influence soon, becoming great before becoming old. It’s time for Chinese leaders to go big or go home, and they’re slowly growing desperate.
The United States, for its own part, has not helped ward off the regional threat that desperation poses. Its policy of strategic patience and its prioritizing of Chinese cooperation on nuclear issues to the exclusion of local security concerns have created an almost palpable sense of growing confidence in the Chinese among nervous U.S. allies nearby. The lack of credible Freedom of Navigation operations since 2012 and the Obama administration’s failure to offer any significant resistance in the face of China’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea have emboldened the Chinese to press ahead with their planned campaign to claim sovereignty over those waters. Such claims threaten the national interests of the United States and directly impinge upon the security of treaty allies and partners in the region.
RELATED: Facing Off with China
China’s actions are representative of a new phenomenon that is increasingly characterizing the foreign policies of authoritarian states around the world. Like states such as North Korea, Iran, and Russia, China has recognized that America is trapped by its doctrinal adherence to “phasing,” the method by which it goes to war as delineated in Joint Publication 3-0, “Joint Operations,” first published in the early 1990s. As its name suggests, the method lays out six major phases of war: phase 0 (shaping the environment), phase I (deterring the enemy), phase II (seizing the initiative), phase III (dominating the enemy), phase IV (stabilizing the environment), and phase V (enabling civil authority). It’s a step-by-step approach that has come to dominate American tactical and strategic thought. The problem is that when you write the book on modern warfare, someone is going to read it, and those that seek to challenge the United States most certainly have. They know that U.S. war planners are all focused on phase III — the “Dominate the Enemy” phase — and treat the separation between phases as impermeable barriers. America’s concentration on phase III has allowed rising competitors to expand their influence through maneuvers that thwart U.S. interests in the preceding three phases, maneuvers cumulatively grouped in a category known as “Hybrid” warfare. Authoritarian states have mastered the art of walking right up to the border of phase III without penetrating it, slowly eroding American credibility without triggering a kinetic response.
Nations work out their differences through consistent and credible interactions. Exercises and real-world operations allow states to define their interests and then defend them. Competitor nations take these opportunities to test the will of states they are challenging. The consistency of these activities allows tensions between states to be released at a constant rate, so that pressures never rise to dangerous levels. But when a nation vacates the arena of competition for too long or fails to conduct credible exercises, as the United States has done in the Western Pacific over the past five years, strains begin to warp the fabric of the international order. China’s construction of artificial islands as a means of extending its claims of sovereignty over the South China Sea have left the United States with few options. RELATED: China Raises the Stakes in the South China Sea The U.S. can continue its policy of sending mixed messages, dispatching individual warships on “innocent-passage” profiles that come within twelve miles of the islands while avoiding normal military operations, but this will only play into China’s plan to slowly boil the frog as it continues arming the islands, establishing a new security status quo in the region. China’s strategy mirrors Russia’s actions in Georgia, the Crimea, and Ukraine. There, Russian forces operated below the U.S.’s radar, conducting phase I and II operations and standing pat in the face of international sanctions, confident that neither the United States nor its NATO allies really wanted to risk war to re-institute the regional order that had just been upended. China clearly feels that time is on its side so long as it only incrementally expands its influence, avoiding direct confrontation with the United States. Such an approach will, of course, leave the United States no choice but to suddenly and directly confront China at some critical point in the future. America’s adherence to its founding principles of free navigation and free trade, not to mention its belief in a free sea, will not allow it to tolerate a Chinese assertion of sovereignty over such a large swath of heretofore-open water. Perhaps when the time comes the United States could simply land an international force of marines on one of the artificial islands as part of an amphibious exercise. As the islands are not Chinese sovereign territory, there is no reason not to use them as the staging ground for an international exercise. And such an exercise would force China’s hand, making it choose between resisting the assembled international marines with armed force or acknowledging the illegitimacy of its own claims. RELATED: The Showdown in the South China Sea While some might view such American action as too confrontational, it was made necessary by the Obama administration’s failure to nip China’s ambitions in the bud. America will now have to skip a phase, taking strong and abrupt action to reset the status quo. As things stand, should China suddenly move to militarize the Scarborough Shoals just off of the Philippines, it is unclear if the United States would defend its ally, in keeping with its treaty commitments, or simply dispatch Secretary of State John Kerry to insist on one thing while his bosses’ actions demonstrate the opposite. Such continuous, systematic acts of accommodation as have been demonstrated with Iran, Syria, and Russia invite conflict and ultimately lead to large-scale major war. Maintenance of a strong military and the upholding of our founding core principles remain the surest guarantee of peace.
— Jerry Hendrix is a retired Navy Captain, a former director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, and a senior fellow and director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments program at the Center for a New American Security.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435749/us-china-war-obama-weakness-east-asia
-
Typical ivory tower academics who wish to paper over all the damage done by Buraq Hussein. The US military is a shadow of it's former self, as is this country. The next war is unlike any of the previous, and is ongoing as we speak.
Our enemies see our unwillingness to project force whether we have arm ourselves or not. They saw the protests and missing patience that shut down our war efforts.
There are so many unknowns. If China takes Taiwan tomorrow, would Pres. O lift a finger over that? The Chinese might think so, but why? He didn't with Crimea. Does he fear Putin more?
China is the largest exporter in the world and the US is their biggest customer. Maybe our arsenal or unwillingness to use it isn't the concern.
We are unbelievably self-destructive to stand still while a totalitarian regime runs by us economically and militarily.
-
" Hence his initial “apology tour,” that burst of confessional soul-searching abroad about America and its sins, from slavery to the loss of our moral compass after 9/11. Friday’s trip to Hiroshima completes the arc."
It is unfortunate that history is being re written by the left on the "loss of moral compass" after 911. Surely the goal of ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussain was a morally just effort. We risked American lives to free that country from the butcher. Yes the unexpected outcome was not due to immorality on the part of Americans. It was not us who degenerated into factions hell bent on grabbing power and continuing old rivalries that led to chaos and death and suffering. They are to blame for not seizing the chance to live in peace free from a murderous dictator.
The immorality is not ours. Otherwise this Krauthammer article makes some sense:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-arrow-of-history/2016/05/26/ff384f7c-2369-11e6-9e7f-57890b612299_story.html
-
http://www.jpost.com/printarticle.aspx?id=455779
:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
-
http://www.jpost.com/printarticle.aspx?id=455779
:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
Anyone shocked to read this?
-
The Global Order After the Brexit
Geopolitical Weekly
June 28, 2016 | 08:00 GMT Print
French President Francois Hollande (L), German Chancellor Angela Merkel (C) and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi met June 27 to discuss the United Kingdom's referendum vote to leave the European Union. (JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images)
By Reva Goujon
Buyer's remorse was the refrain in the wake of the June 23 Brexit vote. A narrow 52 percent of British citizens voted to leave the European Union. That is to say 48 percent of the 33 million British citizens who felt compelled to vote believed they were better off staying in the European Union. Such a close vote on such a fateful decision with such global impact naturally yielded disbelief on the island and beyond.
Champions of the status quo quickly seized on maps and scatter graphs of the voter breakdown to argue their position: "Of course," several remarked, "it was the uneducated working class that dragged us into this mess." Or, "It was those old baby boomers with their fat pensions who are gambling on the future of the young." Perhaps most interesting is the spreading belief among "remain" voters that enough Brits will come to rue their decision and that, one way or another, British Prime Minister David Cameron's eventual successor will find a way to avoid heeding the call of the nonbinding vote. Then, calm would be restored to financial markets and maybe, just maybe, everything could go back to normal.
Many of us (especially those on the outside looking in) see the vote as something of a democratic marvel. With a high voter turnout of 72 percent, the plebiscite empowered the people to decide the fate of the island, and the resulting rancorous debate is a riveting accompaniment to an honest vote. Still, many are flatly uninterested in the democratic virtues of the vote. They argue that people who voted with their emotions, hoping to shun immigrants or to reclaim British sovereignty, will surely rethink their choice once they realize its painful economic ramifications. Given the current state of chaos in British politics, there may well be a political turn of events over these next few months that triggers early elections and widens the divide between the "leave" and "remain" camps before the government begins signing the divorce papers.
But beware of wishful thinking, especially if you find yourself or others framing undesirable outcomes as a product of irrational thought. An instinct to deplore the result rather than to understand it will create only more room for error in judging the ultimate outcome. After all, sophisticated financial analysts, fearing a Brexit, made the erroneous assumption that "remain" would prevail, even when poll numbers fell well within the margin of error. The world is still reeling from that market correction.
Class, Nationalism and Rationality
On the other side of the Atlantic, Americans are looking at the Brexit and reflecting on what effect an uneducated, working-class voting bloc could have on the future of the United States in the upcoming presidential election. But it would be wrong to assume that only Britain's poor and uneducated believe the United Kingdom should leave the European Union; demographic breakdowns of the British referendum vote just as easily point to a large age divide among voters. Unlike the 73 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who voted to remain, the 60 percent of voters aged 65 and older who chose "leave" remember the world before the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community in 1973. As they argue, the United Kingdom has existed for centuries while the European Union has existed for only two and a half decades. As a result, they do not see exiting the union now as a particularly existential decision. Many are naturally distrustful of continental Europe — particularly now that it is showing serious signs of disintegration — and genuinely believe that their country will come out stronger if it moves early enough and effectively negotiates the terms of a split. These are voters driven by geopolitical considerations and a sense of place and history.
Moreover, the United Kingdom, a country that epitomizes civility, is among the 10 most educated and connected countries in the world. Some have characterized the vote as a struggle between the sophisticated and international capital city and the rest of the country. This may be true in part, but what of the 40 percent of London voters who opted to leave? Even if "remain" voters hold university degrees in higher numbers than "leave" supporters do, a large proportion of undecided voters deliberated their decision until the last minute before casting their ballot. One particularly distressed voter interviewed by BBC World Service left quite an impression on me the night of the vote. Her anxiety was endearing and palpable as she described standing outside in the rain for hours, letting other voters move ahead of her in line. She had done her research, listened to the experts on both sides, and debated with family and friends, and she was downright tortured by the fact that her government had put her in the position to decide such an important matter. She, and several others interviewed, did not fall under the stereotype of xenophobic and uneducated laborers voting with emotion over reason.
Emotion is a word invoked in many Brexit debates. If we say someone votes with emotion, the assessment is often understood as a pejorative, implying that the voter is irrational. But when it comes to matters of justice and national sovereignty, emotion can assume a particular depth. When people feel that they have fallen behind economically and that it will take too long to catch up in a globalized world; that leaving domestic decisions to foreign leaders with completely different priorities, customs and interests is unfair; that national culture is being eroded by outsiders; that the will of the ordinary should prevail over that of a privileged elite — these are all valid, deep-seated "emotions" that easily transcend demographic divides. Emotion, in other words, becomes synonymous with nationalism, and some level of nationalism resides in every one of us.
A sense of embattlement enlivens the innate sense of nationalism. As more and more election cycles and referendums worldwide reveal, a substantial number of people apparently do not believe that the elites have their nations' best interests at heart. Globalization supposes that there will be winners and losers in every country. But it also promises that even the losers, with enough time and a bit of assistance, will eventually come out ahead.
Many people have grown tired of waiting for the benefits of a vastly interconnected world to trickle down. As the world whizzes by them, their wages remain flat and jobs become scarcer. Then it becomes convenient to blame their straits on the immigrant speaking a strange tongue and taking their employment opportunities. These people are not studying demographic charts and complex economic models to understand why their country needs immigrants in the long run, nor are they lying awake at night fretting over a Moody's downgrade. The more sophisticated rhetoric they hear about the benefits to come — and the fewer benefits they actually see — the more distrustful they become. As John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run we are all dead."
The masses begin to crave plain speak on a simple path to a better life. The populist leaders who answer their call know perfectly well that a simple path does not exist. They will find neither the political establishment's support nor the financial resources to make good on their promises. Expectations breed further disappointment, and more political volatility ensues.
A Post-Globalization World
This picture contrasts with the ever-increasing openness and integration promoted by many pundits who equate more connectivity with greater stability. Instead, we may be entering a post-globalization world. The integration of Central and Eastern Europe and China into the world economy over the past quarter-century set off record trade expansion, culminating in super-stretched supply chains, massive shipping fleets and cross-hemispheric trade proposals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. But global trade growth has been in structural decline since the Great Recession. Faced with slower growth, countries in the developing and the developed world will still be driven to seek out additional markets, but the path will be slower and rockier thanks to a tempestuous blend of political conflict within states, geopolitical divergences between states and, in the longer run, technological shifts that will transform the way we consume, build and trade internationally.
The political dimension is already evident in the rise of anti-establishment voices worldwide and in the geopolitical divergences long in the making. Brexit was a catalyst for European fragmentation, not the trigger. The Continent was already splitting, and the United Kingdom, an island that has always kept a fair distance from Continental machinations, was among the first to split off. In the coming years, blocs of countries with like-minded interests will band together to fundamentally reshape the European map.
To Europe's east, Russia, locked in a confrontation with the West that stems from its own geopolitical vulnerabilities, is already in the process of isolating itself economically from the West as best as it can while supplementing with linkages to its East. China, meanwhile, is cautiously integrating with the West financially. Although it still relies on overseas trade, Beijing is working on a long-term plan to move up the value chain and become more self-sufficient at feeding its large consumer base while also creating alternatives to Western-dominated lending, legal and regulatory institutions.
The gradual shift in China's economic profile is part of a broader technological shift that will transform the world. Like South Korea and Japan, China has followed a traditional path up the production ladder, taking advantage of a world that operates on long supply chains and cheap labor to produce components and assemble parts for low-value goods with an eye toward higher-value production. But advances in automation, advanced robotics and software-driven technologies are shaping a future that will rely on shorter supply chains to make more products in fewer locations closer to the consumer.
The United States, Northern Europe and parts of Asia will lead this technological transformation in the coming decades, and much of the developing world will find it ever harder to catch up. Regionalized supply chains fit into a more divided world map in which developed countries will have more options to develop their economies within smaller, and perhaps more politically compatible, trade blocs.
Toward Equilibrium
And so, with time, the familiar patterns of the post-Cold War globalized world will change. As conflicts in the developing world continue, and as countries try to balance demographic challenges with social pressures, developed nations will become more selective in whom they take in and with what skills. The ambitions of cross-regional trade agreements will be tempered, and the merits of cross-national integration projects from the European Union to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will come under scrutiny.
Many will lament this projection of the world as a regression after decades of progress. But I see it as something quite natural. Europe has swung from the extreme of horrific warfare to another extreme, one that tried to convince itself that matters of national sovereignty and identity were wrinkles that could be smoothed out in a federal union. China has swung from economic turmoil to a level of global prowess. The world at large has swung from tepid trade to globalization and climate-impairing consumption. Imagine a pendulum swinging. The greater the swing, the longer it takes to travel to the center. Between two extremes always lies a point of equilibrium. Maybe that's where the global pendulum is headed.
-
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/us/politics/donald-trump-issues.html?emc=edit_na_20160721&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
-
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/COLUMN-ONE-Turkey-Roger-over-and-out-462082
-
Trump has an extended history of making favorable comments about Putin and better relations with Russia.
How far is he willing to go down this road?
Are we willing to go there with him?
For example:
If Russia takes his out loud ruminations about maybe not defending Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as a permission slip to start fg with and/or invading them, what then?
If we ally with Putin against ISIS, does not Iran become the regional hegemon?
What implications for Israel?
What implications for conflict with Turkey? NATO Article 5 issues?
Deep waters here and it is not clear to me that Donald fully realizes this.
-
http://atimes.com/2016/08/trump-lacks-experience-but-his-detractors-lack-common-sense/
http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/averting-the-coming-republican-foreign-policy-brain-drain/
Big Dog:
Let's have this conversation here on this thread. Right now I am headed out for the day.
-
Separately, there is this:
http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/the-end-of-globalization-the-international-security-implications/
-
http://www.wsj.com/articles/dangers-rise-as-america-retreats-1473461151
-
I posted this on the US economy/stock market thread as well, AND post it here for its echo of themes I have been discussing on this forum for years now:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4009875-americas-hegemony-means-asset-management?auth_param=evk9c:1bv5m78:3184b8e8fd38d0523ffceb521e8532bf&uprof=46
-
An eternal law of global affairs is that weakness invites aggression that can lead to war. The latest validation of this truth is that in the eighth year of the Obama Presidency the tide of war is building on multiple fronts and the U.S. can’t escape the consequences.
Start with the rumors of cyber war between the U.S. and Russia. Vice President Joe Biden said on “Meet the Press” Sunday that the U.S. plans to retaliate against Russia for its hacking into Democratic Party files “at the time of our choosing.” Such a hawkish boast isn’t this Administration’s style, but perhaps it wants to look stronger against Vladimir Putin in this election campaign than it has for eight years.
Russia’s interference with U.S. elections is serious and deserves a response that is large enough to deter future attacks, not merely reply to this one. That could involve offensive cyber operations to damage the hackers’ hardware or ability to operate. Or it could include exposing Russians with foreign bank accounts or assets abroad, including Mr. Putin.
Yet there’s no evidence the U.S. has done anything to deter previous Russian hacks, or even to respond to its harboring of national-security thief Edward Snowden. Russia dismissed the Biden threat and promised to retaliate in turn. After the VP’s boast, the U.S. has to do something or look like it is erasing another red line. But if Mr. Obama does take serious action, Mr. Putin could escalate.
After the U.S. pulled out of cease-fire talks on Syria, Mr. Putin unilaterally withdrew from a plutonium-disposal pact and deployed nuclear-capable missiles to the Soviet territory of Kalingrad on the Baltic Sea. His next move could be on the Baltics, perhaps as Robert Kaplan argued on Monday in these pages on the pretext of protecting ethnic Russians. What does Mr. Obama do then?
Speaking of Syria, Russians are threatening to retaliate against U.S. forces if they bomb the marauding forces of Russian ally Bashar Assad. Mr. Putin is also deploying anti-air defenses in Syria that could shoot down U.S. planes or drones. The point is to suggest that an attempt to establish a no-fly zone to protect Aleppo or refugees runs the risk of war with Russia. The U.S. response has been to again deploy . . . John Kerry.
Then there’s Yemen, where the U.S. Navy is being drawn into the conflict by Houthi forces backed by Iran. The USS Mason, a destroyer, took defensive actions again Saturday after it detected more missiles fired from the Yemen coast. The Pentagon is investigating what would be the third attack in 10 days.
The Houthis have little incentive to stop firing because their risk-reward ratio is so low. They know Mr. Obama has no appetite to get further involved, while one hit on a U.S. ship could kill dozens of sailors and cause the U.S. to drop its support for their Saudi enemies.
Next up is Iraq’s looming battle at long last to retake Mosul from Islamic State. The U.S. has some 5,000 troops engaged in that effort, including special forces in forward deployments to help Iraqi or Kurdish peshmerga units. Mr. Obama declared the Iraq war was over when he pulled out all American troops in 2011, but the U.S. departure created a political vacuum that Islamic State filled.
By the way, notice that U.S. troops are back on the ground in Iraq without a U.S.-Iraq status-of-forces agreement. The lack of such an agreement was the excuse Mr. Obama used in 2014 after ISIS marched into Mosul to justify his 2011 unilateral troop withdrawal. Another case of retreat inviting aggression.
Iraq will retake Mosul, albeit at a fearsome cost to its soldiers and the one million or so civilians still trapped there. But it isn’t clear that Iraq’s Shiite-led government can maintain order afterwards without allowing for more local Sunni control. Iran-backed Shiite militias will also be fighting in Mosul, as part of Iran’s plan for a Shiite arc of power from Tehran through Syria to the Mediterranean.
As important as ousting ISIS from Mosul is, the fight to retake the city portends a new phase of conflict that will continue. The next American President would be wise to avoid Mr. Obama’s mistake and negotiate a permanent base for U.S. forces in Iraq to deter the return of ISIS.
And don’t forget the war in Afghanistan, which Mr. Obama also promised would end on his watch but now may require U.S. military help for many more years. The Washington Post reported this week that Afghan forces in Helmand Province require U.S. air power and military advisers to block the Taliban from regaining control. The U.S. strategy is “just enough to lose slowly,” New American Foundation Senior Fellow Douglas Ollivant told the Post.
All of this means the next President will face some difficult choices, especially how to respond to Mr. Putin’s aggression. Negotiating to ratify his gains might buy some short-term peace but at the cost of emboldening him further. Standing up to him will mean more tension and perhaps conflict. Thus rises Mr. Obama’s tide of war.
-
By Rodger Baker
April 2016
Stratfor strives to provide impartial geopolitical analysis and forecasts that identify critical trends in global and regional affairs, explaining the world's complexities in a simple but not simplistic manner. Through the years we have always sought to adhere to these core underlying principles, with mixed success. Remaining "unbiased" in part means staying out of politics, avoiding policy prescriptions (or proscriptions), and addressing issues not from a good/bad or right/wrong approach but rather from a view of effective/ineffective. It means at times stepping away from the emotions of issues, examining deeper compulsions and constraints, and observing how leaders and global actors modify their behavior based on the shifting circumstances in which they find themselves.
It is a difficult endeavor and one that draws various accusations from our readers. We are accused of seeing the world through Cold Warrior lenses, of not caring about human rights and human dignity, of promoting some form of old-school realpolitik. At times, this underpinning philosophy draws equal accusations of being liberal shills, of being too centered on the United States, and of justifying the behavior of dictatorial or repressive regimes. At our best, we garner equal quantities of impassioned responses from all sides of an issue. Criticism is not something we shy from, particularly if our mandate is to ease back the curtains of perception and reveal, as best as possible, the underlying realities of a very complex world system.
For a company accused of being too focused on the United States, we also often receive criticism from our readers for failing to write enough about it. It has been noted more than once that we largely steer clear of covering U.S. politics or even presidential elections. In the grand scheme of geopolitics, over time the role of individuals is largely washed out — to be overly simplistic, the individuals rarely matter. This is, of course, not true, but it is a way to look beyond the subjective desires of leaders and instead to examine the objective realities they face, the circumstances that shape and constrain their options, the structure of the system in which they work, and the upbringing and background that color the way they see and interpret information and make decisions.
In some ways one could argue that, on a broad global scale, the difference in individual presidents, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to whoever succeeds him, has only minimal implications. Bush did not enter the White House with the intent to invade Afghanistan (it is highly unlikely that any U.S. president could conceive of a worse place for a maritime power to find itself). Obama did not enter the White House intending to be engaged in a conflict in Syria. One could perhaps argue that Franklin Roosevelt did intend to enter the war in Europe. But his initial comments, along with those of Woodrow Wilson ahead of U.S. involvement in World War I, gave little sense that this was the direction in which he was headed. Wilson sought to focus on domestic political issues; Roosevelt led an increasingly isolationist nation. World events placed stark choices before them. Bush had September 11. The Syrian civil war, the overall fight against terrorism and the rebalancing of the Middle East placed Syria on Obama's agenda, despite his grand proclamations of a Pacific pivot, which even at the end of his presidency looks a whole lot more modest than envisioned.
Geopolitics can help us understand the implications and pressures on different states, and the way those may limit or compel certain responses. But geopolitics is predictive of broad trends, not of final decisions. We strongly reject the idea of geopolitical determinism, but we also reject the idea that politics is somehow so fundamentally different from other fields that the human agent is supreme. Few completely reject Adam Smith's assertion of an invisible hand in economics; we argue that geopolitics helps us identify elements of a hidden hand in international politics. The narrower the time frame, the more discrete the geography and the more immediate the decision, the less geopolitics explains. But there are other analytical and collection tools to help account for that. Given our broad mandate to use geopolitics to explain the flow of the world system, rather than looking at individuals as unrestrained decision-makers, we seek to understand the circumstances and environment in which they operate. We don't call elections, but we do seek to identify the forces that shape the processes and the realities that will face the officials who rise to power, through whatever means.
Bias, Intentional or Otherwise
So more immediately, we are asked why we do not address the current U.S. presidential election. The first answer is that the contest is not yet at the election stage. We are watching the intraparty competition play out on the way to the nomination. This is politics at its most basic level: a component of a geopolitical approach, but only a component. Perhaps there is room at this stage to read from the primaries some of the broader undercurrents shaping society that will continue to play a role once a president is elected. But frankly, the market is saturated with assessments of the minutiae of day-to-day campaigning. If we are to help our readers understand the world system, there is only so much that we could add to that daily flow of information, assertions and assessments of the current campaigners — and little at this stage yet rises to broader significance.
Perhaps more directly, we do not cover the U.S. election at the same day-to-day depth as the general news media or political commentators not only because we are not political commentators but also because, for the most part, our staff lives in the United States. And this is where the risk of bias materializes. We are designed to be a neutral, nonpartisan service. On U.S. politics (as opposed to policy), it is hard to maintain that nonpartisan approach. Just by living here, we have a stake in the outcome of the analysis that could taint our perceptions. This is not insurmountable — one does not avoid bias by denying its existence but rather by recognizing openly and honestly what that bias is.
Bias is not always intentional. Intentional bias is the easiest to overcome, since it is the most obvious. On the other hand, subconscious bias requires more intense searching to discover. Bias is a natural result of numerous factors: Upbringing, family life, personal experiences, faith, education, friends and location all shape the individual and the way the individual sees things. We often argue here that one piece of information in five hands is of greater value than five pieces of information in one hand, thanks to the variety of perspectives that can be brought to bear. This is why Stratfor's analytical staff is multinational in composition. Techniques such as acknowledging and identifying bias, using alternative viewpoints in the analytical process, and clearly laying out assumptions as differentiated from facts all serve to help overcome bias. Perhaps the best individuals we could use to cover the U.S. election, then, would be foreign nationals living abroad, able to observe the process through less invested eyes.
A Dispassionate View
If we were to apply our process to the U.S. election, as divested of outcome and involvement as we are with other countries, it would perhaps be jarring to our U.S. readership (and perhaps our foreign readership as well). We would discuss the struggles within the opposition conservative party. With no viable centrist candidate, it is instead torn between a strong right-wing fringe candidate with a reputation among his own party in Congress for being uncooperative and an outsider businessman/media star who has openly donated to both parties in years past and who favors provocative statements (perhaps even intentionally provocative, given his extensive media experience). We would talk about the clashes within the ruling liberal party between an establishment candidate, the spouse of a former president and potentially the first woman to assume the U.S. presidency, and an avowed socialist who, despite his age, has drawn heavily on youth support.
We would look at a nation that is still recovering from a massive economic downturn, one that rocked the world. A country where the financial institutions that contributed to the crisis not only appear to have avoided punishment but also are once again thriving, exacerbating the gap between the status of economic recovery overall and the public's perception of economic stability. It is a country that, not necessarily seeing a strong economic recovery for the middle class or blue-collar labor, is now turning against immigration (once again — this has been a fairly typical cycle since nearly the nation's foundation).
It is a country that has been heavily engaged in overseas conflict for well over a decade, where support for the seemingly interminable, distant war is flagging. A country not only facing an imprecisely defined opponent (is terrorism a thing, an ideology or a group of people?) but also seeing the resurgence of peer rivals (Russia and perhaps China). It is a country dealing with a fracturing Europe, long the center of a global alliance structure. A country coming to grips with the unrequested, but no less real, shift of the global center of gravity from the North Atlantic to the North American continent. It is a country that appears to have a global responsibility but that, after years of extensive involvement, has come to question that duty.
It is a country with a changing population that, like those in Japan, South Korea and even China, is grappling with the changed significance of a college education. Meanwhile, a large segment of the population is soon heading for retirement. It is a country undergoing a new round of internal debates over just what social justice means in the "American" context; each expansion in the concepts of freedom and personal rights is considered by some as advancement and by others as further deviation from a known "ideal." It is a country that, consistent with its relative security, has the leisure to debate morality but also to question whether equality and individual freedom are achievable or even desirable at their extremes.
In short, it is a country that, on the largest scale, is now emerging as the center of the global system. On a narrower scale, it is a country ending a cycle of heavy international military engagement and shifting back toward, if not isolationism, at least the pursuit of (or reliance on) a balance-of-power strategy to manage the world system without policing it. It is a country that is coming out of a major economic crisis and seeing its labor market change with shifting technology. Although the shifts have led to new business methods and economic activity, they have also brought job losses in some sectors. It is a country that, like many other places in the world, is struggling with national identity at a time when globalization appears relevant and desirable.
What we see, then, is not yet the U.S. election, but instead the stage for that election. The process is less about the candidates than about the system that has allowed these individuals, as opposed to others, to rise to prominence. We see not Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders, or even John Kasich. Instead, we see the way these individuals — the systems in which they operate and the undercurrents of society — lead to this broader debate on a national level. What any of them will do as president will be a much different story. We can see the space into which they will emerge and how that might constrain their options. But a president does not exist in a vacuum. There is a Cabinet, a Congress, the courts, a society and the international system. It is not that the individual doesn't matter but rather that the individual will exist in a space that he or she largely does not control. Looking at the candidates, then, if we were to get partisan at all, it would be to find the ones most able to adapt and to act in a rapidly changing environment.
-
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/10/20/as-obamas-clock-winds-down-revisionist-powers-pounce/
Obamageddon
As Obama’s Clock Winds Down, Revisionist Powers Pounce Walter Russell Mead
The Philippine pivot to China is just the latest consequence of Obama’s feckless foreign policy.
Hillary Clinton has swept her debate series with Donald Trump, and voters seem to like Trump less the harder they look at him. But as Clinton surely understands, even as she approaches the White House, the global scene is getting darker.
This morning, we saw a glimpse of that world, as one of America’s longest-standing allies in Asia turned its back on the United States and embraced China:
In a state visit aimed at cozying up to Beijing as he pushes away from Washington, the Philippine President announced his military and economic “separation” from the United States.
“America has lost now. I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow,” he told business leaders in Beijing on Thursday. “And maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world: China, Philippines and Russia. It’s the only way.”
As usual, the Obama administration was caught off guard and flat-footed. John Kirby, the spokesman for the State Department, said the move was “inexplicably at odds” with the U.S.-Philippine relationship. “We are going to be seeking an explanation of exactly what the president meant when he talked about separation from us,” Kirby said. “It’s not clear to us exactly what that means and all its ramifications.”
Kirby is right that the outlook in the Philippines is murky; lots of Filipino officials are as appalled by their president’s remarks as anybody in Foggy Bottom. But what isn’t murky at all is that President Obama’s faltering foreign policy has taken another serious hit. It is hard to think of another American president whose foreign policy initiatives failed as badly or as widely as Obama’s. The reconciliation with the Sunni world? The reset with Russia? Stabilizing the Middle East by tilting toward Iran? The Libya invasion? The Syria abstention? The ‘pivot to Asia’ was supposed to be the centerpiece of Obama’s global strategy; instead the waning months of the Obama administration have seen an important U.S. ally pivot toward China in the most public and humiliating way possible.
Duterte clearly thinks that humiliating Obama in this way is a solid career move. He certainly believes that China will support him against the critics at home and abroad who will wring their hands over his shift. He presumably has had some assurances from his Chinese hosts that if he commits his cause to them, they will back him to the hilt.
This points to a broader problem: Obama’s tortuous efforts to balance a commitment to human rights and the niceties of American liberal ideology with a strong policy in defense of basic American security interests have made the world less safe for both human rights and for American security. As the revisionist powers (Russia, China, and Iran) gain ground, foreign leaders feel less and less need to pay attention to American sermons about human rights and the rule of law. Death squads and extra-judicial executions on a large scale: the Americans will lecture you but China will still be your friend. Barrel bombing hospitals in Aleppo? The Russians won’t just back you; they will help you to do it. Obama’s foreign policy is making the world safer for people who despise and trample on the very values that Obama hoped his presidency would advance. His lack of strategic insight and his inability to grasp the dynamics of world power politics have opened the door to a new generation of authoritarian figures in alliance with hostile great powers. Unintentionally, and with the best of intentions, he has opened the doors to the demons of Hell, and the darkest forces in the human spirit have much greater scope and much more power today than they did when he took the oath of office back in 2009.
Now in the final days of Obama’s presidency, Russia, Iran, and China are all stepping up their game. Putin has been humiliating and outfoxing Obama at one end of Eurasia; Iran has gone from routing Obama at the bargaining table to enabling its proxies in Yemen to fire on American ships. Xi now has a triumph of his own, with one of America’s oldest Asian allies insulting Obama at official events. Clearly, America’s opponents (and some of our allies) have reached the conclusion that this particular American administration is unable or unwilling to respond forcefully to provocations.
This isn’t just a painful and embarrassing time for President Obama; it is a dangerous time for world peace. Secretary Clinton is well aware of just how damaging the Filipino defection is in Asia; she helped develop the Obama administration’s Asia strategy and she knows that China’s challenge has just grown much more dangerous. She knows what a wreck the Middle East has become, and she is well aware that Obama will hand her a region that is in much worse shape than it was when Obama took office. She knows how Putin made a patsy and a laughingstock of Obama around the world, and she knows that Obama’s efforts to stabilize the Middle East by conciliating Iran have had just the opposite effect. She knows that even as Donald Trump’s poorly led, poorly conceived electoral campaign weakens, America’s enemies abroad are using every day of Obama’s tenure in office to weaken the foundations of America’s power around the world.
We do not know what other plans our opponents have to take advantage of Obama’s shortcomings as the clock slowly runs down on his time in the White House. Putin clearly hoped that his interference could muddy the waters of the American presidential race; the Russians believe that Trump is if anything less capable than Obama, and that a Trump presidency would give Russia four more years to work at dismantling American power and the European Union. As Putin now contemplates the likely frustration of those hopes, he is likely to think harder about how he can use the time remaining on Obama’s watch to further weaken the United States and erode its alliance system.
Should Secretary Clinton make it to the White House, her first and biggest job will be to stop and then reverse the deterioration in America’s global position that her predecessor permitted. She will have to convince both friends and foes that the President of the United States is no longer a punching bag, and that the United States of America is back on the stage. She will need, and she will deserve, the support of patriotic Americans in both political parties as she undertakes this necessary mission. President Obama’s mismanagement of foreign affairs is creating a genuine international emergency; the White House and Congress will have to work together to restore American prestige and stop the slide toward chaos and war.
-
On the one hand he can't do any harm there. ( If only his secone leg of his round trip was cancelled :evil:)
OTOH if the penguins and sea lions were smart they would make a deal with him and Obama now, especially before they have to deal with Trump:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/his-very-long-trip-kerry-producing-much-co2-average-american-1-year
-
Interesting, thoughtful piece:
http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/01/jim-webb-addresses-americas-elites-donald-trump-foreign-policy-keynote/
-
This is a VERY interesting article shared with me by our Big Dog.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydides-trap/406756/?utm_source=atlfb
-
Hoping for some discussion of my "Thucydides Trap" post of yesterday , , ,
-
Second post:
http://www.dickmorris.com/trumps-emerging-foreign-policy-techniques-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
-
Hoping for some discussion of my "Thucydides Trap" post of yesterday , , ,
http://warontherocks.com/2016/12/thucydides-reading-between-the-lines/
-
This is a VERY interesting article shared with me by our Big Dog.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydides-trap/406756/?utm_source=atlfb
It is very interesting and I will comment after digesting it.
-
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/the-conservative-split-on-russia/510317/
Why Trump’s Republican Party Is Embracing Russia
Ideological and civilizational conservatives united in opposition to the Soviet Union, but divide on whether Putin’s Russia is a totalitarian enemy, or a defender of the Christian west.
Through his public statements and presidential appointments, Donald Trump is remaking Republican foreign policy in two fundamental ways. The first concerns Russia. Previous GOP leaders like Mitt Romney and John McCain described Moscow as an adversary. Trump describes it as a partner. The second concerns Islam. Previous GOP leaders—most notably George W. Bush—insisted that the U.S. had no beef with Islam, or with the vast majority of Muslims worldwide. Trump and his top advisors disagree. They often describe Islam itself as a hostile force, and view ordinary Muslims as guilty of jihadist sympathies until proven innocent.
On the surface, these two shifts seem unrelated. But they’re deeply intertwined. Before Trump, Republican leaders generally described the United States as fighting an ideological struggle against the enemies of freedom. Now, Trump and his advisors describe America as fighting a civilizational struggle against the enemies of the West. Seen through that very different lens, Muslims look more nefarious and Vladimir Putin looks more benign.
To understand this shift, it’s worth distinguishing two different strains of conservative foreign-policy thinking during the cold war. Civilizational conservatives like Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan saw the cold war as a struggle between two countries defined primarily by their view of God: The Judeo-Christian United States versus the atheistic Soviet Union. Ideological conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams, by contrast, saw the cold war as a conflict between two countries defined primarily by their view of government: the liberty-loving United States versus the totalitarian USSR. (A third group, composed of realists like Henry Kissinger and George Kennan, saw the cold war as a traditional great power conflict between two countries defined primarily by their geopolitical heft.)
In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, ideological conservatives and civilizational conservatives parted ways. The clearest example was the former Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, Serbs brutalized the largely Muslim breakaway republic of Bosnia. Ideological conservatives like Robert Kagan urged NATO to intervene in the name of human rights. Cultural conservatives like Buchanan wondered why the U.S. was going to war to defend Muslims against Christians. Ideological conservatives saw Russia, Serbia’s traditional ally, as defending tyranny and ethnic cleansing. Cultural conservatives saw Russia as defending Christendom.
For a while, 9/11 papered over these divisions. Bush largely justified the “war on terror” in ideological terms: as a struggle against a new totalitarian foe that had “hijacked” Islam. In this depiction, ordinary Muslims living in places like Afghanistan and Iraq were not the equivalent of Nazis or communists; they were the equivalent of the people who those previous totalitarian foes had held in bondage. Civilizational conservatives considered Bush naïve. Franklin Graham, who delivered the prayer at Bush’s first inauguration, repeatedly described Islam itself as wicked. But while their justifications for the “war on terror” differed, both ideological and civilizational conservatives backed Bush’s military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bush left behind a GOP establishment dominated by ideological conservatives. In 2008 and 2012, McCain and Romney both resisted describing Islam itself as a threat. Romney described authoritarian Russia as America’s greatest geopolitical foe. But during both election cycles, more populist, civilizationally-oriented, conservatives—Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson—kept attacking Islam itself.
When he ran for president, Trump realized that on Islam, as on trade, Republican elites were out of step with the Republican base. Trump distinguished himself from his rivals not by proposing a different strategy against ISIS. He distinguished himself by suggesting that the problem was not merely ISIS, or even “radical Islam,” but Muslims in general. Republican leaders reacted to Trump’s call for banning Muslim immigration to the U.S. with revulsion. But, according to surveys, more than seven in 10 GOP voters supported it.
Trump also broke with his establishment rivals by taking a softer line on Russia. Maybe financial interests motivated him. Maybe he just likes authoritarian tough-guys. Whatever the reason, the deviation seemed politically dangerous given the overwhelming hostility to Putin among GOP foreign-policy elites. But Trump’s pro-Putin line hasn’t hurt him. In fact, Republicans as a whole have grown markedly less anti-Russian since 2014.
Partly, they’re aping Trump. But there’s something deeper at work. Ideological conservatives loathe Putin because he represents an authoritarian challenge to the American-backed order in Europe and the Middle East. But many civilizational conservatives, who once opposed the Soviet Union because of its atheism, now view Putin’s Russia as Christianity’s front line against the new civilizational enemy: Islam. Among the alt-right, Putin is a very popular man. He’s popular because he resists the liberal, cosmopolitan values that Muslims supposedly exploit to undermine the West. Richard Spencer, who was until recently married to a pro-Putin Russian writer, has called Russia the “sole white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, another prominent figure in the alt-right, recently told Business Insider that “Russia is the leader of the free world.” In 2013, Pat Buchanan penned a column entitled, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?”
Trump is building on this shift to recast GOP foreign policy. He’s moving it away from an ideological confrontation with authoritarian Russia and toward a civilizational conflict with Islam. Trump’s choice for National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn, has tweeted that “fear of Muslims is rational” and that Islam is “like cancer” When asked in August about Putin, he explained that America “beat Hitler because of our relationship with the Russians” and we should renew that partnership in the new world war against “radical Islamism.” Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, likes to talk about the “long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam … a war of immense proportions” that continues to this day. And in that struggle, he’s argued, “we the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s [Putin] talking about as far as traditionalism goes—particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism.” Unlike the globalists of the European Union, Bannon argues, Putin believes in “sovereignty,” which makes him a valuable ally in America’s civilizational fight.
This is the backdrop to the looming conflict between Donald Trump and congressional Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who want to investigate Russia’s efforts to elect him. Will the GOP define Americanism as the defense of a set of universal principles or as the defense of a racial and religious heritage? The answer won’t only help determine how well liberal democracy fares overseas. It will help determine how well it fares at home.
-
This article engages with some deep and important points-- respect for that!-- but I would like to see it address why, given Europe's dramatic failure to meet its commitments for military spending, why the US should not consider exactly what the article mentions-- the idea of an alliance with Russia to balance against China.
Given the PROFOUND questions in play, it is more than a little unfortunate that Trump has acted, and is acting in ways that allow questions concerning his motivations to take form.
==============================================================
Saving Europe From Itself—Again
A Russian aggressor could drive through NATO’s weak center or bite off its edges piece by piece.
By Mark Helprin
Updated Dec. 14, 2016 11:40 p.m. ET
126 COMMENTS
Though Europeans bridle when confronted with the possibility that Americans have something to offer, the Champs Élysées is not called Unter den Linden, and the Thousand-Year Reich and Warsaw Pact are no more, because—intelligently, successfully, and sacrificially—the U.S. came three times to Europe’s aid.
But for the past quarter-century the U.S. has had no effective, proactive strategy in regard to the defense of Europe. Should it not awaken to this with strategic clarity and resolve, the price may be beyond calculation.
Although the Continent is dangerously weakened by ideological fevers, economic malaise and the importation of bereft masses from war-crazed cultures, keep your eye upon the sparrow—a resurgent, revanchist Russia, which with continued success in recobbling its lost empire will look westward to the rich lands between it and the Atlantic. Rather than arriving late as in the two world wars, the U.S. should take military and diplomatic measures now to deter yet another catastrophe.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was able to keep the Soviets at bay because its nuclear forces and resolution were at least equal to those of the U.S.S.R.; its powerful conventional elements were properly positioned opposite their adversaries; its command structure was unified; and American echelons were deployed in strength.
Despite the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the migration of most of its members to NATO, and the U.S.S.R.’s collapse, the European military balance is shifting toward Russia. While the U.S. has reduced the number of its nuclear weapons, failed to modernize them, and pacified its nuclear doctrines, Russia has cut less, steadily modernized, and promiscuously issued nuclear threats.
Some examples in regard to conventional forces: In 1987 the U.S. had 354,000 military personnel in Europe and surrounding waters, and 735 combat aircraft. Now it deploys 40,450 and 130, respectively. Between 1987 and 2015, Great Britain’s main battle tanks have dwindled to 227 from 1,200, France’s to 200 from 1,340, and Germany’s to 306 from 4,887. Britain’s combat aircraft have fallen to 194 from 596, France’s to 360 from 520, and Germany’s to 235 from 604.
Given the strategic chaos in the Mediterranean, it is astounding that while in 1985 the U.S. Sixth Fleet often comprised two aircraft carriers, six nuclear submarines, and 28 other warships, during most of the Obama administration it had been reduced to one virtually unarmed command ship.
Though to save themselves the Europeans must be pressured to increase defense expenditures, threatening publicly and without warning to refrain from U.S. treaty obligations, and eight years of military retreat under President Obama, have emboldened Russia and pushed Europe further into creating a European defense separate from NATO. Herding 28 countries into a coherent military structure is difficult enough without adding another level of command. And even if the possibility of aligning with Russia to balance out China were not met with Russian betrayal, the price would be Western Europe, which is obviously unacceptable.
Were Europe merely to meet its minimum spending targets, military outlays would increase by 59%, or $87 billion annually. This close to $1 trillion over a decade would bolster its capacities and also allow for a richer variety of equipment, which—though more costly and unwieldy—would provide different tools for different problems, with multiple types, ranges, and heat and radar signatures vastly complicating an enemy’s planning.
But reconstituting NATO’s strategic and conventional forces is not in itself sufficient to counter Russia’s carefully executed incremental strategies. Russia treats firmness as provocation justifying further Russian aggression, and sees fecklessness as an invitation to the same. Adding to the general instability, de facto U.S. abandonment of tactical nuclear weapons while Russia retains them removes NATO’s option of limited escalation, forcing it to rely on either its weakened conventional defenses or all out nuclear brinkmanship. To counter this, NATO needs a new form of flexible military-diplomatic response. To wit, a massive, newly deployed force that can quickly and with precise calibration respond to provocation, and with similar agility ease off in response to accommodation.
No such structure now exists, due to NATO’s overall weakness and to the scattered deployment of its components, suitable to the defense of each individual nation more than to defeating an attack upon its center. Germany’s rapid westward conquests in both world wars might not have occurred had British armies not been sitting off to the side in England. This bitter lesson, leading to the success of strong central deployment in the Cold War, has now been forgotten. As NATO’s capabilities have contracted, the accession of new members has expanded its continental defense perimeter by 83%. The product of these two deficiencies is vulnerability similar to that of the interwar years of the 1920s and ’30s.
An aggressor can drive through NATO’s weakly defended center or bite off its weakly defended edges piece by piece (starting, perhaps, with the Baltic republics). Concentrating the main NATO force near Russia’s borders would make them simultaneously too provocative and too vulnerable. Massing them in Germany would rob them of the ability to move in response to Russian action except to the Russian periphery.
Better to base NATO’s main “column” in Germany and (a major diplomatic challenge) France. In response to Russian provocation, French-stationed forces could then be moved eastward—in a clear and substantive signal—and moved back just as easily. Tripwire forces could be sent to the Baltic and Poland as they are now (though now, with insufficient backing other than general nuclear warfare, Russia need not take them too seriously). Meanwhile, NATO’s center would be massively defended, which is the heart of the matter and the best insurance against Russian adventurism.
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, is the author of “Winter’s Tale,” “A Soldier of the Great War” and the forthcoming novel “Paris in the Present Tense.”
-
http://warontherocks.com/2016/12/the-return-of-hard-power/
-
This is a VERY interesting article shared with me by our Big Dog.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydides-trap/406756/?utm_source=atlfb
It is very interesting and I will comment after digesting it.
China has serious internal stability issues. This fuels China's aggressive behavior in the South China sea. Building China's internal perception of a strong, rising power is what gives the CCP it's legitimacy with the population. Failure to maintain it's legitimacy could be fatal to the current power structure. So, China is motivated to act aggressively, and not back down in a scenario that offers a loss of face for the power structure. Keep in mind that despite all the money China has dumped into upgrading it's military, it spends even more on internal security. The power vacuum of "leading from behind" has further fueled China's aggressiveness. Obama has left Trump a ticking bomb.
-
http://www.mediaite.com/online/obama-heads-to-golf-course-after-receiving-reports-on-berlin-attack-and-russian-ambassador-death/
(http://static01.mediaite.com/med/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/obamagolf1-300x196.jpg)
Obama Heads to Golf Course After Receiving Reports on Berlin Attack and Russian Ambassador Death
by Justin Baragona | 4:05 pm, December 19th, 2016
2863
Well, this is what one would call bad political optics.
With the dual breaking news events surrounding potential terrorism and a foreign diplomat being shot to death, White House pool reports showed that President Barack Obama headed to a country club in Hawaii near his rental house, where he is vacationing.
The first email shows that Obama has directed his staff to keep him updated on the situation in Turkey regarding the assassination of the Russian Ambassador.
From the White House, per Principal Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz:
“This morning the President was briefed by his National Security Team on the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey in Ankara today. The President directed his team to provide updates as warranted.”
Meanwhile, at 10:10 a.m. in Kailua, the press van prepares to depart the rental house where we’ve been holding.
In a following email, we are informed that Obama is leaving the rental home to go play golf.
The President and his motorcade departed the Kailua neighborhood where the First Family rents a vacation home at 10:21 a.m. Spectators on the street threw shakas and recorded photos or video on cell phones as the motorcade made the 10-minute drive to Mid-Pacific Country Club, where the President will be golfing under cloudy skies.
The times listed are local Hawaii time. Obama’s motorcade left his vacation home at 3:21 PM ET.
Currently, the news is dominated by both the assassination in Turkey, which could have large-scale implications on foreign policy and relations, and multiple deaths in Berlin via a truck driving through a market in an incident reminiscent of the Nice terror attack.
Needless to say, there will be a lot of negative attention given to Obama playing golf in the immediate aftermath of these horrific, and potentially history-altering, events.
-
This thread is for substantive issues. Obama ducking work yet again belongs on the Glibness thread.
-
http://www.hoover.org/research/new-american-grand-strategy
-
https://www.policyed.org/intellections/no-empty-threats/video?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=intellections&utm_content=foreign-policy-empty-threats&utm_medium=paid
-
The Trump Doctrine: A Work in Progress
Geopolitical Weekly
December 20, 2016 | 08:02 GMT Print
Text Size
Commentators among the Washington establishment have been quick to dismiss President-elect Donald Trump's foreign policy moves outright over the past few weeks, but his actions merit deeper exploration than knee-jerk disbelief. (JEFF SWENSON/Getty Images)
By Reva Goujon
The world is in a "frenzy of study," Henry Kissinger said in a recent interview. At home and abroad, strategists and pundits are trying to piece together a blueprint of American foreign policy under U.S. President-elect Donald Trump from a stream of tweets, some campaign slogans, a few eye-catching Cabinet picks, meetings at Trump Tower, and a pingpong match already underway with Beijing. Highbrow intellectualism can be a handicap in this exercise. Commentators among the Washington establishment have been quick to dismiss Trump's foreign policy moves outright as erratic and self-serving over the past few weeks. In an op-ed entitled "Trump Failed His First Foreign Policy Test," for instance, columnist David Ignatius admonished the president-elect for the "hot mess" his phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen precipitated. Trump makes people uncomfortable. It's what he does best, in fact. But how this quality applies to foreign policy is a question that merits deeper exploration than knee-jerk displays of stricken disbelief. After all, as Kissinger noted in his Dec. 18 interview, "a president has to have some core convictions."
So what are Trump's? From what we can discern so far from his upbringing, the trajectory of his career and the profiles of those who have infiltrated his inner circle, Trump prizes business acumen and a "killer" instinct for managing affairs. He has enough corporate firepower in his Cabinet to fill the next Forbes' list. By nominating ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, he has demonstrated his belief that tough deal-making — identifying sources of leverage and showing a willingness to use them — is the secret to running a country and presiding over the international system. Trump does not fear nationalism; he sees it as the natural and rightful path for every state, the United States included, to pursue in protecting its interests. He also seems to have internalized the idea that the United States is losing its competitiveness and that internationalist foreign policy is to blame. Finally, Trump apparently believes that U.S. foreign policy has become too predictable and overwrought with diplomatic formality. Better to say it like it is and call out institutions and conventions that have outlived their usefulness.
This, at least, is the worldview at a distance. When we come in for a closer look, however, some of the cracks come into clearer view. In 1953, General Motors Co. CEO Charles Wilson was asked in his Senate confirmation hearing to become President Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of defense whether his decisions in office could end up harming his company. He answered that they might but that he could not imagine such a scenario since "for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." In fact, what is good for a business will not always be congruent with the national interest. A company is answerable to its shareholders, just as a president is answerable to some degree to Congress and the American public. But the mission of the CEO — maximizing value for its shareholders — entails different considerations when pursuing the raison d'etat and preserving a social contract with a nation's citizenry. The latter entwines economic arguments with the social and moral obligations of the state, a nebulous territory where inefficiencies, compromise and the social consequences of massive deregulation are unavoidable.
Driving a Hard Bargain
Trump sees it as his mission to repair the social contract with the American public by bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. This will be easier said than done, however. Across-the-board tariffs against big trading partners, such as China, might have worked 20 years ago but not in today's globalized environment. Raising import tariffs now could cause the price of goods no longer produced domestically to skyrocket and disrupt international supply chains, turning many U.S. businesses into pawns in various overseas trade wars.
It could be argued that China depends more heavily on exports than the United States does and cannot afford to risk its vital supply lines in a major confrontation with the world's most powerful navy. This, in effect, leaves Washington with the upper hand in its trade tussle with Beijing. In the search for additional leverage against China, Trump has shown a willingness to expire Washington's "one-China" policy, a holdover from the Cold War that dodged the question of Taiwan's statehood to drive a wedge between the Soviets and Communist China.
But that's just one side of the equation. China has twin imperatives to maintain access to export markets and raw materials and to prevent an outside power from blockading its northern coast through the Taiwan Strait. If Trump's policies interfere with these objectives, Beijing has levers it can pull to retaliate. Should the United States play the Taiwan card to try to exact economic concessions from Beijing, China can strong-arm U.S. companies operating on the mainland. Beijing can also use its enormous economic clout over Taiwan — whose semiconductor manufacturing and assembly industry is tightly intertwined with the mainland — to threaten a disruption to the global tech supply chain. Furthermore, as its recent seizure of an unmanned U.S. naval drone illustrated, China can flex its maritime muscle, albeit cautiously, to raise the stakes in a trade dispute with the United States. Though Trump would rather leave it to regional stakeholders such as Japan and South Korea to balance against Beijing, his compulsion to correct the United States' trade relationship with China will draw him into stormy security waters in the Pacific.
A Different Kind of Negotiation
Just as Trump regards the one-China policy as a relic of the Cold War worth revisiting, he intends to update Washington's relationship with Moscow. As Trump sees it, the United States is not fighting an existential battle with Russia deserving of Cold War-era collective security commitments. Russia is no longer preoccupied with forging an empire under an ideology that is anathema to Western capitalism. Instead, Moscow is focused on the more basic task of constructing a national identity and insulating the state and its borderlands from Western encroachment in anticipation of greater domestic turmoil to come. As Kissinger recently put it, Russian President Vladimir Putin is like one of Fyodor Dostoevsky's characters, for whom "the question of Russian identity is very crucial because, as a result of the collapse of communism, Russia has lost about 300 years of its history." If Russia were to try to build a state by expanding its already sprawling territory, nationalism would not be enough to hold it together. Consequently, Putin is trying to defend the areas surrounding his country and compel the West to recognize and respect that sphere of influence.
Taking a less alarmist view of Russia's intentions, the Trump administration sees an opening to develop a new understanding with Moscow, one that could put to rest the question of Crimea and perhaps recognize Russia's influence over eastern Ukraine. Syria, a peripheral issue for both Moscow and Washington, would be recognized as such. Since sanctions are a drag on business and Russia sorely needs investment, Trump could ease the measures to get a dialogue moving on what an understanding would look like without sacrificing the U.S. military presence along Europe's eastern flank.
Should Tillerson be confirmed as secretary of state, Trump would rely on his knowledge of Kremlin personalities and their internal feuds to advance the negotiations. After all, if a company needs good inroads with the Kremlin to do business in Russia, the same must go for a government that wants to negotiate with Moscow. But negotiating access to Russia's Arctic shelf on ExxonMobil's behalf is not the same as conducting talks centered on Russia (or China, for that matter) trying to get the West out of its backyard.
Russia has no illusion that a shuffle of personalities in the White House will reverse U.S. policy and cede the former Soviet sphere to it. The United States will still be compelled to keep a check on Russia's moves in Europe just as Moscow will maintain its levers across several theaters, from cybersecurity to arms control to proxy wars in the Middle East. Though Trump's administration may change the tone of the conversation and broach the topic of tactical concessions, Russia will still be driven by an unrelenting distrust of Western intentions that will keep defenses up on both sides. Nonetheless, the very notion of a private bargain developing between Washington and Moscow will inject uncertainty into long-standing collective security arrangements as the European Continent is undergoing another Machiavellian moment in history where the assertion of state interests is breaking the bonds of its flawed union.
An Unlikely Precedent
Despite the changes that Trump will doubtless bring to the presidency, his foreign policy is not as unprecedented as the world's pundits may claim. The bridge between President Barack Obama's foreign policy doctrine and the one evolving under Trump is not entirely sturdy, but the foundation is there. As president, Obama was a realist. He considered it his mission to rebalance the United States after the country had overextended itself fighting wars in the Islamic world. His resistance to expanding U.S. military commitments in the Middle East was deeply ingrained; as he said in an interview in The Atlantic, "it is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism." He held strong convictions that the United States would once again be trampled under a sectarian horde in the Middle East if it tried to extend its ambitions beyond the more immediate and visible threat of the Islamic State. He also pressured even close U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom to pay their fair share in security commitments because, as he put it, "free riders aggravate me." Obama was a follower of 20th-century American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who held a rather Hobbesian view of the world as a struggle among self-interested groups. (It was Niebuhr who wrote, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.") The current president built a foreign policy on extreme restraint while addressing his own set of geopolitical anachronisms: the United States' relationships with Iran and Cuba.
But Obama, unlike Trump, applied an internationalist lens to his realist views. He wanted his allies to pay their share but was resolute in keeping the U.S. security umbrella over their heads. He viewed foreign trade as a means to build alliances and contain conflicts. Still, protectionism was already well underway during Obama's tenure. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the United States has led G-20 countries in carrying out discriminatory trade measures on selective industries (particularly metals), according to a report by Global Trade Alert. At the same time, Obama saw that the world was changing with technology and that old jobs would give way to advances in manufacturing. He preferred to think in longer horizons, at times to his own detriment: For Obama, the long-term impact of climate change was existential compared with the short-term threat posed by the Islamic State.
By contrast, Trump's realism is steeped in nationalism and tends to be more myopic in assessing threats. His solution to displaced American labor is to punish foreign trade partners rather than to retool the workforce to adapt to demographic and technological change. Under Trump, climate change concerns will take a back seat to the more immediate desires to ease regulations on business. Rather than play a restrained globalist role, the next president would sooner respect countries' rights to defend themselves, irrespective of the long-term consequences of undermining time-honored collective security arrangements. Though a departure from an already defunct two-state solution in Israel's favor acknowledges the current reality, it also risks further destabilizing the balance of power in the Middle East as Turkey continues its resurgence and multiple civil wars rage on. A short-term escalation with Beijing over trade and Taiwan could cost Washington a much bigger strategic discussion over China's attempts to achieve parity with the United States in numerous spheres, from cyberspace to the seas.
Keeping the World on Its Toes
Perhaps the greatest difference between the Obama and Trump foreign policies lies in what may be Trump's biggest virtue: his unpredictability. Obama has been criticized as overly cautious in his foreign policy and thus too much of a known entity for U.S. adversaries. Trump, on the other hand, gives the impression that he is willing to throw caution to the wind and rely on instinct in shaping foreign policy. This matters immensely for U.S. allies and adversaries alike that have to be kept on their toes in developing their long-term strategy while avoiding the unexpected with the world's superpower.
Regardless of who occupies the presidency, the United States' strong geopolitical foundation gives it options. As opposed to more vulnerable countries in less forgiving locales, the United States, buffered as it is by two vast oceans, can debate the merits of isolationism and intervention. George Kennan, a diplomat during the Cold War era, may have captured the immense power of the country's unpredictability best:
"[American democracy is like] one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: He lives there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath — in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat."
Aloofness in international affairs is a geopolitical luxury, but it cannot be taken for granted. That may be the basis for the Trump doctrine.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443347/obama-foreign-policy-ignores-human-nature-time-tested-truths?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-12-27&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
-
All we have heard for 8 yrs is that what we really need are *statesmen* who can give us diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy. The Left lectured us that we just need more of this
diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy.
diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy.
diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy.
diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy.
Now 5 minutes before he exits Obama is giving everyone the finger.
Thanks for your diplomacy BROCK!
Nobel prize winner. If only the world was smart enough to appreciate your genius. God , can we make it till the 20th?
From another compost this one the Huffington one:
Brock "lowers the boom":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-sanctions-russia-over-election_us_586560e7e4b0d9a5945a9b3a?17ybfuwv2i4jqncdi
Funny how cyber security only became a top priority once it hurt the Democrat Party. Last I heard we still don't have our power gird protected against and EMP.
If you ask me OBama looks more like a coward then a tough guy, by getting pissy as he is heading for the exits after 8 yrs of selling us out.
-
David Burge
@iowahawkblog
Russia invades Crimea: oh well
Russia shoots down airliner: mistakes happen
John Podesta falls for phishing scam: RESTART THE COLD WAR
All we have heard for 8 yrs is that what we really need are *statesmen* who can give us diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy. The Left lectured us that we just need more of this
diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy.
diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy.
diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy.
diplomacy, diplomacy and more diplomacy.
Now 5 minutes before he exits Obama is giving everyone the finger.
Thanks for your diplomacy BROCK!
Nobel prize winner. If only the world was smart enough to appreciate your genius. God , can we make it till the 20th?
From another compost this one the Huffington one:
Brock "lowers the boom":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-sanctions-russia-over-election_us_586560e7e4b0d9a5945a9b3a?17ybfuwv2i4jqncdi
Funny how cyber security only became a top priority once it hurt the Democrat Party. Last I heard we still don't have our power gird protected against and EMP.
If you ask me OBama looks more like a coward then a tough guy, by getting pissy as he is heading for the exits after 8 yrs of selling us out.
-
Understanding America's Global Role in the Age of Trump
Geopolitical Weekly
January 3, 2017 | 08:07 GMT Print
Text Size
A Trump supporter holds a campaign prop of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan in November 2016 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. President-elect Donald Trump has invoked Reagan's policy of "Peace Through Strength." (JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/Getty Images)
By Rodger Baker
The New Year, of course, is a time when many reflect on the past and look toward the future. The past provides potential lessons and cautions for those who would seek to find tomorrow's solutions in yesterday's actions. In his 1994 book Diplomacy, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote: "The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations. But each generation must determine for itself which circumstances are in fact comparable."
While Kissinger is explicit on the importance of studying and applying history to policy, he is as insistent that history not be misapplied, that the assessment of the past not lead to false conclusions for the present or the future. Today, the concept of "Peace Through Strength" popularized by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s is emerging as a mantra of the incoming Trump administration, its advisers and supporters. The risk of raising iconic personalities and policies from American history is that lessons may inadvertently be misapplied. The concepts may be sound, but the interpretation and application in a different context may lead to wildly different results.
Peace Through Strength
"Peace Through Strength" was a cornerstone of the Reagan administration, an assertion that an economically and militarily strong United States was necessary to ensure peace and stability internationally by demonstrating the futility of challenging U.S. power. But times have changed, the world system is far different than it was during the Cold War, threats have evolved, and the mythos of Reagan has perhaps superseded the reality of history. It is worth considering what Peace Through Strength meant in the past, what it may mean in the present, and perhaps most important, just how one measures American strength in the modern era.
It is hard to reconcile some current policy proposals — rolling back free trade, increasing tariffs, pulling back on the U.S. global role and leaving allies to their own defense — with the underpinnings of the Reagan-esque Peace Through Strength, which encouraged free trade, an activist foreign policy and the strong support of distant allies. But it is also a very different moment in history.
Reagan came to office at a time of double-digit interest rates and chaotic oil markets, in a binary world of the U.S.-led West versus Soviet East, and on the heels of a major U.S. intelligence reassessment of the Soviet nuclear and conventional threat. The structure of the U.S. economy was still based on manufacturing with a strong export component, and the coming computer revolution was just beginning. Reagan even noted in his 1983 State of the Union address that "To many of us now, computers, silicon chips, data processing, cybernetics, and all the other innovations of the dawning high technology age are as mystifying as the workings of the combustion engine must have been when that first Model T rattled down Main Street, U.S.A.," a comment that seems rather quaint given today's technology-driven lives.
In the Soviet Union, Reagan had a single major foreign threat to contend with, and he coupled his push for missile defense systems (to negate the advantage in Soviet missiles) with calls for reductions in nuclear arms. Peace Through Strength was intended to deter conventional and nuclear attacks against the United States and its allies by the Soviet Union and its allies.
In his March 1983 Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security, Reagan explained Peace Through Strength as the application of a policy of deterrence. "Since the dawn of the atomic age, we've sought to reduce the risk of war by maintaining a strong deterrent and by seeking genuine arms control. 'Deterrence' means simply this: making sure any adversary who thinks about attacking the United States, or our allies, or our vital interests, concludes that the risks to him outweigh any potential gains. Once he understands that, he won't attack. We maintain the peace through our strength; weakness only invites aggression."
Two months earlier, in his State of the Union Address, Reagan had highlighted the dual economic and military components of a policy of Peace through Strength. "Our strategy for peace with freedom must also be based on strength—economic strength and military strength. A strong American economy is essential to the well-being and security of our friends and allies. The restoration of a strong, healthy American economy has been and remains one of the central pillars of our foreign policy." The dual concepts of a strong domestic American economy and a strong defense capability were tied together into a single strategy with a global focus.
The incoming U.S. administration has picked up on these two themes and revived the Peace Through Strength concept. The focus is on rebuilding the American economy through manufacturing, infrastructure development and tax reform, and on strengthening American defense in part through an expansion of nuclear capacity. But the conditions are different now. Manufacturing and exports are no longer as important to the U.S. economy, technology has created entire new sectors of economic activity, and trade patterns have expanded into massive networks spanning continents. Interest rates in double digits when Reagan took office are barely rising above record lows today, and oil prices remain hovering near lows, while U.S. domestic production is on the rise. Technology has advanced the tools of warfare and disruption into the cyber realm, reducing the speed and confidence of identifying the perpetrator and altering the perception of risk and reward for state powers as well as non-state actors.
And, of course, there is no Soviet Union. Rather than a single superpower adversary, the United States faces the emergence of several regional powers, none exactly an opponent, but each seeking to assert its own interests in the face of the single remaining global hegemon. The threat is seen less as a battle between nuclear-armed superpowers than as a struggle against non-state actors with a very different risk-reward calculus. It is not clear, for example, that a strong nuclear force will deter terrorist attacks by non-state actors and their sympathizers. Even the large-scale U.S. military response in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks did not stop the later emergence of the Islamic State or its promotion of militant attacks against American allies, interests and homeland.
Reagan's Peace Through Strength was more than simply about making America great: Reagan asserted America was already great but just faced some problems. His policy was about making America strong internally and externally so it could carry out its broader global mission of spreading democracy. Underlying Reagan's policies was the recognition that American exceptionalism derived not only from its being powerful, but from its responsibility to spread the American system to other countries. In the super hero trope, great responsibility came with great power.
Beacon vs. Missionary
Exceptionalism has long been a conceptual underpinning of American foreign and domestic policy. America's founding myths perpetuate the idea that this is a unique country, one that has refined a system of government and personal freedoms that are not merely the result of local conditions, but universal in application. The debate among American leadership, as Kissinger highlighted, has long centered on whether to be the light on the hill, semi-isolated but a shining beacon for others to emulate, or to be the active crusading missionary, taking a direct role in bringing American principles and systems to the world.
Reagan was no isolationist; he did not seek retrenchment or withdrawal from the global role of the United States. Instead, he promoted internationalism, free trade, active financial and defense support of allies, and a hands-on approach to world affairs. The Reagan administration sought through strength a greater capacity to fulfill what he saw as the U.S. role as the leader of the West, the bringer of democracy, and the guiding light to the world.
It is this broader mission that appears, at least on the surface, to be lacking in the incoming administration's expression of Peace Through Strength. America is exceptional, but exceptional and alone, responsible for itself but not others. The goal is to make America great, but it is unclear to what end. In part this may be the wide swing reaction to the perception that the current Obama administration often appeared to focus on the interests, concerns, or verbal preferences of others over those of the United States. In times of transition the pendulum often swings wide before it moves a back a little toward the center. Reagan's policies were a far cry from those of his predecessor, and Barack Obama shaped himself as the antithesis of what was derided as the cowboy-esque tendencies of the George W. Bush administration. In each case, though, the realities of the global system ultimately tempered at least some of the rhetorical and ideological differences, or at least their application.
Perhaps the biggest challenge currently is simply understanding just how to measure American power in the modern world. During the Cold War, the intelligence community produced so-called "net assessments" and National Intelligence Estimates for the president and the administration to measure the net balance between different aspects of American and Soviet power and those of their alliance structures. These included economic, social, political and, of course, military comparisons, though the latter frequently defaulted to bean-counter comparisons of the numbers of systems rather than providing a holistic look at their overall effectiveness. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc gave rise to a clear preponderance of U.S. economic, cultural, political and militarily power.
But that massive gap is narrowing, not necessarily due to a decline in overall U.S. strength, but rather to the rise of regional powers — notably China and the re-emergence of Russia, but also smaller regional groupings that have been growing economically and militarily. Many worldwide argue that the United States should no longer be the default global leader, that other countries have the right to take their turn at broader international leadership, and that U.S. ideals are not universal and so should not be asserted as such. The diffusion of global power is also creating a diffusion of global ideals. Global and domestic resistance to perceived over-globalization is strong, and the ability of the United States to assert its ideals and its right to lead the global system is increasingly challenged from without and within.
In relative strength, the United States is losing ground, particularly by measures from the beginning of the post-Cold War period. But that does not mean that any other single power will soon overtake the United States. The United States remains the single largest economy and the single most powerful military force in the world. The question is perhaps not whether the United States has strength, but how it intends to apply that strength, and whether the United States has vision beyond itself.
-
Trump Embraces Pillars of Obama’s Foreign Policy
By MARK LANDLER, PETER BAKER and DAVID E. SANGERFEB. 2, 2017
Continue reading the main story
Share This Page
Share
Tweet
Email
More
Save
Photo
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech during a memorial ceremony for Ron Nahman, the founder of Ariel, one of the largest Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank on Thursday. Credit Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
WASHINGTON — President Trump, after promising a radical break with the foreign policy of Barack Obama, is embracing key pillars of the former administration’s strategy, including warning Israel to curb construction of settlements, demanding that Russia withdraw from Crimea and threatening Iran with sanctions for ballistic missile tests.
In the most startling shift, the White House issued an unexpected statement appealing to the Israeli government not to expand the construction of Jewish settlements beyond their current borders in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Such expansion, it said, “may not be helpful in achieving” the goal of peace.
At the United Nations, Ambassador Nikki R. Haley declared that the United States would not lift sanctions against Russia until it stopped destabilizing Ukraine and pulled troops out of Crimea.
On Iran, the administration is preparing a set of economic sanctions that are similar to what the Obama administration imposed just over a year ago. The White House has also shown no indication that it plans to rip up Mr. Obama’s landmark nuclear deal, despite Mr. Trump’s withering criticism of it during the presidential campaign.
Continue reading the main story
The Trump White House
Stories about President Trump’s administration.
Melania Trump’s Absence From Washington Raises Questions About Her Role
FEB 2
New C.I.A. Deputy Director Had Leading Role in Torture of Detainees
FEB 2
Trump Looks to Another Finance Veteran for Senior Role
FEB 2
Pointing to Trump, Groups Reject U.S. Aid to Fight Extremism
FEB 2
For Europe, There’s a New Threat in Town: The U.S.
FEB 2
See More »
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
New administrations often fail to change the foreign policies of their predecessors as radically as they promised, in large part because statecraft is so different from campaigning. And of course, today’s positions could shift over time. But the Trump administration’s reversals were particularly stark because they came after days of tempestuous phone calls between Mr. Trump and foreign leaders, in which he gleefully challenged diplomatic orthodoxy and appeared to jeopardize one relationship after another.
Mr. Trump, for example, made warmer relations with Russia the centerpiece of his foreign policy during the campaign, and European leaders were steeling for him to lift the sanctions that they and Mr. Obama imposed on President Vladimir V. Putin after he annexed Crimea. But on Thursday, Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador, Ms. Haley, sounded a lot like her predecessor, Samantha Power.
“We do want to better our relations with Russia,” Ms. Haley said in her first remarks to an open session of the United Nations Security Council. “However, the dire situation in eastern Ukraine is one that demands clear and strong condemnation of Russian actions.”
Similarly, Mr. Trump presented himself during the campaign as a stalwart supporter of Israel and sharply criticized the Obama administration for allowing the passage of a Security Council resolution in December that condemned Israel for its expansion of settlements.
“While we don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace,” the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said in a statement, “the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal.”
The White House noted that the president “has not taken an official position on settlement activity.” It said Mr. Trump would discuss the issue with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel when they meet Feb. 15, in effect telling Mr. Netanyahu to wait until then. Emboldened by Mr. Trump’s support, Israel had announced more than 5,000 new homes in the West Bank since his inauguration.
Mr. Trump shifted his policy after he met briefly with King Abdullah II of Jordan on the sidelines of the National Prayer Breakfast — an encounter that put the king, one of the most respected leaders of the Arab world, ahead of Mr. Netanyahu in seeing the new president. Jordan, with its large Palestinian population, has been steadfastly critical of settlements.
The administration’s abrupt turnaround also coincided with Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson’s first day at the State Department and the arrival of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in South Korea on his first official trip. Both men are viewed as potentially capable of exerting a moderating influence on the president and his cadre of White House advisers, though it was unclear how much they had to do with the shifts.
With Iran, Mr. Trump has indisputably taken a harder line than his predecessor. While the Obama administration often looked for ways to avoid confrontation with Iran in its last year, Mr. Trump seems equally eager to challenge what he has said is an Iranian expansion across the region, especially in Iraq and Yemen.
Get the Morning Briefing by Email
What you need to know to start your day, delivered to your inbox Monday through Friday.
Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
See Sample Manage Email Preferences Privacy Policy
In an early morning Twitter post on Thursday, Mr. Trump was bombastic on Iran.
“Iran has been formally PUT ON NOTICE for firing a ballistic missile,” he wrote. “Should have been thankful for the terrible deal the U.S. made with them!” In a second post, he said wrongly, (MARC: FY Pravda on the Hudson!!!) “Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion.”
Still, the administration has been careful not to specify what the national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, meant when he said on Wednesday that Iran had been put “on notice” for its missile test and for its arming and training of the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The new sanctions could be announced as soon as Friday. But most experts have said they will have little practical effect, because the companies that supply missile parts rarely have direct business with the United States, and allies have usually been reluctant to reimpose sanctions after many were lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear accord.
Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, replied, “This is not the first time that an inexperienced person has threatened Iran,” according to the semiofficial Fars news agency. “The American government will understand that threatening Iran is useless.”
Some analysts said they worried that the administration did not have tools, short of military action, to back up its warning. (MARC: I share this concern)
“Whether the Trump administration intended it or not, they have created their own red line,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “When Iran tests again, the administration will have no choice but to put up or shut up.”
Mr. Netanyahu will cheer Mr. Trump’s tough tone with Iran. But the American statement on settlements may force him to change course on a delicate domestic issue. His coalition government seemed to take Mr. Trump’s inauguration as a starting gun in a race to increase its construction in occupied territory.
After Mr. Trump was sworn in, the Israeli government announced that it would authorize another 2,500 homes in areas already settled in the West Bank, and then followed that this week with an announcement of 3,000 more. On Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu took it a step further, vowing to build the first new settlement in the West Bank in many years.
For Mr. Netanyahu, the settlement spree reflects a sense of liberation after years of constraints from Washington, especially under Mr. Obama, who, like other presidents, viewed settlement construction as harmful to the chances of negotiating a final peace settlement. It is also an effort to deflect criticism from Israel’s political right for Mr. Netanyahu’s compliance with a court order to force several dozen families out of the illegal West Bank outpost of Amona.
Mr. Trump had also promised to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But in recent weeks, the White House slowed down the move, in part out of concern that it would cause a violent response.
The policy shifts came after a turbulent week in which Mr. Trump also clashed with the leaders of Australia and Mexico over one of the most fraught issues of his new presidency: immigration. He defended the tense exchanges as an overdue display of toughness by a United States that has been exploited “by every nation in the world, virtually.”
“They’re tough; we have to be tough. It’s time we’re going to be a little tough, folks,” he said at the prayer breakfast Thursday. “It’s not going to happen anymore.”
Yet later in the day, the White House felt obliged to put a more diplomatic gloss on events. Mr. Spicer said Mr. Trump’s call with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia had been “very cordial,” even if Mr. Trump bitterly opposed an agreement negotiated by the Obama administration for the United States to accept the transfer of 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention camp.
A senior administration official disputed a report that Mr. Trump had threatened to send troops to Mexico to deal with its “bad hombres.” The official said that the conversation with President Enrique Peña Nieto had been “actually very friendly,” and that Mr. Trump had been speaking in jest.
-
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-one-The-Trump-way-of-war-480439
-
Risk of war going way up?
http://www.wnd.com/2017/02/michael-savage-cautions-trump-about-inner-circle/
-
Glick quotes this article as support of her hypothesis:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-looks-at-driving-wedge-between-russia-and-iran-1486342035
-
By Peggy Noonan
Feb. 9, 2017 7:48 p.m. ET
233 COMMENTS
Let’s step back from the daily chaos and look at a big, pressing question. Last fall at a defense forum a significant military figure was asked: If you could wave a magic wand, what is the one big thing you’d give the U.S. military right now?
We’d all been talking about the effects of the sequester and reform of the procurement system and I expected an answer along those lines. Instead he said: We need to know what the U.S. government wants from us. We need to know the overarching plan because if there’s no higher plan we can’t make plans to meet the plan.
This was freshly, bluntly put, and his answer came immediately, without pause.
The world is in crisis. The old order that more or less governed things after World War II has been swept away. The changed world that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall is also over.
Make Inaugurals Dignified Again
Advice for the new president on his first day—and for the media covering it.
Click to Read Story
Shining a Light on ‘Back Row’ America
Chris Arnade, a photographer whose travels and pictures reveal an America that is battered but standing, a society that is atomized but holding on.
Click to Read Story
The Smartest Thing I Heard in 2016
In July, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott told me this was an ‘unpollable’ election. He was spot on.
Click to Read Story
Advertisement
What Trump Got That Romney Didn’t
Trump, unlike Romney, understands that ideology isn’t enough to provide the unity America needs.
Click to Read Story
More By Peggy Noonan
We’ve been absorbing this for a while, since at least 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea. But what plan are we developing to approach the world as it is now?
I always notice that a day after a terrible tornado hits the Midwest the television crews swarm in and film the victims picking through what’s left. People literally stand where their house was, their neighborhood was. In shock, they point at some flattened debris and say, “That was our living room.” They rummage around, find a photo. “This was my son’s wedding.”
That’s sort of what a lot of those interested in foreign policy have been doing in recent years—staring in shock at the wreckage.
But something has to be rebuilt. Everyone now has to be an architect, or a cement-pourer, or a master craftsman carpenter.
It’s been instructive the past week to reread a small classic of statecraft, “Present at the Creation” by Dean Acheson, published in 1969. As undersecretary and then secretary of state he was involved in the creation of the postwar order.
After the war the world was in crisis, much of it in collapse. “The period was marked by the disappearance of world powers and empires, or their reduction to medium-sized states, and from this wreckage emerged a multiplicity of states . . . all of them largely undeveloped politically and economically. Overshadowing all loomed two dangers to all—the Soviet Union’s new-found power and expansive imperialism, and the development of nuclear weapons.” The Cold War had begun. China was in civil war, about to fall to communism. Europe’s economy had been destroyed. Europe and Asia were “in a state of utter exhaustion and economic dislocation.” The entire world seemed to be “disintegrating.”
What came after the crisis was the Marshall Plan, in which the U.S., itself exhausted by the war, helped its allies, and enemies, survive and resist communism. The objective, as the Truman administration declared it, was not relief but revival—spending American money to bring back agriculture, industry and trade. New financing was needed from Congress, in amounts then thought impossible—hundreds of millions that became billions.
It was an effort appropriate to its time. Apart from its essential good—millions didn’t die of starvation, nations such as Greece did not fall to communism—it brought America more than half a century of the world’s sometimes grudging but mostly enthusiastic admiration. They now knew we were not only a powerful nation but a great people. This was not unhelpful in times of crisis down the road.
It is exciting at a time like this to read of the development of a successful foreign-policy effort from conception to execution. And—how to say it?—Acheson’s first-rate second-rateness is inspiring. This was not a deeply brilliant man, not a grand strategist, but more a manager who was a good judge of others’ concepts. He could see facts—he had sturdy sight—and spy implications. He had the gift of natural confidence. He could also be clueless: One of his most respected aides was the Soviet spy Alger Hiss.
But Acheson was gutsy, willing to throw the long ball, and a first-rate appreciator of the gifts of others. He thought George Marshall, who preceded him as secretary of state, the greatest American military figure since George Washington. He is moving on the subject of Harry Truman. You are lucky if you can love a president you serve, and he did. Unlike FDR, Truman was not devious but plain in his dealings; also unlike FDR, he was not cold at the core but available. After Truman left office, a friend of Acheson’s, visiting the new White House, was told as a man went into the Oval Office: “Oh, he’s going in to cheer up the president.” Acheson’s friend replied, “That’s funny, in our day the president used to cheer us up.”
Acheson: “Harry S. Truman was two men. One was the public figure—peppery, sometimes belligerent, often didactic, the ‘give-’em-hell’ Harry. The other was the patient, modest, considerate and appreciative boss, helpful and understanding in all official matters, affectionate in any private worry or sorrow.” Truman “learned from mistakes (though he seldom admitted them), and did not waste time bemoaning them.”
What is inspiring about Acheson’s first-rate second-rateness is that he’s like a lot of those we have developing foreign policy right now.
Acheson, though he did not present it this way, provides useful lessons for future diplomats in future crises.
• Everyone’s in the dark looking for the switch. When you’re in the middle of history the meaning of things is usually unclear. “We all had far more than the familiar difficulty of determining the capabilities and intentions of those who inhabit the planet with us.” In real time most things are obscure. “We groped after interpretations of [events], sometimes reversed lines of action based on earlier views, and hesitated before grasping what now seems obvious.” “Only slowly did it dawn upon us that the whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone.”
• D on’t mess things up at the beginning. Acheson’s insight was that it wouldn’t work to put forward the Marshall Plan and then try to sell it to the public. The way to go was to explain to Congress and the public the exact nature of the crisis. This, he believed, would shock both into facing facts. While they were doing that, a plan to deal with the crisis was being developed. “We could not afford a false start.”
• Be able to see your work soberly. Keep notes so history will know what happened. “Our efforts for the most part left conditions better than we found them,” Acheson says. Especially in Europe, which was dying and went on to live.
• Cheer up. Good things can come of bad times, great things from fiercely imperfect individuals.
• Even though you’ll wind up disappointed. All diplomats in the end feel frustrated over missed opportunities and achievements that slipped away. “Alas, that is life. We cannot live our dreams.”
Still to be answered: What is America’s strategy now—our overarching vision, our big theme and intent? What are the priorities? How, now, to navigate the world?
That soldier needs an answer to his question: What do you need from us? What’s the plan?
-
https://www.prageru.com/courses/foreign-affairs/why-america-must-lead
-
Very interesting read:
http://www.aei.org/publication/securing-asias-mediterranean/?utm_source=paramount&utm_medium=email&utm_content=AEITODAY&utm_campaign=030717
-
http://www.aei.org/publication/boltons-foreign-policy-priorities/
-
http://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge-index
-
WTF?
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/227526/obamas-foreign-policy-wizards
-
:? :x
-
http://chargedaffairs.org/on-china-and-russia-strategy-for-the-new-administration/
"...the United States should work to improve relations between Russia and countries adverse to China such as Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, at least on the economic front."
-
Bigdog posts:
http://chargedaffairs.org/on-china-and-russia-strategy-for-the-new-administration/
"...the United States should work to improve relations between Russia and countries adverse to China such as Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, at least on the economic front."
ccp responds:
About the author of above post:
http://chargedaffairs.org/author/caleb-marquis/
John Bolton on threats to US. He seems to categorize China and Russia as long term threats vs more immediate threats such as terrorism, N Korea
He might well agree with Caleb Maruis on some of hs strategy which is kind of vague :
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/02/23/bolton-trump-needs-long-term-strategy-keep-russia-check-europe-middle-east/
I tried to find something written on Rex Tillerson's views on Russia China and all that comes up is mostly LEFTist slanted criticism:
"Tillerson skips Nato for meeting with Putin" etc.
-
Thank you CCP
-
Have not read this yet but it looks promising.
https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/3/27/in-the-mind-of-the-enemy
-
https://amgreatness.com/2017/04/10/trumps-realism-america-first-not-america-alone/
-
http://www.thediplomad.com/2017/04/climbing-out-of-obama-foreign-policy.html
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Climbing out of the Obama Foreign Policy Hole (Part 2)
A bit over three years ago I posted a piece titled "Climbing Out of the Obama Foreign Policy Hole." It was one of several in which I surveyed the disaster that was our foreign policy under the late, unlamented Obama misadministration, and provided some general prescriptions, and made the following observation,
our president should matter more to foreigners than to us. We hear nonsense from progressives about the president "running the country." Wrong! Our presidency was not designed to run the country--anybody who thinks that it was has not read the Constitution. The executive branch is not the country. The president must concentrate on the executive branch and the main tasks assigned it by the Constitution. Instead of promoting disastrous health care initiatives, listening to every phone call in Iowa, using the IRS to suppress dissent, beating up on Israel, yammering about fictitious global climate change, or demanding a costly and pointless relabeling of food products in the supermarket, the President should focus on his primary responsibility, the national defense. We must have a military capability second to none, and, in fact, greater than any foreseeable coalition of powers that might oppose us. We must stand with our allies; our word must be a gold coin; our enemies and friends must know we say what we mean and mean what we say, to wit, we have the biggest gun and will pull the trigger. The enemy is real and dangerous--a look at the forcibly altered NYC skyline should be proof enough of that. The "end of history" silliness should have died in the rubble of the Twin Towers.
I had written one earlier than that, some four years ago (time flies!) in which I also focussed on,
the disaster that is Obama's foreign policy, a policy of defeat. In its defense, let me say that to call it a policy designed for America's defeat gives it too much credit. My experience at State and the NSC, has shown me that most Obamaistas are not knowledgable enough to design anything. Foreign policy for the Obama crew is an afterthought. They really have little interest in it; many key jobs went vacant for months at State, DOD, CIA, and the NSC. The Obama foreign policy team is peopled by the "well-educated," i.e., they have college degrees, and as befits the "well educated" in today's America, they are stunningly ignorant and arrogant leftists, but mostly just idiots. They do not make plans; they tend to fly by the seat of their pants using a deeply ingrained anti-US default setting for navigation. They react to the Beltway crowd of NGOs, "activists" of various stripes, NPR, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Relying on what they "know," they ensure the US does not appear as a bully, or an interventionist when it comes to our enemies: after all, we did something to make them not like us. Long-term US allies, e.g., Canada, UK, Israel, Japan, Honduras, Colombia, on the other hand, they view as anti-poor, anti-Third World, and retrograde Cold Warriors. Why else would somebody befriend the US? Obama's NSC and State are staffed with people who do not know the history of the United States, and, simply, do not understand or appreciate the importance of the United States in and to the world. They are embarrassed by and, above all, do not like the United States. They look down on the average American, and openly detest any GOP Congressman or Congresswoman . . . They have no problem with anti-American regimes and personages because overwhelmingly they are anti-American themselves
As we come up on the 90th day of the Trump administration (Only three months! Time crawls!) are we making progress in climbing out of the hole Obama made for us?
I think the answer is, "yes."
In just a scant ninety days, Trump has reestablished the USA as a force with which to be reckoned. It is a remarkable achievement, and one done solely on the basis of leadership. Even under the miserable Obama reign, the USA was the world's foremost economic and military power--at least on paper. We, however, had Obama, Clinton, and Kerry as the architects of a bizarre foreign policy which in essence assumed that the US had to atone for past sins, and should adopt a foreign policy worthy of perhaps Liechtenstein (I mean no offense to Liechtenstein), and not worry about whether America was "winning." We caught an eight-year "glimpse" into what a post-America world would look like. As I have said before, (here, here, for example) Russia parlayed its much weaker hand into a winning one on the basis of superior leadership on the part of Putin and Lavrov; they, and all our other rivals, knew how to take advantage of the foreign policy clown car careening around in DC.
You can have aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, the US Marine Corps, and an awesome fleet of nuclear subs but if leadership is missing, you got blather, you got convoluted word salads, you got angst, you got, well, you got dystopian Obama World in which our enemies ran amok while we ran amuck. To repeat, what was missing was American leadership. That's no longer the case.
As I have noted before, you can like Trump or not, you can agree with him or not, but the man makes decisions, and moves on. I don't see the "flip-flops" that some of his old critics greet with the same glee that some of his old supporters bemoan. If these first there months are any indication, I think he will prove a master negotiator and game changer in the foreign policy arena. Trump is not flip-flopping, the world is; it is coming his way, not the other way round.
The Russians and the Chinese certainly have taken note of the change in Washington, and I suspect that the regimes in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, and the fetid leaders of ISIS and the other radical Islamist death cults have, as well. We can see positive change all around; we see it in the willingness of the Chinese to work much more energetically to control Krazy Kim and deal with the unbalanced nature of our bilateral trade, we see it in the Russian acquiescence to our blasting their Syrian ally, we even see it on our border where illegal crossings have plummeted as the coyotes fear the new sheriff.
I am optimistic that we have begun the long climb out of the Obama foreign policy hole.
-
By Daniel Henninger
April 19, 2017 7:01 p.m. ET
265 COMMENTS
After 59 Tomahawk missiles landed on a Syrian airfield, followed by the dropping of a 21,600-pound bomb on Islamic State’s hideouts in Afghanistan, the world has begun to ask: What is Donald Trump’s foreign policy? And so the search begins by pressing what Mr. Trump has done so far against various foreign-policy templates. Is he a neoconservative, a Scowcroftian realist or a babe in the woods?
We know this is a fool’s errand. There will be no Trump Doctrine anytime soon, and that’s fine. The Obama Doctrine, whatever it was, left his successor a steep climb in the Middle East and Asia. It is difficult to find doctrinal solutions for issues that everyone calls “a mess.” It is possible, though, to see the shape of an emerging strategy.
The place to look for that strategy is inside the minds of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.
During his Senate confirmation hearings, Mr. Mattis said something that jumped out at the time. He called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization “the most successful military alliance probably in modern history, maybe ever.”
This was in notable contradistinction to the view of his president that NATO was obsolete. Then last week, after meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, President Trump said of the alliance: “I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete.”
Let’s set aside the obligatory sniggering over such a remark and try to see a president moving toward the outlines of a foreign policy that, for a president who likes to keep it simple, may be described with one word: allies.
NATO emerged as a formal alliance after World War II. Less formally, the U.S. struck alliances with other nations to base troops and ships, as in the Persian Gulf.
After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, foreign-policy thinkers began to debate the proper role of the U.S. as the world’s only superpower. Liberals argued that maintaining the U.S. at the apex of this alliance system was, well, obsolete. Instead the U.S. should act more like a co-equal partner with our allies, including international institutions such as the United Nations.
The idea of a flatter alliance structure, or leading from behind, came to life with the Obama presidency. It doesn’t work.
If indeed Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster are the architects of an emerging Trump foreign policy, their most formative experiences, in Iraq, may shape that policy.
After the Iraq War began in 2003, the U.S. tried to defeat the enemy essentially with brute force. Serving in different areas of Iraq—Gen. Mattis in Anbar province and then-Col. McMaster in the city of Tal Afar—the two men realized that force alone wasn’t winning. Instead, they sought, successfully, to gain buy-in from the local populations and tribal leaders. In return for that buy-in, U.S. forces provided security to their new allies.
The difficult and ultimately tragic question was, what happens after the U.S. leaves? In strategic terms: How does the U.S. stabilize a volatile world without becoming a permanent occupying force?
Last month, Gen. McMaster brought onto the NSA staff Nadia Schadlow, who has thought a lot about that question. Her assignment is to develop the National Security Strategy Report. The title of her just-released book, “War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success Into Political Victory,” summarizes its core idea:
Unlike its pullout from Iraq, the U.S. has to remain involved—engaged—in the turbulent political space that always exists between conflict and peace, a space filled with competition for influence and power. What Gens. Mattis and McMaster learned in the wake of Iraq is that if you make allies, you should keep them.
Thus, Vice President Mike Pence stood at the DMZ across from North Korea reconfirming the U.S.’s alliance with South Korea. A day later, he did the same in Japan.
Mr. Trump met in recent weeks with King Abdullah of Jordan, President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi of Egypt and, most importantly, Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince Salman. This week, Mr. Trump called to congratulate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his referendum “victory.”
These are the Middle East’s “tribal leaders,” or allies, whose buy-in will be necessary if the U.S. is to consolidate gains from the military strikes in Syria and Afghanistan—possibly with the partition of Syria into three tribal sectors.
Russia has separated itself by choosing instead an alliance with Iran to create a Russo-Iranian Shiite crescent extending across the Middle East to the Mediterranean.
The Mattis-McMaster foreign policy taking shape looks like a flexible strategy born of military experience in fast, fluid circumstances—our world. It is based on both formal and mobile alliances with partners willing to use diplomatic, financial, political and, if necessary, military pressure to establish stable outcomes. The word “abandon” doesn’t fit here.
Some might say that sounds like the U.S. leading alongside. With one big difference: The U.S. is in fact leading.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
-
The Man Who Saved Europe the Last Time
Konrad Adenauer restored democracy to Germany and helped unify a devastated Continent.
Konrad Adenauer (second from left), Sept. 21, 1949, with the high commissioners of the occupation (left to right), America’s John J. McCloy, Britain’s Sir Brian Robertson and France’s André François-Poncet.
Konrad Adenauer (second from left), Sept. 21, 1949, with the high commissioners of the occupation (left to right), America’s John J. McCloy, Britain’s Sir Brian Robertson and France’s André François-Poncet. Photo: Bettmann Archive
By Henry A. Kissinger
April 28, 2017 6:10 p.m. ET
6 COMMENTS
The attribute of greatness is reserved for leaders from whose time onward history can be told only in terms of their achievements. I observed essential elements of Germany’s history—as a native son, as a refugee from its upheavals, as a soldier in the American army of occupation, and as a witness to its astonishing renewal.
Only a few who experienced this evolution remain. For many contemporary Germans, the Adenauer period seems like a tale from an era long transcended. To the contrary, they live in a dynamic established by Konrad Adenauer, a man whose lifespan, from 1876 to 1967, covered all but five years of the unified German national state first proclaimed in 1871.
Devastated, impoverished, partitioned, the Federal Republic came about after World War II by the merger of the American, British and French zones of occupation, containing just two-thirds of Germany’s prewar population. Five million refugees from Germany’s prewar territories needed integration; they agitated for the recovery of lost territories. The Soviet occupation zone, containing 18 million people, was turned into a communist political entity.
The Federal Republic’s advent capped a century of discontinuity. The Empire after Bismarck had felt beleaguered by the alliances surrounding it; the Weimar Republic after World War I had felt abused by an imposed peace settlement; Hitler had sought an atavistic world dominion; the Federal Republic arose amid a legacy of global resentment.
The newly elected German Parliament chose Adenauer as chancellor by a margin of just one vote on Sept. 15, 1949. Shortly afterward, on Nov. 22, 1949, he signed the Petersberg Agreement with the three Allied high commissioners, conferring the attributes of sovereignty on the Federal Republic but withholding its premise of juridical equality. The center of its mining activity, the Ruhr, remained under special Allied control, as did the industrial Saar region along the French border. Adenauer’s acquiescence to these terms earned him the sobriquet from his opposition “Chancellor of the Allies.”
In his first formal encounter with the three high commissioners, on Sept. 21, 1949, Adenauer demonstrated that he would accept discrimination but not subordination. The high commissioners had assembled on a carpet; to its side, a place for Adenauer had been designated. The chancellor challenged protocol by stepping directly onto the carpet facing his hosts.
From this posture, Adenauer heralded a historic turning point. The new Federal Republic would seek, in his words, “full freedom” by earning a place in the community of nations, not by pressure or by seizing it. Calling for an entirely new conception of foreign policy, Adenauer proclaimed the goal of “a positive and viable European federation” to overcome “the narrow nationalistic conception of the states as it prevailed in the 19th and 20th century . . . in order to restore the unity of European life in all fields of endeavor.”
Adenauer’s conduct reinforced his rejection of European history. Tall, erect, imperturbable, his face immobile from an automobile accident in his youth, he exuded the serenity of the pre-World War I world that had formed him. Equally distinctive was his sparse speaking style. It conveyed that unobtrusiveness and performance, not exhortation or imposition, were to be the operating style for the new Germany.
Winston Churchill had made a comparable proposal for Europe two days before in Zurich, but Churchill was not in office then. Governing amid defeat and division, Adenauer had proposed an indefinite (possibly permanent) partition of his country while integrating it into a nascent European structure. The country whose nationalism had precipitated two world wars would henceforth rely on partnership with its erstwhile enemies.
The turn westward proved fundamental. The choice of Bonn as the new capital, located in the westernmost part of Germany, with close links to Western Europe, was symbolic. Adenauer convinced the Parliament to select Bonn because, as he said sardonically, he wanted the capital to be in the wine region, not amid potato fields, and not least because his home village of Rhöndorf (population of about 1,000) was not suitable for a capital.
It required all of Adenauer’s personality and stature to implement these visions. Opposition came largely from the Social Democratic Party, which, while pro-democracy, insisted on a national policy of neutrality. The opposition included vestiges of German conservatives, one of whose spokesmen was Heinrich Brüning, the chancellor whose overthrow in 1932 had opened the way for Hitler.
Adenauer proved adamant. He made democratic regeneration his first priority as the precondition to integration into Europe. A renewed reputation for reliability was essential. Maneuvering between the superpowers would destroy confidence and repeat historical tragedies.
Adenauer’s foreign policy was founded on the moral imperative of democracy. He envisaged a relentless progression toward the twin goals of a security partnership with America and political integration with Europe.
The Petersberg Agreement of 1949 was followed by negotiations over European defense, spurred by the Korean War and the Soviet military buildup in Central Europe. As NATO was forming, Adenauer urged the European nations to pool their efforts into the European Defense Community. After the French Assembly rejected this concept, Adenauer in 1954 agreed to the Paris Accords, which ended West Germany’s occupation, affirmed its sovereignty, and opened the way to its national membership in NATO. The culmination was Adenauer’s 1955 visit to Washington. When the German national anthem was played as he visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Adenauer described it as the most moving moment of his life.
European integration followed a comparable, in retrospect inevitable, sequence. From France and Germany’s 1951 agreement to establish the Coal and Steel Community to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which established the European Economic Community, Adenauer, working with wise French leaders, overcame one of world history’s once-hereditary national animosities.
Within the space of six years, Adenauer had moved his country from an outcast to an equal member in political and security arrangements unprecedented in European history. This was made possible by a spirit of American creativity which, in the Marshall Plan and the origination of NATO, overcame America’s pre-World War II isolationism.
The U.S. became Germany’s principal link to security through NATO, and to economic recovery through the Marshall Plan. France, as the link to the European Community, played a comparable role. In America, John Foster Dulles symbolized the relationship; in France, President Charles de Gaulle. They both represented to Adenauer elements capable of stabilizing the inevitable storms the future might hold. In that sense, Adenauer viewed Europe as a potential corrective to the fluctuations into which global responsibilities and a certain inherent restlessness on occasion drew the U.S. When, in 1956, Guy Mollet, France’s prime minister, stressed a gap between the obligations of NATO and American conduct in the Suez Crisis, Adenauer defended the existing structures as flexible enough to recover shared vitality: “Europe will be your revenge,” he said.
I had the privilege of hearing Adenauer’s vision in several conversations with him over a 10-year period. His courtesy and serenity were his most memorable traits. Our first meeting took place in 1957, shortly after a Soviet ultimatum threatening Berlin. Adenauer concentrated on the nightmare of everyone privy to nuclear planning: whether any U.S. president would actually bring himself to unleash the catastrophe on which NATO nuclear strategy was based. Since the official answer was formal but the actual one would depend on unknowable contingencies and personalities, he raised the question at every subsequent meeting.
Another major issue preoccupying Adenauer was geopolitical evolution. Did I realize that a break between China and Russia was imminent? The West should prepare for that contingency and not provide too many temptations to its adversaries by its divisions. He construed surprised silence as assent and, on his first visit to the White House in 1961, repeated the prediction, adding, to an astonished President Kennedy: “Professor Kissinger agrees with me.”
In 1962, as part-time consultant to President Kennedy, I was asked during a crisis to reassure Adenauer about America’s determination and capacity to defend Berlin and support Germany. I had been briefed to present details of some nuclear capabilities and deployments on a personal, presidential basis—information which, at that time, was shared with only the U.K.
As I began my presentation of the political issues, Adenauer interrupted: “They have already told me this in Washington. If it did not convince me there, why would it convince me here?” I replied that I was an academic, and a government employee only a quarter of my time. Adenauer was nonplussed. In that case, he replied: Let us assume you will convince me three-quarters of the way.
But when I presented the military briefing, Adenauer was transformed—partly because of the enormous gap in the West’s favor that it demonstrated, but above all because of the confidence President Kennedy had shown in him. It turned into the warmest of all my meetings with him.
A moving aftermath followed some decades later. I received a letter whose sender I did not recognize. He had served as an interpreter during that conversation (though German is my native language, I generally conduct official conversations in English because my vocabulary is more precise, especially on technical matters). Adenauer had given me his word of honor not to distribute the nuclear information I had shared with him. The interpreter informed me that he had, in fact, given a full record of my briefing to Adenauer, who had instructed him to destroy the nuclear portion out of respect for his word of honor.
The historic German-American partnership that began with the Adenauer chancellorship proceeded from almost diametrically opposed starting points. Adenauer assumed office at probably the lowest point of German history. The U.S. was at the zenith of its power and self-confidence. Adenauer saw his task as rebuilding Christian and democratic values through new designs for traditional German and European institutions. America had equally grand objectives and, at times, pursued them with insistent certainty. For Adenauer, the reconstruction of Europe was the rediscovery of ancient values; for America, the implementation of prevailing ones. For Adenauer to succeed, it was necessary to stabilize the soul of Germany; for America, to mobilize existing idealism. Occasionally there were strains, especially when American optimism overestimated the scope for more-fragile structures and divergent historic memories.
The Atlantic relationship between Bonn and Washington transformed, however, the shattered world it inherited and helped create a half-century of peace between major powers.
This system is now under stress from simultaneous upheavals on several continents. Can it heal a fractured world by rediscovering the conviction and creativity with which it was built?
Mr. Kissinger served as national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford. This is adapted from an April 25 speech to the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
Appeared in the Apr. 29, 2017, print edition.
-
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/26/trump-is-playing-the-international-strategy-game-like-a-novice-among-experts/
-
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/26/trump-is-playing-the-international-strategy-game-like-a-novice-among-experts/
Another author who appears to have been in a coma the last eight years.
-
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/26/trump-is-playing-the-international-strategy-game-like-a-novice-among-experts/
I disagree with the conclusions made in the article.
I can't see light between what America wanted from Germany and what Merkel said following the meetings, "Europe must take its fate into its own hands". About time.
I can't imagine ISIS being more scared at any other time or how they would be under any other President. Must give Trump credit for Mattis appointment, words, strategy and the delegation of power to carry out the policies.
I can't see a way China could feel more pressure to cooperate. We will see on NK and the 'Taiwan to Singapore' Sea.
I can't imagine betting odds against North Korea's future being higher under any other leadership change of any other country.
Israel hasn't had a better friend in a long time, if ever. All these things subject to change.
The perception of having a screw loose or being a loose cannon might scare American media and establishment analysts, but it scares rivals and enemies too.
The worst foreign policies I feared with Trump do not appear to be coming true, trade wars and isolationism.
I hate Reagan analogies, but Reagan-critic analogies might be appropriate:
'His [Reagan's] policies are his policies are dangerously wrong.'
"in the next year, it will become more apparent that the program he offers is leading us in the wrong direction."
Reagan's foreign policy is "heading us into very serious trouble ... From the time Mr. Reagan came in, he has evidenced publicly a basic hostility to the Soviet Union ... It is exceedingly unfortunate and dangerous ... "
When asked if he still considers Reagan "an amiable dunce"...
"Those words were uttered two years ago at a private gathering and were never intended for publication." "I would never speak disrespectfully of a president--in public."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/12/15/clark-clifford-says-reagan-can-be-beaten/8915a1e4-3b23-41f6-bb23-67b98000a910/
How's the Brezhnev doctrine doing now? )
-
As this forum itself voluminously attests, I certainly agree with this article that America's geopolitical position is very bad.
I agree with GM that the author seems to have slept through the Obama era.
Though he regularly trips over his shoelaces with regular unforced errors, in the big picture Trump is getting some very important things right.
A) We are badly overextended and our military badly underfunded. We are no longer in the bi-polar world of the Cold War, or the uni-polar era of Clinton and Bush. Putting aside articulating my seething anger at Obama I would say that we are now in a multi-polar world facing, in no particular order:
1) Russia;
2) the Russian-Iranian Axis from the Indian Ocean to the Baltic Sea;
3) Iran going nuke;
4) the Arab middle east circling the drain
5) Afpakia a clusterfuck that we can't leave and in which we can't stay
6) North Korea going nuke;
7) China--including its slow motion seizure of the waters of one third of the world's trade;
8) Europe imploding demographically, militarily, economically, and psychologically;
9) the Democrats-- who are determined to leave our military underfunded and to bring down Trump by any means necessary
This is more than we can handle. We need to figure out how to shorten this list.
Any suggestions BD?
-
I am rather busy at the moment, but will try to respond with actual detail this weekend.
In the short term, I think you miss some threats, and overstate one. I would add India's relations with both China and Pakistan, and I think you overlook the domestic threat of the right in your focus on the left.
I agree with your concern about the size of the military budget, but it is not merely the Dems who are at fault (necessarily): http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/05/trump-administration-just-missed-its-best-shot-military-buildup/138254/?oref=d-river but see https://warontherocks.com/2017/05/is-trumps-350-ship-navy-on-the-rocks-the-politics-promise-and-perils-of-shipbuilding/
As this forum itself voluminously attests, I certainly agree with this article that America's geopolitical position is very bad.
I agree with GM that the author seems to have slept through the Obama era.
Though he regularly trips over his shoelaces with regular unforced errors, in the big picture Trump is getting some very important things right.
A) We are badly overextended and our military badly underfunded. We are no longer in the bi-polar world of the Cold War, or the uni-polar era of Clinton and Bush. Putting aside articulating my seething anger at Obama I would say that we are now in a multi-polar world facing, in no particular order:
1) Russia;
2) the Russian-Iranian Axis from the Indian Ocean to the Baltic Sea;
3) Iran going nuke;
4) the Arab middle east circling the drain
5) Afpakia a clusterfuck that we can't leave and in which we can't stay
6) North Korea going nuke;
7) China--including its slow motion seizure of the waters of one third of the world's trade;
8) Europe imploding demographically, militarily, economically, and psychologically;
9) the Democrats-- who are determined to leave our military underfunded and to bring down Trump by any means necessary
This is more than we can handle. We need to figure out how to shorten this list.
Any suggestions BD?
-
"I think you overlook the domestic threat of the right in your focus on the left."
Do tell.
-
http://www.atimes.com/article/trump-triumphant-major-reduction-geopolitical-risk-underway/
-
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/us/politics/world-leaders-wary-of-trump-may-have-an-ally-congress.html?ribbon-ad-idx=3&rref=politics&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&pgtype=article
-
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/340330-possible-war-authorization-repeal-reflects-growing-shift-in-gop
-
I have a lot of respect for this author.
There are other threads where this could fit as well, but I put it here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449318/war-powers-congress-commander-in-chief-constitution-iraq-libya-syria-aumf-federalist-society
-
I have a lot of respect for this author.
There are other threads where this could fit as well, but I put it here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449318/war-powers-congress-commander-in-chief-constitution-iraq-libya-syria-aumf-federalist-society
Very good piece but the question isn't settled. I was wondering these same questions for the upcoming war in N. Korea, not directly mentioned in the piece. War wasn't declared in Korea last time around either. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/truman-orders-u-s-forces-to-korea-2
From the article: "President Obama did not seek congressional authorization for the Libya campaign, just as President Clinton did not seek it for the bombings in the Balkans, and President Reagan did not seek it prior to the invasion of Grenada. After insisting as candidate Trump that Obama needed Congress’s assent to attack regime targets in Syria, President Trump has attacked regime targets in Syria without Congress’s assent. Congress’s war powers seem not to be much of a hindrance on the executive."
The President has a bias in the matter of divided powers and the Congress has little or impact on the decision after the fact. We should have congressional declarations of war in place on all our sworn enemies. I assume they skip that because it would not pass.
The President can get around that requirement when the country is under threat (like Grenada for example?) but the results would be better if the country was committed beyond merely the judgment of the commander in chief.
"where the use of force is clearly in America’s vital interests, congressional war powers — used to issue a powerful endorsement of a clear, necessary mission — can help us achieve something that has eluded us since 1945: victory."
Interesting terminology from Andrew McCarthy:
"... radical Islam — ... I prefer to call “sharia supremacism”
-
This is a VERY interesting article shared with me by our Big Dog.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydides-trap/406756/?utm_source=atlfb
It is very interesting and I will comment after digesting it.
China has serious internal stability issues. This fuels China's aggressive behavior in the South China sea. Building China's internal perception of a strong, rising power is what gives the CCP it's legitimacy with the population. Failure to maintain it's legitimacy could be fatal to the current power structure. So, China is motivated to act aggressively, and not back down in a scenario that offers a loss of face for the power structure. Keep in mind that despite all the money China has dumped into upgrading it's military, it spends even more on internal security. The power vacuum of "leading from behind" has further fueled China's aggressiveness. Obama has left Trump a ticking bomb.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-14/sleepwalking-to-world-war-three-stan-grant/8710390
Are we sleepwalking to World War III?
ANALYSIS
The Link By Stan Grant
Updated Sat at 12:10pm
Officer Cadets on Parade at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra
PHOTO: Is Australia fully prepared for a 21st Century conflict? (Australian Defence Force)
MAP: Australia
Australia is plunging headlong into catastrophe and we are utterly unprepared. In fact, we may be past the time when we can prepare.
The time-bomb is ticking and it will explode in our lifetimes.
All certainty will be lost, our economy will be devastated, our land seized, our system of government upended.
This isn't mere idle speculation or the rantings of a doomsday cult, this is the warning from a man who has made it his life's work to prepare for just this scenario.
Admiral Chris Barrie was chief of Australia's Defence Force between 1998 and 2002.
He has seen war and sent troops into battle.
Now, he says we are sleepwalking towards a conflict that will alter the world as we know it.
Australia, he says, will be invaded. He fears for the country his grandchildren will inherit.
History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme
Admiral (ret.) Chris Barrie talks to Stan Grant over Korean bbq
PHOTO: Admiral (ret.) Chris Barrie says a misunderstanding or miscalculation could tip the region over the edge. (ABC News)
Admiral Barrie delivered his warning to me over a Korean barbeque meal in Western Sydney.
I was interviewing him for The Link to get his assessment of the North Korean nuclear threat, but his fears expand far beyond the hermit kingdom.
Over kimchi and slices of beef, Admiral Barrie guided me through our region's many tripwires.
A miscalculation or misunderstanding, he said, could tip us over the edge, countries would be backed into corners and we have no way right now of talking our way out.
This is a warning that comes from our past, and if unheeded, will shatter our future.
"History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme."
That quote is often attributed to the great American writer Mark Twain, but its sentiment speaks to us through the ages.
History can appear as inevitable even as we fail to see it.
The French diplomat and political scientist, Alexis de Tocqueville, said of the French Revolution:
"Never was any such event, stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable and yet so completely unseen."
In a new century, simmering tensions and geo-strategic alliances would tip the world into all-out war.
Historian Christopher Clarke's book Sleepwalkers reveals how the assassination of Habsburg heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28 1914 in Sarajevo triggered a domino effect that pitted the reigning global power Britain against the rising Germany.
The world thought it couldn't happen — Germany and Britain were each other's single biggest trading partners; the royal families were blood relatives — yet it did.
How? Clark says political leaders become hostage to events.
"Causes trawled from the length and breadth of Europe's pre-war decades are piled like weights on the scale until it tilts from probability to inevitability," he wrote.
Admiral Chris Barrie says he has been reading Clark's book and thinking how events then mirror events now.
He is not the only one.
The Thucydides Trap
Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie
PHOTO: Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, shortly before he was assassinated. (Imperial War Museum)
Founding dean of the Harvard University Kennedy School, Graham Allison, fears the world is lurching towards conflict unseen since World War II.
He puts his case in a new book, Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides' Trap?
Thucydides? He was the Greek Historian whose writings about war 2,000 years ago resonate still.
"It was the rise of Athens and the fear this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable," he writes.
Then it was Athens-Sparta. In 1914 it was Germany-Great Britain and now China-United States.
"As far ahead as the eye can see, the defining question about global order is whether China and the US can escape Thucydides's trap. Most contests that fit this pattern have ended badly," Allison writes.
On the current trajectory, Allison says, war is "not just possible, but much more likely than currently recognised".
Any clash between the US and China is potentially catastrophic, but as much as we may try to wish it away, right now military strategists in Beijing and Washington are preparing for just an eventuality.
Global think tank the Rand Corporation prepared a report in 2015 for the American military, its title could not have been more direct — War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable.
It concluded that China would suffer greater casualties than the US if war was to break out now. However, it cautioned, that as China's military muscle increased so would the prospect of a prolonged destructive war.
Where would such a conflict spark?
Many potential faultlines
Satellite image of Subi Reef, one of China's artificial islands in the South China Sea
PHOTO: A satellite image of Subi Reef which appears to show anti-aircraft guns and a weapons system. (CSIS AMTI: Reuters)
The entire Asia region is a tinderbox.
Historian Michael Auslan, thinks Asia is so potentially unstable and insecure that he has questioned the very future of the region in his new book, The End of the Asian Century.
War and economic stagnation are the two biggest risks, Auslan identifies.
"Here be dragons," he writes.
Mr Auslan reminds us the Asia-Pacific is the most militarised region in the world, it's home to some of the world's largest armies, technologically advanced fighting machines, nuclear armed states and added to that a massive American military presence.
To the military muscle add the incendiary mix of history: old bitter enmities, existential stand offs, and a fierce competition for scarce resources.
The faultlines are many: India-Pakistan, North and South Korea, China-Japan.
Much of these simmering tensions coalesce around territorial disputes notably the Diaoyu-Senkaku islands claimed by Japan and China and the islands of the South China Sea.
It is these disputes that most observers fear could escalate.
China has dredged up sand to expand the islands, building runways and harbours potentially to deploy fighter jets and war ships.
Mr Auslan points out that militarising the islands not only allows China to project power but bolsters legal claims of territorial control.
The US has demanded the right of freedom of navigation through the islands and to fly over the disputed territory.
Tension has ebbed and flowed, at one point in 2016, a Chinese state-run newspaper declared war as "inevitable".
But is it?
Has the first 'shot' already been fired?
Cyber war
PHOTO: Cyberspace is expected to be the frontline in any confrontation. (Reuters: Rick Wilking)
Some fear the war has already begun — in cyberspace.
The US reports massive hacking by groups controlled by the Chinese military.
In 2015 the Obama administration revealed that Chinese hackers had hacked government personnel files potentially exposing every US state employee.
But what of a shooting war?
Certainly the world is very different to the time of Thucydides.
Even compared to 1914, we are a more interconnected, economically entwined global community.
Since the 1960's peace in Asia has allowed unprecedented growth.
Chinese scholar Wu Zurong, in a 2015 article for Foreign Policy magazine called No Thucydides Trap, wrote of how globalisation and the links between China and the US mitigates war.
China, he wrote, seeks "a modern relationship ... a win-win scenario".
In a speech in the United States in 2015 China's President, Xi Jinping, spoke of an opportunity for the two powers to boost global security but he also issued a warning.
"Should they enter into conflict or confrontation, it would lead to disaster for both countries and the world at large," he said.
Admiral Barrie has looked at how the world can avoid its sleepwalk to disaster.
This week he joined with fellow Australian National University scholars, Roger Bradbury and Dmitry Brizhinev, for an article in The Conversation that measured what they termed "hawkishness" — a preparedness for war — with risk.
They found that a little bit of risk aversion significantly increases the chances of peace.
"Hawkishness alone", they wrote, "will not lead to war unless risk aversion is also low."
Simply put, how willing are countries to avoid war? How much do they fear the consequences?
Risk on the rise
Soldiers in blue and white camo helmets and fatigues march past a tank and Chinese flags, lined up perfectly, and holding guns.
PHOTO: China has been increasing it military power. (AP: Vincent Yu)
In Asia there are many unknowables. Who is prepared to say for certain, that Kim Jong-un will not launch a nuclear strike?
Would a downed plane in the South China Sea push China and the US over the brink?
Would an attack in Kashmir bring the nuclear armed stand-off between India and Pakistan to the brink?
What would happen in Taiwan declared independence?
What's to stop any of this happening?
As Mr Auslan writes:
"Risk that should be falling is instead rising. As Asia's nations become wealthier and have more resources to devote to their militaries, they seem less interested in avoiding confrontation."
Personally, as someone who has reported across Asia for two decades and lived many years in China, I err on the side of peace.
America is crucial to the stability of the region and we cannot afford for it to retreat or to weaken its resolve. I don't believe it will.
China for all its military build-up, knows it still cannot compete with US firepower.
Yet, people with far more experience in matters of war than I, fear the worst. People like Admiral Chris Barrie.
How does Allison answer his question: can America and China escape the Thucydides trap?
He believes our fate depends on realism on all sides, vital interests must be clearly defined, America must strengthen its democracy and China address its failures of governance - threats come from within.
There is a need, he writes, for great thinkers to devise a grand strategy.
Allison concludes with a quote not from Thucydides but Shakespeare, our destiny lies "not in our stars, but in ourselves".
I can think of something else Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth:
"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools.
"The way to dusty death."
-
Putin Faces Off Against America’s Founding Fathers
By Reva Goujon
VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor
Reva Goujon
Reva Goujon
VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor
Russia's active reinforcement of the perception that the United States is weak and distracted has only spurred a natural rebalancing of power between the executive and legislative branches, just as the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended.
(JIM LO SCALZO/AFP/Getty Images)
Connections
Articles
Regions & Countries
Topics
Themes
As the political theater surrounding the United States and Russia builds once again, now is as good a time as any to step back from the daily drama and make sense of the dynamics and characters at play. Though Russia is exceptionally good at crafting its foreign policy and positioning itself in multiple conflicts to better bargain with the United States, its efforts have yet to produce any tangible results. In fact, Russia's active reinforcement of the perception that the United States is weak and distracted has only spurred a natural rebalancing of power between the executive and legislative branches, just as the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended.
Syria: The Land of Opportunity and Constraint
The most recent act of the unfolding drama began about a month ago on the crowded Syrian battlefield. Loyalists were busy trying to blaze a path from their western strongholds to the Iraqi border in the east, an endeavor Iran supported in hopes of realizing its own strategic goal of creating a land bridge between Tehran and the Mediterranean coast. Meanwhile, the United States was attempting to forge ahead with its fight against the Islamic State in Raqqa, as Russia searched for an opportunity to use its central role on the Syrian stage to bring about a crisis in order to re-engage Washington in negotiation. The scene was set for a head-on collision.
The United States has made clear that it not tolerate any attempt to interfere with the Raqqa offensive.
And it came on June 18 when the United States, already irritated by loyalist attacks against its rebel allies near the strategic town of Tabqa, shot down its first Syrian Su-22 warplane targeting rebels in the area. The bold move sent a clear message: Washington would not tolerate any attempt to interfere with the Raqqa offensive. Russia quickly seized on the opportunity, condemning the shootdown the following day, suspending deconfliction channels with the United States and threatening to strike U.S. coalition aircraft west of the Euphrates River. (Moscow had sung a similar tune in early April on the heels of a showy U.S. strike on a Syrian air base in response to a chemical weapons attack by the loyalists.)
Washington scrambled to insulate its forces in Syria as U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson led the charge to mend ties with Russia. But the White House's need to show its European partners that it did not intend to take a softer stance on Ukraine complicated matters. At the time, U.S. President Donald Trump was hosting his Ukrainian counterpart, Petro Poroshenko, in Washington before making a special trip to Poland to reassure Eastern Europe that he would not strike a grand bargain with Moscow.
Nevertheless, the United States and Russia found room to cooperate. At Trump's first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the two leaders not only agreed to implement a cease-fire in southwestern Syria but also proposed broader opportunities for collaboration, including the formation of a joint cybersecurity unit.
Of course, plenty of problems came with this new show of friendship between the United States and Russia. Even if Moscow proved capable of holding back its Iranian and Syrian partners in the race to the Iraqi border — which repeated cease-fire violations and Iran's rejection of the deal certainly call into question — it wasn't clear whether the Kremlin actually could be trusted to uphold its end of the bargain. Moreover, the irony of the Trump administration working with Moscow in cybersecurity amid allegations of Russian interference in last year's U.S. election was not lost on the American public, and the president eventually retracted the idea in a tweet. (If anything, Russia will rely more heavily on cyberwarfare and the ambiguity it affords to compete with its adversaries as its own structural weaknesses worsen in the coming years.)
Still, from Russia's point of view, it had given the United States a carrot — the offer of cooperation in Syria — and it expected something in return, and fast. So the Kremlin began lambasting the White House for failing to deliver a particularly low-hanging fruit: the return of Russian diplomatic compounds in New York and Maryland that the U.S. government had seized during the final weeks of President Barack Obama's administration in response to Russian election meddling. (Moscow is suspected of using the compounds to collect intelligence against sensitive U.S. targets.)
Amid Russia's vocal demands that the United States return the compounds or face retaliation in kind, the news cycle continued to center on a bizarre cast of characters, from Donald Trump Jr. to a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who attended a meeting in Trump Tower during the presidential campaign to discuss the potential transfer of damaging information about Hillary Clinton "as part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." The optics did not look good for the White House, to say the least. The administration had made another attempt to heal relations with Russia, had struck a flimsy Syrian cease-fire already fraught with violations, had become mired in another scandal tracing back to Russian election meddling, and had to deal with a pushy Putin demanding concessions with little regard for the blowback building against the U.S. president.
Building Up Russia's Foreign Policy Reserve
From Putin's perspective, however, this was a White House too politically befuddled and strategically hamstrung to make worthwhile concessions, such as lifting the most damaging sanctions against Russia or pulling back NATO's presence on its doorstep. So, for the time being, he might as well add to the turmoil consuming Washington by reinforcing the perception that the White House was being led by a weak and impressionable president, all while positioning Russia in other arenas in which the United States faced budding crises. Moscow followed a similar strategy when it reinforced its relationship with Tehran during Iran's standoff with the United States over its nuclear program and when it entrenched itself in the Syrian civil war as Washington focused on combating the Islamic State. By presenting itself as part of the solution to the United States' thorniest foreign policy problems, Russia hoped to use its position to steer Washington toward meaningful concessions.
In the months ahead, North Korea and Venezuela will bear watching for signs of Russia's strategy at work once more. As it did during the Cold War, and as China is still doing today, Russia is trying to use North Korea as a buffer between itself and U.S.-backed South Korea. Pyongyang looks to Moscow for food imports, fuel and coal exports, employment for migrant workers, and critical infrastructure development. Though Russia boasts far less economic influence over North Korea than China does, it is gathering just enough leverage there to ensure that the United States must factor in Moscow's cooperation — or obstruction — while shaping its policies toward Pyongyang. Washington will thus have to face off against both Beijing and Moscow as it works to exhaust its economic and diplomatic options against Pyongyang in the U.N. Security Council, all while carefully studying the consequences of taking military action against North Korea without the buy-in of the region's biggest players.
Meanwhile, in the United States' own backyard, Russia has placed itself at the center of a raucous power struggle in Venezuela. In part, Moscow hopes to protect its energy investments in the country while using the political crisis to obtain additional mineral concessions. But by quietly negotiating an asylum deal for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, staying close to Cuba and forging strong ties with key figures like Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, Russia is also ensuring that any emergency exit from the crisis is buoyed by a Russian-made life jacket. And given Venezuela's location particularly close to home, the United States has little choice but to consider Russia's role in any solution it formulates to contain the fallout from Caracas' troubles in Washington's Caribbean sphere of influence.
Congress, the President and U.S. Foreign Policy
In many ways, Moscow stands to benefit from Washington's distractions and from its own involvement in global conflicts. But those gains won't come without a price. Though the White House maintains its desire for a friendly relationship with the Kremlin — in spite of a scandal-ridden campaign trail and little Russian will to make the kinds of strategic concessions needed to justify warmer relations — an emboldened U.S. Congress is working to insulate the country's democratic institutions, protect its foreign alliances and keep Russian ambitions in check.
The centerpiece of lawmakers' efforts is a piece of Senate legislation, currently mired in the House of Representatives, that could greatly reduce the president's authority in direct dealings with Russia. As drafted, the bill requires the White House to notify Congress of any intent to ease sanctions against Russia and sets forth a timeline for lawmakers to approve or reject such action. It also codifies into law five of Obama's executive orders levying sanctions against Russia for its activities in Ukraine and the U.S. election, thereby preventing Trump from lifting them through his own executive order. The scope of the sanctions, moreover, is expanded to include the rail and mining sectors while threatening to slap punitive measures against any firm participating in energy projects involving Russia. (The last point, likely to be amended, has already caused an uproar among U.S. energy companies and European leaders who don't want sanctions to interfere with large projects already underway, leaving room for foreign competitors to swoop in.) By draining the ink from the executive's pen, the bill — if passed and upheld against a potential presidential veto with a two-thirds majority — would mean that even soothing "irritants" in the U.S.-Russia relationship, such as the diplomatic compounds issue, would be subject to legislative review.
The ebb and flow of the intragovernmental tussle over U.S. foreign policy is shaped in large part by the makeup of the government and the geopolitical climate of the day. The Founding Fathers designed the U.S. Constitution to give the president ample foreign policy power as commander-in-chief, along with the ability to negotiate treaties and appoint diplomats. At the same time, Congress holds the power of the purse, as well as the authority to declare war, approve treaties and presidential appointments, and maintain oversight of the administration. U.S. history is replete with examples of Congress inserting itself into foreign affairs, from the Senate's infamous rejection of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to the passage of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, requiring the president to consult with lawmakers before sending troops to war and end military action if Congress refuses to declare war or authorize the use of force.
The flexible definition of these powers creates a healthy tension between the legislative and executive branches. For example, the president can avoid formal treaties — and by extension, the need for the Senate's approval — by signing international agreements through executive order instead. For instance, both the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran's nuclear program were executive agreements, not formal treaties. Worried that the Obama administration would yield too much ground in its talks with Iran, Congress took steps to codify into law sanctions implemented by executive action, erecting more legal barriers to lifting them. For this reason, Obama was unable to repeal sanctions against Iran when the JCPOA was signed in 2015; rather, he signed an executive order supported by the president's national security waiver to simply stop enforcing existing legislative measures against Iran. As a result, the deal was struck, and the potential for a military confrontation with Tehran was dramatically reduced. The tradeoff, however, was that the use of executive action made the deal more vulnerable to the actions of future presidents, who have the power to decide whether to keep the agreement in place.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, a Republican who played a role in expanding congressional oversight over Washington's Iran policies, has said point-blank that "it's been my goal as a chairman just to bring back [Congress'] equivalent status to the executive branch." He has cited the Senate bill on Russia as yet another way of doing that. Unsurprisingly, Corker's sentiment has deepened the sense of unease in the White House, which prefers to retain its executive privilege in shaping the United States' relationship with Russia. With Moscow embedded in several conflict zones central to Washington's interests, the administration argues, the White House needs the flexibility to negotiate with the Kremlin without Congress' interference.
Of course, this is an argument to be expected of any U.S. presidency. Bold foreign policy moves, after all, are often essential to protecting the nation's interests, and being hampered by a large, unwieldy legislature answerable to local constituencies doesn't necessarily allow for that kind of agile policymaking abroad during periods of such geopolitical complexity. But the Trump administration's unique and multifarious relationship with Russia is diluting this executive appeal. And regardless of the president's policy preference, many of Moscow's demands are fundamentally at odds with Washington's imperative to keep Russian ambitions in check and to maintain the alliance structure that emerged from World War II. The Kremlin can do much to disrupt the seat of U.S. power in Washington. But it cannot break the system of checks and balances so cleverly institutionalized by America's founding fathers.
-
The Axis of the Sanctioned
Jul 28, 2017
By Jacob L. Shapiro
Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity was doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. In January 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush famously declared Iraq, Iran and North Korea the axis of evil in his State of the Union speech. This week, with the passage of a bill to impose expanded sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea, the U.S. has effectively replaced the axis of evil with the axis of the sanctioned – the only difference being that Russia has replaced Iraq on the list of sinners. But if Washington is expecting to see different results this time around, it’ll soon learn how misguided this expectation is.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved the sanctions bill on July 25 with an overwhelming majority (419-3). It was passed by the Senate on July 27 by an equally decisive margin (98-2). Because of the strong majority with which it passed both the House and the Senate, it’s unlikely President Donald Trump can veto the bill.
All three countries targeted by the legislation have been the subject of sanctions before. Many have debated whether this tool is an effective way to influence a country’s actions. A study updated in 2009 and published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics examined 174 case studies and determined that sanctions were partially successful 34 percent of the time. According to the study, the success rate varied based on the goal. If the goal was modest and specific, such as the release of a political prisoner, the success rate approached 50 percent. But if the goal was regime change or significant policy reforms, the success rate was only 30 percent.
The bottom line is that sanctions are an ineffective way of achieving foreign policy objectives in two-thirds of cases, according to this study. They can be a powerful tool, alongside other measures, to encourage a country to halt a certain action, but on their own they can achieve little and might actually make a situation worse.
Sanctions Won’t Change Reality
It is with that in mind that the geopolitical implications of the sanctions bill should be evaluated. Of the three countries included in the bill, Russia has drawn the most attention because of the Russian cloud that has cast a shadow over Trump’s administration since he came to office. But the bill was originally designed to levy new sanctions against Iran; North Korea was also subsequently added. These three countries arguably represent the United States’ most significant geopolitical challenges today. They also happen to be intractable issues that the U.S. does not currently have the will or power to change in any meaningful way – and sanctions won’t alter that reality.
Consider North Korea. The U.S. has been hoping that partnering with China and expanding international sanctions against North Korea, which has already been subject to sanctions for decades, could convince the regime to stop its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The existing sanctions were ineffective, in part because the regime is willing to endure some discomfort to ensure its survival, and giving up its weapons program could put that in jeopardy. China, meanwhile, is either unwilling or unable to bring Kim Jong Un to heel. In the first half of this year, it even increased its exports to Pyongyang by 20 percent year on year, according to a report by the Korean International Trade Association on July 26. (The same report also indicated that Chinese imports from North Korea have decrease by 24.3 percent in the same period.)
The Chinese government itself has also reported increased exports to North Korea in the first and second quarters of 2017. Trump even accused China on Twitter last month of not living up to its sanction pledges against North Korea.
The U.S. is beginning to get the impression that Beijing isn’t willing to apply financial pressure on Pyongyang, and some say the next step should be to impose sanctions against China. But sanctions won’t force China to handle the problem the way the U.S. wants. The dirty little secret is that China’s prestige as the chief negotiator with Pyongyang far outweighs its actual power. That becomes abundantly apparent in situations such as these.
Shared Enemy
Or consider Iran, which has been a foreign policy disaster for the United States since the 1953 military coup that the U.S. helped organize. Many believe the “unprecedented” sanctions (as they were described by U.S. officials at the time) imposed in 2010 have been effective. After all, just five years after they were implemented, Iran signed the much-maligned nuclear deal. Proximity, however, is not causality. Iran did not capitulate because of sanctions.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (C) arrives at parliament ahead of presenting the proposed annual budget in the capital, Tehran, on Jan. 17, 2016, after sanctions were lifted under Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers. ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images
This is not to say sanctions were irrelevant. They were no doubt painful for the Iranian economy, and they became a major political issue in Tehran. But what compelled Iran to sign the deal was that Iran’s strategic plans were disrupted after the Syrian war broke out. In 2010, a Shiite arc of influence, led by Iranian-backed proxies, seemed poised to spread from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean. But then Bashar Assad’s government came under attack in Syria, and it continues to fight a bloody civil war that has permanently fractured the country. More important, out of the ashes of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, a force arose that would eventually become the Islamic State.
It’s this reality – not the economic impact of sanctions, significant as it may have been – that convinced Iran to enter into the nuclear deal. Iran was wary of a potential Sunni Arab power rising on its border, one with an ideology that saw Iran as an enemy equal to if not greater than the West. The rise of IS meant that suddenly the United States and Iran had a common enemy; IS threatened the national security interests of both countries.
Now that the Islamic State is on the defensive, the subtle ties between these strange bedfellows are beginning to show signs of fraying – on both sides. The issue is that Iran wants to be the dominant power in the Middle East, while the United States doesn’t want any single country to control the region. Defeating Iran by military force is not a realistic option for the Middle East, and by toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, the U.S. eliminated the natural balance to Iranian power in the region. The U.S. is trying to reconstruct a regional balance of power to deal with Iran, but the Saudis are weak, the Turks have little desire or need to enter the fray at this point, and no one else is up to the task. Sanctions are not going to induce Iran to stop testing ballistic missiles or to stop funding its proxy groups throughout the region; in fact, they may have the opposite effect.
Easier Said Than Done
And then there’s Russia, which has become something of a U.S. media obsession. Like George W. Bush and Barack Obama before him, Trump came to office hoping to build a better relationship with Russia, only to realize it’s much easier said than done. Trump may have thought that a positive personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin was going to be enough to accomplish what his predecessors couldn’t. But niceties don’t change the fact that Ukraine is a national security interest to Russia, and that the United States – even under Trump – has shown no signs of bending on the Ukraine issue. In fact, Trump has met with Ukraine’s president and has declared his support for Ukraine multiple times. The State Department’s new special representative to Ukraine even said July 25 that the U.S. might consider providing Kiev with defensive arms.
The sanctions bill won’t convince Russia that it can abandon Kiev to the West’s orbit, and it may even embolden Ukraine. It may be coincidence, but Ukraine’s recent decision to cut off electricity to Donetsk, amid other markers of tension, suggests that these sanctions could encourage Kiev to push back against Russia with an expectation of U.S. support. Russia will have to retaliate in some way. In light of this possible escalation, we at GPF may even have to re-examine our forecast for 2017, which saw Ukraine as a frozen conflict.
This is not to say that sanctions are ineffective or that they don’t have any geopolitical import. They do, and we’ll be publishing more on their impact in the near term. But by relying on sanctions that have had only a marginal effect in the past, the U.S. is insisting on forcing square pegs into round holes. That will have ramifications, but the underlying problems – North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, Iran’s pursuit of regional hegemony and Russia’s need to maintain Ukraine as a buffer – will remain long after these sanctions are lifted.
The post The Axis of the Sanctioned appeared first on Geopolitics | Geopolitical Futures.
-
A Perfect Storm Is Brewing in U.S. Foreign Policy
By Reva Goujon
VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor
Reva Goujon
Reva Goujon
VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor
The White House's pledge to put
(P_WEI/Getty Images)
The White House's pledge to put "America First" in its policymaking implies that the president has a responsibility to prioritize his country's problems over the rest of the world's. But making good on that promise isn't as easy as it sounds. After all, the foreign policies of great powers are crafted, not imposed.
If we can assume that every nation follows its own interests, we can also expect the executor of its foreign policy to make sense of a complex geopolitical landscape by internalizing the imperatives and constraints shaping the behavior of itself and its peers. In part this means identifying potential points of competition and collaboration, giving priority to the issues that pose a strategic threat to the republic. It also means teasing out and testing implications, determining the most critical points of stress that demand attention. Excessive ambition, whether driven by egotism or romanticism, will inevitably seep into the foreign policy realm, but it can be tamed. And the greater the power, the more tools at its disposal to form a policy designed to subtly steer its adversaries and allies toward its desired course without any party losing face.
Of course, this approach doesn't preclude conflict. A successful foreign policy, however, will anticipate, manage and even harness clashes to ensure a balance of power that is ultimately intended to preserve the might of the republic. The unique collection of foreign policy challenges facing the United States today will require a particularly deft hand to address as Washington looks to parse the unavoidable disputes from the avoidable ones, and to prepare Americans for them. But the ongoing power struggle between the ideologues and professionals on the White House's policy team seems certain to only intensify, leaving little room for strategic planning and ample room for error in some of the world's most pressing conflicts.
If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It
Consider Venezuela, where a government led by the narco politicians largely responsible for the economy's self-destruction is using a constituent assembly to create a one-party state. Naturally the United States doesn't want a failed Venezuelan state to destabilize its Caribbean sphere of influence. Unfettered narco states thrive on American drug consumption and create a robust market for arms traffickers, which in turn spawns violent crime and waves of migration. Even during the reign of Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, the United States managed to find institutional partners in Bogota with which to join forces and tackle the multidimensional threat posed by the narco state. Imagine how difficult it will be to do the same in Caracas once narco politicians have formalized their position in power, all while persistent clashes between security forces and protesters give rise to humanitarian calls for an intervention.
Though policymakers in Washington feel compelled to respond to this blatant power grab, the nature of their response matters tremendously. By all appearances, the U.S. administration is preparing new hard-hitting sanctions that set Venezuela's all-important energy sector, in addition to specific individuals, in their crosshairs. The sanctions could target the state-run Petroleos de Venezuela, ban U.S. light crude exports to Venezuela and cut off Venezuelan oil imports; such comprehensive measures would essentially accelerate the country's downward spiral. Depending on the sanctions' scope, dollars from Venezuela's vital oil trade will dry up, severe shortages in basic goods will become intolerable, unrest will intensify, and splits within the ruling party, military or both will risk the government's collapse, creating a mess that no one player will be willing or able to clean up.
So, the United States will have to weigh its options. Does it make strategic sense to exacerbate the Venezuelan crisis, knowing that there are still other, larger foreign policy matters that need Washington's attention? Or should it avoid a premature crash by incrementally increasing sanctions, undermining the most incorrigible elements in Caracas, and working with those desperate enough to strike a deal to create a softer landing for the Caribbean state?
Iran can be seen through a similar lens. The past week has brought to light a particularly raucous debate within the White House over whether the executive branch would consider Iran to be in compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The deal's five other signatories, the International Atomic Energy Agency and foreign policy professionals within the administration — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, to name a few — maintain that Tehran is abiding by the terms of the agreement. But President Donald Trump and a group of like-minded staffers seem determined to make the case that Iran is not in compliance with the deal's stipulations, and they have raised the prospect of the United States' unilaterally withdrawing from the deal when it reviews Iran's compliance again in 90 days.
Rather than basing this assessment on the deal's actual terms, the president and his allies have founded their position on the United States' other grievances with Iran, including its weapons testing and support of regional militant groups, as well as a general belief that Tehran should be treated as an axis of evil. But does it make strategic sense to abandon the agreement, when doing so will renew the prospect of a military confrontation in the Persian Gulf and when the United States lacks the European support needed to keep effective sanctions in place against Iran? Or will Washington take into account that the Iranian government will not be easily uprooted by force, is serious enough about keeping the nuclear deal in place and already has its hands full in competing with its neighbors for influence? If the United States' goal is to avoid further destabilizing the Middle East while it has so many other foreign policy conundrums to grapple with, then relying on the more subtle tools of covert intelligence to maintain oversight of Iran's nuclear program while playing off existing tensions between Iran and the Middle East's major Sunni powers may be a more effective way to keep Tehran's ambitions in check than single-handedly reigniting a nuclear crisis that could easily consume the United States' military capacity.
When It Comes to Russia, Proceed With Caution
Meanwhile, for all the recent drama surrounding the U.S.-Russia relationship, Washington's policy toward Moscow is fairly straightforward. Aware of the internal issues it faces in the coming years, the Kremlin is trying to reach an understanding with the United States and the West at large that recognizes Russia's sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union. For instance, by trying to draw the line at NATO's expansion and persuade the West to lift its sanctions, Moscow hopes to insulate itself from the United States and its allies while it is still powerful enough to do so.
To this end, Russia has devoted a considerable amount of energy to inserting itself into conflicts where the United States has a vested interest. There, Moscow believes, it can build a collection of carrots and sticks that it can use to steer Washington toward more fruitful negotiations. The United States isn't pitted against Russia in an ideological war, as it was during the Cold War, and there is certainly room for cooperation between them in some areas of mutual interest. But Russian concessions — even on tactical matters — often come with hefty price tags attached, and selling out European allies on Moscow's doorstep is simply too steep a cost for Washington to pay. Even without the immense complications created by Russia's information operations against the U.S. administration and by Congress' growing compulsion to check the president's influence over Washington's Russia policy, Moscow and Washington will remain fundamentally at odds with each other on several fronts. Nevertheless, the United States will need to stay alert to areas of emerging conflict where Russia will attempt to throw a wrench in Washington's plans — not least of which is North Korea.
The Real Fight Is in Asia
When it comes to Venezuela, Iran and Russia, the United States still has options in how it chooses to proceed. Depending on how carefully it weighs the implications of its own actions, it can either exacerbate or temper the threats stemming from each country. North Korea, on the other hand, leaves the United States with dangerously little room to maneuver.
Pyongyang and Washington have passed the point of viable negotiation. North Korea is on track to develop a nuclear deterrent, and as it nears the point of possessing a reliable nuclear weapon and delivery system capable of striking the continental United States, Washington will be compelled to seriously consider military action against it. That decision will fall to the Trump administration, perhaps within the next 18 months. In trying to forgo military action, the United States will be forced to rely on China's and Russia's cooperation in sanctions or covert action intended to destabilize the North Korean government and thwart its nuclear ambitions. Yet even as Washington pursues this policy out of diplomatic necessity, it knows it is unlikely to bear fruit. Because as much as they dislike the idea of a nuclear North Korea on their doorstep, China and Russia do not want to face the broader repercussions of an unstable Korean Peninsula or open the door to a bigger U.S. military footprint in the region.
And so, the two states will try to get as much as they can out of negotiations with the United States as they try to push Washington toward inaction. Unable to rely on the clout of China and Russia to moderate North Korea's behavior, the United States will resist their demands to curb its military presence in the Asia-Pacific as the North Korean nuclear threat mounts. Washington's need to address the North Korean threat will thus clash with Beijing's own imperative to consolidate its maritime sphere of influence, raising the stakes in an increasingly complicated conflict zone.
The beat of the war drums in Northeast Asia is deafening compared with the low rumble emanating from Venezuela, Iran and Russia. But it is the confluence of these crises — some of which are more avoidable than others — that risks creating a foreign policy cacophony that even the political squabbles in Washington won't be able to drown out in the months to come.
-
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/special/gpf-fall-2017-conference.html
-
“Every bureaucracy in Washington has its own culture. Some of them, like the State Department, have several sub-cultures. The overwhelming political perspective of the career employees of the State Department is liberal Democrat. It affects their policy in virtually every aspect.”
After watching the parade of State people paraded on CNN and MSNBC this is plainly obvious.
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/08/11/john-bolton-inexplicable-to-say-iran-in-compliance-with-nuclear-agreement/
-
A Nietzschean Lesson on the Use and Abuse of History
By Reva Goujon
VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor
Friedrich Nietzsche's observations about the misuse of history to sow chaos in the present hold as true today as they did in the 19th century when he wrote them.
(Stratfor)
A lot of history is being casually tossed around these days. We see it from energized segments of the "alt-right" throwing up Nazi salutes, calling for a "revolution" against "the Bolsheviks" and marching to chants like "Jews will not replace us." We see it from their anti-fascist adversaries on the left, branding themselves antifa, a movement that draws its roots from the Antifaschistische Aktion resistance from 1930s Germany. We see it from world leaders when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan brazenly calls his German and Dutch counterparts Nazis and fascists and when U.S. President Donald Trump ardently defends Confederate statues as symbols of "heritage not hate." We see it from jihadist groups like the Islamic State when a member of the Barcelona attack cell calling himself Abu Lais of Cordoba spookily reminds Spanish Christians to remember "the Muslim blood spilled" during the Spanish Inquisition as the group fights to reincorporate "Al Andalus" into a revived caliphate.
The Third Reich. The Bolshevik Revolution. The American Civil War. The Spanish Inquisition. This is heavy, heavy history. Yet in the words of some actors, some of the darkest days of our historical memory seem to take on a weightless form in today's angst-ridden political discourse. While jarring to observe, this kind of historical levity is to be expected whenever the world moves through a major inflection point. When more wretched periods of history lie just beyond the horizon of the current generation, they become fuzzy, impersonal anecdotes rather than visceral memories that impress upon everyday lives. And when the future looks especially bleak to that same generation, a raucous few can capture the minds of many by plunging deep into the depths of a blemished history to conjure up leaders and legends that, with a bit of polishing and dusting off, can serve as the unadulterated icons of a new world order.
Today's antifa movement models itself after Germany's anti-fascists in the 1930s.
Today's antifa movement in the United States models itself after Germany's anti-fascists in the 1930s.
(Public domain)
The reasoning behind the tactic is fairly simple. Leaders and movements that try to implement a revisionist agenda in the world crave two things: credibility and power. If the masses can be seduced by a narrative with historical legs (however flimsy those legs may be), then power will presumably follow. And if credibility does not come naturally, then the amassing of state power enables the distortion of facts and silencing of critics. After all, mimicking history is a far easier strategy to pursue than trying to understand and innovate yourself out of the deeper problems of the present.
At the same time, history is just as important to internalize in tense times like these. How else will current and future generations learn from and avoid the mistakes of their past?
Tackling the Dilemma of History
It is this very dilemma of how to responsibly treat history that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche tried to tackle in an essay titled "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" as part of his Untimely Meditations series. When Nietzsche published this work in 1873, just two years following German reunification led by Otto Von Bismarck, he described himself as "out of touch with the times." While most everyone around him was celebrating the music of Richard Wagner and erecting monuments to the heroes of the Franco-Prussian War in the act of knitting together a unified German state, Nietzsche was a bit of a wreck thinking about all the ways this exercise in German nationalism could go terribly awry. His musings on the role history should play in audacious political times are particularly apt in today's "historical fever."
Nietzsche argues that the fundamental purpose of history should be for life. And as we live, we must understand our past without becoming enslaved to it. To underscore the importance of living in the present, he describes with envy the "unhistorical" beast, grazing among a herd in a valley with finite horizons on all sides, living in an eternal state of forgetfulness. In contrast to the human, ever-burdened by the past, the honest beast lives blissfully, as a child does, freeing the mind to think and achieve great things. "The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is. … And no artist would achieve his picture, no field marshal his victory, and no people its freedom, without previously having desired and striven for them in that sort of unhistorical condition."
The opposite of the unhistorical mind is the superhistorical being, one who takes history much too seriously and thus feels little point to living in the present. In between these two minds are the more even-minded and optimistic historical beings — those who use history to serve the living. They look to the past with reverence to understand the present and to frame a vision for the future.
Nietzsche then goes on to describe the three approaches to history: Monumentalism, Antiquarianism and Criticism. No single approach is the right one; each can be used in combination and at an appropriate time and context. If misused, however, "destructive weeds" will sprout and pull society down into chaos.
The Monumentalists are on a historical search for glory. This can be a dangerous exercise, for if the past is viewed as something that can be imitated and reinterpreted into something more beautiful, then it can easily fall into a trap of "free poeticizing" by people serving up mythic fictions to "weakly cultured nations" craving hope and direction. In a prophetic peering into the Third Reich, Nietzsche warns that the Monumentalists are most dangerous as superhistorical people when they are not anchored to a particular place. When saturated in a myth of cultural superiority and lacking in geopolitical boundaries, "less favored races and people" roam around, "looking for something better in foreign places," and competition and warfare ensures. While such thinking in the past has fueled foreign adventurism and destructive wars, the Monumentalists today are more concerned about a nativist agenda on their home turf. Chants by the alt-right like "our blood, our soil" and campaigns against "cultural Marxism" taking over the world stem from a stubbornly anchored place and people who believe their white, European-derived race is being diluted by "the other," who belong on the other side of the fence.
The Antiquarian, like the Monumentalist, tends to look at history through rose-colored glasses, but wants to preserve the past in a traditionalist, literalist sense rather than use history to generate life. "Man envelopes himself in a moldy smell" and steeps himself so deeply in the past that he will take little interest in what lies beyond the horizon. The modern jihadist drawn to the Islamic State banner can be seen through this lens, believing that a return to a seventh-century Islamic way way of life will restore virtue in man and glory to the Islamic world.
The third approach to history that Nietzsche describes is the critical one. He writes that a person must have the power to break with the past in order to live. This, he argues, can be done by "dragging the past before a court of justice" to look at history with a critical eye. In describing a "first and second nature," he describes how a generation that looks at its past and can recognize its ills alongside its virtues sets the stage for the next generation to study its past with a healthier, more critical view of history, and thus society is better off in the long run. In this thought, Nietzsche may have been a tad idealistic. In reality, as we can see today, several decades is long enough to wear down the critical eye and blur our historical memory for the worse.
The Limitations of the Critical Approach
The critical method may appear like the most pragmatic and reasoned approach to history, but here, too, we must be careful. To make the point that we can never fully internalize the time, place and conditions of our past to perfectly understand it, Nietzsche dramatically asserts that "objectivity and justice have nothing to do with each other." One can "interpret the past only on the basis of the highest power of the present."
This lesson in critical history is an important one for the modern-day globalist fighting to extinguish resurgent flames of nationalism. While the 20th century horrors of unhinged nationalism need to be represented in starkly honest terms to prevent a repeat of the past, it is just as important to remember the economic, social and security conditions that give rise to those ideological currents in the first place. Nationalism is a natural product of the human condition and need not be blanketly vilified in all forms. While some German integrationists want to remain committed to a docile existence in the European Union, German students may tire of history books that overly fixate on the catastrophe of the Third Reich. While the message "Never forget!" matters, there comes a time when rational people looking for purpose and seeing problems with the current order want a fuller historical understanding of their past to comprehend who they are and where they come from instead of drowning themselves in guilt.
Nietzsche also warns against taking science and a purely empirical approach to life too far. The German thinker, best known for the declaration "God is dead," was of course speaking at a time in European history when rationalism and scientific thought were celebrated by philosophers as the great escape from religion's straitjacket. The nuance to Nietzsche's argument is often lost, however. Nietzsche himself was an atheist, but he warned that if we went too far down the critical path and didn't leave any room for the Antiquarian memory, then we would strip society of religion, art and other enigmatic instincts that humans need to make sense of the inexplicable. As he put it, "all living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness" or else European culture would face a catastrophe in suffering the perils of nihilism. If Nietzsche were alive today, he would probably argue that overzealous technologists intent on erasing borders in an ever-globalizing world were setting it up for a violent clash.
Heeding Nietzsche's Warning
Nietzsche would also see the jumbled historical references feeding into today's political discourse as a gross abuse of history warning of much bigger problems ahead. In every camp of Monumentalists and superhistorians, there are some whose egos and visions are so big that they believe that the entire passage of history is to serve their modern agenda. Nietzsche saw this type in his day as well:
"Arrogant European of the nineteenth century, you are raving! Your knowledge does not complete nature, but only kills your own. For once, measure your height as a knower against your depth as a person who can do something. Of course, you clamber on the solar ray of knowledge upward towards heaven, but you also climb downward to chaos."
In fact, chaos is exactly what many modern-day radical Monumentalists are seeking. If one assumes an apocalyptic view of the world, as many among the alt-right and some within a rapidly thinning camp of ultranationalists in the White House have openly espoused, then their energy and focus will be on tearing down the current order at whatever cost to energize the masses to engage in their so-called revolution. To complete this aim, enemies need to be invented, the intelligentsia needs to be condemned and history needs to be revised. And whether they know it or not, the motto of the modern-day Monumentalist, in Nietzsche's words, will be the following: "Let the dead bury the living."
-
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/North-Koreas-ultimatum-to-America-504213
-
The author here is no fool, but IMHO she fails to note:
a) Trump ran on no more endless wars-- public support for going heavy back into the ME on the ground is near zero-- no to mention that American military bandwidth is mightily stretched already with various other BFD problems requiring attention (Norks, South China Sea, and more)
b) IMHO as he wisely did with DACA, there is wisdom is putting this on Congress. Congress needs to man the fk up and do its job instead of what we now have-- pissing and moaning after the fact no matter what is done. The country needs to make a unified decision on this.
https://www.aei.org/publication/president-trumps-failing-leadership-on-iran/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVRVM05UZzVOalF3TW1JeCIsInQiOiIrczlFU0c2blVzN3luelJGc1hVMzlXamV6WmFrWGVWWVZDNStGQndnTk9pUGVtY3FDKzBCS0o0T3Flc2pkbHl0Nk1aNlRVUHNyM2JIQnk1bERNczhQcVNDUzc5bndrQ3hMM3JPM28zZldtWXJOb1RmamV0QXhUV3F5UUlNMTZ2UyJ9
-
Dec. 9, 2015 As the strength of many Arab states deteriorates, it may not be possible to think of the Arab world as a whole anymore.
Turkey and Iraq are engaged in a diplomatic spat. The dispute is over Turkey placing troops and armor inside of Iraq’s borders ostensibly to train Kurdish peshmerga fighters, as well as Arab Sunnis and Turkmen, to fight Islamic State without Iraq’s permission. The number of troops at this point – Reuters reported it to be about a battalion, so between 400 and 1,000 troops – is not enough to change realities on the ground by itself. It may be that Turkey is in the very initial stages of either participating in or helping to plan an offensive on the Islamic State-held city of Mosul. Even if it is, such a development is a long way off. The deeper issue is that Turkey, a non-Arab country, felt it could station troops in an Arab country without having to be concerned with that country’s reaction – in this case Iraq.
We speak often of Turkey’s strengths and advantages compared to other would-be regional powers: it has a strong military, a strong economy, it controls some of the most strategic real estate in the world as the gate keeper to the Bosporus. The flip side of this is the weakness of the region’s Arab states. Indeed, it may not be possible to think of the Arab world as a whole anymore. Like the terms “Syria” and “Iraq,” the term “Arab world” has become a hollow phrase.
Since the peoples of the Middle East encountered Western imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the word “Arab” has referred to the notion that the Arabic-speaking people of the region constitute a nation to themselves. The various borders drawn by Great Britain and France were for imperial purposes; the states that began to emerge were all part of the Arab nation. The word “Arab” however has meant many things over the course of history. As Bernard Lewis notes in “The Arabs in History,” its first meaning was to describe the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. After Mohammed’s conquest and the birth of the caliphate in the 8th century, the term was used often to distinguish between the Arabian conquerors and the masses of the conquered. Over time the term lost its explicitly ethnic content, becoming a social term which described a class of people who tried to preserve the old nomadic ways, though the importance of Arabic language remained constant. It gradually became imbued with its now-familiar nationalist ideas towards the end of the 19th century.
At Geopolitical Futures, one of the core principles that informs our work is the importance of the love of one’s own. The international system is based on the existence of nation-states, and the foundation of the nation-state is the natural love of what one considers to be one’s own people. Nationalism uses the love of one’s own as the bedrock out of which to establish the nation-state – which is precisely what Arab nationalism tried to do in the second half of the 20th century after casting off the imperial yoke.
There is a rough equivalent to the love of one’s own in Arabic thought, a concept used prominently by the famous historian Ibn Khaldun, who wrote and lived in North Africa in the 14th century. Ibn Khaldun wrote of a concept called “asabiyya,” which roughly translates to “social solidarity.” Ibn Khaldun thought that the nomadic Bedouin – the original “Arab” – destroyed civilization but founded states. This was because the Bedouin had a natural asabiyya, one that Albert Hourani described as a “mutual affection and willingness to fight and die for each other.” With asabiyya came the strength and courage to defeat civilizations, and which allowed for the formation of states after conquest. Once the state was established, a new asabiyya had to develop, one that put the state before all else. But Ibn Khaldun recognized that in this region, the relationship of soldiers and citizens to a state could never be as strong as the primal asabiyya that exists between those related by blood and not by political convention.
With the exception of Saudi Arabia and a few other monarchies, like Jordan and Morocco, the political structure of the Arab-national world came to be dominated by two main ideologies imported from Europe: socialism and nationalism. From Algeria to Iraq, socialism and Arab nationalism were the asabiyya that held these brand-new states together. These ideologies however have failed to fulfill their promises. Socialism did not bring prosperity to the masses. The existence of independent nation-states did not usher in an age of freedom – in fact, it propped up authoritarian dictators.
IS is one response to the failure of these ideologies. IS lives in the world of the failure of socialism and Arab nationalism, and all of its targets in the Middle East – Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon – are states to varying degrees where the cohesion of the state has broken down as a result. It is easy to dismiss IS as a bunch of violent radicals, but the fact of the matter is the IS’ ideology appeals to Arabic-speaking Muslims in the Middle East as well as many non-Arab Muslims around the world. Islam is the only thing that has ever succeeded at uniting the various tribes and clans and ethnic groups scattered across the region into a whole. In a similar way to the European fascists, who used nationalism to establish legitimacy and communal bonds, the IS harkens back to an imagined-golden age where the only thing that was important was whether one was a true believer or not.
But another manifestation of the breakdown of Arab political power is in the fact that on Dec. 4, Turkey reportedly deployed 220 Turkish troops backed by approximately 8 tanks and other support elements to the towns of Zlekah and Bashink outside of the IS-held city of Mosul. Also, on the same day, the Turkish military released details of a training program for Kurdish peshmerga fighters that it has been engaged in for over two and a half years. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi characterized the news as a violation of Iraqi national sovereignty, and he wasn’t wrong. And yet all the broken state of Iraq can do is to threaten to take it up with the UN Security Council, or to make calls to NATO officials and Kurdish political leaders, as Abadi has done in response. Abadi does not have the national strength necessary to do anything besides take offense. Turkey can bomb northern Iraq to hit PKK positions when it likes, and it can station troops outside Mosul if it chooses. Whether Ankara’s motives are to train the peshmerga against IS, to send a signal to the Russians, to halt the successes of the Syrian Kurds matters little. Turkey, if it wishes, can do as it pleases in Iraq right now.
This is not just an Iraqi issue. Or a Syrian issue. The most capable “Arab” state left is Saudi Arabia – and the Saudis do not speak to any broad coalition of people within the region itself. The influence they have is a result of money and previous American support. Egypt has its own economic and security issues; the beating heart of pan-Arabism flat-lined decades ago and nothing has arisen in its place. Libya no longer exists. Yemen is a permanent war zone. There is no Arab unity. There is tribalism and factionalism and sectarianism. There is primal asabiyya – small groups battling to survive for the sake of surviving and protecting their own.
The age of the Arab caliphates ended when the Mongols besieged a Baghdad already weakened by centuries of Turkic and Persian attacks in the 13th century – from that point on, until after World War I, the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East were ruled by foreign powers, and for the bulk of that time by the Turkic Ottoman Empire. The period from roughly 1918 to 2011 was a rare moment in history where Arab states controlled their own destinies far more than they had in previous centuries. That time however has come to an end. The Arab world in so far as it exists is completely fractured, so much so that the very notion of speaking about the “Arab world” in a way that transcends clan, tribe, or sect is quickly losing any real meaning.
And this is the usual state of affairs in this part of the world. The region has always been a magnet for competition between great powers – the Ottomans and the Safavids, the Americans and the Soviets. Today, military elements of the U.S., Russia, France, and the UK are all active in the region. Persian Shiite Iran wields a tremendous amount of influence in Baghdad via the Shiite militias it funds, and throughout the region with its various proxies. Turkey is being drawn into the vortex that Islamic State has created within the old Syria and Iraq borders. The Kurds are caught between it all, with the Turks using some clans and tribes for their own purposes, and fighting others as necessary. People look at the Middle East as if it is in chaos but really the region is reverting to a familiar state of affairs. The exception has been the last 100 years or so. The present is familiar to the student of history.
The Turks have little interest in making what’s left of Iraq angry. Ankara will do what it can to assuage Abadi’s hurt feelings. Even so, there is something remarkable happening here to take note of. It has become increasingly hard to speak of the Arab world as anything beyond a vague description of the Arabic-speaking people of the Middle East. There is the Islamic State and there is narrow asabiyya. For the time being, the region’s fate rests ultimately in the inevitable clash between the former and foreign powers.
-
North Korea: Where China Can Beat the US
Oct 10, 2017
By Jacob L. Shapiro
Of all the parties involved in the Korean missile crisis, the most difficult to read is China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s almost daily platitudes about the need for a peaceful resolution do little to reveal what China’s real interests and objectives are – and what they are is multiple and conflicting. At one level, China is concerned with the balance of power on the Korean Peninsula. China doesn’t want Pyongyang to have nuclear weapons, and it doesn’t want the peninsula to unify. But at the same time, what happens on the Korean Peninsula also affects China’s relationship with the U.S., and despite the deep economic ties between the two countries, from Beijing’s perspective that is a relationship defined ultimately by fear and mistrust.
(click to enlarge)
Roots of Mistrust
To understand where this mistrust comes from, we need to revisit some history. When North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, it did so without Chinese participation. What assistance China did offer before the invasion was rebuffed by Kim Il Sung’s young regime, confident as it was that it would not only succeed in its attack but that the invasion would provoke a popular uprising in South Korea as well. North Korea’s invasion caught the U.S. flat-footed. In its panicked analysis of what had happened, the U.S. feared that the invasion might be part of a much larger attack by the communist bloc against U.S. interests. That is why two days later, then-U.S. President Harry Truman ordered the 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait.
At the time of Truman’s order, the People’s Republic of China was less than a year old. It was led by Mao Zedong, who was deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions toward his regime. Mao’s concerns were not unfounded. Mao remembered what happened after World War I, when, upon arrival at Versailles, Chinese delegates discovered that the U.S. had recognized a Japanese claim over Chinese territory that European powers had once held. Mao also lived through the United States’ breaking off support for the Chinese Communists – after the U.S. had supported them in their fight against Japan in World War II – because of the Cold War. The U.S. instead poured its resources into rebuilding Japan, which had invaded and brutally occupied China during the war. In addition, the U.S. threw its support behind Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists in the hopes that they would defeat the upstart Communist forces. (The term “Chinese nationalists” has always been something of a misnomer – the Communists were just as nationalistic as Chiang’s forces, but that is what history has come to call them.)
Moving the 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait was the last straw for Mao. To him, the U.S. was the only thing standing between his Communist Party of China and the creation of a unified Chinese nation-state beholden to no one but the Chinese people themselves. But China could do nothing to avenge the slight directly. It didn’t have the military force necessary to conquer Taiwan with the 7th Fleet standing guard. The only place China could hope to respond was in North Korea, where the rugged geography negated some of the advantages of the United States’ technological and military superiority. China entered the Korean War in October 1950, and because of China’s intervention, the Korean War ended in a stalemate that remains unresolved to this day.
Cycles of History
Fast forward to today, and it is plain to see that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Korea is still divided, and despite momentous growth in the economy and the military capabilities of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan remains outside of its control. But it’s not just the strategic reality that is the same. It’s also true that for China, the North Korea and the Taiwan issue are inextricably linked.
On Dec. 2, soon after the U.S. presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump did something that no U.S. president had done for more than 37 years: He had direct contact with the president of Taiwan. It may seem a small thing, but for Beijing, this was not a trivial moment. It took Trump another two months to accept the “One China” policy – two months where Chinese strategic planners were left to wonder what the United States’ true intentions were with regard to Taiwan, and China’s territorial integrity in general.
Chinese vendors sell North Korean and Chinese flags on the boardwalk next to the Yalu River in the border city of Dandong, northern China, across from the city of Sinuiju, North Korea, on May 24, 2017. KEVIN FRAYER/Getty Images
From the perspective of the Communist Party of China’s political legitimacy, Taiwan is the only part of China it has been unable to capture and integrate into its revolution. From the perspective of China’s defense strategy, Taiwan is an island 100 miles (160 kilometers) away from the mainland that a powerful navy could use as a base from which to blockade China or even to attack the mainland. If Taiwan were to gain U.S. recognition and perhaps even host U.S. forces, what is already a Chinese handicap would become an existential threat. It would also make a mockery of China’s faux-aggressiveness in the South China Sea, and would make previous American freedom of navigation operations look friendly in comparison.
China also faced another potential threat from the Trump administration: the potential that the U.S. might block Chinese exports from the U.S. market. A trade conflict between the two sides would hurt both parties, but China was always going to be hurt more, and President Xi Jinping could not afford an economic crisis in the lead-up to this month’s Party Congress, where he will solidify his dictatorship over the country.
What China needed, then, was a bargaining chip, a way of turning its position of weakness into one of strength. Enter North Korea. China had to proceed carefully. On the
one hand, China had to appear to have enough control over Pyongyang to divert the Trump administration from following through on some of its threats to redefine the U.S.-China economic relationship. On the other hand, China could not overstate its influence in North Korea such that the U.S. could hold China directly accountable for failure to help denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. The July 2017 revelation by China’s Ministry of Defense that contact between the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and North Korea’s military forces has completely ceased in recent years was meant to underline the limits of what Trump’s bargain with Xi at Mar-a-Lago in April had bought.
In reality, Xi has as little control over Kim Jong Un’s actions as Mao had over Kim Il Sung’s. But Xi does not need total control over Kim’s regime to use Kim to China’s advantage; all he needs is for China and North Korea to share an interest in limiting U.S. power in Asia, and there is little to suggest that interest is going away anytime soon. North Korea is pursuing a nuclear weapons programs to establish a nuclear deterrent against the United States. China doesn’t have to make such moves. It already has nuclear weapons and is far more powerful than Pyongyang. That allows China to be more pragmatic – that is, cooperative – in its dealings with the United States. But China’s pragmatism and willingness to work with the U.S. should not obscure the fact that, like North Korea, China is deeply suspicious of U.S. motives.
This, in turn, is one of the major limiting factors on the U.S. ability to attack North Korea. China has a mutual defense treaty with North Korea. And China, though it would prefer the status quo on the Korean Peninsula, does not necessarily lose if the U.S. were to try to solve the North Korea issue by force. This is because the attempt, absent some unknown technological devilry, wouldn’t work. The U.S. has tried and failed twice to win a war on the Asian mainland, and the situation in Korea hasn’t improved enough to think that the third time would be any different. China can’t beat the U.S. at sea, and it can’t take back Taiwan, but it can beat the U.S. in North Korea. That allows China to remind the U.S. that, though Beijing may not yet be able to achieve One China, its memory is long, its patience is vast, and classes in Confucian humility are readily available to those who seek them out.
-
Articles
Regions & Countries
Topics
Themes
Print
Save As PDF
Deep ideological differences and mutual mistrust have marred the relationship between the United States and Iran since the Islamic Republic replaced the nation's monarchy nearly four decades ago. But time has done little to heal the wounds that each country has inflicted on the other. Their enduring enmity will be on full display this week as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to "decertify" the deal Iran has struck with global powers on its nuclear program by arguing that the agreement isn't in the best interest of U.S. national security. Though Washington will likely keep sanctions relief for Tehran in place for now, Trump's speech will trigger a 60-day review period during which Congress will have the power to reimpose them.
Despite this apparent setback for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the prospect that the longtime adversaries will eventually set aside their grievances hasn't entirely dimmed. Because while political narratives come and go, the geopolitical forces that led to the nuclear deal's inception are here to stay, pushing the United States and Iran closer and closer to rapprochement.
The President's Gamble
The current U.S. administration has placed far more emphasis on curbing Iran's activities throughout the Middle East than its predecessor did. Within the past year, the White House has tried to unite Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, into a coalition against Iran while stepping up its military aid and weapons sales to Sunni powers across the region. In all likelihood, Trump will steadfastly maintain this tough stance when he unveils his administration's policy on Iran later this week, announcing additional targeted sanctions against it. As long as the nuclear deal remains intact, though, the use of Washington's strongest tool against Tehran — wide-reaching sanctions — will be off the table.
By reopening the debate about the JCPOA with the threat of withdrawal, Trump hopes to either rein in Iran's regional meddling or persuade Tehran to broaden the deal to include restrictions on its ballistic missile program and on its support for militant groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas. The president's strategy, however, is not without risk. Any cracks that open within the JCPOA's framework could spread quickly, perhaps even leading to the deal's collapse. Trump's approach also relies on the assumption that Iran — a country with a precarious political balance to maintain within its borders — won't respond aggressively to provocation.
Still, the president's gamble may not be as risky as it seems. We need only look at the forces that shaped the JCPOA's signing in the first place to see why. Over the past decade, the United States has searched for a way to reduce its presence in the Middle East and shift its attention to other parts of the world, including a resurgent Russia and a rising China. The solution it has settled on is to balance Middle Eastern powers — including Iran — against one another, forming a built-in check to prevent any one country from becoming too influential. But Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons program was something that neither the United States nor its European allies could allow. The JCPOA thus offered a means of halting the program's progress without risking the outbreak of war.
The United States' pressing need to look beyond the Middle East persists to this day. In fact, if anything, it has become even more imperative: China's economy and military prowess are growing, the standoff between Russia and the West endures, and the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula has deepened. Reviving the nuclear ambitions of — and the threat of conflict with — Iran by abandoning the JCPOA would doubtless detract from the United States' ability to address these urgent needs in Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific. It would also harden North Korea's belief (not to mention Iran's) that negotiation with the United States on nuclear issues is futile.
To make matters more complicated, Washington is alone in its newest strategy to contain Iran's influence. Unlike the United States, Europe considers Iran's regional ambitions to be separate from its nuclear activities, and the JCPOA to be pertinent only to the latter. The White House has blurred that distinction in a way the deal wasn't designed to handle. This discrepancy is the reason that the rationale behind Washington's decertification of the accord is key: The United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) agree that there is no evidence to suggest that Iran is not complying with the deal. And as long as Iran upholds its end of the bargain, the European Union will likely push back against any U.S. attempt to reinstate broad sanctions, which would damage several European companies. (The Continental bloc has already vowed to challenge the United States in the World Trade Organization if it tries to do so.)
All of these factors will make it difficult for Congress to put sanctions back in place against Iran. But perhaps that's exactly what the Trump administration is counting on. After all, the president derided the nuclear deal during his campaign for office. By punting the issue to Congress, where lawmakers will have a hard time resuming sanctions, Trump can wash his hands of the decision and gain the political cover needed to keep the agreement in place while adopting a tougher stance toward Iran.
Weighing the Cost of a Nuclear Weapon
Of course, the United States is only half of the JCPOA equation. And though Iran is often portrayed throughout the West as an erratic and unreliable partner, the country — like all nation-states in the global system — is a rational actor whose moves reflect its constraints and imperatives.
Chief among them, for the Islamic republic, is the simple need to survive. Throughout history, Iran has faced the threat of invasion from the west, first from powerful forces in Mesopotamia and then from the state of Iraq, particularly under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Seizing the chance that revolution afforded, Saddam invaded the Islamic republic not long after its establishment in 1979, prompting former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini to restart the deposed shah's nuclear weapons program in search of a credible deterrent against Iraq. Vital oil reserves along Iran's border with Iraq has only heightened its vulnerability in modern times.
With Saddam's removal from power, Iraq presented more opportunity than risk to Iran, and Tehran began to exert influence over its neighbor's Shiite leaders. But Iraq's fate also served as a stark warning: The weapons of mass destruction that were once an asset for Saddam became the liability that led to his downfall. The message was not lost on Iran, which halted most of its nuclear weapons development in 2003, even as it used the facade of the program's progress to drive a grand bargain with the United States.
This strategy, though quite rational, backfired by encouraging the creation of a powerful sanctions regime that crippled the Iranian economy. Prior to 1979, Iran's economy was roughly the size of Saudi Arabia's; today it is only three-fifths as large. As a result, the Islamic republic has struggled to make good on many of the promises that brought it to power. And in a country with a lengthy history of revolution and political upheaval, the popular backlash that sustained hardship tends to generate doesn't bode well for the government’s self-preservation.
Iran's leaders, who lack the immunity to widespread discontent that North Korea's dictatorship enjoys, believe that the greatest threat to the nation's stability today comes from within. Countering it requires a stronger economy and the careful management of social and political discord — both goals that have reinforced the growing sentiment among Iranians that the pursuit of a nuclear weapons program isn't worth the steep cost of sanctions. Consequently, Iran is keen to avoid making any rash decisions about its nuclear weapons development. Rather than uniting the United States and its allies by restarting its shuttered program, Tehran will likely keep using the issue to drive the wedge between them even deeper.
A Piece of a Bigger Puzzle
Iran will enter into any new negotiations over its nuclear program with an eye toward the rest of the international community as well. Iran has little incentive to remain a pariah state, given the extent to which that status has already devastated its economy, and a movement toward diplomatic moderation has blossomed among the country's leaders since the late 1980s. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is now the standard-bearer for that movement, though the volatile nature of the nation's politics has hampered his attempts to act on that ideology so far.
Nevertheless, he and his contemporaries have the heft of geopolitics on their side. Though Iran's rhetoric has traditionally targeted the United States, it is Turkey and Russia that may be more likely to threaten Tehran's security interests, especially as Washington withdraws from the region. Iran is deeply concerned about Turkey's resurgence in the lands it previously controlled during the Ottoman Empire, including Iraq and the Levant. And Russia — a country with which Iran has fought numerous wars — has similarly increased its involvement in Tehran's backyard over the past decade. Detente with an external powerhouse like the United States would certainly improve Iran's position against both threats.
Saudi Arabia is another regional rival that Iran is sure to watch, particularly given the Sunni kingdom's close relationship with the United States. Despite that partnership, however, Washington's strategy of balancing power in the Middle East requires just that: balance. Saudi Arabia's influence could therefore wane in the coming decades, especially since its prominence is based in oil reserves and the wealth that comes with them. As the Saudi oil industry becomes less lucrative over time, it will call into question the kingdom's economic vitality — and by extension, its utility as the United States' most powerful Middle Eastern ally.
Of course, Iran's economy relies on oil, too. But it is far more diversified, which suggests that it will fare better in a world where oil no longer reigns supreme. Moreover, Iran has the advantage of strategic location. As China works to build land routes through Asia to Europe, it will have to choose whether to pass through Iran or Russia — a decision that Beijing's natural rivalry with Moscow will make easy. With a quick glance at the map, it is clear how Iran's position on China's newest Silk Road would give Washington plenty of opportunities to counter both China and Russia if Tehran were its partner.
A Partnership Checked by Politics
The slow-moving undercurrents of geopolitics can take years to shape domestic policy. In the meantime, Iran and the United States will continue to display their mutual animosity at home. Iran's powerful hard-line groups, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have staunchly opposed negotiation with the United States. Trump's recent actions have only reinforced their belief that Washington cannot be trusted, and if Rouhani's administration offers to discuss scaling back its conventional weapons program, as some have suggested it might, their objections will only grow louder. Until Iran takes true strides toward a more moderate foreign policy, its conservative groups will continue to disrupt any agreement with the United States that stretches beyond its nuclear program.
Back in the United States, Iran's support for Middle Eastern militant groups and threats to the Persian Gulf have slowed Washington's attempts to pull back from the region. The reputation Iran has gained among the American public hasn't made things any easier: Many of Iran's current leaders were visible figures during the Islamic Revolution, the subsequent hostage incident at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the talks regarding Iran's nuclear program, all events that painted a picture of an untrustworthy nation. That paint will only start to chip away when the next generation of political leaders rises to power in both countries.
For now, Iran and the United States have reached a crossroads in their relationship. Many of their long-term imperatives have begun to align. But it remains to be seen how quickly they will override the more immediate national and regional problems that each state now faces. And should the nuclear deal collapse, it could push back the lasting relationship that Iran and the United States have begun to build by another decade.
-
Link copied…
Opinion Commentary
Is ‘Classical Liberalism’ Conservative?
Trump didn’t divide the right. Centuries-old philosophical divisions have re-emerged.
By Yoram Hazony
Updated Oct. 13, 2017 6:38 p.m. ET
449 COMMENTS
American conservatism is having something of an identity crisis. Most conservatives supported Donald Trump last November. But many prominent conservative intellectuals—journalists, academics and think-tank personalities—have entrenched themselves in bitter opposition. Some have left the Republican Party, while others are waging guerrilla warfare against a Republican administration. Longtime friendships have been ended and resignations tendered. Talk of establishing a new political party alternates with declarations that Mr. Trump will be denied the GOP nomination in 2020.
Those in the “Never Trump” camp say the cause of the split is the president—that he’s mentally unstable, morally unspeakable, a leftist populist, a rightist authoritarian, a danger to the republic. One prominent Republican told me he is praying for Mr. Trump to have a brain aneurysm so the nightmare can end.
But the conservative unity that Never Trumpers seek won’t be coming back, even if the president leaves office prematurely. An apparently unbridgeable ideological chasm is opening between two camps that were once closely allied. Mr. Trump’s rise is the effect, not the cause, of this rift.
There are two principal causes: first, the increasingly rigid ideology conservative intellectuals have promoted since the end of the Cold War; second, a series of events—from the failed attempt to bring democracy to Iraq to the implosion of Wall Street—that have made the prevailing conservative ideology seem naive and reckless to the broader conservative public.
A good place to start thinking about this is a 1989 essay in the National Interest by Charles Krauthammer. The Cold War was coming to an end, and Mr. Krauthammer proposed it should be supplanted by what he called “Universal Dominion” (the title of the essay): America was going to create a Western “super-sovereign” that would establish peace and prosperity throughout the world. The cost would be “the conscious depreciation not only of American sovereignty, but of the notion of sovereignty in general.”
William Kristol and Robert Kagan presented a similar view in their 1996 essay “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” in Foreign Affairs, which proposed an American “benevolent global hegemony” that would have “preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain.”
Then, as now, conservative commentators insisted that the world should want such an arrangement because the U.S. knows best: The American way of politics, based on individual liberties and free markets, is the right way for human beings to live everywhere. Japan and Germany, after all, were once-hostile authoritarian nations that had flourished after being conquered and acquiescing in American political principles. With the collapse of communism, dozens of countries—from Eastern Europe to East Asia to Latin America—seemed to need, and in differing degrees to be open to, American tutelage of this kind. As the bearer of universal political truth, the U.S. was said to have an obligation to ensure that every nation was coaxed, maybe even coerced, into adopting its principles.
Any foreign policy aimed at establishing American universal dominion faces considerable practical challenges, not least because many nations don’t want to live under U.S. authority. But the conservative intellectuals who have set out to promote this Hegelian world revolution must also contend with a problem of different kind: Their aim cannot be squared with the political tradition for which they are ostensibly the spokesmen.
For centuries, Anglo-American conservatism has favored individual liberty and economic freedom. But as the Oxford historian of conservatism Anthony Quinton emphasized, this tradition is empiricist and regards successful political arrangements as developing through an unceasing process of trial and error. As such, it is deeply skeptical of claims about universal political truths. The most important conservative figures—including John Fortescue, John Selden, Montesquieu, Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton —believed that different political arrangements would be fitting for different nations, each in keeping with the specific conditions it faces and traditions it inherits. What works in one country can’t easily be transplanted.
On that view, the U.S. Constitution worked so well because it preserved principles the American colonists had brought with them from England. The framework—the balance between the executive and legislative branches, the bicameral legislature, the jury trial and due process, the bill of rights—was already familiar from the English constitution. Attempts to transplant Anglo-American political institutions in places such as Mexico, Nigeria, Russia and Iraq have collapsed time and again, because the political traditions needed to maintain them did not exist. Even in France, Germany and Italy, representative government failed repeatedly into the mid-20th century (recall the collapse of France’s Fourth Republic in 1958), and has now been shunted aside by a European Union whose notorious “democracy deficit” reflects a continuing inability to adopt Anglo-American constitutional norms.
The “universal dominion” agenda is flatly contradicted by centuries of Anglo-American conservative political thought. This may be one reason that some post-Cold War conservative intellectuals have shifted to calling themselves “classical liberals.” Last year Paul Ryan insisted: “I really call myself a classical liberal more than a conservative.” Mr. Kristol tweeted in August: “Conservatives could ‘rebrand’ as liberals. Seriously. We’re for liberal democracy, liberal world order, liberal economy, liberal education.”
What is “classical liberalism,” and how does it differ from conservatism? As Quinton pointed out, the liberal tradition descends from Hobbes and Locke, who were not empiricists but rationalists: Their aim was to deduce universally valid political principles from self-evident axioms, as in mathematics.
In his “Second Treatise on Government” (1689), Locke asserts that universal reason teaches the same political truths to all human beings; that all individuals are by nature “perfectly free” and “perfectly equal”; and that obligation to political institutions arises only from the consent of the individual. From these assumptions, Locke deduces a political doctrine that he supposes must hold good in all times and places.
The term “classical liberal” came into use in 20th-century America to distinguish the supporters of old-school laissez-faire from the welfare-state liberalism of figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt. Modern classical liberals, inheriting the rationalism of Hobbes and Locke, believe they can speak authoritatively to the political needs of every human society, everywhere. In his seminal work, “Liberalism” (1927), the great classical-liberal economist Ludwig von Mises thus advocates a “world super-state really deserving of the name,” which will arise if we “succeed in creating throughout the world . . . nothing less than unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions.”
Friedrich Hayek, the leading classical-liberal theorist of the 20th century, likewise argued, in a 1939 essay, for replacing independent nations with a world-wide federation: “The abrogation of national sovereignties and the creation of an effective international order of law is a necessary complement and the logical consummation of the liberal program.”
Classical liberalism thus offers ground for imposing a single doctrine on all nations for their own good. It provides an ideological basis for an American universal dominion.
By contrast, Anglo-American conservatism historically has had little interest in putatively self-evident political axioms. Conservatives want to learn from experience what actually holds societies together, benefits them and destroys them. That empiricism has persuaded most Anglo-American conservative thinkers of the importance of traditional Protestant institutions such as the independent national state, biblical religion and the family.
As an English Protestant, Locke could have endorsed these institutions as well. But his rationalist theory provides little basis for understanding their role in political life. Even today liberals are plagued by this failing: The rigidly Lockean assumptions of classical-liberal writers such as Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand place the nation, the family and religion outside the scope of what is essential to know about politics and government. Students who grow up reading these brilliant writers develop an excellent grasp of how an economy works. But they are often marvelously ignorant about much else, having no clue why a flourishing state requires a cohesive nation, or how such bonds are established through family and religious ties.
The differences between the classical-liberal and conservative traditions have immense consequences for policy. Establishing democracy in Egypt or Iraq looks doable to classical liberals because they assume that human reason is everywhere the same, and that a commitment to individual liberties and free markets will arise rapidly once the benefits have been demonstrated and the impediments removed. Conservatives, on the other hand, see foreign civilizations as powerfully motivated—for bad reasons as well as good ones—to fight the dissolution of their way of life and the imposition of American values.
Integrating millions of immigrants from the Middle East also looks easy to classical liberals, because they believe virtually everyone will quickly see the advantages of American (or European) ways and accept them upon arrival. Conservatives recognize that large-scale assimilation can happen only when both sides are highly motivated to see it through. When that motivation is weak or absent, conservatives see an unassimilated migration, resulting in chronic mutual hatred and violence, as a perfectly plausible outcome.
Since classical liberals assume reason is everywhere the same, they see no great danger in “depreciating” national independence and outsourcing power to foreign bodies. American and British conservatives see such schemes as destroying the unique political foundation upon which their traditional freedoms are built.
Liberalism and conservatism had been opposed political positions since the day liberal theorizing first appeared in England in the 17th century. During the 20th-century battles against totalitarianism, necessity brought their adherents into close alliance. Classical liberals and conservatives fought together, along with communists, against Nazism. After 1945 they remained allies against communism. Over many decades of joint struggle, their differences were relegated to a back burner, creating a “fusionist” movement (as William F. Buckley’s National Review called it) in which one and all saw themselves as “conservatives.”
But since the fall of the Berlin Wall, circumstances have changed. Margaret Thatcher’s ouster from power in 1990 marked the end of serious resistance in Britain to the coming European “super-sovereign.” Within a few years the classical liberals’ agenda of universal dominion was the only game in town—ascendant not only among American Republicans and British Tories but even among center-left politicians such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
Only it didn’t work. China, Russia and large portions of the Muslim world resisted a “new world order” whose express purpose was to bring liberalism to their countries. The attempt to impose a classical-liberal regime in Iraq by force, followed by strong-arm tactics aimed at bringing democracy to Egypt and Libya, led to the meltdown of political order in these states as well as in Syria and Yemen. Meanwhile, the world banking crisis made a mockery of classical liberals’ claim to know how to govern a world-wide market and bring prosperity to all. The shockingly rapid disintegration of the American family once again raised the question of whether classical liberalism has the resources to answer any political question outside the economic sphere.
Brexit and Mr. Trump’s rise are the direct result of a quarter-century of classical-liberal hegemony over the parties of the right. Neither Mr. Trump nor the Brexiteers were necessarily seeking a conservative revival. But in placing a renewed nationalism at the center of their politics, they shattered classical liberalism’s grip, paving the way for a return to empiricist conservatism. Once you start trying to understand politics by learning from experience rather than by deducing your views from 17th-century rationalist dogma, you never know what you may end up discovering.
Mr. Hazony is president of the Jerusalem-based Herzl Institute. His book “The Virtue of Nationalism” will be published next year by Basic.
Appeared in the October 14, 2017, print edition.
-
https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/21/how-the-state-department-is-undermining-trumps-agenda/
How the State Department is Undermining Trump’s Agenda
By The Editors| October 21, 2017
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has isolated himself from his own department and allowed subordinates to fill a handful of top positions with people who actively opposed Donald Trump’s election, according to current and former State Department officials and national security experts with specific knowledge of the situation.
News reports often depict a White House “in chaos.” But the real chaos, according to three State Department employees who spoke with American Greatness on the condition of anonymity, is at Foggy Bottom.
Rumors have circulated for months that Tillerson either plans to resign or is waiting for the president to fire him. The staffers describe an amateur secretary of state who has “checked out” and effectively removed himself from major decision making.
Hundreds of Empty Desks
About 200 State Department jobs require Senate confirmation. But the Senate cannot confirm nominees it does not have. More than nine months into the new administration, most of the senior State Department positions—assistant and deputy assistant secretary posts—remain unfilled.
What’s more, the United States currently has no ambassador to the European Union, or to key allies such as France, Germany, Australia, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Meantime, Obama Administration holdovers remain ensconced in the department and stationed at embassies in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East.
The leadership vacuum has been filled by a small group opposed to the president’s “America First” agenda.
At the heart of the problem, these officials say, are the two people closest to Tillerson: chief of staff Margaret Peterlin and senior policy advisor Brian Hook, who runs the State Department’s in-house think tank.
Peterlin and Hook are longtime personal friends who current staffers say are running the department like a private fiefdom for their benefit and in opposition to the president and his stated policies.
‘Boxing Out’ Trump Supporters
The lack of staffing gives the duo unprecedented power over State Department policy. Since joining Tillerson’s team, Peterlin and Hook have created a tight bottleneck, separating the 75,000 State Department staffers—true experts in international relations—from the secretary. As the New York Times reported in August, “all decisions, no matter how trivial, must be sent to Mr. Tillerson or his top aides: Margaret Peterlin, his chief of staff, and Brian Hook, the director of policy planning.” In practice, however, that has meant Peterlin and Hook make the decisions.
More important, sources who spoke with American Greatness say, Peterlin and Hook have stymied every effort by pro-Trump policy officials to get jobs at the State Department.
Margaret Peterlin
Margaret Peterlin
“Peterlin is literally sitting on stacks of résumés,” one national security expert told American Greatness. Together, Peterlin and Hook are “boxing out anyone who supports Trump’s foreign policy agenda,” he added.
Peterlin, an attorney and former Commerce Department official in the George W. Bush Administration, was hired to help guide political appointments through the vetting and confirmation process. She reportedly bonded with Tillerson during his confirmation hearings, and he hired her as his chief of staff.
Brian Hook
Brian Hook
Peterlin then brought in Hook, who co-founded the John Hay Initiative, a group of former Mitt Romney foreign-policy advisors who publicly refused to support Trump because he would “act in ways that make America less safe.” In a May 2016 profile of NeverTrump Republicans, Hook told Politico, “Even if you say you support him as the nominee, you go down the list of his positions and you see you disagree on every one.”
Hook now directs the department’s Office of Policy Planning, responsible for churning out policy briefs and helping to shape the nation’s long-term strategic agenda.
NeverTrumpers on Parade
In September, Peterlin and Hook hired David Feith, a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer and the son of Douglas J. Feith, one of the architects of the Iraq War. Feith shares with Peterlin and Hook a deep dislike for President Trump. Feith, according to one State Department employee with knowledge of the hire, had been rejected by the White House precisely because of his opposition to the president and his policies. Peterlin and Hook forced him through anyway.
Incredibly, even the State Department’s spokesman, R.C. Hammond, was an outspoken NeverTrumper before the election, frequently tweeting jibes and barbs at the candidate. Hammond, a former aide to Newt Gingrich, is now the face and one of the leading voices of U.S. public diplomacy.
Many of these anti-Trump hires have occurred in the face of a hiring freeze Tillerson imposed earlier this year following an executive order to review agency and department staffing, along with the White House’s request to cut the State Department’s budget by 30 percent. But rather than put a check on untrustworthy career bureaucrats, the move had the opposite effect of empowering the president’s opponents.
State’s anti-Trump climate has shut out several top-notch foreign policy hands.
Kiron Skinner, founding director of the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, worked on Trump’s national security transition team and was hired as a senior policy advisor. She was considered for the job Hook now has in the Office of Policy Planning. But she was isolated from career staffers and quit after a few days.
At least Skinner managed to get into the building. Another former Reagan Administration staffer with decades of experience in U.S.-Russian affairs and international economics had spent months in 2016 campaigning for the president in critical battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio. As soon as Trump won the election, this experienced analyst and several other pro-Trump associates were passed over for State Department jobs. It’s to the point that even internship candidates are being rejected if they volunteered for the Trump campaign.
Tillerson or No, Personnel is Policy
When he agreed to take the top diplomat’s job, Tillerson reportedly asked President Trump for autonomy‚ and got it. Unfortunately, his leadership style has changed from his days running ExxonMobil. In his definitive history of ExxonMobil, journalist Steve Coll described Tillerson’s approach as open and informal. By contrast, Tillerson’s modus operandi at state has been described as isolated, unapproachable, even “draconian.”
In government today, the maxim that “personnel is policy” is truer than ever. As a result, the State Department mirrors the management style not of its leader, but of Tillerson’s chief aides who are at odds with the president’s stated foreign policy agenda.
Tillerson this week told the Wall Street Journal he would remain on the job “as long as the president thinks I’m useful.” But whether it’s Tillerson behind the secretary’s desk, or CIA Director Mike Pompeo, or any other foreign policy hand, a State Department staffed with opponents of the president is hardly useful to Americans who voted to reject the failed foreign policies of the past two administrations.
President Trump made “draining the swamp” a cornerstone of his campaign. How can he drain the swamp if the swamp dwellers control his administration and drown out voices of his most innovative supporters?
-
Donald Trump’s High-Wire Foreign Policy
It’s more conventional than expected, at a time when the world is more perilous.
Donald Trump’s High-Wire Foreign Policy
Photo: iStock/Getty Images
By Walter Russell Mead
Nov. 13, 2017 6:21 p.m. ET
28 COMMENTS
President Trump inherited a world in crisis, with the Pax Americana challenged in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Caribbean. Today the White House has clear priorities—but questions about temperament and competence persist.
Think back 10 months to Inauguration Day. North Korea was regularly testing and improving its missiles and nuclear weapons, well on its way to threatening the American mainland. China was intensifying its multifaceted challenge to the Asian status quo. Iran’s expansionism threatened to plunge the Middle East into chaos, and the regime had outmaneuvered an Obama administration that was desperate for a nuclear deal. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for breakaway forces in eastern Ukraine presented legal and geopolitical challenges to the post-Cold War order. Venezuela’s progressive degradation threatened to destabilize Latin America, a region of direct interest to the U.S.
Remember, too, President Trump’s skepticism of global engagement. He came into office convinced that American interests were being undermined by the multilateral trading system, as established by the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He disdained the process enshrined in the 2016 Paris climate accord.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
If all this weren’t enough, the incoming team knew that the American public was increasingly skeptical of large overseas commitments—whether to diplomacy, foreign aid or war. And the journalistic and foreign-policy establishments viscerally opposed Mr. Trump on personal and political grounds.
Talleyrand, Metternich, Bismarck and Kissinger, working together, would have had a difficult time managing a portfolio this large, urgent and unwieldy. The Trump administration has struggled visibly to develop a coherent approach. Yet as the president’s first year nears its conclusion, some order has begun to emerge, and at least the outlines of a Trump global policy now seem clear.
The first task was to set priorities, and it is obvious that the White House is putting Asia and the Middle East above other regions and issues. The crises in Ukraine and Venezuela are on the back burner. So are climate and trade policy, though the president’s tweets sometimes disguise this reality.
When addressing its priorities, the Trump administration has chosen an activist approach, tightening relations with traditional allies to restore regional orders under threat. This means checking Iran by working closely with the untested new Saudi leadership, as well as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Israel.
This anti-Iran phase is beginning in earnest now that the Trump administration’s original goal of destroying Islamic State’s so-called caliphate has been largely achieved. The White House also hopes the new constellation of forces will allow progress on another goal: containing and maybe even resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
In Asia the administration, working closely with Japan, is trying to assemble and strengthen a coalition to counterbalance China—while simultaneously seeking Chinese cooperation in tightening the screws on North Korea. The White House hopes that offering Beijing a smooth trade and political relationship will induce it to provide real help with the North Korea problem, even as the U.S. works to persuade the North Koreans that the risks of conflict are real.
Mr. Trump’s foreign policy has so far turned out to be more conventional than his rhetoric and style would suggest. Working with America’s traditional allies in Asia and the Middle East against those regions’ revisionist powers hardly amounts to a strategic revolution.
But if Mr. Trump’s current goals are conventional, the state of the world is not. He may well fail. The challenges are large, the learning curve is steep, and the terrain is unforgiving. Allies and adversaries are watching the Republican Party’s disarray on issues like health care, assessing the prospects of a Democratic wave in 2018, and paying close attention to the progress of the Mueller investigation. Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, like his presidency overall, is a gamble whose outcome the president cannot fully control.
For now Mr. Trump is performing a high-wire act, juggling his way across the Indo-Pak region even as his administration pursues ambitious goals in the Middle East. Some of the world’s most powerful countries hope that he fails, and they will do what they can to trip him up. Americans, regardless of party or their personal sentiments about Mr. Trump, should wish him success overseas. The consequences of failure could be extreme.
Mr. Mead is a fellow at the Hudson Institute and a professor of foreign affairs at Bard College.
-
Walter Russell Mead writes with great wisdom in foreign policy.
"President Trump inherited a world in crisis, with the Pax Americana challenged in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Caribbean."
Pax Americana - a term applied to the concept of relative peace in the Western Hemisphere and later the world as a result of the preponderance of power enjoyed by the United States beginning around the middle of the 20th century.
"... though the president’s tweets sometimes disguise this reality." - An analyst who recognizes this!
"working closely with Japan, is trying to assemble and strengthen a coalition to counterbalance China—while simultaneously seeking Chinese cooperation in tightening the screws on North Korea. The White House hopes that offering Beijing a smooth trade and political relationship will induce it to provide real help with the North Korea problem, even as the U.S. works to persuade the North Koreans that the risks of conflict are real." - In 10 months, more than his predecessors did in a quarter century.
"Allies and adversaries are watching the Republican Party’s disarray on issues like health care, assessing the prospects of a Democratic wave in 2018..." - Failure to come to agreement on all these issues at home hurts our standing abroad. Kind of obvious but someone needs to point that out!
"Americans, regardless of party or their personal sentiments about Mr. Trump, should wish him success overseas." - Mead is (was?) a Democrat. Make him the next (Dem) nominee and we could have two parties that want what's best for our country.
-
U.S. President Donald Trump's prominent tour of the Asia-Pacific ended with limited concrete success, but it has produced an important conceptual change to U.S. strategy in the region. On Nov. 12, leaders from the United States, India, Japan and Australia met in Manila to revive the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD) and to urge cooperation for a free and open Indo-Pacific. The term Indo-Pacific, and the policy implications that come with it, is an important indicator of how the United States and its allies are working to shape geopolitics, or at least how it's conceived. And the fact that Trump repeatedly referred to the Asia-Pacific region as the Indo-Pacific points to just how central the idea is to his administration's foreign policy.
Geopolitics on the Asian continent is organized around the numerous seas, bays and lagoons that fringe its expansive oceans. The Indo-Pacific idea simply expands the conceptual region of Asia-Pacific to include India and the Indian Ocean. The QSD translates this geopolitical understanding into strategy, envisaging the two oceans as a single security space, which includes India and Japan, is bridged by Australia, and is undergirded by U.S. maritime dominance. The impetus for such a reconceptualization is simple: Japan and India, isolated as they are in their own oceans, want to balance against the Western Pacific's rising power, China, by uniting under a single geopolitical sphere.
The Indo-Pacific is not a new concept. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe first proposed the QSD in 2007 during his ill-fated first term, but it quickly fell apart after Australia's Labor Party-led government, which opposed the organization, assumed power. The idea of an Indo-Pacific region, however, endured. The notion has resurfaced time and again, brought up by numerous leaders in former U.S. President Barack Obama's administration during its Pivot to Asia. Most recently, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster began using the term instead of Asia-Pacific.
For a buzzword, Indo-Pacific has been remarkably durable. In the decade since Abe proposed the QSD, China's regional clout has only grown, making the QSD more relevant than ever. China has cemented its dominant position in the South China Sea, expanded in the disputed East China Sea, established footholds in the Indian Ocean, and pushed roads and military infrastructure to the Indian border. During the past year, China held a landmark summit of its 64-nation Belt and Road Initiative, made progress toward a South China Sea Code of Conduct, faced off with India on the Doklam Plateau, and opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti. Meanwhile, a de facto alliance between China and Russia based on their shared interest in challenging the United States has begun to take shape.
As positive as all of these developments are for China, the country's rise and its attempts to gain more regional influence impinge on the imperatives of a growing number of other countries. This makes China uniquely vulnerable to the sort of alignment the QSD offers: Smaller nations in Asia feel less threatened by U.S. power because of the country's geographic distance from them. Separately, China's rivals have already been working to offset China's strength. In July, Japan participated in military exercises in India's Malabar region, which it also did in 2007, 2009 and 2014. Japan and India have also announced the launch of a program, the Freedom Corridor, to compete with China's Belt and Road program. The relaunch of the QSD builds on this cooperation and on the increasing military ties between all members of the QSD. Apart from countering China, the unique format addresses key interests from all of its members: Japan's need to protect energy flows from the Middle East, the United States' desire to devolve responsibilities to regional allies, as well as Australia's and India's bid to become maritime powers.
The success or failure of the QSD will be determined by not only cementing the initial grouping but by expanding the "Indo-Pacific" concept to include the numerous smaller powers bordering the two oceans. Countries occupying key geopolitical positions — namely Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar and Sri Lanka — could be enlisted as part of the effort to balance against China. But this is where the concept would run into serious trouble. Even at the height of the Cold War, when the competing Western and communist spheres of influence offered stark choices, the United States never succeeded in forging the same strategic unity in Asia it achieved on the other side of the Eurasian landmass through NATO. Without the imminent threat of the Cold War, the prospect of unity is even more limited today, particularly given increased interconnectedness of trade since the 1990s. Many small countries enjoy the economic benefits of strong relations with China and the security benefits of relations with the United States. They would be hard-pressed to align against either.
Even in its current form, the QSD's viability and effectiveness are questionable. India's military capacity is still limited, particularly in terms of its force projection capabilities, hindering its ability to advance its land-based goals, much less its maritime ones. India also has close connections to Russia, especially in the realm of defense procurement, and will be hosting the Russia-India-China trilateral meeting in December. In addition, the country has a long history of preserving autonomy, dating back to the Cold War, and is wary of subservience to any foreign power. Any balancing against China will have to factor in these three limitations. Even the stalwart U.S. allies Japan and Australia have their limits. Japan is engaged in the slow process of empowering its military for a role in foreign policy and will need to balance the expense of that shift against social spending. Australia, which nixed the original QSD, is torn between its strong economic relationship with China and its loyalty to its strategic allies. It's leaning toward its strategic allies now, but time and economic considerations could always change that.
Considering the shifting dynamics in the Asia-Pacific, the Indo-Pacific concept and its strategic implications have no guarantee of success. If the nascent alignment of the QSD does advance, its progress will be slow. But as China's regional ambitions grow, so will efforts to provide a coherent geopolitical response to that rise, including through the QSD.
-
For decades the United States has sat atop a unipolar world, unrivaled in its influence over the rest of the globe. But now that may be changing as a new, informal alliance takes shape between China and Russia. The two great powers have a mutual interest in overturning an international order that has long advantaged the West at their own expense. And as the Earth's sole superpower turns inward, they will seek to carve out bigger backyards for themselves. Will their marriage of convenience once more give rise to the bipolarity that characterized the Cold War, or will it unravel in the face of a natural rivalry rooted in geopolitics?
An Informal Alliance Emerges
First, a few observations about the Cold War. The multidecade conflict was much like the classical great-power contests that have taken place since the advent of the modern nation-state: Two blocs of roughly equal power (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) participated in a continuous arms race, waged proxy wars and engaged in the politics of securing spheres of influence.
But the Cold War also contained some striking new elements. Chief among them were the feud's pervasive reach into most sovereign states, the presence of nuclear weapons, the two participants' radically different economic and political systems, and the missionary zeal each superpower had for exporting its ideology worldwide. Moreover, membership within each alliance was sizable and stable, though developing countries occasionally shifted their loyalties after a revolution or military intervention by the United States or the Soviet Union.
On their face, any parallels between today and the Cold War of decades past seem overblown. The United States leads most formal alliance structures; Russia and China have no obvious ideology to export; and variations of capitalism have won out worldwide, leading to a deeply integrated global economy. Furthermore, Russia and China appear to have too many conflicts of interest to form an enduring partnership.
A closer look at recent events, however, suggests otherwise. Despite lacking an official alliance, Russia and China have acted virtually in lockstep on many major security issues. Both were first neutral, then opposed to, NATO's intervention in Libya in 2011. Both have taken nearly identical positions on the Syrian conflict and cybergovernance at the United Nations. Both have issued a joint proposal to resolve the crisis on the Korean Peninsula by freezing North Korea's nuclear and missile programs in exchange for halting joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States. Both are firmly opposed to undermining the Iranian nuclear deal. And both have lobbied against U.S. missile defenses in Central Europe and Asia, as well as the Western doctrine of intervention known as "responsibility to protect." Meanwhile China — a well-known defender of the principle of national sovereignty — has been noticeably silent on Russia's intervention in Ukraine.
Despite lacking an official alliance, Russia and China have acted virtually in lockstep on many major security issues.
At the same time, Beijing and Moscow have symbolically demonstrated their compact in the realm of defense. They have conducted joint military exercises in unprecedented locales, including the Mediterranean Ocean and the Baltic Sea, as well as in disputed territories, such as the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea. Weapons deals between them are likewise on the rise. Russian arm sales to China skyrocketed in 2002. After temporarily dropping off between 2006 and 2013 amid suspicion that China was reverse-engineering Russian platforms, Russia's sales to China resumed. Moscow agreed to sell its most sophisticated systems, the Su-35 aircraft and the S-400 surface-to-air missile systems, to its Asian neighbor.
The two great powers have signed several major energy deals of late, too. Russian oil has made up a steadily growing share of China's energy portfolio for years, and in 2016 Russia became the country's biggest oil supplier. China, for its part, has begun to substantially invest in Russia's upstream industry while its state-run banks have heavily bankrolled pipelines connecting the two countries. Beijing, for instance, recently acquired a large stake in Russian oil giant Rosneft. Russian exports of natural gas, including liquefied natural gas, to China are climbing as well. These moves are rooted in grand strategy: Russia and China are privileging each other in energy trade and investment to reduce their dependence on locations where the United States is dominant.
With their robust indigenous defense industries and vast energy reserves alone, China and Russia satisfy the basic requirements of presenting an enduring challenge to the United States. But both have also begun pushing for greater financial and monetary autonomy by distancing themselves from the dollar-dominated order of international trade and finance. China has already partially seceded from the SWIFT system of global banking transactions by creating its own system, CIPS. Russia is following suit, and it too has started to build an alternative network. Moreover, the Chinese yuan recently entered the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Rights currency basket. Now most Asian currencies track far more closely with the yuan than the dollar in value. China plans to introduce an oil futures contract in yuan that can be fully converted to gold as well. This, along with Beijing and Moscow's decision to boost their gold reserves, suggests that they may be preparing to switch to a gold standard someday. (The convertibility of gold is an important intermediate step toward boosting investor confidence in an up-and-coming currency like the yuan, which still suffers from many constraints such as illiquidity and significant risk in its country of origin.) The seriousness of their effort indicates their determination to move away from a system ruled by the U.S. currency.
Of course, China and Russia still suffer huge deficits with respect to the United States in technology, innovation and global force projection. But the gap may be closing as China makes substantial investments into sunrise technologies such as renewable energy, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. Plus, the projection of power to every corner of the globe probably isn't their immediate goal. Rather, the two powers seem to be aiming for maximum autonomy and a proximate sphere of influence that encompasses Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East and Asia. They also seek to overhaul international rule-making with the intention of gaining greater influence in multilateral institutions, securing vetoes over military interventions, increasing global governance of the internet (albeit for their own self-interest), ending U.S. pressure regarding democracy and human rights, dethroning the reigning dollar and accounting for their interests in the design of the global security order.
A Durable Marriage of Convenience
China and Russia are not natural allies. They have a long history of discord and at least three areas of conflicting interests: overlapping backyards in Central Asia, competition in arms sales and a growing asymmetry in power that favors Beijing.
Over the years, the two countries have taken on somewhat distinct roles in Central Asia. Russia has become the leading security guarantor in the region by founding the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a formal alliance with a mutual self-defense clause, and by building military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Russia has also integrated Kazakhstan into its air defense system. By comparison, China is rapidly emerging as the leading energy and infrastructure partner in the region. The country's Belt and Road Initiative is well underway, and several oil and natural gas pipelines connecting China to its Central Asian neighbors are already functional. That said, both powers have a stake in the region's security and economic integration, as evidenced by the presence of the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union and the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization there.
Russia seems to have largely accepted the reality of China's rising power — an acceptance that is key to the formation of a compact between the two countries.
Despite their dependence on China and Russia, Central Asian states still enjoy considerable autonomy and cannot be deemed satellites of either great power. The recent resistance of Kazakhstan, a CSTO member, to Russian pressure to deploy troops to Syria is a case in point. Of the five Central Asian countries, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan are most closely intertwined with China and Russia; Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have kept a greater distance.
The dynamic Chinese economy's steady outpacing of its Russian counterpart would ordinarily cause deep consternation in Moscow. However, Russia seems to have largely accepted the reality of China's rising power — an acceptance that is key to the formation of a compact between them. Beijing, for its part, has tactfully walked back from its historical claims to Outer Manchuria, paving the way for the settlement of its long-standing border dispute with Moscow. China has also worked to keep its economic competition with Russia from degenerating into political antagonism.
Russia is still wary of China, though. Against the wishes of Beijing, which has a long-standing competition with New Delhi, Moscow supported and facilitated India's accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The Kremlin also keeps close ties to Vietnam and maintains an ongoing dialog with Japan. However, Russia has also compromised with China on some of these matters, including by agreeing to Pakistan's simultaneous admission to the bloc. It has also limited its cooperation with Tokyo, dragging its feet in settling its Kuril Islands dispute with Japan.
These concessions indicate Moscow's pursuit of a hedging strategy, not a balancing one. If Russia were truly trying to balance China, their rivalry in Central Asia would take on a security dimension, resulting in factionalization or, in the worst-case scenario, wars between their local proxies. So while some structural tension certainly exists between China and Russia and could lead to a security rivalry in the long run, their leaders have actively managed and largely contained it thus far. This marriage of convenience will likely prove lasting, given its goals for dramatically transforming the international system. And even if a formal Russia-China alliance never comes to pass, the durability of their partnership already makes it feel like one in many ways. That the two countries feel no need to formalize their alliance, moreover, indicates that informality will increasingly serve as a template for strategic partnerships in the future.
The Resurgence of the Middle
Could an alignment between Russia and China expand to new states? The country most likely to join their compact is Iran. A revolutionary state with deep enmity for the United States and its allies, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, Iran has a strong desire to rewrite the rules of the current global order. As China's Belt and Road Initiative has taken off, Chinese investment in Iran has started to rise. And though Iran and Russia have their differences, their security interests have recently aligned. In the Syrian civil war, for instance, they have closely coordinated their air and ground operations over the past two years. Iran, meanwhile, would add to the two great powers' energy heft and welcome any attempt to shift global energy markets away from the dollar. Under the current circumstances, Iran has every reason to strengthen its strategic ties with Russia and China, even as it woos global investors.
Iran isn't the only core state candidate that may join the Sino-Russian compact. China's Belt and Road Initiative is a formidable gambit, partly intended to draw several states into its orbit. Among them are Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Turkey, Sri Lanka and Thailand. All of these nations, in theory, could join the Sino-Russian core. Still, it is doubtful whether most will. Turkey, a member of NATO, has worked more closely with Russia and Iran in the past few months to manage the Syrian conflict, and it is heavily reliant on Russian energy supplies. But Turkey will find it difficult to abandon its commitments to NATO; instead it will most likely play a transactional game with all three powers.
The country most likely to join the Sino-Russian compact is Iran.
On the Asian continent, it is in Sri Lanka's and Bangladesh's best interests not to antagonize their next-door neighbor, India, by tilting too far toward China. Moreover, Myanmar has a complex history with China, while Thailand is a U.S. treaty ally that lately has sought a middle ground between Washington and Beijing. Pakistan has been close to China for decades while maintaining an intense (if transactional) security relationship with the United States and complicated ties with Iran. If relations between Islamabad and Washington as well as New Delhi and Beijing deteriorate sharply, Pakistan may find that aligning with Russia and China brings more benefits than costs. But when all is said and done, any attempt to transform the Sino-Russian compact into an expansive, international alliance would encounter massive roadblocks.
Meanwhile, all is not going as planned within the United States' own bloc. Washington's treaty ally, South Korea, staunchly opposes any U.S. military action against North Korea. The United States' ties with another major partner, Turkey, are deteriorating. The Philippines is trying to balance between the United States and China, as is Thailand. Australia is increasingly torn between its deep economic dependence on China and its commitments to the United States. Wide rifts have opened between the United States and Europe over trade, climate action and Iran. Hungary has moved closer to Russia as populist nationalism — in some cases laced with support for Russian President Vladimir Putin — rises across the Continent. Then there is Germany, which the United States has long worried is less than fully committed to balancing against Russia. On top of all this, a nationalist upswing in U.S. politics has made the superpower more hostile to trade agreements and foreign entanglements.
On the other hand, the United States is bolstering its security relationship with India and Vietnam, finding ready partners against China and Russia in Japan and Poland, respectively, and enjoying the prospect of a post-Brexit United Kingdom that is more beholden to Washington than ever before. With a population of more than a billion people, India's future is particularly consequential to the global order — but only if it can transcend its many domestic challenges. And though India could become a core member of the U.S.-led bloc in the future, its historical autonomy and deep defense ties with Russia could limit just how close New Delhi can get to Washington and Tokyo.
Added to these factors are the non-state challenges to state power that have emerged since the 1990s and now show no sign of going away. Giant technology corporations, criminal networks, transnational terrorist groups, global civil society and growing environmental threats often weaken the system of sovereign nation-states, and they will continue to do so in the years to come.
Two Poles, Much Smaller Than Before
The upshot of these changes is that bipolarity, though not inevitable, is likely a foundational feature of the future. But it would be much diminished, compared with that of the Cold War — a "bipolarity-minus" of sorts. Each side in such a world would boast a much smaller set of core members: Russia, China, probably Iran and plausibly Pakistan, on one side, and the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, probably Japan and plausibly India and Australia on the other.
Though all other powers may lean in one direction or another, they would have more malleable relationships with each bloc and with each other. At the same time, there would be ample space for non-state actors and fluid minor coalitions to try to maximize their own freedom by, among other things, limiting the intensity of bipolarity among the great powers. Core states would have to work that much harder to win over the many swing states scattered across the globe, and alignment based on specific issues will become the norm. Existing institutions of global governance will either become moribund or will shrink as competing institutions with different approaches form and gain traction.
The Cold War years offered a faint preview of this world. The Non-Aligned Movement and the G-77 influenced issues such as decolonization, foreign aid and disarmament, while OPEC briefly shook the world with an oil embargo. Core bloc members occasionally demonstrated radical autonomy — the Sino-Soviet split of 1959, "goulash communism" in Hungary and Ostpolitik in West Germany are only a few examples. Still, these deviations never seriously undermined the global system, dominated as it was by two superpowers.
Today a new constraint on the emergence of true bipolarity exists: the intertwining of the U.S. and Chinese economies. Interdependence determinists will argue that such ties are incompatible with bipolarity and will ultimately prevent it. However, the limited nature of a bipolarity-minus world may allow the phenomena to coexist, albeit uneasily, as they did in a highly interdependent Europe before World War I. Alternatively, the United States and China may reorder their supply chains to reduce this interdependence over time. Technological advances are already shrinking these supply chains, a trend that could accelerate if the United States becomes far more protectionist.
If the future does indeed hold a bipolar-minus world, the United States may not be ready for it. To be prepared, Washington would have to recalibrate its strategy. In a world in which many major powers are uncommitted and have large degrees of freedom, tools like open-ended military interventions, unilateral sanctions, extraterritoriality and hostility to trade will likely yield diminishing returns. By comparison, incentivization, integration, innovation and adroit agenda-setting can be smarter and more effective options. The United States historically has been a pioneer of these approaches, and it may prove able to wield them persuasively once again. But perhaps most important, the superpower will have to resolve its internal polarization if it hopes to position itself as a cohesive leader of the international community. Only then will it once again become, as former U.S. President Ronald Reagan so eloquently put it, "a shining city upon a hill."
-
YEAR IN REVIEW
The Eight Great Powers of 2017
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD & SEAN KEELEY
In 2016, Russia surpassed Germany, and Israel joined the list for the first time.
1. The United States of America
No surprise here: as it has for the last century, the United States remains the most powerful country on earth. America’s dynamic economy, its constitutional stability (even as we watch the Age of Trump unfold), its deep bench of strong allies and partners (including 5 of the 7 top powers listed below), and its overwhelming military superiority all ensure that the United States sits secure in its status on top of the greasy pole of international power politics.
Not that American power increased over the past year. 2016 may have been the worst year yet for the Obama Administration, bringing a string of foreign policy failures that further undermined American credibility across the world. In Syria, Russia brutally assisted Assad in consolidating control over Aleppo and sidelined Washington in the subsequent peace talks. China continued to defy the American-led international order, building up its military presence in the South China Sea and reaching out to American allies like the Philippines. Iran and its proxies continued their steady rise in the Middle East, while the Sunnis and Israel increasingly questioned Washington’s usefulness as an ally. Meanwhile, the widespread foreign perception that Donald Trump was unqualified to serve as the President of the United States contributed to a growing chorus of doubt as to whether the American people posses the wit and the wisdom to retain their international position. Those concerns seemed to be growing in the early weeks of 2017.
In the domestic realm, too, America’s leaders did little to address the country’s pressing long-term economic problems, nor did they inspire much confidence in the potential for effective bipartisan cooperation. The populist surge that almost gave the Democratic nomination to the Socialist senator Bernie Sanders and brought Donald J. Trump to the White House was a sign of just how alienated from politics as usual many Americans have become. Foreigners will be watching the United States closely in 2017 to see whether and how badly our internal divisions are affecting the country’s will and ability to pursue a broad international agenda.
Still, for all this gloom, there was good news to be had. Fracking was the gift that kept on giving, as the United States surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the country with the world’s largest recoverable oil assets and American businesses discovered new innovations to boost their output. The economy continued its steady growth and unemployment fell to a pre-financial crisis low, with the Fed’s year-end interest rate hike serving as a vote of confidence in the economy’s resilience.
As the Trump administration gets under way, the United States is poised for what could be the most consequential shift in American policy in several generations. On some issues, such as the shale revolution, Trump will build on the progress already made; in other areas, such as China’s maritime expansionism or domestic infrastructure, his policies may bring a welcome change; in others still, Trump’s impulsiveness could well usher in the dangerous consequences that his liberal detractors so fear.
But regardless of what change the coming year brings, it is important to remember that America’s strength does not derive solely or primarily from the whims of its leaders. America’s constitutional system, its business-friendly economy, and the innovation of its people are more lasting sources of power, proving Trump critics right on at least one count: America has never stopped being great.
2. China (tie)
In 2016, China cemented its status as the world’s second greatest power and the greatest long-term challenger to the United States. In the face of American passivity, Beijing projected power in the South and East China Seas, built up its artificial outposts and snatched a U.S. military drone at year’s end. Aside from its own forceful actions, China also enjoyed several strokes of good fortune in 2016, from the election of a China-friendly populist in the Philippines to the demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will grant China a new opportunity to set the trade agenda in the Asia-Pacific.
China continued to alternate between intimidating and courting its neighbors, scoring some high-profile victories in the process. Most prominent was the turnaround from Manila, as the new Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte embraced China: in part because of his anti-Americanism, but also thanks to Chinese support for his anti-drug campaign and the promise of lucrative trade ties and a bilateral understanding on the South China Sea. Beijing also cannily exploited the Malaysian Prime Minister’s disillusionment with the United States to pull him closer into Beijing’s orbit, while pursuing cozier ties with Thailand and Cambodia.
Not all the news was good for Beijing last year. For every story pointing to Beijing’s growing clout on the world stage, there was another pointing to its inner weakness and economic instability. Over the course of the year, Chinese leaders found themselves coping with asset bubbles, massive capital flight, politically driven investment boondoggles, pension shortfalls, brain drain, and a turbulent bond market. The instinctual response of the Chinese leadership, more often than not, was for greater state intervention in the economy, while Xi sidelined reformers and consolidated his power. These signs do not suggest confidence in the soundness of China’s economic model.
And despite the gains made from flexing its military muscle, there have been real costs to China’s aggressive posture. In 2016, Vietnam militarized its own outposts in the South China Sea as it watched China do the same. Indonesia began to pick sides against China, staging a large-scale exercise in China-claimed waters. Japan and South Korea agreed to cooperate on intelligence sharing—largely in response to the threat from North Korea, but also, implicitly, as they both warily watch a rising Beijing. And India bolstered its military presence in the Indian Ocean in response to China’s ongoing “string of pearls” strategy to project power there. For all its power, then, China is also engendering some serious pushback in its neighborhood.
The new year finds China in an improved position but also a precarious one, as its economic model falters and it seeks to break out of its geopolitical straitjacket.
2. Japan (tie)
Here at TAI we have long argued that Japan is a perennially underrated global power whose influence has been steadily increasing over the past few years. 2016 saw that trend continue, thanks to smart diplomacy from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a widespread anxiety over China’s aggression that drove many of its neighbors toward greater cooperation with Tokyo.
In 2016, Japan continued to be at the forefront of opposition to China, pushing back against Chinese incursions and pursuing partnerships with other Asian states that are similarly troubled by China’s rise. In its own neighborhood, in the East China Sea, Japan upped its deterrence posture and announced plans to deploy a tactical ballistic missile shield. Tokyo also took a firmer stance on the South China Sea dispute (to which it is not a party) as it sought to rally claimants who are similarly fed up with China’s aggression. The threat from North Korea also strengthened Japan, allowing Tokyo and Seoul to find common ground on missile defense and an intelligence-sharing pact that infuriated Beijing. Farther abroad, Japan inked a landmark civil nuclear deal with India and continued to lay the groundwork for a promising partnership with New Delhi.
Not every Japanese initiative paid off: despite much hoopla about the Putin-Abe summit, Japan made little headway with Russia in their decades-old islands dispute. But on the whole, Abe can claim a remarkably successful year in foreign policy. Abe’s nationalist outlook and push for Japanese remilitarization remain controversial at home, but his record-high approval ratings and the ongoing reality of Chinese aggression have vindicated him for now.
America’s erratic course in the Pacific created both problems and opportunities for Japan. Obama’s dithering, Trump’s irascibility, and the collapse of American support for TPP meant that both friends and rivals became wary of an increasingly unpredictable United States. America’s unsteady course pushed Japan toward a more visible leadership role in the region, and Japan’s role in the construction of a maritime alliance to balance China took on a much higher profile than before. Japanese nationalists welcomed the country’s newly assertive regional stance, but they worried about the reliability of Japan’s most important ally.
On the economic front, Japan’s year was less successful. Economic growth continued to be sluggish for much of 2016, despite a better-than-expected third quarter. The demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was another setback, dealing a blow to Japan’s economic strategy and its efforts to contain China. Still, Japan remains the world’s third-largest economy, and it shrewdly wielded its financial clout in countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka as it sought to counter China’s checkbook diplomacy. All in all, Japan in 2016 continued to prove its mettle, acting not only as a powerful balance against China but as a major power in its own right.
4. Russia
Russia rose in our power rankings this year as Vladimir Putin continued to punch above his weight, defying predictions of economic collapse and military quagmire. The country once dismissed by President Obama as a “regional power” acting out of weakness ran circles around the United States in Syria, held its ground in Ukraine, weathered an economic storm at home, watched cracks widen in the European Union, and inserted itself into the heart of the American presidential election.
Putin scored both tactical and symbolic victories in Syria, allowing Assad to retake Aleppo while repeatedly humiliating the United States in the process. Russia’s ability to sideline the U.S. in post-Aleppo peace talks only confirmed that Russia, not the U.S., has become the major power broker in the county. Meanwhile, Putin’s reconciliation with Erdogan, NATO’s most estranged ally, positions Russia well to drive a wedge between Turkey and the West while laying the groundwork for a favorable settlement in Syria.
Closer to home, Russian troops continued to forestall any lasting peace in Ukraine, rendering any talk of EU or NATO integration a moot point. Russia-friendly leaders were elected in Georgia, Estonia, and Moldova, while the EU was buffeted by the shocks of Brexit, Eurosceptic populist insurgencies across the continent, and an ongoing stream of refugees, created in large part by Russia’s actions in Syria.
Putin’s fortunes took another upturn in November, when the United States elected Donald Trump, who has consistently promised to pursue friendlier ties with Moscow. The post-election uproar over Russia’s hacking of the DNC, and the dubious assertion that Trump will be Putin’s Manchurian candidate also played right into Putin’s hands, creating an impression that the all-powerful Putin holds the American electoral process in his hands.
When faced with these victories, it is worth remembering Russia’s many underlying weaknesses. Russia remains a weakly institutionalized state, subject to the whims of its strongman leader, and torn by long-simmering ethnic divisions and vast inequality. Its economy is resource-dependent and highly vulnerable to price shocks. Its military capabilities are laughably out of sync with the superpower image it attempts to project around the world. None of these realities changed this year, and all of them undermine Russia’s long-term potential as a great power. But 2016 showed that in a world of weak opponents, Russia can punch well above its weight. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
5. Germany
Germany was ahead of Russia in last year’s power rankings. This year, their positions are reversed. Partly, this is because Putin had a good year; partly, it is because Germany, and Germany’s project in Europe, had a bad one.
As we wrote last year, Germany is locked in a long-term fight with Russia over the future direction of Europe. Germany wants a Europe in which European policies and laws are decided by EU institutions without outside interference. Germany’s dream is Russia’s nightmare; for hundreds of years Russia has had a say in almost every important question in Europe. Russia’s most important economic interests and, historically at any rate, its most important security concerns are European. The idea that a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels can decide what rules Gazprom must obey, or how Russian minorities in the Baltic states are to be treated strikes many Russians (even many of Putin’s opponents) as unacceptable. Russia wants to be involved in European decision making about defense, about trade, about migration and about the Middle East. It wants a veto over NATO and EU expansion, and it wants a larger say in how these institutions work. It wants to bring power back into European politics, and to revive the old fashioned games of balance of power. Russia wants to tear down the edifice that Germany is trying to build.
In 2016, the wrecking ball gained on the construction crew. It wasn’t just the Brexit vote, though that vote was a profound shock to the European system and its rippling aftershocks continue to shake the foundations of the EU. There were also the continuing gains in public opinion polls of parties (both on the right and on the left) who oppose the current version of the European project in countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands—all among the six original founding members of the EU. It was the continuing rise to power of “illiberal democrats” in countries like Poland and Hungary. It was the continuing impasse over the euro and the corrosive fallout of the eurocrisis. It was the shock of Syrian and North African migrants, flocking into Europe and setting the EU countries against one another, even as Chancellor Merkel weakened her authority at home and abroad by a poorly thought out if warm hearted response to the crisis. It was the abrupt deterioration in EU-Turkish relations, and the painful realization in Brussels and Berlin that the EU will have to swallow its pride and concerns for human rights in order to prevent Turkey’s emerging strongman from blackmailing Europe with the threat of opening the floodgates for migration from Syria, Afghanistan and other troubled Islamic countries.
Europe was less united, less confident and less strong at the end of 2016 than it was at the beginning. With the election of Donald Trump, a man whose sympathies seem to lie more with the wrecking ball than with the construction crew, Europe’s prospects could darken still more. And with them, Germany’s clout could diminish further.
6. India
Like Japan, India is often overlooked in lists of the world’s great powers, but it occupies a rare and enviable position on the world stage. India is the world’s largest democracy, home to the second-largest English-speaking population in the world and boasting a diversified and rapidly growing economy. On the geopolitical front, India has many suitors: China, Japan and the United States are all seeking to incorporate India into their preferred Asian security architecture, while the EU and Russia court New Delhi for lucrative trade and defense agreements. Under the leadership of Narendra Modi, India has deftly steered its way among these competing powers while seeking to unleash its potential with modernizing economic reforms.
Not that Modi’s economic reforms are going all that well; the public backlash resulting from Modi’s hasty demonetization policy this year showcases the perils of overzealous reform. And India’s rapid growth trajectory has brought other crises that the government has been ill-equipped to address, India’s accelerating air pollution being the most visible example. Meanwhile, the escalation of the Kashmir conflict with Pakistan threatened to edge two bitterly opposed nuclear powers to the brink of war.
Despite these internal problems and the Pakistan scare, India found its footing elsewhere in 2016. Long hesitant to pick sides, New Delhi took several clear steps this year to deter a rising and aggressive China, announcing that it would fast-track its defense infrastructure projects in the Indian Ocean, amid fears that China was trying to encircle India with a “string of pearls.” Likewise, Modi explored new naval cooperation with both the United States and Japan, and signed a host of defense deals with Russia, France and Israel to modernize the Indian military. From the Middle East and East Africa to Southeast Asia, India is making its presence felt in both economics and security policy in ways that traditional great powers like Britain and France only wish they could match.
7. Iran
The proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran continued unabated throughout 2016, and as we enter the new year Iran has confidently taken the lead. Saudi Arabia remains a formidable power, but it was Iran that pulled ahead in the last 12 months.
Throughout 2016, Iranian proxies were on the march across the Middle East, and the Shi’a Crescent seemed closer to reality than ever before. In Lebanon, Tehran rejoiced at the growing clout of Hezbollah and the election of Shi’a-friendly Michel Aoun, while the Saudis bitterly cut off aid in a sign of their diminishing influence in Beirut. And in Syria, Shiite militias helped to retake Aleppo and turn the tide for Assad. Iran was also gaining ground in Iraq. More disquieting than all this, from the Saudi perspective, were developments in Yemen. Iran-backed Houthi rebels took the fight to the Saudi-backed government in a war that has already claimed 10,000 lives.
Meanwhile, the fruits of the nuclear deal continued to roll in: high-profile deals with Boeing and Airbus sent the message that Iran was open for business, while Tehran rapidly ramped up its oil output to pre-sanctions levels.
2017 may be a more difficult year for Tehran; one of the mullahs’ most important assets, President Obama, is no longer in office and, as far as anybody can tell, the Trump administration seems more concerned about rebuilding ties with traditional American allies in the region than in continuing Obama’s attempt to reach an understanding with Iran.
8. Israel
This year there’s a new name on our list of the Eight Greats: Israel. A small country in a chaotic part of the world, Israel is a rising power with a growing impact on world affairs. Although 2016 saw the passage of yet another condemnation of Israel at the United Nations, this time in the Security Council thanks to an American decision to abstain rather than veto, overall the Jewish state continues to develop diplomatic, economic and military power and to insert itself into the heart of regional politics.
Three factors are powering Israel’s rise: economic developments, the regional crisis, and diplomatic ingenuity. Looking closely at these tells us something about how power works in the contemporary world.
The economic developments behind Israel’s new stature are partly the result of luck and location, and partly the result of smart choices. As to the luck and location factor, large, off-shore discoveries of natural gas and oil are turning Israel into an energy exporter. Energy self-sufficiency is a boost to Israel’s economy; energy exports boost Israel’s foreign policy clout. In 2016 Erdogan’s Turkey turned on most of its NATO and Western allies; ties with Israel strengthened. Turkey’s Islamist ruler wants gas, and he wants to limit Turkey’s dependence on Russia. Israel is part of the answer.
But beyond luck, Israel’s newfound clout on the world stage comes from the rise of industrial sectors and technologies that good Israeli schools, smart Israeli policies and talented Israeli thinkers and entrepreneurs have built up over many years. In particular, Israel’s decision to support the rise of a domestic cybersecurity and infotech economy has put Israel at the center of the ongoing revolution in military power based on the importance of information control and management to 21st century states. It is not just that private investors all over the world look to invest in Israel’s tech startups; access to Israeli technology (like the technology behind the Iron Dome missile system) matters to more and more countries. It’s not just America; India, China and Russia all want a piece of Israeli tech wizardry.
Other, less glamorous Israeli industries, like the irrigation, desalinization and dry land farming tech that water poor Israel has developed over the decades play their part. Israel’s diplomatic outreach to Africa and its deepening (and increasingly public) relationship with India benefit from Israel’s ability to deliver what people in other countries and governments want.
The second factor in Israel’s appearing on our list is the change in the Middle Eastern balance of power that has transformed Israel from a pariah state to a kingmaker. On the one hand, Syria, one of Israel’s most vociferous enemies and biggest security threats in the old days, has now been broken on the wheel. What has happened in Syria is a terrible human tragedy; but in the cold light of realpolitik the break up of Syria further entrenches Israel’s military supremacy in its immediate neighborhood. Egypt hates Hamas, ISIS and Islamic Jihad as much as Israel does; never has Egyptian-Israeli security cooperation been as close as it is today. Even more consequentially, the rise of Iran and its aspirations to regional hegemony on the one hand and the apparent support for its dreams from the Obama administration made Israel critical to the survival of the Sunni Arabs, including the Gulf states, who loathe Iran and fear a Shia victory in the religious conflict now raging across the Middle East. The Arab Establishment today has two frightening enemies: radical jihadi groups like ISIS on one side, and Iran on the other. Israel has a mix of intelligence and military capabilities that can help keep the regional balance stable; privately and even not so privately many prominent Arab officials today will say that Israeli support is necessary for the survival of Arab independence.
Finally, Israel has managed, uncharacteristically, to advance its global political agenda through effective and even subtle diplomacy. Just as Israel was able to strengthen its relationship with Turkey even as Turkish-U.S. and Turkish EU relations grew distant, Israel has been able to build a realistic and fruitful relationship with Russia despite Russia’s standoff with the west over Ukraine, and Russia’s ties with Iran. The deepening Israel-India relationship has also required patience and skill. Israel’s diplomatic breakthroughs in relations with African countries who have been hostile to Israel since the 1967 war were also built through patient and subtle diplomacy, often working behind the scenes. That behind-the-scenes outreach diplomacy has also helped Israel achieve new levels of contact and collaboration with many Arab countries.
It is not, of course, all sweetness and light. Hezbollah has tens of thousands of missiles aimed at Israel and, thanks to Iran’s victories in Syria, it can now enjoy much more reliable supplies from its patron. The Palestinian Question is as far from a solution as possible, and even as they fragment and squabble among themselves, the Palestinians continue to fight for Israel’s delegitimation in the UN and elsewhere. Israeli politics are as volatile and bitter as ever. The kaleidoscopic nature of Middle East politics means that today’s hero can be tomorrow’s goat. While the breakdown of regional order has so far been a net positive for Israel’s security and power, things could change fast. In ISIS coup in Saudi Arabia, the collapse of Jordan, the fall of the Sisi government in Egypt: it is not hard to come up with scenarios that would challenge Israel in new and dangerous ways.
Former President Obama and his outgoing Secretary of State, John Kerry (neither widely regarded these days as a master of geopolitics), frequently warned Israel that its policies were leaving it isolated and vulnerable. This is to some degree true: European diplomats, American liberals and many American Jews are much less sympathetic to Israel today than they have been in the past. Future Israeli leaders may have to think hard about rebuilding links with American Democrats and American Jews.
But for now at least, Israel can afford to ignore the dismal croaking of the previous American administration. One of a small handful of American allies to be assiduously courted by the Trump campaign, Israel begins 2017 as the keystone of a regional anti-Iran alliance, a most-favored-nation in the White House, and a country that enjoys good relations with all of the world’s major powers bar Iran. Teodor Herzl would be astonished to see what his dream has grown into; David Ben-Gurion would be astounded by the progress his poor and embattled nation has made.
Subscribe at americaninterest.com
-
WRM consistently produces quality, thoughtful pieces.
-
WRM consistently produces quality, thoughtful pieces.
Yes.
-
WRM consistently produces quality, thoughtful pieces.
Agreed. A great deal of wisdom in that and about as concise as you can accurately sum up the eight greatest powers in the world today. When he writes something a disagree with on foreign policy, it moves me to reconsider my position.
Odd that he has Japan in a tie with China. I don't agree but it causes me to consider that we are underestimating the importance of Japan. Japan aligned with the United States, India, South Korea and the other powers in the region perhaps approaches the power of China going against the region. (?) Trump seems to understand the value of Japan (and India) to us in counterbalance to China.
Quite interesting that Israel is becoming somewhat of an ally to some powers in the Middle East.
Also kind of sad that the UK is no longer a major power.
You could have a complete understanding of all these current forces in the world and still have no idea which way it will turn from here.
-
Another from WRM!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-brings-foreign-policy-back-to-earth-1511825878?shareToken=stce9b80005869468bb84e7efe4faf8c2c&reflink=article_email_share
-
Another from WRM!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-brings-foreign-policy-back-to-earth-1511825878?shareToken=stce9b80005869468bb84e7efe4faf8c2c&reflink=article_email_share
"Mr. Trump’s mix of ideas, instincts and impulses is not as ill-suited to the country’s needs as his most fervid detractors believe.
What gives Mr. Trump his opening is something many foreign-policy experts have yet to grasp... "[What his predecessors were doing wasn't working.]
Mead isn't predicting foreign policy success for Trump but he breaks from other 'experts' in that he isn't ruling it out.
-
The Coming Conflict Between China and Japan
Dec. 6, 2017 As the U.S. nears the limits of its power, regional powers will be more unencumbered than ever before.
By Jacob L. Shapiro
It is easy to forget that as recently as the 19th century, China and Japan were provincial backwaters. So self-absorbed and technologically primitive were East Asia’s great powers that German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said, “The extensive tract of eastern Asia is severed from the process of general historical development.” His description seems laughable today. China and Japan are now the second- and third-largest economies in the world. Japan’s failed quest for regional domination during World War II and its subsequent economic reconstruction profoundly affected the world. China’s unification under communism and its pursuit of regional power in the past decade have been no less significant.
And yet, for all the strength and wealth Beijing and Tokyo accumulated, since 1800 neither has been powerful enough to claim dominance of the region. Since European and American steamships discovered their technological superiority relative to the local ships in the first half of the 19th century, Chinese and Japanese development has proceeded at the mercy of outside powers. Japan tried to break out, and came close to breaking out during World War II, but was ultimately thwarted by the United States. China, already anointed by many as the world’s great superpower, remains a country divided. The lavish wealth found in its coastal regions is noticeably, if not entirely, absent from the interior.
This state of affairs is beginning to change – and the U.S.-North Korea stand-off over Pyongyang’s pursuit of deliverable nuclear weapons shows just how much. The United States does not want North Korea – a poor, totalitarian state of roughly 25 million malnourished and isolated people – to acquire nuclear weapons capable of striking the U.S. mainland. The U.S. has threatened North Korea with all manner of retribution if Pyongyang continues its pursuit of these weapons, and yet North Korea remains undaunted. It is doing this not because Kim Jong Un is crazy. It is doing this because it figures it will be left standing, come what may.
It may not be such a bad wager. From Kim’s point of view, there are only two ways to get North Korea to halt its development of nuclear missiles: The U.S. either destroys the regime or convinces it that continued tests would call into question its very survival. (For that to work, the regime would have to believe it could be destroyed.)
The U.S. can rail all it wants in the U.N.; it will fall on deaf ears. The U.S. can try to assassinate Kim Jong Un; someone else will take his place. The U.S. can forbid China from fueling North Korea; the North Koreans don’t use that much fuel anyway, and they have already demonstrated they will sacrifice much to defend their country.
One Step Closer
But can the U.S. take out the Kim regime, or at least make Pyongyang think it can? It’s hard to say. There are only two ways to take out the regime. The first – using the United States’ own vast nuclear arsenal – would set a precedent on the use of weapons of mass destruction that Washington would rather not. The second – a full-scale invasion and occupation of North Korea – would strain even U.S. capabilities and wouldn’t have the desired outcome. The U.S. might be able to defeat the North Koreans in the field, but as Vietnam and the Iraq War showed, defeating the enemy in battle is not the same thing as achieving victory. And there is, of course, the question of China, which came to Pyongyang’s aid in 1950, the last time the U.S. fought on the Korean Peninsula, and might well again if the U.S. struck North Korea pre-emptively with massive force.
(click to enlarge)
Limited military strikes are another possibility. Politically attractive though they may be, they can only delay, not destroy, North Korea’s nuclear program. And they would surely enhance Pyongyang’s credibility. Every U.S. attack that doesn’t succeed in knocking out the political leadership would be used as propaganda, spun in the North Korean countryside as a victory against the “gangster-like U.S. imperialists.”
Thus is the extent, and limit, of American power. Around the world, the U.S. has been struggling to execute a foreign policy that does not rely on direct U.S. intervention. This is easier said than done, especially when the issue at stake is nuclear war. Analysts like me can scream until we are blue in the face that North Korea would never use its nuclear weapons because doing so would invite its own demise. But we are not the ones making the decision. We don’t bear the burden of being wrong.
That is the brilliance behind North Korea’s strategy. The goal is to prod the U.S. to react to its behavior – and then to use its reactions to shore up support. And the strategy is working. The U.S. has said time and again that it will not allow North Korea to have a nuclear weapon. If North Korea gets a nuclear weapon, then what good is a U.S. security guarantee? If the U.S. attacks North Korea without destroying the Kim regime – and I believe it can’t – then North Korea can say it defeated the imperialists as it continues to pursue its current strategy. If the U.S. agrees to remove its forces from South Korea in exchange for North Korea’s halting its testing, then North Korea is one step closer to its ultimate goal: unifying the Korean Peninsula under Pyongyang’s rule.
Doing, Not Saying
In every scenario, the conclusion is the same: The United States alone cannot dictate terms in East Asia. It cannot bring North Korea to heel. It cannot make China do what China does not want to do. It cannot even persuade its ally, South Korea, to pretend that a pre-emptive military option is on the table. Japan looks at all the things the U.S. cannot do, and for the first time since 1945 it must ask itself a question that leads to a dark place: What does Japanese policy look like if Tokyo cannot rely on U.S. security guarantees?
The North Korea crisis may not have created Washington’s predicament, but it exposed it in ways previously unseen, to China’s benefit. The U.S. has shed blood and spent untold sums of money forging an alliance network in East Asia to prevent any country there from challenging its power. And so it is the region’s great power, China, not North Korea, that is putting U.S. strategy to the test. Already an economic behemoth, China is rapidly developing its military capabilities. Its newly declared dictator-president, Xi Jinping, intends to preside over a massive transformation of the Chinese economy that, if successful, would make China more self-reliant and politically stable than at any point in the past four centuries. China still has a long way to go – too long before it first loses its political stability, in our estimation – but in the short term, China’s power is growing. Chinese adventurism in the South and East China seas, its strategic investments around Asia, and the continued development of its navy all validate its growing power.
china-japan-exclusive-economic-zones
(click to enlarge)
Its ascendance will inevitably bring China into conflict with Japan. Such conflict is nothing new – these civilizations have fought their fair share of wars. The brutality of the Japanese invasion of China in the 20th century – an invasion for which Korea was a staging ground – still lingers fresh in the memories of the Chinese and Korean people. But the conditions for conflict are different this time. For one thing, China and Japan are both powerful. In the early 20th century, Japan discovered the difficulties that many of China’s would-be conquerors did when it attempted to take over the Middle Kingdom, but Japan was still by far the superior power. It’s hard to say which is stronger today. China has a greater population, but Japan is more stable and boasts better military and technical capabilities. This has the makings of a balanced rivalry.
China and Japan, moreover, are no longer worried about being subjugated. This may seem an obvious observation, but in fact it is the first time since the Industrial Revolution that both countries have been able to call their own shots. They came close a few times, of course. Japan nearly came to dominate the Pacific but was eventually subdued by the United States. China wanted to conquer Taiwan in a bid for complete unification, but the arrival of the U.S. 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait dashed the government’s hopes.
(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)
Now, the first signs of the coming Sino-Japanese competition for Asia are reaching the surface. Ignore the things Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Xi Jinping have said to each other recently – their statements seek to obscure reality, not uncover it. Look instead at what they are doing. China is investing significant financial and political capital in the Philippines in an attempt to lure Manila away from the U.S. Japan is there with military aid and support, as well as economic incentives of its own. China sees strategic potential in cultivating a relationship with Myanmar, and Japan is there too, with promises of aid and investment without the kinds of strings China often attaches. Much has been made in the mainstream media about China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, a testament to Beijing’s excellent PR skills. Less time has been spent examining Japan’s counters – resuscitating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, pledging to invest more than $200 billion in African and Asian countries, and announcing various initiatives involving the Asian Development Bank, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Japan Infrastructure Initiative. China has bullied other powers out of the South China Sea, but Japan won’t be bullied out of the East China Sea. Meanwhile, Japan advocates the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – a grouping of the U.S., Japan, India and Australia – to keep China’s power confined to its traditional terrestrial domain.
The conflict will develop slowly. Its contours are just now taking shape. The United States won’t simply disappear from Asia entirely – Washington still has an important role to play, and how it manages the North Korea crisis will go a long way in defining the long-term regional balance of power. But over the next few years, the U.S. will begin to reach the limits of its powers, and as it does, it will pursue a new strategy that employs skillful manipulation of relationships instead of brute force. It will find that China and Japan are no longer severed from world history but shaping history on their own terms.
-
Not how I would put it :wink:
The World Has Taken Trump’s Measure
From Asia to Europe, he has squandered America’s influence and moral authority.
By William A. Galston
Dec. 5, 2017 7:19 p.m. ET
195 COMMENTS
Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to make America great again. As president he is doing the opposite: He is making America smaller than at any time in the past 100 years.
By pulling the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Mr. Trump has ceded economic leadership in Asia and beyond to China, whose president touts the Chinese model to other countries that want the blessings of prosperity without the inconveniences of liberty. To back up this offer, China is investing huge sums in its “One Belt, One Road” plan and in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
These moves are having the intended effect. Myanmar, which had long been dominated by anti-Chinese sentiment, is now accepting China’s blandishments. The country’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, went to Beijing last week for a conference hosted by the Communist Party.
Vietnam, which has looked to the U.S. as a counterweight against its historical enemy to the north, now wonders whether it must accept Beijing’s economic leadership and yield to its claims in the South China Sea. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has made noises about abandoning his country’s alliance with the U.S. in favor of China. Even Australia, one of our closest allies, is openly debating how to deal with American decline.
In the Middle East, the Trump administration is busy giving ground to Russia. Vladimir Putin is conducting Syrian peace talks while America languishes on the sidelines. Turkey, a member of NATO since 1952, is endorsing the Kremlin’s leading role. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently met with Mr. Putin and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani to support negotiations on the future structure of the Syrian government and state.
Egypt was another long-term linchpin of American diplomacy, and Mr. Trump has lavished praise on its autocratic leader. Yet Cairo has just struck a deal allowing the largest Russian military presence on its soil and in its airspace since 1973. The U.S. doesn’t even have an ambassador in Egypt, let alone a coherent policy to deal with this pivotal country.
Even in Europe, America has been diminished. Mr. Trump’s early ambivalence toward NATO, which gave way to a grudging expression of support, have left a residue of doubt about the credibility of American guarantees. He has driven a wedge between the U.S. and Germany, long our closest ally on the Continent. The “special relationship” with the United Kingdom may not survive his repeated gaffes, capped by his impulsive decision to retweet discredited anti-Muslim videos from a British fringe group.
Close to home, Mr. Trump’s brand of leadership is sorely trying Canadians’ patience: 93% view him as arrogant, 78% as intolerant, and 72% as dangerous. Mexico’s people have also been united against the U.S., by Mr. Trump’s ham-handed immigration policies and heedless negotiations to revise the North American Free Trade Agreement. This may well lead Mexicans to elect an anti-American left-wing populist as their president next year. That Mr. Trump has no discernible policy toward Central and South America is probably a good thing.
Squandering America’s economic and political influence is bad enough. Far worse has been the way Mr. Trump has dissipated our moral authority. Yes, the U.S. has struck deals with unsavory regimes, especially during the Cold War, and has sometimes failed to respect the outcomes of free and fair elections. In the main, however, America has pushed for free societies and democratic governments around the world, while speaking against repression in all its forms.
Until now. The Trump administration has all but abandoned democracy promotion. In practice, an “America First” foreign policy means being indifferent to the character of the regimes with which the U.S. does business.
I wish I could say that President Trump shares this indifference. In fact, he prefers autocrats to elected leaders. He admires their “strength.” He envies their ability to get their way without the pesky opposition of legislatures and courts. He probably wishes he had their power to shut down critical news organizations. In his ideal world, everyone would fall in line behind his goals, and his will would be law.
The world has taken President Trump’s measure. In a 2017 survey of 37 countries, 64% of people expressed confidence in Barack Obama’s ability to do the right thing in international affairs, compared with 22% for Mr. Trump. The current president’s figures were 11% in Germany, 14% in France, and 22% in the U.K. The principal exception was Russia, where Mr. Trump enjoyed 53% approval, compared with 11% for Mr. Obama.
In 1776, at the threshold of American independence, the Founding Fathers espoused a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Today, citizens of countries around the world regard the U.S. as morally diminished under Mr. Trump’s leadership. He shows no signs of caring, and he probably doesn’t.
Appeared in the December 6, 2017, print edition.
-
Just saying aloud what is so obvious that no one ever says it. The first and biggest thing (not the only thing!) we can do to strengthen our security and our foreign policy is to step out of stagnation and grow the economy. Let's make sure the table is set to do that.
We have had a good year of repealing over-regulation. The tax bill, if it ever gets passed, does a lot to reverse the environment where 4700 US companies moved out of the US while we had a historic dearth of real, new startups. The tax bill as it passed the Senate includes a provision for drilling in ANWR, about 20 years late, and repeals the Obamacare individual tax penalty.
If this tax reform bill succeeds in delivering growth, more bills can follow to accelerate that and lock it in.
Building a wall takes money, as does shipbuilding, modernization, keeping ahead of the Russians, Chinese, rogue states and sending military assets to the Middle East and Pacific Rim. We need new technologies to keep up with new enemies in cyber-warfare, EMP and more.
In the coming years there will be great debates about allocating sufficient resources for defense. That debate goes much better when incomes, wages, revenues and jobs are growing, as compared to the recent past environment where all the growth was in food stamps, SSI and public debt. Bargain from a position of strength!
-
A Foreign Policy for ‘Jacksonian America’
Sen. Tom Cotton has a worldview—even a doctrine—that is hawkish and realistic, though tinged with idealism.
By Jason Willick
Dec. 8, 2017 6:12 p.m. ET
195 COMMENTS
Washington
At 40, Tom Cotton of Arkansas is the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. He was called a young man in a hurry four years ago when he announced, during his first and only term in the House, that he would challenge the incumbent senator, Mark Pryor. Now there is talk President Trump may nominate him to lead the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a national-security shake-up. Admirers have also suggested he is presidential timber.
I met Mr. Cotton this week in his Capitol Hill office to explore his foreign-policy thinking. What emerged was the outline of a coherent if contentious worldview—one might even call it a doctrine—that begins with a sense that U.S. foreign policy has been adrift for a quarter-century.
“The coalitions of the Cold War rapidly began to break down as soon as the Soviet Union dissolved,” Mr. Cotton says. That first became clear during the debate over the Balkan wars of the Clinton years. “You had some Cold War hawks that were all of a sudden sounding like doves,” Mr. Cotton says, referring to conservatives who’d been staunchly anti-Soviet but were wary of U.S. involvement in what was then Yugoslavia. “You had Cold War doves”—including the liberal humanitarians of the Clinton administration—“that were beginning to sound like Teddy Roosevelt, ready to charge up the hill. That pattern consistently repeated itself” in subsequent years.
When it comes to America’s present challenges—from Iran to North Korea, China to Russia, Syria to Ukraine—Mr. Cotton, a conservative Republican, is squarely on Team Roosevelt. “There is always a military option,” he says. “That is the case everywhere in the world.”
Babar the Elephant Takes His Final Bow
The author of the famed children’s series, begun by his father in 1931, explains Babar’s swan song and how childhood has changed.
Click to Read Story
From India to Israel, Making Beautiful Music
Zubin Mehta discusses Wagner, Mahler and the evolution of the Jewish state in the half-century since he adopted it.
Click to Read Story
Why Black Colleges Need Charter Schools
Only 35% of students earn bachelor’s degrees in six years. Why? Because traditional public schools failed to prepare them.
Click to Read Story
The Politicization of Motherhood
Conservatives cheer and liberals jeer New York psychoanalyst Erica Komisar’s book on the science of early childhood development.
Click to Read Story
The Business of Saving Lives
Gilead Science’s executive chairman discusses his company’s innovative treatments and its efforts to make them affordable while turning a profit.
Click to Read Story
Cuban Communism, in Fact and Fiction
Best-selling suspense novelist Nelson DeMille discusses his writing career and his latest book, which lampoons Yalies touring Havana.
Click to Read Story
A Return to the Conservation Ethic
The interior secretary wants to restore the vision of Gifford Pinchot and use public lands ‘for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.’
Click to Read Story
The Blockchain Is the Internet of Money
Silicon Valley visionary Balaji Srinivasan explains how bitcoin works and why he regards it as revolutionary.
Click to Read Story
A Former Democrat Rises in Trump Country
Missouri’s governor talks about his journey to the right, his fights with the unions, and his experience as a Navy SEAL.
Click to Read Story
Why Entitlements Keep Growing, and Growing, and . . .
Once granted, benefits always multiply and are nearly impossible to repeal, John Cogan says. Only three presidents have been able to rein them in.
Click to Read Story
The Teachers Union’s Public Enemy No. 1
Betsy DeVos is Trump’s stylistic opposite, but she stirs more antagonism than any other cabinet member.
Click to Read Story
More Weekend Interviews
But he believes that the lack of a clear organizing principle for how and when to use that power has knocked America’s global strategy off kilter. It also has created a divide between foreign-policy elites and what Mr. Cotton calls “Jacksonian America”—heartland voters who favor a strong national defense but are skeptical of foreign entanglements and humanitarian interventions.
A Foreign Policy for ‘Jacksonian America’
Illustration: Ken Fallin
“Foreign policy, to be durable and to be wise, must command popular support,” Mr. Cotton says. Statesmen and diplomats “might craft what they think is a wise foreign policy—something that Metternich or Bismarck might draw up in his study,” he continues. “But without the support of Jacksonian America, the people who are going to cash the checks that are written by elites in New York and Washington”—that is, to pay the price for intervention—“no foreign policy can ultimately be successful.”
On that score, he thinks the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all fell short. “Some of the interventions over the last 25 years, I think, have been plainly unwise and had very limited popular support, and they’ve created foreign-policy disasters,” he says. As a prime example, he cites the desultory 2011 air campaign in Libya, whose aftermath is now “destabilizing Europe and creating new terrorist breeding grounds.” President Obama, Mr. Cotton argues, “probably did the wrong thing” in helping to oust Moammar Gadhafi while leaving Bashar Assad alone. If the U.S. had intervened in Syria and not Libya, “we might have had a happier end in both.”
What about Iraq, where Mr. Cotton served as a U.S. Army infantry captain? The senator does not say, as President Trump has, that the invasion was a mistake—although neither does he tell me, as he insisted as recently as 2016, that Iraq was a “necessary, just and noble war.”
Instead, he observes that the war’s mismanagement alienated voters and cost Republicans dearly. The Bush administration, he adds, erred in prioritizing democratic ambitions ahead of the basic task of securing the country: “There was a belief in the immediate aftermath of the invasion in 2003 that we could simply fly the flag of democracy, have an election with some purple fingers”—the symbol of proud Iraqi voters in 2005—“slap a uniform on some people, call it an army and declare victory.” On the other hand, he calls the 2007 surge George W. Bush’s “finest hour.”
For Mr. Cotton, the lesson from Iraq is not that the U.S. should be more circumspect about confronting hostile powers. Rather, it is that security must come first—before “political reconciliation, economic development, democracy promotion, human rights or anything else. Without security, there’s nothing else.” That’s one reason Mr. Cotton’s hawkish approach to Iran emphasizes strictly military objectives, not political or ideological ones. “Any military action against Iran,” he says, “would look more like Operation Desert Fox from Iraq in December of 1998 or Operation El Dorado Canyon in Libya in 1986.” Those were limited bombing campaigns designed to punish misbehaving regimes. Mr. Cotton insists—controversially—that such an attack on Iran would not require a sustained military commitment: “It would be primarily a naval and air attack against its nuclear infrastructure.”
Mr. Cotton sees Iran as a greater long-term challenge than North Korea. But Kim Jong Un’s nuclear brinkmanship is the more immediate threat. “If I were the leader of Japan or I were the leader of South Korea,” he says emphatically, “and I had any reason to doubt U.S. resolve to extend its nuclear deterrent to me, then I would absolutely pursue nuclear weapons.”
Mr. Trump has suggested he is relying on Beijing to help solve the North Korea problem. Mr. Cotton thinks that is unlikely: “China is a rival in every regard. China is not a partner.” He calls China’s 2001 admission to the World Trade Organization “one of the biggest failures of post-Cold War foreign policy.” He is fiercely critical of the view that integrating China into the global economy would cause it to liberalize internally. “Those who argue that position,” he tells me, “should have their judgment impeached in future, similar arguments.”
At the same time Beijing is becoming more repressive at home, it is challenging the U.S. “in every domain, not just militarily, but politically and economically and diplomatically.” Mr. Cotton worries that China, a rising power, can afford to play the long game, and that “in many ways, they’ve been beating us at that game.” The U.S. needs to “join the competition in every way,” including by conducting more freedom-of-navigation operations in the disputed South China Sea. Yet in the very long game, Mr. Cotton says, America’s market liberalism gives it a clear advantage: “Nothing in China’s state-driven economy has rewritten the basic rules of market-driven economics that have made the Anglo-Americans the dominant world power for 400 years.”
Has the Trump administration undercut this advantage by pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which had been designed to draw other Asian countries into America’s orbit? “I know that many of the countries in the Trans-Pacific Partnership who thought they got a good deal from the Obama administration have pitched that line,” Mr. Cotton answers. “I know that Xi Jinping ”—China’s president—“has pitched that line as well. I’m skeptical.” Mr. Cotton’s view on TPP seems less an exercise in antitrade philosophy than a bow to political reality: “Ultimately, the American people simply did not want to ratify that agreement.” The voters who swung the 2016 election to Mr. Trump “believed that we needed to make fewer economic and political concessions to allies than might have been necessary in the Cold War to defeat the Soviet Union.”
If Mr. Cotton sounds comfortable accommodating the Trumpist mood on trade, he rejects the view that the U.S. might be able to “get along” with Russia, as Mr. Trump frequently suggests. “Russia is the great land power of the Old World,” he says. “The United States is the great maritime power of the New World. Those facts will never change; those facts will always create tension between our nations.”
Mr. Cotton points to a book on his coffee table, “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville. “I assume you’ve read that book over there,” he says. Tocqueville, Mr. Cotton paraphrases, predicted that Russia’s authoritarian spirit and America’s democratic spirit put the two countries on a collision course. As Tocqueville puts it, “each seems called by some secret desire of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.”
In discussing Vladimir Putin, Mr. Cotton makes clear his prime concern is U.S. interests, not the Russian president’s dictatorial practices at home. “I condemn Russia for their atrocious treatment of their own people,” he says. “But it’s of graver concern that they are bombing our allies in Syria, or that they are invading sovereign countries in the heart of Europe.” Russia’s various aggressions, he says, “spring from the common core of Vladimir Putin being a dictator.”
Mr. Cotton’s hawkish realism is tinged with idealism. “It simply is a fact,” he says, “that the American people have moral aspirations about America’s role in the world, and about the Founding principles of America being universal.” There’s no contradiction, however, if favoring democracy also serves U.S. interests.
“The easiest way to prevent attack is to secure the Western Hemisphere,” he says, and “the easiest way to secure the Western Hemisphere is to defend forward in the Old World”—by which he means the Middle East and Asia as well as Europe. “In doing so, we would need to have alliances and those alliances are easier to build with countries that share our principles. That doesn’t mean that we can only work with democratic governments or with capitalist societies, but those are longer-lasting, more durable alliances.”
Mr. Cotton does not share liberal internationalists’ alarm over developments in Poland and Hungary, both of which are consolidating power around populist parties of the right. “Many of those Central and Eastern European countries are moving towards nationalism. and I think that’s an understandable trend,” he says. “If your nation had spent 100 years being invaded and occupied and facing genocide you might be happy with the way you are as well—which is small and politically, culturally, ethnically, linguistically homogenous. Much of the turn in these countries . . . is against the Brussels-driven transnationalist movement in Europe.”
This points to the obvious establishmentarian critique of the Cotton Doctrine: that a shortsighted focus on security over values and national interest over multilateralism risks damaging American interests in the long run. But there’s another, more serious risk: that the impulse to send American troops to so many chaotic and disorderly places cannot hold the support of Jacksonian America. If military intervention leads to quagmire, it could widen the gap between elites and the public that Mr. Cotton says he is trying to bridge.
If he can navigate around these treacherous pitfalls, the Republican Party may one day be his. But even if he can’t, his ambition to ground America’s long-drifting foreign policy is serious and valuable. The Cotton Doctrine represents a first draft of the GOP’s effort to rebuild a coalition that began to fall apart not long after the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Willick is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.
-
Trump’s ‘Blue Water’ Foreign Policy
The administration’s new security strategy is reminiscent of Pax Britannica.
President Donald Trump speaks on his administration’s National Security Strategy at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, Dec. 18.
By Walter Russell Mead
Dec. 25, 2017 3:19 p.m. ET
114 COMMENTS
Most National Security Strategy statements are appallingly platitudinous, numbingly conventional and quickly forgotten. In the history of the U.S. government, no ranking official in a moment of crisis has ended a bitter policy debate by turning to a dog-eared, well-thumbed copy of the current National Security Strategy and saying, “Wait, people! Just calm down! The answer is right here on page 37.”
Yet the Trump strategy represents a significant accomplishment. It reconciles the instincts of an unconventional president with the views of a more seasoned and conventional national-security team. The new approach breaks with the conventionally globalist assumptions of American foreign policy and instead embraces an older strategic approach.
As recently as the early 20th century, Britain ruled the waves and took the lead in the construction of a liberal, capitalist world system. During its long reign, two foreign-policy schools faced off over how to engage with Europe. On one side were advocates of a “continental” strategy, which prioritized alliances and close political cooperation with key European states. On the other were advocates of a “blue water” policy, who encouraged Britain to turn away from Europe and toward the open oceans, using its unique global position to maximize its power and wealth.
The bitter fight over Brexit shows that the blue-water-vs.-continentalist divide lives on in British politics. That division also matters in the U.S., Britain’s successor as the world’s leading naval and commercial power. In contemporary America, continentalists see the Atlantic world, and the thick institutional web that developed among the Cold War allies, as the template on which a peaceful global society can and should be built. From this perspective, the wisest American foreign policy would work through these international institutions and with Western partners to make the rest of the world look more like NATO and the European Union.
The Trump administration hews closer to the blue-water school. In the time of Pax Britannica, blue-water partisans believed Britain could accumulate great strength and wealth by advancing its interests in the wider world. This would do more to keep the country strong and respected than success in the intricate games of European diplomacy, they believed. A strong and rich Britain could always intervene in European politics if necessary to preserve the balance of power, and a globally dominant Britain would always be respected, even if it failed to make itself loved.
This is the view now driving many of America’s key foreign-policy decisions. The Trump administration sees the Paris climate accord as a potential obstacle to America’s recent exploitation of unconventional hydrocarbon resources, which has upended global power politics to America’s advantage. It sees current trade agreements as unfairly privileging commercial and geopolitical rivals like China. Above all, it sees itself embroiled in a geopolitical competition with China that cannot be won by invoking principles of multilateral institution-building and maxims of international law.
Asia before Europe, realism before liberal internationalism, American prosperity before global solidarity: This is a vision that appears to blend the pragmatic approach of the professionals in President Trump’s national-security team with the less disciplined but still sometimes acute insights that helped him win the election.
A modern blue-water approach to foreign policy need not entail abandoning the West, turning away from the world, or discarding the democratic ideals that resonate so deeply in American history. To the contrary, blue-water strategists in the Trump national-security team believe that it is American power, not multilateral institutions, that keeps the West afloat. If challenges to American power from countries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are successful, the wider West will weaken and crumble.
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and his team deserve credit for finding ways to narrow the gap between President Trump’s strongly held personal views about foreign policy and the ideas embraced by mainstream Republicans. Whether they can make the strategy work in the real world remains an open question. But they appear to have done with this document all that an administration can hope to accomplish with a National Security Strategy—that is, to lay out the broad principles and elements of consensus on which the administration will base its work.
The world remains as unstable and crisis-prone as it did before the publication of the NSS. The Trump administration’s national security apparatus, on the other hand, seems to be finding its sea legs.
Mr. Mead is a fellow at the Hudson Institute and a professor of foreign affairs at Bard College.
-
Russia and China’s Alliance of Convenience
Dec. 26, 2017 A common enemy isn’t the basis for a stable, enduring partnership.
By Jacob L. Shapiro
China and Russia conducted a six-day military exercise last week. The exercise simulated attacks on both countries from ballistic and cruise missiles. The Chinese Ministry of Defense declined to identify which country was the simulated aggressor in the exercise, but it’s not hard to figure out that it was the United States.
A few days into the exercise, the Trump administration published its National Security Strategy. The document is 68 pages long, but one line in particular from the second page has been quoted endlessly in the media: “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests.” These two developments raise the same question: Is a Sino-Russian alliance emerging?
Military cooperation between Russia and China has indeed increased in recent years. The two main vectors for this cooperation have been weapons purchases and military exercises. Since the end of the Cold War, China has been the Russian weapons industry’s largest and most consistent customer. One of China’s more recent and consequential acquisitions from Russia, S-400 surface-to-air missile defense systems, are set to be delivered to Beijing in 2018. China’s current SAM force has a range of only about 185 miles (300 kilometers). The S-400s will have a range of 250 miles. This will put all of Taiwan within range of Chinese SAMs and will extend China’s range in the East and South China seas.
Soldiers in action during a drill on day three of the China-Russia counterterrorist Cooperation-2017 on Dec. 5, 2017, in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region of China. VCG/Getty Images
China and Russia have also stepped up the frequency, and complexity, of joint military exercises. They held their first joint exercise in 2003. Since then, the two countries have conducted nearly 30 military drills together. The most recent exercise, which tested readiness to combat an attack from a more advanced air power, was as much for show as it was to hone technical capabilities. The same can be said for Russian-Chinese naval drills held in the Sea of Japan back in September. Chinese state news agency Xinhua insisted that the exercises were not linked to North Korea, but considering the timing and location, that’s a dubious claim. That both drills coincided with U.S.-South Korean-Japanese drills is further evidence of their political nature.
Superficial Alliance
Many observers view these developments as signs of a nascent Russian-Chinese alliance. And both Russia and China want observers to think precisely that. Just take the recent anti-missile exercise. Russia’s ambassador to China made a point of telling Russian reporters last week that the exercise was an example of “vigorously developing military cooperation.” The subsequent article based on the ambassador’s remarks, published in Russian media, was picked up and posted verbatim on the only official English-language military news website of China’s People’s Liberation Army. It’s an article that, frankly, is difficult to take seriously. After the early headline-grabbing quotes, the story lists the areas where China and Russia are increasing cooperation: “military medicine, martial music, and military orchestras.”
Military cooperation, even over such weighty matters as military orchestral arrangements, does not guarantee, or even imply, an alliance between two countries. An alliance is a relationship of serious gravity. When two countries forge an alliance, it means their interests are aligned. In practical terms, that means they will put aside small-ticket items and points of contention because there is a larger shared interest that is of immense importance. The currency of an alliance is trust. The products of an alliance are duty and obligation. Alliances are not entered into lightly, nor are they broken easily. They are based on shared interests that are clear to both sides, interests important enough that they justify the sacrifice by the people of one country for the people of another should a threat arise.
This is not the basis of the Russia-China relationship, and it cannot be the basis of a Russia-China alliance. This is not to say that Russia and China don’t have some basis for cooperation. Both countries chafe at the extent and application of U.S. power. Russia and China are land-based powers of continental size whose access to the global economy can be significantly curtailed by the U.S. Navy in the event of conflict. U.S. power is uniquely suited to limit Russian and Chinese ambitions. For instance, Russia’s primary imperative is to extend its influence out to the Carpathians. The U.S. is blocking Russia from achieving this. China seeks to conquer Taiwan to make the South China Sea a Chinese lake. The U.S. stands in the way. China and Russia share an enemy, and that means a certain level of coordination is useful.
The Multipolarity Myth
When Russian and Chinese leaders get together, one of the buzzwords they use to discuss their policies is “multipolarity.” Multipolarity is part wishful thinking and part strategy. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the world has been unipolar – that is to say, only one country has had the ability to project global power: the United States. Russia and China would see that changed. That is where Russia and China’s shared vision begins – but it’s also where it ends. Russia and China agree that the U.S. should not be a dominant superpower. But they have a vastly different sense of what the alternative reality should be. Russia sees the alternative as a rebirth of Russian power on the order of the Soviet Union’s. China sees the alternative as reclaiming the mandate of heaven, a position that was usurped by Western imperialist powers in the 19th century at a period of maximum Chinese vulnerability. Their issue is not with a unipolar world. Their issue is that they themselves are not the ones calling the shots.
The two sides use the word multipolar to paper over this difference. Better to focus on weakening the U.S. now and work out differences later. But there is only so much that can be papered over. After all, from Beijing’s perspective, Russia was one of the Western imperialist powers that took advantage of Chinese vulnerability. Vladivostok is the most important city in eastern Russia, the home base of Russia’s Pacific Fleet – and China views Vladivostok and the roughly 350,000 square miles of territory around it that it was forced to cede to Russia in previous centuries as Chinese land. Russia views Central Asia as part of its sphere of influence. China views Central Asia as crucial to its plans to develop its own interior and to find alternate routes to Europe until its military is capable of challenging the United States.
china-russia-border
(click to enlarge)
From Russia’s perspective, China is a Pacific-facing power whose fundamental interests lie outside of Russia’s interests. Russia has also always seen China as lacking a basic sense of strategy as it is understood in the West, and Moscow believes that this lack of strategy, along with China’s internal inconsistencies, limits China’s effectiveness outside of its main wealth centers on the coast. From China’s perspective, Russia is part of a bygone world order that it seeks to rearrange to its own benefit. China’s patience is as long as its memory. China has not forgotten the various humiliations it was forced to endure, whether U.S. support of Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese Civil War or Russia playing all sides during the Second Opium War to solidify its position in Asia at China’s expense.
Russia and China don’t trust each other, and they don’t trust each other because they have divergent interests. They work hard to keep this mutual distrust out of public view: military cooperation, economic investments, a chummy relationship between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and promises of coordination on China’s grand plans to unify the world via belts and roads all serve to make it appear that the two sides are in lockstep. But these are surface-level political affairs of convenience. Russia and China challenge U.S. power, security and interests, but they do so for vastly different ends. It will be their undoing.
-
Overview
Reckoning With North Korea: Though the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula can't be ruled out, the United States will probably try to avoid a costly preventive strike against the North's nuclear weapons program that would plunge the global economy back into recession. Instead, Pyongyang's demonstration of a viable nuclear deterrent next year will spawn a new and more unstable era of containment.
Hedging All Around: Deepening collaboration between China and Russia will pose a strategic threat to the United States, spurring Washington to try to check the budding partnership by reinforcing its own allies in the Eurasian borderlands. The fluidity of alignments among great powers will increasingly define the international system as Moscow and Beijing balance against each other, just as many U.S. allies hedge their relationships with Washington.
Putting Trade Ties to the Test: The White House will forge ahead with an aggressive trade agenda that targets China, Mexico, South Korea and Japan. While the U.S. trade agreement with South Korea hangs by a thread, congressional and legal checks on U.S. executive power will have a better chance of keeping the North American Free Trade Agreement intact. The United States' increasing unilateralism in trade will expose the weaknesses of the World Trade Organization, but it won't shatter the bloc or trigger a trade war.
Revisiting Iran: North Korea's nuclear weapons achievements will fuel a hard-line U.S. policy toward Iran, jeopardizing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. As the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel close ranks against Iran, proxy battles across the Middle East will intensify. But Iran won't walk away from its nuclear deal with the West. Russia will nevertheless exploit the tension mounting between Washington and Tehran, as well as its advantage on the Syrian battlefield, to expand its influence in the Middle East at the United States' expense.
Managing an Oil Exit Strategy: Major oil producers hope to stay on track to rebalance the global oil market in 2018. As the expiration of their pact to limit production and draw down inventories approaches, compliance will slip among OPEC and non-OPEC participants alike. Even so, Saudi Arabia and Russia may be able to work together to counteract an expected uptick in U.S. shale output.
The Next Phase of China's Reform: Chinese President Xi Jinping will take on entrenched local interests as the central government tackles the next phase of its reform agenda: wealth redistribution. A slowing property sector and corporate debt maturities will compound financial pressures on China's northeastern rust belt in 2018, but Beijing has the tools it needs to prevent a systemic debt crisis.
France Finds Its Voice: France will find itself on more equal footing with Germany next year as it defends Southern European interests and debates eurozone reform. The possibility of a more Euroskeptic government emerging in Italy will send jitters through financial markets, but the country won't leave the currency zone.
Populism Persists in Latin America: Popular frustration with the political establishment will make for a more competitive election season in three of Latin America's biggest economies: Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. Should a populist president take office in Mexico, Congress will block him from enacting any sweeping policy changes. Meanwhile, Brazil and Argentina will have a narrow window in which to implement domestic reforms and push ahead with trade talks in the Common Market of the South before political constraints start piling up against them.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwnPgscg0vU&feature=share
-
second post
2.5 hours. I listened entranced through out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwnPgscg0vU&feature=share
-
https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf
Hat tip to our Big Dog for this.
-
A Word From Henry Kissinger
What can a column on foreign affairs add to today’s cacophonous debate? ‘Context.’
By Walter Russell Mead
Feb. 5, 2018 7:22 p.m. ET
When The Wall Street Journal asked me to become its Global View columnist, I immediately went for advice to the dominant figure in American foreign policy of the past 50 years: Henry Kissinger.
Asking Mr. Kissinger a question is a little like inquiring at the Oracle of Delphi: You never quite know what you are going to get. Some queries elicit long, learned analyses. Mr. Kissinger often deftly weaves together the motives of the leaders involved, the interests of the U.S., and the effect of American domestic politics on the range of available choices.
Some questions elicit a more lapidary response. In the aftermath of the Cold War, I once heard someone ask Mr. Kissinger what he saw as the most important trends in the world. I braced myself for an hour of sage but complex geopolitical monologue. Instead he replied with a single sentence, albeit one with more substance than most books published in the field: “You must never forget that the unification of Germany is more important than the development of the European Union, that the fall of the Soviet Union is more important than the unification of Germany, and that the rise of India and China is more important than the fall of the Soviet Union.”
My request for advice as a new columnist did not even merit a sentence; Mr. Kissinger had only a word for me. What a column on international affairs should seek to provide, he said, is “context.”
That short answer points to the heart of Mr. Kissinger’s worldview—and to the vast intellectual gap between him and most of the academics who study foreign affairs and the bureaucrats who carry it out. It has often been said, sometimes by Mr. Kissinger himself, that he is a “realist” while many of his critics are “idealists.” There is some truth there, and Mr. Kissinger’s most trenchant opponents attack what they characterize as his cynical willingness to achieve policy objectives through morally dubious or even reprehensible means. But the gap between Mr. Kissinger and the rest cuts deeper. He isn’t suspicious merely of rosy idealism; he is suspicious of those who think ideologically about foreign policy, reasoning down from first principles and lofty assumptions rather than grounding their analysis in the messiness and contradictions of the real world.
Unlike so many professors, policy makers and pundits on both the left and right, Mr. Kissinger does not believe the arc of history makes house calls. American values may one day prevail around the world, but no leader should base strategic calculations on a hope that Russia, China and Iran will turn into friendly liberal democracies in a relevant time frame. Nor would a wise policy maker assume that other powers share America’s interest in, for example, an end to the North Korean nuclear program—or any initiative aimed at making the international order more stable and secure.
Oddly, the “conservative” Mr. Kissinger takes diversity much more seriously than many of his liberal critics. Historical study and a lifetime of experience have taught Mr. Kissinger the folly of assuming that Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Ayatollah Khamenei thinks like American leaders do or wants the same things. Each of these men and their supporters are grounded in cultural and historical imperatives that do not always mesh with ideas about Adam Smith, liberal order and win-win negotiating.
When Mr. Kissinger advises a columnist to focus on “context,” he is suggesting that there is value in helping readers to appreciate the kaleidoscopic variety and sometimes dizzying complexity of the forces at work on the international scene, and in explaining how those forces interact with American politics.
In 2018, this mission is more important than ever. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the United States and its Cold War allies sought to spread Western institutions around the world, but that effort has ground to a halt. Support for free trade, free movement of capital, free speech and free government is in retreat in many places, the U.S. not excepted. Geopolitical rivals are trying to roll back American power, and longtime allies like Turkey are moving away from the West. The end of history has ended, and the world is suddenly looking more Kissingerian.
It has never been more important to understand world events, and it has rarely been harder to do so. I look forward to the challenge of engaging with the Journal’s readers on the momentous geopolitical trends of our time, and I hope that this column can help, if only in a small way, prepare our country for the tests that lie ahead.
-
Will China Impose a New World Order?
When Pax Britannica gave way to Pax Americana, the transition was peaceful. A repeat is unlikely, says the author of ‘Safe Passage.’
By Tunku Varadarajan
Feb. 9, 2018 6:32 p.m. ET
129 COMMENTS
When Kori Schake was a senior at Stanford in 1984, she enrolled in a seminar on Soviet politics taught by Condoleezza Rice, then 29. The two young women hit it off. “I was a dreamy, impractical kid, and didn’t have a plan for what I was going to do after I graduated,” says Ms. Schake (pronounced “shocky”). “Condi saw me at loose ends and offered me a job as her research assistant.” They worked together for a year on a book about “elite selection in the military that Condi never ended up writing. But I read everything about what makes the American military tick. Everything.”
Thirty-four years later, Ms. Schake has written a book—her fourth—whose jacket carries a glowing blurb from her illustrious former professor. The book, “Safe Passage,” traces the international order’s transition from British to American hegemony. With all of the talk of China’s rise and what it will mean for the U.S., Ms. Schake says, she “got curious about the history of transitions between a rising power and an established global hegemon. The only peaceful transition in all of history, I found, is the one between Britain and the United States.” (Ms. Schake has made that transition in reverse. She moved earlier this month from Stanford to London, where she is an executive at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a defense think tank.)
The U.S. did not fully supplant Britain until 1945. But the American challenge began in 1823 with the Monroe Doctrine, under which the U.S. declared the Western Hemisphere to be its own exclusive zone of influence. “It was the first opportunity the United States had to assert a different calculus for the rules of international order,” Ms. Schake says. “A hegemon isn’t just a country that’s powerful or wealthy, but one that aspires to set the rules and is willing to enforce them.”
Is China the next hegemon? President Xi Jinping appears to challenge the U.S. frequently and deliberately. Ms. Schake agrees that Mr. Xi is “clearly telegraphing that China wants different rules.” She points to the “One Belt, One Road” initiative—a plan to establish a China-centered global trading network that would extend to Western Europe, Northern Africa and Australia, under which Beijing would make loans to countries that need to expand their infrastructure. She also cites Beijing’s aggressive maritime claims, most prominently in the South China Sea, to which “Chinese scholars make comparisons with the Monroe Doctrine. It’s a legitimation device, by which they say, ‘You had your sphere of influence when you were a rising power. Now we have our sphere.’ ”
Will China Impose a New World Order?
Illustration: Terry Shoffner
Not that Ms. Schake thinks the U.S. should accede. “There’s no reason for us to accept that Chinese assertion,” she says, because China’s neighbors—over whom Beijing seeks to impose its will—are “friends and partners and allies of the United States. We aren’t a modern parallel of European states seeking to colonize Latin America.”
Most states in the Asia-Pacific region seem content with the existing order, and “by being so brazen and uncooperative during its rise, China has actually activated the antibodies that will help prevent its success.” The exception is the Philippines, which has cozied up to Mr. Xi, “but that has less to do with China and more to do with the leadership in Manila”—a reference to the maverick Filipino president, Rodrigo Duterte.
In her book, however, she warns that “America is making the same strategic choice with China that Great Britain did with a rising America,” in assuming that the rising power “can be induced to comply with extant rules.” Does that mean that the Pax Americana must someday give way to a Pax Sinica? After all, that British tactic of accommodation helped pave the way for the U.S. to take over world leadership.
Ms. Schake demurs. “What the U.S. is saying to China,” she says, “is that if you behave as a liberal political and economic power in the international order, we’ll help you succeed in the existing global order.” The U.S. expects China to understand that “our allies will be protected, even if China is the challenger. If the autonomy or security of South Korea and Japan, Australia or Taiwan, is challenged, we’ll defend them.”
The U.S. has also made clear that disputes over territories and waters need to be resolved by peaceful negotiation. China, says Ms. Schake, will not be allowed to “use force to impose its will on weaker states in the region.”
Ms. Schake worries about the Trump administration’s protectionist inclinations: “I do think that President Trump is calling into question some of the fundamental rules of the liberal international order that the hard men who won World War II created in its aftermath.” Free trade, she says, “undergirds political relationships. Prosperity gives states reasons to cooperate, and to broaden participation in a liberal order.”
She fears that Mr. Trump “does not seem persuaded by those fundamental American arguments,” and she laments his withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Ms. Schake invokes the late Nobel economics laureate who supervised her doctoral dissertation: “ Tom Schelling would be shaking his head if he were here, saying that Trump gave that enormous strategic advantage to China without even getting anything in return.”
The good news is that the other 11 members of the trade deal “have determined to continue to try to bring the TPP into effect without the United States. So it’s an example of the liberal international order being sustained without American leadership.”
And Ms. Schake’s overall view of the administration’s foreign policy is favorable. Trade, she says, is “the only area in which Trump has, so far, been demonstrably damaging to the liberal international order.” In other areas, she thinks the administration “has actually made policy decisions consistent with the existing order,” even if Mr. Trump is an “outlier” regarding the philosophy on which it rests.
She points to Mr. Trump’s “continuing to assist Afghanistan until it has the ability to secure its own territory from threats to itself and to us.” She also cites U.S. assistance to the government of Iraq, “to secure it against malign external and internal influence,” as well as support for the security of “our stalwart Asian allies.” Besides, she says, Mr. Trump’s predecessor was hardly a champion of the Pax Americana: “I think you could make a strong case that President Obama’s foreign policy was one of retrenchment, shifting burdens onto allies and off America’s shoulders.”
As for China, Ms. Schake says she is “less convinced than many other people” that its rise will continue. But if Beijing does seriously challenge the U.S., she is “deeply skeptical that a hegemonic transition would happen peacefully.” A fundamental difference between the two countries is that even when the U.S. acts in ways that many would regard as globally unpopular, it does so while sincerely proclaiming universal values.
What values might a hegemonic China impart on the world? “Their leadership is groping to come up with something,” Ms. Schake says. “Xi has talked about the Chinese Dream, but it’s of a prosperous China where people don’t agitate for political control, where they trust the leadership to do the right thing for them.”
The unwillingness of major Western leaders to endorse One Belt, One Road illustrates for Ms. Schake “how much concern the established powers—the U.S., France, Britain—have about China attempting to change the rules.” She cites with evident pleasure Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s remark last year: that in a globalized world “there are many belts and many roads.” Mr. Mattis and Ms. Schake are close friends and longtime colleagues, and have edited a book together.
The Chinese initiative has also served, unintentionally, to highlight the attractions of the American-led international order: “The rules we established are advantageous not only to us, but also foster prosperity and peace for other countries.” The rest of the world sees its interests advanced by sustaining the current system, and the U.S. rarely has to enforce the rules. As Ms. Schake puts it, “we get the advantage of playing team sports because of the nature of the rules we’ve established.” That isn’t true for China. It claims One Belt, One Road is mutually advantageous, “but other countries’ concerns about sovereignty and what happens if loan terms aren’t met may yet stall China’s ambitions.”
In other words, unless China can come up with a more attractive narrative about itself and its ambitions, most countries will continue to favor the American-led order. “We have been a clumsy hegemon, certainly,” Ms. Schake says, “but we have also been a largely beneficent one.”
Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
-
An Arms Race Toward Global Instability
By Omar Lamrani
Senior Military Analyst, Stratfor
Omar Lamrani
Omar Lamrani
Senior Military Analyst, Stratfor
U.S. and South Korean jets fly over the Korean Peninsula during a joint exercise in July 2017.
(South Korean Defense Ministry via Getty Images)
Connections
Articles
Regions & Countries
Topics
Themes
Print
Highlights
The United States is shifting its focus to great power competition as it works to address the challenges of Russia's and China's growing confidence and capabilities.
Combined with this rivalry, weakening arms control regimes and the emergence of disruptive weapons technologies will erode global geopolitical stability.
Declining trust and increased competition will spark discord and conflict between the United States on the one hand and Russia and China on the other.
The United States is gearing up once more for a struggle between giants. On Jan. 19, the Pentagon released a new National Defense Strategy, the first in 10 years, in which it called strategic competition the "central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security" as Russian and Chinese military capabilities expand. U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis echoed that concern Feb. 2 in the preface of the Nuclear Posture Review, arguing that the United States could no longer afford to pursue a policy of nuclear arms reduction given the steady growth of the Chinese and Russian nuclear arsenals. The U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense Review, due for publication soon, is expected to emphasize the same key points, namely that the United States should bolster its missile defenses to better repel threats as strategic competition builds.
Among these documents, the common thread is that great power competition, and not terrorism, will be the next focus of the U.S. security strategy. Washington has outlined how it will move to redirect its resources, capabilities and approach to overcome the challenges that the growing confidence and abilities of China and Russia pose. Beijing and Moscow, however, show no sign of backing down. And new, destabilizing weapons technology is entering more common use, while long-standing arms control agreements are deteriorating. These developments together promise to usher in a new era of international competition that could rival the Cold War.
A Shift in Focus
Even before the latest string of U.S. defense and policy reviews, the emerging power competition with China and Russia was on Washington's radar. The United States pursued a "pivot to the Pacific" during President Barack Obama's administration, mostly in an effort to counter China's growing dominance in the region. Similarly, since Russia's intervention in Ukraine, the United States has bolstered its military deployments in Europe, reversing its drawdown on the Continent. The Pentagon also touted the "Third Offset" strategy — an initiative to encourage the development of promising military technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence — during the previous administration in an effort to stay ahead of its mounting competition.
Yet counterterrorism was the true focus of the U.S. security strategy, not only under the last president but also under his predecessor. Enduring conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia continue to draw the lion's share of military deployments, resources and focus to this day. China and Russia, meanwhile, have taken advantage of the United States' diverted attention, making great strides in building arsenals and honing their military capabilities. In a few areas — such as anti-ship missiles, rocket artillery and ground-based air defense — the two Eurasian countries may even have surpassed the United States.
In light of these trends, Washington has every reason to be worried about a great power rivalry. But trying to stay ahead in the competition will only accelerate it. As the United States works to fortify its defenses, China and Russia will redouble their efforts to strengthen their own capabilities. The two countries — revisionist powers that want to alter the current geopolitical balance, whether in the South and East China seas or in the former Soviet Union — won't give up their geopolitical ambitions just because the United States tries to foil them.
Raising the Stakes
As the power competition between Russia, China and the United States intensifies, the emergence of disruptive weapons technologies will drive them deeper into a destabilizing arms race. Increasingly capable missile defense systems, for example, will play a central role in the struggle going forward, though the technology is still evolving to better address ballistic missiles. To appreciate the disruptive effect of ballistic missile defense, one must consider the limited inventory of ballistic missiles available to the United States, Russia and China. The fear among these countries is that as missile defense technology improves and becomes more prevalent, it will render their modest arsenals ineffective. A disarming nuclear strike from one power would further reduce the number of viable missiles in the target state's holdings, and the remaining weapons may not be powerful enough to overcome the aggressor country's missile defenses in a retaliatory strike. Consequently, while the United States' early lead on missile defense technology will spur Russia and China to keep working on their own missile defenses, it will also push them to beef up their offensive weapons.
Nuclear weapons will be another point of contention. According to the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, the United States is preparing to shift its stance on the use of nuclear weapons and to introduce new ones, including a low-yield warhead for submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Low-yield nuclear weapons aren't a new development for the United States, but putting them on a ballistic missile submarine is. The move is intended to address the growing concern that a potential enemy — be it a great power such as Russia or a rogue state like North Korea — would resort to an "escalate to de-escalate" strategy. Under that strategy, the inferior military power would use a low-yield or "tactical" nuclear weapon to discourage continued attacks from the United States on the assumption that Washington wouldn't strike back with its strategic nuclear arsenal for fear of starting a devastating war.
Positioning low-yield nuclear weapons on ballistic missile submarines will give the United States greater speed and flexibility in their use. The decision is not without its risks, however. For one thing, a single strike with a low-yield nuclear warhead may well escalate to a full-blown war with strategic weapons. For another, since the U.S. ballistic submarine fleet carries a large portion of the country's strategic nuclear weapons arsenal, adding low-yield nuclear weapons to the mix could create a discrimination problem for adversary states in the event of a launch. An enemy would detect an incoming ballistic missile fired from a submarine without being able to tell whether it carried a low-yield warhead or it was the opening salvo in a massive first strike with strategic nuclear weapons.
The advent of super-fuze warheads will compound the risk. Super-fuze technology dramatically enhances the effectiveness of weapons against hardened targets, such as nuclear missile silos, by optimizing a warhead's ability to home in on and detonate directly on top of its mark. Although it's currently in use only on U.S. W76 strategic nuclear warheads, the super-fuze could conceivably work for low-yield nuclear weapons as well. And because low-yield nuclear weapons are not subject to the same arms treaty restrictions that limit the number of strategic nuclear weapons a country may hold, improving their accuracy with super-fuze technology could upend the current nuclear balance. The more countries acquire low-yield nuclear weapons — much less super-fuzed warheads — the greater the potential for their use.
Further complicating matters are hypersonic missiles. The missiles' high speed — at least five times the speed of sound — facilitates their rapid use and boosts their rate of survival by making them difficult to intercept. In addition, some hypersonic weapons come equipped with a glide vehicle that extends their range, enabling forces to launch the weapons from beyond an enemy's reach. These factors offer militaries great incentive to incorporate hypersonic missiles into their arsenals. As more and more countries adopt hypersonic missiles, the weapons' offensive abilities may prove destablizing. States may opt to strike first — perhaps with nuclear weapons — to take out an adversary's hypersonic missile caches before the enemy has a chance to use them.
An artist's rendering shows a hypersonic missile glide vehicle, designed to enhance the weapon's range.
An artist's rendering shows a hypersonic missile glide vehicle, designed to enhance the weapon's range.
(Stratfor)
Losing Control
While weapons technology is developing at a rapid clip, arms control treaties are deteriorating just as quickly. Key agreements between the United States and Russia were foundering well before Washington shifted its focus back to great power competition. The United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, and the critical Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty is showing signs of considerable strain, which is bound to increase as Washington bolsters its defenses. Alarmed by the United States' growing investment in missile defense and super-fuze technology, Russia and China will try to enhance their offensive capabilities in kind. The resulting arms race would probably drive the last nail into the INF's coffin and perhaps even jeopardize the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Beijing, meanwhile, will strive to keep its competitive edge in hypersonic weapons development in an effort to get ahead of Washington's advancing missile defense capabilities. Though the countries will try to craft new arms control agreements to accommodate their changing world, the challenges of striking a deal among three great powers with disparate strengths will get in the way.
Coupled with the fall of critical arms control regimes and the rise of disruptive weapons technology, the next great power competition could erode global stability. Tightening arms races and moribund arms control agreements will undermine the trust between the great global powers and discourage cooperation. Instead, more discord and conflict will erupt between the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other.
Editor's Note: This column has been adjusted to reflect U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis' title.
-
The World After McMaster
Feb 23, 2018
By George Friedman
U.S. National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster is rumored to be on his way out. The reason appears to be McMaster’s endorsement of the view that the Russians engaged in a disinformation campaign designed to create instability in the United States during the 2016 presidential election. President Donald Trump is highly sensitive to this claim because of the implication that the disinformation campaign helped him get elected. Whether or not that is true is unimportant for our purposes. Trump, like any politician, is sensitive to anything that challenges his legitimacy in office, and he expects absolute loyalty from subordinates.
Senior government officials come and go, and it rarely matters. One suit replaces another, and life goes on. At this moment, however, the fate of McMaster is somewhat more important. The job of the national security adviser is to coordinate all of the elements involved in national security, including the State and Defense Departments, the intelligence agencies and any other part of the federal government that touches on such matters. He is the president’s chief adviser in foreign policy, the channel through which the views of the departments and agencies are filtered, and above all, the person who enforces the president’s foreign policy throughout all relevant entities.
The national security adviser has become a particularly sensitive role. It is always hard to control the agencies, but at a time when the CIA and the FBI appear to be in occasional confrontation with the president over the Russia issue, it has become even harder. The intelligence and security agencies have to continue to carry out their primary mission – gathering intelligence and conducting counterintelligence – while also communicating their activities to the president. Given the tension, the president lacks trust in the intelligence and it’s McMaster who has to keep the system functioning while a confrontation with the president is underway. The riptides of politics are enormous.
Even more important, the United States is facing old and new foreign policy issues that are inherently contentious. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Trump administration’s various policies is the continuity they share with the policies of previous administrations. Rhetoric aside, the U.S. relationship with NATO and Russia is not materially different than it was during Barack Obama’s administration. The same is true in the Middle East, with insufficient forces pursuing an unclear goal. The U.S. and China continue to bicker over trade relations. And nothing violent has happened in North Korea, with the Trump administration pursuing the same cautious attempts to shape Pyongyang’s policies that were pursued by previous administrations.
Much of this continuity can be attributed to bureaucratic inertia. An argument could be made that all of these issues require more aggressive handling. But it is very difficult to move anything as vast and diffuse as U.S. foreign policy. Another reason for the continuity is that Trump appointed three people to run U.S. foreign policy who are inherently cautious. Secretary of Defense James Mattis resisted more aggressive policies when he was a top military commander during Obama’s administration. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson comes from outside of the foreign policy establishment and has had to catch up to its subtleties. He heads the department that is least respected by the Trump administration, with attempts being made to slash its budget and its staff.
McMaster is also a cautious and meticulous man. He is the author of a book called “Dereliction of Duty,” which eviscerated the Johnson administration’s handling of the Vietnam War and, in particular, criticized the spread of dishonest information. It appears that, for McMaster, orderly and honest flow of information must be maintained at any cost. The paradox is that the more information you have, the more unwilling you become to make major changes. But at the moment, the flow of information is far more important than innovations in foreign policy.
McMaster has been critical in creating processes that maintain stability. That isn’t to say there haven’t been turf battles over foreign policy. It’s rumored that Mattis and McMaster see some things very differently. Mattis is said to be more cautious on Korea, McMaster more aggressive. Such differences are common and healthy. In fact, they create healthy, creative tension between important foreign policy figures – far better than consensus.
The problem is that it’s difficult to imagine how the continuity of U.S. policy could be maintained if someone very different than McMaster took over his position. One of the things causing tension between the president and some of his advisers has been that the president wants them to be political, and they won’t be. That’s the case here and it’s the ability and willingness of McMaster to resist the temptation to become political – as others hadn’t – that has been a stabilizing force.
In general, our view is that the people running the government come and go, but U.S. foreign policy is driven by geopolitical necessity, constraining decision-makers from making many changes they might otherwise want to make. I will not argue that McMaster is indispensable. But with the president confronting the Russian disinformation issue, and with a range of foreign policy issues likely to shift of their own weight, any degree of instability in U.S. foreign policy could have an impact. North Korea, Russia, China and the Middle East are all under pressure, and the U.S. has thus far been restrained. At a time when the foreign policy institutions of the U.S. are themselves in flux, increasing that flux could have consequences.
This is not a world-changing event, but every event need not be world-changing. It is simply noteworthy in the sense that institutional instability can have some impact on regions that don’t need any more impacts.
The post The World After McMaster appeared first on Geopolitical Futures.
-
Some very important thoughts from the WSJ. And very much worth noting is that at yesterday's joint press conference with Australian PM is that President Trump said we had no goals there beyond defeating ISIS.
We love President Trump and Sec Def Mattis, but it is time to decide whether to shit or get off the pot. It IS a terrible problem. If we leave, the Iranians will have land bridge to the Mediterranean (including direct connection with Hezbollah and all that implies) backed by Russia's anti-aircraft systems i.e. Israel will no longer have dominance in the skies. All out war (including nukes?) seems likely.
If we stay, we are permanently in the morass of the Middle East, and thus overloaded China takes the South China Sea and the Norks finish their ability to deliver nukes.
Is this why yesterday President Trump said is ONLY issue with China was trade even while the Australian PM spoke of holding China to the rule of law (i.e. respecting rights in the South China Sea?
======================================================
Russia’s Attack on U.S. Troops
Putin’s mercenaries are bloodied in Syria, as he tries to drive Trump out.
Businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, shows Russian President Vladimir Putin around his factory which produces school means, outside St. Petersburg, Russia, Sept. 20, 2010.
Businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, shows Russian President Vladimir Putin around his factory which produces school means, outside St. Petersburg, Russia, Sept. 20, 2010. Photo: Alexei Druzhinin/Associated Press
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 23, 2018 6:50 p.m. ET
354 COMMENTS
The truth is starting to emerge about a recent Russian attack on U.S. forces in eastern Syria, and it deserves more public attention. The assault looks increasingly like a botched attempt to bloody the U.S. and intimidate President Trump into withdrawing from Syria once Islamic State is defeated. The U.S. military won this round, but Vladimir Putin’s forces will surely look for a chance at revenge.
Here’s what we know. Several hundred men and materiel advanced on a U.S. Special Forces base near Deir al-Zour on the night of Feb. 7-8. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White confirmed soon afterward that the “battalion-sized unit formation” was “supported by artillery, tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems and mortars.” U.S. forces responded in self-defense “with a combination of air and artillery strikes.”
Ms. White wouldn’t confirm how many attackers were killed or who was fighting, though the U.S. had “observed” the military buildup for a week. Defense Secretary James Mattis called the confrontation “perplexing,” adding that “I have no idea why they would attack there, the forces were known to be there, obviously the Russians knew.” He’s referring to the U.S.-Russia “deconfliction” agreement in which the Russians agreed to stay west of the Euphrates River.
Now we’re learning that Russian fighters were killed in the attack, and Lebanese Hezbollah was also involved. The Kremlin has tried to cover up the deaths, but that’s getting harder as the body bags come home and Russian social media spread the word. The Foreign Ministry finally admitted Tuesday that “several dozen” Russians were killed or wounded but claimed that “Russian service members did not take part in any capacity and Russian military equipment was not used.”
That depends on how you define “Russian military.” Evidence is growing that the attack was orchestrated by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who does much of Mr. Putin’s dirty work. His businesses include the Internet Research Agency, a media operation indicted by a federal grand jury last week for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mr. Putin has a history of using mercenaries in Crimea and southern Ukraine, the better to preserve deniability if something goes wrong. The Obama Administration blacklisted Mr. Prigozhin in 2016 for supporting Russia’s Ukraine invasion, and in June the Trump Administration sanctioned Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian intelligence officer associated with Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group of mercenaries.
Wagner has been fighting in Syria since 2015, according to the Institute for the Study of War’s Bradley Hanlon, including campaigns to retake oil-rich areas. Mr. Putin has been doling out contracts tied to oil and mining to mercenaries in Syria, including to Mr. Prigozhin.
The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing intelligence sources, that Mr. Prigozhin had “secured permission from an unspecified Russian minister” for the attack and had also “discussed” it with Syrian officials. Mr. Prigozhin would never undertake such an operation unless he felt he had clearance from the highest levels of the Kremlin.
Why risk such an attack, especially given how badly it went for Russia? Mr. Putin is constantly probing for weaknesses in adversaries, and perhaps he wanted to embarrass Mr. Trump by capturing some Americans. Perhaps he hoped to push the U.S. troops back and seize the nearby oil fields. With Mr. Trump sending no clear signals about U.S. intentions after Islamic State, and given his 2016 campaign claims that Syria is someone else’s problem, Mr. Putin might have thought that some American casualties, prisoners or a retreat would increase calls inside the U.S. to leave Syria.
The U.S. military response was impressive and laudable, but American silence about the Russian attack is puzzling. The attack shows again that Mr. Putin is looking to damage U.S. interests wherever he sees an opportunity, even at the risk of a U.S.-Russia military engagement. Maybe Mr. Trump doesn’t want to humiliate Mr. Putin, but the Russian won’t forget this defeat merely because the U.S. is quiet about it.
The danger is that he’ll interpret U.S. silence to mean that he can risk an attempt at revenge. Mr. Putin is running for re-election this spring, and while he has rigged the vote to guarantee victory, the Russian public needs to know his mercenaries suffered a humiliating defeat. If the U.S. won’t tell the truth, Mr. Putin has an easier time telling lies.
The Russian engagement also shows that the U.S. is operating a de facto safe zone for allies in eastern Syria. The Pentagon is still pursuing dispersed Islamic State fighters, but another goal is to influence the shape of post-ISIS Syria. Mr. Putin wants to push the U.S. and its allies out so its axis with Iran can dominate Syria. Look for more such confrontations to come.
-
A New Era at the State Department?
by A.J. Caschetta
Modern Diplomacy
March 1, 2018
http://www.meforum.org/7225/a-new-era-at-the-state-department
Share:
Loy Henderson,Director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, who fostered the Arabist culture at the State Department.
Ever since the partition of UN Mandate Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel, the US State Department has promoted a grievance-based approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Its staffers' view Palestinian deprivation (of statehood, dreams, etc.) as the chief obstacle to peace. U.S. diplomatic efforts, therefore, have focused on appeasing those grievances. One year into the Trump administration, there are signs that this is changing.
After World War II, Loy Henderson, director of the Office of Near Eastern, African and South Asian Affairs, cultivated the culture that would define the State Department's entire Middle East outlook. Henderson filled his Office with specialists known as "Arabists" because of their love of the Arabic language and Arab culture. They suffered from what Robert D. Kaplan, in his seminal work on the topic, calls "localitis" and "clientitis," and their sympathies with Muslims were often accompanied by a rejection of the West and especially of Israel. In his Memoirs, Harry S. Truman wrote that State's "specialists on the Near East were almost without exception unfriendly to the idea of a Jewish state," adding, "some of them were also inclined to be anti-Semitic."
After the Six-Day War, when most Arab countries severed relations with the U.S. and closed American embassies, many Arabists found themselves without foreign posts. Their domination of the State Department subsided, and they were replaced by a new group – the "peace processors" – who were not immersed in Arab culture but rather in diplomatic culture. By the 1980s, they dominated the State Department, and they still do.
Though their motives may differ, the peace processors share the Arabists' trust that the Palestinians will negotiate rationally. In pursuit of the ultimate peace deal, they ignore or excuse Palestinian diplomats who insist that Israel has no right to exist, as though Palestinian irredentism was a negotiating ploy rather than a deeply-felt principle.
The cohesion of the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein in Desert Shield/Storm, heralded as a major diplomatic achievement, spurred a renewed faith that the diplomatic process itself can solve even the most intransigent of problems, of which the Israel-Palestinian conflict loomed large. The peace processors have always been driven by the theory that the right combination of Israeli concessions (land, water, money) will end Palestinian hostilities. They continue to downplay Palestinian rejectionism while emphasizing Palestinian cooperation.
Even the 2003 bombing of a State Department convoy in Gaza...elicited little more than a perfunctory telephone call from Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Palestinian Authority (PA), urging it to crack down on militants.
The peace processors thrived during the Obama years, especially during the tenure of Secretary of State John Kerry. In a 2016 Oxford Union speech Kerry waxed poetic about peace-making, or as he called it, "the art of diplomacy – [which] is to define the interests of all the parties and see where the sweet spot is that those interests can come together and hopefully be able to thread a very thin needle." The problem, to continue Kerry's mixed metaphor, is that under Kerry's leadership, the State Department expended most of its energies massaging the Palestinian sweet spot and trying to thread its very thin needle. Israeli interests, on the other hand, were largely ignored, and Israel was often blamed for Palestinian hostilities.
Donald Trump campaigned promising a different approach to Israel. He chose Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, a diplomat with no foreign policy record and few known political opinions. Tillerson began his tenure at the default State Department position – treating the PA and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as legitimate and trustworthy peace partners, and ignoring or downplaying evidence to the contrary...
There's no doubt that Donald Trump's election initiated a major disruption at the State Department.
Then, in November, Tillerson announced the closure of the PLO mission in Washington, D.C., in compliance with a U.S. law prohibiting any Palestinian attempts to bring a case against Israel at the International Criminal Court. But when the PLO responded by threatening to cut off all contact with the U.S., the State Department rather obsequiously caved, announcing that the mission could remain open for a 90-day probationary period...
Subsequent events suggest a change in U.S. Israel policy, especially the announced plan to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and the cutting of U.S. funding to UNRWA. Trump has also threatened to cut all aid to Palestinians. At Davos in January, he said that Palestinian disrespect for Vice President Mike Pence would cost them as well. Under normal circumstances, one might infer that these are coherent policy redirections. But it is not unreasonable to believe that they are impulsive reactions to perceived insults. They may also be bargaining chips in the president's famed deal-making art.
....
But these moves from the top down are not necessarily permanent. No one really believes Abbas will terminate all contact with the U.S. In fact, the PLO's man in Washington, Husam Zomlot, signalled in an interview just days ago that he's ready to talk: "It's not like I am not speaking to them. My phone is open."
Like Trump, Abbas is positioning for a better deal. When he comes back to his senses and apologizes, perhaps even personally thanks Donald Trump for reengaging, the State Department's peace processors will awaken from their drowse with a new Oslo, a new Road Map to Peace, and Israel will be squeezed again. As Daniel Pipes writes, "the American door is permanently open to Palestinians and when they wise up, some fabulous gift awaits them in the White House." Maybe next time there will be pressure for Israel to repeat Ariel Sharon's mistake and force all Israelis out of the West Bank, and after that out of East Jerusalem, and after that, who knows? Pressuring Israel to give up more land and money and make their nation less secure is the only strategy the peace processors know.
There's no doubt that Donald Trump's election initiated a major disruption at the State Department. Many long-serving senior officials resigned immediately before or after inauguration day. The hum of diplomats complaining that their expertise is being ignored has continued. When Elizabeth Shackelford (lauded by Foreign Policy a "rising star at the State Department") resigned very publicly in early December, she complained that State had "ceded to the Pentagon our authority to drive US foreign policy." The question is, will disruption lead to genuine change?
If outgoing senior diplomats are replaced with careerists and entrenched junior peace processors, the Trump shake-up will be just sound and fury. On the other hand, bringing in qualified experts from outside the State Department rank-and-file might lead to meaningful and important changes. If the rumor is true that David Schenker of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy will be the new Deputy Assistant for Near East Affairs, it's a good start.
Genuine change at the State Department will require more than one year of the unpredictable Trump administration. U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman recently began urging the State Department to stop using the term "occupation". When the State Department complies, we'll know something big has happened. Until then, celebrations are premature.
A.J. Caschetta is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
-
The Middle of an Era
By George Friedman
I have written in several places about a paradox. On the one hand, if you take a snapshot of the world every 20 years or so, the reality of how the world works and what matters will have shifted dramatically compared with the previous snapshot. On the other hand, at any point in time there is a general belief that the world as it is at this moment will remain in place for a long time. It is not just the public but also experts and those who govern who tend to fail to see how transitory the present reality is. As a result – and this is what makes it important – as the geopolitical system shifts, there is a tendency to see the shifts as transitory, a temporary disruption caused by unfortunate events, until they are well entrenched, and so we tend to align ourselves with the shift far too late.
In 1900, Europe was peaceful and prosperous, and it dominated the world. It was assumed that this was a permanent reality. By 1920, Europe had torn itself apart, impoverished itself, in a bloody war. It was assumed that Germany, having been defeated, was finished. By 1940, Germany had re-emerged and was astride Europe. It was assumed that the German tide could not be resisted. By 1960, Germany was an occupied and divided country. It was assumed that war between the strongest of the occupiers, the United States and the Soviet Union, was inevitable. By 1980, there had been a war, but in Vietnam rather than Europe, and the United States had been defeated. The U.S. was now aligned with China against the Soviet Union. It was assumed that the Soviets were a permanent and dangerous enemy to both countries. By 2000, the Soviet Union no longer existed. It was assumed that the key interest of all countries was economic growth, and that traditional conflict among nations had become a marginal matter.
Twenty years is an arbitrary time period, but historically it’s about the length of a human generation. The world changes radically in each generation, but the dates can vary. The last era began in 1991 and ended in 2008. Yet even now there are many who are waiting for the world of 1991 to return. More important, only now is the full power of what started in 2008 being felt.
Life After the Cold War
Consider how the world changed in 1991. The Soviet Union collapsed, and it was assumed that the rump state, Russia, was no longer a significant factor in how the world worked. Europe signed the Maastricht Treaty, which was seriously and reasonably believed to be the preface for the creation of a United States of Europe. The United States led a vast coalition of nations against Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, defeating Iraq with few dissenting voices. China had adopted capitalism and begun its historic economic surge; it seemed an unstoppable train headed toward liberal democracy. Japan, the previous economic miracle that would never end, was in the midst of its transformative economic crisis. With the Cold War over, the U.S. was the only global power, and the world was reshaping itself in the American image.
The world was filled with the promise that the horrors and dangers of the 20th century were behind us. And for a time, that appeared to be the case. The first sign that the world was not quite as it seemed came in 2001, when operatives of al-Qaida attacked the United States, and the United States struck out at the Islamic world.
That era hung on for a few more years, until two events a few weeks apart finally broke it. On Aug. 8, 2008, Russia and Georgia went to war, putting to rest the idea that Russia had fallen into permanent, shabby irrelevance, or that conventional warfare was obsolete. Then on Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, wrecking the illusion that the global economy could only go up. In the span of just over five weeks, the core assumptions of the era began to change.
Russia was no longer a superpower, but it was certainly still a regional power. It still had a sphere of influence beyond its borders, and it would protect its interests by force. The empire the czars had created would not go quietly into that good night.
The core weakness of the European Union was revealed: It was not a nation-state but merely a treaty joined into by sovereign states whose leaders were elected by their citizens and whose loyalty was to their voters, not to Brussels. The EU was a perfectly designed instrument for economic success, but it could not cope with economic dysfunction because economic pain did not distribute itself neatly over the bloc’s vast geography. Each member state increasingly pursued its own interests and frequently found the EU a hindrance rather than a help. 2008 was the high point of Europe.
China found in 2008 that an economy built on exports was not in its hands but in the hands of its customers. The economic stagnation that followed transformed China from a powerful engine pouring goods out to eager customers to a nation scrambling to put out financial fires, fantasizing about endless roads and artificial intelligence, all while turning into a dictatorship that would likely define it for the next era. Japan, rather than descend into disaster, used its social solidarity to weather its crisis by accepting the idea that a declining population and stable growth lead to higher per capita income.
And the United States discovered that being astride the world was a prescription for stumbling and falling. The war against jihadism would not end; the Russians would not accept their place in the world order; the Chinese would be less an economic problem than a potential military one; and the Europeans would be self-absorbed and provincial, as would be expected from their position. The United States realized that it was not ready, institutionally or psychologically, to manage the power it had acquired, and it could not delegate.
A New Era
The world in 2008, some 17 years after the last era had begun, did not resemble what most people expected. For a long time – for some even today – there was the expectation that the post-Cold War world (as good a name as there is for what began in 1991) was the norm, and but for someone’s bungling we would still be there and certainly would return to it. But eras come and go, and the world of 2008 will be in place well into the 2020s.
After 10 years, its outline is already clear. It is a time of economic dysfunction, defined by slow growth and unequal distribution of wealth, leading to domestic political tension and deep international friction. Countries will be focused on their own problems, and those problems will create trouble abroad. It is a world that is best described as parochial, tense and angry. There are worse things that it can be. But much depends on how rapidly the United States matures into its role as the single-most powerful country in the world. Likely the emergence of the U.S. from its internal rages will be the major feature of the next era.
Twenty years means nothing in history, but it means everything in our lives, so our tendency to convince ourselves of the permanence of the present era is understandable. But history didn’t end in 1991, and it didn’t end in 2008. For better or worse, this too shall pass.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/wakanda-politics-foreign-policy-debate-mirrors-right/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-03-12&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/donald-trump-foreign-policy-strategic-ambiguity-american-interests/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-03-21&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
-
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/opinion/trump-bolton-allies-enemies.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion
Written by our lead negotiator on the Iran deal , , ,
-
From media thread, Crafty:
"I remain of the point of view that we are BADLY overextended militarily and in great need of shortening the list of things to do:
a) Iran-- Bolton calls for ending the nuke deal and pre-emption, Iran's move for land bridge to the Mediterranean as a possible trigger for war with Israel
b) The Norks-- Bolton calls for pre-emption
c) China-- the South China Sea AND Trade War
d) Russian adventurism in Europe and the Middle East, cyber war
e) the Middle East in general
f) etc etc etc"
---------------------
A number of building blocks now in place help with the above challenges. The team of Matthis, Bolton, Pompeo, the bump up in military spending and the tough talk from Trump follow the proven principle of peace through strength, increasing the leverage of not needing to fire missiles. Mostly it was the corollary of peace through strength, disaster through weakness, that got us to this point.
As Crafty points out, the wide map of trouble weakens the specific US threat in each area to our adversary. We should have dealt with Iran, NK, etc. as they came up.
We will know something very soon regarding North Korea, but I can't imagine what can come out of the talks that solves anything. I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the Xi-Un talks. Also the Moon-Un talks. The NK leader is more rational and committed to his cause than any (previous) American or western leader has been. Trump needs a bold move up his sleeve. I can't imagine Un can abandon his nuclear ambition without a US strike hitting him close to home first. If Trump hits NK facilities, would Un really kill millions in Seoul as a result? For what purpose? 'Deterrence' after the fact?? That makes no sense and he is no doubt interested in his own survival above whatever he sees as the good of his country. What is his future if he attacks S.K. civilians in response to the US striking his military facilities and palaces? The US doesn't have second, third strike capability? Trump would be afraid to use it? It is very expensive to have US Fleets circling just to wait out endless talks. Analysts say NK is 9 months from combining the nuclear capability with the missile capability to hit the US mainland (if they can't already). The end of world non-proliferation that comes with that is unthinkable, yet it is the current course if we don't change it. If not now, when? China accepts an outcome where the entire region goes nuclear? That helps them?? Striking North Korean nuclear facilities and/or palaces DURING the talks as an alternative to runaway global nuclear proliferation is not unthinkable. It likely costs less to wage a strike or two as threatening that and keeping all those assets in the region. As we wonder what Xi told Un, what does Un think Bolton is telling Trump? We need the N.K. threat ended.
The thought of an all out trade war should be unthinkable for China who just retaliated with increased tariffs on US goods. Who de-escalates first? All issues are interrelated. If China sees Trump as failing, they will watch tariffs hurt the US and wait for the Democrat congress, Mueller, impeachment and more US weakness. OTOH, Rasmussen reports Trump approval this morning at 50, and other polls have him close to 45 which means close to 50 and holding onto power in the near term. If Trump holds strong, China will fold first and cut a deal, making Trump look even better. Also, they are a big part of the NK situation and just coached them on it. The South China Sea issues are more long term in approach. Resolving the other US challenges will allow greater focus and leverage there.
Russia: Shrink their importance down to size. Trump expanded the already growing US oil and gas capability. He sold anti tank missiles to Ukraine, re-authorized missile defense in Eastern Europe. We need to aggressively market US natural gas to Russia's customers. Squeeze them further. Russia is also spread too thin across the globe. Does anyone report that their GDP shrunk almost in half during the US fracking boom? 2.2 trillion 2013 to 1.2t 2016: https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp They just tested some new missile but isn't their arsenal aging too? Putin was 'reelected' but he is not immortal.
Middle East and the Iran influence reaches to the Mediterranean. Mentioned elsewhere, Trump believes the Arab Middle East states need to provide the forces if Iran is to be countered. A big reform operation is going on in Saudi and Trump's right hand man Jared is involved. Saudi and Israel have the most to lose if Iran goes nuclear and controls the region. Shia in Iraq are not fully on board with being ruled by Mullahs from Iran. Nor is the population in Iran. The situation with Turkey is complicated. The Kurds... It isn't going that well for the Russians. Maybe ISIS is defeated and Assad still in power but Iran in power isn't a perfect ally for Russia either. Iran's economy, 96th per capita in the world and about to lose their Obama deal, is punching a bit above their weight class as well. Israel has a leadership crisis? The US has a (big) role to play but not as direct of a role as it was in the Iraq war.
And we have a border issue...
We aren't the only ones with challenges. It looks worse to me for everyone else mentioned above. The first strategy in American foreign policy is ... grow our economy - and the rest becomes more manageable.
-
A U.S. Battlefield Victory Against Russia’s ‘Little Green Men’
Americans drove back an advance by mercenaries. The next one ended almost as soon as it began.
A U.S. Battlefield Victory Against Russia’s ‘Little Green Men’
Photo: istock/getty images
By Tod Lindberg
April 3, 2018 5:56 p.m. ET
181 COMMENTS
The U.S. military has created a new precedent for how to counter Russian “hybrid war.” Set in a murky clash of arms in Syria in early February, and one averted in March, this precedent—you might even call it a “red line”—will reverberate from the Middle East to the Black and Baltic seas.
The problem is the appearance on your territory of what defense-policy wonks call “little green men.” They come heavily armed and dressed for combat. They operate at the direction of a government, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Yet they wear no insignia, and their sponsors deny any control over them. Operating outside the laws of war, they pursue Russian political ends such as the illegal takeover of Crimea and the dismemberment of Ukraine. Via a Russian mercenary paramilitary company called Wagner Group, they have turned up to support Russian ends in Syria as well.
Hybrid war, in the popular conception, encompasses all sorts of irregular conflict, from little green men to cyberdisruption to information operations. Its point is the pursuit of political ends by means not readily traceable to their origin. It seeks conflict without accountability. It probes the question of how much gain is possible short of regular military means. As such, it poses particular challenges to deterrence and wartime accountability. These challenges are of especially great and increasing interest in Europe’s east, from Finland and Sweden through the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine, on to the Balkans. What to do?
In Syria on the night of Feb. 7, a group of pro-Assad-regime fighters crossed the Euphrates River and advanced on a headquarters in Deir Ezzour of the Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF are the main regional ally of the U.S. in the fight against ISIS. U.S. special forces were also present at the base in significant numbers on their “advise, assist, accompany” mission.
The Euphrates marks a “deconfliction” line between Russia-backed pro-Assad forces and the U.S.-backed SDF. U.S. and Russian forces are in regular communication with each other to avoid unintended military confrontation in the region.
Although the exact size and composition of the forces crossing the Euphrates that night is in dispute, the fact of the crossing and the presence of Wagner Group mercenaries is not. Nevertheless, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said last week, when U.S. military personnel contacted their Russian counterparts about the contingent bearing down on the SDF base, the Russians said they “weren’t their forces.”
Perhaps this was a mask on a deliberate Russian probe of U.S. and SDF commitments to the base and to securing oil facilities on that side of the river. Perhaps the Wagner Group paramilitary operatives were exceeding their instructions or freelancing. Perhaps the operation was not primarily a Wagner Group affair. Mr. Mattis, who always speaks carefully, said: “I have no evidence that they were being dishonest and that they knew, in fact, these forces were theirs.”
But if the Russian disavowal was intended to sow confusion, it failed. The U.S. attacked the advancing force by air, halting its advance and destroying much of it. Casualty estimates range from dozens to several hundred killed, including unknown numbers of Russians. Russia, in the months since, has lodged no significant public protest.
The message is this: If you are responding to little green men who—without acknowledgment of their state sponsorship—have turned up in your territory or are crossing into it, you should act at once to repel them, rather than scratching your head in puzzlement while they establish their presence. A “deconfliction line” is not an international border, but the principle is similar.
It’s unlikely that the U.S. military attacked the force advancing on the SDF base to make this broader point. But it seems to have been made anyway, even though the Russians and Iranian-backed pro-Assad forces seem intent on continuing to test U.S. resolve, in Syria and elsewhere.
Last month another military force, including Russian mercenaries, crossed the Euphrates deconfliction line toward the Deir Ezzour base. As if to emphasize the seriousness of the issue, the “deconfliction” conversation this time took place at the highest military level: U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford himself discussed the matter with his counterpart, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian military.
Details of that conversation, unsurprisingly, have not become public. But it’s hard to imagine it didn’t include a component from Gen. Dunford along the following lines: If the forces are under your control, pull them back; if not, well . . .
The advancing force pulled back.
Mr. Lindberg is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
-
On Our Minds
Testing Sino-Russian Solidarity. Last week's high-profile visits by the Chinese foreign and defense ministers to Russia were designed to broadcast to the world the growing strategic alignment between Russia and China. What struck us most was how explicit China was in positioning itself as an ally of Russia in opposition to the United States. Rhetoric aside, will the Sino-Russian strategic cooperation actually translate into an allied military front against the United States in a potential conflict? Or will the growing definition of the Eurasian threat only serve to focus American attention on the weak, exploitable fissures of their partnership? We're also building a broader framework to understand how the U.S. military force structure will evolve from a counterterrorism focus to great power competition with Eurasia over the next couple of decades.
-
War and the Asymmetry of Interests
By George Friedman
This past weekend, I attended a re-enactment of the Battle of Lexington, the battle that started the American Revolutionary War, in Massachusetts. The pleasure of being with children and grandchildren was my primary motive. But as I watched the superb re-enactment, an obvious question came to mind: Why did the Americans defeat the British, not just at Lexington but in the war itself? The British forces were better armed and better trained, and there were potentially far more of them. On a purely military basis, the British should have won, yet they didn’t.
A phrase came to mind: asymmetry of interests. The concept of asymmetrical warfare has become commonplace in recent years. It refers to warfare in which different types of technology and tactics confront each other, like improvised explosive devices against armored brigades. Sometimes, the force with what appears to be inferior technology can compel the force with superior technology to withdraw. This is what we see in the American Revolution. We need to consider why.
For the Homeland
About 56,000 British troops were deployed at the height of the Revolutionary War, supplemented by 30,000 Hessian mercenaries in a kind of coalition. The Americans deployed about 80,000 regular and militia forces. The British forces were far better trained and, most important, had more and better artillery. The Hessians were professional soldiers. The Americans had a core of trained soldiers, but the militia troops were a mixed bag. During the war, 25,000 American troops died in battle or from disease compared to 24,000 British. The British losses were a fraction of the global British force, but for the Americans, this was 5 percent of the free white male population, according to the website Foxtrot Alpha.
The British forces were united. The American population was divided. A little less than half of all Americans were committed to the revolution. A fifth were loyal to the British. Thus, both sides were fighting on a terrain in which substantial parts of the population opposed them. The British drew their supplies from Britain, while the Americans had to draw their logistics from the population – with some help from the French.
When you look at the disparities, the losses and the disunity, the Americans should have lost. It is true that the final battle involved the French fleet, but the Americans stayed intact as a fighting force for eight years to reach that point. So even leaving the French out, the Americans were not defeated. And to keep fighting, the Americans had to absorb tremendous casualties without a decisive break in cohesion and morale.
They were able to do it because of the asymmetry of interests. The Americans were fighting for their homeland. Defeat would subordinate the United States to British power for a long time. They had no interests that could compete with the interest to defeat the British. The British, on the other hand, were simultaneously engaged in a struggle with France for domination of Europe and control of the oceans, a contest that would lead to global empire. For the British, the American Revolution was not a matter of indifference, but neither was its outcome decisive in determining Britain’s place in the world.
The British were prepared to deploy a substantial force in North America, but having done that, they went on with their nascent industrial revolution and their global concerns. The amount of time and casualties they could rationally devote to North America had to be seen in the context of broader interests. They could absorb casualties, but the war could not be an absolute imperative.
Absolute War
World War II is on the other end of the spectrum, a rare war in which all major powers had absolutes at stake. Britain, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States all faced, or could face, existential consequences from the war. Their interests were symmetrical. It was therefore a war in which no effort was spared by anyone to avoid defeat and attain victory. In a sense, the war, once commenced, ceased to be political. It became a purely military conflict in which anything less than total military and industrial commitment would be irrational. There was precious little political maneuvering once the war got fully underway in 1941.
For many Americans, the WWII model, which I will call “absolute war,” ought to be the model for fighting all wars. Instead, none of the U.S. wars since WWII have been absolute. As a result, since that time the U.S. has been unable to decisively defeat enemies that are militarily inferior. Korea resulted in stalemate. Vietnam resulted in stalemate, withdrawal and the defeat of America’s Vietnamese allies. The wars against jihadists have not resulted in a decisive, positive outcome for the United States. The only conflict since WWII in which the U.S. achieved its strategic goal was Desert Storm, where the Iraqi army was defeated in Kuwait. Many blame strategy or insufficient public support or a host of other reasons for this.
There might be truth to all these reasons, but I think the fundamental reason was an asymmetry of interest between opposing forces. Consider Vietnam. Vietnam was on the periphery of American strategic interest. The U.S. was less concerned with Vietnam than with the consequences in the region and elsewhere if North Vietnam were to unite the country under communism. Those consequences were hypothetical – even if they occurred, they might not undermine U.S. interests substantially. On the other side, the North Vietnamese were fighting for fundamental national imperatives, chief among them the unification of Vietnam under the ideological and political control of Hanoi. From this, they might control all of Indochina and emerge as a major regional power able to counterbalance China.
In other words, the outcome of the wars in Vietnam – French and American – went to the heart of the North Vietnamese national interest. The wars from the French and American points of view were not insignificant but were still on the margins of national imperatives. The unification of Vietnam under a communist regime was essential to North Vietnam. Blocking North Vietnam’s ambitions was of interest to the United States, but not an absolute imperative. It was part of a mosaic of interests.
The British were not prepared to devote all the resources they had to fighting American rebels. Doing so would have been irrational. Even defeat at the hands of the heavily committed Americans was more palatable than throwing their fleet into battle with the French at that time and place. For the British, there was nothing absolute in North America. It was a political war, not an absolute one. The same has been true of the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, only one of these wars was won, while over time, the imperative that led to war dissipated.
When Great Powers ‘Lose’
In a democratic society, sacrificing lives without an absolute commitment to victory is unsavory. All of the wars since World War II have left a bad taste in the mouths of Americans. Sacrificing lives for tactical advantage, rather than for the direct defense of the homeland, is unpalatable. Sacrificing them for tactical advantage that is abandoned over time is worse. Absolute war is moral; political war designed to bring temporary advantage has the air of immorality.
In watching the re-enactment of Lexington, I could imagine British planners thinking, “We can’t abandon North America, but we can’t ignore the French, and the French are more important.” They must have spent many hours being briefed on the French and far less on the Americans. In due course, since the Americans were prepared to die far out of proportion to the interests of the British, their notional helicopters lifted off their notional embassies and left with their global power surging in spite of defeat.
Great powers have multiple interests, and not all interests are the same. That means a global power is prepared to initiate and withdraw from wars without victory, for tactical and political advantage. Over time, paying the cost of the war becomes irrational. Great powers can “lose” wars in this sense and still see their power surge. Fighting in a war in which your country’s interest is not absolute, and therefore the lives of soldiers are not absolute, is difficult for a democracy to do. In most of the world, the great power will encounter an asymmetry of interest. Those who live there care far more about the outcome of the war than the great power does. And so, the great power withdraws from Syria when the price becomes higher than the prize. Given the string of defeats, it is expected that the great power is in decline. Like Britain after its defeat in North America, it is not in decline. It has simply moved on to more pressing interests.
-
Great wisdom in this, applies to many things.
-
Recent reviews of this article: "Superb piece!" - Crafty Dog
"Rather than seek to impose an order of its own design on the turbulent region, Washington would simply ensure that no other power or group of powers succeeds in dominating the Middle East."
"A coalition of front-line states, promoted and supported by the United States, may ultimately address the Iran problem in ways no outside power ever could."
-----------------------
Along with VDH, WRM is my favorite Democrat.
Trump’s Realist Syria Strategy
By Walter Russell Mead, American Interest, WSJ
April 16, 2018
As the echoes from President Trump’s second Syrian missile strike died away, many observers criticized the administration for lacking a coherent strategy. There is more than a little truth to the charge. The drama and disarray of this often-dysfunctional White House does not suggest a Richelieu at work. The presidential Twitter feed has not always been consistent or levelheaded on the topic of the Syrian war, and it is hard to reconcile Mr. Trump’s denunciations of Bashar al-Assad and his warnings about Iranian aggression with his apparent determination to remove U.S. troops from Syria as quickly as possible.
The tangled politics of last week’s missile strikes illustrate the contradictions in Mr. Trump’s approach. The president is a realist who believes that international relations are both highly competitive and zero-sum. If Iran and Russia threaten the balance of power in the Middle East, it is necessary to work with any country in the region that will counter them, irrespective of its human-rights record. The question is not whether there are political prisoners in Egypt; the question is whether Egypt shares U.S. interests when it comes to opposing Iran.
Yet the rationale for the missile strikes was not realist but humanitarian and legalistic: Syria’s illegal use of chemical weapons against its own people demanded or at least justified the Western attacks. For any kind of activist Middle East policy, Mr. Trump needs allies—including neoconservatives and liberal internationalists at home and foreign allies like Britain and France abroad—and the realpolitik approach he wishes to pursue would alienate them.
Nevertheless, as is often the case with this unconventional administration, a pattern if not quite a strategy is beginning to emerge—one defined as much by what the president rejects as by what he seeks to accomplish. The administration’s approach looks and often is erratic, but beneath the rants and the posturing Mr. Trump seems to be working toward an approach to the Middle East that reflects the interplay of American politics and interests in a strangely coherent way.
Mr. Trump sounds inconsistent at least in part because his choices are so unappealing. Iran’s Russia-assisted march toward regional dominance leaves the U.S. caught between two courses. Letting Iran have its way in Syria opens the door to a much more dangerous confrontation between Israel and its Arab partners on one side and Tehran on the other. But denying Iran a victory in Syria almost certainly would mean major American military commitments, as well as another extended exercise in nation-building as the U.S. tries to cobble together some kind of viable, nonradical government in Damascus.
Mr. Trump recoils from both choices on both political and policy grounds. Standing back while Russia and Iran run the table in the Middle East would be bad policy and bad politics—but so, too, would rushing into another Iraq-style military and political effort to stabilize Syria. The goal is to avoid bailing out without getting sucked in.
Mr. Trump may be unintentionally arriving at a form of offshore balancing. Rather than seek to impose an order of its own design on the turbulent region, Washington would simply ensure that no other power or group of powers succeeds in dominating the Middle East. When the balance of power appeared secure, the U.S. would have a low profile in the region; but when, as now, the balance appeared to be threatened, the U.S. would be more forward-leaning, working with partners who share its concerns to contain the ambitions of revisionist powers. Mr. Trump also seeks compensation from the countries whose independence America supports; rich allies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait should help pay for their defense.
For Mr. Trump, this is a common-sense approach to a thorny problem, and while the pressures of events—and the united efforts of his advisers—may sometimes cause him to deviate, his inner compass always returns to this course.
Mr. Trump’s approach carries its share of risks, but its failure is by no means assured. Both Russia and Iran are overstretched. They suffer from weak economies and parasitical state structures. Their populations are not in love with their Syrian adventures. Despite recent increases, oil prices remain well below the level they require to fund their ambitious foreign policies while meeting domestic needs. Expanded sanctions against both Russia and Iran are gaining support in Europe. Simultaneously, Arab-Israeli cooperation against Iran continues to gel. A coalition of front-line states, promoted and supported by the United States, may ultimately address the Iran problem in ways no outside power ever could.
The Trump agenda has a real chance of success in the Middle East—but only if the Trump administration can master the dark arts of alliance management. That may seem unlikely, but if there is one thing we have learned about this president, it is that he can be tactically flexible in pursuit of his goals.
-
GPF discusses a theme I have raised around here repeatedly:
by Jacob L. Shapiro
Everywhere you turn, people are sounding the alarm about the decline of American power. The alarms are loudest in the U.S. itself. Those who oppose President Donald Trump believe he is destroying America’s influence and credibility abroad. (The threat to tear up the Iran deal is just one example.) Those who support Trump believe U.S. power has already declined. (Implicit in the slogan “Make America Great Again” is the idea that America is not currently great.) Outside the United States, the U.S. has become punching bag, punchline and declining power all at once. The term “multipolar world,” once simply wishful thinking, is now being uttered by U.S. friends and foes alike.
Repeating History
We’ve seen this all before. After World War II, the U.S. became the undisputed global superpower. It was the only country that had nuclear weapons and was one of the few countries involved in the war that came away from it relatively unscathed at home. The U.S. lost about 400,000 soldiers and a small number of civilians in the war. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, lost around 11 million soldiers and some 7 million to 10 million civilians. While Soviet and European cities were being rebuilt, American cities prospered. It seemed clear to all that the future belonged to the United States.
But it didn’t take long for the luster of unrivaled power to tarnish. The U.S. military machine relaxed as quickly as it had mobilized, and wartime unity gave way to peacetime political debates over government spending and entitlement programs. Within five years, a bipolar world emerged: The Soviets attained an atomic bomb, and the U.S. was caught flat-footed in a war on the Korean Peninsula that ended in a stalemate. Soon thereafter, the U.S. was withdrawing from Vietnam and rioting at home. In 1971, then-President Richard Nixon predicted a world that he said would soon emerge in which the U.S. was “no longer in the position of complete pre-eminence.” Within 26 years of the end of World War II, the U.S. seemed resigned to its fate.
The 1970s were a turbulent decade in America. That turbulence brought to the White House the man who originally coined the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Ronald Reagan had the fortune of being in the right place at the right time. As a leader, his main function was to restore a sense of optimism and confidence to the American people. Whether he accomplished his goals is a topic for others to debate. What is important here is that by the end of Reagan’s term, the Soviet experiment had run its course. In 1987, Reagan demanded that the Soviet Union tear down the Berlin Wall, and within three years of his leaving office, the Soviet Union itself also crumbled. In the U.S., the end of history was declared, and the United States was king once more in the “giddy springtime of the bourgeoisie.”
The 1990s were an unabashedly optimistic time in the United States, but by 2001, doubt had crept back into the American psyche. The dot-com bubble burst, the World Trade Center towers fell, and the U.S. once again engaged in wars in faraway places to secure its interests and preserve its credibility in an increasingly hostile world. The 2008 financial crisis added insult to injury, as a new generation of Americans graduated college with dismal prospects for employment, let alone for pursuing the American dream and building lives more prosperous than those of their parents.
Leaving Out the Biases
Twenty-six years after the Soviet Union fell, the U.S. elected another man who promised to make America great again, and the concept of multipolarity from the Nixon days was resuscitated. Multipolarity is a fancy word with a simple definition. It is the idea that power is not dominated by one country but distributed among multiple countries. China is seen as the eventual challenger to U.S. supremacy, but in a multipolar system, there has to be more than one. Russia, India and Germany are a few of the other contenders.
The problem with discussions about multipolarity is that they are often laced with biases about how people want the world to evolve rather than how the world actually works. Proponents of a multipolar world see events as defined not by the actions or interests of a single global hegemon but rather by the competing interests of different nodes of power. They often argue that a multipolar world, where equal powers cooperate in a way that serves their interests, is more peaceful and desirable than an imperial Pax Americana, where all countries chafe against the overwhelming power of a single political entity.
When Russian and Chinese political figures speak about a multipolar world, they are speaking about the world they want to see, not the world that exists today. Unsurprisingly, the world they want is one in which they have a greater share of power than they have now. It is a particularly useful concept for countries like Russia and China, which have a history of mistrust and very real geopolitical imperatives driving them toward zero-sum competition. Proponents also tend to use the U.S. as both a scapegoat and a lightning rod: The root of the world’s problems is the level of power the U.S. holds globally. The inverse is also sometimes true. Proponents of a unipolar system often dismiss setbacks in American foreign policy because setbacks don’t comport with their unrealistic visions of U.S. hegemony.
Ultimately, whether we live in a multipolar or unipolar world is an objective, not a political, question, and it is an exceedingly important one. The answer affects how we understand the North Korea crisis, developments in Iran and the trade skirmish with China. If the world is unipolar, then the stories dominating the headlines today are all brushfires that the U.S. is struggling to put out and that won’t be of much consequence even five years from now. If the world is on the verge of multipolarity, then these issues are manifestations of the competition between the U.S. and its rising challengers, and the post-1991 way of viewing the world has become obsolete.
The Driving Force
Perhaps the simplest way to address this question is to ask what country is driving these events. On the Korean Peninsula, it was Kim Jong Un who accelerated Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, but it was the U.S. that deployed three aircraft carriers to the region and threatened fire and fury against the hermit kingdom unless it backed down. Now North and South Korea are negotiating, and even recalcitrant China is getting tough on the North. In Iran, the nuclear deal is under strain because of U.S. threats to withdraw. European countries, led by France and Germany, don’t want to lose access to what Europeans have always wanted out of Iran – cheap oil. If Trump refuses to renew the sanctions waiver on May 12, banks in countries that do not reduce Iranian oil imports will face sanctions. And for most, cheap Iranian oil is not worth the price of U.S. sanctions. As for China, the U.S. made the first move to revamp the bilateral trade relationship, because the U.S. has more leverage in this relationship – China needs to export to the U.S. more than the U.S. needs to import from China.
In other words, the actions of the United States are still driving global developments. And for all of its mistakes (e.g., the Iraq war) and internal problems (e.g., the decline of the middle class’s purchasing power), the U.S. in 2018 is far more powerful than it was when the last discussion of a multipolar world began during the Nixon administration. In 2018, there is no equivalent to the Vietnam War, nor is there anything close to the level of domestic social unrest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, despite what you might see in the press. (This week marks the 48th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. It is difficult to imagine what the reaction to Kent State would have been if there were a 24-hour news cycle back then.) The U.S. has a penchant for hysteria that the current media environment only magnifies, and the world is full of would-be competitors who want to use that crisis of confidence for their own agendas.
Even so, the U.S. is still the world’s pre-eminent power. This isn’t necessarily a permanent state of affairs. If, for example, GPF is wrong about China’s and Russia’s underlying weaknesses, a multipolar world might be closer than I’m suggesting. But that’s a pretty big if. In 2018, the world is still unipolar. The U.S. remains the global center of gravity, and the actions it takes are felt throughout the world. This should not necessarily come as a comfort. With great power comes great responsibility. But the job of an analyst is not to provide comfort; it is to point out where great power currently lies.
-
A Crisis on Each End of Asia
Modest success on North Korea is giving the U.S. breathing room to focus on Iran.
April 30, 2018 5:56 p.m. ET
One of the world’s oldest and ugliest frozen conflicts, dating back to 1950, appears to be thawing. North and South Korea are vowing to end their state of war. Kim Jong Un is offering one concession after another on his nuclear program, while progress continues toward a summit between Mr. Kim and President Trump.
At the same time, the U.S. and its Middle Eastern allies are tightening the screws on Iran. America’s newly confirmed secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, made his first trip to the region in his new role this week. As he orchestrated a series of anti-Iranian statements with Arab and Israeli leaders, bunker-busting bombs (presumably Israel’s) hit Iranian bases in Syria.
These developments are closely related. Throughout Mr. Trump’s tenure, his foreign-policy team has juggled two crises: First, North Korea’s progress on missiles that could carry its nuclear weapons to the U.S. mainland threatened to upset the balance of power in Northeast Asia. If Mr. Kim destroyed Tokyo, would the U.S. really retaliate and put the American homeland at risk?
Second, the Obama administration’s bungled attempt to stabilize the Middle East by softening its approach to Iran had the opposite effect. Longtime American allies became jittery about Iran’s imperial ambitions, even as sectarian war and jihadist violence erupted across Syria and Iraq.
The dilemma for the White House was that neither challenge could be ignored, but managing two explosive crises, one at each end of Asia, would stretch America’s political and military capacities to the limit. Complicating matters further, North Korea is a client of China, while Iran is an ally of Russia. An aggressive approach risked pitting the U.S. against Beijing and Moscow at the same time.
The big question was whether one of the two crises could be put on hold. In his unconventional way, Mr. Trump has been probing to see whether China or Russia is willing to cooperate. With China, he linked trade negotiations to Beijing’s help on the Korea issue, even as he raised the temperature by signaling that U.S. military action against Mr. Kim was on the table. With Russia, Mr. Trump has consistently spoken of his desire for better relations and made clear that Moscow’s help with Iran could lead to sanctions relief.
Mr. Trump seems to have believed initially that Russia would be more likely to choose engagement, but Moscow has so far stuck by Iran. China, in contrast, has twisted Mr. Kim’s arm to de-escalate. This makes sense: Although a rising China may be a greater long-term threat to the U.S. than a declining Russia, China has more powerful motives for working with the U.S. than Russia does.
To start, China is deeply invested in its trade relationship with the U.S. A trade war would hurt both countries, but China has more at stake. It’s poorer, with a financial system under great stress, and it depends heavily on exports.
Further, China does not want North Korea to upset the nuclear balance in Northeast Asia. If Japan begins to doubt its protection under America’s nuclear umbrella, it will go nuclear itself. Taiwan and South Korea would soon follow. Yes, China would like to maintain North Korea as a buffer against the West, but it does not want nuclear adversaries along its coastline. Reining in Mr. Kim helps both China and the U.S.
China and the U.S. also have some interests in common in the Middle East. They both want low oil prices and a stable geopolitical environment. If disruption in the region jacks up energy prices, China loses, given that it is the world’s largest energy importer, and Russia wins, since high prices would prop up its shaky economy and make Vladimir Putin’s foreign ambitions more affordable. Whenever Chinese leaders reflect on these truths, it is a good day for Washington and a bad day for Moscow.
Mr. Kim’s concessions thus far do not mean that the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula is over. China may be interested in preventing North Korea’s missile program from destabilizing East Asia, but forcing Pyongyang to give up its existing arsenal would be much harder. Still, even a temporary freeze of the missile program gives the U.S. breathing room to focus its efforts on the Middle East.
The early signs are that the Trump administration intends to make the most of this North Korean opportunity. By responding positively to Mr. Kim’s overtures and continuing preparations for the promised summit, the White House is signaling its appreciation for China’s help and paving the way for intense negotiations with Beijing and Pyongyang over both security and trade. That will let the U.S. ratchet up the pressure even further in the Middle East. Moscow and Tehran would be well-advised to study their copies of “The Art of the Deal.”
-
Thank you for posting this. I strongly agree with Mead that "These developments are closely related".
Since the writing of that, Trump announced his bold decision on Iran and it definitely strengthens his hand with North Korea. In a short time Trump looked in the world press like an idiot tweeting about "little rocket man" and now hne looks like the most serious world leader since Reagan and Thatcher.
During this process he changed his advisers to so-called hard-liners, he moved the embassy when everyone said he couldn't, he pulled out of the Paris accord and the TPP, showing strength and resolve, and he stood up to allies like Macron in France, the former administration and the 'pragmatists' of the old Republican establishment to call out the truth on Iran, taking a bold risk very much like Reagan did with Gorbachev in Reykjavik.
Assuming Xi and Un are quite bright, aware and self-interested, and if they thought they could just finesse their way out of this crisis with Trump, the Iran pronouncement in context with the other moves mentioned will tend to change their thinking.
The other big breakthrough on this front was the breaking of the 'sequester' that limited US spending on defense. None of us like what that does to spending overall, but on the defense side, in the short, medium and long term, peace through strength is cheaper than world chaos through US weakness, the policy Trump inherited.
Xi and Un (and the mullahs) see the US commitment to build a 350 ship navy as one benchmark, where just one of our vessels could fire and end his regime as he knows it. The other half of military strength is the willingness to use it. Trump works everyday on his public image as a loose cannon that could go off at any time. For all Un knows, Trump could order a strike from the negotiating table if he doesn't see his enemy as serious about resolving the threat to the US and the region's security. That perception strengthens his negotiating hand and makes the actual need to use force much less likely.
Xi and China do not want the US to deploy force or look strong militarily on their border. Xi has enormous leverage and is most certainly telling Un to make this (Trump) problem go away.
-
A Conversation About U.S. Credibility
By Jacob L. Shapiro
In an era in which reality is so often defined by how well something can be quantified, politics is a stubborn outlier. Some aspects are quantifiable, especially as they relate to military strength or economic conditions: We can measure the number and range of Iran’s missiles, or the widening wealth gap in the United States. But data (especially economic data) is imperfect, and it’s often deceptive. For instance, that Iran has a certain number of missiles says nothing about the quality of the missiles, let alone whether Iran would use them. “Political science” emerged as an academic discipline in the 19th century out of a desire to treat politics like a science – to define its truths in terms of empirical data, not ancient Greek philosophical principles. But exclusive reliance on data is no better than exclusive reliance on theory. And unfortunately, especially in the United States, political science has become not just data-driven but data-obsessed.
The limitations of this approach can be observed clearly in a debate raging over the importance of U.S. “credibility” in the world. The U.S. made three major foreign policy moves this month: It pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, it has been inconsistent on trade disputes with China, and canceled, at least temporarily, a planned summit with Kim Jong Un next month. In both the U.S. and abroad, it is becoming a common refrain to hear that U.S. credibility has been damaged as a result of these moves, and that this has the effect of eroding U.S. power and creating more geopolitical instability.
Determining whether this is true is more difficult than it may seem. After all, how does one measure credibility? We could survey a large sample of people in a foreign country and ask whether it is commonly believed that the U.S. will follow through on its promises, but the results would be imprecise – and mostly irrelevant. Answers would vary based on the issue, and more important, it’s foreign governments, not their citizens, that must decide whether the U.S. is trustworthy after the foreign policy decisions of this month.
And Americans themselves are unreliable judges of U.S. credibility abroad because of the political history of the term in America. The credibility question was ubiquitous in the 1960s not because of the United States’ relationship with foreign governments but because a “credibility gap” opened up between the Lyndon B. Johnson government and the American electorate. The Johnson government relied on key statistics (like “body count”) to claim that the U.S. was winning the Vietnam War even as the situation was getting no better. Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal widened the trust gap still further. Ironically, when Americans refer to the credibility of the U.S. abroad, they are often projecting their own lack of confidence in their government onto others.
Yet despite the shapelessness of the term credibility, and despite the political landmines surrounding discussions of it, it is not a discussion that can be avoided. The reliability of U.S. promises is not an academic question. The U.S. became involved in the Vietnam War precisely because it feared the implications for its containment policy against the Soviet Union if it allowed Vietnam to fall into communist hands. What was at stake was not so much Vietnam but the value of a U.S. security guarantee. The same is true, albeit on a much smaller scale, of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. Russia was not interested in conquering Georgia so much as it was interested in demonstrating that a U.S. security guarantee was worthless, and therefore that countries in the Caucasus would do well to make their peace with a resurgent Moscow.
Credibility, then, is as much perception as it is reality. The Iran nuclear deal is a useful example. The stated goal of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (as it is officially known) was to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But the U.S. and Iran each conceived of the JCPOA in very different terms. The U.S. wanted a willing partner in the fight against the Islamic State. It got a partner that was too willing, because after IS was all but defeated, Iran aggressively pushed into the region and began testing missiles. Iran wanted to rejoin the global economy and secure legitimacy for its foreign policy moves in the region. The deal was concluded by two weak administrations, and in the U.S. it wasn’t even given the status of a treaty, meaning it was easy to cancel.
Those who advocate remaining in the JCPOA argue that leaving the deal is catastrophic for U.S. credibility. They find useful corroboration of this position from Iran’s president, for whom the U.S. withdrawal is disastrous, and from European leaders who are primarily interested in buying cheap Iranian oil. Those who advocated leaving the deal think that Iran is a menace with no credibility of its own and that it is better to take the hit to U.S. credibility than to remain in a political arrangement that empowers a U.S. adversary. It’s hard to argue that U.S. credibility has been damaged while Iran is trying to buy the Iraqi election and is building bases on the Israeli border.
The U.S.-North Korea issue is different, if less immediately weighty. The Trump administration appeared poised for a summit with Kim Jong Un, only to withdraw from the summit via a letter that boasted of the United States’ own nuclear arsenal and gave the primary reason for the cancelation to be the “tremendous anger and open hostility” of recent North Korean statements. The Trump letter came days after the U.S. insinuated that Libya was a good model for North Korean denuclearization, an eyebrow-raising suggestion considering the U.S. helped topple Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya in 2011. Now the U.S. and North Korea are talking again, and the summit may be back on – or it may not. The whole issue has become a farce.
But it is a farce that could be damaging to U.S. credibility. North Korea released U.S. prisoners, toned down its criticism of U.S.-South Korea military exercises, and appeared to dismantle a nuclear test site. Though Iran, strictly speaking, was not violating the terms of its deal with the U.S., Washington could at least point to violations of the spirit of the agreement. Not so with North Korea.
The U.S. has also been losing the larger credibility battle in East Asia. U.S. credibility in the region won’t rise and fall depending on whether Trump and Kim share a cheeseburger, but it matters whether countries in the region trust the United States. And on this issue, North Korea already achieved a major objective months ago when it exposed deep cracks in the U.S.-South Korea security relationship by pushing the U.S. to the brink of a military strike. North Korea also successfully demonstrated to U.S. allies like Japan that U.S. resolve in halting North Korea’s nuclear program is mainly rhetorical.
What this all really comes down to is that the United States is at the center of the world order, and when the United States acts in ways that other countries don’t like (or that political factions within the U.S. don’t like), it often manifests as the weakening of U.S. credibility. Sometimes the issue of reduced U.S. credibility is real, as it is in Asia, where the power of the U.S. is declining (compared to China and Japan), and where the United States’ inconsistent approach to the North Korea issue is producing unease, not a tactically useful level of unpredictability. Sometimes, however, credibility is simply a scapegoat for a policy disagreement or divergent strategic interests. Either way, the issue is not so much that the U.S. broke this or that agreement as it is a much broader lack of strategic clarity dating back to 1991 about how and to what end the U.S. wields its power in the world.
More than anything, the conversation about credibility is a veneer that hides the true nature of international politics. Ultimately, the best indicator of how a country is going to behave is not what its leaders have said or agreed to, but what its interests dictate. Consider that in 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. I can think of no two political regimes whose credibility in keeping the terms of such a pact could have been lower – and yet they signed the pact, even though both were planning on eventually breaking it. Those who worry about U.S. credibility have a notion that U.S. exceptionalism means the U.S. keeps its word when all other countries don’t, or more optimistically, that politicians can be trusted. That’s a pleasant fiction. The U.S. is a country like any other, and it can be trusted to act in its interests at all times. The problem isn’t so much that the U.S. cannot be trusted, but that the U.S. is often unclear about what those interests are, an unfortunate byproduct of thinking about politics as an algebra problem.
The post A Conversation About U.S. Credibility appeared first on Geopolitical Futures.
-
The United States is restructuring its global military footprint, reallocating its resources and shifting its strategic focus to better compete against China and Russia.
To achieve this, the United States will be compelled to prioritize its commitments in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
However, enduring U.S. commitments elsewhere and emerging global flashpoints will sidetrack Washington's attention and resources.
Changing times call for changing measures. In the face of an intensifying great power competition with Russia and China, the United States is expanding its efforts to refocus its global strategy, force deployments and resources to better position itself in a new struggle. But recalibrate as it might, the United States' enduring commitments, along with global flashpoints, will continue to sap the country's attention and resources as it wages a new global battle for influence.
The Big Picture
At the outset of 2018, Stratfor noted that the deepening collaboration between China and Russia would pose a strategic threat to the United States, prompting the latter to consolidate its alliances in the Eurasian borderlands. Washington is doing that and more as it embarks on a period of great power competition with Moscow and Beijing, but ongoing commitments and regional issues appear set to dog its efforts.
See 2018 Annual Forecast
Finding a New Focus
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the advent of the so-called global "war on terrorism" in 2001 ushered in a change in the United States' strategic defense posture, which shifted from a primary focus on defeating a great Eurasian power toward a more diffuse, enduring and amorphous effort against violent non-state actors and "rogue" states. As part of this transformation, the United States significantly bolstered its force presence in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, altered its training structure and prioritized different sets of military capabilities. At the same time, the United States greatly reduced its presence in Europe, decreased its capabilities in the Pacific and shuttered a large number of headquarters primed for a potential war with Russia.
But after years of unceasing conflict in the Middle East and South Asia, the United States has come to recognize the profound shift in the global strategic balance. Observing China's growing strength and efforts to modernize its military, the Obama administration attempted to rebalance toward Asia with the "Pacific Pivot" in 2011. Russia's military intervention in Ukraine in 2014 also completely altered the United States' direction in Europe, as Washington rushed additional forces to the Continent as part of increased rotational deployments under the European Reassurance Initiative after it had begun to withdraw forces from the region.
But this year's National Defense Strategy, which identifies great power competition as the "central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security," leaves no room for doubt as to the strategic direction the United States wishes to pursue in its security outlook. Reinforcing the new defense strategy is a robust defense budget that seeks to repair some of the readiness shortfalls stemming from years of sequestration (automatic spending reductions).
In line with its strategic direction, the United States will make significant changes in terms of the regional deployment of strategic forces and, in the same vein, the geographic areas it wishes to prioritize. The North Atlantic has emerged as a central battleground in the competition with Russia, prompting U.S. military officials to announce plans to reactivate the U.S. 2nd Fleet in July after deactivating it in 2011. The 2nd Fleet's central mission will be to ensure U.S. naval dominance in the body of water amid increased forays by Russian submarines into that particular ocean. At the northern edge of the area, Iceland, which is strategically positioned as a base from which to detect and intercept such submarine activity, is accordingly receiving increased attention from the United States after its significance waned following the end of the Cold War.
At the other end of Europe, Ankara's balancing effort between the United States and Russia will gain added importance as Moscow seeks to break the containment role that Turkey, home of the strategic Bosporus, has played on its flank and the U.S. efforts to maintain it. Elsewhere on the Continent, the Baltic nations — Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia — have assumed an increasingly important role as battleground states between the United States and Russia. In the north, Scandinavia in general and Norway in particular are witnessing increased attention from the United States as well, mainly because of the area's strategic proximity to the Arctic theater. Furthermore, the U.S. Navy has raised the number of deployments made by the 6th Fleet to the European theater amid expectations of more patrols in the Baltic and Black seas.
In the Pacific, China's growing arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles and the United States' lack of air bases relative to other theaters complicates the latter's strategic military posture in the competition with Beijing. As a result, the United States must place special emphasis on its relationship with Japan and Singapore. At the same time, the Pentagon is simultaneously searching for alternative bases in places such as northern Australia, the Philippines and the Northern Mariana Islands. The United States already maintains a considerable military presence in South Korea, but these forces are largely oriented toward a potential conflict with North Korea and could even constitute a strategic liability to the United States because they would be within striking range of China's much larger land forces in the event of open hostilities.
A chart comparing the composition of the U.S. and Chinese navies by 2030.
The United States is the world's dominant naval power, but China has ambitions to closing the gap.
Beyond military issues, however, Washington also aims to strengthen its relationship with a number of non-allied Asia-Pacific countries as a hedge against China's ascendancy. India, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, in particular, are all likely to witness increased attention from the United States in the years ahead. Together, these countries form a solid anchor on the southern rim of the first island chain — an area that encircles the Yellow, East China and South China seas — from which the U.S. Navy could choke off China's sea lines of communication to Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Naturally, China is unlikely to remain passive on this front, and will work hard to enhance its relationship with Southeast Asian countries in response.
A map showing China's first and second island chains (PLACEHOLDER - Source to change)
Unsurprisingly, Taiwan remains a serious bone of contention. The United States appears increasingly willing to provoke China's ire against the island through the sale of sensitive military equipment and enhanced diplomatic and military engagement with Taipei. Accordingly, Taiwan is the issue that is most likely to push the strategic competition between Washington and Beijing into an active conflict, especially as China's military options expand with its naval development.
Finally, the United States is considering major changes in how it deploys its main naval forces on a global basis. Over the last three decades, U.S. aircraft carrier task forces have maintained a virtually constant presence in the waters around the Middle East. Now, however, the country is working toward shifting its deployments to focus more on the European and Pacific theaters and to be less predictable and routine in its naval forays.
The Fly in the Ointment
Although Washington has recognized the emergence of this new great power competition and begun acting accordingly, several flashpoints could distract the United States and tie up its resources and focus. Of these, the most prominent is the global "war on terrorism," which continues to this day, even as its focus has shifted considerably since beginning 17 years ago. Globally, but especially in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the United States has devoted considerable attention and resources to this fight. In turn, this has placed significant strain on the United States' special operations forces and hurt the readiness of U.S. air forces, both from the Air Force and the Navy. Almost two decades of consistent deployments and rotations to frontlines and bases have left little time for recuperation. This fatigue, coupled with the recent effects of sequestration, has led to maintenance problems, the widespread cannibalization of airframes and a recent spike in accidents.
The United States preparations to confront China and Russia could be derailed by significant conflicts and engagements elsewhere.
Adding to this ongoing strain is the potential for significant conflicts that could distract the United States from its preparations to confront China and Russia. Immediately, this could emerge in the form of a possible war with either Iran or North Korea — or both. The U.S. withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal and the adoption of an increasingly hard-line stance on Iran's activities in the Middle East could ignite a conflict between the two, especially if Tehran chooses to restart its nuclear program in response to Washington's actions. As for North Korea, the initial optimism regarding a summit between Washington and Pyongyang could rapidly give way to preparations for war in the absence of any breakthrough in negotiations.
A war with either Iran or North Korea would undoubtedly require the commitment of large numbers of forces and funds, but even a containment strategy against both could entail long and significant deployments in and around the Persian Gulf and the Korean peninsula. The United States could rapidly reverse its decision to curtail its permanent carrier presence around the Middle East, the theater of operations for the 5th Fleet, if tensions with Iran rise significantly as a result of Washington's increasingly confrontational approach toward the country. The return of more forces to the Middle East, however, would hamper the United States' struggle against Russia and China, since the region is far removed from the areas of activity central to the emerging great power competition. Force dispositions around North Korea, on the other hand, offer more flexibility because the U.S. military could redirect troops and materiel in northeast Asia, especially those in Japan — if not those in South Korea that are locked on North Korea and remain vulnerable to Chinese action — to face China more easily.
These costly distractions to U.S. power are unlikely to escape the attention of China or Russia. As the great powers engage in increasingly adversarial competition, the planet might witness a geopolitical climate unseen since the days of the Cold War. The hallmarks of such competition would include concerted support for insurgencies and proxy forces around the globe that could tie down an adversary in protracted and expensive campaigns. Russia, in fact, has already begun pursuing some facets of this new fight by reportedly supporting certain factions of the Taliban in Afghanistan, while the United States has previously backed certain anti-Russian factions in Syria. In this context, if the adversarial relationship between the United States and Iran reaches a more bellicose level, Moscow and Beijing could provide direct aid to Tehran to improve its capabilities.
The United States has moved to define the great power competition with Russia and China as its greatest priority, necessitating a restructuring of the country's global military footprint, reallocation of resources and shift in strategic focus. The Pentagon has already begun implementing measures in this regard, but it is by no means a straightforward process. Continued distractions abound, specifically the crises with Iran and North Korea, though more generally the enduring U.S. commitment to the global "war on terrorism." In the end, the United States will undoubtedly intensify its focus on great power competition, but overcoming these distractions will be no easy task — especially as China and Russia are unlikely to make the United States' attempts to disentangle itself any easier.
Omar Lamrani focuses on air power, naval strategy, technology, logistics and military doctrine for a number of regions, including the Middle East and Asia. He studied international relations at Clark University and holds a master's degree from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, where his thesis centered on Chinese military doctrine and the balance of power in the Western Pacific.
-
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/trump-could-be-one-of-americas-great-foreign-policy-presidents/
Trump Could Be One of America's Great Foreign Policy Presidents
Below I repost Uwe Parpart's Asia Times analysis of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore. Liberal media is aghast at the president's rough handling of Canadian boy-band frontman Justin Trudeau, and his confrontational approach overall at the Group of Seven summit. When the dust settles, though, Trump may accomplish what eluded Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama: a stabler and safer world without the need for millions of American boots on the ground. He well may go down in history as one of our great foreign policy presidents. It's not in the bag, but it is within sight.
North Korea and Iran are decisive issues: Will America and its allies be subject to blackmail by rogue nuclear states? There is a grand compromise that might work in the case of North Korea, and the president reportedly has already put it on the table: Formal diplomatic recognition of the Pyongyang regime in return for full de-nuclearization. In the case of Iran, the president's tough stance and close coordination with our ally Israel has already pushed Iran back in Syria and put the Islamist regime under extreme stress.
Of course, Trump can't please everybody. German Chancellor Angela Merkel complains that Trump is being too nice to Russia by suggesting that it rejoin the Group of Seven. Considering that Germany spends just 1.2% of GDP on defense and can't get more than four fighters in the air at any given moment, that's chutzpah. Merkel's policy is to talk tough about sanctions against Russia while rolling over for Putin when it comes to Germany's gas supplies, which will be supplied by the just-started Nord Stream II pipeline from Russia. Germany likes to wag a finger at Russia over its depredations in Ukraine, but only 18% of Germans say they will fight to defend their country. Trump's policy is to rebuild American strength and stand up to Russia, while looking for ways to strike agreements with Russia--on American terms. That's the difference between speak softly and carry a big stick, and declaim loudly while waving a bratwurst. If the Germans don't want to spend money on defense, let alone fight, that's their business, but they shouldn't lecture us about how to handle the competition.
Just what has the Group of Seven accomplished in the last dozen years? Who can remember a single line of a single communique? And what is the group worth without Russia? "We have a world to run," Trump said, and the effort requires having Russia at the table.
I'm guardedly hopeful about the Singapore summit. The foreign policy elite despises America's president, who is an amateur in international relations. But the elite knows that it has failed miserably since the end of the Cold War -- for example Prof. Michael Mandelbaum, whose 2016 book Mission Failure catalogs the collective blunders of the establishment since the end of the Cold War (see my notice at Claremont Review of Books).
-
Sent to me by someone of background for whom I have high regard:
PS: Note the references to "uni-polar" and "multi-polar".
==========================
https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/raiding-and-international-brigandry-russias-strategy-for-great-power-competition/
Raiding and International Brigandry: Russia’s Strategy for Great Power Competition
No one knows if the next six years of Vladimir Putin’s reign will be his last, but signs suggest they will be the most difficult for Washington to navigate in what is now widely acknowledged on both sides as a long-term confrontation between Russia and the West. Moscow has weathered an economic crisis brought on by low oil prices and Western sanctions, domestic political scandals, and international setbacks. More importantly, just as America’s own national security documents begin to frame great power competition as the defining challenge to U.S. power, Russia is yet again adapting its approach based on the experience of the past three years. Russian leaders may not have something that would satisfy the Western academic strategy community as a deliberate “grand strategy,” but they nonetheless possess a strategic outlook and a theory of victory for this competition. That theory is based less on direct competition and more on raiding, a stratagem that holds promise for revisionist ambitions and the weaker side in the conflict.
Raiding is the way by which Russia seeks to coerce the United States through a series of operations or campaigns that integrate indirect and direct approaches. Modern great power competition will thus return to forms of coercion and imposition reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but enacted with the technologies of today. Although raiding will be Moscow’s principal approach to competition, international brigandry may be the best term to describe elements of Russian behavior that the West considers to be “bad” or “malign.” These are acts of indirect warfare, both centrally planned and enacted on initiative by entities within the Russian state empowered to shape policy – often in competition with each other. Brigandry may come with negative legalistic connotations, a byword for outlaw, but here the term is meant to define a form of irregular or skirmish warfare in the international system conducted by a partisan.
Russia is, at times, miscast as a global spoiler or retrograde delinquent. Delinquents commit minor offenses and have no plan. Spoilers react to plans, but have little strategy of their own. Raiders, by contrast, launch operations with a strategic outlook and objectives in mind. And while often weaker than their opponents, raiders can be successful. The structure of the international system and the nature of the confrontation lends itself to the use of raiding, which increasingly appears to be the chosen Russian strategy. By focusing on deterring the high-end conventional fight and restoring nuclear coercive credibility, both important in and of themselves, the United States national security establishment may be fundamentally overlooking what will prove the defining Russian approach to competition.
Raiding as a tactic is not a new experience for the United States, but considered in a strategic context, the concept may lend itself more useful than the hodgepodge of gray zone, and other neologisms the community is often stuck referencing to explain the modern character of war. More importantly, raiding is a long established concept at the operational and strategic level of warfare, unlike “Russian hybrid warfare,” which has devolved into a kitchen sink discussion about Russian bad behavior. Indeed, raiding was once the principal form of warfare throughout Europe. Raiding is new in the sense that it is actually quite old as a strategy for competition between powers before the prominence of industrial scale warfare. Today, in our manuals, a raid is viewed as an operational tool rather than strategic concept, as can be seen in Joint Operations (JP 3-0), which describes a raid as “an operation to temporarily seize an area in order to secure information, confuse an adversary, capture personnel or equipment, or to destroy a capability culminating in a planned withdrawal.”
Raids are often conducted over phases, including infiltration, denying the enemy the opportunity to reinforce, followed by surprise attack and withdrawal. Raiding plays much more to Russian strengths, leveraging agility and a simplified chain of command ( i.e. deinstitutionalized decision making, and a strong desire to achieve political ends, but not to get stuck with the costs of holding terrain). This is a strategy of limited means and it is also lucrative. Thus, raiding is not about territorial expansion or global domination. We should consider this term when seeking to understand how classical great powers like Russia use their toolkits in strategic competition.
Great Power Spoiler or Great Power Raider?
Once the Cold War ended, Washington became accustomed to seeing Russia as a largely irrelevant power, unable to contest American foreign policy and too weak to effectively pursue its own interests. However, the 1990s and early 2000s were an anomalous period of time, with Russia missing as an actor in European politics, and taciturn on the international stage. In truth, it was not simply Russia’s absence from international politics, but the dearth of other powers in general that made this a period of unipolarity and the primacy of one state in international affairs well above and beyond the power of others. Denizens of Washington tended to forget or ignore the second word in the term Charles Krauthammer coined in 1990 to describe American primacy in the post-Cold War period: the “unipolar moment.”
He wrote:
The most striking feature of the post-Cold War world is its unipolarity. No doubt, multipolarity will come in time. In perhaps another generation or so there will be great powers coequal with the United States, and the world will, in structure, resemble the pre-World War I era. But we are not there yet, nor will we be for decades. Now is the unipolar moment.
That moment lasted longer than many had expected, but the decades did pass, and great power competition has reemerged.
The Russo-Georgian War in 2008 led to a turning point in bilateral relations. There was a sense in Washington that somewhere things had gone awry in Russia policy, and a desire emerged to reset relations with Moscow, in the hope that successful cooperation on areas of mutual interest would demonstrate the benefits of integration with the West, and into a U.S.-led international order. Suffice it to say that dream did not come to fruition.
Around 2015, after its intervention in Syria, Russia became increasingly seen as a global spoiler. Still the view prevailed that Moscow was resurgent, but brittle in terms of the foundations of power. This is a hubristic and overly optimistic interpretation. Such a vision is borne of the consistent mythos in America’s outlook that Russia is dangerous, but no more than a paper tiger that will eventually fade from the global stage. The endless trope that Russia doesn’t have a long game is a self-serving delusion. As Russia seeks to navigate through mounting international challenges posed by its confrontation with the United States it is increasingly forcing Washington and its allies to respond to a series of operations, campaigns, and calculated and not so calculated gambits.
Effective nuclear and conventional deterrence has long resulted in what Glenn Snyder described as a stability-instability paradox. This holds that the more stable the nuclear balance, the more likely powers will engage in conflicts below the threshold of war. If war is not an option and direct competition is foolish in light of U.S. advantages, raiding is a viable alternative that could succeed over time. Therefore, Russia has become the guerrilla in the international system, not seeking territorial dominion but raiding to achieve its political objectives. And these raids are having an effect. If Moscow can remain a strategic thorn in Washington’s side long enough for Beijing to become a global challenge to American leadership, Washington may have no choice but to negotiate a new great power condominium that ends the confrontation , or so Moscow hopes.
At the heart of a raid is the desire to achieve a coercive effect on the enemy. Even if unsuccessful, a raid can positively shape the environment for the raider by the damage and chaos it can inflict. At the tactical level, it is about military gains, but large raiding campaigns in the past sought political and economic impact on the adversary, typically ending with a withdrawal. The French word for this form of warfare was chevauchee, or mounted raid, describing an approach to conflict that eschewed siege warfare. The chevauchee was prominent in the 14th century, and the quintessential raider of that time was the English Black Prince, Edward III’s son. The Black Prince led two extensive raiding campaigns in 1355 and 1356 during the Hundred Years War, looting, burning and pillaging the French countryside. He was forced to adopt this form of warfare in part because the English lacked the means to siege French cities. Thus, the goal became to destabilize France to convince its feudal sovereigns that they were on their own. He did this with raids that targeted economic resources and thereby destroyed the political credibility of the French monarchy.
In Spain, the term for this form of warfare was cabalgadas, prolonged raiding operations conducted by infantry, a common feature of the War of the Two Pedros (1356 to 1379). In North Africa, raids were called razzia. America’s martial traditions are also rooted in raiding, from Roger’s Rangers during the French and Indian War, to the Revolutionary War, or the famous cavalry raids of the Civil War.
Russia has extensive experience in raiding as a form of warfare. The Russian term for raiding is nabeg. Long before the Mongol invasion in 1237 to 1240 and the formation of the Russian Empire, the first raids by the Rus began in 860 against the Byzantine Empire. These raids went on until 1043. Peter the Great was also no stranger to raiding operations in wartime. Hundreds of years later, during the latter years of the Great Northern War, Russian galley fleets with thousands of raiders successfully attacked Sweden, including Gotland, Uppland, and the Stockholm archipelago. The Red Army had its armored raids of World War II, like the 24th Tank Corps raid on Tatsinskaya during the last stages of the Battle of Stalingrad in December 1942.
Raiding is an effective riposte to a strong but distracted opponent, and becomes popular when the technologies of the time create a rift between the political objectives sought and the means available to attain them. This makes traditional forms of warfare too costly, too risky, or unsuitable to the goals desired. Raiding proved prevalent before the modern nation-state system was formed in 1648 and subsequently exported by Europeans to the rest of the world. However, today the modern nation-state construct is weak. Do states truly have economic, information, or cyber borders? How do you demark these borders, defend them, and deter adversaries from crossing them? Much of the infrastructure for this digital age lives in exposed global domains, lies under the sea in international waters, in space, and cyberspace. All of it is vulnerable and ripe for exploitation.
The Modern Chevauchee
Russia will continue to use other instruments of national power to raid the West as part of a coercive campaign intended to at minimum weaken and distract Washington and, at maximum, coerce it into concessions on Russian interests. This is not a short-term strategy for victory, and it would be wrong to assume that these raids are centrally directed given the diverging security factions, clans, and personalities seeking to shape Russian foreign policy. Mark Galeotti cleverly coined “adhocracy” to describe this system. The image of Putin sitting in the Kremlin pulling knobs and levers, or the mythical Gerasimov Doctrine (a linguistic invention that its author has forsworn), have become tragic caricatures in the current zeitgeist. On the contrary, raiding has historically been conducted by detachments with a simplified chain of command, pre-delegated authority, and substantial leeway in how to prosecute their campaign. Raiding is not for deliberate strategists, but for those able to capitalize on leaner, fail fast, and fail cheap approaches.
Russia is not raiding to erode the liberal international order, at least not intentionally. That is the inevitable consequence of Russian behavior from a Western perspective, but not its objective. Such evaluations are frankly expressions of Anglo-Saxon political ideology more so than astute analysis of how Moscow actually tries to influence the international system. Russia does not believe there is any such thing as a liberal international order, nor does it see NATO as anything other than America’s Warsaw Pact, an organization structured around the projection of U.S. military power. As such, what the Kremlin understands the current international order to be is simply a system built around American unipolarity, and the best way to change this construct is to accelerate a transition from unipolarity to multipolarity (or what their policy establishment now calls a “polycentric” world).
Suffice it to say this transition will take a long time because, as William Wohlforth argued in 1999, unipolarity is more stable than it seems. Before 2014, many in Moscow thought they could just wait for this shift in power to happen. It’s important to understand that Russian elites too believe time is on their side. Many misread the 2007-2008 financial crisis as the beginning of rapid decline in the West. The confrontation has now forced Russian leadership to become active in pursuing the long-stated objectives of its own foreign policy, and they won’t stop until a settlement is made.
The center of gravity, in Russian military thought, is the adversary’s will to fight and a country’s ability to engage in war or confrontation as a system. Therefore, the purpose of operations, particularly at a time of nominal peace, is to shape adversary decision-making by targeting their economic, information, and political infrastructure. Senior Russian officers see the modern character of war (correlation of forms and methods) as placing greater emphasis on non-kinetic means, particularly when compared to warfare in the 20th century. Russia’s chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, famously had this posited as a 4:1 non-military to military ratio in one article. Another important trend in Russian military thought identifies the decisive period of conflict as the confrontation or crisis preceding the outbreak of force-on-force violence and the initial period of war. Much of this Russian discourse focuses on non-contact warfare, the ability of long range precision weapons, paired with non-kinetic capabilities in global domains to inflict damage throughout the enemy’s system.
This vision seeks to reconcile the natural proclivities of a General Staff (i.e. planning for high-end warfare, buying expensive capabilities, and seeking larger conventional formations) with an understanding that modern conflicts will play out without set battle lines and meeting engagements. Russia seeks to shape the environment prior to the onset of conflict, and immediately thereafter, imposing costs and inflicting damage to coerce the adversary, in the hope that an inherent asymmetry of interests at stake will force the other side to yield. Russian officers are certainly not partisans, nor do they vocally advocate for raiding, but it is hard to escape the fact that the central tenets of current Russian military thought resemble more the coercive theory of victory of a chevauchee than they do of industrial scale warfare.
Raiding should not be confused with hybrid warfare. Raiding is an established historical approach to warfare, with discernible phasing, objectives, ways, and an overall strategy. The application of hybrid warfare to describe Russian operations has usually been confusing and disjointed in practice. Today, the term is increasingly relegated to European conversations about Russian information warfare and political chicanery.
The Strategic Terrain of Great Power Competition
Moscow is constrained by the structural realities of its competition with Washington. There is no way for Russia to fundamentally alter a balance of power that dramatically favors the United States. America’s GDP is more than five times that of Russia’s adjusted for purchasing power parity and ten times greater in raw terms. Washington sits at the head of the world’s most powerful network of allies in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. And U.S. conventional military superiority is underwritten by a defense budget that is many times the size of Russia’s.
This is why Stephen Walt was right when he argued in March that the current competition is dissimilar to the Cold War (China, however, might prove a different story). It is not borne of a bipolar system, has no universalist ideological conflict behind it, and will not shape international politics as that period of confrontation did. Despite shrill cries by Max Boot, this is also no war, and the United States should do its best to keep it that way. We are still in what can broadly be described as a great power peace. Ever since the great powers built nuclear weapons, large-scale warfare has proven too risky and costly, thereby displacing competition into a host of proxy conflicts or actions short of warfare. Occasional conflicts do occur, such as the Sino-Soviet border conflict 1969, or Kargil War in 1999, but these have tended to be among young, and relatively minor nuclear powers, during the early stages of their nuclear arsenal development. Major nuclear powers, with established nuclear deterrents, eschew conventional wars because they understand that no one wins a nuclear war.
International orders historically have been created from the ashes of a great power war. As such, powers that want to create a multipolar world order have no quick or easy way of realizing such a vision. Therefore, Russia is stuck playing on a largely fixed strategic board, where the rules and institutions created by the West both favor the United States and constrain revisionism. That’s the end of the good news.
However, not all is well with the U.S.-led liberal international order. One need only to look to Russia’s war with Ukraine, successful projection of power in Syria, and sustained efforts at political subversion. Russia’s strategy is aimed at pursuing a great power condominium, seeking to secure former Soviet space as a de facto sphere of influence and its status as one of the principal players in the international system. The approach is rooted in convincing the United States that Russia is a great power with special rights, including the primacy of its security over the sovereignty of its neighbors and a prominent role in organizations governing world affairs. The Russian dream is to return to a status and recognition the Soviet Union held during a very particular time of its history, the détente of 1969 to 1979, when Washington saw Moscow, albeit reluctantly, as a co-equal superpower. In the face of structural constraints, Russia has found a viable path to getting what it wants from the United States via a strategy of coercion, leveraging raids and a wider campaign of international brigandry to impose outsized costs and retain Western attention.
In the early 2000s, when Russia was weak, Putin hoped to make a deal, trading Russian support for the U.S. so-called War on Terror in exchange for certain prerogatives: being treated as a great power, a free hand in its near abroad, and a U.S. ‘hands off’ approach in the former Soviet space. Back then, Moscow sought to explain why Russia deserves a seat at the table, but it was judged in Washington as too weak and irrelevant. When that approach didn’t work, Russia sought to demonstrate that its power and influence was grossly underestimated. Starting with the 2008 Russia-Georgia War, Moscow began using force to prevent NATO expansion. In Ukraine and Syria, Russia illustrated to what at times seems an overly post-modern Western political establishment that military power is still the trump card in international relations, despite what then-Secretary of State John Kerry had to say about 19th century behavior.
Russia’s successful use of force got the West to rethink Moscow’s capabilities and intentions, but it did not lead to a recognition of Russian interests, or a renegotiation of the post-Cold War order and Russia’s place in it, as the Kremlin had hoped. In place of a great power condominium, Russian leaders earned a lasting confrontation. Russia may have the power to filch Crimea from Ukraine, but it is still judged too weak to force a renegotiation of the security framework in Europe or attain major concessions from the United States. After Congress passed sanctions in the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act in July 2017 and the executive branch closed ranks to prevent any rapprochement, it became clear that no deal was in the offing between the Kremlin and the White House.
Russia still seeks recognition of its great power status in the international system, believing that with it will come privilege, security, and a privileged sphere of influence over its neighbors. The Russian leadership’s strategic outlook has not changed, but demonstrating renewed military strength and resolve has proven insufficient for their country to get a deal with the United States. Washington is still full of policymakers who see Russian power as brittle, believing Moscow doesn’t have a long game. The Russian leadership has no alternative but to settle in for a prolonged geopolitical confrontation, banking on their own resilience, and the ability to impose costs on the basis of an old and familiar strategy of raiding.
Goodbye Nation-State, Hello Raiding
Ironically, as the driver of globalization and the growth of global interdependence, it is the West that has done the most to make raiding against itself so lucrative. Global connectivity, labor flows, migration both legal and illegal, proliferation of information technologies such as social media, together with the creation of supranational entities like the European Union are all enabling factors. Great powers like China and Russia often strive for autarky, seeking to fence off their kingdoms from influences that might create interdependence and allow uncontrolled outside influence. Beijing built the ”great firewall of China,” while Russia has also sought to wall itself off and impose statist control over the invisible ties that connect it to the rest of the international community.
Moscow’s latest battle that sparked protests was its attempt to censor Telegram, a popular messaging app, a contest which has escalated into millions of IPs blocked. These countries seek to create advantage in the great power competition by securing themselves from those technological trends which make modern states borderless. They are building forts. At the same time, they have come to recognize that liberal democracies are open plains ripe for raiding. The 21st century, with all its technological advancements and global interconnectedness, is naturally reviving forms of warfare that shaped Europe in 13th and 14th centuries.
Cyber operations are perhaps the most obvious instrument for modern day raiding. Both Russia and China have made good use of it to raid the U.S. politically and economically, pillaging and looting like in the days of yore. Those Russian attacks not intended to damage are perhaps even more worrisome intrusions designed to gain access and lay the groundwork for future strikes against critical infrastructure such as “energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation and manufacturing.” Russia’s recently closed San Francisco consulate was reportedly an intelligence hub for physically mapping fiber optic networks, and a host of activities described as “extraordinarily aggressive intelligence-collection efforts” considered to be “at the very forefront of innovation.”
However, military raiding is back as well. The Russian campaign in Ukraine’s Donbass region is only posing as a form of industrialized warfare. In reality, this was meant to be a raid. It began with infiltration, and its strategic centerpiece is a low-cost effort to coerce Ukraine into federalization in a bid to retain control over Kyiv’s strategic orientation. Moscow never wanted to hold on to the Donbass and still does not. If anything, it long sought to return it to Ukraine in exchange for federalization, though, at minimum, Russia is happy at the destabilizing effect that this conflict has on Ukraine’s policy and economy. Put aside cyber and political warfare campaigns, the four-year conflict in Ukraine is at face value a sustained raid that Moscow had hoped to close out with the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements. Russia empirically lacks the manpower to take over Ukraine, nor did it want to own and pay for parts of the country either. At its core the war in the Donbass is the modern equivalent of the Black Prince’s great chevauchee campaigns in France.
Raiding is not a direct imposition by conquest, nor is it a fait accompli. Behind a raid lies neither the desire for domination nor for limited territorial gains. From the outset, the adversary seeks to withdraw. This is why Crimea does not fit this model, although there is much evidence to suggest that Russia initially seized Crimea without the intent to annex it ( i.e. it was first meant as part of a game of coercive diplomacy). That said, Ukraine illustrates the fundamental problems with raiding: Raids are easier to launch than they are to manage. The fitful and messy escalation in Ukraine is a hallmark of raiding, when the character of war is not defined by two armies meeting in the field, or a militarily superior power seeking to simply impose its will on a weaker adversary via large-scale industrial warfare. If Russia wanted to crush the Ukrainian military, it could do it, but instead it wants to raid. Since 2015, the conflict has evolved to unconventional warfare throughout Ukraine’s territory, with state-sponsored assassinations, acts of terror, and industrial sabotage becoming the norm.
As Russia grows more confident, and the confrontation intensifies, raiding may become more military in nature. Moscow’s position in Syria is ideal for campaigns elsewhere in the Middle East where it can establish itself as a power broker on the cheap, with countries in the region already choosing to hedge and deleverage from their dependency on relations with the United States. This is ultimately an iterative experience: Some raids or acts of brigandage have clearly backfired. The best recent example of blowback was the failed Russian mercenary attack on February 7 east of Deir Ezzor. That night in the desert was the brainchild of one of Russia’s “mini-garchs” and infamous backers of the Wagner mercenary group, together with the internet troll factory, Yevgeny Prigozhin. While not exactly the brightest horseman, he has been closely linked to Russian efforts in information, political, and other forms of indirect warfare.
The Middle East is a flanking theater in the competition, one where the United States is visibly weak, and its allies are interested in any alternative external power to reduce their own dependency on Washington. Russia will look for ways to raid America’s influence there without taking ownership, security responsibilities, or otherwise over extending itself. The military campaign in Syria came cheaply, taught Russia that it can indeed project power outside its region, and challengeds America’s monopoly on use of force in the international system.
The Black Prince’s Strategy
Forget the decisive Mahanian battle. The typical conventional wars, which the United States frequently wargames, but probably will never get to fight (thanks to nuclear deterrence), are poorly aligned with how adversaries intend to pursue their objectives. Avoiding disadvantages in direct competition is undoubtedly important, as Russia and China have equally invested in conventional and nuclear capabilities, but it is precisely because of our investments in these realms that we have made raiding lucrative. The surest way to spot a raid is when the initiating power doesn’t actually want to possess the object in contest but is instead seeking to inflict economic and political pain to coerce a more important strategic concession out of their opponent. This is not to say that limited land grabs or conventional warfare will disappear from the international arena, but raiding poses a more probable challenge to the United States and its extended network of allies.
Great power raiding is not meant to represent a unified field theory of adversary behavior in the current competition. Not everything aligns neatly with this concept, nor can the actions of a country with numerous instruments of national power be reduced so simply. Nonetheless, raiding for cost imposition and outright pillage, together with other behaviors by intelligence services and elites that may be summed up as in international brigandry, do encapsulate much of the problem. The Russian long game is to raid and impose painful costs on the United States, and its allies, until such time as China becomes a stronger and more active contender in the international system. This theory of victory stems from the Russian assumption that the structural balance of power will eventually shift away from the United States towards China and other powers in the international system, resulting in a steady transition to multipolarity. This strategy is emergent, but the hope is that a successful campaign of raiding, together with the greater threat from China, will force Washington to compromise and renegotiate the post-Cold War settlement.
Can Russia win? If winning is defined as Moscow attaining influence and securing interests in the international system not commensurate with the relative balance of power, but rather based the amount of damage they have inflicted by raiding – quite possibly. If the raider has staying power, and makes a prolonged strategic burden of itself, it can get a favorable settlement even though it is weaker, especially if its opponent has bigger enemies to deal with. Throughout history, leading empires, the superpowers of their time, have had to deal and negotiate settlements with raiders.
Here, conventional military might and alliances count for a lot less than you might hope. Today, you don’t need mounted riders for a raiding campaign or for acts of international brigandry. Moscow successfully rode past NATO, all of America’s carrier strike groups, and struck Washington with a campaign of political subversion. The technology involved may be innovative or new, but this form of warfare is decidedly old. To deal with it, Washington will not require panel discussions, new acronyms, and the construction of a center of excellence, but instead to revisit the history of conflict, international politics, and strategy.
Michael Kofman is a Senior Research Scientist at CNA Corporation and a Fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute. Previously he served as program manager at National Defense University. The views expressed here are his own.
-
second post:
From the preceding:
"However, today the modern nation-state construct is weak. Do states truly have economic, information, or cyber borders? How do you demark these borders, defend them, and deter adversaries from crossing them? Much of the infrastructure for this digital age lives in exposed global domains, lies under the sea in international waters, in space, and cyberspace. All of it is vulnerable and ripe for exploitation."
I reflect upon this.
-
Jun 22, 2018 | 07:00 GMT
8 mins read
Trump, Kissinger and the Search for a New World Order
By Reva Goujon
VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor
Reva Goujon
Reva Goujon
VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor
U.S. President Donald Trump (R) meets with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office in October 2017 in Washington.
(WIN McNAMEE/Getty Images)
The United States' return to aloofness, China's rise, Europe's fragmentation and the growing strategic alignment between Moscow and Beijing are all destabilizing the international system.
Basing the world order on Westphalian principles is necessary to reinject enough flexibility and pragmatism into the global system amid a new, competitive era of great power politics, according to veteran diplomat Henry Kissinger.
The potential for a U.S.-China understanding on the fate of the Korean Peninsula will serve as a critical testing ground for this emerging world order.
Donald Trump is nothing if not unpredictable as president. But when it comes to foreign policy, that just might be his greatest foreign policy asset. After all, America's ability to swing between aloofness and overreaction are embedded in its DNA thanks to its inherently strong geopolitical foundation. A mercurial spirit in the White House might make some big waves, but can also — at least in some circumstances — be harnessed into an opportunity.
A grand strategist like Dr. Henry Kissinger, who has been known to advise Trump on occasion, likely detects such an opportunity in a Trump presidency. Kissinger, now 95 but lucid as ever, has made himself available to several presidents and candidates to help shape foreign policy and engage in quiet shuttle diplomacy. His guidance, delivered in long, gravelly monologues, centers on his quest to shape a new world order that has a chance at coping with centurial challenges. As the man who split the Sino-Soviet axis during the Cold War and gave rise to the phrase "Nixon Goes to China," Kissinger spends much of his time dwelling on the rise of China. Now, the veteran diplomat is trying to help craft a new order in a rapidly changing environment – starting with a solution to one of the United States' biggest headaches of the day, North Korea.
The Big Picture
An emerging great power competition among the United States, China and Russia will define the international system in the coming years. As that competition intensifies, the Korean Peninsula, wedged between empires, will inevitably come into play. While many countries find U.S. President Donald Trump's tactics deeply polarizing, his overtures to North Korea are based on a deeper strategy that could usher in a balance of power with China in northeast Asia.
In his most recent book, World Order (2014), the veteran diplomat questions history to explain when, and under what circumstances, previous attempts to foster world order succeeded and failed. In Kissinger's view, the foundational template for world order was the Westphalian balance of power that emerged at the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. It was under this model that a system of peer powers, none powerful enough to defeat the rest, embraced the notion of sovereignty and shared a sense of legitimacy to maintain a relative and flexible equilibrium on the continent. If any one power tried to achieve hegemony or a second-tier power tried to force its way into the ranks of major powers through destabilizing actions, the unspoken rules of the order would effectively induce pragmatic alliances to counter the emerging threat.
Kissinger acknowledges the powerful (and perhaps unavoidable) forces that ultimately caused the Westphalian order to fray in the 19th century, including the rise of nationalism, the unification of Germany, Britain's aloofness and Russia's probing on the Continent. At the same time, he deeply laments the 20th century carnage that resulted from a series of miscalculations by state leaders who failed to read their geopolitical surroundings accurately. As many of his writings and testimonies imply, Kissinger is not a man for retirement; the mission of this bold nonagenarian is the prevention of global tragedy through the construction of a new balance of power.
In surveying the world today, the stresses on the post-Cold War global order are easy to pinpoint. The United States remains inherently powerful but is no longer unrivaled. China is rapidly rising as a peer competitor to the United States while a weaker and wary Russia, enticed by the prospect of weakening the U.S.-led order, has strategically aligned itself (for now) with Beijing. Squeezed between these two poles, Europe finds itself too divided to play the role of an effective mediator, while regional giants like Japan, Turkey and India are still trying to find their footing in the fluid space among these great powers.
In other words, the world is in a growing state of disequilibrium. China and the United States, two countries on opposite ends of the earth, each with their own claim to historical exceptionalism, together form the center of gravity in the present international system. After being the center of its own world for centuries, China was thrust into a Western-led order even though it took no part in writing the rules of the system. In time, as Kissinger warns, China will expect to revise the rules of the contemporary order to better suit its needs. Regardless of whether Trump is in the White House or Xi Jinping remains president for life, China's global drive for economic security is on a collision course with an American imperative to maintain global dominance. And unless the United States can find a way to both coexist and balance against a rising China, this century could bear witness to a new — and perhaps much more intense — tragedy in great power politics.
Unless the United States can find a way to both coexist and balance against a rising China, this century could bear witness to a new tragedy in great power politics.
The North Korean Litmus Test
The fate of the Korean Peninsula is Exhibit A in this emerging world order. Wedged between empires, Korea is no stranger to falling prey to bigger powers. If Korea is to attain a semblance of balance among its more powerful neighbors, it must find a path to unification, even if such a path has been riddled with pitfalls for the better part of seven decades. The first attempt at reunification ended in a draw among the great powers when Kim Il Sung exploited the deep paranoia of the Soviets and their Chinese allies in 1950, obtaining their endorsement to invade the south. But in another demonstration of American unpredictability, the United States rapidly shifted from ambivalence to decisiveness in its Cold War calculations to push the North Koreans all the way to the Yalu River on the Chinese border, putting unification under American tutelage within Washington's grasp. But as Kissinger explains, the same necessity that drove the Chinese in 1593 to repel an invading force (then Japanese) from the Yalu border compelled Mao Zedong to respond to the U.S. incursion. Not wishing to get in over its head with China at a time when the Soviet Union was a priority, the United States exercised strategic restraint to scale back its forces on the peninsula and respect a buffer line on the 38th parallel.
Will China and the United States once again succeed in reaching an understanding on Korea to manage their great power competition? Both have an interest in neutralizing North Korea's nuclear arsenal. Both know from history why an American military intervention in Korea could easily draw China into a war that both would rather avoid. And both are well-positioned through security, economic and political means to influence a Korean path to reunification. While the Korean Peninsula will remain a theater of competition for the United States and China in the long run, it also has the potential to reflect an emerging balance of power between Washington and Beijing in northeast Asia.
Commentators who were up in arms over the utter lack of detail on denuclearization in the final statement from the Trump-Kim summit should bear in mind that the traditional, decades-old approach to containing a nuclear rogue like North Korea has failed spectacularly.
The president's unconventional outreach to North Korea fits neatly into this strategic paradigm. His seemingly brash move to call off the June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un just days ahead of time seemingly forced Pyongyang to cede the unpredictability card to the U.S. president (at least for now, anyway). Commentators who were up in arms over the utter lack of detail on denuclearization, as well as the absence of any discussion on human rights in the final statement, should bear in mind that the traditional, decades-old approach to containing a nuclear rogue like North Korea has failed spectacularly. If Washington had commenced the top-level dialogue with denuclearization technicalities, much less human rights, the conversation would have immediately hit a wall. Instead, the Singapore summit demonstrated political will on both sides to break through their stalemate — not much more and not much less. And while the specter of collapse will naturally loom over future negotiations between two radical, short-tempered leaders on the prickly issue of denuclearization, the strategic foundation underlining their dialogue is undeniable. In fact, it's what gives these negotiations real legs.
Trump may be the most radical president in modern U.S. history. And radical tactics will, by design, make the traditionalists among us squirm. Agile alliance-making, after all, is a prerequisite to balance-of-power politics, and the president's hawkish economic agenda threatens to polarize many of the allies that it needs in this great power competition. But that does not mean that every move the president makes is entirely bereft of strategy. And with the aid of an old foreign policy hand like Kissinger, a Korean settlement could serve as one of many blueprints in the construction of a new world order.
-
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/12/the-lessons-of-henry-kissinger/505868/
Long, but useful, read. The interview up front is great, especially given when it happened.
-
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/america-has-lost-the-worlds-respect
-
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire
With large oceans to the east and west, America's geography often allowed the United States to develop in isolation.
(ENOT POLOSKUN/Getty Images)
Print
LinkedIn
Twitter
Facebook
Mail
Save As PDF
Listen
Bookmark
Editor's Note
This installment on the United States, presented in two parts, is the 16th in a series of Stratfor monographs on the geopolitics of countries influential in world affairs. Click here for part two.
Like nearly all of the peoples of North and South America, most Americans are not originally from the territory that became the United States. They are a diverse collection of peoples primarily from a dozen different Western European states, mixed in with smaller groups from a hundred more. All of the New World entities struggled to carve a modern nation and state out of the American continents. Brazil is an excellent case of how that struggle can be a difficult one. The United States falls on the opposite end of the spectrum.
The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway and is the world's largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.
The North American Core
North America is a triangle-shaped continent centered in the temperate portions of the Northern Hemisphere. It is of sufficient size that its northern reaches are fully Arctic and its southern reaches are fully tropical. Predominant wind currents carry moisture from west to east across the continent.
Climatically, the continent consists of a series of wide north-south precipitation bands largely shaped by the landmass' longitudinal topography. The Rocky Mountains dominate the Western third of the northern and central parts of North America, generating a rain-shadow effect just east of the mountain range — an area known colloquially as the Great Plains. Farther east of this semiarid region are the well-watered plains of the prairie provinces of Canada and the American Midwest. This zone comprises both the most productive and the largest contiguous acreage of arable land on the planet.
East of this premier arable zone lies a second mountain chain known as the Appalachians. While this chain is far lower and thinner than the Rockies, it still constitutes a notable barrier to movement and economic development. However, the lower elevation of the mountains combined with the wide coastal plain of the East Coast does not result in the rain-shadow effect of the Great Plains. Consequently, the coastal plain of the East Coast is well-watered throughout.
In the continent's northern and southern reaches this longitudinal pattern is not quite so clear-cut. North of the Great Lakes region lies the Canadian Shield, an area where repeated glaciation has scraped off most of the topsoil. That, combined with the area's colder climate, means that these lands are not nearly as productive as regions farther south or west and, as such, remain largely unpopulated to the modern day. In the south — Mexico — the North American landmass narrows drastically from more than 5,000 kilometers (about 3,100 miles) wide to, at most, 2,000 kilometers, and in most locations less than 1,000 kilometers. The Mexican extension also occurs in the Rocky Mountain/Great Plains longitudinal zone, generating a wide, dry, irregular uplift that lacks the agricultural promise of the Canadian prairie provinces or American Midwest.
The continent's final geographic piece is an isthmus of varying width, known as Central America, that is too wet and rugged to develop into anything more than a series of isolated city-states, much less a single country that would have an impact on continental affairs. Due to a series of swamps and mountains where the two American continents join, there still is no road network linking them, and the two Americas only indirectly affect each other's development.
The most distinctive and important feature of North America is the river network in the middle third of the continent. While its components are larger in both volume and length than most of the world's rivers, this is not what sets the network apart. Very few of its tributaries begin at high elevations, making vast tracts of these rivers easily navigable. In the case of the Mississippi, the head of navigation — just north of Minneapolis — is 3,000 kilometers inland.
The network consists of six distinct river systems: the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Ohio, Tennessee and, of course, the Mississippi. The unified nature of this system greatly enhances the region's usefulness and potential economic and political power. First, shipping goods via water is an order of magnitude cheaper than shipping them via land. The specific ratio varies greatly based on technological era and local topography, but in the petroleum age in the United States, the cost of transport via water is roughly 10 to 30 times cheaper than overland. This simple fact makes countries with robust maritime transport options extremely capital-rich when compared to countries limited to land-only options. This factor is the primary reason why the major economic powers of the past half-millennia have been Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Second, the watershed of the Greater Mississippi Basin largely overlays North America's arable lands. Normally, agricultural areas as large as the American Midwest are underutilized as the cost of shipping their output to more densely populated regions cuts deeply into the economics of agriculture. The Eurasian steppe is an excellent example. Even in modern times Russian and Kazakh crops occasionally rot before they can reach market. Massive artificial transport networks must be constructed and maintained in order for the land to reach its full potential. Not so in the case of the Greater Mississippi Basin. The vast bulk of the prime agricultural lands are within 200 kilometers of a stretch of navigable river. Road and rail are still used for collection, but nearly omnipresent river ports allow for the entirety of the basin's farmers to easily and cheaply ship their products to markets not just in North America but all over the world.
Third, the river network's unity greatly eases the issue of political integration. All of the peoples of the basin are part of the same economic system, ensuring constant contact and common interests. Regional proclivities obviously still arise, but this is not Northern Europe, where a variety of separate river systems have given rise to multiple national identities.
It is worth briefly explaining why Stratfor fixates on navigable rivers as opposed to coastlines. First, navigable rivers by definition service twice the land area of a coastline (rivers have two banks, coasts only one). Second, rivers are not subject to tidal forces, greatly easing the construction and maintenance of supporting infrastructure. Third, storm surges often accompany oceanic storms, which force the evacuation of oceanic ports. None of this eliminates the usefulness of coastal ports, but in terms of the capacity to generate capital, coastal regions are a poor second compared to lands with navigable rivers.
There are three other features — all maritime in nature — that further leverage the raw power that the Greater Mississippi Basin provides. First are the severe indentations of North America's coastline, granting the region a wealth of sheltered bays and natural, deep-water ports. The more obvious examples include the Gulf of St. Lawrence, San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay, Galveston Bay and Long Island Sound/New York Bay.
Second, there are the Great Lakes. Unlike the Greater Mississippi Basin, the Great Lakes are not naturally navigable due to winter freezes and obstacles such as Niagara Falls. However, over the past 200 years extensive hydrological engineering has been completed — mostly by Canada — to allow for full navigation on the lakes. Since 1960, penetrating halfway through the continent, the Great Lakes have provided a secondary water transport system that has opened up even more lands for productive use and provided even greater capacity for North American capital generation. The benefits of this system are reaped mainly by the warmer lands of the United States rather than the colder lands of Canada, but since the Great Lakes constitute Canada's only maritime transport option for reaching the interior, most of the engineering was paid for by Canadians rather than Americans.
Third and most important are the lines of barrier islands that parallel the continent's East and Gulf coasts. These islands allow riverine Mississippi traffic to travel in a protected intracoastal waterway all the way south to the Rio Grande and all the way north to the Chesapeake Bay. In addition to serving as a sort of oceanic river, the island chain's proximity to the Mississippi delta creates an extension of sorts for all Mississippi shipping, in essence extending the political and economic unifying tendencies of the Mississippi Basin to the eastern coastal plain.
Thus, the Greater Mississippi Basin is the continent's core, and whoever controls that core not only is certain to dominate the East Coast and Great Lakes regions but will also have the agricultural, transport, trade and political unification capacity to be a world power — even without having to interact with the rest of the global system.
There is, of course, more to North America than simply this core region and its immediate satellites. There are many secondary stretches of agricultural land as well — those just north of the Greater Mississippi Basin in south-central Canada, the lands just north of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, the Atlantic coastal plain that wraps around the southern terminus of the Appalachians, California's Central Valley, the coastal plain of the Pacific Northwest, the highlands of central Mexico and the Veracruz region.
But all of these regions combined are considerably smaller than the American Midwest and are not ideal, agriculturally, as the Midwest is. Because the Great Lakes are not naturally navigable, costly canals must be constructed. The prairie provinces of south-central Canada lack a river transport system altogether. California's Central Valley requires irrigation. The Mexican highlands are semiarid and lack any navigable rivers.
The rivers of the American Atlantic coastal plain — flowing down the eastern side of the Appalachians — are neither particularly long nor interconnected. This makes them much more like the rivers of Northern Europe in that their separation localizes economic existence and fosters distinct political identities, dividing the region rather than uniting it. The formation of such local — as opposed to national — identities in many ways contributed to the American Civil War.
But the benefits of these secondary regions are not distributed evenly. What is now Mexico lacks even a single navigable river of any size. Its agricultural zones are disconnected and it boasts few good natural ports. Mexico's north is too dry while its south is too wet — and both are too mountainous — to support major population centers or robust agricultural activities. Additionally, the terrain is just rugged enough — making transport just expensive enough — to make it difficult for the central government to enforce its writ. The result is the near lawlessness of the cartel lands in the north and the irregular spasms of secessionist activity in the south.
Canada's maritime transport zones are far superior to those of Mexico but pale in comparison to those of the United States. Its first, the Great Lakes, not only requires engineering but is shared with the United States. The second, the St. Lawrence Seaway, is a solid option (again with sufficient engineering), but it services a region too cold to develop many dense population centers. None of Canada boasts naturally navigable rivers, often making it more attractive for Canada's provinces — in particular the prairie provinces and British Columbia — to integrate with the United States, where transport is cheaper, the climate supports a larger population and markets are more readily accessible. Additionally, the Canadian Shield greatly limits development opportunities. This vast region — which covers more than half of Canada's landmass and starkly separates Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto and the prairie provinces — consists of a rocky, broken landscape perfect for canoeing and backpacking but unsuitable for agriculture or habitation.
So long as the United States has uninterrupted control of the continental core — which itself enjoys independent and interconnected ocean access — the specific locations of the country's northern and southern boundaries are somewhat immaterial to continental politics. To the south, the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts are a significant barrier in both directions, making the exceedingly shallow Rio Grande a logical — but hardly absolute — border line. The eastern end of the border could be anywhere within 300 kilometers north or south of its current location (at present the border region's southernmost ports — Brownsville and Corpus Christi — lie on the U.S. side of the border). As one moves westward to the barren lands of New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua and Sonora, the possible variance increases considerably. Even controlling the mouth of the Colorado River where it empties into the Gulf of California is not a critical issue, since hydroelectric development in the United States prevents the river from reaching the Gulf in most years, making it useless for transport.
In the north, the Great Lakes are obviously an ideal break point in the middle of the border region, but the specific location of the line along the rest of the border is largely irrelevant. East of the lakes, low mountains and thick forests dominate the landscape — not the sort of terrain to generate a power that could challenge the U.S. East Coast. The border here could theoretically lie anywhere between the St. Lawrence Seaway and Massachusetts without compromising the American population centers on the East Coast (although, of course, the farther north the line is the more secure the East Coast will be). West of the lakes is flat prairie that can be easily crossed, but the land is too cold and often too dry, and, like the east, it cannot support a large population. So long as the border lies north of the bulk of the Missouri River's expansive watershed, the border's specific location is somewhat academic, and it becomes even more so when one reaches the Rockies.
On the far western end of the U.S.-Canada border is the only location where there could be some border friction. The entrance to Puget Sound — one of the world's best natural harbors — is commanded by Vancouver Island. Most of the former is United States territory, but the latter is Canadian — in fact, the capital of British Columbia, Victoria, sits on the southern tip of that strategic island for precisely that reason. However, the fact that British Columbia is more than 3,000 kilometers from the Toronto region and that there is a 12:1 population imbalance between British Columbia and the American West Coast largely eliminates the possibility of Canadian territorial aggression.
It is common knowledge that the United States began as 13 rebellious colonies along the east coast of the center third of the North American continent. But the United States as an entity was not a sure thing in the beginning. France controlled the bulk of the useful territory that in time would enable the United States to rise to power, while the Spanish empire boasted a larger and more robust economy and population in the New World than the fledgling United States. Most of the original 13 colonies were lightly populated by European standards — only Philadelphia could be considered a true city in the European sense — and were linked by only the most basic of physical infrastructure. Additionally, rivers flowed west to east across the coastal plain, tending to sequester regional identities rather than unify them.
But the young United States held two advantages. First, without exception, all of the European empires saw their New World holdings as secondary concerns. For them, the real game — and always the real war — was on another continent in a different hemisphere. Europe's overseas colonies were either supplementary sources of income or chips to be traded away on the poker table of Europe. France did not even bother using its American territories to dispose of undesirable segments of its society, while Spain granted its viceroys wide latitude in how they governed imperial territories simply because it was not very important so long as the silver and gold shipments kept arriving. With European attentions diverted elsewhere, the young United States had an opportunity to carve out a future for itself relatively free of European entanglements.
Second, the early United States did not face any severe geographic challenges. The barrier island system and local rivers provided a number of options that allowed for rapid cultural and economic expansion up and down the East Coast. The coastal plain — particularly in what would become the American South — was sufficiently wide and well-watered to allow for the steady expansion of cities and farmland. Choices were limited, but so were challenges. This was not England, an island that forced the early state into the expense of a navy. This was not France, a country with three coasts and two land borders that forced Paris to constantly deal with threats from multiple directions. This was not Russia, a massive country suffering from short growing seasons that was forced to expend inordinate sums of capital on infrastructure simply to attempt to feed itself. Instead, the United States could exist in relative peace for its first few decades without needing to worry about any large-scale, omnipresent military or economic challenges, so it did not have to garrison a large military. Every scrap of energy the young country possessed could be spent on making itself more sustainable. When viewed together — the robust natural transport network overlaying vast tracts of excellent farmland, sharing a continent with two much smaller and weaker powers — it is inevitable that whoever controls the middle third of North America will be a great power.
With these basic inputs, the American polity was presented a set of imperatives it had to achieve in order to be a successful nation. They are only rarely declared elements of national policy, instead serving as a sort of subconscious set of guidelines established by geography that most governments — regardless of composition or ideology — find themselves following. The United States' strategic imperatives are presented here in five parts. Normally imperatives are pursued in order, but there is considerable time overlap between the first two and the second two.
1. Dominate the Greater Mississippi Basin
The early nation was particularly vulnerable to its former colonial master. The original 13 colonies were hardwired into the British Empire economically, and trading with other European powers (at the time there were no other independent states in the Western Hemisphere) required braving the seas that the British still ruled. Additionally, the colonies' almost exclusively coastal nature made them easy prey for that same navy should hostilities ever recommence, as was driven brutally home in the War of 1812 in which Washington was sacked.
There are only two ways to protect a coastal community from sea power. The first is to counter with another navy. But navies are very expensive, and it was all the United States could do in its first 50 years of existence to muster a merchant marine to assist with trade. France's navy stood in during the Revolutionary War in order to constrain British power, but once independence was secured, Paris had no further interest in projecting power to the eastern shore of North America (and, in fact, nearly fought a war with the new country in the 1790s).
The second method of protecting a coastal community is to develop territories that are not utterly dependent upon the sea. Here is where the United States laid the groundwork for becoming a major power, since the strategic depth offered in North America was the Greater Mississippi Basin.
Achieving such strategic depth was both an economic and a military imperative. With few exceptions, the American population was based along the coast, and even the exceptions — such as Philadelphia — were easily reached via rivers. The United States was entirely dependent upon the English imperial system not just for finished goods and markets but also for the bulk of its non-agricultural raw materials, in particular coal and iron ore. Expanding inland allowed the Americans to substitute additional supplies from mines in the Appalachian Mountains. But those same mountains also limited just how much depth the early Americans could achieve. The Appalachians may not be the Swiss Alps, but they were sufficiently rugged to put a check on any deep and rapid inland expansion. Even reaching the Ohio River Valley — all of which lay within the initial territories of the independent United States — was largely blocked by the Appalachians. The Ohio River faced the additional problem of draining into the Mississippi, the western shore of which was the French territory of Louisiana and all of which emptied through the fully French-held city of New Orleans.
The United States solved this problem in three phases. First, there was the direct purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. (Technically, France's Louisiana Territory was Spanish-held at this point, its ownership having been swapped as a result of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 that ended the Seven Years' War. In October 1800, France and Spain agreed in secret to return the lands to French control, but news of the transfer was not made public until the sale of the lands in question to the United States in July 1803. Therefore, between 1762 and 1803 the territory was legally the territory of the Spanish crown but operationally was a mixed territory under a shifting patchwork of French, Spanish and American management.)
At the time, Napoleon was girding for a major series of wars that would bear his name. France not only needed cash but also to be relieved of the security burden of defending a large but lightly populated territory in a different hemisphere. The Louisiana Purchase not only doubled the size of the United States but also gave it direct ownership of almost all of the Mississippi and Missouri river basins. The inclusion of the city of New Orleans in the purchase granted the United States full control over the entire watershed. Once the territory was purchased, the challenge was to develop the lands. Some settlers migrated northward from New Orleans, but most came via a different route.
The second phase of the strategic-depth strategy was the construction of that different route: the National Road (aka the Cumberland Road). This project linked Baltimore first to Cumberland, Md. — the head of navigation of the Potomac — and then on to the Ohio River Valley at Wheeling, W. Va., by 1818. Later phases extended the road across Ohio (1828), Indiana (1832) and Illinois (1838) until it eventually reached Jefferson City, Mo., in the 1840s. This single road (known in modern times as U.S. Route 40 or Interstate 70 for most of its length) allowed American pioneers to directly settle Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri and granted them initial access to Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. For the better part of a century, it was the most heavily trafficked route in the country, and it allowed Americans not only to settle the new Louisiana Territory but also to finally take advantage of the lands ceded by the British in 1787. With the road's completion, the original 13 colonies were finally lashed to the Greater Mississippi Basin via a route that could not be challenged by any outside power.
The third phase of the early American expansion strategy was in essence an extension of the National Road via a series of settlement trails, by far the most important and famous of which was the Oregon Trail. While less of a formal construction than the National Road, the Oregon Trail opened up far larger territories. The trail was directly responsible for the initial settling of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. A wealth of secondary trails branched off from the main artery — the Mormon, Bozeman, California and Denver trails — and extended the settlement efforts to Montana, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. The trails were all active from the early 1840s until the completion of the country's first transcontinental railway in 1869. That project's completion reduced East Coast-West Coast travel time from six months to eight days and slashed the cost by 90 percent (to about $1,100 in 2011 dollars). The river of settlers overnight turned into a flood, finally cementing American hegemony over its vast territories.
Collectively, the Louisiana Purchase, the National Road and the Oregon Trail facilitated the largest and fastest cultural expansion in human history. From beginning to end, the entire process required less than 70 years. However, it should be noted that the last part of this process — the securing of the West Coast — was not essential to American security. The Columbia River Valley and California's Central Valley are not critical American territories. Any independent entities based in either could not possibly generate a force capable of threatening the Greater Mississippi Basin. This hardly means that these territories are unattractive or a net loss to the United States — among other things, they grant the United States full access to the Pacific trading basin — only that control of them is not imperative to American security.
2. Eliminate All Land-Based Threats to the Greater Mississippi Basin
The first land threat to the young United States was in essence the second phase of the Revolutionary War — a rematch between the British Empire and the young United States in the War of 1812. That the British navy could outmatch anything the Americans could float was obvious, and the naval blockade was crushing to an economy dependent upon coastal traffic. Geopolitically, the most critical part of the war was the participation of semi-independent British Canada. It wasn't so much Canadian participation in any specific battle of the war (although Canadian troops did play a leading role in the sacking of Washington in August 1814) as it was that Canadian forces, unlike the British, did not have a supply line that stretched across the Atlantic. They were already in North America and, as such, constituted a direct physical threat to the existence of the United States.
Canada lacked many of the United States' natural advantages even before the Americans were able to acquire the Louisiana Territory. First and most obvious, Canada is far enough north that its climate is far harsher than that of the United States, with all of the negative complications one would expect for population, agriculture and infrastructure. What few rivers Canada has neither interconnect nor remain usable year round. While the Great Lakes do not typically freeze, some of the river connections between them do. Most of these river connections also have rapids and falls, greatly limiting their utility as a transport network. Canada has made them more usable via grand canal projects, but the country's low population and difficult climate greatly constrain its ability to generate capital locally. Every infrastructure project comes at a great opportunity cost, such a high cost that the St. Lawrence Seaway — a series of locks that link the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and allow full ocean access — was not completed until 1959.
Canada is also greatly challenged by geography. The maritime provinces — particularly Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island — are disconnected from the Canadian landmass and unable to capitalize on what geographic blessings the rest of the country enjoys. They lack even the option of integrating south with the Americans and so are perennially poor and lightly populated compared to the rest of the country. Even in the modern day, what population centers Canada does have are geographically sequestered from one another by the Canadian Shield and the Rocky Mountains.
As time advanced, none of Canada's geographic weaknesses worked themselves out. Even the western provinces — British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — are linked to Canada's core by only a single transport corridor that snakes 1,500 kilometers through the emptiness of western and central Ontario north of Lake Superior. All four provinces have been forced by geography and necessity to be more economically integrated with their southern neighbors than with their fellow Canadian provinces.
Such challenges to unity and development went from being inconvenient and expensive to downright dangerous when the British ended their involvement in the War of 1812 in February 1815. The British were exhausted from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and, with the French Empire having essentially imploded, were more interested in reshaping the European balance of power than re-engaging the Americans in distant North America. For their part, the Americans were mobilized, angry and — remembering vividly the Canadian/British sacking of Washington — mulling revenge. This left a geographically and culturally fractured Canada dreading a long-term, solitary confrontation with a hostile and strengthening local power. During the following decades, the Canadians had little choice but to downgrade their ties to the increasingly disinterested British Empire, adopt political neutrality vis-a-vis Washington, and begin formal economic integration with the United States. Any other choice would have put the Canadians on the path to another war with the Americans (this time likely without the British), and that war could have had only one outcome.
With its northern border secured, the Americans set about excising as much other extra-hemispheric influence from North America as possible. The Napoleonic Wars had not only absorbed British attention but had also shattered Spanish power (Napoleon actually succeeded in capturing the king of Spain early in the conflicts). Using a combination of illegal settlements, military pressure and diplomacy, the United States was able to gain control of east and west Florida from Madrid in 1819 in exchange for recognizing Spanish claims to what is now known as Texas (Tejas to the Spanish of the day).
This "recognition" was not even remotely serious. With Spain reeling from the Napoleonic Wars, Spanish control of its New World colonies was frayed at best. Most of Spain's holdings in the Western Hemisphere either had already established their independence when Florida was officially ceded, or — as in Mexico — were bitterly fighting for it. Mexico achieved its independence a mere two years after Spain ceded Florida, and the United States' efforts to secure its southwestern borders shifted to a blatant attempt to undermine and ultimately carve up the one remaining Western Hemispheric entity that could potentially challenge the United States: Mexico.
The Ohio and Upper Mississippi basins were hugely important assets, since they provided not only ample land for settlement but also sufficient grain production and easy transport. Since that transport allowed American merchants to easily access broader international markets, the United States quickly transformed itself from a poor coastal nation to a massively capital-rich commodities exporter. But these inner territories harbored a potentially fatal flaw: New Orleans. Should any nation but the United States control this single point, the entire maritime network that made North America such valuable territory would be held hostage to the whims of a foreign power. This is why the United States purchased New Orleans.
But even with the Louisiana Purchase, owning was not the same as securing, and all the gains of the Ohio and Louisiana settlement efforts required the permanent securing of New Orleans. Clearly, the biggest potential security threat to the United States was newly independent Mexico, the border with which was only 150 kilometers from New Orleans. In fact, New Orleans' security was even more precarious than such a small distance suggested.
Most of eastern Texas was forested plains and hills with ample water supplies — ideal territory for hosting and supporting a substantial military force. In contrast, southern Louisiana was swamp. Only the city of New Orleans itself could house forces, and they would need to be supplied from another location via ship. It did not require a particularly clever military strategy for one to envision a Mexican assault on the city.
The United States defused and removed this potential threat by encouraging the settlement of not just its own side of the border region but the other side as well, pushing until the legal border reflected the natural border — the barrens of the desert. Just as the American plan for dealing with Canada was shaped by Canada's geographic weakness, Washington's efforts to first shield against and ultimately take over parts of Mexico were shaped by Mexico's geographic shortcomings.
In the early 1800s Mexico, like the United States, was a very young country and much of its territory was similarly unsettled, but it simply could not expand as quickly as the United States for a variety of reasons. Obviously, the United States enjoyed a head start, having secured its independence in 1783 while Mexico became independent in 1821, but the deeper reasons are rooted in the geographic differences of the two states.
In the United States, the cheap transport system allowed early settlers to quickly obtain their own small tracts of land. It was an attractive option that helped fuel the early migration waves into the United States and then into the continent's interior. Growing ranks of landholders exported their agricultural output either back down the National Road to the East Coast or down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and on to Europe. Small towns formed as wealth collected in the new territories, and in time the wealth accumulated to the point that portions of the United States had the capital necessary to industrialize. The interconnected nature of the Midwest ensured sufficient economies of scale to reinforce this process, and connections between the Midwest and the East Coast were sufficient to allow advances in one region to play off of and strengthen the other.
Mexico, in contrast, suffered from a complete lack of navigable rivers and had only a single good port (Veracruz). Additionally, what pieces of arable land it possessed were neither collected into a singular mass like the American interior nor situated at low elevations. The Mexico City region is arable only because it sits at a high elevation — at least 2,200 meters above sea level — lifting it out of the subtropical climate zone that predominates at that latitude.
This presented Mexico with a multitude of problems. First and most obviously, the lack of navigable waterways and the non-abundance of ports drastically reduced Mexico's ability to move goods and thereby generate its own capital. Second, the disassociated nature of Mexico's agricultural regions forced the construction of separate, non-integrated infrastructures for each individual sub-region, drastically raising the costs of even basic development. There were few economies of scale to be had, and advances in one region could not bolster another. Third, the highland nature of the Mexico City core required an even more expensive infrastructure, since everything had to be transported up the mountains from Veracruz. The engineering challenges and costs were so extreme and Mexico's ability to finance them so strained that the 410-kilometer railway linking Mexico City and Veracruz was not completed until 1873. (By that point, the United States had two intercontinental lines and roughly 60,000 kilometers of railways.)
The higher cost of development in Mexico resulted in a very different economic and social structure compared to the United States. Instead of small landholdings, Mexican agriculture was dominated by a small number of rich Spaniards (or their descendants) who could afford the high capital costs of creating plantations. So whereas American settlers were traditionally yeoman farmers who owned their own land, Mexican settlers were largely indentured laborers or de facto serfs in the employ of local oligarchs. The Mexican landowners had, in essence, created their own company towns and saw little benefit in pooling their efforts to industrialize. Doing so would have undermined their control of their economic and political fiefdoms. This social structure has survived to the modern day, with the bulk of Mexican political and economic power held by the same 300 families that dominated Mexico's early years, each with its local geographic power center.
For the United States, the attraction of owning one's own destiny made it the destination of choice for most European migrants. At the time that Mexico achieved independence it had 6.2 million people versus the U.S. population of 9.6 million. In just two generations — by 1870 — the American population had ballooned to 38.6 million while Mexico's was only 8.8 million. This U.S. population boom, combined with the United States' ability to industrialize organically, not only allowed it to develop economically but also enabled it to provide the goods for its own development.
The American effort against Mexico took place in two theaters. The first was Texas, and the primary means was settlement as enabled by the Austin family. Most Texas scholars begin the story of Texas with Stephen F. Austin, considered to be the dominant personality in Texas' formation. Stratfor starts earlier with Stephen's father, Moses Austin. In December 1796, Moses relocated from Virginia to then-Spanish Missouri — a region that would, within a decade, become part of the Louisiana Purchase — and began investing in mining operations. He swore fealty to the Spanish crown but obtained permission to assist with settling the region — something he did with American, not Spanish, citizens. Once Missouri became American territory, Moses shifted his attention south to the new border and used his contacts in the Spanish government to replicate his Missouri activities in Spanish Tejas.
After Moses' death in 1821, his son took over the family business of establishing American demographic and economic interests on the Mexican side of the border. Whether the Austins were American agents or simply profiteers is irrelevant; the end result was an early skewing of Tejas in the direction of the United States. Stephen's efforts commenced the same year as his father's death, which was the same year that Mexico's long war of independence against Spain ended. At that time, Spanish/Mexican Tejas was nearly devoid of settlers — Anglo or Hispanic — so the original 300 families that Stephen F. Austin helped settle in Tejas immediately dominated the territory's demography and economy. And from that point on the United States not so quietly encouraged immigration into Mexican Tejas.
Once Tejas' population identified more with the United States than it did with Mexico proper, the hard work was already done. The remaining question was how to formalize American control, no small matter. When hostilities broke out between Mexico City and these so-called "Texians," U.S. financial interests — most notably the U.S. regional reserve banks — bankrolled the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836.
It was in this war that one of the most important battles of the modern age was fought. After capturing the Alamo, Mexican dictator Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna marched north and then east with the intention of smashing the Texian forces in a series of engagements. With the Texians outnumbered by a factor of more than five to one, there was every indication that the Mexican forces would prevail over the Texian rebels. But with no small amount of luck the Texians managed not only to defeat the Mexican forces at the Battle of San Jacinto but also capture Santa Anna himself and force a treaty of secession upon the Mexican government. An independent Texas was born and the Texians became Texans.
However, had the battle gone the other way the Texian forces would not have simply been routed but crushed. It was obvious to the Mexicans that the Texians had been fighting with weapons made in the United States, purchased from the United States with money lent by the United States. Since there would have been no military force between the Mexican army and New Orleans, it would not have required a particularly ingenious plan for Mexican forces to capture New Orleans. It could well have been Mexico — not the United States — that controlled access to the North American core.
But Mexican supremacy over North America was not to be, and the United States continued consolidating. The next order of business was ensuring that Texas neither fell back under Mexican control nor was able to persist as an independent entity.
Texas was practically a still-born republic. The western half of Texas suffers from rocky soil and aridity, and its rivers are for the most part unnavigable. Like Mexico, its successful development would require a massive application of capital, and it attained its independence only by accruing a great deal of debt. That debt was owed primarily to the United States, which chose not to write off any upon conclusion of the war. Add in that independent Texas had but 40,000 people (compared to the U.S. population at the time of 14.7 million) and the future of the new country was — at best — bleak.
Texas immediately applied for statehood, but domestic (both Texan and American) political squabbles and a refusal of Washington to accept Texas' debt as an American federal responsibility prevented immediate annexation. Within a few short years, Texas' deteriorating financial position combined with a revenge-minded Mexico hard by its still-disputed border forced Texas to accede to the United States on Washington's terms in 1845. From that point the United States poured sufficient resources into its newest territory (ultimately exchanging approximately one-third of Texas' territory for the entirety of the former country's debt burden in 1850, giving Texas its contemporary shape) and set about enforcing the new U.S.-Mexico border.
Which brings us to the second part of the American strategy against Mexico. While the United States was busy supporting Texian/Texan autonomy, it was also undermining Spanish/Mexican control of the lands of what would become the American Southwest farther to the west. The key pillar of this strategy was another of the famous American trails: the Santa Fe.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Santa Fe Trail was formed not only before the New Mexico Territory became American, or even before Texas became an U.S. state, but before the territory become formally Mexican — the United States founded the trail when Santa Fe was still held by Spanish authority. The trail's purpose was twofold: first, to fill the region on the other side of the border with a sufficient number of Americans so that the region would identify with the United States rather than with Spain or Mexico and, second, to establish an economic dependency between the northern Mexican territories and the United States.
The United States' more favorable transport options and labor demography granted it the capital and skills it needed to industrialize at a time when Mexico was still battling Spain for its independence. The Santa Fe Trail started filling the region not only with American settlers but also with American industrial goods that Mexicans could not get elsewhere in the hemisphere.
Even if the race to dominate the lands of New Mexico and Arizona had been a fair one, the barrens of the Chihuahuan, Sonoran and Mojave deserts greatly hindered Mexico's ability to settle the region with its own citizens. Mexico quickly fell behind economically and demographically in the contest for its own northern territories. (Incidentally, the United States attempted a similar settlement policy in western Canada, but it was halted by the War of 1812.)
The two efforts — carving out Texas and demographically and economically dominating the Southwest — came to a head in the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War. In that war the Americans launched a series of diversionary attacks across the border region, drawing the bulk of Mexican forces into long, arduous marches across the Mexican deserts. Once Mexican forces were fully engaged far to the north of Mexico's core territories — and on the wrong side of the deserts — American forces made an amphibious landing and quickly captured Mexico's only port at Veracruz before marching on and capturing Mexico City, the country's capital. In the postwar settlement, the United States gained control of all the lands of northern Mexico that could sustain sizable populations and set the border with Mexico through the Chihuahuan Desert, as good of an international border as one can find in North America. This firmly eliminated Mexico as a military threat.
3. Control the Ocean Approaches to North America
With the United States having not simply secured its land borders but having ensured that its North American neighbors were geographically unable to challenge it, Washington's attention shifted to curtailing the next potential threat: an attack from the sea. Having been settled by the British and being economically integrated into their empire for more than a century, the Americans understood very well that sea power could be used to reach them from Europe or elsewhere, outmaneuver their land forces and attack at the whim of whoever controlled the ships.
But the Americans also understood that useful sea power had requirements. The Atlantic crossing was a long one that exhausted its crews and passengers. Troops could not simply sail straight across and be dropped off ready to fight. They required recuperation on land before being committed to a war. Such ships and their crews also required local resupply. Loading up with everything needed for both the trip across the Atlantic and a military campaign would leave no room on the ships for troops. As naval technology advanced, the ships themselves also required coal, which necessitated a constellation of coaling stations near any theaters of operation. Hence, a naval assault required forward bases that would experience traffic just as heavy as the spear tip of any invasion effort.
Ultimately, it was a Russian decision that spurred the Americans to action. In 1821 the Russians formalized their claim to the northwest shore of North America, complete with a declaration barring any ship from approaching within 100 miles of their coastline. The Russian claim extended as far south as the 51st parallel (the northern extreme of Vancouver Island). A particularly bold Russian effort even saw the founding of Fort Ross, less than 160 kilometers north of San Francisco Bay, in order to secure a (relatively) local supply of foodstuffs for Russia's American colonial effort.
In response to both the broader geopolitical need as well as the specific Russian challenge, the United States issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. It asserted that European powers would not be allowed to form new colonies in the Western Hemisphere and that, should a European power lose its grip on an existing New World colony, American power would be used to prevent their re-entrance. It was a policy of bluff, but it did lay the groundwork in both American and European minds that the Western Hemisphere was not European territory. With every year that the Americans' bluff was not called, the United States' position gained a little more credibility.
All the while the United States used diplomacy and its growing economic heft to expand. In 1867 the United States purchased the Alaska Territory from Russia, removing Moscow's weak influence from the hemisphere and securing the United States from any northwestern coastal approach from Asia. In 1898, after a generation of political manipulations that included indirectly sponsoring a coup, Washington signed a treaty of annexation with the Kingdom of Hawaii. This secured not only the most important supply depot in the entire Pacific but also the last patch of land on any sea invasion route from Asia to the U.S. West Coast.
The Atlantic proved far more problematic. There are not many patches of land in the Pacific, and most of them are in the extreme western reaches of the ocean, so securing a buffer there was relatively easy. On the Atlantic side, many European empires were firmly entrenched very close to American shores. The British held bases in maritime Canada and the Bahamas. Several European powers held Caribbean colonies, all of which engaged in massive trade with the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. The Spanish, while completely ejected from the mainland by the end of the 1820s, still held Cuba, Puerto Rico and the eastern half of Hispaniola (the modern-day Dominican Republic).
All were problematic to the growing United States, but it was Cuba that was the most vexing issue. Just as the city of New Orleans is critical because it is the lynchpin of the entire Mississippi watershed, Cuba, too, is critical because it oversees New Orleans' access to the wider world from its perch on the Yucatan Channel and Florida Straits. No native Cuban power is strong enough to threaten the United States directly, but like Canada, Cuba could serve as a launching point for an extra-hemispheric power. At Spain's height of power in the New World it controlled Florida, the Yucatan and Cuba — precisely the pieces of territory necessary to neutralize New Orleans. By the end of the 19th century, those holdings had been whittled down to Cuba alone, and by that time the once-hegemonic Spain had been crushed in a series of European wars, reducing it to a second-rate regional power largely limited to southwestern Europe. It did not take long for Washington to address the Cuba question.
In 1898, the United States launched its first-ever overseas expeditionary war, complete with amphibious assaults, long supply lines and naval support for which American warfighting would in time become famous. In a war that was as globe-spanning as it was brief, the United States captured all of Spain's overseas island territories — including Cuba. Many European powers retained bases in the Western Hemisphere that could threaten the U.S. mainland, but with Cuba firmly in American hands, they could not easily assault New Orleans, the only spot that could truly threaten America's position. Cuba remained a de facto American territory until the Cuban Revolution of 1959. At that point, Cuba again became a launching point for an extra-hemispheric power, this time the Soviet Union. That the United States risked nuclear war over Cuba is a testament to how seriously Washington views Cuba. In the post-Cold War era Cuba lacks a powerful external sponsor and so, like Canada, is not viewed as a security risk.
After the Spanish-American war, the Americans opportunistically acquired territories when circumstances allowed. By far the most relevant of these annexations were the results of the Lend-Lease program in the lead-up to World War II. The United Kingdom and its empire had long been seen as the greatest threat to American security. In addition to two formal American-British wars, the United States had fought dozens of skirmishes with its former colonial master over the years. It was British sea power that had nearly destroyed the United States in its early years, and it remained British sea power that could both constrain American economic growth and ultimately challenge the U.S. position in North America.
The opening years of World War II ended this potential threat. Beset by a European continent fully under the control of Nazi Germany, London had been forced to concentrate all of its naval assets on maintaining a Continental blockade. German submarine warfare threatened both the strength of that blockade and the ability of London to maintain its own maritime supply lines. Simply put, the British needed more ships. The Americans were willing to provide them — 50 mothballed destroyers to be exact — for a price. That price was almost all British naval bases in the Western Hemisphere. The only possessions that boasted good natural ports that the British retained after the deal were in Nova Scotia and the Bahamas.
The remaining naval approaches in the aftermath of Lend-Lease were the Azores (a Portuguese possession) and Iceland. The first American operations upon entering World War II were the occupations of both territories. In the post-war settlement, not only was Iceland formally included in NATO but its defense responsibilities were entirely subordinated to the U.S. Defense Department.
4. Control the World's Oceans
The two world wars of the early 20th century constituted a watershed in human history for a number of reasons. For the United States the wars' effects can be summed up with this simple statement: They cleared away the competition.
Global history from 1500 to 1945 is a lengthy treatise of increasing contact and conflict among a series of great regional powers. Some of these powers achieved supra-regional empires, with the Spanish, French and English being the most obvious. Several regional powers — Austria, Germany, Ottoman Turkey and Japan — also succeeded in extending their writ over huge tracts of territory during parts of this period. And several secondary powers — the Netherlands, Poland, China and Portugal — had periods of relative strength. Yet the two world wars massively devastated all of these powers. No battles were fought in the mainland United States. Not a single American factory was ever bombed. Alone among the world's powers in 1945, the United States was not only functional but thriving.
The United States immediately set to work consolidating its newfound power, creating a global architecture to entrench its position. The first stage of this — naval domination — was achieved quickly and easily. The U.S. Navy at the beginning of World War II was already a respectable institution, but after three years fighting across two oceans it had achieved both global reach and massive competency. But that is only part of the story. Equally important was the fact that, as of August 1945, with the notable exception of the British Royal Navy, every other navy in the world had been destroyed. As impressive as the United States' absolute gains in naval power had been, its relative gains were grander still. There simply was no competition. Always a maritime merchant power, the United States could now marry its economic advantages to absolute dominance of the seas and all global trade routes. And it really didn't need to build a single additional ship to do so (although it did anyway).
Over the next few years the United States' undisputed naval supremacy allowed the Americans to impose a series of changes on the international system.
The formation of NATO in 1949 placed all of the world's surviving naval assets under American strategic direction.
The inclusion of the United Kingdom, Italy, Iceland and Norway in NATO granted the United States the basing rights it needed to utterly dominate the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean — the two bodies of water that would be required for any theoretical European resurgence. The one meaningful European attempt to challenge the new reality — the Anglo-French Sinai campaign of 1956 — cemented the downfall of the European navies. Both London and Paris discovered that they now lacked the power to hold naval policies independent of Washington.
The seizure of Japan's Pacific empire granted the Americans basing access in the Pacific, sufficient to allow complete American naval dominance of the north and central portions of that ocean.
A formal alliance with Australia and New Zealand extended American naval hegemony to the southern Pacific in 1951.
A 1952 security treaty placed a rehabilitated Japan — and its navy — firmly under the American security umbrella.
Shorn of both independent economic vitality at home and strong independent naval presences beyond their home waters, all of the European empires quickly collapsed. Within a few decades of World War II's end, nearly every piece of the once globe-spanning European empires had achieved independence.
There is another secret to American success — both in controlling the oceans and taking advantage of European failures — that lies in an often-misunderstood economic structure called Bretton Woods. Even before World War II ended, the United States had leveraged its position as the largest economy and military to convince all of the Western allies — most of whose governments were in exile at the time — to sign onto the Bretton Woods accords. The states committed to the formation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to assist with the expected post-War reconstruction. Considering the general destitution of Western Europe at the time, this, in essence, was a U.S. commitment to finance if not outright fund that reconstruction. Because of that, the U.S. dollar was the obvious and only choice to serve as the global currency.
But Bretton Woods was about more than currency regimes and international institutions; its deeper purpose lay in two other features that are often overlooked. The United States would open its markets to participating states' exports while not requiring reciprocal access for its own. In exchange, participating states would grant the United States deference in the crafting of security policy. NATO quickly emerged as the organization through which this policy was pursued.
From the point of view of the non-American founders of Bretton Woods, this was an excellent deal. Self-funded reconstruction was out of the question. The bombing campaigns required to defeat the Nazis leveled most of Western Europe's infrastructure and industrial capacity. Even in those few parts of the United Kingdom that emerged unscathed, the state labored under a debt that would require decades of economic growth to recover from.
It was not so much that access to the American market would help regenerate Europe's fortunes as it was that the American market was the only market at war's end. And since all exports from Bretton-Woods states (which the exception of some Canadian exports) to the United States had to travel by water, and since the U.S. Navy was the only institution that could guarantee the safety of those exports, adopting security policies unfriendly to Washington was simply seen as a nonstarter. By the mid-1950s, Bretton Woods had been expanded to the defeated Axis powers as well as South Korea and Taiwan. It soon became the basis of the global trading network, first being incorporated into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and in time being transformed into the World Trade Organization. With a single policy, the Americans not only had fused their economic and military policies into a single robust system but also had firmly established that American dominance of the seas and the global economic system would be in the interest of all major economies with the exception of the Soviet Union.
5. Prevent any Potential Challengers from Rising
From a functional point of view the United States controls North America because it holds nearly all of the pieces that are worth holding. With the possible exception of Cuba or some select sections of southern Canada, the rest of the landmass is more trouble than it is worth. Additionally, the security relationship it has developed with Canada and Mexico means that neither poses an existential threat to American dominance. Any threat to the United States would have to come from beyond North America. And the only type of country that could possibly dislodge the United States would be another state whose power is also continental in scope.
As of 2011, there are no such states in the international system. Neither are there any such powers whose rise is imminent. Most of the world is simply too geographically hostile to integration to pose significant threats. The presence of jungles, deserts and mountains and the lack of navigable rivers in Africa does more than make Africa capital poor; it also absolutely prevents unification, thus eliminating Africa as a potential seedbed for a mega-state. As for Australia, most of it is not habitable. It is essentially eight loosely connected cities spread around the edges of a largely arid landmass. Any claims to Australia being a "continental" power would be literal, not functional.
In fact, there are only two portions of the planet (outside of North America) that could possibly generate a rival to the United States. One is South America. South America is mostly hollow, with the people living on the coasts and the center dominated by rainforests and mountains. However, the Southern Cone region has the world's only other naturally interconnected and navigable waterway system overlaying arable land, the building blocks of a major power. But that territory — the Rio de la Plata region — is considerably smaller than the North American core and it is also split among four sovereign states. And the largest of those four — Brazil — has a fundamentally different culture and language than the others, impeding unification.
State-to-state competition is hardwired into the Rio de la Plata region, making a challenge to the United States impossible until there is political consolidation, and that will require not simply Brazil's ascendency but also its de facto absorption of Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina into a single Brazilian superstate. Considering how much more powerful Brazil is than the other three combined, that consolidation — and the challenge likely to arise from it — may well be inevitable but it is certainly not imminent. Countries the size of Argentina do not simply disappear easily or quickly. So while a South American challenge may be rising, it is extremely unlikely to occur within a generation.
The other part of the world that could produce a rival to the United States is Eurasia. Eurasia is a region of extremely varied geography, and it is the most likely birthplace of an American competitor that would be continental in scope. Geography, however, makes it extremely difficult for such a power (or a coalition of such powers) to arise. In fact, the southern
-
By Tony Abbott
July 13, 2018 6:45 p.m. ET
49 COMMENTS
Eighteen months into Donald Trump’s term, the world is having trouble coming to grips with the most unconventional American president ever. Still, he is neither a bad dream from which the U.S. will soon wake up, nor a fool to be ridiculed.
For someone his critics say is a compulsive liar, Mr. Trump has been remarkably true to his word. Especially compared with his predecessor, he doesn’t moralize. It’s classic Trump to be openly exasperated by the Group of 7’s hand-wringing hypocrisy. Unlike almost every other democratic leader, Mr. Trump doesn’t try to placate critics. He knows it’s more important to get things done than to be loved.
The holder of the world’s most significant office should always be taken seriously. Erratic and ill-disciplined though Mr. Trump often seems, there’s little doubt that he is proving a consequential president. On the evidence so far, when he says something, he means it—and when he says something consistently, it will happen.
He said he’d cut taxes and regulation. He did, and the American economy is at its strongest in at least a decade. He said he’d pull out of the Paris climate-change agreement and he did, to the usual obloquy but no discernible environmental damage. He said he’d scrap the Iranian deal, and he did. If Tehran gets nuclear weapons, at least it won’t be with American connivance. He said he’d move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and he did, without catastrophe. He said he’d boost defense spending. That’s happening too, and adversaries no longer think that they can cross American red lines with impunity.
In Mr. Trump’s first year, he acted on 64% of the policy ideas proposed in the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” agenda—not bad compared with Ronald Reagan’s 49%.
It’s a pity that he kept his promise to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But his concerns about that deal shouldn’t be dismissed. In the short term, freer trade can be better for rich people in poor countries than for poor people in rich ones.
Mr. Trump thinks that the effect of freer trade has been to make America’s rivals stronger. But as the Harley-Davidson example shows, global supply chains mean that even “all-American products” are made all over the world. The consequence of taxing imports can be losing exports, too, as other countries retaliate. So far, though, Mr. Trump’s strong rhetoric and tough action haven’t triggered a full-scale trade war, but have forced other countries to address America’s concerns about technology theft and predatory pricing.
Then there’s the nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. Maybe a hitherto brutal dictator is looking for the survival strategy that Mr. Trump has offered. On the other hand, it could turn into a latter-day version of the Iran deal, in which pressure is eased on the basis of promises that are never fully kept, while leaving allies unsure of American support. That’s the trouble with one-on-one meetings. They may be good for building trust, but they’re bad for making decisions, because each participant has his own version of what was meant.
Still, whatever your judgment on Mr. Trump’s presidency so far, he has 2½ more years in the world’s biggest job and every chance of being re-elected. He is the reality we have to work with.
For Australia, Mr. Trump has so far been a good president. Despite his testy initial conversation with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, he has honored the “very bad deal” that President Obama made to take boat people from Nauru and Manus Island to settle in the U.S.
Mr. Trump seems to appreciate that Australia is the only ally that has been with America, side by side, in every conflict since World War I. He has exempted our steel and aluminum from the tariffs slapped on many others. As a country that’s paid its dues, so to speak, on the American alliance, we have been treated with courtesy and respect. Still, that’s no grounds for complacency in dealing with a transactional president.
As weightier allies found at the NATO summit this week, Mr. Trump is reluctant to help those who don’t pull their weight, and who can blame him? America has been the world’s policeman, the guarantor of a modicum of restraint from the world’s despots and fanatics. No other country has had both the strength and the goodwill for this essential task.
And America’s thanks for its seven decades of watchfulness and its prodigious expenditure of blood and treasure? Condescension from the intellectuals whose freedom the U.S. has protected, and commercial exploitation by the competitors that the American-led global order has created. It’s little wonder that Mr. Trump wants trade that’s fair as well as free, or that he’s tired of allies who give sermons from the sidelines while America keeps them safe.
The truth is that the rest of the world needs America much more than America needs us. The U.S. has no threatening neighbors. It’s about as remote from the globe’s trouble spots as is possible to be. It’s richly endowed with resources, including energy and an almost boundless agricultural capacity. Its technology is second to none. Its manufacturing base is vast. Its people are entrepreneurial in their bones. From diversity, it has built unity and an enviable pride in country.
In many respects, America is the world in one country, only a better world than the one outside. If it decided to live in splendid isolation from troubles across the sea, it would lose little and perhaps gain much, at least in the beginning. A fortress America would be as impregnable as any country could be.
Mr. Trump is clearly impatient with the liberal internationalism that has shaped American policy for 70 years, which he worries has been better for others than for the U.S. There are two possible versions of the evolving Trump doctrine. One goes something like this: America may help those who help themselves, but it will be likelier to help those who help America. The other, kinder version: They’re your values too, so don’t expect us to be the only ones fighting for them.
President Obama spoke beautifully about American values but was always cautious and sometimes slow to stand up for them. On his watch, the rules-based order was already unraveling. Mr. Trump is much more honest about the limits of American power. For all Mr. Obama’s high-mindedness on fringe issues like climate change, Mr. Trump’s America is more robust. It’s certainly less apologetic and readier to use force. So at least for those allies that don’t shirk their responsibilities, Mr. Trump’s America should remain a reliable partner. Just don’t expect too much.
A new age is coming. The legions are going home. American values can be relied upon but American help less so. This need not presage a darker time, like Rome’s withdrawal from Britain, but more will be required of the world’s other free countries. Will they step up? That’s the test.
I was prime minister when Mr. Obama declared at West Point in 2014 that America could not be the world’s policeman on its own. My response was that America need never be alone, and that while it would have more important and occasionally more useful allies, it would never have a more dependable one than Australia. As prime minister, I wanted to be a welcome contrast to those White House visitors asking America to do things for them—asking instead what we could do for America.
When the WikiLeaks spying scandal broke, there was nothing but strong support from Australia. When Islamic State stormed to the gates of Baghdad, Australian special forces, military training teams and strike fighters were there almost as quickly as American ones, because the U.S. should never have to take on the world’s fight solo.
Being America’s partner, as well as its friend, is even more important now, given Mr. Trump’s obsession with reciprocity. It may be the only hope of keeping America engaged in troubles that aren’t already its own.
In my judgment, Australia should have upgraded its Iraq mission to “advise, assist and accompany” as soon as America did, and extended it into Syria. Australia should have mounted freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea. And Australia should have not only welcomed the move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem but moved ours, too.
The rise of China means that Australia can no longer take for granted a benign strategic environment. For the first extended period in my country’s settled existence, the strongest power in our part of the world is unlikely to share our values. We can no longer be sure that a friendly nation will be the first to respond to a new challenge to peace, stability and decency in our region.
I fear there will have to be a much greater focus on strategic deterrence, especially if a rogue state like North Korea has long-range nuclear weapons—and especially if the American nuclear shield becomes less reliable.
My government increased Australia’s defense spending from a historical low of 1.6% of gross domestic product to 2%. I made the commitment to continuous construction of major surface ships and began the process of acquiring new submarines.
To its credit, the Turnbull government has continued this work. But I fear that dramatically increased military spending in our region overall—up 60% in the past decade—means that rather more now needs to be done. Can Australia’s ships be expected to operate without the air cover that an overstretched America may no longer provide? Can we afford to wait at least 15 years before the first of the next generation of submarines becomes operational? Does it really make sense for Australia to take a French nuclear submarine and redesign it for conventional power, making it less potent than it currently is?
My instinct is that acquiring a capacity to strike harder and further, while giving our country and our armed forces greater protection, could soon require military spending well beyond 2% of GDP. Our armed forces need to be more capable of operating independently against even a substantial adversary, because that is what a truly sovereign nation must be prepared to do.
America spends more than 3% of the world’s biggest GDP on its armed forces, and the rest of the Western world scarcely breaks 2%. It’s hard to dispute Mr. Trump’s view that most of us have been keeping safe on the cheap. The U.S. can’t be expected to fight harder for Australia than we are prepared to fight for ourselves. What Mr. Trump is making clear—to us and to others—is what should always have been screamingly obvious: that each nation’s safety now rests in its own hands far more than in anyone else’s.
Mr. Abbott served as prime minister of Australia, 2013-15. This is adapted from a speech he delivered Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/donald-trump-nato-new-world-disorder/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=180720_G-File&utm_term=GFile
-
Jonah makes good points.
Trumps utter clumsiness and speaking first and *reluctantly* thinking later (when forced to only) is a big problem even if he is mostly right on a lot of constructs.
I can't agree less with Rush who promotes the idea that Trump is simply toying with other nations and the media deliberately and consciously.
We know that is an absurd conclusion .
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/donald-trump-nato-new-world-disorder/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=180720_G-File&utm_term=GFile
That is a great column and he has it about 99% right in my thinking.
He points out what is missing in other people's thinking, but what is missing in his thinking is this:
If the US is paying for 70 to 90% of the protection of Europe and Montenegro for example is paying .001% or so, what is the negotiating tactic that needs to be done to get all to pay their fair share? What is the lever other than threatening to drop them? What is the lever on any of them when all of them other than us come up short?
And what about applying Jonas's wisdom to the UN? They did not avert war to my knowledge or accomplish all of these things. In some ways they have worsened the risks. For another thread I assume, but I would leave the UN in place to talk and to rot on the vine and create some new group that will establish its own reputation and Institution, sometimes called the association of democracies.
-
"what is the negotiating tactic that needs to be done to get all to pay their fair share? "
Exactly the question!
-
"what is the negotiating tactic that needs to be done to get all to pay their fair share? "
Exactly the question!
Walking away. NATO has outlived it’s purpose.
-
http://www.jordantimes.com/news/region/trump-seeks-revive-%E2%80%98arab-nato%E2%80%99-confront-iran
-
China and Russia are growing closer. Officials from both countries met in Moscow on Wednesday and discussed North Korea, the Iran nuclear deal and President Xi Jinping’s upcoming visit to Russia, according to Chinese news agency Xinhua. After the meeting, the director of China’s Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission said that China-Russia relations were at their “best point in history” and that together, the two sides would work to jointly build a “just and equitable international order.” The U.S. has identified Russia and China as its two main strategic competitors, and relations with both are shaky at best, what with the latest round of anti-Russia sanctions and tariffs on Chinese imports. A meeting and an impressive sounding statement by themselves aren’t much to write home about. The deeper issue here is whether the U.S. is giving two historical rivals a reason to work together.
-
By George Friedman
John McCain and the Moral War
An obituary of the late U.S. senator.
There’s a saying that John McCain never saw a war he didn’t like. That is only partly true. He understood the price of war more than most. What McCain believed was that the United States, rightly or wrongly, had a strategic and moral obligation to use its power to impose liberal democratic principles. He proselytized war, that heavy instrument of human violence, because he believed it was the best way to end tyranny and its associated human rights abuses. His voting record on the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to name just a few, attests to this belief.
It seems ironic that a neoconservative (as he was called) should have the same moral ends as human rights groups (as they are called). Both hold that the values of liberal democracy are moral imperatives, and both want the United States to use its power to reshape the world, often with the same tools – lectures, sanctions, intervention, and so on. I say it seems ironic because it really isn’t. It is the vision of U.S. foreign policy that emerged from World War II, which imparted its lessons to students such as McCain.
The United States saw World War II as a moral war. The Axis powers were evil states that did evil things. Their people needed to be saved from their own governments. It’s a tempting thought to dismiss, but doing so, I think, would be a mistake. There were important strategic considerations for joining the war, of course, but the immorality of the Axis powers was the basis for the sacrifice. That sacrifice required the use of overwhelming force, which led to the destruction of those regimes, the imposition of liberal democracy and the liberation of the Japanese, German and Italian people.
This vision was the foundation for the resistance to the Soviet Union and, later, China. The conceptual framework for defeating communism was the same as for defeating the Nazis: Stop their advance by stabilizing liberal democracies on their periphery, arm their enemies, then launch an overwhelming military campaign to defeat them.
The ensuing war was a world war by different means. Some fronts such as Korea were mostly conventional wars. Others like the Congo were covert, waged through proxies. Each side sought to undermine the other in a particular place rather than in a global theater. Decisive victory would have led to nuclear war, so combat was waged in relatively unimportant areas.
But in limiting their engagement, they violated the “total war” principle that governed World War II. Total war was intended to annihilate the enemy. These new wars were intended to defeat the enemy without annihilating it. The goal for both sides was the triumph of their ideology. In this sense, neither victory nor loss would alter the balance of power. So the point was not to win but to confront and block.
Nothing after World War II could be considered total war, not even the war in which McCain cut his teeth: Vietnam. When McCain went to school, there was a saying that the U.S. had never lost a war, Korea having been a tie. That was true until the U.S. lost in Vietnam. (Some may argue that it counts as a win because the U.S. defeated the Communists in every engagement. Yet the North’s flag flew in Saigon all the same.) And it lost because it pursued a World War II end without the coherence of a World War II means, whereby all resources were dedicated to total victory. Vietnam was not worth all of America’s resources, nor was total victory the goal. So some resources were devoted to an inarticulate goal, and those resources were wasted.
It was in this war that John McCain was famously captured, imprisoned and tortured for five years. He was eventually released, and when he came home, he came home to a country in which he, the warrior, was blamed for the war, where activists openly challenged America’s liberal democratic credentials and questioned the moral depravity of the enemy government and thus the moral rectitude of their own. In World War II, no one doubted that the Axis powers were morally depraved. No one criticized the soldiers for the devastation they wrought. Partly that’s because World War II was a morally unambiguous main event, not a sideshow in a global conflict whose primary goal was the avoidance of both victory and nuclear war.
Over time, though, America came together and accepted that the principles of World War II applied in Vietnam. Those who fought, fought a repressive regime. Those who served, served honorably.
But the things we were taught in school were no longer true. The United States had been defeated in a war. Now there are those who hesitate to pursue the moral ends of World War II, not because the ends are unjust but because victory, long held to be assured, is no longer guaranteed. John McCain was not one of those people. He never wavered in that belief, even if he evolved in other ways after he became a senator. He returned to Vietnam and accepted the regime, still a communist dictatorship, against which he fought. But he never forgot the lessons of World War II. He accepted the American moral mission. He continued to believe that the U.S. would win whatever war it entered. He became subtler and more understanding of the challenges, but his belief was unshakable that intervention was the moral course.
And so, paradoxically, McCain’s war was not Vietnam but World War II, where right governed all things and all wars are won by Americans. McCain never quite accepted that World War II was the exception, not the rule. He never quite accepted that some enemies cannot be defeated, even if they are militarily inferior, even if they are willing to die. He never quite accepted that the cost of pursuing human rights everywhere outstrips the ability and appetite of the American people. And he continued to believe in a neutral intervention in which Americans take no sides but awe everyone with their sheer firepower.
McCain and America fought the war in Vietnam based on the core principles of World War II – the right and might of the United States. We all know that in wars that are “just,” there is no such thing as too much power. But in, say, Iraq and Afghanistan, we learned there are wars where overwhelming force is no match for an enemy prepared to die, and willing to fight forever, no matter how many human rights they trample.
John McCain lived an extraordinary life, a life to be admired and emulated by the few who would dare, and he died a hero. He was a hero not because he was shot down or because he was tortured, but because he climbed into the cockpit of his A-4 day after day and flew into the most intense surface-to-air belt in the world, knowing that the chance of dying was high. He represented perhaps the purest of American times, the times when it was understood what was just, and when the decision to go to war carried with it the certainty of victory. McCain leaves behind two valuable lessons. One is the meaning of character. The other is that times change, and as they do, so too does the execution of power.
-
By George Friedman
Creating an Arab NATO
It is hard to imagine an Arab alliance that can cohere as a military giant.
The United States has announced plans to hold a summit in January to launch what’s being called an Arab NATO, officially the Middle East Strategic Alliance. On the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held preliminary talks with the other main countries involved – namely, the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council plus Egypt and Jordan – to discuss the summit. The idea has been batted around before, but for the first time, the U.S. president is planning to preside over a meeting intended to discuss its creation. The story didn’t receive much coverage last week, with other stories monopolizing the press, but in other times, it would have dominated the news.
In the past, the idea of an Arab NATO was motivated by a desire to unite Arab nations against jihadists. Political realities delayed its creation, but this time around, it’s being motivated by the expansion of Iranian influence, which poses an existential threat to Arab states. Iran already has a dominant position in Iraq, substantial influence in Syria and Lebanon, and is supporting Shiites fighting in Yemen. And though its economy is under extreme pressure, particularly with the addition of U.S. sanctions, Iran would become a more direct threat to Arab regimes, if only it could consolidate its position. Iran’s interest in the Arab world is to guarantee its own security and, as important, to gain control of Persian Gulf and Arab oil. It's a distant threat, but distant threats should be addressed early rather than later. Hence the meeting between the leaders of the future Arab NATO.
(click to enlarge)
In creating the invitation list, however, the summit hit its first snag. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are deeply hostile to Qatar. Qatar is close to Iran geographically and in policy. Given the direction the winds are blowing, cozying up to Iran was prudent. For the Saudis and the UAE, it was a betrayal. This and undoubtedly other less visible issues triggered a diplomatic crisis last year, when a Saudi-led group formed a blockade against Qatar. The U.S. position seems to be that including Qatar – which hosts U.S. bases – would protect Doha and shift it away from Iran.
This is one of the virtues of an Arab NATO. It would bring Arab nations together and lock them into place, just as NATO did in Europe. It would start as a defensive platform, providing military, economic and political support to limit Iranian influence. Later, it could take on an offensive role, reversing Iranian gains in the region.
There are several questions still unanswered. Would the alliance include a collective defense clause, similar to NATO’s Article 5, stating that if one member is attacked, all the others must take action? Would the United States make such a commitment? Would it have a command structure with forces from each country committed to war plans, as NATO does?
It also poses some strategic questions. If this alliance actually works, then the Arabs go from being a divided and mutually hostile people to a united and potentially powerful entity. There’s a very real chance this could threaten both Turkey and Israel. Since both countries have large militaries, this could wind up, in the worst case, as an Arab power surrounded by non-Arab powers (Israel, Turkey and Iran). That would make quite a battle.
I am likely looking too far in the future of an organization that doesn’t yet exist and is still struggling over what to do with Qatar. It is hard to imagine an Arab alliance that can cohere as a military giant. But in geopolitics, imagination is a more powerful tool than common sense, since history constantly confounds common sense. The likelihood of this alliance surviving and growing powerful is small, but it is not impossible. If it happens, it could change the region, threaten other powers, and generate conflict.
-
Mike Pence Announces Cold War II
The administration is orchestrating a far-reaching campaign against China.
101 Comments
By Walter Russell Mead
Oct. 8, 2018 6:58 p.m. ET
Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., Oct. 4.
Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., Oct. 4. Photo: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg News
Did Cold War II break out last week while no one was watching? As the Kavanaugh confirmation battle raged, many Americans missed what looks like the biggest shift in U.S.-China relations since Henry Kissinger’s 1971 visit to Beijing.
The Trump administration’s China policy swam into view, and it’s a humdinger. Vice President Mike Pence gave a guide to the approach in a speech last week at the Hudson Institute (where I am a fellow). Denouncing what he called China’s “whole of government” approach to its rivalry with the U.S., Mr. Pence vowed the Trump administration will respond in kind. He denounced China’s suppression of the Tibetans and Uighurs, its “Made in China 2025” plan for tech dominance, and its “debt diplomacy” through the Belt and Road initiative. The speech sounded like something Ronald Reagan could have delivered against the Soviet Union: Mr. Xi, tear down this wall! Mr. Pence also detailed an integrated, cross-government strategy to counter what the administration considers Chinese military, economic, political and ideological aggression.
In the same week as the vice president’s speech, Navy plans for greatly intensified patrols in and around Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea were leaked to the press. Moreover, the recently-entered trilateral U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement was revealed to have a clause discouraging trade agreements between member countries and China. The administration indicated it would seek similar clauses in other trade agreements. Also last week, Congress approved the Build Act, a $60 billion development-financing program designed to counter China’s Belt and Road strategy in Africa and Asia. Finally, the White House issued a report highlighting the danger that foreign-based supply chains pose to U.S. military capabilities in the event they are cut off during a conflict.
Any one of these steps would have rated banner headlines in normal times; in the Age of Trump, all of them together barely registered. But this is a major shift in American foreign policy. As China responds, and as other countries formulate their approaches to the emerging U.S.-China rivalry, a new international reality will take shape. With many longtime U.S. allies opposed to the Trump administration on trade policy and other matters, and with Russia, North Korea and Iran all looking to frustrate U.S. goals, an indignant China looking for opportunities to make Washington pay may find help.
American businesses engaged directly or indirectly with China could face difficulties as the U.S. strategy is implemented. American presidents have broad authority over trade and investment related to national security. Donald Trump has already used this to threaten and impose tariffs and Mr. Pence warned that even higher tariffs are on the way. The White House report highlighting supply-chain vulnerabilities could provide the basis for new and more far-reaching restrictions.
Business and investors may still be underestimating both the Trump administration’s determination to challenge China and the amount of economic disruption that greater U.S.-China tension can bring. To the mix of longtime China hawks and trade hawks now driving U.S. policy, national security matters more than economic friction, and many of the protestations from the U.S. business community may fall on deaf ears. Both China and the U.S. are likely to move quickly, unpredictably and disruptively as they struggle for advantage; Wall Street should brace itself for further shocks.
In terms of domestic politics, the new and more confrontational policy is likely to be broadly popular. Mr. Trump’s populist base resents the “theft” of American jobs, and human-rights and religious-freedom advocates are increasingly troubled by China’s severe repression at home and support for authoritarian regimes abroad. The foreign-policy establishment may oppose Mr. Trump’s tactics, but it generally accepts the need for a stronger stance against China. Businesses will be split; while some are heavily exposed to a potential deterioration in U.S.-China relations, others are angry about stolen intellectual property, resent restrictions on their access to Chinese markets, or fear competition from subsidized Chinese firms.
Democrats who have relished attacking Mr. Trump for allegedly being soft on Vladimir Putin will have a hard time explaining why a hard line on Russia is a patriotic duty but a tough China policy is a mistake. Things could change if the economic and political costs of confrontation rise, but at least initially the new China policy has encountered little opposition.
Replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement, reshaping the Supreme Court, and launching a new Cold War in the same week is quite the trifecta. America may or may not be on the road to greatness under Mr. Trump, but it is certainly going somewhere, and at an accelerating pace.
Appeared in the October 9, 2018, print edition.
-
Oct. 19, 2018 11:32 a.m. ET
Like all such meetings with senior Chinese officials, mine last week took place in a cloistered government compound, the overstuffed chairs placed side by side with only a small table between them, an arrangement that requires turning your entire body or twisting your neck to make eye contact. Just behind the table dividing us was the interpreter; my host was flanked by a phalanx of aides, all of whom took notes but said nothing throughout the hourlong session.
Just minutes into our meeting, his voice rose. “The Chinese people are upset and angry. From beginning to end he was just bashing China. In 40 years, we have never seen a speech like this. Many believe it is a symbol of a new cold war. We find this speech unacceptable, as it turns a blind eye to our joint efforts of the last 40 years and what China has achieved.”
The “he” is Vice President Mike Pence, and the speech is the much-publicized one that he delivered on Oct. 4 at the Hudson Institute in Washington. Another of my Chinese interlocutors compared the speech to the talk delivered in March 1946 by Winston Churchill in Fulton, Mo. The only difference, this person said, was that the “Iron Curtain” has been replaced by a “Bamboo Curtain.” “Winter is coming,” predicted a Chinese scholar over dinner.
The vice president’s speech heralds a new era in modern Sino-American relations. Many in China believe that the trade war being waged by the United States has evolved into a comprehensive effort to block China’s rise. U.S. sanctions introduced in response to a Chinese purchase of weapons from Russia, new U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, U.S. freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea—all reinforce the view that the Trump administration’s aims are strategic and not just economic.
To be sure, the speech by the vice president was broader and deeper in its criticism of China than any other U.S. government statement of the past several decades. A number of its accusations are debatable if not unfounded. That said, the remarks, which build on the December 2017 National Security Strategy describing China (along with Russia) as a “revisionist power,” are consistent with a critique of China that many in the foreign policy establishment, Democrats and Republicans alike, have voiced in recent years.
The critique has three parts. First, there is the view that China has violated the spirit and letter of the World Trade Organization, which it joined in 2001. The U.S. list of complaints includes higher-than-warranted tariff and nontariff barriers, forced transfers of technology, theft of intellectual property, government subsidies and currency manipulation designed to make exports cheaper and to reduce demand for imports.
Second, China’s integration into the world economy has not brought about hoped-for reforms. Large state-owned enterprises, once expected to be wound up, remain. President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign seems to be motivated in part by a desire to root out his opponents, and he has managed to abolish term limits for his own office. As many as one million Muslims in western China are in re-education camps. Civil society has been further circumscribed. China appears to be more authoritarian today than at any time since Mao Zedong was in charge.
Third, China’s foreign policy has become more assertive. China has acted unilaterally to militarize the South China Sea despite an international legal ruling rejecting its claims and a personal pledge from President Xi that China would not do so. It unilaterally declared an air-defense identification zone in the East China Sea and regularly challenges Japan on disputed islands. China is also pursuing its global “Belt and Road” infrastructure initiative, which looks less like a project to promote development than a geoeconomic ploy to increase its access and influence around the world.
This is hardly the first time that the U.S. and China have been at loggerheads. Their difficult modern history goes back to World War II. The Chinese, divided between Communist guerrillas led by Mao and authoritarian, pro-capitalist Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek, were fighting the Japanese occupation as well as one another. The U.S. provided extensive military assistance to the Nationalists. Even so, by 1949 the Communists controlled the mainland and the Nationalists were forced to flee to Taiwan. The U.S. retained diplomatic ties with the nationalist-led Republic of China and refused to recognize the newly declared People’s Republic of China.
Soon after, American and Chinese soldiers fought in Korea, and there were several crises over the status of islands in waters separating China and Taiwan. At one point in 1954, the U.S. seriously considered using nuclear weapons against China only to hold off when allies weighed in on behalf of restraint. The U.S. did, however, sign a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan.
There matters stood until the late 1960s, when American analysts realized that China and the Soviet Union increasingly saw one another as rivals. Acting on the adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger exploited the Sino-Soviet split to forge ties with the mainland in the hope it would give the U.S. leverage in its struggle with the far more dangerous U.S.S.R. Within a decade, the U.S. moved to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, and relations with Taiwan were formally downgraded.
This second phase of Sino-American ties—in which, among other things, the two countries cooperated against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan—lasted some two decades, until the end of the Cold War. What provided the impetus for a third era in Sino-American relations was growing economic interaction, initiated by Deng Xiaoping, who took power after Mao and in 1978 declared a policy of “reform and opening.” Each side sought access to the market of the other, and the Chinese economy began its long and spectacular rise.
Many Americans hoped that engaging with China would open the country politically and economically and moderate any temptation on its part to challenge U.S. primacy. Nor was American policy just based on hope. The U.S. also hedged against the possibility that China would become a strategic rival by maintaining its alliances in the region along with air and naval forces to signal U.S. resolve.
This third, optimistic era has now drawn to a close, as Vice President Pence’s speech emphatically showed. The economic ties meant to buttress the relationship have now become a major source of friction. Limited strategic cooperation on North Korea or issues such as climate change cannot offset this trend, which has been made worse by political shifts in China itself. It is a non-starter to think that China—whose economy is 30 times larger than it was three decades ago and is now the world’s first or second largest—will be content as a mere “responsible stakeholder” (to use then-Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s 2005 phrase) in a U.S.-designed and dominated international system.
Not surprisingly, this liberal-democratic order holds little appeal for a Communist Party leadership that sees liberalism and democracy as a threat to its rule. Just as important, this order is fast fading. It has been rejected by Russia, North Korea, Iran and others, and new issues have emerged (climate change, cyberwar) that the order was not designed to handle. The Trump administration, for its part, has made clear that, unlike its predecessors, it sees the post-World War II order as inconsistent with U.S. interests.
The question now is what a new, fourth era of Sino-American relations will look like. There is a good deal of speculation that it will be a new cold war, but a cold war is a possible (and undesirable) outcome, not a strategy. The containment strategy that shaped U.S. policy against the Soviets doesn’t apply to a new challenge that is more economic than military. Indeed, some disagreements between the U.S. and China can be narrowed or even resolved, including those over tariff and nontariff barriers, requirements for joint ventures and the size of the trade imbalance. But these are exceptions.
The possibility of a U.S.-China armed confrontation over the South China Sea, Taiwan or even North Korea cannot be ruled out. But even if such a dramatic scenario does not materialize, it is easy to see how the relationship could deteriorate. As we know from the earlier Cold War, such competitions are risky and costly, and all but preclude cooperation even when it would be in the interests of both sides.
The most realistic option for the future is to focus on managing the two countries’ major disagreements. This approach has worked for four decades when it comes to Taiwan. The U.S. acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China. The task now is for China, Taiwan and the U.S. to avoid unilateral steps that would jeopardize an arrangement that has kept the peace and allowed Taiwan to flourish economically and politically.
Management is also likely to be the best approach for the South China Sea. As with Taiwan, “final status” issues are best left vague. The emphasis ought to be on avoiding unilateral actions that could trigger a crisis.
‘ In other domains, the U.S. will simply have to accept China for what it is. ’
In other domains, the U.S. will simply have to accept China for what it is. China will continue to maintain a large (if somewhat reduced) state role in the economy and a closed political structure. “As China enters middle income, we need a strong anchor for our society,” one senior Chinese official told me. “We need to strengthen the Party. You equate authority with authoritarianism, and think China is a dictatorship. This is wrong.” The U.S. should call out human-rights abuses in China, but the focus of our foreign policy should be China’s foreign policy, where we are more likely to have influence.
Attempting to hold China back is simply not a realistic policy for the U.S. Worse, it would stimulate nationalist impulses there that will set the countries on a collision course.
To avoid outright conflict, the U.S. needs to persuade Chinese officials that taking on the U.S. militarily is a fool’s errand—a calculation that depends in some measure on our international support. The Trump administration has adopted a tough line toward China, but it has undermined its own policy by weakening our alliances and rejecting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have pressured China to further reform its economy. Such strategic inconsistency doesn’t serve U.S. interests.
The U.S. also needs to adopt new policies on several fronts. The just-signed-into-law “Build Act” to encourage private American investment in the developing world is a useful, if limited, response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Strengthening controls on Chinese investment in the U.S. is also a step in the right direction. Some supply chains may need to be rerouted away from China, although such interdependence is one bulwark against conflict. Universities and think tanks should refuse to accept Chinese government funding. And if the U.S. isn’t to be left behind by Beijing’s major technology push, “Made in China 2025,” the public and private sectors will need to cooperate much more in developing critical fields such as artificial intelligence.
‘ China is not responsible for America’s health-care crisis, aging infrastructure or poor public schools. ’
The U.S. must also get its own house in order. China is not responsible for America’s health-care crisis, aging infrastructure, poor public schools, exploding debt or inadequate immigration policy. Foreign policy must truly begin at home for the U.S. to compete successfully. Progress across these areas would also disabuse the Chinese of the idea that the U.S. is in decline and lacks the will and ability to stand up to a dynamic new power.
Finally, it would be foolish to give up on the prospect of selective cooperation. North Korea is a case in point. Afghanistan could be another, given China’s influence in Pakistan. Sino-American cooperation is also essential if the world is to weather the next financial crisis, make progress on climate change, reform the WTO and set forth rules for cyberspace. The U.S. will want to avoid holding areas of potential cooperation hostage to areas of competition.
China will have to do its part as well. China’s economy is too large for it to hide behind the argument that it remains a developing economy that should not be expected to live up to global norms. President Xi has called for a new type of great power relationship between the two countries, but he has not explained what he means in such a way as to clarify or resolve current tensions. Doing so would be one mark of a great power.
Competition between the U.S. and China need not be “a four-letter word,” as Matthew Pottinger, the senior staff member on the National Security Council responsible for Asia, has said. A reasonable goal would be managed competition that allows for limited cooperation. For now, however, the Trump administration has adopted a confrontational approach without making clear what it seeks to achieve. It has thus ignored Clausewitz’s prudent advice—that battle should be joined only “as the means towards the attainment of the object of the War.”
Mr. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. His most recent book is “A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order.”
-
https://books.google.com/books/about/Destined_for_War.html?id=CtmpDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false
-
When Human Rights Become a Handicap to U.S. Foreign Policy
By Reva Goujon
VP of Global Analysis, Stratfor
The degree to which a U.S. president will emphasize human rights in foreign policy is as much a product of the geopolitical climate as it is personal ideology.
In addition to exposing the lengths to which the White House will go to maintain a strategic relationship, the slaying of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi revealed a broader defiance developing among authoritarian allies over Western human rights criticism.
In an era of great power competition, in which the Chinese model of digital authoritarianism is a direct challenge to the Western liberal order, human rights abuses are bound to grow more frequent and blatant.
Despite the cautionary tale of the Arab Spring, the United States and other Western powers will not be able to avoid the risk of entangling strategic imperatives with strongman personalities.
"We must seek partners, not perfection."
These were perhaps the most tantalizing words U.S. President Donald Trump could offer to the more than 50 leaders of the Islamic world who attended his speech in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May 2017. And perhaps no one was listening more intently to that message than an excitable young prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who was merely days away from kicking his older cousin out of the line of succession while preparing to take the reins of the kingdom.
The shock surrounding the grisly killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi all comes back to that sublimely surreal summit in Riyadh. The royal carpet at the now legendary Ritz-Carlton was rolled out for America's new, gilded president, cementing a powerful personal bond between the young prince and the Trump family dynasty. Less than a month later, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, expecting a wink and a nod from the Trump White House, launched an aggressive diplomatic offensive against Qatar over Doha's ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. By November, high-powered CEOs flocked to the Ritz in Riyadh to pledge billions of dollars in investment at the kingdom's inaugural "Davos in the Desert" conference. Two months after that, the same palatial digs became a temporary prison for hundreds of Saudi royals charged with corruption.
The Big Picture
When competition builds among great powers, strategic interests will generally trump human rights considerations in U.S. foreign policy. In today's geopolitical climate, China's technology-fueled style of authoritarianism provides a compelling alternative for authoritarian states that have grown weary of Western human rights lectures and see an opening to consolidate power.
Crown Prince Salman was on a roll, and he was not about to let anything get in his way. So long as he had the seemingly unwavering support of a White House fixated on crippling Iran and so long as he could count on Bloomberg, Financial Times and other major platforms to boost his image as the poster boy of reform in the Middle East, his strategy was clear: ruthlessly remove rivals from his path at home, squeeze regional partners to bend to his foreign policy priorities and double down on any foreign governments or corporations that dare to voice an opinion on his questionable methods.
But strategy by itself does not necessarily translate into strategic results. Placing Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri under house arrest and having him show up in selfies with the crown prince a few months later does not change the fact that any Lebanese leader will need a working relationship with Hezbollah to avoid paralyzing a deeply fractured country such as Lebanon. Cutting ties with Qatar will only give Doha more cause to shore up alliances with like-minded regional powers such as Turkey to avoid getting swallowed up by Saudi Arabia's shadow. And pursuing dissidents at any cost, including significant diplomatic and corporate fallout, could end up giving more space and credibility to the crown prince's rivals as questions over succession continue to swirl in the Saudi kingdom.
This was supposed to be the lesson of the Arab Spring for the United States and other powers in the Western world: Beware of getting overly attached to strongman personalities, keep your options open and focus on building up credible institutions in countries of interest to avoid getting caught in a lurch if and when a prized ally bites the dust. Perhaps that's easier said than done, especially when dealing with seemingly indestructible political dynasties or when democratic votes have the potential to produce unpleasant results.
The Blurry Line
That unavoidably blurry line around human rights and its role in U.S. foreign policy also tends to get a lot more contentious in a period of great power competition, and it can fluctuate widely between White Houses. In the Nixon-Kissinger era during the Cold War, the White House battled Congress to keep a tight lid on human rights concerns, from Chile's Pinochet to the Shah's Iran. As Kissinger said during his confirmation as secretary of state in 1973, "I believe it is dangerous for us to make the domestic policy of countries around the world a direct objective of U.S. foreign policy," insisting on a "pragmatic policy" in which the United States would have to determine whether or not "the infringement is so offensive that we cannot live with it” in managing the United States' bilateral relationships.
That ruthlessly realpolitik approach by the White House compelled a much more assertive Congress in 1976 to mandate annual reports from the secretary of state on the condition of human rights in countries that receive U.S. aid. President Jimmy Carter endorsed that track and made institutionalizing human rights oversight and cutting military aid to offending states a key feature of his foreign policy. President Ronald Reagan's administration returned to a more strategic approach, using human rights issues to rhetorically seize the moral high ground in its ideological crusade against communism, all while dealing much more pragmatically with unsavory allies in practice. President George H.W. Bush broadly continued with that approach, taking care to avoid a rupture in the Sino-U.S. relationship after the Tiananmen Square massacre, but he also gambled on interventions on humanitarian grounds in Panama and Somalia.
As great power competition waned and globalization took hold of the 1990s, human rights arguments gained more prominence in policy debates and U.S. foreign policy grew more experimental in practice. Under President Bill Clinton, the United States made humanitarian interventions in Haiti and the Balkans and held the prevailing, albeit mistaken, belief that China's entry into the World Trade Organization would be the long-term antidote to authoritarianism. President George W. Bush and his neoconservative camp combined the liberal idea of democratic peace promotion with military activism to capsize Iraq in an amorphous global war on terrorism. President Barack Obama, in trying to unbury the United States from its all-consuming wars in the Islamic world and prepare for rising competition from Russia and China, practiced a far more restrained approach to foreign policy overall, all while rhetorically championing democratic ideals abroad.
The Trump Approach
Like several of his predecessors, Trump follows a dualistic and selective approach to human rights issues, albeit in much blunter terms. Depending on whether a country is on the White House's friend or foe list, human rights will either be used as a Get Out of Jail Free card to reinforce strategic ties or as a hammer to whack problematic governments over the head. The White House approach to Saudi Arabia illustrates the former: A strategic partnership fueled in large part by a common agenda to weaken Iran and stabilize energy markets will overwhelm the near-term awkwardness over the Khashoggi affair or any other human rights spectacle that emerges from the kingdom. An overwhelming U.S. imperative to avoid a costly military conflict in Northeast Asia has largely omitted human rights from the U.S. diplomatic agenda on North Korea. But in the case of Iran's protest crackdowns, Turkey's detention of American evangelical pastor Andrew Brunson and China's treatment of the country's Uighur minority, the Trump White House has wielded human rights abuses and the threat of punitive measures as one of several pressure tactics to try to coerce these governments into meeting U.S. demands.
Some level of hypocrisy is expected from any president trying to steer U.S. foreign policy around human rights issues. But how foreign governments interpret the White House's general approach toward the subject from the onset will have a profound impact on their behavior. As journalist Tamar Jacoby described in a 1986 Foreign Affairs article on "The Reagan Turnaround on Human Rights," abuses in El Salvador, Haiti and South Korea soared just between Reagan's election and his inauguration. His rebuke of Carter for allowing human rights to get in the way of U.S. interests in Nicaragua and Iran brought a sigh of relief to authoritarian Cold War allies eager to shrug off Carter's human rights obsession. Similarly, the Saudi crown prince — along with a number of other regional players — interpreted Trump's message from the May 2017 summit as a clear-cut sign that the White House would not make human rights a fixture of Trump foreign policy.
Authoritarian Defiance
So it's little wonder that the Khashoggi affair has appeared to have little impact so far on the crown prince's royal clout. Not only does the crown prince remain in the public limelight and retain an array of powerful economic and security portfolios with the king's blessing, but he is also heading up the investigation and internal intelligence restructuring triggered by a crime that he is widely believed to have commissioned. And even as Saudi Arabia continues to face the threat of sanctions and investment curtailments in the wake of the slaying, Riyadh is staying the course and holding business ties hostage over their meddling in Saudi affairs (Saudi Arabia has reportedly frozen a $2 billion Egyptian-German defense deal that it helped finance in response to Germany's freeze on arms exports licenses to Riyadh).
And that defiance is by no means limited to Saudi Arabia. In an incredible display of Gulf solidarity after the Khashoggi crisis, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates called for boycotts of companies that threaten to pull out of Saudi Arabia, including Virgin and Uber, two critical investors for Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund expansion strategy. What would compel these Gulf neighbors to jump on a bloodstained bandwagon and risk tarnishing their reputation among investors when the Khashoggi fallout could have been just as easily confined to the Saudi kingdom? The opportunity to underscore a deeper message: that foreign governments and companies are not allowed to have an opinion on how they run their domestic affairs.
In this era of great power competition, that message has a powerful endorser. China, in harnessing and exporting its technological prowess in running a surveillance state, offers a compelling alternative to a number of politically paranoid regimes that are no longer convinced that the Western liberal order is the inevitable organizing principle of the international system. China's emulative model of digital authoritarianism and its growing challenge to the United States as a peer competitor will encourage a number of governments to spurn human rights lectures with the growing confidence that Western strategic interests will trump their humanitarian concerns in the end. Can Germany, for example, really afford a major breach with Turkey or Poland over human rights when these front-line states serve a core, strategic interest in balancing against Russia? Would the United States harangue Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte over human rights when China is actively chipping away at the United States' alliance network in Southeast Asia?
A cycle thus emerges: As competition intensifies among the great powers, the maintenance of strategic ties will outweigh humanitarian concerns in managing U.S. foreign relations. Illiberal allies will gain more confidence to crack down on dissidents and curb freedoms in a bid to consolidate power. The more power consolidated under a single personality or clan in a repressive climate, the more vulnerable that political system is bound to grow over time. In the face of rumbling dissent, authoritarian personalities will resort to more extraordinary measures to hold on to their dynasties. More and more egregious human rights abuses will be exposed, and Congress and the White House will spar over the handling and interpretation of matters of security. And the United States will ultimately find itself in an all too familiar dilemma: U.S. strategic imperatives hanging by a thread from the hands of despotic and arguably indispensable allies.
-
second post
The Illusion of a Russia-China Alliance
Neither country can solve the other’s top economic and strategic problems.
George Friedman |November 7, 2018
Save to PDF
Print
Tweet
Share on Facebook
Recipient e-mail
Your name
Your message
China is holding a weeklong event called the China International Import Expo in Shanghai this week meant to encourage trade, sell China as an import market and send the message that the Chinese economy is open for business. China’s motivation for doing this is obvious: It’s a nation dependent on exports, and American tariffs have decreased demand for its goods. In his opening address, President Xi Jinping stressed that China was prepared to open its markets even further to international trade – with the United States and the rest of the world. His remarks were clearly directed at the U.S., as he looks toward his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at the G-20 meeting in Argentina later this month. But the conference has also raised questions about China’s relations with another country that’s experienced its own setbacks in U.S. relations: Russia. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said at the expo that Moscow and Beijing are now closer than ever, and the Chinese emphatically agreed. Indeed, there has been much talk of a Russo-Chinese alliance, and the Shanghai extravaganza is a good opportunity to look closer at what this could mean.
China and Russia both have serious economic problems that have been exacerbated by the United States. Russia’s problems derive from the decline in the price of oil, a resource on which the Russian economy is heavily dependent. The United States, along with the EU, has compounded Moscow’s economic woes by imposing sanctions following Russian incursions in Ukraine and meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. China’s problems derive, at least in part, from its dependency on exports. This year, the U.S. has imposed tariffs on more than $250 billion worth of Chinese imports, and according to Bloomberg, it’s preparing to announce new duties on all remaining Chinese imports by December if trade talks don’t go well.
On the surface, that Russia and China share a common, powerful adversary should be the foundation of a strong alliance. Both countries are significant military powers, and they ought to be able to support each other economically. But appearances can be deceptive.
On the economic front, developing stronger ties with each other wouldn’t fully solve any of their problems. Russia needs to sell raw materials, particularly oil, in massive amounts to keep its economy running. Between January and August 2018, crude oil accounted for 28.8 percent of Russia’s total exports and natural gas accounted for 10.9 percent, according to Russia’s statistics agency. China was its biggest oil importer at 22 percent, though it purchased only 1 percent of Russia’s natural gas exports. (As a whole, however, the European Union imported more Russian oil than China did.) Indeed, China is a big oil importer and overtook the U.S. as the world’s largest crude buyer in 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The problem, however, is that Chinese imports are limited by the lack of energy infrastructure between the two countries. Pipelines are costly and take a long time to build. China, therefore, might be able to ease a bit of Russia’s demand for oil consumers, but it can’t buy enough to keep prices high or ease the risk of further sanctions that could target its energy exports.
(click to enlarge)
China, meanwhile, needs to find buyers for its manufactured goods. In 2017, exports made up nearly 20 percent of its gross domestic product, according to the World Bank. The United States is its largest market, accounting for 19 percent of its goods exports, according to the International Trade Centre. With U.S. tariffs cutting into these exports and intensified competition from other exporters, Beijing needs to find new buyers for its goods. But Russia is in no position to consume enough Chinese exports to make up for these losses – it purchased only 2 percent of China’s total exports in 2017. Neither country, therefore, can provide meaningful economic support to the other.
(click to enlarge)
On the military front, it’s true that the two countries have increased cooperation in recent years. Since the end of the Cold War, China has been Russia’s largest arms purchaser, and according to Russian media, Beijing acquired a Russian-made S-400 air defense system in July of this year. In addition, Russia’s largest military exercises since the Cold War, held in September, were attended by thousands of Chinese troops. This had many speculating that the two countries were on the verge of forging a military alliance. The problem is that alliances are based on shared interests, and Russia and China have a history of mutual distrust. The two have clashed over border issues several times throughout the years and competed for influence in Asia throughout the Cold War.
They also have different strategic priorities. Russia is facing what it sees as intense pressure along its western frontier and, to a lesser extent, in the Middle East. China has little interest in expending its resources to protect Russia’s European buffer. They might share the world’s sixth-longest international border but deploying troops and resources to Russia’s west, where its major population centers are located, would be a logistical nightmare for China, to say the least. (Nor would Moscow welcome or be able to support such a deployment.)
China, on the other hand, faces a challenge from the United States in the South China Sea, where Beijing is trying to prevent any possible future blockade of its access to maritime shipping lanes by stationing military and naval assets on its artificial islands off its southeastern coast. The U.S. often conducts freedom of navigation operations in contested waters there to make the point that the Chinese buildup won’t prevent others from traveling freely through the region and to reassure its allies in Southeast Asia. The Chinese could undoubtedly use naval support there and in the Western Pacific, but the ability of the Russians to project significant naval power in these areas is limited. The Russians do have a naval base at Vladivostok, but it’s blocked from ready access to the Pacific by Japan, as well as U.S. air power. While a blockade of Vladivostok isn’t likely, any military action must take into account the worst-case scenario, and Vladivostok can easily become a trap for Russia’s fleet.
It might be far-fetched, but the only way the Russians and Chinese could coordinate to thwart their major threats would be through a simultaneous attack by Russia toward the west and by China on U.S. naval assets in the east. The problem is that whereas Europe is an army issue, the South China Sea is a naval issue. The U.S. could concentrate its naval forces against China without diverting land forces from Europe. But infinitely more important is the fact that, considering all their economic problems, neither China nor Russia intends to start a world war, which this certainly would do.
Though a Sino-Russian alliance would seem to be a logical counter to their common adversary, it’s just an illusion. All the warm gestures in Shanghai can’t hide the fact that Russia and China can’t help each other get out of their serious economic and strategic problems. It’s an alliance that works only on paper, at best
-
https://clarionproject.org/khashoggo-affiar-derail-arab-nato/
-
https://tnsr.org/roundtable/policy-roundtable-the-future-of-conservative-foreign-policy/
-
https://tnsr.org/roundtable/policy-roundtable-the-future-of-conservative-foreign-policy/
Some interesting and different perspectives in there. Conservative foreign policy is what we used to American foreign policy. )
I like the distinction Dr. Fonte made between two diverging views one taken by Trump and the other by Obama, “sovereigntists” and “post-sovereigntists”. 'American foreign policy' versus global vision.
Fonte quoting President Obama: At the United Nations in 2016, Obama outlined a post-sovereigntist vision that was the mirror opposite of Trump’s worldview. Obama told the General Assembly, “We’ve bound our power to international laws and institutions.” He declared that the “promise” of the United Nations could only be realized “if powerful nations like my own accept constraints… . I am convinced that in the long run, giving up freedom of action — not our ability to protect ourselves…but binding ourselves to international rules over the long term — enhances our security.”
Without even getting to Obamacare that pretty much sums up how he lost the House, the Senate and the succession of the White House to the people who abhor that view.
[What conservatism aims to conserve] Fonte: “conserve” something realistic — America’s military superiority and manufacturing base — and idealistic — America’s sovereignty and way of life.
----------------------------------------------------------------
One problem among many with the global citizen view [to an 'elite' ruling class] is that as you lose your sovereignty you become a subject, not a citizen.
-
Interesting discussion in this piece. I would ask Mr. Dobbins: Is the US capable of doing what he calls for?
History Ended in 1945
Undoing the postwar order could produce global depressions and frequent wars.
44 Comments
By James Dobbins
Dec. 9, 2018 6:01 p.m. ET
Debate over the health of democracy and the liberal world order is all the rage these days, sparked by President Trump’s brand of “America First” nationalism, similar movements in Europe, the emergence of a revanchist Russia, and the rise of China.
In 1989 Francis Fukuyama published an essay heralding the “end of history,” by which he meant the triumph of representative democracy over all other forms of government. For a decade he appeared prescient, as democracy swept through Central and Southeastern Europe, Latin America and much of Asia. More recently some of those democracies have faltered. Although few have definitively collapsed, the democratic wave seems to have begun ebbing.
Yet in a larger sense, the “end of history” came in 1945. Since then there have been no wars between major powers and few between smaller states. The business cycle has been moderated if not eliminated. The subsequent seven decades saw almost continuous economic growth, lifting nearly half the world’s population into the middle class.
These accomplishments are based on two basic, widely accepted norms of international behavior: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s territory, and thou shall open thy markets to all equally. The norms were buttressed by numerous postwar institutions—the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization. Equally important, the norms were backed by U.S. military and economic power and the attractiveness of the American political and economic model.
It is therefore legitimate to ask whether this order can survive if America proves unwilling to continue bearing the burden of leadership and what the alternatives would be. One possibility is that China fills the void, producing a new order—perhaps peaceful but no longer conducive to individual liberty. An even worse outcome would be a return to history—the age-old cycle of boom-and-bust economics and frequent major wars.
To see what happens when an international order breaks down, recall the first half of the 20th century, a time of global depression and world war. Civilization survived that paroxysm in the prenuclear age. With at least nine nuclear powers, cyberwarfare and potential aggressive applications of biotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence, one cannot be so confident today.
In the early days of the Trump administration, the president’s top national-security and economic advisers, H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote that “the world is not a ‘global community,’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” The authors of this Hobbesian vision were the two leading globalists in the White House, and neither lasted long.
Since then Mr. Trump has steadily chipped away at the postwar order starting with its original foundations, the trans-Atlantic and European communities, embodied respectively in NATO and the European Union. He has levied national-security tariffs on America’s closest allies, called into question the continued relevance of the trans-Atlantic alliance, and raised doubts about the durability of the U.S. commitment to Europe’s security. Reversing decades of American policy, Mr. Trump cheered Britain’s exit from the EU and effectively encouraged Germany to leave too when he urged Chancellor Angela Merkel to negotiate a bilateral trade deal with the U.S.
While not an isolationist, Mr. Trump is a bilateralist. His effort to achieve balanced trade one nation at a time runs counter to the core principles of the postwar trading system and to the economic consensus from John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo to the present day. Mr. Trump has attacked the WTO’s dispute-settlement mechanism even though the U.S. wins a large majority of its cases. He has even threatened to leave that organization.
These and other steps to undo past bargains represent a significant retreat from the norm-based, democratically inclined, open-market-based order that the U.S. largely invented beginning in 1945 and has championed since. Most of these steps are reversible, and some of the damage can be undone. But if this vision of the international order endures, the result may be a return to history where life for many will again become “nasty, brutish and short.”
Mr. Dobbins holds the Distinguished Chair in Diplomacy and Security at the RAND Corp. and is a former assistant secretary of state
-
The norms were buttressed by numerous postwar institutions—the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization.
:roll:
All the above either hopelessly corrupt, ineffective or actually counterproductive towards their stated mission.
-
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42699.pdf
-
Thank you for that BD.
-
This piece starts out promisingly, but then goes downhill.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-12-11/how-world-order-ends?cid=nlc-fa_twofa-20181213
-
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272337/withdrawing-syria-implements-trump-doctrine-daniel-greenfield
-
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/its-chutzpah-to-blame-trump-for-syria/
-
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/its-chutzpah-to-blame-trump-for-syria/
Quite a thought provoking piece though I find things to agree and disagree with.
The point of blaming Trump is future oriented. There is no blame now. If something avoidable goes wrong, he pulled our forces out.
On the positive side they say our pullout frees Israel he says to be more aggressive with Syria, Iran, Lebanon. Yes and no. I don't think they checked those things with us before nor are they fully unconstrained after.
-
Spengler is always very interesting.
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13380/europe-iran-appeasement
-
Trump’s Successful Pivot to Asia
America’s regional allies are relieved to learn that the U.S. isn’t going anywhere—for now.
9 Comments
By Michael Auslin
Jan. 15, 2019 6:48 p.m. ET
President Trump signed legislation on the last day of 2018 designed to strengthen America’s role in the Indo-Pacific region. The Asia Reassurance Initiative Act is the most comprehensive statement in a generation of America’s regional interests. It authorizes expenditures of $1.5 billion annually through 2023 to enhance U.S. military, diplomatic and economic engagement with East and Southeast Asian allies such as Japan, India, South Korea and Taiwan. Unlike the Obama administration’s ballyhooed “pivot” to Asia, Mr. Trump’s turn to the East seems to have rattled China’s cage.
The president is regularly attacked by critics for withdrawing from the global stage and undermining the American-led world order, but his goal in Asia is consistent with that of previous administrations from both parties: preserving what the Trump administration calls a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” Mr. Trump has energetically pursued this goal, overturning significant parts of America’s Indo-Pacific policy dating back to the 1970s. His decision to levy tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods made clear that Washington is dropping the fiction that China is a fair trading partner. The U.S. military has increased freedom-of-navigation operations and flyovers near China’s new military bases in the South China Sea.
The administration has also abandoned the policy of looking away from Chinese cyberaggression. Moreover, by negotiating directly with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Mr. Trump has broken the model of negotiating multilaterally in the hope of compelling Beijing to push Pyongyang to denuclearize.
Mr. Trump is correct that America’s Asia policy needed a reset, and China’s global ambitions make it unlikely that future American presidents will return to business as usual. But if Mr. Trump fails to arrest China’s advances or North Korea’s nuclear successes, his pivot may ultimately diminish U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific region.
Mr. Trump signed the new law, co-sponsored by Sens. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) and Edward Markey (D., Mass.), a day before the 40th anniversary of the normalization of U.S.-China relations. The symbolic timing of this gesture is a clear signal that the administration sees China as the world’s greatest threat to U.S. interests. But even without the new law, Mr. Trump’s get-tough attitude toward Beijing sets him apart from his predecessors.
The administration has at last begun retaliating against China’s persistent cyber-espionage and global meddling. In October Belgian authorities arrested a Chinese intelligence officer and extradited him to the U.S., where he will soon face trial for stealing trade secrets from American aviation companies. In December, at the request of the U.S., Canada detained Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive of telecommunications giant Huawei. She is free on bail, but federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York are looking to have her extradited so they can charge her with helping companies circumvent American sanctions against Iran.
Though few in Washington will admit it publicly, policy makers on both sides of the aisle see Mr. Trump’s bold stance as long overdue. Yet his Asia pivot is also risky. Some worry he will rush into an agreement with North Korea, perhaps withdrawing U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula in return for a promise of denuclearization. If Mr. Trump caves in to pressure from Pyongyang, Seoul and Beijing to reach a bad deal, it may be impossible to convince Tokyo and other allies that Washington won’t pack up its troops and leave them to face the Chinese threat on their own.
Arrests and tariffs alone won’t force a change of heart in Beijing. Yet the U.S. administration likely has the upper hand. Global opinion is turning against China and the world’s second-largest economy is suddenly sputtering. Mr. Trump should therefore push for as detailed and verifiable a commitment as possible from Beijing to open its markets further, uphold international law, and crack down on state-sponsored hacking. Because prior Chinese pledges have proved hollow, if Beijing fails to follow through this time, Mr. Trump should immediately restrict the number of Chinese students permitted to study at U.S. universities, place curbs on Chinese tech companies’ American operations, and limit Chinese purchases of American companies and real estate.
No one should be in any doubt about the stakes: Beijing is looking to hasten the day when it replaces the U.S. as the indispensable Indo-Pacific power. America’s allies in the region are watching—some fearfully—to see whether the time has come to cleave to China and support Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. Mr. Trump’s pivot may offer the last chance to forestall such an outcome.
Mr. Auslin is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The End of the Asian Century.”
-
https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/prime-minister-winston-churchill-postwar-speeches-best-legacy/
-
I will be giving that a proper read BD.
================================
A Sino-Russian Entente Again Threatens America
The U.S. must revise its policy toward Moscow if it is to meet the threat from a rising China.
89 Comments
By Graham T. Allison and
Dimitri K. Simes
Jan. 29, 2019 7:09 p.m. ET
WSJ
Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned in 1997 that the greatest long-term threat to U.S. interests would be a “grand coalition” of China and Russia, “united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.” This coalition “would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time China would likely be the leader and Russia the follower.”
Few heeded his admonition. But this grand alignment of the aggrieved has been moving from the realm of the hypothetical toward what could soon be a geostrategic fact. Beijing and Moscow are drawing closer together to meet what each sees as the “American threat.”
The thought of an entente between Eurasia’s two great powers has for the most part struck the Washington establishment as so outlandish as not to require serious examination. Then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in August that Moscow and Beijing have a “natural nonconvergence of interests.” And there can be no doubt that their values and cultures differ starkly.
Nonetheless, a fundamental proposition in international relations is that the enemy of my enemy is a friend. Students of history know how often governments have been surprised by unnatural bedfellows, including the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and the U.S.-Soviet alliance in World War II.
The U.S. and Russia have grown more antagonistic in theaters from the Middle East to Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the Washington foreign-policy establishment is increasingly in agreement that China is the primary strategic adversary of the U.S. as the two countries clash over trade and the South China Sea. It would be surprising if strategists in Beijing and Moscow did not recognize a common enemy.
President Obama was visibly disdainful toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, and President Trump charges that China is “raping America.” By contrast, Xi Jinping took his first foreign trip as China’s president to Moscow and has recently declared the Russian leader his “best, most intimate friend.” Both Messrs. Xi and Putin see the U.S. as trying to undermine authoritarian regimes and therefore their own legitimacy as rulers.
In Chinese and Russian national-security documents, their relationship is called a “comprehensive strategic partnership.” Mr. Xi said in 2013 that “the Sino-Russian relationship is the world’s most important bilateral relationship, and is the best relationship between large countries.” China and Russia coordinate their positions in the United Nations Security Council (where they vote together 98% of the time), the Brics summits, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Russia is also pivoting east economically. China is Russia’s top trading partner and the top buyer of Russian oil. With the completion of the Power of Siberia pipeline this year, China will become the second-largest market for Russian gas, just behind Germany.
American experts have discounted Sino-Russian military cooperation. But one Russian official described the relationship as a “functional military alliance.” Russia has started selling China some of its most advanced technologies, including the S-400 air defenses. The two countries share intelligence and threat assessments and actively collaborate on rocket-engine research and development.
True, Russian elites continue to look west when it comes to tradition, culture and history. Wealthy Russians buy second (and third) homes in London and New York, not Beijing. But as their hopes for integration with the West have eroded, the number of Russians learning Mandarin and traveling east has increased.
A half-century ago, recognizing the threat from the Sino-Russian behemoth, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon managed to forge a relationship with Mao’s China that widened an emerging fissure between the two powers. Over time, this helped the U.S. undermine the Soviet empire and achieve victory in the Cold War. Today China is taking a page from that script, pulling Russia into its orbit for a long confrontation with the U.S.
If the defining challenge to U.S. national interests in the 21st century is a rising China, preventing the emergence of a Sino-Russian entente should be a key U.S. priority. Persuading Russia to sit on the U.S. side of the balance of power seesaw will require American policy makers to revise substantially their strategic objectives in dealing with Moscow. As difficult as this is to imagine in the craze of American politics today, the starting point for the conversation must be clear-eyed recognition of cause and effect. When the U.S. seeks to punish Mr. Putin for his unacceptable behavior—no matter its intentions—it has the predictable consequence of pushing Russia into an unnatural alliance with China.
A sound U.S. global strategy would combine greater realism in recognizing the threat of a Beijing-Moscow alliance, and greater imagination in creating a coalition of nations to meet it.
Mr. Allison, a professor of government at Harvard, is author of “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , 2017). Mr. Simes is president and CEO of the Center for the National Interes
-
Trump’s ‘Endless Wars’ and Peace
U.S. troops abroad are needed to deter war and bad actors.
26 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 7, 2019 7:38 p.m. ET
American troops coordinate with Iraqi counterparts to launch airstrikes and artillery from a small complex in the town of Qaim, Iraq, Jan. 25, 2018.
American troops coordinate with Iraqi counterparts to launch airstrikes and artillery from a small complex in the town of Qaim, Iraq, Jan. 25, 2018. Photo: Susannah George/Associated Press
President Trump won applause in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address when he declared that “great nations do not fight endless wars.” It’s a resonant line in a country that has been fighting in parts of the Middle East for nearly two decades. And, in a literal sense, the statement is true.
Yet the risk of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is that it encourages a public belief that America can abdicate its responsibility to work with allies to preserve the peace. History shows the great danger in failing to distinguish between fighting wars and deterring them. That’s especially true now that the authoritarian nations of Russia, Iran and China are seeking to dominate their regions and sometimes join forces against U.S. interests.
Potomac Watch Podcast
Trump's State of the Union Address
What we learned from Trump's State of the Union address.
One lesson is that keeping troops abroad is often cheaper than bringing them home. An unwavering commitment to the defense of Western Europe under NATO prevented the Cold War from becoming a hot one. Some 300,000 U.S. troops across Europe deterred Moscow for decades until the Warsaw Pact imploded.
The same strategy has preserved the peace in North Asia, to the benefit of the American homeland and economy. Strategic commitments to Japan and South Korea, bolstered by some 80,000 American military personnel, have partially contained the North Korean threat while creating space for both countries to become thriving democracies.
Mr. Trump himself sometimes seems to intuit the importance of troops abroad to protect American interests. The U.S. maintains a naval base in Bahrain, an air base in Qatar, and deployments across Africa to target terrorists that could strike the homeland. His Pentagon late last year dispatched a carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf for the first time in eight months to contain Iran.
The President said on Sunday he wants to keep American troops in Iraq to “watch Iran.” He also wants a 350-ship Navy to patrol key waterways, including on occasion the Taiwan Strait. The point of these sensible deployments is to deter bad actors precisely so the U.S. doesn’t have to fight a war.
The alternative lesson is that withdrawing U.S. forces can invite war. That’s the lesson of Barack Obama’s 2011 withdrawal of troops from Iraq while claiming “the tide of war is receding.” Jihadists used the reprieve to form Islamic State, and by 2014 Mr. Obama was re-sending thousands of troops to the same theater. Staying would have been far less costly.
Opinion Live Event
Join us on March 4 as WSJ Opinion’s Paul Gigot leads a “State of TV News” panel discussion including Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, CBS’s Christy Tanner and “Network” actor Tony Goldwyn. Included in your admission to the event is a ticket to see “Network” on Broadway at a subsequent date.
Mr. Trump sometimes talks as if the choice now in Syria and Afghanistan is between no troops or tens of thousands and permanent conflict. But the U.S. only has 2,000 troops in Syria, and even he says the U.S. will need to strike Islamic State if it reconstitutes itself. That will require troops somewhere in the region. Likewise, a decision to withdraw from Afghanistan should depend on whether it won’t again become a safe haven for global jihad.
A key point here—and why Mr. Trump’s rhetorical isolationism is damaging—is that America can’t deter rogue regimes by itself. Whether in NATO or North Asia or the Middle East, the U.S. relies on allies to magnify America’s effectiveness as a keeper of the peace. Those allies need to trust that America will also be there when needed.
All the more so as Mr. Trump focuses on the challenges posed by undemocratic regimes in China, Russia and Iran. The White House’s 2017 strategic review made these challenges explicit, and Mr. Trump has done better than Mr. Obama in addressing them.
He has pulled out of the flawed nuclear accord and tried to raise the cost of Iranian aggression with renewed sanctions. Against Russia, Mr. Trump’s appeasing rhetoric toward Vladimir Putin has belied his tougher policies: NATO deployments in Eastern Europe, lethal arms for Ukraine, lobbying against its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, and no easing of sanctions.
A rising China is the stiffest test, and a work in progress. Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the Pacific trade accord was his worst strategic blunder, missing a chance to form a trade alliance without China. He can correct some of the damage if his talks with Beijing change China’s behavior. But that has a better chance of success if he’d rally Japan and Europe in a united front against China’s bad practices.
Mr. Trump’s foreign policy has been better than his rhetoric. But he shouldn’t mislead his supporters at home and upset friends abroad by suggesting that peace can be purchased by American retreat.
-
Trump doctrine, in practice, isn’t the isolationism that he sometimes promised on the campaign trail; nor is it the flailing bellicosity that many of his critics feared. It’s a doctrine of disentanglement, retrenchment and realignment, in which the United States tries to abandon its most idealistic hopes and unrealistic military commitments, narrow its list of potential enemies and consolidate its attempts at influence. The overarching goal isn’t to cede United States primacy or abandon American alliances, as Trump’s opponents often charge; rather, it’s to maintain American primacy on a more manageable footing, while focusing more energy and effort on containing the power and influence of China.
https://outline.com/YDutEH
Ross Douthat, NY Times
-
On the whole, I agree.
This article does not:
The French Philosopher Who Loves America
Bernard-Henri Lévy describes the gilets jaunes as a ‘crisis of liberal democracy’ and Trump as an ‘epiphenomenon’ of American ‘retreat.’
2 Comments
By Tunku Varadarajan
Feb. 8, 2019 6:32 p.m. ET
The French Philosopher Who Loves America
Illustration: Ken Fallin
New York
Bernard-Henri Lévy is bleary-eyed. He’s a dashing spectacle in every other way, but his eyelids loll from a lack of sleep. Bustling in the kitchen of his suite at the Carlyle Hotel is his young assistant, who knows exactly what to do for a boss who’s flown in from Paris. “Quatre sachets,” she says as she brings a small teapot to the table, crammed with four bags of Darjeeling.
BHL—to use Mr. Lévy’s nickname—is a philosopher given to interpreting the world’s maladies. He is in New York for the publication on Feb. 12 of his latest book, elegantly provocative, “The Empire and the Five Kings.” It describes “the new geopolitical order which is designing itself before our eyes” as a result of “America’s abdication” of global leadership.
“You have America going back,” he says, “retreating and lowering its flag, both on military and ideological terms.” In Mr. Lévy’s thesis, “five former empires, which we all thought to be dead and buried, are waking up again—Russia, China, Turkey, Sunni radical Islamism and Persia. We thought they were pure ghosts—but no, they are moving again; they are dancing again on the floor of the world.” They are rushing unchecked, he says, into the voids left everywhere by the retreat of the West, most notably under Donald Trump.
A public intellectual in the French manner, Mr. Lévy, 70, has long had the ear of many of his country’s presidents and other politicians. He does not shrink from inserting himself into the world’s war zones. Of these, he is most involved in Northern Iraq, where he is a tireless advocate for Kurdish autonomy. The high point of his worldliness came in 2011, when, by many accounts—including his own—he persuaded then-President Nicolas Sarkozy to pursue the toppling of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, who faced a major uprising in the Arab Spring.
The uprising that most preoccupies Mr. Lévy today is one that rumbles on in France itself. Since November, the country has seen the eruption of the gilets jaunes—the “yellow jackets”—political protesters who have converged on the heart of Paris, wreaking physical havoc on some of France’s most cherished symbols. Driven by an incendiary mix of ideologies, they have demanded the repeal of a steep new fuel tax, to which President Emmanuel Macron has acceded, as well as the implementation of “citizens’ referendums,” to which he has not.
The yellow jackets also called for Mr. Macron to resign, but he seems, for the moment, to have subdued the insurrection by launching a two-month Grand Débat National on what ails France. Some see the debate as a cynical ploy to deflate the enraged mob, others as a statesmanlike attempt to hear everyone out. BHL subscribes to the second view. “You know the Greek word maieutic?” he says. “It’s a word of Socrates. It means that your interlocutor is pregnant with an idea of which he’s not clearly aware himself, and that you help him to deliver it.” With his national debate, Mr. Lévy says, “Macron has invented a political maieutic.”
The protests, Mr. Lévy says, are “a big Event, with a capital E, in the history of France over the last two or three centuries”—so seminal that they will “remain in the archive” for later generations to marvel at.
“What’s happening here?” he asks, then answers: “Anger, for sure. A populist riot, for sure. But also the first real nihilist riots in modern European history.” Past riots, he says, always “had a target, a sense, a hope. There was the idea that the future could be better than the present. For the first time now, we have a pure moment of collective despair.” In the Paris Commune insurrection of 1871, he allows, “you had an attempt to burn the Louvre, so there was a nihilist dimension. But there was hope for a better world. There is nothing of the sort with the yellow-jacket movement.”
Newsletter Sign-up
So who are the gilets jaunes? “They are obviously desperate people, who feel they are treated in an unfair way,” says Mr. Lévy. “And they are right.” Yet many of the protesters own cars and tractors, farms and small businesses—that’s why they hate the fuel tax. How desperate can they be? “They work during the week,” Mr. Lévy says, “and they demonstrate on Saturday. In other words, they are certainly not the Damned of the Earth.”
Further, “the words in which they express this suffering,” Mr. Lévy says, “recall the worst of French history.” The movement has been egged on by “the two extremes of our political spectrum, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen”—the leaders of France’s extreme left and right, respectively. The two, Mr. Lévy adds, “are real twins,” who represent “the darkest political forces in France.” If the yellow jackets were American, Mr. Lévy adds, they would support Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. “They might oscillate—swing between the two.”
In BHL’s mind, the protests constitute “the third crisis of liberal democracy in France.” The first happened at the time of the Dreyfus affair—the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second was at the beginning of the 1930s, when citizens of a floundering France “began to think that liberal values were dead and that fascism represented the future.” He describes the yellow jackets as “the same sorts of people.” They turn their backs on democracy but don’t know what to put in its place: “What is sure is that they hate elites. They hate complexity. They hate the idea of France being open to the rest of the world. They hate immigration, trade.”
They also seem unfriendly to Jews. Mr. Lévy tells me protesters have made an arm gesture called the quenelle, invented by a comedian named Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, that is widely understood to be anti-Semitic. They have also chanted the word “Rothschild, again and again, as an obsession.” No doubt that is a way of anathemizing Mr. Macron, who worked for Rothschild & Cie Banque a decade ago—but it is also part of the French left’s anti-Semitic argot. “French socialism, when it was born 130 years ago, had two wings,” Mr. Lévy says. One of them, led by Jules Guesde and known as the Intransigents, “was really anti-Semitic. There was this idea, in this half of the party, that the embodiment of capitalism was the Rothschild Bank, and Rothschild was a nickname for the Jews. And this tradition continues, still, today.”
The yellow jackets hate Mr. Macron, BHL says, “because he wants France open to the world, and because he wants a country taking the risk of economic reforms.” More generally, Mr. Macron is “a man of complexity and of ideas, exactly what this sort of movement hates.” He adds a sweeping observation: “One of the characteristics of populism is that even when you are clever, you think that societies have to be governed in an unclever way.”
Mr. Macron’s cardinal sin in the eyes of France’s populists, BHL adds, is that he “is deeply pro-American. Like Sarkozy, he really believes in American exceptionalism.” Mr. Macron “believes that the U.S. is a shining city upon the hill.” Such a love for America, Mr. Lévy says, is itself “exceptional” in France. “Anti-Americanism is an important element of the French ideology. On the right and on the left, France was built upon the hate of America.” If you say you love America, “you are suspected of the worst. So imagine a French president! Being pro-American makes him an enemy of the true, real, well-rooted French people!”
Mr. Macron and French populists likewise have opposite views about the current American president, Mr. Lévy says. Mr. Macron “certainly thinks . . . that the shining city deserves better than Donald Trump.” The extreme left and right see “Trump killing America—and they like that. They like the idea of an American president destroying the values of America. They hate these values. They hate exceptionalism. They hate the idea of spreading democracy. They hated the neoconservative movement. So for them, Trump is a blessing.” In fact, he adds, one of the points on which far left and right agree in France is that “America is the embodiment of evil, not Russia.”
The genius of America, according to Mr. Lévy, “is to believe that it is a new Europe, an improved Europe.” The colonists, he says, read Virgil’s “Aeneid,” whose protagonist, Aeneas, “left his city in flames in order to replant its values on new ground. The Pilgrim Fathers were convinced that London, Amsterdam, and Paris were new Troys, devastated by the flames of intolerance,” so they left on ships and “replanted the values of a devastated Europe on the soil of America.”
Mr. Lévy worries that America’s “Virgilian link” may now be broken. “When did America cut this cord of life that made it a better Europe?” he asks. “Before Trump, for sure. The neoconservatives—even if I was not one of them—still believed in the gesture of Aeneas. They were probably the last pearl yielded up by the Virgilian oyster.”
Mr. Lévy is among the most pro-American of France’s public intellectuals. “I love America,” he says. “I was taught, all my childhood, that without America I would not even exist.” Mr. Trump dismays him, and the U.S. “retreat” from the world fills him with dread. But he says “Trump is only an epiphenomenon in this regard,” and America began drawing back when President Obama “offered the Middle East to Putin and Iran. Then you had the first breaches in the alliance with Europe.”
With Mr. Trump, BHL says, America’s retreat has become “tragically worse. For this time, the betrayal is generalized. He betrays the Syrian democrats, he betrays the valiant Kurdish fighters, and he delivers the Middle East to Putin. And this creates, for Israel, the most threatening situation there could be.”
In Mr. Lévy’s view, “when Trump says he wants to make America great again, that means he makes it small. He renounces the exceptionalism that is the vocation of his country. It means that America loses the moxie that was always the real source of its authority and its grandeur.” America has erred in the past, he adds, “when it has acted as if its oceans were borders.” It is making that mistake again under Mr. Trump, “with unprecedented proportions.”
What would BHL like the Trump administration to do? “Stand with the Kurds,” he says fiercely. “Stay in Syria. Tell Putin, ‘Hands off Ukraine! Don’t touch the Baltic states!’ Make Erdogan understand that the time of the Ottoman Empire is over. And understand that carrying out America’s democratic and liberal vocation isn’t only an honor, but in America’s best interests.”
The philosopher swirls his teapot, but he’s emptied it. He shrugs: “Anyway, Trump will pass, and America will remain. There is an essence of America, and it is infinitely stronger than any current president. You have people who believe that the Trump moment means the erasing of America. I believe the opposite.”
Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Appeared in the February 9, 2019, print edition.
-
I'm a big fan of General Keane. He was the guest on the Mark Lavin show last night. Very much worth tracking down!
-
Athens and Jerusalem
On geopolitics and the intellectual tradition.
George Friedman |February 21, 2019
It is time for me to write the book I always wanted to write, the book that may have no readers but that sums up my work. My book on America, “The Storm Before the Calm,” will be out in September, freeing me to write the book that has no title yet. The intent of this next book is to embed geopolitics, my life’s work, with philosophy, my love; I want to imagine that geopolitics derives from the great minds I read. My other books I have written alone. The writing of this one, or at least the thoughts that give it life, will be shared with my readers. And they, being in my mind far wiser than all the professors of philosophy I have met, will point out my errors and inconsistencies and will enrage me until I do better.
Each week I will write about a fragment of thought that I have been mulling over. Some will be polished; most – such as this one – will not have reached the clarity worthy of the reader. But each fragment is meant to be a prism through which I can understand important things in due course. The pieces will appear each Thursday.
It may be that most people will object to its obscurity and carelessness. If so, I will return to my cave and mutter.
This week’s fragment of thought is on the relationship between geopolitics and the shaping of the human soul. It traces Europe to Christianity, Christianity to Athens and Jerusalem, and these cities to wars between Babylon and Persia. It also traces the tension between the dictums “know thyself” and “I am the Lord thy God.” It is only a first sketch, so don’t expect too much of it.
European civilization has a unique place in world history. It was Europe, through exploration and conquest, that forged the global understanding that there is a single humanity living in multiple hemispheres and made that notion common knowledge. Until then, humanity had lived with a different and false map of the world, ignorant of its breadth and variability. Since Europe was the continent of Christianity, it spread Christianity. But Europeans’ realization of the many different cultures that existed, worshipping so many different gods, ultimately weakened the self-confidence of Christianity and of European civilization. But that is a story to consider at a later date. For now, the question is why it was Europe and not some other civilization that tore the veil away and revealed the breadth of the world.
All of this is a geopolitical problem. Religion would seem not to be part of geopolitics any more than philosophy is, but geopolitics is complex. It is about the relationship of humans to a place, but the nature of a place is shaped by complex forces – which, in this case, include Christianity. And Christianity itself emerges from two cities that are both near and very far apart: Athens and Jerusalem. It is there that we must begin.
Athens was the city in which reason came to know itself as man’s highest moment, and in which Aristotle said, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” Jerusalem is the city that enshrined the commandment “I am the Lord thy God … Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Athens was the city of logos – reason and discourse. Jerusalem was the city of awe not of men but of God and his law. The Gospel of John begins with the proclamation, “In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In that phrase, John sought to unite reason and revelation, the principles of Athens and Jerusalem. Athens held the core belief that to know thyself was the highest of goods; Jerusalem, that knowing God’s law was the greatest of things. Christianity obsessed over the soul and the self at the same time that it obsessed over God’s will. The Christian scholar Thomas Aquinas struggled with this tension, as did the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and the Muslim scholar al-Farabi. The dilemma of Athens and Jerusalem embedded itself in Eurasia. The tension between reason and revelation defined the region.
From a purely geopolitical point of view, it is striking that all of this played out along the rim of the Mediterranean, a small region within a far vaster world. It is hard to imagine two cities more distant in spirit than Athens and Jerusalem. Athens was built above a port, Piraeus. Ships from all over the Mediterranean arrived daily, delivering luxuries from around the basin. Athens was a wealthy city and, as some have said, corrupt and even weak because of its wealth. Jerusalem rested on a hill, overlooking a hard land where luxuries were few and held in suspicion. Athens luxuriated in the good life. Jerusalem luxuriated in a hard and jealous God. Athens knew many truths; Jerusalem, only one.
The one thing that bound them together was Persia. Persia threatened the Athenians’ very existence – but they were saved first by the Spartans (who were more Hebrew than Athenian) and then by their own navy. The Israelites were not threatened by the Persians but rather saved by them. The prophets had warned the Israelites that their failure to adhere to God’s laws would cause the fall of Jerusalem. In the end, this is what happened. They were conquered by Babylon (roughly located in present-day southern Iraq), the Israelites were exiled, and many wound up in Persia. Persia and Babylon fought a war – or, more precisely, an episode of a war that is ancient if not eternal. After defeating Babylon, King Cyrus allowed the Israelites to return to Israel and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.
The Athenians had allies. The Spartans and the Athenians had a common interest in avoiding being subjugated by Persia. The Israelites lived on difficult land and struggled with one other – one of the reasons for God’s aforementioned warning. And because the land was hard, there were few allies available, and because the Israelites were meant to focus on God, diverting their attention to subtle statecraft could be difficult. Their relative poverty and limited ports also meant they were not embedded in the wider world of the Mediterranean. So, the Athenians won, the Israelites lost – yet, they recovered what was lost because of Persia’s war with Babylon and the Israelites’ ability to shape Persian policy toward them.
Greece defeated Persia because it had strategic depth: a navy that could strike the Persian flank and rugged hills to retreat into. The Greeks, moreover, did not have to unite until war broke out. Their own fragmentation increased their defensive capability. Israel faced a different problem. It had hills in the north and desert to the south, but there was little to protect it in the east. Therefore, the Israelites had to maintain constant vigilance and unity, for a threat could materialize quickly. The Israelites did not have the Greek comfort of strategic depth. Greece had luxury – even Sparta was luxurious compared to Israel. The Greeks had the luxury to think about knowing themselves. Israel, united by the commandment to honor God and his laws, could mass and win. Divided by a lack of piety, they could be crushed – and they were. The moral problem and the geopolitical reality merged. Or, more precisely, geopolitical reality generated a moral principle essential to survival.
Athens and Jerusalem were in many ways forged in the Persian-Babylonian crucible. But their most significant effect was not to the east but to the west and north, in Europe. Athens and Jerusalem served as the foundation for post-pagan Europe and dominated it. Europe dominated the creation of a single world as well. Part of Europe’s hunger came from searching for discounts in India. But the Christian components of the European surge into the world should not be neglected. And therefore, Athens and Jerusalem must not be neglected.
As I’ve said, this is not intended to be anything more than a fragment of thought. But it is the beginning of the question: What is the relationship of geopolitics to the intellectual tradition? I do not regard geopolitics as a mechanistic tool designed to predict next week. I see it as part of a very old discussion of how we humans should understand the things we do and the things we have done. I regard global self-awareness as a giant punctuation mark in human history that can be traced back to Christianity, Christianity to Athens and Jerusalem, and Athens and Jerusalem to Persia and Babylon – one of the axes of the world.
There will be more to follow.
-
By George Friedman
After Hanoi: North Korea, the US and Japan
As the United States alters its strategy, the others will follow suit.
The Hanoi talks ended in deadlock. Both sides – represented by U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – showed their anger by refusing to shake hands. The media labeled the talks a failure. But I’ve been involved in a number of negotiations in my life, and I see this as a normal part of the process. At some point, all parties will take positions designed to test the other side’s hunger for a deal, and prudent negotiators know that showing hunger can be devastating. So, ending the negotiation, particularly with a show of anger, is routine. At the same time, mutual rejection can be genuine, and now each side is trying to figure out how serious the other is. Establishing that you are prepared to walk away from the table is important – but sometimes the deal falls apart as a result.
Where Things Stand
War with North Korea is not a good option for the U.S. There’s the danger of artillery fire close to Seoul, the uncertainty of the location of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and the U.S. aversion to the idea of getting bogged down in another war this century. North Korea, on the other hand, knows that one thing that would trigger a U.S. pre-emptive nuclear strike would be to develop weapons that can reach the U.S., and it wants to avoid such a strike at all costs. So, this failed negotiation leaves a reality in which war is not likely, giving both sides room for obstinacy.
The other major players in the region must now calculate their courses. For China and Russia, there’s little downside to the United States’ attention being diverted to North Korea. The more the U.S. feels under pressure to attend to other issues, the less it can focus on China and Russia. But it’s not clear whether the Hanoi outcome helps or hurts these two. On the one hand, the U.S. and North Korea are furious at each other. On the other hand, if this results in a frozen conflict, the U.S. can spare attention for others. The logic is that China and Russia will push North Korea to more overt moves to draw Washington’s focus. But North Korea has created room to maneuver for itself, and a cold distance from the United States serves it well.
For the U.S., the years since 9/11 have forcibly displayed the limits of its military power. The U.S. is very good at destroying enemy armies, but it is very bad at occupying enemy countries where the citizens’ morale has not been crushed (think Germany or Japan during World War II). In Iraq, for example, the U.S. expected Iraqis to welcome the Americans. Some did, some were indifferent and some resisted. The resistance was prepared to absorb substantial casualties; this was their country, and they had nowhere else to go. The U.S., quite reasonably, was not prepared for high casualties, as Iraq was not a fundamental, long-term, American interest. The local forces understood the social and physical terrain, while the U.S. had limited familiarity. The initial attacks were successful. The occupation was a mess.
Thus, out of necessity, the U.S. has adopted a strategy that draws down its forces and that is extremely cautious about engagements where it cannot crush civilian morale through World War II-style bombing and blockade. Even if confident in its ability to break a conventional or nuclear force, the U.S. has no appetite for occupation. The strategy since World War II, built on the assumption that U.S. conventional forces can defeat any foe and pacify the country, is being abandoned. And in the case of the Hanoi talks, the U.S. is following a new strategy of diplomatic deadlock without recourse to the insertion of force.
We understand therefore the North Korean, Chinese, Russian and U.S. positions. (South Korea, of course, wants a stable balance on the Korean Peninsula.) The country whose strategy is uncertain is Japan.
Japan’s Next Move
The major question that has emerged from the Hanoi talks is what Japan will do now. Japan is the world’s third-largest economy. It has a stable and homogeneous population, a substantial military force and an enormous capacity to increase that force.
The U.S. has decided to accept that North Korea is a nuclear state, so long as none of its nuclear weapons can reach the U.S. mainland. This completely destabilizes Japan’s strategy. Under that strategy, first imposed by the U.S. and happily embraced by Japan, the U.S. guarantees Japanese national security. The U.S., in exchange, has been able to use Japan as a base from which to project force across the Korean Peninsula, threaten China and block Russia’s Vladivostok fleet from accessing the Pacific Ocean. Japan, unencumbered by defense expenditures and any responsibility in American wars, could focus on the monumental task of its dramatic post-World War II recovery. Most important, the U.S. nuclear umbrella has guaranteed that any nation that might attack Japan with nuclear weapons would face retaliation from the United States. In reality, the United States’ willingness to launch a massive nuclear exchange if China or Russia hit a Japanese city was always uncertain. But since it was uncertain to potential aggressors too, it served its purpose, which was more psychological than military.
The Hanoi talks subtly shift that guarantee. The new U.S. position is that it cannot accept a North Korean nuclear program that threatens the United States. Implicit in that position is that it can tolerate one that threatens Japan. The U.S. nuclear umbrella is notionally still there, but the United States’ reluctance to engage raises the question of whether North Korea will be deterred. So, the U.S. nuclear deterrent still guards Japan – but can the guardian be trusted?
Japan lives in a rough neighborhood. The Russians hold islands to which the Japanese lay claim, and while it’s not a real threat now, the Russian future is always unknown. China is challenging Japan’s control of islands in the East China Sea and is threatening to potentially take control of the Western Pacific, which is currently in the hands of the United States. China has a long memory of Japanese occupation and atrocities committed during the Sino-Japanese War. The Korean Peninsula, too, has a long memory of Japanese occupation, exploitation and abuse. So apart from the current geopolitical reality, Japan lives in a region that resents it for historical reasons.
In this context, the Japanese continue to struggle internally over defense policy. Japan’s current policy is to build a substantial force while minimizing its capabilities, saying it is only for national defense purposes. The alternative is for the world’s third-largest economy to normalize its international status by abandoning the constitutional prohibition on military force (already ignored for the most part) and create an armed force congruent with its economic might and strategic interests.
The Japanese public is on the whole comfortable with its postwar strategy. But with the rise of China, North Korean nuclear weapons and a potentially aggressive Russia, it cannot remain so for long. As the U.S. puts pressure on its allies to carry their own burdens, the Japanese strategy is becoming increasingly untenable. It cannot undergo a serious shift until the public does, and that means there will be an internal political crisis over the matter. But public opinion is already shifting, and the Japanese will face their reality.
Behind all this is an inevitable shift in U.S. foreign policy, visible in its stance on North Korea and elsewhere and rooted in the failure of U.S. warfare since World War II. The Korean War was a costly tie. Vietnam ended with Hanoi’s flag flying over Saigon. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan failed to establish viable, pro-U.S. regimes. The only 20th century wars in which the U.S. fared well were those in which U.S. allies bore a massive part of the burden. These wars only ended well when there was no U.S. occupation or when the ruthless execution of the war shattered the morale of the enemy and permitted the U.S. to reshape the societies. And very few wars will be like that.
That U.S. strategy had to shift was obvious to me a decade ago when I wrote “The Next Decade.” The shift has arrived, and that means nations, enemies and allies are repositioning themselves. In Asia, the Chinese and Russians will mostly hold their positions. North Korea will exploit the shift to the extent it can. But it is Japan that will have to undergo the most radical change.
-
US nukes in Taiwan would get their undivided attention.
By George Friedman
After Hanoi: North Korea, the US and Japan
As the United States alters its strategy, the others will follow suit.
The Hanoi talks ended in deadlock. Both sides – represented by U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – showed their anger by refusing to shake hands. The media labeled the talks a failure. But I’ve been involved in a number of negotiations in my life, and I see this as a normal part of the process. At some point, all parties will take positions designed to test the other side’s hunger for a deal, and prudent negotiators know that showing hunger can be devastating. So, ending the negotiation, particularly with a show of anger, is routine. At the same time, mutual rejection can be genuine, and now each side is trying to figure out how serious the other is. Establishing that you are prepared to walk away from the table is important – but sometimes the deal falls apart as a result.
Where Things Stand
War with North Korea is not a good option for the U.S. There’s the danger of artillery fire close to Seoul, the uncertainty of the location of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and the U.S. aversion to the idea of getting bogged down in another war this century. North Korea, on the other hand, knows that one thing that would trigger a U.S. pre-emptive nuclear strike would be to develop weapons that can reach the U.S., and it wants to avoid such a strike at all costs. So, this failed negotiation leaves a reality in which war is not likely, giving both sides room for obstinacy.
The other major players in the region must now calculate their courses. For China and Russia, there’s little downside to the United States’ attention being diverted to North Korea. The more the U.S. feels under pressure to attend to other issues, the less it can focus on China and Russia. But it’s not clear whether the Hanoi outcome helps or hurts these two. On the one hand, the U.S. and North Korea are furious at each other. On the other hand, if this results in a frozen conflict, the U.S. can spare attention for others. The logic is that China and Russia will push North Korea to more overt moves to draw Washington’s focus. But North Korea has created room to maneuver for itself, and a cold distance from the United States serves it well.
For the U.S., the years since 9/11 have forcibly displayed the limits of its military power. The U.S. is very good at destroying enemy armies, but it is very bad at occupying enemy countries where the citizens’ morale has not been crushed (think Germany or Japan during World War II). In Iraq, for example, the U.S. expected Iraqis to welcome the Americans. Some did, some were indifferent and some resisted. The resistance was prepared to absorb substantial casualties; this was their country, and they had nowhere else to go. The U.S., quite reasonably, was not prepared for high casualties, as Iraq was not a fundamental, long-term, American interest. The local forces understood the social and physical terrain, while the U.S. had limited familiarity. The initial attacks were successful. The occupation was a mess.
Thus, out of necessity, the U.S. has adopted a strategy that draws down its forces and that is extremely cautious about engagements where it cannot crush civilian morale through World War II-style bombing and blockade. Even if confident in its ability to break a conventional or nuclear force, the U.S. has no appetite for occupation. The strategy since World War II, built on the assumption that U.S. conventional forces can defeat any foe and pacify the country, is being abandoned. And in the case of the Hanoi talks, the U.S. is following a new strategy of diplomatic deadlock without recourse to the insertion of force.
We understand therefore the North Korean, Chinese, Russian and U.S. positions. (South Korea, of course, wants a stable balance on the Korean Peninsula.) The country whose strategy is uncertain is Japan.
Japan’s Next Move
The major question that has emerged from the Hanoi talks is what Japan will do now. Japan is the world’s third-largest economy. It has a stable and homogeneous population, a substantial military force and an enormous capacity to increase that force.
The U.S. has decided to accept that North Korea is a nuclear state, so long as none of its nuclear weapons can reach the U.S. mainland. This completely destabilizes Japan’s strategy. Under that strategy, first imposed by the U.S. and happily embraced by Japan, the U.S. guarantees Japanese national security. The U.S., in exchange, has been able to use Japan as a base from which to project force across the Korean Peninsula, threaten China and block Russia’s Vladivostok fleet from accessing the Pacific Ocean. Japan, unencumbered by defense expenditures and any responsibility in American wars, could focus on the monumental task of its dramatic post-World War II recovery. Most important, the U.S. nuclear umbrella has guaranteed that any nation that might attack Japan with nuclear weapons would face retaliation from the United States. In reality, the United States’ willingness to launch a massive nuclear exchange if China or Russia hit a Japanese city was always uncertain. But since it was uncertain to potential aggressors too, it served its purpose, which was more psychological than military.
The Hanoi talks subtly shift that guarantee. The new U.S. position is that it cannot accept a North Korean nuclear program that threatens the United States. Implicit in that position is that it can tolerate one that threatens Japan. The U.S. nuclear umbrella is notionally still there, but the United States’ reluctance to engage raises the question of whether North Korea will be deterred. So, the U.S. nuclear deterrent still guards Japan – but can the guardian be trusted?
Japan lives in a rough neighborhood. The Russians hold islands to which the Japanese lay claim, and while it’s not a real threat now, the Russian future is always unknown. China is challenging Japan’s control of islands in the East China Sea and is threatening to potentially take control of the Western Pacific, which is currently in the hands of the United States. China has a long memory of Japanese occupation and atrocities committed during the Sino-Japanese War. The Korean Peninsula, too, has a long memory of Japanese occupation, exploitation and abuse. So apart from the current geopolitical reality, Japan lives in a region that resents it for historical reasons.
In this context, the Japanese continue to struggle internally over defense policy. Japan’s current policy is to build a substantial force while minimizing its capabilities, saying it is only for national defense purposes. The alternative is for the world’s third-largest economy to normalize its international status by abandoning the constitutional prohibition on military force (already ignored for the most part) and create an armed force congruent with its economic might and strategic interests.
The Japanese public is on the whole comfortable with its postwar strategy. But with the rise of China, North Korean nuclear weapons and a potentially aggressive Russia, it cannot remain so for long. As the U.S. puts pressure on its allies to carry their own burdens, the Japanese strategy is becoming increasingly untenable. It cannot undergo a serious shift until the public does, and that means there will be an internal political crisis over the matter. But public opinion is already shifting, and the Japanese will face their reality.
Behind all this is an inevitable shift in U.S. foreign policy, visible in its stance on North Korea and elsewhere and rooted in the failure of U.S. warfare since World War II. The Korean War was a costly tie. Vietnam ended with Hanoi’s flag flying over Saigon. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan failed to establish viable, pro-U.S. regimes. The only 20th century wars in which the U.S. fared well were those in which U.S. allies bore a massive part of the burden. These wars only ended well when there was no U.S. occupation or when the ruthless execution of the war shattered the morale of the enemy and permitted the U.S. to reshape the societies. And very few wars will be like that.
That U.S. strategy had to shift was obvious to me a decade ago when I wrote “The Next Decade.” The shift has arrived, and that means nations, enemies and allies are repositioning themselves. In Asia, the Chinese and Russians will mostly hold their positions. North Korea will exploit the shift to the extent it can. But it is Japan that will have to undergo the most radical change.
-
That would be regarded as REAL unfriendly by China.
OTOH nukes in Japan and/or South Korea (as mentioned by candidate Trump in one of the debates btw) have a lot of promise , , ,
-
"US nukes in Taiwan would get their undivided attention."
"That would be regarded as REAL unfriendly by China."
----------------------------------------------------------
Yes. And they don't need Japan and others to become a permanent nuclear power too. So, on balance, they should help end the NK threat. China is facing his own economically existential negotiations with Trump. Their cooperation on NK could very well be part of the agreement. Settling both issues would be an amazing accomplishment.
Walking away from negotiations IS a negotiation. Trump wrote a book about it and I imagine Kim has read it. I did not know they the meeting ended "angrily" "without a handshake". That does not help the one who needed the photo opp. No one expected NK to just give up his most prized possessions based on a couple of meetings so Trump is not hurt by the perhaps temporary setback.
Trump's offer to Un stays open as sanctions hopefully tighten. In the meantime, the refusal of North Korea to denuclearize means China can expect its neighbors, Japan especially, to begin a march to surpass NK's capability. I cannot see how this is in China's best strategic interest. To the contrary, the militarizing of China's regional rivals moves things irreversibly in the exact opposite direction of China's intent to dominate the region.
-
Tit for tat. Nukes for NorKs means a nuclear Taiwan.
"US nukes in Taiwan would get their undivided attention."
"That would be regarded as REAL unfriendly by China."
----------------------------------------------------------
Yes. And they don't need Japan and others to become a permanent nuclear power too. So, on balance, they should help end the NK threat. China is facing his own economically existential negotiations with Trump. Their cooperation on NK could very well be part of the agreement. Settling both issues would be an amazing accomplishment.
Walking away from negotiations IS a negotiation. Trump wrote a book about it and I imagine Kim has read it. I did not know they the meeting ended "angrily" "without a handshake". That does not help the one who needed the photo opp. No one expected NK to just give up his most prized possessions based on a couple of meetings so Trump is not hurt by the perhaps temporary setback.
Trump's offer to Un stays open as sanctions hopefully tighten. In the meantime, the refusal of North Korea to denuclearize means China can expect its neighbors, Japan especially, to begin a march to surpass NK's capability. I cannot see how this is in China's best strategic interest. To the contrary, the militarizing of China's regional rivals moves things irreversibly in the exact opposite direction of China's intent to dominate the region.
-
Not on board with nukes to Taiwan.
Didn't Nixon sign on to Taiwan being part of China?
This is NOT something they could accept any more than we would we accept Chinese nukes to Puerto Rico.
-
Not on board with nukes to Taiwan.
Didn't Nixon sign on to Taiwan being part of China?
This is NOT something they could accept any more than we would we accept Chinese nukes to Puerto Rico.
The difference being that we could do something about Chinese nukes in Puerto Rico. If the PLA could take Taiwan, they already would have. They are working on it, but not there yet.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJmrODCZmmw
-
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/03/us-army-trying-bury-lessons-iraq-war/155403/?oref=d-mostread&fbclid=IwAR1cBAMlth2ODNZ0gI2HEwG5B06ypeKdKULjkf1NeJ-5BWDcveVIFBb0kcg
-
Why America Needs New Alliances
The international order of the Cold War era no longer makes sense. But the world can’t do without U.S. leadership. Here’s a better approach.
By Yoram Hazony and
Ofir Haivry
April 5, 2019 6:30 p.m. ET
A joint U.S.-Indian army exercise in India, April 6, 2004. Photo: RAVEENDRAN/AFP/Getty Images
President Trump is often accused of creating a needless rift with America’s European allies. The secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Jens Stoltenberg, expressed a different view Thursday when he told a joint session of Congress: “Allies must spend more on defense—this has been the clear message from President Trump, and this message is having a real impact.”
Mr. Stoltenberg’s remarks reflect a growing recognition that strategic and economic realities demand a drastic change in the way the U.S. conducts foreign policy. The unwanted cracks in the Atlantic alliance are primarily a consequence of European leaders, especially in Germany and France, wishing to continue living in a world that no longer exists. The U.S. cannot serve as the enforcer for the Europeans’ beloved “rules-based international order” any more. Even in the 1990s, it was doubtful the U.S. could indefinitely guarantee the security of all nations, paying for George H.W. Bush’s “new world order” principally with American soldiers’ lives and American taxpayers’ dollars.
Today a $22 trillion national debt and the voting public’s indifference to the dreams of world-wide liberal empire have depleted Washington’s ability to wage pricey foreign wars. At a time of escalating troubles at home, America’s estimated 800 overseas bases in 80 countries are coming to look like a bizarre misallocation of resources. And the U.S. is politically fragmented to an extent unseen in living memory, with uncertain implications in the event of a major war.
This explains why the U.S. has not sent massive, Iraq-style expeditionary forces to defend Ukraine’s integrity or impose order in Syria. If there’s trouble on Estonia’s border with Russia, would the U.S. have the will to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers on an indefinite mission 85 miles from St. Petersburg? Although Estonia joined NATO in 2004, the certainties of 15 years ago have broken down.
On paper, America has defense alliances with dozens of countries. But these are the ghosts of a rivalry with the Soviet Union that ended three decades ago, or the result of often reckless policies adopted after 9/11. These so-called allies include Turkey and Pakistan, which share neither America’s values nor its interests, and cooperate with the U.S. only when it serves their purposes. Other “allies” refuse to develop a significant capacity for self-defense, and are thus more accurately regarded as American dependencies or protectorates.
Liberal internationalists are right about one thing, however: America cannot simply turn its back on the world. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 demonstrated that the U.S. can and will be targeted on its own soil. An American strategic posture aimed at minimizing the danger from rival powers needs to focus on deterring Russia and China from wars of expansion; weakening China relative to the U.S. and thereby preventing it from attaining dominance over the world economy; and keeping smaller hostile powers such as North Korea and Iran from obtaining the capacity to attack America or other democracies.
To attain these goals, the U.S. will need a new strategy that is far less costly than anything previous administrations contemplated. Mr. Trump has taken a step in the right direction by insisting that NATO allies “pay their fair share” of the budget for defending Europe, increasing defense spending to 2% of gross domestic product in accordance with NATO treaty obligations.
But this framing of the issue doesn’t convey the problem’s true nature or its severity. The real issue is that the U.S. can no longer afford to assume responsibility for defending entire regions if the people living in them aren’t willing and able to build up their own credible military deterrent.
The U.S. has a genuine interest, for example, in preventing the democratic nations of Eastern Europe from being absorbed into an aggressive Russian imperial state. But the principal interested parties aren’t Americans. The members of the Visegrád Group—the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia—have a combined population of 64 million and a 2017 GDP of $2 trillion (about 50% of Russia’s, according to CIA estimates). The principal strategic question is therefore whether these countries are willing to do what is necessary to maintain their own national independence. If they are—at a cost that could well exceed the 2% figure devised by NATO planners—then they could eventually shed their dependent status and come to the table as allies of the kind the U.S. could actually use: strong frontline partners in deterring Russian expansion.
The same is true in other regions. Rather than carelessly accumulate dependencies, the U.S. must ask where it can develop real allies—countries that share its commitment to a world of independent nations, pursue democratic self-determination (although not necessarily liberalism) at home, and are willing to pay the price for freedom by taking primary responsibility for their own defense and shouldering the human and economic costs involved.
Nations that demonstrate a commitment to these shared values and a willingness to fight when necessary should benefit from relations that may include the supply of advanced armaments and technologies, diplomatic cover in dealing with shared enemies, preferred partnership in trade, scientific and academic cooperation, and the joint development of new technologies. Fair-weather friends and free-riding dependencies should not.
Perhaps the most important candidate for such a strategic alliance is India. Long a dormant power afflicted by poverty, socialism and an ideology of “nonalignment,” India has become one of the world’s largest and fastest-expanding economies. In contrast to the political oppression of the Chinese communist model, India has succeeded in retaining much of its religious conservatism while becoming an open and diverse country—by far the world’s most populous democracy—with a solid parliamentary system at both the federal and state levels. India is threatened by Islamist terrorism, aided by neighboring Pakistan; as well as by rapidly increasing Chinese influence, emanating from the South China Sea, the Pakistani port of Gwadar, and Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, where the Chinese navy has established its first overseas base.
India’s values, interests and growing wealth could establish an Indo-American alliance as the central pillar of a new alignment of democratic national states in Asia, including a strengthened Japan and Australia. But New Delhi remains suspicious of American intentions, and with good reason: Rather than unequivocally bet on an Indian partnership, the U.S. continues to play all sides, haphazardly switching from confrontation to cooperation with China, and competing with Beijing for influence in fanaticism-ridden Pakistan. The rationalizations for these counterproductive policies tend to focus on Pakistan’s supposed logistical contributions to the U.S. war in Afghanistan—an example of how tactical considerations and the demands of bogus allies can stand in the way of meeting even the most pressing strategic needs.
A similar confusion characterizes America’s relationship with Turkey. A U.S. ally during the Cold War, Turkey is now an expansionist Islamist power that has assisted the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al Qaeda and even ISIS; threatened Greece and Cyprus; sought Russian weapons; and recently expressed its willingness to attack U.S. forces in Syria. In reality, Turkey is no more an ally than Russia or China. Yet its formal status as the second-largest military in NATO guarantees that the alliance will continue to be preoccupied with pretense and make-believe, rather than the interests of democratic nations. Meanwhile, America’s most reliable Muslim allies, the Kurds, live under constant threat of Turkish invasion and massacre.
The Middle East is a difficult region, in which few players share American values and interests, although all of them—including Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even Iran—are willing to benefit from U.S. arms, protection or cash. Here too Washington should seek alliances with national states that share at least some key values and are willing to shoulder most of the burden of defending themselves while fighting to contain Islamist radicalism. Such natural regional allies include Greece, Israel, Ethiopia and the Kurds.
A central question for a revitalized alliance of democratic nations is which way the winds will blow in Western Europe. For a generation after the Berlin Wall’s fall in 1989, U.S. administrations seemed willing to take responsibility for Europe’s security indefinitely. European elites grew accustomed to the idea that perpetual peace was at hand, devoting themselves to turning the EU into a borderless utopia with generous benefits for all.
But Europe has been corrupted by its dependence on the U.S. Germany, the world’s fifth-largest economic power (with a GDP larger than Russia’s), cannot field more than a handful of operational combat aircraft, tanks or submarines. Yet German leaders steadfastly resist American pressure for substantial increases in their country’s defense capabilities, telling interlocutors that the U.S. is ruining a beautiful friendship.
None of this is in America’s interest—and not only because the U.S. is stuck with the bill. When people live detached from reality, they develop all sorts of fanciful theories about how the world works. For decades, Europeans have been devising “transnationalist” fantasies to explain how their own supposed moral virtues, such as their rejection of borders, have brought them peace and prosperity. These ideas are then exported to the U.S. and the rest of the democratic world via international bodies, universities, nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations and other channels. Having subsidized the creation of a dependent socialist paradise in Europe, the U.S. now has to watch as the EU’s influence washes over America and other nations.
For the moment, it is hard to see Germany or Spain becoming American allies in the new, more realistic sense of the term we have proposed. France is a different case, maintaining significant military capabilities and a willingness to deploy them at times. But the governments of these and other Western European countries remain ideologically committed to transferring ever-greater powers to international bodies and to the concomitant degradation of national independence. That doesn’t make them America’s enemies, but neither are they partners in defending values such as national self-determination. It is difficult to foresee circumstances under which they would be willing or able to arm themselves in keeping with the actual security needs of an emerging alliance of independent democratic nations.
The prospects are better with respect to Britain, whose defense spending is already significantly higher, and whose public asserted a desire to regain independence in the Brexit referendum of 2016. With a population of more than 65 million and a GDP of $3 trillion (75% of Russia’s), the U.K. may yet become a principal partner in a leaner but more effective security architecture for the democratic world.
Isolationists are also right about one thing: The U.S. cannot be, and should not try to be, the world’s policeman. Yet it does have a role to play in awakening democratic nations from their dependence-induced torpor, and assisting those that are willing to make the transition to a new security architecture based on self-determination and self-reliance. An alliance including the U.S., the U.K. and the frontline Eastern European nations, as well as India, Israel, Japan and Australia, among others, would be strong enough to exert sustained pressure on China, Russia and hostile Islamist groups.
Helping these democratic nations become self-reliant regional actors would reduce America’s security burden, permitting it to close far-flung military installations and making American military intervention the exception rather than the rule. At the same time, it would free American resources for the long struggle to deny China technological superiority, as well as for unforeseen emergencies that are certain to arise.
Mr. Hazony is author of “The Virtue of Nationalism.” Mr. Haivry is vice president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem.
Appeared in the April 6, 2019, print edition.
-
https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-winston-churchill-museum-in-missouri-50th-year-20190405-story.html?outputType=amp&__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR25fhHwN9ZTyqYssJwW22_VPfp9TlktNyDlnFdNW1G5PudvH5wtTxwhx6A
-
https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-winston-churchill-museum-in-missouri-50th-year-20190405-story.html?outputType=amp&__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR25fhHwN9ZTyqYssJwW22_VPfp9TlktNyDlnFdNW1G5PudvH5wtTxwhx6A
Nice publicity for the college BD.
I have long believed the UN, if the US is to host it, should meet somewhere in middle America, not NYC.
I wonder if Churchill's medical prohibition doctor note is in the museum:
(http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/05223101/churchill-alcohol-letter.jpg)
-
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/02/5-very-important-things-about-the-world-nobody-knows/
5 Very Important Things About the World Nobody Knows
The future will be determined by a handful of big questions that don’t yet have answers.
[More at the link on each.]
...
China’s future trajectory.
...
How good are America’s cybercapabilities?
...
What’s going to happen to the EU?
...
How many states will go nuclear in the next 20 years?
...
Who will win the debate on U.S. grand strategy?
...
-
April 16, 2019
By George Friedman
Doing the Haka
Despite the furor that rages, the world appears to be quietly moving along.
In New Zealand, the Maoris have a ceremonial dance called the haka. Today it’s performed at rugby matches and consists of the New Zealanders making stylized threatening gestures, including sticking out their tongues at their competitors, crouching, jumping and chanting. It is deeply rooted in Maori history, but for all its energy and passion, it does not do what it is intended to do, which is frighten their opponents, and the rugby match goes on.
The political history of humankind is filled with the haka and the violence that was meant to come next. Even at the great turning points, the deepest agonies of humanity, life went on. This was no comfort to those caught in the moment. They died, but in the end, so did everyone. That is of course too Olympian a perspective for most of us, and certainly for those of us with children and grandchildren, but there is a terrible truth to it.
On a lesser level, there are moments when the haka goes on, when all sides are determined to frighten each other and frighten the world, yet it means no more than what it means at a rugby match. Coming back down to earth, we seem to be at a moment like that. The furor rages, but the world appears to be quietly moving along.
The Americans and the Chinese have been locked in a “trade war.” There has been great anticipation of catastrophe for both sides, yet the world remains unchanged save for the noise.
The North Koreans have nuclear weapons. The Americans don’t want them to. Each meeting is greeted with the expectation that something will happen. Apart from each side pulling frightening faces, nothing does.
Russia continues to lick its wounds after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of Ukraine. Threatening gestures are made in places that hardly matter to Moscow, like Syria, and Russia struggles with the price of oil, but little of substance takes place.
On the Continent, there are those who regard the European Union as the source of Europe’s redemption, others who see it as a necessary evil, and still others who see it merely as evil. Each faction has utter contempt for the other and makes frightening faces, but nothing comes of it.
In the Middle East, the lines shift as Arabs and Israelis face the Iranians in a battle never really joined. The Kurds and the Palestinians demand statehood, but both are still far from reaching their goal.
And in the United States, Donald Trump is president and the Democrats despise him. Each day, each side invents a new way to hurl contempt, and the viewers are enthralled by the venom. But at the end of the day, Trump sleeps in the White House and those who feel this is outrageous demonstrate their outrage.
There are, of course, places where terrible things are happening, and they must not be dismissed. But such dreadful things have been going on for a long while and will likely continue beyond our time.
This is not the normal condition of the world. Think of the 2008 financial crisis and the great movement of global power that it incited, with China staggering economically and Europe fragmenting politically. These are not moments but rather unfolding trends. Nothing is settled, even when things come to a standstill, as they appear to be now. Nothing is leading to anywhere. Trade wars continue without coming to a head, nuclear talks lead nowhere, gestures of power remain gestures, and ancient animosities continue to show themselves. And the politics of the time plod on, resembling a haka more than any great historical moment.
In one sense, it has always been this way, the blood and fury flowing while humanity goes on. At other moments, they are the signs of a period that has exhausted itself. That is what our current moment looks like. What 2008 created has run its course, and the world is waiting for the next act in the never-ending drama. But such moments of meaningless paralysis can continue a long time; in retrospect, they are good times, but in the moment, they frustrate those who aspire to great things. It is a moment of mediocrity, in which the haka challenges the course of history, but it does not capture the moment that is coming.
The problem is that once the haka has been danced, eventually the game begins. We seem to be in the haka interlude, with dances meant to inspire terror being performed and onlookers seeing the performance as merely odd. But the period of gestures will end. Where the future war will break out is truly unclear. At the moment, none of these hakas warrant war. But wars never seem to warrant violence until they are underway.
The world, as always, is filled with genuine issues that affect nations profoundly. In due course, the gestures end and the issues are settled. Some of the lesser issues can be resolved with calm discussion. It is the most significant ones that transit from the gesture to the conflict. It is rare that all explode at once. But equally rare that none explode at all.
-
April 18, 2019
By George Friedman
The Nature of Nations
Over the past few weeks, I have discussed the relationship between geography and the evolution of three countries: the United States, Australia and Hungary. A key distinction I drew between them was that the United States and Australia were invented countries while Hungary was an organic country. This week, we’ll examine this idea further.
Invented Nations, Organic Nations
The American and Australian nations were forged from migrants who crafted a political system that defined them. In both countries, the political system and its moral principles – along with the social principle that each newly arrived citizen must set his own course and take responsibility for his own condition – defined them. This enabled the simultaneous absorption of migrants into the system and the retention of their familial memory. It was possible, and even necessary, for migrants to graft their own psyches onto an overarching commitment to the national regime and the culture it created, while preserving a residual recollection of where they came from. This was not simply something for recent immigrants. The descendants of the first English immigrants became Americans and Australians through the regimes, but centuries later, they still remembered that they were once English and that they owed something to that past.
This complex identity emerged from the need to invent something different than what existed. The immigrants faced a geography of a vast land occupied by other nations, and they felt a compulsion to create a new reality on that land. The creation of that new reality was in many ways driven by the reality they faced rather than a clear plan. It was a process of ongoing invention and self-invention that bore new nations while embedding in the national psyche the complex tension between the immigrants’ hunger to leave the past and their hunger to retain it.
Hungary, an organic country, is a different case. A Hungarian living in Hungary has a single identity. His family’s past is Hungarian, his mother tongue is Hungarian, and so on. Most important, he is Hungarian no matter what the regime is. And yet, when we step back and think of the origin of organic nations like Hungary, we see they all came from somewhere and they all displaced someone. They just did so a long time ago. Hungary’s history is blurred by time, but at some point between the 6th and 9th centuries, the Hungarian tribes crossed over the Carpathian Mountains and displaced tribes that were already there.
The difference between the United States or Australia and Hungary is not that the Hungarians did not displace native peoples on occupying the land. It was more radical. The Hungarians existed independent of the land and prior to coming to the place where they finally settled; the Americans and Australians as peoples were invented after coming to the land. The Hungarians had community and identity independent of place; the Americans and Australians built it after coming to the land, partly from the land but mostly from the moral and legal principles of their nations. The Hungarians were bound to their people; the Americans, in particular, were bound to the principles of the regime.
This striking difference is illustrated in two very different pledges. In the 9th century, once settled in the Carpathian Basin, seven Hungarian tribal leaders took a blood oath. Although the Hungarian people preceded it, it was on this oath that Hungary as a nation was founded. In contrast, American armed forces pledge to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” – not specifically to defend the land or the people.
Land, People, Regime
When we think of a nation, we think of three components: the land, the people and the regime. In the American and Australian cases, the identity of the people was always somewhat ambiguous. It was the regime, constitution, laws and moral principles that bound the nation together. The land evolved over time. In the case of Hungary, the land was taken, the people were the absolute, and the blood oath joined the tribes, which were already Magyars, into one.
There is much criticism of modern settler countries displacing native populations. But most nation-states came into existence by displacing someone else. The Hungarian case is simply one in which the conquest took place so long ago, and the destruction of the native peoples – who either were killed or simply scattered – was so total that there is no moral question. The moral question arises with the United States, Australia and other recently founded nations, because the deed is still remembered. The uncomfortable truth is that the creation of one nation requires that another pay some price.
Most people who think about geopolitics think in terms of the interaction of geography and people. But in this equation, the people are a very complex variable. Geography provides imperatives for survival, but geopolitics does not exclude the origins and nature of community, nor the moral character of the nation. And, therefore, it doesn’t ignore the political regimes that emerge.
The difference between the Hungarian blood oath and the American military oath is striking. The first was a pledge to the unity of the people; the second was a pledge of loyalty to the Constitution even against the people if necessary. The blood tied the Hungarians together. The regime and its principles tied the Americans together. The Australians define themselves based on place, though their history makes their moral commitment complex. Still, the moral derives from the necessary – and the necessary begins with place.
-
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/conversation-outgoing-french-ambassador-gerard-araud/587458/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2019-04-19T16%3A41%3A26&fbclid=IwAR0mbhcsa-8XBMlWBU3UOI6MGf3CVZb-dFhmD1HudSiNP8n7I7dPGhzunkk
-
For my fellow geopolitical junkie friends:
Wei Qi – America’s Key to Victory
China is inevitably seeking global dominance across multiple domains. This has become clear as China hosts more than 40 world leaders in Beijing this week for the second international forum on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – with Vladimir Putin as the guest of honor. Axios’ Mike Allen wrote, “When you can get that many powerful people to come to you in Beijing, you're starting to look a lot like a superpower.”
Dave Lawler with Axios also notes that the BRI infrastructure effort is only one part of “China's plan to supplant the U.S. as the dominant global superpower within the next three decades.” In addition to the BRI, China’s aggressive tactics used in the race to 5G, the militarization of the South China Sea, the theft of intellectual property, and discriminatory business practices all work collectively to advance China’s economic, military, and political influence across the globe.
In my new book Trump vs China: America’s Greatest Challenge, which will be released in October, I describe China’s challenge to the rules-based world order and how, as a result, American interests and security are being put at risk.
Sun Tzu, one of the most famous (and possibly legendary) Chinese military thinkers stressed that you must know both yourself and your opponent in order to be successful in competitions. According to Sun Tzu, the attributed author of The Art of War, by having an understanding of both contenders, “you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
China is the most serious and formidable competitor that the United States now faces. It is essential to examine Chinese tactics and strategic thinking to better position the U.S. for this new era of competition. It will affect the future of our country for generations to come.
One of the most revealing comparisons to Chinese strategy is the game wei qi, which is said to have originated in China thousands of years ago. Wei qi – more commonly known by its Japanese name, “go,” in the West – is a game played with two players using a checkered board lined with 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. One player has 180 white round stones and another has 181 black round stones. The players take turns placing their stones on the board one at a time on the intersections of the checker lines. The goal of the game is to capture the most territory either by encircling empty spaces or your opponent’s pieces on the board. The player with the most territory after all the pieces have been played, or after both players pass on their turns, wins.
Go is an incredibly complex game due to the number of possible moves and board configurations. As the game progresses, there are multiple invasions, engagements, fights, and confrontations between players that occur in all different areas of the board at the same time. Moreover, it is a lengthy game that requires players to capitalize on short-term victories – but to never lose sight of the long-term strategy.
In a paper analyzing Chinese strategic thinking, Dr. David Lai, now the research professor of Asian Security Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, argues that the Chinese approach to strategy is reflected in go. The American approach to strategic thinking, Lai argues, is reflected in chess.
American strategy relies on our technological superiority and capabilities. The U.S. focuses on force-on-force competition that seeks the result of total victory over the opponent. In chess, there are pieces that are more powerful than others that are deployed with the objective of capturing the opponent’s king. Every move is directed toward protecting your own king and seizing your opponent’s. In this way, chess is narrowly focused.
Chess players must also preserve their stronger pieces to keep the balance of power in their favor and ensure a better chance of victory. The player with the most powerful pieces in play during the game will likely win.
Henry Kissinger notes in his book, On China, “If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign.”
In go, every stone is equal. Players can unleash massive amounts of potential power by creatively and tactfully placing their stones. All stones that are placed on the board work in close connection with one another, as each individual is a part of a larger, bigger strategy.
Moreover, in go there are multiple campaigns, pursuits, battles, and maneuvers happening at the same time across the board. As the board is constantly changing in complex, subtle, and dynamic ways, players must always have a sharp awareness of the overall situation. Due to the number of possibilities where players can place their stones and the limited number of stones available, players must know when to fight for or defend territory. More importantly, they must know when to let it go.
In an evenly matched game, go is a competition of simultaneous incremental victories. Total, decisive, and complete defeat of an opponent is not typically an attainable objective. Usually, games are won by just a few points.
Dr. Lai notes that playing go with a chess approach is dangerous. Similarly, it will be dangerous for the U.S. to continue to approach the challenges we face with China without understanding and seeing the totality and breadth of their strategy.
China has already placed numerous stones on the board – such as artificially low Huawei 5G equipment prices, government loans to Belt and Road countries, building islands in the South China Sea, and forced technology transfers.
These stones work together in pursuit of various territorial acquisitions that will (in partnership with other stones) yield 5G dominance, control of the South China Sea, and economic superiority.
We must examine all of these campaigns – in addition to others – collectively. We must understand this go-based approach, rather than look at each endeavor as an independent challenge. Each of China’s campaigns work in concert with one another and will ultimately result in China’s emergence as a global hegemon. China’s current aggressive tactics will eventually undermine the United States, jeopardize our security, hurt our economy, compromise our values, and alter our way of life.
Those trying to understand the challenges that the United States now faces with China need to learn how to play go. The National Go Center has very helpful resources and events for players of all levels.
Moreover, the United States must develop an American-based strategy in this new era of competition that is focused on our strength, capabilities, ingenuity, and American spirit. Only then can we ensure that that the U.S. will emerge prosperous, successful, and stronger than ever.
Your Friend,
Newt
-
I strongly suspect China is using AI to plan out it’s global strategy.
For my fellow geopolitical junkie friends:
Wei Qi – America’s Key to Victory
China is inevitably seeking global dominance across multiple domains. This has become clear as China hosts more than 40 world leaders in Beijing this week for the second international forum on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – with Vladimir Putin as the guest of honor. Axios’ Mike Allen wrote, “When you can get that many powerful people to come to you in Beijing, you're starting to look a lot like a superpower.”
Dave Lawler with Axios also notes that the BRI infrastructure effort is only one part of “China's plan to supplant the U.S. as the dominant global superpower within the next three decades.” In addition to the BRI, China’s aggressive tactics used in the race to 5G, the militarization of the South China Sea, the theft of intellectual property, and discriminatory business practices all work collectively to advance China’s economic, military, and political influence across the globe.
In my new book Trump vs China: America’s Greatest Challenge, which will be released in October, I describe China’s challenge to the rules-based world order and how, as a result, American interests and security are being put at risk.
Sun Tzu, one of the most famous (and possibly legendary) Chinese military thinkers stressed that you must know both yourself and your opponent in order to be successful in competitions. According to Sun Tzu, the attributed author of The Art of War, by having an understanding of both contenders, “you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
China is the most serious and formidable competitor that the United States now faces. It is essential to examine Chinese tactics and strategic thinking to better position the U.S. for this new era of competition. It will affect the future of our country for generations to come.
One of the most revealing comparisons to Chinese strategy is the game wei qi, which is said to have originated in China thousands of years ago. Wei qi – more commonly known by its Japanese name, “go,” in the West – is a game played with two players using a checkered board lined with 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. One player has 180 white round stones and another has 181 black round stones. The players take turns placing their stones on the board one at a time on the intersections of the checker lines. The goal of the game is to capture the most territory either by encircling empty spaces or your opponent’s pieces on the board. The player with the most territory after all the pieces have been played, or after both players pass on their turns, wins.
Go is an incredibly complex game due to the number of possible moves and board configurations. As the game progresses, there are multiple invasions, engagements, fights, and confrontations between players that occur in all different areas of the board at the same time. Moreover, it is a lengthy game that requires players to capitalize on short-term victories – but to never lose sight of the long-term strategy.
In a paper analyzing Chinese strategic thinking, Dr. David Lai, now the research professor of Asian Security Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, argues that the Chinese approach to strategy is reflected in go. The American approach to strategic thinking, Lai argues, is reflected in chess.
American strategy relies on our technological superiority and capabilities. The U.S. focuses on force-on-force competition that seeks the result of total victory over the opponent. In chess, there are pieces that are more powerful than others that are deployed with the objective of capturing the opponent’s king. Every move is directed toward protecting your own king and seizing your opponent’s. In this way, chess is narrowly focused.
Chess players must also preserve their stronger pieces to keep the balance of power in their favor and ensure a better chance of victory. The player with the most powerful pieces in play during the game will likely win.
Henry Kissinger notes in his book, On China, “If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign.”
In go, every stone is equal. Players can unleash massive amounts of potential power by creatively and tactfully placing their stones. All stones that are placed on the board work in close connection with one another, as each individual is a part of a larger, bigger strategy.
Moreover, in go there are multiple campaigns, pursuits, battles, and maneuvers happening at the same time across the board. As the board is constantly changing in complex, subtle, and dynamic ways, players must always have a sharp awareness of the overall situation. Due to the number of possibilities where players can place their stones and the limited number of stones available, players must know when to fight for or defend territory. More importantly, they must know when to let it go.
In an evenly matched game, go is a competition of simultaneous incremental victories. Total, decisive, and complete defeat of an opponent is not typically an attainable objective. Usually, games are won by just a few points.
Dr. Lai notes that playing go with a chess approach is dangerous. Similarly, it will be dangerous for the U.S. to continue to approach the challenges we face with China without understanding and seeing the totality and breadth of their strategy.
China has already placed numerous stones on the board – such as artificially low Huawei 5G equipment prices, government loans to Belt and Road countries, building islands in the South China Sea, and forced technology transfers.
These stones work together in pursuit of various territorial acquisitions that will (in partnership with other stones) yield 5G dominance, control of the South China Sea, and economic superiority.
We must examine all of these campaigns – in addition to others – collectively. We must understand this go-based approach, rather than look at each endeavor as an independent challenge. Each of China’s campaigns work in concert with one another and will ultimately result in China’s emergence as a global hegemon. China’s current aggressive tactics will eventually undermine the United States, jeopardize our security, hurt our economy, compromise our values, and alter our way of life.
Those trying to understand the challenges that the United States now faces with China need to learn how to play go. The National Go Center has very helpful resources and events for players of all levels.
Moreover, the United States must develop an American-based strategy in this new era of competition that is focused on our strength, capabilities, ingenuity, and American spirit. Only then can we ensure that that the U.S. will emerge prosperous, successful, and stronger than ever.
Your Friend,
Newt
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14178/venezuela-monroe-doctrine
-
May 14, 2019
By George Friedman
US-China Trade Talks and American Strategy
The United States is shifting from military to economic warfare.
As the U.S. continues to negotiate a trade deal with China, a shift in American global strategy has emerged. The United States is reducing its use of direct military action and instead using economic pressure to drive countries like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran into conceding to U.S. demands. Even in places where the U.S. is still engaged militarily, such as Afghanistan, serious talks are underway for a withdrawal. It’s a shift that has been long in the making. In my book “The Next Decade,” published in 2011, six years before Donald Trump took office, I argued that the United States would reduce its military activity dramatically because it couldn’t maintain the tempo of engagement it had established over the years. I also discussed the topic in a 2018 article titled “The Trump Doctrine,” which argued that the United States would eventually be forced to scale back its foreign engagements. The use of economic power to shape behavior isn’t new; what is new is the focus on economic rather than military warfare.
An Inexperienced Power
The U.S. is a global power, engaged and exposed in many theaters. Having used its military presence in far-flung corners of the world as a symbol of its global reach and superiority, the U.S. spread itself thin and became unable to defeat even enemies whose forces and capabilities were far inferior. The classic example is Korea in 1950, where the United States had deployed an insufficient force, a result of the military drawdown. The North Koreans chose to strike, compelling the U.S. to fight for three years to a truce that left the North Korean regime intact and the boundaries roughly the same as before the war. The U.S. could not initiate war with the force it had. The North Koreans could and did.
Since World War II, the United States has been victorious in only one major conflict: Desert Storm. For 28 of the past 74 years, the U.S. has been at war in places like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq but has failed to achieve victory in most cases. Neither Rome nor Britain used main force to wage wars. They relied instead on capable local powers with an interest in defeating the same enemy to do most of the fighting. They underwrote the conflicts and supplied some minimal force and material aid, but they tried always to limit their own exposure. The United States, a much younger and more inexperienced power, has consistently used its own force as the main combatant, and failed.
(click to enlarge)
There is a core geopolitical reason behind the U.S. failure in these wars. The United States has fought most of its conflicts in Europe and Asia, where force deployment is a substantial logistical effort. The challenges of intercontinental logistics limit the number of troops that can be sent. More important, the moment the United States sets foot in Eurasia, it is vastly outnumbered. The U.S. has tried to overcome this challenge through technology, but as we saw in Korea, technological superiority is enough to contain the enemy but not enough to defeat it. In Vietnam and the Middle East, the United States fought dispersed forces, native to the area and therefore with better intelligence on American forces than the Americans had on them.
The U.S. failures were also due in part to the fact that no one could define what a sufficient force was, and even if they could, it would likely be much larger than what the U.S. was willing to commit to the effort. The U.S., therefore, fought long wars based on the mistaken belief that the force it was willing to supply was enough to defeat the enemy. And while the United States is outstanding in conventional war, it’s not good at occupying a country that is unwilling to be occupied.
Charting a New Path
Inevitably, the time came when the United States recognized that continuing to do what it had been doing for years and expecting a different result was insane. And so, it has developed a new path, one which Trump has followed in his dealings with several countries thus far. The first step in this new strategy is to intimidate the adversary. When that doesn’t work, threaten to carry out military action without actually doing so. The final step is to resort to economic warfare by initiating or extending sanctions or a blockade. (In some cases, Trump has used some military force to enforce sanctions but, rather than going ashore, has used the Navy as the primary vehicle of military operations.)
It’s within this context that we should view the U.S.-China trade talks. Chinese trade practices seen by Washington as establishing an unfair advantage for Chinese producers is a reasonable topic for discussion and negotiation. But such negotiations are also a powerful alternative strategy for dealing with China’s potential emergence as a global power. For Beijing, the buildup in the South China Sea is an attempt to break out of the ring of islands surrounding the sea and, therefore, undermine a geographic advantage the U.S. would have if it chose to blockade China. The U.S. wants to retain this advantage. But even more important, it also wants to retain the Western Pacific – a region from which it fought to expel Japan during World War II – as a buffer against Asia. If China broke out of the South China Sea, it could become a Pacific threat. The U.S. could prevent this from happening by committing a major military force to the region. It could also initiate an attack on the Chinese navy. But it also has a third option that requires no military commitment at all: impede the reason for China’s policy in the South China Sea in the first place – securing safe passage for Chinese exports.
(click to enlarge)
China is heavily dependent on exports, which account for roughly one-fifth of its gross domestic product – possibly more given doubts over the accuracy of Chinese GDP figures. About 18 percent of Chinese exports are destined for the United States. In contrast, U.S. exports to China account for only about 0.5 percent of U.S. GDP. This is classic asymmetric warfare. China is far more dependent on its exports to the United States than the United States is on exports to China. Certainly, some Americans will be hurt by a trade war, but the U.S. as a whole is much less vulnerable than China is. The U.S. has therefore found a way to threaten vital Chinese interests without threatening war (though it also has some forces located near the South China Sea).
The U.S. has applied a similar approach to Iran, whose expansion throughout the Middle East is a concern for the U.S. and its allies. It’s questionable whether military action against Iran would succeed, so the U.S. has resorted to economic warfare here, too. It pulled out of the nuclear deal and imposed sanctions on Iranian energy exports that have hurt the Iranian economy. As for North Korea, the United States, in concert with the United Nations, introduced strict sanctions to try to limit Pyongyang’s nuclear program. It even seized a North Korean cargo ship last week that allegedly was used to violate sanctions. Similarly, the U.S. has accepted that it can do little militarily in eastern Ukraine or Crimea, but it has organized painful sanctions against Russia and made clear that additional sanctions are possible.
The U.S. is the world’s largest military power, but it is also the world’s largest economy and importer. For the most part, U.S. military engagements over the past 74 years have not ended well, but the use of economic warfare, which takes advantage of the fact that China and other countries are heavily dependent on the U.S. market, gives Washington an alternative to the military option.
It is not clear whether Trump will continue to use this approach, but thus far he has done so. As I have argued elsewhere, political leaders’ actions are shaped by geopolitical reality. The geopolitical reality of our time is that economic action has emerged as a major foreign policy tool of the United States.
-
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/284611/new-strategy-to-counter-iran?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=a1d3770bb9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_14_06_48&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-a1d3770bb9-207194629
-
May 22, 2019
By George Friedman
Iran and the Problem of Occupation Warfare
For the U.S., defeating the Iranian military wouldn’t be the end of the war.
There has recently been a lot of talk about a war between the United States and Iran. In my view, it’s unlikely because the risks are too high for both countries. Iran can’t take the chance that its military would be destroyed, and the U.S. can’t accept the costs a real victory would entail. Since Korea, the United States has performed poorly in war, with the exception of Desert Storm, when the destruction of Iraqi forces allowed U.S. entry into Kuwait and no Kuwaiti resistance to American occupation emerged. But in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States faced the problem of what I would call occupation warfare, a type of combat that carries a substantial price even after the initial war has been won.
The Three Phases of War
Military theorist Carl von Clausewitz posited that there were three phases of war, each requiring different capabilities of warfare. The first phase is breaking the enemy’s military force, what we typically think of as military combat. The second is occupying the country, which involves the physical occupation of the defeated country and the establishment of the instruments of governance, production and consumption. The third is breaking the enemy’s ability to resist, which involves not only breaking its morale but also destroying any desire of the population to fight back against the occupiers.
The second phase is necessary because defeating an enemy military without occupying the country opens the door to the establishment of a new military force in the defeated country and a return to the strategic threat that sparked the war in the first place. After World War II, for example, the Allies had to occupy Germany and Japan or risk leaving in place the ability to resume the fighting and the political forces that posed the threat to begin with. In the final peace negotiations, therefore, the Americans insisted on occupation despite Japan’s resistance to it.
But the third phase of war didn’t emerge in either Japan or Germany for two reasons. First, and most important, the Allies had attacked not only the military but also the civilian population. Modern war involves hitting industrial targets, and factories are surrounded by people. Attacking the enemy’s industrial base means attacking its population, which dissolves any will to resist in the first place. The population, therefore, didn’t resist and the third phase never developed.
Second, even had there been a will to resist, the occupiers tried to rapidly identify weapons caches and destroy them. Leftover weapons could have been used to reignite the fighting, but eventually, new supplies would have to be obtained. Some might be stolen from the occupation force, but, with some exceptions, creating a force to resist the occupation requires an outside power willing to deliver materiel and a base from which to distribute it.
In Iraq, the United States defeated the Iraqi army within weeks and was able to quickly occupy the country. But the Iraqi army’s weapons had been cached in a number of places, and many Iraqi troops took weapons home. The United States had destroyed the Iraqi army and occupied the country but then faced the emergence of a force that had both the will and weapons to resist, obtained from both within and without the country. The United States failed at that third phase of war.
The Urge to Resist
In occupation warfare, the occupied have no hope of defeating or inflicting significant damage on the occupying military. But they can use their advantages to undermine the occupiers’ will to resist. The resisting force has several advantages, chief among them moral superiority. It is their country that’s being occupied, and the urge to resist is easy to generate. In addition, they have superior intelligence to the occupier and, therefore, a deeper sense of what’s happening. If the terrain permits, they can use it to cloak themselves. In urban environments, the city can make them invisible. Rooting the resistance out of a city is difficult and requires gathering intelligence from the civilian population, but their willingness to help is limited by their sympathy for the resistance, hatred of the occupier and fear of retribution. When the occupier carries out operations in populated areas, civilians are inevitably killed or wounded, increasing the population’s hostility and decreasing the opportunity for cooperation.
This is why occupation warfare is so difficult. It requires the occupier to craft a strategy appropriate for the occupied country, one based on knowledge of the country that the occupying force doesn’t have. The occupier, therefore, can’t obliterate the resisting force, but the resisting force can strike as and where it chooses, depending on its capability.
This means that the occupied win so long as they are not defeated, and the occupiers lose so long as the resistance continues. The resistance will try to create an unending war not because it expects to win but because it wants to break the will of its enemy to remain in the country. War must have a purpose and an end. The purpose for the resistance is clear. But over time, even the relatively low casualties being inflicted on the occupiers compel them to reconsider the political value of continuing to wage war. Clausewitz pointed out that war is the continuation of politics by other means, and that is nowhere truer than in occupation warfare. For years, the war can drag on with the assumption that withdrawal would undermine international credibility and that the occupier cannot allow itself to be defeated in this way. But in due course, the price of withdrawal becomes lower than the cost of maintaining the presence.
Occupation warfare, against a motivated and supplied resistance, is the most difficult type of warfare. It breaks an occupier not by main force but by steadily draining its resources. Some might say that the resistance cannot withstand overwhelming and brutal force. That may be true in some instances, but consider the German attempt to suppress Soviet partisan fighters and communists under Tito. The Germans had occupied the territory but couldn’t defeat the resistance despite extraordinary brutality. The partisans had the Pripet Marshes to hide in. Tito’s force had mountains. Both had a degree of outside supply. And both were highly motivated by the fact that surrender meant death. The very brutality of the occupier put steel into the resistance.
The Seduction of Victory
The United States can certainly destroy the Iranian military. It can also likely occupy Iran, but it would then be forced into occupation warfare. The Iranians would lose control of their country for an extended period of time. The costs would be too high for each side. The U.S. could of course bomb Iran, but only one country has ever capitulated after facing airstrikes alone: Yugoslavia in the Kosovo War. And even in this case, the capitulation had more to do with foreign diplomacy than the pain of war. Air power can cause tremendous damage but likely won’t force a country to back down. The end of war requires a political shift in an enemy, and air power usually can’t impose such a shift.
(click to enlarge)
The United States has had experience with occupation warfare in Afghanistan and, in some sense, in Vietnam. In each case, the ability of the enemy to impose extended occupation warfare on the United States compelled the U.S., in the long run, to accept an outcome that was previously unthinkable. In Iraq, the German and Japanese examples from World War II led to the assumption that the final phase would not involve resistance. But those examples, it turns out, didn’t apply to the Iraq War.
There will be mutual threats and possibly even airstrikes and counterstrikes. But the destruction of the Iranian military would lead to occupation and necessitate breaking the will to resist. The dangers of occupation warfare are well known, but the calm after the destruction of the enemy’s military is the most dangerous point in war. It seduces the victorious government into imagining that this time will be different. It rarely is.
-
https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=189701&sec_id=189701&fbclid=IwAR3jo6qh9F_MwwYybtMbrOB5okgeiW4CbMSWtGWD7S8LKUA8WMKgOlD89XM
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/angela-merkel-germany-anti-american-views/
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/angela-merkel-germany-anti-american-views/
Well past time we GTFO of old europe.
-
Does that mean we leave our NATO allies in East Europe too? And what of Ukraine?
-
Does that mean we leave our NATO allies in East Europe too? And what of Ukraine?
We have NATO allies? Really?
1. The vast majority of our NATO “allies” are a bunch of ungrateful backstabbers who are happy to let us pick up the tab while they rot from within.
2. The US military is badly overstretched and worn thin and hasn’t actually won a war since about a quarter century before I was born.
3. We can use the US military to protect people around the globe, well except actual Americans on American soil. Does this strike you as a bit odd?
-
Of course point taken about over extended, but in fairness it should be noted Llithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland have all been grateful and pay their way. The Czechs signed on for being a missile base for us too.
-
Of course point taken about over extended, but in fairness it should be noted Llithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland have all been grateful and pay their way. The Czechs signed on for being a missile base for us too.
How many of your children would you want to go to war for the future of Latvia?
Keep in mind that Russia today is Brazil with a nuclear arsenal. But with worse beaches and fashion sense.
http://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php
-
"Of course point taken about over extended, but in fairness it should be noted Llithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland have all been grateful and pay their way. The Czechs signed on for being a missile base for us too."
- These alliances are valuable.
"How many of your children would you want to go to war for the future of Latvia?"
- Seen alone, it makes no sense, but intervene and stop major threats sooner before they grow larger was the lesson of that 'last war we won'.
"Keep in mind that Russia today is Brazil with a nuclear arsenal. But with worse beaches and fashion sense."
http://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php
[/quote]
Yes, Russia's importance is over-rated. Their ability to cause trouble does not seem hampered by their shrinking economy. Besides bankrupting them through fracking, a wonder what we could do if we committed to an all-out, no weapons fired, cyber war aimed directly at the threat they pose. By the end of Trump's second term we should have the UN replaced with a security council that doesn't give the two largest threats veto power.
-
"We have NATO allies? Really?"
- Kind of a stretch to call Germany an ally right now.
"1. The vast majority of our NATO “allies” are a bunch of ungrateful backstabbers who are happy to let us pick up the tab while they rot from within."
- True.
"2. The US military is badly overstretched and worn thin and hasn’t actually won a war since about a quarter century before I was born."
- A few exceptions in my view. Ask ccp about the war in Grenada. Small but it mattered that we drove their bases out of our hemisphere for the moment. We liberated Kuwait and had Saddam's troops waving their underwear in the desert to show the sign of surrender. We defeated Saddam Hussein soundly a decade later and the threat he posed, ending with his own people hanging him. The nation building exercise was another matter. Likewise for forcing Osama bin Laden into hiding and eventually eliminating him, but again not the nation building. The real wins were the conflicts avoided through strength and deterrence. We defeated the Soviet Union, a win perhaps as large as the win over Hitler.
"3. We can use the US military to protect people around the globe, well except actual Americans on American soil. Does this strike you as a bit odd?"
- Yes, back to that point about rot from within.
We need to update the rules and promises made in NATO and update our priorities on where we station troops and military resources. There is an obvious asymmetry entering agreements with these smaller 'powers' like Latvia, and all powers are smaller than us, but we would rather have these countries with us than against us in a larger conflict and we would rather stop Russian Soviet (or Chinese or Islamist) expansionism at their border than at ours. At least we elected a President who has called them out on keeping their end of the bargain. The deepest military thinker on the other side is still working on utility billing in South Bend.
One thought comes to mind for a post-Trump US foreign policy, a President Pompeo.
-
" .Keep in mind that Russia today is Brazil with a nuclear arsenal. But with worse beaches and fashion sense."
true but I agree with (Ras) Putin ; they do have some foxy ladies
and as a plus they do produce the best preserved mammoth carcusses! :-D
-
Doug wrote " Kind of a stretch to call Germany an ally right now."
since we are all VDH fans here I might assume we have all seen his post today on this subject. If not here it is:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/angela-merkel-germany-anti-american-views/
About Grenada - it was a great win . some later called it a police action - but the point was it proved we will defend our borders and our interests and having another Cuban backed socialist regime in our back door wa good enough reason to do it.
90 % of Grenadians were glad we invaded! - to the chagrin of the F'n liberals.
And finally after the Lefts constant battering of US military ever since the Vietnam War it was a great pleasure to see our military being revered appreciated again . As it should be.
-
OK, thought experiment. We leave NATO. What happens when the Russkis retake East Europe?
What happens when the Turks throw in with Russia and reestablish an Ottoman Empire.
What happens when the Iranians see no reason to not go nuke? They already have the missiles , , , What happens next in the Middle East? What message do the jihadis-- and those who oppose them-- take?
What happens when Russia effectively ends its pretense of supporting sanctions on North Korea?
What message do the Chinese take? Not only in the South China Sea but also with regard to the plan to replace the US at the center of the international order with their ethno-fascist goolag state?
You guys are indulging yourselves in a temper tantrum.
-
"Of course point taken about over extended, but in fairness it should be noted Llithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland have all been grateful and pay their way. The Czechs signed on for being a missile base for us too."
- These alliances are valuable.
**Please describe the value of the alliances.**
"How many of your children would you want to go to war for the future of Latvia?"
- Seen alone, it makes no sense, but intervene and stop major threats sooner before they grow larger was the lesson of that 'last war we won'.
**Like the rise of the global jihad that started in 1979? Or the collapse of our border?**
"Keep in mind that Russia today is Brazil with a nuclear arsenal. But with worse beaches and fashion sense."
http://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php
Yes, Russia's importance is over-rated. Their ability to cause trouble does not seem hampered by their shrinking economy. Besides bankrupting them through fracking, a wonder what we could do if we committed to an all-out, no weapons fired, cyber war aimed directly at the threat they pose. By the end of Trump's second term we should have the UN replaced with a security council that doesn't give the two largest threats veto power.
[/quote]
Cyber wars will lead to shooting wars. Better to collapse the Chinese and Russian economies through legitimate means.
-
OK, thought experiment. We leave NATO. What happens when the Russkis retake East Europe?
**Much easier said than done. Russia faces a much bigger threat from China. Something that could be exploited if we'd weren't pushing their paranoia buttons on their borders.**
What happens when the Turks throw in with Russia and reestablish an Ottoman Empire.
**I am pretty sure Putin and whatever Russian strongman follows him won't be bowing to either Turkey or Mecca anytime soon.**
What happens when the Iranians see no reason to not go nuke? They already have the missiles , , , What happens next in the Middle East? What message do the jihadis-- and those who oppose them-- take?
**You think Iran doesn't already have nukes? The Sunni states and Israel are planning on dealing with Iran. Perhaps we should let them.**
What happens when Russia effectively ends its pretense of supporting sanctions on North Korea?
**That it will be business as usual, without the pretense.**
What message do the Chinese take? Not only in the South China Sea but also with regard to the plan to replace the US at the center of the international order with their ethno-fascist goolag state?
**Does getting out of the North American Moochers Organization mean we don't work against China's plans for conquest? I don't recall saying that.**
You guys are indulging yourselves in a temper tantrum.
-
"Likewise for forcing Osama bin Laden into hiding and eventually eliminating him, but again not the nation building."
He was in hiding before 9/11. We killed him. Did we kill the global jihad? Did we teach Pakistan a lesson for sheltering him? Indeed we did. We taught them and the rest of the world that America won't do what it takes to win. America will settle for a draw on the battlefield that translates to a strategic loss. Oh, and how many billions of dollars did we keep giving them even after we knew about Bin Laden?
In late 2001, did you think that by 2019, there would be places throughout the western world where sharia law would be the law?
Do you think we are winning?
-
What does that have to do with withdrawing from East Europe?
-
What does that have to do with withdrawing from East Europe?
Our NATO "allies" were for the most part useless in Afghanistan.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougbandow/2013/04/22/natos-lack-of-any-serious-purpose-means-it-should-retire/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/german-soldiers-in-afghanistan-cant-shoot
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/todays-nato-mission-is-to-preserve-itself/
-
I listed probable consequences of our leaving East Europe to the Russians. Your reply is non-responsive to that.
-
I listed probable consequences of our leaving East Europe to the Russians. Your reply is non-responsive to that.
I believe Russia acts in a more hostile manner because we have NATO on their border. Imagine if Mexico became a Soviet client state/Warsaw pact member during the Cold War. We might actually have a real border fence long before Trump. I am sure you are well of Russian history and why they are always awaiting the next horrific event on Russian soil.
Russia doesn’t like it’s prison bitch relationship with China. There is a chance to do a “Nixon to China” to a degree, although the Dems have really poisoned that well.
That doesn’t mean we don’t help Eastern European nations, but we don’t need to keep pissing money away on NATO.
-
That is responsive.
Of course the other side to it is that it can also be portrayed as being OK with Russia re-establishing the Soviet Empire in East Europe.
IMHO these questions remain:
What happens when the Russkis retake East Europe?
What happens when the Turks throw in with Russia and reestablish an Ottoman Empire?
What happens when the Iranians see no reason to not go nuke? They already have the missiles , , , What happens next in the Middle East? What message do the jihadis-- and those who oppose them-- take?
What happens when Russia effectively ends its pretense of supporting sanctions on North Korea?
What message do the Chinese take? Not only in the South China Sea but also with regard to the plan to replace the US at the center of the international order with their ethno-fascist goolag state?
-
That is responsive.
Of course the other side to it is that it can also be portrayed as being OK with Russia re-establishing the Soviet Empire in East Europe.
IMHO these questions remain:
What happens when the Russkis retake East Europe?
What happens when the Turks throw in with Russia and reestablish an Ottoman Empire?
What happens when the Iranians see no reason to not go nuke? They already have the missiles , , , What happens next in the Middle East? What message do the jihadis-- and those who oppose them-- take?
What happens when Russia effectively ends its pretense of supporting sanctions on North Korea?
What message do the Chinese take? Not only in the South China Sea but also with regard to the plan to replace the US at the center of the international order with their ethno-fascist goolag state?
Crafty, You make a strong case and I agree with you.
There are some enormous contradictions within our foreign policy.
We protect places like East Europe and West Europe because it is in our best interest, not as a favor to them. Therefore I guess we need to get over their thanklessness.
The better we protect them, the less compelled they feel to contribute to their own defense. Someone needs to question these alliances even if we continue them. (Enter Trump.) It seems to me we need bilateral negotiations with sovereign nations. Groupthink just becomes bilateral, US and not-US.
NATO has an all or none premise. No real deterrence comes from saying we might come to the defense of a country depending on the latest political circumstances. Article 5 of NATO spells out a certainty that has serves a good purpose. Meanwhile, all the burden falls on the US and that is not right.
I don't see how (or why) we can provide for their defense AND then face unfair trade practices in return. cf. Europe has 4 times the tariff rate on cars vs. US. Also they give us zero support in the UN and Europe is giving us zero support in the tariff and technology war with China. Does it make sense that we protect them and get stepped on in return? Maybe yes, but then what is the lever we have with them?
When do we reevaluate things like having the two largest rogue players on the security council of the UN with permanent veto power? When do we reevaluate our own participation in an institution that is anti Israel and anti-US, anti-Taiwan, anti-life, anti free enterprise, etc.?
The Trump phenomenon of questioning NATO and US interventions was not started by Trump. People are skeptical. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan could have been strike hard and (mostly) leave. Colin Powell was wrong about break something that is already broken and you have to fix it.
So-called allies like Germany and Turkey keep giving us reason to question the alliance. Other key allies and would-be/should-be allies are not in the 'North Atlantic'. List of countries that helped in Gulf War 1991:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Gulf_War
As G M suggests, Russia is a third rate economy. If they are our enemy, if they are the threat we spend a good part of $5 trillion per decade to defend against, aren't there other strategies, economic strategies (fracking expansion and exporting LNG worldwide) that would weaken them as well to supplement our military expense. Don't we have cyber capabilities that would cripple Russia or China if necessary without deploying a troop or firing a shot?
-
https://medium.com/@bradleynewlon/free-riding-in-nato-525ad98fe504
NATO members recognize past Russian aggression and see the current threat posed to the NATO member Baltic states. However, there is not a consensus on how to deal with these aggressions. Poland is the most openly hostile state to the Russians and has accepted military aid willingly. The invasion of Ukraine highlights some of the disagreement between the United States and Germany within NATO. For instance, seventy-one percent of Germans, when surveyed, were in favor of providing economic aid to Ukraine. The Americans, on the other hand, were sixty percent in favor of providing economic aid. The public’s view of providing aid is unanimously in favor on both sides. However, the contrast lies in the public’s view of providing military aid. Forty-six percent of Americans were in favor of providing military aid whereas only nineteen percent of Germans were in favor. Sixty-two percent of Americans were in favor of admitting Ukraine to NATO whereas only thirty-six percent of Germans approved.
Above I have only highlighted only some external issues for NATO members, and there are more that could be covered. However, I believe the evidence above sufficiently highlights
NATO’s current problems both external and internal. Namely, Russian aggression and intimidation of both NATO and non-NATO states, and, secondly, disagreement amongst NATO states on how to solve problems. For the rest of this paper, I will focus on whether there is freeriding in NATO. Namely, through examining NATO funding targets, and current trends in funding country-to-country.
Free Riding in NATO:
To first assess whether there is free-riding in NATO we first need to explore what freeriding is and why it arises in agreements such as NATO. This questions first brings us to the subject of public goods. In our introductory economics classes, we learned about the goods we use every day — these are called private goods. Namely, we can exclude others from using them, and our consumption of them prevents others from using them as well. However, when one cannot exclude someone from a good or rival their consumption that good is called a public good. National Defense is a favorite example of a public good because, seemingly, no matter how many people there are in a country it does not seem to impede the military’s ability to defend them.
It is impossible for free-riding to exist when it comes to regular national defense because citizens are required by law to pay their fair share of taxes. In the case of NATO and international defense, however, countries are not mandated to pay a certain amount towards their defense. However, NATO members met in 2014 and agreed to raise a budget that is equal to two percent of their real GDP — this rule cannot be enforced. This is where free-riding arises. Members are not required to pay a certain amount to be members of NATO, so there is an incentive to pay as little as possible to get by. This incentive can be demonstrated in a simple 2x2 game theory matrix — in this example we will model the decisions between two parties for simplicity.
Where Strategy A is to provide, and Strategy B is to under-provide. As we can see here the dominant strategy for either member is to always under-provide. This is the fundamental problem in associations where there is no mandate of a specific level of financial support.
However, the problem with NATO that arises begins to complicate once we add in more actors. Typically, public goods are underprovided; however, International defense in NATO is overprovided despite members not meeting the agreed upon level of spending — two percent of
GDP. This is because of the over spending by members such as Estonia, Greece, The United States, and The United Kingdom — with the United States overpaying by the largest margin. Latvia is the only country who currently meets the agreed upon level of spending as we can see in the figure below.
A Pew Research poll showed that fifty-eight percent of Germans, fifty-three percent of the French, and fifty-one percent of Italians were against using the armed forces to defend another member of NATO. On the other hand, only thirty-seven percent of Americans and citizens from the UK were opposed to using the armed forces to defend an ally. These poll results, coupled with another poll that said that sixty-eight percent of Europeans believed the United States would use the force necessary to defend against a Russian attack, can be used to explain Europe’s willingness to provide less than the agreed upon two percent of GDP. We can use our median voter model to explain these countries raising a budget where the two percent of GDP target is not met. That is if we assume the legislature perfectly represents their constituents. This can be seen in the diagram below.
This diagram represents a normal distribution of ideal voter points with the black line separating regions, Provide and Underprovide, representing the voter who is indifferent between the two, the green line representing the median voter, and the red lines representing two candidates running for office. In the case drawn above, the candidate who is closest to the median voter wins the election — over the long term the candidates’ positions will converge. This can explain why most countries in NATO do not meet the agreed-upon funding level.
-
"A Pew Research poll showed that fifty-eight percent of Germans, fifty-three percent of the French, and fifty-one percent of Italians were against using the armed forces to defend another member of NATO. "
But they would have no problem if the US did ! :x
That after the US bailed them out of 2 WW!
-
Our NATO "allies" are prepared to fight to the last American.
"A Pew Research poll showed that fifty-eight percent of Germans, fifty-three percent of the French, and fifty-one percent of Italians were against using the armed forces to defend another member of NATO. "
But they would have no problem if the US did ! :x
That after the US bailed them out of 2 WW!
-
Note my post earlier this evening on the South China Sea thread about Germany eyeing the Taiwan Straits and the French actually sailing it.
-
Note my post earlier this evening on the South China Sea thread about Germany eyeing the Taiwan Straits and the French actually sailing it.
The PLA/PLAN is duly on notice! :roll:
-
https://www.meforum.org/58777/two-central-asia-summits?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=d7a8da3cdf-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_06_22_12_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-d7a8da3cdf-33691909&mc_cid=d7a8da3cdf&mc_eid=9627475d7f
-
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/06/end-forever-wars-sound-bite-not-security-policy/158017/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl
-
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/06/end-forever-wars-sound-bite-not-security-policy/158017/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl
"Pulling out completely [Syria in this case] won’t end that war or terrorism in that country, but it will give every one of the roughly 20 identified terrorist groups there freer reign"
Having a zero leave behind force and no base in Iraq enabled the ISIS caliphate. Surrender in Vietnam brought human disaster. The pullout in Afghan is putting the Taliban back in charge. Leaving NK and Iran untouched adds them to the nuclear club. No one else steps up when the US does nothing. These aren't simple, easy or inconsequential choices.
It is easy to be a critic and difficult to lead with a coherent policy aimed at long term security. Sanders is stuck at the sound bite phase. His highest level of executive experience was the surprise of being elected mayor of Burlington Vermont. He has never seriously contemplated the consequences of his words or proposals, and he might have picked the Soviets over the Americans in the cold war anyway. Who would be his Secretary of Defense? Or would they close the department? Why would you rather fight the wars here? And if so, wouldn't you want to control the border at some point in the conflict?
Trump didn't know what the term nuclear triad was or know Kurds from Quds by name at the start but he did understand peace through strength, and maybe more importantly, negotiation through strength. He also knows which side he is pulling for and made some excellent appointments. He will no doubt make mistakes but has been mostly a very pleasant surprise on national security policies so far.
-
https://www.wnd.com/2019/06/memo-to-trump-trade-bolton-for-tulsi/
personally I would rather have Bolton.
recently on the John Batchelor show he had a guest who pointed out that Al Qaida is just as strong in Afghanistan now as it was prior to 911!
We can thank the Taliban for that.
So Tulsi is from that source not correct in what she is saying that the Taliban did not attack us and the other candidate
who stated they re harboring the terrorists is correct.
-
Jul 4, 2019 | 10:00 GMT
7 mins read
Considering America on Independence Day
A painting of the Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull (1756-1843).
(Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire
July 4, 2016: The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway and is the world's largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.
The Greater Mississippi Basin is the continent's core, and whoever controls that core not only is certain to dominate the East Coast and Great Lakes regions but will also have the agricultural, transport, trade and political unification capacity to be a world power — even without having to interact with the rest of the global system.
Listening to the Echoes of the American Revolution
July 4, 2016: "The struggle had opened in a grey dawn at Lexington; its last shot was fired eight years later on the other side of the world outside a dusty town in southern India."
So ends Piers Mackesy's 1964 book, "The War for America; 1775-1783." Mackesy helps us see beyond the story of a scrappy band of rebels cleverly hiding behind trees and using backwoods marksmanship to defeat an outdated rank-and-file military organization, an image still pervasive in Americana today. Instead, what emerges is a cautionary tale of just what it means to be an empire with global interests and relations. Writ large are the choices and responsibilities that ultimately limit possibilities, require prioritization and can lead to unexpected catastrophic results.
The world is a complicated, interconnected and volatile place. No country has the singular power to intervene for national, economic or even moral reasons everywhere. For Britain, a small rebellion, driven by distance, fiscal policy and changing culture, escalated from a localized police action to a global crisis that dragged on for nearly a decade. In the process, old foes were reawaked and unforeseen challenges to British forces at the far reaches of the empire emerged. On America's Independence Day (a day marking more the start than conclusion of hostilities with the mother country), it is worthwhile reflecting on the ideas and complexities of global capabilities and responsibilities as well as considering the nature of independence and freedom.
At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Britain was, at least briefly, the undisputed global hegemon ... In reality, the British were stretched thin, facing political turmoil at home and transitioning from a high-intensity wartime military and economy to a post-crisis structure.
Coming to Terms With the American Empire
April 14, 2015: The geography of the American empire was built partly on military relations but heavily on economic relations. At first these economic relations were fairly trivial to American business. But as the system matured, the value of investments soared along with the importance of imports, exports and labor markets. As in any genuinely successful empire, it did not begin with a grand design or even a dream of one. Strategic necessity created an economic reality in country after country until certain major industries became dependent on at least some countries. The obvious examples were Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, whose oil fueled American oil companies, and which therefore — quite apart from conventional strategic importance — became economically important. This eventually made them strategically important.
As an empire matures, its economic value increases, particularly when it is not coercing others. Coercion is expensive and undermines the worth of an empire. The ideal colony is one that is not at all a colony, but a nation that benefits from economic relations with both the imperial power and the rest of the empire. The primary military relationship ought to be either mutual dependence or, barring that, dependence of the vulnerable client state on the imperial power.
This is how the United States slipped into empire. First, it was overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful. Second, it faced a potential adversary capable of challenging it globally, in a large number of countries. Third, it used its economic advantage to induce at least some of these countries into economic, and therefore political and military, relationships. Fourth, these countries became significantly important to various sectors of the American economy.
The U.S. military is built around force multipliers, weapons that can destroy the enemy before the enemy destroys the relatively small force deployed. Sometimes this strategy works. Over the long run, it cannot.
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 2: American Identity and the Threats of Tomorrow
Aug. 25, 2011: What happens when something goes wrong, when the rest of the world reaches out and touches the Americans on something other than America's terms? When one is convinced that things can, will and should continually improve, the shock of negative developments or foreign interaction is palpable. Mania becomes depression and arrogance turns into panic.
An excellent example is the Japanese attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. Seventy years on, Americans still think of the event as a massive betrayal underlining the barbaric nature of the Japanese that justified the launching of a total war and the incineration of major cities. This despite the fact that the Americans had systemically shut off East Asia from Japanese traders, complete with a de facto energy embargo, and that the American mainland — much less its core — was never threatened.
Such panic and overreaction is a wellspring of modern American power. The United States is a large, physically secure, economically diverse and vibrant entity. When it acts, it can alter developments on a global scale fairly easily. But when it panics, it throws all of its ample strength at the problem at hand, and in doing so reshapes the world.
A map showing the United States' expansion over time.
How the Plight of a Heartland Could Upset America's Balance
Societal, economic or cultural change is not always immediately reflected in the halls of Washington, D.C. Some of the change at the political level can be delayed due to the fundamentals of the U.S. political system. Changes in population due to the rise and fall of local state economies will only result in changes in representation every decade and even then, they will be gradual. After each census, the House of Representatives recalculates the number of seats allocated to each state proportionally, meaning that the population declines in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, West Virginia and Michigan that have occurred over the past decade will have a delayed effect on overall political power within the House. In the meantime, traditionally powerful states that see waning power and influence ahead will seek to hold onto influence in other ways and in other branches of the government. See the 2016 presidential elections, when many states that have been facing long-term economic decline gravitated to the candidate who promised a return to former glory. However, the growth of urban areas as economic hubs could slowly change the social and political profiles of the states that host them. Ultimately, the lag between demographic and economic changes and its formal reflection at the level of political representation leaves the U.S. political system in a state of limbo.
Against this backdrop, the United States is witnessing the growth of ideological divides stemming from generational shifts, urbanization, internal migration and economic inequalities. Without a unifying culture, economy and geography knitting the core together, the new ecumene — fiscally robust as it may be — will not help an already fraying populace mend itself. After all, many of the cultural concerns and economic priorities of Los Angeles still have little in common with those in Raleigh. Instead, we are more likely to witness states push more heavily for their own regional, rather than national, interests as a result of the lag of national representation behind economic realities.
-
The best case we can hope for is a peaceful separation, but that is less and less likely.
Jul 4, 2019 | 10:00 GMT
7 mins read
Considering America on Independence Day
A painting of the Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull (1756-1843).
(Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire
July 4, 2016: The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway and is the world's largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.
The Greater Mississippi Basin is the continent's core, and whoever controls that core not only is certain to dominate the East Coast and Great Lakes regions but will also have the agricultural, transport, trade and political unification capacity to be a world power — even without having to interact with the rest of the global system.
Listening to the Echoes of the American Revolution
July 4, 2016: "The struggle had opened in a grey dawn at Lexington; its last shot was fired eight years later on the other side of the world outside a dusty town in southern India."
So ends Piers Mackesy's 1964 book, "The War for America; 1775-1783." Mackesy helps us see beyond the story of a scrappy band of rebels cleverly hiding behind trees and using backwoods marksmanship to defeat an outdated rank-and-file military organization, an image still pervasive in Americana today. Instead, what emerges is a cautionary tale of just what it means to be an empire with global interests and relations. Writ large are the choices and responsibilities that ultimately limit possibilities, require prioritization and can lead to unexpected catastrophic results.
The world is a complicated, interconnected and volatile place. No country has the singular power to intervene for national, economic or even moral reasons everywhere. For Britain, a small rebellion, driven by distance, fiscal policy and changing culture, escalated from a localized police action to a global crisis that dragged on for nearly a decade. In the process, old foes were reawaked and unforeseen challenges to British forces at the far reaches of the empire emerged. On America's Independence Day (a day marking more the start than conclusion of hostilities with the mother country), it is worthwhile reflecting on the ideas and complexities of global capabilities and responsibilities as well as considering the nature of independence and freedom.
At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Britain was, at least briefly, the undisputed global hegemon ... In reality, the British were stretched thin, facing political turmoil at home and transitioning from a high-intensity wartime military and economy to a post-crisis structure.
Coming to Terms With the American Empire
April 14, 2015: The geography of the American empire was built partly on military relations but heavily on economic relations. At first these economic relations were fairly trivial to American business. But as the system matured, the value of investments soared along with the importance of imports, exports and labor markets. As in any genuinely successful empire, it did not begin with a grand design or even a dream of one. Strategic necessity created an economic reality in country after country until certain major industries became dependent on at least some countries. The obvious examples were Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, whose oil fueled American oil companies, and which therefore — quite apart from conventional strategic importance — became economically important. This eventually made them strategically important.
As an empire matures, its economic value increases, particularly when it is not coercing others. Coercion is expensive and undermines the worth of an empire. The ideal colony is one that is not at all a colony, but a nation that benefits from economic relations with both the imperial power and the rest of the empire. The primary military relationship ought to be either mutual dependence or, barring that, dependence of the vulnerable client state on the imperial power.
This is how the United States slipped into empire. First, it was overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful. Second, it faced a potential adversary capable of challenging it globally, in a large number of countries. Third, it used its economic advantage to induce at least some of these countries into economic, and therefore political and military, relationships. Fourth, these countries became significantly important to various sectors of the American economy.
The U.S. military is built around force multipliers, weapons that can destroy the enemy before the enemy destroys the relatively small force deployed. Sometimes this strategy works. Over the long run, it cannot.
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 2: American Identity and the Threats of Tomorrow
Aug. 25, 2011: What happens when something goes wrong, when the rest of the world reaches out and touches the Americans on something other than America's terms? When one is convinced that things can, will and should continually improve, the shock of negative developments or foreign interaction is palpable. Mania becomes depression and arrogance turns into panic.
An excellent example is the Japanese attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. Seventy years on, Americans still think of the event as a massive betrayal underlining the barbaric nature of the Japanese that justified the launching of a total war and the incineration of major cities. This despite the fact that the Americans had systemically shut off East Asia from Japanese traders, complete with a de facto energy embargo, and that the American mainland — much less its core — was never threatened.
Such panic and overreaction is a wellspring of modern American power. The United States is a large, physically secure, economically diverse and vibrant entity. When it acts, it can alter developments on a global scale fairly easily. But when it panics, it throws all of its ample strength at the problem at hand, and in doing so reshapes the world.
A map showing the United States' expansion over time.
How the Plight of a Heartland Could Upset America's Balance
Societal, economic or cultural change is not always immediately reflected in the halls of Washington, D.C. Some of the change at the political level can be delayed due to the fundamentals of the U.S. political system. Changes in population due to the rise and fall of local state economies will only result in changes in representation every decade and even then, they will be gradual. After each census, the House of Representatives recalculates the number of seats allocated to each state proportionally, meaning that the population declines in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, West Virginia and Michigan that have occurred over the past decade will have a delayed effect on overall political power within the House. In the meantime, traditionally powerful states that see waning power and influence ahead will seek to hold onto influence in other ways and in other branches of the government. See the 2016 presidential elections, when many states that have been facing long-term economic decline gravitated to the candidate who promised a return to former glory. However, the growth of urban areas as economic hubs could slowly change the social and political profiles of the states that host them. Ultimately, the lag between demographic and economic changes and its formal reflection at the level of political representation leaves the U.S. political system in a state of limbo.
Against this backdrop, the United States is witnessing the growth of ideological divides stemming from generational shifts, urbanization, internal migration and economic inequalities. Without a unifying culture, economy and geography knitting the core together, the new ecumene — fiscally robust as it may be — will not help an already fraying populace mend itself. After all, many of the cultural concerns and economic priorities of Los Angeles still have little in common with those in Raleigh. Instead, we are more likely to witness states push more heavily for their own regional, rather than national, interests as a result of the lag of national representation behind economic realities.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/brexit-united-states-united-kingdom-relations/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-07-11&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/brexit-united-states-united-kingdom-relations/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-07-11&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
They should.
-
https://www.wsj.com/articles/uncle-trump-to-the-naval-rescue-11565304467
-
We Stand With Hong Kong
Sooner or later, the rest of the world will have to do what the protesters are doing—confront Beijing.
By Mitch McConnell
Aug. 20, 2019 6:51 pm ET
Protesters outside the Central Government Offices in Hong Kong, Aug. 18. Photo: roman pilipey/Shutterstock
The Hong Kong crisis is something the world has seen time and again: authoritarian rulers seeking to repress the innate human desire for freedom, self-expression and self-government. The scenes remind us of Budapest in 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, of Tiananmen Square in 1989 and Moscow in recent weeks. The next chapter is unfolding today as the Chinese Communist Party terrorizes the people of Hong Kong.
An estimated two million Hong Kongers—about one-fourth of the population—are demonstrating for the freedoms and autonomy that have made their city a global success. They are protesting the government in Beijing and its determination, in violation of its promises, to chip away at those freedoms.
Opinion Live: America’s Political Realignment and the 2020 Election
Join Paul Gigot in Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 1 for a discussion with Opinion columnists and political experts on the current state of the 2020 election field. Register with WSJ+.
The protestors want their liberties preserved, the territory’s autonomy respected, and justice for those the security services have detained, brutalized or murdered. Contrary to Communist propaganda, this citizens’ uprising is no foreign conspiracy. If anything, the world’s leading democratic nations have been slow to respond. Only one capital is responsible for what is unfolding in Hong Kong: Beijing. The demonstrators are responding to its efforts to exert ever more influence and control over what is supposed to be an autonomous region.
It is crucial to recognize that the dynamics that led to this crisis didn’t begin in Hong Kong and won’t end there. The turmoil is the result of Beijing’s systematic ratcheting up of its domestic oppression and its pursuit of hegemony abroad.
Years ago, it was reasonable to think that China’s rapid development and integration into the global economy might lead it to embrace prevailing international rules, that success would give Beijing a stake in the systems that uphold peace and prosperity. Now it is clear the Communist Party wants to write its own rules and impose them on others.
For evidence of China’s hunger for power, consider the fate of its other supposedly autonomous regions. In Tibet, Beijing’s brutal response to unrest in 1959 drove tens of thousands into exile and killed tens of thousands more. In Xinjiang, a mostly Muslim province, the state has displaced ethnic Uighur minorities through population transfers and established an elaborate architecture of social and political surveillance, including ethnic prison camps. Xinjiang is no autonomous region; it is a modern gulag. In both cases, Beijing spent decades methodically tightening its grip.
Beijing has sought to write a similar story in Hong Kong, albeit more subtly. But Hong Kongers are not cut off from the truth by China’s “Great Firewall.” They recognized a bill to allow extradition to the mainland as a significant threat to their legal and political autonomy. So China’s leaders now face a choice. Will they intensify pressure on Hong Kong, gambling that the rest of the world will look the other way? Or will Beijing conclude that further repression in Hong Kong would bring further consequences?
China’s trading partners, including the U.S., should make it clear that any crackdown would have real and painful costs. I wrote the Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992, which extended special privileges to the region because of its unique status. This special access to the U.S. and other nations helped drive the investment and modernization that have enriched Hong Kong, and Beijing by extension. Beijing must know the Senate will reconsider that special relationship, among other steps, if Hong Kong’s autonomy is eroded.
I support extending and expanding the law’s reporting requirements to illuminate Beijing’s interference in Hong Kong. And the Senate will do more. I have asked Jim Risch, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to examine Beijing’s actions in Hong Kong and its efforts to expand the Communist Party’s influence and surveillance across China and beyond. I am working with Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee for State and Foreign Operations, to fund democracy and human-rights programs across Asia. I will maintain our strong focus on rebuilding and modernizing the military, continuing the huge strides of the past 2½ years, so that our ability to project power and defend American interests keeps pace with this major competitor.
But it is not America’s task alone to address these threats. The world is awakening to China’s abusive and aggressive practices, from unfair trade actions to intellectual-property theft to offshore expansion. Now Hong Kong has plastered front pages with yet another cautionary tale about how the Chinese regime treats those within its envisioned sphere of influence and disregards international agreements that govern them.
Every trading nation and democracy that values individual liberty and privacy has a stake here. Their choice is not between the U.S. and China but between a free, fair international system and the internal oppression, surveillance and modern vassal system China seeks to impose.
The U.S., for its own interests, seeks international peace, a good relationship with China, and a mutually prosperous future for our peoples. Hong Kong is only one piece of the complex set of interests that makes up the U.S.-China relationship. But China’s treatment of the people of Hong Kong will shape how the U.S. approaches other key aspects of our relationship.
As Beijing grapples with growing domestic unrest and slowing economic growth, it should pause before threatening a key engine of its growth and provoking the international community. Beijing can step back from chaos to pursue freer and fairer trade and greater respect for sovereignty and human rights. These basic steps can ensure a more prosperous and peaceful future for all of our citizens.
Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, is U.S. Senate majority leader.
-
I agree with the murder turtle.
We Stand With Hong Kong
Sooner or later, the rest of the world will have to do what the protesters are doing—confront Beijing.
By Mitch McConnell
Aug. 20, 2019 6:51 pm ET
Protesters outside the Central Government Offices in Hong Kong, Aug. 18. Photo: roman pilipey/Shutterstock
The Hong Kong crisis is something the world has seen time and again: authoritarian rulers seeking to repress the innate human desire for freedom, self-expression and self-government. The scenes remind us of Budapest in 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, of Tiananmen Square in 1989 and Moscow in recent weeks. The next chapter is unfolding today as the Chinese Communist Party terrorizes the people of Hong Kong.
An estimated two million Hong Kongers—about one-fourth of the population—are demonstrating for the freedoms and autonomy that have made their city a global success. They are protesting the government in Beijing and its determination, in violation of its promises, to chip away at those freedoms.
Opinion Live: America’s Political Realignment and the 2020 Election
Join Paul Gigot in Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 1 for a discussion with Opinion columnists and political experts on the current state of the 2020 election field. Register with WSJ+.
The protestors want their liberties preserved, the territory’s autonomy respected, and justice for those the security services have detained, brutalized or murdered. Contrary to Communist propaganda, this citizens’ uprising is no foreign conspiracy. If anything, the world’s leading democratic nations have been slow to respond. Only one capital is responsible for what is unfolding in Hong Kong: Beijing. The demonstrators are responding to its efforts to exert ever more influence and control over what is supposed to be an autonomous region.
It is crucial to recognize that the dynamics that led to this crisis didn’t begin in Hong Kong and won’t end there. The turmoil is the result of Beijing’s systematic ratcheting up of its domestic oppression and its pursuit of hegemony abroad.
Years ago, it was reasonable to think that China’s rapid development and integration into the global economy might lead it to embrace prevailing international rules, that success would give Beijing a stake in the systems that uphold peace and prosperity. Now it is clear the Communist Party wants to write its own rules and impose them on others.
For evidence of China’s hunger for power, consider the fate of its other supposedly autonomous regions. In Tibet, Beijing’s brutal response to unrest in 1959 drove tens of thousands into exile and killed tens of thousands more. In Xinjiang, a mostly Muslim province, the state has displaced ethnic Uighur minorities through population transfers and established an elaborate architecture of social and political surveillance, including ethnic prison camps. Xinjiang is no autonomous region; it is a modern gulag. In both cases, Beijing spent decades methodically tightening its grip.
Beijing has sought to write a similar story in Hong Kong, albeit more subtly. But Hong Kongers are not cut off from the truth by China’s “Great Firewall.” They recognized a bill to allow extradition to the mainland as a significant threat to their legal and political autonomy. So China’s leaders now face a choice. Will they intensify pressure on Hong Kong, gambling that the rest of the world will look the other way? Or will Beijing conclude that further repression in Hong Kong would bring further consequences?
China’s trading partners, including the U.S., should make it clear that any crackdown would have real and painful costs. I wrote the Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992, which extended special privileges to the region because of its unique status. This special access to the U.S. and other nations helped drive the investment and modernization that have enriched Hong Kong, and Beijing by extension. Beijing must know the Senate will reconsider that special relationship, among other steps, if Hong Kong’s autonomy is eroded.
I support extending and expanding the law’s reporting requirements to illuminate Beijing’s interference in Hong Kong. And the Senate will do more. I have asked Jim Risch, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to examine Beijing’s actions in Hong Kong and its efforts to expand the Communist Party’s influence and surveillance across China and beyond. I am working with Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee for State and Foreign Operations, to fund democracy and human-rights programs across Asia. I will maintain our strong focus on rebuilding and modernizing the military, continuing the huge strides of the past 2½ years, so that our ability to project power and defend American interests keeps pace with this major competitor.
But it is not America’s task alone to address these threats. The world is awakening to China’s abusive and aggressive practices, from unfair trade actions to intellectual-property theft to offshore expansion. Now Hong Kong has plastered front pages with yet another cautionary tale about how the Chinese regime treats those within its envisioned sphere of influence and disregards international agreements that govern them.
Every trading nation and democracy that values individual liberty and privacy has a stake here. Their choice is not between the U.S. and China but between a free, fair international system and the internal oppression, surveillance and modern vassal system China seeks to impose.
The U.S., for its own interests, seeks international peace, a good relationship with China, and a mutually prosperous future for our peoples. Hong Kong is only one piece of the complex set of interests that makes up the U.S.-China relationship. But China’s treatment of the people of Hong Kong will shape how the U.S. approaches other key aspects of our relationship.
As Beijing grapples with growing domestic unrest and slowing economic growth, it should pause before threatening a key engine of its growth and provoking the international community. Beijing can step back from chaos to pursue freer and fairer trade and greater respect for sovereignty and human rights. These basic steps can ensure a more prosperous and peaceful future for all of our citizens.
Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, is U.S. Senate majority leader.
-
The world retains its ability to suprise-- me too!
-
https://buchanan.org/blog/greenland-trumps-maga-idea-137433?fbclid=IwAR2I2CzcysVCqBekTsU9zhVDs1yWF8GR1pHsx8JTNXAyK_7f43kr2C6J-qk
-
www.geopoliticalfutures.com© 2019 Geopolitical FuturesTHE GEOPOLITICS OF DONALD TRUMP
11War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States reinterpreted this final imperative as maintaining the balance of power among smaller countries. This resulted in smaller wars like Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and within this framework even smaller wars. To this end, the United States created a range of alliances, some emerging from the Cold War, like NATO, and some ad hoc coalitions. The wars were always fought within some alliance structure, however thin. But the U.S. did poorly in most of these limited conflicts. Where it had excelled in total war and potential total war, these limited conflicts had as their ends political outcomes that were strongly resisted by forces in the countries that had a far greater interest in the outcome than did the U.S., and therefore an imperative of continued resistance that went beyond the American imperative. The culmination was the series of wars that arose out of 9/11 and has continued, on a diminishing basis with unsatisfactory outcomes, to this day.
www.geopoliticalfutures.com© 2019 Geopolitical FuturesTHE GEOPOLITICS OF DONALD TRUMP12
This raises the question of the value of the alliance structures and the ability of the U.S. to use direct American force to achieve its desired ends. It also raises the question of the ability of American leadership to clearly define the desired end. Any president would have had to address the question of the value of the Cold War alliance system and the wisdom behind the wars the U.S. has waged since World War II, particularly in light of the 18 years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no neat ideological division here. Many internationalists who support the U.S. alliance structure oppose the current wars and others the U.S. has fought. Many nationalists who oppose the alliance structure want to see ongoing military action against jihadists. Others want both, and still others want neither.While the question of alliances and military strategy does not map to the social divisions, there is another dimension that does: internationalism versus nationalism. This division does not directly translate into strategy or tactics, but rather into an intellectual and even moral sensitivity.
Internationalists, drawing their vision from the failure of key nations to cooperate in blocking the rise of Hitler, argue that the United States must be deeply embedded in global affairs and that it should do so in collaboration with other nations. They argue that involvement in international structures is both in the United States’ interest and a moral imperative. More important, they argue that whatever short-term costs this might incur, the long-term advantage to the United States outweighs the cost.The nationalist view argues that the U.S. is overexposed in the world and that its strategy in Eurasia increases the possibility of war that may or may not be in American interests. The alliance structures in general depend on the United States for their main force, meaning that obligation to the alliance places the U.S. at disproportionate risk. The exposure throughout the Eastern Hemisphere allows potential enemies to initiate conflicts at the time and place of their choosing by striking
at Americans in the region or at allies the U.S. is obligated to defend. Nationalists use the case of Munich to argue that the failure of the United States to join Britain and France against Hitler in 1938 misses the point. Britain and France could have defeated Hitler at that point had they chosen to bear the burden. They chose not to. The failure was not the absence of the United States but the Anglo-French calculation of their self-interest. U.S. presence would merely have entangled the U.S. in an impossible situation. Taking all these things into account, nationalists argue that the internationalist ambition is not only too grandiose but leaves the U.S. perpetually exposed. U.S. foreign policy must be based on U.S. interest, and U.S. alliances must be based both on that interest and on shared burdens. In addition, the constant use of force that does not reach its ends is untenable. The nationalist view has many components of leftist views, just as the internationalist has right-leaning views. The ideological division has less meaning.Strategy in the Trump PresidencyU.S. foreign policy is not coherent, nor does it have a political consensus behind it. America’s geopolitical imperative is to constantly manipulate Eurasia, but it does not provide for limits. Militarily, the U.S. is divided between those who believe wars in the Middle East cannot simply be abandoned without creating instability in the region and those who argue that the presence of U.S. troops achieves nothing but U.S. casualties. The argument between nationalists and internationalists creates two competing viewpoints, each with a reasonable core, and neither compatible.
The geopolitical situation is currently stable. What is unstable is a coherent, systematic response to it. Presidents are political. Their job is to craft a majority, and at a time of deep social tension that is difficult. Presidents normally go to their base to produce a foreign policy. Trump’s base – not all his support by any means – is made up of the declining industrial workers. His response to these forces stems from that.In the experience of this class of voters, the world is dangerous, the government indifferent. Trump harnessed that to become president. This explains why his foreign policy reflects a nationalist outlook and deep suspicion of foreign commitment. From this logic, there is an aversion to war as a foreign policy tool. He has spoken of withdrawals more than he has withdrawn, but the basic principle of his foreign policy is not to initiate war. Instead, he approaches foreign issues with a different tool, one that has been common to all presidents, but which has become central to his foreign policy: the use of economic warfare, including sanctions, embargoes, tariffs and related tools. This achieves three things. First, it provides a tool that strikes at the stability of other countries. Second, it avoids the use of the military as the primary tool for managing adversarial relationships. Finally, it solidifies his political base behind him.It is important to note that this is not a new policy for the United States. The U.S. has used economic weapons many times since World War II. The Cuban trade embargo was one case. The embargo on sales of wheat to the Soviet Union during the 1980s was another. More recently, sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea have been a near-constant feature of U.S. foreign policy. What is new is the degree to which it is being used, and the types of economic actions – tariffs – that are being used.
The use of trade sanctions perturbs Trump’s opponents, whose interests are tied to international markets and the free flow of products and capital. But it pleases those for whom free trade has been synonymous with economic distress. For Trump, the use of economic warfare endears him to those who regard close alignment of the United States with foreign countries as dangerous but see warfare as ineffective. It angers those who see free trade as a foundation of international peace.
But, on the whole, its political and geopolitical logic make it a mutually supportive system.This is not the place to go into all the complexities of a foreign policy, and clearly Trump’s policy is both as impulsive and as planned as others’. That will be challenged by some on all sides of the political spectrum, but as I have argued, presidents are the prisoner of impersonal forces. They align themselves with those forces. They do not create them. This is not how presidents think of themselves, nor how their passionate advocates and enemies think of them. Nevertheless, in my view that is the reality. While not attempting a tour of the world, I want to present a short description of Trump’s actions in various regions, so that his actions can be compared to my analysis. I will disregard Trump’s rhetoric and, as I have with other presidents, focus on actions. North AmericaNorth America is larger in population and in GDP than the European Union. It follows that there would be tensions. The United States, Canada and Mexico have had the routine pain of renegotiating NAFTA. The greatest tension is with Mexico, which is a transit route for large numbers of migrants from Central America. This obviously intersects with domestic American politics generated by Trump’s base and has now been countered by using tariffs on Mexican exports to the United States. Here, immigration and economic weapons have merged as issues.
www.geopoliticalfutures.com© 2019 Geopolitical FuturesTHE GEOPOLITICS OF DONALD TRUMP16East AsiaNorth Korea. In North Korea, an issue that preceded Trump by decades, the threat posed by nuclear weapons was not met with airstrikes or other military actions but with intensified sanctions and negotiations. The aversion to initiating military action is the key.
www.geopoliticalfutures.com© 2019 Geopolitical FuturesTHE GEOPOLITICS OF DONALD TRUMP17
China. The confrontation with China is a continuation of an extended friction between China and the United States over China’s blocking U.S. exports, manipulating its currency, stealing U.S. intellectual property and so on. China is different for Trump because it has become the symbol of the deindustrialization of the United States. Trump therefore imposed substantial tariffs on Chinese goods while engaging in desultory discussion. The confrontation is asymmetrical in the sense that China exports about 4 percent of its GDP to the United States, while the United States exports less than one-half of one percent of its GDP to China. Still, there is economic pain in the United States that causes political friction, but Trump’s base may forgive him if they are convinced he took enough action against China.Middle EastIran. The Iranians have expanded their power throughout the region, including in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Trump has used as his basic weapon economic sanctions, which have been sufficiently severe to create serious tension in Iran. He has moved some military assets but has not engaged militarily. He has also acted against the wishes of allies in Europe, using the issue of Iran’s missile program to justify these actions, clearly also or perhaps primarily aimed at the spread of Iranian power. In addition, he helped create an alliance including Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and some others to resist Iran. This is an impermanent alliance to which the U.S. has contributed little or no force.EuropeNATO. Trump has not appreciably changed NATO, his demands for greater participation from the Europeans in their defense spending budgets notwithstanding. The United States has focused on an imperative to curb Russian hegemony by
www.geopoliticalfutures.com© 2019 Geopolitical FuturesTHE GEOPOLITICS OF DONALD TRUMP18supporting Ukraine and placing troops in Poland and Romania. This structure is in some ways part of NATO, but practically it is a structure created for a particular purpose and outside the purview of NATO.Russia. After the Ukrainian revolution, former President Barack Obama placed sanctions on certain Russian individuals. Trump has continued and, in some ways, intensified the sanctions program. While in some ways the pressure of charges of collusion with Russia likely made him more amenable to public actions against Russia, it continues a model that he has taken as central to his global strategy: economic action.ConclusionThe core argument I make in this special report is that Trump’s rise to power was based on deep divisions in the United States that originated in U.S. relations with other nations. The tensions between China and the U.S. translated into energizing a significant faction in the United States, and Trump’s campaign challenging China was important in getting him elected. Having been elected through this geopolitical process that generated a political response, he then engaged in negotiations with China that seemed similar to prior negotiations but terminated in tariffs.When we look at prior presidents, they employed a mix of economic and military actions, the mix determined by circumstance and mission. Trump has consistently tilted away from military action, and sometimes reduced it as was the case in Syria. He has consistently shown a preference for economic action, using the power of the United States, against China for example, to try to compel changes in the policies of adversaries. He has also, in the case of Mexico, sought to use tariffs to shape its actions around immigration. This has created new sorts of crises but may well avoid other kinds.
www.geopoliticalfutures.com© 2019 Geopolitical FuturesTHE GEOPOLITICS OF DONALD TRUMP19I refuse to get involved in the contemporary argument between Trump’s supporters and opponents. That debate is certainly part of democratic life and necessary, but in my view, it misses the point. There are social pressures in the United States that conflict with other social pressures.The global balance has its own realities. The United States has the largest economy, the largest military and deepest cultural influence – for bad or good – in the world. It has clear national imperatives it must protect and pursue. It is global, and therefore interacts with nations around the world and the interactions sometimes bring hostile responses. The global reality interacts with the American domestic reality and generates certain outcomes. One of the outcomes made Trump president of a country in which his opposition was at least as equally powerful as his support. Therefore, he must, as any president does, take care of his political base and also avoid international disaster, like a war with North Korea. I have said many times that history makes presidents, and then presidents do what it demands of them. This is not true in every detail, but it’s true in the broadest sense, of who a president regards as a friend and enemy and how he uses his power. What I have tried to show is the degree to which Trump has changed the tempo of foreign policy, and the way it is waged. I also tried to show why he did it. Forget whether you like him or not. That’s irrelevant in the long run. He did it because geopolitical reality is in charge, not Donald Trump
-
or China and Russia, Common Interests Make for Closer Security Ties
Military officials salute each other in a ceremony before Russia and China warships set out for a naval cooperation exercise.
(YURI SMITYUK\TASS via Getty Images)
Highlights
To counter the United States in key Asian and European theaters, Russia and China will increase the size and scope of their joint military exercises in the coming months.
Russia and China will also increase consultations with each other on internal security issues, including their shared desires to create a sovereign internet and manage unrest in Moscow and Hong Kong, respectively.
But such cooperation will be limited by Russia and China's own strategic competition with one another, particularly in areas of overlapping influence such as Central Asia and the Russian Far East.
In the longer term, Russia-China security ties will last only until the three great powers' triangular relationship inevitably shifts again, and prompts Moscow and Beijing to recalibrate their positions.
As the saying goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." And indeed, that dynamic is what has seemingly brought Russia and China closer together in recent years amid the two countries' separate standoffs with the United States. The U.S. trade war with China and Washington's prolonged sanctions campaign against Moscow, for one, have driven greater economic and energy ties between the Eastern neighbors. Over the past year, Russia and China have also coordinated their diplomatic positions to counterbalance U.S. interests and influence in areas such as Venezuela, Iran and North Korea.
As a result, Beijing and Moscow have found themselves aligned with each other in the many areas where they both stand at odds with Washington — and increasingly, that includes security issues. But in the long term, Russian-Chinese security ties will ultimately depend on the evolution of each country's relationship with the United States and, thereby, with each other.
The Big Picture
Escalating tensions between the United States on one hand and Russia and China on the other are pushing Moscow and Beijing into greater cooperation on numerous fronts. The growth of this partnership, however, will ultimately be limited by the inherent differences between the two Eastern powers, as well as future swings in the balance of power between Moscow, Washington and Beijing.
A Path for Military Cooperation
Perhaps the greatest area of U.S.-motivated growing alignment between Russia and China has been in the security sphere. As Washington challenges Russia in the former Soviet periphery and contends for influence in China's maritime periphery, Moscow and Beijing have recently increased military cooperation with each other, particularly when it comes to joint military exercises. And broader U.S. military buildups in both European and Asian theaters will likely continue to prompt even more joint military drills between the two countries — especially now that the United States is less constrained to develop its missile capabilities amid the collapse of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.
Following years of accusations of non-compliance from both sides, the United States suspended its Cold War-era treaty with Russia in February before formally withdrawing in August. In its announcement, the United States said that Russia's weapon development had not been in compliance with the INF limits the two countries agreed to more than 30 years ago. But Beijing has also been significantly ramping up the development of its own intermediate-range missiles, which no doubt factored into the U.S. decision to withdraw from the agreement as well.
As a counterweight to China's weapon development, Washington will likely first focus on building up its missile capabilities in Asia with the help of its chief regional allies, South Korea and Japan. Given this, it is perhaps no coincidence that Russia and China chose to conduct their first-ever, joint long-range air patrol in the Sea of Japan in late July. During the joint exercises, South Korea accused a Russian surveillance plane of entering its airspace over the disputed island of Dokdo (also known as Takeshima), prompting South Korean warplanes to even fire a warning shot. That's not to say the recent joint exercise was directly linked to Washington's INF withdrawal, as such exercises don't directly affect weapons capabilities or deployments that the treaty limited. But it nevertheless points to a growing level of shared military cooperation as a result of shared concerns between Russia and China.
This map shows areas where Russia and China have conducted joint military exercises.
In tandem with U.S. military buildups, joint Russian-Chinese military exercises will thus likely only increase in size, scope, and frequency in the coming months. This could include joint air drills elsewhere in Asia, or joint naval drills in areas like the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean. To further signal their growing military interoperability to Washington and its global allies, Moscow and Beijing could also start pooling assets like surveillance and tanker aircraft, and engage in the joint production of heavy-lift helicopters and other military equipment.
Battles on the Homefront
In addition to conventional military cooperation, Russia and China are also finding common ground on internal security matters, with both countries facing protracted protest movements in recent months. China, for its part, continues to grapple with ongoing demonstrations in Hong Kong. And Russia has also faced some of the biggest protests it has seen in nearly a decade, prompted by the government's decision to exclude many opposition candidates from the country's Sept. 8 regional elections. In handling each situation, the Russian and Chinese governments have opted for a similar mix of limited security crackdowns and selective political concessions, in the hopes of avoiding a broader military intervention.
Both Moscow and Beijing have also publicly blamed the United States for helping fan the flames in each situation. Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that Moscow "took seriously" China's claims that Washington and other Western countries have "directly participated and organized unrest" in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Geng Shuang said U.S. support for the protests in Moscow serves as "an example of interference in Russia's domestic politics, which points to (the West's) hegemonic claims." According to Zakharova, Moscow and Beijing plan to hold consultations over U.S. involvement in their respective protests. While the details and extent of such consultations remain unclear, the fact that Russia and China have vocalized their support for each other over their respective claims of U.S. interference is significant in itself.
Similar Cyber Visions
Another area of potential security coordination between Russia and China is in the cybersphere. The two countries have been increasingly discussing their shared desire to each create an internet that can operate independently from the rest of the world — or what Moscow has coined "internet sovereignty." In July, Russia's state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor hosted a delegation from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) — the first such delegation to ever visit Russia. Officials from the CAC also reportedly visited Yandex, Russia's major online search engine, as well as the Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, to discuss joint cooperation prospects.
When the power balance between Russia, China and the United States inevitably shifts, so too will the incentives driving Moscow and Beijing's current security alignment.
Such consultations with China indicate that Russia is planning to take further steps to crack down on the cybersecurity front. In recent years, Moscow has been continuously tightening its internet controls, including blocking the use of the Telegram messenger app over its refusal to hand over encryption keys to the security services. Russia is also considering using Huawei's 5G networks next year, just as some countries are trying to avoid doing so under U.S. pressure (though Washington has been far less successful than it hoped in terms of getting other countries to outright ban Huawei). Russia, meanwhile, is also still pushing ahead with the development of its own indigenous 5G infrastructure to maintain a degree of technological independence, though it is significantly behind China, Europe and the United States on this front.
A Partnership of Circumstance
There are, of course, limits on how far this burgeoning cooperation between China and Russia can go. Beijing, for one, has a much higher threshold for overt state involvement in the cybersphere compared with Moscow. And this, combined with the vast differences between the two countries' domestic conditions and political environment, means that cooperation between Russia and China on internal issues like protest management and cybersecurity will likely remain more consultative than collaborative.
On the conventional military front, Russia and China's cooperation will also be limited by the fact that, historically, they pose as much of a strategic threat to each other than the United States does to them currently. Because of the two countries' geographic proximity, there are several areas where their interests have the potential to clash rather than overlap, particularly in regions close to their respective borders. While Moscow and Beijing have established a division of labor of sorts in Central Asia, China's growing economic clout is leading to an increased security focus and footprint there — one that has been carefully managed up until now, but could ruffle Russia's feathers down the line. Meanwhile, in the Russian Far East, ties could become more sensitive amid growing Chinese power and involvement in the region, with Moscow already threatening to cut off its timber exports due to what it claims as Beijing's illegal logging operations in the region.
Ultimately, however, Russia-China security ties and the broader relationship will be shaped by each country's respective relationship with the United States. In the current trajectory, both Russia and China are facing pressures and challenges from the United States that are pushing the two countries together on several security issues out of pragmatism and convenience. But when the balance between the three great powers inevitably shifts, so too will the incentives driving Moscow and Beijing's current security alignment.
-
a relationship that fulfilled its destiny.
what is surprising is Romney's comments at end of this article:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/461425-bolton-returns-to-political-group-after-exiting-administration
-
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/the-moral-logic-of-humanitarian-intervention?source=EDT_NYR_EDIT_NEWSLETTER_0_imagenewsletter_Daily_ZZ&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_091419&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d3fa3f92a40469e2d85c&cndid=50142053&esrc=&mbid=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
-
A Sino-Russian Alliance? Don’t Bet On It
Students in Beijing and Moscow want to keep their neighbor at arm’s length. They also admire the U.S.
By Thomas Sherlock and
John Gregory
Sept. 15, 2019 3:52 pm ET
A meeting of senior Chinese and Russian officials in Beijing, Sept. 6. Photo: pool/Reuters
‘Great-power competition” is increasingly a central concern in Washington foreign-policy circles. The 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy warns that “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” The era of great-power competition is all the more dangerous if America’s adversaries join forces. In a column this year, the Journal’s Walter Russell Mead described factors shaping cooperation between China and Russia. But do the Chinese and Russian people support greater cooperation against the U.S.?
Our research suggests the future elites of both countries, at least, are wary. In mid-2018 we conducted 21 focus groups of students—primarily undergraduates in their junior or senior years, but also a few graduate students—at the leading universities in Beijing and Moscow. We asked each to evaluate Russia, China and the U.S. as “great powers.” The students expressed disinterest, ambivalence or misgivings about Sino-Russian cooperation. Many believed China and Russia did not share sufficient values or interests to work together over the long term. We also found that most of the students in both countries saw much to respect or admire in the U.S.
The Chinese students had internalized Communist Party propaganda that China’s political system is a genuine democracy tailored to Chinese conditions. Consistent with the party’s “China Dream” campaign, students felt that the legitimacy of a particular political order depends on whether it can produce social and economic “development.”
This standard has inadvertently devalued Russia as a partner in their eyes. The Chinese students were unimpressed by their neighbor’s culture and society, in part because they did not view either as sources of significant national power. They also were skeptical that the Russian political system could modernize the economy and support Moscow’s return to great-power status.
By contrast, the students in Beijing identified the U.S. as the kind of dynamic, wealthy and influential country that China aspires to be. American culture, particularly movies, captivated the students: “America’s cultural influence is obvious in movies broadcast worldwide, for instance in Captain America and Black Panther,” one said. Others echoed this assessment of American soft power: “Culture is what makes [America] a superpower,” offered another participant. These sentiments were common across the Chinese focus groups despite ubiquitous Communist Party criticism of U.S. foreign policy and the American system. The students used the following terms most often to describe America: free, diverse, developed, strong, advanced, cultural, international, technology, individualism and rule of law.
Unlike their counterparts in Beijing, the students in Moscow often criticized their own government, expressing concern about the future of Russia. This pessimism underscores the deteriorating ability of state-controlled media to neutralize societal disapproval of the Kremlin and its policies—including its policy of closer ties to China. For many of the participants, China encompassed a “mysterious” world that was incompatible with dominant strands of Russian culture and identity.
Some Russian students also found China untrustworthy, in part because its regime is so authoritarian: “If we aren’t a democratic country in full measure, they are even more so,” one said. “That’s scary. You do not know what to expect from such a closed society.” A common worry was that in a partnership with China, Russia would be relegated to political, strategic and economic dependency. This could produce grievances and insecurities even worse than those associated with Russia’s relationship with the West, both in the past and the present.
Most Russian participants not only acknowledged American cultural and technological prowess but also respected the American political system. According to one student, “despite all the problems of the United States we’ve discussed, it all works, it all holds. And it’s been holding for a quite a long time.” For another student, “we deeply associate America with freedom.” The members of the focus groups also viewed the “American dream” as an authentic aspiration, not an anachronism or a legitimating narrative concocted by ruling elites.
It’s striking that the perspective most strongly shared across the groups in Beijing and Moscow was respect and often admiration for America. To be sure, both Chinese and Russian students criticized U.S. policies overseas and American domestic problems. Yet for the Chinese participants, America’s cultural and economic power stimulated intense interest and fascination. The Russian students were also drawn to the U.S. because of its Western identity and by the perceived importance of American political values and institutions.
The U.S. can strengthen these positive views and its soft power by adhering to its liberal-democratic principles. Such conduct will help blunt the narrative of the Russian and Chinese governments that America’s expression of universal values is a self-interested smokescreen. The U.S. must also avoid demonizing Russia and China as it grapples with the challenge of great-power competition. Otherwise, Washington risks stoking anti-American nationalism as well as support for Sino-Russian collaboration—even as a rising generation of elites prefers to stand apart.
Mr. Sherlock is a professor of political science at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y. Col. Gregory directs the Chinese Program and the Center for Languages, Cultures and Regional Studies at West Point.
-
8 hours! Recommended by someone whom I respect greatly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyjcsjjkb9E&feature=youtu.be&t=16059&fbclid=IwAR3fR2hYZEzcUpt8Ha0vpTuga7tv_ry85DxaeZtB8G2J-0gyaDhhiEPXv04
-
Too late now for Trump to connect with Russia? What/who comes after Putin?
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2019/10/china-russia-are-turning-each-other-tech-help-west-limits-access/160364/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl
-
second post
snapshots
Russia, China: Cooperation on a Missile Warning System Points to an Increasing Alignment
2 MINS READOct 4, 2019 | 19:08 GMT
The Big Picture
The status of the relationship between China and Russia is a major factor in global geopolitics, especially in the context of their great power competition with the United States. Tracking the trajectory of this relationship, especially as China continues to rise and Russia faces up to its systemic constraints, is therefore of significant importance.
See 2019 Fourth-Quarter Forecast
At the 16th annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club on Oct. 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was helping China create an anti-missile early-warning system. The active cooperation between Russia and China on such a strategic project highlights the degree to which Sino-Russian relations have improved.
Early-warning systems, generally consisting of long-range radar stations and satellite constellations, play a critical role in a country's strategic nuclear deterrence by offering advance warning of an impending attack, enhancing the attacked country's ability to respond with its own strikes before it can no longer offer any deterrence. These early-warning systems are expensive, and Russia and the United States are the only countries that have created large networks of this kind.
Given the secrecy associated with such systems, there needs to be a high degree of mutual trust for both Russia and China to work with each other on such a sensitive project. Putin's statement, if true, suggests China is largely unconcerned about a potential attack from Russia down the line as Moscow's cooperation on the construction of such a network will naturally give the Kremlin some degree of insight into its strengths and weaknesses.
Given the sensitivity and secrecy associated with early-warning systems for missiles, Putin's statement suggests China is largely unconcerned about a potential attack from Russia.
Russia and China have found themselves increasingly aligned in a number of security areas, particularly with regard to their concern over U.S. moves. In particular, Moscow and Beijing have both denounced the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and specifically its intention to place intermediate-range missiles in the western Pacific. Russia and China have also jointly pushed back on the U.S. buildup of missile defense, which both countries see as a threat to their nuclear deterrent.
This increasing alignment between Russia and China, especially in terms of the strategic balance versus the United States, has played a prominent role in paving the way for increasingly closer security cooperation between the two powers.
-
The Origins of New US-Turkish Relations
By
George Friedman -
October 14, 2019
Open as PDF
For several years, there has been a significant shift underway in U.S. strategy toward the Middle East, where Washington has consistently sought to avoid combat. The United States is now compelled to seek accommodation with Turkey, a regional power in its own right, based on terms that are geopolitically necessary for both. Their relationship has been turbulent, and while it may continue to be so for a while, it will decline. Their accommodation has nothing to do with mutual affection but rather with mutual necessity. The Turkish incursion into Syria and the U.S. response are part of this adjustment, one that has global origins and regional consequences.
Similarly, the U.S. decision to step aside as Turkey undertook an incursion in northeastern Syria has a geopolitical and strategic origin. The strategic origin is a clash between elements of the Defense Department and the president. The defense community has been shaped by a war that has been underway since 2001. During what is called the Long War, the U.S. has created an alliance structure of various national and subnational groups. Yet the region is still on uneven footing. The Iranians have extended a sphere of influence westward. Iraq is in chaos. The Yemeni civil war still rages, and the original Syrian war has ended, in a very Middle Eastern fashion, indecisively.
A generation of military and defense thinkers have matured fighting wars in the Middle East. The Long War has been their career. Several generations spent their careers expecting Soviet tanks to surge into the Fulda Gap. Cold Warriors believed a world without the Cold War was unthinkable. The same can be said for those shaped by Middle Eastern wars. For the Cold War generation, the NATO alliance was the foundation of their thinking. So too for the Sandbox generation, those whose careers were spent rotating into Iraq or Afghanistan or some other place, the alliances formed and the enemies fought seemed eternal. The idea that the world had moved on, and that Fulda and NATO were less important, was emotionally inconceivable. Any shift in focus and alliance structure was seen as a betrayal.
After the Cold War ended, George H.W. Bush made the decision to stand down the 24-hour B-52 air deployments in the north that were waiting for a Soviet attack. The reality had changed, and Bush made the decision a year after the Eastern European collapse began. He made it early on Sept. 21, 1991, after the Wall came down but before the Soviet Union collapsed. It was a controversial decision. I knew some serious people who thought that we should be open to the possibility that the collapse in Eastern Europe was merely a cover for a Soviet attack and were extremely agitated over the B-52 stand-down.
It is difficult to accept that an era has passed into history. Those who were shaped by that era, cling, through a combination of alarm and nostalgia, to the things that reverberate through their minds. Some (though not Europeans) spoke of a betrayal of Europe, and others deeply regretted that the weapons they had worked so hard to perfect and the strategy and tactics that had emerged over decades would never be tried.
The same has happened in different ways in the Middle East. The almost 20-year deployment has forged patterns of behavior, expectations and obligations not only among individuals but more institutionally throughout the armed forces. But the mission has changed. For now, the Islamic State is vastly diminished, as is al-Qaida. The Sunni rising in Iraq has ended, and even the Syrian civil war is not what it once was. A war against Iran has not begun, may not happen at all, and would not resemble the wars that have been fought in the region hitherto.
This inevitably generates a strategic re-evaluation, which begins by accepting that the prior era is gone. It was wrenching to shift from World War II to the Cold War and from the Cold War to a world that many believed had transcended war, and then to discover that war was suspended and has now resumed. War and strategy pretend to be coolly disengaged, but they are passionate undertakings that don’t readily take to fundamental change. But after the 18 years of war, two things have become clear. The first is that the modest objective of disrupting terrorism has been achieved, and the second is that the ultimate goal of creating something approaching liberal democracies was never really possible.
Consistency
The world has changed greatly since 2001. China has emerged as a major power, and Russia has become more active. Iran, not Sunni jihadists, has become the main challenge in the Middle East and the structure of alliances needed to deal with this has changed radically since Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. In addition, the alliances have changed in terms of capability. The massive deployments in the Middle East have ended, but some troops remain there, and to a section of the American military, the jihadist war remains at the center of their thinking. To them, the alliances created over the past 18 years remain as critical as Belgium’s air force had been during the Cold War.
There is another, increasingly powerful faction in the United States that sees the Middle East as a secondary interest. In many instances, they include Iran in this. This faction sees China or Russia (or both) as the fundamental challenger to the U.S. Its members see the Middle East as a pointless diversion and a drain of American resources.
For them, bringing the conflict to a conclusion was critical. Those who made their careers in this war and in its alliances were appalled. The view of President Donald Trump has been consistent. In general, he thought that the use of military force anywhere must be the exception rather than the rule. He declined to begin combat in North Korea. He did not attack Iran after it shot down an American drone or after it seized oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. After the attack on the Saudi oil facility, he increased Saudi air defenses but refused offensive actions against the Iranians.
Given the shift in American strategy, three missions emerge. The first is the containment of China. The second is the containment of Russia. The third is the containment of Iran. In the case of China, the alliance structure required by the United States is primarily the archipelago stretching from Japan to Indonesia and Singapore – and including South Korea. In dealing with Russia, there are two interests. One is the North European Plain; the other is the Black Sea. Poland is the American ally in the north, Romania in the south. But the inclusion of Turkey in this framework would strengthen the anti-Russia framework. In addition, it would provide a significant counter to Iranian expansion.
Turkey’s importance is clear. It is courted by both Russia and Iran. Turkey is not the country it was a decade ago. Its economy surged and then went into crisis. It has passed through an attempted coup, and internal stress has been massive. But such crises are common in emerging powers. The U.S. had a civil war in the 1860s but by 1900 was producing half of the manufactured goods in the world while boasting a navy second only to the British. Internal crises do not necessarily mean national decline. They can mean strategic emergence.
Turkey’s alignment with Iran and Russia is always tense. Iran and Russia have at various times waged war with Turkey and have consistently seen Iraq as a threat. For the moment, both have other interests and Turkey is prepared to work with them. But Turkey is well aware of history. It is also aware that the U.S. guaranteed Turkish sovereignty in the face of Soviet threats in the Cold War, and that the U.S., unlike Russia and Iran, has no territorial ambitions or needs in Turkey. Already allied through NATO and historical bilateral ties, a relationship with Turkey is in the American interest because it creates a structure that threatens Iran’s line to the Mediterranean and compliments the Romanian-U.S. Black Sea alliance. The U.S. and Turkey are also hostile to the Syrian government. For Turkey, in the long term, Russia and Iran are unpredictable, and they can threaten Turkey when they work together. The American interest in an independent Turkey that blocks Russia and Iran coincides with long-term Turkish interests.
Enter the Kurds
This is where the Kurds come into the equation. Eastern Turkey is Kurdish, and maintaining stability there is a geopolitical imperative for Ankara. Elements of Turkey’s Kurds, grouped around the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, have carried out militant attacks. Therefore it is in Turkey’s interest to clear its immediate frontiers from a Kurdish threat. The United States has no overriding interest in doing so and, indeed, has worked together with the Kurds in Iraq and Syria. But for the Turks, having Kurds on their border is an unpredictable threat. American dependency on the Kurds declines as U.S. involvement in the Middle East declines. Turkey becomes much more important to the United States in relation to Iran than the Kurds.
Trump clearly feels that the wars in the Middle East must be wound down and that a relationship with Turkey is critical. The faction that is still focused on the Middle East sees this as a fundamental betrayal of the Kurds. Foreign policy is a ruthless and unsentimental process. The Kurds want to establish a Kurdish nation. The U.S. can’t and doesn’t back that. On occasion, the U.S. will join in a mutually advantageous alliance with the Kurds to achieve certain common goals. But feelings aside, the U.S. has geopolitical interests that sometimes include the Kurds and sometimes don’t – and the same can be said of the Kurds.
At the moment, the issue is not al-Qaida but China and Russia, and Turkey is critical to the U.S. for Russia. The U.S. is critical for Turkey as well, but it cannot simply fall into American arms. It has grown too powerful in the region for that, and it has time to do it right. So Trump’s actions on the Syrian border will result in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visit to Washington and, in due course, a realignment in the region between the global power and the regional power.
-
Mike Pompeo’s Predicament
The Syria withdrawal worried allies, divided the GOP, and made his job a lot harder.
By Walter Russell Mead
Oct. 14, 2019 6:53 pm ET
As Turkey advances into Syria, foreign powers will increasingly act on the belief that the American executive is both politically weak and intellectually unfocused.
Foreign leaders have found much to dislike in President Trump’s policy—the aggressive stance on trade, the chaotic policy process, the disregard for convention and past agreements. Yet they’ve seemed willing to work with the administration anyway. However much it pained them, they appeared to believe that Mr. Trump had a strong enough political coalition behind his foreign-policy program that, on the whole, it was better to deal pragmatically with the administration than to try to wait out his presidency.
That changed last week. The sudden decision to break with the Syrian Kurds, the shambolic execution of the decision, and the administration’s evident inability to manage the easily foreseeable political consequences in the Republican Senate crystallized a perception that the White House is in over its head. Unless that changes, foreign powers will increasingly act on the belief that the American executive is both politically weak and intellectually unfocused. The consequences for political stability and economic prosperity around the world are not good.
Mr. Trump’s trade diplomacy is particularly at risk. China is much less likely to make significant compromises if it thinks the president is a lame duck. As the Europeans shift from dealing with Mr. Trump through gritted teeth to waiting for his administration to end, the European Union will likely stiffen its trade stance as well.
The geopolitical consequences of a weakened Trump administration will also be significant. Revisionist powers large and small are more likely to take risks and challenge American power when they believe the U.S. is distracted and divided. Russia’s attack on Georgia came in the summer of 2008 when George W. Bush was an unpopular lame duck and the building financial crisis was beginning to distract Americans from international news.
Russia, far from seeking any kind of special relationship with Mr. Trump, is likely to revel in his weakness. In the western Balkans, in Syria, and in hot spots like Venezuela, Russia must be expected to move more aggressively.
A belief that the Trump administration has divided political support will encourage hard-liners in Iran to press their regional advantage, leading to crises that could force Israel and its new Arab allies into risky moves of their own. Israelis are wondering how far they can count on the Trump administration even as they recalculate the odds that Democrats will control both Congress and the White House after the 2020 elections.
The Taliban is unlikely to make significant concessions at the negotiating table in the face of perceived American weakness. China will see a sustained period of internal division in America as an excellent opportunity to intensify its effort at strengthening its regional position and creating of a rival sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific.
The greatest damage will likely be to U.S. relationships with allies that were already nervous—either because of the pattern of American withdrawal under President Obama or erratic decision making under Mr. Trump. As they watch the Democratic Party shift left and the Clinton-Biden wing of the party lose ground in the primary campaign, U.S. allies are likely to conclude that America’s turn inward will continue past 2020.
From South Korea and Japan to Australia, India, Israel, Germany, France and the U.K., policy makers and public opinion will perceive the U.S. as a less reliable, less engaged partner. They will, inevitably, think about how they can ensure their security and their other interests without America. Their interest in aligning their policies with America’s will diminish; it will only become harder for Mr. Trump and his successors to reach agreements with allies that benefit the U.S.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo now faces the most critical challenge of his career. Leading a divided State Department in a divided country, America’s chief interlocutor with foreign governments must work to restore a sense of competence, continuity and calm. That won’t be easy. Mr. Pompeo has made loyalty to the president the foundation of his tenure—something that is necessary for anyone in that job, and especially vital in the Age of Trump. Without losing Mr. Trump’s confidence, Mr. Pompeo must also speak up for America’s permanent interests as most Americans, regardless of party, still understand them.
The only man in Washington under more pressure than Mr. Pompeo is Mr. Trump. This president is a unique historical figure whose unconventional approach to politics has reshaped American political life. But at the moment Mr. Trump has lost control of the international agenda and faces some of the greatest risks of his presidency. His survival in office and his place in history both depend on putting American foreign policy on a more solid footing, and the clock is against him. The coming episodes of “The Trump Show” look to be the most compelling, and the most consequential, yet.
-
"Mike Pompeo’s Predicament
The Syria withdrawal worried allies, divided the GOP, and made his job a lot harder."
I like Walter Russel Mead, but there is that "sudden withdrawal" mantra again. He comes at this as both a hawk and a Democrat. He buys the current spin that Trump is weakened from this, "lame duck"? Therefore it hurts Trump with China etc. I see just the opposite. If Mattis and Bolton can't talk him out of this in Syria, his political and economic advisers aren't going to change his mind with China. Standing up to advisers and to short term pain is a strength in negotiations.
Maybe Pompeo can help Trump come up with a more clear and persuasive explanation of his own policy.
I was just going to write that we can wait for VDH to help sort this all out, and there it was:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/kurdish-syrian-turkish-ironies/
...
So, yes, it is incumbent on the Trump administration in general and on Secretary Pompeo in particular to find ways to prevent mass Turkish attacks on the Kurds, while not inserting American ground troops into a cauldron of fire between Turks and Kurds.
...
The chief problem is that the Kurds are our friends but not our legal allies. In contrast, the Turks are not really our friends anymore but are legal, treaty-bound allies.
...
If all Trump has done for now is to remove a few dozen Americans from a “trip wire” deployment between the two belligerents, he can hardly have “sold out” the Kurds.
...
As I understand the present outrage, the logic goes like this: It is a sellout to leave the Kurds vulnerable to the Turks, and it undermines our noble promises and our credibility in a way that ignoring our ignoble, legal commitments to Turkey do not.
...
Our allied Syrian Kurds of the YPG in Syria, for instance, are also affiliated with the Kurdish PKK inside Turkey — a group that has often committed terrorist attacks on Turkish civilians and authorities.
...
The Realities of Protecting the Syrian Kurds
Any current critics calling for the use of American trip-wire soldiers to protect Kurds from the Turkish military — in the current stated mission to defeat ISIS and keep it defeated — should at least make the case that de facto fighting against Turkey means that it is therefore no longer a friend and should no longer be a NATO ally, and thus, in extremis, can be opposed militarily, and also that we can do without its geographic access and bases in the Middle East without harming ourselves or our interests. And note they should also assume that Turkey, out of spite, will release millions of refugees into Europe, and it will react to friction with Americans troops in Syria in who knows what fashion to their U.S. counterparts now stationed with nuclear weapons at Incirlik Air Base inside Turkey. Do we really wish to risk a shooting war with a NATO ally while 5,000 American airmen are inside its country equipped with 50 nuclear weapons?
-
Open Skies Help Keep the Peace With Russia
Ike’s idea, codified in a 1992 treaty, is still a good one. The U.S. shouldn’t abandon the pact.
By George P. Shultz,
William J. Perry and
Sam Nunn
Oct. 20, 2019 3:20 pm ET
A Russian reconnaissance aircraft flies over Omaha, Neb., April 26. Photo: Chris Machian/Associated Press
International security isn’t a given. Historically, peace among the great powers is a rarity. It’s also a great accomplishment. Like trust, peace and security take a long time to build and only a moment to dismantle.
One of the pillars upholding international peace and security today is the 1992 Open Skies Treaty. Thirty-four nations, including the U.S. and Russia, have agreed to this treaty, which allows signatories to fly unarmed surveillance aircraft over one another’s territory. This important tool, known as overflight, has been especially useful for the U.S. and our allies to monitor Russian military activities. Even when relations between Moscow and Washington are tense, the Open Skies Treaty helps preserve a measure of transparency and trust.
This great accomplishment of post-Cold War diplomacy could soon be erased if, as has been widely reported, some Trump administration officials have their way and the U.S. unilaterally exits the treaty. Such a withdrawal would be a grave mistake. It would undermine trust between the U.S. and Russia and endanger American allies.
Since the emergence of the superpower nuclear-arms race, leaders in Moscow and Washington have sought to avoid all-out war. They’ve had to overcome mutual distrust and negotiate agreements to manage military competition, reduce tensions, and lower the risk of surprise attack.
The idea for the Open Skies Treaty dates back to the 1950s. President Dwight D. Eisenhower realized that without better information about each side’s capabilities, worst-case assumptions would drive decisions and exacerbate risks. In 1955 he made a bold proposal: The U.S. would permit unarmed Soviet aircraft to make unlimited surveillance flights over U.S. territory if the Soviet Union would reciprocate. U.S. allies, the American public and many congressional leaders backed the idea, but the Soviets were skeptical and the proposal was shelved. The two sides went on to negotiate a series of nuclear arms-control agreements, beginning in the 1960s, that verifiably capped and later slashed their enormous nuclear arsenals.
As the Cold War ended, President George H.W. Bush outlined a new vision for security that included a fortified version of Open Skies. Bush saw overflight as an effective way to verify the new limits on military forces established by 1990’s Conventional Forces in Europe agreement. The idea was supported by smaller European countries that believed it would be beneficial to have an independent ability to monitor events around the continent.
Moscow hesitated at first, but in 1992 the new Russian government agreed to open its entire territory to observation and overflight. The Open Skies Treaty was signed in Helsinki in 1992 and took effect a decade later.
The treaty has authorized more than 1,426 missions, including more than 500 U.S. flights over Russia, which is by far the most overflown and best-monitored country in the treaty. The flights, scheduled on short notice, provide valuable photographic evidence of major military movements across Europe, reducing uncertainty and worries about surprise attack. They add important information to what satellites provide.
The treaty stipulates that mission aircraft can be equipped only with specified sensors limited to an agreed resolution. By agreement of all parties, including the U.S., a process is under way to upgrade the sensors. These detailed, verifiable procedures allow observing parties to identify significant military equipment, such as artillery, fighter aircraft and armored combat vehicles. All imagery collected from flights is made available to any signatory.
As with any treaty, implementation disputes arise. Current disagreements are related to underlying territorial and political issues between Russia and some of its neighbors. But these problems can be solved through professional, pragmatic diplomacy, not by abandoning treaty commitments.
Today, Republicans and Democrats agree that Vladimir Putin’s Russia poses serious international-security challenges. Rather than walk away from security agreements that help the U.S. and its allies manage the risks posed by Moscow, Washington needs to redouble its longstanding commitment to proven risk-reduction strategies and arms-control treaties advanced by successive presidential administrations. Unilateral withdrawal from Open Skies would damage the security of the U.S. and its allies.
We respectfully urge President Trump to reject calls to abandon the treaty. Congress also needs to approve Pentagon requests for upgrades to U.S. observation aircraft, as other Open Skies countries, like Germany, are already doing.
Open Skies has become what Eisenhower envisioned—a critical confidence-building treaty that improves Euro-Atlantic security with every flight. The U.S. should preserve this agreement, particularly in a time of renewed tensions with Russia.
Mr. Shultz served as secretary of state, 1982-89. Mr. Perry served as defense secretary, 1994-97. Mr. Nunn, a Democrat, was a U.S. senator from Georgia, 1972-97, and was chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
-
https://spectator.us/does-trump-better-idea-endless-wars/
-
second post
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/10/10-ways-americas-situation-middle-east-will-get-worse/160752/?oref=defenseone_today_nl
-
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/10/10-ways-americas-situation-middle-east-will-get-worse/160752/?oref=defenseone_today_nl
This may be right but seems unnecessarily negative to me, and some of it is contradictory. If it hurts Iran, it is good the region, for one thing. Our leaving might create a new balance of power between the remaining Middle East powers, Turkey, Saudi, Iran, and Russia, and Israel. Our staying without committing to fight all foes may have led to other problems, and fatalities. Our stepping back keeping powder dry doesn't mean we can't step back in as necessary.
Why is being caught up in a Middle East quagmire all empowering for Russia but bad for the US? Iran and Russia are both failing economies. Why is having their resources and commitments spread wider good for them but bad for us?
We moved a few hundred advisers a short distance. We avoided a 'red line' situation that we might not have chosen to enforce with all out war against 'ally' Turkey. This wasn't the largest military move of the century that it is being portrayed.
It could lead to Turkey being booted from NATO if they overplay their hand with genocide. More likely, the Kurds, who are not helpless, will reach a new balance and new peace with Turkey instead of an artificial balance held up by an indefinite US presence.
Syria was a mess before and after this, with or without us. Maybe fewer refugees leave the region this way.
-
Intelligent thoughts.
For the record, I follow D1 because they regularly post about things military that are off the radar screen elsewhere. As best as I can tell, they are definitely Democrat and definitely anti-Trump. That said, they often bring up things that need considering and/or response.
=================
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/10/23/giuliani-style_shadow_diplomacy_par_for_the_course_of_us_history_120883.html
-
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/what-could-syria-tell-us-about-us-foreign-policy-and-security-establishment?fbclid=IwAR3ToprNzFkNw5e1Zn8CGmTl9b-VPwf1gIwOb3V9LtrQ_QyZQ2cZIW-jL7Y
-
One more point on what changed since we were all hawks in Middle East:
Iran blew up half of Saudi's refinery capacity recently and gas prices here went from 2.45 to 2.42/gal. once the market settled. Arab (and Persian etc) Muslim extremists in a faraway desert don't hold the world economy by the short hairs anymore.
Back to my NHL referee analogy, the refs let the fights go on until the parties are exhausted and then step in to remind them the rules say no fighting.
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-turkey-tie-up-important-to-stabilize-multi-faceted-conflict-in-syria-insider_3121239.html
and a serious read from a serious man
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/24/opinions/syria-kurds-trump-withdrawal-kent/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0jaZSXk1o3FI7oCOZScPBC7wBRFDPyXVSlhPgV3AgfYecANb_fJf9jD_o
-
https://www.amazon.com/Cheap-Threats-United-States-Struggles/dp/1626162816
-
Obama, Trump and the Wars of Credibility
By: George Friedman
The United States is in the process of shifting a core dimension of its strategic doctrine. In the past, the U.S. resorted to the use of force to address international threats. Barack Obama was the first president to argue that the use of force, particularly in the Middle East, was costly and ineffectual and that other means had to be used to exercise foreign policy. He ran his first campaign for president on this basis. He was only partially able to shift the direction of U.S. strategy. Donald Trump has extended Obama’s policy and applied it more consistently by refusing to strike at Iran over the Persian Gulf crisis and the Saudi oil facilities attack and, most recently, withdrawing from the Syria-Turkey border.
The shift in strategy was something I predicted in my 2011 book, “The Next Decade.” The basic argument was that the United States is now a global power with no global challenger, only regional ones of various sizes. Having a strategic doctrine of responding to challenges with military force would leave the decision on when to go to war up to the adversary. John F. Kennedy once said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” This doctrine made sense in dealing with the Soviet Union, but in a less orderly world, it reads like a blank check on U.S. military power and an invitation to other nations to draw the U.S. into combat at their will. I reasoned that a more nuanced foreign policy would emerge in the 2010s, one that would compel the U.S. to become more disciplined and selective in committing U.S. forces to combat.
In the 74 years since World War II ended, the U.S. has spent about 28 years, roughly 38 percent of the time, engaged in large-scale, division-level combat, leaving over 90,000 U.S. military personnel dead. This includes the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan War and the War in Iraq, and there have been other deployments in smaller conflicts. Nearly three decades over a 74-year period is a staggering amount of time for any nation to be at war, particularly the leading global power.
With the exception of Operation Desert Storm, the United States has not won any of these wars. Korea ended in an armistice, with both sides at roughly the same point as when they began. Vietnam ended with the enemy flag flying over Saigon. Afghanistan, Iraq and related wars did not end in outright defeat, but they have not ended in victory. Given that the United States crushed both Japan and, with the help of the Allies, Germany in World War II and emerged with overwhelming military power, the increased tempo of U.S. military operations since 1945, combined with consistently unsatisfactory outcomes, must be analyzed to understand the emergence of the Obama-Trump doctrine.
One explanation that must be dispensed with is that the American public does not have the patience to allow a war to be fought to a satisfactory conclusion. There was no anti-war movement of any significance during Korea. There was an anti-war movement over Vietnam, but the conflict continued for seven years, and the public voted overwhelmingly for pro-war Richard Nixon and against anti-war George McGovern in 1972. There has been opposition to the Iraq War, but it was only a peripheral reason for the U.S. drawdown there, after nine years of war.
World War II was fought on a different scale. It was a total war, one that could not be lost. Defeat would have posed fundamental dangers to the United States, so all necessary resources were devoted to the war effort. It was the central focus of society as a whole. Bringing massive resources to bear, including atomic bombs at its conclusion, the United States emerged from the war victorious.
None of the other conflicts were total wars that involved existential threats to the United States. During the Cold War, the interventions in Korea and Vietnam were the result of indirect U.S. interests. From the Truman administration’s perspective, Korea was outside core U.S. interests. The U.S. had no treaty with or strategic interest in South Vietnam. In both cases, the benefits of engaging in conflict were indirect.
The U.S. strategy in the Cold War was containment. The U.S. did not intend to invade the Soviet Union, or later China, but it opposed its expansion. The U.S. got involved in both Korea and Vietnam to defend the credibility of the doctrine of containment, fearing that a lack of U.S. engagement in these conflicts would be interpreted by the Soviets and Chinese as a lack of commitment to the doctrine. Even more important, the U.S. was afraid that staying out of these wars would lead its allies to draw the conclusion that American guarantees were hollow and that the alliance structure needed for the containment strategy would collapse.
The U.S. engaged in the two wars, therefore, not out of strategic necessity but to demonstrate American reliability. They therefore could not be fought as total wars. The amount of effort required to show a willingness to engage was much less than the amount of effort needed to decisively crush enemy forces. It was necessary to demonstrate U.S. will for global reasons, but imprudent to devote the force needed to win the war. It was also impossible to withdraw from the war, as abandoning a conflict would be the same as refusing to engage. The wars were being fought for the sake of demonstrating that the U.S. was willing to fight wars, and no coherent strategy or even clear definition of what victory meant or how to achieve it emerged. In a strange way, this made sense. Maintaining the confidence of West Germany, Turkey, Japan and all other U.S. allies was of enormous strategic importance, and Korea and South Vietnam were needed to hold the alliance together. Over 90,000 died in wars that were gestures, yet how many more would have died if the gestures were not made? That was the logic, but the truth is that no one anticipated the length of engagement and amount of bloodshed in either war. Wars fought to reassure allies have no strategic basis on which to calculate such things.
What we will call the anti-jihadist wars were framed differently but had similar results. After 9/11, the U.S. goal was to destroy Islamic jihadists and governments that gave them haven and to impose governments favorably inclined to the United States. The problem was that terrorists are mobile. Al-Qaida was a global, sparse and capable force. It could exist anywhere, including hostile territory, and its members were capable and difficult to locate, making them excellent covert operators, as seen on 9/11.
To dismantle the organization, it was assumed that the U.S. had to deny al-Qaida sanctuary for its operations and have the cooperation of countries in the region, ensuring that they would resist al-Qaida and provide intelligence. The invasion of Afghanistan was designed to displace the Taliban and force al-Qaida to disperse. The Taliban withdrew, dispersed and reformed. Al-Qaida was built to be mobile. This placed a premium on getting others to support the American effort, a difficult task inasmuch as the U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon and Somalia made them feel the U.S. wouldn’t back them up. In Iraq, there were many strands behind the U.S. invasion, but credibility was an important one. In the end, the problem was that al-Qaida was not destroyed when it had to mobilize. In addition, occupying a country that is hostile to foreign interference is impossible. Even the Nazis couldn’t defeat the Russian and Yugoslav partisans, and they were far less gentle than the U.S. was.
Demonstrating credibility was part of what motivated the jihadist wars, just as it motivated U.S. involvement in the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The problem with wars designed to demonstrate U.S. will, however, is that they are almost by definition without end. But if the U.S. is going to lead a coalition, credibility is a critical asset, even if the likelihood of success in the war is uncertain. There is therefore an inherent dilemma. In World War II, the war was aligned with U.S. strategy. In the wars that have been fought since then, the conflicts have not been aligned with U.S. strategy. As a result, stalemate or defeat did not undermine basic U.S. interests. The conflicts created vacuums in regions where the U.S. had interests, but all forces were committed to what I will christen as wars of credibility. These were wars that didn’t have to be won, but only fought.
Given the sweeping breadth of U.S. power, and the lack of challengers that might absorb the U.S. as it was absorbed in World War II (including China and Russia), coalition building and management becomes an end in itself. And that leaves the U.S. constantly off balance, as in the long run it undermines coalitions anyway. It was inevitable, therefore, that the U.S. would significantly curtail its military involvement and devote resources to upgrading the force, rather than constant deployment.
-
From fire hydrant thread. VDH did a column around that time noting how complicated it is to know who is allies and enemies with whom in the Middle East.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isis-saudi-arabia-iraq-syria-bandar/373181/
'Thank God for the Saudis': ISIS, Iraq, and the Lessons of Blowback
U.S lawmakers encouraged officials in Riyadh to arm Syrian rebels. Now that strategy may have created a monster in the Middle East.
STEVE CLEMONS
JUN 23, 2014
ISIS fighters at a checkpoint in the northern Iraq city of MosulREUTERS
“Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar,” John McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley in January 2014. “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar, and for our Qatari friends,” the senator said once again a month later, at the Munich Security Conference.
McCain was praising Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services and a former ambassador to the United States, for supporting forces fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham had previously met with Bandar to encourage the Saudis to arm Syrian rebel forces.
But shortly after McCain’s Munich comments, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah relieved Bandar of his Syrian covert-action portfolio, which was then transferred to Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. By mid-April, just two weeks after President Obama met with King Abdullah on March 28, Bandar had also been removed from his position as head of Saudi intelligence—according to official government statements, at “his own request.” Sources close to the royal court told me that, in fact, the king fired Bandar over his handling of the kingdom’s Syria policy and other simmering tensions, after initially refusing to accept Bandar’s offers to resign. (Bandar retains his title as secretary-general of the king’s National Security Council.)
The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the “moderate” armed opposition in the country, receives a lot of attention. But two of the most successful factions fighting Assad’s forces are Islamist extremist groups: Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the latter of which is now amassing territory in Iraq and threatening to further destabilize the entire region. And that success is in part due to the support they have received from two Persian Gulf countries: Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Qatar’s military and economic largesse has made its way to Jabhat al-Nusra, to the point that a senior Qatari official told me he can identify al-Nusra commanders by the blocks they control in various Syrian cities. But ISIS is another matter. As one senior Qatari official stated, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”
ISIS, in fact, may have been a major part of Bandar’s covert-ops strategy in Syria. The Saudi government, for its part, has denied allegations, including claims made by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, that it has directly supported ISIS. But there are also signs that the kingdom recently shifted its assistance—whether direct or indirect—away from extremist factions in Syria and toward more moderate opposition groups.
The United States, France, and Turkey have long sought to support the weak and disorganized FSA, and to secure commitments from Qatar and Saudi Arabia to do the same. When Mohammed bin Nayef took the Syrian file from Bandar in February, the Saudi government appeared to finally be endorsing this strategy. As The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote at the time, “Prince Mohammed’s new oversight role reflects the increasing concern in Saudi Arabia and other neighboring countries about al-Qaeda’s growing power within the Syrian opposition.”
The worry at the time, punctuated by a February meeting between U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice and the intelligence chiefs of Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, and others in the region, was that ISIS and al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra had emerged as the preeminent rebel forces in Syria. The governments who took part reportedly committed to cut off ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, and support the FSA instead. But while official support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia appears to have dried up, non-governmental military and financial support may still be flowing from these countries to Islamist groups.
Senior White House officials have refused to discuss the question of any particular Saudi officials aiding ISIS and have not commented on Bandar’s departure. But they have emphasized that Saudi Arabia is now both supporting moderate Syrian rebels and helping coordinate regional policies to deal with an ascendant ISIS threat.
Like elements of the mujahideen, which benefited from U.S. financial and military support during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and then later turned on the West in the form of al-Qaeda, ISIS achieved scale and consequence through Saudi support, only to now pose a grave threat to the kingdom and the region. It’s this concern about blowback that has motivated Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to encourage restraint in arming Syrian rebels. President Obama has so far heeded these warnings.
John McCain’s desire to help rebel forces toss off a brutal dictator and fight for a more just and inclusive Syria is admirable. But as has been proven repeatedly in the Middle East, ousting strongmen doesn’t necessarily produce more favorable successor governments. Embracing figures like Bandar, who may have tried to achieve his objectives in Syria by building a monster, isn't worth it.
-
Inching Toward the End of the Conflict in Syria
By: Hilal Khashan
Starting a protracted conflict is much easier than ending it. That’s especially true when the regime in question is callous and fossilized and foreign countries are waiting for an opportunity to take advantage of a deteriorating situation. These two factors explain how the brutal armed conflict in Syria got underway. Before his death in 2000, Hafez Assad entrusted select members of his old guard with shoring up the safety of the future regime of his politically inexperienced son, Bashar Assad.
Instead of applying Hafez's Machiavellian approach in addressing a seemingly spontaneous and innocuous protest movement, the old guard recommended heavy-handed action. The regime's use of excessive coercive force militarized the uprising and invited foreign intervention – from Iran, to rescue the younger Assad, and Saudi Arabia, to bring Iran down and prevent the formation of the Shiite Crescent (that is, Iran’s overland route to the Mediterranean).
(click to enlarge)
Syrian army defectors established the Free Syrian Army, with the goal of bringing down their former commander in chief. But as uncoordinated material support from outside militaries flowed to rebel groups, jihadist militias arose in Syria’s overwhelmingly religious society.
Syria, a Geopolitical Chessboard
The United States did not seek to overthrow Assad's regime, despite what people may think. (This was borne out, in particular, when the Obama administration failed to punish the regime for crossing the notorious “red line” of using chemical weapons against the Syrian people.) Rather, the CIA’s 2013 program was aimed at supporting the FSA against radical Islamic movements, such as the Nusra Front. But when the program proved ineffective, Langley terminated it in 2017 and recognized Russia's leading role in defeating jihadism in Syria and restraining Iran’s burgeoning power.
Russia, in partnership with the Syrian air force, had already begun in 2015 a systematic air campaign to support Assad’s army, which, despite massive backing by Iran and its multinational Shiite militias, had been forced into retreat. Russia also intended to help rebuild the Syrian state.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan abandoned the core demands of Syrian rebels in favor of establishing a safe zone despite American, Russian and Iranian reservations. While moderating Turkish ambitions, clearly with tacit U.S. backing, Russia seems determined to rein in Iran’s influence in Syria. Foreign power players share a desire to prevent Iran from extending its territorial control in eastern Syria and filling the vacuum caused by the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from the area. Russia has been keen to recruit young Syrians away from Iran; it invested in the formation of the Fifth Assault Corps that reports directly to Russian officers, and whose 50,000 members come from pro-regime groups and elements of the defunct Free Syrian Army. Russia is also expanding its Hmeimim air base and naval facility in Tartus. Russia deployed FAC units last year in southwestern Syria and near the cease-fire line in the Golan Heights after reaching an understanding with the U.S. and Israel.
Iran demonstrated its anger at Russian efforts to weaken its influence on the government in Damascus by ordering its Shiite militia allies to refrain from participating in the battle for Idlib in June, which rendered it an unnecessary war of attrition.
Contrary to media reports that Islamic militants sought to attack Russia’s Hmeimim air base near Latakia, the truth is that the Iranian-created 313th Battalion in Qardaha, the Assad family's hometown, sent drones to fly over the base only for harassment. The Russians ordered the Syrian regime to disband this battalion after implicating it in launching drones.
Competition between Russia and Iran in Syria goes beyond military influence on the ground to economic supremacy. Russia has a competitive advantage over Iran in winning big reconstruction projects. Russian President Vladimir Putin angered the Iranians when he negotiated to grant Russian businesses the lion’s share of postwar projects in return for propping up Assad’s regime. Assad is unhappy about Iranian attempts to control the centers of decision-making in Syria. He prefers to work with Russia because Moscow wants to be a junior partner, whereas Tehran wants to be the dominant partner.
Assad also understands that the United States, Russia and Israel have decided to disallow Iran's permanent presence in Syria. Russia has concerns that Iran will be an obstacle to its long-term economic interests in Syria. The Russians reason that Syria will emerge from the devastating civil war as a fragile state. Putin does not want to have rivals in determining Syria’s domestic and foreign policy, and he made this point clear to Assad before committing himself to rescuing Syrian regime. Russia understands Syrian sectarian and ethnic sensitivities, and, unlike Iran, which promotes a strictly religious agenda, it has no reservations about dealing with the country's diverse groups. When Moscow secured the withdrawal of Islamist rebels from Greater Damascus last year, it used Chechen military police officers to communicate with them. The Russians want to work with an able Syrian government and avoid getting stuck there, whereas the Iranians prefer to work with a lackey administration. The crippling sanctions against Iran curtail its ability to preserve its achievements in Syria. The eventual readmission of Syria to the Arab League, which Assad is eager to realize, threatens to distance its regime from Iran.
The cost of staying in Syria is high and useless. In addition to business opportunities in Syria, Putin is more interested in flexing military muscle to project the surge of Russian military might and win concessions in Europe. The Russian public sees no strategic reason to squander scarce resources on such a volatile country, while poverty-stricken Iranians are unable to comprehend their mullahs' ideological drive in Syria. In terms of articulating their Syrian policy, Russia is pragmatic, while Iran is dogmatic. Thanks to Russian mediation, there is increasing evidence that Turkey is willing to work with the Syrian government whose forces, even if token, are positioning themselves in specific border posts. The release of 18 Syrian soldiers recently arrested by the Turkish army, despite Assad's anti-Turkish rhetoric, points in that direction. Erdogan had to shelve his ambitions to overthrow Assad's regime and install a pro-Turkish government in Damascus. He's now resigned to the establishment of a safe zone along the Syrian border under strict American and Russian surveillance after halting Operation Peace Spring.
Iran’s heavy involvement in the Syrian conflict generated the false impression that its influence there has become paramount. This claim is far from reality. Iran faces a fundamental weakness in determining the future of Syria, mainly because of its overbearing political style and the small size of Syria’s Shiite community. Shiite proselytization is not as widespread as the Iranians think it should be, since Sunnis have an aversion to it and Alawites disfavor it. Despite Iran's best efforts, there are less than 300,000 Syrians who follow Twelver Shiite Islam – the branch of Shiite Islam favored by Iran. Even though Iran founded Syrian Shiite militias (such as Imam al-Rida Forces in Homs and al-Baqir Brigade in Aleppo), the main forces commanded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are Iraqi and Afghan Shiites.
Postwar Syria
No matter what shape postwar Syria takes, the country will look different than what it was before 2011. Nearly 600,000 Syrians have lost their lives, and more than half of the country’s population of 21 million on the eve of the uprising have been displaced, both internally and externally. Even though Assad escaped the fate of other presidents in the countries of the Arab Spring uprisings, he did not win the war; in fact, he is the biggest loser in the battle for Syria. Syria is economically devastated, and he is presiding over a shattered country, whose cost of reconstruction could reach a staggering $1 trillion. (For reference, Syria’s gross domestic product in 2010, just before the war, was about $60 billion.) It is doubtful whether reconstruction can occur in Syria's massively corrupt business and bureaucratic environment. Postwar reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Lebanon do not bode well for Syria. The regime lost critical oil and water resources and the fertile agricultural areas of northeastern Syria. Iran’s IRGC and Russian forces control the command structure of most Syrian military and security formations, and the Turks established their much-sought security belt to prevent the Kurds on both sides of the border from linking up. The perceived Kurdish threat remains a top priority for Turkey and a stable determinant of its foreign policy choices.
The ongoing understandings among the major actors in Syria, be they bilateral or multilateral, are setting the stage for military action in Idlib, the site of the last major battle in the Syrian armed conflict. Syria's march toward the final settlement of its conflict will commence only then. One must not assume that Iran's presence there is about to end. It will not, but its scale would not live up to the expectations of Iran's conservative ruling elite. Unlike Iran’s sway over Iraqi politics, Syria is reemerging as an arena of inconclusive regional competition.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-foreign-policy-doctrine-deterrence-without-intervention/?fbclid=IwAR1ZucjlVv95jUAEnI994yY8rqXBWVjBHEWhjUahaOljfKDB1c7TgbdSh4E
-
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/11/abandoning-kurds-america-hurt-itself/161201/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl
-
Lessons From the Past for Trump's Transactional Foreign Policy
Ian Morris
Ian Morris
Board of Contributors
13 MINS READ
Nov 13, 2019 | 16:40 GMT
An illustration of an aged world map.
(ILOLAB/Shutterstock)
HIGHLIGHTS
President Donald Trump's administration is anything but the first to pursue a transactional foreign policy. An important comparison case: 18th-century Britain.
The British experience suggests there are huge benefits to reap from a transactional foreign policy but huge costs to avoid. Doing transactionalism correctly is difficult.
While 18th-century Britain resembles our own world in many ways, there are differences. It's in those differences that the United States possesses few of the advantages Britain enjoyed three centuries ago.
One of the Trump administration's hallmarks has been its transactional approach to foreign policy. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine shortly before the 2016 presidential election, the strategist Rosa Brooks suggested that "To Trump, U.S. alliances, like potential business partners in a real estate transaction, should always be asked: 'What have you done for me lately?'" Since entering office, President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to walk away from alliances that no longer seem to be paying dividends, regardless of old friendships or cultural affinities. He has brought American troops home from distant shores and favored national interests over multinational cooperation. He self-consciously presents himself as disrupting an American foreign policy tradition, going back at least to 1941, of promoting the spread of democracy, human rights, open markets and supranational organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations.
Few alliances, no matter how long-standing, have avoided the president's criticism. He has called NATO "obsolete" and named the European Union as the United States' "biggest trade foe." Nor are newer allies secure. The Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) has lost 11,000 dead since 2014 in an American-led war in Syria against the self-styled Islamic State, while the United States has suffered only six fatalities, but the president abruptly cast it aside in October. "We never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives," Trump tweeted. "Where's the agreement that we have to stay in Middle East for rest of civilization? … I don't think it is necessary, other than that we secure the oil." The Turkish army immediately attacked the Kurds.
South Korean legislator Won Yoo Chul calls this the "Trump risk" — the nagging fear that he'll wake up to a tweet announcing the withdrawal of American forces from the Korean Peninsula. When asked, shortly after the United States abandoned the Kurds in Syria, whether he still thought Europeans could rely on Article 5 of NATO's constitution (the idea that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all), French President Emmanuel Macron answered, "I don't know … to have an American ally turning its back on us so quickly on strategic issues; nobody would have believed this possible."
A Comparison Case
The U-turn in U.S. foreign policy seems to have baffled many observers. According to The Washington Post, "Donald Trump's ignorance of government policy, both foreign and domestic, is breathtaking." However, the Trump administration is anything but the first to pursue a transactional foreign policy. It might be worth taking a look at the experience of the most important comparison case, 18th-century Britain.
Through the 16th and 17th centuries, English strategy ("Britain" did not exist until the union of England and Scotland in 1707; Ireland was added in a second Act of Union in 1800) had been intensely ideological, focusing on fighting Catholicism to protect what were called "English liberties." After 1713, however, Britain increasingly acted as if (as the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, put it in 1848) "We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual friends … [only] our interests are eternal and perpetual."
The new British policies focused on preserving a balance of power in Europe, intervening against any power — regardless of its religion or constitution — that looked like it might be about to dominate the Continent. If one power did dominate the Continent, British strategists feared, it would gain a free hand to build a navy powerful enough to challenge Britain at sea; but so long as the Continent remained divided, Britain, protected by its fleet, could concentrate on grabbing up transoceanic trade and building a worldwide empire.
This strategy paid off. Britain rose from being a second-rank European power in the 1680s to a first-rank global one 150 years later. However, it had costs too, particularly on the moral side. By constantly shifting alliances, Britain earned a reputation as untrustworthy ("perfidious Albion"). At critical moments, it found itself utterly isolated. Foreign relations spilled over into domestic politics too, dividing the country deeply.
There are no 1:1 correlations between what worked in the past and what will work today. But as U.S. foreign policy breaks radically with the traditions of the past 75 years, it might be worth taking a look at 18th-century Britain, not only for how it resembles our own world but also for how it differs from it.
'When Will This Bloodshed Ever Cease?'
For several centuries before 1713, English foreign policy had been highly ideological. France's victory in the Hundred Years' War in 1453 had reduced England to a bit player whose independence depended on playing Spain and France against each other and bullying the Scottish enemy to its rear. Things got significantly worse after 1534 when Henry VIII took England out of the Roman Church. England became a pariah state, much like the Soviet Union after 1918, and 16th-century England's relations with the Continent's great powers were every bit as polarized, ideological and violent as the 20th-century Cold War.
Sixteenth-century England's relations with the Continent's great powers were every bit as polarized, ideological and violent as the 20th-century Cold War.
Henry VIII paid for his wars to defend England's Reformation by looting the country's monasteries, but by the time he died, in 1547, that money was long gone. His successors were trapped between the Scylla of satisfying Protestant sentiments within England by waging anti-Catholic crusades (which the country couldn't afford) and the Charybdis of avoiding unaffordable wars by cozying up to France and Spain (which enraged domestic opinion). Edward VI (reigned 1547-53) tried the former and Mary I (1553-58) the latter, while Elizabeth I (1558-1603) walked a tightrope between them, several times considering but never quite concluding a Catholic marriage. When the tightrope snapped in 1588, it took good luck as much as good gunnery to save England from invasion by a Spanish Armada.
Elizabeth knew that England could not fund such wars with Spain for long, and her successor James I immediately compromised with the Catholic powers. He sidestepped being dragged into the ruinous Protestant-Catholic conflict now known as the Thirty Years' War, and, blessed by a generation of neutrality, England's shipping and share of the growing transatlantic markets grew dramatically. The domestic price of these policies, however, was enormous. The English elite polarized between a "Court" faction, which favored peace, a degree of religious toleration, a strong monarchy and alliances with Spain and/or France, and a "Country" group, virulently anti-Catholic, suspicious of royal decadence and incompetence and ready to fight Spain and France (at the same time, if necessary) to defend the Protestant cause.
Political violence erupted into civil war in 1642, ending in a victory for the anti-monarchical rebels. Revealing what a united government could do with England's new wealth, Oliver Cromwell built the greatest fleet the country had ever seen. Protected by it, he crushed Scottish and Irish resistance in the home isles, struck across the Atlantic at Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and joined anti-Catholic campaigns on the Continent.
However, Cromwell's triumphs also revealed the continuing obstacles to sectarianism. Commercial rivalries compelled him to fight fellow Protestants in the Netherlands before taking on Spain, while his attempts to build a Puritan New Jerusalem at home failed miserably. The solution, moderates concluded, was to restore the monarchy, but when that was achieved, in 1660, it solved little. Like his antebellum predecessors, Charles II found himself stuck between cozying up to France and Spain but generating internal dissent and harnessing Protestant energies into anti-Catholic conquests but going broke. He quickly decided not just to lean toward the Continental Catholics but actually to sell the country out to them. In a secret treaty signed in 1670, he agreed in return for cash payments not only to support Catholic France's aggressive young king Louis XIV in attacking the Protestant Netherlands but even to let Louis' troops reimpose Catholicism in England. In the end, that did not happen, but when Charles' brother James converted to Catholicism before becoming king, even royalists panicked.
In 1688, a bipartisan alliance of Tories and Whigs (the successors of the old Court and Country factions) asked William of Orange, the staunchly Protestant leader of the Dutch armies fighting France, to intervene against their own Catholic king. James promptly fled, whereupon William formed an alliance with the Whigs and committed England fully to the Dutch fight against Catholicism.
The result was a quarter-century of brutal warfare, which turned Britain into Europe's rising power. A Bill of Rights, signed in 1689, merged the crown and Parliament, making civil war less likely, and the Bank of England, established in 1694, gave Parliament the deepest credit in Europe. England destroyed France's fleet in 1692, won one of its greatest land victories at Blenheim in 1704 and forged a political union with Scotland in 1707.
As ever, though, the costs of confronting Catholicism were ruinous. The national debt spiraled, there were waves of bankruptcies and the casualties became intolerable. As a proportion of the population, more Englishmen died at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709 than on the first day on the Somme in 1916, driving Queen Anne — previously even more committed to the anti-Catholic war than King William had been — to demand "When will this bloodshed ever cease?" As the political elite fragmented, Tories undermined the crown's alliance with the Whigs. They even drove the Duke of Marlborough — the victor of Blenheim and Malplaquet — from office and convicted him of embezzlement. Marlborough's fall left the way open for peace with France.
A Strategic Pivot
The Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713, began the biggest strategic pivot in British history. Its Tory architects did not just end the current war with France; they put British foreign policy on an entirely new footing. Who cares, they asked, whether potential allies were Protestant or Catholic, or what gratitude Britain owed them? What mattered was protecting Britain's Atlantic trade. That called for the biggest fleet in Europe, and the obvious way to stop any Continental power building a fleet to rival Britain's was to keep Europe divided. If France grew too strong, Britain would back any coalition (even one including the Muslim Turks) to restore a balance of power, but if one of its allies — Spain, Austria, Russia or whoever — did too well, Britain would switch to a coalition (even one including France) that would block it. And, while the Europeans fought each other, Britain would encompass the world's maritime trade.
Who cares, the British architects of the Treaty of Utrecht asked, whether potential allies were Protestant or Catholic, or what gratitude Britain owed them? What mattered was protecting Britain's Atlantic trade.
The Treaty of Utrecht rejected ancient notions of loyalty and honor, leaving Britain's allies in the lurch and unleashing a level of political fury beyond anything seen in the United States since 2016. As soon as the Whigs won back power, they impeached, exiled and imprisoned the Tories responsible, and whenever Tories gained a local advantage, they turned the purge back on the Whigs. Already by the 1720s, though, the Tories' transactional approach to foreign policy was clearly winning the debate.
The new policies unfolded against a surprisingly modern background of financial meltdown (particularly the "South Sea Bubble" of 1720), elite corruption, mounting inequality, growing distrust of the political class and the power of a spectacularly partisan news media, capable of whipping up violent mobs at a moment's notice. Through it all, though, the political giant Robert Walpole (probably the most venal prime minister Britain has ever had, but also the greatest master of patronage) kept Europe off-balance, taxes low, Britain out of Continental wars and transatlantic trade growing.
He did this by dropping one ally after another as they became inconvenient. By 1739, Walpole himself conceded that Britain was "at present without any one ally upon the Continent." Some Tories thought this was fine, but in the end, Walpole's failure to keep all the diplomatic balls in the air brought him down. Slowly, painfully, Britain rebuilt its diplomatic networks, to the point that a new coalition won a mighty victory over France in 1759 — only for Britain once more to cast its expensive allies aside in the 1760s. When an American colonial revolt posed entirely new challenges in 1776, Britain found itself utterly without friends. In trying to fight France, Spain and the Netherlands as well as the rebels, Britain lost the bulk of its empire.
And on the cycle went. Continental powers learned to treat Britain as transactionally as Britain treated them, breaking alliances at will. Not even the danger that Napoleon would completely overturn the European system was enough to make governments trust Britain; in 1807, the Russian czar told Napoleon, "I hate the English as much as you do." Only when Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 revealed that his ambition truly was insatiable and then broke his military power did Austria, Prussia and Russia fully commit to fighting him, and his final defeat, at Waterloo in 1815, left Britain as the world's greatest superpower. The Tories' transactional strategy had been vindicated.
Important Differences Between Then and Now
It is easy to see analogies between post-1713 Britain and post-2016 America, casting Donald Trump as Walpole and China and Russia in the parts of France and Spain. However, the differences between the two cases are equally important. In 1713, Britain was still a rising power, challenging the status quo powers of France and Spain, but in 2016, the United States had been dominant for a century, and China was the emerging rival. Britain in 1713 boasted the world's fastest-growing economy; the United States in 2016 did not. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 was a diplomatic interlude after 25 years of great power war; in 2016, there had been no such war for more than seven decades, and its resumption was unthinkable.
These differences, and others, probably make it unwise to conclude that because a transactional foreign policy worked so well for 18th-century Britain, it will always succeed. Rather, we should be focusing on the broader strategic principles revealed by the British case — which suggest that those who view Trump's foreign policy as incoherent and those who think that it is just common sense are equally mistaken.
A no-eternal-allies/no-perpetual-friends model worked for two centuries to keep Britain out of expensive Continental wars, allowing it to reduce military costs and lower taxes while maintaining a great fleet to protect its global trade and expand its commercial networks. However, even if we leave aside all moral questions, this diplomatic ruthlessness carried high costs. Britain repeatedly found itself isolated internationally and divided internally, and transactionalism seems to carry the same costs today. On the international front, I have heard policymakers from Canberra to Seoul say openly that American behavior is making them rethink their relationships with China, while Macron suggests that American inconstancy will produce European "rapprochement" with Russia. Domestically, Trump is facing impeachment over his foreign policy transactionalism.
I see three big lessons in 18th century British diplomatic history. First, transactionalism is difficult to do right, frequently driving former allies into enemy camps; second, trust takes decades to build but only days to destroy; and third, British transactionalism would not have succeeded had the country not possessed the world's fastest-growing economy and most modern institutions and infrastructure. Three centuries later, the United States possesses few, if any, of these advantages. American leaders might want to pay attention to Britain's earlier experiment with transactionalism if they are to avoid paying all the same costs without reaping any of the same benefits.
-
Above Stratford piece:
"transactional" foreign policy is a very good thought piece.
not simple and the historical experience not straightforward in applying to today.
The S Korean leader having trouble sleeping thinking he could wake up any day and read about a tweet that the Trump has decided (while watching Tucker Carlson) to remove the US from the Southern Korean Peninsula is VERY REAL.
On the other hand we don't need situations where are "allies" simply take us for granted like the Euros seem to do with NATO.
-
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=510.msg3180#msg3180
-
How 3 Key Allies Will Respond to U.S. Demands on Troop Deployments
8 MINS READ
Nov 22, 2019 | 11:00 GMT
This photo shows U.S. soldiers standing guard in the Korean border village of Panmunjom, located inside the Demilitarized Zone separating South and North Korea, on April 18, 2018.
U.S. soldiers stand guard in the Korean border village of Panmunjom, located inside the Demilitarized Zone separating South and North Korea, on April 18, 2018.
(CHUNG SUNG-JUN/Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
Seoul finds itself in a weak position to resist U.S. demands for more money to base troops in South Korea, but the demands will spur its efforts to reduce its dependence on the U.S. military.
Japan will try to bargain Washington's asking price down, but its significant wealth and need for close alignment with the United States mean it will reach a deal.
Germany's relatively secure, by contrast, and the fact that U.S. troops would likely depart for neighboring Poland, and still shield Germany from Russia, means a complete drawdown of U.S. forces is more likely there.
U.S. demands for huge payment increases from three of its major allies, South Korea, Japan and Germany, for basing military forces on their territory could cause significant shifts in the global U.S. military footprint. The centrality of the United States and its military to South Korea's and Japan's security strategies means Washington is in a strong position to extract more money. But the effort could push Germany further away from the United States.
Reports emerged this month that U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have demanded that South Korea pay $4.7 billion next year — or 400 percent more than what it currently pays — for continued U.S. military protection. Then a report emerged that in July, the United States had requested that Japan increase its own share of military cost-sharing fourfold to $8 billion after their bilateral Special Measures Agreement expires in March 2021. These reports came as the United States was already preparing to press its NATO allies in Europe, in particular Germany, to pay more for the presence of U.S. troops on the Continent.
The Big Picture
Favorable security alliances are central to the United States' ability to continue as global hegemon. The current U.S. administration has accelerated efforts to extract money from key allies in exchange for basing troops on their territory. These efforts could trigger far-reaching effects, possibly significantly reshaping the U.S. military footprint.
See The U.S. and the Balance of Power
The latest U.S. demands were not the first indication that such a policy shift was in the works. In March, Bloomberg reported that under White House direction, the administration was drafting demands that Germany and Japan pay not only the full cost of U.S. forces deployed on Japanese soil, but also an additional 50 percent for the privilege of having them there. The same template was initially used in the Special Measures Agreement negotiations with South Korea in 2018 before the United States backed off. And in June, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon was analyzing the impact of the large-scale removal of U.S. troops from Germany, alarming European officials, who sought an explanation from their U.S. counterparts.
Despite pushback from the Pentagon and the State Department, which have at times successfully moderated the demands, the White House and Trump personally are determined to negotiate what they see as fair deals for U.S. troop deployments from its wealthiest allies. The Pentagon study on the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Germany underscores that the United States actually appears willing to withdraw forces if such negotiations fail.
The U.S. effort to get money for troop deployments is not new, and will not disappear when Trump leaves office. But Trump and the current White House have supercharged the process, making it a central component of relations with these countries. Given the negotiation timetable, South Korea finds itself in a tough spot with little room to stall, but Japan and Germany can be expected to stall and see whether 2021 will bring a new U.S. administration with a less intense position on this policy. Either way, for at least the next year and potentially beyond, U.S. efforts to significantly alter basing agreements with key allies could trigger far-reaching effects.
South Korea: Continued Defense Dependence, but Growing Defense Ambitions
South Korea finds itself in a weak position to resist the new U.S. approach. After already agreeing to pay the United States 8.2 percent more in a tough round of Special Measures Agreement negotiations in 2018, South Korea now faces U.S. demands for a 400 percent increase in payments. The new negotiations did not begin on a cordial note: On Nov. 19, U.S. negotiators cut talks short when it became clear no progress would be made for the time being.
But eventually, Seoul will have to strike a deal. This is because, despite its considerable military strength, its defense strategy remains heavily dependent on the U.S. military and its 28,500 troops on the Korean Peninsula. While more powerful conventionally than North Korea, in any major military conflict with the North the South Koreans would rely on the U.S. military, and in particular on U.S. command and control and intelligence gathering capabilities and its air and naval power. These capabilities would be crucial in neutralizing North Korean offensive capabilities before Pyongyang could inflict grievous damage on South Korea's people and economy. The growing strength of the North Korean missile and nuclear arsenal has only increased the importance of the U.S. defense role.
The tough U.S. demands on South Korea have increased calls for greater defense autonomy, especially from lawmakers on the left. South Korea has already been working to lessen this dependence by bolstering its defense capabilities, with some even calling for the acquisition of nuclear arms. But creating true defense independence will take decades, making an immediate South Korean defense rupture with the United States highly unlikely despite the steep U.S. demands. Nevertheless, contentious talks would increase the South Korean momentum toward greater autonomy in defense, while an impasse could prompt Trump to unilaterally reduce U.S. troop numbers in South Korea.
Japan: Wealth and a Dangerous Neighborhood Will Force Tokyo to Bargain
Like South Korea, Japan remains heavily dependent on U.S. security guarantees — and like South Korea, Japan also faces forceful U.S. demands for a large increase in payments. According to a report in Foreign Policy, in July the United States asked Japan to increase its share of military cost-sharing fourfold, to $8 billion, when their bilateral Special Measures Agreement expires in March 2021. Also like South Korea, Japan maintains a powerful military. But Japan's armed forces have long heavily focused on defensive capabilities, and Tokyo is only now beginning to accumulate serious offensive firepower. In the meantime, Japan relies on the roughly 50,000 U.S. troops on its territory to bolster its ability to respond to external threats.
These threats, and especially that of a rising China, will ensure that like South Korea, Japan will not break with the United States over demands for more money. Though Japan will strive to strike a better deal than the one Washington is offering, it is one of the safer allies for the United States to pressure given its significant wealth plus its need for close alignment with the United States.
Though Japan will strive to strike a better deal than the one Washington is offering, it is one of the safer allies for the United States to pressure.
Tokyo might well use the pressure to bolster its case for an acceleration of the normalization of the Japanese military, arguing with domestic critics that a better-rounded military will make Japan more self-reliant. While Washington has long demanded just this from Tokyo, an expanding Japanese military poses some risks for Washington — such as a greater risk of Japan dragging the United States into conflict.
Germany: A Position of Strength Could See U.S. Troops Head East
Germany is in a much better position than South Korea and Japan to resist U.S. defense demands, which Washington is expected to push with NATO — and especially with Berlin — in 2020. Like South Korea and Japan, Germany hosts a hefty number of U.S. troops — 34,000 in its case — but unlike them, it feels secure from immediate military threats. Also unlike South Korea and Japan, Germans as a whole are far more critical of the U.S. military presence in their country. Recent polls show that while about two-thirds of South Koreans and Japanese support the U.S. military presence in their countries, a 2018 YouGov poll for DPA news agency found that more Germans would welcome the departure of U.S. forces (42 percent) than would oppose it (37 percent).
Germans often see U.S. military bases on their soil as primarily serving U.S. foreign policy interests rather than those of Germany. And in fact, the military infrastructure the United States has built up in Germany over the decades, including airfields and hospitals, has seen heavy use during U.S. wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. These factors make Germany the most likely to reject U.S. demands for a massive increase in payments, and to see a subsequent significant drawdown of U.S. forces.
Even more likely to make Germany stand its ground is the most likely place departing U.S. troops might go to: neighboring Poland. For its part, Poland is actively lobbying for more U.S. troops and has offered to pay a significant sum to attract them. Since the main German security concern is Russia, shifting U.S. troops to Poland would give Berlin what it wants without having to pay. This scenario would, however, come at the cost to Germany of even worse relations with Washington.
-
I respect WRM a lot, but I'm not quite sure where the last paragraph comes from , , ,
China Is Europe’s Problem Too
Only the trans-Atlantic alliance can counter Beijing’s moves in the Pacific.
By Walter Russell Mead
Nov. 25, 2019 7:06 pm ET
Opinion: China's Rise Makes U.S.-European Alliances More Important
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
UP NEXT
Opinion: China's Rise Makes U.S.-European Alliances More Important
Opinion: China's Rise Makes U.S.-European Alliances More Important
Global View: As the United States focuses its foreign policy on the Pacific and the rise of China, U.S.-European alliances should be recognized as an important tool in countering the burgeoning Moscow-Beijing alliance. Image: Pang Xinglei/Zuma Press
What will the trans-Atlantic alliance look like in a world focused on the Indo-Pacific? That, more than President Trump’s unpredictable diplomacy, is the question that haunts Europe. During the Cold War, protecting Europe from Soviet aggression was Washington’s highest foreign-policy priority. That didn’t only mean that the U.S. put troops in Europe. Washington took European opinions seriously, engaged with Europeans, cut deals with them and was willing to make concessions to preserve alliance unity.
Clearly, some of that has changed. The next U.S. president may not share Mr. Trump’s undiplomatic instincts or his affinity for Brexiteers such as Nigel Farage and anti-Brussels figures like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. But will he or she engage in the ritualistic ceremonies of diplomatic consultation with the various chancellors, presidents, commissioners and high representatives that Europeans so love? When America’s most urgent foreign policy worries involve smoothing over Japanese-Korean spats or facing down China in the Taiwan Strait, just how relevant will Europe be? When Europe calls Washington, will anybody answer the phone?
The French like to say they are a Pacific nation, thanks to Tahiti and other outposts, but it takes more than a sprinkling of islands, however idyllic, to make you a serious factor in Pacific politics. From a military standpoint, the European powers—and NATO itself—won’t play a large role in the Indo-Pacific zone. Nor will European ideology or Europe as a model have much appeal there. The memories of colonialism are too strong, and many Asian countries see the slow-growth, high-regulation European social model as a trap to avoid, not a goal to be reached.
Yet as China looms larger, a new trans-Atlantic consensus is forming. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in one of her rare political missteps, decided last month to allow China’s Huawei to supply components for Germany’s 5G internet. Americans made the usual protests and threats, to be met by the usual refusals. But the matter didn’t end there. Delegates to her party’s conference last week revolted, adopting a resolution that could lead to a Bundestag vote to block Huawei from Germany’s 5G rollout. Prominent Social Democrats, the center-left party uneasily allied with Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, agree. Chinese companies cannot be trusted with German data.
The convergence between European and U.S. views on China is far from complete. France has refused to exclude Huawei from its 5G program, and other European governments as well as many European companies still see China through rose-tinted lenses. But opinions are changing. Like Americans, Europeans sympathize with Hong Kong’s democracy movement, and are horrified by Beijing’s treatment of the Tibetans and Uighurs. The Federation of German Industries has been voicing sharp criticism of Chinese business practices for the past year.
There is another force pushing Americans and Europeans closer together: Vladimir Putin, who appears to have resigned himself to a full-fledged alliance with China. Russia’s disruptive agenda in Europe, ranging from the annexation of Crimea to efforts to influence European elections through disinformation, has always suffered from a lack of money that is the curse of Russian power projection. A perception that Russian activity in Europe is more of a nuisance to the U.S. than a strategic threat has gained ground in some neo-isolationist circles. But as China makes major investments in Greece and across Southern and Eastern Europe, that perception could change. The closer Russia and China are aligned, the more important Europe’s Russia problems become for a China-focused U.S. foreign policy.
The Indo-Pacific isn’t Las Vegas—what happens there doesn’t stay there. As China’s economic, political and military reach expands in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, European as well as U.S. interests will be affected. Efforts by China to export its method of authoritarian governance backed by high-tech surveillance will pose a serious threat to a vision of the open society that Europeans and Americans mostly share.
One hates to say anything so obvious, but world politics is a global endeavor. During the Cold War, America’s main focus was on Europe, but Japan and South Korea were important allies without whose support and counsel the Cold War would have been much harder to win.
The real question isn’t whether the U.S. will take the problems of the Indo-Pacific too seriously and write off its old allies in Europe. It is whether Americans and Europeans will recognize the global nature of the challenge before us.
About this, I am an optimist. The Americans who best understand the potential threats emerging from China also know that without Europe’s help it will be difficult and perhaps impossible to prevail. The harder Americans think about China, the more they will care about Europe. If enough Europeans share U.S. concerns about Beijing, the Western alliance will remain a vital force even as the world’s political center of gravity shifts to the Indo-Pacific.
-
"I respect WRM a lot, but I'm not quite sure where the last paragraph comes from , ,,"
WRM is great for analysis and views on foreign policy. I often call him my favorite Democrat. But if he is a Democrat on some things, eventually a different view is going to show through. If our success and future depends on Europe for anything, I am not an optimist.
That said he is right, Europe needs to be with us to fix China by standing up to them, whether they like each US President or not. Our support of Brexit should not be a factor in that. Brexit has been a major blunder of Europe, just as the US makes mistakes too. Brexit and their distaste for Trump do not alter the China threat. Europe needs to get its head on straight.
The 'other' 5G company, Ericsson, is European, incidentally.
https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g
-
Europe has become the sick man of Europe. They have imported their own doom and are well past the point of no return.
"I respect WRM a lot, but I'm not quite sure where the last paragraph comes from , ,,"
WRM is great for analysis and views on foreign policy. I often call him my favorite Democrat. But if he is a Democrat on some things, eventually a different view is going to show through. If our success and future depends on Europe for anything, I am not an optimist.
That said he is right, Europe needs to be with us to fix China by standing up to them, whether they like each US President or not. Our support of Brexit should not be a factor in that. Brexit has been a major blunder of Europe, just as the US makes mistakes too. Brexit and their distaste for Trump do not alter the China threat. Europe needs to get its head on straight.
The 'other' 5G company, Ericsson, is European, incidentally.
https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g
-
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-and-russia-are-partnersand-now-have-a-55-billion-pipeline-to-prove-it-11575225030?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-foreign-policy-momentum-china-iran-north-korea/?utm_source=Hoover+Daily+Report&utm_campaign=099f69338e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_03_06_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_21b1edff3c-099f69338e-73073697&fbclid=IwAR1-1aD32tvsUAXbW7atytTYsg-xIEVYzwQ2_07W9gt3Z57R8UDLsjDkIns
-
‘Ukrainegate’—Treason or Common Sense?
Beneath the circus lies a real conflict of foreign-policy visions.
By
Walter Russell Mead
Dec. 9, 2019 7:28 pm ET
Opinion: Impeachment Has Turned Ukraine Into a Foreign Policy Showdown
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
UP NEXT
0:00 / 1:35
Opinion: Impeachment Has Turned Ukraine Into a Foreign Policy Showdown
Opinion: Impeachment Has Turned Ukraine Into a Foreign Policy Showdown
Global View: The United States is facing a policy battle between those who see Europe as the top foreign policy objective, and others who see the Indo-Pacific as the primary challenge that the U.S. needs to focus on. Image: Ludovic Marin/Getty Images
“Ukrainegate,” like Russiagate before it, is more than a domestic scandal; it is also a foreign-policy showdown of historic proportions.
Much of the American foreign-policy establishment, both inside and outside the government, is liberal internationalist and Atlanticist. They believe that America’s chief task is to build a world order on liberal principles and that America’s chief allies are the NATO and European Union countries that share our convictions. They see Russia as the primary opponent of this effort and therefore of the U.S. Moscow’s efforts to interfere in European and American domestic politics threaten the cohesion of the EU and the liberal democratic principles for which the West stands. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea are direct attacks on liberal order and the Atlantic world.
From this perspective, the war in Ukraine matters to the whole world. To use Ukraine’s aid as a bargaining chip in a cynical domestic political ploy isn’t merely a political dirty trick. It’s collusion with the enemy. It’s like blocking Lend-Lease during the Blitz to make Winston Churchill investigate Thomas E. Dewey. President Trump’s exact feelings toward the Kremlin aren’t of great importance. It doesn’t matter if he is being blackmailed into it, sees the Russian president as a soul mate and fellow traveler on the road to destroying American democracy, or is a malignant clown bent on destroying a complex international system that he doesn’t understand. Donald Trump, his most determined opponents believe, has committed something very close to treason even as he shamelessly abuses his office to enrich himself.
For most Republicans, the Ukrainegate question is much narrower: Was Mr. Trump’s attempt to hold back congressionally authorized aid to force Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden a constitutional crime that requires removal from office, or can the decision be left to the voters? Unless investigators can show that Mr. Trump pressed Ukraine to frame the Bidens, to concoct false evidence and make false charges to discredit them, the president’s hold on the White House through January 2021 looks secure.
It isn’t that Republicans don’t care if Mr. Trump is a Russian agent. They approach Ukrainegate differently because many of them, uneasy as they may be about some aspects of his foreign policy, see some much-needed changes taking shape.
Among the administration’s most consistent features is a belief that the U.S. should change the priority it gives to the different theaters in world politics. From this perspective, the center of gravity of American policy must move from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. Latin America deserves more attention as a growing social and political crisis creates larger threats in the hemisphere—of which the chaos on the Southern border may be only a foretaste.
After Latin America, the threats of jihadist violence and Iranian expansionism make the Middle East the next-highest priority for the Trump administration. Europe, America’s highest priority for much of the Cold War, has fallen to fourth place. For the Trump administration and many of its Republican allies, Russia, because it is weaker and poorer than China, comes after Beijing on America’s list of geopolitical concerns—an important disagreement with the liberal Atlanticist foreign-policy establishment and not the only one.
Beyond geopolitics there is ideology. The rules-based world order means much less to Mr. Trump and to many Republican senators than it does to liberal Atlanticists. The president isn’t a believer in the application of the broken-windows theory of foreign policy—that a violation of one rule in one place materially increases the chance of other rules being broken in other places. A “realist” in the jargon of international relations, Mr. Trump thinks that national power matters much more than international law.
Given these views, it is natural that Mr. Trump and some of his Senate defenders don’t believe Ukraine matters much to the U.S., or that a few weeks or months of delay in military aid would have a discernible impact on world events. Even Republican Russia hawks like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin tend to see developing a long-term strategy to combat China as a top priority for U.S. foreign policy.
Mr. Trump’s views on foreign policy aren’t always correct, and his conduct of foreign affairs is often destructively chaotic even when his instincts are sound. But he is not all wrong, either. The decline of Europe as a force in world affairs and the shift of the axis of world politics to the Indo-Pacific are realities that American foreign policy cannot ignore. The liberal Atlanticist consensus cannot guide American foreign policy going forward, and new ways of thinking and acting will have to be found.
The domestic political circus will go on as it must. But the need to replace the liberal Atlanticist approach with a new foreign-policy framework is a bigger problem than the future of President Trump. One must hope that Democrats and Republicans can find ways to advance this vital debate even as each episode of the Trump Show that airs is more dramatic than the last.
-
Pearl Harbor and the Strategy of Economic Sanctions
By: George Friedman
There have been many lessons drawn from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One was that wars need not begin according to international law. Another was that attacks can be unexpected and that constant vigilance is necessary. Still another was that underestimating an enemy can be catastrophic. And yet another was that failure to understand how new technology changes the nature of war can be disastrous.
The list of lessons learned is of course longer than the list of lessons remembered, one of which is particularly germane at this moment: When imposing economic sanctions, the more powerful the sanctions, the greater the pressure on your adversary to strike back. At a time when the U.S. is shifting from the use of military force to the use of economic power, the lesson of why Pearl Harbor was attacked needs to be considered carefully.
War Plans
Prior to World War I, Japan was the leading industrial power in the Western Pacific. After World War I, Japan expanded its military sphere of influence. It had sided with the Anglo-French alliance during the war, and as a reward, German holdings in the Western Pacific were turned over to it. This paralleled the growth of Japanese naval power, and it seemed that the American position in the Pacific, built around Hawaii and the Philippines, was in danger.
The United States had developed a series of global war plans after the end of World War I. War Plan Black assumed a war with Germany. War Plan Red assumed a war with Britain (not quite as insane as it sounds, since the U.S. had been dueling with Britain over control of the North Atlantic since its founding). The plan that was taken most seriously was War Plan Orange. For the U.S. Navy, War Plan Orange was the basis of all planning between 1920 and 1941. It assumed that the Japanese would move against the Philippines in order to take control of the resources in present-day Indonesia and Southeast Asia. The U.S. assumed that Japan could not achieve its goals unless the Philippines was in Japanese hands, since ships in the Philippines could cut the flow of supplies to Japan. The U.S. plan was to accept the conquest of the Philippines and then send the U.S. Pacific Fleet, a massive force built around battleships, westward to force the Japanese navy into a decisive battle that the U.S. fleet would win.
The entire premise behind War Plan Orange was that the Japanese had a hunger for raw materials. That was the decisive reality. Japan was a significant industrial power but was bereft of minerals at home. They had to import nearly all the raw materials needed for their domestic industry and defense. The U.S. assumed that at some point Japan would move south and intervened in China to undermine such a move. The U.S. national defense strategy was built not on Europe but on Asia, and on the assumption that Japan would move south.
The Japanese did not move beyond Japan until 1940. They had treaties with both the Netherlands and the French to supply a wide range of raw materials. But the collapse of France and the Netherlands put in question the value of those treaties and posed an existential problem for Japan. Japan saw Indochina as unable to guarantee compliance with the treaties, and so it moved into Indochina. The United States believed that if it simply accepted the move, it would guarantee Japanese control of China and open the door for their expansion into the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean basin.
The U.S. solution to this was actions they regarded as a means short of war. It halted all sale of U.S. oil and scrap metal to Japan and had U.S. agents buy up Indonesian oil not for shipment to the United States but to prevent Japan having access to it. The Americans demanded that Japan withdraw not only from Indochina but from China as a whole. The U.S. sought to put Japan in an impossible spot on the assumption that an aggressive Japanese response would trigger War Plan Orange, force a confrontation with the Japanese fleet somewhere between Taiwan and Borneo, and finish the Japanese.
The Japanese were familiar with the concepts behind War Plan Orange due to numerous naval war games that simulated it. The danger of peacetime readiness is that it reveals the kind of war you expect to fight. The Japanese knew that if they failed to comply with U.S. demands, U.S. sanctions would cripple them at best. But if they did comply with U.S. demands, they would be reduced to an American vassal state.
Their third option was war, but knowing the specifics of U.S. war plans, they would have to fight the war in a way that would deny the U.S. the opportunity to bring its fleet of battleships to bear. They knew that the U.S. expected to lose the Philippines but that the Americans intended the loss to lead to the destruction of the Japanese navy. The Japanese understood the threat that resisting or complying with U.S. sanctions posed, and that war waged as the U.S. expected it to be waged would lead to defeat. The Japanese had hoped to avoid war with the United States, but American sanctions convinced them that the U.S. intended to break Japan. What the U.S. saw as an alternative to war the Japanese saw as forcing their hand.
Most important, they would not fight as War Plan Orange expected. They would not engage the American fleet in a surface battle. Rather than serving as the culmination of war, they decided they had to engage the U.S. fleet as the first act of war. Thus, they chose to use aircraft carriers as the main strike force that would approach from a completely unexpected direction (from the northwest), and try to fight the decisive battle not with a surface fleet against a surface fleet, but with naval air power against a surface fleet in port.
To emphasize, the Japanese did not intend or expect war with the U.S. until the U.S. put sanctions on them. Japan saw itself as maintaining access to raw materials guaranteed by treaty. It saw U.S. sanctions as an attempt to compel Japan to capitulate without engaging in war and capitulation as permanent subordination to the United States. Under this pressure, they chose war but deliberately avoided the war the U.S. had planned. They ultimately lost by underestimating the recuperative power of the United States. But they understood that their core geopolitical problem was lack of resources, which compelled them to capture Southeast Asia.
Economic Warfare
The Japanese could not back off; they had to be aggressive. The United States saw the challenge posed to U.S. security by Japan’s imperative as requiring the imposition of pressure that challenged Japan’s fundamental interests. Rather than capitulating, the Japanese chose to launch a war in a totally unexpected way. The U.S. had constantly signaled how they would wage a war with Japan, and the Japanese adjusted their own war plan in ways the U.S. didn’t expect. The Japanese were aware of the extremely high risk of the war, but thought the U.S. would negotiate rather than try to invade Japanese-held territory. Japan viewed war as less risky than sanctions. Both sides were wrong. The Americans did not anticipate the Japanese response to sanctions directed at fundamental Japanese interests. The Japanese did not understand that after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would wage war asking and giving no quarter.
American strategy during and especially after the Cold War has depended heavily on the use of sanctions. Over the past decade, the U.S. has shifted its posture away from military action toward economic warfare. In China, Iran, Russia, Turkey and numerous other countries, the first American response to divergent interests is not to wage war but to take what is seen as a less threatening step of imposing sanctions. The United States produces nearly 25 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and is the largest importer in the world. This gives it significant options and forces other countries to consider whether complying with U.S. demands is less harmful than the risk of resisting those demands.
The Japanese example is a classic case in which sanctions, deliberately targeted against a country’s core interests, caused the country to choose a military option rather than to duel economically. Tokyo realized it would lose the latter and had a chance with the former. The core lesson of Pearl Harbor was not that economic pressures aren’t a valuable tool, but that the assumption that the adversary would not choose a military response is uncertain. The more effective the sanctions, the greater the chance of a military response. The assumption that the adversary has no military options may be true given expectations of capabilities. But, as with Japan, effective sanctions can compel the other side to develop innovative and painful solutions.
The danger of War Plan Orange was that it drilled into a generation of naval officers a perception of how a war would be fought. The combination of effective sanctions and the gift of a clear understanding of American war plans caused the Japanese to adjourn the economic confrontation and commence an unexpected opening to war.
In undertaking economic sanctions, there must also be parallel and unexpected military options on the table. The predictability of U.S. operational principles allows the enemy to innovate unexpectedly. The assumption that the economic dimension will remain economic because we wish it to fails to understand one of the main lessons of Pearl Harbor.
This is not an argument against economic sanctions; they have been used for decades. It is a warning to carefully select who they are directed against and how they are applied. They can create a situation where the sanctions are so effective that war can seem like an attractive alternative. If such sanctions are required, the U.S. should not expect the enemy to go to war in a way that is most advantageous to the United States. As with Pearl Harbor, the enemy will strike where we least expect and as hard as possible. The more desperate the adversary becomes, the more the military must anticipate an unexpected response.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/post-wwii-order-ending-and-nothing-has-replaced-it/
Solid analysis. In part, this is happening simply because the world changes, and because much of the post-WWII order was designed to entrench the alliances and structures from 1945. But it’s also happening because countries’ interests and aspirations have changed. And, of course, it’s changing because there’s a disconnect between our purported elites and those they govern.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/post-wwii-order-ending-and-nothing-has-replaced-it/
Solid analysis. In part, this is happening simply because the world changes, and because much of the post-WWII order was designed to entrench the alliances and structures from 1945. But it’s also happening because countries’ interests and aspirations have changed. And, of course, it’s changing because there’s a disconnect between our purported elites and those they govern.
disconnect between our purported elites and those they govern.
THIS. ^
-
George Friedman's Thoughts: A Month of Travel
By: George Friedman
Since the beginning of November, I have traveled, in sequence, to Dubai, Calgary, New York, Istanbul, Zurich and London, with quick stopovers at home as possible, to catch my breath and try my hand at running a business. The schedule was sufficiently intense that I had to beg off writing my Thoughts column last week. But the chance to visit such cities is a rare privilege. I choose not to disclose whom I met with, unless they choose to announce it first. There are two reasons. First, I dislike name dropping, and second, because the rule of the game is he who talks doesn’t get invited back.
The general principle that guides my forecasting system is that personalities don’t matter. The constraints and imperatives imposed on a nation by necessity and circumstance shape the kind of leader who can emerge, and define what he can and must do. The leader announces the decisions that history imposes on him. Certainly, there is layer upon layer of more and more minor decisions he can make. But the major decisions, the things that touch the core of a nation, are beyond his will. This is a frightening thought. We like to think of our leaders as saints and villains, and more important, we need to think that someone is in control. But the fact is that we are hurtling forward in history, constrained by where we are, what we have and who our neighbor is.
Given this, it would seem odd that I would care to meet with leaders, beyond the pride that comes from saying I had. However, there is something that is of great value in such meetings. Accepting that their actions are the result of constraints and imperatives, the leader is at the center of these forces and experiences them in his daily life. He may not be in control of his direction, but he is a leader because he is exquisitely aware of the pressures that are forcing him hither and yon. Almost all leaders think they are in control, the decision-maker, without being fully aware of the forces driving them. But in speaking to them, you can get a sense of the imperatives and constraints guiding them that is more human than the one you would get by simply focusing on the impersonal forces. His voice may give the order to launch those fleets that he is compelled to launch, but his voice comes from his brain, and his brain feels the power of history. It is one thing to watch a game of chess, another to hear a grandmaster try to articulate his decisions.
What I heard this time from virtually all of the political figures I met with was the call for “American leadership.” This is an old phrase going back to the Cold War. It seems to elevate the United States to a special status in the international system, which it has simply by dint of its economic and military power. Calls for American leadership have frequently been demands that the U.S. behave in ways that served the interests of that particular country. In other words, the call for American leadership is actually a call for American followership – that it take its bearings from the needs of other countries.
There are two problems associated with that. First, the United States has its own needs. Second, the desire for American leadership frequently emerges from conflicts one country has with another. In calling for American leadership in managing a problem, it frequently means a call for Americans to side with one country or another. Or sometimes it is not American leadership that is wanted, but rather the United States shifting its position. A prime example is Europe and the institutional link of the United States to Europe in NATO. The United States has taken the lead in demanding that European countries carry out their responsibilities to NATO, both by increasing spending on defense to 2 percent of gross domestic product, and by possessing military forces sufficient to carry out their commitment to NATO. This is not a new demand, but of late it has become more strident.
But it cannot be said that the U.S. has abandoned leadership in this case. It is leading, but few are following. The argument is that the U.S. hasn’t posed the challenge to Europe appropriately under President Donald Trump. That may be the case, but this issue, which used to be called burden sharing, goes back very far in NATO’s past. It is not new. The U.S. has led, but only those who chose to in NATO have followed. The Europeans obviously know this, so the question is what they are talking about when they discuss “American leadership.”
The concept goes back to World War I, when the U.S. intervened toward the end of the war, was decisive in its outcome, and then went home. The U.S. had a national interest involved: preventing German domination of Europe, as that might result in a threat to the U.S. in the North Atlantic. But from the European point of view, this represented leadership – risk-taking on behalf of Europe, and then leaving Europe to make its own way, a way that led to World War II and another U.S. intervention. This time the U.S. led in underwriting Europe’s economic recovery, as well as organizing resistance to the Soviet Union.
A better term for this than leadership was “assuming the burden,” and the U.S. was assuming the burden because it was in the United States’ best interest. The idea of American leadership has less to do with leading the world in the direction the U.S. thinks it will go, and more to do with herding cats all wanting the U.S. to go in their direction, and against the neighboring cat, and doing this for the sake of doing good.
Now, not a single person who spoke to me of American leadership meant that they intended to follow. They had their own imperatives and they wanted the U.S. to support them. It was a case in which the actions are shaped by the imperatives and constraints the leader lives in, and the terminology is designed to bring American power to bear on its side. When the U.S. refuses to do that – or worse, sides with a rival – the U.S. has failed to be a nation that leads.
The political leaders know all this, of course, but they choose to say such things to persuade their own public that the limit of their power is caused by a force beyond their own control, or possibly to create a political dynamic in the United States that might compel a change in U.S. policy. The delicate language of diplomacy hides both desperate needs and ruthless ambitions. But they are never naive. No one rises to leadership of even a few million people without understanding the realities in which he works or the nature of power. They also understand that shifting responsibility changes little, but might buy them some time.
Listening to leaders has its uses. It reveals the outer layers of their real concerns. The real concern I heard on this trip was that the U.S. was in fact leading in ways they resented, and that it was not providing the soothing rhetoric that allowed them to more effectively manage their public. Soothing rhetoric has its uses, but it can also be a trap if your own people believe it. Nations do not mind trapping other nations. And right now, the leaders are uneasy with a U.S. not given to soothing statements, nor to subordinating its interests. Hence the longing for American leadership.
-
https://themindunleashed.com/2019/12/china-russia-iran-first-ever-joint-military-drills.html
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcFiJwpvmq0
-
My thought earlier was that Trump should strike sites in N.K. as a way of also telling the Mullahs in Iran he is serious. Vice versa works fine for me too.
His patience with Iran was commendable. They struck. He mostly waited. They struck. He showed restraint. They struck, and now this.
I approve of this message just sent to all would-be adversaries. This move was not only about Iran.
-
My thought earlier was that Trump should strike sites in N.K. as a way of also telling the Mullahs in Iran he is serious. Vice versa works fine for me too.
His patience with Iran was commendable. They struck. He mostly waited. They struck. He showed restraint. They struck, and now this.
I approve of this message just sent to all would-be adversaries. This move was not only about Iran.
Yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC1_tdnZq1A
-
a) You strike America or cross our red line and nothing happens.
b) You think twice before striking America because they will strike back.
Which makes us safer?
-----------------------------------------------------
Disproportionate? Soleimani killed or injured thousands of Americans. We killed back one or two guilty parties. Who is disproportionate?
-
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/opinion/trump-soleimani-iran.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
-
a) You strike America or cross our red line and nothing happens.
b) You think twice before striking America because they will strike back.
Which makes us safer?
-----------------------------------------------------
Disproportionate? Soleimani killed or injured thousands of Americans. We killed back one or two guilty parties. Who is disproportionate?
Disproportionate is how you win.
-
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/opinion/trump-soleimani-iran.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
[/quote
I'm blocked.
-
There’s a witticism that makes the rounds on Twitter whenever Donald Trump does something particularly plutocratic or corrupt, a variation on the following: Look, this is what all those folks in Midwestern diners voted for. The sarcastic point being either that Trump’s populism was a con with blue-collar voters as its mark, or else that Trump’s supporters professed to care about his populist promises only as a means to own the libs.
But with the assassination of Qassim Suleimani, I’m afraid that I must deploy the one-liner seriously: This was, in fact, exactly what a certain kind of Trump supporter voted for — including both the downscale, disaffected conservatives who turned out for him in the primary and the blue-collar Obama-Trump moderates who tipped the Midwest in the general election.
Not the killing of Suleimani specifically; like Trump himself on the campaign trail, some of these voters wouldn’t be able to tell the Quds Force from the Kurds. But the strategic spirit behind the killing, the preference for a single act of vengeance over more ambitious forms of intervention, the belief in the hardest possible counterpunch, the dismissal of norms and rules and cautious habits that constrain the violence that America deals out … all this is what Trump promised in the 2016 campaign, with his simultaneous dismissal of both neoconservatism and liberal internationalism and his pledge to crush America’s enemies by any means.
This combined promise was not a contradiction; it was an expression of a practical philosophy of foreign policy, usefully called Jacksonianism, that many Americans and especially many white and rural and working-class Americans have always tended to embrace.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
The phrase “Jacksonian” belongs to the foreign policy scholar Walter Russell Mead, part of a famous typology in which he divides American foreign policy tendencies into four worldviews: Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jacksonian and Jeffersonian. The worldviews are simplifications (“intended to be suggestive and evocative,” in Mead’s words), and they inevitably frustrate many scholars; nonetheless, they remain a useful way of thinking about how, in our imperial era, American foreign policy tends to work.
The Hamiltonians are the business-minded internationalists, cold-eyed and stability-oriented and wary of wars that seem idealistic rather than self-interested. The Wilsonians are the idealists, whether neoconservative or liberal-humanitarian, who regard the United States military as a force for spreading democracy and protecting human rights. Most foreign policy elites belong to one of these two groups, both political parties include both tendencies in their upper echelons, and most recent presidencies have been defined by internal conflicts between the two.
But far more American voters are either Jacksonians or Jeffersonians. The Jeffersonian impulse, more common on the left than on the right, is toward a “come home, America” retreat from empire that regards global hegemony as a corrupting folly and America’s wars as mostly unwise and unjust. (“No blood for oil” is the defining Jeffersonian attitude toward all our Middle Eastern misadventures.) The Jacksonian tendency, more common on the right than on the left, is toward a pugilistic nationalism that’s wary of all international entanglements but ready for war whenever threats arise. (“More rubble, less trouble” is the essential Jacksonian credo.) Since neither tendency has that much purchase in the imperial capital, it’s a safe bet that at any given moment in Washington, D.C., elites in both political parties will be trying to mobilize Jacksonian or Jeffersonian sentiment to achieve Hamiltonian or Wilsonian ends.
But when elites of both persuasions preside over too many calamities, you can get Jeffersonians and Jacksonians as important presidential contenders in their own right — think of George McGovern and George Wallace when the Vietnam War went bad. And when one party’s elite loses control of the electoral process entirely, it turns out that you can get an actual Jacksonian in the White House.
Yes, not everything Trump has done fits Mead’s paradigm — but a great deal of what makes him different from previous presidents is plainly Jacksonian. A Hamiltonian wouldn’t have saber-rattled so wildly against North Korea; a Wilsonian wouldn’t be so subsequently eager for a deal with such an odious regime. A Hamiltonian wouldn’t be as eager for an extended trade war with China; a Wilsonian would speak out more clearly against Beijing’s human rights abuses instead of just treating them as one more bargaining chip. Trump’s bureaucracy-impeded attempts to pull out of Syria and Afghanistan are patently Jacksonian; likewise his disdain for his predecessor’s negotiations on climate change. His eagerness to pardon war criminals and threaten war crimes, meanwhile, are Jacksonianism at its worst.
Editors’ Picks
‘There Was a Woman Sitting Alone at the End of the Bar’
Hype House and the Los Angeles TikTok Mansion Gold Rush
Adam Driver Has Put Everything He’s Got Onscreen
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
What is the best of Jacksonianism? I would say it’s the capacity to identify and prioritize threats, an area where Wilsonians get way too expansive and ambitious (“make the world safe for democracy,” “an end to evil”), while Hamiltonians sometimes let realpolitik blind them to ideological enmities that can’t be negotiated away.
To the extent that Trump’s foreign policy has been a useful corrective to his predecessors, and better than what other Republican candidates might have offered, it’s been because of his attempts at just such a prioritization. The execution has been, inevitably, Trumpy, but the goals — drawing down in Syria and Central Asia, confronting China while de-escalating with North Korea, burden-shifting to other NATO powers in Europe while keeping our relationship with Russia cool but short of Cold War hostility — are more strategically reasonable than the Bushian and Clintonite forms of interventionism that Trump campaigned against.
But in Trump’s Iran policy we may be seeing the limits of Jacksonianism, or at least a Jacksonianism that operates in strategic contexts that its own impulses did not create.
The Iranian government is indeed our enemy, to an extent that the Hamiltonians in the Obama administration sometimes underestimated, and in that sense Trump’s hawkishness toward the mullahs fits with his Jacksonian approach. But the Tehran regime’s capacity and inclination to cause problems for America also reflect our regional presence, posture and alliances, which mostly exist to advance a kind of mixtape of Hamiltonian and Wilsonian grand strategies — access to Middle Eastern oil, the promotion of democracy and human rights, and regime change in Tehran itself.
None of these are naturally Jacksonian goals, especially now that America is more energy independent than when the Carter Doctrine was formulated or the first Iraq War fought. Were America’s Iran policy fully Jacksonian we might still be at loggerheads with Tehran, but we wouldn’t be nearly so invested in projecting power in the Persian Gulf, and there would be fewer natural flash points and fewer targets for Iranian attacks.
But so long as Trump is working within an inherited Hamiltonian-Wilsonian strategic framework, his Jacksonian tactical approach — in the Suleimani case, picking the most surprising and dramatic option on the military board of retaliatory options — is unlikely to serve his official goal of escaping endless Middle Eastern entanglements. Instead, it points to either a permanent retaliatory cycle with the Iranians — we hit hard, they hit hard, we hit a little harder, ad infinitum — or else a disastrous ground war in a nonessential theater, the least Jacksonian of ends.
[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
Precisely because I think Trump’s Jacksonianism is fundamentally sincere, I don’t think the full-scale war scenario is particularly likely. And since I’ve written numerous columns, before his election and since, about Trump as geopolitical destabilizer without anything as bad as Obama’s still-unfolding Libya folly yet ensuing, it’s important to stress that the fallout from the Suleimani gambit could be less dramatic than the panicked punditry expects. Indeed, if the dead general was really the Islamic Republic’s Stonewall Jackson, its asymmetric strategy’s indispensable man, then over the long run his death might benefit American interests more than any subsequent escalation hurts them.
But the most likely near-term consequence of Suleimani’s death is an escalation in hostilities that looks to most Americans like more of the endless war that Trump campaigned against. In which case some war-weary voters might decide that if they really want out of futile Middle Eastern conflicts electing a ruthless Jacksonian is not enough; only a peace-seeking Jeffersonian will do.
And it just so happens that a genuine left-wing Jeffersonian, Bernie Sanders, is currently near the top of the Democratic field, contending with Joe Biden, the embodiment of the Hamiltonian-Wilsonian elite dialectic despite his blue-collar lingo, in an increasingly spirited foreign policy debate.
If the establishment’s follies gave us Trump’s Jacksonian presidency, in other words, the question before the Democratic electorate is whether the perils of Trumpism require that we give that establishment another chance — or whether putting a Jeffersonian in charge of an empire built by Hamiltonians and Wilsonians is the only reasonable option left.
-
Time.com, Who knew? I thought everything Trump did was unprecedented.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obama's Breathtaking Expansion of a President's Power To Make War
BY JACK GOLDSMITH
SEPTEMBER 11, 2014
Future historians will ask why George W. Bush sought and received express congressional authorization for his wars (against al Qaeda and Iraq) and his successor did not. They will puzzle over how Barack Obama the prudent war-powers constitutionalist transformed into a matchless war-powers unilateralist. And they will wonder why he claimed to “welcome congressional support” for his new military initiative against the Islamic State but did not insist on it in order to ensure clear political and legal legitimacy for the tough battle that promised to consume his last two years in office and define his presidency.
“History has shown us time and again . . . that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch,” candidate Barack Obama told the Boston Globe in 2007. “It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action.” President Obama has discarded these precepts. His announcement that he will expand the use of military force against the Islamic State without the need for new congressional consent marks his latest adventure in unilateralism and cements an astonishing legacy of expanding presidential war powers.
The legacy began in 2011 with the seven-month air war in Libya. President Obama relied only on his Commander in Chief powers when he ordered U.S. forces to join NATO allies in thousands of air strikes that killed thousands of people and effected regime change. His lawyers argued beyond precedent that the large-scale air attacks did not amount to “War” that required congressional approval. They also blew a large hole in the War Powers Resolution based on the unconvincing claim that the Libya strikes were not “hostilities” that would have required compliance with the law.
Although he backed down from his threat to invade Syria last summer, President Obama proclaimed then the power to use unilateral force for purely humanitarian ends without congressional or United Nations or NATO support. This novel theory, which removed all practical limits on presidential humanitarian intervention, became a reality in last month’s military strikes to protect civilians trapped on Mount Sinjar and in the town of Amirli.
Yesterday’s announcement of a ramped-up war against the Islamic State in Iraq and possibly Syria rests on yet another novel war powers theory. The administration has said since August that air strikes in Syria were justified under his constitutional power alone. But yesterday it switched course and maintained that Congress had authorized the 2014 campaign against the Islamic State in the 2001 law that President George W. Bush sought to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda.
The administration’s new approach allows it to claim that it is acting with congressional approval. It also lets it avoid the strictures of the War Powers Resolution because that law does not apply to wars approved by Congress.
The problem with this approach is that its premise is unconvincing. The 2001 law authorized force against al Qaeda and its associates. The Islamic State once had associations with al Qaeda, but earlier this year al Qaeda expelled it and broke off ties. The administration nonetheless insists that the 2001 law applies to its new military action, primarily because the Islamic State claims to be “the true inheritor of Usama bin Laden’s legacy” and is supported by “some individual members and factions of [al-Qaeda]-aligned groups.” But if this remarkably loose affiliation with al Qaeda brings a terrorist organization under the 2001 law, then Congress has authorized the President to use force endlessly against practically any ambitious jihadist terrorist group that fights against the United States. The President’s gambit is, at bottom, presidential unilateralism masquerading as implausible statutory interpretation.
-
Methodology and Empathetic Analysis
By: George Friedman
I have spent a great deal of time trying to lay the groundwork for an approach to understanding the relations between nations. I was not searching so much for a methodology as for a sensibility for considering and understanding these relations. A methodology is a highly disciplined system of extracting essential variables and creating a predictive model. The subject of international relations does not lend itself to a simplistic methodology (a term I do not intend as dismissive but simply descriptive). Rather it requires a sensibility. The causes of conflict, for example, are rarely rooted in a neat model. They may emerge but out of a sense of complexity and disorder that permits us to grasp the whole, rather than out of a model that simply extracts the causes. The key word here is “simply.” Causation is so intricate that a general model is impossible. I will argue that a system based on sensibility must be created.
Let’s begin with a smaller and therefore more manageable unit, the nuclear family, using my own family as an example. It’s what I know best, and it highlights the layers that have to be understood and respected when dealing with human beings. Most important, the truth can be hidden even from the speaker.
My father’s family came from the western foothills of the Carpathian Mountains and moved west into Hungary late in the 18th century. My father and his half-brother, born before World War I, became enemies in the 1930s. My father was a social democrat and his brother was a communist. Others have told me that after this time they never spoke directly to each other again. Both were forced into Hungarian labor battalions attacking the Soviet Union. My uncle was captured by the Soviets, taken to Moscow for training as a Soviet apparatchik, and returned to Hungary as a minor Communist official after World War II. My father refused to surrender to the Soviets and returned to Hungary after a terrible journey walking back from the Russian front to Budapest in the middle of winter. The silence endured. Yet when the Communists came to power and my father was to be arrested, my uncle got word to him to flee. We ended up in the United States. When the 1956 revolution came, my father hired smugglers to go into Hungary and rescue his half-brother from the wrath of the momentarily triumphant revolutionaries. As my father had been saved by his brother, he tried in turn to save him. But his brother refused to leave Hungary.
The point is that the silence was far more complex than the words they spoke about each other. There was a depth that had to be understood.
The two boys had the same mother but different fathers. My father was younger so for a while his father likely favored him over his half-brother who was not of his blood. My grandfather fought in World War I and died of complications after the war, and so my grandmother was widowed for a second time. The brothers grew into adolescence with their mother, but the years in which my uncle lived under the rule of his step-father had to be painful. The love of a father for his own blood is real and frequently unrestrained. We do not know whether the step-father influenced his wife to put distance between her love for her first and second sons, but my father belonged to both of them and it is likely he was favored. Many families have such dark episodes, their memory hidden even from themselves. Often the memory is so painful that the animosity can’t be hidden, but must be given a more sophisticated and less honest explanation for its origin.
The formal family explanation for the hatred between the two half-brothers has to do with political ideology. A methodology that argues that different views alienate people is both true and utterly insufficient in this case. After everything that each of them went through, with so many in the family dead, could ideology really cause this abyss? Methodology is too antiseptic to grasp the real origins of human malice. It wants a clear, replicable process, but human existence does not yield to that. Its truth is in the dark corners that we can grasp only through empathy, and not by method.
Empathetic analysis is not sympathetic analysis. It is simply the process of imagining yourself in someone else’s position and the pressures that have come to bear in shaping them. Imagine two boys living in the poverty of the Carpathian foothills who both lose their fathers. That must have plunged them deeper into hunger and despair. After the first husband’s death, the mother remarries. Women were in high demand in those days, given the rate of death during childbirth. Men married later to earn enough money to support a family.
When my grandfather, older than my grandmother, married her, he saved her and my uncle from poverty. But her new husband naturally wanted his own family, and my grandmother gave birth to my father, two girls and another boy. My grandfather was poor by most standards, and he probably favored my father (his first son) over the older step-son, both materially and emotionally.
I take this analysis not from anything I was told but from the simple facts. A half-brother is likely to get the short end of the stick, and his mother must protect her vulnerable newborn and allow her older child to make his own way.
The anger was expressed ideologically, but it was not about ideology. The anger was the force driving a division between a mother, her second husband and their children on one side, and her son from her first marriage on the other. My uncle’s sense of having been hurled into the ranks of the inessential and my father’s commitment to protecting his sisters from his brother (and that is what he said he had to do) provides a more empathetic analysis of the situation.
Is the analysis correct? The explanation that the split was due to ideology is after all these years hard to believe. And there are some key questions that could lead one to a different explanation: Were the half-brothers still bound by a degree of love? My uncle saved my father’s life, and my father tried to save his, both at great risk to themselves. What could it have felt like to have your father die when you’re so young? How did it feel to have him replaced by a stranger who wants his own family? What does it feel like to see your mother having his children and loving them? How do two boys, surviving the hardship of the Carpathians, as tough and unforgiving as the countryside, deal with each other when there are no family therapists to tell them that hunger doesn’t matter?
The family is the foundation of the nation. It is also the laboratory within which human behavior can be modeled. But it is not modeled as you would model the economy or build a war game. Human beings cannot be blended together as a mathematical abstraction; they must be analyzed empathetically, by telling their story and understanding how little choice they had. By grasping the imperative and constraints that controlled their lives, and observing empirically what they did to each other, it is possible to take the ideological explanations both used and understand that the real limits and constraints rest in a different place. But to do this work you must be naive, you must see the obvious, believe what you see and refuse to be diverted by inconsequential sophistication. And above all, you must tell the story.
Now, explaining Iranian foreign policy is enormously more difficult than this, but it begins with some of the same core principles. We are all caught in a web of needs and relationships that force us in certain directions. We can choose to go where we want, when we are rich and safe. Otherwise you have fewer choices and a much higher penalty if you ignore the dangers. And the more power you have accumulated, the less room for maneuver you have, as power slips away with each misstep.
Therefore, the key to geopolitical analysis is understanding the constraints and imperatives, and being a good story teller. In “Speaker for the Dead” by science fiction writer Orson Scott Card, Ender Wiggin takes it on himself to explain with empathy, but without saccharine sympathy, the lives men have lived. I try to do that with nations. We both believe that we have choices, but they are few, and because they are few, our lives, families and nations are in some sense simpler and less mysterious than they appear.
There is a conventional methodology built around constraints (being born in the Carpathian foothills, being poor, having a father die), and then there is a sensibility that serves as a different methodology, called empathetic analysis, built around imperatives (eating, being safe, being loved). For that you must see the story, accept the story’s uniqueness and understand how it compels action. And then you can tell how people live and behave. It requires that you see clearly what has happened and neither condemn nor excuse.
A couple makes a family, a family builds a business, the business creates an industry, and all constitute a nation. One cannot be understood without the others, and no one truly understands or tells the truth as to why he did what he did. When looking at the United States and Iran, diplomacy hides the truth on both sides. Only empathy can reveal it, and empathy is the foundation of geopolitical analysis. We are humans whether peasants or kings, and neither fully understand why they do what they do. But they must be spoken for. Methodology reduces reality to the manageable. Empathy welcomes its complexity.
-
second post
Returning to the Beginning
By: George Friedman
In recent weeks, I have been writing on the very ordinary but precious moments of my life. I wrote about the complexity of my family’s holidays and of a vacation, with what I hope came across as humor. All this is in preparation for my return to my original project: to place geopolitics in the philosophical tradition. There may seem to be no connection between the ordinary moments of life and something as exalted as philosophy, but they are intimately connected.
Ordinary life is extraordinary. The task of philosophy and geopolitics is to find the sacred in everyday life, and to do so with deep irony, which requires being able to laugh heartily. For who are we humans to speak of our lives and the sacred? Anyone who tries must do so with a deep sense of its pretentiousness. In elevating a rum punch during a beach vacation to a subject worthy of deep thought, we do three things: We elevate the ordinary, force ourselves to realize that there is little that is ordinary there, and face the chasm separating our attempt to understand the world and the absurdity of the attempt. But in that rum punch, in the game it plays with your mind, there is a freedom to both elevate yourself and mock yourself.
The problem of philosophy is that it tends to be boring. It is boring because it is complex and because it is abstracted from the lives that people live. The great philosophers give you a window through which to see yourself. That window is irony or, for those of us less elevated, humor. The entire idea of philosophy is humorous. Here we are, human beings who know many things, being told that we do not know the most important things. But humans know well the most important things: doing one’s duty, nurturing children, battling nature and society to provide for them, being just without being a martyr, being kind and being forgiving, even to those who won’t forgive.
This is a random list, and many things can be refined and added, but if philosophy is the study of the true and beautiful, then it at best makes elegant the things we already know. Philosophy holds no surprises, except for one profoundly important one: that human beings, in the course of their lives, should contemplate such matters without holding an advanced degree. And with that, philosophy contributes its most important gifts: irony and caution.
Irony is telling a truth in such a way that we can see it through the veil of laughter. As Plato infers, who are we mere humans to dare to think such exalted thoughts? I think of my father, who survived the Mauthausen concentration camp and a Soviet occupation, whom life had crushed too many times, who still had the ability to hope for something better and laughed at me, saying I was such a scrawny child to place his hopes in. He had faced Hitler’s and Stalin’s ideas directly and survived them, yet could still know that all homes, especially the most urgent, must be clothed in laughter.
Philosophy must also cloak the best and worst from the world. A philosopher is not someone with an advanced degree. It is someone who has confronted the best and worst of the world, and discovered that it takes courage to face both. I have an advanced degree and wrote books and articles that were designed not to enlighten but to demonstrate my brilliance through their obscurity. Later, doing other work, I discovered that philosophy does not live in the academy where justice is discussed but in the world, where justice must be lived.
Geopolitics is not recognized as a field, so I made it a business. But geopolitics is at the heart of philosophy. If we agree that all the examples I cited can be summed up by the question “who is man?” then the first answer is that humanity is divided into two parts: man and woman, and all that follows from this. The first discussion of duty must somehow revolve around this.
Geopolitics is a field that tries to define, explain and forecast the relationship among communities. The story it tells is a story of greatness and horror, but it begins in the simplest things that make us human. The first question I have raised in other places is, what creates a community or nation? The answer is the love of one’s own, the love of the things you were born to, and being brought up to know that their loves are yours and their hates are yours as well. But where does the love of one’s own come from? The irreducible truth is that the love of one’s own must be preceded if not with love then at least with lust. To have a child you must have sperm and an ovum. However we reengineer the human being and reproduction, and whatever journey in life the child undertakes, it begins with the sperm and ovum, and most usually the man and woman, retelling the oldest story there is.
Philosophy ought not to be about pontificating, and certainly not advocacy of policies, although listening to a professor discussing the just war is a hoot. But it is a hoot meant not to reveal hidden things but to set rules unrelated to reality. He is saved by the grace of indifference.
This may strike you as pointless or obvious. But that is the purpose of philosophy, to hold up to the light things that you are intimately familiar with and suddenly see something you never imagined you would see there. And those things are easiest to see when you see how preposterous it is for you to be seeing them. Next week, I will try to start climbing the mountain.
-
Decade Forecast: 2020-2030
19 MINS READ
Feb 12, 2020 | 02:59 GMT
(Shutterstock)
Table of Contents
OVERVIEW
An Overview of the 2020s
Factors Shaping the 2020s
View As Multi Page
Overview
Over the next 10 years, the world will revert to a multipolar power structure that will encourage constantly shifting alliances and create a more contentious global system. In the midst of this dynamic change, pockets of economic opportunity will emerge. ...
SECTION
An Overview of the 2020s
7 MINS READ
Jan 29, 2020 | 15:48 GMT
Over the next 10 years, the world will revert to a multipolar power structure that will encourage constantly shifting alliances and create a more contentious global system. In the midst of this dynamic change, pockets of economic opportunity will emerge. ...
Toward a Multipolar World
As the decade dawns, the world system is moving toward a more "normal" state of affairs, a return neither to the bipolar blocs of the Cold War nor to the brief hegemonic interlude that followed. Rather, we see a return to a world with several competing poles of power, both large and small, with less defined and more fluid alliances and partnerships. Over the decade, the United States and China — buoyed by their economic, political, military and social power — will be the most significant poles, with Russia and Europe each playing important, albeit less powerful, roles. Numerous smaller alliances and alignments will emerge, regionally or topically focused, seeking to use their shared interests and pooled resources to better maneuver among the larger powers.
The United States will remain the single largest power in holistic terms through the decade, but its comparative share of power is waning. China will continue to expand its global role, but domestic issues will limit its overall attention and power. Russia faces increasingly severe demographic and economic challenges, and by the end of the decade, the Russian-Chinese relationship will likely undergo significant strain as the power balance tips in Beijing's favor. Europe, meanwhile, will struggle to forge a new identity as it grows more apparent that the dream of a pan-national Europe does not match the reality of the differing social, economic and political models spread across the Continent.
The travails of the European Union, in plain view since the global financial crisis, are a precursor of the future across much of the world. The challenges posed by the spread of technologies, the revival of economic nationalism and stresses over economic expectations will likely lead to an increase in localized and regional conflict. With neither a global hegemon nor a bipolar system to try to force stability, the globe's shifting allegiances and alliances, changing trade arrangements and flows, and increasing social and political instability will produce a more fluid and contentious world over this decade.
Amid that volatility, pockets of economic opportunity and growth will emerge. Southeast Asia, East Africa and South America are but some the areas where expanding populations, rising urbanization, infrastructure development and growing social expectations will provide those opportunities. If they are able to capitalize on technology trends, and not be bypassed, these areas are poised to be engines of global growth. They stand in contrast to the global north, where populations are graying and stagnating, or even declining, slowing the rate of consumption and available capital. The demographic dichotomy will invigorate nationalist sentiments, even as migration may be the very thing needed to ease the social burdens in both the north and the south.
It is a decade where resistance to the ideals of extreme globalization will be even more manifest and where the assertion of national and local self-interest will clash with trends of regionalism and globalism. Amid demographic and economic challenges, the tendency will be to think local and act local, despite the identification of global problems.
Political Framework: The Limits of Alliances
Without a singular global hegemon, or clearly defined competing blocs, nations will be freer to pursue relationships of benefit to their unique interests, leading to looser alignments, rather than comprehensive alliances. Nations will resist singular political, economic, security and social partnerships, preferring flexibility. It will be more common to have economic ties with one partner and security ties with another, straddling competitors among the larger powers. Despite calls for regional and global solutions, the nation and even subnationalism will be the dominant expression during the decade.
The United States and Europe will continue to diverge as the latter struggles with its own internal cohesion and the former moves to a less interventionist pattern. This will play out not merely in the realm of NATO and military activity, but in trade and taxation models, global climate initiatives, cyberspace policies and other aspects of global governance.
Meanwhile, during the first half of the decade, Russian-Chinese cooperation will continue to expand in the military, economic and technological realms. But China and Russia remain wary of one another's strength and motives. Russia will begin to resist China's initiatives by the latter half of the decade as Moscow prepares for a significant demographic crunch in the 2030s and sees Chinese infrastructure and connectivity stretching through the old Soviet Central Asia and Eastern Europe, through the Indian Ocean Basin and north across the Arctic as a threefold envelopment of its former sphere of influence.
Economic Framework: The Limits of Globalization
Demographic, economic and technological developments are creating the pressures and the space for reshaping the global trade patterns that have been the norm since the late 1980s. While globalization will not go away, and complex supply chains will remain, there will be moves back toward more regional and local supply chains, and tighter intraregional trade. Comprehensive multilateral trade agreements have reached their limits due to their complexity and inflexibility, and they will be replaced with bilateral and minilateral trade arrangements. Coupled with surges in economic nationalism, this will prove a more complex environment for large multinational corporations, forcing the navigation of multiple systems or a choice to operate only in one.
We see a slower overall economic growth over the next decade, as the structures of trade and demographic dynamics evolve, though there will be localized pockets of high growth in less developed areas. The broader economic stagnation will have social implications as expectations of a continual rise in prosperity remain unfulfillable and youths find employment and upward mobility elusive, whether due to population bulges in the south or greying populations in the north not making way for new workers. The U.S. dollar is unlikely to lose its primacy in the international system during the next decade, though its centrality will continue to erode. China is simply not prepared to take on the cost and risk of promoting the yuan as the global reserve currency, and intra-European challenges will continue to weigh down the euro. Where China and Russia may make progress will be in exchange mechanisms, as they build redundancies and bypasses to blunt U.S. sanctions power.
Security Framework: The Limits of U.S. Power
Attempts by the United States to shift from counterterrorism to a focus on peer and near-peer competition will be only partially successful over the next decade, as terrorism, whether inspired by global ideals or local issues (or more often than not a combination of the two), will not fade away. But even the United States has finite resources, and prioritization will have to be made. We expect the United States, actively or by default, to encourage local and regional actors to take up security responsibilities, with Washington intervening only occasionally where deemed strategically important. Europe will see a continued evolution of its security role beyond the confines of NATO. A shift in U.S. posture on the Middle East and South Asia, and the ripple implications into Central Asia, will ultimately pull Russia and China to take a more active approach, compelling Beijing to finally break from its reticence to use its military forces abroad.
Technological advances will distribute capabilities, reducing the military dominance of the "big powers." Automated systems, information operations, cyber actions with kinetic consequences and advances in communications will facilitate actions by even smaller states and nonstate actors. First- and second-tier powers will accelerate competition for space dominance, and long-anticipated advanced systems, including hypersonic and energy weapons, will reach operational stages. Following North Korea's example, we also see a further erosion of nuclear containment this decade.
SECTION
Factors Shaping the 2020s
12 MINS READ
Jan 29, 2020 | 15:51 GMT
Over the next 10 years, the world will revert to a multipolar power structure that will encourage constantly shifting alliances and create a more contentious global system. In the midst of this dynamic change, pockets of economic opportunity will emerge. ...
Reshaping Global Norms
The existing international system is built on the back of a North Atlantic consensus — effectively among the United States, Canada and Western Europe. The basic economic, political and security architecture was put in place when this represented the bulk of global trade and economic activity and military and political power. But the world has changed substantially since the end of World War II, and particularly in the post-Cold War era. The rest of the world is now staking its claim to shape global norms, regulations and standards, and their champion is China. This trend will only accelerate over the decade.
Competition over global governance isn't just about the relation between nations, it is about trade and technology. China has expanded its position in global regulatory and standards-setting bodies and will continue to take a more active role. Coupled with China's sheer size and market, this can have lasting impact on the development and deployment of new technologies, from electric vehicles to artificial intelligence, telecommunications infrastructure and the internet of things.
The spectrum of differences is seen particularly in areas where social, economic and national security considerations overlap (telecommunications), but also in places as varied as agriculture policy and phytosanitary standards, and conflicting desires for global standards and national independence. In this, we see continued divergence not only between the United States and China, but also between each of them and Europe. While there are many areas of cooperation between or among these three, the decade will see a further fracturing of global consensus, and the emergence of competing but not completely divergent standards and regulations.
One large question for the decade is the role of the United Nations, and more specifically that of the Security Council. The council's five permanent members are no longer representative of the distribution of global power and influence, and as competition for global norms and standards heats up, reform of the Security Council is likely to be a contentious issue in the decade. Similar questions of relevance will dog the World Trade Organization, driven by the continuing shift away from multilateral trade arrangements.
Shifting Trade Patterns
Containerization revolutionized the shipping industry, driving major new investments in ports and ship design and even requiring alterations in physical geography, including the expansion of the Panama Canal. But the growth of global containerized shipping may be nearing its limits, and while it will not necessarily decline, even a slowdown to that growth could create economic difficulties for the numerous new or expanded port facilities built over the past few decades.
Rising labor costs will reduce China's role as the center of global manufacturing. Few other locations can singly fill the huge space it currently occupies. Instead, the sector will become more distributed, much of it to nearby Southeast Asia. But if overall trade patterns begin to contract, the space for these countries to take advantage of their growing labor pools to move up the value chain will shrink.
A combination of shifts in technology, purchasing and labor patterns, climate awareness, and rising economic nationalism will contribute to a further reformation of global trade patterns, with growing levels of regional trade versus continued expansion of long supply chains. Further disruptions will stem from shifts in energy and commodity trade patterns, the expansion of new sea and land routes (driven by China's Belt and Road Initiative), and economic nationalism. Breakthroughs in additive or advanced manufacturing could compound the contraction of complex global supply chains.
Cyber Fragmentation
We expect a further fragmenting of global communications and information infrastructure over the next decade. These systems sit at the intersection of matters of national security, information sovereignty, business continuity and personal freedom. Europe, the United States and China represent differing approaches to creating a balance among these interests, and as each creates differing regulatory environments, it will prove more difficult for companies to operate freely across all three, leading to reshaped technology supply chains. Over the decade, these trends can compound to create differing spheres of technology infrastructure.
Economic competition, differing regulations and national security concerns will also affect research and development initiatives, making it more difficult for ideas to freely flow between the private and state sectors and across geographies. Developments in artificial intelligence and other big data projects will diverge based on regulations over the collection and storage of data. Fragmentation will increase the pace and scope of cyberespionage in the private and state sectors.
Despite fragmenting systems, the low bar for entry will leave the cyberdomain vulnerable to state and nonstate actors conducting theft, espionage, disruption and information operations. States will struggle with managing information technologies that facilitate organization and mass movements within and across borders. The expansion of applications for the internet of things increases the likelihood that cyber actions will more frequently have kinetic implications. Should a major disruption to power, communications or financial systems occur, government responses will lead to further tightening of cybersovereignty.
Technology Impacts
Technology is a massive bucket, but for this forecast, we will focus on three key areas: information systems, power generation and manufacturing.
The expansion of information systems can create educational opportunities, allowing distributed instruction and adaptable training and reducing the overconcentration of educational opportunities in key cities. In effect, this growth can redistribute opportunity, potentially slowing the pace at which developed economies are hollowed out and increasing access in developing nations. But the pace of technological change also requires rapid adaptability, and some areas will struggle to keep pace, particularly in the global south, where rising populations and limited government resources may leave them playing catch-up in training and adoption.
Advances in alternative energy production, large-scale energy storage and smart grid technology may do for energy production and distribution what cellular services did for telecommunications. These technological developments will allow the construction of smaller scale localized transmission grids that could, by the end of the decade, facilitate a rapid expansion of rural electrification, bringing new educational, health and employment opportunities to more places. This will have significant effects on social and political patterns, bringing disruption along with opportunity to areas of India, Central Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America where such connectivity had previously not been viable.
Advanced manufacturing techniques will facilitate the further near- or onshoring of manufacturing after decades of labor arbitrage. Advanced and additive manufacturing can reduce material and storage costs, facilitate just-in-time on-demand manufacturing, and allow smaller scale distributed facilities. While we do not expect a wholesale shift in manufacturing patterns over the decade, we do see experimentation that blends techniques such as 3D printing with on-demand purchasing and delivery services such as those offered by Amazon.com — an expansion of existing on-demand book printing to other simple tangibles. If such production were to grow faster than expected buoyed by advances in materials science and the expiration of key patents, it could undermine the opportunity for developing nations to move up the value chain as centers of manufacturing for global consumption.
A final feature of the decade will be the acceleration of the space race, with states, private industry and hybrids of the two competing over launch technologies, telecommunications systems and experimental space-based manufacturing. Since satellite systems fill critical roles in communications and information infrastructure and national security, as the space race heats up, so will the militarization of space.
Climate Issues
Over the next decade, the most significant physical impacts of climate change will be an increasing volatility of extreme weather events, along with more acute water stress, shifts in maritime foodstuff resources and evolving accessibility to the Arctic. But the most immediate impacts will be felt at the political and social levels. Shifting energy production and transportation priorities will drive changes in the energy, automotive and infrastructure sectors. Europe will be the test bed of the economic effects of taking more aggressive measures to change the energy and transportation mix, but this may also exacerbate national and regional differences.
Increasing weather volatility, including shifting monsoon patterns, and expanding urbanization, with its attendant increase in animal protein consumption and concentrated water usage, can be expected to create several spreading agricultural challenges, punctuated by acute short-term crises. The developing world remains far behind the developed world in per capita meat consumption, but reduced poverty is driving rising rates, compounding water and land demand for food production. Water stresses can limit urbanization initiatives and strain hydropower production. In places like India and Central Asia, we expect water stress to have significant social and political ramifications over the decade.
Changing ocean temperature patterns are already affecting the location and robustness of stocks of fish and other marine foods. These resources are particularly significant both to the Asia-Pacific as a key source of animal protein and among localized areas elsewhere. As marine resource concentrations migrate, they cross artificial borders and contribute to clashes over territorial seas and maritime resources. We expect greater competition over maritime resources to strain relations not only along the Asia-Pacific rim but also along the Arctic and Antarctic frontiers.
Climate shifts have created the most profound and immediate changes in the Arctic, with sea ice patterns now effectively altering geography as much as human-made canals did in the past. With growing technological capabilities, competition over future resources and strategic concerns, the Arctic will be a focal point for great power competition, for challenges to global governance and norms, and for testing the limits of cooperation over climate mitigation with competition over resources and strategic advantage.
Beyond Hydrocarbons
As climate change and economic and technological advances drive shifts in energy production and storage, hydrocarbon-based power will wane in overall significance — but it is unlikely to be surpassed by other methods over the decade. Neither will demand for oil peak before 2030. The continued expansion of liquefied natural gas infrastructure will shift global energy trade flows, as it offers new ways of being both green and diversifying suppliers for energy security.
Competition over strategic minerals for new energy applications will open investment opportunities and geopolitical competition in South America, Africa and along the Arctic fringe. Frontier locations, such as seabed mineral extraction, will draw continued interest but are unlikely to reach significant economic viability during the decade. However, they will reopen debates over global governance in the Arctic and Antarctic, with implications toward future developments in space exploration.
Shifting technology priorities risk driving boom-or-bust cycles in key new resource commodities, and rising economic security concerns will lead to increased political competition over key producer regions. The exploitation of new energy resources is unlikely to lead to development patterns driven by a concentration of easy access to a commodity in high demand akin to those experienced in the Middle East. But opportunities will emerge for nations able to exploit and retain control over in-demand mineral resources.
Demographics
Much of the developed north is already facing graying populations and stagnating or declining natural population growth. The impacts of this trend will be felt keenly over the next decade. The financial burden will begin to strain social safety nets, and underfunded pension systems will force governments to further increase retirement ages, reducing space for entry to younger workers and making it harder for those wishing to exit the labor pool to afford retirement. As retirees move from storing up savings to spending on basic needs, the amount of available capital in the banking and finance system will begin to shrink. These challenges will be most pronounced in Europe, Japan and South Korea, though the United States will not remain unscathed.
In the global south, aside from China and soon India, populations are still growing, creating pools of available labor and, when paired with urbanization, rising consumption rates. These growing populations, with rising expectations, may prove a mixed blessing. If countries can harness the available labor, they can become pockets of economic growth and consumption. But if they are unable to meet expectations, they are vulnerable to social disruption and political turmoil. The contrast of demographic trends between the "north" and "south" is already playing into political and economic nationalism in Europe and the United States, often characterized as anti-immigrant. But by the end of the decade, this may shift to competition for select immigrants to counter demographic declines.
Technological advances have the potential to exacerbate or ameliorate these challenges. If advanced manufacturing techniques, lower energy costs and shorter transportation routes (or politically motivated economic policies) lead to more near- or onshoring, many of the countries poised to step into the low- and mid-end manufacturing and arbitrage their large labor pools may find themselves bypassed. But advances in telecommunications connectivity that provide significant decreases in lag time could begin to open a new space for outsourcing control of physical manufacturing without needing to move factories. In either case, the challenge of technological change against the current demographic backdrop will be one of reskilling — and the countries most adept at this will have the advantage.
Poverty and Health
In part, health care advances, the increasing percentage of women in the workforce, smaller families and poverty alleviation efforts over the past half-century will drive the demographic shifts in the coming decade. Populations are skewing older because people are living longer. Birth rates have dropped in part because there is less expectation of high child mortality rates.
With less poverty and longer lifespans, the demand for resources will increase, including energy, agriculture, available land and clean water. Within countries, this can strain government resources and, if poorly managed, increase social instability. Among countries, the competition for resources or global attempts to shape conservation and climate mitigation initiatives can stir contention and accusations of imperial unfairness.
Reduced poverty, improved nutrition and preventative health care have also contributed to a global increase in societal expectations, whether for access to jobs, housing and education, or government social services. Rising expectations can drive economic intervention or nationalism, as governments seek to provide more and better quality domestic jobs. It also creates challenges for governments as the rising middle class becomes more politically active. This is even more pronounced as communication technologies allow rapid coordination of like interests, and greater access to alternative ideas, information and expectations. As more challenges are made to the political order, the likelihood that efforts toward building greater national digital sovereignty and security to reduce information flow will increase.
-
We should all do our 10 year forecast.
---------------------------------------
6 Reasons for Optimism in 2020
https://fee.org/articles/how-the-prague-spring-led-to-the-fall-of-communism/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-2010s-have-been-amazing-11576540377
1. Extreme Poverty Is Plummeting
2. More Than Half the World Is Middle Class
3. Global Life Expectancy Is Rising
4. Climate-Related Deaths Are Falling
5. Life Is Getting Better in the World’s Poorest Countries
6. The Cost of Starting a Business Has Plummeted in Developing Economies
(much more at link)
-
Some really important maps in the original, too bad they do not print here!
Ukraine and Turkey: The Foundations of a Strategic Partnership
By: Ridvan Bari Urcosta
Last week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky met with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Kyiv. During the visit, Erdogan promised to strengthen military and economic cooperation with Ukraine and emphasized his support for the Crimean Tatars. After all, Crimea has long been central to Turkey’s relationship with Ukraine.
Another key factor in this relationship is a common adversary: Russia. Ankara has sought to use Ukraine and its long-standing connections there to its advantage as it engages with Moscow. Erdogan’s trip to Kyiv happened to coincide with a recent shift in Turkey-Russia relations, particularly in Syria, where the two countries appear to be getting closer to a potential confrontation in Idlib, and in Libya, where they support opposing sides in the civil war. Erdogan knows that Ukraine is an especially sensitive issue for the Kremlin, which sees a partnership between its critical buffer to the west and its historical rival to the south as a threat to its strategic interests in the Black Sea. By building closer ties to Kyiv, Ankara sees an opportunity to block Russian expansion in a strategic region historically known as the Pontic Steppe.
(click to enlarge)
Turkey’s Interests in the Pontic Steppe
At its peak, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the Atlas Mountains in the west to the Zagros Mountains and the Persian Gulf in the east, and to the Balkans and the Caucasus in the north. Former Ottoman territories still play a large role in contemporary Turkish foreign policy, particularly in Erdogan’s ambitious agenda to re-establish Turkish influence in the Persian Gulf, Levant, Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. As GPF forecast, Turkey has already begun to expand its presence in some of these areas, but while its involvement in places like Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean has garnered much attention of late, its relationship with Ukraine seems to have been mostly overlooked.
(click to enlarge)
Crimea is at the heart of Turkey’s engagement with Ukraine. Beginning in 1475, the Crimean Peninsula came under Ottoman rule, though it still had some autonomy. The Crimean Khanate was useful to the Ottomans as a bulwark against the Russians in the Black Sea for three centuries. With the Ottomans’ help, the khanate controlled strategically important chokepoints in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. These chokepoints are still an integral part of modern-day Turkey’s geopolitical strategy and are crucial in understanding Turkey’s quest to expand its influence north. The Ottomans also controlled three regions north of Crimea that now belong to Ukraine: Odessa, Nikolayev and Kherson. When the Ottoman Empire lost the Crimean Khanate in 1783, it was forced to retreat from many other theaters, particularly the Caucasus and the Pontic Steppe. The Russian Empire then took over these areas that had been occupied by the Turkic people for centuries.
Following the Russo-Crimean Wars in the 16th century, competition between the Ottomans and Russia in Crimea expanded. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, Crimea was officially handed over to the Russians with the signing of the 1774 Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca, regarded as a watershed moment marking the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s protracted decline. After years of revolt against Russian rule, the Russian Empire annexed Crimea in 1783 and began to Slavicize Crimea and the surrounding areas. (Interestingly, Russia’s revival of the Novorossiya, or New Russia, concept in 2014 included claims to the Pontic Steppe. Russia used this concept to justify its incursion into Donbass in eastern Ukraine, though Novorossiya extends beyond Donbass to include Kharkov to the north and Odessa to the west.)
Russia had realized that without destroying the Crimean Khanate, it would have been nearly impossible to carry out military operations deep into the Balkans because the Turks and Crimean Tatars would have been able to sever Russian communications and lines of supply in central Ukraine. With Crimea under Russian control, Russian expansionism was formidable and could be stopped only with the emergence of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Russian Empire thus expanded in two directions: into the Caucasus and into the Balkans.
For Turkey, the loss of Crimea once again reinforced the geostrategic importance of the Pontic Steppe (present-day Ukraine). Though Russia has failed to regain control of much of this area, it has managed to bring Crimea under its jurisdiction, which Turkey will inevitably see as a threat to its security. Turkey’s strategy in Ukraine, therefore, has been to support not just the Crimean Tatar nation but also Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. So long as the Tatars – who, for the most part, opposed Russian annexation and pledged their support to Kyiv – remain a factor in Crimea, Ankara will have some degree of influence on the peninsula.
Turkey-Ukraine Relations After 2014
Russian President Vladimir Putin once called the Soviet Union’s collapse “a major geopolitical disaster.” And it’s not hard to see why. Russia had lost access to Crimea’s strategic ports, controlled just a small portion of the Black Sea coast and required access to the Turkish-controlled Bosporus just to be able to conduct maritime trade beyond the Black Sea. Turkey, on the other hand, had superior naval forces, control over strategic waterways (namely, the Turkish Straits), and more sovereignty over a larger portion of the Black Sea coast than any other country in the region. Suffice it to say, Turkey was satisfied with this state of affairs.
(click to enlarge)
That is, until 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. Since then, Moscow’s position in the Black Sea has strengthened, and the possibility of confrontation between Turkey and Russia in the Black Sea has intensified. Indeed, without control of Crimea, Russia likely would not have been able to conduct military and naval operations in its Syrian campaign through the Eastern Mediterranean. Turkey was alarmed over the rapid geopolitical developments in the region and expressed its support for Ukrainian territorial integrity from the very beginning of the Ukraine crisis, even sending then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to Kyiv for talks in early 2014. To this day, it has not recognized Crimea as part of Russia and maintains close relations with the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, a body that represents Crimean Tatars and was banned by Russia in 2016. Turkey and Ukraine have also expanded military cooperation; they held joint naval exercises in the Black Sea in March 2016, just a few months after Turkey’s downing of a Russian military jet near the Syrian border. For Ankara, showing that it has a presence in Russia’s critical buffer is a way of increasing pressure on Moscow.
However, military cooperation between the two countries goes back further than 2014. In fact, Turkey has some of the closest ties to Ukraine’s defense industry of any NATO member. Ukraine’s state-owned defense firm Ukroboronprom has collaborated with Turkish companies Hevelsan, ASELSAN and Roketsan, among others. Last year, the two countries set up a joint venture focused on precision weapons and aerospace technologies. They also participated in joint projects to create An-188 and An-178 military transport aircraft, active defense systems for armored vehicles and radar systems. In 2019, Ukraine acquired Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, armed with high-precision MAM-L bombs purchased from Roketsan. Ukrainian experts are expected to help Turkey develop a new, indigenously built battle tank. They even discussed collaborating on corvettes and surface-to-air missiles. One could argue that Turkey is using Ukraine to sidestep collaborating with Russian defense companies and also to bolster its own defense industry to reduce its dependence on NATO. In the process, the Ukrainian defense sector, which was hurt by the complete disengagement with the Russians, is also benefiting from collaborating with a NATO member, bringing its industry into line with NATO standards.
Economic cooperation has also been growing. During last week’s meeting, Erdogan and Zelensky agreed to complete talks on a free trade agreement, negotiations for which began under former President Petro Poroshenko. Zelensky appears ready to sign a trade deal, even though the benefits to Ukraine, as the weaker of the two economies, are still uncertain. With a deal in place, the two countries hope to bring trade turnover to $10 billion. Turkey also promised to give Ukraine $36 million in military support. Zelensky, in return, promised to help Erdogan on security issues, instructing Ukraine’s Security Service to look into Ukrainian educational centers linked to Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who Erdogan has accused of orchestrating a coup attempt against him.
In an effort to attract more foreign capital, Zelensky has said he wants to lift a moratorium on farmland sales, raising the issue last year during a speech in Istanbul. (The Ukrainian parliament has since passed a bill that would allow the sale of land to foreigners, except Russian citizens and corporations, beginning in 2024.) Ukraine has also welcomed the Trans-Anatolian pipeline project, which could bring natural gas from Azerbaijan via Turkey to Ukraine, as well as other parts of Europe. Alternative sources of energy are becoming increasingly important as Russia becomes more reluctant to deliver energy to Turkey and Europe via pipelines that pass through Ukraine, such as the Trans-Balkan pipeline.
In addition, Crimea has continued to play a key role in Ukraine-Turkey relations. As part of Turkey’s quest to promote the concept of Neo-Ottomanism, Turkish officials have emphasized the historical and ancestral links between Turkey and the Crimean Tatars. Former Foreign Minister Davutoglu even regularly met with leaders from the Crimean Tatar community. Before 2014, this may have irritated Kyiv, but since the Russian annexation, Crimean Tatar representatives have been included in delegations on official visits. As Davutoglu once put it, Crimea is now considered “a bridge of friendship” between the two countries.
Turkey is also the top trade partner for the three regions of Ukraine north of Crimea: Odessa, Nikolayev and Kherson (all part of the Pontic Steppe). And Turkish ally Qatar recently won a bid to develop Olvia port in Nikolayev region, which will be the biggest foreign investment in a Ukrainian port in history.
Immediately after Crimea’s annexation, Turkey and the Crimean Tatars asked Kyiv for permission to build ethnic settlements in Kherson (once part of the Crimean Khanate) for Tatars who had fled Crimea. Poroshenko avoided making a decision on the issue, but Zelensky has pledged his support. Russia will likely stir up anti-Tatar sentiments among locals there to try to convince them to oppose it.
There are between 1 million and 3 million Crimean Tatars in Turkey, most of whom tend to be pro-Ukraine. Erdogan, therefore, has a political incentive to woo the region. In 2017, he spoke with Putin on behalf of two Crimean Tatar leaders who were jailed for opposing the annexation. And recently, Zelensky asked Erdogan to intervene in a case over Crimean Tatars convicted on extremism charges after Russian authorities accused them of being followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that has been banned in Russia.
In addition to political, economic and military links, the two countries have religious connections. In 2019, the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople approved the official decree splitting the Orthodox Church of Ukraine from Russia. Erdogan has declined to comment on religious issues in Ukraine but has met with Bartholomew I of Constantinople, who signed the decree.
It’s worth noting, however, that within the Ukrainian political elite, there is some concern over Turkey’s true intentions and loyalties, especially considering that Ankara has not joined the West in applying sanctions against Russia over Crimea. Ukraine has viewed with suspicion the budding relationship between Putin and Erdogan, which continues despite their countries' disagreements. When Ukraine hoped to import liquefied natural gas through the Black Sea to reduce its reliance on Russian energy, Turkey refused passage of LNG tankers through the Turkish Straits. Turkey has meanwhile kept the straits open to Russian warships that could be used to threaten Ukraine. However, Kyiv hopes the proposed new Istanbul Canal may be blocked for Russian naval ships since, according to Ukraine, it won’t be governed by the Montreux Convention, which regulates transit through the Turkish Straits.
Both countries have benefited from military cooperation and continue to pursue economic ties, including the proposed free trade deal. Turkey sees Ukraine as a key part of its goal to restore its once overwhelmingly dominant position in the Black Sea, and Ukraine sees Turkey as a counterbalance to Russian influence and leverage in the Black Sea. Their relationship is driven by their own strategic interests. So long as they need allies in the Black Sea, they will look to each other as strategic partners.
-
February 18, 2020 View On Website
Open as PDF
New US Strategy and Technology
By: George Friedman
The world is facing a fundamental strategic and technical shift in both the geopolitics of war and its dynamic. The shift is being driven by the United States’ decision to change its global strategic posture and the maturation of new classes of weaponry that change how wars will be fought.
U.S. Posture
The U.S. has publicly announced a change in American strategy consisting of two parts. The first is abandoning the focus on jihadists that began with al-Qaida’s attack on the U.S. in 2001. The second is reshaping and redefining forces to confront China and Russia. For a while, it had been assumed that there would no longer be peer-to-peer conflicts but rather extended combat against light infantry and covert forces such as was taking place in Afghanistan. After every international confrontation, including the Cold War, the absence of immediate peer threats leads strategists to assume that none will emerge, and that the future engagements will involve managing instability rather than defeating peers. This illusion is the reward of comfort to the victorious powers. Immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, the belief was that the only issue facing the world was economic, and that military strategy was archaic. The events of 9/11 changed that, but the idea of national conflicts was still seen as farfetched.
The United States is now shifting its strategy to focus on peer-to-peer conflict. Peer-to-peer conflict is not about two equal powers fighting; it’s about two powers that field similar forces. So the war in Afghanistan was between a combined arms force and a totally different, light infantry force. As we saw in Vietnam, the latter can defeat a far more advanced force by understanding the political dimension more clearly than its opponent. Peer-to-peer conflict involves two forces conceiving of war in the same way. Germany invaded Poland and was by far the more powerful force, but Poland conceived of war the same way the Germans did. In this sense, they were peers.
The United States is a global power. Russia cannot wage war in the Atlantic or Pacific. China cannot project decisive power into Europe. The United States can do both. It is not nearly as geographically limited in its warfighting as the other two are. But were the United States to confront them within the areas where they can operate, the question then is the quality of forces, in terms of command and technology.
China’s national interest pivots on its ability to use sea lanes to sustain international trade. Its ability to project land power is limited by terrain; to its south are hills, jungles and the Himalayas, and to its north is Siberia. It could attack westward through Kazakhstan, but the logistical challenges are enormous and the benefits dubious. For China, then, the fundamental problem is naval, deriving from the threat that the U.S. could use its forces to blockade and cripple China.
Russia’s strategic interest rests in regaining the buffer zone from Latvia to Romania. The loss of these states in 1991 eroded the main defense line of an attack from the west. Russia’s primary goal, therefore, is to recover these buffers. Of secondary but still significant importance is holding the North Caucasus south of the Russian agricultural heartland. The threat to this region is insurgency in areas like Chechnya and Dagestan, or an American move from the South Caucasus.
Neither a U.S. naval blockade of China nor an attack on Russia proper from the west are likely scenarios. But national strategy must take into account implausible but catastrophic scenarios, because common sense can evaporate rapidly. Thus the Russians must maintain sustained pressure primarily to the west but also to the south. China must press eastward, in the South and East China seas, to demonstrate the costs a blockade would impose.
The focus for each is not necessarily action but creating the possibility of action and thereby shaping the political relationship. The danger is that the gesture will trigger what had been seen as an unreasonable response. The problem for the United States is that it cannot be sure of Russia’s or China’s reading of American intentions, and therefore, it must be prepared to counter both. War is rarely about hunger for conquest; it is about the fear of being conquered. For Russia, it is fear that the U.S. will try to achieve what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve, given the loss of its buffers. For China, it is a fear of strangulation by American naval forces. For the United States, it is fear that Russia will return with force to Central Europe, or that China will surge into the Western Pacific. All such fears are preposterous until they mount to such a point that doing nothing appears imprudent.
A New Class of Weapons
World War II was first waged between German armor and Soviet infantry, and then it became a war of armor against armor. In the Pacific, the decisive war was not of battleships against battleships, but of aircraft against naval vessels and, toward the end, airpower. Much of the battles on islands like Saipan and Guadalcanal were intended by both sides to secure them for air bases. The Cold War, had it turned hot, was conceived of as an upgraded World War II, of armor and air power against armor and air power.
From World War II until the end of the Cold War, peer-to-peer conflict focused on three classes of weapons: armored vehicles, aircraft carriers and manned bombers. After 1967 and the introduction of precision-guided weapons, the survivability of these weapons declined, and massive resources had to be allocated to allow them to survive. Armor had to be constantly upgraded to defeat far cheaper projectiles that were unlikely to miss. Aircraft carriers had to be surrounded by carrier battle groups consisting of anti-air cruisers, anti-submarine destroyers and attack submarines, all integrated into complex computer systems that could counter attacks by precision-guided weapons. Manned bombers flying into enemy airspace could be confronted by sophisticated surface-to-air missiles. The solution was to try to build bombers invisible to enemy radar. The cost of defending these systems that emerged in World War II surged as the cost of destroying them began to decline.
Counters to precision-guided weapons inevitably emerged, and we have reached the threshold of a new class of weapons: hypersonic missiles. These munitions, which can travel at five to 10 times the speed of sound, maneuver in flight and carry sufficient explosives, including sub munitions (smaller projectiles designed to hit multiple targets), make the survival of tanks, surface vessels and manned bombers increasingly problematic. Their speed, maneuverability and defenses against detection decrease the probability that all incoming hypersonic missiles can be destroyed, while they retain the precision of previous generations of weapons.
(click to enlarge)
Russia, China and the U.S. are all working on these weapons. Sometimes they exaggerate their limited capabilities; sometimes they minimize their substantial capabilities. But all have them and are developing better ones if they can. And this changes war from the way it was conceived in World War II and the Cold War. A new system of weapons is beginning to emerge.
The key to the development of hypersonics is range. The shorter their range, the closer the attacker must come. The longer the range, the more uncertainty there is over its location and the more likely it is to survive and be fired, maneuvering in excess of the ability of defending system. So in the South China Sea, it will not be carriers facing carriers. They will be neutralized by hypersonic missiles. Nor will it be armored brigades engaging. The tanks will be neutralized long before they engage. The goal will be to locate and destroy an enemy’s missiles before they are launched and before they can approach their target.
The key will be the ability to locate and track hypersonic missiles and then destroy them. The solution to this is systems in space. The Chinese will not engage the U.S. Navy with its carriers. It will try to destroy them with well camouflaged missiles from land bases. To do this, they must locate the target, which is mobile. Its own platforms being vulnerable, they will rely on space-based reconnaissance. The United States’ primary mission therefore will be to destroy Chinese satellites, find the location of Chinese launchers and launch saturated attacks on them, likely from space.
Modern war, like all war, depends on intelligence and targeting information. Precision-guided munitions move older platforms toward obsolescence, and hypersonics closes the door. The battle must be at a longer range than most missiles have now, and will be dependent on a space-based system for targeting. This means that victory in war will depend on command of space.
Note that the U.S. has now established the U.S. Space Force, which integrated the space fighting capabilities of other services into one. This represents the realization that dealing with peer powers now depends on the command of space. Therefore, the United States’ strategic turn away from jihadists toward Russia and China also constitutes a shift away from the primacy of older platforms. A new strategy and the recognition of the importance of space mean that the decisive battle will not be fought on Earth’s surface.
-
Europeans Try to Have It Both Ways
They expect American protection but aren’t prepared to defend their own countries.
By Walter Russell Mead
Feb. 17, 2020 4:20 pm ET
How solid is the West? At last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, the world’s largest gathering of security policy makers and officials, the theme was “Westlessness,” referring to the sense of disorientation that many Europeans feel in this age of America First.
Since the 1940s, U.S. leadership in the service of a united and secure Europe has been the one unchanging feature in the Continental landscape. For generations, the U.S. committed to protect Europe from Russia, maintain bases in Germany to prevent it from threatening its neighbors, and promote European integration. Now Europeans don’t know where they stand, and a mixture of bafflement, anger, disappointment and fear fills the atmosphere at conferences like the one in Munich.
There’s little doubt that Trump administration policies, ranging from trade wars to toughness on Iran, have tested trans-Atlantic relations to the breaking point. But to understand the growing weakness of the Western alliance, Europeans need to spend less time deploring Donald Trump and more time looking in the mirror. A good place to begin is with a Pew poll released earlier this month on the state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Superficially, the poll looks like good news. In 14 European countries plus Canada and the U.S., a median 53% of respondents said they had a favorable view of NATO, while only 27% saw the alliance unfavorably. Despite double-digit declines in NATO’s favorability among the French and the Germans, these numbers aren’t bad. Mr. Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are all less popular in their home countries than NATO is.
So far, so good—but that support is thin. When asked if their country should go to war with Russia if it attacked a NATO ally, 50% of respondents said no, and only 38% supported honoring their commitment to NATO allies.
Let those numbers sink in. Only 34% of Germans, 25% of Greeks and Italians, 36% of Czechs, 33% of Hungarians and 41% of the French believe their country should fulfill its treaty obligation if another European country is attacked. Only the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands and Lithuania had a majority in favor of honoring the NATO commitment to mutual defense.
Europeans often contrast the “nationalism” of backward political cultures like Russia, China and the U.S. with their own supposedly enlightened attitude of cosmopolitan solidarity. Yet if these numbers are accurate, Europeans haven’t replaced nationalism with European solidarity. They have replaced nationalism with fantasy: the belief that one can have security and prosperity without a strong defense.
That vision leaves Europe vulnerable, and it is threatening to let the West unravel. European leaders believe they are trading parochial loyalties for higher and broader commitments, when in truth their countries lack the solidarity that makes international order possible. Those who dream that they can have security without the willingness to fight for it are slowly turning NATO into the paper tiger that its enemies hope it will become.
Meanwhile, Europeans still, mostly, trust America. Seventy-five percent of Italians believe the U.S. would rally to NATO’s defense if Russia attacks, as do 63% of Germans and 57% of French. Despite European ambivalence about fulfilling NATO obligations, the alliance is held together by their confidence that America—Mr. Trump’s America—will fulfill its obligations.
Europe’s problem isn’t Mr. Trump. It isn’t nationalism. It isn’t that others aren’t wise or enlightened enough to share Europe’s ideals. It is that too few Europeans stand ready to defend the ideals they claim to embrace. That young Germans no longer dream of fighting and dying to conquer Poland is an excellent thing, but it is a bad and even a dangerous thing that so few young Germans think Europe is important enough to defend and, if necessary, to risk their lives for.
This problem won’t be easy to solve. For many Europeans, the essential purpose of European integration was to end war. For centuries, the restless nationalisms of European peoples plunged the Continent into one wretched war after another. The European Union was meant to bury those national antagonisms and end the cycle of war. To love Europe was to enter a posthistorical age of perpetual peace. For voters who grew up in the European cocoon, the military defense of European ideas sounds like a contradiction in terms. How can you build peace by making war?
In contrast, Americans continue to believe that Europe is worth defending. We must hope that over the next few years more Europeans will come around to that position; otherwise, the prospects for “Westlessness” will only grow.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/china-arms-control-american-policy-confronts-major-new-nuclear-threat/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-03-06&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15745/coronavirus-china-communism
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15745/coronavirus-china-communism
"The real disease is Communism."
Amen.
-
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/consider-possibility-trump-right-china/609493/
-
May 18, 2020
Back to the Future: China and the US
By: George Friedman
The COVID-19 disease, which seems likely to be with us for a long time, has done its part to define history. But it has not suspended history. Though there is much we still don’t know about the disease, we do know that all nations have been affected by it. The death toll is significant but does not threaten to annihilate populations as other diseases have. It has, however, inflicted damage on economies that will take years to repair. Either science will defeat it or the world will adjust to living with it.
But that branch in the logic will not come for a while.
Since nations continue to exist, the distrust between them remains – in many cases, it has intensified. As things evolve, the relationships between nations will return to their traditional role. As there is little more to be said for now about the virus that has not been said already, we need to return to the consideration of geopolitics, which like diseases can cause massive casualties. Were this the bubonic plague, we would be returning to the relationship between Rome and Florence. Today we will return to the relationship between the U.S. and China.
When we last visited these two nations, the United States had placed tariffs on some Chinese exports to the U.S., hurting and angering China and leaving it no effective counter. The Chinese built their economy the same way the United States had between 1890 and 1929: by exporting cheap manufactured goods and agricultural products. The international system needs cheap products, and the exporter must export to increase domestic prosperity and create a self-sustaining society. The advantage of an exporter is it makes money. The disadvantage is it depends on the willingness and ability of its customers to buy. So when, for example, the post-World War I depressions took hold of Europe, Europe’s ability to buy U.S. products became a major cause of the Great Depression.
China suffered a blow in 2008, when the global recession following the subprime loan crisis cut into China’s exports dramatically. More recently, tariffs imposed by the U.S. threatened to create a massive imbalance in the Chinese economy.
Chinese industry vastly outgrew domestic Chinese demand, producing more than Chinese consumers could buy. The U.S. move was designed to destabilize China, which had been emerging as a major power suffering a major vulnerability. The U.S. took advantage of it.
At roughly the same time, it was revealed that the Chinese were operating concentration camps of sorts for Uighurs, Turkic Muslim minority populations in far western Xinjiang province, as demonstrations and riots broke out in Hong Kong. Try as it might, China’s excellent propaganda had a harder time convincing the world that it was passing the U.S. as a great power. China’s gross domestic product was about $14 trillion and the United States' was just under $22 trillion, and China has many more people. The U.S. military is able to operate globally. The Chinese are trying to find a lever in the South China Sea.
Propaganda aside, China was to the U.S. what the U.S. was to Britain in 1900. Looked at from that point of view, the U.S. could be ambitious but had to be cautious. Britain could be contemptuous at its own risk.
China is not in any way the equal of the U.S., either economically or militarily. Propaganda is not trivial but it can not be decisive. Or more precisely, it could not be decisive yet. Britain in 1900 was celebrating its very real glory. By the 1920s, it was defaulting on its vast debt to the United States, in the midst of economic agony, struggling to hold its position in Europe, fearing reasonably that its empire was in danger.
There are of course many differences between the three countries, but the core dynamic had similarities. One of these similarities is that British investment in the United States was a centerpiece of both nations’ economic strategies. British capital was critical to U.S. industrialization and to ranches in the West. Similarly, U.S. investment in China was critical to China’s industrial development, as was the import of Chinese goods. The United States and China were linked economically as were the U.S. and Britain. And we should remember that when Britain fought in World War II to save its empire, it was the United States that compelled the British to follow a military strategy that made its loss of empire inevitable. Winston Churchill accused Franklin Roosevelt of trying to destroy the British Empire. Roosevelt was shocked and offended by the charge.
China remains inferior to the U.S. in all measures, but it has risen to the point where the U.S. can no longer accept China’s military ambitions nor finance the Chinese economy. China wants badly to resume the economic relationship it had with the United States, while having the U.S. accept its need to dominate first the South and East China seas and then the Pacific, while also projecting economic power and later military power globally. The United States is dominant in North America. It fought for control of the Pacific and the Atlantic in World War II. From China’s point of view, the geography of the Western Pacific and the ability of the U.S. to blockade China is an existential threat.
China has little appetite for risk. Starting a war carries with it the chance of losing. Nor can China trust the U.S. So it is laying the groundwork for an opportunity or an aggressive decision by the United States. Facing historically hostile enemies like Japan and South Korea and, more recently, Taiwan and Indonesia, the Chinese lack a meaningful alliance structure. North Korea is a useful but dangerous tool with which to goad the United States. Other than that, it has a strategy of making random investments around the world to demonstrate its growing power. As propaganda, it works. The use of investments in, say, Serbia is less clear strategically.
China therefore has three core strategic problems. Challenging the U.S. for command of the sea is a dangerous game. While countries such as Russia might fear the U.S. as much as China does, geography prevents cooperation, so China lacks a meaningful alliance structure. Finally, China’s main adversary, the U.S., is also indispensable for the Chinese economy.
China’s solution to this dilemma, bravado aside, is twofold. The first is to hope that the U.S. gets involved in a war like World War I, as Britain did. The other is to confront the U.S. in another domain: space. Success in the latter might create an opportunity for the former. Thus for China, space and missiles provide a military option but don’t solve the economic problem.
The U.S. is obviously aware of the military challenge. It has announced a massive withdrawal of forces from the Middle East to devote more time and attention to Russia and China. Patriot missiles have been removed from Saudi Arabia and bases in Iraq have closed. At the same time, the U.S. has withdrawn B-52s from Guam, indicating it is focusing on a space-based missile option against China. But in the end, both nations are in deterrence mode. Neither can afford losing a war against the other.
The major U.S. weapon against China is economic. Here the virus opens opportunities. The U.S. is dependent on China for vast amounts of products, a supply chain that gave the U.S. the benefit of low-cost manufacturing, and the Chinese an industrial base. The Chinese move is to expel and block the U.S. supply chain, but Beijing can’t do it while also maintaining social stability. And the U.S. has options to replace the Chinese supply chain.
The solution on both sides is to hurl insults. The Americans hint that the Chinese are responsible for the coronavirus. The Chinese have a global effort to show that the virus has crippled the United States permanently and that China is now the leading power. Propaganda wars may be fun to watch, and hurling insults should perhaps be an Olympic sport, but power is not a matter of perception, at least not when bombs start landing and bankruptcies mount. The U.S. will continue to hurl insults while undermining the Chinese by shifting the supply chain. China will continue seeking a military advantage.
China and the U.S. have been hammered by the virus. The hopes, imperatives and constraints of both countries relative to each other have been bent but not broken by the epidemic. As it was before so it will be in the future.
-
Wars Are Not Won by Military Genius or Decisive Battles
We place the battle on a high pedestal, but attrition has a far greater impact on the war.
AeonCathal J Nolan
War is the most complex, physically and morally demanding enterprise we undertake. No great art or music, no cathedral or temple or mosque, no intercontinental transport net or particle collider or space programme, no research for a cure for a mass-killing disease receives a fraction of the resources and effort we devote to making war. Or to recovery from war and preparations for future wars invested over years, even decades, of tentative peace. War is thus far more than a strung-together tale of key battles. Yet, traditional military history presented battles as fulcrum moments where empires rose or fell in a day, and most people still think that wars are won that way, in an hour or an afternoon of blood and bone. Or perhaps two or three. We must understand the deeper game, not look only to the scoring. That is hard to do because battles are so seductive.
War evokes our fascination with spectacle, and there is no greater stage or more dramatic players than on a battlefield. We are drawn to battles by a lust of the eye, thrilled by a blast from a brass horn as Roman legionaries advance in glinting armour or when a king’s wave releases mounted knights in a heavy cavalry charge. Grand battles are open theatre with a cast of many tens of thousands: samurai under signal kites, mahouts mounted on elephants, a Zulu impi rushing over lush grass toward a redcoat firing line. Battles open with armies dressed in red, blue or white, flags fluttering, fife and drums beating the advance. Or with the billowing canvas of a line of fighting sail, white pufferies erupting in broadside volleys. Or a wedge of tanks hard-charging over the Russian steppe. What comes next is harder to comprehend.
The idea of the ‘decisive battle’ as the hinge of war, and wars as the gates of history, speaks to our naive desire to view modern war in heroic terms. Popular histories are written still in a drums-and-trumpets style, with vivid depictions of combat divorced from harder logistics, daily suffering, and a critical look at the societies and cultures that produced mass armies and sent them off to fight in faraway fields for causes about which the average soldier knew nothing.
Visual media especially play on what the public wants to see: raw courage and red days, the thrill of vicarious violence and spectacle. This is the world of war as callow entertainment, of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) or Brad Pitt in Fury (2014). It’s not the world of real Nazis or real war.
Battles also entice generals and statesmen with the idea that a hard red day can be decisive, and allow us to avoid attrition, which we all despise as morally vulgar and without redemptive heroism. We fear to find only indecision and tragedy without uplift or morality in trench mud, or roll calls of dead accumulating over years of effort and endurance. Instead, we raise battles to summits of heroism and generals to levels of genius that history cannot support. Though some historians might try, celebrating even failed campaigns as glorious. Prussia is wrecked, yet Frederick is the greatest of Germans. France is beaten and an age is named for Louis XIV, another for Napoleon. Europe lies in ruin, but German generals displayed genius with Panzers.
Whether or not we agree that some wars were necessary and just, we should look straight at the grim reality that victory was most often achieved in the biggest and most important wars by attrition and mass slaughter – not by soldierly heroics or the genius of command. Winning at war is harder than that. Cannae, Tours, Leuthen, Austerlitz, Tannenberg, Kharkov – all recall sharp images in a word. Yet winning such lopsided battles did not ensure victory in war. Hannibal won at Cannae, Napoleon at Austerlitz, Hitler at Sedan and Kiev. All lost in the end, catastrophically.
There is heroism in battle but there are no geniuses in war. War is too complex for genius to control. To say otherwise is no more than armchair idolatry, divorced from real explanation of victory and defeat, both of which come from long-term preparation for war and waging war with deep national resources, bureaucracy and endurance. Only then can courage and sound generalship meet with chance in battle and prevail, joining weight of materiel to strength of will to endure terrible losses yet win long wars. Claims to genius distance our understanding from war’s immense complexity and contingency, which are its greater truths.
Modern wars are won by grinding, not by genius. Strategic depth and resolve is always more important than any commander. We saw such depth and resilience in Tsarist Russia in 1812, in France and Britain in the First World War, in the Soviet Union and the United States during the Second World War, but not in Carthage or overstretched Nazi Germany or overreaching Imperial Japan. The ability to absorb initial defeats and fight on surpassed any decision made or battle fought by Hannibal or Scipio, Lee or Grant, Manstein or Montgomery. Yes, even Napoleon was elevated as the model of battle genius by Clausewitz and in military theory ever since, despite his losing by attrition in Spain, and in the calamity of the Grand Armée’s 1812 campaign in Russia. Waterloo was not the moment of his decisive defeat, which came a year earlier. It was his anticlimax.
Losers of most major wars in modern history lost because they overestimated operational dexterity and failed to overcome the enemy’s strategic depth and capacity for endurance. Winners absorbed defeat after defeat yet kept fighting, overcoming initial surprise, terrible setbacks and the dash and daring of command ‘genius’. Celebration of genius generals encourages the delusion that modern wars will be short and won quickly, when they are most often long wars of attrition. Most people believe attrition is immoral. Yet it’s how most major wars are won, aggressors defeated, the world remade time and again. We might better accept attrition at the start, explain that to those we send to fight, and only choose to fight the wars worth that awful price. Instead, we grow restless with attrition and complain that it’s tragic and wasteful, even though it was how the Union Army defeated slavery in America, and Allied and Soviet armies defeated Nazism.
With humility and full moral awareness of its terrible costs, if we decide that a war is worth fighting, we should praise attrition more and battle less. There is as much room for courage and character in a war of attrition as in a battle. There was character aplenty and courage on all sides at Verdun and Iwo Jima, in the Hürtgen Forest, in Korea. Character counts in combat. Sacrifice by soldiers at Shiloh or the Marne or Kharkov or Juno Beach or the Ia Drang or Korengal Valley were not mean, small or morally useless acts. Victory or defeat by attrition, by high explosive and machine gun over time, does not annihilate all moral and human meaning.
Cathal J Nolan teaches military history at Boston University. He is the author of The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (2017).
-
Friedman’s Thoughts In and Around Geopolitics: Why There Won’t Be a War With China
By: George Friedman
Jacek Bartosiak, a close friend and collaborator, wrote a piece earlier in the week that concluded with a discussion of U.S.-China relations. He and I don’t so much disagree on this as arrive from different perspectives, one Polish and the other American. In that sense, I’m not responding to him; I’m creating a parallel universe.
At the end of the article, Jacek calls for American collaboration with China. It reminds me of calls for detente with the Soviet Union. The argument for detente was reasonable, had the foundation for it not been so tenuous. It treated the Soviet Union as a peer power. It also assumed that there was a danger of war. In retrospect, neither claim was true.
The United States feared a Soviet invasion of Europe. Washington counted the number of divisions Moscow could field, the number of tanks it had and the technology it proudly left available for viewing. All of these were real. It presented a glamorous force. But the Soviets’ weakness was in far less glamorous form. Their ability to supply advancing forces with needed petroleum was severely limited. The command structure, particularly at the company level and lower, was chaotic. They lacked a noncommissioned officer cadre that all modern armies have as the backbone of their force. There were officers and draftees cycling through the system. A lack of sergeants or the ability to fuel tanks during an attack excited intelligence officers far less than the appearance of a new armored personnel carrier. But the men in the APC needed noncoms to lead them and fuel flowing as they attacked.
The United States overestimated the Soviets for a number of reasons. First, a key principle of war is to never underestimate the enemy. It is a principle that should be used prudently. Second, the Americans underestimated their own capabilities. They saw their weakness without understanding that war is a confrontation less of strength and more of comparative weakness. They were blind to the Soviet weakness and were frightened by their own.
But the Americans had another problem: Pearl Harbor. It was not the attack itself but the fact that the United States had vastly underestimated the Japanese. The generation that emerged from World War II was raised in the doctrine of “never again.” The U.S. would never again underestimate an enemy. The U.S. was afraid of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis. Yet, the Soviets had no strategic air force, even as the U.S. had the B-52 fleet. The United States had surrounded the Soviet Union with bases housing shorter-range missiles. The Soviet intermediate missiles could not reach the U.S. from Russia, and besides there were no nearby bases to launch them from. The Soviets tried to build nuclear bases in Cuba so they could hit the U.S. while their intercontinental ballistic missiles were deployed. The world was on the verge of nuclear war, but only if the U.S. decided to start one.
The U.S. took away the wrong lesson from Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was not a Japanese victory but a catastrophic defeat. The political purpose of the attack was to destroy the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and force the United States into a truce that allowed Japan to hold the Western Pacific. The attack succeeded but the political goal was lost. Pearl Harbor led to the devastation and occupation of Japan. This was inevitable. Japan was not an American peer in an economic sense. It could not possibly produce the weapons that were needed to engage the U.S. The Japanese failed to learn the first rule of war: You can lose.
It was because of this that the Soviets never attacked Europe or the United States, and that the United States never attacked the Soviet Union. In the end, the Soviet Union collapsed because of its own inadequacies. The Soviets spent a fortune on weapons they could not afford or use.
This comports with the Russian operating principle of Maskirovka – the masquerade that makes small men look large and weak countries look strong. It worked so well that the U.S. spent the 1980s creating weapons it could afford and for which it had troops who could operate them. It’s the competition that broke the Russians.
And now we come to China. China has always been there, even if some couldn’t see it. It is a vast universe unto itself. To the west are endless grasslands that no mechanized army can cross. In the southwest are the Himalayas, and to the south are hills and jungles, both of which are barriers to war. To the north is Siberia, to the east the sea. China is isolated by geography. It may on occasion move a bit south or north, but it has not since the 15th century moved into the sea. Its last naval engagement was fought in 1895, and its fleet was destroyed by the Japanese. Since then, no Chinese admiral has had to refuel his ships a thousand miles from home, while under fire.
I am making two points. The first is that, as with the Russians, the core of a military force is not the technology but the soldiers who man the guns and the command structure that manages them. Great militaries come from a great tradition. Even as technologies evolve, the principles of leadership and of war-making are central. The British have a long tradition, as do the Americans. It is a tradition of war handed down to generations who have not yet fought one. The Chinese memory of war is of their civil war. The American is of glorious victories and losses as well. Historically, China’s great battles have been waged in China against the Chinese (or the Mongols). This was dictated by geography. Power projection has always been too difficult and risky.
China is an isolated nation, most of whose citizens live in enormous poverty west of the strip along the ocean. Mao called on these peasants to rise and fight Chiang Kai Shek. They died by the millions but won against their countrymen. It is a noble tradition of war, but not one that suits a nation whose only potential battlefield is the sea, or command of the sea from air and space. That culture of war is lacking.
It must also be remembered that before the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. gross domestic product was $22 trillion. China’s was $14 trillion, its GDP being reported always two weeks after the new year. China has 1.5 billion people enjoying the wealth, and the U.S. only 330 million. The point is that the economy, however honest or inflated the numbers are, is a fraction of that of the United States.
China is a country where there is great poverty, and to bring it back to Jacek’s point, pioneering a space force is a staggering effort even for an economy twice China’s size. Recall, too, that China can build its wealth only by exporting goods. The United States is its largest customer, while the U.S. exports little to China. Even now the U.S. is looking for other suppliers. Such a shift would be a catastrophe to China. There is a rule in business: Never create a conflict with your best customer when he can take his business elsewhere. China must export to sustain itself. The Chinese have a merchant tradition that does not align with a war with the United States.
I agree that the next war will be in space, but no one wants to undertake another Pearl Harbor. Everyone knows how Pearl Harbor ended. Assuming that a brilliant strike would blind the U.S., the Chinese can look at American history to know that that would not be the end of the war. The attack at Pearl Harbor was followed by a relentless and brutal crushing of Japan. War has many dimensions, and a skilled and motivated enemy can overcome defeats that would crush others.
Never wound your enemy. Kill him or leave him alone. Assuming that China is capable of denying outer space to the U.S., which I strongly doubt, the Chinese are too smart to believe that would be the end of the game. We Americans oddly believe we cannot fight a long and muddy war. The Chinese saw the U.S. crush Japan, saw it absorb over a million casualties against a relentless American enemy, and saw the U.S. fight for seven years in Vietnam and for 18 years in the Middle East. Win or lose, wise or not, the United States embraces war as it did in the Revolutionary or Civil wars. Americans see themselves as a pacific people. History tells a somewhat different tale. The Chinese have seen America at war and the price its foes have paid.
Think of the Chinese space capability as we failed to think of the Soviets’ military. China is a master of deception. It does everything it can to make itself appear an equal of the United States. But in fact, there will be no war between the two. The United States has no interest in controlling China, and China cannot take the Japanese risk and lose. It knows that the biggest risk in war is losing, and it knows that no matter how well played the first inning is, the risk of the outcome is too great.
For any country dealing with America, the ultimate risk is a successful Pearl Harbor. For China, it’s having your best customer do his shopping elsewhere. The danger to China is that the U.S. will take being blinded as a preface to a nuclear attack, and will therefore preempt it. A massive nuclear exchange would certainly be a problem for both. But under any circumstance, even the hint of a conflict would be a massive economic blow to China.
-
Mother Nature as a Geopolitical Force
By: Alex Berezow
History is biased, and not just because the victors tend to write it. The study of history is largely the study of humankind – specifically, the geopolitical events that have shaped human actions (and vice versa) over millennia. It’s true that to learn from the past, we must study ourselves. But what if we’re missing a large part of the story? What if Mother Nature plays just as large a role in shaping the course of human events as mankind? After all, any force that compels specific actions by nation-states is necessarily geopolitical.
It has long been understood that geography imposes substantial imperatives and constraints on nations. Russia, for example, will always be obsessed with securing warm water ports and access to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea because accidents of geography placed the country adjacent to potential adversaries on one side and the Arctic Ocean on another, making it essentially landlocked.
But geography is just one piece of the puzzle, one that fails to account for the vagaries of natural disaster. To understand just how potent a force Mother Nature can be in geopolitics, we must expand our understanding beyond basic geography to include transitory disasters. But this raises questions that are difficult to answer. How can a geopolitical model such as ours, designed to forecast the predictable behavior of nation-states, incorporate unpredictable forces? Is there some threshold that a natural event must cross in order to be considered geopolitically relevant? Is there a way to determine if a natural event plays a determinative role in shaping events or simply accelerates a preexisting trend? Are certain nation-states, cities or societies particularly vulnerable to natural disaster?
Throughout history, Mother Nature has radically altered the course of events, far beyond simply causing structural and economic damage and personal hardship. Indeed, natural forces have helped topple governments and destroy empires. For example, in 1755, Lisbon was slammed by an enormous earthquake and tsunami and then engulfed in an ensuing fire.
According to science writer Robin Andrews, the country immediately lost roughly one-third to one-half of its gross domestic product, and the European balance of power shifted decisively away from Portugal to Britain and France. But was this event truly determinative? Perhaps not. Britain and France were already powerful, and Portugal’s empire was sunsetting.
Adding a layer of complexity, Mother Nature doesn’t always have to act locally to change geopolitics. Rather, its impact can have effects on locations far from the natural event’s origin. In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, spewing so much ash into the atmosphere that it has been blamed for the bizarre climate of 1816, which became known as “the year without a summer.” Crops failed all across the Northern Hemisphere, and famine and disease were rampant. It is widely believed that the unusually gloomy year helped inspire, at least in part, the invention of the bicycle and Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein,” the former being a new form of transportation and the latter leaving a lasting imprint on our culture. Once again, Mother Nature’s impact is evident but not fully clear. Surely, somebody somewhere would have invented a bicycle at some point. And “Frankenstein” was a story about the immoral and irresponsible use of technology, a story that could just as easily be written today.
Fast forward nearly 200 years, and another cataclysmic event in the Asian Pacific served as a catalyst for major geopolitical events. In 2011, an underwater earthquake triggered a massive tsunami, inundating Japan and causing a meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility. On the other side of the planet, Germany responded by phasing out its nuclear power plants, which in turn increased that nation’s reliance on Russian natural gas. About 22 percent of Germany’s energy needs are met by natural gas, and about 50 to 75 percent of it comes from Russia. This, in turn, has deepened divisions within the European Union, particularly angering some members of the Central and Eastern bloc that believe reliance on Russian natural gas poses a national security threat. But to what extent can we really blame Mother Nature for the EU’s problems? Europeans are quite capable of creating controversy all by themselves.
Geological catastrophes aren’t the only trick Mother Nature can use to influence geopolitics. Biology provides fertile ground for meddling in international affairs. In his book “Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World,” professor Irwin Sherman explains how genetic and infectious diseases radically altered the course of history. Consider Queen Victoria, a carrier of hemophilia, a disease that causes uncontrollable bleeding due to inadequate clotting. The disease can be so severe that a tiny cut or bruise becomes a life-threatening wound. While she did not suffer from the disease herself, she passed on a bad gene to her children and grandchildren. Victoria’s granddaughter, Alexandra, married into the Romanovs, becoming the wife of Czar Nicholas II and the empress of Russia. Her son, Alexis, suffered from hemophilia. Sherman argues that, after Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, Alexis’ illness prevented him from becoming a constitutional monarch. The resulting chaos opened the door to the Bolshevik Revolution. Obviously, Queen Victoria’s genetics didn’t cause Bolshevism, but perhaps they provided the opportunity for the Bolsheviks to seize power.
The diseases that have had the greatest impact on history, of course, were infectious rather than genetic. Sherman goes on to describe how potato blight, cholera, smallpox and myriad other diseases triggered chains of events whose consequences are still apparent today. For example, the fungal pathogen that destroyed potatoes and caused starvation in Ireland drove a massive immigration of Irishmen to America, forever changing its political landscape. The devastation of Native Americans by smallpox and other diseases facilitated the exploits of the Spanish conquistadors and aided colonization by the British. Some infectious diseases came with a silver lining. Though it is responsible for the deaths of untold millions of people, the death wrought by cholera helped inspire the establishment of global public health institutions, which have played a leading role in preventing or even eradicating infectious disease. Here, Mother Nature arguably has played a much larger determinative role.
What can we learn by applying this new way of thinking to the current coronavirus pandemic? Like a lightning bolt, Mother Nature is powerful and unpredictable. Yes, we know lightning occurs during storms, but we can’t predict when and where it will strike. Likewise, microbiologists and epidemiologists have long worried about an infectious disease pandemic, but few if any thought it would be a coronavirus in the year 2020. A report from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy makes that clear:
“When severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) – the virus that causes COVID-19 – first emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, even the most experienced international public health experts did not anticipate that it would rapidly spread to create the worst global public health crisis in over 100 years. By January 2020, a few public health officials began sounding the alarm, but it wasn’t until March 11, 2020, that the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic.”
By then, we now know, it was too late. The virus was everywhere. In the flash of an eye, Mother Nature commandeered the global agenda, ruthlessly and inconsiderately upsetting the lives of billions, indiscriminately wrecking democracies and dictatorships alike. She reminded us that she is still active and even mercurial in geopolitics. Our airplanes have conquered the skies, but Iceland’s volcanoes can keep them on the ground. Our doctors can save lives, but a new virus can end them. In retrospect, it is often clear to discern a chain of causal events linking nature to major geopolitical events – such as an undersea earthquake leading to friction in the EU. But such revelations only occur in hindsight. That’s why forecasting Mother Nature has been left to soothsayers and the local weathermen. Perhaps it’s time for geopolitical analysts to give it a try.
-
https://www.thewirechina.com/2020/06/07/the-birth-life-and-death-of-engagement/
-
Why the U.S. Is Moving Troops Out of Germany
Forces are needed in the Indo-Pacific. And Berlin should contribute more to European security.
By Robert C. O’Brien
June 21, 2020 12:39 pm ET
To counter China and Russia, two great-power competitors, U.S. forces must be deployed abroad in a more forward and expeditionary manner than they have been in recent years. This is the main reason the U.S. will reduce its permanently stationed force in Germany from 34,500 troops to 25,000.
President Trump confirmed the plans on June 15, but details remain under development and no formal public announcement has been made. The secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are working diligently to provide the president with options to carry out this plan.
The Cold War practice of garrisoning large numbers of troops with their families on massive bases in places like Germany is now, in part, obsolete. Modern warfare is increasingly expeditionary and requires platforms with extended range, flexibility and endurance. While air bases and logistics hubs remain important, the Cold War-style garrisoning of troops makes less military and fiscal sense than it did in the 1970s.
Several thousand troops currently assigned to Germany may be reassigned to other countries in Europe. Thousands may expect to redeploy to the Indo-Pacific, where the U.S. maintains a military presence in Guam, Hawaii, Alaska and Japan, as well as deployments in locations like Australia. In that theater, Americans and allies face the most significant geopolitical challenge since the end of the Cold War. And the remainder will return to bases in the U.S.
After these redeployments, America will still maintain 25,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in Germany. The U.S. relationship with Germany will remain strong, as will American commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It is time, however, for all European nations to contribute their fair share in defending their homelands. Germany has the world’s fourth-largest economy yet spends only 1.4% of gross domestic product on its own defense—despite NATO member countries’ longstanding commitment to a 2% target. American taxpayers contribute 3.4% of GDP toward defense.
Since Mr. Trump took office, NATO allies have increased defense spending substantially, by $130 billion through 2020. Burden-sharing has reinvigorated the NATO alliance, bolstering its mission of defending Europe and North America from external threats while also playing a constructive role in hot spots such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
Berlin still has time to step up and show leadership. The Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline isn’t complete; a German decision to stop the project would strengthen Europe’s energy security. Berlin hasn’t yet selected its 5G telecommunications provider. A trusted European company, such as Nokia or Ericsson, would be safer for this role than China’s Huawei. And Germany can accelerate its plan to harden its defenses, which would more than offset U.S. troop redeployment.
Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, America continues to lead the free world. The U.S. military’s global posture demonstrates this commitment and provides the maximum security for the American people.
Mr. O’Brien is White House national security adviser.
-
https://www.thewirechina.com/2020/06/07/the-birth-life-and-death-of-engagement/
-
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/mcmaster-china-strategy/609088/
-
https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-chris-brose-kill-chain
-
July 22, 2020 View On Website
Open as PDF
The Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales
By: George Friedman
The British recently finished building two new aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales. Last week, Britain announced that one of the carriers would be based in the Pacific. Obviously, the timing of the announcement had to do with the Chinese actions in Hong Kong. Hong Kong had been a British possession, which under a treaty with China would eventually revert to full Chinese control. China’s repression of Hong Kong is seen as violating guarantees China made concerning the preservation of rights in Hong Kong during the transition, and therefore Britain views that repression as a violation of China’s commitments to Britain. Thus, the decision to base a carrier in the Pacific.
The carriers are nearing the end of their testing, but as the Chinese know as well, building a vessel is a far cry from having an operational aircraft carrier. The carrier must be supplied with aircraft and the crews trained in operations. Supplying a carrier is enormously difficult, as it consumes vast amounts of material during operations. A logistic vessel, carrying huge amounts of everything from fuel to ammunition, must accompany it, and crews must be trained in the fine art of resupply at sea, and potentially while in combat. The new carriers are supposed to be equipped with F-35s, and that means training on that aircraft. Carriers do not sail alone. They are accompanied by vessels equipped with air defense capabilities and with ships to protect against submarines. Operational doctrine must be developed, and staff trained. Having built an aircraft carrier is very different from having an operational carrier battle group, and perhaps the most important part is not the hardware, but a trained captain and crew. China has also built two carriers, and the ships can sail. How close they are to having a combat-capable carrier battle group is as questionable as how close the British are.
The deployment of an aircraft carrier is occasionally a political and not a military matter. The British understanding of the future of Hong Kong has been shredded by China. Britain has both an interest in Hong Kong and an interest in being regarded as a force to be reckoned with. As has been the case for centuries, the act of deploying a warship during a significant dispute is meant to be a signal to the other side that, while no military action is intended, the intention can shift depending on circumstances. More important, it is a signal that disregarding Britain carries with it risks.
In Britain’s case, the decision to build carriers and to base one in the Pacific involves more than Hong Kong or China. The British have, through Brexit, reverted to their historical norm of being part of Europe but distinct from the nations of the European Peninsula. The English Channel, culture and interests divide them.
Ending the relationship with the European Union returns Britain to its prior state, and it was the Royal Navy that guaranteed that prior state and defended British sovereignty against the dangers always incubating on the Continent. Britain is seeking to regain its identity as something other than simply European, and naval force symbolizes that Britain is returning to its foundations. Building aircraft carriers, although discussed for years before Brexit, turned into an adjunct of it. Britain has not only left Europe but returned to itself, a nation with a Royal Navy.
Britain in 2020 is not likely to stand alone against its enemies. It has always sought to meld its naval power with alliances of convenience, and the current circumstances make that essential. It can symbolically threaten China for its actions, but in truth it cannot wage war, nor does it want to. Brexit was part of a process of Britain redefining itself as both a significant power and a dangerous one. The latter is more difficult than the former, and Britain cannot in this sense stand alone. The decision to send a carrier into the Pacific is certainly about Hong Kong, but it is also, as Winston Churchill had to do, drawing Britain closer to the United States.
The United States is in an adversarial position with China. There can be long discussions of relative power, but such discussions ultimately are concluded after the war is fought. Until then all matter of claims on the nature of power can be made. As Colin Powell put it, no war was ever lost because too much force had been deployed on the battlefield. The U.S. has a vast navy and, far more important, a long institutional memory of naval warfare, a memory China lacks. The U.S. also has a strategic advantage. China’s interest is in establishing control over its littoral waters. The U.S. interest is in not controlling the waters but merely denying control by China. The Chinese task is far more ambitious than mere sea lane denial. This is one of the reasons the adversarial relations have not become hostile. The U.S. merely wants to impose risk on China’s use of its waters. China wants to expel the U.S. from the region. The latter is a vastly more ambitious and risky undertaking.
(click to enlarge)
The U.S. operates through alliance systems. NATO has atrophied because the threat to Europe has abated. Another, informal alliance system has emerged. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines (this one is uncertain at times), Indonesia, Australia, Singapore and increasingly India are either formally or informally aligned with the United States, and most have been aligned for decades. China, on the other hand, has no formal allies, and at most has significant cooperation with Cambodia. In other words, where the U.S. force in the Western Pacific ranges from the Aleutians to the Strait of Malacca, the Chinese stand alone, isolated by geography and politics. Although it is strange to speak of a billion and a half people standing alone, that is the practical reality and it weighs on China.
(click to enlarge)
For Britain, making itself part of this coalition does more than simply signal its anger about Hong Kong. It also allows it to pursue its historical goal of a global navy and global allies. At this historical moment, the British can not be first among equals in this alliance, but membership in the alliance will demonstrate that the Royal Navy is global. It shows Britain to be a significant power, if not a superpower, which in turn makes its significance to Europe somewhat greater, even as it leaves the EU.
But there is another critical consideration: Britain’s relation to the United States. British military relations with the U.S. range from close to intimate. Since World War II it has become lopsided. Britain cannot correct the imbalance of power, but it can demonstrate that it is prepared to increase that force, build the most valuable of ships, and send one to join the anti-China coalition in the Pacific. Britain cannot return to its old role of full self-sufficiency, but it can have a close relationship with the alternative to a Brussels-led Europe: the United States. This is of course obvious, but the British also know that coming to the table as a mendicant does not generate American generosity. Bringing carriers to the table and deploying them in a region the U.S. is most concerned with now is significant, no matter how unprepared the carriers are for battle. It increases China’s sense of isolation, and also forces it to consider how far it will go. The British will be able to sit at the American table and expect consideration, and they will get it.
The carriers are not the issue. The issue is what Britain will be now that it has returned to its historical role, and how it will deal with the global interests it still has, including China. And it helps define its relations with the United States, which is next on its menu of things to do, after U.S. politics settle down. The risk is low, but the price is high. Carrier battle groups do not come cheap, nor does the ability to be a global power.
-
I have been pounding the table about this for four years now. Candidate Trump saw this coming , , ,
https://patriotpost.us/articles/72459-the-ominous-china-slash-russia-alliance-2020-07-28?mailing_id=5221&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5221&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
-
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3099642/us-seeks-formal-alliance-similar-nato-india-japan-and-australia-state?utm_content=article&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1598909439
-
GPF
No Pacific NATO. On Monday, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun called for a more formalized alliance structure akin to NATO with fellow members of the so-called Quad – India, Japan and Australia. Biegun noted that the Indo-Pacific region lacks strong multilateral structures – which is true – but that a Pacific NATO would only ever work if other countries were “as committed as the United States” – which is unlikely.
The U.S. developed a “hub and spoke” alliance structure in the Indo-Pacific in lieu of a NATO-like comprehensive alliance for reasons that haven’t really gone away. And both India and Australia are reluctant to enter into any sort of rigid partnership that accelerates the slide toward conflict with China and limits their ability to hedge their bets. Other countries Biegun suggested should be included, particularly South Korea, would be even more hesitant to follow the U.S. lead at a time when their strategic interests are diverging.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for stronger partnerships on narrower issues. On Tuesday, for example, Japan, Australia and India held talks on launching a supply chain resilience initiative later this year.
-
China’s Amphibian Dilemma: Straddling Land and Sea Ambitions
Rodger Baker
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
12 MINS READ
Sep 7, 2020 | 10:00 GMT
Cadets from China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy march in formation before a ceremony at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Sept. 30, 2019.
Cadets from China's navy march in formation before a ceremony at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Sept. 30, 2019.
(Mark Schiefelbein - Pool/Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
China borders the largest number of countries by land, and its navy now boasts the largest number of battle force ships by sea. With the pressures and opportunities of both a continental and maritime power, China faces an amphibian’s dilemma, as the characteristics best suited for life at sea and life at land may not always prove complementary. Traditional continental powers are more prone to autocratic leadership to manage their challenges, while traditional maritime powers lean toward democratic systems and more open markets. China’s attempt to straddle both can intensify sectionalism and exacerbate differences between the interior core that remains continental in outlook, and the coastal areas that become more maritime in outlook. This challenge is also highlighted in China’s attempts to reshape global norms and standards, which themselves largely represent the maritime world order. The apparent global political and economic dissonance is not merely caused by China seeking change, but...
"Land-based northerners have dominated Chinese culture throughout most of her history and whenever they have been in political control… China has been oriented primarily inwardly…. On the other hand, when control was exercised by South China groups… a strong maritime outlook was emphasized. … In the former instances, China functioned as a continental rimland state, in the latter as a maritime rimland state."
Donald W. Meinig, Heartland and Rimland in Eurasian History (1956)
China borders the largest number of countries by land, and its navy now boasts the largest number of battle force ships by sea. With the pressures and opportunities of both a continental and maritime power, China faces an amphibian’s dilemma, as the characteristics best suited for life at sea and life at land may not always prove complementary. Traditional continental powers are more prone to autocratic leadership to manage their challenges, while traditional maritime powers lean toward democratic systems and more open markets. China’s attempt to straddle both can intensify sectionalism and exacerbate differences between the interior core that remains continental in outlook, and the coastal areas that become more maritime in outlook.
This challenge is also highlighted in China’s attempts to reshape global norms and standards, which themselves largely represent the maritime world order. The apparent global political and economic dissonance is not merely caused by China seeking change, but by the very continental nature of China’s history. China is bringing a continental mindset to a maritime system. And though it is able to rally sympathy with others with a more continental history, China may find it difficult to bridge the continental/maritime divide.
China as a Continental Power
For most of its history, China has been a classic continental power. Initially a sedentary agricultural society on the northern plain along the Yellow River, China faced threats from both nomadic tribes to the north and west, as well as seafaring raiders along the east and southern coasts. Successive Chinese dynasties fought externally to secure buffer states and protect against outside powers, as well as internally to consolidate the fractious ethnic Han core, which stretched south to the Yangtze River and the rich rice land’s beyond.
Chinese empires followed a general pattern of dynastic rise and collapse:
Consolidation of the Han core under a strong central leadership.
Pressing outward along the periphery to counter external threats or capture new opportunities.
Expanding the bureaucracy to manage the sprawling empire.
Internal and external economic, political and military pressures weaken the center of power.
Some shock that finally breaks the back of a waning empire, starting over the cycle.
China’s reconsolidation came under external northern powers twice: the Yuan dynasty of the Mongols (1279-1368) and the Qing dynasty of the Manchu (1644-1912). During the Tang dynasty (618-906), China took its position as the “Middle Kingdom,” establishing suzerainty relationships with numerous nations around its expanding periphery, and engaging in international trade and diplomatic delegations across the Asian continent. But while trade and international connections expanded, China remained heavily focused on the continent, not at sea. Managing the myriad differing population and linguistic groups inside China and pressure from external threats shaped priorities, and trade outside of the expanded empire and bordering states was largely unnecessary.
China has flirted with a maritime focus in the past, often when power was centered in the south. The Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) had a large navy for coastal defense and riverine operations. And when the Mongols conquered Korea and Southern Song, they turned that maritime power briefly against Japan, with two ultimately unsuccessful invasions. During the early Ming dynasty (1368-1644), where the capital was initially in southern China at Nanjing, Zheng He embarked on several voyages around Asia and Africa in his famed treasure fleets. While these marked a notable expansion of Chinese maritime activity, they were largely focused on asserting Chinese power and centrality through diplomatic and tribute collection delegations, rather than building trade routes or a long-term naval presence. And with the capital shifted back north to Beijing and internal troubles once again arising, China disposed of the fleet and turned continental once again.
Modern China has largely retained that continental focus. Like earlier peasant rebellions, the Chinese Communist revolution took root in the interior in the 1930s and 40s, despite the nationalist government having a maritime outlook from its southern base in Nanjing. And while Taiwan has always been a focus of the Communist Party’s unification of China, early consolidation focused on western regions, securing Xinjiang in 1950 and Tibet in 1951. Mao Zedong (1949-1976) focused heavily on China’s interior, at times with disastrous results, as in the Great Leap Forward. Even as Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping (1978-1989) moved to shift China’s economic policies and open the country to more trade, the Chinese government prioritized managing internal ethnic and social issues, as well as China’s numerous disputes along its land borders. During this time, China’s national security was focused on maintaining a large, land-based People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with infrequent attention to naval power.
China today is still largely a continental land power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, China found itself with 14 contiguous neighbors, many ambivalent toward the People’s Republic. Domestically, around two-thirds of the Chinese population live in the interior, though much of the nation’s economic activity occurs along the coast. This dichotomy has the potential to stir traditional instability, and Chinese leaders spend a lot of their time and effort emphasizing the importance of the interior. The response to the global financial crisis was to rapidly increase infrastructure spending in the interior, and enhance rail connectivity toward western China. The Belt and Road initiative (BRI) continued that continentalist strategy by seeking to redirect attention from domestic socio-economic gaps to economic opportunities across the borders to the west and south.
China as a Maritime Power
China’s rapid economic rise from the mid-1990s created a new pressure point on the Chinese system. For much of China’s history, the country was largely self-sufficient, so long as it didn’t mismanage its resources. But economic growth increasingly linked China into extended supply chains, for raw materials and for overseas markets. With most outward-focused economic activity taking place along the coast or along rivers connected to the coast, China’s international trade was largely by sea, and vulnerable to the key maritime chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca. Rising competition with the United States reinforced China’s trade risk, with U.S. allies or partners forming a crescent surrounding the Chinese coast, from South Korea and Japan through the Philippines and down through Southeast Asia and Australia.
For China, there were three options: 1) Accept U.S. control of the seas, as most other nations did; 2) Find alternative routes to reduce its vulnerability to the chokepoints along its maritime frontier, or 3) Build a naval capability that could secure its supply chains throughout the region and beyond. China chose the latter two, one through the BRI and the other via the rapid expansion of the PLA navy, coupled with air and sea defense missiles and territorial assertions in the South China Sea. By the late 1990s, China was building bases and airstrips on contested reefs and rocks in the South China Sea. And in early 2001, tensions rose amid the Hainan Island Incident. While China backed off at the time, due both to its own recognized weaknesses and the U.S. shift in attention to the war against terrorism, Beijing redoubled its shipbuilding efforts.
China’s navy now outmatches the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force and has more battle force ships than the United States (though in tonnage, the U.S. Navy’s vessels still far outweigh those of the PLA Navy). Combined, these developments have reshaped the balance of naval power in the Western Pacific. In addition, China has significantly expanded its coast guard and other coastal defense forces, revived and expanded several airfields and small bases on artificial islands built on disputed reefs in the South China Sea, and has fielded two aircraft carriers, with another under construction and several more planned.
While China’s naval buildup focused initially on quantity, it has shifted in recent years to quality, testing numerous versions of ships before choosing preferred platforms, and coming close to its peer competitors in several areas of key naval technologies. China has tested its ability to operate for extended periods of time far from home, taking advantage of anti-piracy operations off the coast of Africa to provide real-world training for its crews and establishing a base in Djibouti. The PLA navy does remain behind in some aspects, including anti-submarine warfare and multi-domain naval operations. It also has no culture of carrier battle group operations, and has not been tested in real combat experience since the 1970s. But Beijing has gone a long way to build a modern and professional navy that by many accounts can now outcompete the U.S. Navy in the enclosed waters of the South China Sea.
China continues to seek to shape the maritime environment within the so-called first island chain, and has regularly pushed beyond into the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific and more recently into the Arctic, though the latter still primarily with its civilian fleet. China’s future shipbuilding capacity appears robust, while that of Japan and the United States is curtailed by budgetary concerns and shifting priorities.
China as an Amphibian Power
China’s naval build-up has been rapid, facilitated by the centralized nature of the government and economy. And this maritime focus has paralleled China’s landward infrastructure and trade push along its periphery, reflecting both China’s overall economic strength and its stated intent to take its place among the chief powers of the world system. But as with past rising powers and empires, China faces challenges both from the status quo power, the United States, and from its many neighbors. China’s proclaimed pursuit of “win-win” solutions as it expands its economic, political and military influence will only serve it for so long before the attendant imbalances in power lead to resistance — and in many places, that is already happening.
China’s dual challenges with managing its continental interests and its newer maritime priorities have historical precedence in other rising powers. In his 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, American naval scholar and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan discusses how France consistently struggled with the economic and security costs of seeking to dominate the European continent and maintain a robust navy to counter British maritime power.
At the time, Mahan sought to stir the United States to a global maritime role, expounding on the way British sea power shaped national strength. Germany, in both World Wars, also found itself torn between its continental and maritime priorities. Both were important to secure German power, but each also required a unique strategy with very different resources and key geographies. During the Cold War, the United States used the geographically constrained Soviet sea access to hem in the country, while also exploiting its long land borders in the strategy of containment.
With the pressures and opportunities of both a continental and maritime power, China faces an amphibian’s dilemma, as the characteristics best suited for life at sea and life at land may not always prove complementary.
Similarly, for China, neighboring countries represent both an opportunity for economic and strategic gain, and a vulnerability to China’s national security. Beijing must ensure that its borders remain secure, that regional problems in places like Afghanistan do not interfere with Chinese supply lines through Central and South Asia or spill over into western China, and find ways to reduce the options for the United States to solidify allies and partners around the Chinese periphery. China must also do this at sea to secure its dominant position in the enclosed seas of Asia, as well as regional territorial competitions and undermine U.S. maritime coalitions, while also building out a network of port and resupply agreements along the length of its supply lines.
The U.S. emergence as a global naval power in the 20th Century occurred only after the United States had largely secured its continental position, and was left with only two land neighbors. China’s maritime emergence is happening while it is still seeking to secure its continental position through infrastructure and trade, but this is still a work in progress. Yet if it could, through a combination of economic, political and security arrangements, China would represent the new heartland power envisioned by British geographer Sir Halford J. Mackinder. As early as his 1904 paper defining the Heartland, Mackinder noted that China could at some future point fill this role as a nation capable of uniting the resource base and manpower of Europe, Asia and Africa and then turning its focus to the seas, where it would overwhelm the international maritime order. In his 1944 book titled The Geography of the Peace, American strategist Nicholas Spykman also noted that the “dominant power in the Far East will undoubtedly be China, providing she achieves real unification and provided that Japan’s military power is completely destroyed.”
Making the Leap
Continental powers must deal with managing governance over large territories, balance the differing interests of numerous
neighbors, ensure unity among a diversity of domestic ethnic regions, and shoulder the higher cost of less efficient transport across land. Maritime powers are driven by commerce and the need to both ensure the continuity of long supply lines far from the core national support base, as well as engage in international intercourse that highlights differing social and economic norms from a continental power. But an amphibious nation must manage both the complexities of a continental empire and the challenges of a maritime power.
A key question, then, for understanding the geography of the 21st century is whether China will be able to overcome the amphibian’s dilemma, and emerge as equally formidable both on land and at sea.
-
http://carolineglick.com/the-uae-and-the-democratic-cair-partnership/
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/when-conventional-wisdom-gets-downright-dangerous/
-
The U.S.'s Eurasia Obsession, Part 1: Setting the Stage
Rodger Baker
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
8 MINS READ
Aug 31, 2020 | 10:00 GMT
"Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?"
U.S. President George Washington, Farewell Address (1796)
Since its founding, the United States has feared European involvement in North America and the Western Hemisphere. And from this fear arose a continentalist strategic view and an idea of a fortress America secure behind its oceanic moats, loathe to get dragged into internecine European conflicts. Over time, as the United States consolidated its position across North America, a competing concern also arose — one that began to see Eurasia at the heart of a strategic challenge to U.S. security, and promoted a more internationalist and interventionist policy abroad. These two strands continue to shape U.S. strategic assessments today amid the emerging geography of the 21st century.
The Continentalist Compulsion
The United States first emerged as a loose federation of colonies sitting at the edge of North America, a less important frontier in the sprawling global British Empire. The establishment of the republic did not remove the British from North America, nor did it free the new nation from European rivalries, which continued to play out across North America and the Caribbean. The United States focused its attention on strengthening the union following the Revolutionary War, and protecting the nascent nation from falling prey to European powers.
It was in this context that President George Washington delivered his 1796 farewell address, advising against European entanglements. "Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course," Washington noted, highlighting the perceived protection of distance. With so much work to do on North America, from ensuring already notable sectionalism didn't tear apart the new nation to protecting the territory from rival European empires, there was little value and much risk in growing too close to any single European power, or getting drawn into European competition. Then, as is still the case today, any U.S. military action in Eurasia would see the United States vastly outnumbered, at the far ends of vulnerable supply lines, and drawing massively on the nation's economic and human resources. Entanglement and intervention simply made no sense, even if there were ideological sympathies to French philosophy and British commerce.
Throughout the 19th century, the United States maintained a largely continentalist focus, spreading its boundaries westward through settlement and colonization on land that was either bought, annexed or seized by force. This included the Louisiana and Florida purchases before 1820, followed by Alaska in 1867; the annexation of Texas in 1845 to secure the southwest border, followed by Hawaii in 1898 to secure the Pacific approaches; and the Indian Wars, the War of 1812 (which resulted in a status quo on the northern border) and the Mexican-American War (which culminated in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo).
Each of these historical moments was about pushing the frontiers of the United States, countering or ousting European powers (Britain, France, Spain and Russia) or the native American nations, and securing a strong and protected homeland. Sectionalism and the Civil War nearly ended the American experiment, but reinforced the core of the nation's jealous regard for territorial integrity.
The boldest expression of continentalism came in 1823. Europe was once again embroiled in internal warfare, Russia was moving down the west coast of North America, and France and Spain appeared ready to reassert their empires in the Caribbean. In his December address to Congress, President James Monroe reiterated America's non-interference in Europe and existing European colonies, but also declared that "we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety." This sentiment, later deemed the Monroe Doctrine, was not mere hubris. The Gulf of Mexico was critical for U.S. commerce traveling down the Mississippi, and the Florida Strait granted access to the Atlantic. A reassertion of European power in the Caribbean islands was a direct threat to American trade. While clearly a reflection of aspiration more than capability, the Monroe Doctrine asserted a fundamental U.S interest not only in keeping Europeans out of any future expansion in North America, but out of the hemisphere as a whole.
Continentalism never meant isolationism, and the 1800s saw the groundwork for a future internationalist United States. While avoiding involvement in European conflict, the United States tested its naval capacity in the Barbary Wars in North Africa early in the Century, signed a Treaty of Friendship with Hawaii in 1849 warning against any European annexation of the islands, sent Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan in the 1850s to open the country to trade, and briefly invaded Korea in 1871. The Civil War and reconstruction, however, kept the United States focused inward for much of the latter half of the century, aside from its distant engagements in Asia.
The Internationalist Imperative
The radical break from continentalism came with the Spanish-American War in 1898, during which the United States annexed Hawaii. At the conclusion of the conflict, the United States also gained possession of Puerto Rico, as well as distant Guam and the Philippines. In 1890, less than a decade before the war, U.S. historian and naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan published his book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, in which he laments the deteriorating state of the U.S. Navy and merchant marine after the Civil War, highlighting the connection between naval strength and economic strength seen in the history of the United Kingdom. Mahan's ideas shifted the concepts of national defense from coastal to oceanic, and the need for the United States to project power to secure its own interests, not merely play a defensive game at home.
Between Mahan's strategic geopolitics and the suddenly expanded territory, the United States embarked on a brief but notable moment of internationalism — sending the Great White Fleet of U.S. Navy battleships on a 14-month circumnavigation of the globe, backing Panamanian secession from Colombia and signing rights to the canal zone, and challenging European imperial trading and economic dominance by asserting its Open Door policy in Asia. This internationalist surge was followed by another turn inward, and as war broke out in Europe, the United States sought to maintain a neutral role and avoid entanglement.
But the Atlantic proved little protection for the United States, and its shipping fell prey to Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare. This, coupled with the publication of the Zimmermann Telegram, which appeared to threaten to bring war directly to North America, prompted the United States to declare war on Germany and send troops to Europe, marking a clear break from Washington's admonition more than a century earlier. Despite President Woodrow Wilson's involvement in the formation of the League of Nations following World War I, the United States resumed its continentalist focus. And one could even argue that U.S. intervention in the war was driven more by a desire to re-secure the Atlantic moat and reassert the Monroe Doctrine, rather than a desire to shape the balance of power in Europe.
The contrast between continentalism and internationalism remains a deep-seated aspect of American strategic thought, reflecting the dual continental and maritime nature of the United States.
It was following World War I that the framework for true U.S. internationalism was laid. In 1919, British Geographer Sir Halford J. Mackinder published his book, Democratic Ideals and Reality, laying out his “Heartland” thesis. In what could be read as a counterpoint to Mahan's maritime focus, Mackinder warned that given the pace of modern transportation and warfighting technology, if a single power like Germany (and later Russia) could dominate the Eurasian heartland, it would have the full resources and human capital of Europe, Asia and Africa at its disposal. Its core would be protected from global maritime power, and its industrial capacity would allow it to ultimately build a fleet capable of dominating the global oceans. The key to preventing an authoritarian power from overwhelming the wartime trading democracies, Mackinder argued, was ensuring no great power could emerge in the European heartland.
Mackinder's book did not initially elicit strong attention, but by the dawning of World War II, it was enjoying a resurgence of recognition in the United States. U.S. attempts to remain out of the war in Europe and remain neutral in fortress America were once again proving less than ideal. And Mackinder offered a way to see the bigger strategic picture, to use geography, history, and a study of societies to explain why the United States could not sit on the sidelines and hope for the best.
Mackinder expounded on his ideas in a 1943 article in Foreign Affairs, and cautioned that Germany was not the only heartland power that could challenge global democracies:
"All things considered, the conclusion is unavoidable that if the Soviet Union emerges from this war as conqueror of Germany, she must rank as the greatest land Power on the globe. Moreover, she will be the Power in the strategically strongest defensive position. The Heartland is the greatest natural fortress on earth. For the first time in history it is manned by a garrison sufficient both in number and quality."
Mackinder's concepts clearly influenced American policy in the post-World War II period. And the contrast between continentalism and internationalism remains a deep-seated aspect of American strategic thought, reflecting the dual continental and maritime nature of the United States. Finding the right balance within this dichotomy will be the strategic challenge of the decade, as the U.S. government grapples with the emergence of China as a new Eurasian strategic power.
-
The U.S.'s Eurasia Obsession, Part 2: The China Challenge
Rodger Baker
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
6 MINS READ
Sep 2, 2020 | 10:00 GMT
"The threat of an encirclement of the United States by a European-Asiatic combination, which first emerged at the time of President Monroe, reappeared at the time of the First World War, and lay dormant in the British-Japanese Alliance, has again appeared, but on a scale undreamt of in former times."
Nicholas J. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics (1942)
The United States is in the midst of a strategic refocus from counterterrorism and rogue nation control, to so-called great power competition. While Russia, the Cold War counterpart, remains a concern, China has emerged as the primary near-peer threat. This is reawakening a key element that has long shaped U.S. foreign policy and strategic assessment — the major power of the Eurasian continent. But U.S. culture is split over the best way to deal with a Eurasian competitor, and domestic political and economic divisions will make it difficult for the United States to maintain a consistent strategy.
The New Eurasia Challenge
In his 1942 book, America's Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, the U.S. social scientist Nicholas J. Spykmam made a very clear case of why an isolationist continentalist United States was not secure in the modern world. Spykman also identified a rimland, stretching around the periphery of Eurasia, where land meets sea, and where the maritime powers contend with the great continental power. It was Spykman's elucidation that helped shape the strategic thinking behind the later U.S. Cold War policy of containment, and the need for U.S. intervention around the Eurasian periphery. The Korean and Vietnam wars were both fought in the rimland, as were the U.S. relationships with Pakistan, Persia and Europe. Current U.S. overseas basing, and a very activist U.S. military, are all legacies of the internationalist concepts laid down by the likes of Spykman.
The United States now faces a new type of Eurasian competitor in China, one that is both continental and maritime. China's Belt and Road Initiative seeks to link the resources, markets and productive capacity of Mackinder's World Island (Asia, Europe and Africa), with Beijing at the center. China is also reaching out beyond Eurasia, across the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic, to tap into the Americas. Should China prove successful, it would represent Spykman's encircling power, one that could exert influence and force across the Atlantic and Pacific frontiers, and perhaps even along the opening Arctic front.
The question facing the U.S. government over the next decade or more is not just what to do about China, but how to do it.
Though China is not poised to take over Eurasia and strangle U.S. trade along each coast any time soon, if at all, strategic thought looks to future potential capabilities, not current capacity or intent. And that raises again the core strategic dichotomy between continentalism and internationalism. While there is general agreement across the political aisle that China is a strategic competitor, if not the chief near-peer power challenger to the United States, there is little consensus on the strategy to deal with that challenge.
Even inside the current administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, there are contradictory strategic policies. There is a drive to reduce the U.S. military footprint abroad, to withdraw troops, shrink overseas basing and, in some ways, try to pull back into fortress America. And at the same time, there is a drive to declare an ideological battle with China, to enhance U.S. forces abroad, particularly in the rimland around China, to keep the confrontation with China on and around the Eurasian landmass, and to disrupt China's economic and political expansion.
The Struggle for Balance
Such a dichotomy is not unique to the Trump administration — U.S. policy is often pulled by the competing forces of continentalism and internationalism, and similar swings were seen during the Cold War. Nor is it merely the cognitive dissonance of the foreign policy elite in Washington. There is widespread general public support for withdrawing U.S. forces after nearly two decades of overseas conflict, as well as rising U.S. recognition of China as an opposing power to U.S. interests abroad. Partisan politics can play into this seemingly contradictory viewpoint, but it isn't the root cause. America's general prosperity and isolation strengthens the sense of continentalism, particularly when it faces economic hardship. But the undercurrent of American exceptionalism, whether couched in terms of democracy, morality or modern individual rights, reinforces the internationalist bent.
The question facing the United States over the next decade or more is not just what to do about China, but how to do it. The United States remains a potent military and economic power, but it is also facing significant social and economic challenges that will reinforce the need to strengthen the homeland before seeking change abroad. The COVID-19 crisis, strong social divisions and extreme partisanship will compel the U.S. government to look inward, as well as U.S. citizens to urge more spending at home rather than on foreign military action.
At the same time, despite recent calls for reshaping supply chains and "decoupling" with China, the United States cannot simply withdraw into a shell and hope that things in the Eastern Hemisphere have no impact at home. Even in its most continentalist moments in the past, the United States has not been truly isolationist, nor has it been able to tease itself away from global commerce, both to absorb U.S. surplus (today in services more than manufactures), or to bring in critical raw materials. Even if the United States decides to take a more limited role abroad, it will not be immune to shifting geopolitical patterns that would impact resources and market access. As Mackinder noted and Spykman reiterated, the world is a closed system, and events in one place now ripple around the globe, whether we want them to or not.
The world is a closed system, and events in one place now ripple around the globe, whether we want them to or not.
Both internationalism and continentalism have their costs and rewards, but it is hard to effectively straddle the line. An internationalist strategy requires active combined political, economic and military influence around the Eurasian periphery, ideally in close cooperation with partners and allies. Attempting to be only partially internationalist quickly sees the strategy lose focus, sees allies lose trust, and paves the way for the Eurasian competitor to exploit the attendant fractures. A purely continentalist strategy that seeks to strengthen the homeland and maintain trade through professed neutrality, but does little to intervene to shape developments in Eurasia, can last only a brief amount of time before the shifting global power balance begins to impinge on America's sense of security, triggering a return to an internationalist course.
-
October 6, 2020 Open as PDF
Conflict in the Caucasus and the New American Strategy
By: George Friedman
During the Cold War, the United States opposed the Soviet Union wherever the Soviet Union sought to make inroads. Some interventions were necessary and therefore took place in obvious locales: in Germany to shield Europe, in Turkey to limit Soviet naval movement into the Mediterranean, and in Japan to block the Soviet port of Vladivostok and the Pacific. Others such as Angola and Afghanistan were less so.
The United States was in a global competition with the Soviets, and they both used the tools they had available to counter each other. Washington’s primary tool was its military, particularly its massive navy. Moscow’s was what were called “wars of national liberation.” They involved covert support to insurgents in countries throughout the world, most notably in former colonies of European imperialists. The United States usually had little interest in the battleground country. It had an overriding interest in blocking Soviet success in these countries, since success might create the perception of greater Soviet power. The U.S. tended to use covert forces to wage a covert war against Soviet proxies, though some such as Vietnam are notable exceptions.
(click to enlarge)
During the Cold War, everything mattered to the United States, because the Soviets could and would exploit any opening. The Soviet Union was a global power, with a military second only to the United States' and a covert capability that frequently put Washington in difficult situations.
But there is no threat from the Soviet Union today. Only some things now matter to Washington. This is a shock to a world that expects the U.S. to take a leadership role, indifferent to the price the U.S. paid in the Cold War for taking the reins. Engaging globally carries with it a high price that can be paid when necessary but should be avoided when possible.
Between then and now, in late 2008, Russia went to war in Georgia. The United States was deeply enmeshed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it made clear it had no intention of intervening. Limited by its commitment elsewhere, it was not in a position to rush troops there, though it did bring other forces such as sanctions to bear. After the war, the United States sent troops to Georgia, primarily to train the Georgian army, and its presence and commitment have lasted to this day.
It was a far slower response than it would have been during the Cold War, but it was no less significant. The question of why Russia's actions should cause the U.S. to take risks and spend resources was still not challenged. A Russian threat to Georgia triggered a visceral reaction: Russian expansion must be blocked wherever it emerges, especially when the victim is America’s ally. The question of whether this even interests the United States was overridden by the assumption from the Cold War: The U.S. has a responsibility to stabilize the world.
The current dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory that like Georgia is located in the Caucasus, represents a fundamental shift in U.S. policy. Azerbaijan lost the territory to Armenia in the early 1990s. Since then, its recovery was a fundamental wish of Azerbaijan, but other internal issues preoccupied its time. But last week, the Azerbaijani military began an artillery attack that lasted for days. Armenia has refused to cede the territory. Turkey has sided with Azerbaijan, both because of historical affinity for Azerbaijan and because of long-standing hostility to Armenia. The Russians are allied with Armenia but also had close relations with Azerbaijan. The Iranians gave lukewarm support to Azerbaijan but overall made it clear that they wished to remain out of the conflict.
(click to enlarge)
If there was an automatic assumption that the U.S. had to “manage” a crisis such as this in 2008, in 2020 it is apparent that the crisis is unmanageable. For one thing, who owns Nagorno-Karabakh is not a matter that concerns the U.S. For another, the outcome of a war – if it comes to that – would have minimal effect on the U.S. Last, U.S. relations with Turkey and Russia are already frayed, and the risks of navigating a war in the Caucasus would outweigh the benefits. Hence why Washington has offered only expected platitudes since last week.
The shift of U.S. strategy was inevitable and predictable. During the Cold War, it took the (not unreasonable) view that the world was of a single fabric such that it couldn’t stand by if it was being tugged far afield. In time, the Cold War ended but the strategy did not, as evidenced by bombing campaigns in Serbia and Libya. During this transitional period, it became much more difficult to define U.S. goals, and more difficult still to explain how military action would achieve the goal. The U.S. had spent half a century built around the principle of constant and urgent global involvement. Strategic principles die hard.
The United States is still singularly powerful, but the experience of war and hostile diplomacy can be painful even for the strong. There was a connection between U.S. power and risk in the Cold War. There is precious little connection between this and the future of Azerbaijani-Armenian relations. It’s the recognition that there is no global war underway, and that some things simply mean more to the U.S. than others. In a tiny place that few outside the region have heard of, the new necessity and logic of U.S. foreign policy are being carried out. In a way, that makes the U.S. more like other powers, accumulating political capital and spending it after calculating the risks of and rewards for acting.
-
Walter Mead on the war in the Southern Caucasus: “Prospects for a cease-fire are poor. While Armenian diplomats frantically work the phones to gin up international support, Azerbaijan and Turkey demand an Armenian withdrawal and an apology as the price of peace. For Mr. Erdogan, a victory in the Caucasus would be a personal triumph. Siding with the predominantly Shiite but ethnically Turkic Azeris against Christian Armenia is wildly popular with both religious and nationalist Turks. Victory would force Russia to take Ankara more seriously as a force in the region. It would increase Mr. Erdogan’s independence from the U.S. and enhance his credentials as the man who can revive the lost glories of the Ottoman caliphate. Mr. Erdogan’s downside risks are also large, especially if Russia decides to settle with Turkey once and for all. But in an increasingly disorderly world, middle powers like Turkey must take their opportunities where they find them. The coming winter will likely be a bitter one for the civilians and conscripts caught up in a war that an enfeebled international system seems unwilling or unable to forestall.
WRM, WSJ
-
ctober 27, 2020
View On Website
Open as PDF
What Happened to American Leadership?
By: George Friedman
International conferences for people in my profession are generally a thing of the recent past, having been replaced by virtual conferences via platforms like Zoom and Webex. I’ve attended three this month alone and many more in prior months. One question has been repeatedly raised, particularly at European conferences: What has happened to American leadership? It’s typically followed by another question of whether the United States is returning to isolationism. I am not at all clear what leadership means when there is little following. I am more baffled by the notion of a return to isolationism.
It is the concept of a “return” that confuses me, since the United States never isolated itself. It’s true that in the interwar period the U.S. tried to avoid going to war in Europe again. The U.S. became involved in the First World War to block a German victory and then withdrew its troops. The U.S. saw this as the war to end all wars, and the Europeans increasingly acted as if it were a truce within one war. The United States did not want to be dragged into another European bloodbath and was in no position to stop what was to the United States an endless European dynamic.
But while the United States sought distance from Europe, it was involved in Asia. It opposed Japan’s invasion of Manchuria by providing limited military force to China, engaged with the Philippines and maintained a substantial naval force in Hawaii. U.S. economic measures grew so intense that they triggered the attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor. For Europeans and what I might call Europeanists in the United States, the failure to engage in Europe is deemed isolation, and the substantial engagement in Asia is deemed irrelevant. The United States was not engaged in Europe because it reasonably believed it could have little influence there, and that expanding its influence would be too risky. The U.S. did not want to replay WWI, and was drawn into Europe by Hitler declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. It is not clear what the U.S. would have done without this, but the desire not to get trapped in another European bloodbath was neither irrational nor irresponsible.
Once Hitler declared war, the United States inevitably assumed leadership. The American industrial plant was indispensable to Britain and the Soviet Union, and U.S. forces rapidly dwarfed the British in Europe. The United States was forced into a Pacific war by Japan and an Atlantic war by Hitler, not altogether by choice. It became the leader in both theaters because of the power it brought to bear. Leadership was the result of an imbalance of power.
After World War II, it became apparent to Washington that without a U.S. presence in Europe, the Soviet Union would dominate the Continent and in doing so threaten U.S. control of the Atlantic. So the U.S. stayed in Europe, sending troops, organizing the economy, rehabilitating Germany and so on. Most important, U.S. forces and the threat of nuclear weapons created what turned out to be a prudent if uneasy understanding between the United States and Europe. The U.S. imposed a unity on the fractured as part of this strategy. It was the leadership of the powerful over the weak.
All the while, the U.S. was intensely involved in the Pacific, fighting major wars in Korea and Vietnam that killed nearly 100,000 Americans. This was a unique period of U.S. history seen by allies as the new norm. But the United States was as involved as it was to confront a coalition of communist states. In creating an anti-communist coalition, the U.S. bore a substantial economic burden and incurred significant military risk. The only advantage was defensive – preventing the domination of both Europe and Asia by a rival power. Otherwise, there was little benefit.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the evolution of China after the death of Mao Zedong changed the global reality dramatically. The Europeans signed the Maastricht treaty, which did not particularly concern the U.S., despite having little influence over the negotiations. Europe was now free to take its own course. Similarly, Asia (particularly Japan) was booming, and with China redesigning itself there was no reason for a massive presence there.
The American presence at both ends of Eurasia was not triggered by any real economic advantage. It was triggered by the American interest in maintaining the Atlantic and Pacific as buffers against Eurasian threats to the United States. In the 1990s, these threats faded, and therefore a new strategy was required. The new strategy emerged slowly. Washington did not abandon Europe; there were no significant enemies to speak of, the European economy was surging, and the need for American leadership weakened. Old habits die hard, and institutions such as NATO continued with a far weakened military capability facing a far weakened threat. Europe recognized as much and adjusted its defense policy so that it could focus on economic matters. In many ways, the American presence became anachronistic. In the past decade, the U.S. has focused on an unlikely Russian threat to Europe, placing U.S. troops in Poland and Romania. But with the European Union having a gross domestic product roughly equal to that of the U.S. and no significant military threat, the U.S. interest in Europe declines and the European need for the United States dissolves.
The United States is a two-ocean power. During World War II, both oceans mattered. During the Cold War, precedence shifted occasionally. Now, the dominant interest of the United States is containing Chinese naval power by controlling its littoral waters. The U.S. has a massive alliance system doing just that. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia are formally or implicitly allied. Indonesia, Vietnam and India are not formally engaged but have interests parallel to those of the United States relative to China. It creates a line of containment from the Aleutians to the Strait of Malacca and into the Indian Ocean. As in the Cold War, the U.S. strategy is containment, and an alliance structure built around massive American power. It is designed to make a Chinese offensive too risky for Beijing while containing China at a high financial cost but low military risk.
So the answer to the original question – “What happened to American leadership”? – is that history has moved on and Europe can and does lead itself. Whatever risks Europe faces should be dealt with through European leadership, and where necessary, a degree of U.S. force can augment it. Interests demand that the U.S. focus on the Pacific, just as it has done since before WWII. American leadership is readily apparent there.
In other words, U.S. leadership goes where the U.S. has significant interest. Europe does not need American leadership in economics or defense. The U.S. has an overarching interest in Asia. It has no desire or means to compel significant European action, nor are the Europeans interested in giving it. The threat of a Russian invasion of Europe is small, but the U.S. has made prudent commitments in front line countries.
The U.S. is not isolationist, nor does it intend to be, nor will it be allowed to arbitrate European squabbles. The Europeans lived through a period of massive American economic and military involvement. That period is over. The alliance structures can stay in place, and meetings can be held with communiques issued, but history has moved on. So has the U.S.
-
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2020/10/28/henry-kissinger-and-the-self-deluding-establishment-n1103776
-
"Friedman is a smart guy but some of his analysis is but a just so story"
Biden’s Dilemma
Geopolitical Futures
November 10, 2020
View On Website
Open as PDF
Biden’s Dilemma
By: George Friedman
The election is over, and barring major fraud or error, Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. He begins as a weak candidate. The country is divided virtually down the middle; almost half of the country voted against him. Animosity toward him will be similar to that faced by Donald Trump for the past four years.
Congress is deeply divided. The Senate may come in at a tie, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris holding the deciding vote. In the House of Representatives, the Democrats’ majority shrunk to just 14 seats. During the Trump administration, they tended to vote with near unanimity. With a smaller majority they may not, given the emergence of a progressive wing of the party. With Trump gone, unanimity may be gone too. Once the euphoria of victory passes, Biden will have little room for maneuver.
Biden must create a strong foundation for his presidency quickly. When Barack Obama came to office, the dominant issue was the Iraq war. He immediately reached out to the Islamic world to redesign perceptions there, and though it had only limited effect in the Islamic world, it had substantial influence in the United States, which was weary after a decade of war in the region. It represented something new at a time when the old was seen by many as dysfunctional.
For Biden, there is no towering foreign policy issue. There are, of course, two towering domestic issues: the COVID-19 crisis and the economy. To some extent there is a tradeoff here, absent a viable vaccine. The more aggressive measures are used to fight the virus, the greater the stress on the economy. The more sensitive one is to the economy, the less obsessed one is with the disease. This is an imperfect view of the situation, but far from preposterous.
Trump regarded the virus as secondary to the economy. The reasonable approach is to take both equally seriously and find solutions for both – reasonable but difficult, when solutions for one impose costs on the other side. (Obviously, each president is expected to invent the impossible, and each president promises to do so.) A “blood, sweat, toil and tears” speech that galvanizes the country to sacrifice on both fronts won’t work. In fighting the virus, you are not asking the nation to do something extraordinarily difficult; you are asking it to not do ordinary things. In any case, Biden may have many virtues, but being Churchillian doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Biden’s promise to unite the country is unlikely enough, for he is trapped in his predecessor’s dilemma. Under present circumstances, Biden has limited economic options. And he is dealing with a disease about which he has no real expertise but for which he is expected to implement solutions. Some solutions will come from doctors who are insensitive to the economic consequences of their decisions. Others will come from the Fed and business, who expect the medical system to solve a problem that baffles it. Like Trump, he will have a menu of imperfect choices. Like Trump, he will pay the political price for whatever he chooses. Trump chose what he thought was politically expedient. He was wrong. But if he had chosen differently that would also have been wrong.
I have written about how the foreign policy of an era tends to follow from one president to another president. Obama’s presidency coincided with the winding down of the jihadist wars. For Obama there were three principles: withdrawing maximum forces from the Middle East, restructuring the U.S.-Chinese relationship, and preventing Russia from dominating Ukraine and other countries. Trump’s foreign policy was to continue to reduce the presence of U.S. forces in the Middle East while overseeing a new geopolitical system that binds Israel to the Arab world, heavily increasing pressure on China to change its economic policies, and modestly increasing U.S. presence in Poland and Romania to block Russia.
Biden will open with some easy moves such as rejoining the Paris Agreement. This requires that a country create plans for meeting the treaty’s goals, create plans for implementation, and implement them. For Biden, creating a plan he can get through Congress is tough; implementing it is tougher still. Many nations that signed the agreement have not implemented plans keeping with its obligations. But joining is easy and will look good to Biden’s fractious party.
He will also revive Atlantic relations by sounding reasonable at the endless meetings that achieve nothing. Aside from Poland and Romania – themselves an extension of the Russia issue – and the perennial issue of defense spending, Washington has few real issues with Europe.
What will matter to Biden will be what mattered to Obama and Trump: China and its economic relationship with the United States, along with protecting the Western Pacific from an unlikely Chinese foray; the continued withdrawal of troops from the Middle East and supporting the Israeli-Arab entente; and the continued attempts to limit Russian efforts at expansion through troop deployment and sanctions.
These are issues that represent continuity and importantly will not detract from the core domestic challenges Biden will grapple with. There are other issues, but shifting them requires dealing with allies who are deeply invested in them. For example, shifting policy on Iran is possible, but it would create huge tensions with Israel and the Sunni Arab world. Similarly, a shift in Korea policy would create problems with Japan and South Korea.
So the goal of the incoming Biden administration will be to focus on the issue that destroyed Trump: COVID-19 and the economy. To do that, it is necessary to limit or avoid foreign policy initiatives that might weaken Biden’s position in Congress and the country. This does not mean that U.S. diplomacy will not change. The myriad meetings will be attended, and a new tone, same as the old tone, will be struck.
This model, of course, depends on the actions of others. Jimmy Carter did not expect an uprising in Iran, and George H.W. Bush was not clear on the fall of the Soviet Union. His son did not expect his administration to be all about al-Qaida. The rest of the world can redefine what is important and what is not. Given the U.S. focus on domestic policy, the opportunity for other countries to take advantage of this preoccupation is potentially significant. So the reality is that for the moment, the initiative shifts out of the United States.
-
Friedman does not mention the cut in defense spending or
what might happen with the new "space force"
-
just as guilty of breaking law as Gen. Flynn
as recommended by Biden :
https://bongino.com/biden-campaign-already-violating-the-logan-act
anyone think msm will ask Joe about the hypocracy?
-
Middle Powers: Maneuvering Among Giants
Rodger Baker
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
8 MINS READ
Nov 27, 2020 | 11:00 GMT
(Maps4media via Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
A multipolar world system creates both greater opportunity and greater incentive for middle powers to assert their interests and seek to influence global norms and developments. Middle powers will be courted by big powers, giving them more room to maneuver. They will be critical components of any balance of power in the international system....
"It is only those countries having adequate resources of men and materials which can exercise a direct influence on the peaceful organization of international society."
Nicholas J. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (1944)
A multipolar world system creates both greater opportunity and greater incentive for middle powers to assert their interests and seek to influence global norms and developments. Middle powers will be courted by big powers, giving them more room to maneuver. They will be critical components of any balance of power in the international system.
The Difficulty of Defining Middle Powers
In international relations and geopolitics, the idea of middle powers is admittedly a bit fuzzy. At times, they are defined in a geographic sense, as countries caught physically between large powers — such as Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, or Korea between China and imperial Japan. At other times, they are defined in terms of economic or military strength — not as powerful as the great powers, but more powerful than their neighbors. South Africa, Egypt or Iran during the Cold War were at times important middle powers in this sense.
Middle powers may be defined by the role they play, such as serving as intermediaries between larger powers like Canada and India did during the Cold War. Or they may be countries sitting astride two worlds or civilizations, such as Turkey, which bridges Europe and the Islamic world, or Japan and Australia, one an Asian nation considered part of the West, the other a Western nation located in the Asia-Pacific region.
As we look out over the next several decades, the multipolar structure of the world system will create opportunities and incentives for other middle powers to assert themselves.
The flexibility of the term "middle power" also reflects the changing position of nations within an international context. The designation is often transitory, based on rising or falling economic, political or military fortunes or changing priorities of the big powers. Mainland China emerged as a middle power during the Cold War, while Venezuela's internal economic and political dynamics have seen that country lose its status as a middle power in northern South America and the Caribbean.
Reemergence of Middle Powers
For our purposes, we will consider the middle powers those countries that do not reach the combined power and influence of the big powers, but nonetheless remain influential in their region or even beyond in select thematic areas. The reemergence of a multipolar world system opens new opportunities for middle powers, either alone or collectively, to balance competition among the big powers, and to try and shape the evolution of global norms and standards. We can already see examples today of middle powers seeking to shape their environment and refusing to lock themselves into any singular big power camp. Three prime examples are Japan, Turkey and India, each of which pursues a different path with differing levels of success, but all of which have found ways to enhance their respective national interests while maneuvering among the big powers.
Japan
After decades of economic malaise, Japan has reasserted itself through economic and security means as an important regional middle power. Following the withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, for example, Tokyo played a key role in reinvigorating and pressing forward with the revised Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. At the same time, Japan is a signatory of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, seen at one time as a counter to the U.S.-backed TPP. By being a founding member of both, Japan reinforces its position as a central economic partner in the Asia-Pacific region, and keeps its trade options open.
Japan has stepped up its regional defense ties in Southeast Asia; with the United States and Australia; and into the Indian Ocean basin, partnering with India in the maritime space and establishing an overseas presence in Djibouti. Japan serves as a critical base for U.S. forces, and is an important component of the U.S. intelligence and missile defense architecture. But despite its increased defense activities and its strong alliance with the United States, Tokyo continues to resist Washington's efforts to force a decoupling with China, or even with Russia. Without a doubt, Japan sees China as a strategic threat. But it also sees China as an economic opportunity it can use to break free from its longtime stagnation. Japan's rivalry with China stretches back centuries, but Tokyo wants to avoid forcing a confrontation with Beijing. Instead, Tokyo competes along the periphery, from Southeast Asia to the South Pacific, and serves as an alternative in the region to Chinese infrastructure development funds.
Turkey
Turkey is another middle power active in expanding its sphere of activity and reshaping its relations with its neighbors and the big powers. Despite being a NATO member, Turkey is seeking to expand its security relations beyond just the North Atlantic, and has purchased S-400 air defense missiles from Russia. Ankara has stepped up activity in the Eastern Mediterranean, challenging its neighbor and fellow NATO member Greece and triggering a European response, and continues to play a role in the Syrian and Libyan civil wars. Yet while potentially risking its NATO relationships (including with the United States), Turkey is also challenging Russian interests in Syria and the South Caucasus, most recently intervening on the side of Azerbaijan in its confrontation with Armenia.
Despite economic difficulties at home, Ankara continues to pursue an ambitious foreign policy initiative driven by dreams of Pan-Turkic power reaching into Central Asia, Neo-Ottoman influence pressing down into the Middle East and North Africa, and leadership in the Islamic world as a primary Sunni power. The still-unbalanced nature of the multipolar world system gives Turkey more room for maneuver as U.S. and European interests often diverge, Cold War rivalries have softened with the rise of nonstate threats, and China has emerged as its own pole of power. None of the big powers wants to completely alienate Turkey, despite Ankara's contrary actions, and none has the strength or interest to force Turkey down a single path.
India
Nearly since independence from the British in 1947, India has asserted its nonaligned position as a middle power, with strategic autonomy a key policy priority. New Delhi's arms purchases straddle Russia and the United States (and Europe). Despite increasing U.S. pressure, that pattern is unlikely to change anytime soon. By dint of location and size, India was long the main center of power in the Indian Ocean region, but in recent years China's expanded economic, political and defense activities have challenged its central role. India is pushing back, and is expanding its defense cooperation with Australia, Japan and the United States, among others. Still, New Delhi is adamant that these relations are not about building a bloc against China, something that would violate the country's desire to remain nonaligned.
While Turkey is taking advantage of security and political weakness to expand its influence, and Japan laid the defense foundation for its reemergence for decades, India is responding to a fairly dramatic shift in the regional balance of power that has created a host of simultaneous defense, political and economic challenges. Nepal and Bhutan are no longer reliable buffer states; China has stepped up relations, investment and infrastructure development with Pakistan and Myanmar along the land frontiers and with Sri Lanka on the maritime front; and the Chinese navy now operates regularly from the Horn of Africa through the Indian Ocean. India is feeling pressure to break from its strategic autonomy and side with the United States to counter China, but continues to resist, hoping to exploit underlying tensions between Beijing and Moscow as much as it exploits U.S.-China tensions.
Managing the Balance of Power
As we look out over the next several decades, the multipolar structure of the world system will create opportunities and incentives for other middle powers to assert themselves. Despite Europe serving as one big power pole, individual European nations are likely to increasingly assert their national interests. France has historic and strategic interests from West Africa through the South Pacific, for example, that do not necessarily align with overall European priorities. South Korea is seeking to assert itself as a middle power through international institutions, actively campaigning to head the World Trade Organization but also working with several international regulatory and standards bodies, trying to straddle the U.S.-China divide. Among the others to watch are the likes of Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, Australia, and Mexico — some of which already are taking steps to play a stronger regional role, others of which are still dealing with internal dynamics.
As the middle powers attempt to balance or exploit the geopolitical space shaped by the great powers, we can expect false starts, overreach and miscalculation. We will also see the United States, China, Russia and Europe shifting and adjusting their behaviors and focusing on efforts to entice and redirect the middle powers. In many ways, then, middle powers will be the focus and lever of managing the global balance of power, retaining more flexibility of relations than during the Cold War, and more significance than during the post-Cold War period of U.S. hegemony. Amid multipolar great power competition, middle powers will become more significant, and perhaps less predictable
-
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/12/hidden-dangers-bidens-foreign-policy/170519/
D1 is very much a Dem operation. FWIW, its thoughts.
-
2021 Annual Forecast: A Global Overview
8 MINS READ
Dec 14, 2020 | 00:00 GMT
Table of Contents
OVERVIEW
Forecast Overview
The world will focus on recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, coming as the U.S. inaugurates a new president seeking to restore U.S. leadership in global affairs. ...
FORECASTS
Forecast Overview
8 MINS READ
Dec 10, 2020 | 20:40 GMT
The world will focus on recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, coming as the U.S. inaugurates a new president seeking to restore U.S. leadership in global affairs. ...
Global Trends
The Global Economic Recovery Begins
The COVID-19 shock to the world economy will last deep into 2021 even as vaccination eases restrictions on economic activity. The key task of policymakers in 2021 will be to refresh or to sustain economic activity given a continuing need for dramatically increased public income support and rapidly increasing debt. Aggregate global output may just barely return to pre-pandemic levels by end-year, and then only due to a stronger, earlier recovery in China and parts of Asia than elsewhere.
Global gross domestic product growth is projected at 4-5% with China contributing one-third of that. Recovery elsewhere is expected to be uneven, and much of the world will not reach pre-pandemic levels of GDP until 2022, including probably the United States and Europe. Scarring from permanent job losses and insolvencies will contribute to long-lasting costs and a need for further extraordinary fiscal expenditures. Inflation, however, should remain subdued given a slow recovery in demand and slack in factor markets for labor and capital. For emerging markets and developing economies, the pandemic exacerbated existing vulnerabilities, especially with regard to sovereign and corporate debt. A large number of people have returned to poverty and a decade or more of aggregate gains in many of the poorest countries has been wiped out. A reversal will take years in the context of the overall environment of slow growth worldwide pre-pandemic; at best, this trend will resume once quick recoveries are exhausted.
A chart showing projected change in world GDP
The U.S. Returns to Multilateralism
The Biden administration will focus heavily on rebuilding U.S. relationships with key European, North American and Asia-Pacific allies as a part of a broader return to a more multilateral approach to foreign policy. It will attempt to strengthen the rules-based Western-led global order and try to ally with like-minded countries to reform the system to better confront 21st-century challenges, including China's rise, climate change and the tech sector. In doing so, we would expect the European Union and the United States to paper over differences on issues like defense spending and trade disputes and the United States to try to paper over recent tension between Japan and South Korea. The United States will also reenter a number of agreements and institutions that the Trump administration abandoned, particularly those related to climate change and human rights.
The U.S. Stays Tough on China
The Biden administration will maintain an aggressive stance on China, but it will attempt to build a more cohesive international alliance against it. A key focus of the Biden administration will be on China's tech sector. President-elect Joe Biden will be less focused on targeting specific companies, preferring to target broad sectors. A widening of the tech war beyond artificial intelligence, semiconductors and 5G to include more restrictions on cloud computing, digital services and financial technology is likely. Although China increasingly will be forced to respond in kind with restrictions on U.S. and other Western countries, Beijing will try to temper aspects of its so-called "wolf warrior" diplomacy as it tries to thwart U.S. attempts to build an international coalition and prepares for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China in 2021 and Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.
U.S. Open to Talks With Iran
Biden will focus on entering negotiations with Iran. There are significant constraints on the U.S. ability simply to reenter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but an agreement that sees a U.S. suspension of some financial sanctions on Iran's oil sector in exchange for Iran reducing its nuclear activities is likely. Iran's expansion of regional activity in recent years — including missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia — will likely force broader negotiations beyond Iran's nuclear program when it comes to a successor deal to the JCPOA. But those talks will last well beyond 2021, assuming they materialize at all.
Focus on Climate in COVID-19 Recovery Plans
National governments and corporations, including energy-producing companies and large energy consumers, will mount a significant push in 2021 to establish attainable medium-term emissions targets and will modify their business strategies to achieve them. Increased liability and risk along with pressure from corporate boards will accelerate these initiatives through 2021. Most governments will also make green projects a pillar of their post-COVID-19 economic stimulus programs and investors will continue to focus heavily on decarbonizing their investments as scrutiny on emissions-intensive industries continues to intensify.
Regional Trends
A Two-Speed Recovery in Europe
A "two-speed" economic recovery will occur in Europe. While Northern European countries will recover most of the economic losses of 2020 in terms of GDP, employment, production, consumption and investment, most of these indicators of economic activity will remain below pre-pandemic levels in Southern Europe. Northern governments will progressively lift their stimulus measures in order to reduce their fiscal deficits while governments in the south will keep, or even increase, their expansionary policies at the price of high fiscal deficits and worsening debt piles. As a result, financial risk (including a sovereign debt crisis and a banking crisis) will remain high in the south while decreasing in the north. The economic rebound in the north and the stimulus measures in the south will keep social unrest within tolerable margins in both regions, though socioeconomic conditions in the south keep the door open to anti-establishment sentiment and action. This north-south divergence in economic performance also makes it harder for the members of the eurozone to reach consensus on measures to increase economic and financial risk-sharing in the currency area.
South China Sea Dynamics
China will continue to quietly build up its already-commanding military position in the South China Sea as part of its broader regional maritime strategy, and will also rely on economic levers. The United States will also continue its push to counterbalance China's regional rise by shoring up the positions of South China Sea claimants with economic outreach, support in international institutions, sanctions against Chinese entities, and the transfer or sale of defense equipment. Both the Philippines and Vietnam will increasingly reach out to the United States for cooperation driven by their domestic political situations, but with the economic damage of COVID-19 still looming large, they will need to avoid jeopardizing their economic ties with China.
Turkey's Economic Gambit
Turkey will try to embrace a more orthodox monetary policy to help stabilize its financial situation in the coming year, which will help protect Turkey from negative economic blowback from its bold foreign policy. Driven by strong national security imperatives that play well with the domestic support base for the ruling Justice and Development Party, Turkey will remain highly active in the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant. Turkey's aggressive actions in these spaces will worsen its rivalries with influential Arab countries like Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. But so long as Turkey does not incur major financial penalties from partners like the United States and the European Union for its actions, Ankara will not shy away from intervening in Middle Eastern disputes to bolster its regional posture.
India's Economy Begins to Recover, but a Vaccine Rollout Will Be Lengthy
India's economy will begin to recover in 2020 and could see one of the highest headline figures for economic growth globally, but may not recover to its full level of economic output prior to the pandemic. The Indian economy was one of the hardest hit by COVID-19 in 2020, with the International Monetary Fund expecting a full-year contraction of more than 10 percent this year, a decline it is unlikely to be able to reverse entirely in 2021. It will be relatively easy for India to achieve a high level of y-o-y growth due to the depth of the 2020 recession. But for India's growth to become more sustainable, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will need more structural economic reforms. This process will remain slow in 2021, failing to meet the aggressive timeline Modi has envisioned. India will meanwhile be tasked with a complicated rollout of a vaccine given its immense population, significant policy differences between states and the national government, and its large rural and impoverished populations — pushing the country's full economic recovery into 2022.
Argentina's Financial Woes Persist
The Argentine economy will continue to struggle in 2021, as the country will face the negative impact of both the COVID-19 pandemic and structural issues such as high inflation, low productivity, lack of confidence in the Argentine peso, and strong skepticism among domestic and foreign investors about the government's ability to reduce the country's fiscal deficit and sovereign debt levels. Local and foreign businesses operating in Argentina should expect interventionist policies by the state, prolonged currency controls and a weak rule of law that will hurt confidence in the economy and undermine growth.
-
https://pjmedia-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/pjmedia.com/uncategorized/david-p-goldman/2020/12/31/shocked-shocked-to-find-europe-cutting-deals-with-china-behind-our-back-n1295419/amp?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQHKAFQArABIA%3D%3D&fbclid=IwAR1fUxr7D7FbIS92nLznJpYYDxH-aGulBNYEdD-2L5VUn4kbgUrv_XMFbF4#aoh=16094498014257&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Fcolumns%2Fdavid-p-goldman%2F2020%2F12%2F31%2Fshocked-shocked-to-find-europe-cutting-deals-with-china-behind-our-back-n1295419
-
Following up with an example of a particular "ally":
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16907/germany-un-security-council
-
2021 Annual Forecast
An image of the COVID-19 vaccine, President-elect Joe Biden, the Huawei logo, and a stock market sign
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP; Mark Makela/Getty Images; ISABEL INFANTES/AFP; PHILIP FONG/AFP via Getty Images
Overview
The geopolitical environment in 2021 will be shaped by two global developments: the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's administration to restore collaborative relationships across the globe....
Forecasts
Global Trends
11 MINS READDec 31, 2020 | 01:18 GMT
Pedestrians wearing face masks walk past an electric board showing the Nikkei 225 index (C) on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Tokyo on March 13, 2020.
The geopolitical environment in 2021 will be shaped by two global developments: the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's administration to restore collaborative relationships across the globe....
An Uneven COVID-19 Recovery
The COVID-19 shock to the world economy will last deep into 2021. The depth of the economic decline in 2020 did not match that of the Great Depression, but the pace and blow to a much larger global economy will raise long-term recovery issues. Even with vaccines, the global economy faces a long, difficult recovery from the most precipitous output drop in history, with risks mainly to the downside, including possible viral recurrences.
The key task of policymakers in 2021 will be to sustain economic activity pending the end of the pandemic and returning to a feasible and sustainable growth path, especially given the continuing need for dramatically increased public income support and rapidly increasing debt. Despite unprecedented amounts of fiscal stimulus and massive liquidity support from central banks, aggregate global output may just barely return to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021, due only to stronger and earlier recoveries in China and other parts of Asia compared with countries and regions elsewhere.
Much will depend on the availability, distribution and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, or the development of better treatments to mitigate the health fallout from the virus, as well as the willingness of people to be vaccinated and endure restrictions on activity. Even with effective vaccines, limits on distribution and availability in the first half of the year will leave government restrictions largely in place, especially on an ad hoc basis in the event of outbreaks. Consumers and businesses will, in turn, remain cautious for an indeterminate time. A return to something approximating normal will differ by region and country-to-country.
Graph of projected global GDP
Global GDP growth in 2021 is projected at 4-5%, with China contributing roughly one-third of that growth. Recovery elsewhere is expected to be uneven, with much of the world not reaching pre-pandemic GDP levels until 2022, including probably the United States and Europe. The impact of permanent job losses and insolvencies will contribute to long-lasting costs and a need for further extraordinary fiscal expenditures. Inflation, however, should remain subdued given the slow recovery in demand and slack in both labor and capital markets. Global interest rates will remain suppressed, near or at zero, with negative returns on many sovereign bonds. Even in the face of some reflation, financial repression with low interest rates will be needed to rein in debt service costs from increases in global debt of 10-20% of GDP in 2020.
For emerging markets and developing economies, the pandemic has exacerbated existing vulnerabilities, especially with regard to sovereign and corporate debt. Excess global liquidity, combined with risk-taking, should support external financing with creditworthiness concerns arising only on a case-by-case basis. The global health crisis, however, has wiped out a decade or more of aggregate gains in many of the world's poorest countries, forcing a large number of people to return to poverty. Prospects for a reversal of this situation will take years to realize in the context of an overall slow-growth global environment that existed prior to the pandemic. As a result, economies in impoverished countries will, at best, revert to slow expansions once quick recoveries are exhausted.
Emerging Market Debt
Much higher debt will be a lingering effect of the pandemic for all countries, but the impact will be strongest for emerging markets and developing economies, especially poor countries with limited fiscal resources that are heavily dependent on external capital flows. The rollout of vaccines for poorer countries will likely take until at least the end of 2021, making them subject to ongoing economic disruptions that require continued government support. Lower commodity prices will impact the availability of resources and options for financing will be limited. Low interest rates in developed countries and a return of risk-seeking investors means larger emerging markets such as Brazil and Turkey, as well as poorer, developing countries with sound economic and credit fundamentals such as Kenya or the Ivory Coast, should be able to access global capital markets depending on global financial conditions. Others, including the 20 low-income countries that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) consider either in or at risk of debt distress, will have difficulty finding funds at reasonable costs.
The Group of 20 (G-20)'s Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) — which helped defer about $5 billion of the estimated $12 billion owed by the 73 poorest countries in 2020 — has been extended through the first half of 2021. The G-20 has also agreed to a "common framework" to negotiate debt restructuring for countries that need it to attain long-term debt sustainability. Nonetheless, working out details will be cumbersome and a prolonged process. China's full participation and the transparency of its claims remain problematic, as is participation by private creditors and eurobond holders. Zambia might have provided an early test case, but the negotiation of an IMF program and debt restructuring will not happen until after the African country holds elections in October. Even then, that will be a messy process and the "common framework" probably will not be tested in 2021, leaving Zambia and other countries to deal with financing gaps and default on an ad hoc basis. Progress on the DSSI will also depend partly on the Biden administration and the rest of the G-20's political appetite to take on China on yet another issue.
Biden's Constrained Return to Multilateralism
The Biden administration will focus heavily on rebuilding the United States' relationships with key European, North American and Asia-Pacific allies as a part of its broader return to a more multilateral approach to foreign policy. In an attempt to strengthen the rules-based, Western-led global order, the new White House will try to ally with like-minded countries to confront challenges such as China's rise, climate change and the growing clout of the tech companies. To pave the way for such coordination, the United States will likely try to alleviate its differences with the European Union on issues like trade and defense spending, as well as ease the recent uptick in tensions between Japan and South Korea. The Biden administration will also work to re-enter a number of agreements and institutions that its predecessor abandoned, particularly those related to climate change and human rights.
But while U.S. relations with other Western countries will improve in 2021, significant differences could still undermine full cooperation between them in the face of China. The United States and Europe's divergent technology policies, in particular, could blunt the West's ability to counter China's tech sector by limiting EU-U.S. collaboration on issues such as taxing tech companies and setting global industry standards. Reforming the World Trade Organization and appointing members to its Appellate Body will likely also be difficult, given the significant role of China and other non-Western countries in the organization.
The U.S. Remains Laser-Focused on Chinese Tech
The Biden administration will maintain an aggressive stance against China. It will also attempt to build a more cohesive international alliance against Beijing. But because of the many differences between the United States and its traditional allies, such international cooperation will not achieve the Biden administration's desired results. This will, in turn, force the White House to rely on unilateral measures against China, periodically causing significant friction with U.S. allies as business and political interests get caught in the middle. The frequency of such disunity, however, will decrease in 2021.
There may only be a small change in U.S. policy regarding China's tech sector, which will remain a key focus of the Biden administration. Global tech companies have already begun compartmentalizing their supply chains as a result of significant export controls and other U.S. restrictions on Chinese companies like Huawei that have been imposed over the past four years. Compared with Trump, however, Biden will probably be more focused on targeting China's tech sector as a whole instead of specific Chinese companies in an effort to establish a more rules-based environment.
A widening of the China-U.S. tech war beyond AI, semiconductors and 5G to more restrictions on cloud computing, digital services and fintech is likely. China, meanwhile, will increasingly respond in kind by imposing similar restrictions on tech companies in the United States and other Western countries. But such retaliatory actions will be tempered by Beijing's desire to also protect its global reputation ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 2021 and the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, as well as drive a wedge in U.S. attempts to build an international coalition.
Despite its focus on improving overall U.S.-China relations, the Biden administration will find it difficult to remove its predecessor's tariffs on China. In exchange for reducing tariffs, the United States will demand significant structural reforms — something China already rejected in negotiations with the Trump administration. Any narrow trade deal involving Chinese purchases of U.S. goods would also need to at least equal the levels of imports that Beijing committed to in the "phase one" trade deal it signed with the Trump administration in 2019. In addition, Biden will be under pressure to punish China for non-compliance with the first deal as Chinese imports continue to lag far behind promised levels. Another narrow U.S.-China trade deal is possible in 2021, but a significant one that removes most tariffs against China is unlikely.
A Shifted U.S. Middle East Policy With Iran Negotiations
Biden will shift the U.S. strategy in the Middle East by entering negotiations with Iran. Significant constraints will limit the United States' ability to simply revive its participation in the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But a compliance-for-compliance agreement that sees suspended U.S. financial sanctions on Iran's oil sector in exchange for a reduction in Iran's nuclear activities is likely. Iran's expanded regional activity in recent years, including missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, will likely also force Washington to broaden negotiations beyond Iran's nuclear program when it comes to a successor or replacement deal to the JCPOA, with those talks likely lasting well beyond 2021.
Graph of Iran's uranium stockpiles
The opening up of such negotiations with Iran will unnerve Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, but will not result in a significant rupture in the United States' relationship with these three countries. Uncertainty surrounding Washington's long-term intentions with Iran, however, will propel continued normalization efforts between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as they look to build a foundation for cooperation independent from the United States on issues where they share common interests.
As the Global Climate Fight Intensifies, Biden Faces Constraints at Home
Under Biden, the United States will re-enter the Paris climate accord quickly as Washington intensifies its focus on climate change and environmental issues. But the lack of a large Democratic majority in the Senate will hinder Biden's ability to pursue more sweeping environmental policies. Reluctance from moderate Democratic senators means climate change and environmental legislation proposed by more progressive members in the Democratic Party will either be watered down or implemented via executive action. Nevertheless, rule and policy changes related to U.S. emissions standards and covering the oil and gas industry are likely. With powerful Democratic-led states like New York and California back in sync with the federal government on such policies, increased coordination on climate issues across various levels of the U.S. government is also likely.
Globally, both corporate and state climate initiatives will gain momentum in 2021 as public concerns about climate change and activism in response to it continue to mount. National governments, energy companies and large energy consumers will modify their strategies in concrete ways to achieve newly established emissions targets that are attainable in the medium-term. Increased liability and risks, along with pressure from shareholders, will accelerate these initiatives throughout 2021. Many governments will also make green projects a pillar of their post-pandemic economic stimulus programs, and investors will continue to focus heavily on decarbonizing investments as scrutiny on emissions-intensive industries continues to grow.
As End of the Pandemic Nears, OPEC+ Discontent Grows
COVID-19 and the energy transition will continue to foment internal incoherence among the world's oil producers, limiting the ability of OPEC and its allies (also known as OPEC+) to manage global oil production and reduce inventories. As the end of the pandemic comes into view amid vaccine rollouts, OPEC+ will face significant internal disagreements about the pace and scope of relaxing production cuts. Countries will also be more willing to reduce their levels of compliance with the deal. OPEC+ production cuts may formally remain in place in 2021, but Iraq, Nigeria, Kazakhstan and others will increasingly challenge Saudi Arabia's views. Russia has largely backed a higher level of restraint, but the Kremlin's position will diverge more significantly from Saudi Arabia's in the second half of the year, when the end of the pandemic is closer on the horizon.
Graph of global crude oil demand
Forecasts
The geopolitical environment in 2021 will be shaped by two global developments: the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's administration to restore collaborative relationships across the globe....
Key Trends for 2021
U.S.-China Tensions Will Remain Quiet, but Endure
Although it will ease back on the Trump administration's emphasis on sudden moves to pressure China on all fronts and on advancing the trade war, the incoming Biden administration will maintain the broad U.S. pressure campaign regarding China. Given the bipartisan push to address Chinese conduct, this will include continued targeted sanctions linked to ethnic Uighurs, the South China Sea and Hong Kong in addition to efforts to counter Chinese tech ambitions and to shore up U.S. defense presence in the Pacific. As before, China will respond selectively to U.S. moves, with proportional responses on issues such as diplomatic ejections, human rights pressure and tariffs, but continued caution in matters such as export controls. This will bring a more predictable, less overtly hard-line U.S. stance toward China, smoothing dramatic spikes in tensions. But Washington's shift toward long-term, strategic objectives regarding China and a multilateral approach will see U.S.-China tensions steadily mount long term as they become an unchallenged norm of U.S. foreign policy.
A map of China and the surrounding region
Opportunities for Middle Powers in the Pacific
Given the Biden administration's shift to outreach to Asia-Pacific partners and the easing of U.S. trade pressure on Asian countries other than China and (to an extent) Vietnam, middle powers will have more room for maneuver. Japan will continue to be a major focus of U.S. strategy to counterbalance China in 2021 with increasing Japanese regional outreach in line with U.S. priorities. South Korea will see an easing of U.S. pressure to boost its share of defense cost contributions. Tensions between U.S. ally Australia and China are unlikely to ease, but the new U.S. administration may allow Canberra room to pause rather than escalate friction with China. Regarding Taiwan, the Biden administration will ease back on high-profile, provocative U.S. moves (such as official visits), but will maintain a strong U.S. emphasis on the Taiwan relationship through rolling weapons sales and sending vessels through the Taiwan Strait. U.S. policy in the South China Sea will see a great deal of continuity in terms of a sustained U.S. presence there to counterbalance Chinese expansion, but the Biden White House will engage in a more multilateral effort in the South China Sea with less pressure on claimants to pick sides. This will see the U.S. court Vietnam and Indonesia and engage in outreach to the Philippines, which is already hardening its stance towards China. This, in turn, will spur China toward outreach to Association of Southeast Asian Nations members through economic sweeteners and to finalize a South China Sea Code of Conduct.
China's Domestic Recovery
China's early COVID-19 pandemic and successful containment will allow it to continue its early lead in returning to growth in 2020 with continued economic expansion in 2021. Its economy will still face challenges given the slowdown in key overseas markets, uneven recovery within China and the risk of renewed outbreaks. Beijing will tout its economic and virus control success as compared to the West to shore up Communist Party of China legitimacy ahead of the 2021 centennial of the party's foundation and the release of a new five-year economic plan, which will require the government to account for the long-term structural slowdown in growth and the risks of U.S.-China tensions.
Beijing will tout its economic and virus control success to shore up Communist Party of China legitimacy ahead of the 2021 centennial of the party's foundation and the release of a new five-year economic plan.
With an eye toward these headwinds, the government will emphasize domestic self-reliance and efforts to more closely connect more developed coastal provinces to the less developed interior, easing back where possible on reliance on imported goods in favor of domestically extracted resources. The pandemic-fueled push for domestic self-reliance and continued U.S. pressure on the tech sector will accelerate government efforts to boost domestic industry under its Made in China 2025 initiative. Beijing will also work to rein in large tech companies, including Alibaba and Tencent, to erode the economic independence that they have built up over the years of lax regulation standards and to ensure that their corporate business models and priorities more closely align with Beijing's.
In Hong Kong, China Tightens the Reins
Hong Kong local authorities and the central government will focus on containing dissent and further fragmenting the opposition to ensure control ahead of the delayed September 2021 Legislative Council election and the March 2022 chief executive selection process. Beijing will have a particularly low tolerance for unrest in Hong Kong given the importance of the July 2021 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the March release of its new five-year economic plan and the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. The pro-establishment's virtually unchallenged policymaking powers will bring reforms to weaken the opposition in the long term that will risk provoking a backlash on the streets. Although the radical fringes of the pro-democracy and pro-independence camp may engage in confrontational or violent tactics, mass turnout will be suppressed by the lingering COVID-19 pandemic and fear of the new National Security Law. The latter half of the year, however, may see authorities ease back on their more heavy-handed tactics in the interest of legitimizing elections and dissipating negative international attention on China ahead of the 2022 Olympics. In terms of the U.S. approach to Hong Kong, the incoming Biden administration will follow the relatively cautious approach followed by the Trump administration, pushing forward with sanctions narrowly targeted at individuals and entities directly involved in eroding Hong Kong's autonomy but refraining from targeting financial institutions with broad international exposure or targeting Hong Kong's ability to access U.S. dollars.
A Weakened North Korea Faces a New White House
Facing the uncertainty of a new U.S. administration and massive economic hardship, North Korea will spend much of the year focused domestically and on trying to compel or convince the international community to ease U.S.-led sanctions. The Biden transition will bring the likelihood of a long delay in outreach given a focus on U.S. domestic issues and U.S. Iran policy, with a reluctance to engage in high-level North Korea dialogue, dramatically lessening the chances of a breakthrough. Pyongyang's early 2021 Party Congress will bring an opportunity for the regime to announce a new strategic line towards the United States, but the gathering will focus foremost on restoring economic growth amid COVID-19, crop shortages and sanctions. The likely U.S. frozen outreach will present North Korea's regime with a dilemma, with renewed missile tests risking an early souring of U.S. relations even as they would help forward its weapons program, service key military factions and remind the U.S. of the costs of neglecting North Korea outreach. North Korea will proceed cautiously with tests, however, given that its external focus will be on outreach to China and South Korea to weaken international resolve on maximum pressure. China will become an increasingly important lifeline for North Korea as Beijing seeks to shore up regime stability.
Chart of North Korea's missile tests over the years
Key Calendar Dates
Early 2021: Thailand holds referendum on constitutional change
January: Workers' Party Congress in North Korea
January: 13th Congress of the Communist Party in Vietnam
February: Hong Kong's government will propose its annual budget
March: China will hold its National People's Congress and release its 14th five-year economic plan.
May: The World Health Organization will release the final results of an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19
July 1: The Communist Party of China will mark its 100th anniversary.
July 23 - August 8: The 2020 Summer Olympics are scheduled to be held in Tokyo, Japan.
September: Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party likely to hold internal leadership elections.
September 6: Hong Kong may hold delayed Legislative Council elections
Forecasts
Europe
7 MINS READDec 31, 2020 | 13:43 GMT
A picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel
The geopolitical environment in 2021 will be shaped by two global developments: the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's administration to restore collaborative relationships across the globe....
Key Trends for 2021
A Two-Speed Economic Rebound Takes Shape
Economic activity will improve across Europe in 2021, but differences in performance between the north and the south will play out against long-standing economic fault lines. Northern European countries will probably recover most of the COVID-19-related losses of 2020 in terms of GDP, employment, production, consumption and investment, while in the south most of these indicators will remain below pre-pandemic levels. The vaccination process will be slow and uneven, forcing governments across the Continent to keep some social distancing measures in place for several months. This will continue to negatively impact sectors such as tourism and hospitality, at least during the early part of the year, which will be particularly damaging to tourism-dependent economies in the south. An improved economic climate will allow northern governments to progressively lift their stimulus measures in order to reduce their fiscal deficits, but governments in the south will keep, or even increase, their expansionary policies at the price of high fiscal deficits and worsening debt. As a result, financial risk (including that of sovereign debt and banking crises) will persist in the south, while it will decrease in the north. Socioeconomic conditions in the south will also leave the door open to anti-establishment sentiments and actions.
A chart of key economic measures for the EU
The north-south divergence in economic performance will make it hard for the members of the eurozone to reach consensus on measures to increase economic and financial risk-sharing in the currency area because the sense of economic urgency that made large EU stimulus packages possible in 2020 will be gone. Structural reforms such as the completion of the banking union or the integration of financial markets will probably be postponed, which will leave the eurozone vulnerable to future crises. In the meantime, greater optimism about the global economy will make the European Union more willing to engage in trade talks. As a result, the European Commission is likely to resume trade negotiations around the world, including with countries like Australia and New Zealand. As the economic environment slowly improves, the European Commission is also likely to continue introducing Green Deal-related legislation to pressure the public and the private sectors to reduce their carbon emissions.
EU-U.S. Relations Improve, but Disagreements Remain
The European Union and the United States will privilege cooperation over confrontation in their bilateral relations, but disagreements on issues such as trade, defense and relations with China will remain between Brussels and the White House. The United States and the European Union will probably refrain from imposing new tariff hikes on each other's exports, but existing ones may be kept. In the meantime, a comprehensive EU-U.S. trade deal will remain elusive because conflicting interests in Brussels and the White House on issues such as agricultural exports and personal data sharing will continue to create obstacles. The United States will continue to pressure its NATO allies in Europe to increase their spending on defense, but without questioning the alliance's mutual protection clause. Regarding China, Brussels and the White House will be aligned on issues such as keeping a tight oversight of Chinese investment in strategic areas of their economies, demanding a level playing field for foreign investors in the country and penalizing Beijing over human rights issues. But export-dependent countries like Germany will pressure Brussels against escalating any trade disputes with Beijing. One of the areas where the United States and the European Union will increase cooperation is the fight against climate change, especially as the United States rejoins the Paris climate agreement. Brussels and the White House will also defend the role of multilateral organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization and will seek to strengthen them and cooperate in their reform.
Chart of EU trade with the US over time
The End of the Merkel Era in Germany
A general election in Germany in September will mark the end of Angela Merkel's chancellorship after 16 years in power and open the door to political change in Europe's largest economy, especially if the current centrist government is replaced by a more right- or left-leaning administration that seeks to change course on issues such as fiscal spending and EU integration. German voters will have to choose between center-right parties that defend domestic fiscal discipline and are reluctant to share financial risk in the eurozone, and center-left parties that defend higher public spending and are more supportive of EU federalization. Far-right and far-left parties will probably perform well, but the most likely outcome is a centrist government that does not introduce drastic changes in domestic or foreign policy. The election will probably result in a fragmented Bundestag and long negotiations to form a government, which will create uncertainty about the future of Germany's policies and slow down the decision-making process in the European Union because structural reforms at the Continental level will probably be postponed until there is a new government in Berlin.
Both before and after the election Germany will be open to domestic stimulus measures to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis, but only as a temporary measure because the government will seek to restore the country's fiscal balance in the medium term. At the EU level, Germany will see France as a key ally to co-lead the European Union, but Berlin will also seek to tone down some of Paris' proposals during an electoral year, especially those concerning deeper economic and financial integration in the eurozone and greater military cooperation in the bloc. Germany will be committed to the EU's Green Deal and will increase pressure on households and companies to reduce their CO2 emissions.
The United Kingdom After Brexit
The United Kingdom will focus its post-Brexit foreign policy on negotiating free trade agreements around the world, but progress will be uneven. Britain will seek to negotiate trade deals with the United States, its most important export market, as well as with its former colonies in the Commonwealth such as Australia and New Zealand. But progress will be slow, especially in the negotiation with the United States, because of issues such as conflicting agri-food standards. The United Kingdom will also continue renegotiating the trade deals it previously enjoyed as an EU member. Progress on these negotiations will be faster, considering that London and its partners will for the most part be replicating existing deals. The United Kingdom will also seek to reach deals with the European Union over issues excluded from the main trade deal, especially financial services. While Brussels is unlikely to grant the United Kingdom full access to its single market, limited deals covering some parts of the service sector are possible, provided that London promises to keep its regulatory framework aligned with that of Brussels.
The United Kingdom and European Union will continue to negotiate issues not included in their main trade deal. Brussels is unlikely to grant the United Kingdom full access to its single market, but limited deals covering some parts of the service sector are possible.
Brexit will lead to a renewed push for independence in Scotland. While Scotland will not secede in 2021, questions about the United Kingdom's long-term territorial integrity will remain. In Scotland, voters will overwhelmingly support the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) in the country's legislative election in May. The SNP will campaign on the promise of a new independence referendum, which London will reject. Factions within the SNP will push for the party to abandon its position against doing anything illegal, but they are unlikely to prevail because the party's leadership will be reluctant to take the risk of unilateral secession. While Scotland will not secede from the United Kingdom in 2021, the issue will not go away anytime soon, keeping British territorial integrity in question.
Key Calendar Dates
January 1: Portugal takes over the rotating presidency of the European Council
January 24: Presidential election in Portugal
March 17: General election in the Netherlands
March 25-26: European Council summit
June 24-25: European Council summit
July 1: Slovenia takes over the rotating presidency of the European Council
September 26: General election in Germany
October 14-15: European Council summit
October: General election in the Czech Republic
Oct. 30-31: Italy Hosts the 2021G20 summit
December 16-17: European Council summit
TBA: United Kingdom Hosts G7 summit
Forecasts
Middle East and North Africa
6 MINS READDec 31, 2020 | 15:56 GMT
A mural painted on the outer walls of the former US embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran
The geopolitical environment in 2021 will be shaped by two global developments: the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's administration to restore collaborative relationships across the globe....
Key Trends for 2021
Sunni Competition Fuels Regional Instability
Competition between Sunni Middle Eastern powers will stoke regional instability in 2021. While Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar will paper over some diplomatic differences to ease the establishment of new relationships with the incoming Biden administration, their long-standing rivalries will remain unresolved. The rivalry between Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, in particular, will surge as each pursues expansionist foreign policies and seeks to block the other from spreading its competing political ideology. The competition will be evident in the Mediterranean, where the United Arab Emirates will increase its support for European efforts to contain expansionist Turkish oil and gas exploration in disputed waters.
Map showing Turkey and UAE's regional strategies
It will also be on display in Libya and Somalia, where Abu Dhabi and Ankara support conflicting military forces. And the competition will extend to economic activity, impacting key sectors such as aviation, and cyberspace, where each is jostling to increase its soft power. Egypt, which opposes Turkish hegemony for economic and ideological reasons, will align more closely with the United Arab Emirates in the coming year in a bid to limit Turkish encroachment in traditional Egyptian spheres of influence, including Mediterranean and Palestinian affairs.
Turkey's Volatile Political Economy Will Make for an Aggressive Foreign Policy
Turkey appears poised to embrace a more market-friendly, orthodox monetary policy in the coming year, which will encourage investment and help stabilize the Turkish lira. But continued economic volatility due to global macroeconomic factors will lead Ankara to posture abroad to bolster its political position at home. Ankara will have to address persistent inflationary pressure that will aggravate the economic uncertainty felt by Turks, threatening support for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Turkey's political opposition will try to leverage economic dissatisfaction into demands for early elections, but the ruling AKP is unlikely to agree to a vote before their scheduled date in 2023.
Chart showing Turkish Interest rates over time
A need to deflect domestic discontent over the economy will drive Turkey to intensify its aggressive regional posture. Turkey will steadily deepen its oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean despite growing European and regional complaints, and will advance its efforts to quash Kurdish militancy in Iraq and Syria in the name of counterterrorism despite Western pushback and the risk of clashes with other forces in the battle spaces, such as the Russians in Syria. EU and U.S. ire is unlikely to dissuade Turkey, which sees its long-term regional strategy as more important than a short-term reputational hit or financial damage from sanctions.
Chart showing the decline of the Turkish lira over time
Iran Looks to Negotiations for Sanctions Relief
Tehran is likely to make incremental progress on its nuclear program in the coming year. New domestic legislation requires that it do so; it will also pursue progress to spur Washington into talks it hopes will yield it sanctions relief. Increasing uranium enrichment beyond 20 percent or suspending the additional protocol could push the European Union toward the U.S. position on limiting Iranian nuclear, missile, and regional activity and limit the odds of a reduction in the U.S. sanctions that are fueling political unrest in Iran. Presidential elections in the middle of the year in Iran will also shape negotiations with the United States. Conservative politicians' performance in the presidential vote will depend in part on the state of the economy and on whether voters believe hard-line strategies like increasing nuclear activity will yield sanctions relief via restarted negotiations.
Timeline of US Iran negotiations
Israel's Right Wing Gains Influence Over Regional Strategy
The transition to the Biden administration will join domestic factors in shaping Israel's Iran strategy. Israeli hawks will pressure for greater action against Iran, most likely covertly through cyberattacks, assassinations, bombings, sabotage and airstrikes in regional proxy theaters like Syria, Iraq and Lebanon to undermine the Iranian nuclear program, influence the U.S.-Iranian negotiation process and reduce Iran's ability to directly threaten Israel. These hawks may gain a greater foothold in the government as the country holds its fourth election in two years, in which nationalists and security-minded parties will be competing for an increasingly right-wing national vote.
Israel will be unlikely to carry out actions that would undermine its alliance with the United States, which under President Joe Biden will be unlikely to welcome unilateral Israeli actions that could destabilize the region or provoke a conflict.
Israel will be unlikely to carry out actions that would undermine its alliance with the United States, which under President Joe Biden will be unlikely to welcome unilateral Israeli actions that could destabilize the region or provoke a conflict. Nationalist politicians will also call for continued expansion of settlements and outposts in the West Bank. While formal annexations may be floated by pro-settler groups, they are unlikely to push ahead given that the new U.S. administration publicly opposes them. Informal settlement expansion will meanwhile continue to undermine the viability of a future Palestinian state in the West Bank.
The GCC Faces up to an Uncertain Economic Recovery and a New U.S. Administration
COVID-19 recovery goals will reinforce existing plans and policies among Gulf Cooperation Council states to rationalize spending and raise non-oil revenue via taxes and revenue diversification efforts. Saudi Arabia faces the growing risk of social unrest if long-term reforms do not succeed, which will prompt Riyadh to tightly control social media to manage the domestic reaction to higher taxes and cuts in social spending. All the GCC states will contend with the implications of growing debt by drawing down financial reserves to finance budget deficits, a strategy Kuwait will heavily leverage. At the same time, less wealthy states such as Oman and Bahrain will probably seek some economic help from their wealthier Gulf Arab neighbors. These financial dynamics will combine with uncertainty about shifts in U.S. regional policy to prompt GCC governments to repair some of their strained bilateral relationships. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will remain focused on lobbying for Iran's isolation through sanctions until a U.S.-Iran deal that assuages their security becomes realistic, but are more likely to pivot toward more multilateral approaches to other regional challenges like Qatar, Yemen and the Palestinians, prioritizing partnerships with the United States to make sure their concerns are heard in Washington. Arab Gulf state partnerships with Israel will deepen, though the United States will not be as involved in promoting such partnerships.
Table of GDPs across the Middle East
Iraq Grapples With Economic Chaos
Baghdad's struggle to manage its oil-dependent economy will grow in 2021. The Iraqi budget will be built around a devalued currency, enabling the government to more easily pay public sector salaries. Not having to cut salaries as formerly planned will significantly reduce the risk of popular unrest. Currency devaluation will, however, likely create new inflationary pressure, higher import prices and a rising cost of living, which could also increase social unrest that Iraq's weak coalition government probably will fail to manage effectively.
Key Calendar Dates
March 23: Israeli legislative election
June 6: Iraqi legislative election
June 18: Iranian presidential election
Summer: Israeli presidential election
November: Deadline by which Moroccan general election must be held
December 24: Libyan general election
Forecasts
Eurasia
6 MINS READDec 31, 2020 | 16:12 GMT
Russian police officers patrol Red square in front of Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow
The geopolitical environment in 2021 will be shaped by two global developments: the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's administration to restore collaborative relationships across the globe....
Key Trends for 2021
A Weak Economic Recovery in Russia
The Russian economy will enjoy only a mild recovery in 2021. Weak fiscal and monetary responses, worker displacement, and geopolitical uncertainty will blunt more substantial gains even as global productivity and international energy demand nears pre-pandemic levels. Russian President Vladimir Putin's relatively moderate stimulus has left consumers and small businesses largely on their own, stretching individual solvency and bank liquidity. With the end of the pandemic on the horizon, a renewed economic intervention potentially tapping into Russia's considerable treasury reserves or sovereign wealth fund seems highly unlikely. Meanwhile, COVID-19 has also displaced millions of people from Russia's largest cities. This exodus may depress productivity and tax revenue until population levels recover, which could take several years.
International politics will also affect the pace of economic recovery. While the United States seems more intent on challenging China than Russia, Russia's continued meddling in Western affairs — such as the recent SolarWinds hack — will render a genuine reconciliation politically untenable. Instead, the Biden administration and the European Union will certainly maintain, if not intensify, the current suite of sanctions handicapping Russia's economy. A key trigger for Russia's 2021 outlook will be the continued construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The completion of the project, which remained dormant for most of 2020, would improve Russia's finances and boost the likelihood of subsequent similar deals. The failure of the project by contrast would prompt Russia to pursue more one-sided deals with China, or to cut costs via reducing its global military footprint in theaters such as Libya or Syria. The economy will play a critical role in September's legislative elections, helping determine the fate of the ruling United Russia party and offering a referendum on Putin.
Map of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline
Russian-Western Relations Continue to Worsen
Russian relations with the West will continue to deteriorate in the first year of the Biden administration. This deterioration will be caused by Washington's need to respond to ongoing crises involving Russia, as well as by the administration's strategic aim of strengthening democracies from authoritarian threats. The Biden administration will have pressing issues with Russia to deal with beyond the SolarWinds hack, including the ongoing political crisis in Belarus and the attempted assassination of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny by Federal Security Bureau officers, all of which will inevitably require a response from the administration that will worsen relations. The Biden administration will also demonstrate increased public support for Ukraine under Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a stark contrast from the Trump administration that is bound to rankle Moscow.
The United States and Russia will, however, begin the year attempting to reestablish a modicum of stability in the realm of arms control. But the conclusion of an extension to the New START treaty will fail to serve as a springboard for a broader reset of relations, let alone for significant progress in restoring other arms control treaties.
Increasing tensions with Russia will manifest themselves materially through sanctions. The Biden administration will aggressively reinterpret existing sanctions regimes on Russia, most notably upping enforcement of all CAATSA provisions, including personal sanctions on Putin's inner circle. Even if the administration does not go full-bore against Russia, Congress will continue to be the origin for legislation intended to impose costs on Russia's activities abroad. For example, legislation known as DASKA that has passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would sanction Russia's sovereign debt and LNG projects. This act and ones like it would be interpreted by the Kremlin as a declaration of all-out economic war intended to topple Putin. A chaotic and collapsing Russia is hardly in the U.S. strategic interest, but a similar bill may eventually make it to Biden's desk, and it would be difficult for him not to sign into law.
A Tense Peace in the South Caucasus
The present peace in the South Caucasus that ended combat between Armenia and Azerbaijan will be strained in 2021, but serious hostilities will be avoided. While the climate has appeared to stabilize, Armenia's domestic political situation is a powder keg. The unrest caused by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's surrender in Nagorno-Karabakh suggests he may be ousted in the coming year by a potentially more aggressive and pro-Russian leader. Further complicating the present peace, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has also indicated a desire for an even greater role abroad.
Azerbaijan has accomplished its key objectives in Nagorno-Karabakh, leaving less to gain from a return to full-on war.
Still, a number of factors will constrain a return to full-on war. Azerbaijan has accomplished its key objectives in the region, leaving less to gain from successive conquests. Armenia's considerable losses meanwhile will also encourage a long period of recovery to restore troop and equipment losses. And further cooperation between Turkey and Russia to keep the peace will prevent serious hostilities, especially considering the deployment of Russian peacekeepers in contested areas.
Azerbaijan's overall success will likely prompt it to seek an even bigger role abroad. Long reliant on Turkey, the Azerbaijani leadership may look to expand ties with powers such as Israel and Pakistan, and even to seek further influence in Central Asia.
Belarus' Leader Hangs on, Albeit at the Cost of Concessions to Moscow
Aleksandr Lukashenko's regime will tenuously maintain power in Belarus, although he may have to agree to a succession plan to secure Moscow's backing. In light of Lukashenko's diminished stature at home, Russia will avoid becoming too closely linked to him. It will continue to withhold the expansive economic support Lukashenko desires, stringing him along with disbursements just large enough to prevent a collapse until he finally rolls out a succession plan. Lukashenko will attempt to delay this process as much as possible in hopes he can stay in power, but he will eventually back down, though perhaps not for a few months.
The succession plan will most likely involve largely symbolic constitutional reforms that will culminate in Lukashenko's leaving the presidency, possibly in favor of another position, such as speaker of parliament. Potential successors will most likely be more amenable to political and economic integration with Russia per Moscow's wishes.
Meanwhile, unrest in Belarus will decline in the winter, but will continue through the spring as the country's economy stagnates. People and businesses, particularly from the information technology sector, will continue to trickle away to neighboring countries, acting as a pressure release valve of dissent for the regime but also starving the country of desperately needed tax revenues. Opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya will continue to receive recognition and support from Western leaders, who will steadily increase their sanctions on Belarusian officials and the country's economy as the crisis winds on. Because the Kremlin will not tolerate the opposition assuming power without a carefully negotiated power-sharing agreement, Belarus will become yet another source of friction in Russia's relations with Europe and the United States for the foreseeable future.
Key Calendar Dates
Jan. 10: Kyrgyz presidential election and constitutional referendum
Jan. 10: Kazakh legislative and local elections
February 5: New START Treaty expiration
February 11-12: Belarusian People's Assembly
March 8-12: First in-person meeting of Russia-backed Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on cybersecurity
Summer: Projected window for Nord Stream 2 completion
Summer: Armenian constitutional referendum
September: Russia-Belarus Zapad military exercises
September 19: Russian legislative elections
October 15: CIS heads of state summit
Forecasts
Americas
7 MINS READDec 31, 2020 | 16:23 GMT
Man waves the Argentine flag
The geopolitical environment in 2021 will be shaped by two global developments: the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's administration to restore collaborative relationships across the globe....
Key Trends for 2021
Argentina's Economy Will Remain Rickety
Argentina's economic crisis will continue in 2021 as structural issues and electoral calculations prevent the government from introducing policies to reduce its fiscal deficit, put inflation under control or restore popular trust in the national currency. A midterm legislative election in October, in which President Alberto Fernandez will seek to retain control of Congress, will prevent the government from lifting the subsidies that benefit its electoral base (and explain a big part of the country's fiscal deficit and inflationary policies). It will opt instead for policies to increase state revenue at the expense of productive sectors, including higher taxes for large companies, agricultural exporters and wealthier households. Softening of social distancing measures could somewhat boost domestic consumption, but the Argentine economy is unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels in 2021. Because of lack of confidence in the peso, the government will keep currency and capital controls in place, which will result in Argentines turning to the black market for dollars as sharply diverging official and unofficial exchange rates coexist. Combined with a weakening rule of law, these policies will reinforce a negative business environment that will deter foreign investment. A widespread campaign of nationalizations of private companies is unlikely but specific, one-off, expropriations cannot be ruled out.
The Argentine government will seek to keep negotiations alive with the International Monetary Fund, but Buenos Aires will have limited interest in enforcing the institution's recommendations in an election year.
The Argentine government will seek to keep negotiations alive with the International Monetary Fund, but Buenos Aires will have limited interest in enforcing the institution's recommendations in an election year. As a result, the risk of the negotiations collapsing and Buenos Aires defaulting on its debt to the IMF will be significant. The IMF will pressure Buenos Aires to reduce its deficit and make debt sustainable, end the divergence in exchange rates and lift capital controls. But slow or insufficient progress in these areas will reduce markets' trust in Argentina and force Buenos Aires to pay high interest rates to borrow internationally.
Brazil Balances Growth Against Debt
Brazil's primary task in 2021 will be maintaining economic growth while making a major fiscal adjustment that reduces or eliminates massive fiscal and monetary stimulus and avoids unsustainable debt that could undermine confidence in the government. President Jair Bolsonaro, who will have his eye on reelection in October 2022, may be tempted to tilt toward populism at the expense of economic reform. Brazil went from a stable, albeit low-growth, economic outlook at the beginning of 2020 to entering 2021 with significant imbalances and risks that, while manageable, put it at peril of shocks from lagging global confidence that affect the exchange rate and availability of low-cost financing. Brazil was among the hardest-hit countries by the pandemic, setting back an economy that by end-2019 was already 7% smaller than in 2014. Now, unemployment is much higher than before the pandemic struck, and Brazil has seen a partial loss of gains in reducing poverty and income inequality.
A massive fiscal consolidation will be required to stabilize debt just at the current high level of more than 100% of GDP, without which inflation could resurge and potentially force the Banco do Brasil to increase its main policy interest rate in 2021, further slowing the economy. One of the most closed major economies in the world, Brazilian growth has lagged other emerging markets for more than 25 years due mainly to a lack of productivity growth. To promote private investment, Bolsonaro would need to restart economic reforms that include trade liberalization, reducing the role of state banks and cutting the cost of doing business. In the absence of reforms to raise potential growth and improve living standards, Brazil faces increasing political risks. Any additional undermining of investor confidence would reduce growth prospects even further, leaving the country highly vulnerable to external shocks and geopolitical tensions.
As Washington Back-burners Its Crisis, Venezuela's Slow Decay Continues
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro will manage to survive another year under intense U.S. sanctions as the challenge from opposition leader Juan Guaido continues to evaporate. The two-year-long attempt by Guaido to use international recognition as a transitional president to generate domestic support among key Venezuelan institutions has largely failed, and will likely continue to struggle — particularly after boycotted National Assembly elections in December 2020. The crushing weight of U.S. sanctions will continue to significantly impact the Venezuelan economy despite a change in U.S. administrations, and Caracas will be forced to rely on external support to withstand the economic pressure. Increasingly, this means Iranian support in the form of gasoline.
Chart of Venezuelan oil production
Maduro will press for a restart on political negotiations with the United States that would result in immunity for top officials and a relaxation of sanctions, but the incoming Biden administration is not likely to put the Venezuela issue at the top of its agenda. Reversing U.S. Venezuelan policy would cost Biden capital he would prefer to use on more pressing foreign and domestic policy issues, such as negotiations with Iran or domestic social spending. Washington could, however, reduce the intensity of new sanctions and press for some humanitarian-related relief.
U.S. Mexico Policy Reverts to Form, Lopez Obrador Seeks More Control
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden will broaden Washington's approach to Mexico to include a new emphasis on institutional and governance issues such as the rule of law, corruption, human rights and labor concerns, and environmental issues, as well as the perennial bilateral issues of trade and immigration. This broadened agenda will probably increase tensions with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador over elements of his populist and nationalist platform. Managing immigration flows, particularly as Latin America has been hit hard by COVID-19 and the global economic crisis, will remain a challenge for the new U.S. president. But the United States will not use the sort of aggressive threats the Trump administration did, such as withdrawing from NAFTA and placing significant tariffs on the Mexican economy, to force local governments to crack down on migrant flows. To go along with linking to human trafficking and migrant flow cooperation, the United States will link economic and other forms of bilateral assistance to Mexico and Central America to governance, corruption, democracy and human rights issues. Moreover, the Biden administration is likely to aggressively use new clauses in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement regarding environmental and labor policies in its attempt to force Mexico to implement higher environmental and labor standards.
Chart of Mexico's GDP growth rate
Domestically, Lopez Obrador will focus on strengthening his and the National Regeneration Movement's (MORENA) political mandate in 2021 midterm elections. Populist anti-corruption charges and investigations into rival parties and previous governments will continue in the lead-up to the vote. If MORENA can gain more seats, Lopez Obrador will become more aggressive in implementing populist policies, most notably those related to the country's embattled economy and oil and gas sector. Mexico will continue to make investments in the energy sector more difficult for foreign companies and prioritize Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and other state-owned enterprises over foreign competitors. But if MORENA performs well in midterms, constitutional reform or broader legal rollback of Mexico's 2014 energy reforms may begin. Mexico will start to see its economy recover in 2021 from the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is unlikely to see its economy reach pre-pandemic highs as the underlying industrial slowdown in Mexico that began before the pandemic and Lopez Obrador's aggressive populist policies and limited response to COVID-19 hobble Mexico's recovery.
Key Calendar Dates
January 20: US President and Vice President Inauguration
April: Presidential elections in Peru and Chile
April 5-11: IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings
April 19: Raul Castro plans to resign as First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party
July: Midterm congressional elections in Mexico
October 11-17: IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Washington, DC
Forecasts
South Asia
4 MINS READDec 31, 2020 | 16:40 GMT
Members of the Taliban delegation attend the opening session of the peace talks
The geopolitical environment in 2021 will be shaped by two global developments: the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's administration to restore collaborative relationships across the globe....
Key Trends for 2021
Peace Talks Founder in Afghanistan
Intra-Afghan peace talks will fail to yield a peace agreement. Meanwhile, external powers will use the U.S. drawdown as an opportunity to achieve their counterterrorism and border security objectives by bolstering their favored faction's bid for power in the postwar order. Such a push will stall negotiations and perpetuate Afghanistan's fragile economy — a particular problem since a portion of U.S. aid has been conditioned on consistent progress toward peace.
As the jostling for control of the Afghan government continues, a weak police force and judicial system will fail to control crime and corruption, leading to increased violence and the threat of spillover into neighboring regions. This will bring increased interest and involvement from surrounding powers. Iran will want the new government to prioritize counterterrorism efforts to keep the local Islamic State branch in check. Counterterrorism priorities will also propel China and India to become more involved. But a strong post-peace Afghan government would derail Pakistan's plans to secure its shared border with the nation, particularly along the contested border, which has seen spouts of violence between Pakistani and Afghan forces.
Map of Taliban control of Afghanistan
High Economic Growth Will Mask Underlying Issues in India
The Indian economy will be one of the fastest growing in the world in 2021, but despite growth anticipated to reach as high as 8 or 9 percent, India's economy is unlikely to reach pre-pandemic levels of economic output during the year. For India, among the countries hit the hardest by COVID-19, even returning to close-to-normal levels of economic output will mean high growth figures. Politically, the high growth rates will aid Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his economic platform, but they mask the significant challenges he faces in implementing enough economic reforms to make growth more sustainable in the long run.
Modi will attempt to pass structural economic reforms, such as more financial sector and infrastructure reforms, but will continue to hit roadblocks in the form of political and popular resistance.
Modi will attempt to pass structural economic reforms, such as more financial sector and infrastructure reforms, and to expand privatization of central government assets. But these will continue to hit roadblocks in the form of political and popular resistance. Modi's previous sets of reforms, including landmark reforms relating to the agricultural sector and bankruptcy code, have been hobbled by public opposition, like the 2020 farmers protests, or implementation challenges. Although the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) retains the ability to pass some of the reforms through legislation at the national level, its unpopularity and frequent need to work with rival parties at the state level will result in a public backlash against reforms and implementation challenges, blunting their effectiveness. Beyond delays surrounding the implementation of reforms, demonstrations and protests against the changes will be increasingly common, particularly as COVID-19 restrictions are relaxed. While at the state level popular opposition will be significant and the BJP will need to work to ensure that it doesn't lose support in India's five state elections scheduled for 2021, the national level will be another story. Modi and the BJP will not see their
-
January 18, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
Taiwan and the Geopolitics of Microchips
If semiconductors are the “new oil,” then Taiwan’s dominance in making tiny chips packs a huge punch.
By: Phillip Orchard
Last week, Ford Motor Co. became the latest in a bevy of carmakers to announce production halts due to a global shortage of microchips. The Chinese military tested a sophisticated new armed reconnaissance drone and conducted a massive exercise in the South China Sea simulating an amphibious assault on Taiwan. President Xi Jinping ordered the People’s Liberation Army to “substantially increase” the use of new technologies in such exercises. The U.S., meanwhile, expanded its ban on doing business with Chinese companies linked to the People's Liberation Army and dealt yet another blow to Chinese telecom giant Huawei. It also released new rules on securing information and communications technology supply chains. Intel Corp., the embattled inventor of the microprocessor, fired its CEO.
What these disparate events have in common is that each, in its own way, underscores the singular geopolitical importance of a single company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The company, which itself made news by announcing plans to boost spending by as much as $28 billion this year to expand capacity, has developed a stranglehold on production of the world's most advanced chips. This makes TSMC indispensable to just about any global power aiming to, say, develop an elite arsenal of autonomous weapons systems, gobble up 5G market share or compete in just about any other emerging technologies space imaginable. TSMC's operations also happen to be heavily concentrated less than 100 miles from China, a country intent on one day retaking control of Taiwan – and one whose vital supply of semiconductors is under assault by the U.S.
As the U.S.-China rivalry heats up, can the company give Taiwan some much-needed room to maneuver?
Flipping the Industry
Chip manufacturing is wildly complicated and just as expensive. For a long time, this allowed a handful of vertically integrated giants like Intel and Texas Instruments, which designed, manufactured and sold their own chips, to shield themselves from competition. If anyone else wanted to try their hand at designing chips, they could, but they'd be stuck contracting out to a more-entrenched competitor to get them made. The amount of investment and expertise required to build and operate an advanced chip fabrication facility was simply too high for most would-be startups to strike out on their own.
But with substantial backing from the Taiwanese government, TSMC was able to flip the industry on its head. Beginning in 1987, the company pioneered what's known as the “pure-play foundry” model that focuses solely on manufacturing other companies’ designs. This gave rise to all sorts of “fabless” heavyweights such as Nvidia and Broadcom, and more recently allowed companies like Apple, Tesla and Alibaba to enter the chip design space. Even some established integrated device manufacturers like Intel rivals AMD and Qualcomm eventually sold off their own foundries, finding it more profitable to contract production out to TSMC and its only comparable competitor, South Korea’s Samsung. (Intel, which has fallen far behind TSMC and Samsung in the endless race to develop smaller, denser chips, is under some pressure from investors to at least partially follow suit.)
This sparked a boom in innovation and specialization as fabless chip designers could channel all their resources into pushing the boundaries in niches ignored by the likes of Intel, which focused mostly on general purpose processors. But it also replaced one chokepoint – the dominance by a small number of vertically integrated giants – with another. This is because building cutting edge factories has become only more expensive; a next-generation chip fab is estimated to cost more than $20 billion. It's also become increasingly technologically sophisticated, requiring expensive, highly specialized materials and tools that themselves are made by a very small number of companies.
As a result, TSMC controls more than 50 percent of the global semiconductor foundry market and makes the vast majority of the world's most advanced chips. Its only competitor with comparable technological capabilities in the contract chipmaking space is Samsung. But since the sprawling South Korean conglomerate, which has its own chip design arm and makes everything from smartphones to laptops to 5G infrastructure, is a direct competitor to so many companies in the market for a contract fab, most opt for TSMC.
TSMC In the Crossfire
Taiwan has reaped enormous benefits from TSMC's success. In 2019, the company said it accounted directly for nearly 4.5 percent of the Taiwanese economy. The benefits of proximity to TSMC also gave upstart domestic firms in other tech sectors an edge, while attracting untold amounts of investment from foreign tech giants, turning the self-ruled island into an indispensable part of the regional high-tech ecosystem on which so much of the world – makers of everything from Fords to phones to F-35s – relies.
But it has also complicated Taiwan's role in the geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China. Next-generation chips are essential to nearly all of China's core economic, diplomatic and military objectives. In 2018, Xi identified semiconductors as a strategically preeminent core technology. Beijing needs to move up the manufacturing value chain. It needs to become a major player in space and in global telecoms networks. And it needs to develop sophisticated anti-ship missiles capable of making it cost-prohibitive for the U.S. Navy to operate with impunity off Chinese shores. Its solutions for most of these challenges place a heavy emphasis on technological breakthroughs, which places a heavy emphasis on ensuring a stable supply of cutting-edge chips.
China has made enormous strides in several emerging technologies, including chip design. But it's still overwhelmingly dependent on U.S. firms for the semiconductors that go into leading chips. It's similarly reliant on TSMC for the fabrication of the chips themselves. Beijing is trying desperately to replicate the Taiwanese and South Korean industrial development models by shoveling money into homegrown chip manufacturers. But even its best are still considered multiple generations behind in chip design and, especially, chip manufacturing.
Naturally, the U.S. has zeroed in on these vulnerabilities over the past couple of years. It began trying to choke off China's supplies of U.S.-designed semiconductors and software in 2018. Last year, it started requiring foreign fabs – that is, TSMC – to obtain a license before selling anything using U.S. intellectual property in the manufacturing process to companies like Huawei. TSMC announced in May that it would comply with the order, at least for the time being.
Picking Sides
Like most of its neighbors, Taiwan doesn't want to have to choose between the U.S. and China. Despite its existential fears of a Chinese attack, commercial ties with the mainland, Taiwan’s top trade partner, have done wonders for the Taiwanese economy. And in any case, Taipei sees mutual dependence as at least something of a deterrent against Chinese aggression. Just as how U.S. firms like Qualcomm and Intel have lobbied against the U.S. offensive against the Chinese tech sector, estimating staggering losses of revenue and fearing that cutting China off will ultimately accelerate the rise of Chinese competitors, TSMC is similarly vulnerable. Last year, China used more than 60 percent of the world’s microchips. The loss of Huawei alone as a customer would cut TSMC’s annual revenues by more than 14 percent. (More than a fifth of the company’s revenues last year came from Apple.)
Yet, China and (to a lesser extent) the U.S. are demanding that Taiwan pick a side. Just how much leverage TSMC gives Taipei in this situation is a tricky question. On the one hand, the company's indispensability may prove just as fleeting as that of the vertically integrated giants that monopolized chipmaking before it. The U.S., where semiconductor production has fallen to just 12 percent of global capacity, has come to understand the problems that come with being dependent on foreign supplies of something as vital as advanced microchips; a concerted effort to reshore advanced foundries will only become more urgent.
China's import substitution efforts, ineffectual though they may be now, may well improve in time if they can find a way to procure or produce cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography machines.
Counterintuitively, some argue that Chinese dependence on Taiwanese chips puts Taiwan at even greater risk of Chinese attack. If microchips are the new oil, and if China is at risk of getting cut off, it could be driven to do whatever is necessary to get its chip fix, or so the thinking goes. Japan certainly did leading up to World War II.
In truth, it's hard to see this being a decisive factor if and when China tries to retake Taiwan. For one thing, while China's ambitions will be blunted by the de facto U.S. chip blockade, it's not about to push the Chinese economy – and the Chinese Communist Party's hold on power – to the brink of collapse, as was the case with Japan in the early 20th century. For another thing, there's the simple matter that physically taking control of Taiwan's fabs (if they even survived the war unscathed) probably wouldn't give China the same chipmaking capabilities. Too much expertise, experience and access to irreplaceable foreign equipment would be lost. If China ever tries to retake Taiwan by force, it will be the result of a combination of factors, foremost among them the belief in Beijing that it would be successful. Beijing does not believe this today.
Taipei may have only marginal influence over the long-term trajectory of U.S.-China rivalry, but TSMC's dominance will likely last at least another couple of decades. And Taipei hopes that this will incentivize both sides to see the value of sustaining the status quo regarding the self-ruled island sitting in the crossfire. It's betting on the power of the path of least resistance in both capitals, in other words.
To ease U.S. fears about its own dependence on foreign-fabbed chips, TSMC announced it would build a modest $12 billion fab in Arizona presumably to serve the needs of Apple and the U.S. military. Its goal here is to persuade Washington to allow a resumption of sales of at least lower-quality chips to the mainland at some point in the interest of sustaining Taipei's leverage over Beijing. If Taipei and Washington can get on the same page – and if continued U.S. dependence on TSMC makes the U.S. see Taiwan as all the more important to defend – then the company might just allow Taiwan to have the best of both worlds.
-
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/21/conservative-nationalism-and-u-s-foreign-policy/
-
https://cgsr.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/StratLatUnONLINE.pdf?fbclid=IwAR09eu3tTHJk48QdNnmQFIlNOjoLQn0eImwQt9lfjbofdMFxLPBhjVsPZRc
-
https://www.stephenwbrowne.com/2007/12/my-take-on-the-cold-war/?fbclid=IwAR2cvqIT9YhvENYVy7W6NlhSaJqpB8lj7Ed8EU3HT-SSLTTS1en6oio6OY8
-
Much I don't care for in this piece from WRM, but he is a smart guy and makes some smart points:
urocrats Are From Pluto
Team Biden will be disappointed if it mistakes them for starry-eyed idealists.
By Walter Russell Mead
Feb. 1, 2021 6:27 pm ET
SAVE
PRINT
TEXT
44
A protester in front of the Russian embassy in Dublin, Jan. 31.
PHOTO: ARTUR WIDAK/ZUMA PRESS
Sooner or later every new presidential administration experiences that sinking feeling that one of its big ideas may not be working well. For Team Biden, that moment arrived last week as Germany, with widespread support in the European Union, made clear that Europe has no real interest in countering either Russia or China.
Warning against the “building of blocs,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told her virtual audience at the World Economic Forum that she thought Europe should not join with either the U.S. or China against the other. Coming on top of an earlier European refusal to defer moving on an EU-China investment accord until the incoming Biden administration could weigh in on the matter, Europe has made its views crystal clear. Uighurs, Hong Kong and the growing military threats in and around the South China Sea matter much less to European policy makers than their commercial interests do.
Alexei Navalny’s challenge to President Vladimir Putin has likewise prompted a European response that is less than robust. As democracy activists and human-rights organizations on both sides of the Atlantic sought to pressure Western governments to do something about Mr. Navalny’s detention and the arrests across Russia, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs announced that he was pressing ahead with a previously planned visit to Moscow for meetings with Mr. Putin. Light wrist slaps may follow, but little more.
READ MORE GLOBAL VIEW
Biden’s Opening Salvo on Beijing January 25, 2021
It Took a Strong America to Survive 2020 January 18, 2021
Beijing Won’t Bow to Bluster on Taiwan January 11, 2021
Brexit Arrives, for Better or Worse January 4, 2021
Beijing’s Collision With Christians December 21, 2020
For starry-eyed American liberals—in whose rich fantasies Europe’s chancelleries are inhabited by committed idealists—this may come as a shock. Europeans aren’t from Mars, and some may hail from Venus, as Robert Kagan put it in his 2004 essay “Of Paradise and Power.” But those who rule the Continent come mostly from Pluto, a cold and remote planet named for the ancient god of the underworld—and of wealth.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Opinion: Morning Editorial Report
All the day's Opinion headlines.
PREVIEW
SUBSCRIBED
It’s a mistake to see Europeans as idealists merely because they like multilateralism and discount the importance of military power. Multilateralism is a realist program for Europe, not an idealist one. Even the largest European states know that they are too small to figure as great powers on their own; they must work together if they want to sway Washington and Beijing. As Mr. Kagan noted, they also understand that a rules-based international order grounded in multilateral institutions increases European world influence.
Most Europeans today believe military power simply doesn’t do them much good. For the large majority of European countries that don’t share borders with Russia, Moscow doesn’t look like a major military threat—China even less so. When serious Europeans think about security issues, they worry first about migration, cybersecurity and outside influence—which includes Moscow, Beijing and, yes, Washington. Fears that Russia will attack Lithuania or that Beijing will invade Taiwan come much further down the list—well behind European concerns over America’s ability to force other countries to follow its lead on economic sanctions.
Liberals and idealists often dismiss commercial realists as cynics, chiding them for putting Nord Stream II over Mr. Navalny, Gucci over the Uighurs. There is something to that. But a German trade negotiator trying to keep the exports flowing from Westphalia to Wuhan might retort that fighting far-right German populism by seeking jobs for German workers isn’t an ignoble objective, and perhaps not something for the U.S. to obstruct.
With a new Harris poll showing Marine Le Pen running neck and neck with Emmanuel Macron, and Italian polls forecasting a victory for the far right, European policy makers believe that the stability of the Continent depends more on its economy than on its military. Even before the pandemic, growth prospects looked shaky. It is hard to see how Europe can prosper without Russian gas and Chinese markets. For most of the European political establishment, a hard-nosed commercial policy isn’t merely good business sense. It is the only way to protect the European status quo against disruptive and illiberal populist forces.
The Biden administration is right to want a less edgy relationship with the Continent. And there are issues, like climate change and the crackdown on illicit finance, on which trans-Atlantic cooperation can be expected to grow. If Germany’s Greens do well enough in approaching national elections to enter the governing coalition, the trans-Atlantic gap may narrow. But overall, Russia is too weak and China is too far away to frighten Europeans into a policy rethink.
That could change, and a more threatening Sino-Russian alliance could drive the Old World back into the arms of the New. But until then, whether the U.S. president is an angry America Firster or an ingratiating liberal multilateralist, European commercial realism is here to stay. Where European commercial interests diverge from American geopolitical priorities, the U.S. will have to get used to Europe saying no.
-
"Europe has no real interest in countering either Russia or China."
What is there to say about Germans morally neutral about totalitarian national fascism. OTOH, isn't Merkel on the way out?
-
Haven't read these yet, but given the authors, they look promising:
https://hooverinstitution.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/StrategikaChinaAfterthePandemic.pdf?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=88379295&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--euBrDPbbVvjOG7Mx0k6KgjT3c0ciHGizYo5jlpVjTVs6EA3lDCT-aDspxZyReQQi2We6TlZel_B3UxLrA-SDdAbO4EA&utm_content=88379295&utm_source=hs_automation
-
Haven't read these yet, but given the authors, they look promising:
https://hooverinstitution.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/StrategikaChinaAfterthePandemic.pdf?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=88379295&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--euBrDPbbVvjOG7Mx0k6KgjT3c0ciHGizYo5jlpVjTVs6EA3lDCT-aDspxZyReQQi2We6TlZel_B3UxLrA-SDdAbO4EA&utm_content=88379295&utm_source=hs_automation
Good material, good authors, I would only add that dated May 2020 and maybe written in April 2020, events did not play out as expected. China has won this round big time.
-
Once I started to read I saw that too of course.
Looking forward to see what these authors have to say now.
-
In his first major foreign-policy address as president, Joe Biden couldn’t have been clearer: There’s a new sheriff in town. Not only did his speech last week announce reversals of high-profile Trump policies; it criticized the neglect “and, I would argue, abuse,” of American alliances in the, ahem, recent past. In describing a recent phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the new commander in chief said he conducted himself “in a manner very different from my predecessor.”
The Biden team is driven by conviction. It really believes that America’s leading position in the world rests on global admiration for U.S. values. The administration thinks America’s alliance network is based on those values and Washington’s commitment to a multilateral approach. President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, in this view, was an all-out assault on the foundations of U.S. power.
Let us hope that Mr. Biden’s leadership will strengthen alliances and rally the rattled forces of democracy against rival authoritarian great powers. But talk is easy; work is hard.
No president in recent decades made as many inspiring speeches about democracy and human rights as President Obama—and yet no administration in recent decades saw authoritarian powers make so many gains. In 2011 Mr. Obama put down a marker in Syria: “The time has come for President Assad to step aside.” A decade later, propped up by Russia and Iran, Bashar Assad is still there.
It is very well for Mr. Biden to say he isn’t Mr. Trump, but what he needs to demonstrate to the world is that he isn’t Mr. Obama. The Obama administration’s mix of tough words and fumbled deeds in places like Egypt and Syria—along with its serial failures to curb Russian and Chinese power plays from Crimea to the South China Sea—badly diminished American prestige. The prospect that the new administration will similarly dissipate Washington’s energy and credibility in empty gestures and moralistic word salads quietly worries U.S. allies (and delights and encourages American adversaries).
Mr. Biden made two clear demands in his speech, calling on Russia to release Alexei Navalny without conditions and Myanmar’s military to roll back its coup. The inevitable question: What happens now? If this turns out to be another empty “Assad must go” moment, then many observers around the world may conclude that Obama Syndrome has again taken hold in Washington. America will posture and strut, but it will not or cannot act.
And it will be hard for Mr. Biden to make these particular demands stick. With regard to the Kremlin, economic sanctions have so far done nothing to change its policy on Crimea, Syria or anything else. If anything, Moscow is more defiant than ever. Russia is escalating cyberattacks on the U.S.
When EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell defied human-rights campaigners in Europe by refusing to cancel a scheduled meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov after the Navalny arrest, Mr. Lavrov responded by treating Mr. Borrell with extraordinary rudeness. After Mr. Lavrov called the EU an “unreliable partner” at a joint press conference, the hapless Mr. Borrell learned from Twitter at a working lunch with Mr. Lavrov that Russia was expelling three European diplomats. These are not the acts of a government worried about Western opinion.
Despite Russia’s economic problems, Mr. Putin evidently believes he has little to fear from the West. Oil prices are up by more than 50% since October and are likely to rise further as the Covid-19 recession ends. Probably this will more than offset the effect of any new sanctions. Shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline while work on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany resumes sends a more powerful signal to the Kremlin about Western intentions than empty demands about Mr. Navalny.
In Myanmar, unless street protests succeed in overturning the coup, American options are limited. Beijing stands ready, checkbook in hand, to demonstrate its worth as an ally not only to Myanmar but to regimes anywhere on earth concerned about U.S. human-rights diplomacy. India and Japan view their relationships with Myanmar’s military as critical elements in their anti-China strategy. Under the circumstances, the generals may feel they have even less to fear from President Biden than Mr. Assad had to fear from President Obama.
Human rights and democracy promotion have a necessary place in American foreign policy. But it is extremely difficult to succeed at them. The world will be watching Russia and Myanmar to assess the new president’s foreign policy skills. Mr. Biden’s words must lead to deeds, and his deeds must drive events. That is how his administration can rebuild U.S. power and prestige.
-
"It is very well for Mr. Biden to say he isn’t Mr. Trump, but what he needs to demonstrate to the world is that he isn’t Mr. Obama."
My understanding is that WR Mead is a moderate Dem and a foreign policy expert. A Joe Biden Presidency should be a dream come true for him and instead it is already a nightmare. Everything has already turned in the wrong direction.
The only constraint on Putin is the price of oil and oil just went up 50%. The fascination with helping Iran, in Yemen for example, is bizarre. Every appointee has been a China sympathizer.
Just say it, America Last.
-
February 12, 2021
View On Website
Brief: Biden’s China Strategy Is Taking Shape
Shared concern over Iran's expansionist and bellicose activities in the Middle East has made Israel and Arab countries unconventional bedfellows. In this episode, Hilal Khashan and Allison Fedirka explore how Israeli-Iranian relationship lies at the heart of this regional dynamic, what that means for the future of this new alliance, and how it may affect any future US-Iranian nuclear deal.
By: Geopolitical Futures
Background: The U.S. is virtually unmatched in its military, economic and diplomatic power, but over the past five years or so, it’s had to confront the limits of its might as it tries to pressure China into doing things it doesn’t want to do. As often as not, pushing China too far goes against Washington’s own interests. The U.S.-China trade war, U.S. naval operations in the East and South China seas, and inconsistent efforts to keep friends and allies from drifting into China's orbit illustrate as much. The U.S. is now attempting to formulate a new, more comprehensive, more coherent strategy for competing with China on multiple fronts.
What Happened: On Thursday, after a two-hour call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, U.S. President Joe Biden couched his infrastructure spending plans in strategic terms, declaring that China is going to “eat our lunch.” This is some crafty messaging meant to drum up the political will needed to overcome Washington’s longstanding struggles with major infrastructure buildouts. But it is indeed a strategic issue. Meanwhile, the U.S. is ramping up targeted measures to limit exports of sensitive technologies that could empower China's own tech sector, as well as the People’s Liberation Army. The trick for Washington is to avoid inadvertently accelerating innovation in China or gutting U.S. firms that rely on Chinese consumption. A senior Pentagon official said the priority of the Pentagon's newly launched China Task Force will be tech and supply chain vulnerabilities.
There are also signs that the U.S. is preparing to dramatically increase support for domestic chipmaking operations in light of the ongoing global chip shortage — something hurting U.S. automakers — and the collective realization that it’s overly dependent on Taiwanese chip factories located an easy missile's flight from mainland China.
Bottom Line: The outlines of the Biden administration's strategy, or at least its priorities, are starting to take shape. It will still challenge China directly by, for example, keeping some tariffs around, continuing the offensive against Huawei and other Chinese tech giants, and looking for more substantive ways to defend the maritime interests of East Asian allies. But the bigger emphasis will be on out-competing China and on leveraging U.S. diplomatic strengths by finding ways to coordinate more closely with its friends and allies. It all makes sense on paper, but none of the strategy's components are easily executed.
-
The US’ Big Plans for the Indo-Pacific
The biggest challenge ahead is diplomatic.
By: Phillip Orchard
Over the past month, the U.S. has been rolling out a comprehensive theory of strategic competition against China, with all sorts of grand plans for how to enact it. The stated goals run an ambitious gamut, collectively making the case that stronger deterrence measures are sorely needed beyond the world of guns and bombs. Still, the dominant focus has naturally been on the military balance of power and growing concerns about Washington’s ability to sustain it.
For all its power, the U.S. military’s current force structure and posture are not particularly optimized to deter an adversary with China’s firepower, increasing technological sophistication and home-field advantages in its littoral waters. Preparing the U.S. military for the challenges posed by China will be a monumental undertaking, one in which some of the biggest obstacles, such as institutional inertia, political complications and limits on civil-military cooperation, start at home. But there's also a fundamental problem facing the U.S. abroad: It needs to expand its physical footprint across the Indo-Pacific, and it needs its friends and allies in the region – ones reluctant to put themselves in the U.S.-China crossfire – to help it do so.
More, Faster, Broader
When the dust of World War II settled, U.S. power in the Western Pacific was unrivaled. The regional base network it built during and after the war has been key to sustaining this status, with substantial forward deployments essential to making the U.S. – whose mainland is nearly 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) away from contested waters like the South China Sea – capable of functioning as a steady, credible force. But long gone are major U.S. bases in the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand. And the remaining U.S. force posture in the Western Pacific, anchored around Japan, Guam, Australia and Hawaii, could prove problematic in three main ways if a conflict with China broke out.
Key U.S. Bases and Potential New Installations
(click to enlarge)
First, the concentration of U.S. forces and assets (ports, airfields, supply depots, and so forth) in the region around a small number of large bases make the U.S. exceptionally vulnerable to China’s rapidly expanding air and missile arsenals. Moreover, the U.S. Navy's predominant operational focus on carrier strike groups makes it difficult to disperse forces quickly and widely enough to significantly complicate China's targeting plans. In a surprise attack, U.S. warships stuck in port would be big, sophisticated sitting ducks.
Second, if a conflict were to break out unexpectedly, most U.S. forces would be too far away to respond quickly. It would take weeks to mount a full counteroffensive. Even U.S. bases in Japan and Australia are less than ideal for flowing forces quickly to potential flashpoints like the South China Sea, much less the eastern rim of the Indian Ocean basin, where the U.S. and its allies would likely blockade Chinese shipping traffic through chokepoints like the Malacca Strait.
Third, while the U.S. Navy is unparalleled in its ability to conduct major operations in remote corners of the globe, there’s only so much firepower it can lug around. The typical carrier strike group includes three to six destroyers and cruisers, which can usually carry around 90-120 missiles each (though some are reserved for air and submarine threats). This is a lot of firepower but not nearly enough to sustain operations for long against a major adversary.
U.S. aircraft carriers and their air wings can carry an immense amount of ordnance themselves, but advances in Chinese anti-ship missiles would likely force U.S. carriers to the fringes of the battlespace, at times beyond the range of the warplanes they carry. This has rarely been a problem for the U.S. because the U.S. rarely fights major conventional powers. Against a foe like China, the U.S. would either exhaust its arsenals relatively quickly or essentially have to cede large parts of the battlespace to China until a larger response could be mounted.
The Pentagon therefore believes it needs a more dispersed, more redundant, more agile force structure operating out of a wider network of ports and airfields in the Indo-Pacific. It wants more, smaller ships complemented by all manner of nifty unmanned platforms, many of them not even invented yet. And it wants them backed by land-based firepower. For example, the Pentagon's recently proposed $27 billion expansion of what's known as the Pacific Deterrence Initiative calls for the deployment of mobile precision-guided missiles throughout the first island chain – plus supporting elements like a network of land- and spaced-based surveillance and targeting infrastructure. The U.S. at present has scant land-based firepower in the region, partly because of constraints on its missile development under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and partly because what the Navy could carry had until recently been considered sufficient.
Notably, the Pentagon is also exploring ways to get the other branches of the military more involved in the theater. (The Indo-Pacific Command is also asking for around $9 billion to redistribute more forces “west of the International Dateline.”) The big focus here, naturally, is redeploying the Marines to their historical focus – the maritime sphere – with the capabilities to move quickly to hot spots well within range of China's missile and air power umbrella. By 2030, the Pentagon hopes to stand up multiple “Marine Littoral Regiments” consisting of between 1,800 and 2,000 Marines and operating from a new fleet of light amphibious warships. Meanwhile, there's increasing awareness of the need for the U.S. Coast Guard to play a larger role in regional training and policing matters that the Navy is ill-suited for.
A Tall Order
Thus, despite already having hundreds of military installations across the world – and despite facing substantial budgetary and political pressures to shrink its global military footprint – the U.S. is on the hunt for new outposts in the Indo-Pacific. It's an open question whether the U.S. can find the new ones it needs to execute its vision for the region.
Persuading foreign governments, even historically friendly ones, to host major U.S. deployments is a big ask. There are plenty of benefits: There are major economic perks. And it's a good way to ensure that the U.S. is much more committed to the host country’s defenses, which generally become better equipped and trained. But the downsides can't be ignored: You may make yourself a target against U.S. adversaries. Any number of major political headaches are likely to pop up. You're also likely to provoke non-military retaliation. China, in particular, has proved very adept at pressuring even close U.S. allies to limit what the U.S. can actually deploy to bases on their soil. For example, Beijing pressured Seoul into barring the U.S. from installing additional THAAD anti-missile systems around its bases in South Korea.
So most countries around China's periphery are uninterested in hosting major U.S. deployments. Finding partners willing to host a bunch of U.S. precision-strike missile positions is even more difficult. The U.S. doesn't even have much in the way of land-based strike capabilities in Japan, a stalwart ally. While China has not yet succeeded in getting the Philippines to abandon a 2014 agreement granting the U.S. rotational access to a number of its bases, it did succeed in persuading Manila to drag its feet on implementing the deal and to bar the U.S. from putting artillery systems at the base closest to China's island bases in the Spratlys.
But the U.S. isn't pursuing a lost cause. For one, it doesn't necessarily need most partners in the region to host large, permanent deployments of U.S. forces. The U.S. is trying to move away from large concentrations of forces anyway. (Last November, the Pentagon even floated the idea of setting up a new, headquarter-less 1st Fleet focused on the waters around Southeast Asia.) For the most part, what the U.S. needs is access – to airfields, to ports, maintenance and logistics facilities, to prepositioned caches of supplies and ordnance – it could use to spin up quickly in a crisis. These sorts of things are a much easier ask. In fact, the U.S. already has quite a few such agreements in place, especially in the logistics realm. There are also many more subtle, small-footprint things the U.S. needs that partner governments are typically keener to support, such as jointly operated ISR facilities. Already, U.S. "technical advisers" can be found embedded with local units across the region, including recently at radar sites in Taiwan.
The U.S., moreover, appears to have options to meet at least some of its basing needs, albeit mostly in locations outside the first island chain. Palau, for example, has been publicly courting U.S. bases. (The U.S. remains noncommittal, but it is setting up a new radar system on the strategically located island nation.) The U.S. and Australia are reportedly in talks to set something up on the Papua New Guinean island of Manus. U.S.-owned islands like Saipan and Tinian could have a role too.
The white whales for U.S. defense planners are the Philippines and Singapore, perhaps the two most strategically located countries on China's periphery. Whether the basing agreement with the Philippines is ever fully implemented is anyone's guess, but it hasn’t yet been scrapped fully, and small numbers of U.S. forces have quietly operated out of the Philippines throughout the Duterte era, mostly due to the country's counterterrorism needs. Singapore, meanwhile, already functions as the U.S. military's main logistics hub in the region and recently extended an agreement to host a small number of U.S. warships on a rotational basis at its Changi Naval Base. Singapore won't accept anything bigger from the U.S. anytime soon, but likely would if push were to come to shove between the U.S. and China.
Finally, though it's looking to expand its presence in the region, the U.S. hasn't given up on its goal of seeing its regional partners pitch in substantially more. This could create all sorts of mechanisms for expanded U.S. access through, say, joint training and operations. It could also help incorporate states that are wary of the U.S. into regional defense structures. Vietnam and Indonesia, for example, are generally reluctant to do much with the U.S., but both have been quietly deepening military cooperation with India and Japan. It could also address, at least in small ways, the U.S. missile dilemma if countries build out their own arsenals (so long as they're willing to use them in coordination with U.S. operations, at least).
All this underscores that, as much as U.S. challenges in developing the force it wants in the Indo-Pacific are technological or fiscal or political in nature, perhaps the biggest challenge ahead is diplomatic. Very few countries are willing at this point to pick a side, and impressions of U.S. ambivalence toward the region's core needs and declining clout have only deepened this reluctance. Thus, in the Pentagon's view, at least, nudging countries off the fence starts with proving that the U.S. is more than capable of deterring China, more than willing to expand the scope of its partnerships with regional states beyond the military realm, and more than willing to stick it out for the long haul. It's a tall order, but the U.S. appears serious about making its case.
-
https://geographicalimaginations.com/tag/us-military-bases/
-
Why the U.S. Won’t Leave the Indo-Pacific
New challenges test American strategy, but the commitment is grounded in history.
By Walter Russell Mead
March 15, 2021 6:37 pm ET
The diplomatic tempo in the Indo-Pacific is picking up. On Friday the “Quad,” an informal but increasingly formidable four-power grouping consisting of Japan, India, Australia and America, held its first (virtual) leaders’ summit and issued a joint communiqué promising enhanced cooperation on issues ranging from vaccination diplomacy to climate change.
This is only the start. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are in Tokyo this week to meet their Japanese counterparts and prepare the ground for Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s expected visit to Washington in April. Messrs. Blinken and Austin will continue their Asian journey to Seoul. After the Korea visit, Mr. Austin will proceed to India, while Mr. Blinken will join national security adviser Jake Sullivan in Alaska for a bilateral U.S.-China meeting. Among other topics, Messrs. Blinken and Sullivan are expected to raise questions about China’s use of trade pressure against American allies like Australia.
Adm. Philip Davidson, commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that a military showdown between Taiwan and mainland China could come “in the next six years.” At nearly the same time, Gen. Xu Qiliang, China’s senior military leader, warned the National People’s Congress that China faces a “Thucydides trap” and needs to step up its military spending and preparedness. (The phrase refers to the ancient Greek historian’s belief that Sparta’s fear of rising Athenian power led to the Peloponnesian War.) Satellite imagery showing major expansions of Chinese military facilities near Taiwan, Vietnam, India and the South China Sea suggests that Gen. Xu’s advice is already being heeded.
Assessing the nature and depth of America’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific is a life and death question for countries wondering whether to accommodate or resist China’s determination to project greater influence over neighboring states. Here a more recent historian than Thucydides can be a useful guide. In his 2017 book “By More Than Providence,” Michael Green demonstrates that the current elevation of the Indo-Pacific to the central focus of U.S. policy is no fad. American interest and presence in the region, Mr. Green argues, has been a constant—and constantly growing—force in U.S. foreign policy from the earliest years of the republic.
Mr. Green identifies historic American interests in the region as commercial, security and values-based. These are sometimes in tension—as when U.S. missionaries helped organize Chinese protests against opium-selling American merchants in the 1840s—but overall they have shaped a steadily deepening engagement.
In the early 19th century, hundreds of U.S. whalers and trading vessels visited every corner of the Pacific. From the moment the 1803 Louisiana Purchase gave America a western coastline, questions of security began to shape American diplomacy toward the Indo-Pacific. By 1842, when President John Tyler expanded the Monroe Doctrine to include the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), the idea that U.S. domestic security required a favorable balance of power in Asia was widely accepted among Washington policy makers. Long before China emerged as a potential challenger to the regional power balance, the U.S. had built coalitions in the region against the U.K., Japan and the Soviet Union.
The Pacific was also the primary focus of the American missionary movement, the largest, longest-lived and most consequential foreign policy intervention by civil society in U.S. history. Missionaries preached more than the gospel, though the large and rapidly growing Christian presence across much of Asia today testifies in part to their success at that task. Funded by grass-roots contributions from believers across the country, they also promoted education for women, introduced modern medicine and agricultural techniques, built colleges, and began the tradition of inviting Asian students to continue their education in America.
The picture wasn’t always a beautiful one. Racist attitudes and the U.S. colonial venture in the Philippines left a complicated and sometimes bitter legacy. But if Americans haven’t always been noble or wise in their Pacific policies, they have always been engaged.
That is unlikely to change today. The region is more central to U.S. prosperity and security than ever. Seeking a balanced and secure regional order—without war traps, Thucydidean or otherwise—is a challenging task. America and its allies are sure to make some mistakes.
But if allies sometimes doubt U.S. wisdom, the American commitment to the region is so deeply grounded in history and the structure of U.S. interests that walking away from the region is the one thing Washington is least likely to do.
-
second post
I have very high regard for George Friedman, but some of his recent ruminations have left me with some doubts-- though there are some good points in it, this one here strikes me as naive about the extent of Chinese aggressive intent.
====================
March 16, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
China’s Strategic Standpoint
By: George Friedman
One of the hardest problems of foreign policy is developing an accurate evaluation of a potential adversary’s intentions and capabilities, which are frequently separate realities. I discussed this recently in a piece that pointed out the degree to which the United States misinterpreted the Soviet Union’s intentions and capabilities. The Soviets were focused on reconstruction after World War II, something that required decades of work. A war that would devastate Western Europe gave them no incentive to start a war. The United States, meanwhile, was obsessed with counting equipment, not evaluating the ability of the Soviet logistical system to support a massive offensive. The U.S. focused on worst-case intentions and capabilities. The real ones were very different.
This was in part due to another miscalculation: the underestimation of Japanese capabilities in World War II. Washington knew war was likely and so had a plan designed to counter it. But planners underestimated the degree to which the Japanese understood the war plans and the flexibility of naval planners in declining combat on American terms. They also underestimated Japan’s naval command and failed to understand the actions that aircraft carriers made possible. They understood the intent to fight but not the intent to define the battle and the hardware needed to do so.
During the Cold War, the U.S. was on the defensive against a Russian attack that never came. Similarly, during World War II, Washington saw Japan as utterly dependent on raw materials from the south and assumed a direct thrust southward. It could not conceive that Japan would launch an indirect attack. In both cases, the U.S. ignored reality. Russian constraints militated against offensive war. Japanese constraints militated against direct attack. The U.S. had vast resources and could survive the misunderstandings, but the constancy of miscalculations in other wars such as Vietnam and Iraq indicate a central problem of military planning. If the U.S. ever faces China, nothing is more important in understanding how China sees its strategic position, or precisely how China’s strategic position will compel it to act.
China has two core problems: maintaining unity and preventing social instability. Events along the border with Tibet and in Xinjiang, and lesser events in Inner Mongolia must be contained. At the same time, the economic divide between coastal and western China that fueled Mao’s revolution and has still not been resolved must be managed. One element of this management is economic growth. The early years were explosive since development was measured from Mao’s economic disaster. Since about the mid-2000s, growth has been increasing, but it has led to tensions in the Chinese economic elite. China’s primary strategic focus is internal.
(click to enlarge)
China has therefore tended to focus inward, but what complicates this is that domestic consumption cannot yet maintain economic growth and that access to global markets is a strategic imperative. China depends on access to sea lanes connected to its eastern ports. Ideas about overland transport to Europe, the much-heralded Belt and Road Initiative, have not yet matured as an alternative.
Access to global oceans is still the foundation of Beijing’s strategy, just as Japan’s access to raw materials was its. The two strategic problems have important things in common. China must enhance its naval power, which, whatever Beijing’s intent, makes other Pacific powers such as the U.S. extremely anxious. The most important element of this is the vast American alliance system of formally and informally hostile countries to China: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Australia and India. It constitutes a massive strategic alliance but also a very significant economic alliance involving key Chinese trading partners.
(click to enlarge)
This creates a long stretch of chokepoints that could block China’s access to the oceans and thus hurt domestic economic development and potentially generate social unrest. The United States has not blocked China’s access, nor has it threatened to. But China must consider what is possible, and the capability the U.S. has is a profound threat to China. From the U.S. point of view, moving eastward from the Aleutian-Malacca line would give China entree to the Pacific, which would threaten fundamental U.S. interests. The U.S. cannot abandon the alliance. China cannot accept the threat.
China cannot afford to engage U.S. forces directly. Its own navy is untested in war and has only exercised in fleet-counterfleet operations. China might well defeat the U.S. fleet, but it can’t be certain it would, and defeat would be catastrophic to the regime. In addition, the U.S. has vast resources and capabilities. In looking at U.S. warfighting strategy in the past, initial defeat can generate a massive counterattack. So unless the U.S. seems intent on blockading Chinese ports, the risk of war is too great.
But China also must see the U.S. as averse to war, and the appearance of the Chinese might be enough for the U.S. to decline a larger conflict and withdraw forces on the blockade. A secondary Chinese strategy, then, could be to demonstrate an appetite for combat in an area that is not critical to the United States and might not trigger a response. The idea has been bandied about that China might invade Taiwan. This would be militarily and politically unwise. Amphibious operations are complex, and are won or lost by vast logistical efforts. Reinforcement and resupply would be vulnerable to U.S. anti-ship missiles, submarines and air power. The Chinese must assume that any invasion would likely be defeated.
Even so, China must demonstrate its military will and capability without risking defeat. In other words, it must attack a target of little value and assume the U.S. would not risk combat at a location where Chinese forces have concentrated. But this strategy has two problems too. First, the U.S. will recognize the ploy and might choose to engage to deter greater combat. Even if Washington wanted to decline, its allies may raise enough hell that it may not be able to. This dovetails into the second problem: The members of the alliance are also vital trading powers. One of the paradoxes of the Chinese position is that those that pose the greatest strategic risk are also essential elements of the Chinese economy. Seizing an island off of Taiwan might trigger a U.S. response, but it would convince the alliance members of Chinese danger and force them, with U.S. support, to take economic action.
China must maintain economic growth to maintain stability. It cannot take actions that would make this difficult. Nor can it tolerate the possibility of U.S. naval action that would cripple the Chinese economy. China’s current economic situation is satisfactory. Certainly, a war would not improve it. It is running a risk of U.S. action that would also cripple it. The key Chinese solution is to seek an accommodation with the United States on outstanding economic issues, being aware of the fact that the U.S. has no appetite for war and will initiate only under significant pressure from China. China must weaken the anti-China alliance by making it clear that it has no intention of waging war and that it will align its economy with others. In other words, China must decline combat and make economic and political peace – without appearing that it is doing so under duress.
China is a great power. But all great powers have weaknesses, so their competitors must understand these weaknesses. Fear and prudence make powers concentrate on strength and neglect the weaknesses, and in doing so tend to magnify the power of a competitor. Accurate and dispassionate analysis is needed to avoid overestimation and underestimation and thus miscalculation.
-
I like WRM a lot for his analysis and advice on foreign policy, but to predict that a country falling into the leadership of the Biden crime family, Kamala Harris and AOC will honor the wisdom of "commitments grounded in history" is somewhere between wishful, hopeful and naive. Our security initiatives so far in the first hundred days have had more to do with individual gender modifications than dealing with global security threats. This crowd is more likely to defund the military than to counter the national security threat that is China, IMHO.
-
Poetry and Forecasting
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
Earlier this week, I wrote an analysis about China’s strategy, the kind of piece that is what is expected in this industry. I end the week with thoughts that are explicitly geopolitical but are foundational to writing.
Geopolitics is about nations and strategy. My approach is to use geopolitics to forecast events. But underlying this is a view of the world that may seem out of place in the world of power politics: the consideration of our relationship to the future and the language that must be used to think of the future. The consideration of the future is what I do, but sometimes it can be done only from a different perspective – sometimes even from a different language.
All of my work, my passion, is to know the future, the one thing that the gods have been said to deny us. That my life’s work is pure hubris is true. Hubris is defined as excessive pride. In my case it is not pride in what I have done, but rather pride in thinking that it is possible to do it, to know what will happen by knowing how things work.
We expect scientists to know how things work, and we include in scientists social scientists, with whom I am grouped, and which I deplore. The work of social scientists is to make great things small, and beautiful things banal. I try to avoid that trap by thinking of the world as vast and overwhelming, and trying to glimpse its directions. But to forecast is to be poetic, for poets have done some of the finest forecasting, having seen the world not only clearly but in proportion – which is much harder to do.
Heinrich Heine was a German-Jewish poet who wrote in the mid-19th century. Of Germany’s future, he wrote:
"Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll."
Nazi Germany’s thunderbolt shook the world, and Heine sensed this was coming a century before the sound could be heard. How could Heine have done this? What did he know that others didn’t? He knew the German soul, its energy, rage and self-certainty that made Germany what it was. He read what Germans wrote and he believed them, while others patronizingly brushed them aside. He also knew that humans do not believe what they see when it seems incredible. And Heine knew that the most common thing is the most incredible thing. When I look back on my life, I understand that the enemy of truth is the certainty that what is now will also be later, and all that contradicts it is a fool’s prattle.
Rudyard Kipling also foretold the fate of his own country, and the reason for its fate.
"Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!"
Britain was built on its navy. It was an island that lived or died by the sea. He saw that the navy would disappear, and while the island might survive, its glory would disappear. It once ruled the world and now it hopes that Scotland will retain union. Kipling warned of a nation drunk with power whose wild tongues congratulate themselves instead of seeing themselves in the hands of God and not of kings. Kipling loved England with a passion, but he had been out in the colonies and had seen the self-glorification that was gnawing at the foundations of the empire. Those colonies are no longer British, and Britain’s navy is a shadow of itself. Kipling forecast it because as a poet he could see the British soul far more clearly than others could. He could sing the song of the recessional as a warning and a certainty.
Both saw greatness in the souls of their countries, and both dreaded what it portended. Greatness brings pride, pride brings catastrophe, and the proud don’t listen. Sometimes the warning is given in general. Sometimes a reader is invited to believe the words written speak specifically to them. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American author, wrote:
“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”
He is the quintessential American thinker, and in recent months I have come to depend more on his guidance on love and hate and our public life. We cannot live without love, and we cannot live without hate. Each is tied to the other. It is comforting that he makes no forecast. He is not Heine or Kipling. He is an American, comfortable with the linkage of the extreme, and I think he sees it as the engine of the country.
My work is based on what must be done and what can’t be done. But the hardest part of my work is to understand the soul, and how it forces things to be done. In the past few months, I have been drawn to the problem of the soul more than before, to understand why Kipling felt pride and Heine felt philosophy could guide you. Hawthorne makes it clear that the soul, at least the soul of Americans, is at war with itself, which paradoxically stabilizes them. German and English smugness destroys them.
It is possible to forecast and absurd to think otherwise. Each of us chooses a path that we think will bring us somewhere. We know what we will do, but the world and our own virtue determine how it comes out. Millions of people are together more predictable than one. If we could listen to a Heine, a Kipling or a Hawthorne it would be easier. But we don’t listen and we don’t believe that it can be understood. And we find poetry alien.
There is, however, one forecast that is certain, courtesy of Homer:
"Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again."
That doesn’t seem to be connected to submarines or the South China Sea or the war in Yemen or inflation, but it is. Once that is understood, the rest seems to follow.
-
https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/2544434/india-us-look-at-ways-to-grow-partnership-to-protect-indo-pacific/fbclid/IwAR2jyH85W_wmUpBSlmppkrqqiD047qUddyK34kehbm-bG2VXiOWvsepNi7c/
-
China, the U.S., and the Geography of the 21st Century
undefined and Senior VP of Strategic Analysis
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
9 MIN READAug 21, 2020 | 10:00 GMT
Pedestrians stand on top of a world map at a monument commemorating the Age of Exploration in Lisbon, Portugal.
Pedestrians stand on top of a world map at a monument commemorating the Age of Exploration in Lisbon, Portugal.
(Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images)
“Each century has had its own geographical perspective.”
Sir Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (1919)
The geographical perspective of the 21st century is just now being formed. And at its heart is a rivalry between China and the United States to succeed Europe’s 500-year centrality in the international system, which will be framed by a shift in global economic activity and trade, new energy resource competition, a weakening Europe and Russia, and a technological battle to control information. The new map of the next century will extend to the ocean floor for resources and subsea cables, to space where low-Earth orbit satellites drive communications, and into the ill-defined domain of cyberspace.
Who Sits at the Pivot to the New Geography?
As the 21st century dawned, Europe’s centrality to the world system was already beginning to fade, despite the economic heft of the European Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union left a weakened Russia and several newly independent or restored states, significantly reducing the chances for major conflict in Europe and curtailing fear of a Eurasian heartland power. China stood on the verge of a massive economic boom, having recovered from the global strictures following the Tiananmen Square incident. Trans-Pacific trade had already overtaken trans-Atlantic trade several decades earlier, and the U.S. “victory” in the Cold War left the United States an apparently unchallengeable global hegemon.
The Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the global financial crisis in 2007-2008 and the current COVID-19 pandemic have all blunted that sense of American invincibility. But it can still be argued that the United States has emerged as the pivot of the world system for this new century — the crossroad between Europe and Asia, between the Atlantic and Pacific. The United States, while managing social and political instability at home, remains the largest single economic or military power on the planet. And despite laments to the contrary, there is still a robust innovative culture and even a manufacturing base.
Across the Pacific, China is proffering itself as the heart of 21st-century geography. Its Belt and Road Initiative connects a massive pool of resources, human capital and consumer markets in Europe, Africa and Asia by land and sea. Its trade and transit arms reach across the Arctic, Pacific and Indian oceans, and spiderweb across Asia and Europe. China’s centralized government and economic model, emerging military might and massive population position it as the peer competitor to the United States. Increased economic and military power brings with it political sway, and China is actively seeking to reshape global norms and regulations to better fit its geopolitical perspective and interests.
Competition, But Not a Cold War
China and the United States are in a contest for the central role in an international system, in a world where, despite resurgent economic nationalism, true decoupling will be difficult, if not impossible. The Cold War splitting of the world into blocs was facilitated by a unique moment in history — the emergence of an existential rivalry at a time when the international system itself lay in rubble following decades of war across Europe and Asia. In excluding the Soviet Union and its allies from the new economic system, the United States was not necessarily decoupling with Russia, but was merely omitting it from a new financial architecture.
There is no such crisis to facilitate an easy breaking of economic bonds with China. While the United States has grown accustomed to using sanctions as an economic tool of political coercion, it has mostly been against much smaller and often marginalized nations — and success of this sanctions-heavy strategy has been mixed at best. China and the United States have complex and tightly integrated economies, from $650 billion in annual trade to reciprocal portfolio holdings and investments, sourcing of materials, and parts and labor in supply chains. It is not simply a few threads to cut, it is a complex tapestry that resists rending.
Unlike the calamity of World War II, the international system is only fraying at the edges now, not completely unraveling, despite the economic and pandemic crises of the last two decades. The United States and its partners may cut some strands with China, focused mainly on high-end technology over national security concerns, but it would take decades of concerted effort and economic pain to tease apart the bulk of trade ties. Supply chains will be reformulated, technological competition will begin to fragment cyberspace, and competition for critical raw materials will increase, but there is little room for the complete decoupling of major economies, despite current U.S.-Chinese frictions or fears of a no-deal British exit from the European Union.
Shifting Geographic Perceptions
In noting that each century has its own geographic perspective, British geographer Sir Halford J. Mackinder made an important observation in his book, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction, published in 1919: While geography may not change much over time, the way people perceive and interact with it does. Technology, economic structures, and evolving social and ideological concepts all play a major role in our interaction with the physical world. The shift from wind to coal to oil had a major impact on not only the perception of distance, but the relative importance of certain geographical locations and routes. As we work to define the 21st-century geography, it is useful to look at the past, recognizing that it is the human interaction that provides perspective and defines the significance of geography at any given time.
Writing at the close of World War I, Mackinder defined the geography of the newly dawned 20th century as one centered on the “Heartland” of Eurasia, and on a contest of power between that continental heartland and the insular maritime powers around its periphery. Mackinder argued that technological innovation, particularly rail, would allow a heartland power to tie together the resources and population of what he termed the World Island (Europe, Asia and Africa). With its internal lines of communication protected from seapower, the heartland would then rally its resources to outproduce and outcompete the maritime powers. The ambitions of Germany and the Axis powers in World War II, and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, both seemed to confirm Mackinder’s assessment and thus defined the geopolitical contours of the 20th century.
The next century’s geographical perspective is just now being formed. And at its heart is a rivalry between China and the U.S. to succeed Europe’s 500-year centrality in the world system.
The defining geographic characteristic of the 19th century was the impact of the industrial revolution on socio-economic patterns and international trade, with a surge in urbanization, the specialization of production and expanding supply lines for raw materials and markets. But the groundwork for the global cataclysms of the 21st century was also being set in motion. Continental-maritime rivalries between the United Kingdom and Russia played out in the Great Game, and global exploration filled in much of the remaining empty space on maps, leaving little buffer space between nations. As the century drew to a close, early signs of a future challenge to Europe’s centrality were appearing. The United States shifted radically from a continentalist to an internationalist position, highlighted in the 1898 Spanish-American War, and Japan overturned the old continental order, supplanting a waning China as the central power in Asia.
We could walk back further, seeing the massive surge in trans-Atlantic trade in the 18th century as defining a new center to an emerging world system, with vast Atlantic replacing the closed Mediterranean as the central connector. What preceded was the 17th century, defined by the Peace of Westphalia treaties and the emergence of the modern state, with sovereignty over people, economics and territory. And before that was the 16th century, which saw the emergence of the interconnected world writ large — made manifest not so much in European conquest, as perhaps in the massive Japanese invasion force trying to push through Korea at the end of the century, armed with European arquebuses in an attempt to overturn a Chinese world order.
Influences on 21st-Century Geography
The United States and China will sit at the forefront of the 21st-century geography, with the United States remaining a traditional maritime power, as China works to bridge a continental and maritime role. Europe and Russia will both retain power and influence, though to a lesser degree, and while they may lean toward the larger poles, they will not fall into locked alliances. Russia may align with China, but Chinese initiatives in the Arctic, Central Asia and into the Indian Ocean and Middle East are all encroaching on areas of traditional Russian interests. While Europe and the United States may align on many issues, Europe is also increasingly integrated into transcontinental land-based trade routes and at odds with the United States on regulatory fronts, from taxation to cyberspace to environmental regulations.
The formative technologies of the 21st century will also include another shift in energy, leaving some areas less important, and others emerging as the center of resource competition, including on the seafloor and potentially in space. Localized power production, whether through wind and solar or through nuclear microreactors, will open opportunities in disconnected areas, from the Arctic to the highlands of Indochina. Agricultural sciences will further change the relationship between populations and land, adapting to changing climatic patterns and urbanization trends. Biomedical technologies will mitigate some of the demographic challenges of aging populations, overturning traditional economic models that preference the continued enlargement of labor pools. Space will become the new battleground for competing routes of information flow, and competition will extend into the physical infrastructure and the ethereal concepts of cyberspace. Hypersonics will further decimate the impact of distance, and the expansion of autonomous weapon systems will again alter the geography of war.
This emerging geographical perspective of the 21st century is still slightly out of focus. But what is certain is that it will revolve around China and the United States, locked in competition for that pivotal position in the world system.
-
third post of the day
Challenging the Inevitability of the Liberal World Order
undefined and Senior VP of Strategic Analysis
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
10 MIN READJul 26, 2018 | 08:00 GMT
This picture shows a session of the U.N. General Assembly from June 13.
This picture shows a session of the U.N. General Assembly from June 13. Institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and others represent the liberal world order -- a global system that is not as inevitable as first believed.
(DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
In contrast to the ideas of some of its proponents, the liberal world order is not the destiny of all societies around the world.
Those seeking to implement such an order have failed because they often don't recognize realities on the ground, occasionally leading to chaos.
Acknowledging that the liberal world order is not inevitably for all of humanity is critical in improving our understanding of the world.
The liberal world order is neither inherently universal, nor is it the inevitable path of societies across the globe. Like the ideals of democracy it embodies, the liberal world order — for us, a Western-oriented financial and trade system that emerged following World War II and which prescribes democracy as the sole path for all societies — is a political construct that has evolved and developed in a certain place and at a certain time. Such historicization is not to argue against the liberal world order's merits nor deny its problems and challenges. As Winston Churchill intoned in 1947, "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
But even democracy itself evolved out of a particular strand of Western philosophy, and its application has been far from equal across place and time. But just because a Western-oriented liberal model has driven the trends of globalization, political development and economic growth for nearly the past century — and particularly since the end of the Cold War — doesn't mean it will continue in perpetuity. Even a brief look at history emphasizes the frequency and scale of changes that have rocked the world system, so there should be little expectation of linearity moving forward.
The Big Picture
At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously declared "the end of history" as he predicted the eventual triumph of a liberal world order. But in the quarter-century since — and especially in recent years — the prospects for the ultimate victory of such an order appear dim amid the challenges posed by local circumstances. Ultimately, recognizing geopolitical realities and the fact that the liberal world order is not inevitable for everyone is essential to understanding the world.
Divergent Views on Globalization
In October 2017, I wrote about competing views of globalization from Asia and Europe in the context of travels through several countries in the year since the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president. In brief, the piece laid bare the very distinct views between Asia and Europe regarding Trump, globalization and the trend of future history. Europe perceived Trump as an ahistorical figure who was crashing against the inevitable progress of the liberal world order and globalization, as well as the universal integration of economic, political and regulatory norms. In Asia, there was a sense of uncertainty, but not nearly as much surprise at the notion that nations and nationalism retained their currency and that conflict and confrontation remained the norm.
Since that time, I have been back through Europe and Asia, including a visit to the middle ground in Kiev. Regardless of the intended topic of discussions, the question of the liberal world order and its challenges always took center stage. Without doubt, Trump's words and actions did much to shape these discussions, but thinking back, the questions were, in general, universal. The questions centered on the structure of international relations, trade flows and regulations, and the ability to predict the interests and behavior of others in order to make effective decisions. In all, they were questions about the direction of the future.
The divergent viewpoints, however, did not stem so much from the differences between East and West as they did from the differences between — for lack of a better term — classes. The globe's larger metropolitan areas, especially the great capitals, as well as coastal and trading cities, share similar beliefs and concerns — to the extent that there is often a greater convergence in views among the denizens of London, New York and even Shanghai than between such urbanites and their compatriots in the suburbs or hinterlands. For evidence, look no further than the voting patterns in the cases of Brexit and the election of Trump, in which the metropoles defended a concept of an international liberal order, while the "rest" reasserted local and national self-interest.
The globe's larger metropolitan areas share similar beliefs and concerns – to the extent that there is often a greater convergence in views among the denizens of London, New York and even Shanghai than between such urbanites and their compatriots in the suburbs or hinterlands.
When Ideals Bump Up Against Reality
If I were to list some of the greatest challenges to the liberal world order, I would not necessarily start with individual leaders or their autocratic tendencies. Without question, individuals matter, as they can shape perceptions and policies alike. But more often than not, they are a reflection of pre-existing underlying trends that they proceed to exploit and magnify. I, instead, would begin with an exploration of the deeply ingrained concept that the liberal world order is universal and inevitable.
At its most extreme, the liberal world order, whether represented by EU leaders in Brussels, the World Trade Organization or even the United Nations, denotes the subservience of national and regional self-interest to a rules-based global order that assumes a universality of application and applicability. Commendably, it attempts to relegate conflict and competition to the dustbin of history, but it does so by ignoring certain underlying truths: That place matters, that opportunity is not equally bestowed by nature across the globe and that — for good or bad — societies, morals and norms evolved differently in different places as organized people interacted with their local geographies.
The near religious zeal for a universalist and inevitable principle of world organization is not a new phenomenon, particularly in Western societies. We have seen it before, from the spread of Christianity to the "white man's burden" of "benign" imperialism, from the enlightenment to the drive for science to eliminate religion and from the idea of civilization always advancing toward perfection to assertions of democracy as the desire of all mankind.
When the ideal is assumed to be the only path, the actions of its proponents often have the reverse effect, as the putative standard bearers of civilization fail to recognize the realities that lie beneath. The challenges to European solidarity have not fostered understanding among EU leaders regarding the different and complex conditions on the Continent but rather convinced them to double down on integration; such action has served to delegitimize — even if unintentionally — the concerns of many in Europe who see their personal experiences in a very different light.
This is the second issue, because the very "success" of globalization, technological development and internationalization of trade has come at a high cost. The belief in abundant opportunity became a core element of the Western myth that spread abroad as the liberal world order took hold, but the so-called "hollowing out" of the middle class reflects the social limits of the current model. At the heart of the issue is the perception of a breakdown in the relatively new idea (in historical terms, at least) that individuals can always improve upon their parents' economic and social standing.
The very "success" of globalization, technological development and internationalization of trade has come at a high cost.
Sir Halford Mackinder, one of the founders of the discipline of geopolitics, pointed to this very risk when Europe contemplated how to rebuild society and the global order amid the wreckage of World War I. In his 1919 book Democratic Ideals and Reality, Mackinder cautioned that "as long as you allow a great metropolis to drain most of the best young brains from the local communities," it will lead to class divisions as village- and town-dwellers lose the opportunity for advancement and young people migrate to large cities.
These new metropoles, however, do not result in a flourishing of diverse ideas but a convergence, as the new elites attend the same schools, enter the same professions and begin espousing the same politics, Mackinder notes. The author goes on to warn that if the divisions between the metropoles and their host countries continue, "it is quite inevitable that the corresponding classes in neighboring nations will get themselves together, and that what has been described as the horizontal cleavage of international society will ensue." In extremely simplified terms, it points to today's split between extreme globalism and rising nationalism.
A final challenge to the liberal world order comes from the rise of the rest, particularly China. In 1900, the American geopolitician Alfred Thayer Mahan witnessed the imperial competition over China but predicted that a unified and economically advanced China might eventually emerge. If it did so, he argued, it would be best to ensure it had Western values. "If the advantage to us is great of a China open to commerce, the danger to us and to her is infinitely greater of a China enriched and strengthened by the material advantages we have to offer, but uncontrolled in the use of them by any clear understanding, much less any full acceptance, of the mental and moral forces which have generated and in large measure govern our political and social action."
While the language reflects a different time — one of empire and the assertion that the West is politically and socially superior to the East — the concept is little different than the assertion today that China needs to play by the West's rules of global trade and commerce. Global integration and trade has opened the way for China, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and even Africa and Latin America to achieve rapid advancements in economic activity, technological development and social mobility. And because of this success, these countries are now asking why the globe's internal system is underwritten by a narrow set of Western values and why they must adhere to such alien concepts if they wish to participate and compete in the world order.
A Not-So Universal Model
Western philosophy, it turns out, is not universal. The idea of linear growth and a constant advancement toward some ideal may be common in the West, but Asian philosophers, for example, have often perceived a world that moves in cycles rather than toward any conclusion. When economic power, political influence and military and cultural "soft power" begin rippling back across the globe instead of traveling in a single direction, a rethink of the system's core concepts is in order.
Today, most would look askance at anyone who asserted that there is a clear racial order to the world in which Europe and America must guide and teach the rest. There would be equal opposition to ideas that Western empires must re-establish themselves to rule the global order, control distant populations and better utilize the world's economic resources and manpower. If we asserted that there is still a white man's burden, or that there is a single religion that must be imposed on the world — whether Christianity, Islam or Hinduism — we would be swiftly rebuked. Even so, there is surprise when peoples who did not participate in the Western world order during its formative years, or help draft its guiding principles, documents or regulations, challenge the system.
Though the ideals of the liberal world order may be noble, it is important to recognize that the world isn't united and that different core worldviews have emerged over time as different peoples engaged with their geographies. Religions might assert universal truths, but there is no universally correct way of doing things in the political order. There is no irresistible march of history toward progress or liberal democracy, just as the future history espoused by Marxists proved to be an analysis, not an inevitability. Acknowledging this is key to understanding the world and, accordingly, how efforts to achieve goals such as the liberal world order may occasionally lead to division, separation and chaos.
-
March 23, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
Russia, China and the United States: First Shots
By: George Friedman
Any time there is a new U.S. president, major powers set out to test him and lay the groundwork for future bargaining in potential conflicts. Occasionally, the United States opens the bidding. Such was the case when Washington, through its new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, accused Beijing of human rights violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and of various cybercrimes. Beijing responded by calling Washington an enormous human rights violator, adding that it does not speak for the world and should not claim to. This is the tone for a showdown, not for a pleasant introduction.
All this took place ahead of a meeting that was doomed to fail. Before the meeting could take place, Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, spent time in South Korea and Japan, both of which oppose China and, despite being longtime allies, have specific gripes with the U.S. (Seoul over the cost of hosting U.S. troops and Tokyo over enhancing its military to face China.) Both meetings went well. Elsewhere, talks were held with the Quad, a security dialogue comprising the U.S., Japan, Australia and India, all of which are naval powers hostile to China. In other words, the U.S. held a series of meetings with its anti-China allies just before it met with China.
As the talks were in the process of collapsing, President Joe Biden was asked in an interview whether Russian President Vladimir Putin was a killer. He said he was. It’s not something you normally say about the head of a major power, even if it’s true. Biden had plenty of time to recant his statement had he wanted to, but he didn’t. The Russians were upset and recalled their ambassador. Putin essentially said, “it takes one to know one.”
I see this as Biden beating China and Russia to the punch. He and his team wanted to let them know – and, indirectly, let the American public know – that he’s not going to be a weak president. Russia’s and China’s responses, of course, were meant for the United States – as well as for U.S. allies who might doubt its strength.
In diplomacy, talk is cheap, and opening acts such as these matter little. Some have said it sets the tone for the next four years, but it doesn’t. It sets the stage for the first month, after which everyone, having the opportunity to sniff and growl at each other, settle into reality. And reality militates against drastic action. The U.S. is China’s biggest customer, which Beijing cannot afford to lose. It is much easier to acquire needed goods in other markets than to sell in other markets. As for Russia, it could pick a fight in, say, Ukraine or Moldova, but doing so would create its worst-case scenario: NATO, Germany and other countries amassing forces in Eastern Europe. So let’s rule that out too.
Russia’s and China’s options are obviously more complicated than what I lay out here, but they are also hemmed in by these realities. The meetings held by the U.S. prior to the meeting with China were meant to remind the Chinese of as much, that it should not overestimate its strength or underestimate its strategic isolation. Calling Putin a killer was meant to warn Putin against covert operations, and to let him know that Washington knows how weak Russia is and doesn’t care what Russia thinks.
The risk is that Biden is wrong and that Russia and China are not as weak as he thinks. In my view, they are in no position to challenge the United States or attempt military action. But it is one thing to write and another to bear the burden of action. The question is what sort of action the Russians and Chinese might take. The logical solution is to form an alliance. The question is what it would look like and whether it would matter.
An economic alliance would be ineffective. Russia and China trade with each other without friction. Neither would have a sufficient market to support the other’s needs. There is a symmetry in that Russia needs Chinese consumer technology and China needs Russian raw materials, but each is already getting what it needs and providing what it can manage. An economic alliance would perhaps formalize existing relations and perhaps increase trade but would not make either invulnerable to third-party pressures.
A military alliance is similarly problematic. Neither Russia nor China can support the other’s strategic needs. The primary threat to China is naval. Russia’s naval capacity is limited, and its major Asian port, Vladivostok, requires passage through maritime routes that are controlled by Japan and the United States. Russia would be contained by the same coalition threatening China. The threats to Russia are primarily terrestrial. China’s ability to send forces to areas of Russian concern is limited, and Russia has no pressing need for additional ground troops. There are areas in which one could help the other, such as military hardware or cyberwarfare, but that isn’t a real alliance.
Could a Russo-Chinese alliance launch a naval assault in the east and a ground attack in the west simultaneously? Perhaps. But doing so, while politically shocking, would not weaken either front because it would be engaging naval forces not needed in the west and ground forces not needed in the east. It may also fail. If it succeeded, it would trigger existential (nuclear) choices or create unshakeable anti-Russia and anti-China alliances.
The more logical and less risky move is for China to reach a political and economic agreement with the United States, and for Russia to do the same, at least with Europe. But to do this, each must be convinced that the U.S. is not interested in a settlement. Showing a lack of interest is the foundation of any bargaining position. The best read is that the U.S. knows that bargaining is coming and is therefore posing as hostile to it. The Chinese have called the Americans’ bet. The Russians shortly will. At any rate now is the time for insults and threats, before we get down to business that may fail regardless of all this.
-
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-meaning-of-the-woke-military/
-
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-meaning-of-the-woke-military/
Well worth reading.
-
Agreed.
I forget all five strands of American foreign policy, (Jacksonian, Wilsonian, Isolationism? Real Politik? and) but one of them, the Wilsonian has been about America as a moral force.
On the insignia of our Special Forces, it says "De Opreso Libre". I may not have the spelling exactly right, but a key point here is that the American soldier needs to believe in what he is fighting for-- freedom from oppression. This is secret sauce a Green Beret can call upon when he goes into the field to help a people, a movement.
This is why we won over the Soviet Empire.
This is why speaking out about the oppression of Hong Kong and the Uighurs is part of a continuum of American foreign policy.
If I understand this piece correctly, the Progs, including our current Commander in Chief, now would now have us fight on behalf of exporting woke-ism. This is a sea change! Twenty years in Afpakia must go on , , , until , , , exactly what? That they are woke enough to take up the Prog approach to male and female?
A considerable part of the fighting tip of our military is legacy, with a large percentage of that being of Southern tradition. What happens if/when that lineage walks away? Will be be protected by pregnant women fighter pilots righteously enabled by the maternity flight suits that our Commander in Chief has called for? Trained at Fort Kamala (formerly known as Fort Bragg)?
-
Agreed.
I forget all five strands of American foreign policy, (Jacksonian, Wilsonian, Isolationism? Real Politik? and) but one of them, the Wilsonian has been about America as a moral force.
On the insignia of our Special Forces, it says "De Opreso Libre". I may not have the spelling exactly right, but a key point here is that the American soldier needs to believe in what he is fighting for-- freedom from oppression. This is secret sauce a Green Beret can call upon when he goes into the field to help a people, a movement.
This is why we won over the Soviet Empire.
This is why speaking out about the oppression of Hong Kong and the Uighurs is part of a continuum of American foreign policy.
If I understand this piece correctly, the Progs, including our current Commander in Chief, now would now have us fight on behalf of exporting woke-ism. This is a sea change! Twenty years in Afpakia must go on , , , until , , , exactly what? That they are woke enough to take up the Prog approach to male and female?
A considerable part of the fighting tip of our military is legacy, with a large percentage of that being of Southern tradition. What happens if/when that lineage walks away? Will be be protected by pregnant women fighter pilots righteously enabled by the maternity flight suits that our Commander in Chief has called for? Trained at Fort Kamala (formerly known as Fort Bragg)?
The vast majority of military recruits into combat arms come from the southern states and the intermountain west. Texas has produced the most SEALs out of any state.
-
Some big sweeping statements in here and some jumps in logic, but overall I found this to be a deeply provocative piece:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/bidens-last-throw-geopolitical-dice?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
-
Some big sweeping statements in here and some jumps in logic, but overall I found this to be a deeply provocative piece:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/bidens-last-throw-geopolitical-dice?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
Yes, thought provoking. Except in opposition to the US, I don't see the Chinese and Russians as allied. The analysis counts Africa and concludes it's more than half the world's people. But I think the Chinese push in Africa is for access to resources, not to numbers of people.
Post-Putin Russia may be vulnerable to China's domination, but I don't see the ego of Putin succumbing to that role. Nor vice versa. Xi sees Russia for it's natural resources, not as anything close to an equal partner.
On the other side, the rise of China has helped build the anti-China coalition. India is seeing that light, and Japan, Australia, certainly Taiwan. Southeast Asian states along with South Korea are needing to choose: https://www.dw.com/en/south-korea-struggles-to-choose-between-us-and-china/a-55172936
The fall of Europe and the loss of Europe hurts us. Worst is the loss of having the US on our side.
If and when the US implodes, China will be the world's dominant economic and military power. But the cause of this is not the success of China, the relative savings rates or the choice of currencies in transactions around the world. The cause is from within. The US could still compete with any of these countries or alliances if that's what we chose to do.
From the article: "The US has, or says it has, enough gold to put a failing dollar back on a gold standard, but for it to be credible it must radically cut spending, its geopolitical ambitions, and return its budget into balance."
Fine, but this isn't that complicated and gold isn't the problem or the solution. We are moving away from responsible governance and moving away from all forms of pro-growth polices right while our largest global competitor is moving quickly forward economically, militarily, globally. That competitor happens to be a murderous, genocidal, freedom thwarting dictatorship. That doesn't seem to alarm anyone.
Don't worry about learning Chinese as we lose out to them because freedom of speech isn't part of the package.
-
https://warontherocks.com/2021/03/battlegrounds-the-fight-for-american-foreign-policy/?fbclid=IwAR3XfwNlrENiOA79h_ViaYPxT_Fn72Qc-7zcIgsYrUY4UsIfm3vxA_AdfWY
-
On the Suez Canal and Chokepoints
By: George Friedman
I’ve often written about chokepoints – those narrow passageways, on land or at sea, that are essential for the movement of goods and people – in the context of waging war. They can be blocked by military means or by natural forces or, as we’ve recently seen, by human error in times of peace.
There are two types of chokepoints. There is the type that nature creates, and the type that humans construct, normally to create a route to a desired objective, a route that had not been there before. In general, those that are created by humans are less robust than those created by nature. Human-designed chokepoints are normally narrower and easier to block than natural ones because engineering is forced, by the vastness of the task, to create a passage of minimal width due to the tremendous amount of labor and cost necessary to build it. Nature is more generous.
Oil Transit Routes Through Maritime Choke Points
(click to enlarge)
The important element of a chokepoint is time. The permanent closure of a chokepoint can have extreme consequences, depending on the importance of what passed through it, and who was dependent on the things that were passed. A short closure may have limited consequences by comparison. The ease of closure and the amount of time to reopening is critical. On the whole, maritime chokepoints tend to be more significant than their terrestrial counterparts, especially because of modern economics and warfare, global maritime trade, the dependence of nations on that trade and the increased power of naval forces. In short, chokepoints are central to geopolitical thinking.
For military planners and high-level strategists, chokepoints are always close to mind. But in the commercial world, critical as business is to national interest, there has been an implicit assumption that the various chokepoints are merely geographic features that will be permanently in place. What they know perhaps in a vague sense was driven home painfully with the blockage of the Suez Canal.
The Suez Canal is an artificial passage between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. It was developed by a private corporation in which British and French interests held the majority of shares. In being the highway between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, it shortened the distance between the United Kingdom and its vast interests in the Indian Ocean basin, and between France and its holdings in Indo-China. The Suez Canal was the foundation of the European empire in Asia and its closure would have been a disaster. Securing the Suez, and its sister chokepoint at Gibraltar, was a geopolitical imperative for the empires, and shaped their strategic and commercial strategy. In World War II, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel intended to take the canal, hoping to destroy the flow of goods from India and of troops from Australia and New Zealand. In 1956, when Britain and France (aided by Israel) invaded to prevent Egypt from nationalizing the canal, the United States, hostile to British and French imperial interests, compelled them to withdraw.
The argument they made against ceding the Suez Canal to Egypt was that Egypt lacked the expertise to maintain it. The United States, having owned the more complex Panama Canal for some time, was confident it could oversee its management. The Egyptian shift to the Soviet camp undermined these efforts, and the condition of the canal became somewhat more tenuous. In 1967, the canal closed after the Six-Day War and was reopened around 1980, after the Camp David Accords. There is much more to the tale, but suffice it to say that the canal, an artificial and therefore narrow waterway, has been a geopolitical pivot since it was opened, and that the fate of empires has turned on it.
Its importance has been made clear by the Ever Given, the ship that was until Monday stuck in the canal. It created a worldwide traffic jam for cargo traveling between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. The Suez is open for business again, but in some ways the damage is already done. Syria, for example, has announced that it is running out of oil. Other countries the world over will likely soon claim likewise for any number of other goods. Economic uncertainty, it seems, is here to stay.
Of course, no one came to blows over the Suez. But in looking at other important chokepoints, that may not always be the case. The Strait of Malacca, for example, through which passage between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific takes place, is absolutely critical for China, as are the chokepoints created by nations and smaller islands east of China. China’s fundamental fear is that the U.S. might close both Malacca and the island chokepoints, which would utterly cripple the Chinese economy.
The world is filled with these kinds of bottlenecks, with some nations more beholden to them than others. Suez has demonstrated the fragility of manmade chokepoints, but mines, submarines, cruise missiles and the like can effectively close off any chokepoint at any time, even the vast system of multiple chokepoints. Any future war will be based on this reality, as past wars were. The Suez should remind us of our vulnerability not to accident alone, but also to the nature of wars that for humans are always on the horizon.
-
https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/30/we-must-arm/
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/03/30/following-alaska-fiasco-blinken-suggests-china-right-on-u-s-human-rights-record/
we are so racist that immigrants including Asians , Chinese and Indians have come to this country opened business became lawyers doctors scientists, professors, politicians, own half the motels (think Patel - Hotel as one Indian friend told me ). in the South
while blacks claim they are suppressed
compare that to the Mandarin Chinese . How many immigrants , non Mandarin , are. CCP in China
-
https://m.jpost.com/middle-east/us-removes-gulf-air-defense-batteries-amid-houthi-drone-strikes-report-663920?draft=true
Turning our back on allies. W.T.F.
-
"Turning our back on allies. W.T.F."
well yeah.
Saudis killed a Wash Post left wing journalist
That is an act of war.
if he were right wing they would be sending more military aid to SA
-
"Saudis killed a Wash Post left wing journalist"
He wasn't an American or a 'journalist' but he didn't deserve that brutal death - without a fair trial. That event reveals something horrible about Saudi top leadership. But if moral derangement is the line for the American Left in power, why do they side with the Mullahs in Iran, the world's number one state sponsor, enemy of Israel, killer of Americans, recently, by the thousands? How do they not know Iran is the main threat in the region? They send planeloads of cash, pave the path to nuclear arms, as Netanyahu said, then say morals guide our foreign policy. Are they kidding?
Ally means on the same team which Saudi has been for some time now. Maybe we should not have any cooperation with them. Then what? Concede the region to Iran? That makes us safer? How?!
-
a) You guys have heard me discuss my Prof Quandt's teachings of Kissinger's uni-polar and multi-polar world analytical framework. The parts of the following piece based on that stimulate thought:
b) Kissinger is the architect of the Nixon policy that enabled China to be what it is today;
c) Kissinger has become a wealthy man advising China since Nixon left office;
d) What do we get from China and Russia in return for our new place that enables us to stop the current trend? The UN?
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/kissinger-warns-washington-accept-new-global-system-or-face-pre-wwi-geopolitical?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17300/china-russia-provocations
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17382/biden-hamas-islamic-jihad
-
makes sense
his advisors are all the same losers that worked with Obama:
https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/commentary/bidens-risky-risk-averse-foreign-policy-why-its-not-smart-mimic-obama
-
Wew ,
I was getting worried
this puts my mind to ease:
more diplomacy:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/white-house-biden-meet-putin-140458968.html
MSM to yak this up
Fareeeeeed will give us the Harvard or is it Yale low down
about how Biden was so forceful with Vlad
new dawn in US Russian relations
they promise to never mess with our elections again
why all the
sarcasm ?
well, after getting BS fed to me for 24/7 how else can I think.
maybe they can make a deal and merge US and Russia propaganda machines to save money
for more spending programs and for reparations to anyone without white skin and does and was not born with a penis.
-
The aircraft carrier the USS Ronald Reagan will deploy from its home port in Japan to the Middle East this summer to support the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week. The move came at the request of U.S. Central Command and was approved by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
The Reagan’s deployment undermines the claim—made by the past three American presidents—that the Indo-Pacific is America’s priority. It also suggests that the Biden administration is conducting a phantom withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan—removing boots on the ground to fulfill a campaign promise to end “forever wars,” but replacing ground operations with other forces conducting similar missions at great difficulty and expense.
A carrier has been present in the Middle East for years, which is wearing out the Navy’s carrier force. The USS Abraham Lincoln spent more than 220 days operating in the region on a 295-day deployment that ended in January 2020, the longest of any carrier since the end of the Cold War.
The USS Eisenhower, currently operating in the Middle East, is on a “double pump” back-to-back deployment. The carrier spent more than 200 consecutive days at sea on its previous deployment. It can no longer put off repairs, and due to years of high carrier demand, the only carrier available to backfill it is the Reagan. That means the U.S. won’t have an aircraft carrier in the Indo-Pacific for months.
Sign up for Opinion: Morning Editorial Report.
All the day's Opinion headlines.
See a preview
SUBSCRIBED
The Pentagon frequently touts the Indo-Pacific as its priority theater; Mr. Austin has said, “China is our pacing threat.” Indeed, the 2018 National Defense Strategy said that if necessary, the U.S. should accept risk in the Middle East and other theaters to focus assets and resources in the Pacific.
This move does the opposite and sends a terrible message to Pacific allies and partners: America doesn’t have the will or focus to live up to its commitments. This is more firepower for China’s diplomats, who repeat this refrain in capitals throughout the region.
And even as U.S. forces rush to leave Afghanistan, the Biden administration still intends to support the Afghan military with training and surveillance aircraft. The administration also plans to continue counterterrorism operations from “over the horizon” locations outside Afghanistan.
Neighboring countries aren’t likely to agree to station U.S. forces. Military commanders will have to rely on strike aircraft operating from distant bases in the region, requiring more refueling aircraft. And the requests for carrier presence will keep coming. The U.S. is at risk of replacing a small force inside Afghanistan with a larger force outside.
The Reagan’s deployment isn’t only a question of carrier presence in the coming months, but in the coming years. It’s up to Mr. Austin to end the circular logic that an aircraft carrier is always needed in the Middle East—to support troops on the ground, to protect them when they withdraw and to replace them once they have left. It’s the same faulty logic some use to argue that a carrier is needed to deter Iran and its proxies from attacking U.S. forces, and needed again to prevent escalation once the attack occurs, despite little evidence that carrier presence influences Iran’s behavior.
All of this is particularly salient as Mr. Austin prepares to present the Pentagon’s budget request to Congress. He is asking lawmakers to make hard choices to prepare the military for the China challenge—divesting of certain older platforms to free up dollars to invest in new equipment, for instance. This strategy is risky because it assumes America can get by with a smaller force today. But it will be doubly so if the Pentagon overburdens that smaller force with unrestrained deployments to the Middle East.
An American strategy that treats the Pacific as the highest priority will require a serious shift in mentality. Mr. Austin can start that process by canceling the Reagan’s deployment to the Middle East and showing he’s willing to follow his own advice and make hard choices. His tenure began amid questions of whether a former commander in the Middle East was suited to manage a strategic shift to the Pacific. It isn’t too late to prove the doubters wrong.
Mr. Walker is a former professional staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee and adviser to Sen. John McCain.
-
June 3, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Roots of Arab Republican Despotism
In Arab republics, elections are often anything but democratic.
By: Hilal Khashan
Last week, Syrian President Bashar Assad won a seven-year presidential term for the fourth time since 2000. According to official figures, Assad won 95 percent of the vote, with close to 80 percent of eligible voters casting ballots. His predecessor and late father, Hafez Assad, who ruled Syria for 29 years, won his first election in 1971 with 99.2 percent of the vote and a 95 percent turnout. Bashar’s victory is startling for a country devastated by a protracted civil war that has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced more than 60 percent of its prewar population. (His apparent near-total support among Syrians was put in doubt, however, by his admission in 2014 that millions of Syrians supported the militant groups al-Nusra and Islamic State.)
But Syria is just one example of an Arab republic in which the leadership clings to power using patriarchal governance and bogus elections. It’s a condition that’s all too common in Arab states where the people have been conditioned to have ultimate faith in their leaders.
Syria Territorial Control, June 2021
(click to enlarge)
Origins of the Problem
Unwavering loyalty to individual leaders in the Arab world goes back to the days of the Prophet Muhammad. His death in 632 caused a power struggle among his followers. Supporters of his cousin, Imam Ali, wanted his successor to come not only from his own tribe, the Quraysh, but also from his own household. Others disagreed and a succession crisis ensued, resulting in the separation of Muslims into two groups: Sunnis and Shiites.
Distribution of Shiite and Sunni Muslims
(click to enlarge)
Unconditional allegiance to a ruler has deep historical roots in tribal Arab political culture. It rests on the notion that embracing a ruler’s total power and authority provides the best defense against hostile outsiders and malevolent rivals. It involves total submission to the will of the ruler, thus denying people the ability to engage in critical and independent thinking. Islam stresses the need for a ruler to administer justice and guard the faith as he sees fit. Even though it recognizes the ruler’s duty to discuss public matters with a select group of pious and wise men, Islam does not obligate the ruler to defer to their counsel.
In medieval Arabia, Islam did not conceive of competitive elections as a means of installing rulers. But even if it had, they would not have been deemed acceptable because Islam views public expressions of will as a form of apostasy. Islam even condemns rebellion against an unjust ruler, provided he does not disavow the faith. Rebellion is seen as a form of sedition because it undermines unity among believers. In fact, many Muslim theologians and traditionalists justify obeying leaders who rise to power using brutal tactics by arguing that they can help a society avoid strife.
Cult Leaders
In the 1950s and 1960s, Arab presidents publicly presented themselves as progressives committed to modernity and establishing a civil state. In reality, they acted as cult leaders, laying the foundations of neopatriarchy and treating elections as endorsements of their power. Examples abound. Syrian military officer Husni al-Zaim staged Syria’s first coup d’etat in 1949 and promoted himself to field marshal. He hoped to become a king and placed himself in the same category as Napoleon, Hitler and Mussolini. Iraqi strongman Abd al-Karim Qasim, who took office after overthrowing the monarchy in 1958, dubbed himself the “sole leader” until a band of army officers executed him in a military coup in 1963. Hafez Assad, who ruled Syria ruthlessly from 1971 until he died in 2000, was referred to by his followers as “our leader forever.” Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser is still considered by many Arabs as the “eternal leader” more than 50 years after his death.
Tunisia’s first president after its 1956 independence, Habib Bourguiba, was referred to as the “great warrior.” His interior minister, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, overthrew him in 1987 but was forced to resign the presidency following an uprising and fled to Saudi Arabia in 2011. Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser after his death in 1970, sought to counter the leftist and Nasserite centers of political power by reviving the Islamic movement and was known as the “faithful president.” After the 1973 October War, he adopted a second title: “the hero of war and peace.” Libya’s mercurial President Moammar Gadhafi viewed himself as a king of kings, essentially the leader of a sort of United States of Africa. In 2016, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi drove down a 4-kilometer-long red carpet to inaugurate a social housing project. In religiously divided and politically fragmented Lebanon, President Michel Aoun, who amid an escalating financial crisis has refused to form a Cabinet unless he dominates it, adopted the title of the “people’s father.”
Many Arab presidents have reached top office by staging coups or manipulating preexisting military regimes. But in their quest for legitimacy, they have organized elections (sometimes called referendums) and flagrantly rigged them in their favor. Nasser participated in the 1952 coup that overthrew King Farouk, and in 1954, he ousted President Muhammad Naguib and declared himself prime minister. In 1956, he announced his candidacy for president and won 99.9 percent of the vote. To give his election a pretense of legitimacy, he claimed that 94 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. In 1965, a referendum was held on his presidency and 99.999 percent of people voted in his favor, while only 64 Egyptians voted against him. The referendum’s unbelievable outcome came after the regime introduced a land reform initiative and nationalized the economy, instantly impoverishing the entire professional class. Egypt’s current leadership has also displayed an obsession with absolute power. In the 2018 presidential election, el-Sissi won 97 percent of the vote.
In 1979, Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein forced Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr to resign, supposedly due to illness, and succeeded him as president. In 1995, after 16 years in office, he sought another seven-year term and won 99.6 percent of the vote. In 2002, he ran for another term and won 100 percent of the vote with 100 percent voter turnout.
In Syria, like in other Arab countries, elections mean very little because the political establishment has no qualms about rigging them. In 1973, violent demonstrations broke out in the Syrian city of Hama against a draft constitution, which the regime said was ratified in a referendum with 97 percent of voters in favor and a 90 percent turnout.
Clinging to Power
Arab republican regimes suffer from a legitimacy crisis. Republican leaders, often from the military, overthrew monarchies promising to accelerate development and defeat Israel. They failed on both fronts and continued to rule their countries through tyranny, plunging their citizens into poverty. Bashar Assad has blamed the Syrian war on a “cosmic conspiracy” orchestrated by the West and Gulf countries. He believes it’s his duty to hold on to power to save Syria from its foreign enemies. El-Sissi frequently speaks about conspiracies that aim to undermine Egypt’s stability. He emphasizes that the challenges facing society are immense and asks his people to make sacrifices for the greater good.
Efforts by Arab leadership to involve the public in their single party systems were not successful. Thus, Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union, Sadat’s National Democratic Party, Algeria’s National Liberation Front, Tunisia’s Democratic Constitutional Party, and the Syrian and Iraqi Baath parties became hotbeds of corruption and nepotism. Arab leaders fear having to face any kind of competition in elections. In 2005, for example, Ayman Nour, the leader of the opposition El-Ghad Party in Egypt, was arrested and imprisoned for four years because President Hosni Mubarak believed he would threaten the presidential aspirations of Mubarak's son, Gamal. In 2018, el-Sissi had the former Egyptian army chief of staff, Sami Annan, arrested after he announced his candidacy for president. In 1979, Saddam Hussein executed many ranking members of the Baath Party, suspecting that they might challenge his presidency in the future.
In Syria, the constitution states that presidential candidates must be at least 40 years old to qualify. However, when Hafez Assad died, the parliament amended the constitution to decrease the minimum to 34 years, the age of his son Bashar. The Lebanese constitution limits presidents to one six-year term, but parliament has amended it three times to allow incumbents to serve an additional term.
The foundation of a republican political system is that sovereignty rests with the people. In Arab republican countries, the ruling elites promulgate constitutions to promote their interests or merely for appearances. They stay in power by relying on their extended families, clans or narrow base of supporters, who share a pervasive fear of change, and by spreading rumors that chaos and strife would prevail should they lose their grip on power.
A referral is the best complime
-
June 29, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
China, Russia and the Strategy of Indirection
By: George Friedman
Europe was the primary battleground of the Cold War. NATO adopted a defensive strategy because it saw no value in conquering Eastern Europe and Western Russia. The Soviets, however, had an interest in securing the European peninsula to secure its western frontier and to take advantage of Western European technology and naval capabilities. Moscow could never launch an attack though. Its western satellites were unpredictable. The long logistical line needed to support an armored offensive was both uncertain and vulnerable to air attack. In addition, the Soviets did not know what exactly would trigger an American nuclear response. Risking a nuclear exchange was not worth any possible advantage that could be gained from a full-scale offensive. So for over 40 years, there was a stalemate in Europe.
The Soviets incurred costs that could not be sustained as they limited economic development. Nor could they modify their military posture without significant political consequences at home or in Eastern Europe. Thus they moved to supplement their position in Europe with a strategy of indirection. The core of this strategy was to create low-cost threats to American power that the United States had to respond to and that forced the U.S. to disperse forces and invite political blowback.
The first major example was Korea, where the Soviets encouraged both the invasion of the south and, later, Chinese involvement. There were many calculations concerning the invasion of South Korea by Russia and China, but in the end it created a problem for the United States: If it declined combat, its credibility among allies would be lost, and if it engaged in combat, it would divert forces to a battlefield in which it had little interest beyond defending its own credibility. The Korean War indeed diverted assets from Europe and raised questions over Washington’s judgment and ability to reinforce in the face of a Soviet attack. The war cost President Harry Truman a great deal of popularity, forcing him to not run in 1952 and helping embolden McCarthyite undermining of confidence in the government.
Korea was the essence of the indirect attack. The cost for the Soviets was low, the political and psychological consequences high. It was not intended to break American power but to weaken and diffuse it.
The Soviets created many indirect problems for the United States in Africa, Latin America and, above all, Vietnam. The watchword in the U.S. was credibility, and that was the force compelling the U.S. into Vietnam: Ceding South Vietnam would weaken the credibility of the United States in Europe, the main theater of operations. So the Soviets, along with China, provided material to the North Vietnamese in a bid to weaken the U.S.
The Americans faced Soviet-backed insurgencies or regimes all over the world. They also faced Soviet-backed terror groups in Europe and elsewhere. U.S. intelligence was forced into a global stance rather than maintaining a laser focus on the Soviets. U.S. actions in these countries resulted in humiliating failures and catastrophic successes, where the political cost vastly outweighed the threat. The Soviets remained in a static position on the main area of combat while taking minimal risks to draw the United States out of position on the main battle. They ultimately failed to turn indirection into a winning strategy, but they prevented the U.S. from concentrating its forces squarely on them.
The Chinese and Russians are both in this position today. The Chinese navy has its back against the wall in China’s east coast and a string of nations a few hundred miles away. It must break out, but it has little room for maneuver, regardless of the hardware it has built. The Chinese may or may not succeed, but the outcome is too important for a nation to risk defeat.
The Russians are struggling to regain borders that they had more or less held since the 18th and 19th centuries. Threatening new territories is one thing. Trying to recover lost territory is another, especially when the territory is vast, as it is from Ukraine to Central Asia. What was lost in a year will take generations to recover. It’s more vulnerable than it appears. It has lost so much that regaining Eastern Europe is a dream, and it must resist American attempts to contain it on its current line.
When a main force cannot be applied with confidence, an indirect strategy is needed. There has been talk about a Chinese-Russian alliance. It is difficult to imagine how the two countries might coordinate their militaries, and an economic alliance has no meaning given Russian economic weakness and China’s power. But one alliance is very conceivable: a covert alliance meant to divert and diffuse the main enemy of both, the United States, and thereby reduce Washington’s pressure on them.
China and Russia have never been particularly close and in fact were enemies in the 1960s. They did, however, collaborate in the Korea and Vietnam wars, the latter of which hurt the United States. Collaboration was not decisive in either country’s long-term future, but it released some Western pressure and created some opportunities. They have had some experience in indirect warfare against the United States.
With this kind of experience in indirect warfare, there are many areas in which one or both might act. The Chinese have an economic strategy designed to tie recipients of investment into political relations with China. The flaw inherent to this strategy was one the United States encountered after World War II, when Soviet-sponsored regimes simply nationalized U.S. assets. U.S. interests had many assets and were heavily invested in Cuba, for example. But ownership is a piece of paper that can be quickly abolished by the arrival of troops. Thus China may “own” the Panama Canal, but it does so without the objection of Washington. If it ever objects, a battalion of Marines can change everything.
What the Chinese and Russians need to do is to create politico-military insurgencies and governments spread around the world in the hopes that the U.S., maintaining an alliance against China and Russia, might be forced into responding. The closer to the United States, the greater the need to respond. Hence why Latin America was fertile ground for the Soviets. If the U.S. preempts, it starts accruing military and political costs. If it does not, the danger is massive political costs.
A strategy of indirection is a strategy of opportunism. Intelligence teams are inserted into places that are already hostile to the U.S. The key is to create so many perceived threats and unknowns that U.S. intelligence is forced to counter, but countering all of them is nearly impossible even if it were politically palatable.
The Chinese and Russians face the same problem in principle. Conventional military options against the United States might work, but there is a real possibility they won’t, and neither can afford the internal consequences of failure. They cannot find satisfactory settlements with the Americans and are therefore left with a strategic position that the U.S. might take advantage of. This scenario must be avoided, so an indirect strategy is obvious. The Chinese economic strategy is fine in the short term, but it is highly vulnerable to changes in government. The creation of anti-American states is critical. A strategy of indirection is more prudent, and Russia and China are prudent nations. They have to be.
-
From a few years ago.
Since George Friedman left Stratfor, a certain grad student glibness has crept into some of the offerings, but IMHO Stratfor remains a must read source:
ASSESSMENTS
Considering America on Independence Day
7 MIN READJul 4, 2019 | 10:00 GMT
A painting of the Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull (1756-1843).
The Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull (1756-1843). John Trumbull's painting shows the five-man drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Congress. The original hangs in the U.S. Capitol rotunda.
(Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire
July 4, 2016: The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway and is the world's largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.
The Greater Mississippi Basin is the continent's core, and whoever controls that core not only is certain to dominate the East Coast and Great Lakes regions but will also have the agricultural, transport, trade and political unification capacity to be a world power — even without having to interact with the rest of the global system.
Listening to the Echoes of the American Revolution
July 4, 2016: "The struggle had opened in a grey dawn at Lexington; its last shot was fired eight years later on the other side of the world outside a dusty town in southern India."
So ends Piers Mackesy's 1964 book, "The War for America; 1775-1783." Mackesy helps us see beyond the story of a scrappy band of rebels cleverly hiding behind trees and using backwoods marksmanship to defeat an outdated rank-and-file military organization, an image still pervasive in Americana today. Instead, what emerges is a cautionary tale of just what it means to be an empire with global interests and relations. Writ large are the choices and responsibilities that ultimately limit possibilities, require prioritization and can lead to unexpected catastrophic results.
The world is a complicated, interconnected and volatile place. No country has the singular power to intervene for national, economic or even moral reasons everywhere. For Britain, a small rebellion, driven by distance, fiscal policy and changing culture, escalated from a localized police action to a global crisis that dragged on for nearly a decade. In the process, old foes were reawaked and unforeseen challenges to British forces at the far reaches of the empire emerged. On America's Independence Day (a day marking more the start than conclusion of hostilities with the mother country), it is worthwhile reflecting on the ideas and complexities of global capabilities and responsibilities as well as considering the nature of independence and freedom.
At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Britain was, at least briefly, the undisputed global hegemon ... In reality, the British were stretched thin, facing political turmoil at home and transitioning from a high-intensity wartime military and economy to a post-crisis structure.
Coming to Terms With the American Empire
April 14, 2015: The geography of the American empire was built partly on military relations but heavily on economic relations. At first these economic relations were fairly trivial to American business. But as the system matured, the value of investments soared along with the importance of imports, exports and labor markets. As in any genuinely successful empire, it did not begin with a grand design or even a dream of one. Strategic necessity created an economic reality in country after country until certain major industries became dependent on at least some countries. The obvious examples were Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, whose oil fueled American oil companies, and which therefore — quite apart from conventional strategic importance — became economically important. This eventually made them strategically important.
As an empire matures, its economic value increases, particularly when it is not coercing others. Coercion is expensive and undermines the worth of an empire. The ideal colony is one that is not at all a colony, but a nation that benefits from economic relations with both the imperial power and the rest of the empire. The primary military relationship ought to be either mutual dependence or, barring that, dependence of the vulnerable client state on the imperial power.
This is how the United States slipped into empire. First, it was overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful. Second, it faced a potential adversary capable of challenging it globally, in a large number of countries. Third, it used its economic advantage to induce at least some of these countries into economic, and therefore political and military, relationships. Fourth, these countries became significantly important to various sectors of the American economy.
The U.S. military is built around force multipliers, weapons that can destroy the enemy before the enemy destroys the relatively small force deployed. Sometimes this strategy works. Over the long run, it cannot.
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 2: American Identity and the Threats of Tomorrow
Aug. 25, 2011: What happens when something goes wrong, when the rest of the world reaches out and touches the Americans on something other than America's terms? When one is convinced that things can, will and should continually improve, the shock of negative developments or foreign interaction is palpable. Mania becomes depression and arrogance turns into panic.
An excellent example is the Japanese attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. Seventy years on, Americans still think of the event as a massive betrayal underlining the barbaric nature of the Japanese that justified the launching of a total war and the incineration of major cities. This despite the fact that the Americans had systemically shut off East Asia from Japanese traders, complete with a de facto energy embargo, and that the American mainland — much less its core — was never threatened.
Such panic and overreaction is a wellspring of modern American power. The United States is a large, physically secure, economically diverse and vibrant entity. When it acts, it can alter developments on a global scale fairly easily. But when it panics, it throws all of its ample strength at the problem at hand, and in doing so reshapes the world.
A map showing the United States' expansion over time.
How the Plight of a Heartland Could Upset America's Balance
Societal, economic or cultural change is not always immediately reflected in the halls of Washington, D.C. Some of the change at the political level can be delayed due to the fundamentals of the U.S. political system. Changes in population due to the rise and fall of local state economies will only result in changes in representation every decade and even then, they will be gradual. After each census, the House of Representatives recalculates the number of seats allocated to each state proportionally, meaning that the population declines in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, West Virginia and Michigan that have occurred over the past decade will have a delayed effect on overall political power within the House. In the meantime, traditionally powerful states that see waning power and influence ahead will seek to hold onto influence in other ways and in other branches of the government. See the 2016 presidential elections, when many states that have been facing long-term economic decline gravitated to the candidate who promised a return to former glory. However, the growth of urban areas as economic hubs could slowly change the social and political profiles of the states that host them. Ultimately, the lag between demographic and economic changes and its formal reflection at the level of political representation leaves the U.S. political system in a state of limbo.
Against this backdrop, the United States is witnessing the growth of ideological divides stemming from generational shifts, urbanization, internal migration and economic inequalities. Without a unifying culture, economy and geography knitting the core together, the new ecumene — fiscally robust as it may be — will not help an already fraying populace mend itself. After all, many of the cultural concerns and economic priorities of Los Angeles still have little in common with those in Raleigh. Instead, we are more likely to witness states push more heavily for their own regional, rather than national, interests as a result of the lag of national representation behind economic realities.
-
U.S. defense leaders have a problem: What they say doesn’t line up with what they do. The mismatch is apparent in the latest Pentagon budget, and a “say-do” gap undermines the trust of Congress and the American people.
Military leaders identify China as our No. 1 challenge, often calling Beijing “an increasingly capable strategic competitor,” as Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley has warned, or a “pacing” threat. Yet the budget request reduces the ability of the Navy and the Air Force—the services that would have outsize roles in any conflict in the Western Pacific—to respond to threats in that region. Meanwhile, the budget promises undeveloped weapons that may take decades to enter the fleet, funded by a “divest to invest” strategy.
The Navy wants to retire 15 ships, including seven guided-missile cruisers and four littoral combat ships, while procuring only two surface combatant ships and two submarines. (Congress’ budget draft would buy another destroyer and limit the retirements.) Naval aviation procurement dropped 15.6% over 2021 even as the Navy speeds up F/A-18 retirements. The USS Ronald Reagan, based in Japan to counter a threat from China, is overseeing the Afghanistan withdrawal in the Middle East because no other aircraft carrier is available. Meanwhile, China is building warships at an astonishing rate. In 2010 the U.S. Navy had 68 more ships than the Chinese navy. Today, it has 63 fewer, a swing of 131 ships in 10 years.
The Air Force is also following the Pentagon’s “divest to invest” lead. Combat aircraft procurement is down 22% from 2021. The force wants to retire 137 aircraft, more than double the number it plans to buy. After the retirement of 17 B-1s last year, the Air Force’s bomber inventory is at a level top officers have called the bare minimum. Ammunition procurement is down more than 40%. China in recent years has focused on procuring advanced aircraft and has the world’s third-largest air force. In addition, China has an extensive ground-based conventional missile force, including the DF-26, known as the “carrier killer” which is capable of striking Guam.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Opinion: Morning Editorial Report
All the day's Opinion headlines.
PREVIEW
SUBSCRIBED
The defense budget tells the American people and allies that although we say China is a threat, we are not taking action to respond. Take Gen. Milley’s June 17 assessment of the threat that China will invade Taiwan: “I think the probability is probably low, in the immediate, near-term future.”
This directly contradicts statements by Adm. John Aquilino, the Pacific combatant commander, who testified that China could be prepared to take Taiwan by force in the next six years: “We’ve seen things that I don’t think we expected, and that’s why I continue to talk about a sense of urgency.”
Congress has a duty to close the “say-do” gap, whether through increased funding or redirecting other Pentagon dollars, and to provide the resources needed to deter China. If you believe Adm. Aquilino—and I do—we may not have another year to waste.
Ms. Luria, a Democrat, represents Virginia’s Second Congressional District. She retired as a commander after 20 years in the U.S. Navy.
-
Our gay, woke military isn’t planning on fighting China, it’s preparing to fight us.
U.S. defense leaders have a problem: What they say doesn’t line up with what they do. The mismatch is apparent in the latest Pentagon budget, and a “say-do” gap undermines the trust of Congress and the American people.
Military leaders identify China as our No. 1 challenge, often calling Beijing “an increasingly capable strategic competitor,” as Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley has warned, or a “pacing” threat. Yet the budget request reduces the ability of the Navy and the Air Force—the services that would have outsize roles in any conflict in the Western Pacific—to respond to threats in that region. Meanwhile, the budget promises undeveloped weapons that may take decades to enter the fleet, funded by a “divest to invest” strategy.
The Navy wants to retire 15 ships, including seven guided-missile cruisers and four littoral combat ships, while procuring only two surface combatant ships and two submarines. (Congress’ budget draft would buy another destroyer and limit the retirements.) Naval aviation procurement dropped 15.6% over 2021 even as the Navy speeds up F/A-18 retirements. The USS Ronald Reagan, based in Japan to counter a threat from China, is overseeing the Afghanistan withdrawal in the Middle East because no other aircraft carrier is available. Meanwhile, China is building warships at an astonishing rate. In 2010 the U.S. Navy had 68 more ships than the Chinese navy. Today, it has 63 fewer, a swing of 131 ships in 10 years.
The Air Force is also following the Pentagon’s “divest to invest” lead. Combat aircraft procurement is down 22% from 2021. The force wants to retire 137 aircraft, more than double the number it plans to buy. After the retirement of 17 B-1s last year, the Air Force’s bomber inventory is at a level top officers have called the bare minimum. Ammunition procurement is down more than 40%. China in recent years has focused on procuring advanced aircraft and has the world’s third-largest air force. In addition, China has an extensive ground-based conventional missile force, including the DF-26, known as the “carrier killer” which is capable of striking Guam.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Opinion: Morning Editorial Report
All the day's Opinion headlines.
PREVIEW
SUBSCRIBED
The defense budget tells the American people and allies that although we say China is a threat, we are not taking action to respond. Take Gen. Milley’s June 17 assessment of the threat that China will invade Taiwan: “I think the probability is probably low, in the immediate, near-term future.”
This directly contradicts statements by Adm. John Aquilino, the Pacific combatant commander, who testified that China could be prepared to take Taiwan by force in the next six years: “We’ve seen things that I don’t think we expected, and that’s why I continue to talk about a sense of urgency.”
Congress has a duty to close the “say-do” gap, whether through increased funding or redirecting other Pentagon dollars, and to provide the resources needed to deter China. If you believe Adm. Aquilino—and I do—we may not have another year to waste.
Ms. Luria, a Democrat, represents Virginia’s Second Congressional District. She retired as a commander after 20 years in the U.S. Navy.
-
July 6, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
China’s Search for a Negotiated Settlement
By: George Friedman
Last week, China celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. The celebration included a plan for the invasion of Taiwan, along with a threat to bloody the heads of China’s enemies. The published plan for invasion, obviously, was merely a cartoon summary of an invasion, designed to intimidate rather than pass tactical information on to the United States. The threat of blood was to make China appear ferocious. The problem was that a planned amphibious invasion needs to include the element of surprise. Amphibious invasions are huge risks and must be surrounded by “a bodyguard of lies,” as was said in World War II, and threatening to bloody its enemies' heads seems more like a temper tantrum than a threat. Still, China is signaling a readiness for war in the hope it won’t have to fight one.
I have written a great deal in the past few weeks about China’s strategic dilemma and its options for resolving it. Last week, I wrote about the strategy of indirection China and Russia must take with the United States. Focusing on China, I want to consider how that strategy might lead to a negotiated settlement. I want to dive deeper into what I think is the optimal strategy for China.
The United States favors the status quo. Its political and military position stretches from Japan to the Indian Ocean. Given the chokepoints between various landmasses, the U.S. has the opportunity to block Chinese access to the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean, threatening closure of maritime routes needed by China to maintain trade – particularly vital for an export-oriented economy. For the U.S., this is a satisfactory and powerful position to hold. In the event of a massive Chinese naval and air assault, the U.S. has the option to engage China or retreat into the Western Pacific. The U.S. can, to some extent, control the risk it incurs.
(click to enlarge)
The status quo is unsatisfactory to China. Its access to the high seas – an essential economic asset – is highly insecure. That access depends on how the United States interprets China’s behavior, and in a number of unpredictable circumstances, the U.S. might close one or more of China’s exits to the world’s oceans. China has very little leverage with the United States, so its other option is to launch military strikes that force the United States from its position. China has threatened to open a gap between the Philippines and Japan and Taiwan that would force other nations in the anti-China coalition to reconsider their position. The United States has made it clear, by placement of forces, that it does not intend to retreat from its position.
China has the option of attacking the face of American confidence. It’s possible the U.S. has overestimated its capabilities, but then the Chinese may have done the same. The problem of launching a war is that you might be defeated, and where the U.S. has room for maneuver to its rear, China would be fighting with its back against its eastern seaboard. Under those circumstances, the consequences for losing could spiral, causing irreparable political damage to the ruling party. The risks are unpredictable but substantial.
China cannot allow the status quo to stand. The Chinese must therefore seek a negotiated settlement that would guarantee unfettered access to the Pacific and control of key chokepoints. The U.S. sees no advantage in this because it would shatter the line of defense Washington has created from Japan down to India. A simple capitulation by the United States would fragment this extremely heterogeneous and fragile line and open the door to a massive destabilization in the Pacific.
China must therefore find leverage, and to do so, it might look to the Cold War. The Soviets sought to redefine the strategic balance with the United States by placing nuclear weapons in Cuba. The United States saw this as an existential threat and signaled its intent to invade Cuba and accept a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. It blew up, of course, because the United States could not confine its response to some symbolic gesture. An indirect action must be painful enough to move the target, without being so threatening as to force them to react dangerously.
So Beijing has an example of what not to do – use the threat of nuclear war – unless it were prepared to accept a nuclear counterstrike, which it isn’t. Its leverage must allow for a negotiated end, not a cataclysmic war.
If China’s problem is that the free use of its ports is at risk, an equivalent action could cause negotiations without war. The alternative is to put U.S. exports at risk without encroaching on U.S. sovereign territory or using vessels in hostile intervention with American shipping, which would be excessive since the U.S. is not interfering with Chinese shipping, only holding the possibility of it.
The United States has ports on three coasts. As with the Americans in the South China Sea, there would be no act of war involved, and responses could be calibrated to American actions, with significant pain to the United States. The chokepoints are the waters between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula and between Cuba and Florida. The port of New Orleans and the port of Houston depend on these two outlets to ship and receive critical commodities for the United States. Long Beach, the major Pacific port, has no sovereign territory offshore, and a substantial Chinese fleet would have to be kept on constant station, a fleet that would force the Americans into military action that the Chinese would want to avoid. From Cuba, a long-term threat could be maintained with naval and air forces designed to be used only in the event of U.S. actions.
(click to enlarge)
The question would be whether Cuba would willingly be a pawn in great power politics. It is an ideal place from which to manage the U.S., which is why the Soviets supported the Cuban revolution so happily. But the Cubans also learned that great powers change course when prudent. The economic condition of Cuba is terrible, but the country appears stable. The Chinese are already working in Cuba on telecommunications and other matters. And I doubt very much that the Chinese have not noticed the geography of Cuba.
Beijing has used financial incentives to cultivate allies. It has not used allies to threaten third parties. At the same time, China has never been so vocal about invading Taiwan. It needs less risky options in negotiations. The Cuban government appears to be quite content being the government of Cuba. Its appetite for adventure has declined. But the U.S. would not strike Chinese vessels in Cuban waters. The risk of failure is less than China’s, but the political consequences of initiating conflict with China would be extreme. To the extent that China is restrained by an aversion to initiating a conflict, that barrier at least would be removed. And the U.S. also knows that the risk of war is defeat.
The Chinese would be in a position to block American ports without actually blocking them, just as the U.S. is doing. It would seem to me that China’s approach to Cuba or other strategic points is essential to China. It can’t tolerate the current strategic reality, and it is reluctant to engage in open warfare, so it needs another strategy. If I am right in all this – and I might not be – the U.S. must work to reach an understanding with Cuba that is highly beneficial. The rest of the Caribbean and South America needs close consideration. If the U.S. is to hold its Pacific position, it does not want to be forced into negotiations that will cost it its position.
-
July 9, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
The 20-Year War
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
On Sept. 11, 2001, a special operations team created by al-Qaida attacked the United States, hijacking commercial airplanes to target psychologically significant structures. I call it a special operations team because that’s exactly what it was, not the primitive cabal it was mistakenly made out to be. Its members were fanatical, but they understood their mission and understood the weakness of U.S. intelligence such that they could coordinate multiple, simultaneous attacks, all the while maintaining secrecy.
The purpose of the attack was to be part of a trigger for an uprising in the Islamic world. If the U.S. attacked the Islamic world more broadly, it would be seen as the enemy of Islam. If the U.S. failed to attack, it would be seen as afraid of the power of the Islamic world. Either would, al-Qaida hoped, inspire its brethren to rise up against the U.S.
Washington could neither engage in a regional war nor decline to respond. It properly understood al-Qaida’s strategy, and it knew just enough about al-Qaida to know it didn’t have a good handle on the group’s resources. From this, two things arose. The first was the fear that 9/11 was merely the first of more attacks to come and that U.S. intelligence couldn’t prevent them. The second was the realization that al-Qaida’s command center had to be either disrupted or destroyed.
It was known to be in Afghanistan, so the mission had to be carried out in Afghanistan and, given the uncertainty of the operation, done quickly. But it was not Afghanistan that mattered but al-Qaida. The primary strategy was to contact and recruit or hire Afghan groups the U.S. was familiar with from the Afghan war against the Soviet Union and use them as the ground force to locate and destroy al-Qaida. The Afghan forces accompanied by CIA operatives and U.S. airpower identified the location of the group’s command but could not mount a decisive campaign against the base. The group dispersed and escaped into Pakistan.
At this point, the U.S. made a critical error. The government of Afghanistan, led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, had allowed al-Qaida to operate in its territory. Therefore, the U.S. thought, the government had to be destroyed and replaced. For al-Qaida, Afghanistan was merely a convenience. Other areas might be chosen, and many national or local leaders might have sheltered them or would shelter them in the future. For the U.S., to destroy the government required the destruction of the Taliban, a force that was an integral part of the nation. Washington’s primary strategy was to use airpower on cities that the Taliban occupied, a strategy that minimized U.S. casualties with what was believed to be maximum casualties for the Taliban. The Taliban understood the strategy and withdrew from the cities. The U.S. saw this as evidence that the Taliban had been defeated. But they had merely retreated from an untenable position and regrouped over time, forcing Washington into a war in which the Taliban had persistent tactical superiority. Strategically, neither side could “win” but the Taliban had to continue fighting, while the U.S. could withdraw. It was a question of time, and time was on the Taliban’s side.
The ouster of the Taliban government meant the United States had to create a new one. The U.S. tried to cobble together various elements into a coalition, but it didn’t work. Its members were frequently hostile to each other, many favored the Taliban, and the major force creating and protecting the new government was American. There was a desire to build an Afghan army, but the first volunteers for the new army belonged to anti-American forces. Unlike in, say, Germany and Japan, the U.S. was in no position to impose much punishment. It was impossible.
The United States then entered its final and longest mistake. It was aware that pacifying Afghanistan and creating a pro-U.S. government was impossible. But it also felt that abandoning Afghanistan would “send the wrong signal” to the Islamic world. The message the Islamic world received, however, was that the United States did not have an understanding of its enemy, was unwilling to provide sufficient force to even try to win, and was merely imposing pain on both sides without purpose. The continuation of a war that was unwinnable based on the illusion that continuation impressed anyone is a frequent theme in American post-World War II strategy.
The United States was not led by stupid people. 9/11 stunned and frightened them. They went into Afghanistan primarily to destroy the group that executed the attacks. When al-Qaida slipped into Pakistan, the U.S. could have stopped or could have continued its war against al-Qaida in Pakistan, with or without the help of Pakistani intelligence, and disrupted them sufficiently to make mounting other attacks impossible. Or the U.S. could have taken some time to see whether al-Qaida had any more attacks in store. Instead, Washington gradually shifted the main focus to Afghanistan while carrying out this covert fight against al-Qaida. In doing both, the U.S. began pyramiding strategic goals – leading to the invasion of Iraq, the deployment of forces in North Africa, and so on. It had the personnel to do so, but what it lacked was a coordinated decision-making process. This process operated on the assumption that any effort against any suspect target was imperative. What happened was that U.S. strategic awareness dissipated, followed by the dissipation of U.S. forces. In short, American goals got wider and more ambitious, while it reduced forces and tried to build a nation that looks like the United States in Afghanistan.
War must have a clear and attainable goal. It requires ruthless analysis and honesty. The spasm after 9/11 until the escape of al-Qaida at Tora Bora was rational, if a partial failure. After that, a war was launched without an attainable goal. For this, I do not blame the generals. They were carrying out their orders. I blame the senior civilian officials, particularly those after President George W. Bush who constantly criticized the war and made gestures to end it but let it go on. Even now, with President Joe Biden’s withdrawal, the U.S. is reportedly creating bases in Central Asia to attack Afghanistan if worse comes to worse. American culture finds it difficult to shape efforts to cohere with U.S. interests, and then simply can’t walk away when things go sideways. It’s a sign of strategic immaturity in a country that no longer is permitted to be immature. It’s been 20 years, and we are still readying airstrikes.
There is an argument in foreign policy between idealists and realists. Reality must include ideals because without them, what would be the point of acting as we do? Idealism must understand the limits of power, or it will do awful things while claiming the best intent. War is sometimes necessary, and when it is deemed to be necessary, every life put at risk, on all sides, must be treated as precious, their death both tragic and necessary. Fighting a war based on fantasy and insufficient force is a violation of fundamental moral principles. The U.S. will lose wars as all nations do, but we must understand precisely why we are in that war. Twenty years is a long time to not understand.
-
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/07/nato-must-shore-control-key-maritime-chokepoint/183791/
-
The Nagging Question in the Indo-Pacific
Everyone in the region is at least thinking about an environment in which the U.S. isn’t on top.
By: Phillip Orchard
Senior U.S. diplomats were fanned out across the Indo-Pacific last week. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin toured Southeast Asia, outlining to circumspect U.S. partners a vision for “integrated deterrence” and, in Manila, tending to a festering wound at the heart of U.S. regional strategy. This followed Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman's visits to Seoul and Tokyo, indispensable U.S. allies whose resentment for each other is a big problem for the U.S. alliance structure. Her boss, Antony Blinken, dropped by India to continue transforming the “Quad” from a reluctant talk shop to a coalition with teeth. Meanwhile, at home, the annual bureaucratic donnybrook over the Pentagon's budget is in full swing, with profound debates over how best to sustain U.S. naval supremacy in the Indo-Pacific (How many ships? What type? What role for unmanned ships?) appearing nowhere close to resolution.
The flurry of activity can be tied to a single, nagging question: Can China win? Or, can China's developing capabilities – hypersonic missiles, warships, cyberweapons, space and information domain assets, and so forth – nullify Washington’s naval superiority, particularly in China's front yard? What happens if China succeeds simply in making it too costly for the U.S. to risk a fight?
In truth, the question will probably never be fully answered. It would take a war to do so, and war would be disastrous for everyone involved. Yet the uncertainty itself will be a defining feature in the regional landscape likely for decades to come.
The U.S. Navy’s Dominance
It’s hard to imagine how the latter half of the 19th century would have played out had the U.S. Navy faced a comparable rival. Its dominance allowed Europe to eschew cyclical conflict for economic and political integration, and it allowed Japan to maintain a largely pacifist posture for nearly half a century. It helped keep the Cold War from turning hot. It allowed the U.S. the domestic security and economic vitality to play a proactive offshore balancing role, discouraging far-flung emerging powers from becoming regional hegemonies. And, for better or for worse, it allowed the U.S. to play the role of global policeman. Perhaps most important, it guaranteed the security of international sea lanes, unleashing the unprecedented boom in maritime trade and fundamentally rewiring the global economy.
Still, it’s reasonable to wonder just how good the U.S. Navy actually is. For all its experience supporting combat operations against weaker powers in the Middle East and elsewhere, it hasn’t fought a conventional naval battle since 1944. The gap between the U.S. Navy and those of its potential rivals was so large, and so expensive to narrow, that no potential rival, not even the Soviets, ever really tried to match it. In other words, the main success of the U.S. Navy was in making it so it would never have to really fight.
But there’s only so much a fighting force can learn about its capabilities and vulnerabilities from war games, computer simulations (in which the U.S. hasn’t exactly lived up to its reputation recently) and supporting roles against land-based foes. And the risks of a dominant navy becoming overconfident and blind to its own vulnerabilities have been borne out repeatedly throughout history.
Moreover, U.S. naval dominance is under pressure from multiple directions. The U.S. military’s misadventures in the 1990s and 2000s made the U.S. at once overstretched and underweighted in the region that would matter most in the 2010s onward. It now seems to understand that it needs to adopt a more subtle strategy of bending global affairs to its interests and avoiding the temptation to be everywhere at once. The U.S. Navy is, of course, still vital in this regard; no component of the U.S. military is more important to sustaining the flexibility to project power decisively from a smaller footprint. But it’s enough to compel far-flung allies, particularly those in the Western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean, to take on greater responsibility for regional security burdens.
China’s Rise
The main threat to U.S. dominance, of course, is China. Over the past 20 or so years, Beijing has embarked on a long-term campaign to develop its maritime forces, and the resulting challenge is unlike anything the U.S. has ever faced. (Even the Soviet Union, which had a greater geographic and strategic imperative to focus primarily on controlling the Eurasian landmass, could rely more on the force of its ideology, its long-range nuclear arsenal and its talent for trapping the U.S. in proxy conflicts.) For the first time in its history, China has an imperative to become a maritime power. Its biggest strategic dilemma is its need for secure access to the Pacific and Indian oceans, access that could be severed by foreign navies around a series of chokepoints running from the Senkakus to the Malacca Strait. And China has the economic dynamism, industrial capacity and technological growth needed to make it happen.
(click to enlarge)
Its naval buildup has thus been remarkable in its scale and speed. In terms of fleet size, the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is nearing parity with the U.S. Navy. Moreover, the Chinese navy is bolstered by thousands of paramilitary vessels from the coast guard and the maritime militia – lightly armed fishing vessels that report directly to the PLA – that can act as force multipliers in China’s littoral waters. Already, they are the vanguard of Beijing’s efforts to enforce its territorial claims and intimidate other South China Sea claimant states into seeing China’s regional supremacy as inevitable.
Chinese Claims in the South China Sea
(click to enlarge)
This doesn’t mean the PLAN would stand a chance against the U.S. fleet in a conventional naval battle in open waters. Fleet size and composition tell us only so much about a navy’s capabilities. Technological sophistication, fleet composition, training, operational experience and logistics support networks are also all key – and in most of these areas, the Chinese navy is widely believed to still be decades behind the U.S.
Still, the U.S. should be concerned. As with all dimensions of China’s rise, trajectory is more important than the current balance of forces. China has quickly weaned itself off foreign components and technology. In 2015, the Pentagon rated 70 percent of Chinese submarines (both nuclear- and diesel-powered), destroyers and frigates as being of “modern design,” compared to 30-40 percent just a decade earlier. Moreover, its ability to play catch-up in technologies with potential “dual-use” commercial-military applications – cyberspace, artificial intelligence, telecommunications and outer space – shouldn’t be dismissed.
Plus, if the U.S. and China go to war in the foreseeable future, China would almost certainly be fighting with home-field advantage, allowing it to structure its defenses in a way that offsets its weaknesses and amplifies its strengths. It couldn't do that if it tried to take on the U.S. Navy in the middle of the Pacific. Beijing understands as much, and though its long-term strategic plans call for its capabilities to dominate distant waters, its overwhelming focus for now is on creating a “fortress fleet” to establish a gradually expanding protective buffer in its littoral waters. The goal here is to make the price too high for an outside navy to threaten the mainland or intervene on Taiwan’s behalf, to persuade weaker regional states that their best bet is to ally with Beijing, and to project enough force to be able to secure its maritime chokepoints. And its prospects for success here are growing. China's buildup of anti-ship missiles alone could very well diminish the operational value of the cornerstone of the U.S. Navy – the aircraft carrier strike group – to the point of being obsolete.
King of the Seas
Of course, the same strengths that allowed the U.S. to achieve naval dominance in the first place haven’t gone away. Its technological base is unmatched, putting it in a reasonably solid position to stay a step ahead and parry whatever China comes up with. The U.S. economy may prove far more resilient than China’s, allowing it to sustain funding for these sorts of next-generation capabilities – not to mention to engage in economic warfare to potentially kneecap China’s ability to sustain its trajectory.
Moreover, the U.S. has spent more than a century building its alliance structure, and China will have an enormously difficult time building its own. Beijing hopes that its neighbors will eventually see that accommodating Chinese regional hegemony is in their own interest, but in the meantime, it's largely compelling them to look for ways to sustain the balance of power. Some, like Japan, are clearly bulking up for a fight. At minimum, China’s buildup will continue to induce tighter military cooperation among regional powers such as Japan, Australia, India and Singapore, as well as some enterprising Europeans. To sustain its edge and maintain the ability to operate in the face of China's anti-access/area denial buffer, the U.S. will need a more decentralized force posture featuring counterstrike batteries and rapid deployment positions across the first island chain. At present, it's struggling to persuade regional partners to give it the access needed for this; given the uncertainty, most regional states are hedging their bets. But the U.S. is still far more likely than China to get the regional support it needs.
Even so, history has shown repeatedly that dominance the likes of the U.S. Navy can’t last forever and that the downfall is typically preceded by technological shifts, domestic rot, inertia and strategic arrogance. The development of carrier-based air power and long-range submarines ended the primacy of battleships. The next great power war will hinge on which side is best-equipped to blind the enemy, and thus command of the sea will soon hinge on command of the space and cyber realms. For all its strengths, U.S. dysfunction at home warrants real skepticism about its ability to harness its resources and execute a steady, comprehensive strategy in these domains. If the U.S. repeats the age-old mistake of preparing to fight the next war as if it were the last, it may very well lose even before shots are fired.
Given its economic and political fragility and geographic vulnerabilities, China may prove to be a paper tiger. But its prospects are strong enough that both the U.S. and its friends in the region, for the first time in several generations, are thinking seriously about how to adapt to an environment in which the U.S. is no longer the unquestioned king of the seas.
-
August 3, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
China and the Element of Surprise
By: George Friedman
A war between China and the United States would be a war between peer powers. That’s not to say they are identical powers; all nations differ in terms of geography, strategy, manpower, weaponry and so on. But they are peers in that at least on the surface each appears perfectly capable of defeating the other. Planning before war becomes all the more important as each side seeks to identify the weakness of its enemy and deploy the force needed to rapidly defeat him. The desire of the attacking power is to strike a blow so powerful and so damaging that the enemy will either capitulate or negotiate a satisfactory settlement. First strike is critical.
Central to striking a successful first blow is the element of surprise. If one side is aware of the intent and the plan of its enemy, a peer power will alert its forces and concentrate them to defeat or deflect the blow. During the 20th century, most major peer conflicts were cloaked in surprise. The German invasion of France through Belgium in World War I was unanticipated by the French, as was the German strike into France through the Ardennes in World War II. The Japanese hid their intent to strike Pearl Harbor operationally and diplomatically, carrying out peace talks with the United States in the hours before the attack. The Germans hid their intention of invading the Soviet Union in 1941, even as they massed their forces. The United States and Britain managed to confuse Germany as to the site of the invasion of France, even though it was clear to everyone that an attack was coming.
Securing the element of surprise does not guarantee final victory, of course, but in these instances, surprise assured that the initial attack did not end before the war began. When Russia opened its war with Japan in 1905, Moscow sent a fleet from St. Petersburg to Japan to defeat its navy and compel a political settlement. Russia hid neither the departure nor its destination. The Japanese navy was deployed and crushed the Russian fleet. So while surprise does not guarantee anything, the absence of surprise makes the victory in the initial thrust extremely difficult.
The Chinese and American positions in the Western Pacific give a sense of a near-war condition. The United States is unlikely to initiate war. Its interest is to retain the option of blocking shipping through China's eastern ports. It is satisfied to hold that position. The Chinese face a situation where the United States has an option to harm China, and they cannot count on American restraint. The circumstances are such that China has to either reach a political agreement with the United States, accept its vulnerability or initiate hostilities.
There are two strategies it can choose to retain the element of surprise. Shielding the intention to wage war is always best, while shielding the opening move of a war known to be likely is second. The latter can be very effective if the attacker is ready to exploit success.
China has not made its intentions known, but it has created an atmosphere in which a war initiated by it is a real possibility if the United States does not shift its diplomatic position or military posture. The creation of such a posture costs China a dimension of surprise. The U.S. has focused its substantial military force on China, making initiation by China more difficult. On the other hand, the U.S. was already deployed in a posture dangerous to China, and whatever the U.S. might think its intentions are, China cannot take for granted that the U.S. is not intending hostile actions. China has had to deploy force anyway, so the possibility of war is not alien from either side. The war indicators are valuable diplomatically. They might convince the United States to shift its military posture and its position on economic relations, not so much out of fear of China but because the issues might not matter so much to the U.S. War fever can force reevaluation, and the U.S. has more room for maneuver than China has.
China has done something strange. It has indicated the point of war initiation – Taiwan – and has put in place a force that could theoretically take Taiwan. Announcing the specific target is as dangerous as the Japanese letting the U.S. fleet know that Pearl Harbor was the target. Attacking Taiwan entails an amphibious operation requiring a force limited by the capacity of amphibious craft (always inadequate, as seen at Normandy), and then leaving that force to engage the enemy while reinforcements and a continual shuttle of supplies cross 100 miles of water under possible U.S. missile and air attack.
It is very odd to reveal the location of war initiation, and odder still because this location is as vulnerable to enemy action as Normandy was. Indeed, the allies undertook Operation Fortitude, which was designed to convince Germany that the invasion was coming anywhere but where it came. They did not name the location of the invasion, as China has, but risked everything to keep the location secret.
China’s constant restatement of its intentions toward Taiwan, including on occasion details of how such an invasion might be executed, are bizarre at face value. It is not bizarre, however, if it supposes the United States won’t fight a war over it. In this case, Beijing’s obsession with Taiwan is simply part of the general strategy of convincing the United States that war is likely unless the United States changes its position. In that role, Taiwan makes perfect sense.
It makes sense in another way, too. China feels constrained to initiate conflict, but the point of it isn’t Taiwan itself, which is dangled as a red herring. Taking Taiwan would not solve China’s strategic problem. The problem is that a string of islands from Japan to Singapore, and including India, Vietnam and Australia, are either formally aligned with the United States or share informal cooperation out of hostility to China. That string creates a line of chokepoints that block China’s access to global oceans. Holding Taiwan would create a broader gap in one location, but in conditions of war, it would be a dangerous passage for merchant vessels.
(click to enlarge)
It is, however, difficult to imagine another point that would solve China’s strategic problem without incurring all the problems an invasion of Taiwan would. If it could pull Indonesia and the Philippines into an alliance, a gap would be opened that the U.S. would be hard-pressed to block, and could not be blocked without a war that would involve ground combat. Neither country has indicated an interest in falling into the Chinese sphere of influence.
An invasion of Taiwan makes little sense, above all, because the possibility of failure is great. The idea that the focus in Taiwan is designed to divert the United States' attention doesn’t work. The preparations for a large-scale amphibious assault are massive, require a good deal of time, and are hard to miss by U.S. reconnaissance capabilities.
From this we can deduce that the focus on Taiwan is meant to increase the sense of imminent war and shape the calculations of the U.S. and those of its allies. It is possible that China intends instead a widescale conflict covering the entire Western Pacific in which China bets everything. But China does not need to bet everything.
The only remaining possibility is that China is preparing for a negotiation with the United States. The competition initially began because the U.S. demanded equal access to the Chinese market and an end to the manipulation of the yuan. China has not been able to agree to either, and the sense of hostility is likely as much for domestic consumption as American. The sense of war has been achieved, but the indications of war are hard to see even if you look closely. That leaves a political settlement.
-
August 10, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
Why America Loses Wars
By: George Friedman
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is moving to its inevitable conclusion. The Taliban, the radical Islamists the U.S. was fighting, are taking back control of the country, one city at a time. Put differently, the United States has lost the war it fought for the past 20 years. There are those who want to continue to fight, but I doubt that another 20 years will bring victory considering that the definition of success is vague and wildly ambitious. The goal was to transform an ancient and complex society from what it was to into what we wanted it to be. Defeating a country comprising warring factions and imposing peace and a new culture was beyond Washington’s reach.
This is not the first war the U.S. has lost since World War II, and given the overwhelming military power of the United States, it must be explained. To explain it, we must begin with World War II, in which the United States was confronted with a conflict initiated by Japan and Germany. The United States responded by defining war as eliminating the enemy’s military and shattering the enemies’ society by destroying their industrial plants and cities. Victory required the enemy’s defeat and a social and moral transformation of the defeated.
World War II taught the United States a number of lessons. The first was that the decision on timing was made by U.S. enemies. Pearl Harbor and Hitlers’ declaration of war made the decision on Washington’s behalf at a time that suited them. It took away the advantage of initiative, beyond nibbling at the edges of the war. Second, Washington learned that in fighting an enemy you must use overwhelming force and that it was essential to shatter not only the military but also the morale of the nation as a whole. The U.S. would do that by applying overwhelming force on the enemy's military and society.
Victory transformed the U.S. Its power was vast and intersected much of the world. The U.S. had failed to see this prior to World War II. It now was obsessed with it. It created a vast military-industrial complex, seeing it as the critical element of national security. So it had greater friction than before, and more power than before. But it had taken another lesson from World War II. Defeating the enemy’s military was not enough. As with Germany and Japan, war could only end with a moral and cultural capitulation by the enemy nation and a transformation to liberal democracy.
After World War II, America’s main adversary was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a moral nightmare. Soviet power was daunting, and a global moral challenge faced the United States. Realpolitik and a moral struggle combined, and the U.S. and Soviet Union fought to transform nations into partisans of the moral project of either liberal democracy or Marxism-Leninism. Over time, this lapsed into massive cynicism on both sides, but at the core, the moral and grand strategies blended, and the real struggle was for the hearts and minds of the populace, shaped by covert and overt war.
Korea was the first war of moral absolutism but was shaped by very conventional war. It was in Vietnam that the new strategy was tested. Vietnam had been occupied by the French, who were defeated in their war against the communists. It ended with the division of the country between communists and anti-communists who posed as liberal democrats to salve the American soul but were simply ambitious men dedicated to holding power, using anti-communism to draw the Americans into protecting them. As a war, it was divided between endless combat on the ground and an air campaign designed to break North Vietnamese morale, much as the U.S. had broken the Germans and Japanese. But the war went beyond that. The goal was to create a government that morally rejected communism and embraced liberal democracy. So long as the communists continued to fight, the U.S. would lose. Its military capability did not reduce the communist north and their southern fighters to the state of the Wehrmacht in 1945. The regime the U.S. tried to invent and protect had no moral interest in liberal democracy.
The problem in Vietnam was the incongruity of its strategic and moral aspects. The strategy called for the defeat of the enemy army and a transformation of Vietnamese society. Somewhere in there was the automatic opposition to the spread of communism, but absent from that was an evaluation of whether this was the right place to fight world communism and whether we had the military force to compel moral change. Communism was spreading elsewhere, so why choose Vietnam as the place to fight?
The U.S. had a military reason to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. But in Vietnam, the military reason, the political reason, the moral principles constantly churned. U.S. strategy was to attrite the North Vietnamese military, cause their public to grow war-weary and impose U.S. will. The U.S. took the attrition and generated its own war-weariness after seven years of fighting. The U.S. lost Vietnam, but from its perspective, the world went on. For all the death and destruction, the war didn’t change much. It was the wrong war fought in the wrong place with the wrong strategy and goals. The lesson of World War II is to control how and where war is waged. In Vietnam, the enemy decided where the war began. By opposing any communist intrusion anywhere, the U.S. allowed the enemy to choose the time and place for Washington to roll out its prepackaged strategy.
Islamic extremism was a moral challenge to America, but before that, it was also a useful ally against the Soviets. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. supported and praised the resistance. The U.S. figured Soviet enemies in Afghanistan shared at least empathy with the United States. Each served the interests of the other, and the Soviets were defeated. Then came 9/11, which was the extremist declaration of war against the U.S. The U.S. ideal of controlling war initiation was lost, in the same way it was lost in Vietnam. Something had to be done. As in Vietnam, the U.S. was sucked in almost unknowingly. It needed to destroy al-Qaida. Having hurt but not destroyed it, it felt compelled to stay engaged. To stay engaged, a degree of offensive warfare had to be undertaken until it became necessary to create a new regime that shared liberal democratic values. In other words, another ancient society would be transformed but without World War II levels of devastation. The strategic and moral collided. Strategically, Afghanistan was vast, and no amount of force could control more than a fraction of the country. Morally, the Afghans had their own political order that didn’t value liberal democracy any more than it valued Marxism.
The wars against the Soviet Union and against the Taliban had a common theme. The U.S. was offended by their moral values and formulated a national strategy based on it. At some point, the national strategy overreached as the moral ambition exceeded strategic possibilities. Not wanting to admit failure, the war went on to exhaustion.
World War II was a moral exercise. It brought the U.S. era upon the world. The moral dimension of that war became a necessary dimension of future wars, which became more frequent as the U.S. became a global power. The moral dimension was easily visible: devise not only a clear strategy for waging war but also a measure of when the war was failing. And above all, know when the strategy isn’t working and avoid being trapped by falling back on the moral to avoid making hard decisions.
The world has grown used to U.S. military intervention. It condemns it and is then comforted by its condemnations. But losing wars after years of struggle – or staying in wars you are losing for moral reasons or to hide the reality – makes no sense. The U.S. has to control where and how it goes to war. Its notion of victory includes the moral transformation of ancient people who do not think they are immoral. A moral principle on terrain well known, and weapons suited for it, works. A moral principle on unfamiliar terrain and inappropriate weapons is less effective.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/american-defeat-in-afghanistan-exposes-the-smart-power-mirage/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_20210816&utm_term=Jolt-Smart
-
America loses wars because we don't fight to win. Want to defeat jihadists? China knows how. China plays to win. We deserve what is coming.
August 10, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
Why America Loses Wars
By: George Friedman
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is moving to its inevitable conclusion. The Taliban, the radical Islamists the U.S. was fighting, are taking back control of the country, one city at a time. Put differently, the United States has lost the war it fought for the past 20 years. There are those who want to continue to fight, but I doubt that another 20 years will bring victory considering that the definition of success is vague and wildly ambitious. The goal was to transform an ancient and complex society from what it was to into what we wanted it to be. Defeating a country comprising warring factions and imposing peace and a new culture was beyond Washington’s reach.
This is not the first war the U.S. has lost since World War II, and given the overwhelming military power of the United States, it must be explained. To explain it, we must begin with World War II, in which the United States was confronted with a conflict initiated by Japan and Germany. The United States responded by defining war as eliminating the enemy’s military and shattering the enemies’ society by destroying their industrial plants and cities. Victory required the enemy’s defeat and a social and moral transformation of the defeated.
World War II taught the United States a number of lessons. The first was that the decision on timing was made by U.S. enemies. Pearl Harbor and Hitlers’ declaration of war made the decision on Washington’s behalf at a time that suited them. It took away the advantage of initiative, beyond nibbling at the edges of the war. Second, Washington learned that in fighting an enemy you must use overwhelming force and that it was essential to shatter not only the military but also the morale of the nation as a whole. The U.S. would do that by applying overwhelming force on the enemy's military and society.
Victory transformed the U.S. Its power was vast and intersected much of the world. The U.S. had failed to see this prior to World War II. It now was obsessed with it. It created a vast military-industrial complex, seeing it as the critical element of national security. So it had greater friction than before, and more power than before. But it had taken another lesson from World War II. Defeating the enemy’s military was not enough. As with Germany and Japan, war could only end with a moral and cultural capitulation by the enemy nation and a transformation to liberal democracy.
After World War II, America’s main adversary was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a moral nightmare. Soviet power was daunting, and a global moral challenge faced the United States. Realpolitik and a moral struggle combined, and the U.S. and Soviet Union fought to transform nations into partisans of the moral project of either liberal democracy or Marxism-Leninism. Over time, this lapsed into massive cynicism on both sides, but at the core, the moral and grand strategies blended, and the real struggle was for the hearts and minds of the populace, shaped by covert and overt war.
Korea was the first war of moral absolutism but was shaped by very conventional war. It was in Vietnam that the new strategy was tested. Vietnam had been occupied by the French, who were defeated in their war against the communists. It ended with the division of the country between communists and anti-communists who posed as liberal democrats to salve the American soul but were simply ambitious men dedicated to holding power, using anti-communism to draw the Americans into protecting them. As a war, it was divided between endless combat on the ground and an air campaign designed to break North Vietnamese morale, much as the U.S. had broken the Germans and Japanese. But the war went beyond that. The goal was to create a government that morally rejected communism and embraced liberal democracy. So long as the communists continued to fight, the U.S. would lose. Its military capability did not reduce the communist north and their southern fighters to the state of the Wehrmacht in 1945. The regime the U.S. tried to invent and protect had no moral interest in liberal democracy.
The problem in Vietnam was the incongruity of its strategic and moral aspects. The strategy called for the defeat of the enemy army and a transformation of Vietnamese society. Somewhere in there was the automatic opposition to the spread of communism, but absent from that was an evaluation of whether this was the right place to fight world communism and whether we had the military force to compel moral change. Communism was spreading elsewhere, so why choose Vietnam as the place to fight?
The U.S. had a military reason to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. But in Vietnam, the military reason, the political reason, the moral principles constantly churned. U.S. strategy was to attrite the North Vietnamese military, cause their public to grow war-weary and impose U.S. will. The U.S. took the attrition and generated its own war-weariness after seven years of fighting. The U.S. lost Vietnam, but from its perspective, the world went on. For all the death and destruction, the war didn’t change much. It was the wrong war fought in the wrong place with the wrong strategy and goals. The lesson of World War II is to control how and where war is waged. In Vietnam, the enemy decided where the war began. By opposing any communist intrusion anywhere, the U.S. allowed the enemy to choose the time and place for Washington to roll out its prepackaged strategy.
Islamic extremism was a moral challenge to America, but before that, it was also a useful ally against the Soviets. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. supported and praised the resistance. The U.S. figured Soviet enemies in Afghanistan shared at least empathy with the United States. Each served the interests of the other, and the Soviets were defeated. Then came 9/11, which was the extremist declaration of war against the U.S. The U.S. ideal of controlling war initiation was lost, in the same way it was lost in Vietnam. Something had to be done. As in Vietnam, the U.S. was sucked in almost unknowingly. It needed to destroy al-Qaida. Having hurt but not destroyed it, it felt compelled to stay engaged. To stay engaged, a degree of offensive warfare had to be undertaken until it became necessary to create a new regime that shared liberal democratic values. In other words, another ancient society would be transformed but without World War II levels of devastation. The strategic and moral collided. Strategically, Afghanistan was vast, and no amount of force could control more than a fraction of the country. Morally, the Afghans had their own political order that didn’t value liberal democracy any more than it valued Marxism.
The wars against the Soviet Union and against the Taliban had a common theme. The U.S. was offended by their moral values and formulated a national strategy based on it. At some point, the national strategy overreached as the moral ambition exceeded strategic possibilities. Not wanting to admit failure, the war went on to exhaustion.
World War II was a moral exercise. It brought the U.S. era upon the world. The moral dimension of that war became a necessary dimension of future wars, which became more frequent as the U.S. became a global power. The moral dimension was easily visible: devise not only a clear strategy for waging war but also a measure of when the war was failing. And above all, know when the strategy isn’t working and avoid being trapped by falling back on the moral to avoid making hard decisions.
The world has grown used to U.S. military intervention. It condemns it and is then comforted by its condemnations. But losing wars after years of struggle – or staying in wars you are losing for moral reasons or to hide the reality – makes no sense. The U.S. has to control where and how it goes to war. Its notion of victory includes the moral transformation of ancient people who do not think they are immoral. A moral principle on terrain well known, and weapons suited for it, works. A moral principle on unfamiliar terrain and inappropriate weapons is less effective.
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17658/afghanistan-double-cross
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3gK8KOL6sU
-
"America loses wars because we don't fight to win. Want to defeat jihadists? China knows how. China plays to win. We deserve what is coming."
Agree
Can anyone think of a war we won because we won the enemies hearts and minds?
I can't.
-
Huh?
========================
US Credibility After Afghanistan
It’ll be fine, for better or worse.
By: Phillip Orchard
Over the past week, there's been a perplexing amount of consternation and, in some corners, elation about how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan might damage U.S. credibility elsewhere in the world. Much of it is disingenuous, of course; President Joe Biden’s political enemies smell blood in the water and are eager to criticize his strategic judgment as the U.S. heads into Cold War 2.0, while Beijing is, as expected, trying to cement global perceptions of the U.S. as a capricious power that can't be trusted. Still, there’s also been seemingly genuine alarm about whether the debacle in Afghanistan will make, say, Taiwan or South Korea or any other U.S. ally conclude that they can no longer rely on Washington to defend them.
This is, to put it plainly, a bit of a head-scratcher. To be sure, U.S. friends and allies across the world already had reason to question whether Washington’s ever-changing strategic interests would compromise its defense commitments. And the chaotic denouement of the U.S. war in Afghanistan – the mere six days it took for the Taliban to sack Kabul, the images of desperate Afghans hanging from the fuselage of U.S. planes booking it out of there – wasn't a great look for a superpower's intelligence or diplomatic chops. The whole thing is sad and betrays the ugly reality that superpowers are typically much better at breaking things than building them.
But the U.S. following through on an overdue decision to cut its losses in a staggeringly expensive, largely unwinnable two-decade war that had, at most, become marginal to core U.S. strategic interests will do minimal damage to U.S. “credibility” in its chief area of strategic concern: the Indo-Pacific. That's not how credibility works in geopolitics. If anything, it's likely to have the opposite effect.
What Makes a Country Credible
Academic theories on military power and credibility vary wildly, but most share a handful of key elements. It starts with capability. Does a country have the weapons, manpower, logistics, leadership and industrial plant to back up its threats or commitments? Then there's the willingness to get in a fight and stay the course until the objective is achieved – taking into account risks, political backing, long-term costs, strategic and diplomatic trade-offs, and so forth. There are also several more abstract elements like the alignment of threats and commitments with motivations and interests; others will be much more likely to believe a country will do what it says when it has sound reasons to do so.
A country's historical record in such matters also plays a role in perceptions of credibility. But studies have shown that countries tend to overrate the need to preserve credibility as a reason to act. In other words, if Country A threatens war against Country B, whether Country A followed through on previous such threats will have little bearing on Country B's determination about whether, this time, Country A is serious. The present circumstances – the correlation of forces, the strategic calculus, etc. – are essentially all that matters.
There's plenty to learn from a country's past wars. In Afghanistan, the U.S. showed a willingness to fight and to keep fighting for decades, even as the scope of its mission set expanded and contracted multiple times. Early on, it showed lightning-quick mobilization capacity and brutally efficient conventional warfighting abilities capable of overwhelming a weaker enemy. As mission creep set in, it showed that U.S. capabilities and/or commitment were not enough to wipe out an entrenched insurgency and transform a failed state into a stable, vibrant democracy. It showed that supposed “war weariness” among the U.S. public is no match for inertia and the fear of leaving without a clear-cut victory. It showed the U.S. penchants for distraction, for overestimating its ability to achieve wide-ranging outcomes through brute force, and for struggling to identify, communicate and pursue clear, obtainable objectives.
Little of this was new, though, nor is much of it relevant to the situation in the Western Pacific. U.S. allies have long questioned Washington’s appetite to stand against threats from China, North Korea, and the like. After all, the U.S. was openly threatening to leave South Korea just a few years ago. It has no formal commitment to defend Taiwan. Its mutual defense treaties with formal allies like Japan and the Philippines are intentionally vague, since the U.S. does not want to get pulled into a war not of its choosing. China has become very strong and capable of, at minimum, inflicting tremendous pain on the Americans should the U.S. try to come to the defense of its friends on China's doorstep. A combination of problems – political constraints at home, its wide-ranging security commitments across the globe (and thus possibility of getting bogged down elsewhere), strains of political discontent with allies free-riding on U.S. military power, and the real possibility that the U.S. one day concludes that dominating the Western Pacific simply isn't important enough to take on the risks and costs of fighting China – is enough to make regional states deeply uncomfortable with depending on the U.S.
‘We’ll See’
Put differently, U.S. credibility is not a fixed resource; it must be diligently maintained. But a different course of U.S. action in Afghanistan would do little to reassure any of its friends and allies in the Indo-Pacific (with the possible exception of India, which benefited somewhat from U.S. counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan). Would the U.S. continuing to divert resources from the Indo-Pacific into Afghanistan really do anything to persuade Taipei or Tokyo or Manila that the U.S. is willing and capable of coming to their defense? Does the U.S. giving up on a 20-year occupation few ever wanted really deepen fears in Seoul that the highly successful, 70-year U.S. presence on the peninsula – something still immensely valuable to core U.S. strategic objectives in the region – is about to end? Do U.S. struggles with nation-building, misadventures and asymmetric warfare really make anyone doubt the U.S. conventional capabilities that would most likely come into play in an Indo-Pacific conflict scenario? It’s apples and oranges, and it's hard to come up with a scenario where any key U.S. partner in the region makes any meaningful strategic adjustments based on the U.S. getting embarrassed in Kabul.
If anything, the opposite is true. Despite its outsize strategic importance, the Indo-Pacific has been getting a relatively small slice of U.S. resources since 2001. Fighting prolonged land wars in the Middle East was very expensive and naturally dominated the Pentagon's budget and attention for two decades. Now, the U.S. appears finally ready to “pivot” to the Pacific for real this time in terms of military structure and spending, diplomatic and economic support, and so forth.
It’s also worth noting that the handwringing about the U.S. ceding “influence” in Central Asia to China and Russia is misplaced. It's generally a very bad idea to wage a zero-sum competition with other great powers in all corners of the globe. Empires fall from that kind of overstretch. In some ways, China and Russia have actually benefitted from U.S. counterterrorism operations in the area. A power vacuum in Afghanistan is a much bigger problem for them than for the U.S., and now they'll have to bear more responsibility for dealing with the mess there themselves – and more risk of falling into the same traps of so many of their predecessors.
Whether or not this ultimately works in favor of U.S. strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific is impossible to say at this point. There's potential for China and Russia to get bogged down in South Asia like the U.S. before, forcing them to draw resources away from priorities in Eastern Europe and the South and East China seas. There's also potential for China to leverage Pakistan's and/or Iran's fear of another failed state in Afghanistan into a strategically invaluable network of military bases across the Indian Ocean rim. There's potential that India gets drawn into the power vacuum as well, derailing its renewed push to become an indispensable naval partner for the U.S. in its own right.
Afghanistan has had a way of making fools of strategic planners ever since the British East India Company became the first of many Western empires to lose their way in the Hindu Kush centuries ago. To borrow an apocryphal quote from Gust Avrakotos: "We'll see." Damaged U.S. credibility from its hasty exit won’t have anything to do with it.
-
Fantasy
Huh?
========================
US Credibility After Afghanistan
It’ll be fine, for better or worse.
By: Phillip Orchard
Over the past week, there's been a perplexing amount of consternation and, in some corners, elation about how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan might damage U.S. credibility elsewhere in the world. Much of it is disingenuous, of course; President Joe Biden’s political enemies smell blood in the water and are eager to criticize his strategic judgment as the U.S. heads into Cold War 2.0, while Beijing is, as expected, trying to cement global perceptions of the U.S. as a capricious power that can't be trusted. Still, there’s also been seemingly genuine alarm about whether the debacle in Afghanistan will make, say, Taiwan or South Korea or any other U.S. ally conclude that they can no longer rely on Washington to defend them.
This is, to put it plainly, a bit of a head-scratcher. To be sure, U.S. friends and allies across the world already had reason to question whether Washington’s ever-changing strategic interests would compromise its defense commitments. And the chaotic denouement of the U.S. war in Afghanistan – the mere six days it took for the Taliban to sack Kabul, the images of desperate Afghans hanging from the fuselage of U.S. planes booking it out of there – wasn't a great look for a superpower's intelligence or diplomatic chops. The whole thing is sad and betrays the ugly reality that superpowers are typically much better at breaking things than building them.
But the U.S. following through on an overdue decision to cut its losses in a staggeringly expensive, largely unwinnable two-decade war that had, at most, become marginal to core U.S. strategic interests will do minimal damage to U.S. “credibility” in its chief area of strategic concern: the Indo-Pacific. That's not how credibility works in geopolitics. If anything, it's likely to have the opposite effect.
What Makes a Country Credible
Academic theories on military power and credibility vary wildly, but most share a handful of key elements. It starts with capability. Does a country have the weapons, manpower, logistics, leadership and industrial plant to back up its threats or commitments? Then there's the willingness to get in a fight and stay the course until the objective is achieved – taking into account risks, political backing, long-term costs, strategic and diplomatic trade-offs, and so forth. There are also several more abstract elements like the alignment of threats and commitments with motivations and interests; others will be much more likely to believe a country will do what it says when it has sound reasons to do so.
A country's historical record in such matters also plays a role in perceptions of credibility. But studies have shown that countries tend to overrate the need to preserve credibility as a reason to act. In other words, if Country A threatens war against Country B, whether Country A followed through on previous such threats will have little bearing on Country B's determination about whether, this time, Country A is serious. The present circumstances – the correlation of forces, the strategic calculus, etc. – are essentially all that matters.
There's plenty to learn from a country's past wars. In Afghanistan, the U.S. showed a willingness to fight and to keep fighting for decades, even as the scope of its mission set expanded and contracted multiple times. Early on, it showed lightning-quick mobilization capacity and brutally efficient conventional warfighting abilities capable of overwhelming a weaker enemy. As mission creep set in, it showed that U.S. capabilities and/or commitment were not enough to wipe out an entrenched insurgency and transform a failed state into a stable, vibrant democracy. It showed that supposed “war weariness” among the U.S. public is no match for inertia and the fear of leaving without a clear-cut victory. It showed the U.S. penchants for distraction, for overestimating its ability to achieve wide-ranging outcomes through brute force, and for struggling to identify, communicate and pursue clear, obtainable objectives.
Little of this was new, though, nor is much of it relevant to the situation in the Western Pacific. U.S. allies have long questioned Washington’s appetite to stand against threats from China, North Korea, and the like. After all, the U.S. was openly threatening to leave South Korea just a few years ago. It has no formal commitment to defend Taiwan. Its mutual defense treaties with formal allies like Japan and the Philippines are intentionally vague, since the U.S. does not want to get pulled into a war not of its choosing. China has become very strong and capable of, at minimum, inflicting tremendous pain on the Americans should the U.S. try to come to the defense of its friends on China's doorstep. A combination of problems – political constraints at home, its wide-ranging security commitments across the globe (and thus possibility of getting bogged down elsewhere), strains of political discontent with allies free-riding on U.S. military power, and the real possibility that the U.S. one day concludes that dominating the Western Pacific simply isn't important enough to take on the risks and costs of fighting China – is enough to make regional states deeply uncomfortable with depending on the U.S.
‘We’ll See’
Put differently, U.S. credibility is not a fixed resource; it must be diligently maintained. But a different course of U.S. action in Afghanistan would do little to reassure any of its friends and allies in the Indo-Pacific (with the possible exception of India, which benefited somewhat from U.S. counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan). Would the U.S. continuing to divert resources from the Indo-Pacific into Afghanistan really do anything to persuade Taipei or Tokyo or Manila that the U.S. is willing and capable of coming to their defense? Does the U.S. giving up on a 20-year occupation few ever wanted really deepen fears in Seoul that the highly successful, 70-year U.S. presence on the peninsula – something still immensely valuable to core U.S. strategic objectives in the region – is about to end? Do U.S. struggles with nation-building, misadventures and asymmetric warfare really make anyone doubt the U.S. conventional capabilities that would most likely come into play in an Indo-Pacific conflict scenario? It’s apples and oranges, and it's hard to come up with a scenario where any key U.S. partner in the region makes any meaningful strategic adjustments based on the U.S. getting embarrassed in Kabul.
If anything, the opposite is true. Despite its outsize strategic importance, the Indo-Pacific has been getting a relatively small slice of U.S. resources since 2001. Fighting prolonged land wars in the Middle East was very expensive and naturally dominated the Pentagon's budget and attention for two decades. Now, the U.S. appears finally ready to “pivot” to the Pacific for real this time in terms of military structure and spending, diplomatic and economic support, and so forth.
It’s also worth noting that the handwringing about the U.S. ceding “influence” in Central Asia to China and Russia is misplaced. It's generally a very bad idea to wage a zero-sum competition with other great powers in all corners of the globe. Empires fall from that kind of overstretch. In some ways, China and Russia have actually benefitted from U.S. counterterrorism operations in the area. A power vacuum in Afghanistan is a much bigger problem for them than for the U.S., and now they'll have to bear more responsibility for dealing with the mess there themselves – and more risk of falling into the same traps of so many of their predecessors.
Whether or not this ultimately works in favor of U.S. strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific is impossible to say at this point. There's potential for China and Russia to get bogged down in South Asia like the U.S. before, forcing them to draw resources away from priorities in Eastern Europe and the South and East China seas. There's also potential for China to leverage Pakistan's and/or Iran's fear of another failed state in Afghanistan into a strategically invaluable network of military bases across the Indian Ocean rim. There's potential that India gets drawn into the power vacuum as well, derailing its renewed push to become an indispensable naval partner for the U.S. in its own right.
Afghanistan has had a way of making fools of strategic planners ever since the British East India Company became the first of many Western empires to lose their way in the Hindu Kush centuries ago. To borrow an apocryphal quote from Gust Avrakotos: "We'll see." Damaged U.S. credibility from its hasty exit won’t have anything to do with it.
-
Not sure what I make of this:
September 1, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
Facing Reality: China’s Strategy
By: George Friedman
China is the definition of dynamic. Until the 20th century, the regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Inner Mongolia were not under the political control of the Chinese government. They have been or are heavily influenced by the power of others — Tibet by India, Xinjiang by Turkey, Inner Mongolia by Russia, and Manchuria by both Russia and Japan. These four buffer regions create security for China but also vulnerability in that they have resisted Chinese rule at various times. Han China, the China we think of as true China, which is found mostly along the coast, is surrounded by these regions and potential enemies and, historically, has been predisposed to dynastic and civil war. Meanwhile, foreign powers have intruded on Han China through the Pacific, either through formal colonies (Britain, Portugal and Japan) or through informal economic pressure (the United States).
China's Buffer Regions
(click to enlarge)
The internal pressures within Han China, the pressures from China’s neighbors and the pressures from the sea have historically kept China in a state or at the risk of fragmentation. The communists who forged modern China understood as much. Using Marxism as a political tool, the most significant outcome of the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in 1947 was the unification of China by force. One means of achieving that was enforcing Beijing’s will on the buffer areas, and another was isolating itself from much of the global trading system, eliminating the power of foreign nations along the coast. The result, of course, was poverty throughout much of the country.
And though Mao unified China at the cost of Chinese wealth, Deng Xiaoping sought to moderate isolation to decrease China’s poverty and prevent unrest. His strategy was economic. China’s advantage was a disciplined workforce operating at extremely low wages. Like the United States in the 1880s and Japan in the 1950s, Deng envisioned China using its cost advantage and discipline to compete with foreign countries by exporting goods. He believed that this time, through the strength of the Communist Party of China, foreign engagement would not mean fragmentation.
And he was right. China has retained its buffers, minimized internal tension in Han China and massively enriched itself. The strategic problem China now faces is whether economic growth, crucial to internal stability, can be reconciled with national unity by deflecting the pressures of foreign powers drawn in or repelled by China’s economic growth.
China’s Geopolitics
Rainfall is perhaps the most important geopolitical factor for China. In order to have sustained agricultural production, a minimum annual rainfall of 15 inches is necessary. But a substantial part of the country lacks that much rain and therefore lacks agriculture. The line of demarcation is called the 15-inch isohyet, which cuts modern China roughly in half. The line also compresses China’s population, 94 percent of which lives east of the 15-inch isohyet. That means about 1.3 billion people live on less than half of China’s land. That chunk of land must produce all of China’s domestically grown food. Among the 6 percent of the population living west of this line, most are Tibetans, Uyghurs, Inner Mongolians, etc. These are the most recently acquired regions and thus the most unstable regions over the past few years.
(click to enlarge)
So China’s geopolitical problem is fairly unique. The acquisition of territory normally is accompanied by settlement by elements of the core population in order to bind the region to the core or to add resources. That wasn’t readily possible for China.
This compounded China’s vulnerability from the west. Foreign powers invading from this direction were one thing; poverty and attendant political instability were another. Hence why the communists under Mao used these regions to form a military force to overthrow the nationalists. In fact, Mao sought to start an uprising in Shanghai in 1927 but failed. Part of the reason for the failure was that the Chinese coastal region was the most prosperous, open as it had been to trade with Europe and the United States. The coastal region and the interior were fundamentally different both in their perspective of the world and the way they lived. The coast was cosmopolitan and integrated. The interior was poor and isolated. So Mao took the long march to Yenan, in the interior, raised an army of poor peasants and over the course of about 20 years overthrew the existing regime and imposed communism. In a sense, the western peasants overthrew the cosmopolitan business class.
Per Capita Disposable Income by Administrative Division - 2019
(click to enlarge)
The distinction between coast and interior remains in place today. China has the world’s second largest GDP. But on a per capita basis, it ranks just 75th in the world. This explains much of China’s behavior, like keeping zombie companies afloat, developing the interior through the Belt and Road Initiative, and, at times, ruthlessly cracking down on opposition in the west.
China’s core geopolitical challenge is therefore economic:
It must generate sufficient wealth to prevent fragmentation and unrest between regions.
It cannot generate sufficient wealth domestically to do so.
So it must generate whatever GDP it can through exports.
It must have unrestricted access to global markets, particularly through the waters off its east coast. Anything that denies its access is an existential threat.
Chinese exports can undermine foreign economies. This can invite retaliation, economic or otherwise.
China must maintain control over the non-Han buffer areas in the face of internal unrest or foreign agitation.
China’s Strategy
1. China must at least maintain, if not increase, the quality of its exports. Ideally these would be products that could be manufactured in the poorer regions of the west to close the economic gap. However, the fact that many other countries are now engaged in low-wage production makes this more difficult. China must therefore compete in more advanced, higher-margin products, but doing so brings China into competition with industries in advanced economies that make up China’s main export markets. These countries in turn might react with tariffs and non-tariff barriers. China’s strategic imperative is to constantly balance between domestic requirements and foreign reactions, and to broaden the range of options available to it.
2. China must deal with military threats, particularly from the United States. The current cycle of tension began with U.S. tariffs on some Chinese products. Under these circumstances, Beijing had to reconsider its security in areas from Japan to the Indian Ocean. The danger was that the U.S. could decide to blockade Chinese ports, or close off chokepoints between the islands surrounding China, and thus block China’s access to the Pacific. China must act under the assumption that an American threat is possible. One countermove is to widen the chokepoints into Chinese-controlled passages by, for example, seizing Taiwan or some other point. It’s a dangerous strategy, and if it fails it will leave China in an even more precarious economic and political situation. China must therefore try to force negotiation. Failing that, Beijing must search for other pressure points around the globe that could induce the U.S. to reduce its pressure on China.
U.S. Partners and Chinese Maritime Chokepoints
(click to enlarge)
3. A strategic alternative for China is to accept the U.S. threat in the South China Sea and find another route for distributing exports. The Belt and Road Initiative was considered for this purpose, but it suffers from several challenges, including the cost of land-based transportation and the sheer number of countries it would pass through (not to mention the poor security in many of these places). Chinese investment in countries to its west is used less to create such a passage than it is for building political coalitions based on investment.
China's Belt and Road Initiative
(click to enlarge)
4. Given the strategic difficulties facing China, Beijing must maintain control of its buffer regions, especially where an international threat might exist. In Tibet, China must maintain internal security and contain India. In Xinjiang, it has gone to extremes to maintain internal security and suppress dissent.
Conclusion
China is a defensive power, not an offensive one. Its fundamental strategic interest is to preserve the unity of Han China and to protect the country from intrusion via the strategic depth of its buffer regions and from internal opposition by a domestic-oriented military. Historically dangerous states such as Japan, Russia and Turkey are currently weak and not motivated to intrude. Therefore, the primary strategic interest of China is to prevent the United States from blocking its ocean outlets. All of this is driven by the need to maintain a robust economy in order to pacify Han China.
China maintains its economy by being the largest exporter in the world. Inasmuch as the United States is the world’s largest importer, an underlying tension exists. China needs access to U.S. markets without giving the U.S. equivalent access to Chinese markets. China must build up its domestic economy for national security reasons, but that economy is under pressure, and permitting U.S. firms to compete in China, beyond a certain limit, is unacceptable. This has created a military dimension in which China hopes to force the U.S. away from its ports and chokepoints and eliminate the possibility of a U.S. blockade. Beijing understands the possibility of a blockade is remote, but the consequences to China if the unlikely happens are too great to risk.
In other words, modern China needs to maintain Deng’s approach to economics but must achieve Mao’s outcome of a united China. China’s national strategy is odd in that China is a great power that must concentrate on economics — and it has been thrust into an economic and military confrontation with an important customer and major military power. China’s strategic goal must be to disengage from this position while preserving national unity.
-
quote author=Crafty_Dog: "Not sure what to make of this"
Facing Reality: China’s Strategy By: George Friedman
...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm also not sure what to think either but he is always interesting to read.
The real threat to the regime of China is from the oppressed within and the regime addresses that threat every minute of every day with every tool available. Sadly, the tools of authoritarianism such as monitoring people and information and controlling communications have never been stronger.
Control over the 'outer areas' Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Inner Mongolia was asserted long ago, mostly mid 20th century, not under Xi who is trying to keep that buffer. The war (or 'skirmish') with India is about an outer geographic and strategic area of control and not about a Chinese desire to conquer the country or rule the people of India. On another border they certainly could have taken over DPRK and most clearly don't want it. Hong Kong and Taiwan, it seems to me, are the areas where the PRC want to expand their governance - and they already did with Hong Kong.
The point about the US posing a threat to its shipping lanes in the South China Sea is upside down to me. In a war scenario initiated by China that response might be true. We pose a threat IF they attack Taiwan for example. That seems easy to avoid.
China, with its new wealth, could feed its people easily if it wasn't throwing its money into everything else.
China faces the threat that another Donald Trump becomes the next President of the US (or maybe the same Donald Trump) as Biden Harris, whom they helped elect, flail and flounder. That could take China back to the pre-covid trade war, which could have been resolved by merely agreeing to compete fairly in the world market. In that scenario, they still keep all their gains from cheating and stealing and then compete going forward with an economy and military close to that of a rapidly disintegrating US.
The real threat they face in my view comes from potential responses their own aggressive mis-steps. The fight against India positions a mostly neutral India against them. Their open threat to Taiwan awakens and emboldens Japan, and Taiwan and the US. Their perpetuation of the North Korea threat keeps South Korea on edge, also Japan and the US. Their broken promises in Hong Kong are a slap in the face to the UK and strengthens a potential US alliance against them. Their feuds with Australia and others, same thing. Their provocation and militarizing of the South China Sea puts the whole region on notice - unnecessarily.
I doubt the next round of conflict is fought with battalions, warships and aircraft carriers. Those seem to be used for positioning and deterrence.
Very hard to declare war on your biggest customer (US) or shut down your main trade route when your real challenges are internal and economic.
In their next offensive mis-step I would like to see the US intervene in the information monopoly in China with something like space based uncensored internet to the people perhaps coupled with a take down of the Chinese existing information control system.
China's best strategy is the status quo. Don't rock the boat. They are already cheating, stealing, infiltrating. They are helping to destabilize their greatest adversary and on a path to become the largest economy and military in the world. Almost everything is going their way. From their point of view, don't screw it up.
-
They are not rational on the topic of Taiwan.
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17724/afghan-fallout-india-china
-
second post
September 10, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
John F. Kennedy and the Origin of Wars Without End
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to answer a fundamental question: Why did the United States, economically and militarily the most powerful nation in the world, lose three wars during my lifetime? Given that tomorrow is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the immediate cause of the last disastrous war, it is proper that this question be asked and that we all try to answer it.
For me, the origin of these wars is to be found in words from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address:
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
At the time it was met with great applause. Kennedy was merely summarizing a moral principle that had become commonplace after World War II. During the conflict, Franklin D. Roosevelt presented the United States as the moral savior of a corrupt world. It’s true that the world was corrupt, and it’s true that the United States saved the lives of my parents and millions of others. But the war had a powerful geopolitical rationale: If Germany and Japan were not defeated, the security and the fundamental interests of the United States would be in danger. Roosevelt meant what he said about salvation, but he carefully calculated the cost of being the savior.
The Roosevelt theory of salvation embedded itself at this time. The struggle against the Soviet Union was a moral struggle but not one beyond the consideration of costs. When he became president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was previously Roosevelt’s commander in Europe, shared a moral abhorrence of the Soviet Union. But he refused to send U.S. troops to Indochina to support France, he insisted that France and Britain, however morally superior they may be to Egypt, withdraw from attempting to seize the Suez Canal, and with meticulous care, he managed to leave office having not engaged in nuclear war. He petted the geopolitical shark, a moral cause carefully calibrated with resources, risks and rewards.
In his inaugural address, Kennedy wrote a blank check from his country. This was the moment the United States left the world of Roosevelt’s prudent savior. The United States would as a matter of principle bear any hardship to support any friend and oppose any foe to assure liberty. In assuming the burden, he assumed the cost of war if needed, and he did not ask the question of whether our hardships would bring success or failure, and at such a price that the nation might not be able to bear it militarily, financially or morally. It is hard to imagine that he understood the promise he was making.
Kennedy’s principle was not a meaningless moment in a speech. It expressed a sensibility that had emerged in World War II in which war was an instrument to be used against evil. It was easy to regard America’s enemies as evil, because they were. There was no tension between the geopolitical imperative of the war and the moral imperative.
It was after Kennedy’s speech that the principles of World War II began to emerge as conscious principles, and this has dominated American strategy imperfectly as such things always do. There were three wars following Kennedy’s stated principles that lasted for many years and were unsuccessful: Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. But they were only the long and agonizing cases. The United States used military force in Iran during the hostage crisis but failed to achieve its desired outcome. The United States invaded Grenada. It succeeded, I suppose. The United States sent troops to Beirut and withdrew when hundreds of Marines were killed by explosives. The United States succeeded in Desert Storm. It conducted an extended bombing campaign in defense of Kosovo. And it has sent troops into Libya, Syria, Chad and northern Africa.
I am no pacifist, but the tempo of operations imposed on the U.S. military and the widely varying environments it went into, frequently with a mission that was opaque, made little sense. In World War II, there was a clear moral and geopolitical reason for combat, a clear if flexible strategy that would withstand reversals. Most important, the military was configured for this war. Training a force takes time, and a force cannot be trained for “whatever comes up.” Having been trained to face the Soviets in Germany, the U.S. military was then unreasonably asked to fight limited wars in the jungle, the desert and so forth. In other words, it was asked to go anywhere to fight any foe and protect any friend. So that’s what it did.
In Vietnam, a military built around armor and clear fields of fire was thrown into a jungle that curbed numbers and limited visibility. In Afghanistan, what started (and should have ended) as a covert mission conducted by the CIA and special operations forces ballooned into something quite different. In Iraq, the military was never trained or equipped for a battle that featured improvised explosive devices and light vehicles.
The thing is, it takes time and experience to develop a concept for fighting a war, identify the troops needed for a war and train a force to fight a war. Eisenhower’s mission was to conquer Germany. He refused to act for over two years. Marshall first trained the army for the war at home, and then Eisenhower trained them again in North Africa, losing battles and learning about the Germans. The army that landed at Normandy and the Navy that delivered and protected them were built for that moment, and even then suffered failures. To have landed an army there trained for Vietnam would have been insane.
Even so, in World War II the U.S. emerged with a sense of invincibility. The first duty of the senior commanders was to ruthlessly extract this feeling from the military and from its civilian leadership. If you go into combat without an appropriate force, and with a sense of invincibility, you may not lose, but you won’t win. And if you go in unprepared for the terrain, weather and horrors of the battlefield, the failures will mount, the politicians will deny any failures, the machine will pump more soldiers into the war, and the public will rightly determine that the war was a horrible failure. And then the soldiers who broke their hearts trying to win will feel betrayed by their nation.
The more wars the U.S. fights in shorter intervals, the less likely it is to win. Kennedy’s doctrine, then, should be expunged from our minds. That doctrine leads to endless war and continual defeat. War is not an action designed to do good. It is the use of overwhelming force against an opponent that threatens your nation’s fundamental interest. War is not an act of charity for deserving friends, not even an act of vengeance for a vicious enemy.
A fundamental foundation for peace is an unsentimental understanding of geopolitics, the discipline that distinguishes sentiment from necessity, capability from boast, and the enemy who matters from the one who doesn’t. We are now more at peace than usual. Minor conflicts in Africa and the Middle East still rage. Only a few are justified; the others are undertaken out of habit, a bad habit at that. “America First” has somehow become an ugly concept. It is as with children: Whoever does not put his children first, above other children, is morally questionable. Those who do not put their nation ahead of others are in my view the same. Once your own love is cared for, and you have the ability, helping another is praiseworthy. But nothing is more immoral than putting others first and failing to protect your own.
Which brings us back to Afghanistan. There are those who argue that leaving Afghanistan puts American lives at risk from future terrorist attacks. But terrorists are tied to no country, and their numbers are small. They keep it that way to gather weapons and plan their operations usually from the country they intend to attack, not a country half a world away.
Kennedy assumed that the U.S. could afford to fight any enemy anywhere. It can’t. And Washington better be certain that the next war it fights can be won, and that the next enemy is actually an enemy.
-
"Democrat" President 1961:
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
"ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/kennedy.asp
Democrat President 2021:
"C'mon man." "You know. It's the thing."
-
Washington is planning on fighting us, here.
-
Subject: Facing Reality: A New American Strategy
August 17, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
Facing Reality: A New American Strategy
By: George Friedman
The United States has been at war for almost the entire 21st century, and it’s only 2021. In contrast, the United States was at war for just 17 percent of the entire 20th century, during which it won the world wars, defeat in which may have led to existential transformations of the country and thus of the international order. But just as it lost Korea and Vietnam – wars that were not an existential threat – so too has it lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This may suggest that the U.S. engages in too many conflicts that are subcritical and is careless in how it fights them, while it fights critical wars with great precision. But to understand why, we must begin by understanding the geopolitical reality of the United States. Geopolitics defines the imperatives and constraints of a nation. Strategy shapes that reality into action. And the defeat of the United States in Afghanistan after 20 years compels a reevaluation of American national strategy, not only of how we fight wars but also of how we determine which wars should be fought.
The thing about major wars, though, is that they are rare, or should be. The international system typically doesn’t develop quickly enough for major powers to challenge each other for a long time. And yet, only five years passed from World War II to Korea. Vietnam came 12 years after that, then Desert Storm and Kosovo in the 1990s, and of course Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s. The frequency of wars raises the critical question of whether they were imposed on the U.S. or selected by it, and whether history is moving so quickly now that the tempo of war has likewise accelerated. If the latter isn’t true, then there is a strong possibility the U.S. is following a defective strategy that profoundly weakens its power by curbing its ability to control world events.
(click to enlarge)
The key measure of strategy is its relative simplicity. Geopolitics is complex. Tactics are detailed. Strategy should, in theory, be straightforward insofar as it represents the main thrust of a nation’s imperatives. For the United States, that strategy might be controlling ocean chokepoints while avoiding detailed plans for other areas of the world. A successful strategy must represent the essential core of a nation’s intent. Excessive complexity represents uncertainty or, worse, a compendium of strategic imperatives that outstrip a nation’s ability to execute or understand. A nation with an excess of strategic goals has not made the difficult choices on what matters and what doesn’t. Complexity represents an unwillingness to make those decisions. Deception is a tactical matter. Self-deception is a strategic failure. Only so much can be done, and understanding priorities without ambiguity and resisting the creeping expansion of strategy is the indispensable craft of the strategist.
The Geopolitical Reality of the United States
1. The United States is virtually immune to land attacks. It is flanked by Canada and Mexico, neither of which are capable of mounting a threat. This means U.S. armed forces are primarily designed to project power rather than defend the homeland.
(click to enlarge)
2. The United States controls the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans. An invasion from the Eastern Hemisphere would have to defeat U.S. naval and air forces in one of these oceans in such a way as to prevent interdiction of reinforcement and resupply.
3. Any existential threat to the United States will always originate from Eurasia. The United States must work to limit the development of forces, especially naval forces, that could threaten U.S. control of the oceans. In other words, the key is to divert Eurasian military energy from the sea.
4. Nuclear weapons are a stabilizing force. It is unlikely that the Cold War would have ended as it did without two nuclear powers managing the conflict. Nuclear weapons essentially prevented World War III. Maintaining a nuclear force stabilizes the system, and preventing new nuclear powers from emerging is desirable but not entirely essential.
5. The United States’ position in North America has made it the largest economy in the world, the largest importer of goods and the largest source of international investment. The United States is also a generator of international culture. It also defines IT culture worldwide. This can be a substitute for military power, particularly before near-war situations.
6. The primary interest of the United States is to maintain a stable international system that does not challenge U.S. boundaries. It has little interest in risk-taking. The greatest risk comes from attempts to retain control of the seas since only great powers can threaten U.S. maritime hegemony.
7. The great weakness of the United States since World War II is being drawn into conflicts that are not in the U.S. geopolitical interest and that diffuse U.S. power for an extended period of time. This is done primarily but not exclusively by strategic terrorism carried out by nations or non-national actors.
8. The United States is a moral project and, like all moral projects, thinks its model superior to others. Moral intervention is rarely in the geopolitical interests of the United States, and it almost never ends well. For the United States, the temptation to engage in these wars should be avoided to concentrate on direct interests and because these interventions frequently do more harm than good. If intervention is deemed necessary, it should be ruthlessly temporary.
Implementing the Strategy
1. North America: Maintaining U.S. dominance and harmony in North America is central to all U.S. strategy. Mexico and Canada cannot threaten the United States militarily, and both are bound to the United States economically. However, any power hostile to the United States would welcome an opportunity to draw either country into a relationship with it. It is imperative that the United States follow a strategy that always makes a relationship with the U.S. far more attractive than a third-party alliance.
2. Atlantic and Pacific: Command of the oceans is primarily a technical problem. Whereas it was once achieved by battleships and then aircraft carriers, it is now an issue of long-range missiles and other weapons. The key to this is to know the location of the enemy in an environment in which aircraft cannot easily survive over a fleet. Since the key to command of the sea is now reconnaissance for targeting information, space-based systems followed by unmanned aerial vehicles are the critical variable in controlling the sea. The U.S. Navy and the U.S. Space Force (as it matures) will be the most important services controlling the seas henceforth.
3. Eurasia: The United States faces Eurasia on two fronts: Across the Atlantic it faces Europe, and across the Pacific it faces East Asia. After World War II, Europe was Washington’s primary focus. The threat of the era was the Soviet Union. The idea was that a European peninsula conquered by the Soviet Union would provide the technology and personnel to construct a fleet that could challenge the U.S. The solution was to create NATO. NATO and the concept of mutually assured destruction blocked Soviet westward expansion and, in the event war broke out, would direct the Soviet navy from trying to control sea lanes to trying to interdict U.S. convoys reinforcing NATO. The threat now is China’s seeking to secure access to the sea. The U.S. has created an informal alliance stretching from Japan to the Indian Ocean to contain China. It has also used economic power to pressure China. The key in both strategies was an early response and to use military power to increase the risk of war on the Soviet or Chinese part and then wait to see if they make a move.
(click to enlarge)
4. Nuclear Weapons: The awe and sense of doom generated by nuclear weapons have died down since the end of the Cold War, but nukes are still the quintessential American weapon. U.S. strategy post-World War II is to construct boundaries against significant enemies to see how they react – i.e., push the boundaries or invite a stable confrontation. In this case, nuclear weapons are the wall. They are not an offensive tool for a country that should avoid offensive operations. They are stabilizers for a country that needs to pursue the status quo.
5. Economics: In most countries, economics limits both the readiness and deterrent power of a military. In the United States, the economy actually provides both. In terms of purchasing power, it creates a stable domestic base that can generate military technology and a significant force. In terms of managing global relations, the economy provides non-military incentives and penalties. As the largest importer in the world, the ability of the U.S. to limit purchases can reshape policy. Used prudently, the willingness to purchase goods from a country can create relationships that prevent the need for military action. Washington needs to develop a strategic economic program that reduces the risk of combat and increases potential allies that might be prepared to carry the burden on shared conflicts. This requires a redefinition of how the private sector makes decisions to some degree.
6. Attaining the primary interest: The primary interest of the United States is to protect the homeland against foreign invasion. The purpose of that security is to maintain an economic system able to provide wealth to the American public and to maintain the regime. Put simply, some things will threaten security, and some will not. For those things that threaten the nation, there must be careful calculus of whether the threat and the cost of mitigating the threat are aligned. The great danger of the United States has been to recognize threats without recognizing either the cost or the probability of successfully containing them. This has led to a series of wars that the United States did not win and that averted attention from core interests while at times destabilizing the nation.
7. Terrorism: Terrorist groups are small and diffuse and are therefore unable to be countered with traditional military action. Time and again, militaries struggle to determine where these groups are and contain them, even if they are in a country known to harbor them (Afghanistan, for example). Intelligence organizations and special forces are essential in this regard. National strategy cannot be diverted from geopolitically defined interests because doing so disperses U.S. power against a group that poses no existential threat against the United States.
(click to enlarge)
There are, of course, foreign policy issues that need to be managed but that do not constitute a significant part of the national strategy. The dilemma is that those who work on such matters regard them as supremely important, as they should. But this turns into a bureaucratic matter or a political one. Minor State Department officials will search for importance, and presidents will search for votes. National strategy may be clear, but its administration is complex. It ultimately falls to the president to set the ever-shifting boundaries and preserve the essential character of national strategy. Otherwise, minor matters may become major wars and destroy a presidency.
Non-Strategic Wars: Vietnam and Afghanistan
The decision to go to war in Afghanistan was rooted in a misunderstanding of American geopolitics and strategy, not unlike what happened in Vietnam decades earlier. The United States fought World War II to prevent the consolidation of Europe under a single power. That was based on an overriding American imperative: preventing a challenge to U.S. domination of the Atlantic. World War II broke up Germany, but the Soviet Union emerged as the new threat capable of dominating Europe. An American alliance, NATO, and the danger of thermonuclear war blocked Soviet expansion. Europe was effectively locked down.
The United States understood this as a struggle against communism. In part, this was correct, since the Soviets wanted to weaken the United States. With nuclear weapons rendering direct confrontation impossible, the only strategy open to the Soviets was to attempt to increase the presence of communist regimes outside of Europe in the hopes that the U.S. would reduce its presence in Europe to deal with them. The U.S. was sensitive to the spread of communist regimes but generally responded only with political and economic pressure and covert operations. One exception was the Cuban missile crisis, which was a fundamental threat to North America’s security and which the U.S. countered by threatening war, leading to Soviet capitulation. After Korea, there were no more full-scale anti-communist wars until Vietnam. The U.S. took the rise of a communist insurgency in Vietnam as more threatening than when the same occurred in Congo or Syria.
Vietnam did not pose a strategic threat to the United States. Even unified it could not threaten U.S. control of the Pacific, and the fall of Vietnam would represent only an extension of North Vietnam. But the U.S. saw two reasons for intervening there. One was the domino theory, in which the fall of Vietnam would lead to the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. The second reason was credibility. The U.S. alliance system, particularly NATO, depended on the belief that the United States would carry out obligations to resist communist expansion. The U.S. was particularly concerned about Europe, where French President Charles de Gaulle was raising questions about American reliability and advocating an independent nuclear deterrent. Any shift in the alliance would be partial but would weaken the wall containing the Soviets.
The words “domino” and “credibility” dominated the case for intervention in Vietnam. Not mentioned was the possibility that a defeat might accelerate these processes. In the end, the fact that this was a communist expansion trumped any consideration that this was a non-strategic war. Another fact was ignored. During World War II, the United States was responding to aggression rather than initiating war. That made a critical difference in the domestic political dynamism. In Vietnam, the U.S. had to be successful in a non-strategic war – a war that didn’t appear essential and wasn’t essential.
The need to maintain a political consensus for the Vietnam War was not a luxury. It was crucial. But American leaders believed U.S. forces could rapidly crush the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. The problem was that the U.S. military was created for a European war, a strategic war. It was trained to fight against a Soviet armored thrust using aircraft, armor and the complex logistics needed to support such an operation. The military was not shaped to fight a war against light, mobile infantry in terrain ranging from hills to jungles. Washington assumed that airstrikes on Haiphong would force capitulation, and it accounted for neither the near-religious commitment of Vietnamese troops nor the ruthlessness of the North Vietnamese regime. The U.S. came as close as possible to winning after the failed Tet Offensive, but command failures, logistical problems and operational constraints, along with rapid reinforcement by the North, rendered that impossible. And that was supplemented by a misunderstanding of the event by the American press that was instrumental in turning the U.S. public against the war.
The problem with the Vietnam War was that it was not strategically necessary. The U.S. public would sanction a cheap victory but not an endless war. It knew that neither the domino theory nor America’s credibility depended on it. The commanders in the war had fought in World War II, where both fronts were strategically essential. They and their troops were not accustomed to accepting a war that would run for seven years before American capitulation.
A similar process happened in Afghanistan. As a nation, Afghanistan was not strategic to the United States. Al-Qaida had planned the attack on 9/11 from there, and the initial use of the CIA, some U.S. special operations forces and anti-Taliban tribes in defeating the group made sense. But al-Qaida escaped to Pakistan, and a decision had to be made either to withdraw or to attempt to take control of Afghanistan. The obvious answer was to leave, but the one chosen was to stay and to begin by launching airstrikes on various Afghan cities. The Taliban controlled those cities, and the air attack was intended to break them. They left the cities, and there was hope that the war was won. But the Taliban had simply retreated and dispersed, and over time they regrouped in the areas they came from and knew best.
The mission evolved into trying to destroy a force deeply embedded in Afghan society and geography. The Taliban could be contained in their areas, at a cost in casualties, but it was impossible to break them. If the Viet Cong fought with near-religious commitment, the Taliban fought with genuine religious commitment. The U.S. tried to create a pro-American Afghan National Army as it had created the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The idea of creating an army in the middle of a war has many flaws, but the greatest is that the first recruits they got would be sent by communists or the Taliban. The result was an army that had its enemy in strategic positions. The enemy would anticipate any offensive the new army might mount.
A military force is created to satisfy strategic imperatives. When a non-strategic war is fought, the chances are overwhelming that the force, and particularly the command structure, will not be ready. Vietnam took seven years. Afghanistan took 20 years. Neither war ended because of a lack of patience by Americans. They ended because the enemy had matured; in Vietnam and Afghanistan, while U.S. troops rotated in and out, the enemy was at home. And they ended because what had been true for years had become manifest: The U.S. couldn’t win, and no great damage to American secrets would flow from the end of the war.
Neither war fit into the strategy imposed on the U.S. by geopolitical reality. Neither military was designed to fight a war against a committed, experienced, agile light infantry. Fighting a non-strategic war inevitably weakens the military deployed. And in both wars, the enemy might have been underestimated, but an ill-prepared American force was greatly overestimated. What ensued was not the failure of the troops on the ground. It was a failure of training, command and, most of all, the fact that U.S. troops wanted to go home. The Taliban were home.
Geopolitics defines strategy. Strategy defines the force. The price of engaging in a non-strategic war is high, and the temptation to fight non-strategic wars is great. They open with real alarm and slowly descend into failure. As important, they distract from the nation’s strategic priorities. The Vietnam War significantly weakened U.S. capabilities in Europe, a weakness the Soviets did not take advantage of. Afghanistan didn’t undermine the force, but it once again shook its confidence and the confidence of the U.S. public. It did not, however, diminish American power.
The two wars lasted as long as they did because the presidents involved (it is always the president) found it easier to continue them than to end them. Losing a war is hard. Deciding that you lost a war still underway and stopping it is harder. And that is the price you pay for non-strategic wars.
From the Non-Strategic to the Extremely Strategic: China
The Soviet threat to Europe and the Atlantic was managed without war. The strategic nature of the threat compelled a clear understanding, appropriate forces and political support. In due course the weaker party, the Soviets, cracked under the economic pressure imposed by the United States. That is the ideal strategic outcome.
The threat in Europe has diminished greatly. The Russians are seeking to regain lost territories but are in no position to threaten Europe. The trans-Atlantic alliance structure the United States created is no longer relevant and will not be for years, if ever. Alliances are vital in generating additional military and economic power. They provide geographical advantages and shift the psychology of adversaries. But as the strategic condition evolves, so does the alliance. The strategic reality of 1945 was a powerful Russia and a weak Europe. The strategic situation today is a weakened Russia and a prosperous Europe. The need for NATO, therefore, shifts to something less central in U.S. policy and less defined by what is to be done, just as it shifts in other members. The danger of alliances that outlast their utility is a distortion of national strategy such that they can weaken the United States instead of strengthening it. The worst-case scenario is that they can draw the United States into policies and wars that undermine rather than enhance its national security.
(click to enlarge)
The diminution of the European theater leaves the United States free to deal with the Pacific Ocean and the potential threat from China. China urgently needs to force the United States back, away from its shores and deeper into the Pacific. This began with the American demand for equal access to the Chinese market, China’s refusal and the United States’ imposition of tariffs on China. The economic issue was not critical, but China reasonably drew the conclusion that the U.S. view of China had changed and that China had to be prepared for a worst-case scenario.
The worst case would be that the U.S. would impose an embargo on China’s east coast ports and/or along the island chokepoints east of China. China is a mercantile power dependent on maritime trade. Closure of the ports, as well as the Strait of Malacca, would cripple China. The U.S. has not threatened this, but China must act on the worst-case scenario. The United States has created an informal alliance structure that concerns China. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore are all formally or informally aligned with the United States, or simply hostile to China. In addition, India, Australia and the United Kingdom are actively involved in this quasi-alliance. China must assume that at some point the U.S. will try to bring pressure if not on the ports then by a blockade of this line of islands.
(click to enlarge)
The United States is roughly in the position that it was in during the Cold War. It has an alliance that provides it the geography needed to meet a Chinese attack, to launch an attack or simply to hold its position. China must act to change this reality. One option is major economic concessions to the United States and others in this group. Another option is to launch an attack designed to break the blockade line. Another is to simply hold this position unless and until the U.S. moves. Or possibly China could do what the Soviets did: create a non-strategic threat that the U.S. can’t resist, given its well-known appetite for the non-strategic.
Launching a war opens the door to defeat as well as victory. China cannot be certain what would happen, and it is not clear what the bill for a defeat would be. The Chinese economy is always under pressure, with vast numbers of relatively poor people. Economic concessions are not a possibility. Staying in this position allows the U.S. to make the first move, and given what China sees as U.S. military adventurism, Beijing is not sure the U.S. won’t overestimate China’s power. Therefore, the most likely choice would be a diversion.
The Chinese have the ability to force regime change in any number of countries that would appear to the United States as a direct challenge, like Vietnam and Afghanistan did. The U.S. tendency to accept these non-strategic challenges also includes Iraq and, to some extent, Korea. China might draw the same conclusion the Soviets did, which is that the U.S. will respond to a threat even if it is non-strategic. China has not engaged in such activities for a long time, but the current situation is riskier than before. Creating a diversion could be seen as the low-risk option.
This is the ultimate problem with the American century: It is reactive, and it sometimes reacts to chum cast on the water by its enemies in the hope the U.S. will bite. The central problem is that U.S. strategy is not driven by the strategic, and as a result, distinguishing the non-strategic from the strategic has been difficult. A new American strategy is needed to provide the discipline to avoid a Chinese attempt to divert the United States.
The ideal outcome of the U.S.-Chinese dispute is a negotiated settlement. Neither can absorb the cost of war, although the U.S. has a geographic advantage that can neutralize any weapon advantage China might have gained. And this is the point of the strategy. First, war is to be rare, not the norm. Avoiding war requires geopolitical, strategic and disciplined thinking. The U.S. stood on the line in Europe for 45 years and ended the conflict with the Soviet Union peacefully, except for the Vietnam War, which was not material. The U.S. and China will maneuver over the Western Pacific, but if the U.S. focuses on strategy, it will likely not end in war. Preparation for war is essential. Throwing away that preparation on non-strategic and bloody distractions is the American habit it must overcome.
-
All China has to do is let us fall apart from internal rot.
-
September 14, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
On Geoeconomics
There's a shift underway that could change the rules in the global system.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
Last week, I spoke and moderated at several conferences in person – a rare thing since the pandemic began – whose topics ranged from defense and security to regional commerce to European affairs. The common denominator, of course, was geopolitics, but what struck me most about my conversations was that, rather than the withdrawal from Afghanistan or the elections in Germany, nearly everyone was concerned foremost by inflation and the green economic shift underway in Europe.
In fact, nearly every conversation had one thing in common: Our society’s economic challenges in light of the pandemic. Until August, inflation was generally triggered by the energy sector and by a narrow set of goods such as semiconductors whose price increases were linked to the supply chain crisis. But, as evidenced by recent upticks in food and services prices, it seems as though the effects are widening. Bad weather conditions, unusual droughts and floods that destroyed harvests, often cited as the collateral damage of climate change, have contributed to an increase in food prices.
And though that was the case even before the pandemic started, the pandemic has indeed exposed the vulnerabilities in the food system, impacting production, supply and delivery. Increased ocean freight rates, higher fuel prices and a shortage of truck drivers are pushing up the cost of transportation services. Moreover, the pandemic created difficulties for producers to access the labor force they need to get crops delivered in due time (to say nothing of the workers needed to deliver and distribute other goods). Such was the case for tomatoes, oranges and strawberries producers in Europe in 2020. In Australia, industry groups fear that pandemic-related challenges could derail what is expected to be a stellar crop of winter grains this season.
The food industry is hardly the only industry grappling with these kinds of challenges. An explanation put forward by HR specialists cites the fact that there seems to be a mismatch between the industries hiring and those seeking jobs, a development apparently borne out by the uneven recovery in different industries. Another explanation refers to the fact that, during the pandemic, many workers moved away from the cities where they worked, leaving their jobs unfilled until there is a better sense of when the pandemic may subside. This speaks to the importance for the workforce to be able – and willing – to migrate from one place to another.
Global Socioeconomic Polls
(click to enlarge)
For the first time, we’re seeing both high unemployment and high inflation – something that is abnormal when economies are recovering from recession, and just generally abnormal. Inflation typically comes alongside recovery and growth, which typically lowers unemployment. The problem is that inflation is unbalanced: There are too many jobs and too few people willing to take them.
Rising Unemployment and Inflation
(click to enlarge)
The summer of 2021 has been anything but normal, of course. The pandemic is not over. The Delta variant, combined with low vaccination rates, has pushed COVID-19 infections up again and has thus slowed the service sector's recovery. In addition to supply shortages cutting into both consumer and business spending worldwide, a steady wave of grim news concerning Afghanistan, global political stability, and also extreme events like hurricanes and wildfires have eroded consumer confidence.
Composite Leading Indicator (CLI)
(click to enlarge)
Confidence is essential for an economy to function. The pandemic has shown once more how vulnerable our current social system is. As with the 2008 global financial crisis, people are witnessing firsthand the negative effects of globalization, even as they reconcile the fact that interconnectivity and interdependency are realities that cannot be quickly undone. It’s only reasonable that they question the current rules of the game if those rules create pain and suffering.
And, after all, it is the people’s tolerance for pain that triggers political change. With so much general discontent with the way that the global system works, the idea that there is something inherently wrong with our society has in its own way advanced the conversation on sustainability and climate change. The perception that we live in a fragile world demands that we ask our governments to fortify our very existence – all while stabilizing the economy. To be sure, it’s a radical change, one that requires socio-economic restructuring.
From a geopolitical point of view, states are asked to make use of their economic power to secure safe and stable living conditions for their people. This has long been the case, but the urgency of needed changes at a time of intense international economic competition makes for the transformation of geopolitics into geoeconomics. The traditional meaning of geoeconomics is that nations employ foreign trade tools to achieve imperatives. In the current context of deeply uncertain times – thanks to the pandemic, climate change and the digital revolution – the geoeconomic function of the nation-state refers to making use of economic tools to achieve political goals and to increase the nation-state’s power. Controlling the markets, managing trade surpluses and making use of economic sanctions or strategic investments to enhance political influence are part of the arsenal a country can use to build, maintain and increase its economic power.
But what is economic power? How can we measure it, given the complexity of the pandemic times we live in? Real gross domestic product growth and trade dependencies give just some basic ideas of the economic stability of a country. With the pandemic, we have learned that the power of disposition over strategic raw materials plays an important role in keeping strategic sectors alive. What constitutes a strategic sector, and therefore a strategic raw material, also changes by location and time. Oil is not as powerful now as it was in the 1970s. Water supply, while essential for everyone, is more strategically valuable in some places than others. Extreme phenomena attributed to climate change also pose specific questions in the longer term. The ability to produce technological innovation will give countries influence over critical infrastructure and therefore enable them to secure their stability in times of extreme events such as droughts and pandemics.
At the same time, the ability for a country to enforce international standards and norms is key to setting the rules for the global economic system and for exerting influence over other states. With globalization, we already have countries using different norms operating in the same market economy, but accessing strategic markets is still difficult due to the prevalence of Western-based standards.
There are therefore three elements a state should focus on in building its geoeconomic strategy. First, it needs to retain the economic strength it currently has. Second, it needs to reduce one-sided economic dependencies. Third, it needs to develop a strategy that captures and expands on the value of its economic strength. In taking these three steps, the state focuses on defining its economic strengths, which are ultimately shaped by the population. The state’s human resources are its most valuable asset for geoeconomic strategy, particularly in uncertain times.
This is why the unstable relationship between inflation and unemployment needs to be taken as a serious signal of economic restructuring. Human behavior wrought by human pain is potentially triggering a revolution that could change the rules in the global system.
-
September 20, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
Rolling in the Deep of the Indo-Pacific
Big things are happening beneath the surface in the increasingly crowded waters of East Asia.
By: Phillip Orchard
In a landmark announcement Thursday, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom unveiled a new trilateral Indo-Pacific security alliance. The pact is expected to focus on all sorts of things, including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. The centerpiece of the pact, though, is good, old-fashioned hard power: The British and U.S. are going to sell Australia nuclear-powered submarines. South Korea, meanwhile, has quietly been making waves of its own. Over the past few months, it’s unveiled a host of new indigenous weapons systems and arms procurements. The biggest came last week, with an apparently successful test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile. This makes South Korea the only non-nuclear power with such a capability. Both developments could have profound implications for the regional security landscape, but they signal very different things about the state of the U.S. alliance structure.
Ending the Debate
It’d be easy to see all the hype around the new security alliance as more than a little overblown. After all, the three countries were already treaty allies. Each is also a member of the crucial Five Eyes intelligence-sharing pact. They’ve had deep cultural, economic and strategic affinities dating back to the days when the U.S. and Australia were still British colonies. There are U.S. Marines in Darwin, Australia, and U.S. troops all over the U.K. And British warplanes make routine landings on U.S. carriers. The British had already announced plans for long-term warship deployments to the Indo-Pacific.
But AUKUS, as the pact is known, is still a huge deal. The hysterical reactions from France (which has seen its own submarine deal with Australia scrapped, and which recalled its ambassadors to both Australia and the U.S. as a result) and China (which should but probably isn’t taking a long hard look in the mirror after unwittingly pushing Australia in this direction) – make as much clear.
The thing is, not all alliances are created equal. It’s what allies are willing and capable of doing for each other, particularly during times of stress, that gives pacts their weight. And it’s the tight alignment of interests that gives alliances their longevity.
Australia has long been a stalwart U.S. ally in just about every respect – even continually getting its hands dirty in U.S. conflicts of marginal Australian interest in the Middle East and elsewhere to demonstrate its continued value as an ally and keep the U.S. attuned to Australian needs. But beneath the surface there’s often been quite a bit of ambivalence in Canberra about tying its fate so closely to a superpower half a world away. In most practical aspects, Australia is an Asian power. Its economy is overwhelmingly orientated toward East Asia, where the biggest buyers of its commodities, its biggest sellers and its most important investors reside. Its most vital sea lanes run through East Asia’s most contentious waters. So every few years or so, a robust debate reemerges in Australia about whether to reorient itself more toward its regional neighbors, including in the security realm.
Australia’s dependence on East Asia is only intensifying, but the debate around how to manage this dependency appears now to be over. The decision to purchase nuclear subs from the U.S. and U.K. ended it. The submarine deal Australia signed with France in 2016 made sense as a purely defensive move. The cutting-edge diesel-electric attack-class submarines France agreed to build would’ve substantially enhanced Australia’s ability to patrol waters in its near abroad – giving it a leg up if and when the simmering contests for maritime dominance farther north along the first island chain came down to the South Pacific. There was a diplomatic component, too, in the decision to go with France rather than Japan, which until the last minute had been widely expected to land the deal. By doing so, Australia made sure to steer clear of any potential blowback from Beijing, which is none too keen to see Japan make good on its ambitions to jumpstart an arms export industry. (Despite the self-imposed limits on its military, Tokyo has long been an elite player in submarine operations.) Australia could credibly claim it was tending its own garden. But Chinese blowback has come Australia’s way anyway, repeatedly, over matters both big (e.g., Australia’s support for the Quad) and trivial (milquetoast calls for a World Health Organization investigation into COVID-19’s origins).
(click to enlarge)
At least partly as a result, Australia is making a profound strategic leap and thus pursuing nuclear subs. These are very different from diesel subs, both tactically and diplomatically. The biggest difference is range. While diesel subs need to refuel relatively frequently, nuclear subs can stay underwater more or less indefinitely; the only real limitation is their crews’ food supply. This would make them more effective in any sort of operation to impose a blockade on China around the string of chokepoints spanning from the Sulu Sea to the Lombok, Sunda and Malacca straits. Crucially, it also allows Australia to take on intelligence-gathering in the South and East China seas, and, if push comes to shove, combat operations. As it happens, anti-submarine surveillance and warfare are widely considered to be some of the Chinese military’s major weaknesses.
U.S. Partners and Chinese Maritime Chokepoints
(click to enlarge)
The move also signals a clear intent by Australia to take on these sorts of operations. The U.S. probably wouldn’t be willing to share such sensitive technology with the Aussies otherwise. (The U.K. had been the only recipient of such technologies.) And China has little choice but to assume that the Australians will soon be poking around near its doorstep. So Australia is effectively saying that it’s adopting the U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific as its own. If you fear Chinese blowback or even are merely interested to keep your options open, this isn’t the move you make.
A Louder Voice
South Korea’s moves are, in essence, saying the opposite: that it needs to put itself in position to act apart from the Americans. This isn’t to say the U.S. opposes South Korea’s build-up. Most of the South’s recent major arms purchases came from the U.S., after all. And the U.S. has basically green-lit the South’s missile build-up through a series of moves beginning in 2012, lifting long-held restrictions on the range and payload capacities of South Korean rockets. (The original intent of these was to keep Seoul from attempting to restart the war with the North and possibly pulling the U.S. back into a war not of its choosing.)
Still, the alliance is on shaky footing for several reasons. There are the U.S. threats to abandon South Korea over stalled burden-sharing negotiations – a reflection of latent anti-alliance political sentiment in the U.S. that never really goes away. (There’s a widespread assumption in Seoul that the U.S. troop deployment on the peninsula would not have survived a second Trump term.) There’s the recent resurgence of historical South Korean-Japanese tensions, resulting in a brief trade war and a near-collapse of a trilateral intelligence-sharing pact that the U.S. had spent a decade trying to forge. There are also inevitable signs of strategic divergence between Washington and Seoul over China – as well as some disenchantment in Seoul over a lack of U.S. support when Beijing took aim at the South Korean economy over the installation of a U.S. missile defense system.
Most important, there are major tactical disagreements over the best way to deal with Pyongyang at a time when the North is sowing doubts in Seoul (and Tokyo) that the U.S. will remain willing to come to its defense amid an attack from the North. The bottom line is that South Korea has legitimate reasons to fear both abandonment by the U.S. and entanglement in a U.S. war it doesn’t want to fight. Fear of one or the other is common in any alliance. For an ally to fear both simultaneously is fairly rare because in such cases the weaker ally, feeling extorted, tends to look for a way out before the partnership turns into a politically unsustainable vassalage.
So the South is steadily preparing for the day when it needs to stand on its own. It says quite a bit that this is happening under the center-left administration of President Moon Jae-in, whose North Korea strategy puts a lot more faith in engagement with Pyongyang. Under Moon, defense spending has accelerated compared to previous administrations, increasing by around 7 percent per year.
In most ways, South Korea’s build-up could ultimately benefit the U.S., which needs its allies to be capable of both looking after their own needs and contributing more to multilateral initiatives. A stronger South frees up U.S. resources for other needs. And though Seoul is reluctant to challenge China with the same intensity of Japan and the U.S., China is still a problem for the South. It can speask with a louder voice whenever it so chooses.
But its pursuit of submarine-launched ballistic missiles hints at a strategic logic in Seoul that could end up introducing profound complications to the regional landscape. There’s a reason no other non-nuclear power has SLBMs: The main point of them is the ability to hold the threat of mass destruction over an enemy indefinitely, and South Korea thinks it needs this to hold a nuclear North at bay. It’s currently snuggled under the U.S. nuclear umbrella and has no nuclear program of its own. But it has been pursuing conventional missiles with payload capacities large enough to at least credibly threaten decapitation strikes against the government of Kim Jong Un. And, like Japan, the South is generally considered to be “a quarter-turn of the wrench away” from going nuclear.
In other words, it has the expertise and the civilian nuclear base needed to develop a nuclear weapons program of its own relatively quickly. It dabbled with nuclear weapons programs in the 1970s, and according to a 2015 NPEC report, South Korea already has enough plutonium to produce thousands of nukes. It’s even believed to have nuclear submarine technologies quietly under development. As the proverbial “minnow among whales,” it has obvious strategic reasons to go this route. And, unlike Japan, polls regularly suggest it has the political backing at home to do so. Certain South Korean papers and politicians regularly agitate for it.
There are any number of reasons, both strategic and economic, for the South to steer clear of this path. The U.S. and many of the South’s friends will oppose it. Seoul is loath to push Japan in a similar direction. China would flip out. Even taking steps to go nuclear would threaten the South’s access to uranium imports that it needs for civilian purposes. Nuclear programs are wildly expensive, and the South Korean military has more pressing needs for many other things. The protection provided by the U.S. umbrella has allowed the South to focus most of its energies instead on getting fabulously rich. But it’s apparent that the South is serious about keeping this option available. The SLBM program makes this much clear.
-
Editor's Note: This assessment is the second of a four-part series that explores China-Taiwan relations through the lens of the latter's economy, politics, military affairs and regional relations. Part one can be found here.
A more aggressive mainland leadership and more skeptical Taiwanese populace are forcing Taiwan's two main political parties to emphasize national sovereignty, which will amplify cross-strait tensions in advance of Taiwanese elections in 2022 and 2024, setting the stage for a more antagonistic relationship in the long term. Since 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping has increasingly used public remarks to associate the 1992 Consensus — an ambiguous bilateral agreement on the statehood of Taiwan — with the "one country, two systems" model of governing Hong Kong. This rhetoric has combined with Beijing's 2019 crackdown on Hong Kong protesters and the 2020 National Security Law in Hong Kong to cast doubt on the sustainability of the cross-strait status quo, in which Taiwan functions as a de facto independent country. It has also spurred a marked shift in Taiwanese sentiment against China, which in turn has led Taiwan's conservative Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party to refocus on protecting Taiwan's sovereignty.
As of June 2021, data from Taiwan's National Chengchi University showed that 56% of Taiwanese support the status quo in cross-strait relations (no independence, no reunification), while 31% support independence and only 7% want reunification. This compares to the June 2017 distribution of 58% status quo, 22% independence, and 12% reunification.
Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, which plans Taipei's policy toward China, showed the share of Taiwanese perceiving Beijing as hostile toward the Taiwanese people had increased from 46% in June 2017 to 60.5% in March 2021, the second-highest figure after March 2020 (61.5%), when President Tsai Ing-wen was reelected.
A line graph showing Taiwanese political sentiment regarding the island's status vis-a-vis the mainland
In advance of the 2022 local and 2024 presidential elections, Taiwan's two main political parties are seeking to redefine themselves as staunch defenders of sovereignty in a new era of contentious cross-strait relations without sacrificing its economic growth, which is dependent on the mainland. Historically, the KMT has downplayed issues of sovereignty and emphasized cross-strait economic ties in the hope of deterring China's territorial ambitions, while the DPP has highlighted sovereignty issues, been circumspect about making political agreements — like the 1992 Consensus — with China, and sought to diversify Taiwan's economic relations away from China. Now, however, the KMT is reconsidering its stance on sovereignty matters, the DPP is realizing the difficulty of replacing China as a trade partner and both parties must cater to a more China-skeptic electorate set to grow as China's deepening tensions with the United States embolden pro-independence voices in Taiwan.
KMT chairman Johnny Chiang has defended Taiwan's sovereignty since Xi's 2019 remarks and criticized Beijing's military threats while maintaining support for cross-strait trade. His rival for the Sept. 25 election for KMT chair, Eric Chu, favors restoring "conciliatory" relations with China. Given the electorate's distaste for China, Chiang seems the more likely KMT candidate to gather votes from centrists during the 2022 and 2024 elections.
President Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP, who favors the status quo, increasingly must soften anti-China legislation from the party's pro-independence faction while still pushing for Taiwan's sovereignty in cross-strait interactions. She is struggling to implement economic decoupling, as her policies have coincided with deepening trade ties with China amid the pandemic. Nonetheless, given the electorate's pro-status quo views, a moderate DPP candidate like Tsai will poll better in 2022 and 2024, assuming the winner can maintain economic growth and defend Taiwan’s ability to represent itself in global forums.
As they prepare to contend with a likely less amicable Taiwanese leadership, Beijing's efforts to influence Taiwan's upcoming elections are likely to be less effective against improved Taiwanese defenses against propaganda, forcing Beijing to rely on overt military threats, diplomatic pressure campaigns and small-scale economic coercion. In November 2018 local elections, China successfully used online influence tactics, like fake campaign groups and social media content farms generating fake coverage, as well as close relationships with Taiwanese news outlets to promote pro-China views and KMT candidates to help the KMT sweep local elections. Ahead of the 2020 presidential and legislative elections, however, Tsai's administration took a number of steps it is likely to replicate in 2022 and 2024 to reduce the impact of Chinese influence efforts and leave Beijing more reliant on other coercive measures likely to generate comparatively more public discontent in Taiwan.
Taipei cooperated with Facebook to take down Chinese inauthentic online content farms, passed a law to punish entities (including news outlets) that abet foreign campaigns to sway elections and mobilized a volunteer fact-checking group to respond to fake news inquiries on social media. Along with these efforts, the KMT's poorly run campaign and China's handling of the 2019 Hong Kong protests helped Tsai get reelected with 57% of the vote.
After the 2020 defense campaign against online influence tactics, DPP lawmakers are now looking to strengthen laws on national security, trade secrets, the transparency of foreign political influence, media influence, illegal donations and other foreign political activities in the current legislative session from September to December and the next from February through May, all ahead of the November 2022 local elections.
Though Beijing will certainly try again to influence Taiwan’s 2022 local and 2024 presidential elections, Taipei’s improved countermeasures will leave China increasingly reliant on other methods to coerce Taiwan, like military flyovers — China launched the most aerial incursions into Taiwanese airspace in 2020 than any year since 1996 — and trade restrictions targeting Taiwan's farmers and other economic sectors dependent on mainland markets. Compared to more covert online influence efforts, these more overt coercive measures will provoke greater Taiwanese frustration with the mainland.
Through 2024 and beyond, Taiwan's more sovereignty-focused politics and Beijing's deeper reliance on overt and belligerent military and economic intimidation over more discreet political influence campaigns will result in a more antagonistic status quo in cross-strait relations. This new normal will push the United States and regional partners to expand their political and security engagement with Taiwan, which will heighten overall tensions and create sporadic flashpoints that disrupt business and political links amid expected Chinese retaliation. Even as all sides seek to limit escalation and have incentives to limit disruptions, a much less likely — but more provocative — U.S. or allied decision to formally recognize Taiwan or make a formal defense pact with the island could push China to seek reunification with the island by force, especially if Beijing perceives room for cross-strait political negotiations as having disappeared or if societal efforts for Taiwanese independence have become the new norm.
Whether under the KMT or DPP, Taipei will make bolder commitments — mainly rhetoric from the KMT and punitive policies from the DPP — to defend Taiwanese sovereignty. Both parties will continue to recognize the importance of Chinese ties to the economy, but the DPP will become more creative and possibly more intrusive in economic decoupling efforts aimed at businesses, like the amendment proposed in August to ban Taiwanese workers from employment on the mainland.
Taipei will likely supplement its more defensive political posture toward Beijing with tighter informal military partnerships and a greater focus on attaining recognition in international forums. To do so, Taiwan will try to capitalize on governing accomplishments like its effective COVID-19 management to pitch itself as a responsible international partner.
As it rebalances to the Indo-Pacific, the United States will likely double down on its support for Taiwan. This will take the form of more diplomatic meetings, like the June meeting between three U.S. senators and Tsai, and perhaps even clearer statements of U.S. defense obligations toward Taiwan as China's threats to Taiwan become bolder. The United States has already pushed the envelope in 2021 on its defense relation with Taiwan, as seen by the agreement on coast guard cooperation signed in March and (more subtly) the July stopover of a U.S. military plane in Taiwan under the auspices of delivering a package to a U.S. diplomat.
Regional powers like Japan may also more clearly define their political and security relationships with Taiwan, as shown by Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi's August remarks on the importance of Taiwan's survival for regional stability. But these diplomatic shifts will be limited by the deep economic dependence on China for countries like Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
China will become more sensitive to perceived changes in cross-strait relations and in how other countries treat Taiwan, reacting with stronger economic and diplomatic retaliation that causes short-term but severe disruptions for affected companies and/or governments. Recent examples of such retaliation include China's March 1 ban on Taiwanese pineapple imports after a proposal to downplay the prospect of reunification in the Taiwanese Constitution and the Sept. 20 ban on Taiwanese apple imports after the United States considered changing the name of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office to the "Taiwan Representative Office."
Should the United States and regional powers deepen their diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Beijing will boost military coercion (e.g. aerial flyovers), cyberattacks and trade restrictions against the island. Much less likely — but much more likely to escalate matters, would be the United States and its allies take clear defense stances about Taiwan, and especially if Taiwanese politicians seek de jure independence or close off cross-strait avenues for political dialogue — China would likely trigger forceful reunification with Taiwan, including either a naval blockade to force Taiwanese political concessions or an outright military invasion of Taiwan's outlying islands or the entire country. These military and diplomatic dynamics will be discussed in the next installations of this series on how Taiwan handles China.
-
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/09/deter-china-relearn-lost-art-dissuasion/185638/
-
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/ben-rhodes-book-proves-obama-officials
Ben Rhodes' Book Proves Obama Officials' Lies, and His Own, About Edward Snowden and Russia
It is hard to overstate the sociopathy of US national security officials: their casual willingness to blatantly lie about the gravest matters is limitless.
-
Needed: A Military Strategy for China
The Pentagon, with its outdated policies, may not have the luxury of time when a crisis develops.
By Seth Cropsey
Nov. 2, 2021 6:37 pm ET
‘Strategic ambiguity” is the longstanding U.S. policy toward Taiwan, but President Biden’s approach has been more ambiguous than strategic. Asked at an Oct. 21 town hall whether he would defend the island nation against a Chinese attack, Mr. Biden replied, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.” The White House then “clarified” his answer by reasserting its commitment to ambiguity.
All this begs the question: What should the U.S. do in defense of Taiwan? And it raises a broader one: What should the U.S. do to counter China’s military challenge?
These two inextricable questions are united by U.S. policy makers’ failure to answer either. China’s strategic objective is to monopolize the South and East China seas and use the resulting economic power to reshape the global order. But doing so requires breaking the U.S. Indo-Pacific alliance system, which in turn requires shattering the First Island Chain, which runs through the Japanese archipelago, Luzon in the Philippines, and Borneo, terminating with the Vietnamese coastline. The First Island Chain limits China’s maritime exit points into the Philippine Sea and the Indian Ocean, making control central to Chinese strategy. Taiwan lies at the center of the First Island Chain.
In such a conflict, deterrence and warfare become synonymous in policy. The U.S. has yet to articulate what victory would mean in a war with China. The Biden administration has suggested no desire to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party and replace it with a regime that respects international order. Rather, the objective seems to be to maintain the status quo, which means defending the sovereignty of all Pacific states, the territorial integrity of regional allies including Taiwan, and the freedom of navigation that undergirds the international system. Accomplishing these objectives means convincing China to stand down from its increasing regional aggression or in a war, to sue for peace. Accomplishing that requires identifying what China holds most valuable.
The answer is simple. The Chinese Communist Party desires survival. President Xi Jinping fears that the managed capitalism of his predecessors won’t prevent the emergence of a middle class that challenges the party domestically. He has turned for inspiration to three past Chinese rulers: Mao Zedong ; Qin Shi Huang (247-221 B.C.), the first Chinese emperor; and Gaozu (202-195 B.C.), the first Han emperor.
The most effective way to destroy the Chinese economy is a long-term blockade. A Sino-American confrontation would trigger a global economic depression that would harm Americans and their allies. But democracies’ electoral legitimacy makes them more resilient to such shocks than authoritarian regimes. A war-generated economic downturn in the West would bring high unemployment and tighter household budgets in the U.S. and, at the very least, an energy crisis elsewhere in the world. In China, such a downturn would usher in cascading power failures, production stoppages, soaring unemployment, and likely riots challenging the Communist Party’s legitimacy.
The huge Chinese social-media site Weibo reveals discontent with some government acts. For example, despite being accused of murder, Ou Jinzhong, who died Oct. 18 while awaiting arrest by Chinese police, received widespread public support on Weibo. He had lived in a shack for five years while local officials denied his requests to build a proper home. Similarly, although the Communist Party appears to have the Evergrande default under control, protests in Shenzhen and Hubei broke out when the full extent of the disaster was revealed.
China isn’t on the cusp of revolution. But the party understands that a sustained economic downturn would trigger unrest that could overwhelm its internal security. A blockade carries risks, not least because it is a long-term strategy that the U.S. would conduct over months or years. The People’s Liberation Army may believe that it can destroy enough U.S. combat ships in the first weeks of a war that such a blockade would become unfeasible, or that co-belligerents—likely Iran, Pakistan and Russia—would complicate the blockade enough to reduce its viability. Beijing may—understandably—assess that the U.S. logistics fleet is unlikely to sustain a multimonth conflict, and that Washington lacks the political will to do so.
Or Beijing may miscalculate, encounter its worst-case scenario, and adopt Russia’s mentality to “escalate to terminate”—that is, use nuclear weapons. The general assumption that the U.S. and its allies are better equipped to handle a long war than the Chinese Communist Party, and that the party therefore hopes to avoid a long war, is likely correct.
The alternative to blockade is to “fight forward” or, as Lord Nelson signaled at the Battle of Trafalgar, to “engage the enemy more closely.” That means defending Taiwan and the sovereignty of U.S. allies by denying China its short-term operational objectives. This would require much more naval and amphibious basing in East Asia than the U.S. currently maintains.
American aircraft carriers must be equipped with long-range antiship missiles, and U.S. Marines with ground-based antiaircraft and antiship missiles, to disrupt an amphibious assault on Taiwan. The U.S. Navy must deploy more submarines to Guam, Yokosuka, Sasebo and perhaps the Australian cities of Sydney and Perth to exploit the PLA’s undersea vulnerabilities and sink Chinese merchantmen and warships. A Marine expeditionary force or Army airmobile division must be deployed within range of the Taiwan Strait, likely to Southern Japan or Darwin, Australia. Air Force and Marine fighter squadrons must be placed in new bases throughout the First Island Chain, supported by ground-based antiaircraft missile units, to deny the PLA immediate air control.
Achieving this would entail the most sweeping reorientation of American force structure and deployment since the end of World War II. But it is the safer strategic choice given the dangers of a longer conflict.
There is no articulated plan for the U.S. to defend our allies while conducting offensive operations against China. We build ships, buy aircraft and tanks, and train solders with no strategy in mind, lumbering forward under institutional inertia, guided by policies 10 to 30 years out of date. In Iraq it took the U.S. military three years to grasp the nature of the conflict, another year to implement a new strategy, and another year for the country to stabilize. We won’t have five years from China’s first missile launch. We may not have five months.
Mr. Cropsey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of Hudson’s Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy.
-
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/11/new-tech-will-erode-nuclear-deterrence-us-must-adapt/186634/
-
Biden Admin Silent as EU, Iran and China Freely Violate US Sanctions
by Majid Rafizadeh
November 6, 2021 at 5:00 am
The Trump administration sent a robust message that violating sanctions would not be tolerated. But since the Biden administration came to power, it seems that almost everyone has been violating the US sanctions in Iran, China or wherever, and no one is being held accountable.
The Biden administration appears not to be taking any action against countries such as China or Iran, which continue freely to violate sanctions while using the revenues to bulk up their war machines.
This US passivity seems due an emerging pattern from the Biden administration of serial surrenders, as seen recently in Afghanistan, on the pretext that "We still believe diplomacy is the best path forward" -- without the threat of an alternative outcome.
This US inaction also seems due to the false belief and myth, which the Obama administration seems to have held as well, that if you appease predatory regimes -- if you side with the mullahs rather than your old regional allies such as Israel -- then the ruling mullahs will suddenly change their behavior and become constructive players in the Middle East. The eight years of appeasement towards them by the Obama administration only further empowered the Iranian regime and happily bankrolled their military adventurism and nuclear program.
Since the Biden administration came to power, it seems that almost everyone has been violating the US sanctions in Iran, China or wherever, and no one is being held accountable. The Biden administration appears not to be taking any action against countries such as China or Iran, which continue freely to violate sanctions while using the revenues to bulk up their war machines. Pictured: Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (right) and China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at the signing of the China-Iran comprehensive strategic 25-year partnership agreement on economic and security cooperation, in Tehran, Iran on March 27, 2021. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
One of the reasons behind US sanctions is to financially pressure a rogue state, such the Iranian regime, to halt its destabilizing behavior and its march towards acquiring a nuclear bomb. But if sanctions are being freely violated without any consequences, there is no incentive for a predatory and dangerous regime such as Iran to stop its malign activities.
Although the US sanctions did have a negative impact on Iran's economy when they were first re-imposed by the Trump administration in 2018, they have become far less effective as many countries ignored and violated them -- all while the Biden administration has not been taking any action to deter, disincentivize or punish those who breach the sanctions.
According to the US Treasury Department, persons and entities that are neither American nor Iranian will be sanctioned if they trade with the Iranian regime. The Treasury Department has clearly warned that the Iran sanctions are not limited to just Iranian or US entities:
"Consistent with this guidance from the President, the Department of State has revoked certain statutory waivers issued to implement the JCPOA sanctions relief, issued the necessary sanctions waivers to provide for an appropriate wind-down period, and plans to take appropriate action to keep such waivers in place for the duration of the relevant wind-down period, i.e., until August 6, 2018, or November 4, 2018, depending on the activity. Non-U.S., non-Iranian persons are advised to use these time periods to wind- down their activities with or involving Iran that will become sanctionable at the end of the applicable wind-down period."
The Trump administration was holding those who violated sanctions and did business with sanctioned entities accountable. In 2018, for instance, Communist China's Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer of Huawei, the world's largest telecom equipment maker, was arrested in Canada at the request of American authorities. Under the Biden administration, however, she was released to return to China. China's ZTE Corp pled guilty to breaking US sanctions against the Iranian regime during the Trump administration. The Trump administration sent a robust message that violating sanctions would not be tolerated. But since the Biden administration came to power, it seems that almost everyone is freely violating the US sanctions on Iran, China or wherever, and no one is being held accountable.
The Iranian regime, for its part, is finding customers to buy its oil and with whom to trade in spite of the sanctions. The sanctions therefore are not crippling the regime financially even slightly, let alone bringing it to its knees. Before the US Department of the Treasury leveled secondary sanctions against Iran's oil and gas sectors in 2018, for example, Tehran was exporting more than two million barrels of oil a day. In 2019 and 2020, Iran's oil exports went down to fewer than 200,000 barrel a day, representing a decline of roughly 90%. This shift took place after the Trump administration decided not to extend its waiver for Iran's eight biggest oil buyers; China, India, Greece, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey and South Korea.
In 2021, though, right after the Biden administration took office, China ramped up its oil imports from by Iran increasing them from 200,000 a day to nearly one million barrels a day. In other words, Iran is exporting approximately five times more oil than at its nadir in 2019 and 2020. Central Asian countries are also continuing to trade with the Iranian regime. As the sale of oil accounts for more than 80% of the country's export revenues, Iran's regime relies heavily on oil exports.
Additionally, in spite of the US sanctions, the European countries are freely trading with Tehran. From January to July 2021, the EU's trade with Iran brought roughly $3 billion to the regime. The Financial Tribune reports:
"Germany remained the top trading partner of Iran during the seven months under review, as the two countries exchanged €1.01 billion worth of goods."
"Italy came next with €347.96 million worth of trade with Iran.... The Netherlands with €264.48 million (down 9.23%), Spain with €178.33 million (up 9.25%) and Belgium with €140.14 million (up 6.79%) were Iran's other major European trading partners. Estonia registered the highest growth of 709.52% in trade with Iran during the seven months under review. Malta with 471.77%, Romania with 284.86% and Croatia with 169.12% came next."
Iran's commodities exports to the EU in the first six month of 2021 was worth nearly half a billion:
"Iran exported €475.75 million worth of commodities to EU during the seven-month period, indicating an 8.08% growth compared with the similar period of the previous year. Germany with €162.38 million, Italy with €96 million, Spain with €48 million, Romania with €35 million and Bulgaria with €22 million were the main export destinations."
The objectives behind the sanctions are to cut off the flow of funds to the Iranian regime and significantly impact its efforts to advance its nuclear program as well as fund and sponsor terrorist and militia groups across the region.
The Biden administration appears not to be taking any action against countries such as China or Iran, which continue freely to violate sanctions while using the revenues to bulk up their war machines.
This US passivity seems due an emerging pattern from the Biden administration of serial surrenders, as seen recently in Afghanistan, on the pretext that "We still believe diplomacy is the best path forward" -- without the threat of an alternative outcome.
This US inaction also seems due to the false belief and myth, which the Obama administration seems to have held as well, that if you appease predatory regimes -- if you side with the mullahs rather than your old regional allies such as Israel -- then the ruling mullahs will suddenly change their behavior and become constructive players in the Middle East. The eight years of appeasement towards them by the Obama administration only further empowered the Iranian regime and happily bankrolled their military adventurism and nuclear program.
History has proven again and again that appeasing a rogue state will only embolden it. As Winston Churchill warned:
"Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear, I fear greatly, the storm will not pass."
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
-
November 9, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
Canada, Mexico and America’s Reality
By: George Friedman
The United States lives in a fundamentally unique geopolitical reality. It’s the only major power that doesn’t face the risk of a land war, so it doesn’t need a massive force to defend the homeland. Instead, it can concentrate on maintaining control of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. If it retains control of the seas, the only threat to the United States would be air and missile attacks. These are not trivial threats, but they are far more manageable without having to worry about an invasion by land or sea. The United States itself has offensive options it can indulge in – even if it doesn’t always use them prudently, and even if it leads to defeat elsewhere. The U.S. has not faced a foreign presence on its soil since the 19th century. Even nuclear weapons are countered by mutual assured destruction, which has protected the U.S. homeland for over half a century.
This happy condition is the foundation of American power. During the harshest of wars, World War II, where much of Europe and Asia was torn asunder, the American homeland remained untouched. This is such an obvious fact that it tends to be neglected.
So too are the geopolitical reasons behind American security. Any attack on the United States must either be an amphibious assault from across the sea or a land assault from either Canada or Mexico. The U.S. fought numerous times with Mexico in the 19th and very early 20th centuries, and in the 1960s, the Quebec independence movement prompted fears in the U.S. that an independent Quebec might align with the Soviet Union. But today, neither country can attack the U.S. itself, hence the first layer of American security. The second layer is that neither country wants to align with powers hostile to the United States. Had Germany secured their allegiance in World War II, or had the Soviet Union in the Cold War, or had China in the past few decades, the risks to American security would have soared, and the U.S. invulnerability to war on the homeland would have evaporated. American history would have been very different, along with the history of humanity.
Therefore, in any discussion of American strategy and of its strategic priorities, the most important issue is not the South China Sea or NATO but the maintenance of relations with Canada and Mexico. It’s true that at the moment each country has an overriding interest in maintaining their relationship, for reasons ranging from trade to social links. It’s also true that the United States could impose its will militarily on either country. However, waging war on neighbors is dangerous and exhausting. America is a global power pursuing global interests, and its domestic stability would be the first casualty of a land assault against Canada or Mexico.
On the surface, this whole line of reasoning sounds preposterous. But the fact that it seems so arises from the misconception among Americans that the current relationship with Canada and Mexico is unchangeable, and thus requires no care. But one of the most obvious observations of history is the speed at which the apparently obvious dissolves and a new normal takes its place. Given the overwhelming importance to the U.S. that neither neighbor shift its national strategy, the comfortable assumption of continuity is perhaps the most reckless element of U.S. policy. Certainly, there is no current danger of a shift, nor any danger on the horizon. But this is precisely the time when a prudent power devotes significant attention to an issue. Reversing a shift in policy is far more difficult than preventing one.
There are forces driving the U.S. apart from these two countries, countries that are not in a position to cause a break, but which in the future, when other issues are added to them and enticing new relationships show themselves, might change the equation. In the case of Canada, the manner in which the United States canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that was important to Canada, signaled a profound indifference to Canada’s interests. There was little consultation, no offer of compensation, nor any attempt to create an alternative project. By itself, this is not enough to cause a break with the United States, but it certainly reminds Canada that Washington sees it as subordinate to its interests rather than as the object of its interests.
In the case of Mexico, the U.S. obsesses over immigration, an issue that is nonessential to Mexican interests. There has been a surge of migrants at that border, most on their way to the United States, but all creating significant problems on their way north. The United States views Mexico as a source of illegal immigration. Mexico sees the problem of immigration as having its origin at Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. Mexico has therefore requested American help in closing its southern border, which has been refused. Instead, Mexico is demonized for the immigration the U.S. will not help stop. (I have no interest in the question of which country is right. All such matters are complex, and every nation is certain that another nation is at fault.)
For the United States, obsessing without alienating either Canada or Mexico is essential to its national interest, if not its national policy. The physical security of the United States and its trade system depends on these two countries. A rational policy of extreme awareness of their internal processes and a willingness to indulge their needs even to the disadvantage of the United States is a low-cost, high-return policy. When someone takes a client to lunch, he picks up the tab, even if the client has ordered the most expensive items on the menu. The cost of lunch is vastly less than the business you will get.
The most interesting part of geopolitics is that a current state of affairs feels eternal. Nothing in geopolitics’ past should give anyone that confidence. Maintaining a beneficial status quo requires effort, painful until the alternative is considered. But since the belief is that nothing will change, then no effort is needed. The U.S. is a dominant global power because its homeland is secure from attack. Its homeland is secure because Canada and Mexico secure it. The failure to understand that they have options – and are far from exercising them – means their treatment is determined by America’s passing interests. From a geopolitical point of view, this is understandable: Power blots out vulnerability. From a policy standpoint, it ignores reality.
-
Both our neighbors are parasites, but Mexico is worse.
November 9, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
Canada, Mexico and America’s Reality
By: George Friedman
The United States lives in a fundamentally unique geopolitical reality. It’s the only major power that doesn’t face the risk of a land war, so it doesn’t need a massive force to defend the homeland. Instead, it can concentrate on maintaining control of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. If it retains control of the seas, the only threat to the United States would be air and missile attacks. These are not trivial threats, but they are far more manageable without having to worry about an invasion by land or sea. The United States itself has offensive options it can indulge in – even if it doesn’t always use them prudently, and even if it leads to defeat elsewhere. The U.S. has not faced a foreign presence on its soil since the 19th century. Even nuclear weapons are countered by mutual assured destruction, which has protected the U.S. homeland for over half a century.
This happy condition is the foundation of American power. During the harshest of wars, World War II, where much of Europe and Asia was torn asunder, the American homeland remained untouched. This is such an obvious fact that it tends to be neglected.
So too are the geopolitical reasons behind American security. Any attack on the United States must either be an amphibious assault from across the sea or a land assault from either Canada or Mexico. The U.S. fought numerous times with Mexico in the 19th and very early 20th centuries, and in the 1960s, the Quebec independence movement prompted fears in the U.S. that an independent Quebec might align with the Soviet Union. But today, neither country can attack the U.S. itself, hence the first layer of American security. The second layer is that neither country wants to align with powers hostile to the United States. Had Germany secured their allegiance in World War II, or had the Soviet Union in the Cold War, or had China in the past few decades, the risks to American security would have soared, and the U.S. invulnerability to war on the homeland would have evaporated. American history would have been very different, along with the history of humanity.
Therefore, in any discussion of American strategy and of its strategic priorities, the most important issue is not the South China Sea or NATO but the maintenance of relations with Canada and Mexico. It’s true that at the moment each country has an overriding interest in maintaining their relationship, for reasons ranging from trade to social links. It’s also true that the United States could impose its will militarily on either country. However, waging war on neighbors is dangerous and exhausting. America is a global power pursuing global interests, and its domestic stability would be the first casualty of a land assault against Canada or Mexico.
On the surface, this whole line of reasoning sounds preposterous. But the fact that it seems so arises from the misconception among Americans that the current relationship with Canada and Mexico is unchangeable, and thus requires no care. But one of the most obvious observations of history is the speed at which the apparently obvious dissolves and a new normal takes its place. Given the overwhelming importance to the U.S. that neither neighbor shift its national strategy, the comfortable assumption of continuity is perhaps the most reckless element of U.S. policy. Certainly, there is no current danger of a shift, nor any danger on the horizon. But this is precisely the time when a prudent power devotes significant attention to an issue. Reversing a shift in policy is far more difficult than preventing one.
There are forces driving the U.S. apart from these two countries, countries that are not in a position to cause a break, but which in the future, when other issues are added to them and enticing new relationships show themselves, might change the equation. In the case of Canada, the manner in which the United States canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that was important to Canada, signaled a profound indifference to Canada’s interests. There was little consultation, no offer of compensation, nor any attempt to create an alternative project. By itself, this is not enough to cause a break with the United States, but it certainly reminds Canada that Washington sees it as subordinate to its interests rather than as the object of its interests.
In the case of Mexico, the U.S. obsesses over immigration, an issue that is nonessential to Mexican interests. There has been a surge of migrants at that border, most on their way to the United States, but all creating significant problems on their way north. The United States views Mexico as a source of illegal immigration. Mexico sees the problem of immigration as having its origin at Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. Mexico has therefore requested American help in closing its southern border, which has been refused. Instead, Mexico is demonized for the immigration the U.S. will not help stop. (I have no interest in the question of which country is right. All such matters are complex, and every nation is certain that another nation is at fault.)
For the United States, obsessing without alienating either Canada or Mexico is essential to its national interest, if not its national policy. The physical security of the United States and its trade system depends on these two countries. A rational policy of extreme awareness of their internal processes and a willingness to indulge their needs even to the disadvantage of the United States is a low-cost, high-return policy. When someone takes a client to lunch, he picks up the tab, even if the client has ordered the most expensive items on the menu. The cost of lunch is vastly less than the business you will get.
The most interesting part of geopolitics is that a current state of affairs feels eternal. Nothing in geopolitics’ past should give anyone that confidence. Maintaining a beneficial status quo requires effort, painful until the alternative is considered. But since the belief is that nothing will change, then no effort is needed. The U.S. is a dominant global power because its homeland is secure from attack. Its homeland is secure because Canada and Mexico secure it. The failure to understand that they have options – and are far from exercising them – means their treatment is determined by America’s passing interests. From a geopolitical point of view, this is understandable: Power blots out vulnerability. From a policy standpoint, it ignores reality.
-
Not my experience of Mexico, or of Canada.
-
Not my experience of Mexico, or of Canada.
After 9/11, the Mexican government couldn't even be bothered to offer an official condemnation of the attack. They are happy to send their worst for us to feed and clothe. Canada glides along in our wake while maintaining a snotty anti-Americanism as one of the few weak strands of what passes as a Canadian national identity. It's an even weaker and feckless ally, even when compared to our weak and feckless european allies.
-
I'm thinking of the people, but I also remember Canada being outstanding during the Iran hostage crisis and strongly present with us in Afghanistan.
As for Mexico "Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States" Porfiorio Diaz
-
How long ago was the Iran hostage crisis? I was elementary school then. Canada’s weak, fake and gay military is a laughing stock until our fake and gay military took center stage recently.
As far as Mexico, it is far from god and close to 100% endemic criminality at every level of it’s society.
I'm thinking of the people, but I also remember Canada being outstanding during the Iran hostage crisis and strongly present with us in Afghanistan.
As for Mexico "Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States" Porfiorio Diaz
-
Honor Veterans by Having the Will to Win a War
If civilian leaders send troops into battle without a commitment to victory, who will sign up to serve?
By H.R. McMaster
Nov. 10, 2021 5:13 pm ET
Marines who had been deployed to Afghanistan are welcomed as they return to Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, Ca., Oct. 3.
PHOTO: MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS
On Veterans Day, it’s hard to look away from the catastrophe in Afghanistan. The consequences of a war lost through incompetence, delusion and self-defeat will reverberate beyond South Asia. In America, the lack of commitment to win in war, apparent in a humiliating surrender to the Taliban and an ignominious retreat from Kabul, risks eroding trust between servicemen and -women and their civilian and military leaders.
If leaders send men and women into battle without dedicating themselves to achieving a worthy outcome, who will step forward to volunteer for military service? Who will offer to endure hardship, take risk and make sacrifices? Winning in Afghanistan meant ensuring that Afghanistan never again became a haven for jihadist terrorists. America and its coalition partners had the means to do so with a low, sustained level of support for Afghans who were bearing the brunt of the fight on a modern-day frontier between barbarism and civilization.
But three presidents in a row told the American people that the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth continued sacrifice. It became typical for citizens to profess support for the troops but not the war. That sentiment was preferable to the derision directed at veterans who fought under difficult conditions in Vietnam. But American warriors won’t long trust a society that doesn’t believe in what the nation is fighting for—as they kill others and risk their own lives.
Winning in war also means convincing the enemy that he is defeated. America’s quick-fix approach to Afghanistan, with persistent promises of imminent withdrawal, made the war longer and more expensive than it needed to be. It weakened Afghan allies; it strengthened the Taliban, their terrorist allies and their Pakistani sponsors.
Winning in war also requires consolidating military gains to achieve an enduring political outcome. In Afghanistan this meant an Afghan government hostile to jihadist terrorists, with security forces capable of withstanding the regenerative capacity of the Taliban. But the Obama and Trump administrations stopped actively targeting the Taliban, gave the enemy a timeline for U.S. withdrawal, and then pursued a negotiated settlement. To rationalize their ambivalence about the outcome of the war, civilian leaders and even some generals used terms like “responsible end” as a substitute for victory. Many leaders simply didn’t show the same determination to win as the warriors they sent into combat.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Opinion: Morning Editorial Report
All the day's Opinion headlines.
PREVIEW
SUBSCRIBED
The long war against jihadist terrorist organizations isn’t over; it is entering a new, more dangerous phase. America’s rivals—including China, Russia, North Korea and Iran—are emboldened. They are watching a Defense Department that seems to focus more on climate change than being prepared to fight, one that promotes postmodernist theories that undermine the warrior ethos and valorize victimhood. Our leaders have an obligation to protect the warrior ethos and build America’s military capabilities, rather than promote destructive philosophies and attempt to solve problems better handled by other departments.
On Veterans Day, we should thank the men and women who served in Afghanistan and the families who gave their last full measure of devotion. We should assure them that America’s war in Afghanistan was a just response to the most devastating terrorist attack in history.
As President George W. Bush observed on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, “You have shielded your fellow citizens from danger. You have defended the beliefs of your country and advanced the rights of the downtrodden. You have been the face of hope and mercy in dark places. You have been a force for good in the world. Nothing that has followed—nothing—can tarnish your honor or diminish your accomplishments. To you and the honored dead, our country is forever grateful.”
But we might also ask American veterans to serve again on the day designated to honor them. Veterans are best equipped to explain to those on active duty that they are part of a living historical community that is proud of them for volunteering to serve at a critical time. Veterans might tell young warriors that we need them to remain ready to fight because wars don’t end when one party disengages.
And we might ask veterans to explain to those considering military service the intangible rewards, especially being part of an endeavor larger than themselves and working on a team that takes on the qualities of a family. America needs our best young men and women to volunteer to serve in the armed forces—even more after our withdrawal from one theater in a war that continues.
Mr. McMaster, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, served as White House national security adviser, 2017-18. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World.”
-
the original blinks is Don Blinken:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_M._Blinken
a favorite of guess who
George Soros
what a small world
Soros who throws his money to every and anyone who wants to delegitimize the our country
now the kid is our SOS
how f'ked up is this ?
-
Fk.
-
November 12, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
A Shift in US-Chinese Relations
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
China’s ambassador to the United States read a letter from Chinese President Xi Jinping at a dinner hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations in Washington on Tuesday. It said in part that China is willing to “enhance exchanges and cooperation across the board” with the United States and bring relations between the two back on track. Meanwhile, reports emerged that Xi and President Joe Biden would meet virtually within the next couple of weeks. Given the hostile rhetoric and military posturing between the U.S. and China, the expectation has been that relations will deteriorate further, possibly leading to open warfare.
This letter is significant in that it seems to indicate China's desire to change course. Whether this was Xi’s decision, a decision forced on him, or merely a trial balloon matters little at this point. The door has been opened for a reversal. And though these kinds of announcements made at Washington dinners usually mean little, in this case, it seems more important because it addresses a dangerous confrontation between two major powers. Notably, the letter specifically mentioned that the U.S. and China are two global powers. China is making clear the parity of the two countries, emphasizing that China may change the atmosphere and its policies but that it is not capitulating. That is vital and makes the letter more credible.
The shift to open hostility was accelerated by the American demand for access to Chinese markets on terms comparable to China’s access to the United States. China declined to comply, which led to tariffs being imposed on Beijing. Meanwhile, China continued to become more aggressive with military gestures, demanding the U.S. withdraw from the South China Sea and threatening an invasion of Taiwan. The Chinese goal was to confront the United States with the strong possibility of war and compel it to accept China’s aims on all fronts since war with China would not be in the interest of the United States. Over time, the Chinese used the military dimension to increase its stature as a world power.
As I have argued, this was always a bluff. The threat to Taiwan was rooted in the idea that China could project multidivisional forces across the Taiwan Strait and keep them supplied in the face of U.S. submarine and missile attacks. It might be possible, but the risk of defeat is too great to attempt. Similarly, forcing the U.S. out of the South China Sea was unlikely. The trade situation was frozen, and so was the military situation.
Accompanying this was a significant shift in the Chinese financial system. The financial foundation of China – real estate – was shaken by a massive crisis in a major Chinese firm called Evergrande that is currently cycling through the system. That crisis has raised serious doubts among American and other investors who had been critical in fueling Chinese economic development. Caution or negativity among foreign investors would compound the financial crisis, which has now spread to shortages in China as it has in much of the world.
It was clear that the United States would not attack China. It was equally clear that launching a war against the United States was a risky operation at best. The risk of defeat outweighed the benefits of victory since defeat would have domestic consequences. Therefore, the military option became less credible than it has ever been, and threatening military action had clearly failed as a strategy. The U.S. had not capitulated and the status quo on military and trade issues remained intact, while the economic situation inside China weakened.
China thus had two choices: to escalate by threatening U.S. interests outside the South China Sea or to deescalate while maintaining China’s status as a great power. Beijing seems to have adopted the latter strategy, or at least that’s what it’s feeling out with its letter.
The United States has no interest in a minor conflict with China, let alone a war. Nor is the ongoing trade dispute that severe. The U.S. has far more pressing economic and social problems than trade equity with China. If China accepts the status quo or even a minor shift in it, the U.S. will be more than content.
There is one key issue in all this: Beijing is insisting that the U.S. acknowledge China as a great power to be treated as an equal and with respect. Xi needs this in the short term to be able to be the one who delivered China to greatness, which only the U.S. can grant. In the long term, such an understanding buys China time to solidify its claims. There is an argument that the U.S. ought to increase pressure on China now to prevent it from becoming too dangerous later. But later is later, and pressing a nuclear power when it is under significant internal pressure is not a risk worth taking.
Everything could fall apart, of course. The current state of U.S. politics can generate all sorts of disruptive forces. The same is true in China. In the U.S., there may be a view that an understanding with China is tantamount to appeasement. In China, there may be a view that Xi gambled and failed. I don’t think either will happen, but then Biden and Xi might insult each other in their virtual conference. I think the most likely course is a shift in relations that gives both countries the breathing room they need.
-
China declares war after Xi is sprayed with explosive diarrhea.
November 12, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
A Shift in US-Chinese Relations
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
China’s ambassador to the United States read a letter from Chinese President Xi Jinping at a dinner hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations in Washington on Tuesday. It said in part that China is willing to “enhance exchanges and cooperation across the board” with the United States and bring relations between the two back on track. Meanwhile, reports emerged that Xi and President Joe Biden would meet virtually within the next couple of weeks. Given the hostile rhetoric and military posturing between the U.S. and China, the expectation has been that relations will deteriorate further, possibly leading to open warfare.
This letter is significant in that it seems to indicate China's desire to change course. Whether this was Xi’s decision, a decision forced on him, or merely a trial balloon matters little at this point. The door has been opened for a reversal. And though these kinds of announcements made at Washington dinners usually mean little, in this case, it seems more important because it addresses a dangerous confrontation between two major powers. Notably, the letter specifically mentioned that the U.S. and China are two global powers. China is making clear the parity of the two countries, emphasizing that China may change the atmosphere and its policies but that it is not capitulating. That is vital and makes the letter more credible.
The shift to open hostility was accelerated by the American demand for access to Chinese markets on terms comparable to China’s access to the United States. China declined to comply, which led to tariffs being imposed on Beijing. Meanwhile, China continued to become more aggressive with military gestures, demanding the U.S. withdraw from the South China Sea and threatening an invasion of Taiwan. The Chinese goal was to confront the United States with the strong possibility of war and compel it to accept China’s aims on all fronts since war with China would not be in the interest of the United States. Over time, the Chinese used the military dimension to increase its stature as a world power.
As I have argued, this was always a bluff. The threat to Taiwan was rooted in the idea that China could project multidivisional forces across the Taiwan Strait and keep them supplied in the face of U.S. submarine and missile attacks. It might be possible, but the risk of defeat is too great to attempt. Similarly, forcing the U.S. out of the South China Sea was unlikely. The trade situation was frozen, and so was the military situation.
Accompanying this was a significant shift in the Chinese financial system. The financial foundation of China – real estate – was shaken by a massive crisis in a major Chinese firm called Evergrande that is currently cycling through the system. That crisis has raised serious doubts among American and other investors who had been critical in fueling Chinese economic development. Caution or negativity among foreign investors would compound the financial crisis, which has now spread to shortages in China as it has in much of the world.
It was clear that the United States would not attack China. It was equally clear that launching a war against the United States was a risky operation at best. The risk of defeat outweighed the benefits of victory since defeat would have domestic consequences. Therefore, the military option became less credible than it has ever been, and threatening military action had clearly failed as a strategy. The U.S. had not capitulated and the status quo on military and trade issues remained intact, while the economic situation inside China weakened.
China thus had two choices: to escalate by threatening U.S. interests outside the South China Sea or to deescalate while maintaining China’s status as a great power. Beijing seems to have adopted the latter strategy, or at least that’s what it’s feeling out with its letter.
The United States has no interest in a minor conflict with China, let alone a war. Nor is the ongoing trade dispute that severe. The U.S. has far more pressing economic and social problems than trade equity with China. If China accepts the status quo or even a minor shift in it, the U.S. will be more than content.
There is one key issue in all this: Beijing is insisting that the U.S. acknowledge China as a great power to be treated as an equal and with respect. Xi needs this in the short term to be able to be the one who delivered China to greatness, which only the U.S. can grant. In the long term, such an understanding buys China time to solidify its claims. There is an argument that the U.S. ought to increase pressure on China now to prevent it from becoming too dangerous later. But later is later, and pressing a nuclear power when it is under significant internal pressure is not a risk worth taking.
Everything could fall apart, of course. The current state of U.S. politics can generate all sorts of disruptive forces. The same is true in China. In the U.S., there may be a view that an understanding with China is tantamount to appeasement. In China, there may be a view that Xi gambled and failed. I don’t think either will happen, but then Biden and Xi might insult each other in their virtual conference. I think the most likely course is a shift in relations that gives both countries the breathing room they need.
-
Overheard "What would Biden and the West do, if Putin went for Donetsk/Odessa, while Xi went for Taipei at the same time?"
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17942/biden-xi-meeting?fbclid=IwAR0Xwyry3jvOdi9feR1xxqJDUIO6_qce42Wruz9RmC3c_7cMHUC2hlQAg38
-
Overheard "What would Biden and the West do, if Putin went for Donetsk/Odessa, while Xi went for Taipei at the same time?"
A lot of people in DC would join Biden in pants-shitting.
-
Blinken first and foremost among them , , , wonder if Milley's counterpart will give him/us a heads up?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10200413/Chinese-diplomat-warns-Australia-faces-ARMAGEDDON-supports-fight-protect-Taiwan.html
-
second
November 15, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
A New Mutually Assured Destruction
Deterrence is different this time around.
By: Phillip Orchard
15To whatever extent the U.S. and China are truly sliding toward a zero-sum Cold War-type rivalry, Beijing appears to be game at least for a good old-fashioned nuclear arms race.
In July, satellite imagery analysis produced by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies appeared to show the construction of at least 120 new nuclear silos in China. With earlier Pentagon estimates putting China’s arsenals at no more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles and just around 250-350 nuclear warheads, the findings suggest a major expansion is in the offing. Last month, the Pentagon began telling multiple U.S. news outlets that China had caught everyone off guard with at least two tests over the summer of a dazzlingly sophisticated new hypersonic cruise missile, one theoretically capable of zig-zagging around in low-orbit space to confuse U.S. early warning and missile defense systems before releasing multiple independently targeted warheads via what's known as a "fractional orbital bombardment system."
This is being treated by many as a Sputnik moment for the U.S., whose own nuclear arsenal is aging and whose hypersonics program is believed to be lagging considerably behind those of China and Russia. And it's easier than ever for foreign powers to hurt each other, even without resorting to military hardware. This makes the U.S.-China relationship appear destined for an era defined by a new interpretation of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Ultimately, it'd be unwise to assume the logic of deterrence that kept the last Cold War from escalating toward the apocalypse will prove as effective this time around.
Why Nukes Are Not a Big Deal
It's tempting to dismiss nuclear arms races as little more than a sideshow, the result as much of opportunistic threat inflation, doomsday profiteering and tactical posturing as strategic necessity. After all, the consequences of even a relatively modest nuclear exchange between two countries are catastrophic enough to make governments think twice before heading down that road.
China already has the capability to obliterate much of the United States. And the U.S., with a stockpile estimated to hold around 3,750 nuclear weapons, has the capability to obliterate China too. Both countries have mastered the nuclear triad, with land-, sea- and air-based delivery systems ensuring a second-strike capability (that is, making it so your entire nuclear arsenal can't be wiped out in a surprise attack).
One could argue that incremental advances in missile defense make it necessary to invest heavily in ever-faster, more maneuverable delivery systems. But missile defense has, to date at least, consistently proved ineffective, especially against the kinds of ballistic missiles that form the bedrock of U.S. and Chinese nuclear strategies. No country has come close to developing a system that can reliably shoot down incoming ICBMs – a task equivalent to hitting a bullet with a bullet in space. Technology will improve, but the attacker will always have the advantage.
One could also argue that it’s smart to compel an adversary to divert precious resources to building weapons they're extremely unlikely to use, as the U.S. did to the cash-strapped Soviets in the 1980s. But at best this is an expensive and inefficient way to maintain conventional military superiority. (The U.S. itself is planning on spending some $1.5 trillion on nuclear upgrades.) The U.S. has budgetary constraints of its own, however arbitrary, and the U.S. Navy has immense modernization needs, in particular.
So does it really matter if China doubles or triples the size of its warhead stockpile? Would it gain any coercive power over the U.S. if it succeeded in developing nuclear-capable cruise missiles that, per reports, left stunned Pentagon scientists “struggling to understand” how the Chinese mastered such technologies? Does anything change if the U.S. spends what's required to attack every Chinese city at once – or, inversely, falls hopelessly behind China in the nuclear hypersonics race?
Why Nukes Are Still a Big Deal
The answer is a resounding: sort of. In theory, the mutual buildup of doomsday capabilities should provide a hard cap on escalation between two powers, ultimately creating conditions for bilateral stability. If there's even a slim chance of a conventional military clash spiraling out of control and resulting in a nuclear exchange, then it’s simply not worth the risk to fight in the first place. This, of course, proved broadly true for the U.S. and the Soviet Union. If such a risk compels the U.S. and China to talk out their problems, contain military standoffs to the realm of posturing, and sharply limit coercive actions, that would be a very good thing. It could, in theory, eventually result in a restoration of equilibrium in the bilateral relationship and even encourage them to shift focus to areas of mutual interest.
But it's a myth that mutually assured destruction has bred anything more than an exceedingly narrow and fragile definition of stability. For one, the U.S. and the Soviets were as much lucky as prudent in avoiding a nuclear exchange. There were countless close calls, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, but also as late as 1983, when the Soviet Politburo nearly convinced itself that a massive NATO exercise was a precursor to a surprise nuclear assault. While it's true that it would be irrational in most cases to conduct a first nuclear strike against an adversary capable of retaliating, it's perfectly rational to act if you think a nuclear strike is inbound. It's just too easy to misinterpret the evidence at hand – famously, to mistake even a weather balloon or flock of geese as a cluster of ICBMs – and too short a window for action to put much faith in assumptions that rationality will always prevail.
Moreover, there's always been, and will continue to be, elements within governments that wonder if using nuclear weapons is, in fact, taboo. This is partly why the U.S. remains unwilling to declare a “no first use” nuclear doctrine, and why the U.S. is routinely toying with the idea of arming troops with low-yield nukes for limited use on the battlefield. Whether or not advocates of weaker nuclear restraint ever prevail over U.S. nuclear policy, the mere fact that these debates exist will sustain the perception abroad that the U.S. might just be willing to pull the nuclear trigger if push comes to shove.
The Cold War was massively destabilizing for much of the world, even if the U.S. and Soviet Union managed to avoid a hot war themselves. Instead, the Americans and the Soviets fought proxy battles across the globe, and for some countries the results were nearly just as apocalyptic. It's likely to look different this time around, given that the U.S.-China rivalry is much less ideological in nature and since the world is less likely to be carved up into discrete spheres. It's harder to see something flimsy like the domino theory compelling U.S. military action to counter Chinese influence.
Even so, the U.S.-China arms race could prove profoundly destabilizing for third parties in other ways, most importantly by accelerating arms races among regional powers. If, say, U.S. allies worry that China can threaten the U.S. so much that the U.S. nuclear umbrella in the region starts to fray, then they may not have much faith in the U.S. ability or willingness to come to their defense. Such powers may eventually conclude that to carve out space to operate and maintain a degree of military parity with their various regional rivals, they must go nuclear themselves.
A regionwide nuclear arms race would be inherently destabilizing in any number of ways. There could be major differences in nuclear use doctrine from one government to the next, in the strength of their command-and-control systems, in risk-reward calculations and political and strategic incentives, and in what their behavior as a nuclear power may look like. The concern with North Korea among most regional states, for example, is less that Pyongyang might launch a nuclear strike and more that it may become more aggressive in other, sub-nuclear ways if it thinks it's made itself immune to retaliation. The India-Pakistan nuclear balance is also instructive in this regard. India launched cross-border airstrikes for the first time in 2019 in large part because it felt that Pakistan, exploiting India's concerns about Pakistani nuclear command and control, was greenlighting militant attacks in India on the assumption that New Delhi’s fear of nuclear escalation would prevent it from retaliating.
Why This Time Is Different
There's one other fundamental factor in the U.S.-China dynamic that wasn't really in play during the Cold War: The U.S. and China are already capable of hurting each other in major ways without resorting to military force. And such capabilities will almost certainly only strengthen as technology continues its rapid pace of development.
At the most basic level, the U.S. and Chinese economic systems are tightly integrated. There are of course many efforts underway on both sides to “decouple,” but the cost of doing so fully – or at least to the point where neither side can find leverage to use against the other – would be devastating to both sides and is highly unlikely to happen short of a catastrophic precipitating event like a war. Since conflicting interests aren't going away, both sides will remain interested to find ways to exploit the other's dependency.
Now, none of the dimensions of U.S.-China trade, technology and financial conflicts alone generate direct risks of nuclear escalation. If bilateral confrontations were confined to this realm, then it would be a good thing for stability. But these dimensions nonetheless make continued friction and non-military conflict inevitable. Combine them with the myriad other high-stakes strategic issues complicating the U.S.-China relationship, and they inflate incentives for each country to be capable of doing serious harm to the other – at a time when it's becoming increasingly easy for countries to do so.
Perhaps the biggest vulnerabilities for both the U.S. and China exist in the cyber realm. It no longer takes a missile for one country to shut down or even destroy critical infrastructure. They can inflict real, tangible damage to a community more than an ocean away with only the push of a button. We've seen countless examples of how this would look in practice in the past couple of years alone. As emerging technologies improve and become ever-more integrated into the operations of critical infrastructure, the vulnerabilities will only proliferate.
Here, too, the theory of mutually assured destruction should act as something of a deterrent. If the U.S. is capable of shutting down the Beijing subway in retaliation for a Chinese cyberattack on a power plant in Tampa, then there's a strong incentive for China to hold fire. But there's a couple of big complicating factors. One, there's not the same sort of norms militating against cyberattacks as against military strikes, particularly nuclear ones. Two, it’s difficult in the dark recesses of cyberspace to quickly and conclusively identify who was responsible for an attack. This makes deterrence less effective to the extent that it rests on the assumption the retaliation is forthcoming. It also raises the risk of miscalculation and escalation by governments, for political reasons or otherwise, concluding they need to strike back even if they're not quite sure where the attack came from.
It's not hard to see how this could set off an escalatory cycle that quickly turns martial, especially since cyber operations themselves will play an increasingly central role in military conflicts of the future. Countries could reasonably suspect that a cyberattack that would make it more difficult for military forces to mobilize was a precursor to a military move and be compelled into action. And once the U.S.-China cold war starts to turn hot, the still-unresolved nuclear question comes back into play.
This is why the U.S. has been trying to narrow the distinction between military attack and cyberattack. Last spring, President Joe Biden warned that cyberattacks could result in major military retaliation. Back in 2018, the Pentagon went even further, proposing that the White House warn that cyberattacks would result in nuclear retaliation. For the logic of mutually assured destruction to prevail as a deterrent and result in bilateral stability, the U.S. seems to be saying there needs to be a much more expansive definition of mutually assured destruction. Given the ease and inevitability of continued cyberattacks, putting the credibility of your military threats at stake with such warnings probably isn't great for the prospects of long-term stability. But neither is stumbling down the road to doomsday, blinded by historical assumption and misplaced faith in rationality.
-
Overheard "What would Biden and the West do, if Putin went for Donetsk/Odessa, while Xi went for Taipei at the same time?"
I hadn't thought of it but that is exactly what they would do. What else would they be talking about, if both were ready to move.
OTOH, they don't have to be that clever to outwit the Biden administration, or the EU military!
What stops Xi from risking military conflict with the US is economic. The US and EU are their biggest customers. Throw Japan and other Asian neighbors in there and nearly all of their export driven economy could be disrupted.
https://www.worldstopexports.com/chinas-top-import-partners/
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17944/china-military-modernization
-
second
What We're Reading: Delusional Foreign Policy
Weekly reviews of what's on our bookshelves.
By: Francesco Casarotto
The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
By John J. Mearsheimer
I was looking for something that explained U.S. behavior in the international system after the Cold War, not from a geopolitical point of view but from a philosophical one. That’s how I crossed paths with John Mearsheimer’s “The Great Delusion.” An international relations scholar, Mearsheimer explains that the guiding light of U.S. foreign policy after the fall of the Soviet Union was liberalism. With the Cold War over, the international system entered the so-called unipolar moment: The U.S. was the sole pole of international politics, incomparably stronger than any other state, facing no direct threat to its national security.
In this context, Mearsheimer argues, U.S. foreign policy assumed that liberal democracy, a market-based economy and human rights protection could and therefore should be spread, by force if necessary. That’s what drove NATO expansion to the east and interventions in the Middle East and in Afghanistan. He then starts to make a case against liberalism-based foreign policy, arguing that NATO’s eastward enlargement unnecessarily antagonized Russia and that the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions turned out to be long and costly wars with vague and unachievable goals that did more harm than good to the United States.
In fact, Mearsheimer claims, Washington should embrace a realist, national interest-based foreign policy, since doing social engineering abroad – this is how he defines interventions aimed at spreading democracy – is costly and useless. Nationalism is stronger than liberalism, especially when liberalism is imposed by a foreign power. Moreover, exporting liberalism abroad could jeopardize liberalism at home, as a state that fights constant wars could lose its domestic liberal values. Finally, a liberal foreign policy ignores the ubiquitous great-power competition that characterizes international politics, distracting a state from its true national interests to the advantage of emerging regional or global rivals.
This short review doesn’t do justice to Mearsheimer’s work: He not only makes his case with an almost flawless logic, but he proves himself to be one of the most knowledgeable and influential international relations scholars. “The Great Delusion” is not a book about geopolitics in the strict sense; it’s a theory-based work, written not only for scholars but also for the public. It offers a policy recommendation, but it’s not a political manifesto that ignores the other side of the topic. I highly recommend it for those interested in a different kind of U.S. foreign policy.
-
The Campaign to Distract Biden From Asia
China and Russia form an entente to hobble America, with a little help from Iran.
By Walter Russell Mead
Nov. 22, 2021 6:35 pm ET
Asia First does not mean Asia Alone. That is the hard lesson the world is busy teaching the Biden administration and the U.S. In Europe, American diplomats last week scrambled to respond to Belarus’s weaponization of migration on its border with Poland, warned that Russia is positioning itself to invade Ukraine, and worked to defuse a crisis in the western Balkans. In the Middle East, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to reassure key allies about America’s continuing commitment to their security, U.S. naval forces participated with Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in the unprecedented joint Arab-Israeli military exercises in the Red Sea.
This shift from an Asia First policy to Global Engagement isn’t something the Biden administration is voluntarily choosing. It is a change forced on the U.S. by the actions of adversaries who believe that by keeping America off-balance and overcommitted, they can hasten the process of American decline.
President Biden’s original plan to focus on Asia made good political sense. Progressive Democrats are dead-set against the military spending and political engagement that a truly global American foreign policy would require. And it isn’t only progressive Democrats who are weary of endless wars, freeloading allies, and American diplomatic and sometimes military engagement in faraway hot spots like the western Balkans and Sudan. If we could get Iran back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal and reach at least a temporary understanding with Russia on some issues, Team Biden hoped, reduced engagement in Europe and the Middle East would help make a tougher China policy easier to sell back home—and to pay for.
Team Biden is right about that. Unfortunately, China, Russia and Iran understand the situation as clearly as the White House does, and these powers want Mr. Biden and the nation he leads to fail. They are doing what they can to keep the president from focusing on Asia. Iranian hard-liners are not only slow-walking any return to the JCPOA; with carefully calibrated help from both Russia and China they also are exploiting every weakness and testing every boundary in the Middle East. And Russia—far from fading into the background so the U.S. can concentrate on China—is backing Belarus, threatening war against Ukraine, demonstrating its growing stranglehold over Europe’s power supply (Marc: Thanks in part due to Biden green lighting the Nord Stream 2 Gas Pipeline!), and raising its profile from Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Our adversaries—and some of our allies as well as several American policy makers and commentators—believe that a polarized America is locked into decline and retreat. This is not, the revisionist powers feel, a good reason to offer Mr. Biden help in rebalancing his commitments. On the contrary, it is the time to double down on their assaults on the American world order. The logic is so obvious that they don’t need to coordinate their response. If America stands tall in the South China Sea, the revisionists will chip away in the Black Sea. If we toughen our stance in the Baltics, they will push harder in the Balkans. If we try to escape the Middle East, they will drag us back in.
Much of the American political establishment, to say nothing of the public at large, has yet to understand how serious and deadly a challenge the Sino-Russian entente poses to American power. China is a much more sophisticated and powerful opponent than the ramshackle Soviet Union ever managed to be—and Russia, while still a shadow of the Soviet Union and now the junior partner in the Eurasian entente, has in Vladimir Putin a daring leader of utter ruthlessness and extraordinary diplomatic talent. No leader in the West is in his league.
China and Russia don’t like or trust each other very much, and should they succeed in marginalizing the U.S., they would quickly fall out. But for now their mutual distrust turns them both against the U.S. as they compete to seize enough spoils from the declining American order to position themselves for the future. As the West weakens, for example, Mr. Putin is raising the stakes in Ukraine and the Black Sea partly because he can, and partly because he needs to grab everything on the table to prepare for the day when Russia and China face off.
The “pivot to Asia” is failing as an American grand strategy because our adversaries are willing and able to disrupt it. To recognize this reality and respond to it requires the kind of foreign-policy leadership that the U.S. hasn’t seen in decades. Mr. Biden and those around him should look to Harry S. Truman’s example of a Democratic president who—in the face of a polarized country and a divided, mostly dovish Democratic Party yearning for more social spending at home rather than activism abroad—prepared the American people for the Cold War. Nothing less will do.
-
Thank you for posting Walter Russel Mead. He is one of my three favorite Democrats and always insightful in these matters.
Why doesn't Biden put someone like him is his inner circle instead of strictly domestic political operatives?
Main lesson: America in decline and American weakness leads us to an exponentially more dangerous world.
WRM doesn't give Trump much credit, but he did quite a few things right in this regard:
1) Strengthened the US economy,
2) Stated to fund the rebuilding of our military and defense capabilities,
3) Showed strategic vision with SpaceForce etc.
4) Stood up to China,
5) Weakened the Kremlin in their wallet with drilling and fracking,
6) Put the N.K. dictator back in his shell,
7) Killed arch terrorist Soleimani, putting others on notice,
8.) And didn't fire a single shot in terms of starting new wars.
That's a pretty good record, especially compared to the 10 months since: Put America in decline, put the military in decline, make it a social program, end strategic thinking and new initiatives, empower the Kremlin by attacking oil and gas at home, and coddle the Chinese.
-
Russia and China Eye a Retreating U.S.
Beijing will push for more sway in Pakistan; Moscow will try in Central Asia’s former Soviet republics.
By John Bolton
Aug. 30, 2021 1:59 pm ET
America’s retreat from Afghanistan is ending tragically—and that has sweeping strategic implications. One major misjudgment underlying the “ending endless wars” mantra was that withdrawing affected only Afghanistan. To the contrary, the departure constitutes a major, and deeply regrettable, U.S. strategic realignment. China and Russia, our main global adversaries, are already seeking to reap advantages.
They and many others judge Afghanistan’s abandonment not simply on its direct consequences for global terrorist threats, but also for what it says about U.S. objectives, capabilities and resolve world-wide.
In the near term, responding to both menaces and opportunities emanating from Afghanistan, China will seek to increase its already considerable influence in Pakistan; Russia will do the same in Central Asia’s former Soviet republics; and both will expand their Middle East initiatives, often along with Iran. There is little evidence that the White House is ready to respond to any of these threats.
Over the longer term, Beijing and Moscow enjoy a natural division of labor in threatening America and its allies, in three distinct theaters: China on its periphery’s long arc from Japan across Southeast Asia out to India and Pakistan; Russia in Eastern and Central Europe; and the Russian-Iranian-Chinese entente cordiale in the Middle East. U.S. planning must contemplate many threats arising simultaneously across these and other theaters.
This underscores how strained our defense capabilities are to protect our far-flung interests, especially given the unprecedented domestic spending demands President Biden is now making. Washington’s most important task, therefore, is somehow to secure significant increases in defense budgets across the full threat spectrum, from terrorism to cyberwar. Diplomacy alone is no substitute.
Xi Jinping will be unimpressed by Mr. Biden’s assertion that America needs to end military activities in Afghanistan to counter China more effectively. Instead, Beijing has new opportunities: shoring up its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan; protecting against the spread of Islamic terror into China; and increasing efforts to establish hegemony along its periphery, especially regarding Taiwan, the South China Sea and India.
These initiatives fit seamlessly into Beijing’s existential threat to the West, extending well beyond our Afghan debacle. By contrast, Washington is floundering in tactical maneuvering and improvisational responses to particular Chinese ploys. Afghanistan is the urgent impetus to marshal our deeper conceptual and strategic thinking; while doing so, we can immediately seize several points of policy high ground. To eliminate ambiguity about our Taiwan defense commitment, for example, we should station military forces there. Theaterwide, we need those budget increases to boost our naval presence in the East and South China seas, thereby establishing deterrence and countering Chinese sovereignty claims.
Our defense relations with India, Vietnam and others must intensify. The scope of the “Quad” (India, Japan, Australia and the U.S.) should expand dramatically to include collective-defense issues and the Quad itself should consider expanding. We also must increasingly hold China accountable for its dangerous policy of proliferating ballistic-missile and nuclear technology to the likes of Pakistan and North Korea.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin was undoubtedly heartened by seeing a weak, flagging U.S. president at their June summit, recalling Khrushchev after meeting John F. Kennedy in 1961. Mr. Biden’s subsequent capitulations on Nord Stream 2 and Afghanistan now surely have Mr. Putin smiling broadly. He will act aggressively in Central Asia to stanch any resurgent Islamic terrorism, but his long-term focus remains Russia’s European neighbors.
Mr. Putin sees disarray in Europe, which fears the resurrection of endemic conflict, largely because it fears America faltering, even substantially withdrawing from world affairs. Although Presidents Trump and Biden don’t constitute a trend—the former was an aberration; the latter is merely a typical Democrat—Mr. Biden’s failure to warn North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies of his Afghan exit shattered already weak confidence levels. The inevitable calls for a larger “European” politico-military role will meet the fate of previous efforts. The European Union can never be a global geostrategic player because it habitually deploys more rhetoric than resources.
That leaves NATO, which Mr. Biden had eased back toward complacency, only to jilt the allies over Afghanistan. Instead of blaming Washington for being too interventionist and then for not being interventionist enough, Europe needs to decide whether it prizes collective self-defense in NATO seriously, or merely prizes dabbling in it. When Germany and others match their defense capabilities with their economies, their opinions will matter. While waiting, the U.S. should work with sub-NATO coalitions, mostly Central and Eastern Europeans, and threatened non-NATO countries just beyond, to counter Mr. Putin’s imperial instincts. Our force posture in Europe can be adjusted accordingly.
In the Middle East, Iran is China’s oil supplier of choice and Russia’s partner in bolstering Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. For Beijing and Moscow, Tehran is a surrogate for destabilization work and a foil to expand their influence throughout the region, recently demonstrated by the military-cooperation agreement between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is hedging against U.S. disapproval and a possible Obama-style alignment with Tehran. Gulf Arabs fear America’s Afghan withdrawal could foreshadow the same in Iraq, or even from major U.S. air and naval bases in their countries. Who wouldn’t hedge?
Washington should emphatically not rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. That part is easy, although the Biden administration still doesn’t get it. The key lies in recognizing that Iran’s objectives are fundamentally contrary to America’s, Israel’s and most of the Arab world’s. Only changing Tehran’s government stands a chance of reducing threats across the region, which is the last thing China and Russia want.
Sadly for those believing withdrawal from Afghanistan was a one-off decision with limited consequences, the world is far more complicated. The results are already deeply negative, and China and Russia are invested in making them worse. Over to us.
Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.
-
November 24, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
The World Ocean Versus the Continent
The dominant maritime power is gathering strength for a contest with a rising land power.
By: Jacek Bartosiak
For centuries, the power that controls the seas – the “World Ocean” – has successfully stymied continental rivals and dictated the rules of world trade. The German geographer Friedrich Ratzel described this contest as one between the Leviathan and the Behemoth, respectively. The Behemoth tries to tear the Leviathan to shreds using his horns and teeth, while the Leviathan tries to smother the Behemoth so that he cannot breathe, eat or drink. Classically, this refers to naval blockades, but in the modern world the Leviathan – the United States – has other, less risky options, such as cutting off the Behemoth’s access to the global reserve currency. This was by design.
Halford Mackinder believed that over time the Continent would gain a clear advantage over the World Ocean because the Eurasian Heartland, though inaccessible to merchant ships, is also inaccessible to warships, and is thus immune to the World Ocean’s authority. At the same time, innovations in rail, road and air travel would dramatically improve land connections. The Eurasian land mass, Mackinder argued, possessed all the elements for economic and military mobility (what today we would call the free projection of power) over very long distances. As an added benefit, the Continent would enjoy internal communication lines throughout the Eurasian land mass, as opposed to the inefficient external communication lines of the power controlling the World Ocean around Eurasia.
Today, China is implementing Mackinder’s ideas for Eurasian consolidation via its Belt and Road Initiative. Highways, railways, air connections, ports, cables, 5G and data flows are all symptoms of Eurasian consolidation. Beijing’s decision-makers have not forgotten Nicholas Spykman’s teachings – their Belt and Road also runs along the coast and across Eurasian coastal seas – but the Continent will necessarily come first.
China's Belt and Road Initiative
(click to enlarge)
The signing of the EU-China investment pact in December 2020 was a signal that the trans-Atlantic unity that has defined the balance of power since 1945 could very quickly disappear and that Eurasia could become one system for the first time. The Eurasia-centric system would be highly complex, and competition for markets and money would be intense. Such a turn of events would be a threat to the status of the World Ocean – one that the United States cannot tolerate.
The battle for supremacy has always been about value chains and the resulting global division of labor. These determine new technology and investment cycles, which confer money and power on those who enter the market first or in a better structural position. The ultimate arbiter is the military power capable of dominating the escalation ladder, which for the most part is determined by wealth.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States enjoyed unquestioned domination (or, as the Americans prefer to call it, leadership or primacy). It has been the only hegemon in the past 30 years of globalization, buoyed by the dollar, the U.S. Navy and its aircraft carriers, GPS, Silicon Valley, the New York Stock Exchange, Hollywood, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The United States sets the rules, which gives it massive influence over the division of labor in production, services and value chains; prices and strategic flows; the currency in which transactions occur; the direction and objectives of investment; technological cycles and new scientific breakthroughs; and regulations that shape the market.
The wealth and power of the U.S. rests on the size of the American middle class, its immense demand capacity, and the strength of the U.S. internal market, but that power would not have arisen without sea trade in the World Ocean. Nor would the Americans hold primacy without control of the World Ocean, where most of the world’s strategic flows take place. The rules of the World Ocean are made in America and defended by the U.S. Navy, which dominates its foes with its flagship fleet of aircraft carriers capable of projecting force far from North America’s shores.
In the modern world, global power projection through the oceans and control of maritime traffic increasingly make use of many space-based observation and communication systems that aid in both navigation and warfare. This greatly reduces the fog of war, which was the bane of the maritime domain, especially offshore. It helped the U.S. control the course of globalization and promote principles of world trade that worked in its favor, all while the U.S. maintained its dominant position in international finance, and the dollar serves as the world currency. The U.S. was able to spread its influence through investment as well as the maintenance of military alliances beneficial to Washington, such as bilateral accords with Japan, Australia and South Korea and collective security arrangements like NATO.
For the past 500 years, the North Atlantic has been the world’s geostrategic linchpin. Control of the North Atlantic in the 19th and 20th centuries helped the United States and Britain coordinate and jointly implement policies through the major European wars of the time. During both world wars and the Cold War, uninterrupted communication from the U.S. East Coast to Western Europe was the basis of NATO’s strength and the foundation of America’s forward presence on the Continent, which made credible U.S. security guarantees in Europe against the Old Continent.
The basic goal of both powers’ strategy is to protect their interests and security and to ensure the stability and predictability of an international system that serves their interests. The key elements of this system are lines of communication, including across borders, which ensure social and economic stability and military assistance when necessary. There are significant differences between land and sea borders, and thus between lines of communication. Land-based communication lines are always less secure because people live on land, and their actions and interactions (capital flows, remittances, migration, etc.) mean land borders are much more prone to change, especially in the absence of natural barriers like mountains, swamps or forests.
Moreover, balancing behaviors against pressure from land powers is much more common because on land every threat is more immediate. The history of Europe is a striking example. Land borders generate more conflict, which was another reason Eurasia was structurally weaker than the World Ocean.
Alfred Thayer Mahan is famous for claiming that naval powers that control the sea lanes are inherently more powerful than land powers. This is true, but there were and still are important overland routes. In fact, for some Eurasian countries, like Kazakhstan, there is no alternative. One such route was the old Silk Road, connecting China to Europe and running through the Middle East and the Levant. A network of oil and natural gas pipelines, railroads and highways essential to the functioning of the global economy still ensures connectivity between resource-rich areas.
Eurasia – inhabited by many nations, states, empires, ethnic groups and even tribes bound together in a web of conflicting interests – is extremely volatile, especially over long horizons. Alliances are mutable, and trust is scarce. By contrast, the stability of sea lanes can lull us into a false sense that navigation of the oceans is free and open, beyond the control of any one power. This perception persists in times of domination by a single maritime power – formerly Britain, and now the United States. But the sea hegemon may at any time deny to others the right to free and undisturbed navigation, cutting off strategic sea flows. Germany’s maritime trade was cut off during World War I, and the U.S. cut off Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. The same could be tried at any time along the approaches to Malacca or in the South China Sea, whether by the Chinese or U.S. navies.
-
November 30, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Debate Over America First
By: George Friedman
Since the 1930s, there has been a debate in the United States over a foreign policy based on “America First,” a nationalistic policy that prioritizes U.S. objectives over others’. It’s an idea that has at different times been central to Democrats and Republicans alike. The positions have ranged from the right urging that the U.S. not take responsibility for the fate of other nations, and the left condemning the United States for acting as the world police. The left has supported a strategy that the United States must remain enmeshed in the world through alliances. On the right, there has been the belief that the U.S. must remain enmeshed in the world in order, for example, to defeat communism. It has taken on the character of a moral principle and prudent action in both ideological tendencies, and as a moral obligation in both as well.
The question of the proper relationship of the United States to the rest of the world has been a central issue since America was founded. Thomas Jefferson warned against entangling alliances, while George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were maneuvering to try to get France engaged in the American Revolution. America was founded as an alternative to Europe and a new order of the ages. It was also one nation among many, and for a while a very weak one. The American relationship to the world has always been ambiguous as a practical and a moral matter and at different times for both sides.
The modern notion of America First emerged in the years before World War II. The United States had been drawn into World War I, in many ways against its will, and the general and reasonable view was that little was gained by the war, which was about to reignite. The left saw intervention against Hitler as a moral obligation. The right argued that the primary moral obligation of the United States was to the well-being of Americans, and that if intervention was a moral necessity, Stalin would be a more appropriate target.
The United States assumed that the oceans separating the U.S. from Europe would protect America from Europe’s follies. The problem with this reasoning was that it wouldn’t. As Hitler conquered France and launched a war against Europe, a vast danger appeared. Britain had the world’s most powerful navy. If Germany defeated Britain, it might take control of its vessels, and it followed that it would take control of the North Atlantic and pose an existential threat to the United States. The America First movement saw intervention as a charitable act, not as a strategic imperative. America First overestimated the security of the United States in a dangerous world. Isolationism was dangerous.
After World War II, the American view was that the cost in American lives was the result of a failure to act sooner against Germany and Japan. As a result, it reacted to Soviet power by reducing its wartime force but never actually demobilizing. The United States created the most entangling alliance possible, NATO, and undertook a policy whereby, as President John Kennedy, put it, "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." This was, of course, the most extreme commitment any nation could make. It was the logical continuation of liberal interventionism, and it opened the door to a series of wars, beginning with Vietnam, that continue to this day. And he was supported on the whole by the right wing. Isolationism and America First had become discredited, seen as they had been as immoral principles, and Kennedy’s vast commitment was simply the summary of the American interest.
In Vietnam, the war went neither badly nor well. It simply went. And as it went, the mood contained in Kennedy’s statement withered. The Kennedy Doctrine was attacked by the left, which argued that the U.S., in assuming responsibility for the world, had become an imperialist monster, waging a ruthless war that was none of its business. The view went beyond Vietnam to the notion that American influence and power throughout the world was exploiting and crushing the rights of other nations. The left made the case for American withdrawal from the world, not as an America First doctrine but as a doctrine by which it was immoral for the United States to be the world police. Nuances aside, the practical application was America First without the celebration of America.
The interventionism in Kennedy’s speech was a reaction against pre-World War II America First. Under attack from the left, the principle survived. The United States has spent more time at war since 2000 than in any prior century in total. (And since 9/11, it has waged war largely unsuccessfully.) Time is not intensity, but it still reshapes the nation’s understanding of itself.
America First is a self-evidently reasonable doctrine if it means placing American interests at the center of consideration. Every nation in the world places its own interests first. Alliances must serve the national interest, as must isolation. None are strategic doctrines themselves. They are means to an end. The government has a moral obligation to protect the nation. Sometimes that requires allies and sometimes war, but to undertake Kennedy’s vision would be to create a set of obligations that can break a nation and has in fact cost the United States a great deal.
And if the idea of Americans putting America first is self-evident, then what that means in practice is subtle and complex. The isolationists on the right thought the United States invincible as it stood. Isolationists of the left thought the United States a brutal oppressor. Both analyses were simplistic, harmful and untrue. But at the core of any national strategy must be an understanding of the national interest, which is never simple, nor self-evident. And it defies simplistic ideologies. The world is a dangerous place, and even if we don’t want war, war may want us. And a moral principle that demands constant war is unbearable.
The issue is always what we shall do now. Not what we did before, nor even what we will do later. The future always surprises us. The issue is to be thoughtful and subtle and to always put America first, which may take us to many parts of the world. America First is not isolationism, it is our moral commitment to the nation.
-
Biden’s invites for democracy summit boggle global minds
Pakistan, Iraq on list; Singapore excluded
BY GUY TAYLOR THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The goal behind President Biden’s upcoming “Summit for Democracy” was to feature U.S. leadership and unify like-minded democracies, including many the administration hopes will work together to counter communist China’s rise as a rival, autocratic global power.
But the summit, a key promise of Mr. Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, might backfire before the virtual Dec. 9-10 event kicks off. Critics and news outlets around the world are questioning the White House’s picky invitations, and U.S. adversaries are scrambling for favor among nations left off the list.
Singapore is among the major democracies conspicuously left off the list of 110 participating countries, while the inclusions of Pakistan and others have triggered speculation about the strategic calculus behind the invitations.
Turkey, a critical NATO ally, didn’t make the cut. Iraq did, despite having a parliament heavily influenced by the nearby theocracy in Iran.
Turkey instead got lumped with China, Russia and other nations left off the list. Moscow and
Beijing are now seizing the moment to attack the very idea of the summit and delighting in the tensions it has generated.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said it is hypocritical of the U.S. to claim to be “a ‘beacon’ of democracy, since they themselves have chronic problems with freedom of speech, election administration, corruption and human rights.”
Chinese officials accused the White House of using the summit to ratchet up Cold War-style tensions with Beijing. “This year marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the Cold War,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told reporters this week. “The U.S. hosting of the summit for democracy is a dangerous move to rekindle the Cold War mentality, to which the international community should be on high alert.”
Even some on the invitation list have raised questions. A high-level source from one participating Indo-Pacific nation said it appears “strange” for Pakistan to have an invitation while Bangladesh and Sri Lanka do not. Sri Lanka is widely regarded as the oldest democracy in Asia.
The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, questioned whether the administration used the invitation to smooth over ill feelings in Islamabad stemming from Mr. Biden’s failure after more than 11 months in office to phone Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. The administration, the source said, may be trying to appease the Khan government in exchange for assurances that U.S. forces can rely on Pakistan to be a partner for regional counterterrorism operations, including in Afghanistan.
Such assurances would be welcome when the White House seems to be struggling to reach basing agreements in the wake of the messy troop pullout from Afghanistan. Tajikistan, left off the summit invite list, is a key Central Asian prospect.
Patrick Cronin, the Asia-Pacific Security chair with the Hudson Institute in Washington, cautioned against “rushing to judgment” about why some countries were invited while others weren’t. Still, he said “there are practical reasons some friends of the United States were probably not invited.”
He pointed to Singapore as an example. The Southeast Asian economic hub is known for its vibrant parliamentary democracy and for being caught in the middle of U.S.-Chinese geopolitical jockeying.
“Singapore is being spared the awkwardness of appearing to side with the U.S. and against China,” Mr. Cronin told The Washington Times. “Singapore likes to focus on being a trading hub, rules and good governance, but it also likes to avoid unnecessarily ruffling feathers. That is why it is a partner of the United States and not an ally.”
Still, Mr. Cronin emphasized that the “simple act of inviting countries to participate in a summit for democracy sends a signal that Washington expects participants to live up to democratic norms and non-invitees should step away from authoritarian governance.”
Such logic could explain why Turkey didn’t make the cut, given widespread perceptions in Washington of the increasingly authoritarian nature of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Biden administration officials have emphasized that a central aim of the summit is to gather government, civil society and private-sector leaders to work together to fight authoritarianism and global corruption and to defend human rights.
A message from Mr. Biden touting the summit on the State Department’s website says the administration is consulting with experts from government, multilateral organizations, philanthropies, civil society and the private sector to solicit “bold, practicable ideas “around three key themes: defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.
“Since day one, the Biden-Harris administration has made clear that renewing democracy in the United States and around the world is essential to meeting the unprecedented challenges of our time,” the message states.
Some perceive the reference to “renewing” democracy in the United States as an attempt to stoke Democratic partisan fervor around the notion that President Trump represented a significant decline in U.S. democracy. Many on the left say that was underscored by the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump demonstrators.
With that as a backdrop, some observers question the extent to which internal or foreign autocratic forces are challenging democracies.
Financial Times opinion writer Janan Ganesh said in a column this week that the summit “risks flattering the unfree world.”
“Its premise, that a contest is going on between democracy and its opposite, is right. But the fault line runs mostly through countries, not between them,” Mr. Ganesh wrote. “By calling nations together, and barring Russia, Turkey and China, the event reframes a largely domestic problem as a geopolitical one. It encourages the idea that foreign subversion (which is real enough) is to blame for Donald Trump in the U.S., the dark vaudeville of Brexit, the numerous flavors of Italian populism and the great mass of anti-liberal votes in France.”
Others have focused on the geopolitics of the summit itself.
The Australian newspaper cited critics questioning whether U.S. strategic interests may have been as vital to the invite list as any given country’s democratic bona fides.
“Important U.S. allies Pakistan and the Philippines made the list despite endemic corruption and human rights abuses,” an analysis by the paper stated this week. “Yet Singapore and Thailand — respectively one of America’s closest regional security partners and one of its oldest regional allies, notwithstanding their deeply-flawed democracies — have been excluded alongside one-party-state Cambodia, communist Vietnam and Laos, the kingdom of Brunei and the murderous Myanmar junta.”
Ben Bland, Southeast Asia program director at the Sidney-based Lowy Institute, told the paper that the “Biden administration seems to have picked some states because of their genuine commitment to democracy while others appear to be there more because of their strategic relevance.”
The invitation list has exposed inherent tensions in U.S. efforts to build a broad-balancing coalition against China while framing competition with Beijing in ideological terms, said Mr. Bland. “The fact that only three ASEAN members are invited,” he said, “shows that pitching competition with China as a grand battle between democracy and authoritarianism will not get Washington very far in Southeast Asia.”
Mr. Cronin said the administration is approaching the summit “not from a position of supreme confidence born of some unipolar moment, but from a position of necessity to push back on illiberal governance at a moment of profound crisis in democracy.”
“In our age of plurilateralism, in which various constellations of countries can choose to partner or opt out of specific frameworks, it would be great for most participants to sign onto an agreed set of democratic principles regarding rules of the road, including for digital technology,” he told The Times. “Over time, a summit process might enhance not just the confidence but also what some have called the operating system of world order.”
‘Strange’ choices
Fighting the autocrats
Geopolitical focus
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has not received a phone call from President Biden since he took office in January, but he is on an exclusive invitation list for the upcoming “Summit for Democracy.” Even NATO ally Turkey wasn’t asked to participate. ASSOCIATED PRESS
-
The Xi-Putin Entente Rises
Both share a goal of undermining the U.S.-led global order.
By The Editorial Board
Follow
Dec. 15, 2021 6:59 pm ET
The gushing remarks at Wednesday’s video meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have drawn renewed attention to an underplayed story: The tightening strategic embrace between America’s two most formidable geopolitical competitors. Moscow and Beijing have held each other at arm’s length for decades, but as the world becomes less stable, both see regional advantages from rolling back American power and prosperity.
“China-Russia relations have emerged from all kinds of tests to demonstrate new vitality,” said the Chinese Foreign Ministryaccount of the discussion. It added that “Russia will be the most staunch supporter of the Chinese government’s legitimate position on Taiwan-related issues.” In his introductory remarks, Mr. Putin hailed “a new model of cooperation” between the two countries. He will travel to Beijing and meet Mr. Xi in person early next year.
This is more than talk. Joint military exercises between the two powers have been accelerating, including a naval demonstration in the Sea of Japan in October. Russian and Chinese warplanes have repeatedly intruded on South Korean airspace since 2019, most recently last month. Moscow surged its supply of military equipment to Beijing in the years after seizing Crimea in 2014.
The nations don’t need to present a single strategic front to imperil American interests. They can do so by pushing on different fronts simultaneously in hopes of sapping American power.
The military crisis Mr. Putin has generated over Ukraine works to Mr. Xi’s advantage, drawing U.S. focus from the defense of Taiwan. And if China starts a shooting war in Asia, Moscow could calculate that it’s more likely to get away with its own territorial expansion. A war in either region could trigger conflict in the other.
Both powers are also giving Iran crucial support as Tehran fights U.S.-led sanctions against its nuclear program. Mr. Putin’s new defense agreement with India also redounds to China’s benefit by pulling India away from the U.S.
The rising entente between Beijing and Moscow underscores the growing threats to the U.S.-led international order. The new reality means the U.S. needs to shore up its own alliances while also moving more quickly than it has to build military and cyber defenses that can meet this more dangerous world
-
"The rising entente between Beijing and Moscow underscores the growing threats to the U.S.-led international order. The new reality means the U.S. needs to shore up its own alliances while also moving more quickly than it has to build military and cyber defenses that can meet this more dangerous world"
well we are kicking there ass on gender studies..............
-
Russia uses U.S., NATO threats as ‘pretext to war’ in Ukraine
BY BEN WOLFGANG THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Russia upped the ante Monday in its dangerous standoff with Ukraine, openly warning of military action if President Biden and America’s NATO allies ignore a list of demands Moscow announced late last week — a far-reaching list that some key U.S. lawmakers have dubbed a “pretext to war.”
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said his country is fully prepared to respond through “military-technical means” if Western powers fail to address those demands. He said NATO must not expand to include Ukraine or Georgia and the U.S. must not base additional military assets in former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Most of Moscow’s proposed security guarantees seemingly have little chance of becoming a reality. Still, some foreign policy specialists warn that Russian President Vladimir Putin could use their rejection to justify a major land invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s proposal and the direct threat of military action put renewed pressure on the White House to defuse a crisis that seems to be nearing the boiling point.
U.S. officials have said Mr. Putin’s list of demands is unrealistic but could be the starting point for easing tensions in Ukraine and letting diplomacy take the place of saber-rattling. At the same time, the U.S. and the European Union say they are preparing unprecedented sanctions on Moscow if the Kremlin moves militarily against Kyiv.
How much of what Russia has sought is bluster and how much is non-negotiable are the big questions. Some of Mr. Putin’s key advisers are doing little to ease the tensions.
“I said that we would find forms to respond, including by military and military-technical means,” Mr. Ryabkov said, according to Russia’s state-run Tass news agency. “I reaffirm this. We will have to balance the activities that are of concern to us because they increase the risks with our countermeasures.”
He did not elaborate on what those actions might be, but Russia’s military posture offers unmistakable clues.
Nearly 100,000 Russian troops are stationed near the country’s border with Ukraine. The Russian military buildup has stoked fears that Mr. Putin is prepared to seize another portion of its smaller and weaker neighbor by force, just as he did with the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
Russia also backs separatists who have been battling the Ukrainian military since 2014 in the country’s disputed Donbas region.
It’s not clear whether Mr. Putin is willing to endure the casualties and the economic blowback that would result from a long-term ground war in Ukraine, but some Western governments are growing increasingly worried that military action is on the horizon.
The British Daily Star reported Monday that intelligence officials privately warned U.K. officials that Russia might launch an invasion on Christmas Eve. U.S. intelligence analysts have said Russia’s buildup could give it an invasion force by early next year but Mr. Putin has not decided whether to invade or stand down.
In another sign of uneasiness in the region, the State Department issued a new travel warning for Ukraine. It specifi cally cited reports that war may be in the offing in the former Soviet republic.
“U.S. citizens should be aware of reports that Russia is planning for signifi cant military action against Ukraine,” the State Department said in its travel advisory. “U.S. citizens choosing to travel to Ukraine should be aware that Russian military action anywhere in Ukraine would severely impact the U.S. Embassy’s ability to provide consular services, including assistance to U.S. citizens in departing Ukraine.”
Further complicating Washington’s task is the hard-line stance of many smaller countries that border Russia with a long history of pressure and intimidation from Moscow.
The leaders of Poland and Lithuania met Monday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They called for even tougher sanctions on Russia and rejected any compromise in the face of Moscow’s security demands.
“Everything must be done” to prevent Russian military aggression against Ukraine, Polish President Andrzej Duda told reporters in the Ukrainian village of Huta. It is “absolutely undesirable to yield to such an ultimatum, to such blackmail.”
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda called Russia’s attempts to unilaterally lay down security red lines “unacceptable in Europe in the 21st century.”
The Biden administration has doubled down on finding a diplomatic solution. Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin spoke via video conference earlier this month. White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan spoke with his Russian counterpart by phone Monday and “indicated U.S. readiness to engage in diplomacy through multiple channels, including bilateral engagement” and in other forums, according to a readout of the call.
State Department officials, meanwhile, tried to strike a balance between keeping the door open for negotiations with Moscow and taking a hard line against the Kremlin’s aggression.
“Any dialogue, any diplomacy has to be based on the principles of reciprocity,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters. “We are having this discussion in the context of Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, but in some ways this is bigger than any one country.
“No country has the right to dictate borders, to bully smaller countries, to intimidate, to coerce, to pursue their own interests,” he said. “That is not something the United States, that is not something our partners or allies will stand for.”
Russia’s demands ostensibly are about protecting national security. That includes preventing a military alliance formed to contain it — NATO — from bringing troops and arms to states along Russia’s western border. Still, many of the specifics are aimed at a much broader goal long advocated by Mr. Putin: establishing new limits on American military activities around the world.
One section of Moscow’s proposal states: “The parties shall refrain from deploying their armed forces and armaments … in the areas where such deployment could be perceived by the other party as a threat to its national security, with the exception of such deployment within the national territories of the parties.
“The parties shall refrain from flying heavy bombers equipped for nuclear or non-nuclear armaments or deploying surface warships of any type, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas outside national airspace and national territorial waters respectively, from where they can attack targets in the territory of the other party,” it says.
Such an agreement would directly impact America’s military posture in Europe and elsewhere around the world.
Although the U.S. isn’t seriously entertaining such proposals, some lawmakers say Mr. Putin has a more sinister aim: creating the threat of a crisis in order to extract concessions from NATO and the U.S.
“The Russian government’s publication of ‘proposals’ for the United States and NATO is an insult to diplomacy and seeks to extort us into ending a crisis Russia itself created. These are not security agreements, but a list of concessions the United States and NATO must make to appease Putin,” Sen. James E. Risch, Idaho Republican and ranking member on the House Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement over the weekend. “The Russian Federation made these demands with the full understanding they are impossible to accept. … Russia is clearly trying to create a pretext for war.”
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/dont-expect-a-sino-russian-alliance-anytime-soon_4177072.html?utm_source=uschinanoe&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-1-3&utm_medium=email
That said, I'm not seeing why they can't play tag team against us.
-
January 4, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
America’s Wars and Failures
By: George Friedman
Sixty years ago, in 1962, the United States made the decision to go to war in Vietnam, deploying major ground and air forces to the battle for the first time. This was a fraction of the men and aircraft that would serve there over the years to come. It was a line that the Kennedy administration realized it was crossing. It saw U.S. involvement as a minor, even experimental, move. But when a nation sends its soldiers to war, a logic takes hold. As men die, the nation assumes it is for a vital interest. Leaders cannot declare the experiment a failure because they cannot admit they experimented with the lives of soldiers. A death requires a worthy reason, and establishing that the death was not in vain is incompatible with “cutting and running,” in Lyndon B. Johnson’s words. Intervention is difficult. Withdrawal under fire is agony.
To understand American strategy between 1962 and now, we have to understand what John F. Kennedy was seeing and thinking when he made the first major commitment. Kennedy was crafted by World War II, and the senior military men were as well. In World War II, America understood its enemy. Germany was ruled by Hitler, and Hitler and his subordinates were clever, ruthless and like us in that they fought a war of engines and industry. We understood that Hitler was an unprincipled tyrant. Japan was an empire ruled by a brutal government and, as we saw in China, merciless fighters. We also knew that like the Germans and Americans, they were fighting an industrial war. We knew the enemy, we never underestimated its strength, and we timed our war to coincide with industrial production. We knew the value of allies, the uses of aircraft carriers and tanks, and how to train men for war. We mastered this and more. And we would fight to the end, no quarter asked nor given.
The United States outstripped North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in every measure that won World War II. We did not realize that we didn’t understand our enemy. They were not industrial, nor were they divided between communists and a range of factions. Clearly the non-communists in the south hated the tyranny of the north. The anti-communist population had to be mobilized and armed with the best equipment, and the U.S. flag, along with the Vietnamese, would fly over Hanoi. Crowds in the south would line the roads welcoming the Americans even if the United States didn’t take Hanoi. The purpose of intelligence is to predict what others will do, and just as the CIA failed to understand the consequence of the Bay of Pigs, it didn’t understand Vietnam. It, too, was stuck in World War II.
Vietnam was not the SS fighting against the Maquis (French Resistance fighters). Vietnam was divided by treaty, but it was one country. The communists had seized the north and the non-communists ruled the south. The non-communists came in many forms, but the one thing they shared with the communists in the north was that they were Vietnamese. They were not shocked by a repressive communist regime as much as by the thought of a Vietnamese civil war, which is what the Americans were selling, whether they called it that or not. They did not want to fight other Vietnamese. What they wanted was to be left alone. The Vietnamese did not see the Americans as liberators and protectors. They saw them as delivering the terrors of industrial war. After enduring French occupation and oppression by Vietnamese whom the French had elevated to puppet rulers, they were not going to choose between a new imperialism and a communist dictatorship. This did not mean that anti-communism wasn’t present, nor that many did not view the Americans as a friendly force. It did mean that the passions of the Vietnamese were divided, complex and volatile.
The Americans made three mistakes. The first was that they thought that, as in Belgium, their arrival in Vietnam would be met with universal joy. They didn’t know that because the leadership didn’t listen to the intelligence.
Second, they did not understand the communist enemy. The communists drew much of their legitimacy from having driven the French out. Their communism and nationalism were bound up. This was also true of Mao’s Chinese Communism and Stalin’s Defend the Motherland speech. There are those who fight for abstract beliefs, but many more who fight for their homeland. I am not sure how many Americans in World War II fought for liberal democracy or America, but I suspect protection of the homeland resonated more. Vietnam had been ruled by many brutes, but the communists at least were Vietnamese brutes. They were understandable.
Finally, they fought the war from the standpoint of perception, particularly of the U.S. public’s perception. Rather than do what was done in World War II, which was to make clear that this would be a long and bloody war and thus bind the public to the truth, the government sought to align strategy with the idea that victory was approaching and casualties would decline. This meant that the Tet Offensive shattered all trust. Lying hopefully works best when reality cooperates.
The U.S. did not understand its enemy or its friends. It feared the communists less than American public opinion. In wars, the darkest moment might be just before success. Think of the Battle of the Bulge. The darkest moment could not be a moment like this because preposterous claims of success had not prepared the American public for it.
When we think of not understanding one’s enemy, of shaping a war to not upset the untruths of the conflict, and of trying to overwhelm through industrial warfare an enemy that is fighting a very different war, we can also think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The enemy might or might not have hated the government, but enough people hated the Americans because they were not Iraqis or Afghans. Ideology and religion played a part but were not the key. A stranger was in their house, and they had to drive him out.
Americans should be aware of this, because our revolution was designed to drive out the haughty British, with their rules and regulations. The revolution was committed to the Declaration of Independence, but the real enemy was the Brits. They were a stranger in our house, and they had to be expelled. The moral principle is there, but men die for the love of their own.
There are few wars like World War I and II, thank God. Reasoning from how we won those conflicts is usually going to bring failure in other wars. The surge in American wars after World War II and their unsatisfactory outcomes should be a testament to this. Going to war and failing represents leadership without discernment, with irrational belief in one’s own strength and foolish dismissal of the motivation and intelligence of the enemy. Even if many welcome us as liberators, it will be these factors that determine our fate. Fortunately for America, it is too wealthy and strong to be brought down by failure. But it’s important not to push your luck.
Wars are necessary and will happen, but they should begin as World War II did: with fear and awe of your enemy. Anything else makes you careless. As Thucydides noted, war cannot be waged from a divided and frightened city. This proved true in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The most important question was never asked: How would the United States benefit from victory, and what would defeat cost? Defeat was never imagined, and the benefit of success was vastly overrated. The world did not end, nor did American power. But fearing the consequences of defeat, we put the inevitable off. Today, the U.S. cooperates with Vietnam against China. What was unthinkable and unbearable then is neither today. Wars, therefore, should be rare and utterly necessary.
-
The Two-Headed Fight for Ukraine and Taiwan
These aren’t mere regional hot spots, as Russia and China work together to upend world order.
By Seth Cropsey
Jan. 4, 2022 12:48 pm ET
ILLUSTRATION: DAVID KLEIN
A crisis may be imminent in Ukraine as Vladimir Putin gathers troops on the Russian border for a possible invasion. American policy makers have also begun focusing on a potential conflict in Taiwan, one that is coming to a boil more slowly. But American statesmen ought to understand: These events can’t be viewed in isolation; they are connected and part of a larger political competition for Eurasia.
Whether Mr. Putin is seriously considering action against Ukraine is an open question. But Mr. Putin has achieved three objectives simply by posing a credible threat. First, he has gained President Biden’s attention, and the two had teleconferences on Dec. 7 and 30. Russia views itself as a great power and wants to deal with other great powers directly, not via the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an execrable reminder of Russian weakness and Soviet collapse.
Second, Mr. Biden hasn’t committed to a military deployment in support of Ukraine, instead emphasizing an economic response, such as sanctions, to a Russian offensive. This is a signal that Mr. Biden is reluctant to intervene militarily. Third, and most important, Mr. Putin has mobilized the Russian military to allow almost immediate combat operations against Belarus, allowing him to swallow Minsk. Internationally, Mr. Putin still hopes to achieve the Soviet dream of dismantling the American-led European security system. This is similar to his objective in the Middle East: replacing the U.S. as the prime external force in the region.
Although separated by geography, Ukraine and Taiwan occupy similar positions in the Russian and Chinese strategic experience and historical imagination. Capturing each is essential to all other strategic objectives. For Russia, taking Ukraine would secure its hold on the Black Sea and open other pressure points against vulnerable NATO members Romania and Bulgaria. For the Chinese Communist Party, seizing Taiwan would allow the country to break out of the First Island Chain and conduct offensive operations against Japan, the Philippines and even U.S. territories in the Central Pacific.
Historically, post-Soviet Russia’s ruling oligarchy has cultivated intense grievances against independent Ukraine. It is a living reminder that Slavic peoples need not live under one flag. Taiwan is proof that Chinese-speaking peoples are fully capable of governing themselves. The modern Communist Party stems from a brutal revolutionary regime that savaged the Chinese people, murdering millions through its messianic ambitions and sheer incompetence. Only by consuming Taiwan can China confirm its superiority. Given the political capital the Communist Party has invested in subduing Taiwan, it may no longer have a way to de-escalate even if it wanted to.
The clearest obstacle to Russian and Chinese escalation is Ukraine’s and Taiwan’s affiliations with the U.S. and its allies. Mr. Putin understands that a spiraling conflict with NATO would overwhelm the Russian military. Unable to hide casualty counts as he did in Syria, Libya and Ukraine in 2014, he would face domestic opposition. Mr. Putin has an incentive to isolate Ukraine militarily and separate the issue from NATO, striking only when the time is right.
Similarly, a Sino-American conflict involving a broader Pacific coalition would prove dangerous for the Communist Party’s survival: A blockade against Chinese Middle Eastern resource imports could destroy the regime in weeks to months.
Yet a fait accompli against Taiwan is more viable than a similar strike against Ukraine. Russia’s likely strategic objective would be the capture of a land corridor between Donbas and Crimea. Yet in 2014, the Ukrainian armed forces, reeling from Russia’s annexation of Crimea and relying upon paramilitaries for additional combat power, repulsed a Russian offensive against Mariupol and drove Russian and separatist forces back to their current salient.
Seven years of warfare have given the Ukrainian military valuable combat experience. Ukrainian society, even in the east, is increasingly hostile to Russia. The Ukrainian public seems willing to accept casualties. While Russia may be able to strike deep into Ukrainian territory and pressure Kyiv from the north as it penetrates south, a Ukrainian political collapse is unlikely. And expect an insurgency against Russian occupation. Ukraine’s willingness and ability to fight hard, no less than NATO’s potential intervention, helps deter Russian action.
By contrast, Taiwan is small and densely populated. Its military isn’t equipped to sustain air and sea control around the island, a prerequisite for defending against amphibious invasion. And it is highly likely that the Communist Party has positioned intelligence assets on Taiwan ready to sow discord throughout Taiwanese society and disrupt civilian communications. The question for the People’s Liberation Army is less whether it can take Taiwan, but whether it can succeed before a potential American and allied coalition can respond.
With China and Russia in strategic cooperation, this is a very dangerous situation. The margin of force between potential enemies in the Western Pacific is far thinner than in Eastern Europe, given China’s increasingly capable military. Russia wouldn’t have to deploy major ground or naval units to the Asia-Pacific, nor time its offensives with China’s. The Russian Pacific Fleet has enough submarines to bog down Japanese and U.S. units needed to defend Taiwan in shielding the Japanese home islands. That would make China’s mission much more likely to succeed.
Roughly concurrent offensive operations in two hemispheres would overstress American and allied resources. Taiwan must become capable of defending itself. But more broadly, the U.S. must begin thinking about its strategic challenges globally, not in regional segments. This is a contest for Eurasia—and thus for the world.
Mr. Cropsey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of Hudson’s Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and as a deputy undersecretary of the Navy.
-
Putin Is Running Rings Around the West
While U.S. and European leaders natter about soft power, Russia’s president is making power moves.
By Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Jan. 12, 2022 1:25 pm ET
Nobody knows whether Vladimir Putin will invade Ukraine, but it is increasingly clear that a divided and confused Western alliance doesn’t know how to deal with the challenge he poses.
Lost in a narcissistic fog of grandiose pomposity, Western diplomats spent the past decade dismissing the Russian president as the knuckle-dragging relic of a discarded past. As then-Secretary of State John Kerry sniffed during Mr. Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped up pretext.”
Neville Chamberlain learned more from failure at Munich than the current generation of Western leaders learned from failure in Crimea. Convinced that the old rules of power politics don’t apply in our enlightened posthistorical century, Europeans nattered on about soft power only to find themselves locked out of key U.S.-Russia talks over Ukraine. As China and Russia grew more powerful and assertive, Americans enthusiastically embraced the politics of mean-spirited polarization and domestic culture wars. Now the Biden administration is simultaneously proclaiming overseas that America is back, in all its order-building awesomeness, and maintaining at home that democracy is one voting-rights bill away from collapse.
Pathetic throwback that he is, Mr. Putin used his time differently, rebuilding the Soviet Union under the nose of a feckless and distracted West. Because Russia hasn’t annexed breakaway republics, many observers underestimate how successful Mr. Putin’s reassembly of the U.S.S.R. has been. But it is hegemony, not uniformity, that he wants. Stalin insisted on enrolling Ukraine and Belarus as founding members of the United Nations while they were part of the Soviet Union; Mr. Putin might be happy to keep them nominally independent under Russian control. In many Soviet republics, Moscow ruled through local strongmen. When the Soviet Union collapsed, leaders like Azerbaijan’s Ayaz Mutalibov, Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov and Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev made a seamless transition to running the republics as personal fiefs. Mr. Putin’s goal is to re-establish ultimate control while leaving subordinate rulers in place.
It’s working. In 2020 he reasserted Russian control over the South Caucasus by ending the Azerbaijani-Armenian war on his terms. Last spring as the West huffed and puffed, Mr. Putin kept Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in power. Last week Mr. Putin established himself as the supreme arbiter of Kazakhstan, providing the political and military assistance that allowed President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to crush a revolt. In most of the former Soviet Union today, Mr. Putin decides who rules and who weeps. Of the 15 constituent republics of the old Soviet Union, only five (the three Baltic states, Moldova and Ukraine) have held him at arm’s length. Georgia clings precariously to the shreds of a once-robust independence; the American withdrawal from Afghanistan leaves countries like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan more dependent on Moscow than ever.
-
Is any part of this Russian threat overstated? All but 5 of the old Soviet republicans now under his control with Ukraine looking to fall next.
"Neville Chamberlain learned more from failure at Munich than the current generation of Western leaders learned from failure in Crimea."
And there is NOTHING we can do? It will be easier to counter them later after they have reconstituted all their old power??
Step one, make Walter Russell Mead Biden's Secretary of State (if we can't make Pompeo President right now). Mead is the only Democrat paying attention. But that would break the Biden Rule made clear in the Kamala selection, he wants no one smarter than him anywhere near him.
-
Russia, China and the Bid for Empire
The U.S. must hold the line against their imperial ambitions in Ukraine, Taiwan and elsewhere.
By Robert D. Kaplan
Jan. 13, 2022 6:47 pm ET
Intellectuals can’t stop denouncing the West for its legacy of imperialism. But the imperialism on the march today is in the East. Russia and China are determined to consume Ukraine and Taiwan, legacies of the Romanov and Qing dynasties respectively, into the latest versions of their historical empires. Technology has intensified this struggle for imperial geography. Great-power war has become entirely imaginable because of the reduced emphasis on thermonuclear bombs in an era of hypersonic missiles, automated weapons systems, and information warfare. Russia and China demonstrate that the struggle for empire has rarely had such nerve-racking stakes.
The notion that we can play Russia off against China—as the Nixon administration played China off against the Soviet Union—is a fantasy. President Biden’s reward for giving up opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany has been the advance of nearly 100,000 Russian troops to the Ukrainian border area. National security adviser Henry Kissinger’s secret 1971 visit to Beijing occurred in the context of dramatic military tensions on the Chinese-Soviet frontier. China was in desperate need of U.S. help. Russia today has no such need.
True, the Chinese are making large-scale economic advances in formerly Soviet Central Asia, as well as providing security assistance to the Muslim republics there. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has calculated that China, a fellow authoritarian regime, isn’t a threat to his rule in the way the West is. (Indeed, Mr. Putin easily moved antiriot police into Kazakhstan, a place that the Russian empire settled with peasants from Russia and Ukraine in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) He has little need to line up with the West to balance against China.
Rather the reverse: Mr. Putin needs China to balance against the West. Since it is the West, in his view, that has helped install a hostile regime in Ukraine, whose border is less than 300 miles from Moscow, and would like to install a similarly hostile and democratic regime in Belarus, also relatively close to the Russian capital. What we see as potential or fledgling democratic states, Mr. Putin sees as vital parts of the former Soviet Union, a great power whose sprawling territory was based on czarist imperial conquests. While Ukraine was the birthplace of Kyivan Rus, it was also forcibly absorbed inside the czarist empire in the late 18th century, only to declare independence in 1918, before the Soviet conquest.
Mr. Putin’s goal isn’t only to restore the former Soviet Union in some form or other, but to establish a zone of influence throughout Central and Eastern Europe that approximates the borders of the former Warsaw Pact. Rather than direct rule through brotherly Communist parties—which proved too expensive and helped bring down the Soviet Union—Mr. Putin’s model is a form of mass Finlandization, in which the countries from Berlin to the east and to the southeast will know exactly what red lines not to cross in terms of Moscow’s interests.
A Pharaonic network of gas pipelines, intelligence operations, organized crime, disinformation and constant self-generated crises are the tools of Russian 21st-century imperialism. The crises of the moment are Ukraine, Belarus and Bosnia. In Belarus Middle Eastern refugees have been weaponized against Poland by President Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin lackey. In the western Balkans, Serb leader Milorad Dodik threatens to break up Bosnia-Herzegovina with backing from Russia and China. Russia’s aim in all of this is to insert itself into Europe as a power broker, the ultimate revenge against a region that in previous centuries generated many military invasions of the Russian heartland.
Imperialism throughout history has often originated from a deep well of insecurity. That is the case with Russia and China today. Just as Ukraine was for centuries part of the czarist and Soviet imperial heartland, Taiwan was a Chinese dynastic conquest until the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War forced China to cede Taiwan to Japan. In Beijing’s view, restoring control of Taiwan to mainland China would right not only a Western depredation against a historic Chinese empire, the Qing Dynasty, but a Japanese depredation as well. Unlike Western countries, which are busy apologizing for their former conquests, the Chinese as well as the Russians take pride in their imperial legacies. Adm. Zheng He, an early Ming Dynasty explorer who sailed a vast armed fleet as far as the Middle East and East Africa, is a Chinese national hero.
If China and Russia didn’t take pride in empire, they wouldn’t be attempting to rule Taiwan and Ukraine today. For China, the return of Macau, the brutal suppression of Hong Kong and economic dominance over Outer Mongolia make Taiwan the only missing piece of its Middle Kingdom’s imperial geography. As for Tibet and Xinjiang (home to the Muslim Uyghur Turks), they represent colonial legacies of former Qing rule.
The problem now isn’t imperialism per se but the melding of imperialism with Leninist methods of control, which continue to define Russian and Chinese rule. Thus, the U.S. has no choice but to be a status quo power—that is, it need not defeat or even seriously undermine these two revisionist empires, but it must firmly hold the line against their advance. Ukraine needs not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union, as long as it remains independent and democratic. Taiwan needs not declare independence, as long as it isn’t incorporated into China. These are unsatisfying positions, but they are moral in the sense that they represent both U.S. values and Americans’ wariness of armed overseas involvements.
Containment is a word nobody likes to say out loud. But it works. Remember especially that it was Richard Nixon’s Vietnam-era policy of détente and tactical maneuvering—rather than an attempt to seek all-out victory in the Cold War—that preceded Ronald Reagan’s successful Wilsonianism. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed of its own accord. We should keep that in mind, given that domestic tensions inside Russia and China, though more opaque than our own, aren’t to be underestimated and in fact help fuel their aggression.
Meanwhile, the American left should focus on where empire as an ideal truly endures, which isn’t in the West.
Mr. Kaplan holds a chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is author, most recently, of “The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian
-
https://www.ft.com/content/d307ab6e-57b3-4007-9188-ec9717c60023?63bac0e6-3d28-36b1-7417-423982f60790&fbclid=IwAR3o8hOHSVx3AX543UfNFaCmapB4WlLU8KhvE3758L-3ncteNSNaui0YLzw
Russia and China’s plans for a new world order
For Moscow and Beijing, the Ukraine crisis is part of a struggle to reduce American power and make the world safe for autocrats
© Evgeniy Paulin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool/AP
The western alliance has threatened the Kremlin with “massive” and “unprecedented” sanctions if Russia attacks Ukraine. But, as the Ukraine crisis reaches boiling point, western efforts to isolate and punish Russia are likely to be undermined by the support of China — Russia’s giant neighbour.
When Vladimir Putin travels to Beijing for the beginning of the Winter Olympics on February 4, the Russian president will meet the leader who has become his most important ally — Xi Jinping of China. In a phone call between Putin and Xi in December, the Chinese leader supported Russia’s demand that Ukraine must never join Nato.
A decade ago, such a relationship seemed unlikely: China and Russia were as much rivals as partners. But after a period when both countries have sparred persistently with the US, Xi’s support for Putin reflects a growing identity between the interests and world views of Moscow and Beijing. According to the Chinese media, Xi told Putin that “certain international forces are arbitrarily interfering in the internal affairs of China and Russia, under the guise of democracy and human rights”.
As Xi’s remarks to Putin made clear, the Russian and Chinese leaders are united by a belief that the US is plotting to undermine and overthrow their governments. In the heyday of communism, Russia and China supported revolutionary forces around the world. But today Moscow and Beijing have embraced the rhetoric of counter-revolution. When unrest broke out in Kazakhstan recently, Putin accused the US of attempting to sponsor a “colour revolution” — a term given to protest movements that seek to change the government — in a country that borders both Russia and China. Senior Chinese ministers echoed those remarks.
Washington’s hidden hand
As Russia and China see it, the uprising in Kazakhstan fitted a pattern. The Kremlin has long argued that the US was the hidden hand behind Ukraine’s Maidan uprising of 2013-14, in which a pro-Russian leader was overthrown. China also insists that foreign forces — for which, read the US — were behind the huge Hong Kong protests of 2019, which were eventually ended by a crackdown ordered from Beijing.
An estimated 100,000 Russian troops have amassed along Ukraine’s border © AP
Both Putin and Xi have also made it clear they believe that America’s ultimate goal is to overthrow the Russian and Chinese governments and that local pro-democracy forces are America’s Trojan horse.
In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson of the US talked of “making the world safe for democracy”. In 2022, Putin and Xi are determined to make the world safe for autocracy.
The ambitions of Russia and China, however, are far from being wholly defensive. Both Putin and Xi believe that their vulnerability to “colour revolutions” stems from fundamental flaws in the current world order — the combination of institutions, ideas and power structures that determines how global politics plays out. As a result, they share a determination to create a new world order that will better accommodate the interests of Russia and China — as defined by their current leaders.
Two features of the current world order that the Russians and the Chinese frequently object to are “unipolarity” and “universality”. Put more simply, they believe that the current arrangements give America too much power — and they are determined to change that.
“Unipolarity” means that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world was left with only one superpower — the US. Fyodor Lukyanov, a Russian foreign-policy thinker who is close to President Putin, believes that unipolarity “gave the United States the ability and possibility to do whatever it saw fit on the world stage”. He argues that the new age of American hegemony was ushered in by the Gulf war of 1991 — in which the US assembled a global coalition to drive Saddam Hussein’s Iraq out of Kuwait.
The Gulf war was followed by a succession of US-led military interventions around the world — including in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. Nato’s bombing of Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, in 1999, has long formed part of Russia’s argument that Nato is not a purely defensive alliance. The fact that Nato bombs also struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade has not been forgotten in Beijing.
China insists that foreign forces — ie the US — were behind the Hong Kong protests of 2019 eventually suppressed by Beijing © Isacc Lawrence/AFP via Getty Images
When unrest broke out in Kazakhstan recently, Putin accused the US of attempting to sponsor a revolution © STR/EPA/Shutterstock
After the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, Nato invoked Article 5 — its mutual-defence clause — and invaded Afghanistan. Once again, according to Lukyanov, America had demonstrated its willingness and ability to “forcefully transform the world”.
But America’s defeat in Afghanistan, symbolised by the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in the summer of 2021, has given the Russians hope that the US-led world order is crumbling. Lukyanov argues that the fall of Kabul to the Taliban was “no less historical and symbolic than the fall of the Berlin Wall”.
Influential Chinese academics are thinking along similar lines. Yan Xuetong, dean of the school of international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing (Xi’s alma mater), writes that “China believes that its rise to great-power status entitles it to a new role in world affairs — one that cannot be reconciled with unquestioned US dominance.”
Like Lukyanov, Yan believes that “the US-led world order is fading away . . . In its place will come a multipolar order”. President Xi himself has put it even more succinctly with his often repeated claim that “the east is rising and the west is declining”.
For Russia and China, the making of a new world order is not simply a matter of raw power. It is also a battle of ideas. While the western liberal tradition promotes the idea of universal human rights, Russian and Chinese thinkers make the argument that different cultural traditions and “civilisations” should be allowed to develop in different ways.
Vladislav Surkov, once an influential adviser to Putin, has decried Russia’s “repeated fruitless efforts to become a part of western civilisation”. Instead, according to Surkov, Russia should embrace the idea that it has “absorbed both east and west” and has a “hybrid mentality”. In a similar vein, pro-government thinkers in Beijing argue that a fusion of Confucianism and communism means that China will always be a country that stresses collective rather than individual rights. They claim that China’s success in containing Covid-19 reflects the superiority of the Chinese emphasis on collective action and group rights.
Fyodor Lukyanov, right, a foreign-policy thinker close to Putin, believes the collapse of the USSR gave the US permission to do what it liked on the world stage © Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS
Beijing and Moscow argue that the current world order is characterised by an American attempt to impose western ideas about democracy and human rights on other countries, if necessary through military intervention. The new world order that Russia and China are demanding would instead be based on distinct spheres of influence. The US would accept Russian and Chinese domination of their neighbourhoods and would abandon its support for democracy or the colour revolutions that might threaten the Putin or Xi regimes.
The crisis over Ukraine is a struggle over the future world order because it turns on precisely these issues. For Putin, Ukraine is culturally and politically part of Russia’s sphere of influence. Russia’s security needs should give it the right to veto any Ukrainian desire to join Nato, the western alliance. Moscow also demands to act as the protector of Russian speakers. For the US, these demands violate some basic principles of the current world order — in particular, the right of an independent country to define its own foreign policy and strategic choices.
The Ukraine crisis is also about “world order” because it has clear global implications. The US knows that if Russia attacks Ukraine and establishes its own “sphere of influence”, a precedent will be set for China. During the Xi era, China has built military bases all over contested areas of the South China Sea. Beijing’s threats to invade Taiwan — a self-governing democratic island that China regards as a rebel province — have also become more overt and frequent. If Putin succeeds in invading Ukraine, the temptation for Xi to attack Taiwan will rise, as will the domestic pressure on the Chinese leader from excitable nationalists, sensing the end of the American era.
Russia and China clearly have similar complaints about the current world order. There are also some important differences between the approaches of Moscow and Beijing. Russia is currently more willing to take military risks than China. But its ultimate goals may be more limited. For the Russians, the use of military force in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere is a way of repudiating the claim made by former US president Barack Obama that Russia is now no more than a regional power. Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Center in Moscow argues that, “For the country’s leaders, Russia is nothing if it is not a great power.”
But while Russia aspires to be one of the world’s great powers, China seems to be contemplating displacing the US as the world’s pre-eminent power. Elizabeth Economy, author of a new book called The World According to China, argues that Beijing is aiming for a “radically transformed international order” in which the US is in essence pushed out of the Pacific and becomes merely an Atlantic power. Since the Indo-Pacific is now the core of the global economy, that would essentially leave China as “number one”. Rush Doshi, a China scholar working in the White House, makes a similar argument in his book, The Long Game. Citing various Chinese sources, Doshi makes the case that China is now clearly aiming for American-style global hegemony.
The 9/11 terror attacks led to Nato invoking Article 5 and invading Afghanistan, showing US willingness to ‘forcefully transform the world’ © Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images
US forces battle the Taliban in 2001. America’s final defeat in Afghanistan last year has given Moscow hope the US-led world order is crumbling © Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images
A bid for global supremacy
The difference in the scale of the ambitions of China and Russia reflects the difference in their economic potential. Russia’s economy is now roughly the size of Italy’s. Moscow simply does not have the wealth to sustain a bid for global supremacy. By contrast, China is now, by some measures, the world’s largest economy. It is also the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter. Its population of 1.4bn people is roughly ten times that of Russia. As a result, it is realistic for China to aspire to be the most powerful country in the world.
But while the differences in the economic potential of Russia and China makes Xi ultimately more ambitious than Putin, in the short term it also makes him more cautious. There is something of a gambler’s desperation in Putin’s willingness to use military force to try to change the balance of power in Europe. Trenin argues that, having seen Nato expand into much of what was once the Soviet bloc, Putin sees Ukraine as his “last stand”.
In Beijing, by contrast, there is a strong feeling that time and history are on China’s side. The Chinese also have many economic instruments for expanding their influence that are simply not available to the Russians. A signature project of the Xi years is the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast international programme of Chinese-funded infrastructure that stretches into Central Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.
Recommended
Rachman Review podcast21 min listen
What would a Ukraine conflict look like?
As America has become more protectionist, China has also used its trading power to expand its global influence. This month has seen the launch of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a vast new free-trade area in the Asia-Pacific that includes China and several American strategic allies, such as Japan and Australia — which the US is not taking part in. Granting or withholding access to the Chinese market gives Beijing a tool of influence that is simply not available to Moscow.
But will gradualism work? Or do Russia and China need some kind of dramatic moment to create the new world order that they seek?
History suggests that new governing systems for the world generally emerge after some kind of seismic political event, such as a major war.
Much of the security and institutional architecture of the current world order emerged as the second world war was closing or in its aftermath, when the UN, the World Bank and the IMF were set up and their headquarters were situated in the US. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) came into force in 1948. Nato was created in 1949. The US-Japan Security Treaty was signed in 1951. The European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the EU, was also founded in 1951. After the end of the cold war, rival Soviet-backed institutions such as the Warsaw Pact collapsed and Nato and the EU expanded up to the borders of Russia. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the successor to the Gatt.
The question now is whether Russia and China’s ambitions for a “new world order” will also need a war to come to fruition. A direct conflict with the US is simply too dangerous in the nuclear era and will not happen unless all sides miscalculate badly (which is always possible).
Iranian, Russia and Chinese warships on a military drill in the Indian Ocean last year. Will Russia and China’s ambitions for a ‘new world order’ need a war to come to fruition? © Iranian Army office/AFP/Getty Images
Russia and China may, however, feel that they will be able to achieve their ambitions through proxy wars. An unopposed Russian victory in Ukraine might signal that a new security order was emerging in Europe, involving a de facto Russian “sphere of influence”. A successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be widely read as a sign that the era of American dominance of the Pacific was over. At that point, many countries in the region that currently look to the US for their security, such as Japan and South Korea, might choose to accommodate themselves to a new China-dominated order.
Alternatively, a new world order might emerge through tacit acquiescence from Washington. That outcome does not seem likely with the Biden administration in power, unless there are some dramatic last-minute concessions from the US over Ukraine. But Donald Trump could return to the White House in 2024. At least rhetorically, he seems sympathetic to aspects of the Russian-Chinese world view.
The former US president sometimes denigrated Nato and suggested that America’s allies in Asia were free-riders. His “America First” philosophy eschewed traditional language about an American mission to support freedom around the world. At times, Trump was also frank in expressing admiration for both Xi and Putin. And, as a self-proclaimed dealmaker, Trump is sympathetic to ideas of spheres of influence.
https://www.ft.com/content/d307ab6e-57b3-4007-9188-ec9717c60023?63bac0e6-3d28-36b1-7417-423982f60790&fbclid=IwAR3o8hOHSVx3AX543UfNFaCmapB4WlLU8KhvE3758L-3ncteNSNaui0YLzw
The ever closer Chinese-Russian alliance will ensure the threat to the US-led world order will not disappear any time soon © Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images
Yet Russia and China do not seem inclined to sit back and wait for Trump to return to the White House. They know that even Trump’s Republican party includes many hawks, intent on confrontation with both Russia and China. In any case, a great deal can happen between now and the next presidential election in November 2024.
Russia’s impatience is clear from Putin’s willingness to force a crisis over Ukraine. The prospects for a new world order that is more congenial to Russia may depend on whether his Ukrainian gamble works. But even if Putin fails to achieve his goals in Ukraine, the threat to the US-led world order will not disappear. A rising China, led by an ambitious President Xi, will make sure of that.
-
January 31, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
New Political Strategies in a New Economic Order
Coordinated protectionism may soon be the norm.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
At several debates I’ve attended since the beginning of the year – and in several responses I’ve received from readers – one question is inevitably asked: In these unprecedented times, how are states using their economic leverage to support their geopolitical imperatives? Put differently, how is geoeconomics changing?
To answer it, we need to consider the origins of the current global economic climate. The COVID-19 pandemic may have revealed and even aggravated some trends already underway, but the problems started with the 2008 global financial crisis, which heralded some fundamental changes. Most notably, it upended the U.S.-dominated economic order established at Bretton Woods after World War II. The United States is still the most dominant country, of course, but the world is decidedly more multipolar than it once was.
Among other things, Bretton Woods enabled the U.S. to establish the U.S. dollar as the world currency while the U.S. Marshall Plan provided the necessary investment to rebuild major European powers. It facilitated free trade-based globalization on an unprecedented scale, with the U.S. Navy securing global trade routes. It created a system whereby everyone was tied to a global market that would, in theory, discourage traditional imperial systems and thus prevent another world war. It was partly responsible for driving the Cold War and partly responsible for ending it. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. was the world’s only remaining superpower, the guarantor of a global government that supported the free flow of trade. Since then, other countries have regained economic, military and political power, even as the U.S. has lost or surrendered some of its own. In short, other nations, financial institutions and corporations took on a larger role in managing the global economy.
Financial markets have thus developed so quickly and so independently that neither the U.S. nor any other state could control them as they could in the latter half of the 20th century. Trading on the so-called secondary market – where rights on assets and guarantees on transactions were being bought and sold as if they were goods themselves – became so fluid and so abstract that it created the bubble that burst in 2008. Citizens the world over lost trust in their financial institutions as well as the governments that purport to protect them.
Many of these same citizens began to embrace both political and economic nationalism, but as important, they began to seek alternate systems operating parallel to the established ones. Enter cryptocurrencies. The viability of cryptos is still very much an open question, but the fact that they have been embraced as they have illustrates a loss of faith in traditional institutions.
So today, with supply chains disrupted, with cryptocurrencies gaining traction, and with the world still not fully recovered from the 2008 crisis, leaders everywhere are struggling to concoct a suitable policy mix. Coupled with the fact that governments the world over are devising ways to make their national economies more resilient, this changes the way governments use economic leverage to pursue their interests.
The problem that both governments and central banks are currently facing seems to be an inadaptation problem. If we look only at inflation, we should know central banks consider so-called “core inflation” to be the driver of monetary policy. “Core inflation” excludes short-term factors that may influence price – which means it excludes energy and food prices. The idea is that monetary policy can’t control them, and fluctuations in price will be eventually corrected.
This leads policymakers to consider inflation “transitory” when consumers are paying higher prices for food and energy. Consumers, for their part, aren’t so optimistic. In so many words, they think inflation will be higher than central bank economists think it will, and both participate in and thus influence the market – all while financial institutions and corporations also place their own bets, based on how they see policymakers and consumers acting on the market. The problem is that many of their actions are divergent as the gap between the two has widened over time.
This is a complex if obvious point: The political will to cooperate in solving financial problems – as happened after the 2008 financial crisis – was challenged by individual socio-economic problems, triggering a domino effect in which political and economic nationalism rose, especially in Europe.
The pandemic complicated things further. Central authorities are being challenged by the population on pretty much everything, from vaccination campaigns to lockdown measures. It has created an environmental challenge, resistance and skepticism. Hence why states feel compelled to provide a sense of protection – or, in some cases, protectionism.
Which brings us to the issue at hand. Since the heady days of relentless globalization in the 1990s, foreign direct investment seemed to be the preferred way for countries to economically leverage their geopolitical interests. The more a country was able to control investment flows and destinations, the easier it was for it to build political ties to various countries and regions. China, for example, has used this strategy to great effect in Africa and Europe.
But as globalization is diluting and we enter a deglobalization era, countries need to learn to understand their domestic markets better first, and then, based on their specific internal needs, pursue their interests internationally. In fact, China has been able to understand this and thus control its domestic market better than most. (It’s much easier to do in centralized economies and non-democracies.) Its tactics in this regard are telling. It was in no rush to end the lockdown in strategic ports like Tianjin, where measures ended last week, and Ningbo, where measures are still in place, and it also signaled it may ban exports of energy and key mineral resources. On Jan. 26, China and South Korea agreed to notify each other if either would ban such exports. This comes after China halted urea exports in November, creating supply chain disruption in the process. Beijing did it to secure its domestic market, particularly its semiconductor industry – which is key to maintaining economic leverage internationally.
Another way to leverage economic capacity for geopolitical ends is to at least influence, if not outright control, the flow of commodities and energy. This is the preferred tactic for Russia. Moscow wielded this weapon aggressively but only when it could afford to. High oil and gas prices usually coincide with military interventions abroad, such as in Afghanistan in 1979-1980 and Georgia in 2008. Rumors abound that a drop in gas prices was the only thing that spared Ukraine from a full-on Russian invasion after Moscow took Crimea in 2014. And as Russian forces amass on Ukraine’s border today, it’s important to note that the high price of energy arguably makes Russia sanctions-proof for the time being.
More abstractly, as countries navigate the new global economy, trying to keep their people happy while pursuing their interests abroad, they need to have a firmer understanding of financial markets and the role they play in those markets. Central authorities have the challenging task of monitoring virtually all market activity while being able to regulate precious little of it. Playing a more systemic role usually translates into the ability for a country to find ways to raise capital at lower borrowing costs and thus gain a greater ability to impact other countries’ borrowing costs. In the current financial system, where the market outpaces policies and their effects, such a task is getting even more difficult than usual.
What’s clear is that as the global economy changes, so too will government strategies for managing financial and commodity markets. This will likely result in protectionist measures, but because supply chains are so integrated and digitized, protectionism will likely be coordinated at least regionally if not globally. Until then, we will all have to live with the uncertainty.
-
In Clash With U.S. Over Ukraine, Putin Has a Lifeline From China
President Biden could find his plans to punish Russia undermined by Xi Jinping, a longtime ally of Mr. Putin. But China moves cautiously during crises.
176
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, left, with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, in Moscow in 2019. The two will meet Friday before the start of the Olympics in Beijing.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, left, with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, in Moscow in 2019. The two will meet Friday before the start of the Olympics in Beijing. Credit...Pool photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko
Steven Lee MyersEdward Wong
By Steven Lee Myers and Edward Wong
Feb. 2, 2022
Updated 2:49 a.m. ET
BEIJING — As the United States moves to exert maximal pressure on Russia over fears of a Ukraine invasion, the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin, has found relief from his most powerful partner on the global stage, China.
China has expressed support for Mr. Putin’s grievances against the United States and NATO, joined Russia to try to block action on Ukraine at the United Nations Security Council, and brushed aside American warnings that an invasion would create “global security and economic risks” that could consume China, too.
On Friday, Mr. Putin will meet in Beijing with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ahead of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics that President Biden and other leaders have pointedly vowed to boycott.
Although details of any potential agreements between the two countries have not been disclosed, the meeting itself — Mr. Xi’s first in person with a world leader in nearly two years — is expected to be yet another public display of geopolitical amity between the two powers.
A Chinese promise of economic and political support for Mr. Putin could undermine Mr. Biden’s strategy to ostracize the Russian leader for his military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. It could also punctuate a tectonic shift in the rivalry between the United States and China that could reverberate from Europe to the Pacific.
“If there’s a war over Ukraine, and the Chinese and Russians overtly align with one another, suddenly the world we’re in looks like a very, very different one,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a professor at Georgetown University who served on the National Security Council during Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
“China will be on the eastern front of what looks like a long-term global competition,” he added.
China’s leaders have watched the confrontation between Russia and the United States over Ukraine intently, with reports in Chinese state media highlighting the divisions among the NATO allies and criticizing the United States, gleefully at times.
The leadership has viewed the showdown as a test of American influence and resolve that could distract Mr. Biden from his administration’s focus on China as the pre-eminent strategic rival of the 21st century. That includes growing American support for Taiwan, the island democracy that China claims as part of its territory.
“In practical terms, China benefits on two fronts,” said Alexander Gabuev, an expert on Russia’s relations with China at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “First, a major security crisis in Europe will suck up a lot of oxygen that Team Biden needs to address China. Secondly, Russia will move even closer to China — on Beijing’s terms.”
Understand Russia’s Relationship With the West
The tension between the regions is growing and Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly willing to take geopolitical risks and assert his demands.
Competing for Influence: For months, the threat of confrontation has been growing in a stretch of Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
Threat of Invasion: As the Russian military builds its presence near Ukraine, Western nations are seeking to avert a worsening of the situation.
Energy Politics: Europe is a huge customer of Russia’s fossil fuels. The rising tensions in Ukraine are driving fears of a midwinter cutoff.
Migrant Crisis: As people gathered on the eastern border of the European Union, Russia's uneasy alliance with Belarus triggered additional friction.
Militarizing Society: With a “youth army” and initiatives promoting patriotism, the Russian government is pushing the idea that a fight might be coming.
In Washington, administration officials said they are worried that at the summit meeting in Beijing, Mr. Xi would offer Mr. Putin reassurances of Chinese support if the United States imposes heavy economic penalties on Russia, as the administration has threatened to do.
When the United States imposed similar penalties in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Mr. Putin also turned to China as an alternative source of investment and trade, minimizing the impact, at least somewhat. That year, China went ahead and signed a $400 billion gas deal with Russia, though Chinese officials did negotiate favorable prices for their companies since Mr. Putin was in a bind.
Maria Snegovaya, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who co-wrote an Atlantic Council paper on American sanctions against Russia, said the 2014 events pushed Russia closer to China.
She predicted that China would again help blunt the impact of sanctions, noting that the country is now a big buyer of Russian weapons, fish and timber, and in 2020 it was the largest importer of Russia’s crude oil and natural gas.
“This provides Russia more flexibility in case the West sanctions some of Russia’s exports,” she said.
While China has often driven a hard bargain with Russia in the past, the economic ties between the two countries have soared since Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine.
China announced last month that trade with Russia had reached nearly $147 billion, compared to $68 billion in 2015, the year after it annexed Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine. Russia’s ambassador to China, Andrei Denisov, said the two countries could soon complete a deal for a second natural gas pipeline like the one called Power of Siberia, which began flowing in 2019.
Beyond any economic benefits, the two countries have found common cause in trying to weaken American power and influence. Officials and state media in both countries have in recent weeks echoed each other’s attacks on the United States, reflecting an increasingly jaded view of American intentions.
China joined Russia in accusing the United States of fomenting public protests that swept Kazakhstan. Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service and a hawkish compatriot of Mr. Putin’s when both served in the Soviet K.G.B., said last month that the United States planned “to aggressively and maliciously interfere” in the Olympics in Beijing.
Global Times, a nationalistic newspaper of the Communist Party, seized on the comments to declare that the plot had been foiled. “Failed attack campaign against Winter Olympics shows incompetence of U.S. government,” a headline declared.
Mr. Xi has met Mr. Putin 37 times as their countries’ leaders, more than any other head of state. In their last meeting, a virtual summit in December, Mr. Xi called him his “old friend,” and the two pledged to build an international political and financial system not dominated by the United States and the dollar.
Chinese officials view Russia’s drive to push back against NATO as a parallel to their own efforts to prevent the United States from building up alliances and partnerships in Asia to counter China.
Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
Card 1 of 5
A brewing conflict. Antagonism between Ukraine and Russia has been simmering since 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, annexing Crimea and whipping up a rebellion in the east. A tenuous cease-fire was reached in 2015, but peace has been elusive.
A spike in hostilities. Russia has recently been building up forces near its border with Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s messaging toward its neighbor has hardened. Concern grew in late October, when Ukraine used an armed drone to attack a howitzer operated by Russian-backed separatists.
Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.
The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.
Rising tension. Western countries have tried to maintain a dialogue with Moscow. But administration officials recently warned that the U.S. could throw its weight behind a Ukrainian insurgency should Russia invade.
While there are many differences in the geopolitical situations of Ukraine and Taiwan, Mr. Putin’s use of historical myths and sheer military power to justify seizing Ukraine has resonance among hawks in Beijing. Mr. Xi, too, has intensified his warnings that Taiwan must never seek independence from a united China under Communist Party rule.
“There is a strong link between the two flash points,” said Artyom Lukin, a professor of international studies at the Far Eastern Federal University in Russia.
One notable difference is that while the United States has flatly said it will not send troops to defend Ukraine, it has maintained “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan for decades and has left unsaid whether it would come to the armed defense of the island. That ambiguity has helped serve as a deterrent against a Chinese invasion.
China’s diplomatic and rhetorical support is not a blank check for Russia’s designs.
If the United States targets Russia with new sanctions, China could take measured steps in aiding its neighbor. As they did in 2014, Chinese banks and companies would need to calculate whether they could end up being penalized if they do business with any targeted Russian entities. Such penalties would jeopardize their commerce in the United States and elsewhere.
China has also never recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and while the two countries conduct joint military operations, it is highly unlikely that China would ever explicitly support a military intervention.
Only weeks ago, China celebrated the 30th anniversary of an independent Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The two nations have strong commercial ties, including in the defense industry. Although Chinese officials have made clear that the United States should address Russia’s “reasonable security concerns” in Europe, they have also emphasized the need for a peaceful resolution of the conflict over Ukraine.
“Beijing is in the uncomfortable position of seeing one sovereign country invade another sovereign country,” said Derek Grossman, an analyst on Asian security issues at the RAND Corporation. “That flies in the face of noninterference, which China, on paper at least, has assiduously upheld.”
Memories also linger of the last Olympics in Beijing, the Summer Games in 2008. During the opening ceremony, news spread that Russian troops had moved into Georgia, another former Soviet republic bristling at Russian interference.
“The attitude of the Chinese government is still relatively prudent,” Cheng Xiaohe, a professor of international studies at Renmin University in Beijing, said, “but it mainly shows a cautious attitude on the basis of sympathy and support for Russia.”
Steven Lee Myers reported from Beijing and Edward Wong from Washington. Claire Fu and Rick Gladstone contributed research and reporting.
Steven Lee Myers is the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. He joined The Times in 1989 and has previously worked as a correspondent in Moscow, Baghdad and Washington. He is the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,” published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. @stevenleemyers • Facebook
Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 20 years, 13 from Iraq and China. He received a Livingston Award and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. @ewong
-
February 4, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
Thinking About Global Annihilation
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
We are in the midst of a major confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. I was there when President Ronald Reagan bluffed the Soviets into trying to keep up with developing space-based weapons the U.S. didn’t actually have. I was there when, as the Soviets threatened to send an airborne force to intervene in the Arab-Israeli War, the U.S. went to DEFCON 3. One of my earliest memories as a child growing up in the Bronx was the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956, when Russian tanks were reported to have leveled the old neighborhood my parents came from and where my relatives still lived.
(MARC: Coincidentally, I just reread James Michener's book about all this "The Bridge at Andau" and yes Russian tanks did level neighborhoods and shoot down many, many civilians. They took substantial casualties from the heroic Hungarian people in doing so.)
I am a connoisseur of global crises, especially the ones between the U.S. and the Soviets. They have the fine patina of subtlety coupled with dishonesty. Crises aren’t the sole domain of Washington and Moscow, but for my money, there is no crisis like a U.S.-Russian crisis. Even the Roman Empire couldn’t annihilate the world.
Given my expertise in crises, I’m taking in the current one as a sommelier imbibes a vintage they know well – expectantly, but prepared to be disappointed. So far the crisis has all the hallmarks of the classics. The Russians have mobilized three groups of tanks and claim not to be planning war. They have made demands that cannot possibly be agreed to, and are insulted when the demands are rejected. The United States has invoked the wrath of NATO, whose members promptly scatter like a herd of cats. NATO will later accuse the United States of abandoning its commitment to the alliance. This crisis will ultimately end in some incoherent outcome guaranteed to trigger more down the road. And in due course, a horde will come of unreadable dissertations and memoirs of the crisis, showing how the authors singlehandedly forced the other side to capitulate.
As a crisis I give it an 86 out of 100, drinkable but badly missing something. The something is the threat of thermonuclear war. What hardware has been mobilized lacks the energy of two nuclear powers moving their defense posture to just below global catastrophe, the tense meetings in bars in Vienna, Voronezh or Arlington, where “almost” senior civil servants talk to each other as if they have any chance of effecting the crisis, transformed into statesmen at the keyboard. Finally, there is intense uncertainty of a population about a future already defined by reality.
The standard-bearer for such episodes is the Cuban missile crisis, a fine blend of danger and bullshit. I was 13 when the crisis occurred. We lived then in Queens, New York, by Idlewild Airport, later named John F. Kennedy International Airport. I knew that Idlewild could be used as a military airfield, and it was loaded with fuel, and so I knew that in the war to come the Soviets would put two missiles about three miles from my precious butt. I knew the Russians were as well-armed as the Americans, and I knew this could only end in nuclear annihilation. I knew that because kids in 1962 took nuclear war as seriously as they took baseball. And as with baseball, they didn’t know much.
And in all the books and movies thereafter, the fear of war hung over everyone. Indeed, the episode was the stuff stories are built on. Robert Kennedy met with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., in a final desperate attempt to ward off the apocalypse. It turns out Kennedy taped all the meetings of the ExComm, the committee managing the crisis, and Soviet files were opened after the fall of the Soviet Union. Both of these documents reveal similar things: Each side wanted to make the crisis exciting so they could appear heroic and statesmanlike, but in fact it wasn’t what it appeared to be.
First, the Soviets had somewhere between two and 15 missiles in Russia said to be able to reach the United States. The U.S. had almost 200 reliable missiles, plus eight nuclear submarines also armed with nuclear weapons. The U.S. also had a large fleet of B-52 nuclear-armed bombers on continued alert. The Soviets had neither a significant long-range bomber force nor an operational nuclear capability.
When John F. Kennedy ran for president, he claimed there was a missile gap. It was a lie, but he knew that Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon couldn’t reveal the truth. The U.S. had the Soviets completely outgunned, not to mention the obsolete short-range missiles stationed in Turkey.
The reason that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wanted Cuba is that, without a long-range missile capability, he could use Cuba as a launchpad for nuclear strikes involving shorter-range weapons. Khrushchev figured that the U.S. would not strike Russia if Russia could have the ability to kill a million or so Americans. It all depended on the Soviets getting the missiles operational before the U.S. found out. The U.S. found out just in time. But as we discovered after the crisis, the U.S. didn’t attack Russia even when the Russians had no means of retaliation.
Kennedy and Khrushchev both understood as much. The idea that thermonuclear war was barely averted isn’t quite right. One thing that the Americans didn’t know was that the Soviets had sent tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba that the Soviet military was free to use in an invasion. Their use might have triggered a U.S. strike on Russia. Nuclear war could have happened only if the U.S. had struck unilaterally, which wasn’t going to happen. The legend that we stood eyeball to eyeball and only for Russia to blink first is nonsense.
I love this crisis because of the extraordinary drama at the moment and the way both leaders tried to make themselves heroic. I love the memoirs of would-be heroes. I love the way the full story came out and that what appeared to be armageddon turned into a called bluff. This is what a great U.S.-Russian conflict looks like: mankind on the brink of annihilation, surrounding a pile of horse manure.
I strongly suspect the current crisis is in fact like the Cuban missile crisis, as some have claimed with deep terror. I, for one, hope it is.
-
Long Live Ukraine, Taiwan and the Nation-State
A critical achievement of modern civilization may rest on the fate of these two small countries, in danger of being swallowed by imperial neighbors.
By Christopher DeMuth
Feb. 4, 2022 2:33 pm ET
Russia wants to absorb Ukraine and rule its people. China wants to absorb Taiwan and rule its people. The two powers isolate and degrade their much smaller neighbors at every turn and invoke stale grievances to justify conquering them outright. They have served notice on the world that they are prepared to make war to impose their will. Frantic countermeasures are under way, focused for the time being on averting an invasion of Ukraine or a Moscow-backed coup.
The bellicose Russian and Chinese overtures have provoked wide fear and revulsion. Fear because either military resistance or successful annexations could lead to further aggression by Russia and China and wider wars involving other European or Asian nations and the U.S. Revulsion because Taiwan and Ukraine are free democracies in the crosshairs of murderous dictatorships.
These are vital considerations for understanding and responding to the emergency. But there is another, more elemental consideration. Whatever their covetous neighbors say, Taiwan and Ukraine have the essential features of independent nationhood. Provenance and their own exertions have given them the moral right to national self-determination, for three reasons.
First, they occupy and police clearly defined territories inhabited and cultivated by millions of citizens. Their territorial boundaries involve a few incidental disputes, like those that pepper hundreds of other national borders; these are matters for routine diplomatic negotiation and are irrelevant to their neighbors’ designs on their entire territories.
Second, they are self-conscious polities with their own histories, traditions and institutions of government, commerce and civil society. Their diversities of ethnicity, language and religion are typical of many modern nations. People with ties of language and heritage to Russia and China enjoy full rights of citizenship. Most important, sundry group loyalties are thoroughly entwined with patriotic identity and allegiance: Large majorities regard Ukraine and Taiwan as their national homes, familiar and admirable, and are ready to fight and sacrifice alongside their countrymen to preserve their independence.
Third, they are peaceable. They have no interest, not to mention ability, in invading China or Russia (or any other neighbor), or to rule their peoples, subvert their institutions or interfere with their corresponding prerogatives as independent nations. Their militaries, and military alliances with other nations, are strictly defensive, with no purpose other than to counter manifest external aggression. The threats to national self-determination are wholly one-sided.
The national status of Ukraine and Taiwan is critical because the nation-state is a critical achievement of modern civilization. It is the product of centuries of social evolution and has proved the most productive, beneficial form of human politics yet devised. It is the indispensable building block of efforts to address regional and global problems. The order of self-governing nations deserves our attention and respect as a stupendous inheritance, one that needs our protection if we wish to keep it.
These assertions may sound strange. The nation-state was born in strife and bloodshed and has been the scene of horrific ethnic and religious conflict. Nationalism is said to have been the root cause of major wars. More than a few nation-states are brutal dictatorships indifferent to the welfare of their citizens. And who among us cannot recite a litany of objections to our own nation’s government and political system? No wonder that progressive idealism, once attached to “national self-determination,” has shifted to globe-spanning agencies and human-rights movements that transcend parochial national interests.
But these constructions are myopic and misleading. Folly, pride and malevolence are constants of our species, but so are reason, piety and benevolence—and the rise of the nation-state is thanks to its relative success in managing the former and making space for the latter. Nation building, beginning in the 16th century and gathering steam in the 18th, promoted diversity, equity and inclusion—and freedom to boot.
As Boston University’s Liah Greenfeld has demonstrated, the modern idea of social equality grew from efforts to transform class-ridden societies into inclusive national communities and to convert aristocracy-ridden governments into meritocratic ones.
The canonical freedoms of religion, speech, inquiry, association and enterprise were instituted to solve problems—wars of religion, out-of-touch ruling elites, static commerce, dogmatic science—that stood in the way of effective nationhood.
Whatever philosophers may declare, in practice there is no such thing as a supernational right: Rights of legal process, political participation, minority protection and security of hearth and home are enjoyed only by those who are part of a political community with the will and wherewithal to enforce them.
Most of today’s successful nation-states are conglomerations of racial, ethnic and religious groups that have become, on balance, sources of dynamism rather than conflict.
Each of these developments was spurred by competition with other countries that were learning the arts of nationhood and reaping commensurate rewards of wealth, independence, cultural achievement and mastery of the physical world. In premodern times, when “nations” meant racial, ethnic or religious groups, rivalry was based on immutable personal characteristics and tended to turn violent and zero-sum. When “nations” became geographic territories with diverse and overlapping population groups, rivalry shifted, productively, to institutional arrangements, management of domestic divisions and cultivation of the spirit of shared identity and purpose.
These tendencies aren’t the whole story, and we see a wide variety of practices and traditions among the world’s nearly 200 nation-states. That variety is itself a strength, akin to that of American federalism. Ukraine is said to be a “fledgling democracy” with a ways to go to meet supposedly high Western standards—but it is a conservative, relatively religious nation with a brave fighting spirit that is impressing friend and foe alike. Older and richer Taiwan features raucous conflict between progressive and conservative parties—yet they have mastered the art of regular, peaceful transfers of government. Fun fact: Taiwan’s constitution has a unique fourth branch, conceived by Sun Yat-Sen, that independently polices government performance and corruption with powers of censure and impeachment. Both major parties would like to be rid of this nettlesome innovation, but I hope that they keep it and that others take note.
For all its variety and many flaws, modern nationhood is in a class of its own and recognized as such. In the 1930s, Germany and Japan talked the talk of aggrieved nationhood—but they walked the walk of race-based, imperial conquest and had to be put back in their place at terrible cost by real nation-states of diverse traditions and interests. Today Russia and China conflate aggrieved nationhood with empire and subjugation and, for China, racial destiny. If they were normal nation-states, with the three essential features I have described, the world would be vastly more secure, peaceful and prosperous (even more so if Iran were to join the club). And their own great cultural achievements would be much more widely admired and studied.
The Russian and Chinese threats focus the mind on how the order of nation-states is to be protected. The “collective security” template at the heart of the League of Nations and United Nations, in which all member nations pledge to take seriously aggression against any other, is too wide and shallow to be effective. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s much firmer pledge has worked better but is limited to a restricted group of similar nations. But all three institutions undermined the national order by obscuring security responsibilities. The league and U.N. oxymoronically made “national self-determination” a dispensation from an “international community,” and NATO transferred significant European security responsibilities from its own nations to the U.S.
I think there is no better alternative than leaving security challenges to the judgement of individual nations from case to case, weighing their own national interests and their collective interest in protecting the national order. That, in any event, seems to be how things work in practice, as in the current crisis. Japan and Australia have effectively pledged to help defend Taiwan militarily in league with the U.S., while South Korea has demurred (it says it won’t fight alongside Japan). France, the U.K. and Poland, along with the U.S., have been outstanding supporters of Ukraine, while Germany has gone to extraordinary lengths to deny support.
Why is the Taiwan coalition planning on joining actively in military defense, while the Ukraine coalition is limiting itself to providing military supplies and intelligence and logistical support? Taiwan, excluded from most international organizations at China’s behest, has carefully cultivated bilateral political, commercial and cultural ties with the U.S. and other powerful nations, and it has been a conspicuously better world citizen than China, as during the Covid pandemic. Self-determination takes time, and Taiwan, which has been effectively independent since 1949, has had more time than Ukraine, which withdrew from the Soviet Union only in 1991. But the decisive reason is that the U.S. correctly sees China as a far more serious threat to American interests and menace to world peace and stability than Russia.
Whatever the upshot, I would like to see, in these and future cases, greater recognition of the integrity of the nation-state and its value to others. If Ukraine’s plight is judged less important than Taiwan’s to the interests of other nations, so be it. But that is no excuse for the disparagement of Ukraine, in some European and American quarters, as less than a “real” nation worthy of our attentions. The Ukrainians’ astonishing defiance in the face of massive military mobilization is an object lesson in the value of the nationalist spirit to international order. It is unmasking Russian ruthlessness while others equivocate, and may itself be a sufficient deterrent unto the day.
Here is a parting thought for giving nationhood a rhetorical boost in the councils of government and public opinion. The word genocide, meaning the extermination of a people for their race or ethnicity, describes an act so monstrous that its very application can influence debate and action. It could be useful to have a cognate, perhaps nationcide, to describe the extermination of the national civilization a people have built—customs, traditions, civil associations and practices of self-government—which many of them will deem as precious as life itself.
Mr. DeMuth is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute.
-
Xi and Putin Announce ‘No Limits’ Partnership Amid Deepening Standoff With West
By Dorothy Li February 4, 2022 Updated: February 4, 2022biggersmaller Print
0:00
3:23
1
China’s leader Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing on the opening day of the Winter Olympics in a show of solidarity amid mounting pressures from the West.
Friday’s meeting also marks Xi’s first in-person meeting with his counterpart for nearly two years. The leader of the Chinese Communist Party hasn’t left the country since the onset of the pandemic in January 2020.
Facing U.S.-led efforts to pressure the Chinese regime over its human rights abuses, and Russia over its military buildup near the Ukraine border, the two leaders proclaimed a “no limits” friendship during the summit on Feb. 4. They also signed gas and oil contracts worth an estimated $117.5 billion.
Displaying a united front, the two leaders issued an over 5,000 word statement after the meeting, highlighting their opposition to what they called “interference in the internal affairs” by “other States,” in a veiled reference to Washington and its allies.
According to the English version joint statement released by the Kremlin, Moscow “reaffirms its support” for Beijing’s stance on Taiwan—the Chinese regime views the self-ruled island as its own territory to be taken by force if necessary.
The Chinese regime backed Russia’s opposition for the enlargement of NATO, issues at the heart of Moscow’s confrontation with the United States and its allies over Ukraine, according to the readout.
The two sides voiced their opposition to AUKUS, a newly-formed security alliance between the United States, the UK, and Australia, which experts have viewed as a game-changer for countering the Chinese regime’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
The summit came hours before Xi opened the Winter Olympics, a global event that has been overshadowed by a spate of diplomatic boycotts amid rising scrutiny of the communist regime’s suppression in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong.
Epoch Times Photo
Australian human rights groups gathered at Martin Place in Sydney on Feb. 4, 2022, to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics. The picture shows the banners and signs at the rally. (Li Rui/The Epoch Times)
Putin is the most prominent guest at the opening ceremony on Friday. The United States and some major participants, including the UK, Canada, and Australia, announced they wouldn’t send any official delegation to the Games in protest against the regime’s human rights violations against Uyghurs in the far-western Xinjiang region.
The meeting also came amid growing fears of a potential war between Russia and Ukraine, which experts have said may lead to Beijing playing a major role in supporting the Kremlin.
The United States and its allies have warned Russia of harsh sanctions if it goes ahead with an invasion of Ukraine, but some 100,000 Russian troops remain near the border with no signs of de-escalation.
On Feb. 3, the United States warned Chinese firms that they would face consequences if they sought to help Russia by evading export controls imposed on the country in the event of an invasion of Ukraine.
The U.S. announcement comes hours after the Chinese regime signaled its “coordinated positions” on Ukraine during a meeting between the two countries’ foreign ministers, Wang Yi and Sergei Lavrov, in Beijing on Thursday, according to Beijing’s foreign ministry.
TAIWAN Air Force
A People’s Liberation Army (PLA) H-6 bomber flies on a mission near the median line in the Taiwan Strait, which serves as an unofficial buffer between China and Taiwan, on Sept. 18, 2020. (Taiwan Ministry of National Defense/via Reuters)
Some observers suggested that Beijing is closely watching how the United States and its allies act in response to the standoff over Ukraine, as the regime ponders its strategy towards Taiwan.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
-
The Chinese Regime Will Not Change Its Grand Strategy
Bradley A. Thayer
Bradley A. Thayer
February 2, 2022 Updated: February 2, 2022biggersmaller Print
0:00
5:54
1
Commentary
States possess grand strategies, that is, how they define their interests, the threats to those interests, and the means that they employ to advance their interests in the face of threats.
Additionally, states make strategic choices to address the threats they face and to advance their interests in the ever-changing circumstances of international politics. Usually this is done by making modest changes such as a making a doctrinal change, establishing a new base or alliance relationship, building new weapons systems, or investing in new weapons technologies.
However, at times states execute major grand strategic changes to address threats. They undertake such a dramatic change, typically because the threat they face has become greater, even an existential threat.
In 1914, Britain made a major break with its grand strategic past when it decided to send its army and so made a continental commitment to support Belgium and France against the German invasion.
Likewise, the 1917 decision by President Woodrow Wilson to enter World War I on the side of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia was a major break with traditional U.S. grand strategy, which, like Great Britain, had avoided making continental commitments.
When the United States reversed course about two years later, when the U.S. Congress rejected the League of Nations Treaty and the Anglo-Franco-American Treaty of Guarantee, it made a similarly major step. However, such changes are rare in international politics, especially for hegemonic states.
While the grand strategies of all states are important, those of the great powers are especially so since their decisions have an exaggerated impact on international stability and the likelihood of war and peace. The Chinese regime possesses a grand strategy of domination and seeks to replace the United States from its position in international politics. The possibility of intense security competition, the new cold war between the United States and China, or conflict between them, compels the contemplation of whether China may execute a grand strategic change. If it could back away from its hegemonic ambition, this would allow a potential confrontation to be avoided.
Due to China’s prodigious growth, the global audience needs to understand China’s motivation and anticipated path in the world, and to have some conception of the degree to which China’s grand strategy is likely to remain on its current course or may be expected to change. Comprehending why China changes its grand strategy is critical for understanding its actions and direction in international politics.
Epoch Times Photo
Journalists and others film next to a large screen showing Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the newly built Museum of the Communist Party of China, in Beijing, on June 25, 2021. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
Unfortunately for international stability, the Chinese seldom change their grand strategy. Historically, this is because China has been the hegemon in East Asia. Only rarely has the external and internal situation combined to cause the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to focus on its survival.
However, the Chinese abruptly changed their grand strategy in the Ming and Manchu dynasties, where at different times, they abandoned their hegemony and executed a grand strategic volte face, abandoning exploration and trade to turn inward as they did after Admiral Zheng He’s last voyage of exploration and conquest in the 15th century. In these cases, the Chinese retreated to focus on stabilizing their rule.
Moreover, there have also been “near misses,” circumstances that have almost brought about a grand strategic change but did not, as both the existential internal and external threats were not present, such as in the turbulent Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900), and the period of instability that surrounded the Tiananmen uprising of 1989.
Based on China’s history, for China to change its course, it must face a major domestic threat at the elite level. This is a dynastic challenge and may be thought of as a domestic peer competitor to the imperial regime. Second, the domestic peer challenge must occur at the same time that there is the threat from an external peer competitor. In each instance, the Chinese retreated when they faced peer competition simultaneously at the domestic and international levels. The combination of a challenge from a domestic peer competitor as well as external peer competitor is required to make China change its grand strategy.
China now may face this situation again. The United States, in conjunction with its ally Japan and with support from India, will serve as the external peer competitors. What is lacking is an internal threat at a sufficiently significant level. Given Xi Jinping’s grip on power, including the success of his anti-corruption and other campaigns at targeting his enemies, a successful internal threat is not likely. Only if the Chinese regime faced a challenge from the United States and its allies, and there was a dynastic struggle, might China change course and conflict, cold or hot, be avoided.
The former might occur, and it is incumbent upon the Biden administration to reassure a Japan concerned about this administration’s path, and to bring India into an alliance. However, the latter, a dynastic struggle, is less likely to occur. Xi is unlikely to be dethroned. Accordingly, the United States and its allies must steel themselves to face the threat from the Chinese regime. The CCP will not change its strategic course. Indeed, from its perspective, it should not as it has been an unalloyed success—rising to a position to challenge America with the active support of many in the United States and the West. For the United States and its allies, there is not going to be a quick or simple solution to the threat posed by the Chinese regime.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
-
Though there are points in here where I am not in accord, Bolton is not a stupid guy and there are points with which I certainly agree completely.
============================
Entente Multiplies the Threat From Russia and China
The misguided idea that the U.S. needs to ignore one to focus on the other intensifies the danger.
By John Bolton
Feb. 15, 2022 12:22 pm ET
SAVE
PRINT
TEXT
54
Chinese President Xi Jinping looks on during a medal presentation ceremony in Beijing, June 8, 2018.
PHOTO: GREG BAKER/POOL/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUT/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK
It’s been more than 75 years since the U.S. last faced an axis of strategic threats. Fortunately, that axis proved dysfunctional. Had it been otherwise, Japan and Germany would have systematically attacked the Soviet Union, not America, first.
Our current strategic adversaries, Russia and China, aren’t an axis. They’ve formed an entente, tighter today than any time since de-Stalinization split the communist world. Involving some mutual interests and objectives, displays of support, and coordination, ententes are closer than mere bilateral friendships but discernibly looser than full alliances. The pre-World War I Triple Entente (Russia, France and Britain) is the modern era’s prototype.
OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
WSJ Opinion Potomac Watch
Ukraine Steels Itself for a Possible Invasion
SUBSCRIBE
Moscow is junior partner to Beijing, the reverse of Cold War days. The Soviet Union’s dissolution considerably weakened Russia, while China has had enormous economic growth since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Russia’s junior-partner status looks permanent, given disparities in population and economic strength (whatever today’s military balance), but Vladimir Putin seems determined to move closer to China.
This entente will last. Economic and political interests are mutually complementary for the foreseeable future. Russia is a significant source of hydrocarbons for energy-poor China and a longtime supplier of advanced weapons. Russia has hegemonic aspirations in the former Soviet territory, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. China has comparable aspirations in the Indo-Pacific region and the Middle East (and world-wide in due course). The entente is growing stronger, as China’s unambiguous support for Russia in Europe’s current crisis proves.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Opinion: Morning Editorial Report
All the day's Opinion headlines.
PREVIEW
SUBSCRIBED
Washington would undoubtedly be more secure if it could sunder the Moscow-Beijing link, but our near-term prospects are limited. This entente, along with many other factors, renders especially shortsighted the common assertion that opposing China’s existential threat to the West requires reducing or even withdrawing U.S. support for allies elsewhere.
Barack Obama’s “pivot” or “rebalancing” to Asia produced a decade of variations on the theme that China matters and other threats don’t. Donald Trump agreed, although he wanted primarily to strike “the biggest trade deal in history” or impose tariffs if he couldn’t, along with assaulting China for the “Wuhan virus” when it became politically convenient. Some analysts argue that the global terrorist threat is diminishing and that hydrocarbon resources are becoming less important because of the green-fuel revolution. Both would mean that we could safely reduce U.S. attention to the Middle East. Thus, Joe Biden argued that withdrawing from Afghanistan was required to increase attention to China’s menace. Sen. Josh Hawley and others even believe we shouldn’t be deeply involved in the Eastern Europe crisis, to avoid diverting attention and resources from countering Beijing.
Such assertions about reduced or redirected U.S. global involvement are strategic errors. They reflect the misperception that our international attention and resources are zero-sum assets, so that whatever notice is paid to interests and threats other than China is wasted.
This is false, both its underlying zero-sum premise and in underestimating non-Chinese threats. Our problem is failing to devote anything like adequate attention or resources to protecting vital global interests. Political elites (who are noticeably lacking in figures like Truman and Reagan) focus on exotic social theories and domestic economics rather than national-security threats. America’s own shortsightedness, particularly an inadequate defense budget, makes us vulnerable to foreign peril. Washington must pivot not among competing world-wide priorities, but away from domestic navel-gazing.
Critically, those who exclusively fear China ignore the Russia-China entente. The entente serves to project China’s power through Russia, as Beijing also projects power through North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs. Moreover, Beijing closely assesses Washington’s reactions to crises like the one in Ukraine to decide how to structure future provocations.
Mr. Biden had it exactly backward in Afghanistan. The U.S. withdrawal not only signaled insularity and weakness, but allowed China and Russia to extend their influence in Kabul, Central Asia and the Middle East. Beijing and Moscow thereby also became more confident and assertive. And that’s not to mention that even the Biden administration admits that terrorism’s threat is rising again in Afghanistan.
Beijing is not a regional threat but a global one. Treating the rest of the world as a third-tier priority, a distraction, the U.S. plays directly into China’s hands. Pivoting to Asia wouldn’t strengthen America against China. It would have precisely the opposite effect and weaken our global posture.
We need to see this big picture before the Russia-China entente grows up to be an axis.
Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.
-
Second post of the day-- contrast with what Bolton advocates above:
The coalition of the unwilling
Western elites prefer not to fight authoritarianism
By Clifford D. May
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan addressed the British Parliament, expressing optimism about the “global campaign for democracy now gathering force.” Less than a decade later, the Soviet Union collapsed. After that, it was widely believed that authoritarianism was in decline and that the community of free nations was bound to grow and prosper.
That belief was incorrect. These days we monitor what political scientist Larry Diamond dubbed the “democratic recession.”
For example, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the respected research and analysis division of The Economist, the respected international magazine, produces a respected annual Democracy Index. The latest, issued last week, reports that the state of global democracy fell to a record low in 2021, with only 6.4% of the world’s population living in a “full democracy” and more than 33% living under authoritarian rule. That includes, of course, the 1.4 billion people living in the People’s Republic of China.
Those figures don’t shock me. What does: the EIU’s contention that the “real challenge for the West may not be to prevent China from one day becoming the dominant global power, which seems to be, if not inevitable, at least highly likely — but to manage that process in such a way as to avoid war and preserve democracy and the best of the Western enlightenment legacy.”
Did you get that? The EIU is untroubled by the prospect of the Chinese Communist Party replacing the United States as “the dominant global power.” The EIU advises that if we “manage that process” well, a few democratic societies and Western values may survive.
It gets worse: The EIU is not sure whether the triumph of authoritarianism over democracy should be regarded as bad or good. “If China’s ascendancy were to result in the spread of authoritarian rule and a rollback of democracy globally, would this bring about an improvement or otherwise in the lives of millions of ordinary people?” the report wonders. “Equally, we may ask to what extent the world’s democracies are succeeding in meeting these aspirations for a better life for all.”
The EIU is no outlier. Au contraire, it reflects the views of a broad swath of British, European and even American elite opinion.
Members of this “coalition of the unwilling” do not intend to exert themselves to defend what Mr. Reagan termed “the infrastructure of democracy” — the institutions, values and habits that guarantee freedom of speech, the press and assembly, along with property rights, competitive politics, an independent judiciary and the rule of law.
Within this coalition are both left-wingers and right-wingers — a horseshoe bent to run along parallel lines. The leftists believe America is so fundamentally flawed, socially unjust and systemically racist that it has no business passing judgment on Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Cuban, Venezuelan and other despots. The rightists believe America can and should become a fortress, ignoring conflicts in far-off lands about which we know nothing (to coin a phrase).
Examples? George Soros, a leftist billionaire, joined forces with Charles Koch, a rightist billionaire, to found (and fund) the Quincy Institute, which champions neoisolationism and therefore promotes appeasement of the regimes ruling China, Russia and Iran.
Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to denounce “warmongers on both sides in Washington” who want “Russia to invade Ukraine” to “lock in this new Cold War” to financially benefit the “military-industrial complex.”
Mr. Carlson found that “a credible view.”
Last month, Xi Jinping, secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party, gave a virtual address to the Davos World Economic Forum whose globalist and plutocratic members are apparently unconcerned about the crushing of freedom in Hong Kong, the reeducation camps in Xinjiang, the destruction of Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, and the distinct possibility that a lethal virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Mr. Xi welcomed Russian strongman President Vladimir Putin as his guest of honor at the Beijing Olympics, which have been compared to the Berlin Olympics of 1936. One difference: Though the Nazi regime’s antisemitism was hardly a secret, the mass murders were still a few years off and, to many, still unimaginable. By contrast, Beijing’s genocide of Turkic Muslims is infamous and ongoing.
As I write this, I see on the website of Amnesty International a slightly out-of-date note that the Olympic Games “promise to be a memorable sporting spectacle, but the watching world cannot willfully ignore what is happening elsewhere in China.” Tough talk! Much more prominently featured on the website: Amnesty’s allegation that Israel is guilty of apartheid, carrying the implication that the democratic Jewish-majority state has no right to exist.
The top dogs in many American and European corporations, Hollywood film studios and sports franchises also defend — and perhaps kowtow to — Mr. Xi and his CCP.
So, what policy does the EIU propose the Free World adopt in response to the rise of authoritarianism? It recommends that the “U.S. and its Western allies should focus their energies on rejuvenating their political systems so that they can provide a desirable alternative model to that of China. Far better that the U.S. and the world’s democracies demonstrate the advantages of their system of government by redemocratizing their politics, rather than by trying to isolate or contain China.”
With apparent pride, the EIU further notes that it seeks “to avoid the tendency to present China in adversarial terms, or to presume that the Western way is the natural order of things.”
Reagan famously said: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” What he’d say about the current generation’s defense of freedom we can only imagine.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a col-umnist for The Washington Times
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/chinas-malevolent-naval-aggression/#slide-1
-
The Ukraine War Exposes Russia and China’s Competing Visions for Eurasia
undefined and Senior VP of Strategic Analysis
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
7 MIN READFeb 25, 2022 | 18:47 GMT
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying discusses the Russia-Ukraine crisis during a press conference in Beijing on Feb. 24, 2022.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying discusses Russia-Ukraine tensions during a press conference in Beijing on Feb. 24, 2022.
(NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images)
China continues to publicly back Russia despite the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. But the conflict is exposing Beijing and Moscow’s competing visions for the future of Eurasia, which will continue to stress their relationship. China sees the continental area as a broad corridor of trade routes linking the Pacific and the Atlantic. But Russia’s assertion of its sphere of influence along its western frontier challenges this view by risking a more permanent rift between Moscow and Europe. Talk of new Cold War dynamics undercut China’s ability to create economic and political links across Eurasia through its Belt and Road infrastructure investments.
Cracks in the Foundation
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has refrained from directly criticizing Russia for invading Ukraine. Chinese media coverage has even used some of Russia’s own arguments in downplaying the military intervention. Beijing is also offering Moscow a partial buffer against sanctions through new deals for increased energy trade, expanded agriculture trade, and the likely use of alternatives to the SWIFT international payment system. But while not openly critical, China has refrained from providing active diplomatic support for Russia’s military actions and its recognition of the breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine. Beijing has longstanding ties with Ukraine (including in the defense sector). And Chinese leaders are concerned with the precedent set by Russia of foreign support for breakaway provinces (which, in China’s case, could include places like Xinjiang, Tibet, or even Taiwan).
The mixed reaction from Beijing reflects a deeper unease in its broader relationship with Moscow. While there are several areas of strategic alignment between the two neighbors, including their mutual concern with the United States, there remains an underlying mistrust between them. China is a rising Eurasian power, Russia is declining. That alone creates unevenness in their relationship — one that Moscow resents and Beijing eyes with caution. In the past, China’s economic power complemented Russia’s military and historical power across Central Asia, leaving more room for cooperation than competition. But China’s growing military prowess, and its increasing political influence, challenge Russia’s traditional influence in its near abroad. Moscow may not be able to match China’s economic largess, but it continues to use historical and cultural ties, the Eurasian Economic Union, and its security relationships to try and temper Chinese influence. While Beijing tolerates this, it perpetuates a sense of mistrust.
China’s Focus on Economic Power
At its core, the fundamental difference between the two large neighbors is their differing visions of the future of Eurasia. Russia continues to see itself in light of an embattled Eurasian heartland power, one that needs to build a shell around itself to ensure its strategic security. This is about distinct spheres of influence and a division between Russia and Europe. China, on the other hand, sees the future of Eurasia as a vast corridor of trade — a crisscross of land routes that ease Beijing’s current vulnerability at sea, reorient its underdeveloped interior provinces away from their wealthier coastal neighbors, and enable China to use economic heft as a tool of influence and security across Asia, Europe and even into Africa.
In many ways, China’s vision better matches British geographer Sir Halford J. Mackinder’s concern of the potential power of what he called the World Island. In the early 20th Century, Mackinder saw the potential for modern technology (the railroad) to crisscross and connect Europe, Asia and Africa into a vast supercontinent. A single Eurasian power could then harness the resources and manpower of the three continents, and then turn that combined power out to the seas. Neither Russia, Germany nor the Soviet Union — all prospective Heartland powers — ever linked Eurasia, much less the World Island. This was in part due to cost. But mostly it was because, in the 19th and much of the 20th Century, the expansion of political power was often tied to territorial aggrandizement, and no country or coalition was able to conquer and control Europe and Asia.
In the 21st century, China seeks political power through economic rather than military tools. Beijing does not have to conquer its neighbors or the more distant reaches of Eurasia; it can instead expand its influence through trade, technology, investment and infrastructure development. China, then, is a modern imperial power — one that grows its reach for the most part without needing to grow its physical territory. In the South China Sea, Beijing has used its military as a tool of coercion to back its vast territorial claims and occupy several unoccupied islets. But China has avoided direct military confrontations or the use of military force to seize territory from others in the strategic waterway.
Only in the past 20 years or so has Beijing begun revising its military for the expected future need of operations abroad. Even then, China remains rather conservative in its use of military force as a tool of foreign policy — particularly when compared with its peer great powers Russia and the United States, or even Western European countries like France. Beijing has a grand vision of power and influence, but it seeks to attain it through means shy of war for as long as possible.
Russia’s Focus on Military Power
By comparison, Russia is a holdout of the past, a country that has regularly used its military as a tool of coercion and influence in its near abroad. Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia in support of Moscow-inspired secessionist movements was repeated and expanded upon in its 2014 intervention in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea. And it has been taken to the extreme with Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine, one aimed not at the minimal goals of establishing buffers along the Russian southern front, but of either the “Finlandization” or reassertion of Russian influence and control of Ukraine.
Modern Russia’s use of its military to reshape its near abroad mirrors the actions of the Soviet Union. Russia uses the military as a tool of coercion, to enact a fait accompli (as with its annexation of Crimea) and as a tool of brute force (as with the current invasion of Ukraine) to actively change regimes along its periphery. While China may appreciate Russian actions keeping the United States focused on Europe instead of the Indo-Pacific, Beijing is concerned that Moscow’s actions may re-strengthen Euro-Atlantic ties and fracture China’s ability to keep trade flowing through former Soviet territories into Europe. China’s economic interests across Eurasia will increasingly be put at risk by Russia’s military and political actions that fragment rather than unite the supercontinent.
A Closed vs. Open Eurasia
Chinese rail and road connections to Europe rely on transit through Russia, or key countries in Russia’s near abroad. If Russian actions and Western sanctions and security dynamics lead to even a light version of the old Iron Curtain, China’s economic and political leverage falters, and Beijing will once again be dependent upon the maritime routes that remain vulnerable to U.S. maritime power. Russia may be satisfied as a continental power, but China sees its continental connections as a path toward global power, secure first on land, and then expanding into the seas. The tension between these two visions will strain Beijing’s ties with Moscow as their actions run counter to their interests. China wants to open the space, Russia wants it closed. In short, China’s attempt to bridge Eurasia may be undermined by Russia’s attempt to dig a moat. And at some point, that challenge may prompt Beijing to deem the costs of its continued close cooperation with Moscow outweigh the benefits.
-
February 26, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
On Ukraine, China Keeps Its Options Open
Many expected Beijing to throw its support behind Russia. That hasn’t happened.
By: Allison Fedirka
With all that’s happening in Eastern Europe, it’s understandable why so much attention has been paid to Russia, Ukraine, NATO, the European Union, the United States and anyone else with skin in the game. China, meanwhile, is flying under the radar, which is exactly where it wants to be.
Given its rocky relationship with the U.S. and the publicly lauded meeting between presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin earlier this month, many expected Beijing to throw its support behind Russia. But that hasn’t happened. So far, the Communist Party of China has employed a measured response that emphasizes dialogue among the interested parties. This is hardly evidence of the Russia-China alliance touted by much of the mainstream media. The truth is their relationship is much more tenuous and, at times, competitive.
They have competing fundamental interests that cannot be overcome simply by having a shared enemy in the U.S. These include India, Mongolia, Central Asia and, to a lesser extent, the balance of power in the Pacific, especially with regard to North Korea, Vietnam and so on. Even if they could temporarily set their differences aside, China doesn’t have much to offer Russia right now other than financial support.
To be clear, financial support is important – more so than, say, military support. For the sanctions regime against Russia to work, a lot of countries have to participate. Any abstention could create a potential loophole for circumvention. Hence why Moscow has been reaching out to Syria, Iran, China and other countries like those in the Eurasian Economic Union.
On that front, Beijing seems to be weighing its options. It must consider its own domestic economic problems, which are many. China’s shadow lending, its intervention in market affairs, its dependence on imports and its supply chain struggles create a very precarious situation. It has weathered COVID-19 well enough, but its struggles predate the pandemic. Financial aid, then, becomes a risky prospect. It would divert government funds away from the public at a time when state coffers play a crucial role in generating growth and preventing defaults, and it would make itself a target of U.S. sanctions. China cannot afford another trade war or restricted access to U.S. dollars, which are essential for China’s floundering tech companies and foreign investment.
There is speculation that China is biding its time, using the war as an opportunity to negotiate a new relationship with the United States. So far, it appears to be little more than speculation. Similarly, several media reports suggest that the war will inspire China to finally invade Taiwan. This, too, is unlikely. China’s decision to invade Taiwan has nothing to do with Russia or instability in the global system. If that were the case, China would have invaded long ago. But it has refrained from doing so because it is politically fraught and militarily daunting. An invasion would result in massive casualties and would likely invite U.S. and Japanese reprisals. Instead, it has opted to conduct menacing flights and naval posturing to wear down Taiwanese defense forces rather than any real action.
When countries pick sides in a global conflict, they do so based on how it benefits them. China could help Russia, but there may not be an upshot. If anything, taking a strong pro-Russian stance may actually hurt the Chinese economy. The U.S., meanwhile, has an interest in making sure China does not support Russia and in improving relations with Beijing. China is wisely keeping its options open.
-
March 4, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
How the Ukraine War Might Shift the Global System
By: George Friedman
War is agony for everyone involved. Wars are bloody affairs that have consequences not just for the soldiers who fight them but also for the governments that decided to wage them. In fact, an uncomfortable and thus overlooked fact of war is that sometimes these consequences are more significant than what the war was fought over. I believe this to be the case in Ukraine.
It’s nearly impossible to properly analyze a war in its first few days. The misinformation and disinformation, propaganda and supposition are simply too much to overcome. But what I’ll say is this. If Russia loses this war, or if the war proves to be a long and grinding affair, the Russia that President Vladimir Putin wished to create will never materialize. He once said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes in history. Ukraine, then, may be his way of proving that the collapse has been overcome, that the boundaries of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire have been restored, and that Russia is now in the first ranks of great powers.
In any case, one of the most consequential events so far is that the invasion of Ukraine has galvanized NATO, the alliance originally meant to counter Soviet attacks. Moscow had hoped to pit the alliance against itself, with some members ignoring retaliation action in favor of maintaining their strong commercial ties with Russia. The striking example is Germany, which had deep trade relations with Russia and, thanks to NATO, has been able to ignore its military needs in favor of its economic interests. But even Berlin chose to accept the economic costs. (To this I should add Japan, which has been overlooked I suspect because it isn’t European. Even so, Japan chose to act in concert against Russia – no small development, considering it is the third-largest economy in the world, one that has serious territorial disputes with Russia.) And important though the global economic response has been, it is weak insofar as it is not a military response, and is therefore not a substitute for war. As of now, the commitment to Ukraine does not include military action in the event the sanctions regime fails.
The coalition, then, is partly a group bound by treaty obligation and partly a group of separate players, none of which is prepared, or able, to wage war. In that sense, NATO has not been resurrected at all; there is a coalition in place to employ sanctions to force Russia out of Ukraine that leaves no room for escalation.
Russia, meanwhile, seems undeterred by sanctions. The measures will indeed hurt the Russians, but, knowing that sanctions would inevitably come, Moscow figured that having Ukraine as a buffer is worth the economic pain. This means that NATO and its allies may have to resort to military means to achieve their desired results. That clearly isn’t going to happen. But neither can Russia withstand sanctions indefinitely. It seems that Russia needs a rapid Russian victory just as badly as NATO needs a rapid Russian defeat.
Put simply, while NATO members seem to be unified only in theory, we can’t say their alliance has been “resurrected” by the Ukraine war because the alliance as a whole has not chosen to wage war, as was its original purpose. And since NATO was created to manage Russia, I’d argue that doing the job it was meant to do doesn’t represent a fundamental shift in the international system.
More interesting is China, which had signed a “love is forever” treaty with Russia before the war broke out. Reports had circulated in Chinese media that invading Ukraine would be a mistake. If Russia thinks it can survive, China, which would be subject to sanctions if it helped Russia, knows it cannot. China is far more the economic animal, basing its internal system on financial and productive systems. As such, it is the largest exporter in the world. The United States' imposition of some tariffs was troubling. The imposition of a sanction system could be catastrophic.
What Beijing would like to do is to solidify agreements with the United States on dollar-based investing to stabilize China’s economy. (And here there is an opportunity for China to influence Russian actions.) This could create an opportunity for an entente with the United States, something China needs and something the U.S. wouldn’t mind on certain terms. And that might be the most interesting outcome of the Ukraine war, if it happens
-
Leave Ukraine and Europe's problems to Europe. Why should we care.
Leave Hong Kong, Taiwan and Asian threats to Asia. Why should we care.
News items, Germany re-arming, Japan re-arming, nuclear non-proliferation dead. US disarming. Deterrence dead. Mutually assured destruction dead. Threatened consequences for 'small invasions' none?
What could go wrong.
-
Ukraine is happening BECAUSE of our moronic "elites" blundering foreign policy.
Leave Ukraine and Europe's problems to Europe. Why should we care.
Leave Hong Kong, Taiwan and Asian threats to Asia. Why should we care.
News items, Germany re-arming, Japan re-arming, nuclear non-proliferation dead. US disarming. Deterrence dead. Mutually assured destruction dead. Threatened consequences for 'small invasions' none?
What could go wrong.
-
We should have respected Putin's very clear expression of Monroe Doctrine.
Huge error on our part!
The people who committed this error and many, many others, are in charge.
China watches to see the consequences for Putin's invasion.
IMHO it would be huge error on our part to simply say "Not our problem."
Would Taiwan, to which China has far superior international law claim than Putin does to Ukraine, have Uke fighting spirit? After US abandonment of Afghanistan and Ukraine in its moment of need?
At the moment this is my simple syllogism: If America does not turn Ukraine into a quagmire for Putin, then Taiwan falls, and America is done or.
-
Our “elites” can’t be bothered to defend Americans on American soil. After Afghanistan, anyone who hasn’t learned the lesson that the US is a weak enemy and a traitorous friend deserves whatever their poor decision making brings them.
If Taiwan wants to remain free, they better already be building their nukes.
We should have respected Putin's very clear expression of Monroe Doctrine.
Huge error on our part!
The people who committed this error and many, many others, are in charge.
China watches to see the consequences for Putin's invasion.
IMHO it would be huge error on our part to simply say "Not our problem."
Would Taiwan, to which China has far superior international law claim than Putin does to Ukraine, have Uke fighting spirit? After US abandonment of Afghanistan and Ukraine in its moment of need?
At the moment this is my simple syllogism: If America does not turn Ukraine into a quagmire for Putin, then Taiwan falls, and America is done or.
-
If Taiwan falls, America too e.g.
a) 85% of the free world's advanced chips are made there.
b) China escapes South China Sea
c) Whatever is left of American people's will collapses
d) etc etc etc
-
“At the moment this is my simple syllogism: If America does not turn Ukraine into a quagmire for Putin“
Can we discuss how to turn America into a quagmire for BurnLootMurder and Antifa the next time our rulers unleash them upon us? Is armed defense for Ukrainians only?
-
If Taiwan falls, America too e.g.
a) 85% of the free world's advanced chips are made there.
b) China escapes South China Sea
c) Whatever is left of American people's will collapses
d) etc etc etc
So perhaps we should stop putting money in their pockets, yes? Unfortunately our illegitimate government is making lots of money there, so that isn’t happening.
-
"Unfortunately, our elites are making lots of money there, so that isn’t happening."
-
"Unfortunately, our elites are making lots of money there, so that isn’t happening."
Remember when the Dems were so upset about Swallwell banging a Chinese spy that they kicked him off the House Intelligence Committee?
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-changed-supply-chain-strategy-with-russia-3-months-ahead-of-ukraine-invasion-showing-it-had-foreknowledge-analyst_4317762.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-03-05&utm_medium=email&est=McCIePWBzQnI62zeaJ2Er%2B89VGhXRK2ZQH0PRXv2iaP79IOXic4LjhHjcOFYP370NK09
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-should-diplomatically-recognize-taiwan-as-a-free-country-pompeo_4316284.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-03-05&utm_medium=email&est=OVYfJrsQm%2B7ZT3%2BqgrI%2Fngg4faAeGkoIp6vDkj%2BtOAGp%2FVSZvaEXJ9gyKqEEgNeXhkwN
THREAT FROM COMMUNIST CHINA
US Should Formally Recognize Taiwan as a Free Country: Pompeo
By Frank Fang and Rita Li March 4, 2022 Updated: March 4, 2022biggersmaller Print
Washington should formally recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on March 4 during a speech in Taipei. He said it is an imperative move that “can no longer be ignored, avoided, or treated as secondary.”
“The United States government should immediately take necessary and long overdue steps to do the right and obvious thing—that is to offer the Republic of China [Taiwan]—America’s diplomatic recognition as a free and sovereign country,” he said in a 20-minute speech.
Pompeo, who was the top U.S. diplomat under former President Donald Trump, was invited by Taiwan think tank Prospect Foundation to give a speech at the Grand Hyatt on Friday.
He arrived in Taiwan on March 2 for a four-day visit, as another five-member delegation sent by President Joe Biden wrapped up a two-day visit after meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen.
Pompeo called on Washington to change its policy of “strategic ambiguity,” wherein the United States neither openly confirms nor denies it will militarily safeguard Taiwan.
“While the United States should continue to engage with the People’s Republic of China as a sovereign government,” said Pompeo, “America’s diplomatic recognition of the 23 million freedom-loving Taiwanese people and its legal, democratically-elected government can no longer be ignored, avoided, or treated as secondary.”
“This isn’t about Taiwan’s future independence. It’s about recognition of an unmistakable, already existing reality. … There’s no need for Taiwan to declare independence because it’s already an independent country.”
Epoch Times Photo
Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivers a speech during his four-day trip to Taiwan, in Taipei, on March 4, 2022. (Chiang Ying-ying/AP Photo)
The same opinion was expressed by Tsai in a previous interview with BBC. “We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China,” she said.
Pompeo’s call does not align with the current official U.S. policy. The United States ended formal ties with Taiwan in 1979 and gave diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Yet Biden said last October that the United States was committed to defending Taiwan if the self-ruled island was attacked by the Chinese regime. Such remarks were seen as a departure from a long-held U.S. position of “strategic ambiguity.”
Pompeo’s comments angered Beijing.
“Pompeo is a former politician whose credibility has long gone bankrupt. Such a person’s babbling nonsense will have no success,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Friday at a press briefing in Beijing.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims Taiwan as its own territory and considers the island as the most sensitive issue in its ties with the United States. Beijing has routinely harassed Taiwan and threatened to unite it with the mainland by force if necessary.
“China’s saber-rattling against Taiwan comes from fear and paranoia,” said Pompeo, calling the democratic island “a living example of the success of freedom and democracy” that is dismissed in China, including Hong Kong.
“So long as this exists,” he said, “it severely undermines the credibility and authority of the CCP, especially with the Chinese people who are under their thumb.”
Future of Taiwan and US Intertwined
If the Chinese regime successfully seizes Taiwan, it would change the global balance of power “in the most fundamental ways, decidedly in the CCP’s favor,” Pompeo said during his Friday speech, given Beijing has been touting its rise over American decline.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] believes that it is stronger than the West and that America is in decline. We saw this when Yang Jiechi gave an arrogant tirade against the United States and anchorage during their very first meeting with the Biden administration.”
Pompeo was referring to the first high-level, in-person bilateral meeting in Alaska last March when Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Yang, China’s senior foreign policy diplomat. The latter criticized Washington’s foreign and trade policies, and claimed that democracy is failing and minorities are treated poorly in America.
“This arrogance, this belief that the West is weak makes Xi [Jinping] dangerous,” said Pompeo. “The very belief that the PRC could prevail in a diplomatic, economic, military confrontation puts our friends at risk and makes the conflicts much greater.”
As America is the most decisive backer of Taiwan’s freedom against China’s aggression, said Pompeo, the future of the two nations are closely intertwined.
Epoch Times Photo
The Chinese delegation led by Yang Jiechi (C), director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office, and Wang Yi (2nd L), China’s Foreign Minister, speak with their U.S. counterparts at the opening session of U.S.-China talks at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, on March 18, 2021. (Frederic J. Brown/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
He said Beijing also considers seizing Taiwan as the ultimate goal of its decades-long communist ideological commitment, and failure to do so is “a major stain” of the CCP’s reputation at home.
“Under Xi, the CCP’s ideological hubris has reached new heights. Thus, taking over Taiwan [as] a necessary mission is not only to boost Xi’s egomania claim of greatness, but indeed to solidify it.”
The Trump administration had pushed for arms sales and laws to help Taiwan deal with pressure from China, and support for its participation in major international organizations.
On March 3, Tsai presented Pompeo with the Order of Brilliant Star with Special Grand Cordon in recognition of his contributions to promoting Taiwan-U.S. relations.
Ukraine
Addressing reporters following his speech, Pompeo said that Taiwan and Ukraine face similar risks, each having to deal with an authoritarian regime that wants to “use aggressive military force to bully around smaller nations.”
Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Xi on Feb. 4 before the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Following their meeting, the two leaders declared a “no limits” partnership, according to a 5,000-word joint statement.
The statement also reveals that the two nations support each other’s geopolitical stance: Moscow supports Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of China, while Beijing denounces the enlargement of NATO—a political justification for Putin to invade Ukraine.
Epoch Times Photo
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrive to pose for a photograph during their meeting in Beijing, on Feb. 4, 2022. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fueled speculation that the Chinese regime could be emboldened to invade Taiwan.
Events unfolding in Ukraine since the start of the invasion might have now given Xi “great pause” about launching military action against Taiwan, Pompeo said, but he warned that the CCP poses more than just military threats.
“Much of what Xi does to the world isn’t military. Much of what he does is diplomatic. It is information warfare. It is economic warfare,” he explained.
“We have to confront the Chinese Communist Party in every dimension.”
He criticized Xi for Beijing’s failure to use its role as a member of the United Nations Security Council to condemn Russia for attacking a sovereign state.
“I don’t think we should give any quarter to Xi Jinping, in terms of him having tried to play this both ways. Xi Jinping has not done the things that nations must do when other nations are attacked, and are victims of aggression,” he said.
Beijing has said it respects Ukraine’s sovereignty, but has refused to denounce Russia for its aggression against its neighbor or calling Russia’s attack an invasion. On Feb. 25, the communist regime abstained from voting on a U.S. National Security resolution demanding Moscow to stop its attack on Ukraine and withdraw its troops immediately.
Pompeo warned that if Xi provided Putin an economic lifeline, then China’s financial sector would face consequences.
“I hope that the world will make very clear to Xi Jinping that if he runs afoul of one of these sanctions regimes, that it could be Chinese banks that are next, it could be Chinese financial institutions more broadly that are next,” he said.
He added: “And this will convince China to deny that oxygen, deny that fuel for Vladimir Putin to have the resources to continue his campaign that has deep ramifications for how Russia might participate, [if it] were the case that Xi Jinping ever decided to make an aggressive military action in Asia.”
Epoch Times Photo
An island that lies inside Taiwan’s territory is seen with the Chinese city of Xiamen in the background on Feb. 4, 2021. (An Rong Xu/Getty Images)
Pompeo was asked to assess the possibility that Beijing could invade Taiwan in the “next six years,” a timeline suggested by Adm. Philip Davidson, who was then-head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, during a congressional hearing in March 2021.
He responded, “You can’t answer how likely it is in a static way because it [depends] on the willingness of the Western world to demonstrate that the cost for Xi Jinping engaging in that kind of activity is just too high.”
-
third
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gorbachev-says-u-s-became-arrogant-after-soviet-union-collapsed/
-
Of course, the counter argument here is to respect Russia's Monroe Doctrine:
Taking Dictators Literally and Seriously
Putin told us for years what he’d do. The West didn’t listen. Will we now listen to the world’s other threatening autocrats?
By The Editorial Board
Follow
March 4, 2022 6:40 pm ET
Politicians and foreign-policy sages say we need to “learn lessons” from whatever disasters befall the world. Well, here’s one of the most important to emerge from Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: Take autocrats literally and seriously when they tell us what they intend to do.
Anyone purporting to be shocked by Mr. Putin’s actions in Ukraine shouldn’t be. He told the world he was going to do it. As far back as 2007, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, Mr. Putin excoriated the European security order and teed up NATO enlargement as a “serious provocation” that would justify a serious Russian response. His tone was fierce. In 2008 he reportedly told then-President George W. Bush he didn’t consider Ukraine a real country.
The same year he waged a proxy war in Georgia, another former constituent part of the Soviet Union. His strategy was to use pro-Russian separatist movements as cover for military intervention—a tactic he repeated in 2014 in the Ukrainian regions of Crimea and Donbas.
In an essay last summer, Mr. Putin asserted that Ukraine sits on historically Russian territory. He often describes Ukrainians and Russians as “a single people.” Why did so many in the West refuse to take any of this seriously? Mr. Putin must be wondering why the rest of the world is outraged that he is doing what he made little or no effort to conceal.
This experience should ring alarms concerning the rest of the world’s autocrats. What have they been telling us that we’ve convinced ourselves they couldn’t possibly mean?
In Beijing Xi Jinping speaks of Taiwan in much the same way Mr. Putin does Ukraine. In 2013 the Chinese leader said a resolution to the Taiwan matter couldn’t be delayed indefinitely. In 2015 he stressed ethnic solidarity between the mainland and Taiwan in a meeting with Taiwan’s then-President Ma Ying-jeou.
In 2019 Mr. Xi said “unification between the two sides of the [Taiwan] Strait is the great trend of history.” He doesn’t necessarily mean peacefully. In the same speech he said, “we make no promise to abandon the use of force.” He has linked unification with Taiwan to his broader program of national unity and rejuvenation.
Beijing’s strong-arm repression of Hong Kong demonstrates the Xi regime is ready to trample treaties and violate its economic self-interest in pursuit of a nationalist agenda that fulfills Mr. Xi’s ambition. China’s concentration camps in Xinjiang reveal a regime immune to global embarrassment. How convincing is the argument that Mr. Xi would never be so foolish as to invade Taiwan?
In Iran the regime gives all indications it’s pursuing a nuclear weapon, and it’s not hard to guess what the targets would be. A senior Iranian military official has warned that Israeli air bases are “within reach” of Iranian conventional missiles. Tehran funds proxies to fight its battles across the Middle East, including in Yemen where Houthi rebels with Iranian arms launch drone and missile attacks on Saudi and Gulf Arab cities.
Israel and the Gulf states take these threats literally and seriously. The U.S. and Europe have instead become bogged down for years in negotiations with Tehran tacitly premised on the notion that Iran doesn’t want a nuke, or to use one, and is merely exploiting its nuclear program as a bargaining chip for some other goal.
***
A pathology of the West’s liberal internationalists is refusing to believe dictators who do the courtesy of saying exactly what they want. This is the opposite of the mindset that won the Cold War. Taking communism seriously as a dangerous, expansionist ideology allowed the U.S. and its allies to understand dangers such as the potential for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe and to deter them.
The fall of Soviet communism in Europe and China’s economic development tempted many to think the West would only face opponents like us—motivated by economic self-interest and ready to make a deal. For years those rivals have told us they have other plans, and told us what they are willing to do. Mr. Putin is demonstrating that it’s time to stop lying to our ourselves about the mission of the deadly serious men who run these threatening regimes
-
Pompeo: Recognize Taiwan!
And offer them NATO membership.
-
Obviously there are some large, even huge holes here e.g. What of the Russian-Chinese alliance? That said, worth the reading.
I have interjected some comments.
===========================================
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/heres_the_truth_on_ukraine_as_far_as_i_can_tell.html
March 9, 2022
Here's the truth on Ukraine, as far as I can tell
By Dan Truitt
First, and most importantly, virtually no one in the US has got this right, including conservative outlets and pundits. Putin's a thug, but he's an excellent politician and a strong leader. And he’s not crazy, as some seem to surmise. He is a cold, calculating, strategic thinker who has disciplined his mind and body for decades. He’s a Russia first guy. Think Donald Trump minus all that hot air, Big Macs, and add a willingness to off his enemies.
We promised Russia we would not expand NATO when the Soviet Union fell. We went back on that promise
(MARC: Not quite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB4C08m3JOY )
and incorporated almost the entire Eastern Bloc into NATO.
Then after 9/11, Bush II unilaterally cancelled the '72 ABM treaty, which until then had frozen nuclear weapon development in the Soviet Union and the US, effectively ending the arms race. Bush's rationale was that we needed to develop new nuclear weapon tech to defeat terrorism. Like we were going to nuke Osama Bin Laden.
Bush's rationale for NATO expansion was also terrorism. So, Bush triggered a fresh arms race. Bush was a decent man, but the more time goes by, the more he looks like an absolute moron to me.
Ukraine belonged to Russia for centuries. They have almost identical cultures and languages. Kiev used to be the capital of Russia. Putin's war is a war of defense. Russia (rightly, in my view) feels threatened by NATO expansion. Russia is a mainly land-based, continental power which desires a buffer with the West. Ukraine serves that purpose perfectly.
MARC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mciLyG9iexE
The US triggered a coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014, overthrowing the democratically elected president who was Russia friendly,
(MARC: This obfuscates that Putin had his heavy thumb on the scale-- see e.g. Belarus)
and installing a pro-western, pro-NATO leader. Putin has had his eye on Ukraine ever since but dared not do anything when Trump was in power because he feared and respected Trump.
So, Putin in the meantime brilliantly helped move along a green revolution in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, leaving Europe, with its wind farms and solar panels, hungry for more energy, which they bought from Russia in the form of NG.
Trump's right: Putin is a genius. Unfortunately, we seem to be in a historically rare period in which the leaders of 1.5 billion people, i.e., the West, are to a person either feckless, obtuse, senile or some combination of the three.
Now that we have President Potted Plant in office, Putin has made his move. BTW, the story is that Russian annexed Crimea some years ago. Putin’s version is that the Crimeans had a plebiscite, and over 90% voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia.
MARC: Very interesting!
That alone should give you an idea of what a dysfunctional country Ukraine is.
Putin has no intention of "reconstituting the Soviet Union." That's a big fat lie. This war is the West's fault, not Putin's. At any time, we could have discussed these issues with him. Instead of seeking closer ties with Russia (as Trump was attempting -- he even talked about disbanding NATO, since Russia is no longer a territorial threat to Europe), we constantly antagonize Russian with our NATO expansion.
What we should be doing is assuring Russia we are not a threat, make treaties with Russia bringing us closer together (after all, they are a European, Orthodox Christian nation), and turning our united efforts against the real threat: China. We couldn't have mishandled this more.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Ukrainians are not making a heroic stand against the Russkies. They're getting their asses kicked. They're hiding in population centers, and Russia, trying to get to them, is killing a lot of civilians as collateral damage.
They're fighting a relatively clean war, (if there is such a thing) and all Zelensky has to do is meet with Putin and agree to Putin’s four demands: 1) Ukraine cannot join NATO, 2) NATO arms out of Eastern Europe (honoring our promise to Russia’s then leader Gorbachev), 3) a ban on NATO missiles within striking distance, and 4) autonomy for the two predominantly Russian provinces in east Ukraine.
Numbers 2 and 3 are a pretty big ask, but here you see how Putin himself may have read The Art of The Deal: always ask for more than you want.
Zelensky could end this in two hours if he wanted. Instead, he seems to have developed a Churchill complex. He’s begging for money and arms, which will prolong the bloodshed. No one is reporting the billions in medicines, foodstuff, and other aid the Russians are shipping into Ukraine.
These insights I'm getting from the Greek press (I live here), which is being much more even-handed, from people inside Russia, and from Ukrainians whom I know. I’ve also watched the 4-hour Putin Interview documentary by Oliver Stone, which skewed left but provided a fascinating look at Putin the human being. I repeat: he is not crazy. He has a surprisingly good sense of humor. Just to remind you, I’m not a fan.
The US can't seem to kick its Cold War habit of looking at Russia as the enemy. The enemy, the real threat, is China, not a country of 125 million with a GDP less than that of 16 million Canadians.
I'm wondering what President Potted Plant is going to do when China invades Taiwan? Now that is a threat to world peace. We get almost all our microchips from the Taiwanese. I wonder also how we will survive the next 3 years with this idiot in the WH. The answer, as always is prayer, and lots of it.
Image: Victoria Borodinova, Pixabay, Pixabay License.
-
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2022/03/09/ukraine-war-an-almost-complete-collection-of-everything-were-doing-wrong-n1564668
-
Not sure I agree with the notion of "leave the innocent Russian people alone".
Maybe they need a sharp wake up call to replace their leader?
-
Not sure I agree with the notion of "leave the innocent Russian people alone".
Maybe they need a sharp wake up call to replace their leader?
Remember how the London Blitz made the English surrender?
Never get into a suffering contest with an Eastern European.
-
Churchill did not lie the British into attacking Germany.
Germany & Russia started it.
-
Churchill did not lie the British into attacking Germany.
Germany & Russia started it.
The average Russian will blame us for their suffering, not Putin.
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/ukraine-war-will-change-indo-pacific-and-the-world-experts_4331987.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-03-13&utm_medium=email&est=lZI6HheNcg4kBVUAWpd9ta2LHJXhto3ittrKy8L1CYz0AjmFq9G2%2BezJV2FqwZDzV0SX
Ukraine War Will Change Indo-Pacific and the World: Experts
By Andrew Thornebrooke March 12, 2022 Updated: March 12, 2022biggersmaller Print
0:00
5:49
1
Feedback
Share
The Russian war on Ukraine will affect global strategy and alter the political and security landscape in the Indo-Pacific for decades to come, according to defense and security experts.
“Putin’s war on Ukraine is like the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” said Yasuhiro Matsuda, a professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo, during a recent interview with the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
“It will change the world.”
Matsuda said that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping shared a point of view with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and that both believed the West was in decline and ultimately useless for their aims.
Matsuda said that he feared Xi’s beliefs would become more extreme, as Putin’s apparently have, with increased age and isolation, and because the Chinese leader personally emulated Putin.
“I think that their worldview might become more and more extreme,” Matsuda said.
“The personal dictatorship is very dangerous,” he added, noting the amount of control that Xi personally held over China.
Matsuda went on to say that, although Xi emulated Putin in his ruling of China, he was now likely taken aback by the Russian failure in Ukraine, for which China is likely to be suffering reputational damage due to its support of Russia.
“This time, Xi Jinping is kind of disappointed by Putin because the Russian military’s performance is so bad … Xi Jinping bet on Putin’s gamble, but it was not successful,” Matsuda said.
CHINA-SCO-SUMMIT-DIPLOMACY
Russian President Vladimir Putin (l) shakes hands with President of the Peoples Republic of China Xi Jinping during a welcoming ceremony at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Heads of State in Qingdao on June 10, 2018. (Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)
Partnership
Xi fears that China is being encircled by U.S. influence in Japan and Korea, and through security partnerships like AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between the United States, Britain, and Australia, Matsuda said.
For this reason, Xi was likely looking to Russia in order to resist U.S. diplomatic and economic pressures, as it could use Russia’s war in Ukraine to divert allied resources away from the Indo-Pacific and towards Europe.
This is one reason, Matsuda said, Xi has apparently abandoned the CCP’s core value of national sovereignty and allowed Ukraine to be invaded, even though China previously signed a treaty pledging to defend Ukraine in the event of a nuclear attack.
According to Matsuda, Putin would not have been confident enough to invade Ukraine without knowing that the CCP would tacitly support the invasion. It has also been reported that Chinese officials explicitly asked Russian authorities to postpone the invasion of Ukraine until the end of the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Despite Russian military failures in Ukraine and increasing condemnations of alleged Russian war crimes, Chinese leadership recently reaffirmed that Russia is its foremost “strategic partner.”
The CCP also committed to purchasing natural gas with ruble and brought Russia into Chinese banking systems to help ease the brunt of Western sanctions.
Despite the apparent effort to split Western attention, however, the Pentagon stated that the Indo-Pacific remained its priority theater, and added that China was the “pacing challenge” and the issue of Taiwan was the “pacing scenario.”
TAIWAN-CHINA-MILITARY-DRILL-ARMAMENT
Taiwanese sailors salute the island’s flag on the deck of the Panshih supply ship after taking part in annual drills, at the Tsoying naval base in Kaohsiung on Jan. 31, 2018.(Mandy Cheng/AFP via Getty Images)
The Struggle for Taiwan
The CCP maintains that the island of Taiwan is a breakaway province and must be united by force, if necessary, with the mainland. The island has been self-governed since 1949, however, and has never been controlled by the CCP.
Tensions over the possible invasion of Taiwan by the CCP have raised fears of a war between nuclear powers, as it is possible that the United States would join a war to defend Taiwan’s continued de facto independence.
During a recent discussion of the war in Ukraine and its implications for the Indo-Pacific hosted by the Center for a New American Security, a defense-focused think tank, experts addressed the issue of how Ukraine was shaping Indo-Pacific strategy and the difficulty of gauging just how the struggles of the Russian military in Ukraine were coloring Xi’s plans for Taiwan.
“I think it’s impossible for us from the outside to actually adjudicate the trade-offs in Xi Jinping’s mind,” said Ashley Tellis, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.
“My own instinct is that he would be reminded more clearly than before about the risks of what a potential invasion entail.”
To that end, Tellis said that it was vital the Untied States ensure that Taiwan had enough military capabilities to convince Xi that a fight would not be worth the reward.
“The only way that you reinforce deterrence between China and Taiwan is that you make certain that [Taiwan’s] defensive capabilities are increased,” Tellis said. “Whether those capabilities are increased unilaterally or through the assistance of the United States. That’s the only thing that holds balance.”
Tellis added that building a robust sense of “Taiwanese nationalism” and a “capacity to resist China” were the two variables that could realistically increase the cost to China in the event of a war.
“Irrespective of what Xi thinks, objectively we simply make it harder for him to pursue unification through force,” Tellis said.
Relatedly, Tellis said that the United States now faced a global challenge in maintaining its support of the international liberal order in the face of CCP and Russian aggression.
To that end, he said, the United States’ ability to deter China and Russia, and balance the peace throughout the Indo-Pacific, could prove to be the test that makes or breaks its status as the most powerful nation on earth.
“It impacts our vision of how we see our own role in the world,” Tellis said.
“If we don’t do it right, then I think our status as a superpower itself becomes open for debate.
-
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1502983736534749188
At least the MIC is making money! Certainly no MANPADs will fall into wrong hands!
-
https://mobile.twitter.com/wretchardthecat/status/1502931277326209029
-
https://mobile.twitter.com/wretchardthecat/status/1502931277326209029
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398198.php
-
Not really sure where to put this one , , ,
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18335/anti-american-dictatorships
-
Russia, China and the New Cold War
Matt Pottinger, an architect of Trump’s security strategy, sees Ukraine as analogous to Korea, a ‘hot opening salvo’ in a global conflict between the free world and a bloc of dictatorships.
By Adam O’Neal
March 18, 2022 2:24 pm ET
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought death, destruction and debate over historical analogies. Is this the summer of 1914, with great powers stumbling into a horrific global conflict? Or is it the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939? What about Moscow’s 1939-40 Winter War against Finland? Will Vladimir Putin’s gambit end like the Soviet Union’s 1979-89 misadventure in Afghanistan?
Matt Pottinger has been thinking of another conflict. Mr. Putin’s attempted conquest, and his burgeoning partnership with China’s Xi Jinping, reminds Mr. Pottinger of the Korean War. “In 1950, Stalin and Mao and Kim Il Sung badly miscalculated how easy the invasion would be and miscalculated American resolve, much as we’re seeing today,” Mr. Pottinger, 48, who served in the Trump White House’s National Security Council, says this week. “The roles are now reversed, with Xi playing the role of Stalin and Putin playing the role of Mao sending his troops to the slaughter. It’s even conceivable that this war may end in a similar fashion, with some kind of a stalemate in a divided country.”
The analogy extends to the free world. Although the Cold War began in 1945, “it really took several more years for public attitudes in the West to catch up to what strategists like Winston Churchill and George Kennan knew about the nature of the Soviet Union.” With the Korean conflict, “the Cold War crystallized in the public imagination in the West.” Today, it’s “really hard to avoid the conclusion that these developments reflect a new cold war that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have initiated against the West.”
Mr. Pottinger believes the new conflict’s “ideological underpinnings” formed as the old one was winding down. “The Chinese leadership was badly rattled by the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the lopsided American-led victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces in the first Gulf War and then the collapse of the Soviet Union.” They came to regard the U.S. as their “primary adversary.”
In this view, Ukraine is the “hot opening salvo in a cold war pitting Washington and its allies against a fragile but increasingly powerful bloc of dictatorships.” The logic of the Cold War “will provide us with explanatory and predictive value. It’ll help us understand and anticipate the moves by Putin and Xi and the other dictatorships that play supporting roles in their global strategy, such as Iran,” he argues. “We would be remiss not to learn lessons from the original Cold War, not least because we won.”
In recent decades American policy makers tried and failed to convert Beijing into a responsible contributor to the U.S.-led international order. Today there is a bipartisan consensus that the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest external threat to American security, but much of Washington was slow to accept it. As President Trump’s senior director for Asia, then deputy national security adviser, Mr. Pottinger urged them along.
He contributed to the 2017 National Security Strategy, which called China a “revisionist” power and warned that “great power competition” had returned. H.R. McMaster, who served as White House national security adviser in 2017-18, called Mr. Pottinger “central to the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War, which is the competitive approach to China.”
His understanding of the Chinese threat and the dangerous new global environment is more widely held now, though not everyone accepts the idea of a new cold war. A former Journal reporter in China fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Pottinger says reading Chinese government documents that aren’t translated into English has shaped his views.
“When Xi Jinping gives speeches—especially important ones and ones where he is laying out an aggressive case for Chinese actions in this de facto cold war that he’s waging—those speeches are kept secret, but they’re not kept secret forever,” he says. “They surface in Chinese-language-only party publications. More often than not, those speeches are ignored by Western analysts, news reporters and even intelligence agencies.”
An example is a November 2021 address in which Mr. Xi said, in Mr. Pottinger’s paraphrase, “that the Korean War was an act of enormous strategic foresight by Comrade Mao Zedong, as he calls him in the speech. It’s a recurring theme in a lot of Xi’s speeches, the idea that China now needs to study the spirit of that war.”
Mr. Xi laid out what Mr. Pottinger describes as almost a case for pre-emptive war: “He says that Mao Zedong in that war had the strategic foresight to, quote, ‘start with one punch so that 100 punches could be avoided.’ He talked about how Mao had the determination and bravery to adopt an attitude of not hesitating to ruin the country”—that is, China—“internally in order to build it anew.” Mr. Pottinger puts this in contemporary terms: “The attitude of being willing to destroy institutions, companies, attitudes and even political norms is something that neither Xi nor the Communist Party that he leads should shy away from.”
The personal relationship between Messrs. Xi and Putin has become central to China’s conflict with the West. “It is an unnatural partnership in many ways, because it’s not deep and wide, society to society, economy to economy, nation-state to nation-state. But it is extremely meaningful from the standpoint of two men,” Mr. Pottinger says. “Those two men happen to be the dictators that make all of the important decisions in their respective systems. And these two guys have a mind meld that we’ve not seen between a Chinese and Russian leader since Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin met six months before the North Korean invasion of South Korea.”
Messrs. Xi and Putin met ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics a few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Pottinger says “there’s little question” that both “understood that an invasion was in the offing.” On Feb. 4, Moscow and Beijing released a 5,000-word statement declaring their relationship had “no limits.” It’s important to take that claim seriously, Mr. Pottinger says: “What you really have are two revanchist, authoritarian dictatorships that have decided, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to go back to back and point their guns outward to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to worry about our long border dispute, which has been a recurring theme for centuries. We’re going to help each other expand our respective spheres of influence to undermine democracies.’ ”
They saw an opportunity in signals of weakness from President Biden: “When Biden came into power, one of the first things he did was end the negotiation over New Start”—the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—“and gave Putin the five-year renewal that Putin was seeking. He eased off on restrictions on Nord Stream 2”—Russia’s gas pipeline to Europe—“and he also began to restrict lethal aid to Ukraine.”
At the same time, the administration began negotiations to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which President Trump left in 2018. “We’re not actually even negotiating directly, but using Russian and other diplomats as a go-between,” Mr. Pottinger says. “This sends a profound signal of weakness.” Israel and Arab states “see a Biden administration that’s more eager to cut deals with our common adversary than to engage meaningfully with longstanding partners.”
Does all that suggest Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if Mr. Trump had won in 2020? “We’ll never know,” Mr. Pottinger answers. Mr. Putin might have “wanted to see whether President Trump would unilaterally take action to undermine NATO and he didn’t want to interrupt that process while it was a possibility.” That said, “there was a genuine unpredictability about President Trump and what he might or might not do, and that may have, more frequently than people appreciate, caused Xi and Putin to delay some of their plans.”
Mr. Pottinger thinks Mr. Trump’s record isn’t viewed with enough nuance: “President Trump’s statecraft, as idiosyncratic as it was, was a lot more sophisticated than either the press or even American adversaries really understood.” Mr. Pottinger sums that approach up as a “close and respectful diplomacy at the top, but also his willingness to knee his counterparts in the groin.” In Russia’s case that included Mr. Trump’s opposition to Nord Stream 2, hard bargaining on New Start, supplying lethal aid to Ukraine, expulsion of Russian spies and diplomats, and sanctions.
Mr. Pottinger argues that Russia’s aggression has discredited the idea that the U.S. can divert its attention from other regions while confronting China. “The war in Ukraine underscores why we cannot compartmentalize our cold war to a specific geography or even to a specific player. There’s no question that Beijing is the mother ship of authoritarianism in the world now,” he says. “But if we fail to see how these adversaries are linked with one another and how they are increasingly coordinated with one another, we run the risk of making big blunders.”
America has a powerful counter in its alliances. The 30-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization has shown impressive cohesion in the face of Russia’s onslaught in Ukraine. Asian-Pacific alliances are looser, but Mr. Pottinger talks up the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. “India made the disappointing, and in my view a mistaken, decision not to hold Russia accountable for its invasion of a peaceful sovereign neighbor,” he says. “We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves on what the Quad can ultimately achieve. But it is nonetheless a substantive group that gives Beijing quite a lot of heartburn.” The group is “talking about things like supply chains and building in resiliency and figuring out ways to counter Chinese disinformation.”
What about Taiwan? In light of Mr. Putin’s difficulties in Ukraine, “a logical and dispassionate analysis would suggest that Chinese war planners are having second and third thoughts,” Mr. Pottinger says. “But logic and dispassionate analysis are not the hallmarks of Xi Jinping. Xi is viewing the world in the reflection of fun-house mirrors at this point.”
He says unwinding Taiwan’s economic ties to the mainland is critical and that President Tsai Ing -wen “has made significant progress in really taking charge of the military services that she commands and getting them to focus on truly asymmetric capabilities, by which I mean ones that are not only quite lethal to China, but also quite affordable for Taiwan.” The Taiwanese “need to show China that the war doesn’t end at the beaches. It will continue in the ports, in the cities, in the countryside and in the mountains.”
The U.S., he says, also needs a show of strength and determination: “What we have to do is double our defense spending immediately. We’re still spending about half of what we spent as a percentage of GDP during the Reagan administration, and the Reagan administration wasn’t even the peak of our Cold War spending.” Can the U.S. afford a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget? “Our defense expenditures are minor in comparison to our entitlement programs. Universal healthcare is an amazing thing, but it’s not going to save Europe and Taiwan or, in the end, our own national security and way of life.”
If this is a new cold war, what would victory look like? “It involves trying to manage the conflict so that it does not become a head-on confrontation between nuclear great powers. Winning involves permitting the weaknesses of the authoritarian powers to erode their advantages over time. Winning involves maintaining solidarity and common cause with the people of Russia and China even as we call out candidly the actions of the dictators who lead those two nations.”
Mr. Pottinger is fundamentally bullish on the West’s chances against Messrs. Putin and Xi. “We need to shed a sense of defeatism, and we need to have the courage of our convictions about what makes our system unique and powerful. That means doubling down on capitalism and democracy and freedom, but containing—I’ll use the C-word—China and Russia’s ability to exploit our freedoms and our markets in ways that are parasitic,” he says.
“The longer the dictators stay in power, the sharper the paradox between confidence and paranoia. And I think both of these men are getting less and less reliable information in their diets and are therefore prime to make strategic miscalculations,” he says.
While Messrs. Putin and Xi may share an antipathy for the democratic West, their countries aren’t natural allies: “I think that the logic of national interest will eventually reassert itself over the interests of two dictators who drew up this pact. That’ll take time to play out, but I think in many respects, it’ll be only downhill from here between Moscow and Beijing.”
Mr. O’Neal is a Europe-based editorial page writer for the Journal.
-
They need to put "Free world" in quotes. Formerly free world is more accurate.
Russia, China and the New Cold War
Matt Pottinger, an architect of Trump’s security strategy, sees Ukraine as analogous to Korea, a ‘hot opening salvo’ in a global conflict between the free world and a bloc of dictatorships.
By Adam O’Neal
March 18, 2022 2:24 pm ET
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought death, destruction and debate over historical analogies. Is this the summer of 1914, with great powers stumbling into a horrific global conflict? Or is it the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939? What about Moscow’s 1939-40 Winter War against Finland? Will Vladimir Putin’s gambit end like the Soviet Union’s 1979-89 misadventure in Afghanistan?
Matt Pottinger has been thinking of another conflict. Mr. Putin’s attempted conquest, and his burgeoning partnership with China’s Xi Jinping, reminds Mr. Pottinger of the Korean War. “In 1950, Stalin and Mao and Kim Il Sung badly miscalculated how easy the invasion would be and miscalculated American resolve, much as we’re seeing today,” Mr. Pottinger, 48, who served in the Trump White House’s National Security Council, says this week. “The roles are now reversed, with Xi playing the role of Stalin and Putin playing the role of Mao sending his troops to the slaughter. It’s even conceivable that this war may end in a similar fashion, with some kind of a stalemate in a divided country.”
The analogy extends to the free world. Although the Cold War began in 1945, “it really took several more years for public attitudes in the West to catch up to what strategists like Winston Churchill and George Kennan knew about the nature of the Soviet Union.” With the Korean conflict, “the Cold War crystallized in the public imagination in the West.” Today, it’s “really hard to avoid the conclusion that these developments reflect a new cold war that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have initiated against the West.”
Mr. Pottinger believes the new conflict’s “ideological underpinnings” formed as the old one was winding down. “The Chinese leadership was badly rattled by the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the lopsided American-led victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces in the first Gulf War and then the collapse of the Soviet Union.” They came to regard the U.S. as their “primary adversary.”
In this view, Ukraine is the “hot opening salvo in a cold war pitting Washington and its allies against a fragile but increasingly powerful bloc of dictatorships.” The logic of the Cold War “will provide us with explanatory and predictive value. It’ll help us understand and anticipate the moves by Putin and Xi and the other dictatorships that play supporting roles in their global strategy, such as Iran,” he argues. “We would be remiss not to learn lessons from the original Cold War, not least because we won.”
In recent decades American policy makers tried and failed to convert Beijing into a responsible contributor to the U.S.-led international order. Today there is a bipartisan consensus that the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest external threat to American security, but much of Washington was slow to accept it. As President Trump’s senior director for Asia, then deputy national security adviser, Mr. Pottinger urged them along.
He contributed to the 2017 National Security Strategy, which called China a “revisionist” power and warned that “great power competition” had returned. H.R. McMaster, who served as White House national security adviser in 2017-18, called Mr. Pottinger “central to the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War, which is the competitive approach to China.”
His understanding of the Chinese threat and the dangerous new global environment is more widely held now, though not everyone accepts the idea of a new cold war. A former Journal reporter in China fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Pottinger says reading Chinese government documents that aren’t translated into English has shaped his views.
“When Xi Jinping gives speeches—especially important ones and ones where he is laying out an aggressive case for Chinese actions in this de facto cold war that he’s waging—those speeches are kept secret, but they’re not kept secret forever,” he says. “They surface in Chinese-language-only party publications. More often than not, those speeches are ignored by Western analysts, news reporters and even intelligence agencies.”
An example is a November 2021 address in which Mr. Xi said, in Mr. Pottinger’s paraphrase, “that the Korean War was an act of enormous strategic foresight by Comrade Mao Zedong, as he calls him in the speech. It’s a recurring theme in a lot of Xi’s speeches, the idea that China now needs to study the spirit of that war.”
Mr. Xi laid out what Mr. Pottinger describes as almost a case for pre-emptive war: “He says that Mao Zedong in that war had the strategic foresight to, quote, ‘start with one punch so that 100 punches could be avoided.’ He talked about how Mao had the determination and bravery to adopt an attitude of not hesitating to ruin the country”—that is, China—“internally in order to build it anew.” Mr. Pottinger puts this in contemporary terms: “The attitude of being willing to destroy institutions, companies, attitudes and even political norms is something that neither Xi nor the Communist Party that he leads should shy away from.”
The personal relationship between Messrs. Xi and Putin has become central to China’s conflict with the West. “It is an unnatural partnership in many ways, because it’s not deep and wide, society to society, economy to economy, nation-state to nation-state. But it is extremely meaningful from the standpoint of two men,” Mr. Pottinger says. “Those two men happen to be the dictators that make all of the important decisions in their respective systems. And these two guys have a mind meld that we’ve not seen between a Chinese and Russian leader since Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin met six months before the North Korean invasion of South Korea.”
Messrs. Xi and Putin met ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics a few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Pottinger says “there’s little question” that both “understood that an invasion was in the offing.” On Feb. 4, Moscow and Beijing released a 5,000-word statement declaring their relationship had “no limits.” It’s important to take that claim seriously, Mr. Pottinger says: “What you really have are two revanchist, authoritarian dictatorships that have decided, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to go back to back and point their guns outward to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to worry about our long border dispute, which has been a recurring theme for centuries. We’re going to help each other expand our respective spheres of influence to undermine democracies.’ ”
They saw an opportunity in signals of weakness from President Biden: “When Biden came into power, one of the first things he did was end the negotiation over New Start”—the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—“and gave Putin the five-year renewal that Putin was seeking. He eased off on restrictions on Nord Stream 2”—Russia’s gas pipeline to Europe—“and he also began to restrict lethal aid to Ukraine.”
At the same time, the administration began negotiations to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which President Trump left in 2018. “We’re not actually even negotiating directly, but using Russian and other diplomats as a go-between,” Mr. Pottinger says. “This sends a profound signal of weakness.” Israel and Arab states “see a Biden administration that’s more eager to cut deals with our common adversary than to engage meaningfully with longstanding partners.”
Does all that suggest Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if Mr. Trump had won in 2020? “We’ll never know,” Mr. Pottinger answers. Mr. Putin might have “wanted to see whether President Trump would unilaterally take action to undermine NATO and he didn’t want to interrupt that process while it was a possibility.” That said, “there was a genuine unpredictability about President Trump and what he might or might not do, and that may have, more frequently than people appreciate, caused Xi and Putin to delay some of their plans.”
Mr. Pottinger thinks Mr. Trump’s record isn’t viewed with enough nuance: “President Trump’s statecraft, as idiosyncratic as it was, was a lot more sophisticated than either the press or even American adversaries really understood.” Mr. Pottinger sums that approach up as a “close and respectful diplomacy at the top, but also his willingness to knee his counterparts in the groin.” In Russia’s case that included Mr. Trump’s opposition to Nord Stream 2, hard bargaining on New Start, supplying lethal aid to Ukraine, expulsion of Russian spies and diplomats, and sanctions.
Mr. Pottinger argues that Russia’s aggression has discredited the idea that the U.S. can divert its attention from other regions while confronting China. “The war in Ukraine underscores why we cannot compartmentalize our cold war to a specific geography or even to a specific player. There’s no question that Beijing is the mother ship of authoritarianism in the world now,” he says. “But if we fail to see how these adversaries are linked with one another and how they are increasingly coordinated with one another, we run the risk of making big blunders.”
America has a powerful counter in its alliances. The 30-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization has shown impressive cohesion in the face of Russia’s onslaught in Ukraine. Asian-Pacific alliances are looser, but Mr. Pottinger talks up the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. “India made the disappointing, and in my view a mistaken, decision not to hold Russia accountable for its invasion of a peaceful sovereign neighbor,” he says. “We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves on what the Quad can ultimately achieve. But it is nonetheless a substantive group that gives Beijing quite a lot of heartburn.” The group is “talking about things like supply chains and building in resiliency and figuring out ways to counter Chinese disinformation.”
What about Taiwan? In light of Mr. Putin’s difficulties in Ukraine, “a logical and dispassionate analysis would suggest that Chinese war planners are having second and third thoughts,” Mr. Pottinger says. “But logic and dispassionate analysis are not the hallmarks of Xi Jinping. Xi is viewing the world in the reflection of fun-house mirrors at this point.”
He says unwinding Taiwan’s economic ties to the mainland is critical and that President Tsai Ing -wen “has made significant progress in really taking charge of the military services that she commands and getting them to focus on truly asymmetric capabilities, by which I mean ones that are not only quite lethal to China, but also quite affordable for Taiwan.” The Taiwanese “need to show China that the war doesn’t end at the beaches. It will continue in the ports, in the cities, in the countryside and in the mountains.”
The U.S., he says, also needs a show of strength and determination: “What we have to do is double our defense spending immediately. We’re still spending about half of what we spent as a percentage of GDP during the Reagan administration, and the Reagan administration wasn’t even the peak of our Cold War spending.” Can the U.S. afford a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget? “Our defense expenditures are minor in comparison to our entitlement programs. Universal healthcare is an amazing thing, but it’s not going to save Europe and Taiwan or, in the end, our own national security and way of life.”
If this is a new cold war, what would victory look like? “It involves trying to manage the conflict so that it does not become a head-on confrontation between nuclear great powers. Winning involves permitting the weaknesses of the authoritarian powers to erode their advantages over time. Winning involves maintaining solidarity and common cause with the people of Russia and China even as we call out candidly the actions of the dictators who lead those two nations.”
Mr. Pottinger is fundamentally bullish on the West’s chances against Messrs. Putin and Xi. “We need to shed a sense of defeatism, and we need to have the courage of our convictions about what makes our system unique and powerful. That means doubling down on capitalism and democracy and freedom, but containing—I’ll use the C-word—China and Russia’s ability to exploit our freedoms and our markets in ways that are parasitic,” he says.
“The longer the dictators stay in power, the sharper the paradox between confidence and paranoia. And I think both of these men are getting less and less reliable information in their diets and are therefore prime to make strategic miscalculations,” he says.
While Messrs. Putin and Xi may share an antipathy for the democratic West, their countries aren’t natural allies: “I think that the logic of national interest will eventually reassert itself over the interests of two dictators who drew up this pact. That’ll take time to play out, but I think in many respects, it’ll be only downhill from here between Moscow and Beijing.”
Mr. O’Neal is a Europe-based editorial page writer for the Journal.
-
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/five-questions-for-natan-sharansky?fbclid=IwAR0HEWTManxPr6NXw-34bxacaTc3FDD3udVp_Wt63nLRekJPP2X609TLqac
-
Russia: Beijing Should Not Be Allowed to Profit
Joseph V. Micallef
March 20, 2022 Updated: March 20, 2022biggersmaller Print
History will show that the Ukrainian war marked the beginning of the end of the Russian state.
Over the last two decades, Vladimir Putin and his cronies, a criminal conspiracy masquerading as the Russian government, have looted the Russian economy, destroyed the Russian middle class and have plunged millions of pensioners into poverty. For their grand finale, they are setting the stage for the eventual disappearance of Russian sovereignty—either by the dissolution of the Russian state or by the transformation of Russia into a Chinese vassal.
The prospect of de facto Chinese control of Russia’s vast resources and territory should give the United States cause for concern. Such an outcome will eventually lead to the creation of a Eurasian superstate; the likes of which has not been seen since the Mongols swept across the Eurasian plain in the 13th century. All the more reason to ensure that Beijing does not accelerate Russian dependence by allowing Chinese companies to flout the sanctions regime.
It is imperative that the United States and its allies step in and sanction those Chinese companies that flout the sanctions that have been imposed on the Russian government and Russian companies. Sanctioning Russia while allowing Chinese companies to flout those sanctions with impunity will lead to the worst possible outcome for the United States and its allies.
Four weeks into the Ukrainian war, the conflict is going very badly for Russia. Gone is the prospect of a quick collapse of the Ukrainian military and an abandonment of Kyiv by the Zelenskyy government, paving the way of a pro-Russian government of national unity. Instead, the Ukrainian military rallied and posted a tenacious defense. In some cases, even going on the offensive.
The Russian military has failed to make any significant advances or capture any additional Ukrainian cities over the last two weeks. Indeed, for the first time since the conflict began, some military analysts are even suggesting what would have been inconceivable four weeks ago—that Ukraine could actually fight Russian forces to a standstill.
Instead, the Russian military has shifted to terror tactics of shelling and aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities—a strategy that will do little to advance the war effort, given the Ukrainian resolve to resist the Russian invasion, and ensures that Ukrainians will harbor a multi-generation hatred of Russia, while the rest of Europe will harbor a multi-generational distrust of the Kremlin’s intentions.
In the meantime, the Russian military has suffered staggering losses of men, equipment, and materials. The much-vaunted Russian air force has failed to sweep the sky over Ukraine of opposing air power, and the Russian advance has consistently been bogged down by logistical problems that are more characteristic of a third-world force than what is supposed to be a military superpower.
The strategy of “rubbleizing” Ukraine’s cities will create a nightmare of urban warfare for Russian troops should they choose to invade the cities. It’s questionable, given the progress to date, if the Russian armed forces have the military strength and logistical reserves to surround all of Ukraine’s principal cities—especially Kyiv.
Even if they were to do so, they face the prospect of fighting another Stalingrad or a replay of the Warsaw ghetto uprising—only this time it will be broadcast across social media in real time. Indeed, from Russia’s perspective, it is hard to see how the outcome could have been any worse.
Putin has threatened to deploy some 40,000 Syrian militia, and the Russian media’s constant references to American funded “bio labs” in Ukraine, a claim also echoed by Chinese state media, has raised concerns that Russia may deploy chemical or biological weapons. Western military analysts have also expressed concern that the Russian military may deploy sub-kiloton “theater” nuclear weapons in a determined show of force.
It’s hard to see how any of these actions will change the progress of the war given the Ukrainian resolve to resist. Indeed, all they will do is further inflame Western public opinion against the Kremlin.
At this point it is imperative that the United States takes the lead in identifying an off-ramp that can bring the conflict to a speedy close. Russia is now a pariah state, the Putin government toxic. Even if a peace agreement is reached, and/or Putin is eventually replaced, it will be years before Russia can expect to normalize relations with the United States and the European Union.
Moreover, the danger of dependence on Russia’s energy exports has been driven home to the EU. Europe will aggressively diversify its sources of energy away from Russia.
On the other hand, neither is it in America’s and the EU’s interest to push Russia into China’s open arms. Make no mistake, amid the chaos and destruction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is Beijing that is emerging as the big winner.
By enabling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing has ensured the Kremlin’s long-term dependence on Chinese support while at the same time positioning itself as an unofficial interlocutor between the United States and Russia.
China has little interest in a speedy resolution of the conflict in Ukraine. The longer the war continues, the more incensed public opinion in the West will be and the more dependent Moscow grows on Beijing’s support. China has an agenda here also. It’s not only about securing long-term supplies of Russian energy and minerals or replacing Russian influence in Central Asia.
How long will it be before China raises the delicate matter of those “unfair treaties,” starting with the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1769), that were foisted on the Qing Dynasty by Czarist Russia between the 17th and 19th centuries, which saw thousands of square miles of Chinese territory transferred to Russia?
I have noted elsewhere that Russia has three possible outcomes: integration with the West, vassalization by China, or dissolution. The first outcome seems unlikely in the short term, even if the Russian people eventually succeed in excising the malignant cancer that is the Putin regime. The most likely outcome now is for Moscow to become an economic vassal of Beijing, or to try to go it alone until economic collapse leads to the breakdown and dissolution of the Russian state.
The United States and its allies need to ensure that the economic and political isolation of Russia does not play out in China’s favor. It is imperative that Chinese efforts to assist Moscow in evading sanctions are met with equally steadfast U.S. and EU sanctions on China and its companies.
The Ukrainian war will lead to the widespread devastation of Ukraine’s cities and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of civilian casualties. Ukraine, however, will survive. Russia will not!
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
-
Toward a New Conservative Foreign Policy Consensus
A “new” conservative foreign policy consensus must be the “old” prudential melding of power and security on the one hand with prosperity and the preservation of American principles on the other.
By Mackubin Owens
March 21, 2022
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 upended political discourse in the United States. Although his election affected debates in both domestic and foreign affairs, the impact on the latter seems to have been the most consequential. As one commenter noted, Trump’s election has led to the bonfire of many of the established concepts of American foreign policy and grand strategy. The bonfire continues to rage.
Much of the debate has taken place on the political Right. Although there are some distinctively conservative views of America’s approach to the world—a commitment to national sovereignty and a concomitant distrust of supranational institutions; a realist recognition of the role of power, including military power, in foreign affairs; and a concern for order and stability at home and abroad—conservatives have disagreed among themselves regarding the purpose of American power.
Foreign Policy Taxonomies
Political scientists and international security specialists have employed two dominant paradigms to examine foreign relations: “realism,” which focuses on the relative power of states in the international system; and “liberal internationalism,” which stresses the role of cooperation, norms, and international institutions in the international system.
These two paradigms have given rise to various taxonomies of policy—for example, “primacy,” “strategic disengagement,” “selective engagement,” and “cooperative internationalism.” U.S. foreign policy, however, has never fit perfectly into any one of these categories.
Historians provide a different perspective. A taxonomy that has gained traction in the recent past can be traced to the work of Walter McDougall of the University of Pennsylvania and Walter Russell Mead in his book, Special Providence. Mead identified four “schools” of American foreign policy since the founding of the republic. First, the Jeffersonians, concerned primarily with liberty at home, have traditionally been suspicious of a large military and large-scale international projects. George McGovern’s plea to “come home, America” and the presidency of Jimmy Carter are recent examples of this approach.
In contrast, Hamiltonians have tended to support international engagement in order to support not only American power but also prosperity. They have focused on armed diplomacy on behalf of opening foreign markets and expanding the U.S. economy.
Jacksonians support a strong military, albeit one that should be used rarely. Once employed, however, the Jacksonians believe the goal should be the application of overwhelming force in order to bring the enemy to its knees. World War II is the clearest example of the Jacksonian use of force.
Finally, Wilsonians are moral missionaries, willing to use force in order to spread democracy, as in the case of George W. Bush in Iraq. But they also prefer to cede sovereignty to international (actually transnational) institutions, as in the case of Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden.
Throughout most of American history, the debate among conservatives has been between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. That changed in the wake of 9/11 when George W. Bush combined Wilsonianism and Hamiltonianism, a hybrid that goes under the rubric of “neoconservative,” an approach that has called forth the ire of many conservatives. Indeed, many interpreted the election of Trump as an explicit rejection of neoconservative foreign policy.
Trump’s Foreign Policy
Analysts have struggled to categorize Trump’s foreign policy. It seems to have represented a fusion of Hamiltonianism and Jacksonianism. But what did this mean in practice? As I argued in American Greatness a year after Trump’s election, it was possible to discern the outlines of a “Trump doctrine” based on five pillars. Some other writers argued along similar lines.
The first pillar was a healthy nationalism, not ethnic or racial nationalism but civic nationalism, better described as patriotism. This is fundamentally a belief that the primary purpose of American power is to advance the interests of American citizens, not an imaginary global community. In so doing, he aroused the anger of our unpatriotic and anti-nationalist elite who fancy themselves “citizens of the world.”
The second pillar—and a corollary of the first—was a state-centric view of international politics, which Trump called “principled realism.” This approach views international institutions and “global governance” with great skepticism. It holds that the United States should not cede sovereignty to international institutions in order to be embraced by the mythical “international community” nor should the primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy be to defend a rule-based liberal international order.
Of course, under this doctrine, the United States supported international institutions to the extent that they advance U.S. interests. But while it is in the interest of the United States to cooperate with other states within this international system, such cooperation depends on reciprocity. This is especially important in the areas of trade and alliances. In principle, free trade is good for countries in the international system but for too long, the United States has pursued trade agreements that have not favored the United States. The principle of reciprocity is necessary to redress this imbalance.
The third pillar was armed diplomacy. For too long, American policymakers have treated force and diplomacy as an either-or proposition. But understood properly, force and diplomacy are two sides of the same coin. As Frederick the Great observed, “diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.” The threat of force increases the leverage of diplomats. The Trump Administration’s approach to Russia, Iran, and North Korea were examples.
The fourth pillar of the Trump doctrine was prioritizing economic growth and leveraging the new geopolitics of energy. The Trump Administration moved expeditiously to lift regulations that hampered U.S. domestic productivity across the board, but especially in the area of energy production. Under Trump, domestic oil and gas production increased as a result of the technical revolution associated with hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and directional drilling. Trump exploited America’s energy potential to take advantage of the new geopolitics of energy. Biden’s reversal of Trump’s energy policy has contributed to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
The fifth pillar was a defense of liberal principles. Critics claimed that the Trump Administration subordinated defense of such principles to other considerations. Of course, prudence dictates that the United States should attempt to spread its principles only when it can do so in a cost-effective manner. Experience illustrates that the United States has been safer and more prosperous in a world populated by other democratic republics. But the United States faces limits. It cannot unilaterally spread democracy throughout the world.
The “National Conservative” Option
So where do we go from here? In a recent New York Times column, “Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party,” three “national conservatives,” Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladden Pappin offer a rebuke of their comrades on the Right, whom they accuse of pushing “liberal imperialism.” Although they don’t use the term in the Times piece, theirs is a denunciation of neoconservatives.
From the post-Cold War ‘Washington consensus’ (the idea that privatization, deregulation and free trade would lead to broad prosperity) to the post-9/11 regime-change wars, ‘crusader’ foreign policy immiserated ordinary people: Thoughtless NATO expansion bred resentment in a wounded-but-still-strong Russia, setting the stage for recurring crises; economic ‘shock therapy’ applied by disciples of Milton Friedman empowered predatory oligarchs in post-Soviet lands; the shattering of Arab states in the name of ‘freedom’ created ungoverned spaces across vast swaths of the Middle East and North Africa, kindling terrorism and sending millions of migrants into Europe.
The authors would replace this “old, broken fusion of pro-business libertarians, religious traditionalists, and foreign-policy hawks” with a new consensus, based on two pillars.
The first is a “sound restraint, especially where the United States doesn’t have formal treaty obligations, and a general retrenchment of the Western alliance’s ambitions.” The second is “domestic industrial prowess and energy independence.”
Both of these pillars have something to commend them, but as in the case of the viewpoint that Ahmari, et al., attack, something is missing: prudence, which ultimately must be the basis of a sound foreign policy consensus. Aristotle called prudence the virtue most necessary for the statesman. Prudence requires an examination of the means available in light of the ends one seeks. This means answering these questions: what are the U.S. interests at stake? What are the courses of action available? What are the risks associated with the various courses of action? What is the likelihood of success?
Regarding the first pillar, the idea of restraint in U.S. foreign policy is nothing new. As John Quincy Adams wrote in 1821, “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
But there are sound geopolitical reasons for an American foreign policy based on forward defense and alliances focused on what the great geopolitical writer, Sir Halford Mackinder, called the Eurasian “heartland.” Mackinder argued that control of the Eurasian heartland by a hostile power could threaten peripheral maritime powers like Britain and the United States. Nicholas Spykman contended that the solution to Mackinder’s geopolitical dilemma was to establish a series of alliances on the “rimlands” of Eurasia, the amphibious littorals between the heartland and the great off-shore islands of Great Britain and the American continent to prevent the formation of such a coalition. This is the geopolitical rationale for continued U.S. support of NATO on the one hand and Japan on the other. If George Kennan is the father of containment, Nicholas Spykman is its godfather.
NATO proved its worth during the Cold War, but some on the Right now question its viability. I would argue that the geopolitical and strategic justification of NATO is still operative, but that as the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict illustrates, our overreach in the wake of the Cold War created a problem and needs to be reconsidered. Arguably, NATO made a strategic error by expanding too far to the east. Although the inclusion of the Visegrad states of Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) made both cultural and strategic sense, including the Baltic States and threatening to embrace other former Soviet states, especially Ukraine, was a strategic “bridge too far.”
Regarding the second pillar, the authors are right to note the shortcomings of “market fundamentalism”—the belief that adherence to free markets is always the best policy—to address strategic issues. Experience teaches that market and free trade often fail to account for changing geopolitical circumstances. But the sort of “industrial policy” that they recommend has a long history of failure, which they fail to acknowledge.
Toward a New Consensus
Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy has oscillated between the poles of what might be called “idealistic Wilsonianism,” based on liberal internationalism and its faith in transnational institutions (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden) and “muscular Wilsonianism”: attempts to spread democracy by force (George W. Bush and a substantial part of the Republican Party foreign policy elite). Trump rejected both foreign policy approaches, which accounts for the fury he aroused from both factions.
Conservatives need to achieve a new consensus on foreign policy but the program offered by the New York Times authors, one based on restraint as the single guiding principle, falls short because doctrinaire restraint is just as formulaic and lacking in prudence as the options they criticize. The content of such a consensus has been described by a number of writers, including Henry Nau, Robert Kaufman, and Colin Dueck. This approach goes by a number of names including “conservative internationalism” (Nau) and “conservative nationalism” (Dueck).
I call my own formulation “Prudent American Realism.” No matter the name, what this general approach has in common is the recognition that the internal character of regimes matters and that our foreign policy must reflect the fundamental principles of democratic republicanism. But unlike liberal internationalism, which holds that international law and institutions alone are sufficient to achieve peace, this approach understands that there are certain problems that can be addressed only through the prudent exercise of power.
In addition to fusing principle and prudence, a new conservative foreign policy consensus should stress several operational concepts. First, it must distinguish between friends and allies, on the one hand, and enemies and adversaries, on the other. Joe Biden’s quest for a nuclear agreement with Iran while stiff-arming Israel and the Sunni states of the Middle East violates this principle.
Second, a new consensus should accept the need for forward defense, forward presence, and freedom of navigation. Its geostrategic goal should be to maintain America’s traditional maritime alliance along the rimlands of Eurasia, in order to keep a potential Eurasian hegemon contained.
Third, this consensus should recognize that the internal character of regimes matters for U.S. foreign policy, a principle that can be found in Thucydides, who noted that an important goal of both Athens and Sparta was to establish and support regimes similar to their own, democracies in the case of Athens and oligarchies for Sparta. The inference one can draw is that the security of a state is enhanced when it is surrounded by others that share its principles and interests.
But although the internal character of regimes matters, a new conservative foreign policy consensus should recognize the need to limit our aspirations when it comes to “spreading democracy” abroad. The Times authors are also right to denounce what often passes today for liberal “values:” a virulent cultural libertinism that dissolves bonds of family and tradition.
Fourth, this consensus must accept the classical connection between force and diplomacy. For too long, American policymakers, motivated by the assumptions of liberal internationalism, have acted as if diplomacy alone is sufficient to achieve our foreign policy goals. A new conservative foreign policy consensus recognizes that diplomacy and force are two sides of the same coin.
Finally, as the authors of the Times column rightly argue, a new conservative foreign policy consensus should not hesitate to use economic power as an instrument of foreign policy. Finance, trade, technology, and energy are powerful means of leveraging national power.
A “new” conservative foreign policy consensus must be the “old” prudential melding of power and security on the one hand with prosperity and the preservation of American principles on the other. U.S. foreign policy should take its bearings from George Washington’s Farewell Address:
If we remain one People, under an efficient government, the period is not far off, when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall Counsel.
Such prudence should guide U.S. foreign policy.
-
Meanwhile, Watch China in the Pacific
With the world focused on Ukraine, bad actors in Asia are on the march.
By The Editorial Board
Follow
March 24, 2022 7:05 pm ET
The world is rightly focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but don’t sit on the Indo-Pacific. A spate of bad news outside Europe this week is a reminder that the U.S. and its allies face challenges from authoritarian regimes on multiple fronts.
North Korea on Thursday fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, its 12th missile test this year. The first ICBM launched since November 2017, it flew higher than any North Korean missile has. The missile landed in waters off Japan’s western coast, but the test demonstrates again that Pyongyang could threaten the U.S. mainland.
The missile launch violated United Nations Security Council resolutions, but that doesn’t seem to trouble China or Russia these days. The Russian foreign ministrysaid this week it hopes to expand bilateral relations with the North, and China seems to like the idea that dictator Kim Jong Un torments the West.
South Korean President Moon Jae -in’s conciliatory policy toward the North has clearly been a failure. The good news is that South Korean President-elect Yoon Suk -yeol, who takes office in May, ran on a platform of improving air and missile defenses and deepening cooperation with Washington.
Meanwhile, China keeps expanding its military reach in the Pacific. Beijing has “fully militarized” at least three islands it built in the South China Sea, the Associated Pressreported this week. “The function of those islands is to expand the offensive capability of the PRC beyond their continental shores,” U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Adm. John C. Aquilino said. “They can fly fighters, bombers plus all those offensive capabilities of missile systems.”
China may also be negotiating a security deal with the Solomon Islands, according to documents that appear to have been leaked from the island government. The deal could eventually lead to Chinese forces deployed to the South Pacific nation a few hours of flight time from Australia.
A Chinese military base with offensive capabilities could follow. Canberra has long guaranteed the Solomon Islands’s security but China has gained ground as it assisted the government after opposition protests last year. China’s assistance always come with a fee.
By the way, remember Afghanistan? President Biden would like to forget, but Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi dropped by Kabul on Thursday to meet with Taliban officials. China, which has been growing its footprint in Central Asia for years, has no qualms about dealing with unsavory regimes and will look to cut favorable deals on mining or infrastructure.
This is the way the world usually works. Trouble in one theater provides incentive for other rogues to create trouble while the U.S. and other democracies are preoccupied.
Our advice to the Solomons and other smaller nations is to think twice before getting in bed with Beijing or Moscow. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s support for Russia are helping to clarify who are friends of the free world and who isn’t. China stands with North Korea and Russia with Syria.
America’s closest allies are success stories like Japan, Germany, Poland and South Korea. The West isn’t perfect, but who would you rather have on your side?
-
Beijing Gains From the Ukraine Invasion
Non-Western countries hedge their bets, giving confirmation to Chinese geopolitical assumptions.
By Dan Blumenthal
March 27, 2022 4:33 pm ET
Conventional wisdom has it that Beijing miscalculated by supporting Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine war. Xi Jinping’s partner faces both unexpectedly fierce resistance from the Ukrainian military and surprisingly strong Western punishment. Some in Washington expect China to attempt to extricate itself by brokering a peace deal. This is unlikely to happen. In many ways China has benefitted from the conflict, as Russia tests the international system with disappointing results for the West.
True, Beijing is taken aback by Russian military failures. The war will surely lead Mr. Xi to question his military’s ability to attack Taiwan. Yet Mr. Xi has long heralded a new era in international relations that overturns the U.S.-made world order. Mr. Putin signed on to this agenda in the Chinese-Russian Joint Statement of Feb. 4. From Beijing’s perspective, a new international politics is emerging.
Far from backing away from an anti-Western position, top Chinese diplomats are pressing their case. Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng have made statements since the invasion blaming the U.S. for not considering Russia’s security concerns and denouncing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastward expansion. In China’s telling, the world should have sympathy for Ukraine not because it was attacked by Russia, but because it is the victim of a reckless U.S. bid to maintain geopolitical dominance.
According to Beijing, the lesson for small countries is don’t be used as a pawn. The U.S. will manipulate them into fighting proxy wars against its adversaries.
China’s main target is Asia. In its narrative, the region can avoid Europe’s fate if it resists Washington’s efforts to contain China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has taken aim at the recently released U.S. strategy for the Indo-Pacific, which envisions a political and economic order free of Chinese coercion. Mr. Le warned that this strategy will “provoke trouble, put together closed and exclusive small circles or groups, and get the region off course toward fragmentation and bloc-based division.”
The American strategy “is as dangerous as the NATO strategy of eastward expansion in Europe,” he added. “If allowed to go on unchecked, it would bring unimaginable consequences and ultimately push the Asia-Pacific over the edge of an abyss.” This is a clear warning that if Washington builds an alliance system in Asia akin to NATO, China reserves the option to resist forcefully. In this view, Russia’s case for attacking Ukraine sets a useful precedent.
Yet the world’s response to the Ukraine invasion should ease Beijing’s worry about the formation of anti-China blocs. Outside the West, America’s partners seem to prefer neutrality when confronted with authoritarian aggression. India, a crucial pillar of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, hasn’t condemned Russia. In Southeast Asia, a region the U.S. views as strategically critical, most have remained neutral. While these countries may feel differently if China starts a conflict, the U.S. cannot count on that.
America’s partners in the Middle East, strategically important to the U.S. because of their energy resources, are staying neutral as well. The Syrian war and Iran’s regional aggression have made these countries more dependent on China and Russia.
Even more gratifying for Beijing is that Japan’s support of Ukraine has caused heightened tensions with Russia. Moscow has called off negotiations to resolve territorial disputes and likely promised Beijing that it would resume joint exercises in the waters around Japan.
It turns out that the Sino-Russian Joint Statement was less an aspiration than a description of the current state of international relations. With so many countries staying on the sidelines in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, China has an opportunity to build greater support for its anti-American vision. Over the past decade, Russia has done much of this work by providing arms and extending its influence. China will also exploit distaste for promiscuous use of U.S. sanctions and American hectoring on human rights.
China hasn’t miscalculated. It was right about the geopolitical fundamentals. And since few countries joined the West in resisting Russian aggression against a sovereign nation, Beijing may conclude that fewer still would punish it for an attack on Taiwan, which most of the world doesn’t recognize as a country. Washington must urgently make a sustained diplomatic case to its partners that such an attack would devastate international security and prosperity.
China doesn’t need allies to support its aggressive plans. It merely needs nations to stay neutral, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given China more confidence that most of the world will stay on the sidelines.
Mr. Blumenthal is director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State.”
-
The Russia-Ukraine War and Ideological Frameworks: Democracy Versus Autocracy
6 MIN READMar 28, 2022 | 21:15 GMT
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is frequently characterized as part of a broader struggle between democracy and autocracy, a lens that the West also has used to counter Chinese actions. In a Feb. 24 press briefing, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg brought his comments to a close by declaring, "Democracy will always prevail over autocracy. Freedom will always prevail over oppression." Less than a week later, in his first State of the Union address, U.S. President Joe Biden said, "In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security." And more recently, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told France24 that "democracy is standing up against autocracy," highlighting the role the European Union and its partners are playing in countering Russian actions in Ukraine.
This ideological lens serves certain political purposes by creating a moral framework that Western leaders can use to encourage a unified and lasting response to the Russian invasion. Western leaders and thinkers have long equated democracy with freedom and human rights while associating autocracy with aggression and repression. This binary evokes the simplicity of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan's epithet for the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and George W. Bush's labeling of North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an "axis of evil." Such emotional appeals are memorable and simpler than explaining the strategic significance of far-away Eastern Europe for U.S., Australian or South Korean national security. The democracy versus autocracy framework is bite-sized and easy to rally around, and it justifies the economic sacrifices citizens in the United States, Europe or other partner countries must accept in countering Russian actions.
But these simple slogans, if not carefully constrained, can take on a life of their own, complicating strategic options and leading to unachievably broad missions. Many U.S. allies and partners in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific are considered autocracies, such as Vietnam, which is a key rising regional partner for the United States. So framing the Russia-Ukraine war as a struggle between democracies and autocracies risks either constraining U.S. relations with its partners or undermining political unity by leaving room for Russia, China or others to accuse the United States and its partners of hypocrisy. The latter outcome would enable more countries to avoid picking sides in the war, thus undermining Western attempts to unify an economic and political response.
Attempts to reframe events in binary terminology simply run counter to the interests and actions of much of the multipolar world. China is a massive global economic consumer, producer and investor, and Russia remains critical to the supply of key mineral and agricultural commodities and military hardware. Few developing nations want or can afford to choose a side in a new global Cold War, and even key U.S. partners like Japan, South Korea and India retain critical connections to Russia and China. As Chinese and Russian information operations have highlighted several times, much of the world is not actively engaged in the West's current sanctions regime against Russia. This is often due to countries' lack of major economic ties to Russia, as well as to the prioritization of local issues over the far-away war in Eastern Europe.
The democracy versus autocracy framing also makes de-escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war nearly impossible, as a long-term struggle between two political systems will only end when one idea is victorious and the other is defeated. Even if Russia were to withdraw from Ukraine tomorrow, that would not end the assertion that Russia is an autocracy and not a democracy, thus prolonging the wider ideological conflict. The binary, therefore, encourages a Cold War framework of a constant struggle between two competing political systems.
But this time around, the democracies risk being seen as the long-term aggressors. Russia may be invading Ukraine now, but if the West's ultimate goal is not merely the withdrawal of Russian forces but the end of autocracy itself, then Russian and Chinese assertions that the West is trying to force political regime change become more believable. And if the West intends to advance democracies globally, these goals could encourage a revival of extreme Western liberalism, the missionary zeal to drive global political change and assert a single North Atlantic political philosophy as the only legitimate — and inevitable — global philosophy.
An ideological framework can also take on a political life of its own, as social dynamics can play a powerful role in a democracy's political process and policies. Politicians capitalizing on moral fervor may find themselves trapped by their own constituents, encouraged to take actions that may not match strategic necessities but are politically expedient. This can reduce options for working with active or potential partner countries when challenging larger strategic competitors like Russia and China. For example, while the impact of sanctions against Russian energy can be mitigated by expanded energy imports from other producers, social and political fervor can undermine logical efforts to increase imports from places like Iran or Venezuela, as these countries are also "autocracies."
Bifurcating the world into two competing political systems risks creating an ever-widening set of potential targets and fails to identify a clear achievable end goal. If autocracy itself is the target, then, in the simplest terms, the West is seeking to replace autocracy with democracy. But that raises several challenging questions. First, what is the line between democracy and autocracy? Are so-called flawed democracies OK? How does the United States manage relations with NATO allies Turkey or Hungary? Are soft autocracies OK? Should the West create space and incentives for the transition to democracy, or should it actively pursue the democratization of autocracies? Would that entail purely economic and political tools or military tools as well? Like the war against terrorism, which evolved from a focused U.S. response to 9/11 and continued well after the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, a battle against autocracy can quickly become vast and ill-defined.
Finally, lumping all countries into one of two categories fails to account for the very different geopolitical positions of each country. China is not Russia, and Taiwan is not Ukraine. Superficial analysis conflates the two and shapes policy that may be inapplicable or even counter-productive. In the Cold War, had the United States recognized the political friction between the Soviet Union and China earlier, it may have been able to exploit the Chinese-Soviet split sooner, perhaps even undercutting the idea of the domino theory and altering U.S. policy toward Vietnam. A democracy versus autocracy framework is a valuable tool that can be used to shape and maintain cohesive action against Russia, but it needs to be carefully applied. Without tailoring policies to the geopolitical context and realities of different countries, the self-averred coalition of democracies risks costly and counterproductive policies.
-
March 29, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Emerging Order
By: George Friedman
I am writing this from Dubai, on a trip I will describe on my return to the United States. A summit was held in Israel over the weekend between Bahrain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Israel and the United States. The meeting was designed to back the U.S. into a corner. The United States wants to reach a new understanding with Iran, roughly built on the negotiation platform that was abandoned by President Donald Trump in 2018 as insufficient in dealing with the Iranian threat. Israel and the four Arab countries, plus some others, oppose the Biden initiative, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was there to persuade them. It did not seem to work. A paper in Dubai headlined that a new Israeli-Arab front had been created. The question has been frequently asked if unity among Arabs and Israel might be reached. The answer seems to be that it’s possible due to fear of Iran and hostility toward American plans for Iran. I have nothing to do with any of this, but watching from close up is always interesting.
My focus remains on Ukraine and Russia and what is emerging as a truly tragic outcome. More talks are scheduled to be held this week in Istanbul. The tragedy is that the settlement being discussed appears to affirm what had originally been the case. The Russians are now claiming that their only intention in the war was to secure the eastern Donbas region, not to occupy Ukraine. Going to war over that would appear to be pointless, since much of the Donbas region has been under informal but very effective Russian control since the events of 2014. It is a region dominated by ethnic Russians, and while Ukraine was not happy with the occupation of Ukrainian territory, it was hardly in a position to seriously challenge Russia. What made the Russian claims dubious, of course, were the columns of tanks heading south from Belarus toward Kyiv, among other things. They seemed to be making war on Ukraine in general and not merely formalizing control of an area they already controlled. It is likely that their demands are going to be more extreme, demanding control of the land between Donbas and Crimea, in effect seizing southeastern Ukraine. But as I said, they fought a war designed with even broader ambitions.
The Ukrainians seem prepared to discuss ceding Donbas and promise Ukrainian neutrality. It is not clear what neutrality means in this context. Switzerland claimed neutrality during World War II, which meant that Germany and the Allies both took advantage of its banking system and operated espionage organizations there. That’s one kind of neutrality. Another kind is Sweden’s. It is not in NATO and has limited acquisition of Western military equipment, but no one doubts where it stands.
What would neutrality mean in Ukraine? Ukraine may not join NATO and may take care to buy Chinese equipment, but after the events of the past month, it is difficult to image Kyiv equally trusting Western Europe and the United States and also Russia. There can be formal neutrality and neutrality over weapons acquisition, but Ukrainian intelligence will likely be swapping information with the West rather than with Russia. How can Ukraine be neutral in such a situation?
The obvious way is to obfuscate. The reality is that Russia demonstrated that it is incapable of carrying out large-scale, multi-front operations and therefore must halt operations. The Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to raise and organize their population to resist and on occasion defeat Russia, but they cannot continue to absorb the casualties Russia could inflict by sheer weight of forces, however incompetent Russia’s war effort. In the end, Russia can replace its generals, retrain its midlevel officers, and discipline and motivate its enlistees. It will take years, but it can do it if it develops a new culture of political warfare. The Ukrainians cannot protect themselves against a well-armed, well-trained professional force until they themselves rearm and train a professional force. Neutrality makes this difficult if neutrality means acquiring weapons and perhaps training from the West (read: NATO countries) is precluded.
Russia has failed badly in its attempt to occupy Ukraine and is now claiming that it never meant to. Fair enough. Ukraine has managed to resist an incompetent force. Fair enough. But Ukraine, in accepting neutrality, must adopt Swedish neutrality – formal neutrality covering its real intent. And that makes the matter difficult.
That Turkey is running the negotiations is interesting. What occasional cooperation there has been with Russia in the Middle East doesn’t hide the historical distrust. Turkey needs a weak Russia. Turkey also has an appetite for Ukrainian territory, having in the past occupied it. Turkey is the perfect interlocutor. Nobody is sure what it wants, and that may make each side cautious.
I started this with the Iranian negotiation, a negotiation that has created what once would have been considered impossible: an Israeli-Arab front confronting the Americans over their opening to Iran. Lean back and imagine how strange this is. And imagine how strange the Russo-Ukrainian situation is. The tragedy is that it took thousands of dead to bring us to the point at which it all started. And with Iran, it has taken us to a place Iran can’t believe it’s in: looking for a break from the Americans while the Arabs and Israelis try to rein the Americans in. When we think of the New World Order, look no further
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/03/29/gradually-then-suddenly/
Plan accordingly.
-
Ukraine War Shows the ‘Rules-Based International Order’ Is a Myth
There are no global threats or standards, only regional equilibria requiring constant maintenance.
By Jakub Grygiel
March 28, 2022 1:42 pm ET
The Biden administration has been vocal in defending what it calls the “rules-based international order,” but there is no such thing. An Earth-spanning security space governed by global rules or a few key powers doesn’t exist, as the war in Ukraine should remind us. There is also no “global threat” facing all states equally but, rather, regional revisionist powers threatening nearby states. Temporary regional equilibria with their own power dynamics are driven by local historical competitions. They are unstable and prone to wars. They require persistent attention and management.
Over the past three decades these regional orders—in Europe, the Middle East and Asia—have been relatively stable and the local competitions subdued. The resulting impression was of a world order. Liberals saw this global stability as the product of international rules, a growing number of democracies, and greater international trade—a “rules-based order” enhanced by democracies and commercial peace. Realists saw a world order underwritten by a rough equilibrium between the great powers—the U.S., Russia and China—with nuclear weapons as an effective pacifying equalizer.
Both visions of world order put too much emphasis on the global nature of this stability. If we look at the world through the lens of regional orders, the picture is more worrisome.
Russia’s wars in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014, as well as Iran’s actions in Iraq, Yemen and Syria, and China’s military expansion in Asia, were signs of growing local volatility. But until now these had been tentative pushes, conducted by hesitant revisionist powers and checked by American power. Russia’s war in Ukraine is the first full-fledged military offensive that aims to change the local balance of power drastically. Russia seeks to be the decisive power in Europe, and for that it needs to dominate Ukraine.
Regional orders are fragile for two reasons. First, military force is more likely to be used in local contests than in disputes between distant rivals. The stakes are high for the local parties, the perceived risks limited. A revisionist power is likely to pursue its goals, such as conquest of territory or control over a neighboring state’s political life, through war more than through negotiations. And the revisionist power’s targets won’t accept a hostile takeover without a fight. In the end, both sides are interested less in preventing war than in making war usable for their own objectives. War is an enduring regional reality.
The U.S. tends to think of stability as a broad goal of its grand strategy. As President Biden has said, the goal is to “strive to prevent” World War III. But regional revisionists in Eurasia aren’t afraid of putting pressure on their own frontiers to extend their influence. The states they threaten will also choose war over submission, regional disorder over lost independence. The U.S. will have to figure out how to navigate, even embrace, instability and war in regions that are important to its national interests.
The second reason regional orders are unstable is that local contests are geographically limited but last a long time. Local conflicts are based on, or justified by, historical claims. Perceived or real offenses committed in the past generate desires for revenge; aspirations to grandeur spur territorial demands; and national self-confidence motivates a stubborn hostility to aggressive neighbors. When the roots of a political action lie in national claims to greatness, diplomatic compromise becomes difficult. Lengthy conflict begins to look preferable to a negotiated settlement. It is more legitimate to dig trenches than to sit at negotiating tables.
Local antagonists are willing to incur high costs both when attacking (like Russia) and when defending (like Ukraine). The expectation is that the high risk will be rewarded with a high payoff: The aggressor anticipates greater influence or a larger territory, while the defender expects independence and greater security.
For a distant power such as the U.S., the enduring nature of regional conflicts in Eurasia is a political challenge. Managing such conflicts requires consistent involvement and a permanent presence. But the U.S. approach is to participate in regional geopolitical dynamics only when necessary to restore an equipoise, and then to move to a different region. Thus we hear talk of “uniting” Europe and “pivoting” to Asia.
It is historically rare for a local contest to come to a permanent end—usually only when a devastating war redraws the map in blood. The Franco-German conflict of the 19th and early 20th centuries turned into friendship only after two gruesome world wars. The end result was good for Europe, but getting there was tragic and something to be avoided.
The current war between Russia and Ukraine will end at some point, but the contest between the two nations won’t. The best that can be hoped for is a delicate local equilibrium demanding constant maintenance through Western economic and military support of Ukraine.
If Ukraine survives Russian aggression as an independent state, the Biden administration’s liberal temptation will be to call it a victory for world order based on rules and democracies. That would be a mistake. The victory will be Ukraine’s, resulting in a moment of fragile regional stability and not in a renewed world order.
Mr. Grygiel is a professor at the Catholic University of America, a senior fellow at the Marathon Initiative, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution
-
April 1, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
A Visit to Dubai
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
On the last day of our trip to Dubai, my wife and I are struggling to understand the precise meaning of “one day.” In order to be allowed to return to the United States, we must be tested for COVID-19 within one day of departure. We leave at 3 a.m. on Thursday. Does one day mean today, or do we include that sliver of time on Thursday? The State Department is not using this hallowed 24-hour period to make the rules more understandable. Does the day start when a stick is shoved up your nose, or when the results are determined? And supposing you test positive and the U.S. doesn’t let you come home for 10 days, will the United Arab Emirates let you stay here, and if so, can you stay in a hotel? If not, where can you go? It is the government that has had my wife searching for the truth, while I contemplate a coming event.
I have been asked to do an interview for a program on NTV in Moscow in a couple of hours. It appears the Russians have read my book, "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century," and want to know how I knew what would happen between Russia and Ukraine. There is a long answer and a short answer, so I won’t bore my readers with yet another rendition of buffer zones. I’ll say only that I am reminded of what Gen. George Patton reportedly yelled in North Africa as he fought the Nazis: “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book.” It’s all I can muster before a Russian TV interview and the nine-hour flight home (plus daylight saving time) fries my brain.
If you’ve gotten the sense that I’m looking forward to being on Russian TV more than I should, you’re right. It’s a strange feeling that comes from participating in one of those conferences Dubai likes to host, bringing together the best minds to consider how to build a better world. I always feel inferior at these conferences since, at most, I have only an occasionally coherent mind and have no idea how to build a better world. I’d like to be helpful, but saying that the world is quite amusing as it is, and enjoying it as much as possible, lacks the gravitas of concern.
What does strike me is that Dubai is holding the kind of conferences that the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab created at Davos. But Dubai is far better because it has the added gravity of reality. Dubai is a city, one of seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates. The largest and by far the wealthiest is Abu Dubai, a traditional society that made its money off oil. Dubai ran out of oil years ago and built a city on the Persian Gulf that is now a trading, finance and budding technology center. The rest of the emirates are small and not major players in the game.
When I went into the auditorium where I was to speak, I brushed by a group of flags. What stood out to me was the Israeli flag. Recently, a summit was held between the UAE, Egypt, Morocco and Israel, the prime subject of which was the country I can imagine seeing out of my hotel room window: Iran. Hatred may be fixed, but interest overwhelms it, and these countries are meeting in anticipation of a potential new Iran nuclear deal. The Obama administration reached an understanding with Iran that sanctions would be dropped if Iran did not build nuclear weapons. The Iranians agreed, but critics felt that the inspection program was weak and that it failed to include the country's missile program, which Tehran is using to threaten Israel and the UAE (via its allies in Yemen). Under the Trump administration, the United States canceled the deal to the delight of the countries at this meeting. In due course, the Abraham Accords were reached, built on a shared fear of Iran. The Biden administration seems to want to revive the original deal. Hence the summit.
In a confrontation with Iran, Israel and the UAE have the ability to rally a number of Arab countries and strike at Iran. Arabs and Israelis see no reason to let Iran out of the box without massive and verifiable guarantees. Following the Arab-Israeli summit, the United States challenged them to explain how they would proceed on the Iran question if the proposed agreement is not an option. I gather from the meeting that their solution is to allow Iran to remain isolated. The problem is that Iran can be even more dangerous in isolation. Israel and the UAE know this and may want Iran to strike a first blow.
The degree to which Israel and the UAE are aligned struck me during my visit. What is known intellectually isn’t always visible until you walk into an auditorium in the UAE to make a speech and see a furled Israeli flag nestled in a corner. I grew up at a time when the Middle East was Israel and the Arab world arrayed against it, or its countries under extreme pressure to toe that line. The degree to which the Middle East has been reshaped is striking, along with the degree to which the U.S. is seen as a supporter of Israel and therefore of much of the Middle East.
The UAE was key to integrating Israel into the Arab world formally. Israel had long had secret understandings in the region, but the UAE was prepared to do it publicly, in part because it saw Israel as a model: a small country with massive technical capability, able to defend itself or project power as needed – a capability partially provided by the U.S. and even more by Israel’s interest in a strong UAE. And that is what you see in Dubai. There are Israelis starting businesses and trading, and Arabs moving beyond traditional issues with Israel, and working with them against another non-Arab country, Iran.
There are those who want the world to boycott Israel. The interesting thing is that there are few Arab countries that would support that, except as a gesture covering their own trade. The fight against Israel has raged in the Arab world and moved to universities that lack precision-guided munitions. But the UAE pioneered the open acceptance and emulation of Israel. And when I mentioned the emulation, there were no arguments.
And then the Islamic State attacked a bus stop in northern Israel. One of the people at the conference told me that IS had hooked up with Iran to carry out these strikes. My friend and colleague Hilal Khashan tells me this is impossible. I say that nothing is impossible in the Middle East. He thought about it a while and decided that "unlikely" might be a better term than "impossible." So that might be a downpayment on what Iran might do if isolated and desperate.
So half of the meeting sounded like Davos and the other half like the Middle East I grew up with – terrorists killing Jews, Jews preparing to retaliate, wild theories of what is going on, and the Arab world quietly doing business while threatening to do war. Now they do business openly while fearing Iran. The strange gyrations of the Middle East remain, none perhaps stranger than having the spirit of Davos and speculation on who paid the terrorist organization to strike Israel discussed side by side. The UAE cannot prosper in a region filled with terrorists attacking Israel. I sense that no one has abanded the Palestinians more than their fellow Arabs. That seems to be the one constant in the Middle East. That and the hospitality I was offered, even in spite of my rhetorical style.
-
Is India, a Close Ally of the US, About to Side With China? (theepochtimes.com)
Is India, a Close Ally of the US, About to Side With China?
April 1, 2022 Updated: April 1, 2022
According to a recent article in Asia Times, India has grown “increasingly skeptical about American policies and statesmanship.” The United States once presented a compelling picture to the world.
Today, however, the picture that the United States now presents is the opposite of convincing, according to the article. The United States has become a “battleground of tribalism and culture wars.” Once an attractive prospect, this “aging superpower” is in decline, with “dwindling influence globally.”
Because of this, India is looking elsewhere for support and potential business. By elsewhere, I mean China.
As the Asia Times piece noted, India now realizes “that it has no real partnership with the US or the European Union” and that its relationships with the two were, and still are, “transactional.”
For both the United States and the European Union, maintaining good ties with India cannot be emphasized enough. After all, India is the fastest-growing major economy in the world. Some authors argue (rather convincingly) that India will become the next great superpower. This fact is not lost on China.
Chinese state-run media Global Times recently published an intriguing piece.
“China and India,” it reads, “share common interests on many fronts.” It then went on to condemn those in “the West” who criticized India “for reportedly considering buying Russian oil at a discounted price.”
Back off, it continued, this “is India’s legitimate right.” The piece finished by calling on Beijing and New Delhi to “mend their fraught relations.”
Will New Delhi accept the invitation?
Don’t be surprised if it does.
But why would India embrace China?
Two years ago, Chinese and Indian troops began engaging in hostile face-offs at various locations along the Sino-Indian border. In June 2020, both sides engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Lives were lost. Three months later, for the first time in 45 years, both sides exchanged gunfire. Since then, tensions have been extremely high.
But, as we all know only too well, politics is a fickle business. Yesterday’s enemy has the potential to become tomorrow’s friend.
If India does embrace China, one must remember that the embrace would be borne more out of desperation than desire. China and the United States are the two biggest players on the world stage. If one begins to lose its pulling power and the other increases its own, then it’s only natural that India reconsiders where its loyalties lie.
Moreover, India now finds itself in a position of genuine power, with both Beijing and Washington knocking on its door. In the past, India was only too willing to open the door to the United States. However, times appear to be changing.
According to M K Bhadrakumar, a former Indian diplomat, Narendra Modi, India’s 14th and current prime minister, “is looking in all directions—Russia and China included—for partnerships.”
India, one must remember, has very close ties with Russia.
Vir Sanghvi, a well-respected Indian author, recently wrote the following: “When it comes to this [Ukraine] conflict, our hands are tied.”
Why?
Because “Russia is our major supplier of weapons.” Moreover, he added, it “isn’t just the arms we have ordered from the Russians. It is also spares, ammunition, and maintenance for our existing equipment. To stand against Russia would be to debilitate our armed forces. We have no real choice but to avoid criticising the Russians.”
Epoch Times PhotoIndia’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi attends a meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi, India, on Dec. 6, 2021. (Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via Reuters)
Xinhua, another mouthpiece of the Chinese regime, recently argued that “China-India diplomatic relations will significantly ease and enter a recovery period.” During this period, “China and India will realize the exchange of visits of diplomatic officials in a relatively short time.”
Staring into their crystal ball, the authors believe “Chinese officials will go to India first.” Shortly after, India’s foreign minister “will come to China.”
As unpalatable as the above lines may sound, India and China are neighbors. Meanwhile, the United States is situated on the other side of the world. Within the realm of social psychology, the proximity principle suggests that individuals form interpersonal relations with those close by (think flatmates, work colleagues, etc.).
In geopolitics, perhaps the proximity principle also plays a role.
The US Has Lost Its Appeal
In 2018, the scholar Gordon Adams wrote that since the end of World War II, American diplomacy “has been essential to multinational agreements on trade, climate, regional security, and arms control.” The United States could “claim to be at the center of a “rules-based international order.” Why? Because it was.
“Those days,” wrote Adams, “are gone.”
Indeed. In the four years since this piece was written, China has grown significantly stronger. On the other hand, the United States appears to have grown weaker, at least in India’s eyes.
According to the aforementioned Sanghvi, a man with his finger on India’s geopolitical pulse, up until very recently, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s biggest right-wing party, spouted largely pro-U.S. philosophies.
Now, though, Modi’s party views the United States negatively. Sanghvi noted, “Joe Biden is seen as antagonistic—if not to India, then to the sort of India that Modi’s supporters want to create.”
After the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States’ image has taken a significant beating. Today, whether you like to admit it or not, everything revolves around branding.
Online dating is an obvious example. How you present yourself to a prospective partner (or partners) matters. It matters a lot.
Similarly, LinkedIn, basically a glorified social media platform, is a place to sell your brand: your expertise, experience, etc.
The world of international politics is no different. For those who say that the United States is not a brand, you’re right. However, you’re also wrong. Definitionally speaking, the United States is nothing like Coca-Cola or IKEA, two of the most recognizable brands on the planet.
On the other hand, the United States is just like Coca-Cola and IKEA. After all, what is soft power but the ability to convince another nation (or citizens of another nation) to “buy into” your brand? It involves convincing people to “buy into” your policies and ideologies to subscribe to your vision.
The United States, once the leader in soft power, appears to have lost its edge. For this, it may very well pay a costly price. Losing India to China, once unthinkable, is a distinct possibility.
As the author Shekhar Gupta wrote just a few days ago, there’s no room for morality when it comes to India’s foreign policy stance. Instead, the only thing that matters is acting in the best interest of the Indian people. For Modi and his colleagues, this could mean embracing China and rejecting the United States.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
-
"Is India, a Close Ally of the US, About to Side With China?"
Weren't they (India) just at war with China a minute ago? And now they are a more appealing ally than us?
And how are we (US) not a more strategic ally to India than Russia is, if India has to take sides.
Russia has gas and oil and we are shutting ours down.
Who, who served in the United States Senate through the 1970s, does not know oil and gas are strategic? (Biden-Moron)
"The United States has become a “battleground of tribalism and culture wars.” Once an attractive prospect, this “aging superpower” is in decline, with “dwindling influence globally.”
Because of this, India is looking elsewhere for support and potential business. By elsewhere, I mean China."
Failed domestic policies equal failed foreign policies. To quote G M: We are not the shining city on the hill anymore. (To quote Doug), Decline is a choice.
Stop choosing socialism, racialism, victimhood, woke, divided, decline and failure over freedom, responsibility, growth, strength and prosperity.
The George Floyd, Portland, Seattle, Michael Brown, trans issues, deficits, inflation, media hoaxes, no gas, no food things are hurting our brand name and relationships around the world, not just at home.
-
What Lessons is China Taking from the Ukraine War?
From battlefield concepts to geopolitics, Beijing is sure to be watching with avid interest—and some chagrin.
By THOMAS CORBETT, MA XIU and PETER W. SINGER
APRIL 3, 2022 08:00 AM ET
COMMENTARY
THE CHINA INTELLIGENCE
CHINA
EUROPE
STRATEGY
Operation Desert Storm was a turning point in modern Chinese military history. As military planners with the People’s Liberation Army watched U.S. and allied forces make short work of the world’s fourth-largest military (on paper), equipped with many of the same systems as the PLA, it became obvious that China’s quantitatively superior but qualitatively lacking massed infantry would stand no chance against the combination of modern weaponry, C4ISR, and joint operations seen in Iraq. The result was new military concepts and over two decades of often-difficult reforms, which produced the modern, far more capable, “informationized” PLA of today.
Today, the PLA is no doubt closely observing its Russian contemporaries in Ukraine as they under-perform in multiple areas, from failing to take key targets or claim air supremacy to running low on fuel and supplies and possibly experiencing morale collapse, and surely taking away lessons that will shape its own future. Of note, Russia’s experience appears to have confirmed many of China’s recent assumptions behind its investments, such as the utility of unmanned aerial systems in high-intensity conflict, as well as the necessity for the PLA’s 2015 reforms, which aim to fix many of the issues driving Russian failure that the PLA recognizes in itself.
Of the many issues that have contributed to Russia’s physical battlefield woes in Ukraine, one of the most important has been the lack of effective joint or combined arms operations, widely considered essential to any effective modern fighting force. Russia’s poor level of coordination between its various services and branches can only be generously described as incompetent. For example, it has repeatedly failed to provide effective air support to its ground forces or deconflict its air and air-defense forces to avoid friendly fire.
The PLA has long had its own serious issues with joint operations. Traditionally dominated by the Army, the PLA had little success developing a truly joint force until a series of sweeping reforms in 2015 that replaced the former Army-dominated system with a series of joint theater commands. The PLA is thus aware of its own shortcomings and taking steps to fix it, but likely remains far off from being able to conduct truly effective, seamless joint operations. Efforts to conduct joint exercises are becoming more common, but most senior PLA leaders are still relatively inexperienced with joint operations, and even new officers typically do not receive joint education below the corps level. Further, it remains to be seen how far these reforms will go or to what extent they will “stick;” indeed, one reason the PLA did not attempt these reforms until 2015 was because of strong institutional pushback from the Army, whose leaders wished to retain their dominant status.
To China, the Ukraine invasion will reinforce the importance of joint and combined arms operations, while also making clear that such operations are highly difficult to conduct in practice. Russia’s stumbles may give the PLA pause as to whether it is truly ready for all the joint elements that a successful Taiwan seizure would require, including close coordination between sea, air, and land forces.
Another issue which has contributed to Russia’s military woes is the low quality of its conscript force. Indeed, Ukraine has even turned images of Russian POW conscripts being allowed to call their mothers into a weapon in its information warfare. While some militaries, such as Israel, have managed to maintain a high-quality conscript force, a full-time professional force is generally considered to hold numerous substantial advantages, which is why most of the Western world now uses a voluntary recruitment model. Despite the copious hyper-masculine recruiting videos which so excited certain Western politicians, Russia has struggled to attract enough voluntary recruits to move away from its current system of 12-month conscription.
Despite some recent success in recruiting a higher-quality, more-educated voluntary force, the PLA has likewise failed to move away from conscription. It presently requires about 660,000 two-year conscripts, many lacking even partial high-school education, to fill out its ranks. While this does not bode well for the PLA’s ability to conduct complex operations, one area where the PLA may have an advantage over its Russian counterparts is in the area of motivation. The Russian conscripts are not just poorly trained, but also suffer from low morale. Many among the invasion force did not know why they were going to Ukraine, or even that they were going to Ukraine at all. By contrast, the PLA places heavy emphasis on personnel political education, and Chinese conscripts have been raised from an early age to believe in the necessity of “liberating” Taiwan. Still, the PLA is surely watching with concern as a conscript force with at least some similarities to its own fares so poorly, and will likely redouble their campaign to attract more, and preferably higher-quality, voluntary recruits.
Russia also allowed its adversary to dominate the information environment. Due to a combination of overly optimistic assumptions about the political weakness of its foe and logistical reliance on its target’s own communications networks, Russia never launched the long-feared effort to take down Ukrainian communications networks. Putin’s strategists wrongly believed that its own messaging and rapid military advances would go viral across these networks and aid in collapsing the Ukrainian state. As well, many of Russia’s units turned out to need access to Ukrainian civilian networks for their own operations.
Instead, the Zelenskyy regime turned the tables on Russia, winning the information war inside both Ukraine and the West, and in so doing, transforming the greater war. Deft Ukrainian government messaging and a mobilized civilian populace created a new sense of domestic unity, as well as mobilizing essential military aid and historic economic sanctions from a widened network of global allies. In turn, Russian use of civilian networks made it susceptible to intercepts and geolocated targeting of its units. The PLA has streamlined coordination between its cyber, electronic warfare, space, and information warfare efforts through the recent creation of the Strategic Support Force, indicating it recognizes the importance of information dominance. It can be expected to redouble its efforts at cyber/information warfare, as well as encrypted communications, to ensure its own operations don’t suffer the same flaws.
Another ongoing issue has been Russia’s serious problems with poor logistics. The sight of broken-down or abandoned vehicles has become common as Russian forces run out of fuel and other vital supplies. To its credit, the PLA has also been rapidly reforming and modernizing its logistical system as part of the same broad set of 2015 reforms. As part of these reforms, the PLA has emphasized its logistics organizations and created the Joint Logistics Support Force. This force’s training has focused on cooperation with other branches of the PLA, and it has cut its teeth training to establish supply lines during natural disasters. In 2018, the JLSF launched its first major exercise, dubbed “Joint Logistics Support Mission 2018,” featuring medical drones, helicopter-dropped refueling depots, and operations in harsh and remote terrain.
However, while the outward manifestation of many of the issues faced by the Russian military appear to be logistical in nature, the true heart of the issue may be corruption. There are reports that before the invasion Russian military officers sold off their fuel and food supplies, and that these corrupt practices may be responsible for the stalling of a Russian tank column outside Kyiv. In this regard, the PLA has much to fear. Corruption has plagued the PLA for decades, with some PLA officers bluntly stating in 2015 that it could undermine China’s ability to wage war. Reportedly, more than 13,000 PLA officers have been punished in some capacity for corruption since Xi Jinping took power, including more than a hundred generals. This was a particular problem in the logistics sector, where there are more opportunities for corruption and links to the civilian economy.
Yet, despite the reorganization of the PLA and widespread prosecution of corruption cases, it still appears to be a major issue. Anti-corruption efforts are ongoing, with Chinese Gen. Zhang Youxia recently calling for innovative measures to keep up the fight. But the fact that Fu Zhenghua, the man brought in to take down the corrupt former security chief Zhou Yongkang, is himself now under investigation for corruption does not bode well for the long-term effectiveness of China’s efforts. The troubled invasion of Ukraine provides a stark real-world example to Xi, the CCP, and PLA about the impact corruption can have on military effectiveness, and will no doubt cause them to redouble their anti-corruption efforts with a newfound urgency. However given its similar authoritarian system and emphasis on career advancement through patronage, systemic corruption may be baked into the system.
Finally, there is the strategic issue of Beijing’s reaction to the global sanctions that have hit the Russian ruble and economy. The swift and severe economic retaliation of the U.S., EU, and others took Moscow by surprise. Even more unexpected was the rapid withdrawal of almost 500 global corporations, pushed on by an effective effort at naming and shaming them into acting to protect their own brands. A longer-term effort targeting essential elements of Russia’s defense industry will hamstring it for years.
While China will benefit from Russia’s increasing reliance on its goods and services, Beijing can be expected to retool its geo-economic strategy to reduce its vulnerability to a similar nightmare scenario. For example, it will likely redouble its efforts to promote its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System—an alternative to the SWIFT international banking system—among its strategic partners and foreign aid recipients in the developing world.
Likewise, China’s recent “Dual Circulation” economic strategy appears to be aimed at countering a decoupling from China’s trade partners. Further, Beijing has surely observed how easy it was for corporations to withdraw from Moscow. If China is to be exposed to the risk of global sanctions and corporate withdrawal, so too are countries and corporations exposed to dependence on the world’s second-largest economy, and thus the government will likely take efforts to make any sanctions or corporate turn against China as painful a prospect as possible. Either way, policymakers in Washington need to understand that the sanctions being used today against Russia are unlikely be as effective the next time around, as China is not just a different economy, but also will learn from the current conflict and adjust accordingly.
For all these valuable lessons, there is little doubt that China has been watching the ongoing conflict with no small amount of chagrin. Chinese leaders are reportedly surprised and unsettled by the poor military performance of its Russian partners, Ukraine’s resistance, and the level of solidarity from the international community. The image of a much smaller state, against all odds, successfully resisting a larger neighbor surely sits uneasily in the psyches of CCP apparatchiks and PLA officials. It also counters the narrative of overwhelming force and grim inevitability Beijing has sought to instill in the psyches of the Taiwanese people. It is notable that early attempts by Chinese state media to capitalize on the Ukraine invasion in precisely this fashion, illustrating how the United States will surely abandon Taiwan when the chips are down, quietly ceased after the initial days of the war, when it became apparent that the U.S. was not, in fact, abandoning Ukraine. Beyond purely psychological factors, Ukraine also offers a blueprint for successful resistance via asymmetric warfare very similar to Taiwan’s proposed Overall Defense Concept, perhaps giving a jolt to a plan that most analysts agree offers Taiwan its best chance of success against the PLA but has stalled out in the face of bureaucratic resistance.
While China and the PLA will surely watch Ukraine closely and try to take away the correct lessons, there is one uncomfortable parallel which China may be unable to avoid by the very nature of its authoritarian system. The runup to the Ukraine invasion featured multiple strategic miscalculations by Putin, driven at least in part by him surrounding himself with the yes-men who inevitably cling to authoritarian leaders, eager to please and afraid to speak truth to power. This was obvious in the visibly uncomfortable reaction of Russia’s SVR (foreign intelligence) chief as he was publicly pressured to agree with Putin in the days leading up to the war, as well as in the sackings and arrests of multiple military and intelligence officials after the war turned poorly. Authoritarian leaders have systemic problems in gaining reliable intelligence, oftentimes magnified by their overconfidence in their own singular understanding of a situation. As China continues its slide away from a system of intra-Party consensus toward a one-man cult of personality in which dissenting views are increasingly unwelcome, Xi is bound to encounter the same problem. It is unclear whether Xi will learn this lesson from Putin, or make his own similar miscalculations in the future towards China’s own neighbors.
-
QUARTERLY FORECASTS
2022 Second-Quarter Forecast
40 MIN READMar 28, 2022 | 00:00 GMT
Overview
During the second quarter, the world will continue to feel the impact of the war in Ukraine, high inflation, energy crunches, supply chain bottlenecks and a weakening — but still present — COVID-19 pandemic. Even if negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv make progress, the West will keep most of its sanctions against Russia in place, which will result in prolonged political and economic uncertainty. In the meantime, high energy prices will slow economic growth worldwide, negatively impacting households' cost of living and businesses' operating costs. Food and energy inflation will be particularly problematic because it will keep the risk of social unrest high, especially in emerging and developing countries where governments have less fiscal room to mitigate its impact. Against this backdrop, large central banks will struggle to find a balance between fighting inflation and encouraging growth as they seek the right speed to phase out their expansionary monetary policies.
In the meantime, much of the world will continue to transition to a "living-with-COVID" strategy that prioritizes economic growth over social distancing measures. Most countries will continue to soften, and in many cases completely lift, their lockdown measures as they seek to boost economic activity. But the process will be particularly slow in China, where authorities are likely to remain skeptical about a quick reopening. In addition, the threat of new, more contagious, variants of the virus is not gone, meaning some regions or countries may reintroduce social distancing measures for short periods.
FORECAST
Global Trends
5 MIN READMar 21, 2022 | 17:23 GMT
A woman signs a Ukranian flag at the Ukraine Pavillion Expo 2020 in Dubai
As the Ukraine War Continues, So Does Russian Political and Economic Isolation
The invasion of Ukraine will lead to Russia's increasing economic and political isolation from the rest of the world, particularly as civilian casualties mount. Even if negotiations were to result in a cease-fire, significant sanctions on Russia will remain in place for an extended period and the exodus of Western companies from Russia will continue; companies leaving Russia are unlikely to reverse their decision in the short to medium term. NATO countries will maintain a high level of military aid for Ukraine, but will refrain from taking steps that could lead to their direct involvement in the conflict, such as implementing a no-fly zone in Ukraine. This will likely prevent the war in Ukraine from spreading to other parts of the world. As Russia's offensive advances and civilian casualties increase, the United States, European Union and members of NATO will scale up their sanctions against Russia, but differences in dependence on Russian oil and natural gas imports will keep the European Union and the West divided over implementing blanket sanctions targeting Russian oil and natural gas exports. China will maintain rhetorical support for Russia and many Chinese companies will maintain their operations in Russia, but China's large banks and national champions are unlikely to violate Western and U.S. sanctions to avoid economic damage. Nevertheless, Moscow will view Chinese companies as an alternative to Western investors, and Chinese companies could expand their presence in Russia and take control of assets or get involved in projects that Western companies leave behind.
High Commodity Prices Add to Global Inflation Woes
The conflict in Ukraine will cause economic headwinds in the second quarter, primarily due to food, fertilizer and energy price inflation, further undermining global economic recoveries and hitting the poor the hardest. Despite Western sanctions largely exempting Russian energy and agricultural products, the Ukraine conflict will cause food and energy prices to remain high in the quarter as Western majors shun some purchases of Russian crude oil and Russia restricts exports of certain raw materials, like fertilizers. The price of European crude oil benchmark Brent could remain above $100 per barrel for most of the quarter. High commodity prices will put more pressure on the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve to continue with their interest rate hikes to curb inflation, but the European Central Bank is likely to delay such a decision until later in the year due to the eurozone's meager economic growth. Rising prices of basic necessities will force many governments to respond with tax breaks or social spending programs — at the price of pervasively deep fiscal deficits — in order to offset the financial pain that poorer segments of their societies experience or risk protests. While some Western governments can afford such programs, emerging and developing countries whose governments have significant U.S. dollar-denominated debt will face more difficulty in expanding social spending programs as they are hit by the Fed's monetary tightening policy strengthening the U.S. dollar and the higher commodity prices. For countries facing fiscal challenges like Turkey, Egypt, Ghana and Ethiopia, the two forces will exacerbate their situations, and could lead to protests and further debt crises.
A Lengthy Conflict in Ukraine Brings More Cyber-Risks to Europe, North America
The Ukraine conflict will also keep cyber-risks in Europe heightened as nation-state and nonstate threat actors carry out cyberattacks connected to the conflict and carry out information warfare campaigns. Russia-linked hacking groups will use data-wiping and -encrypting malware in their attacks against Ukrainian organizations, keeping the risk high that malware will affect machines of Western organizations that work closely with Ukrainian counterparts. As the conflict in Ukraine drags on and Western sanctions remain in place, the risk of Russia-linked hacking groups directly targeting U.S. and Western organizations to retaliate for sanctions will increase. The conflict in Ukraine is also blurring the line between Russian nation-state threat actors and cybercriminals. Nationalistic Russian ransomware gangs could more brazenly target Western organizations and critical infrastructure operators in attacks, either in coordination with the Russian government or for their own ideological motivations.
Western Countries Rapidly Adopt 'Live-With-COVID' Strategies
As the number of cases and hospitalizations from omicron continues to trend down in most countries, governments are accelerating their "live-with-COVID" strategies, which will provide some relief to their services sectors and could ease some supply chain disruptions. In our annual forecast, we laid out that most countries would adopt a live-with-COVID strategy this year, and omicron's rapid rise and decline in the West will accelerate that process. Most Western countries are removing pandemic restrictions and are likely to leave things that way barring a new variant that spreads as rapidly — if not faster — than omicron and that is more dangerous. Given their more aggressive strategies, East and Southeast Asian countries could face more challenges in adopting a live-with-COVID strategy. Even if China takes steps toward relaxing its zero-COVID strategy, the country will deal with localized outbreaks that it will struggle to contain, potentially leading to a return to lockdowns.
FORECAST
Asia-Pacific
6 MIN READMar 21, 2022 | 17:22 GMT
file footage of a North Korean missile test
Key Trends for the Quarter
China's Economic Struggles and Diplomatic Humility
China's continued zero-COVID policy may spur renewed manufacturing relocations outside the country, while its push to secure energy supplies could worsen South China Sea tensions. Beijing will slowly ease real estate capital restrictions in an effort to recover fixed asset investment (a key driver of China's economy) but sectoral revenues and broader fixed asset investment will remain low compared to previous years despite renewed state-led infrastructure investments, putting a further drag on economic growth and hurting the Chinese Communist Party's chances of achieving its ambitious 5.5% annual GDP growth target. China will seek to find new sources of energy, food and raw materials in the wake of Western sanctions on Russia. This may spur higher state revenues for Asian commodities exporters like Indonesia and Myanmar, but could also lead to an unintended maritime clash between China and either Vietnam, the Philippines or Indonesia as China deepens oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea. China's zero-COVID strategy (which is characterized by heavy social restrictions and sudden supply chains disruptions) will persist, as will restrictions in Hong Kong, prompting further investment and manufacturing flight out of both territories as the "live-with-COVID" strategies of other regional countries attract business despite higher caseloads. China's diplomatic isolation amid its tacit support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine will prompt Beijing to redouble efforts to strengthen trade partnerships and settle disputes with U.S. partners and allies. Such efforts may include easing Australian trade restrictions, advocating for China's membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or easing sanctions on EU members of parliament in order to resume negotiations for the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Progress on these fronts may be limited, but China may nonetheless engage in fewer diplomatic spats as it seeks the goodwill of hesitant U.S. partners.
Elections Test U.S. Security Coalition
While leadership changes in South Korea, Australia and the Philippines are unlikely to result in drastic disruptions in security cooperation with the United States, nuanced shifts in the balance with China are possible. The new South Korean government will likely herald warmer relations with Japan, boosting U.S. efforts at trilateral security cooperation on the Korean Peninsula and in maritime competition with China in the East China Sea, which over time will ease the U.S. security burden in the region. If the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte win the presidency and vice presidency, respectively, on May 9, the duo is likely to maintain current President Rodrigo Duterte's amenable stance toward China on South China Sea territorial disputes and seek bilateral resolution mechanisms that exclude the United States in a key region for the U.S. Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy. This could make it harder for the United States to push back against Chinese territorial and military encroachment in the region. If the Labor Party wins the Australian federal election due on or before May 21, Canberra could pursue a more balanced strategic and trade policy toward Beijing, giving some nuance to current Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's near-unqualified commitment to maritime security cooperation with the United States in pressuring China from the Pacific Islands region. All three of these countries are long-term U.S. defense partners, so major changes in security cooperation are unlikely, but more nuanced shifts regarding the degree to which countries balance between Chinese and U.S. security interests in specific theaters, like the South China Sea, are possible.
Escalating North Korean Missile Tests
North Korea is likely to continue conventional weapons development, expanding its options for non-nuclear responses to peninsular security threats, but a resumption of nuclear or intercontinental ballistic missile testing could shift U.S. and South Korean aims in negotiations to arms control rather than denuclearization. Despite ongoing testing, new conventional capabilities do not signify an increased likelihood of a North Korean attack on South Korea or the United States in the short term, and the United States is likely to encourage the continued transfer of operational control of forces to the South Korean military. North Korea's continued development of mobile launch sites, however, will raise concerns over the type of missile being tested, as mobile launches are more advantageous for military missiles than civilian satellites, which the north aims to use for improved surveillance of the United States. Should Pyongyang restart nuclear testing or resume ICBM testing over Japan instead of continued testing in the sea between the two countries, South Korea may expedite the deployment of missile defense systems to defend against the ballistic missile threat. With the United States still focused on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its long-term strategic competition with China, renewed Korean Peninsula concerns would have to compete for attention from the Biden administration.
Supply Chain Uncertainty Complicates ASEAN Recovery
The war in Ukraine, global differences in COVID-19 policies and commodities market fluctuations will drive supply chain and economic growth uncertainty in East Asia and especially Southeast Asia, complicating manufacturing recoveries and encouraging political turnover. The war may impede global flows of key inputs for the tech industry, impeding Asian governments' plans to expand their chip production to boost national innovation, advance manufacturing capabilities and improve tech self-sufficiency. In addition, persisting high fuel prices will also impair national manufacturing recoveries, including in Vietnam, while rising food and raw materials prices will deepen Myanmar's economic turmoil as the country leans into another year of civil war. Myanmar's social and political situation may increase refugee flows and COVID-19 spread — due to the junta's poor ability to administer health care and the country's scant revenue — into the rest of mainland Southeast Asia, complicating governments' transitions to live-with-COVID strategies and potentially introducing tighter border restrictions. Rising fuel prices will also cause Association of Southeast Asian Nations governments to reconsider price caps and fuel subsidies, increasing the chances for political turnover via electoral upsets and adding to already simmering unrest in Thailand amid economic uncertainty. General energy insecurity could prompt new administrations in the Philippines, South Korea and Japan to reconsider expanding or resuming nuclear power capacity, reigniting environmental debates and questions of foreign investment, particularly from China, and the political influence that often accompanies it.
Key Dates to Watch
April 1: EU-China Summit
May 8: Hong Kong chief executive election (unless postponed)
May 9: Philippines presidential, vice presidential, and some House and Senate seat elections
May 21: Deadline for Australian elections for all House seats and a majority of Senate seats
May 22: Bangkok gubernatorial election
FORECAST
Europe
7 MIN READMar 21, 2022 | 17:23 GMT
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addresses the Italian Parliament via live video from the embattled city of Kyiv
Key Trends for the Quarter
Public Spending Levels to Remain High in Europe
European institutions and national governments will increase public spending to cope with the global energy crisis and the war in Ukraine. This will ensure continued economic growth, but also contribute to inflation and increase the risk of a debt crisis. The European Commission will relax the implementation of EU rules on state aid so that national governments can assist companies negatively impacted by high energy prices, sanctions against Russia and the overall increase in geopolitical uncertainty. Brussels will also urge EU governments to redirect grants and loans from the EU COVID-19 recovery fund to assist households and companies in distress. While governments will debate whether to authorize the commission to borrow on financial markets on their behalf, a decision may not be reached during the quarter because of internal divisions. The rise in global economic uncertainty will also reactivate the debate over whether to reform EU sovereign debt and fiscal deficit rules known as the Stability and Growth Pact. While a radical reform of the pact is unlikely due to resistance from Northern European governments, the Continent's growing economic challenges mean there will be room for a compromise to allow some spending areas (such as spending on the energy transition or defense) to be excluded from the calculations of a country's debt or deficit. The combination of all these expansionary policies will probably ensure continued economic growth in Europe during the quarter. But they will also keep inflation high, which will reignite the debate within the European Central Bank over whether interest rates should be hiked faster than anticipated (though a hike is unlikely to materialize during the quarter as the bank prioritizes growth). These measures will also result in pervasively high fiscal deficits and sovereign debt levels that could result in financial crises in the future.
Europe's Push for Energy Diversification to Accelerate
The European Union will adopt measures to accelerate its energy diversification away from Russia, but the process will be uneven and will last well beyond the quarter. The European Union will start to implement a plan to replace tens of billions of cubic meters of Russian natural gas by increasing LNG and pipeline imports from other sources, doubling the production of biomethane, and other measures. The bloc is also likely to announce measures to increase the production and import of renewable hydrogen, accelerate the installation of photovoltaic panels on buildings and farms across the European Union, and accelerate permitting procedures for on- and off-shore wind capacity and large-scale solar projects. In April, the commission will issue a legislative proposal requiring gas storage facilities in the bloc to be up to 90% full by Oct. 1 every year. These measures will take months (and in some cases years) to implement, however, meaning the bloc will not significantly reduce its dependence on Russian natural gas during the quarter, a situation that will keep the bloc from banning the purchases of Russian oil and natural gas. In the meantime, individual member states may announce plans to increase their reliance on nuclear energy while others are likely to slow down the phaseout of coal. Collectively, these moves could make it harder for the European Union to meet its carbon dioxide reduction targets for 2030, and could influence companies not to move away from coal as quickly as originally planned.
Crucial Presidential and Legislative Elections in France
France will elect a moderate president and National Assembly that will push for deeper EU economic, political and military integration. France will spend the entire quarter in electoral mode, with two rounds of presidential elections in April followed by two rounds of legislative elections in June. In both elections, voters will likely support moderate, pro-European parties that will defend France's role in the European Union and the eurozone and propose deeper European political, economic and security integration. While far-right or -left parties could perform well in both elections, the risk of one assuming control of the presidency or National Assembly such that France could exit the European Union or the eurozone will be very low. President Emmanuel Macron will use the electoral campaign and the war in Ukraine to push for reduced EU dependence on Russian energy by diversifying the bloc's energy sources and increasing the use of renewable energy and nuclear power. Macron's reelection will also see him promote greater cooperation on defense issues, including joint research, development and procurement, although the debate over these processes will extend well beyond the quarter. In the meantime, France's electoral season will also result in the European Commission slowing down the ongoing negotiations over free trade agreements, a controversial issue in France. This will slow negotiations with countries like Australia and New Zealand, while the ratification of agreements with blocs like South America's Mercosur will remain frozen.
East-West Tensions within the EU to Calm Down
The crisis in Ukraine will increase political stability in Central Europe and mitigate disputes with EU institutions, which will secure continued access to EU funds, at least temporarily. The war in Ukraine will contribute to the stability of previously fragile governments in countries like Poland and Romania as geopolitical concerns and the need to show a united response to Russia will temporarily put domestic political differences aside and allow their coalition governments to survive. Political and social stability will likely be short-lived, as an improvement of the conditions on the ground in Ukraine or a lowering of the perceived threat from Russia eventually will likely see a return to prewar internal political disputes. Countries in Central and Eastern Europe will keep their borders open to migrants escaping the war as they express solidarity with Ukraine, while countries in Western Europe will accept some of these migrants in their own territories. In addition, the European Commission will probably refrain from escalating its rule of law disputes with countries like Poland to avoid deepening internal EU divisions at a time of worsening relations with Russia, which will ensure continued access to EU funding for Warsaw and others. Finally, the war in Ukraine increases the probability of the United Opposition winning Hungary's parliamentary election April 3, as the ruling nationalist Fidesz party will struggle to distance itself from the Kremlin after years of expressing political sympathy for Russia. This could open the door to a pro-EU Hungarian government that reduces disputes with Brussels over rule of law issues and secures Budapest's continued access to EU funds.
The EU and the U.K. to Look for Compromises in Northern Ireland
The conflict in Ukraine and political calculations will result in the European Union and the United Kingdom toning down their dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol, which will open the door to compromises to avoid a trade war. Northern Ireland will hold a legislative election in May in which Unionist parties will campaign for the abolition of the Northern Ireland protocol while Republicans will support the protocol. Against this backdrop, London and Brussels will continue negotiations to amend the protocol and avoid a collapse in the talks that could result in more sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The conflict in Ukraine will also convince Brussels and London to avoid a trade war that could create additional problems for their economies at a time of rising global uncertainty. If Brussels and London fail to reach a mutually acceptable amendment of the protocol, they will likely postpone the enforcement of some aspects of it to make sure that goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland continue to move with minimal disruptions for several more months until a permanent solution is found. While widespread violence in Northern Ireland is improbable, the electoral season could result in a temporary spike in demonstrations, limited clashes between Republican and Unionist groups, and small-scale attacks and acts of sabotage, especially against customs infrastructure and staff, but also against other politically symbolic targets.
Key Dates to Watch
April 3: Parliamentary elections in Hungary
April 10: First round of France's presidential election
April 24: Second round of France's presidential election
June 12: First round of France's legislative elections
June 19: Second round of France's legislative elections
June 23-24: European Council summit
June 26-28: G-7 Leaders Summit in Germany
June 29-30: NATO Summit in Spain
FORECAST
Middle East and North Africa
5 MIN READMar 21, 2022 | 17:24 GMT
Aramco oil facility near al-Khurj area, just south of the Saudi capital Riyadh
Photo by FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty Images
Key Trends for the Quarter
A Deal for Iran’s Nuclear Program Would Change Little Else
The United States and Iran may reach a deal to resume compliance with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in the second quarter, but regional tensions will persist. An agreement would allow Iran to boost its oil exports by as much as 1.5 million b/d, alleviating the currently tight global oil market and giving Iran an incentive not to target U.S. interests and partners in the region as aggressively. Although a deal is possible, significant roadblocks remain that could derail negotiations. If an agreement is not reached in the first half of the quarter, then escalation will become more likely due to Western concerns that Iran's rapidly advancing nuclear program may soon reach a stage where the JCPOA no longer can achieve its nonproliferation objectives. Any escalation would likely involve Iran and its proxies more frequently targeting oil infrastructure and commercial vessels in the Middle East. Regardless of whether there is a deal between Iran and the West, Iran and Israel's so-called "shadow war" will continue, as Israel will remain focused on Iran's missile program and its support of proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria — issues the JCPOA does not address. Consequently, Israel will continue to launch covert and overt operations against Iran's allies aimed at degrading Tehran's capabilities to project force near Israel's borders.
Erdogan Friendly Abroad but Combative at Home
Turkey will improve relations with regional rivals in order to increase trade and investment flows, but Ankara will not introduce significant changes to its domestic economic strategy unless political conditions deteriorate significantly. Roaring inflation, a weakening lira and new global economic interruptions caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine will continue to weaken Turkey's economy, further undermining public support for the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) ahead of June 2023 elections. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will, however, likely continue his low-interest-rate approach to growth. By virtue of his control over the Central Bank and over most of the opposition who used to balance him, Erdogan holds the levers of power over economic policy, so his calculations will drive the country's economic strategy. Turkey will likely continue to improve relations with former rivals from Greece to Israel to Saudi Arabia in hopes that a softer diplomatic approach will yield increased investment and trade, easing the economic crisis at home. To that end, Turkey will also likely try to maintain neutrality in the Russo-Ukrainian war given its worries over the economic effects should Russia cut energy and food exports to Turkey. Its neutrality will be challenged by its fellow NATO allies, and will weaken should Russia directly provoke Turkey through accidental clashes with Turkish assets or allies in the Black Sea, Syria or the Caucasus.
A Threat of Violence After Lebanon’s Elections
Lebanon's May elections will not break the country's political impasse and might spur violence and emigration as more Lebanese lose faith in the state's ability to handle the economic crisis. Lebanon has not fundamentally restructured its sectarian election system, which means that most parties in power will return with similar results as the 2018 election. This will leave establishment parties — which lack an interest in deeply reforming the country's budgetary or economic policies, preferring instead to await fresh international aid — in place. As a result, public protests and strikes are likely, but these are unlikely to convince establishment politicians to begin a serious reform path given that previous nationwide protests have not forced changes and because the elections will not change the incentives that keep establishment politicians from reform. Public anger may manifest into violence that could trigger sectarian clashes. Higher fuel and food prices in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian war will exacerbate such unrest. With the political process paralyzed and the economy stagnating, more middle class Lebanese are likely to emigrate while poorer Lebanese emigrants attempt the sea journey to Europe, worsening the country's brain drain and pulling more capital out of its weakened banks.
America’s Gulf Allies Push Back
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will leverage their positions as major oil producers to win diplomatic concessions from the United States on their human rights records and military intervention in Yemen. With oil supplies uncertain in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent Western sanctions campaign, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will push back against U.S. criticism and pressure. Though they are unlikely to break with OPEC+ production quotas unilaterally, they will leverage their influence to calm oil markets in exchange for improved relations with the United States and potential U.S. support for their intervention in Yemen and defense against Iran and its regional proxies. The United States is likely to provide fresh diplomatic and intelligence support in Yemen, where Washington was already moving closer to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, and also is likely to discuss new U.S. arms sales to secure the Saudis and Emiratis.
The Land of Two Prime Ministers
In Libya, rival prime ministers will vie for international and domestic legitimacy, which could lead to disruptions in the export of the country's oil and gas resources. The Libyan parliament's March 1 approval of a new prime minister has resulted in competing prime ministers who will seek to gain international legitimacy in order to gain control of Libya's economic and government organizations, including the national oil company. Supporters of newly appointed Prime Minister Fathi Bashagha could shut down Libya's oil exports if Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibeh does not step down, which could exacerbate the tight oil market. If Bashagha tries to move the government from Tripoli, violence could break out in the capital between different rival militias.
Key Dates to Watch
April 2 - May 2: Ramadan
May 15: General election in Lebanon
FORECAST
Eurasia
5 MIN READMar 21, 2022 | 17:25 GMT
Smoke rises from a Russian tank destroyed by the Ukrainian forces on the side of a road in Lugansk region
Key Trends for the Quarter
The War in Ukraine Continues
Russia's and Ukraine's radically different strategic goals mean that a sustainable solution to their conflict is unlikely during the quarter. Ukraine will maintain its strategy of repelling Russia's invasion with the goal of causing Russia to sustain enough material and human losses that Moscow softens some of its demands for a cease-fire. Russia's strategy meanwhile consists of progressively weakening the Ukrainian government's resources to force it to accept a cease-fire on Moscow's terms. This means that regardless of any negotiations, Russia will maintain a significant degree of territorial control in Ukraine during the quarter. Moscow will continue its attempts to establish pro-Russian regional regimes in areas such as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia that create a land bridge from Russia to Crimea. The Ukrainian government's reluctance to recognize Russian territorial gains amid Russia's continued seizure and occupation of new areas will strengthen Moscow's demands for a deal that imposes costs that are simply too high for Kyiv to accept, making a complete withdrawal of Russian troops improbable. In an alternate scenario, Kyiv would accept a painful deal at a high territorial and political cost to end the active phase of the war. In this scenario, the deal would codify Ukraine's neutral and demilitarized status on terms largely dictated by Moscow, while Ukraine would also surrender its claims to Crimea and cede the eastern region of Donbas. The deal would allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's government to survive and regain control over some of the regions Russia occupied in eastern Ukraine as Moscow moves to fortify and integrate the Donbas into Russia.
Russia Will Increasingly Feel The Pain Of Sanctions
The Russian economy will contract significantly under crippling sanctions, threatening long-term growth prospects but not causing a change of government or foreign policy. Russia's GDP will contract significantly in the second quarter due to Western sanctions and boycotts, which will likely remain in place or even expand despite a possible end of the most violent phase of the war. Russia will also see a significant increase in inflation, which a likely sovereign default and government efforts to prop up ruble liquidity will accelerate. This will result in stagflation as businesses and consumers seek to minimize their loss of purchasing power by spending on an increasingly shrinking amount of available goods. High prices for hydrocarbons and other commodities of which Russia is a major exporter (most notably, minerals such as nickel, aluminum and titanium), however, will mean that the Russian government can still bring in large amounts of foreign currency and run a current account surplus, providing the government with the means to intervene to stabilize the economy and banking sector in the long run. Russians will see their standards of living fall precipitously, but this will not significantly affect the Kremlin's pursuit of the war in Ukraine let alone spur political change in Russia because of Moscow's efforts to restrict access to information it views as undesirable, increasingly harsh punishments for dissent and the accelerated brain drain of those opposed to Russian actions in Ukraine.
Russia’s Economic Struggles Will Impact Central Asia
Russia's economic turmoil will cause an economic contraction in Central Asia, increasing regional political volatility and creating the risk of social unrest. As Russia's economy severely contracts due to Western sanctions and boycotts, the economies of Central Asia states, which are highly interdependent upon Russia, will undergo their own economic downturns. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which are heavily dependent on Russian remittances, will likely be hit the hardest as the volume of remittances declines due to the loss of economic opportunities in Russia and sanctions on Russia's banking sector cut off avenues for financial transactions. The ruble's decline will mean that even the remittances that do make it back to the region will be worth less. The depressed economic environment, which will happen on top of the ongoing spike in fuel prices, will increase the risk of social unrest across the region, but governments will likely avoid collapse with a combination of repression and modest support measures. Proponents of extremist ideologies will look to capitalize as the economic downturn deepens, reaching out to millions of potential followers, including the many migrant workers returning to the region from Russia vulnerable to radicalization amid the lack of work. Moscow will pressure regional governments to increase border controls and reduce the ability of Islamists in Afghanistan to link up with sympathetic Central Asian elements, but may be forced to provide security assistance to protect Central Asian governments from destabilization. This would further strain Moscow's budgetary and military resources, limiting Russia's ability to influence political developments in the region and prompting governments to seek economic support elsewhere.
Key Dates to Watch
April 3: Kyrgyzstan's census concludes
April 8: Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) foreign ministerial summit
April 11-13: Russia International Arctic Forum 2022
May 26-27: Eurasian Economic Forum
May (date unspecified): CIS heads of state summit
June 10: CIS Economic Council meeting
FORECAST
Americas
5 MIN READMar 21, 2022 | 17:25 GMT
Facade of Argentina's Central Bank in Buenos Aires
Key Trends for the Quarter
High Food and Energy Prices Drive Unrest in Brazil
In reaction to high food and energy prices, Brazil will see more frequent labor strikes and social unrest and increased government spending, sparking investor concern about the country's social and economic stability. As President Jair Bolsonaro tries to boost his odds of reelection in October amid record-high global food prices, the government is likely to attempt to limit exports of cereals in an effort to relieve inflationary pressures. International energy prices are likely to remain similarly high as Western powers maintain sanctions on Russia, leading the government to contain the price of gasoline and diesel by either forcing state-owned energy giant Petroleo Brasileiro to keep prices artificially low or by subsidizing fuel prices for a set period. In either case, government spending and a lack of political will to decrease the government's high debt burden will make it hard for Brasilia to reduce its fiscal deficit. Foreign and domestic investors will be wary of the increased state involvement in the Brazilian economy. They will likely wait to issue new investment in the country until after the election, though the country will likely see limited new investment concentrated in its oil and gas sector. Despite the subsidies, households are likely to feel some of the effects of rising prices of food and fuels, providing fodder for domestic unrest (including labor unrest), which could result in supply chain disruptions if strikes target major highways or ports.
The Mexican Government Compromises on Electricity Sector Reform
Horse-trading between the Mexican government and the opposition will result in watered-down reform to the country's electricity sector that decreases the likelihood of USMCA violations. While the opposition coalition Va por Mexico is unlikely to be cooperative ahead of June 5 gubernatorial and regional elections in six states, it has indicated that it will be more open to supporting the government's plans to reform Mexico's electricity sector in exchange for government support on other issues after the election. Though Va por Mexico and the governing National Regeneration Movement are likely to strike a deal on electricity reform, the reforms are likely to be watered-down from what the government had originally wanted. For example, the opposition will demand the preservation of independent regulatory agencies and decreases in the percentage of the electricity sector that will be designated for state-owned electricity company Federal Electricity Commission to control. Weaker reforms will be less likely to violate the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement than the original government proposal. But even weak electricity reforms, however, will discourage foreign direct investment in Mexico's energy sector for fear that the state will follow up with additional reforms limiting private investment.
Relief From the IMF and the Agricultural Sector Boost Argentina Amid Price Surges
New International Monetary Fund special drawing rights and agriculture export revenue will temporarily stabilize Argentina's economy, allowing Buenos Aires to implement food and fuel subsidies amid rising global prices. Argentina's deal with the IMF will provide $9.8 billion in special drawing rights that Buenos Aires will use to boost its Central Bank's weak dollar reserves. As the price of wheat and oil and gas rise globally, Buenos Aires will be well-positioned to cash in on its wheat and soy harvest (anticipated to be 21 million metric tons of wheat and 40 million metric tons of soy products for the 2021-2022 growing season) as the country's high export tariffs remain in place. Both developments will allow the Argentine government to maintain social welfare spending amid high food and fuel prices, though inflation is likely to remain high and the government will be unable to soften capital controls because of households' and businesses' persistent lack of confidence in the government's economic policies. The stability afforded by the IMF program could lead to a small increase in investment interest in the country's extractive industries such as the petroleum, natural gas and lithium sectors, which have already attracted foreign and domestic investment despite Argentina's overall negative business climate.
U.S. Outreach to Venezuela Will Help Some International Oil Companies
U.S. outreach to Venezuela may result in a narrow agreement allowing exemptions for debt-for-oil swaps, allowing some companies to partially recover their losses. As Washington seeks to mitigate the oil shortages and subsequent price increases created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the United States may temporarily ease its formerly hard-line approach of demanding regime change in Venezuela in favor of selective engagement with the Maduro administration. This calculation is likely part of a broader push by the White House to increase the oil and gas supply in the United States amid the crisis in Ukraine. Negotiations could lead to progress toward exchanging oil cargoes to settle the debts of state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela. This could allow a limited number of companies (U.S.'s Chevron, Italy's ENI and Spain's Repsol, among others) to recover some of their losses in the country. In an effort to achieve broader sanctions relief, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro will likely reenter Mexico City negotiations with the opposition, where he will likely have to make credible but limited political concessions (such as releasing political prisoners or ending discriminatory practices against the opposition).
Key Dates to Watch
April 22: Second-round vote in Costa Rica's presidential election
May 29: Colombian presidential election
June 5: Gubernatorial and local elections in six Mexican states
June: Summit of the Americas hosted in Los Angeles
FORECAST
South Asia
5 MIN READMar 21, 2022 | 17:26 GMT
An employee of a fuel station updates the latest fuel price list in Islamabad
Key Trends for the Quarter
India's Economy Struggles With High Inflation
In order to mitigate the risk of social unrest at a time of global uncertainty, the Indian government will refrain from implementing substantial economic reforms, a decision that could undermine long-term economic growth. The economic shocks caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine — including higher energy prices likely to result in rising food prices and supply chain disruptions for goods such as Russian fertilizers on which India depends — are likely to force the Indian central bank to change its growth-oriented strategy and prioritize reducing consumer prices. While this could help India reduce inflation (which was above 6% in January and February), it could also result in slowing economic growth in 2022. While the governing Bharatiya Janata Party performed strongly in the state assembly election in March, giving Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi political room to implement economic reforms, the government will avoid any controversial policies such as agriculture and electricity sector reforms in the quarter in order to prevent social unrest. The government likely will implement some reforms, however, including leasing out state properties, the privatization of the state-owned Life Insurance Corp. (LIC) and two public sector banks, to increase state revenue. Reforms to simplify labor laws and enable easier compliance by companies and improve India's ease of doing business are also likely since the government now has the political capital to undertake them. Similarly, negotiations over a free trade agreement with Australia will proceed, and an interim trade deal is possible during the quarter
Political Uncertainty Deepens in Pakistan
Political uncertainty will worsen Pakistan's economic situation, reduce the room for an agreement with the IMF, and see the business climate deteriorate. High oil and commodities prices will probably force the Pakistani government to implement additional subsidies and aid programs for low-income households and the industrial sector, which will result in a pervasively high fiscal deficit. In addition, foreign reserves could fall as import bills rise, which will reduce the government's resources to pay for coal and liquified natural gas imports, increasing the probability of power outages that further undermine economic activity. Recent steps to alleviate the economic crisis (which included granting tax breaks to the industrial sector and measures to lower electricity and gasoline prices) failed to prevent the opposition from triggering a vote in Parliament to oust the prime minister, highlighting the political uncertainty in the country. Against this backdrop, Pakistan will struggle to negotiate with the IMF to clear the next tranche of $1 billion as part of its bailout package because the government's recent relief measures breached the terms of the deal with the IMF. On the security front, Pakistan will likely seek to maintain its relationship with the Taliban government in Afghanistan as it continues cease-fire negotiations with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and seeks to avoid a possible spillover of instability from Afghanistan into Pakistan. The likely continuation of attacks in Pakistan by multiple militant groups (some of which have targeted or affected civilians), however, will contribute to perceived and real instability, further worsening investor and business confidence in the country.
Afghanistan's Instability Persists
Worsening economic and humanitarian crises, persistent disunity within the Taliban and the arrival of the fighting season could worsen instability in Afghanistan in the coming quarter. The Taliban will continue to struggle with balancing internal, domestic and foreign expectations and interests, which will sustain ineffective governance and instability in Afghanistan. The arrival of the fighting season (which is marked by the end of winter and of the poppy growing season) will likely escalate Taliban attempts to consolidate power across the country, but persistent disunity and the drain of resources from increased fighting will challenge these attempts. The Taliban's frequent abuses will sustain the international community's distrust of the Taliban's expressed commitment to human rights, keeping the chances for international recognition of, and direct foreign economic aid to, the Taliban government low. The likely increase in violent resistance to the Taliban government over the coming quarter and the indiscriminate nature of the Taliban response will also challenge the group's legitimacy among Afghans, further limiting its ability to effectively govern. To facilitate trade and economic activity, the Taliban will engage with neighboring countries to negotiate deals involving mining or gas pipelines, though progress will depend on the evolution of the security situation. Because Pakistan remains a strong advocate for humanitarian assistance and aid for Afghanistan, the Taliban will likely seek to limit tensions related to the contested Afghan-Pakistani border and continue to mediate cease-fire negotiations between the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and the Pakistani government, allowing the Taliban to balance its strategic partnership with Pakistan and its loyalty to the TTP.
Key Dates to Watch
April (date unspecified): China hosts meeting of the six countries that border Afghanistan
April (date unspecified): Sri Lanka-IMF meeting to discuss a potential support package
May 18: Likely date for Nepalese local elections
FORECAST
Sub-Saharan Africa
5 MIN READMar 21, 2022 | 17:27 GMT
'Africa's Best Mineral' quarry near Carletonville, some 40kms west of Johannesburg
Key Trends for the Quarter
Revenue Windfalls Won’t Dull Social Discontent
South Africa will benefit from high global commodity prices, but continued welfare spending will not dull the social discontent caused by power outages, high inflation and unemployment. In the second quarter, South Africa will gain increased revenue from high global commodity prices resulting in part from the crisis in Ukraine. Coal, platinum group metals, gold, iron ore, manganese and chrome exports, among others, will add to South Africa's recent budget surplus through royalties and export duties. Despite revenue windfalls, state-owned power company Eskom will likely institute rolling blackouts at times due to dilapidated infrastructure, insufficient capacity and high diesel prices. In addition to stoking public discontent and resistance to the ruling African National Congress and President Cyril Ramaphosa's administration, the power crisis will continue to harm the business environment. Meanwhile, the extension of the R350 (about $23) monthly welfare payment will not compensate for exorbitant consumer prices or high unemployment. This means that unrest is probable, with potential flare-ups occurring in reaction to former President Jacob Zuma's ongoing legal woes and contentious wage negotiations with labor unions scheduled to begin at the end of March.
Insecurity in the Sahel Could Expand Throughout West Africa
While France's withdrawal from Mali will leave a void that will harm regional security, the war in Ukraine will limit Russia's diplomatic and security influence, giving local militant groups an opportunity for expansion. French troops will continue to withdraw from Mali and relocate to southern Niger, likely completing their reorganization by the end of the second quarter or the beginning of the third. France will likely continue to carry out airstrikes in Mali from its base outside of Niamey, Niger, and potentially alternate regional bases, which may result in limited tactical successes. Malian security forces will be incapable of independently combatting insurgent groups, including Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State (IS). While the Malian junta planned to have Russian paramilitary forces partially offset the loss of French capabilities, the war in Ukraine means that Russia will likely divert its attention and resources from conflicts in Africa. Without significant third-party intervention to support Malian forces, groups like JNIM and the Islamic State have a window for expanding their attacks from north and central Mali into neighboring states. Because of this situation, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Niger and Togo are likely to see more violent attacks on security forces.
A Humanitarian Catastrophe in Tigray Will Have Economic Implications
The lingering Tigray conflict will extend the humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia and derail central government efforts to attract foreign direct investment. While Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed publicly acknowledged in January that the government would be willing to negotiate with the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the two sides signed a conditional cease-fire March 24, the presence of numerous ethnic militias with disparate interests will complicate the implementation of the cease-fire and any negotiations that follow. While the government will seek to attract investment in the banking, logistics and telecoms sectors, international investors are unlikely to be interested given the uncertainty associated with the ongoing Tigray conflict. Additionally, members of pro-government Amhara militias will continue to call on the government to root out all TPLF fighters from the region, adding pressure on Abiy to appear tough on Tigray and forcing him to balance these domestic demands with international calls for peace. Even if negotiations begin between government and TPLF elites, it will likely take weeks if not months to reestablish the aid supplies and resources needed to alleviate the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Drought and rising fertilizer prices will exacerbate existing food insecurity.
High Commodity Prices Threatens Economic Stability
High food, fuel and fertilizer prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine will threaten the stability of fragile sub-Saharan African economies. Most African countries will struggle to cope with price shocks during the quarter, which in some cases will lead consumers to protest exorbitant prices of everyday goods. Consumers in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria have a strong history of protesting high fuel prices, and these countries are likely to see protests again as households struggle to buy basic goods. Additionally, the global attention on the crisis in Ukraine means that the international community will likely focus less on sub-Saharan Africa, which may result in decreased funding for aid and development projects. Alternatively, producers of oil, gas food and minerals (such as Nigeria, Angola and Equatorial Guinea for oil and South Africa and Ghana for minerals) will reap the rewards of high prices, and it is possible that countries that produce commodities exported by Russia and Ukraine will see increased investment in extractives (like palladium and nickel) and gas. But even for these countries, the short-term gains are unlikely to completely offset the negative impact of food and fuel inflation. Over the course of the year and beyond, countries that attempt to reduce consumer hardship with food and fuel subsidies will face rising deficits, which means that other areas, like social welfare and/or infrastructure investment, are likely to suffer. Additionally, increases in global fertilizer prices will mean lower crop yields in 2022 and for seasons to come, especially for smallholder farmers in places that currently import fertilizer, like South Africa, Zambia, Kenya and Nigeria, likely worsening existing food insecurity.
Key Dates to Watch
Unspecified: Adjusted wage negotiations between a coalition of South African labor unions and the government occur
April 11: Former South African President Jacob Zuma's trial over alleged corrupt arms deals resumes
-
second
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18398/us-lead-lose-ground
-
Not that I agree, but a thought challenging read:
1) https://americanmind.org/memo/beating-china/?fbclid=IwAR24lHbboOitRrBkzeXj94o1QSLZgcYT9hMNi_KV8ninD76p_NMAerEKz0A
=============
=============
2)
We’re better than communist China Not the time to abandon what has made us great By Michael McKenna S
ometimes Americans’ competitive nature requires that we think of our current rivals as much more impressive than they actually are. As difficult as it is to imagine now, in the 1950s and 1960s, many thought that Soviet Russia would overtake us. They turned out to be wrong.
In the 1970s, the Arabs were going to run the world because of their perceived hegemony in oil. Didn’t happen. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, the United States was fixated on the idea that Japan, Inc. was the new, better model.
Now, we face communist China, whose impressive and bloody 50-year run has transformed them from a mostly poor and rural farm economy to the world’s factory floor. Many, including some in the United States (looking at you, Larry Fink), believe that the communist model emphasizing conformity, the collective, and the unquestioned authority of the state is superior to our own.
Let’s take a look at our new rival and how we compare.
First, the economy. Depending on how you count, China is either the largest or the second-largest economy in the world. Yet, Americans make between four and six times more than the Chinese per capita.
As always, aggregated numbers hide important information. America is already much wealthier than China, mostly because of the efficiency of the American economy and American businesses — U.S. GDP per worker is 6 times greater than China’s. In the last 20 years, the American economy has generated $12 trillion more in wealth for American consumers than the Chinese economy has created for Chinese consumers.
Since 2019, 257,000 more people (in a population of nearly 1.4 billion) in China have become millionaires, while an additional 1.75 million Americans (in a population of about 330 million) have become millionaires.
We also have an enormous economic advantage because the dollar is the reserve currency for the world. This is primarily because of the American commitment to private property, the rule of law, and a relative lack of corruption. If you invest in the United States, there is little chance that the government will nationalize or otherwise materially degrade the investment.
How about demographics? By 2031, the population of China will peak and then start a slow and steady drop for the remainder of the century. China’s population will also age; by 2040, they will have 317 million people over the age of 65 (compared to 81 million in the U.S.).
More ominously, by 2040, there will be 50 million more men than women in China. This imbalance, created primarily by the one-child policy (and Chinese families’ preference for male children), ensures delayed and suboptimal family formation and attendant social unrest.
The size and composition of the population in the U.S., on the other hand, are limited only by our willingness to accept and assimilate immigrants. If necessary, we could accept millions of immigrants in a short period of time. The desire to become American and the struggles that people endure to get and stay here are the best evidence that the communist Chinese model is in no way superior or ascendant.
Each year, more than a million people immigrate into the United States legally, and probably another million make it into the country illegally. More than a half-million people (net) escape from China each year.
For good or ill, we also dominate the culture. For 100 years, since screens (TVs, computers or cell phones) became ubiquitous, we have been the largest and most significant provider of cultural content provider to the globe. If you don’t think that is important, imagine if your child’s or grandchild’s favorite movie or singer was from China.
One obvious result of this dominance is that the English language is now the planet’s reserve language. While English colonialism was essential in the linguistic colonization of the world, the U.S expanded and completed the process. About 1.35 billion people speak English, most of them (about 1 billion) as a second language. By comparison, about 1.1 billion people speak Mandarin, almost all of them as a first language.
We also dominate education. According to the Center for World University Rankings, 29 of the top 50 universities globally are found in the United States. The highest-rated Chinese university is #58.
How about national security? The United States enjoys two of the longest peaceful borders on the planet and leads multiple networks of alliances. In comparison, the Chinese have few friends, are surrounded by hostile neighbors, including India, Vietnam, Australia, the Philippines, Japan and, most importantly, Taiwan, and use half of their military resources to ensure their border security. Given all of this, it is obvious that the best way to approach the threat posed by communist China is to build on our strengths. We did not become the world’s dominant economic, educational, linguistic, cultural and military force by worrying about every new contender. We achieved that dominance by emphasizing personal liberty and resisting collectivism, keeping government involvement in our lives to a minimum, valuing creativity and innovation in all their forms, recognizing and defending private property, and respecting the rule of law.
To win this new contest, we need to keep doing what has made us the leaders of the world for the last 150 years. Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the co-host of “The Unregulated” podcast. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House
-
April 11, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
Russia and the First Economic World War
The Kremlin has prepare
As momentous as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is, the most strategically important event in recent weeks was the global economic war between Russia and the U.S. and its allies. Russia, however, has been preparing to confront the West and challenge the Western socio-economic model for a long time.
The Putin Era to the Pandemic
Russia’s strategic interests in Ukraine are well-known. The geography and history of Russia compel its leaders to create and preserve a buffer between Moscow and the major powers in Western Europe, and to ensure access to the Black Sea. Ukraine is crucial to both goals. But beyond Ukraine, the Kremlin perceives the eastward expansion of Western influence, including into Russia, to be a modern invasion by stealth that threatens the Russian regime.
It is not Western organizations like NATO and the European Union that challenge the Kremlin, but the socio-economic model that enabled the West to win the Cold War and that enticed Eastern Europeans to want to join the West. When he became president of Russia in 2000, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the economic crisis of the 1990s, Vladimir Putin inherited a broken country. Many Russians contemplated joining the European Union, hoping that alignment with the West would bring a better life.
The priority for the Russian establishment was to stabilize and rebuild the country. Putin just wanted to survive politically. Following the example of past successful Russian leaders, he centralized power. Knowing he needed stability and growth to slow the rate of emigration and address Russia’s poor demographics, he sought to make Europe economically dependent on Moscow. And looking back at history and the current power balance, he identified Germany as the lynchpin of his strategy of dependence.
Russian ties to Germany were key to establishing ties to the European Union more broadly, but this was only the beginning of Russia’s strategy in Europe. Russia opened up its economy to Western investment, established links throughout the Continent and tried to understand the inner workings of EU bureaucracy. It established close business ties with Italy, France and later Hungary, and built a political network that would help expand its influence in Europe. For Moscow, learning about European vulnerabilities was just as important as building up its economy and growing Russia into a stable economic power.
The Kremlin also campaigned to join the World Trade Organization to establish deeper relationships with the world’s biggest economic players. In the process, it benefited from foreign investments in Russia and learned how the global economy works, building partnerships with not just Western economies but also other economic powers. The only problem was that China, its major ally against the West, was not seeing the accelerated growth it hoped for and was still very much dependent on the U.S. market, giving Beijing limited ability to counter U.S. interests in the world and forcing Russia to keep its focus on Europe.
Average Russians saw improvements in their standard of living under Putin. In major Russian cities, life was similar to that in the West. However, when it became a major player in the energy market, Russia also increased its exposure to global economic cycles. The European economic crisis of the 2010s sent shivers through Moscow. Russia’s economy remained fragile overall, and the gap between urban and rural areas remained dangerously high, potentially threatening Putin’s control.
At the same time, the West offered an attractive model to rival Russia’s. It wasn’t so much the growing Western influence in Russia’s buffer zone that bothered the Kremlin, but the fact that ordinary Russians might look at Eastern Europe and see a better model for political organization and economic growth.
Then the pandemic hit. The Russian president apparently feared that the economic insecurity wrought by COVID-19 could threaten his country’s economic security and stability. As the worst socio-economic effects of the pandemic faded, action against the West became urgent. From the Kremlin’s point of view, this was a unique moment. The U.S. has been trying to reduce its presence in Europe and instead focus on the Indo-Pacific and domestic problems. In other words, from the Kremlin, the trans-Atlantic alliance and the European Union appear weak. Most important, Russia’s leaders believe they have gained sufficient knowledge of the way the West works and can fight it effectively.
Preparing for War
Russia has been preparing to confront the West since at least the early 2000s. Besides stockpiling foreign reserves, Moscow constructed trade blocs and deepened relations with projects like the Eurasian Economic Union. In Europe, it enticed Germany to become dependent on Russian natural gas, which as is clear today made it extremely difficult for Europe to cut off Russian energy imports. Shifting from gas would require Europe to build new infrastructure – a costly, time-consuming process.
The close German-Russian partnership also benefited the Kremlin’s Europe strategy in other ways. To give a practical example, the EU had plans to make the Danube fully navigable through the establishment of additional canals, increasing Central Europe’s connection with the Black Sea. This would have given Europe more leverage against Russia at the moment, when the war in Ukraine has forced the rerouting of commercial flows from the Black Sea to much more expensive land routes. Instead, positive relations with Moscow made the project seem unnecessary, and it faded away.
It is no coincidence that after 2012, the first full year that Nord Stream 1 was operational, Europe became much more reluctant to adopt policies that could be seen as anti-Russian. There was simply no interest in Germany to carry them out. It is also no coincidence that relations between the U.S. and Germany have cooled down over that time. The U.S. needed Germany to lead Europe, or at least maintain neutrality, to prevent Russia from expanding its influence in Europe as the U.S. drew back. The fact that Russia joined the World Trade Organization in 2012 gave it even more leverage in the world economy.
It is also worth noting that the Kremlin used personal relationships to shore up its influence. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was tapped to lead Nord Stream 1. Nord Stream AG also hired former Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen as a consultant to speed up the permit process in Finland. Former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi served on the board of Delimobil, a Russian car-sharing service. Former Finnish Prime Minister Esko Aho was on the board of Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank. Former Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern resigned from the board of Russia’s state-owned railway company in the early days of the war in Ukraine, while another ex-chancellor, Wolfgang Schussel, remained on the board of Russia’s Lukoil. This is just a short list of top politicians, all of whom had at least some influence over their country’s foreign policy discussions. They have certainly been useful to Russian economic growth and the advance of Russia’s economic strategy in Europe.
Working closely with Europeans for the past two decades has enabled Russia to learn what is important for the stability of their countries. It has also helped the Kremlin better understand their political agendas and support causes that work to its advantage. For example, Russia enthusiastically supported many green policies, like Germany’s decision to give up nuclear power – which translated into greater reliance on Russian gas. And Russia has openly supported populist parties throughout Europe and effectively used information warfare, all in an attempt to destabilize and ultimately divide Europe.
Globally, Russia has maintained close relations with traditional enemies and competitors of the West. Joining the WTO gave it a stronger position on the global stage, which is used to advance the influence and interests of emerging global players, including the BRICS countries, which also include Brazil, India, China and South Africa. Though the results were modest, Russia promoted the group as an alternative to the West and continued to focus on building ties to China and India, establishing links that it hoped would withstand in a potential confrontation with the West, which we’re seeing play out today.
To counter the current sanctions, it has looked to China for help. The Eurasian Economic Union gives it proxies for continuing to do business with the world. At the same time, Russia’s presence in the Middle East and parts of Africa helps it keep the price of oil high – high enough that it can keep paying its bills. Influence in the Middle East and the Sahel, two highly unstable but resource-rich areas, also gives Russia more leverage over the world economy.
In building its network, Russia has tried to focus on economics and enhancing weaknesses in the global network. It expanded its influence abroad, making sure the dependencies it was encouraging were strong enough to give it leverage but lose enough to allow its withdrawal when necessary. Russian strategy certainly has its weaknesses, but Russia has options in countering the West during the current global economic war. Supporting EU fragmentation through its economic ties in Europe and using the knowledge of European politics that it’s gained over the years are likely the most important elements of its strategy. The moment European citizens feel the repercussion of Western sanctions is when the bloc will become more fragile, which will allow Russia to exploit the EU’s weaknesses.
The world is witnessing its first economic world war of the modern era. The rules are undefined, and the global economy is complex, meaning collateral damage is unavoidable and frequently unpredictable. Slowly, we are becoming aware of the repercussions the sanctions on Russia are having on the global economy. Less clear are the instruments that Russia can employ against the West. How this will change the world is a mystery. All we can do is look back at what Russia has prepared for – and guess what could come next. This is only the beginning.
-
April 15, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Pain and Pleasure of Being Right
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
In 2009, I published a book about the next century called "The Next 100 Years," in which I predicted that Russia would become increasingly aggressive and that, sometime around 2020, its aggression would result in an invasion of Ukraine. It was deemed by many to be absurd, if not impossible. I won’t deny that I felt vindicated. Some men crave money, some crave glory. My desire is to be right. This was a moment in which I was right and could show why I was right.
What dampens my pleasure is that being right means being war. Last week, I wrote about the agony of war through the experience of my father in World War II. It was personal. When I wrote my forecast over a decade ago, it was an impersonal thing. At the time, my purpose was simple: to write a book that accurately mapped out the coming years. I realize now that the passion to be right blinds you to what you are right about.
When I wrote what I did, I wrote heedless to what I was predicting. Even worse, when the Russians crossed the border, my first thought was not for the troops at the crossings that were exchanging fire and trading death. My thought was the pleasure of being right. It required the recollection of my father’s life to grasp the perversion that was embedded in my being right. This did not affect the world, which spins on without concerning itself with me. But it concerns the profession I have entered and in some ways created.
Geopolitics is the science of how nations interact. My most important forecasts are about pain, even when they are not about war. Some, like my forecast on the United States now taking place, is a rare exception to war. Others, like the decline and fragmentation of China, have not yet happened. In the case of the United States, I thought I was offering an element of comfort by arguing that the discord of our time had happened before and that America emerged better for it. Over the past few years, as I have lived, heard and seen the unending rage and mutual loathing within our country, I have realized that the forecast offers little solace.
My goal has been to try to provide a roadmap of the future, one built around the forces that compel and constrain nations. My argument is that individuals may shape their lives within the limits of these constraints, but as individuals, they are trapped in the time and place in which they live. The collective public is trapped in this time and place, and all its collective anger and hope is of little consequence. We are all living our lives, trapped in reality.
I wrote what I did in the hope that my method was right and in the hope that understanding the forces that overwhelm us might in some way mitigate the pain of living through history. I wanted to be right about Ukraine and Russia but at the same time hoped that knowledge of what was coming would, if not prevent it, at least mitigate it. I had foreseen a time when Russia would try to reconstruct its empire, when it had to hold Ukraine again, and when the U.S. and Europe would resist. I also saw that invasion was fated to fail and that the defeat would rip Russia apart.
If I was right, then there was no mitigation possible. Every nation was trapped in its own reality, in what it feared and what it hoped. And the world couldn’t care less about what I thought anyway. So I absolve myself. The men sleeping on the cold ground are not there because of anything I have said. They are there because the Russians were not going to permanently accept their fate, because Ukraine did not want to share Russia’s fate, and because the U.S. dollar is a mighty weapon. If Putin had never been born, someone else would seek to reconstruct the Russian Empire. And failing would reside over another Russian geopolitical catastrophe.
Whether my forecasts are correct or not doesn’t matter to history or to humanity. But it matters to me in that, for unknown reasons, I do want to be right and I have a soul that has to be tended to. Taking pleasure in events that will breed agony does not make it well.
I had a friend once who was a neonatologist, a doctor who treated premature children, many of whom were going to die. My own son was born under his care, and he survived and flourished. I hung around with my friend through some very dark hours, and he explained to me that the most important thing he did was identify the children who would die no matter what. Doing that, he said, gave him the time and strength to deal with the ones who might live.
I take solace in that, even if it is absurd to do so. What he did resulted, hopefully, in good. Nothing I do will save or kill a nation. I am simply trying to call the play by play of a game I barely understand to an audience that isn’t listening. And that is the solace I have. Right or wrong, history is not waiting for my verdict. There is comfort in that.
-
Walter Russell Mead: "We've moved from a post-war era to a pre-war era".
-
:-o :-o :-o
-
The author not infrequently is self-important and hubristic, but IMHO although I disagree with certain points this is an intelligent thoughtful big picture piece:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2022-04-06/cold-war-never-ended-russia-ukraine-war?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=The%20Cold%20War%20Never%20Ended&utm_content=20220415&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week%20-%20112017
PS: He could benefit from George Friedman's analytical framework around geography.
-
pril 18, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
India’s Defiance of Washington’s Russia Strategy
New Delhi has resisted calls to stop doing business with the Russian economy.
By: Allison Fedirka
Under normal circumstances, India would have little reason to care about what happens in Ukraine. The current circumstances, however, are far from normal. The war in Ukraine has put U.S.-Indian relations back into the spotlight as Washington lobbies all of its major allies to join its economic assault on Moscow. So far, India has resisted. The U.S. wants to use the Ukraine conflict to bring India into alignment with the West on issues that don’t relate to China, but New Delhi is unwilling to impose its own sanctions on Russia and recently even agreed to purchase millions of barrels of Russian oil. Its defiance is important less because of India’s ability to prop up the Russian economy and more because of what it says about the state of U.S.-Indian relations. Still, strategic constraints will compel Washington not to take punitive measures against New Delhi for its noncompliance and to seek mutually acceptable accommodation instead.
Difficult to Manage
Alliances derive their strength from shared interests among members. For the U.S. and India, their mutual desire to contain Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific is the cornerstone of their partnership. But their lack of alignment on other issues can make it difficult to manage. For India, formalizing military or political alignments is seen as risky because the country fears that doing so could make it vulnerable. For much of India’s modern history, the sub-continent fell under the control of a foreign power. Today, the country finds itself between three major powers (Russia, China and the U.S.) and sharing borders with two formidable enemies (Pakistan and China) – all while trying to find its place as a major player in its own right within the region. And while New Delhi agrees on the importance of containing China, the U.S. and India’s distinct geographies, histories and economics result in diverging interests over secondary issues.
The Ukraine matter is a case in point. For the U.S., the Russian threat didn’t end with the Cold War, and a Russian victory in Ukraine would mean a win over the West. But India sees Russia as much less of a threat than the U.S. does. During the Cold War, Russia was a reliable trade and defense partner for India and helped keep China in check. New Delhi has a pragmatic approach to foreign relations and has managed to maintain ties with various partners without fully committing to any single one. It thus has cultivated good relations with Moscow while attempting to strengthen ties with the U.S. of late – and it’s unwilling to veer too far away from this balance.
But the war in Ukraine has complicated India’s position. The U.S. fears that India’s continued willingness to do business with Russia could undermine the U.S. strategy to force Moscow into concessions through economic isolation. India’s noncompliance can best be seen through its energy sector. Since the start of the invasion, India has been on a spending spree, buying up Russian oil at a discounted price compared to international markets. India has ordered an estimated 13 million to 14 million barrels of oil from Russia since the end of February, compared to the 16 million barrels it purchased from Russia all of last year. As the world’s third-largest oil importer, India relies on foreign supplies to meet approximately 80 percent of its needs. Though Russia supplies only 1-2 percent of the oil consumed in India, the main attraction at the moment is the low price – a key consideration given that India spent approximately $100 billion on oil imports in the last fiscal year. Under the current terms, Indian imports of Russian oil don’t violate U.S. sanctions, but Washington fears New Delhi’s continued purchases of Russian exports could prove to be an economic lifeline for Moscow.
India's Top Oil Suppliers by volume
(click to enlarge)
India has had similar problems with other energy suppliers in the past. Iran and Venezuela together accounted for 20 percent of India’s oil imports in 2016, but were both subject to U.S. sanctions in recent years. In these cases, however, Washington issued waivers that allowed India to continue importing from these countries during a transition period and increased its own energy exports to help fill the gap. The U.S. has told India that it will help support its efforts to diversify its suppliers again, but that could prove more difficult this time around. The U.S. government is currently using its strategic reserves to boost its own domestic supplies, and private companies have resisted Washington's calls to increase production. Washington’s urging of Saudi Arabia to increase production hasn’t worked either. And the U.S. has already committed to helping European markets find alternative sources, so whatever supplies it’s able to export will need to be shared among all its partners.
(click to enlarge)
To a lesser extent, the U.S. has also taken issue with India’s purchases of Russian fertilizers and defense equipment. Russia is one of the largest global suppliers of fertilizers, which are exempt from U.S. sanctions because of a global shortage and their importance in food production. Prior to its invasion of Ukraine, Russia banned the export of fertilizers through the end of June and limited the countries to which its supplies could be sent. India is among the approved destinations – though it received only 8.5 percent of its fertilizer imports by value from Russia in 2020.
Washington had concerns over India’s procurement of Russian defense equipment even before the war in Ukraine began. During the Soviet era, India acquired much of its military equipment from the USSR. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia is still India’s top arms supplier, accounting for just under half of all arms imports. But this figure is down from 69 percent between 2012 and 2017, as Russia’s share in India’s arms imports has steadily declined over the past decade. That’s in part because India is developing a national defense industry initiative, which will increase its self-sufficiency in arms, and recently announced it would stop importing over 100 defense-related goods from Russia by the end of this year. Notably, the U.S. has not applied the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act to India since its introduction in 2017. Under the act, any country that signs defense deals with Russia, Iran or North Korea may be subject to sanctions.
Levers and Constraints
The U.S. does have some economic levers it can use to influence India’s behavior. Trade between the two countries totaled $113.4 billion in 2021 – one-third U.S. exports to India and two-thirds U.S. imports from India – making the United States India’s largest trade partner. Exports to the U.S. account for 18.9 percent of India’s total exports and the equivalent of 3.5 percent of gross domestic product. The U.S. is also a major contributor of foreign direct investment, spending roughly $41 billion in India in 2020. In 2021, it ranked as India’s second-largest source of FDI behind Singapore. The services sector was the top beneficiary (16 percent), which includes outsourcing, R&D and tech testing. This was followed by computer software and hardware, which receives 14 percent of total FDI. For India, technology remains a top priority for trade and FDI as many of the government’s economic development initiatives rely on getting access to or funding for technology from places like the U.S. and the EU.
U.S. - India Trade
(click to enlarge)
However, the U.S. faces three strategic constraints that prevent it from bringing its full economic power to bear on India. First, its Indo-Pacific strategy for containing China requires India’s participation. And given that the U.S.-China rivalry will likely remain for years to come, Washington needs New Delhi on its side in the long term. Second, it’s in the U.S.’ interest to maintain a relatively stable and functional India to counter China. Imposing economic punishments for India’s unwillingness to toe the line on Russia could be destabilizing for New Delhi, and that would only benefit Beijing. Last, India plays an important role in the foreign policies of the U.K. and Australia – the former of which is relying on commonwealth states to boost trade to offset the economic losses from leaving the EU. Australia, meanwhile, signed an interim free trade agreement with India earlier this month. The pact, which covers over 90 percent of goods traded between the two countries, is part of Australia’s strategy to reduce its dependence on China. The U.S. wouldn’t want to do anything to weaken these relationships with India, especially because the U.K. and Australia are both members of the Five Eyes, Washington’s most important security alliance.
When it comes to trade with Russia, there’s plenty of space for the U.S. and India to find mutually acceptable accommodation. New Delhi has shown that it’s willing to work toward self-sufficiency in the defense sector, meaning its purchases of Russian military goods will diminish over time – although this will likely be a long process. Besides, Washington has already given New Delhi some leeway here by not imposing sanctions over its Russian arms purchases. India’s other main imports from Russia are fairly low and focus on strategic sectors essential to keeping the Indian economy running – i.e., fertilizers and energy. As long as this remains the case, the U.S. will tolerate the limited commercial exchange between India and Russia.
-
https://nypost.com/2022/04/19/a-ukraine-loss-could-be-trouble-for-taiwan/?fbclid=IwAR294lLgiPn0DXSajOuSwa0Kk3kNF4ddSOCbmjygGnlraL_k0Lj_FsflHE8
-
https://nypost.com/2022/04/19/a-ukraine-loss-could-be-trouble-for-taiwan/?fbclid=IwAR294lLgiPn0DXSajOuSwa0Kk3kNF4ddSOCbmjygGnlraL_k0Lj_FsflHE8
Ukraine has lost, only the western propaganda mill says otherwise.
-
April 22, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
Historical Phases and Transitions
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
I have said before that 1991 was the year one era ended and another began. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Maastricht treaty was signed. Operation Desert Storm occurred and the Japanese economic miracle collapsed. The previous era had been dominated by the Cold War, a global ideological and strategic confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Most global events fit somewhere in that paradigm.
The new era’s essence was contained in the European Union, which emerged out of the fear of yet another European war and the belief that war was obsolete and that the global system was now primarily about economics. This era had other dimensions as well. Desert Storm energized Islamic fundamentalism and triggered decades of war on terror. Japan’s decline made room for China’s rise. The new era was not about the potential for nuclear war in the bipolar struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, but rather about the decline of national boundaries and the primacy of international trade.
In my view, the Russian invasion of Ukraine signals a new era, whose shape is not yet clear. Obviously, war has returned as a primary factor, but perhaps more important, the use of economic warfare by the United States and the resurrection of Cold War institutions signal a new way of using economics – from faith in global economics enriching the world to the use of global economics as an instrument of war. This must be preliminary because we have seen only Ukraine and perhaps COVID-19 as indicators of this shift.
Human life is built on patterns: birth, childhood, adulthood, reproduction and exit. If the life of one human being is orderly in its broad outlines, it seems to me odd to think the life of human society would be random. So, I spend perhaps too much of my time looking for those patterns, a field theory of humanity. In looking at 1991, and what is unfolding now before us, I decided to try to take a quick hand at parsing human history for the past 200 years or so. Below you have my first, and likely half-baked, cut at this. Its use is not in simply finding order in history, although that has importance. Its potential use might be that in finding order, the wrenching and psychologically destabilizing blows dealt out by shifts might be mitigated. Of course, such grandiose thoughts must follow the question of whether the order I am presenting is real or simply an illusion I have created, with boundaries that are clear only in my head. I don’t normally present minimally thought-out ideas (some might argue with that), but in this case I thought it might have some value. It is something I have been playing with for some time, but it seems particularly significant in 2022. I have not tried to include the transitional events as I did in 1991 but simply to identify transitional points.
This is focused heavily on Europe, with minimal mentions of other continents, but that is because global history was forged and dominated by Europe for the past 200 years or so, transiting to other countries as drivers only in later epochs.
Five Epochs of History Since 1789 and the Emerging Sixth
1. 1789-1858 (69 years): Republicanism challenges the kingdoms of Europe
This epoch begins with the French Revolution and the rise of an attempt to reshape Europe into a single entity. A culture emerged of nation-states liberally governed, with the decline of the old European political and social order.
2. 1858-1914 (56 years): European empires dominate the globe
1858 marked the establishment of the British Raj in India and a definitive point in which much of the world, already under European intrusion and assault, found itself enveloped in European imperialism, where previously there were assaults but no systematic imperial system. Where France defined the previous epoch, Britain defined this one.
3. 1914-1945 (31 years): Europe tears itself apart, U.S. emerges
This epoch was dominated by European wars that resulted in the emergence of the United States as a dominant economic and military force, and in the collapse of the British
imperial system.
4. 1945-1991 (46 years): Two ideologies of the Enlightenment become geopolitical
This period was dominated by the U.S.-Soviet struggle centered on Europe but fought globally. The global fear was of nuclear war, but the global reality was that the American economic and technical model dominated much of the world, supplanting the culture of European imperialism.
5. 1991-2022 (31 years): American triumph and the fantasy of global peace and prosperity
6. 2022-????
When we look at the prior epochs, we are struck by discontinuity. European self-absorption is replaced by European obsession with the world. European obsession with the world is replaced by European subordination to the United States. The ideological military confrontation of the Cold War is replaced by a globalist ideology.
In separating the epochs, it is not simply that a conflict ended and a new power emerged but rather that the fundamental reality of the world changed. The most important thing about the Cold War was not U.S. victory but the creation of an entirely new conception of the world. Beginning with the French Revolution, the certainties of the world shifted dramatically every generation or two.
If this is true, then defining which country rises or falls, while necessary, is insufficient. If the Ukraine war defines the end of the fifth era, a return to a multi-generation cold war between the United States and Russia as a defining principle of the epoch is the least likely outcome. The end of the Cold War resulted in very different players playing a very different game.
I keep looking at the sequence, and I realize that each epoch was a fundamentally different reality. And what is most startling is the speed at which it evolves. When I look at other times, shifts on this order after one or two generations don’t happen. Now it appears with regularity. Some would guess it is technology, but I don’t think so. Technology has a base in the Enlightenment, and enlightenment is an unhappy culture, always yearning for something new and better. Technology is simply part of this culture.
The crucial point is that within an epoch there is an overarching theme that is constantly repeating itself. In the fourth epoch, there was the Cold War, the third European and global wars. The fifth saw the decline of nations in favor of economics. The difference between epochs is striking and sudden. If I am right, we are just over the threshold to the sixth epoch, whose shape might be discernable if this model becomes far more comprehensive and significant. In looking at the model, these elements seem obvious and hold no secrets. But it is obvious because we all know this history and have not looked carefully under the hood. I am trying to find the latch on the hood, still far from the careful look. First thoughts, long mumbled about.
-
May 3, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Beginning of a New Era
By: George Friedman
A week ago, I wrote a piece on the stages of history, pointing out systemic shifts that have taken place for more than 200 years. In the last century, these shifts took place roughly 30-40 years apart with the last occurring in 1991, or about 30 years ago. That year, the Cold War ended, the Maastricht Treaty was signed, Operation Desert Storm began, and the Japanese economic miracle ended, opening the door for China’s rise. The world in 1989 was very different from the one in 1992.
We are now in an era in which shifts occur. Being in an era doesn’t necessarily mean the shift will immediately come; the change between the epoch of world wars and the post-Cold War world took almost 50 years, solidified as it had been by the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. It is uncertain why some eras last longer than others. It might well be simply chance. An alternative to consider is that some eras are based on single, very solid realities, while others are based on multiple and more fragile ones. Thus, the 1945-1991 era was based on the solid foundation of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation, while 1991-2022 was based on multiple forces – the global war on terror, the European Union, China emerging, Russia asserting itself, and so on. It was less coherent and therefore more fragile. Our current epoch began with more fragmented shifts, creating a less stable platform.
Whatever the reasons, the era that began in 1991 is coming to an end, and a new era is beginning. All the major northern entities or nations – China, the U.S., Russia and Europe – are undergoing profound changes. For Russia, the invasion of Ukraine is only the latest and most important attempt to reverse the events of 1991. But with a per capita gross domestic product ranking of 86, the turn away from communism may not be as profitable as was once thought. And with a military being outperformed by Ukrainian forces, it can hardly be considered a major military power. Put simply, Russia hasn’t lived up to its own expectations, so it will either undergo the revolution expected in the prior period, continue its aggressive moves using limited military capability, or end up as a minor power, albeit one with nuclear weapons.
The war in Ukraine has also changed Europe. NATO has reemerged as a primary, parallel system with the EU, one with somewhat different members, a different agenda and differing budgetary costs. More important, the trans-Atlantic relationship has been given new life, along with a greater commitment to military expenditures. This takes Europe into a fundamentally different configuration. First, as government expenditures rise and economic performance contracts under the pressure of conflict, the stresses within the EU will get worse. And with increased U.S. dependence, Washington may again be seen as an alternative economic partner to Germany. The European Union, already under centrifugal pressures, will have to redefine itself once again.
China is also in transition. It has undergone a period of breakneck economic growth. Like Japan before it, and the United States long before that, China has been in an extraordinary economic expansion. When Japan reached the limits of double-digit growth in 1991, its decline led to its replacement by China. Japan had surged its economy on a combination of low-cost exports, followed by advanced technology growth. It had financed this through a financial system that allocated capital on both an economic and political basis – through keiretsu, or families of companies. It surged on a disciplined workforce. It ran into intensive competition for low-value goods that undersold its own, as well as political resistance by its consuming countries, particularly the United States. This intensified with high-value goods like autos. As volume or margins declined, the fragility of the financial system revealed itself, and in the lost decade, it had to transform itself.
But now China’s low-end exports are eroding under competition, as are its high-end products, to say nothing of resistance to exports by consuming markets. An expansion that began 40 years before can’t sustain its growth rate. Exports come under pressure, and the financial system does too. In China’s case, this happened in the real estate sector, which is used as a failsafe. Failures in this sector, including defaults, inevitably destabilize the economy and thus create political tension. Dramatically slower growth in China is likely, with large numbers of Chinese citizens who never fully benefitted from previous growth, a dangerous situation.
The United States is still the strongest power in the world despite domestic discord and economic pressure. That discord is cyclical, and it presages an economic surge built on new technology. But for now, American economic power, seen most recently through the use of the dollar against Russia, still stands tall. The United States is the least likely of the four majors to require institutional change, which has helped it to maintain its position since 1945.
The prior assumptions about Russia and China as emerging powers are now questionable at best. Things change, but today it’s hard to see a Russian resurgence or a rapid end to China’s economic problems. So if we are at the beginning of a cyclical shift, as I think we are, the U.S. will be one of the pillars of the transition to the new era. It is hard to visualize the rest. Who would have thought in 1991 that China would surge, or in 1945 that Europe would rebuild itself as it did? The easy part of this project is done, I think, and it is time to look for the unimaginable that exists in any epoch
-
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-doctrine-of-american-unexceptionalism?fbclid=IwAR3GJwkhsOkFpIwyTsfN43H3r7ZZIqiqdcdJNIfrKprFYw_JrUdCsnUqAsk&s=r
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/henry-kissinger-predicts-point-at-which-putin-will-have-to-end-ukraine-war/ar-AAX6XiK?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=767a111e67dc41c49def0c88be3e1e9a
Henry Kissinger believes President Vladimir Putin miscalculated the international situation and Russia's own capabilities when he launched the invasion of Ukraine. He will have to end the war when it effectively kills off any chance of Russia remaining a great power in the future, the former secretary of state predicts.
Kissinger, who served under the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1970s, told a Financial Times event over the weekend that he fears the conflict could veer into the nuclear realm.
Kissinger played a key role in shaping American foreign policy during the Cold War, his guidance leading to a relaxing of tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Russia, and especially between the U.S. and China, which led to President Nixon's historic visit to Beijing in 1972.
At the FTWeekend Festival in Washington on Saturday, Kissinger told the paper's U.S. national editor, Edward Luce, about how he managed to split Moscow from Beijing by treating the two enemies differently. Amid hostilities in Europe, Washington should now seek to do the same once again, Kissinger said.
The former secretary warned against taking "an adversarial position" on both China and Russia that could drive them closer together. "After the Ukraine war, Russia will have to reassess its relationship to Europe at a minimum and its general attitude towards NATO," he said.
The war in Ukraine is now in its 11th week, and Russia has so far failed to achieve any major objectives in the country. In early April, Russian troops that were deployed in the areas surrounding Kyiv were redirected by the Kremlin to southeast Ukraine, with the new goal of "completely liberating" the Donbas region. The Ukrainian armed forces were able to regain control of larges part of the north as a result.
Western intelligence and international observers were expecting Putin to make a big announcement on Monday as Russia marked its annual Victory Day parade on May 9, celebrating the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany. But, surprisingly, the Russian president refrained from declaring all-out war on Ukraine or announcing general mobilization, a move analysts say may be a sign that Putin is wary of the Russian people are willing to endure.
At the current stage, it's hard to predict how the war will end. Asked about its possible conclusion, Kissinger told Luce that Russia would continue fighting in Ukraine until the conflict eats up so much of its military capability and resources that the country risks losing its status as a great power.
"The obvious question is how long will this escalation continue and how much scope is there for further escalation?" Kissinger said. "Or has he reached the limit of his capability, and he has to decide at what point escalating the war will strain his society to a point that will limit its fitness to conduct international policy as a great power in the future?"
At that point, Kissinger said, whether Russia would then turn to its nuclear arsenal in order to end the war was something he couldn't predict. "We are now living in a totally new era" from the Cold War, he said.
As for avoiding a nuclear disaster—Kissinger's goal during the Cold War—circumstances have changed so much in recent decades that there needs to be a whole new discussion about the potential implications of nuclear weapons use, he said.
"As technology spreads around the world, as it does inherently, diplomacy and war will need a different content and that will be a challenge," Kissinger said.
"One thing we could not do in my opinion is just accept it," he concluded.
-
We clearly see here the forces at work behind Vindman's participation in the attempted Impeachment Coup of Trump.
That said, at this point, has he become right? Should America look for Uke victory?
====================================================
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-05-11/america-embrace-ukraine-victory-goal?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=The%20Coup%20in%20the%20Kremlin&utm_content=20220513&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week%20-%20112017
America Must Embrace the Goal of Ukrainian Victory
It’s Time to Move Past Washington’s Cautious Approach
By Alexander Vindman
May 11, 2022
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-05-11/america-embrace-ukraine-victory-goal
For years before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the Ukrainians had been growing frustrated with U.S. leadership. A former high-level Ukrainian official described U.S. policy to the country in this way: “You won’t let us drown, but you won’t let us swim.” Washington has earned this mixed reputation in the decades since Ukraine broke free from the Soviet Union in 1991. Although Ukraine saw the United States as an indispensable partner and greatly appreciated U.S. security and economic assistance, many Ukrainians were aggrieved that the United States remained reluctant to more fully and forthrightly support them in the face of Russian provocations and aggression—even following Ukraine’s pivot toward the West after the tumult of 2014, when protests toppled a pro-Russian government in Kyiv and Russia responded by annexing Crimea and invading the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. With few exceptions, Ukrainian pleas for increased military aid, greater economic investment, and a concrete road map for integration with Europe fell on deaf ears in Washington. The Ukrainians could not understand why the U.S. national security establishment continued to privilege maintaining stable relations with Russia—an irredentist and revanchist authoritarian state—over support for Ukraine, a democratic state that had made important strides in weeding out corruption and implementing democratic reforms.
In the two months since Russia attacked Ukraine, the United States has thus far lived up to this ambivalent reputation. It has committed aid to Ukraine in fits and starts and has sought to avoid an escalation with Russia at the expense of more uncompromising support for Ukraine’s defense. But Washington can and should do more. The United States can shore up regional stability, global security, and the liberal international order by working to ensure a Ukrainian victory. To achieve this goal, Washington must finally abandon a failed policy that has prioritized trying to build a stable relationship with Russia. It needs to discard the desire—which seems to shape views on the National Security Council—to see Ukraine ultimately compromise with Russia for the sake of a negotiated peace. And the United States must give Ukraine the support it needs to bring this war to a close as soon as possible.
A FIGHTING CHANCE
Thus far, the National Security Council has stubbornly refused to end its policy of incremental assistance and adopt a strategy for supplying continuous aid to Ukraine. Such elevated support could prove to be a deciding factor on the battlefield. As it stands, the United States has missed one opportunity after the other to help precipitate a decisive Ukrainian victory and stop Russia from making gains in the Donbas. Instead of foreclosing the possibility of a Russian success, Washington’s strategy of metering incremental military aid to Ukraine—based on a flawed assessment of the risk of escalation and the potential consequences of a Russian defeat—has provided Moscow with the time and space to continue its war, even as it now shifts to defending the territory it has seized since February 24.
Ukraine has already demonstrated that it can successfully hit operational military targets in Russia, such as rail lines, airfields, depots, and materiel stockpiles, in a restricted and responsible manner. With new long-range firing capabilities delivered by the United States, Ukraine would be able to strike farther into Russia and destroy militarily relevant targets, thus reducing Moscow’s capabilities and limiting its potential for further offensive attacks. Ukrainian forces have given Washington good reason to trust in their restraint and have refrained from conducting strikes on strategic targets or civilian targets that could stoke escalatory tensions with Russia. Given such evidence, the United States has little reason to wring its hands over shipping additional and more powerful weapons to Ukraine that could undermine Russia’s war effort.
The war has reached a critical inflection point, with Russia on its heels after a disastrous start and now seeking to consolidate control over the east of Ukraine. Even in the face of Russia’s humiliating military blunders, Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to accept a cease-fire or peace deal on unfavorable terms. He continues to believe that Russia has the resources and equipment necessary to win a war of attrition. He could be wrong—the Ukrainian military has performed masterfully, and the Ukrainians themselves have rallied in extraordinary numbers to repulse the Russian attack—but he may not reach this conclusion until months down the road. By that time, more Ukrainian cities will have been reduced to rubble, and untold numbers of Ukrainians will have been raped, maimed, slaughtered, deported, or displaced.
NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL
Short of direct intervention, the United States can prevent further massacres of Ukrainian civilians and further destruction of the country only by supplying more lethal aid. That effort starts at home by training and preparing the Ukrainians to use advanced NATO military equipment and simultaneously replenishing U.S. allies’ capabilities as they transfer Soviet-era systems to Ukraine. The United States must also continue to pressure European leaders who have been overly cautious and indecisive in their military support for Ukraine’s defense, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. They must come to understand that there can be no return to business as usual with Russia as long as Putin rules from the Kremlin. Momentum may be on Ukraine’s side, but Kyiv alone cannot bring an end to this war. Without a steady stream of supplies from the United States and its allies to replace its lost or exhausted equipment, Ukraine may find itself mired in a drawn-out war of attrition. Even if Russia’s ground forces prove ineffective, the Kremlin can still sustain combat operations with air power and long-range shelling over an extended period of time, during which Russia may attempt to regroup for a broader offensive or seek to consolidate its territorial gains. The West must deny Russia that window of opportunity.
Many analysts and advisers believe the United States should stagger its support to Ukraine to encourage Kyiv to make what they see as necessary concessions to Moscow. Overt calls for appeasing Russia have become more muted—especially as Ukraine performs superbly on the battlefield and as many Western observers see the conflict as a battle between democracy and autocracy. But many in Washington still privately express their belief that any peace deal will require Ukraine to cede some territory to Russia. This camp believes that boosting U.S. support may make Ukraine unwilling to compromise. But the fact remains that one or both sides need to think they can lose to pave the way for fruitful negotiations, and neither Kyiv nor Moscow has reached this point, with both states unwilling to accept the other’s demands.
Washington is fretting over how it can prevent a Russian defeat while limiting the scope of a Ukrainian victory.
Why, then, is the United States looking to Kyiv to bend in the face of Russian aggression rather than working to convince the Kremlin that it will lose this war? To avoid destabilizing Russia too much. Some experts fear that a Russian loss—or some other inglorious outcome for Moscow—may precipitate a broader war or nuclear escalation. Washington, in other words, is fretting over how it can prevent a Russian defeat while limiting the scope of a Ukrainian victory. As thousands of Ukrainians die defending their country, and as Putin wields the threat of nuclear escalation to frighten his opponents in the West, U.S. policymakers should move forward with one explicit goal: helping Ukraine win on the battlefield to the fullest extent possible.
This option carries obvious risks, but the alternate scenarios—including a cyberwar between Russia and NATO, Russian conventional attacks on NATO arms shipments to deter external assistance for Ukraine, a NATO intervention in the conflict, and potential accidents or miscalculations that could precipitate a broader war—will grow only more likely the longer the war drags on. The solution to the present crisis is not to wait until the war spills over into the rest of Europe or draws other countries into the conflict. Acting now will reduce the probability of catastrophes further down the line. Moreover, the risk of a nuclear escalation has been overstated and remains exceptionally small: even Putin understands the extraordinary taboo he would be breaking by employing nuclear arms. Rhetorical threats and political theater abound in the Kremlin, but there have been no movements or changes in Russia’s nuclear forces that would indicate that a nuclear strike is under consideration, no matter Russia’s warnings that continued arms shipments to Ukraine from the West could prompt such a response.
Stepping up military assistance for Ukraine would not be a reckless shot in the dark. Rather, it is a risk-informed move that is unlikely to provoke any meaningful retaliation from Moscow. It remains in Russia’s interests to prevent the conflict from escalating. Deploying a nuclear weapon would provoke swift, severe, and unpredictable reactions from the international community. The threshold for Russia’s use of weapons of mass destruction, let alone a nuclear weapon, remains almost impossibly high. Russia cannot use such weapons against NATO and the West without provoking a concomitant response, per the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Even the prospect of the use of weapons of mass destruction against Ukraine seems highly unlikely, as the United States has warned Russia that such an attack may draw NATO into the conflict. Russia is loath to set off a war with NATO, particularly when its military is already experiencing humbling setbacks in Ukraine.
WHAT THE WEST OWES UKRAINE
As the war in Ukraine drags on, Kyiv may ultimately opt for a negotiated settlement. Until such time as Ukraine feels ready to approach the negotiating table on its own terms, however, it is not the West’s place to coerce Kyiv into accepting an armistice, much less a cease-fire, merely for the sake of cooling tensions with Russia. Even if Putin declares victory, the West should not rein in Ukraine’s efforts to liberate occupied regions in the hope that the conflict will fade away. Such an agreement could even prove counterproductive: a pause in the fighting could give the Russian military an opportunity to regroup and rearm for a new push into Ukrainian territory and simultaneously deprive the Ukrainian military of precious momentum on the battlefield. Russia would also get a chance to consolidate its gains in eastern and southern Ukraine. There are already signs that the Kremlin may attempt to stage another referendum on the establishment of the so-called Kherson’s People’s Republic in the territory Russia has newly occupied in southern Ukraine. If any hypothetical agreement were to leave Ukrainians in these occupied territories, then it would be with the full knowledge that torture, rape, killing, kidnapping, and deportation would continue, much as they have in the Russian-occupied territories in the Donbas and Crimea since 2014.
Given these circumstances, peace in Ukraine must—and will—come only through Kyiv’s victory, not its capitulation. Nothing in Putin’s track record suggests that he will voluntarily end the conflict in Ukraine on Kyiv’s terms, and there is no reason to believe that the Kremlin will honor a new agreement any more than it has honored past treaties or cease-fires. The Ukrainians believe in and are fighting for their victory. Despite the toll of the invasion, polling data and anecdotal evidence suggest that morale in the besieged country remains extraordinarily high. On the other hand, some in the West seem to peddle the idea that the United States and NATO are fighting Russia down “to the last Ukrainian.” But the Ukrainians are not fighting the West’s war, and they do not need to be coerced into resisting Russia’s aggression. There is no shortage of fighting spirit in Ukraine—or of faith in the country’s skill and potential. It is the West, apparently, that still needs convincing.
HOW TO BEAT RUSSIA
A Ukrainian victory against Russia will be defined, first and foremost, by the Ukrainians themselves. Ukraine’s triumph will likely entail the liberation of Ukrainian territories occupied after Moscow’s initial assault on February 24. This is entirely within Ukraine’s power: Ukrainian forces already succeeded in expelling Russian forces north of Kyiv in a matter of weeks and are winning back areas around the city of Kharkiv. With a constant flow of Western support and training, they will also succeed in the battle for the east and the south.
This is where Washington can and must do more: although the Biden administration’s recent announcement of $34.7 billion to fund five months’ worth of military aid is welcome, the Ukrainian army increasingly needs new and advanced weapons to fend off Russia’s military, air power, and long-range weapons. The weapons included in current U.S. packages—including towed howitzers, Soviet-era helicopters, tactical vehicles, armored personnel carriers, unmanned coastal defense vessels, and military surveillance and reconnaissance drones—are more of the same. This materiel is merely replacing what Ukrainian forces have lost or used up rather than bolstering Ukraine’s capacities; it will not hasten Russia’s defeat on the battlefield. Ukraine still needs more advanced military technology and the comprehensive training to accompany arms shipments from the West. Moreover, although the United States and its allies have provided assistance that categorically checks boxes in some areas, the total volume of aid has also been insufficient. Ukraine needs squadrons of advanced unmanned combat aerial vehicles, battalions of multiple rocket launchers, and multiple batteries of surface-to-air missile and antiship missile systems.
Peace in Ukraine must—and will—come only through Kyiv’s victory, not its capitulation.
Providing this breadth and depth of support will require institutional changes in Washington to speed up the current incremental approach to lethal aid packages. The U.S. government is already taking some important steps in this direction, albeit too slowly. The president recently signed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022—a program that I called for in these pages—into law, which will expedite arms transfers and give the president greater authority to enter into agreements with Ukraine to lend or lease defense equipment. This arrangement must be transformed from an ad hoc one to a recurring, continuous supply of arms. Otherwise, piecemeal arms shipments will continue to put out small fires in Ukraine without changing the state of play in the broader conflict. To fully implement a lend-lease program, NATO must begin to consolidate the equipment Ukraine will need for the coming weeks and months of war and establish warehouses for supplies just across the border from Ukraine in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Depots and stockpiles can then be organized for Ukraine to draw whatever it needs without going through a protracted requisition and delivery process. Furthermore, NATO should use its competencies in planning for war to identify what Ukraine needs to sustain the war effort now, rather than waiting for the Ukrainians to make resupply requests themselves. And as for those who are concerned that such efforts will allow Ukraine to beat Russia too soundly, such as the leaders of the National Security Council, they would do well to remember that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has consistently expressed his willingness to resolve these issues diplomatically; any failure in diplomacy thus far falls squarely on the Kremlin.
A long-term Ukrainian victory will also require both the country’s greater integration into Europe and a monumental international campaign to help rebuild Ukraine, akin to the Marshall Plan in the aftermath of World War II. Ukraine is already making swift progress in its campaign to join the EU: the Ukrainian government has submitted a formal questionnaire for EU membership, and the country could be granted candidate status within weeks. The United States admittedly has limited influence over these proceedings, but it can still project soft power—and give diplomatic nudges to allies in Europe—to encourage the expedited conferral of EU candidate status to Ukraine. As for the issue of reconstruction, the EU is planning to establish a so-called solidarity trust fund for Ukraine. The United States—as well as the United Kingdom and any other willing democratic countries—should also rally to the cause of economic revival in Ukraine. Public-private partnerships seeded with a combination of grants, private equity, and asset seizures and forfeitures from Russia could direct funds to rebuild Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure. These funds could be guided and managed by both an EU integration process and a board of directors drawn from Ukraine and the United States to ensure accountability, but Ukrainian oversight would be crucial in shaping an effective economic plan for the country.
This long-term vision for victory will not be realized, however, until security is reestablished and guaranteed in Ukraine. If peace will come only on the heels of a military breakthrough, then the United States has an obligation to help Ukraine win on the battlefield. Those worried about escalation with Russia must understand that the risks of a Ukrainian victory are greatly exaggerated. The risks of a Ukrainian loss are far greater and would entail irreversible damage to the liberal order, international law, security norms, and global stability. That is an outcome that the United States cannot afford and should be doing everything in its power to avoid.
==================
Pentagon mouthpiece D1:
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/05/does-west-want-ukraine-win-or-not/366820/
-
For the record, I do not agree with the description of the Kurd events:
==================================================
The Opportunity in the Ukraine Crisis
Biden can revive America’s standing after the Afghan debacle. The first step is to help the Kurds.
By Thomas S. Kaplan and Bernard-Henri Lévy
May 15, 2022 1:32 pm ET
‘A statesman cannot create anything himself,” the “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck, observed. “He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment.” A century and a half later, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has apparently heard those steps. By canceling a critical gas deal with Russia and overturning a longstanding policy of not sending lethal weapons into war zones, Mr. Scholz has seized the garment and transformed Germany’s role in the world.
Of even greater importance for the global order, Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine could be providential for President Biden too. Like it or not, the retreat of the U.S. has been the big story in the chancelleries and ministries of Europe, Asia and the Middle East for many years. Even before Barack Obama’s failure to follow through on his Syrian “red line” and Donald Trump’s betrayal of Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, the word on the street has been loud and clear: America is faithless to its friends and at serious risk of being challenged by a new axis of China, Russia and even second-tier adversaries like Iran.
This may seem like a bum rap on America, which has been a mostly benevolent hegemon for decades. But as the Ukrainians and the Kurds well know, life is unfair. Nobody likes a loser, especially an arrogant one. One can be arrogant yet magnificent in projecting power and values. One can be ineffectual yet respected if one is at least humble about one’s missteps. To be ineffectual and arrogant simultaneously elicits universal contempt.
The U.S. hit rock bottom with the tragic fiasco of its bungled exit from Afghanistan. America’s natural allies quite reasonably asked if they should hedge their bets with China and Iran.
Then things changed. The debacle in Kabul, which likely emboldened the Kremlin, was spectacularly surpassed by Russia’s serial blunders and war crimes in Ukraine. The U.S. was given a historic chance to turn back years of retreat and reassert the leadership that seemed to have been lost forever. Consistent with Bismarck’s observation, America didn’t create this opportunity. It is owing to the unforeseen bravery and leadership of the Ukrainian people and leadership and their ability to channel resilience and courage into a spectacular success on the battlefield that shamed the world into doubling down on their audacity.
But how can the Biden administration turn this gift into one that keeps on giving? First, continue supplying and supporting Ukraine against Russia. But fashion this new posture into a full doctrine and re-create, for the first time in years, a bipartisan foreign policy committed to enabling those who are willing to bear the burden of fighting for interests and values they share with all Americans.
Begin with the Kurds. Like the Ukrainians, America’s Kurdish allies fought and won battles against a vicious foe that is also an adversary of the U.S.—Islamic State. They paid the price for their victories in blood so that America didn’t have to. Like the Ukrainians—a land of more than 40 million that Russia would have us believe isn’t a real nation—the Kurds face a denial of their identity as a people. They number some 30 million and are the largest stateless ethnic group in the world. Like the Ukrainians, they suffer from challenging geography, straddling the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Yet, also like their counterparts in Ukraine, the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in Iraq and the Rojava Kurds in Syria are a case study in the effective implementation of America’s longstanding exhortation that its friends should do more of the actual fighting while the U.S. trains and assists them.
The Kurds accepted that bargain. During the conflict with ISIS, which began in 2014, fewer than two dozen U.S. soldiers have been killed. The Kurds bravely and stoically bore the brunt of a successful campaign in which they lost some 11,000 men and women and suffered another 23,000 wounded.
What were the wages of this exceptional case study in “burden sharing”? Betrayal. First in Iraq after the 2017 referendum in which the Kurds voted for independence, then in Syria when American troops were ordered to step aside in 2019 so that Turkish forces and their Islamist proxies could invade and slaughter our comrades-in-arms.
Both Mr. Biden and Kamala Harris spoke out against this travesty against the Kurds. Practically all their fellow Democrats agreed. Most Republicans have also shown themselves to be vehemently pro-Kurd in their expressions of gratitude and admiration for a people who have fought and won brutal struggles so that terrorism doesn’t visit our towns as well as theirs.
Americans of all political stripes are rallying around Ukraine, and Mr. Biden is right to call on Congress to pass $40 billion in aid. Americans of all stripes would support the Kurds too if presented the opportunity. It’s up to the president to give them one.
One bipartisan win in today’s America may be seen to be an accident. But two would be cause for a celebration—and a chance for Mr. Biden to make good on his promise that “America is back.”
Mr. Kaplan is chairman and CEO of The Electrum Group LLC. Mr. Lévy is author, most recently, of “The Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope.” They are founders and board members of Justice for Kurds, a New York-based nonprofit.
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10847579/Henry-Kissinger-tells-global-elite-gathered-Davos-Ukraine-Russia-territory.html
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10847579/Henry-Kissinger-tells-global-elite-gathered-Davos-Ukraine-Russia-territory.html
As long as the swamp gets their cut, they might.
-
May 27, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
Why I Disagree With Henry Kissinger
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
Henry Kissinger recently spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he made two significant statements. One was that Ukraine must be prepared to cede some territory to Russia in order to reach a peace treaty, and in doing so allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to hold on to his position, which Kissinger regards as essential. He also said that Taiwan should not be allowed to become a major issue between the U.S. and China, implying that the U.S. was making it an issue, and by my inference that the Chinese seizure of Taiwan should not trigger a U.S. response.
In both cases, Kissinger believes it is in Washington’s interest to accommodate its adversary. He’s arguing that America’s utmost concern should be global stability, which requires accommodating the interests of nations that want to shift the regional balance of power. In other words, the stability of the former Soviet Union, including the political survival of Putin, will stabilize the region and increase global stability. Likewise, ceding Taiwan to China would stabilize the Western Pacific and increase global stability.
Kissinger held this view when he was advising presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. During the Vietnam War, the goal was not to win the war – he correctly regarded it as unwinnable – but to avoid a confrontation with China and the Soviet Union. In order to do that, he retained U.S. forces in Vietnam in an unwinnable war to give Moscow and Beijing a sense of American inflexibility, even as he carried out intense bombing in the north to demonstrate America’s willingness to wage aggressive warfare. The ultimate goal was to force the North Vietnamese and its allies to reach an agreement that would allow the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam in due course and thereby stabilize relations with the Soviet Union. He wanted to show the U.S.' mettle while maintaining a degree of flexibility. In this convoluted fashion, the war was extended, even lost, but the fundamental goal of a detente with Russia was achieved.
Likewise, his mission to China in the early 1970s had a strategic payoff. The Soviets and the Chinese had fought battles along the Ussuri River. The Russians were considering strikes on China’s nuclear facility at Lop Nor, and China was challenging Russia for leadership of the communist world. Kissinger approached the Chinese with the offer of an understanding between the U.S. and China. The strategic concern of the United States was a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Aligning with China created the possibility of a two-front war. Kissinger had no interest in a war, but the threat would reduce that danger by creating an unacceptable risk for Russia, which paradoxically helped the U.S. reach an understanding on coexistence, reduced the risk of war and stabilized the global system. It also laid the groundwork for the emergence of contemporary China.
Kissinger’s thinking was complex, sometimes seemingly heading away from his ultimate goals, but he focused on a single issue: the threat of the Soviet Union, and thus the threat to the global order. The Soviets threatened Europe, they threatened China, they fished in the Caribbean Sea, and they were a nuclear power. He was prepared to pay any price for that because he saw the Soviets alone as a threat to the global system.
The Soviets postured as though they were willing to risk up to and including nuclear war. In my opinion, they used this posture as a cape to goad the bull into spending energy on matters the Soviets were not interested in. For all his subtlety, Kissinger had a very simple end: avoid direct war with the Soviets and allow them the initiative so that the U.S. could respond and thus demonstrate its will to Moscow. Kissinger was obsessed with the Soviet Union, so when it started to support groups in Latin America, the U.S. responded. The Soviets did not see themselves as nearly as powerful as Kissinger did, but learned that if the main was quiet, Chile, Syria or Angola could be agitated.
Kissinger’s response to the Russian attack on Ukraine flows from the same logic. He sees a conflict between Iraq and Syria as frightening the Russians concerning U.S. intentions. He sees Putin as he saw Leonid Brezhnev: as a potentially stabilizing force that is less dangerous than a power vacuum filled by a less flexible person. In that sense, defending Ukraine could simply make things worse.
With China, I think a different but related dynamic was at play. Kissinger’s greatest achievement was opening China and making it an ally. In his mind, he achieved it through accommodation, but in fact it was because China never lost its fear of the United States. After the U.S. inflicted massive casualties on the Chinese army, Mao saw the U.S. as powerful, the U.S. saw China as a possible ally, and each went away relieved by the deal.
It is good to overestimate your enemy so that you are prepared for the worst. But excessive miscalculation will blind you to opportunities and make you beholden to moves by the other side. I think that for Kissinger the failure of the British and French to understand how powerful Germany was drove him to fear repeating their mistakes. This informs his positions on ceding territory to Russia and China. The weaker party must be the cleverer one and approach the obvious with utter caution. Global stability is at stake. In my view, Russia and China are declining powers, while the U.S. is the surging one. This is where you nail the door shut on your adversary.
I will confess, of course, that in the 1970s, as I rose to awareness, my fears of the Russians were as intense as anyone. But over time, as I studied their military and spoke to expatriates, I came to see them differently. That was a long time ago, and I have little right to criticize a man I admire. But thinking him wrong is not the same as being reckless. He played the game he thought he had to. He still is.
-
High regard for GF, but disagree that agreeing to neutral Ukraine would risk Russian conquest of Europe
===================================
May 31, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
America’s Interests in Ukraine
By: George Friedman
Nearly every time Russia has been invaded, it has been saved by its strategic depth. Russia can’t truly be defeated without first taking Moscow, and it is a long way to Moscow. From Napoleon to Hitler, invaders from the west had to try to reach the capital city before the brutal winter came – indeed, it helped to arrive before the rains of autumn choked the roads with mud. Russia must therefore keep the starting point of an attack as far away as possible and use its army to delay its advance as much as possible.
Thus is the strategic value of Ukraine to Russia. If Ukraine remains intact, and if it becomes a part of NATO, Moscow would be less than 300 miles (480 kilometers) from the attackers. Many argue that NATO has no intention of invading. I argue that nothing is less reliable than intentions. War planners must plan on capabilities, which are much slower to change than intentions. Considerations such as the rights of sovereign nations have historically always taken a back seat to the need to guarantee the security of a nation.
Some have argued that the U.S. has no interest in Ukraine, or if it does then it’s a moral interest. The moral argument is not sufficient in the hard realities of geopolitics. I think the U.S. has a fundamental national interest in the war. The United States is secure from land invasion, so the only threats that can arise come from the oceans. Securing the seas has thus been the foundation of U.S. national security since 1900.
History backs this up. It entered World War I after the sinking of the Lusitania. The attack wasn’t the basis for entering the war, of course, but it drove home the point that the conflict would be a naval war too, and that a naval war could threaten fundamental U.S. interests. If Germany had won, it would have controlled the Atlantic, putting the eastern United States at risk.
World War II resurrected the problem. The United States was sufficiently alarmed that it agreed to the Lend-Lease Act, whereby Washington would lend the United Kingdom much-needed supplies in exchange for leasing most British bases near North America to Washington. But in a then-secret addendum, London agreed that if it was forced to surrender to Germany (not a far-fetched notion at the time) the British Navy would sail to North America. Put differently, America would help, but its help was contingent on forcing British power away from North America, as well as on a commitment, in the worst-case scenario, to turn the British navy over to the United States.
The Cold War also had a major if overlooked naval component to it. All the land-based conflicts that took place required the infusion of supplies to local forces. NATO supplies, for example, were promised by the United States, and the Soviet Union had an overwhelming interest in stopping them. In a war, Soviet submarines would pass through the GIUK gap (Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom), and Soviet bombers would come out of the Kola Peninsula, hitting air bases in Norway, while also shooting through the GIUK toward convoys containing aircraft carriers and massive anti-air and anti-missile capabilities. For the U.S., the Cold War was as much a naval war as a land war.
To Washington, Soviet expansion into Europe was the same as Soviet expansion into the Atlantic. If the European Peninsula were ever dominated by a single power that could consolidate its human and material resources, it might construct a naval force that could threaten North America.
For the U.S., preventing domination of the European Peninsula by any single power stops a threat before it happens. And this is the crux of its interest in Ukraine. Among other reasons, Russia invaded to limit the threat posed by NATO. Even if Russia subjugates Ukraine, there is yet another NATO ally to its west. A quick victory in Ukraine therefore raised the possibility of more military movement farther west. Russia’s handling of the war has made this outcome more unlikely, of course, but unlikely isn’t the same as impossible.
That’s because for a country like Russia there is safety in distance. It’s reasonable to assume Moscow will push as far west as it reasonably and safely can. And that is very much a threat to U.S. national security. Stopping Russia in Ukraine, with Ukrainian troops doing the fighting and the U.S. providing weapons while waging a parallel economic war, is an efficient check on Russian ambition.
-
HT GM for this very interesting piece-- quite a bit of which agrees with points I have been making here for years haha.
(For the record, IMO there are also passages with serious jumps in logic.)
https://grahamefuller.com/some-hard-thoughts-about-post-ukraine/
Question: How might we summarize what he would like to see us do now?
-
HT GM for this very interesting piece-- quite a bit of which agrees with points I have been making here for years haha.
(For the record, IMO there are also passages with serious jumps in logic.)
https://grahamefuller.com/some-hard-thoughts-about-post-ukraine/
Question: How might we summarize what he would like to see us do now?
Could you flesh out what you agree/disagree with?
-
You force me to reread. Not sure what the hell I had in mind. :-D
-
June 29, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
G-7 versus BRICS
Most countries would rather not choose sides.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
The first half of 2022 is ending with a string of major summits. Meetings of national leaders aren’t usually fateful, but the G-7 summit in southern Germany and the BRICS summit in Beijing are different this year. Amid the Russian-Ukrainian war, surging inflation globally and a looming food crisis, leaders started in earnest the process of redrawing economic alliances and reshaping the world order for years to come.
The G-7
The Group of Seven consists of the world’s wealthiest democracies – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – plus the European Union. Since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, these countries have coordinated to support Kyiv in various ways while launching an economic war against the Kremlin. However, sanctions and Russian countermeasures have helped to drive up energy prices, exacerbating already high inflation and creating serious social and economic risks in much of Europe, which depends heavily on Russian energy. The war has also severely hampered Ukrainian grain production and exports, while high energy and fertilizer prices affect production elsewhere. The scale of these crises calls for high-level, coordinated solutions. The G-7 hopes to mitigate the economic pain on everyone except Russia while turning up the pressure on Moscow to end the war.
Member Countries of G-7 and BRICS
(click to enlarge)
One element of that pressure campaign is a gold embargo, which was agreed to on Tuesday. Russia has used its enormous stockpile of gold to blunt the effect of sanctions and support its currency. With the West searching for new ways to pressure the ruble and the Russian economy without European energy sanctions, banning Russian gold imports is a logical step. The U.S. has prohibited gold-related transactions involving Russia since March.
Another measure, far from finalized, concerns a cap on the price of Russian oil. Revenues from energy exports have helped fund the war, and sanctions to date have only forced the price higher. The U.S. and others have already banned imports of Russian oil, but much of Europe is too reliant on Russian supplies and thus resistant to adopting similar bans. A price cap would in theory ensure that flows continue – Russia willing – while eating into Russia’s revenues. However, many questions remain about implementation, and Moscow has meaningful leverage. For instance, it could refuse to sell its oil at the mandated price, or it could shut more natural gas pipelines to Europe under dubious pretenses, as it is threatening to do with Nord Stream 1 to Germany. These countermeasures would come with their own costs for Russia, and it’s simply impossible to know which side could tolerate the pain for longer. What is clear is that the West has struggled to secure alternative energy supplies and is thus in a tough spot.
Zooming out, something more important is happening. The G-7, and the so-called West more generally, needs allies to help it defend existing international rules and norms and to help it reduce its reliance on Russian energy. It also needs allies against the potential food crisis, which is orchestrated by Russia – itself a massive food producer – via its destruction of Ukrainian grain storage facilities and a Black Sea blockade. To that end, the German hosts of the G-7 summit invited Argentina, India, Indonesia, Senegal and South Africa to join. In a statement, the G-7 countries announced their intention to pursue so-called Just Energy Transition Partnerships with the guest countries, indicating that all or some of them may help the West decouple from Russian energy. In the meantime, Germany and Senegal are discussing ways to jointly explore and develop Senegalese natural gas reserves. Argentina formally offered to become “a stable and reliable substitute supplier of Russian gas to Europe and of food to the world.” And India announced the relaunching of free trade talks with the European Union after a nearly decadelong freeze.
At the same time, there’s plenty of reason for caution. For example, most of Argentina’s gas reserves are undeveloped, and it needs significant investment to live up to its promises. For its part, India has yet to condemn Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Tough discussions lie ahead. Not all players have chosen a side, and convincing the convincible will require compensation.
Russia’s Summits
While the West is recruiting allies, Russia seems to be having problems keeping its partners together. Earlier this month, Russia held its St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, gathering government and business leaders interested in working with Russia. The number of participants has declined significantly since Russian operations first began in Ukraine in 2014, but the forum still included leading figures from the Eurasian Economic Union as well as China, India, Venezuela, Cuba and Serbia.
During the event, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev made headlines when he said Kazakhstan would not recognize the breakaway Ukrainian Donetsk and Luhansk republics. He also said most non-G-7 countries preferred not to choose a side, while arguing that Russia has much to offer “friendly” countries. Over the weekend, apparently trying to limit the damage from deviating from the Kremlin’s script, Tokayev called Russia an important ally and said he had had a “nice meeting” with President Vladimir Putin. Russian repairs on a Kazakh oil pipeline will probably be completed this week, he added. (Western officials doubt that the pipeline is undergoing needed maintenance.)
The St. Petersburg forum followed the 14th annual summit of leaders from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), a “southern” rival to the G-7 and U.S.-led blocs generally. At the summit on June 23, Putin asked his counterparts for support and closer economic ties to counteract Western sanctions.
So far, his calls have fallen on muffled ears. Though only Brazil voted to condemn Russia’s attack on Ukraine at a U.N. vote in March, the other BRICS members have stalled for time and avoided clearly choosing sides. They have taken advantage of Russia’s willingness to do business, while staying open to Western trade and investment. India has significantly increased purchases of Russian energy since the war started, but it also attended the G-7 and restarted trade talks with the EU. South Africa typically aligns with Russia, but it too attended the G-7, where it discussed energy projects with Germany. And Argentina, as mentioned, sought energy and agricultural investment from the G-7.
Putin also promoted the idea of a BRICS basket-based currency and alternative to the SWIFT interbank messaging system, noting that Russian trade with the BRICS group had increased by 38 percent in the first quarter of 2022. The effort is intended to help Russian trade partners avoid becoming subject to Western sanctions, which remains a significant concern for them. For example, cargo dispatchers in China that want to send goods to Europe need to choose whether to do so via Russian or Kazakh territory.
Based on available data, more and more are choosing the latter. The Kazakh national railway company reports that the Aktau Sea commercial port, the Kuryk port and the Aktau Marine North Terminal have doubled their shipping volume since the beginning of the year. China’s Belt and Road Initiative already envisaged Kazakhstan as a transit zone for trade to and from Europe. The war in Ukraine is only accelerating the process and augmenting Kazakhstan’s regional importance. The strategic partnership between Kazakhstan and Turkey also supports this new transport map. On May 10, Tokayev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met to discuss diversifying oil export routes to China and Europe, “including the use of Turkish transport corridors.”
This is important context for Tokayev’s remarks in St. Petersburg. More than ever, the Kazakh president has important leverage in his relationship with Putin. This also helps to explain why Putin is attending the Caspian Summit in Ashgabat on Wednesday, where investment projects will be further discussed. The Kremlin doesn’t think proposed new corridors will be effective – the Caucasus is too unstable – but worries about the development of regional initiatives without its participation.
The concluding BRICS statement referred to members’ positions expressed at the U.N. Security Council and U.N. General Assembly, and reiterated their support for U.N. humanitarian assistance to the region. Such nebulous statements only reaffirm the hesitation countries have in siding outright with Russia. However, neither are they eager to side with the West. In an economic environment ruled by uncertainty, flexibility is priceless.
-
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ask-the-experts/2022-06-21/will-china-and-russia-stay-aligned?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fatoday&utm_campaign=The%20Hollow%20Order&utm_content=20220630&utm_term=FA%20Today%20-%20112017
-
Second
SSESSMENTS
Placing NATO’s New Strategic Concept in Context
7 MIN READJun 30, 2022 | 20:52 GMT
Heads of state pose for a group photo at the NATO summit in Madrid, Spain, on June 29, 2022.
Heads of state pose for a group photo at the NATO summit in Madrid, Spain, on June 29, 2022.
(CHRISTOPHE ENA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
NATO’s first update to its Strategic Concept in 12 years underscores the foundational shifts in the Western security alliance’s priorities and threat perceptions as the Russia-Ukraine war rages on, China expands its reach in Asia, and temperatures rise across the world. On June 29, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) unveiled its new Strategic Concept outlining the alliance’s guiding principles, purpose and goals. The document, which was last updated in 2010, identifies Russia as “the most significant and direct threat” to NATO members’ peace and security amid Moscow’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine. NATO lists China as a strategic “challenge” for the first time as well, citing Beijing’s “coercive policies.”
The updated Strategic Concept was announced during the June 29-30 NATO summit in Madrid. The Madrid summit was the first held since the alliance’s March 24 extraordinary meeting to coordinate a response to Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.
In response to these changing priorities and threat perceptions, NATO also announced changes in its force posture, including the expansion of its rapid reaction force and new U.S. deployments on Russia’s borders. NATO plans to increase the size of its rapid reaction force nearly eightfold by next year, from 40,000 to 300,000 troops, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The United States, in particular, plans to significantly expand its military presence in Europe. On June 29, President Joe Biden announced Washington will establish a permanent headquarters in Poland for the U.S. 5th Army Corps, send 5,000 additional troops to Romania, and increase rotational deployments in the Baltic states (namely, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). The United States will also send two additional squadrons of F-35 fighter aircraft to the United Kingdom, station additional air defense systems at bases in Italy and Germany, and increase the number of naval destroyers in Rota, Spain, from four to six.
NATO’s so-called Response Force includes land, sea and air assets that are designed to be deployed quickly and wherever necessary in the event of an attack. The force numbered just 13,000 troops prior to Russia’s initial aggression against Ukraine in 2014.
Despite identifying Russia as a “direct threat,” NATO declined even stronger action to deter and defend against Moscow. The updated Strategic Concept describes Russia as “the most significant and direct threat” to security and stability in the entire Euro-Atlantic area, as Moscow seeks to “establish spheres of influence and direct control through coercion, subversion, aggression and annexation,” using “conventional, cyber and hybrid means against NATO and [NATO’s] partners.” The only other “direct threat” identified in the document is terrorism. This harsh language represents a fundamental reversal from the document’s previous iteration in 2010, when NATO said it sought “a true strategic partnership” with Russia and would “act accordingly, with the expectation of reciprocity from Russia.” The updated Strategic Concept also removes any mention of the 1998 Russia-NATO Founding Act governing relations between the alliance and Russia, which the 2010 version reaffirmed. But in the 2022 document, NATO says it is willing to “keep open channels of communication with Moscow to manage and mitigate risks, prevent escalation and increase transparency,” which indicates a desire to maintain the spirit of and compliance with the 24-year-old pact. The new NATO troops that will soon be deployed to Poland and the Baltic states will also continue to rotate throughout the alliance’s Eastern European members to avoid running afoul of the Founding Act, in which NATO pledged not to permanently station combat troops on the Russian border.
On June 29, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander said the U.S. 5th Army Corps’ permanent stationing in Poland will be staffed by headquarters officials, not combat troops, and would thus not violate the U.S. understanding of the NATO-Russia Founding Act. Officials in countries such as France and Germany have said the Founding Act should be preserved, while some, particularly in Eastern Europe and the United States, had called for the alliance to consider formally disavowing or suspending the agreement to remove restraints on NATO force posture.
But the new strategy will still fuel Russia’s concerns about NATO’s expansion and prompt Moscow to increase its military presence in the Baltic region. NATO's impending troop movements do not contradict the alliance’s stated desire to maintain the possibility of dialogue with Moscow. They do, however, contradict Russia’s desire for a decreased NATO presence on its periphery, which Moscow expressed prior to invading Ukraine in February. Increased NATO forces in Poland and the Baltic states — not to mention Sweden and Finland’s impending admission to the alliance — will thus still push Russia to increase its nuclear and nuclear-capable weapons systems in the Baltic area and eventually base many more conventional forces there as well. The 2022 Strategic Concept also reaffirms the decision of the 2008 Bucharest Summit that said Ukraine and Georgia will one day be NATO members, adding that “decisions on membership are taken by NATO allies and no third party has a say in this process” in a clear jab at Russia. While this does not portend any concrete or imminent action regarding Georgia and Ukraine’s membership aspirations, it will still increase tensions with Russia, which could use the reaffirmation of the policy to help justify an escalation of the war in Ukraine and/or destabilization measures in Georgia or Moldova.
China’s first-ever mention as a strategic “challenge” also reflects NATO’s new concerns with Beijing’s growing influence in Asia. The 2010 Strategic Concept did not once mention China nor the Indo-Pacific region, but the 2022 document devotes significant space to China, whose “stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge NATO interests, security and values”, and says “the Indo-Pacific is important for NATO, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security.” This represents a long-awaited change of tone toward China. The alliance’s statement in the 2022 document that it will “strengthen cooperation with new and existing partners in the Indo-Pacific to tackle cross-regional challenges and shared security interests” will likely raise eyebrows in Beijing. However, the updated Strategic Concept also makes clear that it “remains open to constructive engagement to build reciprocal transparency” with China.
The 2022 Strategic Concept highlights new cybersecurity, climate change, authoritarian governance and other non-military threats as well. Climate change was mentioned only once in the 2010 Strategic Concept. But in the 2022 version, it is mentioned 11 times, including the ambitious statement that NATO should “become the leading international organization when it comes to understanding and adapting to the impact of climate change on security.” Additional attention is also given to cyberattacks. The alliance reaffirmed its longstanding policy that a “single or cumulative set of malicious cyber activities; or hostile operations to, from, or within space” could prompt NATO to trigger its Article 5 mutual defense clause — another measure directed first and foremost toward Russia and China and intended to deter cyberattacks causing physical damage, as otherwise the alliance would be skeptical of triggering Article 5 because of a cyberattack. Finally, the 2022 Strategic Concept on several occasions notes the challenge to the alliance’s interests and values posed by advancing authoritarianism — a threat not acknowledged directly in 2010.
NATO’s updated Strategic Concept acknowledges non-military threats such as identifying and mitigating strategic vulnerabilities and dependencies, including with respect to critical infrastructure, supply chains and health systems. These new threats underscore the increasing importance of reliable partners in geographies outside the NATO alliance such as in Asia, from where the alliance must ensure the stability and security of supplies of critical components and resources.
-
https://www.golocalprov.com/news/Countering-Chinas-Grand-Strategy-Mackubin-Owens-MINDSETTER?fbclid=IwAR3SOhzVXf4bcCDntotVDY8V3aquytz8qW8yDSbEUPsILpodoTuL2gOGND8
-
ASSESSMENTS
Considering America on Independence Day
8 MIN READJul 4, 2022 | 10:00 GMT
The Boston Pops Orchestra rehearses for a Fourth of July fireworks show on July 3, 2015, in Boston, Massachusetts.
The Boston Pops Orchestra rehearses for a Fourth of July show on July 3, 2015, in Boston, Massachusetts.
(Paul Marotta/Getty Images)
Editor's Note: To commemorate July 4th this year, Stratfor offers a sampling of past analyses that examine how the United States came to dominate the global system — and where the American empire might be headed next.
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire
The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway and is the world's largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live. Read the full article here.
Listening to the Echoes of the American Revolution
The world is a complicated, interconnected and volatile place. No country has the singular power to intervene for national, economic or even moral reasons everywhere. For Britain, a small rebellion, driven by distance, fiscal policy and changing culture, escalated from a localized police action to a global crisis that dragged on for nearly a decade. In the process, old foes were reawaked and unforeseen challenges to British forces at the far reaches of the empire emerged. On America's Independence Day (a day marking more the start than conclusion of hostilities with the mother country), it is worthwhile reflecting on the ideas and complexities of global capabilities and responsibilities as well as considering the nature of independence and freedom. Read the full article here.
Coming to Terms With the American Empire
The geography of the American empire was built partly on military relations but heavily on economic relations. At first these economic relations were fairly trivial to American business. But as the system matured, the value of investments soared along with the importance of imports, exports and labor markets. As in any genuinely successful empire, it did not begin with a grand design or even a dream of one. Strategic necessity created an economic reality in country after country until certain major industries became dependent on at least some countries. The obvious examples were Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, whose oil fueled American oil companies, and which therefore — quite apart from conventional strategic importance — became economically important. This eventually made them strategically important.
As an empire matures, its economic value increases, particularly when it is not coercing others. Coercion is expensive and undermines the worth of an empire. The ideal colony is one that is not at all a colony, but a nation that benefits from economic relations with both the imperial power and the rest of the empire. The primary military relationship ought to be either mutual dependence or, barring that, dependence of the vulnerable client state on the imperial power.
This is how the United States slipped into empire. First, it was overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful. Second, it faced a potential adversary capable of challenging it globally, in a large number of countries. Third, it used its economic advantage to induce at least some of these countries into economic, and therefore political and military, relationships. Fourth, these countries became significantly important to various sectors of the American economy. Read the full article here.
The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 2: American Identity and the Threats of Tomorrow
What happens when something goes wrong, when the rest of the world reaches out and touches the Americans on something other than America's terms? When one is convinced that things can, will and should continually improve, the shock of negative developments or foreign interaction is palpable. Mania becomes depression and arrogance turns into panic.
An excellent example is the Japanese attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. 70 years on, Americans still think of the event as a massive betrayal underlining the barbaric nature of the Japanese that justified the launching of a total war and the incineration of major cities. This despite the fact that the Americans had systemically shut off East Asia from Japanese traders, complete with a de facto energy embargo, and that the American mainland — much less its core — was never threatened.
Such panic and overreaction is a wellspring of modern American power. The United States is a large, physically secure, economically diverse and vibrant entity. When it acts, it can alter developments on a global scale fairly easily. But when it panics, it throws all of its ample strength at the problem at hand, and in doing so reshapes the world. Read the full article here.
How the Plight of a Heartland Could Upset America's Balance
Societal, economic or cultural change is not always immediately reflected in the halls of Washington, D.C. Some of the change at the political level can be delayed due to the fundamentals of the U.S. political system. Changes in population due to the rise and fall of local state economies will only result in changes in representation every decade and even then, they will be gradual. After each census, the House of Representatives recalculates the number of seats allocated to each state proportionally, meaning that the population declines in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, West Virginia and Michigan that have occurred over the past decade will have a delayed effect on overall political power within the House. In the meantime, traditionally powerful states that see waning power and influence ahead will seek to hold onto influence in other ways and in other branches of the government. See the 2016 presidential elections, when many states that have been facing long-term economic decline gravitated to the candidate who promised a return to former glory. However, the growth of urban areas as economic hubs could slowly change the social and political profiles of the states that host them. Ultimately, the lag between demographic and economic changes and its formal reflection at the level of political representation leaves the U.S. political system in a state of limbo.
Against this backdrop, the United States is witnessing the growth of ideological divides stemming from generational shifts, urbanization, internal migration and economic inequalities. Without a unifying culture, economy and geography knitting the core together, the new ecumene — fiscally robust as it may be — will not help an already fraying populace mend itself. After all, many of the cultural concerns and economic priorities of Los Angeles still have little in common with those in Raleigh. Instead, we are more likely to witness states push more heavily for their own regional, rather than national, interests as a result of the lag of national representation behind economic realities. Read the full article here.
China, the U.S., and the Geography of the 21st Century
The United States and China will sit at the forefront of the 21st-century geography, with the United States remaining a traditional maritime power, as China works to bridge a continental and maritime role. Europe and Russia will both retain power and influence, though to a lesser degree, and while they may lean toward the larger poles, they will not fall into locked alliances. Russia may align with China, but Chinese initiatives in the Arctic, Central Asia and into the Indian Ocean and Middle East are all encroaching on areas of traditional Russian interests. While Europe and the United States may align on many issues, Europe is also increasingly integrated into transcontinental land-based trade routes and at odds with the United States on regulatory fronts, from taxation to cyberspace to environmental regulations. Read the full article here.
Will Biden Be the Last U.S. President To Champion Global Trade?
In his famed 1918 Fourteen Points speech, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson laid out a vision of a liberalized global order that promoted free trade, freedom of navigation on the seas, open agreements (i.e. no secret treaties) between governments, and the League of Nations to champion world peace. But the United States never joined the ill-fated League of Nations, which Woodrow helped create in the face of growing domestic opposition against his interventionist foreign policies. And in 1920, just two years after Woodrow made that speech, the United States went on to reject the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, and then entered a depression. Wilson’s vision of free trade was then rejected again (and again) over the next 15 years as the United States went into an extended period of economic protectionism that included the 1922 Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act (which raised tariffs by 25% and triggered a trade war with Western Europe) followed by the even more extreme 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (which raised tariffs by another 20%).
Fast forward to today, and growing domestic support for protectionist policies is once again constraining the United States’ global trade strategy. U.S. President Joe Biden recently unveiled two economic initiatives: the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity and the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. Some have criticized both deals for being too narrow in scope, as neither is a free trade agreement. Such agreements, however, are now no longer en vogue in Washington, where an increasingly polarized political environment — along with longstanding accusations that trade has hollowed out America’s industrial and manufacturing base — has left more lawmakers in support of protectionist policies (or hesitant to say otherwise). Read the full article here.
-
John Bolton said he planned foreign coups. The global outcry was swift.
By Adam Taylor and Ana Vanessa Herrero
July 13, 2022 at 3:14 p.m. EDT
National security adviser John Bolton listens as President Donald Trump speaks with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari during a meeting at the White House on April 30, 2018. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
When a former White House national security adviser and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations says he was involved in planning coups abroad, the world takes notice.
John Bolton, speaking to Jake Tapper live on CNN’s “The Lead” on Tuesday afternoon, said that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was not a “carefully planned coup d’etat” — and that he would know.
Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia's war in Ukraine.
“As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [President Donald Trump] did,” Bolton, who served as the top national security official in the Trump administration for 17 months before a bitter exit in 2019, told Tapper.
In CNN interview, John Bolton says he has planned foreign coups
It was a passing reference, apparently meant as a stinging criticism of the former president rather than a bombshell admission of responsibility.
But clips of the remarks went viral online, drawing millions of views from all corners. Within hours, they had sparked official condemnation and unofficial speculation from foreign observers, especially in parts of the world where decades of U.S. intervention remain fresh memories.
Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia who was ousted from office in 2019 by the military amid murky election claims, tweeted Wednesday that the remarks showed that the United States was “the worst enemy of democracy and life.”
Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, called on Thursday for an international investigation into Bolton’s remarks.
“It is important to know in which other countries the United States planned coups d’etat,” Zakharova told Radio Sputnik.
Was Bolton serious? Though some in the United States had their doubts, far-flung rivals suggested this was just further confirmation of what they already knew.
“This is no surprise,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a daily news conference on Thursday. “The admission simply shows that interfering in other countries’ internal affairs and overthrowing their governments have become the standard practice of the U.S. government.”
“This is very much part of the U.S. rule book,” Wang said.
Bolton did not specify what coups he had been involved in planning, if any, during the interview. When Tapper pressed him, he pointed to the unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2019 but added that the United States did not have “all that much to do with it.”
That was a strange example. For one thing, Bolton had said the attempt to oust Maduro was “clearly not a coup” in 2019.
Maduro’s government has accused the United States of helping promote political instability in Venezuela.
Maduro did not offer a response after Bolton’s comments Tuesday. But Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s permanent representative to the United Nations, jumped on Twitter to respond that Bolton was correct: Coups did take a lot of work. “For this reason, he also failed with his local agents in Venezuela,” Moncada wrote.
Some international affairs experts said Bolton’s comments could be a setback for well-intentioned U.S. policies.
“It’s damaging to our efforts to advance and support democracy,” Stanford University-Hoover Institution scholar Larry Diamond said. “We have enough trouble already countering Russian and Chinese propaganda.”
Bolton could not be reached for immediate comment.
For America’s foreign critics and foes, Bolton often plays the role of a boogeyman, representing the worst of U.S. foreign policy and neoconservative interventionism.
As an official, his hard-line views have made him few friends internationally. But he appeared to relish his reputation, writing in one book that being labeled “human scum” by North Korean state media in 2003 was “the highest accolade” he had received.
Bolton had two stints in high positions. Under President George W. Bush, he served in senior arms control roles before becoming ambassador to the United Nations in 2005. He was a major backer of the 2003 invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein.
After Bush, Bolton spent years in the foreign policy wilderness — though he hardly went hungry, accepting positions at right-wing think tanks in Washington, working with a global private equity firm and serving as a Fox News contributor.
He returned to government office in April 2018 as the Trump White House’s national security adviser — its third in less than 18 months.
He didn’t last long, leaving the administration in September 2019. Foreign policy appeared to be one major source of dispute, with Trump later tweeting that despite Bolton’s reputation as a hawk, Trump actually had “stronger” views on Cuba and Venezuela.
So what coups might John Bolton have been involved in, exactly?
In Turkey, local media supportive of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan linked Bolton’s latest remarks to the failed attempt to overthrow the Turkish government in July 2016. Bolton, who was not then in government, was a critic of Erdogan at the time.
Takvim, a pro-government tabloid, printed an article Wednesday pointing to statements Bolton made in 2016 in support of the “treacherous” coup attempt. The newspaper noted that Bolton had spoken in support of Kurdish groups in Turkey and neighboring countries.
Takvim pointed to a 2016 appearance on Fox News, during which Bolton argued that Erdogan had been seeking to “re-create the Ottoman caliphate” with an Islamist government. Bolton criticized Erdogan for not supporting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“If he goes down, I don’t shed any tears,” Bolton said. “I don’t think he’s been a friend of the United States.”
Bolton has been supportive of coups in the past.
In a 2008 interview with Al Jazeera, he said coups can sometimes be “a necessary way to advance American interest” and defended the 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran, Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
“I think the U.S. should have that capability,” Bolton said, referring to Iran and North Korea as two areas that the United States should focus on toppling hostile regimes.
But despite the speculation, a number of former U.S. intelligence operatives on Tuesday responded with derision to Bolton’s remarks.
“Bolton never touched a coup,” Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief who oversaw U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s, wrote on Twitter. “And anyone who thinks fomenting coups is a good idea just doesn’t get out enough.”
Julian Mark contributed to this report
-
The coup was the stolen election. It was so successful, people still think they are going to vote their way out of it.
John Bolton said he planned foreign coups. The global outcry was swift.
By Adam Taylor and Ana Vanessa Herrero
July 13, 2022 at 3:14 p.m. EDT
National security adviser John Bolton listens as President Donald Trump speaks with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari during a meeting at the White House on April 30, 2018. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
When a former White House national security adviser and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations says he was involved in planning coups abroad, the world takes notice.
John Bolton, speaking to Jake Tapper live on CNN’s “The Lead” on Tuesday afternoon, said that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was not a “carefully planned coup d’etat” — and that he would know.
Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia's war in Ukraine.
“As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [President Donald Trump] did,” Bolton, who served as the top national security official in the Trump administration for 17 months before a bitter exit in 2019, told Tapper.
In CNN interview, John Bolton says he has planned foreign coups
It was a passing reference, apparently meant as a stinging criticism of the former president rather than a bombshell admission of responsibility.
But clips of the remarks went viral online, drawing millions of views from all corners. Within hours, they had sparked official condemnation and unofficial speculation from foreign observers, especially in parts of the world where decades of U.S. intervention remain fresh memories.
Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia who was ousted from office in 2019 by the military amid murky election claims, tweeted Wednesday that the remarks showed that the United States was “the worst enemy of democracy and life.”
Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, called on Thursday for an international investigation into Bolton’s remarks.
“It is important to know in which other countries the United States planned coups d’etat,” Zakharova told Radio Sputnik.
Was Bolton serious? Though some in the United States had their doubts, far-flung rivals suggested this was just further confirmation of what they already knew.
“This is no surprise,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a daily news conference on Thursday. “The admission simply shows that interfering in other countries’ internal affairs and overthrowing their governments have become the standard practice of the U.S. government.”
“This is very much part of the U.S. rule book,” Wang said.
Bolton did not specify what coups he had been involved in planning, if any, during the interview. When Tapper pressed him, he pointed to the unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2019 but added that the United States did not have “all that much to do with it.”
That was a strange example. For one thing, Bolton had said the attempt to oust Maduro was “clearly not a coup” in 2019.
Maduro’s government has accused the United States of helping promote political instability in Venezuela.
Maduro did not offer a response after Bolton’s comments Tuesday. But Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s permanent representative to the United Nations, jumped on Twitter to respond that Bolton was correct: Coups did take a lot of work. “For this reason, he also failed with his local agents in Venezuela,” Moncada wrote.
Some international affairs experts said Bolton’s comments could be a setback for well-intentioned U.S. policies.
“It’s damaging to our efforts to advance and support democracy,” Stanford University-Hoover Institution scholar Larry Diamond said. “We have enough trouble already countering Russian and Chinese propaganda.”
Bolton could not be reached for immediate comment.
For America’s foreign critics and foes, Bolton often plays the role of a boogeyman, representing the worst of U.S. foreign policy and neoconservative interventionism.
As an official, his hard-line views have made him few friends internationally. But he appeared to relish his reputation, writing in one book that being labeled “human scum” by North Korean state media in 2003 was “the highest accolade” he had received.
Bolton had two stints in high positions. Under President George W. Bush, he served in senior arms control roles before becoming ambassador to the United Nations in 2005. He was a major backer of the 2003 invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein.
After Bush, Bolton spent years in the foreign policy wilderness — though he hardly went hungry, accepting positions at right-wing think tanks in Washington, working with a global private equity firm and serving as a Fox News contributor.
He returned to government office in April 2018 as the Trump White House’s national security adviser — its third in less than 18 months.
He didn’t last long, leaving the administration in September 2019. Foreign policy appeared to be one major source of dispute, with Trump later tweeting that despite Bolton’s reputation as a hawk, Trump actually had “stronger” views on Cuba and Venezuela.
So what coups might John Bolton have been involved in, exactly?
In Turkey, local media supportive of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan linked Bolton’s latest remarks to the failed attempt to overthrow the Turkish government in July 2016. Bolton, who was not then in government, was a critic of Erdogan at the time.
Takvim, a pro-government tabloid, printed an article Wednesday pointing to statements Bolton made in 2016 in support of the “treacherous” coup attempt. The newspaper noted that Bolton had spoken in support of Kurdish groups in Turkey and neighboring countries.
Takvim pointed to a 2016 appearance on Fox News, during which Bolton argued that Erdogan had been seeking to “re-create the Ottoman caliphate” with an Islamist government. Bolton criticized Erdogan for not supporting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“If he goes down, I don’t shed any tears,” Bolton said. “I don’t think he’s been a friend of the United States.”
Bolton has been supportive of coups in the past.
In a 2008 interview with Al Jazeera, he said coups can sometimes be “a necessary way to advance American interest” and defended the 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran, Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
“I think the U.S. should have that capability,” Bolton said, referring to Iran and North Korea as two areas that the United States should focus on toppling hostile regimes.
But despite the speculation, a number of former U.S. intelligence operatives on Tuesday responded with derision to Bolton’s remarks.
“Bolton never touched a coup,” Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief who oversaw U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s, wrote on Twitter. “And anyone who thinks fomenting coups is a good idea just doesn’t get out enough.”
Julian Mark contributed to this report
-
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1959-10-01/peaceful-coexistence?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fa100&utm_content=20220716&utm_campaign=FA%20100_071622_Khrushchev%20and%20Kennan%20on%20the%20Potential%20for%20%E2%80%9CPeaceful%20Coexistence%E2%80%9D&utm_term=fa-100
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1960-01-01/peaceful-coexistence?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fa100&utm_content=20220716&utm_campaign=FA%20100_071622_Khrushchev%20and%20Kennan%20on%20the%20Potential%20for%20%E2%80%9CPeaceful%20Coexistence%E2%80%9D&utm_term=fa-100
-
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-last-days-of-joe-biden/
The Last Days of “Joe Biden”
Whose idea was it to send the wind-up doll president called “Joe Biden” to Saudi Arabia…?
Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page
And thanks to all my Patrons for your support
It’s like our country is trapped on one of those swirling carnival rides beloved of the county fairs… only, the felonious mutt who runs the ride has nodded off in a fentanyl delirium with the motor running at maximum speed… and the children-of-all-ages locked in the pods of this infernal machine shriek and vomit with each sickening rotation… as the half-century-old swing arms groan and wobble from metal fatigue on their squealing pivots… and suddenly comes a deafening crunch of gnashed gears, the smell of burning oil, and the pathetic whimpering of the nearly dead.
That’s us. Some terrible midsummer accident-of-state has befallen the USA Carnival, and most are too dazed to know it. Whose idea was it to send the wind-up doll president called “Joe Biden” to Saudi Arabia? I can just imagine what went on in the chamber in private with “JB” and MBS (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman), virtual autocrat of the oil-soaked desert land. The American visitor muttered something about wanting an ice-cream cone before dropping into a catatonic thousand-yard stare.
“How does this thing work?” MBS asks his chief vizier, the foreign minister (in Arabic, of course), gesticulating disdainfully at the ghostly figure sunk in the plush camel-hair armchair yards away. “Joe Biden” sits motionless. Someone has forgotten to rewind him, some “aide” who carries the president’s Adderall. Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud tells the boss, “We’ll make up some camel-dung for release to CNN and friends. They’ll fall for anything.”
It’s like a crime scene where the forensic experts have entered. The Saudi leader and his entourage only hang around the room for three minutes until the US State Department shoots enough photos to prove that “JB” was there and not stuffed in the basement of his Delaware beach house for the weekend, as usual. The American news media gets briefed: Saudi Arabia graciously agrees to bump up its oil production somewhere in the 2025-2027 time-frame — a triumph for US diplomacy, the networks are informed. Air Force One wings home through clouds of despair. The White House team members spend the flight updating their resumés.
I think we have witnessed “Joe Biden’s” final appearance at any world-stage event. He can do no more for the Party of Chaos. It has done what it can to wreck the joint with him as the pretend head-of-state. The Ukraine gambit is a bust, a foolish miscalculation that was obvious from the start. All it accomplished was to reveal the pitiful dependence of our European allies on Russian oil and gas, leaving their economies good and truly scuppered without it. The Russians end up with control of the Black Sea and probably the Ukraine bread-basket as well. So, now, Europe will starve and freeze.
Did they really want to commit suicide like that? Do the populations of Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the rest just aim to roll into oblivion? Probably not. Rather, we are entering the season of upended governments. The Schwabenklausian stooges implanted everywhere will be overthrown, NATO and the Euro Union will dissolve in impotent ignominy, and the various countries involved will have to renegotiate their destinies, forgoing US advice and coercion. They might even become adversaries of the USA, not allies. Did you forget we fought two wars against Germany not so long ago? And all those countries have been fighting each other since the Bronze Age, too.
History never stops reminding us what a prankster it is. A strange and terrible inversion has occurred in this Fourth Turning. Somehow, Mr. Putin’s Russia is left to represent what remains of international rule-of-law while the western democracies sink deeper into a morass of deranged despotism. Anyway, they are too busy conducting war against their own people to even pretend to assist their Ukrainian proxies. “Joe Biden” crammed nearly $60-billion into the Ukraine money laundering machine since February, which will just spew hallucinated capital back out into increasingly disordered financial markets. Look: the indexes are up world-wide this morning. Why? Because global business is so good? I don’t think so.
Moving toward autumn, what we have to look forward to is the blatant desperation of the claque behind “Joe Biden.” Their propaganda machine is going all-out on climate change and renewed Covid hysteria. There are always heat-waves in midsummer. CNN acts shocked that it’s over 100-degrees in Texas. Really? Never seen that before? Meanwhile, behind the news about emerging Omicron sub-variants, the vaccine injuries and deaths mount and the CDC pretends not to notice. They are just lying as usual. You’re used to it. You pretend it’s to be expected. You’ve forgotten that it wasn’t always so. Soon, it will matter.
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400075.php
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-last-days-of-joe-biden/
The Last Days of “Joe Biden”
Whose idea was it to send the wind-up doll president called “Joe Biden” to Saudi Arabia…?
Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page
And thanks to all my Patrons for your support
It’s like our country is trapped on one of those swirling carnival rides beloved of the county fairs… only, the felonious mutt who runs the ride has nodded off in a fentanyl delirium with the motor running at maximum speed… and the children-of-all-ages locked in the pods of this infernal machine shriek and vomit with each sickening rotation… as the half-century-old swing arms groan and wobble from metal fatigue on their squealing pivots… and suddenly comes a deafening crunch of gnashed gears, the smell of burning oil, and the pathetic whimpering of the nearly dead.
That’s us. Some terrible midsummer accident-of-state has befallen the USA Carnival, and most are too dazed to know it. Whose idea was it to send the wind-up doll president called “Joe Biden” to Saudi Arabia? I can just imagine what went on in the chamber in private with “JB” and MBS (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman), virtual autocrat of the oil-soaked desert land. The American visitor muttered something about wanting an ice-cream cone before dropping into a catatonic thousand-yard stare.
“How does this thing work?” MBS asks his chief vizier, the foreign minister (in Arabic, of course), gesticulating disdainfully at the ghostly figure sunk in the plush camel-hair armchair yards away. “Joe Biden” sits motionless. Someone has forgotten to rewind him, some “aide” who carries the president’s Adderall. Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud tells the boss, “We’ll make up some camel-dung for release to CNN and friends. They’ll fall for anything.”
It’s like a crime scene where the forensic experts have entered. The Saudi leader and his entourage only hang around the room for three minutes until the US State Department shoots enough photos to prove that “JB” was there and not stuffed in the basement of his Delaware beach house for the weekend, as usual. The American news media gets briefed: Saudi Arabia graciously agrees to bump up its oil production somewhere in the 2025-2027 time-frame — a triumph for US diplomacy, the networks are informed. Air Force One wings home through clouds of despair. The White House team members spend the flight updating their resumés.
I think we have witnessed “Joe Biden’s” final appearance at any world-stage event. He can do no more for the Party of Chaos. It has done what it can to wreck the joint with him as the pretend head-of-state. The Ukraine gambit is a bust, a foolish miscalculation that was obvious from the start. All it accomplished was to reveal the pitiful dependence of our European allies on Russian oil and gas, leaving their economies good and truly scuppered without it. The Russians end up with control of the Black Sea and probably the Ukraine bread-basket as well. So, now, Europe will starve and freeze.
Did they really want to commit suicide like that? Do the populations of Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the rest just aim to roll into oblivion? Probably not. Rather, we are entering the season of upended governments. The Schwabenklausian stooges implanted everywhere will be overthrown, NATO and the Euro Union will dissolve in impotent ignominy, and the various countries involved will have to renegotiate their destinies, forgoing US advice and coercion. They might even become adversaries of the USA, not allies. Did you forget we fought two wars against Germany not so long ago? And all those countries have been fighting each other since the Bronze Age, too.
History never stops reminding us what a prankster it is. A strange and terrible inversion has occurred in this Fourth Turning. Somehow, Mr. Putin’s Russia is left to represent what remains of international rule-of-law while the western democracies sink deeper into a morass of deranged despotism. Anyway, they are too busy conducting war against their own people to even pretend to assist their Ukrainian proxies. “Joe Biden” crammed nearly $60-billion into the Ukraine money laundering machine since February, which will just spew hallucinated capital back out into increasingly disordered financial markets. Look: the indexes are up world-wide this morning. Why? Because global business is so good? I don’t think so.
Moving toward autumn, what we have to look forward to is the blatant desperation of the claque behind “Joe Biden.” Their propaganda machine is going all-out on climate change and renewed Covid hysteria. There are always heat-waves in midsummer. CNN acts shocked that it’s over 100-degrees in Texas. Really? Never seen that before? Meanwhile, behind the news about emerging Omicron sub-variants, the vaccine injuries and deaths mount and the CDC pretends not to notice. They are just lying as usual. You’re used to it. You pretend it’s to be expected. You’ve forgotten that it wasn’t always so. Soon, it will matter.
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/kissinger-warns-biden-against-endless-confrontation-with-china/ar-AAZL2VS
I like listening to his opinions
but I don't know enough to agree or disagree
though the general principal here is sound
-
Right or wrong, he always sounds important.
-
“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”
— Henry Kissinger
-
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/07/18/reading-the-runes-of-war/
-
I remember reading several years ago in Investor Business Daily that Kissinger was profiting quite heavily from advising the Chinese.
-
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/rivals-within-reason?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=Rivals%20Within%20Reason?&utm_content=20220722&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week%20-%20112017
-
https://lawliberty.org/two-kinds-of-detente/?fbclid=IwAR3k_Snh-FV9FFPusEefcFhHw0DRGmtJJFFe38jRSxfASUz55KaCEEZncHE
-
https://lawliberty.org/two-kinds-of-detente/?fbclid=IwAR3k_Snh-FV9FFPusEefcFhHw0DRGmtJJFFe38jRSxfASUz55KaCEEZncHE
The America that did great things no longer exists.
-
https://lawliberty.org/two-kinds-of-detente/?fbclid=IwAR3k_Snh-FV9FFPusEefcFhHw0DRGmtJJFFe38jRSxfASUz55KaCEEZncHE
The America that did great things no longer exists.
This is the average "american" now:
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/111/852/204/playable/b988b46ee2eaae99.mp4
-
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-wrecking-crew-will-be-overcome/
CLUSTERFUCK NATION – BLOGJuly 25, 2022
The Wrecking Crew Will Be Overcome
In keeping with the principles of mass formation psychosis, the maliciously insane people in charge of national affairs will expect you to swallow ever-greater absurdities to maintain their control (and protect themselves).
Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page
And thanks to all my Patrons for your support
We stumble into the horse latitudes of summer feeling trapped in the stillness. The heat disorders minds — and these are minds already scrambled by official propaganda. We are this close to a general recognition that the Covid vaccines were a deadly scam, even while Rochelle Walensky of the CDC keeps pushing boosters on TV and the entire public health bureaucracy stands by silently behind this murderous fakery. When their trials finally come, will they plead that they just didn’t know? How is that possible? (It’s not.)
The crisis of the vaccinated is coming and there won’t be any hiding it. Anyway, nobody expects actual news reporting out of the legacy media. It will get around through the alt.media for sure, and already is, but the real spread will proceed when all the everyday people see themselves and those around them get sick, and realize they have one thing in common: those vaxxes they submitted to. It’s already happening.
In keeping with the principles of mass formation psychosis, the maliciously insane people in charge of our nation’s affairs will expect you to swallow ever-greater absurdities to maintain their control (and protect themselves). But we’re way beyond the “women-with-penises” stage of the mind-fuckery program. Nobody with a functioning brain believes that bullshit anymore — except the people who run the California prison system. Next up, apparently, is a hot little war with Russia or China, a useful distraction from the systematic self-dismantling of Western Civ.
“Joe Biden” has sent troops from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to Europe, supposedly to “train” the NATO forces of Euroland. Is this some kind of bluff? Or does “Joe Biden” and Company imagine that they’ll pull off some blitzkrieg counter-offensive on-the-ground in Ukraine and recapture territory secured by Russia painfully since February? If we send troops into Ukraine proper, it would amount to a deliberate sacrifice of our supposedly best soldiers in a meat-grinder. Maybe the purpose is simply to further weaken the US military, humiliate NATO, and hasten the death of the West.
Of course, we have no real strategic national interest in Ukraine. We had no quarrel all the years that the Russian Soviets owned and operated it. We set in motion the current conflict by cooking up the 2014 color revolution. (There followed the fat years for Hunter Biden converting US aid money into revenue for his many shell corporations.) I doubt that a plurality of Americans will fall for another such stupid Hate Russia ploy. We’ve had enough pointless and costly foreign misadventures. This would be a war exceeding the unpopularity of Vietnam and could easily unleash widespread street protests. Only this time the Left will be pro-war and the Party of Chaos will send out its ragtag army of Antifa trannies to make the street protests bloodier. It will be seen for what it is: the ruling regime’s war on its own people. And it will be overcome.
Vying in the absurdity Olympics, the World Health Organization (WHO) just declared Monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) — but only after the outfit’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, overruled a WHO committee that voted against such a move. Monkeypox, you understand, is a disease spread almost exclusively among the gay population, that is, men having sex with men, exchanging bodily fluids. Outbreaks have been keyed to gay orgies, especially during the recent June “Pride Month” festivities. Do you think it might be more appropriate for the WHO to issue an advisory against gay orgies?
But, really, it’s just another obvious power-grab, an attempt by the Schwabenklausian maniacs to push people around and wreck the economy in order to Build Back Better — that is, to orchestrate a program of severe digital social control for managing its depopulation event. The US Department of Defense (DOD) is now authorized under the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to administer a mandatory vaccine program, while the CDC has bought millions of doses of supposed monkeypox vaccine.
Knowing how deadly the Covid vaxxes were, do you really think that masses of Americans who happen to not engage in gay sex might line-up willingly for these new shots? I kind of doubt it. The idiotic war provocations, the renewed climate hysteria, and dishonest health scares are devices for postponing, cancelling, or screwing around with the US midterm election. If the Left loses the US Congress, then the globalists will lose their main weapon: the Party of Chaos. Meanwhile, Euroland leaders are already falling and whole governments over there will crash and burn in the months to come.
All of this is happening against the background of a wobbling financial system that is making life unaffordable for what’s left of the middle-classes. One way or another, they will be sharply motivated to rescue their own livelihoods and recreate a country under real rule-of-law in the service of liberty. We await “Joe Biden” and Company’s most desperate move: to turn off the Internet so that Americans won’t be able to communicate easily or remain informed about anything. Of course, if they try that, they’ll also destroy everything that is managed automatically by computers in this land and plunge America into battle against the demented bureaucracy that rules us.
-
A new Western global strategy is taking shape. Its development was evident during President Biden’s tour in the Middle East—specifically at the July 14 online summit with the quadrilateral I2U2 Group: Israel’s Prime Minister Yair Lapid and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (the I’s) and the United Arab Emirates’ president Mohamed bin Zayed and Mr. Biden (the U’s).
I2U2 launched in October 2021 to promote cooperation on economic and technological issues. A joint declaration shortly before the July virtual summit promised “to harness the vibrancy of our societies and entrepreneurial spirit . . . with a particular focus on joint investments and new initiatives in water, energy, transportation, space, health and food security.”
Yet geopolitics loom behind economics. Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, compared I2U2 to the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the embryonic Indo-Pacific alliance of the U.S., Japan, Australia and India. Indian and Emirati media routinely refer to I2U2 as the “Western Quad.” U.S., Indian and Emirati media all see it as an extension of the 2019 Abraham Accords, which outline both economic and military cooperation. Even in purely economic matters, the “security” angle is apparent: I2U2 repeatedly mentions “energy security” and “food security.”
The longer view is even more pertinent. Beyond I2U2, the Quad and the Abraham Accords, one must consider many analogous developments: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization re-energized by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and about to expand to include long-neutral Finland and Sweden; a semiformal Eastern Mediterranean security alliance bringing together France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Israel and Egypt; the Negev Summit architecture that provides for tight security cooperation between Morocco, Egypt, Israel, the U.A.E. and Bahrain; the reinvigoration of an Anglo-Pacific defense community Australia, the U.S. and the U.K., or Aukus; the upgrading of the U.S.-Taiwan relationship; the rise of Japanese and South Korean military efforts and cooperation despite an acrimonious history.
A U.S.-supported arc of strategic cooperation now stretches from Western to Eastern Eurasia, as a defensive oceanic “Rimland” against the hostile continental powers of Eurasia—China and Russia. Such an approach has a historical pedigree in the grand strategies of Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947) and Nicholas John Spykman (1893-1943), which underpinned British, American and global Western defense policies during World War I, World War II and the Cold War.
Mackinder, a British geographer, famously suggested in a 1904 paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” that world geopolitics was leading to a clash between continental empires based in Eurasia (which he called “the World-Island”) and maritime powers located in non-Eurasian islands, archipelagoes or smaller continents. He elaborated on these intuitions in his 1919 book, “Democratic Ideals and Reality.” Primarily concerned by the rise of Russia under the czars and then the Bolsheviks, he also pointed to a potential German-Russian condominium.
Spykman, a Dutch-born American professor of international relations at Yale, warned in the early 1940s against isolationism and then, after Pearl Harbor, against the long-term viability of the war alliance with the Soviet Union. His books, “America’s Strategy in World Politics” (1942) and “The Geography of the Peace” (1943), helped shape the Cold War doctrine of containment, which remained in force until 1989.
The difference between Mackinder and Spykman lies with the Rimland, the sea-accessible periphery of Eurasia. “Who rules the World Island rules the World,” Mackinder asserted. The strategic priority is thus to prevent the emergence of a single dominant power in continental Eurasia. Such a power, should it materialize, would be close to world domination, no matter what.
Spykman took the opposite view: “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia.” Continental empires, including the Soviet Union or an alliance between Moscow and Beijing, can be checked by an American-controlled crescent spreading from the European coast (Western and Mediterranean Europe) through the Middle East (the Arab-Turkish-Persian world) to the monsoon lands (South and East Asia).
Spykman’s grand strategy proved highly effective, and highly compatible with such additional strategic dimensions as nuclear deterrence or access to oil, even if it was subject to revision time and again. It initially translated into four regional alliances, complemented by bilateral U.S. alliances or agreements with Spain, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan and South Korea.
Among the regional alliances, only NATO was so successful as to continue in operation and be enlarged after the Cold War’s denouement. The Central Treaty Organization—formed in 1955 by the U.K., Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey—never took off. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization—also established in 1955, and including the U.S., U.K., Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand—faltered in 1975. Anzus—the alliance between Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.—is technically still in force despite differences between Wellington and Washington, but it may be supplanted by Aukus.
In the Middle East, plans for a strong postwar Anglo-Arab or American-Arab partnership were thwarted by a succession of pro-Soviet Nasserist and Baathist revolutions from 1952 to 1970. Non-Arab and pro-Western Iran then succumbed to a fanatical anti-Western revolution in 1979. On the other hand, Israel, which American strategists originally saw as an encumbrance, was reappraised as a valuable strategic player after the 1956 and 1967 wars, and finally recognized as the most reliable regional ally. The apparently vulnerable conservative Arab regimes of Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the Gulf states endured as Western allies, and so did Egypt once it rejected the Soviet embrace under Anwar Sadat. A different but more reliable Middle Eastern Rimland took shape. Non-Arab, Europeanized and secularized Turkey, a member of both NATO and Cento, was an essential Rimland partner throughout the Cold War.
In the Far East, the initial Rimland strategy targeted a Soviet-Chinese communist empire that briefly existed until the Korean War but gave way in the 1960s to a fierce “communist civil war.” Unfortunately, the U.S. failed for too long to perceive the Soviet-Chinese rift’s implications and was accordingly drawn into the Vietnam quagmire. It took Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to approach China and turn it into a partner, thus ending the Soviet bid to rule the “World Island.”
The emerging 21st-century Rimland strategy raises several questions. First, is the present continental Eurasian menace real? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. China and Russia are both major military powers, nuclear and conventional. Both are authoritarian, hypernationalist, revisionist imperial states, bent on destroying the Western-centered world order. Both suppress domestic ethnic, religious and political dissent. Both are planning and training for regional confrontations with neighboring countries and ultimately a global confrontation with the West. Both have already engaged in unilateral military interventions abroad (including in the South China Sea, Syria and Ukraine). Both have heavily invested in soft power to anesthetize world opinion, in the tradition of Sun Tzu, the Okhrana and the KGB, and both largely succeeded until the past few years.
The 21st-century Beijing-Moscow axis has already proved more durable and internally reliable than its 20th-century forerunner. The two nations have closely cooperated over the past quarter-century, either within such partnerships as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or through bilateral agreements.
Even more worrisome is the present Eurasian axis’ power base. The Soviet-Chinese partnership in the 1950s could boast of its massive area (two thirds of the Eurasian landmass) and population (more than one billion, or 40% of the world) and its natural resources. But the Soviet economy and technology lagged behind the West’s in every field except weaponry and space. China was an underdeveloped country. Today, China is close to economic and technological parity with the global West (which includes Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) and could plausibly replace America as the world’s economic epicenter in a generation.
The second question is whether Mackinder’s and Spykman’s insistence on geographic constraints and Spykman’s more focused insistence on the Rimland are still valid in the age of planes, satellites and internet. The Chinese certainly think so, as evidenced by their Belt and Road Initiative, which would open up all of Eurasia to commercial and military circulation and bring the Eurasian coastlines into the sphere of the inland empires.
The third question is whether all potential Rimland partners fully agree on a coordinated containment strategy against China and Russia. That is so far unresolved. Europe may be more wary of Russia than of China, whereas the contrary might be true in South Asia and the Indo-Pacific region. Some Western strategists think it would be a Vietnam-style blunder not to attempt to decouple Russia, the weaker Eurasian partner, from China. And some countries that formally belong to the Rimland alliances are tempted to stay neutral in the new Cold War: Turkey, still a NATO member but also a nationalist-Islamist regime since 2002, joined a July 22 strategic Russia-Iran summit in Tehran intended as a response to Mr. Biden’s tour.
The fourth and final question is whether the new Rimland strategy is a conscious one. Did Western leaders decide at some point to revive Mackinder and Spykman, or is the present strategic turn a cumulative result of multiple ad hoc initiatives?
The available evidence—books, op-eds, reports—suggests that scholars have rediscovered the classic Anglo-American geopolitists since the early 2000s in the context of increasing Chinese and Russian aggressiveness but failed to elaborate it fully until recently. At the government level, the Trump administration laid the foundations of a new containment strategy once it overcame its early neo-isolationist temptation, and the Biden administration was wise enough to keep up the momentum. What is still lacking is the equivalent of George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram” of 1946 and the Truman Doctrine of 1947, which turned Spykman’s insights into policies.
Mr. Gurfinkiel, a French author, is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and a contributing editor of the New York Sun.
-
instead we need to focus where the real threat is to us:
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/josh-hawley-nato-china/2022/08/01/id/1081254/
-
I support and applaud Biden for approving the hit on the al Qaida leader, as I did for Obama with regard to bin Laden.
Too bad we don't all agree on more things.
-
I support and applaud Biden for approving the hit on the al Qaida leader, as I did for Obama with regard to bin Laden.
Too bad we don't all agree on more things.
I'm pretty sure this is the 3rd time we've killed him. Maybe he'll stay dead now.
At least our very professional intelligence professionals wouldn't lie to us.
-
I support and applaud Biden for approving the hit on the al Qaida leader, as I did for Obama with regard to bin Laden.
Too bad we don't all agree on more things.
I'm pretty sure this is the 3rd time we've killed him. Maybe he'll stay dead now.
At least our very professional intelligence professionals wouldn't lie to us.
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/02/joe-biden-delivers-a-jumbled-word-salad-after-claiming-under-extremely-suspect-circumstances-the-u-s-killed-ayman-al-zawahiri/
-
I meant to say, if true, I support the action.
-
GF is a very shrewd man, but don't know if he is addressing all the variables here.
For example, does America have the bandwidth for this AND China, Iran, North Korea, AQ/ISIS, and Mexico?
And the EU is as big as our economy more or less-- let their blood and treasure be spilt in their defense.
August 5, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
America, War and the Atlantic
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
On Aug. 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. Two days later, Germany declared war on France. The following day, Britain declared war on Germany, and then on Aug. 6, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Russia. Within a week, Britain would declare war on Austria-Hungary.
Germany unified in 1871, and in doing so emerged as an economic powerhouse. It rapidly outstripped France, and by the end of the century it was challenging Britain. With economic growth came power. Germany was aware of the anxiety it was creating in Europe, and it reasonably believed that a simultaneous attack by Britain, France and Russia would crush it. It chose to launch a preemptive war, assuming this would throw them off balance and set the stage for a negotiation guaranteeing Germany’s status. The Austro-Hungarian Empire saw value in its relationship with Germany and opportunities to expand into Russia. The British declared war on Austria-Hungary to give Russia a sense of being part of a powerful coalition and to prevent a Russian truce with Germany.
Which is all to say that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand didn’t trigger the war; the war had been well planned by all the parties over the years. The killing was simply occasion to begin the planned operations. The war was hardwired – like many wars, it was expected to be a short affair. It wasn’t. No one trusted the other enough to make concessions needed to wage peace, and as a result somewhere between 15 million and 20 million people died.
The United States got involved in 1917, after the Russian czar was overthrown. The Americans feared that Russia would abandon the war and that German troops would be massed in the west, with France overrun and Britain facing the German navy. Washington feared that a victorious Germany would come to dominate the Atlantic and threaten the United States. When German U-boats sank the Lusitania, American fears were confirmed. U.S. troops were sent to France, where some 100,000 were killed. The U.S. did not itself win the war, but it prevented the Anglo-French alliance from losing it. Afterward, the U.S. withdrew from Europe, assuming the defeat of Germany had ended the tale.
Of course, European tales do not end so neatly. In the 1930s, Germany rearmed, then conquered France and invaded Russia. The United States followed the World War I strategy, focused on retaining control of the Atlantic. It supplied Britain with the means to wage war in the Atlantic, in return for Britain leasing most of its bases in the Western Hemisphere to the United States and guaranteeing that, in the event of British defeat, the British fleet would sail to North American ports. Washington did not get involved in European operations until 1943, and not in decisive operations until 1944. For the United States, the European peninsula was a means to defend the Atlantic, which could shield it from foreign attacks, not in itself crucial to its national security. About 50 million people died in the war.
This time, the U.S. did not withdraw when the war was over. It saw a threat from Russia forming and, having lost confidence in the ability of the Europeans to defend themselves, saw itself as Europe’s security guarantor, not as an act of chivalry but as a means of maintaining primacy in the Atlantic. Most saw the Cold War as a potential land war against Russia. This misses the strategic point. Europe could not defend itself, and the full force needed to block a Russian attack couldn’t be stationed there. In the event of a Russian attack, the U.S. would send large convoys of men, equipment and supplies, and the convoys would continue to supply NATO forces throughout the war.
The primary Russian strategy would be to destroy or block U.S. shipping across the Atlantic. A submarine force and long-range, supersonic aircraft were deployed to carry out the mission. The U.S. prepared a force of aircraft carriers, anti-submarine systems and anti-air, anti-missile systems to protect the convoys. If the Russians closed the Atlantic, they would win the war. If they did not, they would lose it. The first significant battle would not be in Germany but off the Icelandic coast.
In each of the world wars and then in the Cold War, command of the Atlantic was critical, both to project forces to Europe and to block potential attacks on the American mainland. The fear was that a European power might defeat its enemies and take advantage of European technology and production to create a fleet that could challenge the U.S. in the Atlantic. It seems like a far-fetched threat now, but Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and every president who held office during the Cold War understood that the oceans were American essentials, even in a nuclear war.
The U.S. drew several conclusions from the two world wars. First, Europeans cannot be trusted to create a prudent defense – nor avoid devouring themselves. Second, it learned that in the end, Europe's irresponsibility would force the U.S. to become involved. Third, wars that appear to be short will turn out to be long. Fourth, the possibility of a threat to the Atlantic as a byproduct of continental war is real. Fifth, early intervention in wars will save American lives, while late interventions will cost them. And finally, in all wars there is a threat to the Atlantic and therefore to the homeland.
Once a European power becomes militarily aggressive, it is forced to become even more aggressive after a victory because the next danger is just over the mountain. Ultimately, the U.S. will be forced to be in Europe. Whether leaders see this I don’t know, but if they are acting only by habit in Ukraine, it flows from American grand strategy. Habit is a substitute for strategy when the rules don’t change.
-
Among the lessons:
"early intervention in wars will save American lives, while late interventions will cost them"
Yes. Intervene against evil earlier.
-
Among the lessons:
"early intervention in wars will save American lives, while late interventions will cost them"
Yes. Intervene against evil earlier.
Like the illegitimate government in DC?
-
By Laura Secor
Aug. 12, 2022 1:27 pm ET
At 99 years old, Henry Kissinger has just published his 19th book, “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy.” It is an analysis of the vision and historical achievements of an idiosyncratic pantheon of post-World War II leaders: Konrad Adenauer, Charles DeGaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan-Yew and Margaret Thatcher.
In the 1950s, “before I was involved in politics,” Mr. Kissinger tells me in his midtown Manhattan office on a steamy day in July, “my plan was to write a book about the making of peace and the ending of peace in the 19th century, starting with the Congress of Vienna, and that turned into a book, and then I had about a third of a book written on Bismarck, and it was going to end with the outbreak of World War I.” The new book, he says, “is a kind of continuation. It’s not just a contemporary reflection.”
All six figures profiled in “Leadership,” says the former secretary of state and national security adviser, were shaped by what he calls the “second Thirty Years’ War,” the period from 1914 to 1945, and contributed to molding the world that followed it. And all combined, in Mr. Kissinger’s view, two archetypes of leadership: the farsighted pragmatism of the statesman and the visionary boldness of the prophet.
Asked if he knows of any contemporary leader who shares this combination of qualities, he says, “No. I would make the qualification that, though DeGaulle had this in him, this vision of himself, in the case of Nixon and probably Sadat, or even of Adenauer, you would not have known at an earlier stage. On the other hand, none of these people were essentially tactical people. They mastered the art of tactics, but they had a perception of purpose as they entered office.”
‘I think that the current period has a great trouble defining a direction. It’s very responsive to the emotion of the moment.’
One never goes long in conversation with Mr. Kissinger without hearing that word—purpose—the defining quality of the prophet, along with another, equilibrium, the guiding preoccupation of the statesman. Since the 1950s, when he was a Harvard scholar writing on nuclear strategy, Mr. Kissinger has understood diplomacy as a balancing act among great powers shadowed by the potential for nuclear catastrophe. The apocalyptic potential of modern weapons technology, in his view, makes sustaining an equilibrium of hostile powers, however uneasy it might be, an overriding imperative of international relations.
"In my thinking, equilibrium has two components,” he tells me. “A kind of balance of power, with an acceptance of the legitimacy of sometimes opposing values. Because if you believe that the final outcome of your effort has to be the imposition of your values, then I think equilibrium is not possible. So one level is a sort of absolute equilibrium.” The other level, he says, is “equilibrium of conduct, meaning there are limitations to the exercise of your own capabilities and power in relation to what is needed for the overall equilibrium.” Achieving this combination takes “an almost artistic skill,” he says. “It’s not very often that statesmen have aimed at it deliberately, because power had so many possibilities of being expanded without being disastrous that countries never felt that full obligation.”
Mr. Kissinger concedes that equilibrium, while essential, can’t be a value in itself. “There can be situations where coexistence is morally impossible,” he notes. “For example, with Hitler. With Hitler it was useless to discuss equilibrium—even though I have some sympathy for Chamberlain if he was thinking that he needed to gain time for a showdown that he thought would be inevitable anyway.”
There is a hint, in “Leadership,” of Mr. Kissinger’s hope that contemporary American statesmen might absorb the lessons of their predecessors. “I think that the current period has a great trouble defining a direction,” Mr. Kissinger says. “It’s very responsive to the emotion of the moment.” Americans resist separating the idea of diplomacy from that of “personal relationships with the adversary.” They tend to view negotiations, he tells me, in missionary rather than psychological terms, seeking to convert or condemn their interlocutors rather than to penetrate their thinking.
Mr. Kissinger sees today’s world as verging on a dangerous disequilibrium. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” he says. Could the U.S. manage the two adversaries by triangulating between them, as during the Nixon years? He offers no simple prescription. “You can’t just now say we’re going to split them off and turn them against each other. All you can do is not to accelerate the tensions and to create options, and for that you have to have some purpose.”
On the question of Taiwan, Mr. Kissinger worries that the U.S. and China are maneuvering toward a crisis, and he counsels steadiness on Washington’s part. “The policy that was carried out by both parties has produced and allowed the progress of Taiwan into an autonomous democratic entity and has preserved peace between China and the U.S. for 50 years,” he says. “One should be very careful, therefore, in measures that seem to change the basic structure.”
Mr. Kissinger courted controversy earlier this year by suggesting that incautious policies on the part of the U.S. and NATO may have touched off the crisis in Ukraine. He sees no choice but to take Vladimir Putin’s stated security concerns seriously and believes that it was a mistake for NATO to signal to Ukraine that it might eventually join the alliance: “I thought that Poland—all the traditional Western countries that have been part of Western history—were logical members of NATO,” he says. But Ukraine, in his view, is a collection of territories once appended to Russia, which Russians see as their own, even though “some Ukrainians” do not. Stability would be better served by its acting as a buffer between Russia and the West: “I was in favor of the full independence of Ukraine, but I thought its best role was something like Finland.”
He says, however, that the die has now been cast. After the way Russia has behaved in Ukraine, “now I consider, one way or the other, formally or not, Ukraine has to be treated in the aftermath of this as a member of NATO.” Still, he foresees a settlement that preserves Russia’s gains from its initial incursion in 2014, when it seized Crimea and portions of the Donbas region, though he does not have an answer to the question of how such a settlement would differ from the agreement that failed to stabilize the conflict 8 years ago.
The moral claim posed by Ukraine’s democracy and independence—since 2014, clear majorities have favored EU and NATO membership—and the dire fate of its people under Russian occupation fit awkwardly into Mr. Kissinger’s statecraft. If the avoidance of nuclear war is the greatest good, what is owed to small states whose only role in the global equilibrium is to be acted upon by larger ones?
“How to marry our military capacity to our strategic purposes,” Mr. Kissinger reflects, “and how to relate those to our moral purposes—it’s an unsolved problem.”
Looking back over his long and often controversial career, however, he is not given to self-criticism. Asked if he has regrets from his years in power, he replies, “From a manipulative point of view, I ought to learn a great answer to that question, because it’s always being asked.” But while he might revisit some minor tactical points, on the whole, he says, “I do not torture myself with things we might have done differently.”
Appeared in the August 13, 2022, print edition as 'Henry Kissinger'.
-
I would note the Kissinger has made a ton of money consulting for the Chinese.
I would note that it is CHINA that has changed regarding Taiwan, and that China blew off its written commitments to Hong Kong's separate way.
-
Third
August 16, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
China and Russia’s Strategic Problem
By: George Friedman
The war in Ukraine, now about 6 months old, is strategically important for a variety of reasons. If Russia defeats Ukraine and takes control of the country, its forces will be on the border of Eastern Europe. A Russian presence on Europe’s border would transform the balance of power in the Atlantic, and would thus inevitably compel the U.S. to deploy forces in Europe’s defense.
What Russia's intentions were at the outset of the invasion matters little. Intentions change, and strategy must not be optimistic. So what is at stake in the Ukrainian war is the possible resurrection of the Cold War, with all the attendant risks. From the American point of view, engaging Russia through Ukrainian troops in Ukraine is far less risky than another Cold War.
The Cold War did not result in a full-scale war, only the fear of war. Western fears of Soviet intentions outstripped Soviet capabilities. Their fear, in turn, kept NATO together, much to the chagrin of the leaders in Moscow. Neither of their worst fears came to pass, and therefore the collapse of the Soviet Union had more to do with internal rot than external threat. It is not clear that any future Cold War would play out like the last one, but one thing is likely: Given the existence of nuclear weapons, the front line of a new Cold War would remain static, and the status quo on each side would remain intact so long as neither side fragmented. It would be a costly and dangerous outcome, since history need not repeat itself. But the collapse of Ukraine would pose threats that could be contained, however expensively and dangerously. The global pattern would remain intact.
China’s vulnerabilities, and its attempts to overcome them, are potentially more dangerous. As with Russia, the core issue is geography. For Russia, the problem is that the Ukrainian border is less than 300 miles from Moscow, and Russia has survived multiple invasions only by virtue of Moscow’s distance from invaders – a distance that the collapse of the Soviet Union closed. Russia’s obsession with Ukraine is intended to rectify that problem. China's geographic problem is that it has become an exporting powerhouse, and as such it depends on its access to the Pacific Ocean and adjacent waters. The United States sees free Chinese access to the Pacific as a potential threat to its own strategic depth, something fundamental to the United States since the end of World War II. Chinese access to the Pacific is blocked by a series of island states – Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia, indirectly supported by nearby powers such as Australia, India and Vietnam. Not all of them are American allies, but all have common interests against Chinese naval expansion. China wants to defend its strategic depth by seizing and controlling it. The United States wants to defend its strategic depth by defending it.
The geographic dimension is compounded by an economic dimension. China’s economy depends on exports, and the United States is its largest customer. Beijing also needs continued U.S. investment, as its financial system is under intense pressure.
Russia is attempting to reclaim strategic depth, and it went into it knowing full well the financial consequences it would create. In other words, it put up with financial damage in exchange for strategic security. So far, it has not gained strategic security and has absorbed significant financial damage while meting out some of its own to Europe.
China is searching for a strategic solution while avoiding the economic damage that further expansion would likely invite. Its primary adversary on both fronts would be the United States. So China is probing the U.S., trying to understand its potential responses. The response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit pressed the limits of an invasion of Taiwan. What China learned about the U.S. military is unclear, but it learned that the trigger for American economic actions lies beyond the Chinese demonstration.
America’s goal in Ukraine, then, is to deny Russia the strategic depth it wants in order to limit the Russian threat to Europe. With China, its goal is to retain American strategic depth in order to prevent China from threatening the U.S. or obtaining global reach.
The issues are similar in principle, but the stakes for the United States are not. For Washington, the China question is much more important than the Russia question. A Russian victory in Ukraine would redraw unofficial boundaries and increase risks. A Chinese success would create a more global power that challenges the U.S. and its allies around the world.
The consequences of war are always significant. U.S. involvement adds economic costs to the equation. So far, Russia has absorbed the costs. China may not be able to, considering its economy is currently vulnerable. But nations live on economics and survive on safety. In that sense, it would appear that Russia is less interested in negotiations than China is.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden are scheduled to meet in mid-November, at a conference in Indonesia or in Thailand. If the meeting takes place, it will be the first since their teleconference in May. Only informal and back-channel talks are happening between the U.S. and Russia. China reeds a stable economy now more than it needs command of the seas. Russia seems able to survive what it has been dealt economically, but it has not broken the back of Ukrainian forces. China is nearer an economic crisis than Russia, and is thus unwilling to risk war with the United States. It will speak, if not settle. Russia’s economic and military situation is murky in the long run. The United States is dealing with China and Russia at a fairly low price and can handle both right now. Russia and China must try to raise the cost to the U.S. but can’t afford to raise their own.
It is a dizzying equation but not an uncommon one. China needs to reach an understanding with the United States. Russia does not have that need. The U.S. is flexible.
-
GF is a super smart guy, but in reading the preceding I am left with the sense that he has not engaged with the true underlying issue with China-- that it has taken advantage of America playing "win-win" and by going "zero-sum".
-
August 17, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Scalable World War Ahead
The world has become more complex but no less deadly.
By: Jacek Bartosiak
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan begins a new era of confrontation between the U.S. and China and marks a new stage in the ongoing conflict over Eurasia, this unique landmass where world history takes place and world wars are fought. What distinguishes this episode from previous world wars is that this one is scalable – the existence of thermonuclear weapons greatly raises the stakes of escalation and demands each side to be circumspect before escalating. In a scalable clash, each side tries to force its interests through various domains of contemporary dependencies in a densely globalized world – a world that will be violently split open before our eyes.
Pelosi’s visit accelerates the process of sharp and violent deglobalization – the breaking, for geopolitical reasons, of all financial, trade, information, communication and human connections that resulted from Pax Americana over the past 30 years. It turns out that the great powers do not agree on the principles that define how the world operates and how they cooperate with each other. China, the U.S. and Russia believe the existing global order no longer serves their interests. Only Europe still wants everything to stay the same, naively thinking that the “old” ways will come back. Completely unprepared for the return of geopolitics, Europe is on course to become the subject of the game of the three aforementioned powers – a place of struggle and kinetic wars and not a main actor, with ambitions and strategic initiative.
The Shape of the War to Come
Dangerous times lie ahead. Conflict will be a constant in many domains: trade, technology, finance, raw materials, currency markets, data and internet, and infrastructure. There will be kidnappings and assassinations, information warfare, fighting for oceans and lands, and fighting to control communication nodes, even in outer space. Finally, there will be hot proxy wars, coups, revolutions and government collapses, and probably a direct clash between China and the U.S. in the Western Pacific, or a war in Europe involving some NATO countries and Russia.
The main focus of this global conflict, however, will be the manipulation of strategic flows to influence the opponent’s stability and social contract. Examples include banning the sale to China of Taiwan's microprocessors necessary in a modern economy and, in response, China’s banning of exports of sand to Taiwan necessary for construction; or bans on capital investments in China and, in response, the expropriation of large U.S. companies with production in China.
In addition, there will be sanctions, blockades, embargoes on trade and raw materials, manipulation of energy transmission systems, attacks on infrastructure and military demonstrations intended to disrupt the enemy’s economy. A good example is the effective sea and air quarantine of Taiwan in the course of China’s sea-air exercises, or the unilateral ban on Russian flights over Lithuania or Poland, which may be broken one day if Moscow wants to contest Europe’s ability to limit where its planes fly.
Kinetic War
In this global struggle, a kinetic war between the U.S. and China in the Western Pacific becomes very likely, possibly sooner than later, given the irreconcilable structural differences of interest between the two powers. For a critical imbalance in the world system has already arisen that will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to correct in the foreseeable future without resorting to force, and such an escalation naturally leads to war. The situation around Taiwan in connection with Pelosi’s visit, and before that Russia’s ultimatum toward Ukraine, is clear proof of this.
Fortunately, the existence of thermonuclear weapons lowers the willingness of each side to enter into an uncontrolled conflict without reflection. It forces each side to be selective about what it seeks to obtain through the threat or use of violence, without stupidly starting a thermonuclear war. This makes the coming world war scalable, and this is what sets it apart from previous world wars.
At the start of the hot phase of past system wars, such as the Napoleonic wars or World War I or II, the attacking side immediately sent corps, fleets, infantry divisions, artillery, armored divisions and air assets, all that was necessary to defeat the enemy and conquer the capital by maneuvering to paralyze the decision-making and political system. For then there were no weapons that could destroy entire cities, states and nations. Strategic nuclear weapons obliterate the political goal of war, which is the loser’s submission to the victor’s will. (Tactical nuclear weapons may be a different matter, something we will learn to live with.) Above all, strategic thermonuclear weapons could trigger automatic retaliation.
None of this was present in previous world wars. There was no need to think about calibrated actions and the opponent’s potential responses on the multilevel escalation ladder, because both sides wanted immediately to take a dominant position in the application of violence. This was the way of the German Blitzkrieg, whose initial phenomenal operational efficiency diminished over time, leaving Hitler to look for a variety of Wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) at the end of the war.
This does not mean that nuclear weapons will not be used in the coming war. There are many indications, especially in Russian strategic and military literature, that it is possible to “disenchant” the use of nuclear weapons. However, even then the warring parties will always remember the risk of mutual annihilation, which hampers the decision-making process and emphasizes the management of the escalation ladder. This is already evident in Washington’s dealings with Ukraine and the Americans’ reservations about providing Kyiv with equipment that could be used to attack targets in Russia, which would be a step up the escalation ladder.
The existence of thermonuclear weapons, in other words, means the war must be scalable. Neither side can immediately reach (or threaten to reach) for the highest rung on the escalation ladder.
At the same time, the accumulation of mutual interactions between states is greater today than in the world wars of the past, meaning there are plenty of means of applying pressure. Likewise, there are more cases where violence can be used: destruction of transshipment terminals, attacks on U.S. natural gas terminals and Russian refineries, the kidnapping of decision-makers, destruction of satellites, acts of sabotage to cut off raw materials, and even terrorist attacks. Therefore, there will be more need to inoculate the state against manipulation of strategic flows, and less discussion of the number of soldiers compared with the 20th century. What matters is the military’s capabilities to wage modern war, often remotely, and the state’s resilience.
Europe in Denial
The scalable war has already begun. It is already changing the global system. As in the last world war, new methods and technologies will emerge. Innovation accelerates during war. This is the dark nature of man – militant and competitive. During World War II we saw the first German maneuvering and ballistic missiles. At the end, we saw the first primitive guided missiles, the jet engine, the technological miracle that was the American B-29 strategic bomber, and the Allied computer needed to constantly break the German Enigma. In this war, automation and robotics will certainly develop. Personally, I’m betting that artificial intelligence developed for war and human competition will change our civil lives beyond recognition before the war is over.
In all of this, Europe still refuses to accept that the war is already underway. Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the uproar it caused, and the imminent U.S. congressional elections will lead the U.S. to focus on the Pacific. Therefore, I believe that Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was a mistake, very unfavorable for Poland, because it accelerates the Americans’ perspective of a war on two fronts in Eurasia, which must always be avoided. And it pushes China into helping Russia on the European front, even if this aid is or will be hidden for some time, just as Roosevelt’s decision to help the British was hidden from world opinion, made after the fall of Paris in 1940, and therefore long before America’s open entry into the war.
For Central and Eastern Europe this means being left with Russia, largely alone, with the only outside protection coming from other Europeans who lack significant military capabilities or excessive determination to confront Russia, apart from Finland, Sweden and Britain. As the war for Eurasia will be scalable, the wider European conflict does not have to be the same as with Ukraine. It can involve terrorism, destruction of infrastructure, kidnappings and killings, and destabilization. However, there can also be a full war like in Ukraine, depending on the capabilities of the Russians and the geopolitical situation, as well as on Europe’s own capabilities, resilience and preparations. The Russians will adjust their strategy to this. Russia wants to gain agency in Europe, and it will do this by pushing the Americans out of Europe and weakening Europe’s cohesion as part of the trans-Atlantic world.
What is happening in the Pacific is therefore of paramount importance for Europe. The world system has become unstable. A new equilibrium will arise after the war that seems inevitable today. Somewhat comfortingly, it seems to be a scalable war. In Poland’s case, located at the junction of the World Ocean and the Continent, it can be anything, including terrorist attacks, manipulating the supply of raw materials (which may end in rationing and the destruction of the Polish economy and competitiveness), kidnappings, destroying infrastructure and even conventional war – even with the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
The world has become more complex but no less deadly.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK2_IicRzX0
-
As always, GF is very bright and insightful, but I think the MY theory of things gets closer to what is coming down the pike at us:
==========================
August 23, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Permanence of War and Peace
By: George Friedman
Last week my friend and colleague, Jacek Bartosiak, wrote a piece for GPF titled “The Scalable World War Ahead,” in which he warned that the world is descending into the abyss of near-global war. The most important argument he made was that there was a new dynamic in the world in which wars will grow as a cancer, with cells dividing until the world is fully consumed.
I disagree with what I will call the theory of war as metastasis generally, and particularly in our time. Wars occur between nation-states, rising from the particular interests of each nation-state. In general, wars originate from fear or greed. A nation calculates that the threat from another nation is best met by preemptive action. This occurs in the particular circumstance in which a nation fears what another nation will become, and risks war on the assumption that going to war will prevent the rise of another nation. The fear could be of the not-yet-harnessed power of the opponent or the possibility of the power of an ally. War can also arise from greed, or the desire to acquire something of strategic value from another nation – in which case the calculation of power assigns a probability of success on the nation initiating the war.
The decision to go to war is initiated by one party that tends to want to avoid an expansion of the war, or will at least wait until the first war is settled before expanding the war and increasing the chance of failure. The defending country tends to seek allies, if the attacker’s calculation of relative power is correct. The cost of alliance is normally high, and the desire to intervene exists only under particular circumstances. Cascading wars are thus possible but not likely. In this sense, most wars are self-limiting.
In retrospect, World War II appears to be a cascading war, but it was so only in a limited sense. There were two separate wars, one in the Pacific and one in Europe. The former did not cascade. The participants at the beginning defined the war until its end. In Europe, the war was really two wars, both involving Germany. One was Germany against the Anglo-French alliance, the other against the Soviet alliance. Neither the Pacific nor the European war metastasized far beyond the core powers.
The Cold War pitted NATO against the Warsaw Pact, and it had a distinctly nuclear flavor. The Cold War in Europe never turned into war because nuclear weapons increased the potential cost of war enormously. The war did spread to parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but these were non-critical conflicts for both sides.
One of the limiters of war involving major powers is the fact that most have nuclear weapons. A war between China and the United States would be possible only if one side were confident it could neutralize the other’s weapons. Absent that, the danger would be in winning the war. In extremis, where the nation’s fundamental interests were threatened by conventional forces, the nation might choose a nuclear option. The potential winner would have to assume that a nuclear response is possible, and would have to calculate whether the potential risks of victory would be worth the prize. Pre-nuclear limits on cascading wars would have a nuclear response added to the equation. Notably, the notion of tactical nuclear weapons creates the illusion of utility. The most widely available tactical nuclear weapons have a lethality of a large fraction of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima. There are smaller ones, but they are either so small as to not justify their use relative to conventional weapons or sufficiently devastating to make a large city uninhabitable.
War is possible between nuclear powers when at least one is acting through proxies able to carry the battle. Vietnam is a classic example. North Vietnam and the United States clashed with each other, with China and the Soviet Union providing logistical support. The U.S. never seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons in the confrontation. Nor did Israel in 1973 when it was attacked by Egypt. The Cuban missile crisis never really came close to nuclear exchange, as the release of papers and tapes by both sides shows. In Ukraine, Russia has threatened a nuclear strike. However, as in Vietnam, one side is conducting direct warfare, while the other is acting by proxy. Nothing is significant enough on either side to risk a nuclear exchange.
The situation between China and the United States is similarly limited. Neither nation has any interest worth a nuclear exchange, and neither side is certain what the other might do if facing an extreme risk of defeat. We have seen endless maneuvering and rhetoric from both sides, but at the moment the uncertainties involved in risking a conventional war are intact. Neither side is confident enough in its position in initiating combat, and neither is certain whether nuclear weapons might be used if it were winning a conventional war. Being almost certain is not the basis for rising national annihilation.
From my point of view, we see in Ukraine a classic uncertainty on both sides as the war progresses. In the Western Pacific, we have had many years of saber-rattling but little action. China is in the throes of a financial crisis that cannot be solved by engaging its largest customer and major investor in war. The U.S. has no desire to change the status quo.
There are, my mind, too many obstacles to a cascading war. The closest to a cascading war we have seen was World War II, but even then the participants were fairly stable after the war started. In the Cold War, the center never destabilized, the smaller skirmishes elsewhere notwithstanding. Cascading wars may happen over decades and with intervening political agreements. There will always be wars, and some will be terrible. But there are too many breakers to allow for cascades
-
GF also said Russia wouldn't go into Ukraine, right?
As always, GF is very bright and insightful, but I think the MY theory of things gets closer to what is coming down the pike at us:
==========================
August 23, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Permanence of War and Peace
By: George Friedman
Last week my friend and colleague, Jacek Bartosiak, wrote a piece for GPF titled “The Scalable World War Ahead,” in which he warned that the world is descending into the abyss of near-global war. The most important argument he made was that there was a new dynamic in the world in which wars will grow as a cancer, with cells dividing until the world is fully consumed.
I disagree with what I will call the theory of war as metastasis generally, and particularly in our time. Wars occur between nation-states, rising from the particular interests of each nation-state. In general, wars originate from fear or greed. A nation calculates that the threat from another nation is best met by preemptive action. This occurs in the particular circumstance in which a nation fears what another nation will become, and risks war on the assumption that going to war will prevent the rise of another nation. The fear could be of the not-yet-harnessed power of the opponent or the possibility of the power of an ally. War can also arise from greed, or the desire to acquire something of strategic value from another nation – in which case the calculation of power assigns a probability of success on the nation initiating the war.
The decision to go to war is initiated by one party that tends to want to avoid an expansion of the war, or will at least wait until the first war is settled before expanding the war and increasing the chance of failure. The defending country tends to seek allies, if the attacker’s calculation of relative power is correct. The cost of alliance is normally high, and the desire to intervene exists only under particular circumstances. Cascading wars are thus possible but not likely. In this sense, most wars are self-limiting.
In retrospect, World War II appears to be a cascading war, but it was so only in a limited sense. There were two separate wars, one in the Pacific and one in Europe. The former did not cascade. The participants at the beginning defined the war until its end. In Europe, the war was really two wars, both involving Germany. One was Germany against the Anglo-French alliance, the other against the Soviet alliance. Neither the Pacific nor the European war metastasized far beyond the core powers.
The Cold War pitted NATO against the Warsaw Pact, and it had a distinctly nuclear flavor. The Cold War in Europe never turned into war because nuclear weapons increased the potential cost of war enormously. The war did spread to parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but these were non-critical conflicts for both sides.
One of the limiters of war involving major powers is the fact that most have nuclear weapons. A war between China and the United States would be possible only if one side were confident it could neutralize the other’s weapons. Absent that, the danger would be in winning the war. In extremis, where the nation’s fundamental interests were threatened by conventional forces, the nation might choose a nuclear option. The potential winner would have to assume that a nuclear response is possible, and would have to calculate whether the potential risks of victory would be worth the prize. Pre-nuclear limits on cascading wars would have a nuclear response added to the equation. Notably, the notion of tactical nuclear weapons creates the illusion of utility. The most widely available tactical nuclear weapons have a lethality of a large fraction of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima. There are smaller ones, but they are either so small as to not justify their use relative to conventional weapons or sufficiently devastating to make a large city uninhabitable.
War is possible between nuclear powers when at least one is acting through proxies able to carry the battle. Vietnam is a classic example. North Vietnam and the United States clashed with each other, with China and the Soviet Union providing logistical support. The U.S. never seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons in the confrontation. Nor did Israel in 1973 when it was attacked by Egypt. The Cuban missile crisis never really came close to nuclear exchange, as the release of papers and tapes by both sides shows. In Ukraine, Russia has threatened a nuclear strike. However, as in Vietnam, one side is conducting direct warfare, while the other is acting by proxy. Nothing is significant enough on either side to risk a nuclear exchange.
The situation between China and the United States is similarly limited. Neither nation has any interest worth a nuclear exchange, and neither side is certain what the other might do if facing an extreme risk of defeat. We have seen endless maneuvering and rhetoric from both sides, but at the moment the uncertainties involved in risking a conventional war are intact. Neither side is confident enough in its position in initiating combat, and neither is certain whether nuclear weapons might be used if it were winning a conventional war. Being almost certain is not the basis for rising national annihilation.
From my point of view, we see in Ukraine a classic uncertainty on both sides as the war progresses. In the Western Pacific, we have had many years of saber-rattling but little action. China is in the throes of a financial crisis that cannot be solved by engaging its largest customer and major investor in war. The U.S. has no desire to change the status quo.
There are, my mind, too many obstacles to a cascading war. The closest to a cascading war we have seen was World War II, but even then the participants were fairly stable after the war started. In the Cold War, the center never destabilized, the smaller skirmishes elsewhere notwithstanding. Cascading wars may happen over decades and with intervening political agreements. There will always be wars, and some will be terrible. But there are too many breakers to allow for cascades
-
https://plus2.credit-suisse.com/shorturlpdf.html?v=5amR-YP34-V&t=-1e4y7st99l5d0a0be21hgr5ht
Hat tip to YA
Forgive me the vanity, but I would note the not insignificant overlap with some of the points I have been making , , ,
-
Some of the snark here is well wide of the mark, but there is a lot that pithily presents important questions:
========================
SEPTEMBER 15, 2022
Russia’s Underperforming Military (and Our Own)
BY ANDREW BACEVICH
In Washington, wide agreement exists that the Russian army’s performance in the Kremlin’s ongoing Ukraine “special military operation” ranks somewhere between lousy and truly abysmal. The question is: Why? The answer in American policy circles, both civilian and military, appears all but self-evident. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has stubbornly insisted on ignoring the principles, practices, and methods identified as necessary for success in war and perfected in this century by the armed forces of the United States. Put simply, by refusing to do things the American way, the Russians are failing badly against a far weaker foe.
Granted, American analysts — especially the retired military officers who opine on national news shows — concede that other factors have contributed to Russia’s sorry predicament. Yes, heroic Ukrainian resistance, reminiscent of the Winter War of 1939-1940 when Finland tenaciously defended itself against the Soviet Union’s more powerful military, caught the Russians by surprise. Expectations that Ukrainians would stand by while the invaders swept across their country proved wildly misplaced. In addition, comprehensive economic sanctions imposed by the West in response to the invasion have complicated the Russian war effort. By no means least of all, the flood of modern weaponry provided by the United States and its allies — God bless the military-industrial-congressional complex — have appreciably enhanced Ukrainian fighting power.
Still, in the view of American military figures, all of those factors take a backseat to Russia’s manifest inability (or refusal) to grasp the basic prerequisites of modern warfare. The fact that Western observers possess a limited understanding of how that country’s military leadership functions makes it all the easier to render such definitive judgments. It’s like speculating about Donald Trump’s innermost convictions. Since nobody really knows, any forcefully expressed opinion acquires at least passing credibility.
The prevailing self-referential American explanation for Russian military ineptitude emphasizes at least four key points:
* First, the Russians don’t understand jointness, the military doctrine that provides for the seamless integration of ground, air, and maritime operations, not only on Planet Earth but in cyberspace and outer space;
* Second, Russia’s land forces haven’t adhered to the principles of combined arms warfare, first perfected by the Germans in World War II, that emphasizes the close tactical collaboration of tanks, infantry, and artillery;
* Third, Russia’s longstanding tradition of top-down leadership inhibits flexibility at the front, leaving junior officers and noncommissioned officers to relay orders from on high without demonstrating any capacity to, or instinct for, exercising initiative on their own;
* Finally, the Russians appear to lack even the most rudimentary understanding of battlefield logistics — the mechanisms that provide a steady and reliable supply of the fuel, food, munitions, medical support, and spare parts needed to sustain a campaign.
Implicit in this critique, voiced by self-proclaimed American experts, is the suggestion that, if the Russian army had paid more attention to how U.S. forces deal with such matters, they would have fared better in Ukraine. That they don’t — and perhaps can’t — comes as good news for Russia’s enemies, of course. By implication, Russian military ineptitude obliquely affirms the military mastery of the United States. We define the standard of excellence to which others can only aspire.
Reducing War to a Formula
All of which begs a larger question the national security establishment remains steadfastly oblivious to: If jointness, combined arms tactics, flexible leadership, and responsive logistics hold the keys to victory, why haven’t American forces — supposedly possessing such qualities in abundance — been able to win their own equivalents of the Ukraine War? After all, Russia has only been stuck in Ukraine for six months, while the U.S. was stuck in Afghanistan for 20 years and still has troops in Iraq almost two decades after its disastrous invasion of that country.
To rephrase the question: Why does explaining the Russian underperformance in Ukraine attract so much smug commentary here, while American military underperformance gets written off?
Perhaps written off is too harsh. After all, when the U.S. military fails to meet expectations, there are always some who will hasten to point the finger at civilian leaders for screwing up. Certainly, this was the case with the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Critics were quick to pin the blame on President Biden for that debacle, while the commanders who had presided over the war there for those 20 years escaped largely unscathed. Indeed, some of those former commanders like retired general and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, aka “King David,” were eagerly sought after by the media as Kabul fell.
So, if the U.S. military performance since the Global War on Terror was launched more than two decades ago rates as, to put it politely, a disappointment — and that would be my view — it might be tempting to lay responsibility at the feet of the four presidents, eight secretaries of defense (including two former four-star generals), and the various deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, and ambassadors who designed and implemented American policy in those years. In essence, this becomes an argument for sustained generational incompetence.
There’s a flipside to that argument, however. It would tag the parade of generals who presided over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and lesser conflicts like those in Libya, Somalia, and Syria) as uniformly not up to the job — another argument for generational incompetence. Members of the once-dominant Petraeus fan club might cite him as a notable exception. Yet, with the passage of time, King David’s achievements as general-in-chief first in Baghdad and then in Kabul have lost much of their luster. The late “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf and General Tommy Franks, their own “victories” diminished by subsequent events, might sympathize.
Allow me to suggest another explanation, however, for the performance gap that afflicts the twenty-first-century U.S. military establishment. The real problem hasn’t been arrogant, ill-informed civilians or generals who lack the right stuff or suffer from bad luck. It’s the way Americans, especially those wielding influence in national security circles, including journalists, think tankers, lobbyists, corporate officials in the military-industrial complex, and members of Congress, have come to think of war as an attractive, affordable means of solving problems.
Military theorists have long emphasized that by its very nature, war is fluid, elusive, capricious, and permeated with chance and uncertainty. Practitioners tend to respond by suggesting that, though true, such descriptions are not helpful. They prefer to conceive of war as essentially knowable, predictable, and eminently useful — the Swiss Army knife of international politics.
Hence, the tendency, among both civilian and military officials in Washington, not to mention journalists and policy intellectuals, to reduce war to a phrase or formula (or better yet to a set of acronyms), so that the entire subject can be summarized in a slick 30-minute slide presentation. That urge to simplify — to boil things down to their essence — is anything but incidental. In Washington, the avoidance of complexity and ambiguity facilitates marketing (that is, shaking down Congress for money).
To cite one small example of this, consider a recent military document entitled
“Army Readiness and Modernization in 2022,” produced by propagandists at the Association of the United States Army, purports to describe where the U.S. Army is headed. It identifies “eight cross-functional teams” meant to focus on “six priorities.” If properly resourced and vigorously pursued, these teams and priorities will ensure, it claims, that “the army maintains all-domain overmatch against all adversaries in future fights.”
Set aside the uncomfortable fact that, when it counted last year in Kabul, American forces demonstrated anything but all-domain overmatch. Still, what the Army’s leadership aims to do between now and 2035 is create “a transformed multi-domain army” by fielding a plethora of new systems, described in a blizzard of acronyms: ERCA, PrSM, LRHW, OMVF, MPF, RCV, AMPV, FVL, FLRAA, FARA, BLADE, CROWS, MMHEL, and so on, more or less ad infinitum.
Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Army’s plan, or rather vision, for its future avoids the slightest mention of costs. Nor does it consider potential complications — adversaries equipped with nuclear weapons, for example — that might interfere with its aspirations to all-domain overmatch.
Yet the document deserves our attention as an exquisite example of Pentagon-think. It provides the Army’s preferred answer to a question of nearly existential importance — not “How can the Army help keep Americans safe?” but “How can the Army maintain, and ideally increase, its budget?”
Hidden inside that question is an implicit assumption that sustaining even the pretense of keeping Americans safe requires a military of global reach that maintains a massive global presence. Given the spectacular findings of the James Webb Telescope, perhaps galactic will one day replace global in the Pentagon’s lexicon. In the meantime, while maintaining perhaps 750 military bases on every continent except Antarctica, that military rejects out of hand the proposition that defending Americans where they live — that is, within the boundaries of the 50 states comprising the United States — can suffice to define its overarching purpose.
And here we arrive at the crux of the matter: militarized globalism, the Pentagon’s preferred paradigm for basic policy, has become increasingly unaffordable. With the passage of time, it’s also become beside the point. Americans simply don’t have the wallet to satisfy budgetary claims concocted in the Pentagon, especially those that ignore the most elemental concerns we face, including disease, drought, fire, floods, and sea-level rise, not to mention averting the potential collapse of our constitutional order. All-domain overmatch is of doubtful relevance to such threats.
To provide for the safety and well-being of our republic, we don’t need further enhancements to jointness, combined arms tactics, flexible leadership, and responsive logistics. Instead, we need an entirely different approach to national security.
Come Home, America, Before It’s Too Late
Given the precarious state of American democracy, aptly described by President Biden in his recent address in Philadelphia, our most pressing priority is repairing the damage to our domestic political fabric, not engaging in another round of “great power competition” dreamed up by fevered minds in Washington. Put simply, the Constitution is more important than the fate of Taiwan.
I apologize: I know that I have blasphemed. But the times suggest that we weigh the pros and cons of blasphemy. With serious people publicly warning about the possible approach of civil war and many of our far-too-well armed fellow citizens welcoming the prospect, perhaps the moment has come to reconsider the taken-for-granted premises that have sustained U.S. national security policy since the immediate aftermath of World War II.
More blasphemy! Did I just advocate a policy of isolationism?
Heaven forfend! What I would settle for instead is a modicum of modesty and prudence, along with a lively respect for (rather than infatuation with) war.
Here is the unacknowledged bind in which the Pentagon has placed itself — and the rest of us: by gearing up to fight (however ineffectively) anywhere against any foe in any kind of conflict, it finds itself prepared to fight nowhere in particular. Hence, the urge to extemporize on the fly, as has been the pattern in every conflict of ours since the Vietnam War. On occasion, things work out, as in the long-forgotten, essentially meaningless 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. More often than not, however, they don’t, no matter how vigorously our generals and our troops apply the principles of jointness, combined arms, leadership, and logistics.
Americans spend a lot of time these days trying to figure out what makes Vladimir Putin tick. I don’t pretend to know, nor do I really much care. I would say this, however: Putin’s plunge into Ukraine confirms that he learned nothing from the folly of post-9/11 U.S. military policy.
Will we, in our turn, learn anything from Putin’s folly? Don’t count on it.
This column is distributed by TomDispatch.
Andrew Bacevich is the author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, which has just been published by Random House.
-
Out-Competing China and Constraining Russia
The PRC and Russia are increasingly aligned with each other but the challenges they pose are, in important ways, distinct. We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the PRC while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia.
China
The PRC is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it. Beijing has ambitions to create an enhanced sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power. It is using its technological capacity and increasing influence over international institutions to create more permissive conditions for its own authoritarian model, and to mold global technology use and norms to privilege its interests and values. Beijing frequently uses its economic power to coerce countries. It benefits from the openness of the international economy while limiting access to its domestic market, and it seeks to make the world more dependent on the PRC while reducing its own dependence on the world. The PRC is
NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY 23
also investing in a military that is rapidly modernizing, increasingly capable in the Indo-Pacific, and growing in strength and reach globally – all while seeking to erode U.S. alliances in the region and around the world.
At the same time, the PRC is also central to the global economy and has a significant impact on shared challenges, particularly climate change and global public health. It is possible for the United States and the PRC to coexist peacefully, and share in and contribute to human progress together.
Our strategy toward the PRC is threefold: 1) to invest in the foundations of our strength at home – our competitiveness, our innovation, our resilience, our democracy, 2) to align our efforts with our network of allies and partners, acting with common purpose and in common cause, and 3) compete responsibly with the PRC to defend our interests and build our vision for the future. The first two elements— invest and align— are described in the previous section and are essential to out- competing the PRC in the technological, economic, political, military, intelligence, and global governance domains.
Competition with the PRC is most pronounced in the Indo-Pacific, but it is also increasingly global. Around the world, the contest to write the rules of the road and shape the relationships that govern global affairs is playing out in every region and across economics, technology, diplomacy, development, security, and global governance.
In the competition with the PRC, as in other arenas, it is clear that the next ten years will be the decisive decade. We stand now at the inflection point, where the choices we make and the priorities we pursue today will set us on a course that determines our competitive position long into the future.
Many of our allies and partners, especially in the Indo-Pacific, stand on the frontlines of the PRC’s coercion and are rightly determined to seek to ensure their own autonomy, security, and prosperity. We will support their ability to make sovereign decisions in line with their interests and values, free from external pressure, and work to provide high-standard and scaled investment, development assistance, and markets. Our strategy will require us to partner with, support, and meet the economic and development needs of partner countries, not for the sake of competition, but for their own sake. We will act in common purpose to address a range of issues – from untrusted digital infrastructure and forced labor in supply chains and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. We will hold Beijing accountable for abuses – genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, human rights violations in Tibet, and the dismantling of Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms – even as it seeks to pressure countries and communities into silence. We will continue prioritizing investments in a combat credible military that deters aggression against our allies and partners in the region, and can help those allies and partners defend themselves.
We have an abiding interest in maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, which is critical to regional and global security and prosperity and a matter of international concern and attention. We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side, and do not support Taiwan independence. We remain committed to our one China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances. And we will uphold our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act to support Taiwan’s self-defense and to maintain our capacity to resist any resort to force or coercion against Taiwan.
page24image251533456
24 NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY
Though allies and partners may have distinct perspectives on the PRC, our diplomatic approach, and the PRC’s own behavior, has produced significant and growing opportunities to align approaches and deliver results. Across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, countries are clear-eyed about the nature of the challenges that the PRC poses. Governments want sustainable public finances. Workers want to be treated with dignity and respect. Innovators want to be rewarded for their ingenuity, risk-taking, and persistent efforts. And enterprising businesses want open and free waters through which their products can be traded.
While we compete vigorously, we will manage the competition responsibly. We will seek greater strategic stability through measures that reduce the risk of unintended military escalation, enhance crisis communications, build mutual transparency, and ultimately engage Beijing on more formal arms control efforts. We will always be willing to work with the PRC where our interests align. We can’t let the disagreements that divide us stop us from moving forward on the priorities that demand that we work together, for the good of our people and for the good of the world. That includes on climate, pandemic threats, nonproliferation, countering illicit and illegal narcotics, the global food crisis, and macroeconomic issues. In short, we’ll engage constructively with the PRC wherever we can, not as a favor to us or anyone else, and never in exchange for walking away from our principles, but because working together to solve great challenges is what the world expects from great powers, and because it’s directly in our interest. No country should withhold progress on existential transnational issues like the climate crisis because of bilateral differences.
While we have profound differences with the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Government, those differences are between governments and systems – not between our people. Ties of family and friendship continue to connect the American and the Chinese people. We deeply respect their achievements, their history, and their culture. Racism and hate have no place in a nation built by generations of immigrants to fulfill the promise of opportunity for all. And we intend to work together to solve issues that matter most to the people of both countries.
Russia
Over the past decade, the Russian government has chosen to pursue an imperialist foreign policy with the goal of overturning key elements of the international order. This culminated in a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in an attempt to topple its government and bring it under Russian control. But, this attack did not come out of the blue; it was preceded by Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, its military intervention in Syria, its longstanding efforts to destabilize its neighbors using intelligence and cyber capabilities, and its blatant attempts to undermine internal democratic processes in countries across Europe, Central Asia, and around the world. Russia has also interfered brazenly in U.S. politics and worked to sow divisions among the American people. And Russia’s destabilizing actions are not limited to the international arena. Domestically, the Russian government under President Putin violates its citizens’ human rights, suppresses its opposition, and shutters independent media. Russia now has a stagnant political system that is unresponsive to the needs of its people.
The United States, under successive administrations, made considerable efforts at multiple points to reach out to Russia to limit our rivalry and identify pragmatic areas of cooperation. President Putin spurned these efforts and it is now clear he will not change. Russia now poses an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and stability. This is not about a struggle between the West and Russia. It is about the fundamental principles of the UN Charter, which
NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY 25
Russia is a party to, particularly respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the prohibition
against acquiring territory through war.
We are leading a united, principled, and resolute response to Russia’s invasion and we have rallied the world to support the Ukrainian people as they bravely defend their country. Working with a broad and durable international coalition, we have marshalled near-record levels of security assistance to ensure Ukraine has the means to defend itself. We have provided humanitarian, economic and development assistance to strengthen Ukraine’s sovereign, elected government and help the millions of refugees who have been forced to flee their homes. We will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine as they fight back against Russia’s naked aggression. And we will rally the world to hold Russia accountable for the atrocities they have unleashed across Ukraine.
Alongside our allies and partners, America is helping to make Russia’s war on Ukraine a strategic failure. Across Europe, NATO and the European Union are united in standing up to Russia and defending shared values. We are constraining Russia’s strategic economic sectors, including defense and aerospace, and we will continue to counter Russia’s attempts to weaken and destabilize sovereign nations and undermine multilateral institutions. Together with our NATO Allies, we are strengthening our defense and deterrence, particularly on the eastern flank of the Alliance. Welcoming Finland and Sweden to NATO will further improve our security and capabilities. And we are renewing our focus on bolstering our collective resilience against shared threats from Russia, including asymmetric threats. More broadly, Putin’s war has profoundly diminished Russia’s status vis-a-vis China and other Asian powers such as India and Japan. Moscow’s soft power and diplomatic influence have waned, while its efforts to weaponize energy have backfired. The historic global response to Russia’s war against Ukraine sends a resounding message that countries cannot enjoy the benefits of global integration while trampling on the core tenets of the UN Charter.
While some aspects of our approach will depend on the trajectory of the war in Ukraine, a number of elements are already clear. First, the United States will continue to support Ukraine in its fight for its freedom, we will help Ukraine recover economically, and we will encourage its regional integration with the European Union. Second, the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory and will continue to build and deepen a coalition with allies and partners to prevent Russia from causing further harm to European security, democracy, and institutions. Third, the United States will deter and, as necessary, respond to Russian actions that threaten core U.S. interests, including Russian attacks on our infrastructure and our democracy. Fourth, Russia’s conventional military will have been weakened, which will likely increase Moscow’s reliance on nuclear weapons in its military planning. The United States will not allow Russia, or any power, to achieve its objectives through using, or threatening to use, nuclear weapons. America retains an interest in preserving strategic stability and developing a more expansive, transparent, and verifiable arms control infrastructure to succeed New START and in rebuilding European security arrangements which, due to Russia’s actions, have fallen in to disrepair. Finally, the United States will sustain and develop pragmatic modes of interaction to handle issues on which dealing with Russia can be mutually beneficial.
The United States respects the Russian people and their contributions to science, culture and constructive bilateral relations over many decades. Notwithstanding the Russian government’s strategic miscalculation in attacking Ukraine, it is the Russian people who will determine Russia’s future as a major power capable of once more playing a constructive role in
26 NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY
international affairs. The United States will welcome such a future, and in the meantime, will
continue to push back against the aggression perpetrated by the Russian government.
Cooperating on Shared Challenges
The United States must maintain and increase international cooperation on shared challenges even in an age of greater inter-state competition. In an ideal world, governments would compete responsibly where their interests diverge and cooperate where they converge—but things have not always worked out this way in practice. The United States, for example, has made clear that we will not support the linkage of issues in a way that conditions cooperation on shared challenges, but some in Beijing have been equally clear that the PRC should expect concessions on unrelated issues as a prerequisite to cooperation on shared challenges, such as climate change. We have also seen how the PRC chose not to cooperate adequately with the World Health Organization and the international community on the global response to COVID-19, including on the investigation into its origins. It also continues to endanger the world with inadequate action on climate change domestically, particularly regarding massive coal power use and build up.
Our strategy to tackle the shared challenges that require global cooperation involves two simultaneous tracks: on one track, we will fully engage all countries and institutions to cooperate on shared threats, including by pressing for reforms where institutional responses have proven inadequate. At the same time, we will also redouble our efforts to deepen our cooperation with like-minded partners. Across both tracks, we will also seek to harness the positive effects of competition, promoting a race to the top, to increase international efforts on these challenges.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sentences%20October%2012&utm_term=Sentences
=========================================
ET
‘The Post-Cold War Era Is Over’: White House National Security Advisor
By Andrew Thornebrooke October 12, 2022 Updated: October 12, 2022biggersmaller Print
0:00
3:33
1
The international order has entered a new epoch and the United States will need to vigorously defend its way of life from encroaching authoritarianism from China and Russia, according to a senior U.S. official.
How the United States acts over the course of the next decade will make or break its efforts to preserve a liberal international order against the autocratic advances of China’s communist regime, said White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan.
“We’re in the early years of a decisive decade,” Sullivan said at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington.
“The terms of our competition with the People’s Republic of China will be set. The window of opportunity to deal with shared challenges like climate change will narrow drastically even as the intensity of those challenges grows.”
Sullivan delivered the remarks hours after the unveiling of the Biden administration’s national security strategy, which designated communist China as the greatest challenge facing the United States.
“The PRC’s assertiveness at home and abroad is advancing an illiberal vision across economic, political, security, and technological realms in competition with the west,” Sullivan said, using the acronym for the regime’s official name.
“It is the only competitor with the intent to reshape the international order and the growing capacity to do it.”
Sullivan said that the world had left the post-Cold War era, often associated with the rise of globalization, international cooperation, and a general lack of military conflict between great powers.
Now, he said, a new era of geopolitical competition has arisen, tied closely to the push by China and Russia towards a multipolar world order. In this burgeoning era, autocratic nations would seek to rewrite the rules of the international system according to their whims, he said.
“The world’s major autocracies believe that the democratic world is in decline,” Sullivan said.
“They seek to advance a very different vision, where might makes right and technological and economic coercion squeezes anyone who steps out of line.”
To that end, Sullivan said that the authoritarian philosophies of Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin contained a “fundamental fragility” that could be overcome by a united “free, open, and prosperous international order.”
“Even if our democratic allies and partners don’t agree on everything, they are aligned with us,” Sullivan said. “And so are many countries that do not embrace democratic institutions but nevertheless depend upon and help sustain a rules-based international system.”
“They don’t want to see it vanish, and they know that we are the world’s best bet to defend it.”
Whether the United States succeeded or failed in defending that international order, Sullivan said, would determine whether the nations of the world could effectively remain free or even work with one another on transnational issues like disease and climate change.
“The stakes could not be higher,” Sullivan said. “The actions we take now will shape whether this decisive decade is an age of conflict and discord or the beginning of a more prosperous and stable future.”
“The post-Cold War era is over,” he added.
-
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/10/misguided-foreign-policies-against-russia-and-others-damage-the-us-and-its-allies.html
-
"the Nazi-controlled Kiev regime"
Seriously?
-
"the Nazi-controlled Kiev regime"
Seriously?
It's an interesting question.
https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/it-was-all-a-lie/
But the remaining fighters inside the plant were a mixed group — Ukrainian soldiers, marines, military police, and members of the country’s National Guard, as well as members of the nationalist Azov Battalion, he explained. The Azov Battalion has its roots in Ukraine’s undeniably Nazi sector, although in recent years, we’ve been told, its members have focused their attention on fighting Russians.
Although the Russians have been losing most of the little territory they’ve gained in Ukraine, they’ve managed to destroy Mariupol. Last weekend, the Russians and the Ukrainians negotiated the surrender of the fighters left in the Azovstal plant, Mr. Smukler said. The Ukrainians, in the understanding that they’d swap their captured Russian prisoners for the Russians’ captured Ukrainians, told the besieged fighters to surrender.
They did. But Putin lied.
They were arrested.
Then they were told to strip to their underwear, and it turns out that the Azov Battalion members are covered in tattoos. Terrible tattoos. Nazi tattoos. They have swastikas, symbols of various SS battalions, and portraits of Stefan Bandera, the World War II Ukrainian leader and Nazi collaborator, and of Hitler inked on their bodies. “One or two of them had slogans from the death camps — Arbeit macht frei” — Work will make you free, from the gate leading to Auschwitz, and “Jedem das Seine,” more or less “To each what he is due,” from Buchenwald, tattooed on their bodies, Mr. Smukler said. The slogans were in their original German, to make their provenance and point as clear as possible. “Other tattoos were quotes from Mein Kampf,” he added.
-
Thank you for that article.
That said, the phrase I contested in the prior article you posted was that the central government was Nazi controlled. With Zelensky being Jewish, this does trigger substantial cognitive dissonance. :-D
-
Thank you for that article.
That said, the phrase I contested in the prior article you posted was that the central government was Nazi controlled. With Zelensky being Jewish, this does trigger substantial cognitive dissonance. :-D
And the funder/founder of the Azovs being Jewish and currently living in Israel. Unless the tats I have seen in photos are ALL skilled Russian photoshops (In this world of cheap and easy deepfake technology, what can we really trust?) I don't know how to explain the abundance of Nazi symbolism with UKR forces and the Jewish leadership.
Fcuking strange.
-
Good point about strong photoshop motive and capability here.
-
Good point about strong photoshop motive and capability here.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fe_XMRdWYAAg0dj?format=jpg&name=900x900
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fe_XMRdWYAAg0dj?format=jpg&name=900x900)
Funny how this has all been memory-holed for some reason.
-
We won't have to memory hole it here since there is no mention in 20 long internet pages of any Nazi connection with Ukraine in the last 70 years.
First mention here was March 2022 after the war was well underway and after Russian war propaganda was well underway:
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1751.msg143535#msg143535
The report shows one helmet with an unidentified model wearing it, shown on German TV picked up by NBC who never has been duped. (sarc.)
-
We won't have to memory hole it here since there is no mention in 20 long internet pages of any Nazi connection with Ukraine in the last 70 years.
First mention here was March 2022 after the war was well underway and after Russian war propaganda was well underway:
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1751.msg143535#msg143535
The report shows one helmet with an unidentified model wearing it, shown on German TV picked up by NBC who never has been duped. (sarc.)
Doug, do you know why most outlaw bikers wear nazi regalia/have nazi tats?
-
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/26/robert-parry-the-mess-that-nuland-made/
-
October 18, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
Still a Unipolar World
By: George Friedman
In recent weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the United States is trying to impose a new world order, one designed to control Russia, China and Europe, as well as the lesser powers of the world. It’s tempting to write it off as the ranting of a leader at war, but there’s more to it than that. Ignore the fact that Washington’s seeking a unipolar world assumes a level of planning that runs counter to the American reality. What Putin is trying to come to terms with is that in planning for war in Ukraine, Moscow completely misunderstood the nature of the world.
Specifically, Russia misunderstood American subtlety. The United States did not commit major military force to block Russia’s advance, nor did it cede any part of Ukraine. The United States understood the threat posed by Russia on the border with NATO – that is, a new Cold War – and it understood Ukraine better than Russia did. So it sent massive amounts of weapons to Ukraine, the power and sophistication of which could not be matched. It struck blow after indirect blow.
Moscow also failed to understand America’s relationship with Europe. Time and again, Europeans bemoaned that Washington had abandoned its European commitments. That that was never the case didn’t stop U.S. think tanks from validating the idea, nor did it dissuade Russia from believing it. In times of peace, the U.S. could do without the prior relationship with Europe, bickering over trade rules and Russian energy dependence. But when the war broke out, the relationship rapidly transformed. Germany, for example, did not value Russian fuel as much as it valued American security guarantees. The Europeans knew that Russia could hurt them, and they did not really trust the Russians, but when push came to shove, they knew American interests lay in Europe. Putin, I think, was stunned when he learned the Germans stood with the Americans. He lacked a sophisticated understanding that there are different types of power and that the power projected by Russia was too blunt to work. Putin could not understand the power of appearing uncertain.
Still, the worst mistake Putin made concerns the U.S. relationship with China, a country in deep economic crisis. Moscow could neither hurt nor help China. The U.S. can do both – help by increasing investment and buying more goods, and hurt by blocking the sale of, say, certain microchips. China believed it did not need the United States to recover, and it convinced itself that Washington could be intimidated by naval and related power. Instead, Beijing discovered that its threats around Taiwan and other areas simply generated more vessels and weapons to be deployed against it. The utility of an alliance with Russia was shattered by the realization that the U.S. could respond militarily in Ukraine and, simultaneously, in the South China Sea.
All of this should have been obvious, and I think China was more aware of U.S. capabilities than Russia was. Chinese President Xi Jinping knew when to cut his losses. Putin kept doubling down. This seemed to be validated over the weekend by a spokesman for the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, whose statements were paraphrased by China's Global Times newspaper as follows:
“If one of the most important events in international relations in the past 50 years is the restoration and development of China-U.S. relations, which has benefited both countries and the world, then the most important thing in international relations for the next 50 years is that China and the U.S. must find the right way to get along with each other. The key for China and the U.S. to find the right way to get on with each other is mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation proposed by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Common interests between China and the U.S. far outweigh differences, and a sound and stable China-U.S. relationship serves the common interests of the two peoples.”
We are used to China hurling threats at the United States. Now, it is searching for ways to accommodate the U.S. It has noted the American performance in Ukraine, both subtle and brutal, and has decided that an alliance with the U.S., however loosely defined or temporary, is far more attractive.
It’s no surprise, then, that Putin sees the U.S. as a force trying to create a unipolar world, because in some notable ways, it is a unipolar world. The U.S. is the largest economy in the world, its current problems notwithstanding. It also has a sophisticated military, able to bring overwhelming force to bear, train an army at war in new weapons, and use subtle force to shape the world. American power isn’t absolute, and it can be outstripped. But it is sufficiently mobile to act sequentially when simultaneous action is impossible. Put simply, the United States is the most powerful economic and military force in the world – when it chooses to act. Inaction can be confused by men like Putin as weakness. The U.S. has learned that with its inherent power it has time to react.
The American public often sees the United States as weak and mismanaged. There’s a tendency to label Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as criminals or morons or both. The same charges were levied against Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Contempt for the commanders-in-chief is a prerequisite, to prevent tyranny, even if it has its drawbacks. The America First movement opposing U.S. participation in World War II interfered with Roosevelt’s ability to make decisions. It had a direct impact on Pearl Harbor and caused a painful initiation for the U.S. into war by the Japanese, which of course ended in catastrophe for them.
The perception of American weakness is a global one, shared even among Americans. Being underestimated has its uses, as does sporting a public that doesn’t trust its president. But only enormously powerful nations can afford the contempt. The past few months haven’t taught us that the United States is finagling a new world order. It’s taught us that Russia is weakening, that China is managing its relationship with the U.S. carefully, and that the international architecture created after World War II, though more complex, essentially remains in place. It is a unipolar world.
-
Delusional.
The GAE is collapsing from within.
October 18, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
Still a Unipolar World
By: George Friedman
In recent weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the United States is trying to impose a new world order, one designed to control Russia, China and Europe, as well as the lesser powers of the world. It’s tempting to write it off as the ranting of a leader at war, but there’s more to it than that. Ignore the fact that Washington’s seeking a unipolar world assumes a level of planning that runs counter to the American reality. What Putin is trying to come to terms with is that in planning for war in Ukraine, Moscow completely misunderstood the nature of the world.
Specifically, Russia misunderstood American subtlety. The United States did not commit major military force to block Russia’s advance, nor did it cede any part of Ukraine. The United States understood the threat posed by Russia on the border with NATO – that is, a new Cold War – and it understood Ukraine better than Russia did. So it sent massive amounts of weapons to Ukraine, the power and sophistication of which could not be matched. It struck blow after indirect blow.
Moscow also failed to understand America’s relationship with Europe. Time and again, Europeans bemoaned that Washington had abandoned its European commitments. That that was never the case didn’t stop U.S. think tanks from validating the idea, nor did it dissuade Russia from believing it. In times of peace, the U.S. could do without the prior relationship with Europe, bickering over trade rules and Russian energy dependence. But when the war broke out, the relationship rapidly transformed. Germany, for example, did not value Russian fuel as much as it valued American security guarantees. The Europeans knew that Russia could hurt them, and they did not really trust the Russians, but when push came to shove, they knew American interests lay in Europe. Putin, I think, was stunned when he learned the Germans stood with the Americans. He lacked a sophisticated understanding that there are different types of power and that the power projected by Russia was too blunt to work. Putin could not understand the power of appearing uncertain.
Still, the worst mistake Putin made concerns the U.S. relationship with China, a country in deep economic crisis. Moscow could neither hurt nor help China. The U.S. can do both – help by increasing investment and buying more goods, and hurt by blocking the sale of, say, certain microchips. China believed it did not need the United States to recover, and it convinced itself that Washington could be intimidated by naval and related power. Instead, Beijing discovered that its threats around Taiwan and other areas simply generated more vessels and weapons to be deployed against it. The utility of an alliance with Russia was shattered by the realization that the U.S. could respond militarily in Ukraine and, simultaneously, in the South China Sea.
All of this should have been obvious, and I think China was more aware of U.S. capabilities than Russia was. Chinese President Xi Jinping knew when to cut his losses. Putin kept doubling down. This seemed to be validated over the weekend by a spokesman for the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, whose statements were paraphrased by China's Global Times newspaper as follows:
“If one of the most important events in international relations in the past 50 years is the restoration and development of China-U.S. relations, which has benefited both countries and the world, then the most important thing in international relations for the next 50 years is that China and the U.S. must find the right way to get along with each other. The key for China and the U.S. to find the right way to get on with each other is mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation proposed by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Common interests between China and the U.S. far outweigh differences, and a sound and stable China-U.S. relationship serves the common interests of the two peoples.”
We are used to China hurling threats at the United States. Now, it is searching for ways to accommodate the U.S. It has noted the American performance in Ukraine, both subtle and brutal, and has decided that an alliance with the U.S., however loosely defined or temporary, is far more attractive.
It’s no surprise, then, that Putin sees the U.S. as a force trying to create a unipolar world, because in some notable ways, it is a unipolar world. The U.S. is the largest economy in the world, its current problems notwithstanding. It also has a sophisticated military, able to bring overwhelming force to bear, train an army at war in new weapons, and use subtle force to shape the world. American power isn’t absolute, and it can be outstripped. But it is sufficiently mobile to act sequentially when simultaneous action is impossible. Put simply, the United States is the most powerful economic and military force in the world – when it chooses to act. Inaction can be confused by men like Putin as weakness. The U.S. has learned that with its inherent power it has time to react.
The American public often sees the United States as weak and mismanaged. There’s a tendency to label Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as criminals or morons or both. The same charges were levied against Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Contempt for the commanders-in-chief is a prerequisite, to prevent tyranny, even if it has its drawbacks. The America First movement opposing U.S. participation in World War II interfered with Roosevelt’s ability to make decisions. It had a direct impact on Pearl Harbor and caused a painful initiation for the U.S. into war by the Japanese, which of course ended in catastrophe for them.
The perception of American weakness is a global one, shared even among Americans. Being underestimated has its uses, as does sporting a public that doesn’t trust its president. But only enormously powerful nations can afford the contempt. The past few months haven’t taught us that the United States is finagling a new world order. It’s taught us that Russia is weakening, that China is managing its relationship with the U.S. carefully, and that the international architecture created after World War II, though more complex, essentially remains in place. It is a unipolar world.
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/10/18/massive-clusterfook-americas-electric-grid/#more-282364
Our cities are disgusting, dangerous shitholes and our infrastructure is collapsing around us.
But we're doing awesome!
Delusional.
The GAE is collapsing from within.
October 18, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
Still a Unipolar World
By: George Friedman
In recent weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the United States is trying to impose a new world order, one designed to control Russia, China and Europe, as well as the lesser powers of the world. It’s tempting to write it off as the ranting of a leader at war, but there’s more to it than that. Ignore the fact that Washington’s seeking a unipolar world assumes a level of planning that runs counter to the American reality. What Putin is trying to come to terms with is that in planning for war in Ukraine, Moscow completely misunderstood the nature of the world.
Specifically, Russia misunderstood American subtlety. The United States did not commit major military force to block Russia’s advance, nor did it cede any part of Ukraine. The United States understood the threat posed by Russia on the border with NATO – that is, a new Cold War – and it understood Ukraine better than Russia did. So it sent massive amounts of weapons to Ukraine, the power and sophistication of which could not be matched. It struck blow after indirect blow.
Moscow also failed to understand America’s relationship with Europe. Time and again, Europeans bemoaned that Washington had abandoned its European commitments. That that was never the case didn’t stop U.S. think tanks from validating the idea, nor did it dissuade Russia from believing it. In times of peace, the U.S. could do without the prior relationship with Europe, bickering over trade rules and Russian energy dependence. But when the war broke out, the relationship rapidly transformed. Germany, for example, did not value Russian fuel as much as it valued American security guarantees. The Europeans knew that Russia could hurt them, and they did not really trust the Russians, but when push came to shove, they knew American interests lay in Europe. Putin, I think, was stunned when he learned the Germans stood with the Americans. He lacked a sophisticated understanding that there are different types of power and that the power projected by Russia was too blunt to work. Putin could not understand the power of appearing uncertain.
Still, the worst mistake Putin made concerns the U.S. relationship with China, a country in deep economic crisis. Moscow could neither hurt nor help China. The U.S. can do both – help by increasing investment and buying more goods, and hurt by blocking the sale of, say, certain microchips. China believed it did not need the United States to recover, and it convinced itself that Washington could be intimidated by naval and related power. Instead, Beijing discovered that its threats around Taiwan and other areas simply generated more vessels and weapons to be deployed against it. The utility of an alliance with Russia was shattered by the realization that the U.S. could respond militarily in Ukraine and, simultaneously, in the South China Sea.
All of this should have been obvious, and I think China was more aware of U.S. capabilities than Russia was. Chinese President Xi Jinping knew when to cut his losses. Putin kept doubling down. This seemed to be validated over the weekend by a spokesman for the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, whose statements were paraphrased by China's Global Times newspaper as follows:
“If one of the most important events in international relations in the past 50 years is the restoration and development of China-U.S. relations, which has benefited both countries and the world, then the most important thing in international relations for the next 50 years is that China and the U.S. must find the right way to get along with each other. The key for China and the U.S. to find the right way to get on with each other is mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation proposed by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Common interests between China and the U.S. far outweigh differences, and a sound and stable China-U.S. relationship serves the common interests of the two peoples.”
We are used to China hurling threats at the United States. Now, it is searching for ways to accommodate the U.S. It has noted the American performance in Ukraine, both subtle and brutal, and has decided that an alliance with the U.S., however loosely defined or temporary, is far more attractive.
It’s no surprise, then, that Putin sees the U.S. as a force trying to create a unipolar world, because in some notable ways, it is a unipolar world. The U.S. is the largest economy in the world, its current problems notwithstanding. It also has a sophisticated military, able to bring overwhelming force to bear, train an army at war in new weapons, and use subtle force to shape the world. American power isn’t absolute, and it can be outstripped. But it is sufficiently mobile to act sequentially when simultaneous action is impossible. Put simply, the United States is the most powerful economic and military force in the world – when it chooses to act. Inaction can be confused by men like Putin as weakness. The U.S. has learned that with its inherent power it has time to react.
The American public often sees the United States as weak and mismanaged. There’s a tendency to label Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as criminals or morons or both. The same charges were levied against Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Contempt for the commanders-in-chief is a prerequisite, to prevent tyranny, even if it has its drawbacks. The America First movement opposing U.S. participation in World War II interfered with Roosevelt’s ability to make decisions. It had a direct impact on Pearl Harbor and caused a painful initiation for the U.S. into war by the Japanese, which of course ended in catastrophe for them.
The perception of American weakness is a global one, shared even among Americans. Being underestimated has its uses, as does sporting a public that doesn’t trust its president. But only enormously powerful nations can afford the contempt. The past few months haven’t taught us that the United States is finagling a new world order. It’s taught us that Russia is weakening, that China is managing its relationship with the U.S. carefully, and that the international architecture created after World War II, though more complex, essentially remains in place. It is a unipolar world.
-
That would be better on the WW3 and/or Electricity threads.
-
To Change the World, China Must Change
The economic world war is heating up, and both top contenders are in disarray.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
Over the past month, I have spoken at several conferences about the challenges that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent economic war pose for the global economy and the Black Sea region, the area where I live. At each event, the audience set the debate topics. In Washington, the main topics were Black Sea shipping, the region’s economic dependencies on Russia, European energy security and the likely European response to another economic crisis. The focus in Europe was slightly different. For instance, at the Clube de Lisboa (Club of Lisbon) – which gathered speakers from Europe, the U.S., Asia and Africa – discussions about the war in Ukraine were global in scope.
However, a common theme at every event was China – the challenges it faces, and what they mean for the world. The most urgent question was about the possibility of a Sino-Russian alliance against the West. The more interesting questions concerned this week’s National Congress and Beijing’s future economic model, which will determine its relationship with the West and Russia. The fact that China’s problems are significantly shaping the global economy is not new; in fact, I previously listed it among the world’s major challenges in the coming months. But the model’s continued ability to promote prosperity and internal stability, as well as how it is perceived in the rest of the world, are critical questions that will affect the whole world.
The Making and Breaking of a Global Order
China is under pressure not only because of its dependencies on the United States but also because of changes in its relationship with developing countries. Emerging economies in Africa and South Asia are no longer looking for help from more developed countries like China, the U.S. and others. Instead, they are biding their time and watching the global economic war evolve to ensure they do not overcommit to the losing side and make the best choice for their nations. For them, Washington’s recently passed CHIPS and Science Act – intended to preserve U.S. technological leadership, including by restricting exports to China – is a reminder that conflict between the West and the East involves more than just Russia.
The first skirmishes in the economic world war started years ago as a U.S.-Chinese trade war. The two countries’ mutual dependencies had created socio-economic problems for both. Protectionism gained favor in both countries. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent supply chain crisis made these problems much worse. This year, the relationship broke beyond repair – or so it seems now.
The current struggle is not between two states but between two governing systems. Both originate in 1944, near the end of World War II, though both have transformed since then (and arguably need to change further to remain effectual). One is the market capitalism model as articulated in “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944 by Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. It asserts that central planning and public ownership lead to oppression, while free markets maximize profit and the general welfare. The other model was put forth in the same year by American-Hungarian economic historian and anthropologist Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation.” Polanyi argues that capitalists exploit society through free markets, and a market economy imposes regulations and politics on society that engender division and eventually crisis. Instead, he argues for a compromise between liberal economic policies internationally (such as free trade and economic openness) and domestic social stability, secured mainly through the welfare state. For Polanyi, the social agenda should set economic rules, not vice versa.
The West adopted Hayek’s model of regulated but basically free markets and democracy, while China broadly followed Polanyi’s “great transformation.” China’s system of governance aims at delivering benefits to most of the population while attempting to control most of its activities. The West, on the other hand, sets the rules of the market and defines individual rights, and then generally lets the market run itself, checked by electoral democracy.
Despite being completely different, these two systems complemented one another during the Cold War and early 2000s. China’s model eradicated absolute poverty in the country and made it the economic powerhouse it is today. The U.S. played a critical role in enabling and sustaining worldwide trade and investment. The stable dollar, American technology and U.S. military power increased global security, making it easier for China to use its low labor costs to become the world’s cheapest manufacturer. Moreover, by engaging China directly, the U.S. won the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Both models succeeded, inspiring developing economies everywhere at the turn of the millennium.
While many of the former Soviet states and satellites in Eastern Europe adopted the Western capitalist model, Russia took up a hybrid of the two. At the same time, large emerging economies like Indonesia, Brazil and India have struggled to deal with the consequences of market failures, such as income and wealth inequality, and have tried to adapt Hayek’s model to Polanyi’s. In Latin America and Africa, the places most dependent on foreign investment for development, most states accommodated the economic model of their most generous investor. The explosion of trade and investment made it possible for the two systems to coexist peacefully.
The Race to Rewrite the Rules
The financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession marked the end of their peaceful cohabitation. When global markets failed, states urgently needed to limit failures in their own markets, minimize harm, and generally fulfill the public’s expectations of prosperity and security. They have not succeeded. The Western and Chinese systems had become too dependent on each other to provide unique answers to global problems while also protecting their publics. As societies and nations polarized, each state developed strategies to limit the fallout of future global crises.
In the process, cooperation between the U.S. and China – between Hayek’s and Polanyi’s models – was replaced by competition and confrontation. Though both talked of structural reform, neither model was actually updated. Instead, the pandemic-induced supply chain crisis accelerated implementation of protectionist measures, from reshoring or friend-shoring business investments to export restrictions. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Western sanctions have further accelerated this process and, through the weaponization of media, finance and trade, made escalation and greater uncertainty inevitable.
Both the U.S. and China are now scrambling to save and reform their governing models, the foundation of their development and their influence over the global economy. In fact, it is striking that Americans and Chinese are both experiencing very negative feelings about their personal well-being. (In China, negative feelings about personal well-being are at a record high.) Both are worried about the future, and confidence is broken. All of this indicates that their respective socio-economic models need to adapt. The West (especially the U.S.) is experiencing high inflation and faces the prospect of an unprecedented energy crisis beginning this winter, given European dependence on Russian piped natural gas. The U.S., Europe and Japan are attempting to tackle their economic problems together, gathering in the G-7 and EU formats, which may serve as a basis for common solutions.
Stress, Worry and Negative Experiences in the U.S. and China
(click to enlarge)
China, on the other hand, finds itself relatively isolated. The most urgent task of this year’s party congress is to restore economic growth. But China depends too much on the U.S. market to risk Western sanctions if it gets too close to Russia. At the same time, the U.S. is no friend either, recently tightening its grip on the semiconductor industry. The biggest obstacle to China’s recovery is its zero-COVID policy, but because of its association with President Xi Jinping, it can’t be openly questioned. In addition, the poor quality of China’s COVID-19 vaccines and low vaccine uptake among the most vulnerable cohorts complicate reopening. (Beijing may turn to even greater coercion to vaccinate the population, a potential threat to regime stability.)
While the U.S. (and the West generally) dumps military and financial aid into Ukraine and distributes money at home to address soaring energy prices, China is limiting its external funding to projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, the keystone of China’s strategy to build up its influence in Eurasia and beyond. Xi unveiled his Global Security Initiative, a plan for a new global order, earlier this year, but it is heavy on principles and light on details about how to achieve them. Beijing can try to shape global and regional institutions to serve Chinese interests – by, for example, lobbying for more state sovereignty over the internet – but it is not clear that its ideology would have the same appeal without massive funding to back it up.
The struggle between the American and Chinese socio-economic models will continue over the coming months as the global economic war intensifies. China understands the risks of a direct confrontation with the U.S., and so it will avoid it. In its attempt to rewrite the global rules, Beijing prefers subtlety (such as working within the United Nations) over Russia’s more direct approach. For example, China successfully lobbied to have the U.N. Human Rights Council begin to prioritize collective rights, such as guarantees of economic subsistence, over individual liberties like freedom of speech and association. At the same time, China could look to ensure a greater role for itself in the Indian and/or Arctic oceans, where norms are more pliable than in the Atlantic or Pacific. In this way, China can set its own boundaries for international trade and investment, and thus for the global economy.
To succeed, however, China must remain stable internally, and that requires a reform of its Polanyi-style model. This is why the current Communist Party congress is important. Whoever China appoints as its leaders at the end of the week, the success of the party to reform the Chinese socio-economic model will determine the country’s role in shaping the global system
-
https://www.revolver.news/2022/10/shocking-1993-george-soros-book-predicted-gae-proxy-war-in-ukraine/
HT to GM!
Let's discuss!
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoRovwemSYo
-
Distinctly too sanguine from my point of view, but it is George Friedman, so here it is:
November 15, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Future of US-China Relations
By: George Friedman
Earlier this week, the G-20 summit opened in Indonesia, during which the long-awaited meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping took place. That they met at all means the meeting was a success. That it was three hours long is encouraging too, since unsuccessful meetings tend to end quickly and are followed by inconsequential joint statements, which so far has yet to be issued. This suggests honesty, substance and the promise of future substantive talks.
Indeed, early reports from the meeting corroborate as much. The two were apparently agreeable on topics such as the dangers of nuclear weapons and the prospect of Secretary of State Antony Blinken visiting China in the future, even as they reiterated the fact that they are competitors with different views on issues such as Taiwan. Xi allegedly even said the American model of democracy is obsolete.
As I have argued for a year, progress on this front owes not to the virtue of either side but to the geopolitical realities in which they operate. For the United States, the confrontation was anchored in economics. From the U.S. perspective, China has yet to provide ready access to its market for American goods and has been manipulating the value of the yuan to maximize trade and investment – a charge levied years ago by the Obama administration. Washington argued that given the amount of investment and technology provided by American firms, China needed to be forthcoming, especially since public sentiment suggested the U.S. had been exploited by China. China was in no position to comply with American demands without undermining its own economy. Thus was the American foundation laid.
For China, American economic demands signified a military threat. Beijing could not accommodate the United States and feared an American military response. China is an exporting power, and its well-being depends on the ability of its goods to pass from its east coast ports to the South China Sea into the Pacific and then into the world. The United States could, in theory, mine or close those ports by other means. China’s response to this possibility was to appear as aggressive as possible to convince the U.S. that its economic demands could mean war and that China could defeat the U.S. Navy.
It never meant to break China’s economy; it meant to use the threat of breaking it to influence Beijing’s response. Likewise, China never intended to go to war with the United States; it wanted to convince the U.S. it was a real enough possibility to induce a policy change. Each appeared ferocious, but each was careful not to push the other too hard.
Two things brought this to a head. The first was Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The willingness of Washington to wage a clever war, marrying U.S. weapons to Ukrainian forces, demonstrated a capability China did not believe the United States had in its repertoire. China’s alliance with Russia, which was designed to confront the United States in two theaters, collapsed before it was put in place. China reevaluated America’s military power, will and alliance structure and saw a military conflict as more dangerous to China than to the U.S.
The second was the continued deterioration of the Chinese economy. A long-term cyclical force created a massive downturn that has threatened social stability. Regulations on imports from and investment in China could make a bad situation worse. Put differently, China has a lot at stake in their relationship. The United States doesn’t. Absent a military threat, the U.S. benefitted from low-cost Chinese products. The U.S. has little to gain from a military confrontation and plenty to gain from economic cooperation. China had no desire for a war it might lose, and the U.S. had no interest in an economic crisis in China. Economic amelioration is very tempting, so long as it’s possible. The meeting this week shows it may well be possible.
-
What the Midterm Results Mean for U.S. Foreign Policy
10 MIN READNov 16, 2022 | 21:21 GMT
The United States' return to a divided Congress will significantly limit its response to more politically-charged foreign policy issues, like immigration and climate change. But the impact on Washington's approach to critical issues — like containing China's influence and helping Ukraine fend off Russia's invasion — will be more modest. The Nov. 7 midterm elections have left the United States with a divided government and Congress, with the Democratic Party retaining control of the Senate and the Republican Party gaining control of the House of Representatives. While Republicans performed below expectations, the overall outcome was largely expected, as such a split result has become typical in recent years after midterm elections.
Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto's victory (which was confirmed only on Nov. 12) has given Democrats at least a 50-50 split control of the Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris has the tiebreaking vote. One more Senate seat remains up for grabs in Georgia, which will hold a runoff election on Dec. 6 between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.
As of Nov. 16, Republicans had been declared winners of 217 seats in the House of Representatives. The races for 11 House seats remain too close to call, but Republicans are highly likely to win at least one of those seats, which is all they need to hit the 218-seat threshold to control the chamber.
The election results confirmed the United States' deep domestic polarization, which will further draw Washington's attention inward and limit its assertiveness abroad over at least the next two years. The election reaffirmed the long-term trend of polarization in the U.S. political system that is occurring not only between Democrats and Republicans, but also between progressive and moderate Democrats and between former President Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican Party. This growing polarization (and rising political violence associated with it) will continue to force the U.S. government to focus its attention inward, which will constrain the country's foreign policy. For one, the close balance of power between Democrats and Republicans will force both the White House and Congress to take into account the impact of foreign decisions on the domestic political environment. The deep polarization in a divided Congress means most major legislation will also fail to pass. Since the 1990s when the Republican party has controlled the House, it has largely abided by the so-called Hastert Rule, the informal governing principle where the House Speaker doesn't bring legislation to the floor unless a majority of his or her party supports it. The Republicans will likely again use this informal rule once it retakes control of the House in January. This will curtail Democrats' ability to pass legislation with a small cohort of Republicans, despite the latter only having a majority in the House by a couple dozen seats. Unilateral executive action in other areas (such as climate policy) will face heavy scrutiny in Congress and more legal challenges as well.
Policy Implications
At a high-level strategic level, this inward focus of the U.S. government will grant other countries more space internationally to shape global policy – including U.S. rivals like Iran, China and Russia, as well as U.S. allies like France, Germany and Japan. But at a more nuanced level, the outcome of the U.S. midterms will also have specific implications for a number of key geopolitical areas:
Ukraine: The outgoing Congress will likely approve a large aid package for Ukraine for 2023. But once they take control of the House in January, Republicans have promised to increase scrutiny on President Biden's support of Ukraine through their subpoena power and the budget legislation, with future Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hinting in October that his party will not ''write a blank check to Ukraine'' while the United States is facing an economic slowdown. But while GOP demands for more concessions (like more funding for border security) will probably slow the approval process for additional aid, Republicans ultimately remain split on the matter — meaning such aid will likely still be approved, even if at lower amounts. House hearings and increased scrutiny on the Biden administration's Ukraine policy will thus likely amount to very few real consequences in the immediate term.
Climate change: Climate and energy-related policies are among the most divisive issues in U.S. politics at the moment. At the state level, Republicans have criticized the rising role of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) considerations in the investment strategies of asset managers, banks and other institutions. With control of the House, the Republicans are likely to open investigations and inquiries into various climate change commitments and carbon-cutting targets. They will also use Congressional hearings to put pressure on financial companies to reduce or explain ESG-related investment strategies. In addition, they will likely increase scrutiny on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other regulatory agencies that are imposing more rules and regulations around climate change and emissions target disclosures. Over the next two years, such efforts could tarnish some companies' reputations in the eyes of Republican voters, and will widen the greater ideological split between Americans who think fiduciary responsibilities include ESG considerations versus those who do not. Ultimately, however, control of the House alone will not give the Republican Party significant power to actually change U.S. policy on climate- and energy-related issues over the next two years.
Immigration: The worsening humanitarian crisis in nearby Haiti — along with the recent influx of northbound migrants reported at the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama (which saw a record 150,000 migrants in October) — signals that 2023 will be another year of significant migration to the United States. Republican lawmakers campaigned heavily on curbing immigration from Central America, which will remain their primary focus during the next legislative session. When the new Congress takes office in January, McCarthy said that the first bill Republicans will put forth when will be one to secure the border. This bill will likely include many of the same proposals the Republicans made during the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump, such as increasing funding for the border wall and border patrols. Given how the issue resonates with their voters, Republicans may threaten to shut down the U.S. government over funding or connect border security issues to appropriation bills and the annual must pass National Defense Authorization Act.
Republicans may also demand additional border control funding in exchange for supporting Democrats' budget resolutions and other policy proposals. But while immigration will emerge as a major political issue on Capitol Hill, it will have little impact on the actual situation at the U.S. border because the fundamental drivers causing people to flee their home countries in Latin America (i.e. political repression, economic uncertainty and widespread violence) remain unsolved. Over the next two years, this could see officials in Arizona and Texas (the two Republican-led states that border Mexico) increasingly take matters into their own hands to curb migration flows. More incidents like that seen earlier this year in Texas — where Governor Greg Abbott closed certain border crossings to drum up pressure on the federal government — could, in turn, cause more delays and interruptions to goods moving from Mexico to the rest of North America.
China: Broadly speaking, both major U.S. political parties support taking a hard-line approach to China and further curbing the development of the Asian country's technology sector. This is one of the few areas that could see productive bipartisan negotiations, with Republicans and Democrats agreeing to impose more restrictions on China's tech sector and potentially even a new mechanism for reviewing overseas investment into China's technology sector. Any such legislation passed by a Republican-controlled House, however, may be narrower in scope or have certain carve-outs to protect U.S. businesses interests, given that Republicans have generally taken positions aligning more closely to that of corporations. Biden's push to reduce the United States' greater economic dependence on China by boosting public finance for domestic manufacturing is also less likely to gain bipartisan support. Many fiscally conservative Republicans have criticized Biden's Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act as exemplifying the ''big government'' spending they oppose, since both bills include billions of financial support for the semiconductor and other sectors.
Venezuela and Cuba: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' landslide victory was one of the most striking results of the U.S. midterm election. DeSantis won by nearly 20 points and became the first Republican governor to carry Miami-Dade county in two decades — revealing that Florida is now a more squarely Republican state than it has been in recent years. U.S. policies toward Cuba and Venezuela are major political issues in Florida — especially in Miami-Dade county, which has a large population of Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans who often support hard-line policies against Havana and Caracas. The outcome of the latest U.S. midterm election, however, has shown Florida to be a more squarely Republican state than it has been in recent years. Democrats may, in turn, decide that appealing to Cuban- and Venezuelan-American voters — who overwhelmingly supported Republicans in the last race — is a lost cause. In Venezuela, the Biden administration has been offering limited sanctions relief in exchange for President Nicolas Maduro's regime resuming negotiations with the political opposition. But without the pressure of needing to appease Florida voters, the White House may accept weaker concessions in talks to maintain relief, which could see an easing of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela's oil sector. And when it comes to Cuba, the Biden administration may also take more steps toward normalization, such as easing travel restrictions and removing Cuba from the U.S. State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Iran: House Republicans will likely demand that Congress be granted the power to review and/or vote on any agreement that comes out of U.S.-Iran nuclear talks, should those talks resume. While this would complicate negotiations, the United States and Iran appear unlikely to return to the table anytime soon — especially amid Tehran's brutal crackdown on ongoing protests over women's rights and growing military support to Russian troops in Ukraine, which likely see the United States impose more sanctions on Iran in the short term. Republican and Democratic lawmakers may work together to craft those new sanctions, but the Iran hawks in the Republican Party will likely also try to add poison pills that make it more difficult for a future agreement to suspend sanctions in exchange for nuclear concessions.
Big tech: With control of the House, Republicans will hold a number of hearings on the tech sector and perceived bias by social media companies against conservative ideologies. But this is unlikely to result in any significant reforms on regulating the tech sector and social media. The Republicans and the Democrats both have an interest in curbing the power of these companies but have very different views on how to do it. The former is more concerned about stifling conservative voices while the latter is more concerned about the rising market dominance of companies like Amazon, Apple and Google.
-
Just leaving this out there
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh2Ic6CaYAA3KSy?format=jpg&name=small)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh2HyX3XgAUCSKj?format=jpg&name=small)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh2HyXfXgAA-sD5?format=jpg&name=small)
-
Who is the middle guy in red?
-
Rishi Sunak, UK prime minister. He is of Indian origin, his wife is the daughter of the founder of Indian tech giant Infosys, and a billionaire.
-
Ah.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8TLGaSPOzY
-
November 29, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
Eurasia in Crisis
By: George Friedman
Demonstrations against Beijing’s zero-COVID policy have surged in the past week, with people voicing their frustration at not only the lockdown measures but also the government and President Xi Jinping himself. This kind of unrest is nearly unprecedented in the modern Chinese era and certainly cause for concern among the ruling elite.
Since the pandemic began, Beijing has consistently sought to contain COVID-19 by imposing city-wide lockdowns in which entry and exit were limited, if not forbidden, and in which activities were severely constrained. Why the government adopted such strict measures is unclear. No other countries imposed this degree of containment, largely because the costs of doing so were so high. Shanghai, the country’s most important financial hub, was shut down for weeks, while similar shutdowns occurred in smaller cities. And this is to say nothing of the impossibility of hermetically sealing large, densely populated and otherwise bustling Chinese cities.
We are left, then, with two possible explanations. One is that the government is trying to contain a mutation that the outside world is unaware of. This is self-evidently dubious, and in any case there hasn’t been the kind of body count one would expect from a new, deadlier strain. The second and more reasonable explanation is that Beijing instituted draconian policies to assert control of places that were already restive or unstable. COVID-19 was, in this scenario, merely a pretext.
Hong Kong is instructive in this regard. It wasn’t that long ago that China experienced a rebellion there. Authorities clamped down on the city, but not before the world saw the deep anger felt by many against Beijing. Indeed, Hong Kong taught the mainland three things: that open unrest was possible; that uprisings could spread and should thus be hidden or downplayed at all costs; and that a country dependent on international trade and investment could not afford a trial in the court of public opinion. If a city like Shanghai had to be slammed shut, so be it. Financial operations had to take a backseat to widespread unrest, or so the thinking went.
If this was indeed the strategy, then the strategy has broken down over the past few days. The precipitating event was a fire in an apartment building that went untended. Public sentiment morphed, as it often does, into a broader anti-government movement. The slogans of the dissidents centered on the loss of freedom imposed by lockdowns before escalating into condemnations of the president and the Communist Party, calling on both to step down.
By no means does this suggest there were demonstrations everywhere, nor does any of this mean the regime is in danger of falling. So far, it’s unclear if this is predominately a youth movement; if it is, it is far less consequential than one led by older, middle-class professionals. Nor is it clear exactly how widespread and intense the protests are – how many cities are involved, how many are calling for a new government, how organized they are, how much the police and the army have had to intervene, etc.
Bear in mind these protests did not erupt overnight. The Chinese economy has performed very poorly in recent years. As exports met resistance, the economy came to depend increasingly on domestic consumption – and on domestic investment. The transition has been rough, as it usually is for countries in this situation. It inevitably raises the question, particularly among the young, of what sort of life lies ahead. After decades of explosive growth, the reversal of expectations can be wrenching.
But banking protests in Henan province are one thing; open, generalized political anger is another. Calling for an end to Communist leadership is extraordinary, and frankly it’s hard to take seriously, especially if it is coming from anyone aside from disaffected youths. Or, put differently, I’ll believe it when I see it. The government almost certainly has the ability to crush this would-be rebellion if it deems it necessary. It’s entirely possible that the government believes the movement will die out on its own accord.
From a broader geopolitical standpoint, if this is in any way the beginning of something more, the power of China becomes questionable. To have this happen at the same time the power of Russia has become perishable, and at the same time the EU is more and more uncertain about its unified direction, suggests the whole of Eurasia is in crisis. In turn, that means the relative power of the United States is rising dramatically. The usual caveats apply, but it’s important to note that if Russia doesn’t stabilize its position in Ukraine, if the EU doesn’t cohere as it needs to, and if Chinese demonstrations are more than a flash in the pan, then a very new world could emerge.
-
December 22, 2015
·
Shared with Your friends
It is always fair to ask critics "Well then, what would you do?"
Among my recommendations in the past are recognizing that previous borders no longer apply (indeed abandoning Sykes-Picot lines and the Durand line altogether) and recognizing the Kurds-- both of which appear in the Ralph Peters piece that follows.
How to crush ISIS
By ret. Col. Ralph Peters
December 20, 2015 | 8:49pm
Why ISIS is still winning
An American president with no military experience, little grasp of history and an outdated mental map of the Middle East.
Obama today? Yes, but potentially a Republican next year.
Ideology isn’t a strategy, and sound bites don’t win wars. The Islamic State caliphate (ISIS) and its rivals can be annihilated, but only if we have a clear objective, a realistic assessment of the means needed to achieve it and — above all — a president with the vision, courage and fortitude to lead.
What will it take? Here are the requirements for a serious military effort (only a military approach will stop ISIS):
Congress must declare war.
Congress needs to face up to its constitutional responsibilities with a declaration of war against “the Islamic State, al Qaeda, their affiliates and imitators and their supporters, wherever they are found.” War is no longer restricted to state-on-state violence, nor should its conduct depend on a president’s whimsy.
Define the mission.
The goal should be the uncompromising destruction of violent jihadi organizations. It shouldn’t include the reconstruction of artificial borders imposed on the Middle East by long-dead Europeans. Don’t cling to doomed governments.
Say less, do more and keep secrets.
Don’t announce operations or troop deployments for domestic political advantage. In the jihadi World Series, our team has to show up unexpectedly. Crack down on Pentagon leaks.
Stop pretending that war can be waged gently.
Kill the enemy. Accept that there will be civilian casualties and collateral damage. Get the lawyers out of the targeting process and off the battlefield. Rules of engagement should empower our troops, not shield our enemies.
The morbid “humanitarianism” of the left ignores the proven principle that winning fast spares lives. As a result of our reluctance to fight promptly, powerfully and ruthlessly, there are now 300,000 dead in Syria, untold numbers dead in Iraq and rising body counts elsewhere, with millions of refugees. And because our enemies know that we don’t strike populated areas, they base themselves in crowded neighborhoods, guaranteeing more civilian deaths.
Concentrate on effects, not numbers.
Our obsession with troop numbers is political, not practical. In a global war against Islamist fanatics, the troop strength required for missions will fluctuate. A vital operation in one country might require a few dozen special operators for one night, while an operation in another might demand 30,000 troops for three months. Anyway, the resolve with which force is applied is far more important than numbers.
Accomplish the mission and leave.
No nation-building. No occupations-by-another-name. Go in, do the job, get out. If you have to go back and do the job again later on, that’s still cheaper in blood and treasure than hanging around. What are called for are old-fashioned punitive expeditions, not nation-building where there are no nations. Surprise them; slaughter them; leave.
Conventional forces must think unconventionally.
Our forces must become more agile and operate under more-austere conditions. More bullets, fewer bases, no Baskin-Robbins. Mobility, speed and firepower are crucial. Think cavalry, not constabulary; saddle bags, not shipping containers.
Hyperexpensive weapons can be the enemy within.
At present, we’ll use a million-dollar precision-guided munition to take out two low-level terrorists at a checkpoint. As a result, we’ve drained our arsenal. While this is good news for the defense industry, it exposes the fallacy of a weapons-procurement process that assumes a short, decisive war against a compliant enemy.
Don’t make fun of the Russians for using cheap bombs on easy targets. We should be doing it, too. And inexpensive, old-fashioned napalm would be poetic justice for apocalyptic jihadis who burn captives to death.
Choose allies for their utility, not from habit.
In the broken territories formerly known as Syria and Iraq, we need to support those whose interests converge with ours, while cutting our losses where our largesse only helps other enemies. That means tacitly backing a Kurdish state; accepting a new Sunni-Arab (but non-Islamist-extremist) state straddling the old border; and cutting all support for the Iranian-dominated Baghdad government President Obama’s incompetence facilitated.
From Libya to Afghanistan and Pakistan, we must not let ill-drawn lines on old maps tyrannize our foreign policy.
Presidential support of our military.
This is the most important factor of all. Our troops and their leaders need to know that their commander-in-chief won’t betray them based on spurious claims from the media or anti-war activist groups; that he won’t lose his courage and resolve when things get ugly; and that he’ll be our military’s advocate, not its adversary.
Of course, there are myriad practical details to be addressed, from basing rights and overflight issues to the conflicting goals of third parties, such as Iran or Russia. Even in lean operations, logistics rule. And our military must relearn how to fight and win, escaping the thrall of political correctness.
We can defeat ISIS, but first we have to stop defeating ourselves.
Ralph Peters is a retired US Army colonel (military intel) and the author, most recently, of “Valley of the Shadow.”
-
Kissinger Sees a Global Leadership Vacuum
A dearth of statesmen has left the world misruled by populists and technocrats.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell Mead
Dec. 26, 2022 12:06 pm ET
SAVE
PRINT
TEXT
8
image
Henry Kissinger speaking in Berlin in January 2020.
PHOTO: CHRISTOPH SOEDER/ZUMA PRESS
Is the quality of world leadership declining just as humanity’s need for great leadership has become more urgent than ever? As I learned over a long lunch this month, Henry Kissinger thinks that is exactly where things stand, and he worries that civilization may be imperiled as a result.
Worry comes naturally to Mr. Kissinger. His first book, “A World Restored” (1957), laid out some basic ideas that dominate his thinking to this day. Mr. Kissinger believes that only a handful of people at any given time understand the complicated architecture of a viable world order, and that an even smaller number have the gifts of leadership required to create, defend or reform the delicate international framework that makes even partial peace possible.
Worse, it is not enough for an effective leader to understand the international system. Mr. Kissinger believes that there is an immense gap between the kind of world the citizens of any given country want to see and the kind of world that is actually possible. The world can’t be as Sinocentric as Chinese public opinion wants it to be, as democratic or woke as many Americans would like, as Islamic as many Muslims would wish, as responsive to development concerns as some African and Latin American countries want, or as awed by French grandeur or admiring of British moral leadership as people in those countries want.
Great leaders must bridge the gap between public opinion in their own countries and the compromises inseparable from international diplomacy. They must see the world clearly enough to understand what is possible and sustainable, and they must be able to persuade their fellow citizens to accept outcomes that are, inevitably, often disappointing. Paradoxically, this task is often harder in a powerful state such as America, which is often able to get much of what it wants in the world. Small and weak countries understand the need for compromise; great and powerful ones often think they can have it all.
READ MORE GLOBAL VIEW
America Is Stronger Than Biden’s Foreign PolicyDecember 19, 2022
It’s Time to Prepare for Ukrainian PeaceDecember 12, 2022
Behind the Global Surge in Anti-SemitismDecember 5, 2022
This kind of leadership involves a rare mix of intellectual ability, deep education and the kind of intuitive understanding of politics given to few. Mr. Kissinger’s most recent book, “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy,” singles out six leaders (Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, France’s Charles de Gaulle, America’s Richard Nixon, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew) who achieved great things at home and abroad. But the book looks forward, not back. As Mr. Kissinger emphasized at our lunch, he fears that the exceptional conditions that enabled these leaders to appear may be fading away.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Morning Editorial Report
All the day's Opinion headlines.
Preview
Subscribed
The six leaders Mr. Kissinger profiled were all born outside the social elite. They were middle-class children from ordinary families. That background gave them an ability to understand how their fellow citizens saw the world. Selected into meritocratic educational institutions, they received a disciplined and demanding education that prepared them psychologically, intellectually and culturally to operate effectively at the highest levels of national and international life.
A question that troubles Mr. Kissinger is whether this pipeline is breaking down—whether elite institutions no longer offer this rigor and discipline, and whether the culture of “deep literacy,” as he calls it, has eroded to the point where society no longer has the wisdom necessary to prepare new generations for leadership.
This isn’t merely about woke college professors dumbing education down or superficial left-wing ideologues driving complex and subtle ideas out of university teaching. It’s about whether the depth and rigor of classic scholarship can withstand the challenge of the more visual culture and the shorter attention spans promoted by electronic media.
Now in his 100th year, Mr. Kissinger has been pondering the problems of leadership for longer than most Americans have been alive. When he entered public life in the 1960s, the old WASP elite still dominated the field of American foreign policy. But the old Brahmins like the Achesons, Bundys and Alsops, who brought America both the Marshall Plan and the Vietnam War, faded away. The Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations achieved important successes, but the 21st-century track record of American statecraft is less inspiring.
Today, Mr. Kissinger warns, the problem of world order is growing harder. Great-power rivalries intensify, China is a more complex challenge than the Soviet Union ever was, and international trust diminishes as the potential for global conflict steadily grows. We need wisdom more than ever, Mr. Kissinger says, but it is not so easy to find.
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
It is hard to disagree. American debates today, over domestic as well as foreign policy, often feature a sterile competition between technocrats immersed in conventional groupthink on the one side and populist demagogues armed with superficial slogans on the other. Henry Kissinger thinks we need to do better. I fear he is right, and I hope that “Leadership” gets the wide readership it deserves.
-
"Mr. Kissinger warns, the problem of world order is growing harder. Great-power rivalries intensify, China is a more complex challenge than the Soviet Union ever was, and international trust diminishes as the potential for global conflict steadily grows. We need wisdom more than ever, Mr. Kissinger says, but it is not so easy to find."
Now we have SoS Antony Blinken.
And we were blessed with another renowned thinker - Hillary Clinton
I wonder if there is anyone he does appreciate who is out there.
And exactly how can one deal with China?
-
More on Henry K's views
Ukraine :
The "internet does not make great leaders ":
https://time.com/6193035/henry-kissinger-leaders/
-
"I wonder if there is anyone he does appreciate who is out there."
I suspect he respects Pompeo.
"And exactly how can one deal with China?"
As the architect of Nixon going to China and pealing China away from the Soviet Union, and as a man who has made a shitload of money explaining America to the ChiComs, HK may well have irremediable biases , , ,
-
very good point; I forgot.
HK is a swamp creature after all:
https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/kissinger-sold-american-business-to-china-and-chinese-interests-to-us-policymakers-4044953.html
promoting Chinese exports to us as strengthening *our leverage over them *
when indeed they worked it to leverage over us and at the same time steal everything they could
and the rest we see today
indeed one could easily argue China out maneuvered HK and the DC swap
including H Bush who persisted in thinking that China could be brought into the "league of nations"
when instead they want to lead all nations.
-
The Most Geopolitically Significant Events of 2022
undefined and Director, Stratfor Center for Applied Geopolitics at RANE
Rodger Baker
Director, Stratfor Center for Applied Geopolitics at RANE, Stratfor
8 MIN READDec 30, 2022 | 13:00 GMT
A Ukrainian soldier’s silhouette is seen in the city of Kharkiv on March 30, 2022, as a gas station burns behind him after Russian attacks.
A Ukrainian soldier’s silhouette is seen in Kharkiv on March 30, 2022, as a gas station burns behind him after Russian attacks on the city.
(FADEL SENNA/AFP via Getty Images)
Choosing the top five most geopolitically significant events of 2022 is no easy feat. Russia’s (re)invasion of Ukraine clearly stands at the top of the list for the myriad of immediate and lingering implications, though events in and of themselves are rarely as significant as the broader trends and shifts they reflect.
That is why, in compiling the below list, we focused on the events over the past year that had the furthest-reaching impacts (both geographically and temporally) and/or represented key shifts in greater global patterns. There were, of course, numerous “honorable mentions,” but we were ultimately able to narrow it down to these final five:
The Most Geopolitically Significant Events of 2022
5) The Artemis I Mission (Nov. 16-Dec 11, 2022)
NASA successfully launched the Artemis I rocket on Nov. 16, sending an uncrewed Orion space capsule to the moon that returned to Earth on Dec. 11. The mission was the first major launch under NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program, which aims to send astronauts back to the moon by 2025. The Artemis program represents a revival of the global space race, as well as the United States’ attempt to shape the future norms and governance of lunar and extra-terrestrial exploration and exploitation. The race to return to the moon has been underway for several years, drawing both nation-states and private industry into a mix of cooperative and competitive initiatives that go far beyond simply landing a person on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. The next space race is looking at lunar orbital space stations that can facilitate lunar exploration and a potential staging point for future manned Mars missions. It’s also looking at lunar and asteroid resource exploitation, space-based manufacturing and biomedical engineering, and (less publicly) the increasingly important role of space in national security. The expansion of the private space industry is granting numerous new players access to the final frontier by making it cheaper and easier to venture beyond Earth's atmosphere. But while we may have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” (to quote the 1940 poem penned by the Canadian airforce pilot John Gillespie Magee), we have not slipped the bonds of terrestrial politics and international relations — making an update to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty all the more important. As space becomes more crowded with geopolitical rivals and new entrants, it will not only drive technological breakthroughs and competition, but challenge global governance models.
4) Russia and Ukraine Sign Turkish-Brokered Grain Deal (July 22, 2022)
Turkey’s brokering of the grain export deal between Russia and Ukraine over the summer eased a major constraint on global food security instigated by the war in Ukraine. But it also highlighted Turkey’s expanding role as an activist middle power, as Ankara pursues its own interests and exploits new opportunities provided by the return to a multipolar world. Over the past few years, Turkey has intervened in the Caucasus (largely replacing Russia as the primary foreign influencer), continued to assert its interests (militarily) in Iraq and Syria, stepped up its involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean, threatened to hold up NATO expansion, and integrated Russian-made air defense systems while still retaining its military ties to Europe and the United States. Ankara has also sold armed drones to Ukraine and promoted the trans-Caspian route as an alternative for China’s Belt and Road Initiative after the Russian invasion of Ukraine threatened the transit corridors through Russia and Belarus. In addition, Turkey has managed to simultaneously work with (and frequently against) the United States, Russia, China and Europe, all while asserting itself as an important regional power. Turkey’s actions highlight how middle powers are navigating the gaps and seams between the big powers to better position themselves and secure their own interests in an increasingly multipolar world system. Indeed, Indonesia, Brazil, Poland, Japan and India have also started taking a more active role within their regions and beyond in an effort to insulate themselves against big power coercion and mounting pressure from China, Russia, the United States and the European Union to pick a side.
3) Eurozone Inflation Reaches 10.7% (October 2022)
European inflation rates continued to climb in 2022, driven by post-COVID-19 supply chain disruptions amid uneven economic openings, and exacerbated by additional disruptions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and constraints on Russian energy imports. While Europe’s programs to buy liquified natural gas (LNG) and delay the shuttering of hydrocarbon-powered energy plants have likely ensured energy supplies through the winter, these programs came at a cost; high food, fuel and commodity prices, as well as government actions to manage fuel supplies, reinforced European deindustrialization trends and contributed to rising political nationalism that has seen the European Union compromise on its "strategic autonomy" and accept more national and regional protectionist measures. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act — an amalgam of legislation aimed at responding to rising costs, national supply chain security and climate issues — highlighted the potential impact of protectionist policies even on allies, raising challenges from Europe and South Korea, among others. Globally, U.S. interest rates and localized political instability have seen many national currencies fall against the U.S. dollar, raising the risk of future debt crises in several developing (and even a few developed) nations, all while China’s uneven COVID-19 recovery suggests Beijing may be less than generous with its own outbound foreign assistance through at least 2023.
2) Chinese Military Exercises Around Taiwan (Aug. 4-9, 2022)
In response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Aug. 2-3 visit to Taiwan, China held two consecutive sets of military exercises around the island, including live-fire exercises at multiple locations, ballistic missile tests, numerous aerial incursions across the Taiwan Strait median line, and anti-submarine and "sea assault" operations. The exercises marked a significant escalation from Beijing’s typical responses to what it portrays as political provocations by Taipei and Washington, and in doing so set a new baseline for future coercive responses. China’s actions accelerated regional security cooperation trends, with the Philippines approving new U.S. military facilities under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement and stepping up military exchanges with Japan, South Korea and Japan increasing defense cooperation dialogue, Australia reemerging as a key regional defense actor, and European countries committing to additional regional maritime patrols. In response to the Chinese exercises, several other countries also sent political representatives to Taiwan, blunting Beijing’s political message. Additionally, Washington agreed to increase key arms sales to Taiwan, and U.S. President Joe Biden, while claiming no change to U.S. policy, said the United States would intervene in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Beijing's military exercises also motivated the United States and other nations to accelerate their partial decoupling of key technologies and supply chain connections from mainland China.
1) Russia Announces 'Special Military Operation' and Invades Western Ukraine (Feb. 24, 2022)
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was the most geopolitically significant event of the year, raising the specter of nuclear war, driving NATO expansion, testing the continuity of global norms and European unity, and impacting energy prices and food security well beyond 2022. Russia’s poor performance revealed an underlying weakness that leaves the country vulnerable to its neighbors, particularly Turkey and China. Finland and Sweden, long holdouts of integrated security, applied for NATO membership, expanding NATO’s northern flank and perhaps solidifying a split in post-Cold War cooperative Arctic governance. Western European countries reinvigorated defense spending and cooperation, driving greater interest in both NATO and European defense concepts, though their debates also highlight differences between the states on the Russian frontier, which prefer NATO, and those in Western Europe. Global response to the war also highlighted the realities of multipolarity, as the United States and its key European partners were unable to garner universal cooperation to economically counteract Russia, at times even from key partners like India and Hungary. Europe’s energy dependence on Moscow triggered a rapid shift in European energy supplies and future plans, altering the infrastructure and future of energy imports, delaying some green energy goals, and expanding LNG supply chains. The war also revealed strains in the Russia-China relationship, and Moscow’s battlefield setbacks, coupled with strong Western economic counters, may push Russia to become increasingly dependent on China. And mere months after the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council signed a new statement on the prevention of nuclear war and arms races, Moscow’s less-than-subtle threats reopened the prospect of the use of nuclear weapons. These threats placed U.S. nuclear forces on their highest level of alert in decades and strengthened the perception in many non-nuclear states that nuclear weapons may be a necessary deterrent, as fear of expanded nuclear conflict appears to have limited Europe's and the United States' willingness to fully counter Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The revival of attention to nuclear security has only been compounded by China’s recent nuclear "breakout" and the challenges facing future arms control regimes that must take into account three, rather than two, major nuclear powers.
-
second
Grading Our 2022 Annual Forecast as 2023 Approaches
undefined and Director of Analytic Client Solutions
Amelia Harnagel
Director of Analytic Client Solutions, Stratfor
8 MIN READDec 29, 2022 | 21:38 GMT
(SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images; OZAN KOSE/AFP via Getty Images; THIBAULT CAMUS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Our analysts take a lot of pride in their forecasts. And they should; it's an incredibly difficult discipline. But the work of forecasting is not complete when we hit publish. As I wrote years ago, ''the best way for us to improve our ability to look forward is to turn around and take a look back.'' A rigorous self-assessment process is as important to our forecasting methodology as anything else. There is an old quote that reads ''We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success.'' And we truly believe that.
Below you'll find our 2022 Forecast Scorecard, in which we celebrate what we got right and acknowledge what we got wrong (though I'm proud to say we, once again, had many more hits than misses).
Asia Pacific
In 2022, we forecast that ''Beijing will not act militarily against Taiwan'' (spoiler alert: this will also be our forecast in 2023), and we were correct. With that said, we did expect continued Chinese incursions in Taiwan's air defense identification zone (ADIZ), which did occur throughout the year. Taiwan also saw increased support from Europe and the United States this year, both economically and diplomatically.
In Hong Kong, we correctly asserted the island's alignment with Beijing would accelerate this year. Throughout 2022, we also saw the fulfillment of our forecast that ''Hong Kong's judicial and legislative independence [would] further deteriorate.''
Europe
France's presidential elections in the spring were highly contested, but the end results lined up with our forecasts: a moderate, pro-EU government led by incumbent President Emmanuel Macron. And from this correct forecast flowed many others. For example, we anticipated the Macron government would seek greater policy coordination with Germany and together pursue ''more flexible EU fiscal rules.'' And indeed, in 2022, the European Union suspended its fiscal rules to allow member states to free up spending and stabilize their economies, while France and Germany also pushed for EU-wide subsidies to protect their economies.
At the end of last year, we were confident that Europe's 2021 economic growth would not continue into 2022. Specifically, we identified increased food and energy prices as being a pain point for many governments across the Continent, which we said would ''create fertile ground for social unrest'' and force ''governments to continue or even expend their welfare measures.'' We saw significant strikes and protests across Europe this past year, most notably in France and the United Kingdom. And in response, most European countries approved billions of euros in aid, subsidies and other forms of spending to help companies and households cope with the economic crisis.
Middle East and North Africa
Entering the year we were optimistic that U.S.-Iran nuclear talks would yield a limited deal. But although negotiators came close to reaching an agreement in both March and August, Iran's overt support for Russia in the war against Ukraine ultimately complicated matters to a degree that became insurmountable. However, we were correct in asserting that Iran was unlikely to ''scale back its nuclear program or aggressive regional behavior'' in advance of inking such a deal, with Iran announcing greater uranium enrichment at its Fordow nuclear site and conducting continued attacks against Israel over the past year.
In Turkey, we correctly forecast that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) would pursue ''high-risk [economic] policies,'' with a focus on short-term growth at the expense of long-term stability, in an effort to boost support ahead of the country's 2023 national elections. We were also correct in forecasting that the AKP would ''pursue politics designed to curry favor with its traditional Islamist-nationalist base,'' as demonstrated by the Turkish government's recently proposed constitutional amendments related to same-sex marriage and secular headscarf rules.
Eurasia
There is no getting around it: We were wrong when we said Russia wouldn't invade Ukraine in 2022. Our assessment was based on two assumptions: a full-scale invasion was unlikely to be successful and would also do little to further Russia's interests (like deterring NATO's expansion). And both of these have proven true. Russia failed to quickly take control of the country after launching its ''special military operation'' in February, and is now struggling to hold on to the early territorial gains it made in eastern Ukraine. And instead of deterring NATO's expansion, the invasion has only accelerated it, as evidenced by Sweden and Finland's coming accession to the Western security alliance. The ongoing war in Ukraine has also seen both NATO forces and weapons systems move even closer to the Russian border. So, while our conclusion that Russia would not invade Ukraine was incorrect, the reasons behind it were solid. And we know that and have worked hard to learn from it. Coming out of February, we did multiple post-mortems on the matter; you can read the output of two of these here and here.
It is also worth noting the rest of our Eurasia forecast was correct. A ''significant improvement in U.S.-Russia bilateral relations [did] remain elusive in 2022,'' and ''Western sanctions [did] constrain the Belarusian economy, forcing the country to further align its foreign and domestic politics with Russia.'' And finally, ''Russia [did] demand a greater say in Belarus' domestic and foreign policies'' and achieved even deeper Belarusian dependence on Moscow. That said, the driver behind these developments was the Ukraine invasion, which we did not foresee. So while we were correct in our forecast, we were wrong in our reasoning, making these all partial hits.
Americas
In the lead-up to Brazil's general elections in the fall, we forecast that President Jair Bolsonaro would attempt ''to boost his appeal'' by increasing a monthly cash-transfer program, which he and his congressional allies did do in July. We were also correct that there would be clashes between different branches of the Brazilian government as each tried to ''shape the election.'' In addition, we correctly asserted (though this wasn't a stretch) that Bolsonaro would contest the outcome of the presidential election if his challenger, former left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, won the race. That said, the protests staged by Bolsonaro supporters were certainly more half-hearted than we expected.
If it seems like we've been tracking Argentina's economic struggles for years, it's because we have. And once again we were correct in our forecast. In 2022, we expected that Argentina would teeter on the edge of a default but not fall down. The International Monetary Fund and the Argentine government were able to renegotiate the country's $44 billion debt in March. We also correctly anticipated a bumpy year politically for the government in Buenos Aires. What we forecast as ''fierce internal disputes'' played out most notably with the appointment of three economy ministers in less than two months.
South Asia
As we expected, India saw robust economic growth over the past year, despite global headwinds. With such a strong position, we forecast that India would look to finalize as many trade deals as possible in an effort to boost exports. And throughout the year, New Delhi was able to do so, striking final agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Australia, as well as an interim deal with the United Kingdom.
Sub-Saharan Africa
At the start of the year, the Ethiopian military was riding high after a series of battlefield gains against the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in late 2021. And yet, we forecast that a victory was not at hand for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government. In fact, we said 2022 would see ''a protracted conflict followed by a negotiated settlement.'' And after 24 months of war, and many false starts, representatives of the Ethiopian government and the TPLF agreed to a cessation of hostilities in early November.
In Nigeria, we forecast a ''highly contested and unstable run-up'' to the country's February 2023 election. And this has largely played out, with Nigeria's two largest parties — the ruling All Progressives Congress Party (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) — both nominating presidential candidates who, if elected, would break with the country's decades-long, informal power-sharing system. We also forecast that 2022 would see significant defections from the APC and PDP as politicians jockeyed for influence. While we have seen many such shifts this year, the most notable was Peter Obi's departure from the PDP to make a long-shot run as the smaller Labor Party's presidential candidate. We also forecast a ''worsening security situation'' throughout the year, and have tracked increased terrorist activity in Nigeria outside of the traditional northeastern states, as well as attacks on electoral officials and politicians.
-
January 3, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
Trends That Will Define the Coming Years
They include deglobalization, stagflation and the bursting of the tech bubble.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
The world is always changing, but some changes are more important than others. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will likely be remembered as the start of a new era in geoeconomics. In response to the war, the West launched sanctions against Russia, escalating the economic war the Kremlin began when it blocked Ukraine from trading with the world through its ports. Moscow answered by drastically reducing natural gas exports to Europe. The uncertainty and tit-for-tat measures kicked off an energy crisis. And the war renewed focus on the growing divide between the West and a nascent revisionist bloc led by China and Russia. It is difficult to see a path back to the status quo ante bellum, but several major trends that will define the next decade have become clear.
Protectionism and Global Realignment
For years before COVID-19, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea challenged the economic, financial, security and/or geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after World War II. The era of relentless globalization had started to slow or even reverse. The pandemic kicked things into overdrive, accelerating reshoring and so-called friendshoring and depriving developing economies of foreign investment.
The war in Ukraine and its economic aftereffects are squeezing developing countries even more. In 2022, most of them put off making a choice between the West and Russia, hoping for a resolution to the conflict that would ease their economic pain. A case in point is Hungary, which, like many of these countries, depends on Russian energy and other commodities to sustain its economy and thus is wary of breaking ties with Moscow. Budapest has sought to slow the progression of Western sanctions against Russia. Others have avoided adopting anti-Russia sanctions altogether.
For Europe, the conflict between Russia and the West has shaken public and corporate confidence about the near future and made it nearly impossible to do business with Russian entities. Elsewhere, businesses expend time and resources checking whether their operations will incur sanctions, looking for alternatives whenever possible. The Black Sea is a de facto war zone, which has the upside of encouraging investment in overland infrastructure and the downside of making maritime trade more expensive.
As important as developments in Europe are, China and its internal stability may be the more consequential economic challenge in 2023. Facing growing protests late in the year, the Chinese government abandoned its zero-COVID policy with no apparent plan B. Official data is sparse and unreliable, and local and regional governments have been put in charge of managing the situation. It is unclear whether this will become a headache for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, especially since it falls between the start of the political transition in November and its end in March, when most officials will have their new posts confirmed. Meanwhile, the United States is escalating its trade war with China.
The result is likely to be a fragile economic recovery for China in 2023. The enduring weakness of the real estate sector has outweighed positive impulses in other economic areas, and fear of a financial crisis is weighing on private investment. Increasing youth unemployment adds a dangerous element to the mix. Beijing has taken steps recently to solve the real estate sector’s liquidity crisis, but it needs political stability for the measures to be effective.
This is not good news for the global economy. As much as the West would like to be shielded from events in China, Europe and the U.S. still depend on Chinese manufacturing of important inputs. Chinese lockdowns created kinks in supply chains, and the country’s political and economic instability could prolong them. Consumption and industrial activity in the U.S. and Europe are already in retreat, and there’s no end in sight to the energy crisis. A crisis in China would only make things worse.
Stagflation and Greenflation
In addition to the global economic slowdown, for the first time since the 1970s the world is simultaneously facing high inflation. The drivers of this bout of inflation include excessively loose monetary and fiscal policies that were kept in place for too long, the restructuring of global trade caused by the pandemic, and the sharp spike in the cost of energy, industrial metals, fertilizers and food as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Angered by the unequal distribution of the gains of globalization, voters demanded more government support for workers and those left behind. However well-intentioned, such policies risk an inflationary spiral as wages and prices struggle to keep pace with one another. Rising protectionism also restricts trade and impedes the movement of capital, limiting improvements on the supply side.
To the extent that the energy crisis is causing high inflation, investment in renewables will mitigate inflationary pressure. Renewable capacity will take time to develop, however, and in the meantime, there is underinvestment in fossil fuel capacity. The latter will take priority. Moreover, the green transition will require the development of new supply chains for certain metals and will increase the cost of energy generally, creating what’s been termed “greenflation.”
This coincides with a rapidly aging population not only in developed countries but also in China and some other emerging economies. Young people tend to produce more, while older people spend their savings and consume more services. And due to the market uncertainty caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, young people are producing less and reluctant to invest, which translates into a general economic slowdown. Therefore, just as the global economy will continue fragmenting into 2023, so will inflation persist.
Future of Tech
The war in Ukraine has caused disruption also in the tech industry. While most sectors have been impacted by declining investment and the challenging state of affairs overall, tech appears to be the hardest hit. Twitter, for example, has cut its workforce by 50 percent, and Facebook parent company Meta is letting go of 11,000, about 13 percent, of its employees. Amazon reportedly cut 10,000 jobs, representing about 1 percent of its global workforce. Meanwhile, FTX, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, recently valued at $32 billion, has imploded. The full fallout of its collapse is still unclear, but other crypto firms have already felt the effects.
Gone are the days of the early 2000s, when global markets were relatively stable and supply chains built on cheap labor were reliable. In those times, companies increasingly depended on the internet to grow their business, and tech firms benefited from low interest rates. But the factors that helped propel the fast growth of the early 2000s are today progressively volatile, as the global economy hobbles through the early stages of restructuring.
Like companies in other sectors, many tech businesses won’t recover, while others will adapt and bounce back slowly. New opportunities will arise. The restructuring of manufacturing and supply chains will require technology, and automation will increase, especially as the population ages. More important, governments will likely seize the opportunity to steer the tech industry in specific directions. There has been much talk about the role of social media in politics and in shaping policy, and as a result, lawmakers have tried to regulate things like privacy and competition as they relate to social media platforms. Cybersecurity is also an increasingly concerning issue for governments worldwide, and will likely continue to be as the sophistication of cyberattacks increases. Governments will therefore be pushed to become more assertive in regulating tech beyond its military applications.
Conclusion
The major trends in geoeconomics for 2023 and beyond are interconnected. The challenges they pose will require a systematic, coherent approach, but the political leadership in countries around the world is struggling to keep up. The speed of the change requires a different toolset than governments are used to, leaving them trying, and sometimes failing, to adapt to new realities. Cooperation is increasingly difficult, but it has actually grown stronger in some limited areas, like the West’s economic war against Russia following the Ukraine invasion.
Thus, even as deglobalization gains momentum, interdependency isn’t going away completely. Restructuring itself will be a global process. There’s just no avoiding the fact that the world today is interconnected in ways never seen before. Different perspectives will need to be reconciled, and people’s place in society beyond their economic value as consumers and political value as voters will have to be acknowledged. Human behavior, and therefore state behavior, is driven by everything from politics and economics to culture and psychology and even technology. This complexity will drive the challenges, and potential solutions, of tomorrow.
-
January 6, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
Putting the World in Perspective
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
In working on GPF’s Annual Forecast recently, I was looking for ways to measure national power and differentiate countries with large mouths from countries that are actually influential. The best approach to something like this is to be stupid and embrace the obvious. The obvious is to identify at least one of the elements of national power and find a way to measure it.
I thus stumbled upon something at once well-known and astounding. One self-evident measure of power is the economy, and the simplest way to measure the economy is by measuring gross domestic product. Rough though it may be, GDP can tell you much about a country, from the kind of military it might have, to the kind of public satisfaction it boasts, and ultimately the strength of its economy and its economic influence.
The following numbers are ones I know about but frequently don’t take the time to really absorb: the GDP of the top five nations as a percentage of global GDP:
The United States (24.06)
China (15.2)
Japan (6.02)
Germany (4.56)
India (3.2)
These five countries account for more than 50 percent of global GDP. Naturally, this correlates with military power. GDP measures production possibilities, including missiles and soldiers, but must also support civilian life. So there is a variation in the amount of effort put into military matters, but the potential to field a military force stands up to scrutiny. We can say, then, these five countries produce half of the world’s product and have the ability to produce equivalent massive militaries.
The most advanced and capable, if not numerically the largest, is the United States, a nation that has simultaneously maintained a relatively dynamic economy, systemic interludes of weakness notwithstanding. China boasts the world’s second-largest economy and has sought to build a major military. The historical question is whether the substantial gap between the United States’ GDP and China’s GDP has left China militarily weaker than the United States.
Behind the two major powers, Japan is trying to build a military based within the ever-changing parameters of its constitutional prohibition, but it certainly has the ability to become a substantial power again. Germany doesn’t really want to rearm but has never fully shut the door on the prospect. It is, however, involved in sending arms to Ukraine and in the economic war against Russia. India is engaged occasionally with China but, despite its GDP, is vast and impoverished. It is the smallest economically of the five and the least militarily engaged. It is also part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with the U.S., Australia and Japan, even as it builds relations with Russia.
The reality is that the five largest economies are either involved in a war or preparing their militaries with some rapidity in order to be able to wage one. This means that the world’s top economic powers are all engaged in active warfare or are preparing for it. Any uncertainty in military systems inevitably creates economic uncertainty. This, of course, applies to countries outside the top five list such as Russia, which is ranked number 11.
The most important country to forecast is, therefore, the United States. It has the largest economic and military footprint and has a tendency to engage in military operations at some level and economic operations as a main force. The next most important is China, particularly with regard to how it behaves in relation to the U.S. The U.S.-Chinese relationship is not only fundamental to what will happen for the rest of this year but also emblematic of the complex nature of power. It gives both nations a chance to compete on multiple levels and find a basis for collaboration. Washington’s role in the world is easy to forget among the political noise, but it's the basic reality driving the world.
-
Big global banks are eying some of the world’s most fragile countries for a new experiment in financial engineering: debt relief in exchange for environmental protections. Called “debt-for-nature swaps,” they present a tempting solution for the rising number of nations in distress, particularly those with ecosystems to protect. A country gets to avoid default and lower its debt burden, as long as it’s willing to earmark some of the savings to salvage a coral reef, preserve a forest or build a wind farm, for example. Global investors get better returns and enhanced green credentials. Wall Street takes a cut. As much as $2 trillion of developing country debt may be eligible for this kind of restructuring, according to a rough estimate by the Nature Conservancy, a US nonprofit that’s taking a lead role in these deals. Belize inked a $364 million nature swap in 2021; Gabon signaled plans for a $700 million restructuring in October; Ecuador is said to be working on a $800 million transaction, and Sri Lanka is considering a $1 billion deal. Buoyed by the finance industry’s newfound enthusiasm for biodiversity, backers of this latest flavor of swap are finding eager partners in investment banks and institutional investors. These are “turbocharged swaps,” said Daniel Munevar, economic affairs officer at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and former adviser to finance ministries in Greece and Colombia. “The limit in these operations isn’t the money to fund the swaps, it’s how much debt can be swapped.” (Source: bloomberg.com)
-
Of course, there is a cheat here. OTOH getting blood from a stone is a non-starter. The ecosystem of the planet IS threatened in various ways. I can imagine there being times this would be a good thing. Of course, with that camel's nose in the tent , , ,
-
By and large I agree with most of the points. Russia has lost the war since it has lost the element of surprise. NATO, the EU, and most importantly the Pentagon are now awake to the Russian threat. This is Russia's operation Barbarossa, the ill fated invasion of Russia by Hitler. Had Putin waited one or two years NATO would have been even further depleted of men and material that she couldn't sustain a major on Russia or support the Ukraine.
Moving on, Russia is involved in a major conflict that they thought would be a walk in the park. While Biden and the White House are involved in a major scandal that will at the very least stop Biden from running for a second term, and could result in him resigning for medical reasons, or facing an article 25. Everyone in the White House, including Blinken, are running around searching for a pair of iron pants to make sure they don't get caught up in this thing. What it seems is that the anyone but Trump candidate has finally screwed up to the degree that try as they may the US MSM can't save his ass.
For Israel this couldn't be better, Russia has had to recall it's troops and S-300s from Syria. Which means the sky's are open to take out Iranian assets in Syria. While just this week Israel has warned Hezbollah in lebanon to not push forward for a war against Israel or we will rain hell from the sky's on them. There is even doubt among the IDF that if we attack Iran, that Hezbollah and Hamas may put up only a token response or none at all. Israel itself is only months away from having operational laser weapons that only cost a few bucks to arm and fire. Compared to the thousands that it cost for Iron Dome to take out homemade or dumb rockets and missiles supplied by Iran. According to the current head of the IDF Israel is prepared for Iranian attacks, and have had three drills dealing with what they believe is the most likely long range nuclear attacks by the Mullahs.
So, Putin is busy in the Ukraine, China is watching and keeping its powder dry, and the US has domestic problems. England is fighting a war between liberals and Tories, lots of strikes and raising inflation. While in Europe, they are madly building up weapons system to help the Ukraine while defending themselves. The EU, UN, and NATO are all on the same page with regards to the Ukraine, and while the UN is an empty shield, NATO is seeing billions of dollars being spent on training and buying new equipment. In fact, the other day on German TV was a story that said for the first time since before the Second World War, German high school students see the military has an option for careers. What a difference between now and just five years ago when anti war pacifists dominated the countries politics. The peace dividend is over, money is being spent on the military, and today Germany is no longer dependent on Russia for energy....NATO is larger, even in Washington Iran is seen as a belligerent state, and China's problems with Covid have not stopped. I'm not saying things are Rosey, but just one year ago I gave the Ukraine a one in three chance to survive the winter....Now, it looks like even odds......Thanks to America, Germany, Poland, and most of the rest of the EU.
My rejoinder:
I would add to your rosy scenario the recent militaristic developments in Japan which support of US-Taiwan goals see e.g. the recent war game by the Pentagon showing that if we bring Japan into the equation that at high cost we would beat China if it attempted to take Taiwan.
-
Interesting French take or https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1613924570725244928
https://t.co/eYdKoBJx7B
-
Thought provoking and well worth considering well.
Nice find!
-
The Frailty Behind Europe’s Triumphalism Over the Ukraine War
The Continent’s hopes rely on GOP votes in Congress.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell MeadFollow
Jan. 23, 2023 5:52 pm ET
The temperature was in the single digits as your Global View columnist struggled to drag his suitcase across the icy streets of Davos to catch the 6 a.m. shuttle bus to Zurich on Saturday. The first winter meeting of the World Economic Forum since 2020 had been a success. While few Chinese and no Russians were present, India and the Gulf states more than took up the slack, and participation from the private sector reached an all-time high.
For Klaus Schwab, the 84-year-old founder and chief impresario of the World Economic Forum, the 53rd annual meeting was a triumph. French President Emmanuel Macron, pushing unpopular reforms to his country’s retirement system, prudently gave Davos a miss. But Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, joined German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in delivering major addresses. A closing panel on the global economic outlook featured the president of the International Monetary Fund, the heads of the European and Japanese central banks, and luminaries like Larry Summers.
No other event brings together this mix of power and prominence. With all its flaws, the World Economic Forum remains an essential destination for the global power elite. And when CEOs and world leaders flock to Davos, journalists and commentators can hardly stay away.
While much of the real business of Davos takes place among CEOs and investors in private meetings, the gathering’s public agenda was dominated by two topics: climate change and the war in Ukraine.
The enthusiasm for Ukraine was vivid. Europeans wore yellow and blue to show their solidarity. President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the conference by video while Ukraine’s first lady visited in person. Both drew rapturous receptions—though non-European, non-American participants from places like India and the Gulf were less enthusiastic.
European enthusiasm for Ukraine is driven partly by relief. The combination of a warm winter and efforts by European governments foiled Vladimir Putin’s plan to bring the Continent to its knees by an energy embargo. And despite qualms in countries like Hungary, Greece and Slovakia, the European Union has been able to unite around economic sanctions against Russia and aid for Ukraine. Speaker after speaker returned to these themes: Europe is strong, Europe is united, Europe has become a major geopolitical actor like China and the U.S.
This latest bout of Euro triumphalism was unconvincing, and not only because of policy battles over issues like Germany’s reluctance to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine. Europe’s weakness matters even more than its divisions. If Ukraine had depended on Europe alone for help, the Russian flag would be flying over the ruins of Kharkiv, Kyiv and Odessa. More than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, Europe can’t act in its own backyard without depending on the U.S. But Washington is increasingly preoccupied by challenges in the Indo-Pacific. With many European leaders sheltering under the American security umbrella even as they double down on close economic relations with China, it isn’t clear how long the U.S. will be willing or able to protect the EU from the consequences of its geopolitical incapacity.
This isn’t an idle concern. Mr. Putin hasn’t yet lost his war. Fears that Russian mobilization could bring hundreds of thousands of fresh if poorly trained troops into the conflict, along with a sober assessment of the effectiveness of the Russian air campaign, are leading some in Kyiv and elsewhere to warn of a massive Russian offensive in the spring.
If Germany relents and sends tanks to Ukraine, Russian hopes for a successful offensive will take a hit. Yet even then, without American money, equipment and ammunition, Ukraine can’t continue the unequal struggle indefinitely.
In my last column, I noted that European hopes for concerted global action on climate change can’t succeed without support from American Republicans. Europe’s hopes for Ukraine likewise depend on GOP votes in Congress. The belief that the EU can achieve its core objectives without engaging seriously with American conservatives is magical thinking. Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine should have alerted Europeans to the danger of erecting foreign policy on wishes and dreams. That doesn’t seem to have happened.
Europe is walking on thin ice. Russia, China and Iran challenge the existing world order. Much of the Global South increasingly resents the status quo. And in the U.S., the political consensus behind two generations of global American engagement is badly frayed.
European diplomats pride themselves on bridge building and dialogue, though they sometimes seem more willing to engage with Tehran and Beijing than with Ohio and Florida. Let’s hope that 2023 will begin an era of engagement, facilitated perhaps by the WEF, between European leaders and the increasingly disgruntled American conservatives whose support they desperately need.
-
January 26, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
Forecast for 2023
Though the war in Ukraine is agonizing to observe, it is not the most important issue of 2023.
By: George Friedman
Our 2023 Annual Forecast, like those before it, is an attempt to provide a sense of the direction of the world. We do this by looking at it holistically, paying particular attention to regions and nations whose actions significantly affect the global system. All countries matter to those who live in them, but for our purposes many are excluded, even though we expect them to be influenced – sometimes dramatically – by the countries and regions we do include.
The central issue this year will be the ongoing spasm of economic dysfunction, due in equal parts to the war in Ukraine, post-pandemic recovery efforts, and the more banal aspects of ordinary business cycles. These problems are compounded by the dramatic economic crisis in China, its effects inevitably transmitting throughout the world by virtue of China's economic weight. Transnational, multifaceted economic crises like these take years to resolve, and in their resolution, they will generate political consequences within countries and between them. This phenomenon will intensify in 2023. And though the war in Ukraine is agonizing to observe, it is not the most important issue we face this year. That honor belongs to China.
China
As expected, China’s economic crisis intensified in 2022, leading to more, higher-profile instances of social unrest. They were ostensibly caused by COVID-19 lockdown measures, but as with all protests, they became broader movements of people airing economic and political grievances. In some ways, China is a victim of its own success. Its breakneck economic growth was unsustainable, but domestic and international investors believed it to be permanent, as they're wont to do. China desperately needs investment capital and unfettered exports to stabilize its system. With the global economic crisis, both are harder to come by – a fact that has forced China to redefine its relationship with perhaps the only country able to provide investment capital and demand for products amid a recession: the United States.
Lockdown Protests Spread Across China
(click to enlarge)
China has had a formal communications channel with the United States since November. So far, talks have not been productive, but we forecast they will be. Beijing will have to ease military tensions with the United States, save for the normal face-saving theatrics. The U.S. has reason to play nice too; it doesn’t want China to move closer to Russia, nor does it want Beijing to act aggressively in the face of economic catastrophe.
For all the saber-rattling between the two, we do not expect a Sino-American war. China cannot afford a defeat in a war as its economic standing at home is in question. Its focus must be on solving its economic problems and quelling unrest. It will need a reasonable relationship with the U.S. to do that.
The United States
At this point, the U.S. cannot afford to abandon Ukraine. Having asserted its interests there and pressured other nations to cooperate, American options are limited. Still, Washington is fighting an optimal war. The Ukrainians are absorbing casualties, even as the delivery of U.S. weapons and munitions imposes heavy casualties on the Russians. Washington will press for a negotiated settlement that keeps Russia as far from NATO’s borders as possible and will hold this position through the year.
At home, the U.S. will experience a significant recession, similar to the 1970s, when the cost of Vietnam, the Arab oil embargo and natural downturns in the business cycle created massive inflation and job pressures. This recession, like that one, will begin to focus on cyclical changes for the decade.
Russia
The war in Ukraine is gridlocked. Every time the Ukrainian armed forces score a tactical victory, Russia prevents them from fully exploiting it – and vice versa. This state of affairs would suggest a negotiated settlement is in the offing, and though we believe that to be the logical outcome, so far no one seems willing to budge.
The prospects for a settlement depend, to some degree, on the viability of the Russian economy. The West’s initial response to the invasion was a debilitating campaign that, for a spell, crippled Russia’s economy. Though Russia isn’t out of the woods, it has rebounded well enough to at least maintain some leverage in the war, in international energy markets, and so on.
Russian Federal Budget
(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)
Economics aside, two major obstacles have frustrated any attempt to end the stalemate. The first is a precondition that neither side will resume hostilities at a time of their choosing. Both want to retain that right. The second is an unwillingness to cede territory, which is difficult for domestic political reasons. The Ukrainians want control of their whole country. The Russian public would be appalled that all the death and hardships were for far less than promised. (A key element on both sides of the war is management of the public. Ukraine and the U.S. have shown they can manage their publics. Russia is the one to watch.)
There is no reason to believe that either side will crush the other. It’s possible that there will be peace talks, but a rapid settlement is unlikely. The stakes are high, and neither side will break. The most likely course is that the war will continue, but don’t be surprised to see the beginnings of talks toward resolution.
Europe
It’s difficult to forecast Europe because "Europe" is ultimately a geographic concept bound together by multinational organizations, the biggest of which are NATO and the European Union, each with its own membership list and mission. It’s better to think of Europe as an arena for cooperation and coemption.
A major issue for Europe in 2023 will be continued access to Russian energy. Europeans agree that they need oil, but they cannot agree what price should be paid for it. Poland opposes any concession to Russia. Hungary doesn’t. Germany is eager to maintain oil shipments but must subordinate itself to the United States, its largest customer and guarantor of national security. Consider also that Europe broadly believes a Russian victory in Ukraine would be bad for the continent. Countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany remember the Cold War, and they are in no hurry to recreate the boundaries that defined it. There is genuine support in governments – and in some publics – for the war.
Dependency on Russian Oil and Petroleum, 2020
(click to enlarge)
The European Union was designed for peace and prosperity. War strains these ideals and skews geopolitical interests and economic desires. Some countries feel they must prioritize war preparations over economic considerations. This will strain the unity of the EU in the coming year, not only over this issue but also over an increasing sense that the bloc undermines national economic and military interests. The EU will continue, however slowly, to fragment as national interests diverge.
India
India is slowly emerging as an economic and military power whose ascension affects everyone. It has one of the fastest-growing major economies – certainly among comparably developed and similarly sized economies. It must now be included with nations that influence the global system.
India's national strategy is to balance between greater powers, particularly Russia and the United States, a practice that will inevitably create tensions inside a country that is famously variegated. India will therefore grow in fits and starts as it manages its relationships with historical adversaries and skews ties with traditional allies. New Delhi will, for example, enhance economic and industrial cooperation with Russia to balance against China. There have always been questions as to when India would emerge as a great power. Next year seems the moment.
The Middle East and North Africa
New alliances will emerge and old ones will decay. Israel has already become a major anchor of the region, as evidenced by the Abraham Accords, but forces inside the country have created a degree of unease in Arab nations. More important is the political future of Turkey, with the Erdogan era waning and the region preparing for new Turkish policies. Internal matters will dominate the region in 2023 – no small matter for a region beset by decades of war – and those within Israel and Turkey most of all. Neither will yield much clarity.
(click to enlarge)
Latin America
Driving the behavior of Latin America in 2023 will be its inability to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. It was arguably the worst-hit region and has been the slowest to recover. Latin American countries will see intense social unrest, and governments will prioritize foreign ties with economic benefits. Increased global uncertainty and competition surrounding commodities like food, energy and metals will spark renewed interest from countries in the Western Hemisphere to establish commodity-driven commercial ties. Russia and China will not be able to compete as strongly in Latin America as they have in past years. Their own economic problems will prevent them from offering financial solutions this far afield, creating an opportunity for the U.S. to shore up ties, including with sometimes adversarial governments in Cuba and Venezuela.
Conclusions
It’s easy to forget we’ve been living in the post-Cold War era for more than 30 years. The world was never perfectly harmonious, but countries broadly seemed to be paddling in the same direction. 2023 may finally be the year the world starts to move into another age. Alliances and relationships will fragment as interests diverge, which could even ease pressure in some places. Tensions created by the U.S.-China competition will at least partly shape those interests, even as Beijing and Washington come to some kind of formal economic understanding and informal military understanding.
-
Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong
NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won't help.
CHRIS HEDGES
JAN 29
SAVE
▷ LISTEN
Everything Must Go - Mr. Fish
Upgrade to paid
Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony, fits this pattern. The danger is that the more dire things look, the more the U.S. will escalate the conflict, potentially provoking open confrontation with Russia. If Russia carries out retaliatory attacks on supply and training bases in neighboring NATO countries, or uses tactical nuclear weapons, NATO will almost certainly respond by attacking Russian forces. We will have ignited World War III, which could result in a nuclear holocaust.
U.S. military support for Ukraine began with the basics — ammunition and assault weapons. The Biden administration, however, soon crossed several self-imposed red lines to provide a tidal wave of lethal war machinery: Stinger anti-aircraft systems; Javelin anti-armor systems; M777 towed Howitzers; 122mm GRAD rockets; M142 multiple rocket launchers, or HIMARS; Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles; Patriot air defense batteries; National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS); M113 Armored Personnel Carriers; and now 31 M1 Abrams, as part of a new $400 million package. These tanks will be supplemented by 14 German Leopard 2A6 tanks, 14 British Challenger 2 tanks, as well as tanks from other NATO members, including Poland. Next on the list are armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.
Since Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, Congress has approved more than $113 billion in aid to Ukraine and allied nations supporting the war in Ukraine. Three-fifths of this aid, $67 billion, has been allocated for military expenditures. There are 28 countries transferring weapons to Ukraine. All of them, with the exception of Australia, Canada and the U.S., are in Europe.
The rapid upgrade of sophisticated military hardware and aid provided to Ukraine is not a good sign for the NATO alliance. It takes many months, if not years, of training to operate and coordinate these weapons systems. Tank battles — I was in the last major tank battle outside Kuwait City during the first Gulf war as a reporter — are highly choreographed and complex operations. Armor must work in close concert with air power, warships, infantry and artillery batteries. It will be many, many months, if not years, before Ukrainian forces receive adequate training to operate this equipment and coordinate the diverse components of a modern battlefield. Indeed, the U.S. never succeeded in training the Iraqi and Afghan armies in combined arms maneuver warfare, despite two decades of occupation.
I was with Marine Corps units in February 1991 that pushed Iraqi forces out of the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji. Supplied with superior military equipment, the Saudi soldiers that held Khafji offered ineffectual resistance. As we entered the city, we saw Saudi troops in commandeered fire trucks, hightailing it south to escape the fighting. All the fancy military hardware, which the Saudis had purchased from the U.S., proved worthless because they did not know how to use it.
NATO military commanders understand that the infusion of these weapons systems into the war will not alter what is, at best, a stalemate, defined largely by artillery duels over hundreds of miles of front lines. The purchase of these weapons systems — one M1 Abrams tank costs $10 million when training and sustainment are included — increases the profits of the arms manufacturers. The use of these weapons in Ukraine allows them to be tested in battlefield conditions, making the war a laboratory for weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin. All this is useful to NATO and to the arms industry. But it is not very useful to Ukraine.
The other problem with advanced weapons systems such as the M1 Abrams, which have 1,500-horsepower turbine engines that run on jet fuel, is that they are temperamental and require highly skilled and near constant maintenance. They are not forgiving to those operating them who make mistakes; indeed, mistakes can be lethal. The most optimistic scenario for deploying M1-Abrams tanks in Ukraine is six to eight months, more likely longer. If Russia launches a major offensive in the spring, as expected, the M1 Abrams will not be part of the Ukrainian arsenal. Even when they do arrive, they will not significantly alter the balance of power, especially if the Russians are able to turn the tanks, manned by inexperienced crews, into charred hulks.
Upgrade to paid
So why all this infusion of high-tech weaponry? We can sum it up in one word: panic.
Having declared a de facto war on Russia and openly calling for the removal of Vladimir Putin, the neoconservative pimps of war watch with dread as Ukraine is being pummeled by a relentless Russian war of attrition. Ukraine has suffered nearly 18,000 civilian casualties (6,919 killed and 11,075 injured). It has also seen around 8 percent of its total housing destroyed or damaged and 50 percent of its energy infrastructure directly impacted with frequent power cuts. Ukraine requires at least $3 billion a month in outside support to keep its economy afloat, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director recently said. Nearly 14 million Ukrainians have been displaced — 8 million in Europe and 6 million internally — and up to 18 million people, or 40 percent of Ukraine’s population, will soon require humanitarian assistance. Ukraine’s economy contracted by 35 percent in 2022, and 60 percent of Ukrainians are now poised to live on less than $5.5 a day, according to World Bank estimates. Nine million Ukrainians are without electricity and water in sub-zerotemperatures, the Ukrainian president says. According to estimates from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 100,000 Ukrainian and 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killedin the war as of last November.
“My feeling is we are at a crucial moment in the conflict when the momentum could shift in favor of Russia if we don’t act decisively and quickly,” former U.S. Senator Rob Portman was quoted as saying at the World Economic Forum in a post by The Atlantic Council. “A surge is needed.”
Turning logic on its head, the shills for war argue that “the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory.” The cavalier attitude to a potential nuclear confrontation with Russia by the cheerleaders for the war in Ukraine is very, very frightening, especially given the fiascos they oversaw for twenty years in the Middle East.
The near hysterical calls to support Ukraine as a bulwark of liberty and democracy by the mandarins in Washington are a response to the palpable rot and decline of the U.S. empire. America’s global authority has been decimated by well-publicized war crimes, torture, economic decline, social disintegration — including the assault on the capital on January 6, the botched response to the pandemic, declining life expectancies and the plague of mass shootings — and a series of military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism.
In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion spending bill included $847 billion for the military; the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which overseesnuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them. In 2021, when the U.S. had a military budget of $801 billion, it constituted nearly 40 percent of all global military expenditures, more than the next nine countries, including Russia and China, spent on their militaries combined.
As Edward Gibbon observed about the Roman Empire’s own fatal lust for endless war: “[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”
A state of permanent war creates complex bureaucracies, sustained by compliant politicians, journalists, scientists, technocrats and academics, who obsequiously serve the war machine. This militarism needs mortal enemies — the latest are Russia and China — even when those demonized have no intention or capability, as was the case with Iraq, of harming the U.S. We are hostage to these incestuous institutional structures.
Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, for example, appointed eight commissioners to review Biden’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) to “examine the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS.” The commission, as Eli Clifton writes at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.” The chair of the commission, Clifton notes, is former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who “sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.”
Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposesas an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.
America’s two ruling parties depend on campaign funds from the war industry and are pressured by weapons manufacturers in their state or districts, who employ constituents, to pass gargantuan military budgets. Politicians are acutely aware that to challenge the permanent war economy is to be attacked as unpatriotic and is usually an act of political suicide.
“The soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance,” writes Simone Weil in her essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”, “but deliverance itself appears to it an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction.”
Historians refer to the quixotic attempt by empires in decline to regain a lost hegemony through military adventurism as “micro-militarism.” During the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) the Athenians invaded Sicily, losing 200 ships and thousands of soldiers. The defeat ignited a series of successful revolts throughout the Athenian empire. The Roman Empire, which at its height lasted for two centuries, became captive to its one military man army that, similar to the U.S. war industry, was a state within a state. Rome’s once mighty legions in the late stage of empire suffered defeat after defeat while extracting ever more resources from a crumbling and impoverished state. In the end, the elite Praetorian Guard auctioned off the emperorship to the highest bidder. The British Empire, already decimated by the suicidal military folly of World War I, breathed its last gasp in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Britain withdrew in humiliation and became an appendage of the United States. A decade-long war in Afghanistan sealed the fate of a decrepit Soviet Union.
“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book, “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.” “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micro-military operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”
The plan to reshape Europe and the global balance of power by degrading Russia is turning out to resemble the failed plan to reshape the Middle East. It is fueling a global food crisis and devastating Europe with near double-digit inflation. It is exposing the impotency, once again, of the United States, and the bankruptcy of its ruling oligarchs. As a counterweight to the United States, nations such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and Iran are severing themselves from the tyranny of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a move that will trigger economic and social catastrophe in the United States. Washington is giving Ukraine ever more sophisticated weapons systems and billions upon billions in aid in a futile bid to save Ukraine but, more importantly, to save itself.
-
The "elites" thought they'd use Ukraine as a way to remove Putin and shatter Russia into pieces to be exploited, as well as distract from the slow-motion trainwreck that is the western world.
Now they are desperate to save face and are throwing miltech at the wall, praying something sticks.
Stupid AND desperate.
That makes them especially dangerous.
To us.
Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong
NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won't help.
CHRIS HEDGES
JAN 29
SAVE
▷ LISTEN
Everything Must Go - Mr. Fish
Upgrade to paid
Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony, fits this pattern. The danger is that the more dire things look, the more the U.S. will escalate the conflict, potentially provoking open confrontation with Russia. If Russia carries out retaliatory attacks on supply and training bases in neighboring NATO countries, or uses tactical nuclear weapons, NATO will almost certainly respond by attacking Russian forces. We will have ignited World War III, which could result in a nuclear holocaust.
U.S. military support for Ukraine began with the basics — ammunition and assault weapons. The Biden administration, however, soon crossed several self-imposed red lines to provide a tidal wave of lethal war machinery: Stinger anti-aircraft systems; Javelin anti-armor systems; M777 towed Howitzers; 122mm GRAD rockets; M142 multiple rocket launchers, or HIMARS; Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles; Patriot air defense batteries; National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS); M113 Armored Personnel Carriers; and now 31 M1 Abrams, as part of a new $400 million package. These tanks will be supplemented by 14 German Leopard 2A6 tanks, 14 British Challenger 2 tanks, as well as tanks from other NATO members, including Poland. Next on the list are armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.
Since Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, Congress has approved more than $113 billion in aid to Ukraine and allied nations supporting the war in Ukraine. Three-fifths of this aid, $67 billion, has been allocated for military expenditures. There are 28 countries transferring weapons to Ukraine. All of them, with the exception of Australia, Canada and the U.S., are in Europe.
The rapid upgrade of sophisticated military hardware and aid provided to Ukraine is not a good sign for the NATO alliance. It takes many months, if not years, of training to operate and coordinate these weapons systems. Tank battles — I was in the last major tank battle outside Kuwait City during the first Gulf war as a reporter — are highly choreographed and complex operations. Armor must work in close concert with air power, warships, infantry and artillery batteries. It will be many, many months, if not years, before Ukrainian forces receive adequate training to operate this equipment and coordinate the diverse components of a modern battlefield. Indeed, the U.S. never succeeded in training the Iraqi and Afghan armies in combined arms maneuver warfare, despite two decades of occupation.
I was with Marine Corps units in February 1991 that pushed Iraqi forces out of the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji. Supplied with superior military equipment, the Saudi soldiers that held Khafji offered ineffectual resistance. As we entered the city, we saw Saudi troops in commandeered fire trucks, hightailing it south to escape the fighting. All the fancy military hardware, which the Saudis had purchased from the U.S., proved worthless because they did not know how to use it.
NATO military commanders understand that the infusion of these weapons systems into the war will not alter what is, at best, a stalemate, defined largely by artillery duels over hundreds of miles of front lines. The purchase of these weapons systems — one M1 Abrams tank costs $10 million when training and sustainment are included — increases the profits of the arms manufacturers. The use of these weapons in Ukraine allows them to be tested in battlefield conditions, making the war a laboratory for weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin. All this is useful to NATO and to the arms industry. But it is not very useful to Ukraine.
The other problem with advanced weapons systems such as the M1 Abrams, which have 1,500-horsepower turbine engines that run on jet fuel, is that they are temperamental and require highly skilled and near constant maintenance. They are not forgiving to those operating them who make mistakes; indeed, mistakes can be lethal. The most optimistic scenario for deploying M1-Abrams tanks in Ukraine is six to eight months, more likely longer. If Russia launches a major offensive in the spring, as expected, the M1 Abrams will not be part of the Ukrainian arsenal. Even when they do arrive, they will not significantly alter the balance of power, especially if the Russians are able to turn the tanks, manned by inexperienced crews, into charred hulks.
Upgrade to paid
So why all this infusion of high-tech weaponry? We can sum it up in one word: panic.
Having declared a de facto war on Russia and openly calling for the removal of Vladimir Putin, the neoconservative pimps of war watch with dread as Ukraine is being pummeled by a relentless Russian war of attrition. Ukraine has suffered nearly 18,000 civilian casualties (6,919 killed and 11,075 injured). It has also seen around 8 percent of its total housing destroyed or damaged and 50 percent of its energy infrastructure directly impacted with frequent power cuts. Ukraine requires at least $3 billion a month in outside support to keep its economy afloat, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director recently said. Nearly 14 million Ukrainians have been displaced — 8 million in Europe and 6 million internally — and up to 18 million people, or 40 percent of Ukraine’s population, will soon require humanitarian assistance. Ukraine’s economy contracted by 35 percent in 2022, and 60 percent of Ukrainians are now poised to live on less than $5.5 a day, according to World Bank estimates. Nine million Ukrainians are without electricity and water in sub-zerotemperatures, the Ukrainian president says. According to estimates from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 100,000 Ukrainian and 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killedin the war as of last November.
“My feeling is we are at a crucial moment in the conflict when the momentum could shift in favor of Russia if we don’t act decisively and quickly,” former U.S. Senator Rob Portman was quoted as saying at the World Economic Forum in a post by The Atlantic Council. “A surge is needed.”
Turning logic on its head, the shills for war argue that “the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory.” The cavalier attitude to a potential nuclear confrontation with Russia by the cheerleaders for the war in Ukraine is very, very frightening, especially given the fiascos they oversaw for twenty years in the Middle East.
The near hysterical calls to support Ukraine as a bulwark of liberty and democracy by the mandarins in Washington are a response to the palpable rot and decline of the U.S. empire. America’s global authority has been decimated by well-publicized war crimes, torture, economic decline, social disintegration — including the assault on the capital on January 6, the botched response to the pandemic, declining life expectancies and the plague of mass shootings — and a series of military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism.
In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion spending bill included $847 billion for the military; the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which overseesnuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them. In 2021, when the U.S. had a military budget of $801 billion, it constituted nearly 40 percent of all global military expenditures, more than the next nine countries, including Russia and China, spent on their militaries combined.
As Edward Gibbon observed about the Roman Empire’s own fatal lust for endless war: “[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”
A state of permanent war creates complex bureaucracies, sustained by compliant politicians, journalists, scientists, technocrats and academics, who obsequiously serve the war machine. This militarism needs mortal enemies — the latest are Russia and China — even when those demonized have no intention or capability, as was the case with Iraq, of harming the U.S. We are hostage to these incestuous institutional structures.
Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, for example, appointed eight commissioners to review Biden’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) to “examine the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS.” The commission, as Eli Clifton writes at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.” The chair of the commission, Clifton notes, is former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who “sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.”
Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposesas an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.
America’s two ruling parties depend on campaign funds from the war industry and are pressured by weapons manufacturers in their state or districts, who employ constituents, to pass gargantuan military budgets. Politicians are acutely aware that to challenge the permanent war economy is to be attacked as unpatriotic and is usually an act of political suicide.
“The soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance,” writes Simone Weil in her essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”, “but deliverance itself appears to it an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction.”
Historians refer to the quixotic attempt by empires in decline to regain a lost hegemony through military adventurism as “micro-militarism.” During the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) the Athenians invaded Sicily, losing 200 ships and thousands of soldiers. The defeat ignited a series of successful revolts throughout the Athenian empire. The Roman Empire, which at its height lasted for two centuries, became captive to its one military man army that, similar to the U.S. war industry, was a state within a state. Rome’s once mighty legions in the late stage of empire suffered defeat after defeat while extracting ever more resources from a crumbling and impoverished state. In the end, the elite Praetorian Guard auctioned off the emperorship to the highest bidder. The British Empire, already decimated by the suicidal military folly of World War I, breathed its last gasp in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Britain withdrew in humiliation and became an appendage of the United States. A decade-long war in Afghanistan sealed the fate of a decrepit Soviet Union.
“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book, “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.” “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micro-military operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”
The plan to reshape Europe and the global balance of power by degrading Russia is turning out to resemble the failed plan to reshape the Middle East. It is fueling a global food crisis and devastating Europe with near double-digit inflation. It is exposing the impotency, once again, of the United States, and the bankruptcy of its ruling oligarchs. As a counterweight to the United States, nations such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and Iran are severing themselves from the tyranny of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a move that will trigger economic and social catastrophe in the United States. Washington is giving Ukraine ever more sophisticated weapons systems and billions upon billions in aid in a futile bid to save Ukraine but, more importantly, to save itself.
-
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2023-01-30/first-months-us-relations-new-russia-1992?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=21e434a1-6969-408e-9c63-8f3ab98b8f13
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19317/russian-iranian-axis
Russian-Iranian Axis: Biden Administration Missing in Action?
by Judith Bergman
January 31, 2023 at 5:00 am
Iran is now selling surface-to-surface missiles to Russia for use in its war on Ukraine -- on the cusp of a reported "major Ukrainian offensive" -- in addition to the drones it has already been delivering, two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats told Reuters.
"In exchange, Russia is offering Iran an unprecedented level of military and technical support that is transforming their relationship into a full-fledged defense partnership.... This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful... to the international community." — John Kirby, White House National Security Spokesperson, December 9, 2022.
When asked how Iran's sale of drones and missiles impacts the Biden administration's stance on the Iran nuclear deal... John Kirby deflected the question.
At a time when Iranians are desperately risking their lives to free themselves of a vicious theocratic dictatorship, it would be equally impressive if the Biden Administration would stand firmly behind the protestors in their fight for liberty and human rights, values America has always professed to support. President Ronald Reagan did it with great success to aid the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Speaking a rally in California in October, President Joe Biden said, "we stand with the citizens, the brave women of Iran." Such words are cost-free: They will not do much to help the Iranian protesters fighting for freedom and human rights.
Even former President Barack Obama, who ignored Iran's "Green Movement" protesters in 2009, admitted in October that his lack of support then for the Iranian dissidents was a mistake.
Statements of solidarity, however strong, will not produce serious results. What is needed from the US is to help the people of Iran concretely – to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons to dominate the Middle East, South America, Europe -- and the United States.
Iran is now planning to station warships in the Panama Canal – which China is aggressively trying to control. The U.S. has not even had an ambassador in Panama since 2018.
All one has to do is look at how terrified the Biden administration has been of "provoking" Russian President Vladimir Putin into using nuclear weapons. What actually provokes dictators? That America exists.
Iran is now selling surface-to-surface missiles to Russia for use in its war on Ukraine, in addition to the drones it has already been delivering, two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats told Reuters. Pictured: Firefighters in Kyiv, Ukraine try to put out a fire in a four-story residential building, in which three people were killed when it was hit by a "kamikaze drone" (many of which are supplied to Russian forces by Iran), on October 17, 2022. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
Iran is now selling surface-to-surface missiles to Russia for use in its war on Ukraine -- on the cusp of a reported "major Ukrainian offensive" -- in addition to the drones it has already been delivering, two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats told Reuters.
According to anonymous US and allied officials quoted by the Washington Post, Iran has secretly agreed to send "what some officials described as the first Iranian-made surface-to-surface missiles intended for use against Ukrainian cities and troop positions."
Russia is reportedly buying Iranian-made missiles capable of hitting targets at distances of 300 and 700 kilometers, respectively.
"The Russians had asked for more drones and those Iranian ballistic missiles with improved accuracy, particularly the Fateh and Zolfaghar missiles family," one of the Iranian diplomats told Reuters.
The news of the missile deal came after it became publicly known in August that Russia had been buying Iranian drones, including the Mohajer-6 and the Shahed-series drones. The first batch, according to the Washington Post, was picked up by Russian cargo flights in late August, with Iranians reported to be training Russian soldiers in using them for Russia's war on Ukraine.
The Shahed-136s kamikaze drones, are designed to explode upon impact with their targets. According to the Washington Post, they are capable of delivering explosive payloads at distances of up to 1,500 miles.
John Kirby, White House National Security Council spokesperson, confirmed in December, that Iranian military support for Russia has become indispensable to Russia's war effort in Ukraine and directly enabling it to kill Ukrainians; that Iran is considering selling ballistic missiles to the country and that the two regimes are developing a military partnership that is mutually beneficial. Kirby said in a December 9 briefing:
"Iran is providing Russia with drones for use on the battlefield in Ukraine... In exchange, Russia is offering Iran an unprecedented level of military and technical support that is transforming their relationship into a full-fledged defense partnership.... This partnership poses a threat, not just to Ukraine, but to Iran's neighbors in the region..."
"Iran has become Russia's top military backer. Since August, Iran has transferred several hundred drones, UAVs, to Russia. Russia has been using these UAVs to attack Ukraine's critical infrastructure, and as I said earlier, to kill innocent Ukrainian people...
"We expect Iranian support for the Russian military to only grow in coming months. We even believe that Iran is considering the sale of hundreds of ballistic missiles from Iran to Russia... We've also seen reports that Moscow and Tehran are considering the establishment of a joint production line for lethal drones in Russia. We urge Iran to reverse course, not to take the steps...
"Russia is seeking to collaborate with Iran on areas like weapons development and training. As part of this collaboration, we are concerned that Russia intends to provide Iran with advanced military components. Moscow may be providing Tehran with equipment such as helicopters and air defense systems. As of this spring, Iranian pilots have reportedly been training in Russia to learn how to fly the Su-35. This indicates that Iran may begin receiving aircraft within the next year. These fighter planes would significantly strengthen Iran's air force relative to its regional neighbors.
"This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful, as I said to Ukraine, to Iran's neighbors, and quite frankly to the international community."
Russia's use of Iranian military equipment against Ukraine not only strengthens Russia in Ukraine, but it gives Iran what the Ukrainian Defense Ministry called "test runs' of its drones, to update their systems for future use against the US and its allies, such as Israel.
Kirby spoke on October 20 about the US response to Iran's drone sales to Russia:
"We have imposed new sanctions, including on an air transportation service provider for its involvement in the shipment of Iranian UAVs to Russia... We've also sanctioned... companies and even one individual that was involved in the research, development, production, and procurement of Iranian UAVs and components... including specifically the Shahed family of drones that we know are being used... in Ukraine."
When asked how Iran's sale of drones and missiles impacts the Biden administration's stance on the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Kirby deflected the question:
"Our focus right now, quite frankly... is not on the JCPOA. We are way far apart with the Iranians in terms of a return to the deal, so we're just simply not focused on that right now. They had demands that were well in excess of what the JCPOA was supposed to cover. And again, so we're just — we are not focused on the diplomacy at this point."
At a time when Iranians are desperately risking their lives to free themselves of a vicious theocratic dictatorship, it would be equally impressive if the Biden Administration would stand firmly behind the protestors in their fight for liberty and human rights, values America has always professed to support. President Ronald Reagan did it with great success to aid the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Iranian security forces have killed at least 500 people since the protests there began in mid-September, including 69 children, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). According to HRANA, Iranian authorities have recently arrested more than 18,400 people in connection with the protests. In addition, at least 100 protesters are currently at risk of facing "execution, death penalty charges or sentences," according to the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights NGO. "This is a minimum as most families are under pressure to stay quiet, the real number is believed to be much higher."
Speaking a rally in California in October, President Joe Biden said, "we stand with the citizens, the brave women of Iran."
Such words are cost-free: They will not do much to help the Iranian protesters fighting for freedom and human rights.
Even former President Barack Obama, who ignored Iran's "Green Movement" protesters in 2009, admitted in October that his lack of support then for the Iranian dissidents was a mistake.
"When I think back to 2009, 2010, you guys will recall there was a big debate inside the White House about whether I should publicly affirm what was going on with the Green Movement, because a lot of the activists were being accused of being tools of the West and there was some thought that we were somehow gonna be undermining their street cred in Iran if I supported what they were doing. And in retrospect, I think that was a mistake."
"Every time we see a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom, I think we have to point it out. We have to shine a spotlight on it. We have to express some solidarity about it."
Statements of solidarity, however strong, will not produce serious results. What is needed from the US is to help the people of Iran concretely – to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons to dominate the Middle East, South America, Europe -- and the United States.
Iran is now planning to station warships in the Panama Canal – which China is aggressively trying to control. The U.S. has not even had an ambassador in Panama since 2018.
All one has to do is look at how terrified the Biden administration has been of "provoking" Russian President Vladimir Putin into using nuclear weapons.
What actually provokes dictators? That America exists.
There are a number of ways the Biden administration can "take steps," suggest Eric Adelman Counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations:
"First, the United States should formally declare that it will end negotiations with Iran on a putative return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action... The United States should also make clear that it will not negotiate with an Iranian government that is repressing the Iranian people and destabilizing its neighbors. Such declarations would rob the regime of its ability to generate hope among the population that sanctions might be lifted under its rule.
"Publicly closing the door on negotiations would also free up the Biden administration to fully enforce sanctions already on the books. The United States should target Iranian officials guilty of the most egregious human rights violations, bolstering hope among Iran's people for government accountability. This should be accompanied by full-throated and ongoing U.S. government statements supporting the protesters and drawing attention to the worst instances of repression."
Adelman and Takeyh also argue that the US should increase protesters' ability to communicate by "sending Starlink terminals," which would enable Iran's anti-regime protest movement to "get around the regime's censorship and blocks on social media. Apparently, thanks to Elon Musk, Iran now has "around 100."
"Other software apps, such as Ushahidi, have been used to monitor elections in sub-Saharan Africa by allowing voters to share images of polling places. Such applications could be repurposed to allow Iranians to share images of acts of protest in different parts of the country, enabling coordination among different groups of protesters and, by forcing the government to overstretch its security forces, making it harder for the regime to quash dissent. The United States should also use popular social media channels, such as Telegram, to provide dissidents with accurate information about what is going on throughout the country, including protests, human rights abuses, and executions. The expansion and creative use of such channels of communication could help new protest leaders emerge and drown out regime propaganda.
"In addition, the United States should ramp up broadcasting by the Voice of America's Persian Service and Radio Farda and fund private television broadcasting by Iranian expats, which could provide additional fuel for the fire raging in the streets of Iranian cities. Currently, the United States is projected to spend less than $30 million in the 2023 fiscal year on broadcasting in Iran."
Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.
Follow Judith Bergman on Twitter
-
Network Intelligence Report: Navigating the Risks of a Multipolar World
133 MIN READFeb 15, 2023 | 16:03 GMT
(Shutterstock)
Editor's Note: This is a complimentary piece of content we share from our Core Intel platform. RANE’s community-based solutions help address a range of enterprise risks covering Safety + Security, Cyber + Information, Geopolitical, and Legal, Regulatory + Compliance. Contact us to learn more.
RANE's Network Intelligence Report incorporates our analysts' diverse expertise to assess risks and opportunities pertinent to our clients across our taxonomy's four areas of focus: geopolitics; legal, regulatory and compliance; cyber and information; and physical safety and security.
Although we only began conceptualizing this special Navigating Multipolarity issue of the Network Intelligence Report towards the end of 2022, it has been clear for several years that the era of unchallenged U.S. hegemony – and of the broader Western-led global order – is over. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is only the most recent and acute demonstration of this, but more broadly the rise of China and the emergence of multiple small and middle powers have introduced a great deal of uncertainty into the global environment. Even a more integrated Europe, though still close to the United States, has created new challenges as Washington and Brussels pursue divergent policies in many areas, such as tech and environmental regulation.
Our Network Intelligence Report begins with an overview of what this emerging multipolar world looks like and the implications for organizations trying to navigate it. As we are keenly aware, business leaders across industries and company sizes have identified geopolitical risk as a key concern in 2023. Our analysts examine five key areas of this new world order that are highly relevant to our clients.
One of the defining characteristics of the emerging global environment is a decline in the relevance and effectiveness of the Western-led multilateral political, economic and security institutions that emerged in the wake of World War II. In particular, the rise of alternative lending institutions and business norms, many of which are championed by China, creates new legal, reputational, financial and operational risks to organizations.
Just as new multilateral institutions are increasingly dividing the physical world, so too are countries increasingly resorting to nationalism in cyberspace. What was once a global commons is increasingly split along national or regional lines. This is creating a much more complex and protectionist digital landscape for organizations to maneuver and protect their data.
Countries are also growing more protectionist in their environmental policies as they seek to pair action on climate change with state-led economic intervention. While China has long done this, it is the United States that has more recently and unexpectedly led this charge, forcing Europe to respond. This is already creating compliance challenges, which are set to only grow in the coming years, for multinational businesses.
If these challenges are not enough, legal and compliance teams are also facing a growing array of sanctions requirements. Though most immediately focused on Russia, Western nations are expanding and in some cases wholly redesigning their sanctions architecture in ways that will make it crucial for all organizations to improve their due diligence practices to avoid legal or reputational blowback, especially as regulators turn their focus toward China.
Finally, a shifting and more uncertain world will make it more important than ever that organizations have a model and tools to evaluate and mitigate the various risks future crises may bring, especially for physical security. Applying a framework from the U.S. Intelligence Community that leverages the proliferation of open-source intelligence for a corporate context offers one well-developed way forward.
We strongly believe that you will find this special Navigating Multipolarity issue of the Network Intelligence Report a useful guide to this emerging multipolar world order. As always, we are indebted to the work of our talented analysts and expert contributors, whose observations and guidance frame each advisory.
Sincerely,
Sam Lichtenstein, Director of Analysis, RANE
Geopolitical Disruptions: The Return of Multipolarity
The reemergence of a multipolar world and rising peer competition is changing the global security and business landscape. Defense budgets are climbing. National security considerations are driving geo-economic competition. Global norms and expectations that have held for decades are in flux. Complex supply chains woven since the end of the Cold War are fraying. Adapting to this shifting global landscape will require rethinking longstanding assumptions, but also understanding the geopolitical forces driving change.
Multipolarity is not new – in fact, it may be the norm of the modern globalized world. With the exception of the Cold War and a brief period of re-adjustment following the collapse of the Soviet Union, modern global history has been characterized by a multipolar world system. No power was able to hold sway over the rest singularly. Even at the height of British imperialism, the UK was not the clear global hegemon, as seen in its continued struggles to manage competing powers on the European continent as well as Russian advances in Central Asia toward South and Southeast Asia – the so-called "Great Game." No truly global bloc formation emerged until after World War II. Instead, the global balance of power was fluid.
From Globalization to Liberal Economics
From a geopolitical perspective, which seeks to take the long, structural view, the "modern" world began sometime in the early 16th century, when Europe "discovered" the rest of the globe. Before this time, there were empires rising and falling, cultures emerging and developing, and science and technology advancing, all over the globe. And there were connections moving people, goods and ideas across Europe, Asia and Africa. But distance remained a major constraint on global connectivity, and it took the combined advances in shipbuilding, navigation technologies and economic resources to bring the globe into clear focus and integration.
By the 19th century, global trade, strategic competition and shifting technology meant that the world was a closed political system. As British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder assessed in 1904, "every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence." In other words, what happened on one continent had repercussions for those on other distant continents and vice versa. Thus the American Revolution had significant implications for Britain's security in India (and affected London's dispersion of force and decision-making), and the expansion of European sea trade to the Far East degraded the economic viability of Central Asian trading routes (and the fortunes of the Italian city-states).
With the integration of the world into a single system, fully cognizant of itself, we can trace the origins of today's globalization to the early 1500s, with sporadic maturation over the succeeding centuries. But it is only after World War II that the modern framework for globalization emerged. At the end of the war, the United States stood as one of the few strong economic powers, and Washington used this heft to rebuild Europe and establish a new global economic and philosophical framework. Modern liberal economic policies may have their origins in older eras and theorists, but it was the widespread destruction of World War II that allowed the construction of a new liberal economic framework, which took on more importance as the world quickly moved into the Cold War architecture.
The Cold War was both a strategic and ideological competition. The United States and Western Europe promoted a liberal ideology that linked personal freedoms, private industry and democracy as the fundamental (and universal) conditions for economic growth and success. This challenged Soviet collectivism and statism, but it also challenged other traditional forms of economic and social collectivism that characterized much of the developing world. When the collapse of the Soviet Union "proved" the superiority of Western liberal economics, the West could demand adherence to its norms amid the rapid expansion of global trade, trade agreements and economic interactions. Thus, one abnormal period (the bipolar Cold War) gave way to another oddity, the "hegemonic" moment of U.S. power that lasted until the early 2000s. This was a transitory period where the rest of the world sought balance, particularly the rapidly growing China.
Challenging the Status Quo
China stands in stark contrast to the universal assertions of Western liberal economic norms. While China made some economic progress through the 1980s, it was the 1990s and early 2000s that saw the real surge in Chinese economic growth and global importance. China was well positioned to take advantage of its massive low-cost labor pool to draw industrial investment and link into the rapidly expanding containerized shipping. Global norms and trade agreements facilitated the growth and complexity of global supply chains, allowing corporations to move goods at various stages of completion to different countries, with products at times crossing oceans several times before reaching their final destinations. China played within this system when it was beneficial, but Beijing never gave up state involvement in the economy or Communist Party control over the government and people.
As China's economic power rose, and its importance to global trade flows increased, Beijing grew more confident in beginning to challenge aspects of the global (i.e. Western) norms, highlighting its own successes in economic growth without the same political or personal freedoms the West asserted were necessary co-requisites. Beijing's message resonates with much of the world. The Western liberal economic and political ideas are not inherently universal, but rather come from a particular strand of philosophy and were codified at a unique moment in history. But the North Atlantic no longer comprises the bulk of global economic activity and heft. Thus, China argues, the West's mores should not necessarily dictate the political, economic and social choices of other countries.
China is not alone in challenging the status quo. As U.S. power seemed to grow unchecked following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rest of the world sought balance. Freed of the Soviet threat, Europe accelerated its own integration, creating a massive single market that gave Brussels power in asserting global norms on issues ranging from the environment to human rights. Russia perceived unchecked U.S. power, and the expansion of NATO, as a direct threat to its own strategic position, and by the early 2000s began its own push against the global order. As these four poles of power became clearer, small and middle powers like Turkey, India and Japan saw the opportunity to begin exploiting the differences between the big powers, finding their own advantages where they may, but also introducing uncertainty into political and economic policies as they bucked against U.S., European, Chinese and Russian interests, or saw local politics swing between different big power influence.
Challenges and Opportunities of a Multipolar System
The United States and China sit at the core of the new multipolar system, with Europe and Russia as similar but not fully aligned poles – and an array of small and middle powers shifting throughout this new ecosystem. But despite growing U.S.-China strategic competition, it is unlikely the world returns to another Cold War-like architecture. Unlike at the end of World War II, there is no massive dislocation of global trade and peoples that can allow the formation of a new competing set of economic and political blocs. Rather, no single power has the ability to either dominate the international system alone or force other countries to fully choose a side. This has strategic and economic implications not only for government policies and international relations but for internationally engaged and exposed businesses and organizations.
Uncertainty in international relations: Multipolarity provides space for many small and middle-tier countries to decline "choosing a side" between big powers, leading to more flexible alignments rather than expanding strong alliances. In the Indo-Pacific, for example, many countries are finding themselves largely aligned economically with China while militarily with the United States. This may make them more susceptible to economic coercion from big powers, and economic impacts are often based less on the economic fundamentals in a specific smaller country than on the political actions of the larger powers. Thus, unexpected economic disruptions may become more common, requiring not only adept political risk awareness that draws on the expanding amount of open-source intelligence but an understanding of the broader geopolitical balance as well.
Emergence of miniblocs: While traditional large-scale complex alliances may be waning, the multipolar system encourages the frequent formation of smaller mini-blocs, attempts by like-minded countries to pool their relative power to better maneuver between the big powers. These may be driven by the big powers, as seen in groupings like the QUAD or AUKUS, or be regionally focused, as with the closer cooperation emerging among the Baltic countries and Poland, or the renewed collaboration within the core of ASEAN. This will force businesses to navigate increasingly diverse – and at times opposed – political and economic blocs, posing new compliance, supply chain, data security and other risks.
Rising nationalism: The challenges to assertions of universal norms (such as Western liberal economics) and the impact of re-emerging great power competition drive renewed nationalism and protectionist tendencies, even on topics like climate change that are truly global challenges. As the global trade system undergoes structural realignment, big powers employ geo-economic tools against one another and ideas of economic security as a key component of national security are revived, protectionist actions and greater state involvement in economics and industry become both more normal and more acceptable. And this moves well beyond the issue of trade, or ideas of near-shoring and friend-shoring. It is also rapidly expanding into new territories, such as information and cyber-sovereignty, and expansion of traditional ideas of air sovereignty to now include space.
Fraying of global financial architecture: While there is little likelihood of a near-term replacement of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, its dominance and the global financial architecture give Washington disproportionate power to use economic tools to shape global political and security environments. China, Russia and many other countries are actively seeking alternatives to the dollar and existing financial infrastructure to soften Washington’s ability to punish and coerce. But this is not limited to just direct competitors to the United States. Even nominal partners, such as Middle Eastern oil suppliers, are making arrangements for alternative currency exchanges, and both China and the European Union have developed regulations that can counteract U.S. sanctions, leaving businesses in the difficult position of choosing which set of regulations to adhere to.
More localized conflict: As nationalism rises, so does sub-nationalism, and many ethnic or regional groups within countries are asserting their own right to self-determination. At the same time, as the big powers step up strategic competition, more localized competition within and among smaller powers may devolve into military conflict. With the focus on China and Russia, the United States and Europe may be less likely to intervene in moderate localized conflict, suggesting that the threshold for intervention is shifting.
Uncoordinated responses to broader global issues: Multipolarity makes collaborative global action more difficult. Nationalism and economic security will often take precedence over global issues, and while this doesn’t end the momentum for addressing things like climate change or illegal fishing, it may lead to more regional and local responses or actions by big powers more focused on their particular location than on the overall globe. This may be particularly notable in places like South America and the Pacific Islands – the former where we are seeing a New Left harness environmentalism as part of its challenge to outside economic exploitation, the latter where their very survival is already being challenged by climate change.
Restructured supply chains: Organizations and corporations that have very complex multi-company supply chains, and those that have very narrow, single-source supply lines, are highly vulnerable to disruptions in the multipolar world. Resilience may require redundancy, which is costly, or more flexibility in identifying and being able to rapidly shift to alternatives in times of localized stress. This impacts not only physical goods but services and information-based products as well. Increasingly, companies will also need to develop their own foreign policy, particularly if they have heavy exposure to more than one of the big powers, or wide-ranging supply chains. Understanding multiple layers of supply, at times down to the initial minerals, will also become an important component in managing geopolitical risk and trade. This will only increase the need for organizations to have robust frameworks to proactively collect, analyze and mitigate various risks.
China's Challenges to Bretton Woods: Implications for Businesses
The rise of non-Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs) in an increasingly multipolar world has significant implications for global business opportunities and demonstrates the need for firms to modify their operational strategies to mitigate potential geopolitical, legal and financial risks. Since the founding of institutions such as the New Development Bank (NDB) in 2015 and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2016, both of which are headquartered in China and guided and resourced to a significant extent by Beijing, concerns have grown that infrastructure development investment projects that these new institutions underwrite, are accompanied by a different set of rules and norms for business and investment that may diverge from the values affirmed during the Bretton Woods era. As part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's vision of the "Chinese Dream," China seeks to challenge the Western-centric global order through such projects as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the new Maritime Silk Road and new multilateral development institutions that offer loan packages that appeal to developing countries and deprioritize transparency, anti-corruption and safeguards for workers, among other things. Close observers of the Chinese influence on multilateral lending by the AIIB and NDB point also to the potential linkages between lending decisions and China's geopolitical objectives. In order to better understand the legal, reputational, financial and operational risks to businesses likely to emerge as competition from non-Western multilateral lending institutions challenges the norms and practices enshrined in the values of BWIs, RANE spoke with Nathan Picarsic and Emily de la Bruyère, Co-Founders of Horizon Advisory.
The Rise of Bretton Woods and China's Recent Challenge
In December 1944, 44 delegates representing the Allied Powers met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss the formation of an international organization to finance the reconstruction of Europe following the conclusion of World War II. The primary lending institution that emerged from the conference is the World Bank Group (WBG). Composed of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Development Association, the International Finance Corporation, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the WBG's primary mandate is to provide financing to low- and middle-income countries for development projects. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was founded alongside the WBG with a mandate to resolve international financial crises and to correct balance of payment issues.
The BWI ecosystem has given rise to a number of multilateral development banks (MDB) focused on regional lending, such as the African Development Bank (1964) and the Asian Development Bank (1966). These MDBs have largely been organized and capitalized in a manner similar to the WBG and have adopted the same terms, practices and norms, and have participated in coordination with other WBG entities in lending activities. To supplement the activities of these MDBs at the regional level in Europe, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was established in 1961. Headquartered in Paris, the OECD's stated purpose is to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It is a forum whose member countries describe themselves as committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practices, and coordinate the domestic and international policies of its members. A brief synopsis of relevant multilateral institutions and their mandates that comprise the BWI ecosystem can be found below:
A List of Major Multilateral Development Banks Founded Since World War II
In general, the norms and behaviors of these multilateral lenders reflect those of the international liberal order established by the United States and its allies at the Bretton Woods Conference. Since the 1990s, this "international liberal order" has come to be defined by the Washington Consensus. The Washington Consensus features policy prescriptions such as fiscal discipline, pro-growth spending, market-based interest rates, free trade, privatization of state-owned enterprises, deregulation of business and basic property rights. Furthermore, integrating the Washington Consensus into its loan packages, the WBG began to require that aid recipients implement structural adjustment programs if they wished to receive new loans or adjust the interest rates on existing loans. Conceived in the aftermath of economic crises in Latin America throughout the 1980s, structural adjustment programs often require recipients to curtail social spending and implement fiscal austerity plans, leading to allegations of neocolonialism and the undermining of national sovereignty. As a result of such policies, the WBG, IMF and their affiliated institutions have been criticized by various groups and opposition leaders in recipient states as examples of Western hegemony.
As global development accelerated, the drumbeat of criticism by emerging and developing economies, most particularly China, became louder. China insisted that the governance structure of the BWIs is too tightly controlled by the United States and its Western allies, and that the investment decisions and economic support provided by the BWIs are inextricably linked to the Washington Consensus. In line with recurring geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing, China came to believe that it did not have appropriate voting power and influence in the BWIs to reflect its own growing economic size and geopolitical influence. The leadership of the World Bank is traditionally reserved for a U.S. representative. The IMF is run by a representative chosen from Western Europe. Even the most relevant regional MDB, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), works in concert with BWI norms and practices and is always headed by a Japanese representative.
In 2016, to correct this perceived imbalance, China established the AIIB, headquartered in Beijing, and coordinated with other emerging and developing economies countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) — to establish the BRICS Development Bank, which was subsequently rebranded as the NDB, and headquartered in Shanghai. As of 2021, the five BRICS countries represented 41% of the world's population and 24% of global GDP. Furthermore, as of 2022, China alone represented nearly 18.5% of the global population and the equivalent percentage of global GDP.
The governance of the new institutions is illustrative: China controls a 26.5% voting share in AIIB decision-making, whereas the next largest vote holder is India, with 7.6% voting rights. China can control the governance of AIIB given that its voting power is greater than the 25% required to block decisions made even by a supermajority of AIIB voting members (which would require 75% of the vote by two-thirds of the Bank's members). China holds a 20% share of voting rights in the NDB, along with 20% held by each of the other four original BRICS founding members. China is the largest capital provider to the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), instituted in the same year as the NDB, which provides balance of payments assistance to BRICS countries. China has committed $41 billion to CRA, the largest contribution from the five BRICS countries, giving it 39.5% of the voting power. Although the United States is not a member of the AIIB, NDB or the BRICS-controlled CRA, Western nations such as Australia, France, Germany, Italy and the UK have joined AIIB (with a combined voting power of 13.2%), demonstrating the rise of the AIIB and NDB as viable, multilateral alternatives to the BWIs.
Unpacking the Challenges
The challenge of these China-centric institutions comes at a time of staggering investment opportunity and need throughout the world's emerging and developing economies. In its 2017 report, Meeting Asia's Infrastructure Needs, the ADB estimated that in the Asia-Pacific region alone, the investment need is approximately $1.7 trillion per year through 2030, "if the region is to maintain its growth momentum, eradicate poverty, and respond to climate change." However, the rise of China-centric multilateral institutions such as the AIIB and the NDB challenge the BWIs and their affiliates and create myriad geopolitical, reputational and economic risks, particularly with respect to the rise of a "Beijing Consensus," divergent positions on human rights, corruption and business transparency, and increasing friction in the Western alliance on shared values and competing commercial interests between the United States and Europe.
A List Showing Challenges to Global Trade and Finance in a Multipolar World: Asia-Pacific
The Beijing Consensus
Picarsic and de la Bruyère both note that China appears to view the AIIB, NDB and related infrastructure initiatives as opportunities to rewrite global norms surrounding lending and economic growth in the developing world. Emblematic of this perspective is the "Beijing Consensus." Defined as a development framework that prioritizes infrastructure, active state intervention in markets and gradual market reform vs. "shock therapy," the Beijing Consensus is an extension of the policy prescriptions that have enabled the Chinese economy to lift over 300 million citizens from poverty since the beginning of the "Reform and Opening Up" period in 1978. Indeed, since 2012, China has leveraged international partnerships and the Belt and Road Initiative, a cornerstone of President Xi's development policy that seeks to provide infrastructure funding in the developing world, to provide training to over 10,000 bureaucrats in the developing world, using the sessions to extol the virtues of state capitalism and infrastructure-led development. Commenting on China's export of new norms, de la Bruyère states that "Beijing is increasing its footprint and that of its institutions and organizations internationally," suggesting that China is likely to continue this practice as it seeks to supplant the U.S.-led unipolar order. For de la Bruyère, this ideological conflict between China and the West is likely to intensify, particularly to the extent that China strengthens its "no-limits friendship" with Russia amid Russia's war in Ukraine.
According to Picarsic, this trend demonstrates how China has learned from the mistakes of the "Washington Consensus" and now seeks to use its lending power in a more appealing formula when engaging the developing world. A primary criticism of the BWIs and structural adjustment programs is that they undermine national sovereignty and breed popular resentment as people chafe at austerity measures required in exchange for financial support. Picarsic theorizes that China has "watched what the United States did since World War Two and throughout the Cold War. And I think they have updated and learned from it." By avoiding overt conflict with aid recipients in favor of an approach that champions active state intervention in markets, he believes that Beijing Consensus policies will likely continue to serve as an attractive alternative to the BWI-led order.
Picarsic also notes that Beijing may be more likely, given its close reading of the history of BWI-led investment and pushback from recipient countries, to position its own geopolitical interests more carefully as commercial and civilian engagements. This approach "won't spur the same kind of wake up call" in the West, Picarsic notes. It may give China the opportunity to present itself in a manner that does not show signs of overt military or undue geopolitical influence while behind the scenes engaging in renegotiations of lending and other financial interactions to increase China's control and influence. For example, in 2022 under the BRI, China's Export-Import Bank extended a $4.7 billion loan to Kenya to finance the country's railway system. Notably, the loan does not feature any expectations for structural adjustment programs and has drawn significant media attention for its questionable terms, portrayed as secretive and exploitative by transparency activists in Kenya. Picarsic adds that using some of the leverage China has in the global financial system through its lending will be part of Beijing's geopolitical playbook, stating that "It won't be the same sort of blunt, in your face mode." Picarsic and de la Bruyère also see China managing its economic policy to further a geopolitical goal of dividing the US relationship with Western Europe. Both comment that there is an "underrecognition of this problem" in which China appears to use economic levers in a manner that creates friction between the United States and its European allies by selectively favoring European companies over U.S. companies. In a more fractured trans-Atlantic alliance, U.S. firms may face stiffer competition in a less fair geopolitical environment and have the added responsibility of managing differing sets of compliance requirements between Europe and the United States.
Human Rights, Corruption and Norms
Within the BWI lending framework, loans are often conditioned on the adoption of policy prescriptions that protect basic human rights such as the freedoms of religion, assembly and expression. In addition, recipients of loans from the IMF and WBG must also commit to anti-corruption measures, particularly on how aid money is spent and allocated, as well as sign on to other good governance initiatives like protecting workers' rights. However, many recipient countries chafe at these restrictions and view them as neocolonial attempts to interfere in domestic governance. Recognizing this opportunity to provide condition-free financing that forges linkages with leaders in developing states, loan agreements from the AIIB and NDB omit language around human rights, anti-corruption and other good governance standards in favor of "resource for infrastructure" loan programs that are often seen as corrupt. As just one of many examples, as of 2020, Angola had received $42 billion in loans from China in exchange for access to Angolan oil.
Indeed, commenting on the deprioritization of anti-corruption in non-BWI institutions, de la Bruyère states that U.S. and Western firms that seek to bid on contracts for major development projects can become "immensely frustrated" because they cannot compete given what she calls the "corruption of the Chinese approach" and the "high degree of bribery." Therefore, as Western firms continue to seek business in the developing world, particularly in primary and raw goods markets, or as participants in the infrastructure development activities financed by these new MDBs, firms will have to be mindful of the constraints on their ability to do business given the anti-corruption and business practice norms and behaviors to which they are held accountable by their home governments.
Reputational Risk and Potential Sanctions
De la Bruyère believes that firms bidding for contracts as part of projects funded by the Bretton Woods institutions, AIIB or NDB investments will have to be mindful of "major reputational and regulatory risk." Because Chinese firms may not be held to the same regulatory and ethical standards as Western firms, consortia led by China could make decisions that run afoul of Western sanctions or other regulations. De la Bruyère suggests that firms should adopt a holistic view of reputational risks throughout the lifecycle of a deal and pursue rigorous due diligence before making agreements and continue to monitor the transaction closely. Picarsic notes that if a Chinese firm becomes aware that a competitor is doing anything that can somehow be construed as cutting corners or seeking ex parte, non-competitive support or assistance on a transaction, "the Chinese side has shown that they're able to weaponize that type of information and use it against the international competitor." The Chinese competitor may have access to Chinese government resources — including classified intelligence or surveillance technology — to potentially compromise and manipulate the international competitor via intellectual property (IP) theft, hack-and-leak cyberattacks and/or reputational attacks.
Picarsic notes the significant reputational risk faced by Western companies that have an on-the-ground local market presence and compete with Chinese firms in the kinds of project development investments that the AIIB finances. He notes "I think those risks are probably going to flow to parent entities in ways that existing compliance and oversight mechanisms probably aren't prepared to handle at the corporate level." He also points out that business activities involving Chinese entities are attracting greater scrutiny from Western politicians and regulators. For example, Disney's continued engagement with China has led to public boycotts by human rights activists such as Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong. Picarsic also notes that capital markets regulators and other watchdogs will be increasingly focused on business that involves China in order to assess and mitigate sectoral exposure to human rights abuses, sanctions violations and other unethical business practices.
Related to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards, de la Bruyère notes that human rights issues are the first line of investigation when assessing ESG and reputational risks. For example, in July 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned five Chinese government officials for involvement in human rights violations against ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The move by the Treasury followed the publication of an advisory earlier the same month by the Treasury and the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce and Homeland Security warning companies of the reputational and legal risks of doing business with entities involved in human rights violations in Xinjiang. This followed the Department of Commerce in 2019-2020 added 37 entities to its Entity List, which flags entities with which U.S. companies are prohibited from engaging in commercial activity, or must do so under specific licenses and approvals from Commerce. De la Bruyère adds that as the incentives and abilities for official governmental watchdogs and non-state monitoring groups to uncover human rights abuses grow, this ESG risk will surface and be a bigger concern that companies will need to monitor and manage.
Picarsic adds that Western firms need to monitor closely for poor environmental performance by the Chinese firms with which they participate in development investment activities. For example, project finance agreements may have content requirements or other stipulations by Chinese finance providers that Chinese solar panels or batteries be used. The production of these materials is often done in an environmentally harmful manner. Picarsic suggests that with more global scrutiny of China-related business, and better watchdog tracking of supply chain realities, the issue of ESG compliance may become "a battleground where you see a reckoning and increasing tension between the reality of Chinese projects and the normative ambitions of ESG friendly capital and corporates."
Geopolitical Risk: Companies on the Frontline and Frayed Alliances
The relationship between China and the West has grown increasingly strained at the same time that China has assumed a more aggressive role in global finance and commerce. The COVID pandemic and the perception by some that China covered up or moved too slowly to combat the possible origin of the virus, as well as increasing concerns over Chinese intentions over Taiwan and China's crackdown on domestic dissent, have complicated China's relationship with Western countries. Even more recently, China's unwillingness to take a hard line opposing Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also been a major concern for the Western alliance. As a result of increasing tension, and the political significance that the U.S. relationship with China plays in U.S. economic and geopolitical decision-making and policy, on Jan. 10, 2023, the new Republican-led House of Representatives established, with broad consensus, a House Select Committee on China. The new committee will likely focus on Chinese threats to U.S. cybersecurity and the IP of U.S. entities, the perceived overdependence of U.S. firms on supply chains originating in China and the risk that some investments by U.S. firms in China may contribute to Chinese human rights violations or the modernization of the Chinese military. In addition, the Committee may investigate activities by Beijing to support and influence the academic study of China in the United States — namely, the use of Confucius Institutes — which it believes shape student perceptions in a manner that favors China over U.S. values and interests. Opposition to China appears to be one of the few bipartisan areas of agreement; there is every indication that U.S. relations with China will assume more politicized attention as the country moves toward the presidential election in November 2024.
De la Bruyère makes the point that China's industrial policy focuses on prioritizing Chinese companies in key strategic value chains. A continuing market risk for non-Chinese firms is the assumption that, if they are operating at a more sophisticated point on the value chain and if significant competition from China is not yet evident, they are immune to competition from Chinese firms. She says it is a mistake to ignore the preferential treatment China provides its companies or how it works to make them more competitive. De la Bruyère comments that "China's approach to international competition and power projection and as geopolitical tension escalates, is to use the private sector as a tool. China puts pressure on U.S. companies so they in turn put pressure on the U.S. government. China inflicts costs on the U.S. for the sake of geopolitical competition."
China is not only targeting the developing world but also states that have been supporters of the international liberal order and the norms captured by the BWIs. "China reaches out to other Western countries about American 'unilateralism,' and presents Beijing's approach as one that actually gives everybody a voice," de la Bruyère comments. She adds that Beijing emphasizes the economic costs of siding with Washington and suggests giving sweetheart-type deals to Western countries with the objective of isolating the United States and driving a wedge over China issues between Washington and its traditional allies. Picarsic agrees, emphasizing that one of China's objectives is to divide the United States from its allies. "In terms of Alliance maintenance and cooperation," he notes, "whether it's international trade or social and cultural trends, the Chinese are farther ahead than we give them credit for, and some of that is that we've just been looking at the wrong things." Picarsic continues to say that while the West may not see clear examples of Chinese military encroachment in areas with immediate geopolitical implications to current conflicts — such as a Chinese presence in the Black Sea, for example — there are examples in recent years of Chinese commercial and financial activities giving Beijing possible dual-use commercial and military influence over other geostrategic locations. High degrees of indebtedness to Chinese commercial lending, such as the Chinese acquisition of a 99-year lease to operate the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka — could lead to an influx of other Yuan-denominated debt transactions that tip a sovereign nation into conceding port access, valuable raw materials or some other geostrategic asset to Chinese control.
In evaluating the trajectory of U.S.-European unity regarding China, Picarsic references the United Kingdom as a key country to track. He recalls that during the Trump administration, London aligned closely with Washington on the geopolitical threat posed by China, specifically the national security risks of allowing Chinese telecommunications company Huawei access to commercial procurement transactions that could put the privacy of communications at risk of penetration by Beijing. Picarsic points to the UK National Security and Investment Act, which came into law in January 2022. London has used the law to unwind the 2021 purchase of Newport Wafer Fab, the United Kingdom's largest microchip assembly facility, by Nexperia Holding, the Dutch subsidiary of Chinese company Wingtech Technology Co. Picarsic suggests the Newport example is illustrative and worth tracking. He believes that, if the UK continues to scrutinize Chinese investment and use the National Security and Investment Act to roll back transactions as necessary, that would bode well for the trans-Atlantic alliance with respect to working together to blunt the geopolitical threats from China coming via commercial transactions. But if the unwinding of the Newport transaction is appealed and if the United Kingdom is not able to show the resolve to use the Act to prevent Chinese commercially directed interests from accessing strategic and emerging industries, there will be cause for greater concern.
Furthermore, Picarsic raises a current test case of how China may seek to exploit the fault lines of Western alliances: the manner in which the United States and its Western allies address the discovery and recent media coverage of overseas police stations linked to the Chinese intelligence services. Various media reports have shown that China uses overseas police stations to monitor the activities of Chinese nationals abroad, harass dissidents and in some cases even forcibly repatriate them. While Picarcic acknowledges that governments' public condemnation has been fairly consistent throughout the Western world, he notes that an "interesting early indicator in the months ahead" will be the degree to which countries are willing to confront this Chinese encroachment. He poses a hypothetical question: if the response by some countries is tepid, to avoid the opprobrium of China, will that suggest that they are more concerned about losing access to Chinese markets and deals arranged through Chinese financing, such as AIIB project loan activities than such an affront to national sovereignty?
How to Respond: Practical Guidance
To limit their risk profile to these threats, there are numerous best practices organizations can implement. The primary obstacle to mitigating the legal and reputational risks of participation in potentially corrupt development projects is to obtain clarity regarding potential business partners and develop a thorough understanding of all firms involved in the life cycle of a deal. To that end, Picarsic stresses the importance of conducting robust due diligence when bidding on contracts, noting that strong due diligence can help firms "execute their compliance mandates." He further states that effective due diligence can "help with governance issues if a firm is publicly listed on an exchange." By conducting appropriate due diligence when evaluating whether to participate in a deal funded by a non-BWI institution or a Chinese-influenced firm, companies will be able to reduce their legal exposure and preempt potential sanctions if the project engages entities on a sanctions list. In particular, effective due diligence should include a thorough investigation of corporate ownership (as Chinese authorities at all levels of government have significant financial holdings in many nominally private firms) and state influence on corporate decision-making. Given that firms in China are required to host Communist Party cells if the firm employs three or more Party members, the Party-state could influence business strategy and potentially implicate partner firms in rights violations.
Moreover, in the context of reputational risk associated with non-BWI-funded development projects, firms can mitigate the fallout of frayed alliances among Western states by maintaining a low profile and avoiding direct engagement with politically-charged discussions. In practice, this means that firms must give more thought to a carefully balanced PR strategy that avoids statements or actions that could be perceived as overtly partisan or political. This approach will enable the firm to focus on business and avoid entanglement with great power competition. To complement this approach, firms can also develop a proactive media policy that assures investors and government regulators that they seek business free from bribery or impropriety. As de la Bruyère notes, because the Western world "is reluctant to engage in what rings of a return to a bipolar world," firms will have to be careful in their messaging on China-centric issues.
Both Picarsic and de la Bruyère note that ESG watchdog specialists, particularly in the human rights, corruption and environmental categories, are increasing their scrutiny of Chinese business activities, looking at the long tail of supply chains and the ecosystem of business participants in a large business transaction like complex, multiyear project finance activities. Companies may need to devote additional resources and develop more comprehensive reviews and documentation of their own ESG targets across their business as a whole, calibrating the differing expectations for ESG between the United States and Europe as necessary, and with due consideration for the ESG performance of the Chinese and other companies with which they partner or who provide business services for them.
Corporate security officers at companies with significant global business activity, particularly involving Greater China, may also need to enhance their understanding of the ongoing risk that managers and employees in their firms face with Chinese competitors that have the advantage of using government resources to monitor and manipulate those individuals. Chinese companies can use information collected about the personal lives and activities of managers and employees, as well as information about their pre-transaction activities and preliminary marketing discussions, to manipulate and create a distorted narrative that may make it difficult for these firms to continue to compete against Chinese firms for participation in transactions. Legal and compliance teams may need to create additional company processes to require structured documentation of the manner in which transactions originate and to record that compliance steps are being undertaken. This documentation also makes sense given the increasing level of scrutiny Western firms may face from home government regulators and public interest organizations.
In addition, maintaining the integrity of proprietary company plans and data is crucial, as is protecting company employees from the risks of being targeted and involved in efforts to suborn their cooperation — both of which point to a need for corporate security teams to prepare for both increased cyber and physical security threats to their data and personnel. On this point, Picarsic points out the ability of Chinese firms to "weaponize" information and use it against their competitors. The overseas police stations previously cited by Picarsic are likely designed to monitor overseas Chinese students and dissidents, but the blatant disregard for national sovereignty they represent suggests that China is capable of taking steps to secure interests that go far beyond the Western liberal order's respect for individual rights, rule of law and territorial integrity of other countries. The drumbeat of attention on all things China is likely to increase; while not engaging in fear-mongering or ignoring the very real and rewarding opportunities to participate in selective transactions with Chinese counterparts, corporate security officers may need to increase the messaging about general best practices and encourage strong internal reporting of threats and concerns regarding the company's China business given the heightened risk environment.
Navigating Growing Nationalization of Cyberspace in a Multipolar World
As the international system has become increasingly multipolar, geopolitical and national security concerns have begun to shape the boundaries of the internet, heightening compliance risks for companies seeking to navigate these competing regulatory frameworks. Some regions, such as Europe, have created a comprehensive and detailed legal framework for its citizens' data rights, in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), while other countries such as the United States have still not adopted a federal legal framework to address data privacy regulations. Outside of the West, other major powers like China have pursued radically different approaches to cyber regulations, reflecting a much higher level of security, evidenced by China's so-called "Great Firewall." In between, emerging powers such as India are only just beginning to bolster and revise cybersecurity policies within their respective cyberspaces amid growing foreign commercial investment in India's markets. As a result of the broad variation between different regions' approaches to regulating cyberspace and as geopolitical tensions rise, businesses will have to grapple with a number of compliance requirements, heightening their reputational and financial risks as a result of the shifting regulatory landscape. To better understand how the internet is changing and which forces are driving this fragmentation, RANE spoke with Ronald Marks, President at ZPN National Security and Cyber Strategies; John Wunderlich, Senior Advisor at Privacy Pro; Michael Morrissey, Chief Information Security Officer at PrivacyEngine; and Andrea Little Limbago, Senior Vice President of Research and Analysis at Interos.
The Move Toward Securitizing Cyberspace
As the digital revolution over the past few decades has grown to encompass most aspects of daily life, many governments have realized the vulnerabilities posed by the open nature of the internet. While digital communication has vastly improved the convenience of sharing information, the internet has also had major implications for national security, individual user privacy, and commercial and economic interests. These realizations have resulted in many governments pursuing different strategies to better protect digital information within their respective cyberspace.
Marks first points to the infrastructure of the internet, as it was originally designed, highlighting the fact that the way it was built did not prioritize security. He notes that "It wasn't built to regulate … in fact it was deliberately built the other way — so you could just put whatever out there you wanted to. And that of course has run into the kinds of problems of any mature industry where it was nice when everyone was playing nice but now we have unexpected challenges with it."
Wunderlich further elaborates on how this natural insecurity has heightened nations' awareness of the dangers posed by an unregulated internet, stating that "A lot of countries — irrespective of left, right, center, up, down, sideways in terms of the orientation of the government — are reexamining, for a number of reasons, why free flows of data turned out to be a bad idea." To many experts, the internet has already begun to fracture. In fact, from Marks' point of view, "There's already a Balkanization of the internet … The question is how far it goes."
In addition to the internet's lack of natural privacy protections, Wunderlich further highlights that data has increased rapidly in commercial value. As he explains, "The more significant data becomes economically, the more it intrudes on the stage of geopolitics and therefore national interests are engaged." Geopolitical tensions, especially between the United States and China, have increasingly included an economic component as both countries seek to advance ahead of the other in a number of strategically important sectors. The heightened value of digitized information, including proprietary data, personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data has added another rationale for governments to try to take greater control of cyberspace.
A Chart List of Three Approaches to Data Privacy
The European Union, the GDPR and the United Kingdom
The European Union paved the way for a rights-based, comprehensive legal framework under the GDPR. The GDPR, which took effect in 2018, includes extensive and stringent requirements for how PII is defined and used, as well as how data is collected, stored and processed by domestic and foreign companies. Among the GDPR's provisions, the legislation upholds EU citizens' data rights, including that data is collected and processed for only its articulated use, limitations on how long clients' data can be stored and various requirements for reporting data breaches. Additionally, the GDPR requires companies to uphold EU citizens' data rights, including their right to be informed on how their data is being used, the right to access their data, the right of data portability, and the right to data rectification and erasure. The extensive compliance requirements that the GDPR enforces pose a number of legal and regulatory challenges for both Europe-based companies and foreign companies operating in European markets. Following Brexit, companies must now also navigate the added challenges of complying with emerging data privacy legislation in the United Kingdom that will likely differ from the GDPR in many ways.
Morrissey first explains the primary differences in how Europe approaches data security compared to other locations like the United States. He notes that "In Europe, personal data is owned by the living individual. It's legally their data, so a company doesn't own it. The latter are called a data controller. They control it on behalf of the individual, and the GDPR defines specific legal obligations on how controllers process such data. So that's an important legal difference between the United States and EU." This foundational difference in how the European Union shapes data privacy and security protections and puts extensive responsibility on companies to uphold this framework, heightening their legal, financial and reputational risks for not complying with the GDPR's high standards.
Failure to comply with the GDPR has resulted in many companies being fined or otherwise penalized, including many U.S. companies operating in Europe. For example, in 2022 alone, a number of companies were fined for noncompliance with various GDPR provisions. These included Meta, which was fined $405 million in September 2022 over how the company handled minors' data and Google, which was fined $57 million in December 2022 for failing to obtain users' consent before using their data for ad personalization purposes.
In addition to the GDPR's rigorous compliance requirements, the British decision to withdraw from the European Union has also complicated the overall European cyber landscape. Since the Brexit process first began, the United Kingdom has sought to enact new domestic legislation in a number of policy areas, including cyber and data regulations. Morrissey explains that Brexit has had a direct impact on any business operating between the United Kingdom and the Continent. He further explains that the United Kingdom is looking to replace the U.K. Data Protection Act of 2018, based on the GDPR, with new legislation in the coming year, which will likely create a number of digital divisions between London and Brussels.
Morrissey highlights the special attention that Europe will likely be paying to the United Kingdom as it pursues new data protections in the coming year. He says, "I think there's a bigger concern about European data going into the U.K. into the future and making sure that there's some degree of alignment between these two pieces of legislation that allows data to continue to flow. He elaborates that "The EU is the U.K.'s biggest trading market, and vice versa. Something has to be figured out that allows business and commerce to continue to operate normally regarding digital data, which is more and more important every day in terms of its intrinsic value."
Morrissey also outlines the challenges that companies will have to face in operating in both the European Union and the United Kingdom under different legislation. He states that "In reality for businesses, if you're an organization in the U.K. and you're trading into the European Union, you're going to have to comply with two pieces of legislation ... So it's going to create an operational headache for companies in the U.K. because they're going to have a double set of legislative standards that they will have to comply with." He explains further, "It's a very concerning problem for them because it's magnifying the complexity at a technical level where they have to segregate data potentially into silos based upon these geo-national restrictions which are coming down the line and that's a headache because it's both an additional operational and capital expenditure cost, as you are potentially duplicating technology across multiple geographical locations, in order to offset compliance risk."
The Fragmented U.S. Approach to Cyberspace
The United States contrasts with the broad and comprehensive EU legal framework with a more disjointed approach to its cyberspace. With no single federal data privacy regulation framework, the United States operates in a decentralized system with multiple overlapping federal agencies and organizations that oversee U.S. cyber practices, leaving states largely to decide data privacy regulations. While this fragmentation may be more attractive for some companies wishing to bypass strict regulation found in other jurisdictions like the European Union, it also poses risks because the lack of a federal data breach reporting requirement, for example, leaves businesses more vulnerable to losses if impacted by a cyberattack or if data is otherwise compromised. Though many states still do not have a comprehensive regulatory framework in place, this is changing, as several states are beginning to adopt data regulation practices modeled after the European Union.
Although federal lawmakers have made some efforts to create a more explicit data privacy framework, each has subsequently fallen through. Without a single federal framework, U.S.-based companies have freer rein and an expanded scope for data collection practices. Limbago notes that, as a result of the growing nationalization of cyberspace, many companies are reshoring to the United States. Though partially due to the extended leeway many are granted in terms of regulation, she claims that it is mostly because of a greater stability and rule of law that provides a better business environment. Nonetheless, Limbago argues that much of the reason for a lack of a federal data framework is due to lobbying by U.S. companies, saying "that's probably why we don't have a data privacy law in the U.S. yet. Instead, we've got a very big patchwork. We have 54 different data breach notification laws because, you know, some core industries have helped limit our ability to have a data privacy law."
Following in the footsteps of the EU GDPR, a handful of states have started enacting more stringent data protection laws using the EU "rights-based" model. In 2023, five states California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Virginia — will begin enforcing these EU-like data privacy laws. Other states — including Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania — are also considering data privacy revisions, demonstrating a state-based trend to bolster cybersecurity protocol even in the absence of a federal mandate. While these changes will enhance cybersecurity regulations within these states, they will also pose more compliance risks to companies that will have to navigate data regulations from state to state.
U.S. cyberspace regulations are not only still being formed through various means, both at a federal and a state level, but also through international cooperation. Despite the absence of a single federal framework to govern data, the United States has participated in a great deal of international collaboration in this field. In fact, Limbago notes that although cross-data border flows are becoming more closed as a result of this growing trend toward the nationalization of cyberspace, in some ways they are also becoming more open — at least between certain jurisdictions. Indeed, agreements that allow for cross-border data flows may make it easier for companies based in the United States to straddle multiple cyberspheres, either to collaborate or work with others outside of this digital sphere or to expand their business scope beyond U.S. borders.
In March 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced an EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework to facilitate trans-Atlantic data flows. Since the European Union is a major trading partner for the United States, the framework, which is still under review in the European Union, is designed to provide a legal mechanism to transfer EU personal data to the United States that addresses privacy concerns and is compatible with EU law. Washington and Brussels frame the d
-
Part of my follow up to an interesting conversation with a friend with whom I have just re-established contact after a long time:
=============================================
Next time I'd like to follow up with your discussion about the natural dynamics of human groups in other parts of the world and how the American Creed might not be a good fit.
Over the years I have done substantial reading in evolutionary psychology, with the starting point being the study of Aggression-- defined as intra-species, hence Konrad Lorenz's formulation of: territorial, hierarchical, and reproductive with predatory behaviors being excluded because they were inter-species. However, upon reflection, much human criminal behavior is both predatory and meets the intra-species criterion.
Analyzed through this filter it makes sense to me to say that free markets work because they sublimate this reality: Corporations (Tribes) establish market share (Territory), individuals compete to rise with in the corporation (Hierachy) in order to be a mighty hunter who brings home the bacon in order to score better pussy (Reproduction) The trick is the Rule of Law (i.e. Win-Win over Zero Sum) which enforces Contract (Private Law)-- a.k.a. the libertarian principle of non-violence-- .
=================================
So, how then to work win-win with others who lack the building blocks for Natural Law/American Creed mind and are not interested in developing them?
-
China’s Russia Dilemma
Will China arm Russia?
N.S. LYONS
MAR 2
“China sending Russia aid in the style of Soviet propaganda” (DALL-E 2)
This was going to be the first section of the next Subscriber Commentary and Review Thread, but it ended up being long enough that I decided to just publish it for you as a separate piece. I’ll send out the rest of the subscriber thread next week. – N.S. Lyons
Over the last two weeks the US government has alleged that China is “strongly considering” providing arms to Russia, one year into the war in Ukraine. Simultaneously, China last week put out a (highly vague) peace plan for the conflict, which was immediately dismissed by Washington. A number of people have asked me about both, so I figure I may as well briefly comment on how things stand, in my view.
First, to be clear about the situation, China has not yet actually sent Russia any arms or ammunition. This is a fact CIA Director Bill Burns acknowledged on Sunday, when he said in an interview that the US government was “confident” Beijing had been considering “the provision of lethal equipment,” but admitted that so far they’ve turned up no evidence of “actual shipments of lethal equipment.”
But the Biden administration is clearly very worried about the possibility, since they keep leaking intel to that effect to the press and issuing loud warnings to Beijing not to do it, calling the provision of arms a “red line” that would have “serious consequences” if crossed. “We will not hesitate to target Chinese companies or officials that violate our sanctions or otherwise engage in Russia’s war effort,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday. Burns declared it “would be a very risky and unwise bet” for China.” This preemptive uproar appears to mostly be in response to reported intelligence that at least one Chinese company has been in negotiations to potentially produce military drones for the Russians.
China swears they have no such intention, however, and there are actually some reasons to believe them (for now). The fact is that China appears to be highly conflicted about how to approach the war, as they are trapped in a situation in which they have multiple, fundamentally conflicting interests at play.
There is no need to be naïve about this: China’s ultimate goal is to smash American/Western hegemonic power and initiate a Chinese Century – but how best to accomplish this? On the one hand, China’s likeminded friend Russia is now engaged in a military challenge to the American-led Western liberal global order, and if it can win decisively in Ukraine the credibility of that order will be badly, maybe even fatally, damaged. China would love to see that happen. On the other hand, the whole basis of Chinese national power is derived from the continued growth of its economic strength; and China’s economy is currently a mess, badly weakened by years of draconian zero-Covid stupidity, an ongoing real estate crisis, huge levels of debt, and communist political mismanagement. Meanwhile international companies are beginning to shift supply chains out of China as they read the room and see Cold War 2.0 dawning. Getting back on track economically is therefore the top priority of Chinese leadership for the foreseeable future, and keeping China’s largest trade partners from decoupling themselves economically is especially critical for Beijing. Which is why China is currently engaged in a big diplomatic “charm offensive,” deploying its top diplomats to fan out across the world and try to convince everyone to get back to doing business with it again as normal.
In addition to whatever sanctions the US might impose on China, arming Russia would completely destroy this diplomatic effort in Europe and deeply alienate much of the continent, which is China’s most important trade partner. In comparison, Chinese trade with Russia, an economy roughly the size of Italy, is miniscule. When US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeymeo recently threatened that the Chinese now “have a choice between doing business with the countries of our coalition, which represent 50% of the global economy, and doing business with Russia,” he was pretty accurate in pointing out China’s strategic predicament.
Nonetheless, the White House is panicking for a reason. Chinese material military support would absolutely be a game changer for Russia, and would likely swing the conflict decisively in its favor. As many have noted, this has become a war of attrition, with both sides running low on ammunition and equipment, as well as manpower. Russia has the advantage when it comes to manpower, but thanks to NATO’s backing Ukraine has a firm advantage in war material. I’ve noticed that some people don’t seem to appreciate the scope of this, perhaps imagining that Russia still has the manufacturing power of the USSR during the Cold War. It does not.
-
The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready for the Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict
Since 2018, the military has shifted to focus on China and Russia after decades fighting insurgencies, but it still faces challenges to produce weapons and come up with new ways of waging war
By Michael R. GordonFollow
Updated March 6, 2023 11:54 am ET
Clint Hinote returned from a deployment in Baghdad in the spring of 2018 to a new assignment and a staggering realization.
A classified Pentagon wargame simulated a Chinese push to take control of the South China Sea. The Air Force officer, charged with plotting the service’s future, learned that China’s well-stocked missile force had rained down on the bases and ports the U.S. relied on in the region, turning American combat aircraft and munitions into smoldering ruins in a matter of days.
“My response was, ‘Holy crap. We are going to lose if we fight like this,’” he recalled.
The officer, now a lieutenant general, began posting yellow sticky notes on the walls of his closet-size office at the Pentagon, listing the problems to solve if the military was to have a chance of blunting a potential attack from China.
“I did not have an idea how to resolve them,” said Lt. Gen. Hinote. “I was struck how quickly China had advanced, and how our long-held doctrines about warfare were becoming obsolete.”
Mammoth shift
Five years ago, after decades fighting insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia, the U.S. started tackling a new era of great-power competition with China and Russia. It isn’t yet ready, and there are major obstacles in the way.
Despite an annual defense budget that has risen to more than $800 billion, the shift has been delayed by a preoccupation with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pursuit of big-ticket weapons that didn’t pan out, internal U.S. government debates over budgets and disagreement over the urgency of the threat from Beijing, according to current and former U.S. defense officials and commanders. Continuing concerns in the Mideast, especially about Iran, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have absorbed attention and resources.
Corporate consolidation across the American defense industry has left the Pentagon with fewer arms manufacturers. Shipyards are struggling to produce the submarines the Navy says it needs to counter China’s larger naval fleet, and weapon designers are rushing to catch up with China and Russia in developing superfast hypersonic missiles.
When the Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies ran a wargame last year that simulated a Chinese amphibious attack on Taiwan, the U.S. side ran out of long-range anti-ship cruise missiles within a week.
The military is struggling to meet recruitment goals, with Americans turned off by the long conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, potentially leaving the all-volunteer force short of manpower. Plans to position more forces within striking range of China are still a work in progress. The Central Intelligence Agency, after two decades of conducting paramilitary operations against insurgents and terrorists, is moving away from those areas to focus more on its core mission of espionage.
The U.S. military’s success in the Mideast and Afghanistan came in part from air superiority, a less well-equipped foe and the ability to control the initiation of the war. A conflict with China would be very different. The U.S. would be fighting with its Asian bases and ports under attack and would need to support its forces over long and potentially vulnerable supply routes.
If a conflict with China gave Russia the confidence to take further action in Eastern Europe, the U.S. and its allies would need to fight a two-front war. China and Russia are both nuclear powers. Action could extend to the Arctic, where the U.S. lags behind Russia in icebreakers and ports as Moscow appears ready to welcome Beijing’s help in the region.
The U.S. military is still more capable than its main adversaries. The Chinese have their own obstacles in developing the capability to carry out a large-scale amphibious assault, while the weaknesses of Russia’s military have been exposed in Ukraine. But a defense of Taiwan would require U.S. forces, which are also tasked with deterring conflict in Europe and the Middle East, to operate over enormous distances and within range of China’s firepower.
The threat is mounting. Beijing has in recent years shifted the security terrain in its favor in the areas around China. In the South China Sea, it has built artificial islands and fortified them with military installations to assert control over the strategic waterway and deny the U.S. Navy freedom to roam.
Decades of ever bigger military budgets, including a 7% boost in spending this year, have improved the lethality of China’s air force, missiles and submarines, and better training has created a more modern force from what was once a military of rural recruits. China is developing weapons and other capabilities to destroy an opponent’s satellites, the Pentagon says, and its cyberhacking presents a threat to infrastructure.
The CIA said President Xi Jinping has set 2027 as a deadline for the Chinese military to be ready to carry out a Taiwan invasion, though it said Mr. Xi and the military have doubts whether Beijing could currently do so.
Structures on the artificial island in Cuarteron Reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, shown in October, part of China’s effort to control the strategic waters.
PHOTO: EZRA ACAYAN/GETTY IMAGES
A China in control of the South China Sea and Taiwan would hold sway over waters through which trillions of dollars in trade passes each year. It would also command supplies of advanced semiconductors, threaten the security of U.S. allies such as Japan and challenge American pre-eminence in a part of the world it has dominated since World War II.
In its efforts to meet the new challenge, the Pentagon has expanded its access to bases in the Philippines and Japan while shrinking the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East. New tactics have been devised to disperse U.S. forces and make them less of an inviting target for China’s increasingly powerful missiles.
The Pentagon’s annual budget for research and development has been boosted to $140 billion—an all time high. The military is pursuing cutting-edge technology it hopes will enable the military services to share targeting data instantaneously so that U.S. air, land, sea and space forces, operating over thousands of miles, can act in unison, a current challenge.
Many of the cutting-edge weapons systems the Pentagon believes will tilt the battlefield in its favor won’t be ready until the 2030s, raising the risk that China may be tempted to act before the U.S. effort bears fruit.
A conflict in the Western Pacific might also give Russia’s military, which has been badly battered in Ukraine, the confidence to carry out President Vladimir Putin’s goals of reviving Russian power in what it believes to be its traditional sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe.
“This is a massive problem to dig out of,” said Eric Wesley, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as the deputy commanding general of the Army Futures Command, which oversees that service’s transformation. “We are in a vulnerable period where we are pursuing this deterrence capability and their time is running out.”
Chris Meagher, a top Pentagon spokesman, said that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was directly overseeing the implementation of the U.S. defense strategy to counter China and that the department’s forthcoming spending request would advance the effort.
“The challenge posed by the PRC is real, but this Department is tackling it in historic ways with urgency and confidence,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “Our strategy drove last year’s budget request and is driving our soon-to-be released budget, which will go even further in matching resources to our strategy. We are continuing our work developing new operational concepts, deploying cutting-edge capabilities, and making investments now and for the long term to meet the challenges we face.”
A little more than a generation ago, the U.S. looked unassailable. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rapid success of the U.S.-led Desert Storm campaign to evict Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwait in 1991 demonstrated Washington’s ability to wage a new type of war, using precision-guided munitions and stealth technology to vanquish regional dangers. President George H.W. Bush declared a “new world order” with the U.S. as its anchor.
In 1995, Beijing began a series of aggressive military exercises near Taiwan to underscore its objections to a visit to the U.S. by Taiwan’s president. The Clinton administration responded with the largest display of American military might in Asia since the Vietnam War, sending U.S. ships through the Taiwan Strait and positioning two aircraft carrier battle groups in the region the following year.
Strategists at the Pentagon’s in-house think tank nonetheless saw trouble ahead.
By using long-range missiles, antisatellite weapons and electronic warfare, Beijing could turn the tables on Washington by attacking the bases and ports the U.S. relied on in the western Pacific to project power, potentially keeping the Americans far from the conflict.
Guided by his defense advisers, candidate George W. Bush proposed to skip a generation of technology and move to advanced tools, such as long-range weapons, sensors and data-sharing technology to counter Beijing’s “anti-access” strategy.
Then the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks changed the threat, and the Pentagon’s mission.
“There was a moment when we thought ‘Huzzah, the transformation of the force is actually going to happen,’ ” recalled Jeff McKitrick, who worked at the Pentagon think tank and is now a researcher with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a Pentagon-supported research center. “Then 9/11 came and everybody focused like a laser beam on the global war on terror.”
Soon this became the mission of Gen. Hinote, then a major, as well. He was known by the call sign “Q,” after the fictional character in the James Bond stories who runs the spy service’s gadget lab, because of his skill in programming the radars and sensors of fighter jets. At the outset of the 2003 Iraq war, he was assigned to a squadron of “stealthy” F-117 fighter jets.
He helped plan the operation to strike at military targets in Baghdad and disable the air defenses of Saddam Hussein’s forces. “We had a really good plan for taking down the Iraqi communications infrastructure, leadership infrastructure and what we thought were the weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “China learned from that.”
As the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, the top U.S. Air Force officer in Japan warned that China’s air defenses were becoming impenetrable to all but the most sophisticated U.S. fighters.
In 2009, Robert Gates, defense secretary from 2006 to 2011, limited the procurement of F-22 fighter jets to 187 to free up funds for other weapons programs.
The Air Force’s Air Combat Command said at the time that would leave the service nearly 200 short of the premier air-to-air fighter jets it previously sought for potential conflicts with China and Russia. Such air-to-air combat experience was limited: The June 2017 shootdown of a Syrian Su-22 jet by a Navy FA/18 over Syria was the first time a U.S. fighter pilot had blasted an enemy plane out of the sky since 1999.
Mr. Gates said he sought to hedge against future threats while also focusing on the war on terror. “My concern as secretary was all about balance,” he said, in an email response to questions. “The need to prepare for future potential large-scale conflict with Russia and China while properly funding the long-term ability to deal with smaller-scale conflicts we were most likely to face in the future.”
Mr. Gates said both Presidents Bush and Obama saw cooperation with China as possible and thought a conflict “was low probability.” He said that changed when Mr. Xi came to power in 2013. The Chinese president has backed a stronger Chinese military and a more assertive foreign posture as part of his campaign to expand Beijing’s global clout.
In 2011, Congress and the White House agreed to multiyear spending limits known as sequestration to curb the federal deficit. The move forced a series of across-the-board cuts and hampered initiatives to transform the military, including on artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous systems and advanced manufacturing.
“With the grinding wars in the Middle East taking $60 billion to $70 billion a year, and service chiefs worried first and foremost about declines in force readiness, we simply didn’t have the necessary resources to cover down on all of the more advanced threats like hypersonics,” said former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work. “The U.S. responses to China and Russia’s technical challenges were therefore delayed—and when it did respond, its choices were constrained by sequestration.”
In 2018, the Pentagon issued a National Defense Strategy saying the U.S. would prepare for a new world of “great power competition.”
Deterring China from invading Taiwan, a longstanding U.S. partner that Beijing claims as Chinese territory, defines the challenge. Allowing China to take Taiwan, just 100 miles from the Chinese mainland, and then trying to wrest it back, Pentagon officials concluded, would involve the U.S. in a protracted fight and might spur China to escalate to nuclear weapons. The U.S. needed to demonstrate it could prevent Beijing from seizing the island in the first place—a requirement included in the Biden administration’s National Defense Strategy issued in 2022.
In 2019, Gen. Hinote, using his new authority in the Air Force’s future war office, organized another classified wargame. The simulation postulated a Chinese attack on Taiwan and assessed how two U.S. forces might fare in contesting it: an “outside force” made up entirely of long-range U.S. bombers and missiles, and an “inside force” of aircraft, ships and troops that would fight within the range of Chinese planes and missiles.
The conclusion was that neither approach would succeed on its own.
“We needed a mix to protect Taiwan and Japan,” he said. “Ever since, we have been gaming, simulating and experimenting to determine that mix.”
A more recent wargame conducted by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff showed the U.S. could stymie a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and force a stalemate if the conflict was fought later in the decade, although high casualties on both sides would result. That simulation assumed that the U.S. would have the benefit of new weapons, tactics and military deployments that are currently being planned at the Pentagon.
To prepare for the future, the Marine Corps has gotten rid of its tanks and is reinventing itself as a naval infantry force that would attack Chinese ships from small islands in the western Pacific. A new Marine littoral regiment, which operates close to the shore and will be equipped with anti-ship missiles, is to be based in Okinawa by 2025.
In an exercise in May 2021, the Marines lugged a 30,000-pound Himars missile launcher across a choppy sea to the Alaska shoreline, loaded it into a C-130 transport plane and flew it to a base in the wilderness. The purpose was to rehearse the sort of tactics the Marines would employ on islands in the western Pacific against the Chinese navy.
The Army, which saw its electronic warfare, short-range air defense and engineering capabilities atrophy amid budget pressures and the previous decades’ wars, is moving to develop a new generation of weapons systems that can strike targets at much longer ranges. It is planning to deploy a new hypersonic missile in the fall though its utility against Chinese forces will depend on securing basing rights in the Pacific.
The Navy, which is confronting budget pressures, personnel shortages and limits to American shipbuilding capacity, is currently planning to expand its fleet to at least 355 crewed ships, a size still smaller than China’s current navy. In the near term, the U.S. will have around 290 ships.
The Air Force, which has one of the oldest and smallest inventory of aircraft in its 75-year history, has rolled out the first B-21 bomber and is pursuing the capability to pair piloted warplanes with fleets of drones. It has tested a new hypersonic missile that will be fired from fighter aircraft, and developed plans to disperse its planes among a wider range of bases in the Pacific.
Decades-old B-52s are being refurbished to fill out the bomber fleet. The service has decided to buy the E-7 command aircraft—originally produced by Australia—and is procuring advanced weapons to attack Chinese invasion forces.
At times, the pace has been slower than Gen. Hinote would have liked. “As we began to push for change, we lost most of the budget battles,” he said. “There is more sense of urgency now, but we know how far we have to go.”
The general has pushed to equip cargo planes with cruise missiles to boost allied firepower, the use of high-altitude balloons to carry sensors and electric “flying cars” to carry people and equipment throughout the Pacific island chains—ideas that have led to experiments but so far no procurement decisions.
He thinks a future Air Force could rely more on autonomous, uncrewed aircraft and deploy fewer fighters. “When push comes to shove and you have to decide if you are going to field unmanned vehicles, or keep flying old aircraft, we’ve never made that decision,” he said.
“I think we’ve got a recipe for blunting” a Chinese attack, he said. “I just think you have to reinvent your force to do it.”
Photo Illustration: Adrienne Tong/The Wall Street Journal; Photos: Associated Press; EPA/Shutterstock; U.S. Navy; istock(2).
Design by Andrew Levinson.
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyOf1wTtdfk
-
Food and Soldiers: China’s Strategic Weaknesses
Renowned geostrategist Edward Luttwak pinpoints Beijing's Achilles' heel
Tourists look on as a Chinese military helicopter flies past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest points to Taiwan, in Fujian Province, on Aug. 4, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Tourists look on as a Chinese military helicopter flies past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest points to Taiwan, in Fujian Province, on Aug. 4, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Guermantes Lailari
By Guermantes Lailari
March 3, 2023
On Dec. 7, 2022, Edward Luttwak, a strategy consultant to the U.S. government, gave the keynote speech at Japan’s National Institute of Defense Studies (NIDS) International Symposium on Security Affairs. The speech was entitled “Can China Fight a War?”
Most media outlets didn’t cover the NIDS conference, and almost none of them mentioned Luttwak’s speech. News sources missed an opportunity to highlight some of China’s most important strategic weaknesses. These should be ferociously pursued if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) orders the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to conduct a military operation against Taiwan.
Can China Wage a War?
Luttwak noted at the beginning of his speech that he can’t answer the question: “Would the Chinese government actually initiate war operations; would it go to war against Taiwan?” He noted that leaders of countries (such as Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine or then-U.S. President George W. Bush in Iraq in 2003) “are quite capable of starting wars they cannot possibly win.”
“That is true of Russians and Americans, and it’s even more true of China,” he said.
Luttwak asked a simple question: “Can the People’s Republic of China as it now exists, actually wage a war … a small war … such as, for example, a war to take Taiwan?”
Using the metaphor of sustainability, he argued that the CCP would be in trouble if it fought a war against Taiwan today, especially if the war continued for more than several months. His analysis wasn’t based on standard military comparisons of the two countries’ military order of battle, weapon systems, or numbers of soldiers.
Instead, Luttwak focused on two key Chinese strategic weaknesses regarding sustainability: food supplies and dead soldiers.
Looking at Russia
Luttwak contrasted Russia and China. First of all, does Russia have a sustainable war?
According to Luttwak: “Russia does not import food. Russia may import some special pâté de foie gras from Paris, but the food the Russians make is the food they eat.”
Second, Russia doesn’t import energy; Russia exports energy.
Third, Russia has the most valuable commodity in wartime: Some families have extra sons.
The Importance of Food
In contrast, Luttwak noted that China annually imports several million tons of food. For example, in 2022, China imported more than 85 percent of its soybeans (95 million tons), mainly from the United States, Brazil, and Argentina.
China imports human food and animal feed, he said, including “95 million tons of soybeans, plus approximately 20–30,000 tons of maize, wheat, sorghum, millet, and these other things to feed to animals.” In addition to meat, “there are of course dairy imports, a lot of dairy imports.”
Consequently, according to Luttwak, “China is a protein-eating country, and the protein is important. Now, whatever else may happen, the moment a fight of any kind starts, even a small war, G-7 type sanctions start,” meaning that China will be cut off from imports such as soybeans from the United States and Canada.
Epoch Times Photo
Workers stand near a crane unloading sacks of imported soybeans from Russia at Heihe port in Heilongjiang Province, China, on Oct. 10, 2018. (Stringer/Reuters)
He argued that once a war starts, “within about three months, they’ll have to kill … most of the pigs and the chicken, the mutton, the beef.”
Luttwak further claimed that during Mao’s rule over China, people survived because they ate more simply. They didn’t have much meat and certainly no yogurt.
“China used to be self-sufficient,” he said. “In other words, it used to be the way Russia is now for food. And now, it is completely different.”
Luttwak noted that Chinese leadership failed to ensure that China would continue expanding local sources of food. Despite recent laws preventing the conversion of agricultural land to housing or industry, China has continued to lose its agricultural land, primarily due to land erosion, industrialization, and urbanization.
However, he noted that Russia has been in a war since February 2022, and “still people in Russia … eat the same food they ate six months ago, a year ago.”
Energy
Some analysts might predict that China would be challenged to procure energy resources during wartime. However, although China imports a great deal of petroleum and liquified natural gas, Luttwak said, those imports “are not so important strategically as food is.”
He noted that “China has a large domestic production of petroleum and gas.” In wartime, he argued, China would be able to divert energy resources used for the export trade to support its population.
“And, in wartime, it is quite easy to ration some energy use,” Luttwak said.
Dead Soldiers: The Past Can Inform the Future
Luttwak noted that the very lowest estimate of Russians killed in Ukraine as of December 2022 was 25,000 (while many estimates put the number at well above 100,000). He said the Russians “can lose 25,000 soldiers in several months and it makes no difference. … Nobody is blocking the streets in Moscow in protest. It can continue like this for a long time.”
He then compared the USSR’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the PLA’s possible invasion of Taiwan.
According to Luttwak, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was “able to put in 400,000 troops in the first 24 hours. And within 48 hours 800,000 troops.”
However, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it made the big mistake of only using 135,000 troops to invade a country that is 4 1/2 times larger than Czechoslovakia (603,700 square kilometers versus 127,900 square kilometers) and four times more populous. (In 1968, Czechoslovakia’s population was 10 million people; in 2022, Ukraine’s population was about 41 million people.) In Luttwak’s view, Russia should have planned to deploy four times the number of troops that the USSR sent into Czechoslovakia, or approximately 3.2 million.
Using similar population ratios, the PLA would need to deploy a minimum of 1.6 million soldiers within 48 hours of an invasion, since Taiwan’s population is about half of Ukraine’s population. The CCP would struggle with an inadequate number of ground forces, in the same way that Russia is struggling in Ukraine.
Post-Heroic Warfare
Luttwak said: “If you want to fight the war, you need to have a supply of expendable soldiers, sailors, airmen. … You cannot start the war if you’re not willing to tolerate casualties. Many years ago [1995], I published a theory called post-heroic warfare. … And my argument was terribly simple, really simple. The wars of history were fought by spare male children.”
According to his theory of post-heroic warfare, “the acceptance of casualties has gone down everywhere. Let’s say … [on] June 6, 1944, on Omaha beach, there was a mistake … 2,200 Americans died in one morning … but the war continued.”
Epoch Times Photo
Vietnam veterans gather at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, on April 8, 1995. (Joyce Naltchayan/AFP/Getty Images)
“[In] Vietnam, the United States lost 50,000 over 10 years … and that was considered very traumatic. … And, of course, since that time, society has changed further,” Luttwak said. “American families are smaller … so tolerance for casualties has gone down a lot. Now it doesn’t mean, of course, that if you go into a place like Iraq or Afghanistan and you lose a few thousand, that’s OK. But what you can’t do is to lose 10,000 dead before breakfast and continue normally. That is the post-heroic change.”
The following statistics for Afghanistan and Iraq support his argument. Almost 2,500 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan during the 20-year war (2001–20) and 4,400 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq during the seven-year war (2003–10). Additionally, more than 3,800 U.S. contractors were killed in Afghanistan and almost 3,600 in Iraq during the same respective time periods.
China’s Lack of Sons
Luttwak cited statistics in what he called “a post-heroic China.” In 1980, the CCP instituted its “one-child policy,” which lasted until 2016. Most Chinese families today have only one child. Although that’s supposed to change under new policies encouraging larger families, those policies won’t have an impact for decades.
In a model in which families are very small, “there are no spare male children, then families and society and the culture and the government all have to reduce casualties,” he said.
Luttwak told a story about the clash between Chinese and Indian troops in the Galwan River Valley of Ladakh in 2020. Approximately 20 Indian soldiers were killed, and shortly after the fighting, the dead were given military funerals, including a brigadier general.
The CCP, however, announced its killed-in-action eight months after the fighting. The CCP acknowledged four soldiers had been killed: one officer and three enlisted. What happened during those seven months is the interesting part of the story.
The PLA officer’s wife, a local music teacher, was promoted to a position as a music professor at a major conservatory.
The three enlisted soldiers were also each given special propaganda value. One soldier who looked very young was made into a local hero. Another PLA soldier was made into the “good guy” who was reported to have said, “I will give my life to defend the motherland—every inch of the motherland; I’m here to defend every inch.” Of course, Ladakh was never part of China—an inconvenient truth.
The CCP presented the third enlisted soldier as “very traditional.” In a letter that he supposedly wrote before he died, he said, “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m very sorry that I will not be there for you when you need me, but if there is an afterlife … then I hope to be there with you.” Luttwak noted the illogic of a reference to the afterlife by communist atheists.
In short, the Chinese “were concerned about the public reaction.”
This entire operation was to reduce the emotional impact of saying that four people died,” he said.
Intolerance for Casualties
Luttwak argued that if the CCP took eight months to work out the details for four soldiers, how will it deal with the death of several thousand, or perhaps several tens of thousands? He estimated that 25,000 to 40,000 PLA soldiers would die in the first week of a conflict with Taiwan. Many would die on ships or airplanes trying to land in Taiwan. These PLA casualties would be caused by Taiwan’s anti-ship systems and U.S. and allied submarines.
He concluded that although China would be unable to win a war in the near- to mid-term timeframe, it might, nonetheless, start such a war.
“I am not at all confident that the fact that China cannot fight a war means that they will not try to fight a war,” Luttwak said.
However, he predicted that “if China starts a war, it will have to stop quite quickly.”
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
-
A Cost-Benefit Analysis of China Providing Military Aid to Russia, Part 1
undefined and Asia-Pacific Analyst at RANE
Chase Blazek
Asia-Pacific Analyst at RANE, Stratfor
9 MIN READMar 9, 2023 | 19:14 GMT
Editor's Note: This column is the first in a two-part series examining China's potential cost-benefit analysis for providing military assistance to Russia for its war in Ukraine. In part one, we broadly lay out why Beijing may (or may not) decide to provide such support and the implications of each scenario.
Reports that China is considering providing Russia with lethal military aid in Ukraine provide a natural case for a cost-benefit analysis paired with scenario planning about what such aid would mean for the war, as well as China's development and its relations with the West. In the past two weeks, there has been a flurry of news reports that China is contemplating providing Russia with lethal aid (e.g. ammunition, weapons and/or weapons' parts) for its war in Ukraine. On Feb. 23, German news outlet Der Spiegel claimed, citing unnamed sources, that Chinese drone manufacturer Xi'an Bingo Intelligent Aviation Technology was planning to sell 100 ZT-180 kamikaze drones to Russia's defense ministry as soon as April, and would also help Russia domestically produce 100 of these drones each month. This came after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Feb. 18 that Washington had intelligence China was strongly considering providing lethal aid to Russia for its war effort in Ukraine. That same day, Blinken warned China's top diplomat Wang Yi that there would be ''serious consequences'' if Beijing provided such support to Moscow. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal and CNN, other U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence Blinken referred to claimed that in addition to drones, China would likely also provide artillery ammunition and other weapons to Russia, if Beijing decided to aid Moscow's war effort. Despite these claims, U.S. President Joe Biden on Feb. 24 said he doesn't ''anticipate a major initiative on the part of China providing weapons to Russia,'' and had previously stated the White House was working on declassifying relevant intelligence reports. Since this story broke, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and senior EU officials have warned China not to provide arms to Russia as well, calling the issue a ''red line."
Scenario #1) China provides Russia with lethal aid.
A number of factors could drive China to provide Russia with lethal military aid in Ukraine, including Beijing's desire to preserve Russia as a strong strategic partner, an internal policy shift toward prizing national security over economics, and circumscribed information flows to China's top decision-makers. Russia is China's closest partner in its strategic and ideological competition with the West. Beijing views its partnership with Moscow as necessary to combat what it perceives as a U.S.-led containment effort against China's economic and military development. But a strategic failure in Ukraine could threaten that partnership by potentially leading to the downfall of Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime or a significant weakening of Russia's state power. To mitigate this risk, China could decide to support Moscow's war efforts by providing Russia with weapons. In doing so, Beijing would be wagering that Western trade retaliation is worth safeguarding the stability of Russia. In this scenario, China is more likely to provide significant lethal aid to Russia than it is to provide limited lethal aid. This is because while Western sanctions retaliation would certainly scale with the magnitude of China's aid, the consequences to China's economy and diplomatic standing in the world would be great either way — in for a penny, in for a pound. Domestically, China's choice to aid Russia could be a strong indicator that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s internal debate about the relative importance of economic growth and national security to China's modern development had skewed decisively toward the latter. Such a decision could also be heavily influenced by President Xi Jinping's close personal relationship with Putin. Moreover, the increasingly ideologically tinged information flows reaching Xi's desk as he consolidates state and CCP power in his hands could present Xi with an incomplete cost-benefit analysis and lead him to make a suboptimal choice on weapons aid to Russia. This could mirror Putin's own circumscribed intelligence flows that led him to believe in February 2022 that the Ukraine invasion would be a month-long affair of rapid regime change in Kyiv — and not the prolonged conflict Russia now finds itself in more than a year after launching its ''special military operation.''
But while sending weapons to Russia could help secure Moscow's strategic objectives in Ukraine, it could also impede China's economic development as Western engagement with China plummets. Dwindling supplies are the biggest challenge that Russian troops are facing in Ukraine. Chinese weapons could thus help the Russian military fend off increasingly well-equipped Ukrainian forces and secure key Ukrainian territories to achieve Moscow's strategic objective of holding a land corridor to Crimea. This aid, however, would also effectively put the United States and China in a proxy war, with both sides competing militarily through intermediaries and attempting to shape the strategic landscape in distant lands — lending some credibility to media speculation about the possibility of a ''New Cold War.'' In response to China's aid, the West could either opt to double down on its own weapons aid to Ukraine or push for a peace process to keep the war from becoming a years-long frozen conflict, or worse, spilling beyond Ukraine's borders. Either way, the West's relations with China would take a sharp turn for the worse. The United States and Europe would no longer see China as a future military adversary (i.e. in the event of a Taiwan invasion) but as a present one, with Beijing helping reshape the borders of Europe. This could not only accelerate trade decoupling and significantly slow China's economic growth (which would escalate China's risks of domestic unrest) but spur a Western-aligned military build-up in Europe and China's near seas. Such a military build-up could take the form of expanded funding for and deployment of stand-off, counterstrike and rapid response capabilities by the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea amid a heightened Chinese military threat. Should Beijing's support for Moscow catalyze a much more aggressive Western push to defend Taiwan, this escalating security environment could even prevent China from retaking the island and becoming the region's dominant military power. Together these risks mean that Chinese support for Russia in Ukraine could jeopardize the CCP's greater strategic goals of the last 40 years, which include turning China into a high-income country, fielding the predominant military in Asia, and maintaining political stability at home.
Aside from these strategic implications, China's aid to Russia could have a number of near-term tactical benefits for the Chinese military and certain sectors of the economy, but these would likely be offset over time. Russian use of Chinese kamikaze drones, artillery pieces or other military assets could provide the Chinese military with a rare opportunity to test its platforms in active combat, providing crucial field data for China's military modernization. It would also enable China to wield its deep industrial base and supply chain capabilities to drain Western militaries of their own assets and supplies in Ukraine. However, the Western response to China's actions — ramping up military-industrial production to a degree commensurate with Chinese aid and Western concern for a Ukrainian loss in the conflict — would offset this benefit. Nonetheless, Western capacity to match China's industrial production would likely take time to build. Russia's purchases could accelerate the development of China's domestic arms industry, supplementing economic growth in a tough year, although Western trade retaliation would weigh on China's broader economy.
Scenario #2) China doesn't provide Russia with lethal aid.
If China doesn't provide Russia with military aid, it could signal Beijing's desire to preserve economic growth and public stability, as well as the limits of Western intelligence on an increasingly closed-off China. If China opts against sending lethal aid to Russia, this could be a sign of Beijing's confidence that a Russian loss in Ukraine would have limited long-term impacts on its closest strategic partner. But it could also be a sign of pure self-preservation, with Beijing conceding that the fallout in relations with the West would be too much for China's economy to handle, especially amid its fragile post-COVID recovery. Closely linked to this would be Beijing's concerns for political stability following the anti-lockdown protests of late 2022, with the CCP perceiving that additional economic pain incurred by Western sanctions could spur a repeat of nationwide unrest and pose a direct threat to the CCP's (and Xi's) power. More broadly, China's decision to not provide arms to Russia would indicate continuity in Chinese policymaking long-term, with economic growth goals not yet subservient to national security concerns. It could also firm up President Xi's domestic political support base, as elite academics and even CCP cadres have (often anonymously) questioned China's decision not to condemn Russia's invasion and to maintain close relations with Russia amid the war. Alternatively, China may end up not sending weapons to Russia because it never intended to, which would indicate subpar Western intelligence capabilities regarding Beijing's policymaking. Though Washington's intelligence on Russia amid the Ukraine war has been top-notch, U.S. intelligence on China may be weaker due to Beijing's advanced counterintelligence capabilities and its world-class surveillance network — both in society at large and especially within the CCP.
China's restraint in Ukraine would preserve Beijing's ability to limit the decline in relations with the West, though a proper rapprochement remains unlikely. Opting against sending weapons to Russia would leave some room for Beijing to limit trade decoupling with the West and the deterioration of China's attractiveness as an investment destination. One recent example of this sort of damage control is China's recent move to slowly restore its trade relations with Australia after Canberra's calls for an international inquiry into the Chinese origins of COVID-19 prompted Beijing to ban key Australian imports in 2021. But regardless, China's relations with the United States and Europe would likely still continue on their slow downward trajectory — with Western concerns persisting about China's human rights abuses and technological development, as well as the threat China poses to the stability of the Indo-Pacific.
In the next part of this series, we'll delve deeper into the historical, economic, social, political and security aspects that could inform China's decision on whether to send lethal aid to Russia.
-
What the Neocons Got Wrong
And How the Iraq War Taught Me About the Limits of American Power
By Max Boot
March 10, 2023
Page url
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/afghanistan/what-neocons-got-wrong
Shortly after September 11, 2001, I became known as a “neoconservative.” The term was a bit puzzling, because I wasn’t new to conservatism; I had been on the right ever since I could remember. But the “neocon” label came to be used after 9/11 to denote a particular strain of conservatism that placed human rights and democracy promotion at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. This was a very different mindset from the realpolitik approach of such Republicans as President Dwight Eisouenhower, President Richard Nixon, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and it had a natural appeal to someone like me whose family had come to the United States in search of freedom. (We arrived from the Soviet Union in 1976, when I was six years old.) Having lived in a communist dictatorship, I supported the United States spreading freedom abroad. That, in turn, led me to become a strong supporter of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Traditional conservatives, such as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to teach the Taliban and Saddam Hussein a lesson and then depart each country as quickly as possible. The neoconservative position—which eventually triumphed in the George W. Bush administration—was that the United States could not simply topple the old regimes and leave chaos in their wake. The Americans had to stay and work with local allies to build democratic showcases that could inspire liberal change in the Middle East. In this way, Washington could finally lance the boil of militant Islamism, which had afflicted America ever since the Iran hostage crisis in 1979.
Regime change obviously did not work out as intended. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were, in fact, fiascos that exacted a high price in both blood and treasure, for both the United States and—even more, of course—the countries it invaded. As the saying goes, when the facts change, I change my mind. Although I remain a supporter of democracy and human rights, after seeing how democracy promotion has worked out in practice, I no longer believe it belongs at the center of U.S. foreign policy. In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking. I am a neocon no more, at least as that term has been understood since 9/11.
Today, I am much more cognizant than I once was of the limitations of American power and hence much more skeptical of calls to promote democracy in China, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela, and—fill in the blank. The United States should continue to champion its ideals and call out human rights abuses, but it should do so with humility and not be ashamed to prioritize its own interests. Foreign policy cannot be solely or even mainly an altruistic exercise, and attempting to make it so is likely to backfire in ways that will hurt the very people Americans are trying to help.
Above all, the United States must be more careful about the use of military power than it was in the heady days of the “unipolar moment” following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The era of great-power competition is back with a vengeance. Although the United States remains the world’s strongest military power and has interests and responsibilities around the world, it cannot afford to squander its strength in conflicts of marginal importance.
THE REGIME CHANGE FALLACY
Twenty years ago, in early 2003, Saddam was clinging to power, and the Bush administration was preparing to launch an invasion to overthrow him. I would never have supported military action had I known that he was not actually building weapons of mass destruction, but what I really wanted was to get rid of Iraq’s cruel dictator, not just his purported weapons program. One of the central arguments that I and other supporters of an invasion made was that regime change could trigger a broader democratic transformation in the Middle East. I now cringe when I read some of the articles I wrote at the time. “This could be the chance to right the scales, to establish the first Arab democracy, and to show the Arab people that America is as committed to freedom for them as we were for the people of Eastern Europe,” I wrote in The Weekly Standard—the now defunct flagship of the neoconservative movement—a month after 9/11. “To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim.”
In hindsight, that was dangerous naiveté born out of a combination of post–Cold War hubris and post-9/11 alarm. I desperately wanted to believe that spreading freedom could solve the security dilemmas confronting the United States—that by doing good in the world, it could also serve its national security interests.
It would have been nice if it had worked out that way, but it didn’t, and I should have realized at the time how far-fetched the entire mission was. Who were Americans to think that they could transform an entire region with thousands of years of its own history? I am still kicking myself for not paying greater attention to a wise op-ed I ran in 2002, when I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal. Under the headline “Don’t Attack Saddam,” the experienced foreign policy hand Brent Scowcroft accurately predicted that an invasion of Iraq would require “a large-scale, long-term military occupation” and would “swell the ranks of the terrorists.” I discounted such warnings because I was dazzled by the power of the U.S. military after its victories in the Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan—and dazzled also by the arguments of neoconservative scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami that Iraq offered fertile soil for democracy. In hindsight, I am amazed and appalled that I fell prey to these mass delusions.
Like the war in Vietnam, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq offered a potent warning about the dangers of good intentions gone awry. The 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya under the Obama administration, which I also supported, later confirmed on a smaller scale those same lessons. The United States and its allies bombed Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces, leading to his overthrow and murder, but the result was not the blooming of a Jeffersonian democracy in the desert. To this day, Libya remains trapped in a Hobbesian hell of internecine warfare and lawlessness. In all those countries, the United States was so eager to spread democracy, just as it was once eager to contain communism, that it inflicted great misery on the very people it was supposed to be helping—and then left them in the lurch.
As a result, I am hardly alone in souring on wars of regime change. I have even become skeptical of trying to foment regime change by covert action or strict sanctions—policies that many still advocate in such countries as China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, where odious, anti-American regimes have faced large protest movements in the recent past. Covert actions seldom work. Witness the failure of U.S.-supported rebels to topple the murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the failure of U.S.-supported rebels to topple Saddam before 2003. Sanctions are often unavoidable when the United States wants to impose a cost on rogue regimes for their wrongdoing, but (with only a few exceptions, such as apartheid South Africa) they generally are not effective in bringing down autocrats.
GETTING REAL ON IRAN
Yet many of my erstwhile ideological allies have not reached the same conclusions about the folly of regime change. Last October, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is often described as a neoconservative think tank, released a paper calling for the “maximum support for the Iranian people.” Most of what the report recommended—such as using “cyber capabilities in support of protesters,” enabling “censorship circumvention,” expanding “human rights sanctions,” and condemning “Iran within international organizations”—was eminently sensible. Much of it, indeed, was already being implemented by the Biden administration. But FDD went too far in calling for an end to diplomatic efforts to get Iran to rejoin the nuclear deal that U.S. President Donald Trump foolishly exited in 2018. This was one of the worst foreign policy decisions in U.S. history. Iran had been abiding by the accord, but today it is a nuclear threshold state with enough highly enriched uranium to produce at least one nuclear weapon.
The United States is running out of options to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The only obvious alternative to a diplomatic solution is a military solution. Years ago, I might have said this was a risk worth running (indeed, I basically suggested as much in 2011), but given how advanced the Iranian nuclear program has become, I no longer believe that. As I wrote in 2019, airstrikes are unlikely to destroy all of Iran’s well-protected nuclear facilities, and they could well trigger a regional conflagration. They could even backfire by convincing Iran to actually build a nuclear weapon. It would be wonderful if liberal protesters were to overthrow the regime and end its nuclear program, but most Iran experts seem to agree that there is no imminent danger of regime collapse. Indeed, protests that began in the fall have already waned. And there is no reason to think that any amount of U.S. intervention, short of outright invasion, could hasten the fall of the ayatollahs.
Opponents of diplomacy with Iran contend that the country would be strengthened by the windfall it would receive if it rejoined the nuclear deal and sanctions were lifted. In truth, the regime has no trouble funding its security forces and repressing dissent even without a nuclear deal. By one count, from mid-September 2022 to early January 2023, 516 protesters had been killed and more than 19,200 arrested. But even if it were true that a nuclear deal would strengthen the state’s capacity for internal repression, that would be a price worth paying for the United States if it actually led Iran to stop its rush to build the bomb. An Iran with nuclear weapons would threaten the United States and its allies and would likely lead some of its neighbors (such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to acquire nukes of their own.
The United States is running out of options to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Of course, the whole debate is academic at the moment, because the hard-liners in Tehran have shown no willingness to rejoin a deal they abhor as much as U.S. and Israeli hard-liners do. No doubt, like other dictators around the world (such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un), the mullahs have studied recent history and drawn the logical conclusions: Qaddafi and Saddam were overthrown by the United States after giving up their weapons of mass destruction programs. Hence, any dictator who wants to stay in power should develop a nuclear arsenal. This is yet another way that the U.S. zeal in spreading democracy has backfired. The error was compounded in the case of Iran by Trump’s exit from the imperfect but important nuclear deal without having a Plan B. His decision will be scrutinized for years to come as a case study of the dangers of prioritizing politics above prudence in the conduct of foreign affairs.
At this point, there are few good options left with Iran. U.S. or Israeli covert action—assassinating weapons scientists or spreading computer viruses—will only slightly delay a program that can soon produce a nuclear weapon. Washington should keep trying to reach a diplomatic breakthrough, but assuming that fails, it will need to rely on deterrence and containment, as it did during the Cold War. That means resisting the spread of Iranian power by working through regional allies such as Israel and the Gulf states and making clear to Iran that any use of nuclear weapons would lead to its own destruction.
No matter how abhorrent the Iranian regime is, the United States should, if possible, return an ambassador to Tehran to open lines of communication. Likewise, Washington needs to maintain close contact with Beijing to avoid a nuclear confrontation, even as it condemns the regime’s egregious human rights abuses, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong. So, too, does the United States need to talk to Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, even as it condemns the murder of The Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi and the imprisonment of dissidents. The United States cannot simply cut off a country that is a key ally against Iran and the world’s top oil exporter.
THE WORLD AS IT IS
Dealing with repressive regimes is unsavory and unpopular—for good reason—but in most cases, the United States doesn’t have the luxury of simply cutting them off and slapping them with sanctions. Such policies may be morally satisfying, but they are not particularly effective. As I suggested in November, to the outrage of the right, the United States might be able to do more for the people of Cuba and Venezuela by easing sanctions in return for human rights improvements rather than demanding regime change. Likewise, it should not be afraid to offer North Korea an easing of sanctions in exchange for a freeze or rollback of its nuclear program, even if that results in more money for the country’s Stalinist regime. (Of course, Pyongyang has shown no interest in such a deal.)
Washington should still call out human rights abuses. It should still champion liberal dissidents, such as the Russian political prisoners Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Ilya Yashin and the brave Iranian demonstrators risking arrest and execution. It should send military aid to embattled democracies, from Ukraine to Taiwan. Even though I am no longer as idealistic as I once was, I have not become the kind of self-styled realist who blames the United States for Russian aggression or thinks that it should sacrifice Ukraine as the price of peace. Nor do I approve of a president kowtowing to dictators (as Trump did). The United States remains the world’s most powerful liberal democracy, and it has a moral obligation to at least speak up for its principles.
But there is a crucial difference—one I did not sufficiently appreciate in the past—between defending democracy and exporting democracy. The United States has a better track record of the former (think Western Europe during the Cold War) than the latter (think Afghanistan and Iraq). Twenty years ago, many advocates of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, myself included, were misled by the U.S. success in transforming Germany, Italy, and Japan after World War II. What we failed to grasp was that these countries benefited from unique historical circumstances—including high levels of economic development, widespread social trust, strong states, and a blank slate created by defeat in a total war—that, it turns out, are nearly impossible to replicate. It was and is foolish to try.
Outsiders can barely understand local societies, much less manipulate them successfully.
Even when it comes to defending democracy, Washington must sometimes make difficult decisions based on a realistic assessment of local conditions far removed from the airy abstractions favored in U.S. political debates. Both South Korea and South Vietnam were worth defending from communist aggression, but the Koreans showed greater skill and willingness to fight for their own freedom than the South Vietnamese did. The United States needs to be hardheaded in its assessment of where it has local partners that can be successful and where it doesn’t.
Ukraine easily meets the test, because its government enjoys the enthusiastic support of its people, and its military has shown itself to be skilled and motivated. By contrast, the regime that the United States and its allies created in Kabul after the overthrow of the Taliban never had sufficient popular legitimacy. As a result, the Afghan military had insufficient motivation to fight on its own. I still opposed the pullout negotiated by Trump and executed by President Joe Biden because I thought it was possible to keep the Taliban out of power at relatively low cost, and I feared the dangerous signal that a U.S. exit would send to other aggressors. Today, I favor maintaining U.S. military advisers in Iraq as a hedge against the power of Iran and the resurgence of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). But those are much more modest objectives than the ones I envisioned 20 years ago. The time I spent with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past two decades gave me a greater appreciation for the importance of local dynamics. No matter how powerful or well intentioned, outsiders can barely understand local societies, much less manipulate them successfully.
At one time, for example, I believed that Ashraf Ghani would be an ideal president for Afghanistan because he was a Western-educated technocrat who wasn’t corrupt. When he came to power in 2014, I wrote, “If anyone is qualified to tackle Afghanistan’s problems, he is.” But he turned out to be a terrible wartime leader who did not rally his people and fled before the Taliban even entered Kabul. I didn’t expect much, by contrast, from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former television comedian. But he has turned out to be a Churchillian figure worthy of the United States’ unstinting support. In truth, even if Ukraine weren’t a liberal democracy, it would still make sense for Washington to back it in order to uphold the principle that international borders cannot be changed by force. (That was why Washington was right to defend Kuwait in the Gulf War and South Korea in the Korean War.) But that Ukraine is a liberal democracy makes it easier to rally to its side.
VALUES, MEET INTERESTS
There is, of course, an age-old debate in U.S. foreign policy over the role of values versus interests. In the 1820s, when the Greeks were fighting a war of independence, many American philhellenes wanted to aid their struggle against the cruelty of the Ottoman Empire. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams resisted those entreaties, famously proclaiming that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” In the past, I have bridled at Adams’s words, which have often been cited by isolationists. But I now have a greater appreciation for his conservative wisdom. As it happened, the Greek rebels won their war of independence with support from France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. But far from ushering in a new Periclean age, they created a barely functional monarchy overseen by foreign kings and punctuated by military coups.
I still favor U.S. international leadership and support of allies, including a strong U.S. military presence in the three centers of global power—Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia—where their deployment is essential to maintain order and deter aggression. But I would no longer make democracy promotion the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy, because I don’t have much confidence that the United States knows how to do it successfully and because other priorities (such as economic security and national security) have to be considered, too.
Biden discovered the difficulty of orienting U.S. foreign policy around support for democracies when he held a Summit for Democracy in December 2021. Some of the countries invited to the virtual meeting, such as India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, are hardly paragons of liberal democracy. Not invited were some especially autocratic governments, such as Singapore, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam, even though the United States has many shared interests with them. Predictably, the summit achieved little, because a mere commitment to democracy is hardly enough to mobilize joint action among 110 countries from all corners of the globe. Besides their democratic political systems, after all, what do Zambia and Uruguay really have in common?
Indeed, the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not break down neatly along democratic-authoritarian lines, with many democracies in the global South—such as Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa—refusing to sanction Russia. Unlike the broader group of the world’s democracies, NATO has staunchly supported Ukraine because most of its members—with the partial exceptions of increasingly autocratic Hungary and Turkey—are united by both values and interests. The U.S. alliances with Australia, Japan, and South Korea are success stories for the same reason, although it is worth remembering that the United States fought for South Korea long before it was a democracy.
Hope is not the basis for a sound foreign policy.
The world is an ugly place, and U.S. officials must deal with it as it is, without imagining that they have more power to transform it than they really do. In the real world, the United States often has to work with regimes it abhors, whether China or Saudi Arabia. Only in the movies and the fantasies of progressive activists is the CIA powerful enough to overthrow any leader on the planet. Its actual record of covert action is far less impressive, and on those few occasions when it helped pull off successful coups, the results have usually backfired. The Iranian mullahs still teach their people about American perfidy by citing the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953.
In the modern world, dictators have proved distressingly talented at using high-tech surveillance tools to suppress popular uprisings. Over the past 20 years, according to the scholar Erica Chenoweth, the success rate of mass protests has declined substantially. It was not terribly surprising, therefore, that China was able to put an end to protests against Xi Jinping’s “zero COVID” policy through a combination of repression and conciliation.
Anyone expecting that a people power revolution will usher in a liberal, pro-Western government any time soon in Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran if only the United States provides more support to protesters, is engaged in wishful thinking. Such hopes may come true, but hope is not the basis for a sound foreign policy. Washington should support liberal protesters with words of encouragement, communications technologies, and other nonmilitary assistance, but it should not count on their success, and it should keep in mind that when a dictatorship falls, the alternative is not always preferable. Remember that Ayatollah Khomeini followed the shah of Iran and that anarchy followed Qaddafi. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal who should be on trial in The Hague, but if he does lose power, his successor may not be a liberal figure like Navalny. It could be an even more reckless, ultranationalist hard-liner who might actually use Russia’s nuclear arsenal in Ukraine rather than merely threatening to do so. Even in Iran, today’s theocracy might be replaced not by a liberal democracy but by a junta of hard-line generals that would be more secular but no less dangerous. There is, alas, little reason other than wishful thinking to expect that other nations will evolve along Whiggish lines into model Western-style democracies.
Dictatorships are, in fact, proving more resilient than many democracies. Even in the United States and India, the world’s two largest democracies, freedom has been under siege in recent years. Elsewhere, in countries including Myanmar, Nicaragua, Russia, and Tunisia, democracy briefly took hold and then has been lost to cunning strongmen. Even in eastern Europe, where the spread of freedom in the 1990s inspired me and so many others across the world, democracy in Hungary and Poland has regressed. I have long ago been cured of the democratic triumphalism born of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, I am much more acutely conscious of the difficulties of creating liberal democracies that last.
OLDER AND WISER
After two decades of bitter experience, I am trying harder than I did in my callow youth to reconcile the aspirations of idealism with the restraints of realism. I still believe the United States should continue to promote human rights and defend democracy, but I have sadly concluded that U.S. foreign policy should not fixate on exporting democracy. That may make me an ex-neocon—a neocon mugged by reality—if “neocon” is taken to mean “a fervent promoter of exporting democracy.” But in some ways, I am harking back to the vision of the original neocons, who were united in their opposition to Soviet designs but hardly advocated a crusade for freedom abroad.
I now occupy a chair at the Council on Foreign Relations named in honor of Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat who was one of the most important neocon intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up. She first came to fame by writing a 1979 Commentary article called “Dictatorships and Double Standards” that argued for making common cause with “moderate autocrats friendly to American interests” despite their human rights violations. That led directly to her appointment as U.S. ambassador to the UN under President Ronald Reagan. As a member of Reagan’s cabinet, she did not want to support the United Kingdom during the 1982 Falklands War because she viewed the Argentine military junta as a bulwark against the expansion of communism in Latin America. Later, long after leaving office, she came to oppose the U.S. invasion of Iraq, arguing that “Iraq lacked practically all the requirements for a democratic government.” Kirkpatrick’s worldview should make clear that democracy promotion was hardly integral to neoconservatism as originally conceived.
So what was neoconservatism about? In the very first issue of the neoconservative publication The Public Interest, in 1965, its founders—Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol—expressed suspicion of all attempts to oversimplify complicated public policy issues by falling back on “ideology, whether it be liberal, conservative or radical.” That magazine would become a forum for dense, closely argued essays on vexing social science problems, not for sweeping ideological manifestos. In explaining the name of their magazine, Bell and Kristol cited the columnist Walter Lippmann’s definition of the “public interest”: “The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.” Sexist language aside, that remains a good guide to public policy, whether at home or abroad—and it is one that I regret to say I sometimes disregarded in my zeal to spread freedom.
Lippmann, it should be noted, was originally a liberal internationalist whose views were not all that different from those of the modern neocons. He began his long and influential journalistic career as a liberal idealist who helped draft President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to “make the world safe for democracy” and ended it as a liberal realist who opposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam. That’s a trajectory I can understand
-
some good points
but by * Max Boot* and real self introspection
as a neocon
a major TDS sufferer always
on I think CNN and maybe mspcp
I am ok with not loving DJT but when self described conservatives go on enemy Dem stations to rant against anything Republican and make everything about DJT , I have to listen with a grain of salt.
he advised Marco Rubio :-o
also is a woke convert it seems ; one of the self described "socially liberal and fiscal conservative " which to me is an oxymoron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Boot
-
Putting aside the man's remaining internal inconsistencies and cognitive dissonance, is there anything to take away from his now "corrected" vision for American foreign policy?
-
without studying the piece but quickly reading it over
I surmise he has now come around to the conclusion the spreading Democracy around the world via wars military strategies is a fool's errand
not necessarily populist I don't think though.
while he debates this international view he has gone woke at home .
do you read the same?
-
Max Boot is a steaming pile of grifter.
without studying the piece but quickly reading it over
I surmise he has now come around to the conclusion the spreading Democracy around the world via wars military strategies is a fool's errand
not necessarily populist I don't think though.
while he debates this international view he has gone woke at home .
do you read the same?
-
So, how would we describe/distinguish our POV here?
-
So, how would we describe/distinguish our POV here?
Can't speak for others but to me, he conflates hawk with neocon, with views that perhaps don't have a name yet, Colin Powellism?
Neocon is a perjorative tossed around by people aiming (in the 2000s) to slur certain people new to a hawkish position of going after enemies of the US outside our borders.
Hawk vs dove is an older distinction between doing something about known threats outside our borders versus letting them fester.
A third view is, build the mightiest military but don't intervene - until it hits us.
My own foreign policy view falls in between hawk and build the mightiest economy and military for deterrence and defense. Evil cannot become the greatest force, not under our watch.,
Yes, some hawks used the argument of building 'democracy' in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a justification for continuing our involvement after the original threat and justification was at least for the moment defeated.
Failure to build great democracy in its place does not mean toppling the regime was wrong, in Iraq, for example.
Colin Powell falsely declared about Iraq, if we break it, we must fix it.
That is a different argument than the 23 point justification passed by Congress declaring war against the regime of Saddam Hussein.
We didn't break Iraq. It was already broken - by a tyrannical dictator. Staying decades to fix or manage things after Saddam (and bin Laden) were toppled were different decisions than the original declarations of war.
Hindsight is an unfair tool for current threats but still we need to learn and keep learning.
I've asked, what is the lesson of WWII, the European war in particular. Answer I think is, intervene earlier against evil.
Switch over to today's threats and conflicts:
In Ukraine, the argument back is that Putin Russia is not the threat Hitler's Nazi Germany posed. It is a different sort of threat. I am okay with slowing him rather than declaring all out war against him for that reason.
Regarding Taiwan, we must ask what threat the totalitarian, genocidal regime of Communist China poses, and what line if not the invasion of Taiwan, is where we or anyone will stop them.
The idea this regime militarizing the region and building the world's greatest military without any checks or balances will stop peacefully after consolidating it's power on the mainland, in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan, is, shall we say, a bit optimistic.
If they don't stop with Taiwan, then that hindsight question comes back to bite us. When could we have intervened. When were they stoppable.
If not now, when?
-
Note the puddle under the baltics
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fq83GqpaYAE9ITh?format=jpg&name=small)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fq886VaacAA07g8?format=jpg&name=small)
-
Bringing this over from the Political Rants thread:
I asked GM:
GM:
Should America do as you advocate:
a) What happens in Ukraine?
b) What happens in East Europe?
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?
d) What does China do?
e) What does Iran do?
f) What does North Korea do?
He replied:
a) What happens in Ukraine? Not our problem
b) What happens in East Europe? Not our problem
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage? :roll:
We have credibility? With whom?
d) What does China do? If we onshore our manufacturing, the PRC is pretty scroomed
e) What does Iran do? Not our problem
f) What does North Korea do? South Korea can figure it out.
======================
Those are crisp answers. Let the conversation begin. I may not get to it until tomorrow.
-
Bringing this over from the Political Rants thread:
I asked GM:
GM:
Should America do as you advocate:
a) What happens in Ukraine?
b) What happens in East Europe?
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?
d) What does China do?
e) What does Iran do?
f) What does North Korea do?
He replied:
a) What happens in Ukraine? Not our problem
b) What happens in East Europe? Not our problem
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage? :roll:
We have credibility? With whom?
d) What does China do? If we onshore our manufacturing, the PRC is pretty scroomed
e) What does Iran do? Not our problem
f) What does North Korea do? South Korea can figure it out.
======================
Those are crisp answers. Let the conversation begin. I may not get to it until tomorrow.
LA in 1983:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3s1PUDqfX4
LA in 2023:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TdIGUkA__w
We must unfuck this country first before we worry about anything else.
America has gone from "a shining city on a hill" to a literal dumpster fire.
-
Bringing this over from the Political Rants thread:
I asked GM:
GM:
Should America do as you advocate:
a) What happens in Ukraine?
b) What happens in East Europe?
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?
d) What does China do?
e) What does Iran do?
f) What does North Korea do?
He replied:
a) What happens in Ukraine? Not our problem
b) What happens in East Europe? Not our problem
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage? :roll:
We have credibility? With whom?
d) What does China do? If we onshore our manufacturing, the PRC is pretty scroomed
e) What does Iran do? Not our problem
f) What does North Korea do? South Korea can figure it out.
======================
Those are crisp answers. Let the conversation begin. I may not get to it until tomorrow.
LA in 1983:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3s1PUDqfX4
LA in 2023:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TdIGUkA__w
We must unfuck this country first before we worry about anything else.
America has gone from "a shining city on a hill" to a literal dumpster fire.
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2023/01/21/philadelphia-neighborhood-like-a-walking-dead-episode-as-soft-on-crime-policies-and-animal-tranquilizer-craze-take-over-the-city-n691823
-
"We must unfuck this country first before we worry about anything else."
This is a potent point.
"America has gone from "a shining city on a hill" to a literal dumpster fire."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GflKh9jlCg&t=15s
Circling back to the Geopolitical position you crisply laid out , , , tomorrow :-D
-
In the long run, perhaps. But in the meantime?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iibs7buNwxQ
-
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/death-of-a-myth/
-
There are some cogent points lurking therein, but mixed in is a goodly dose of deceptive Russo-Prog type propaganda.
This is frustrating, because the need to evolve our heuristics for things geopolitical is great.
-
some of the #' s of death
blamed on USA
is misleading
Americans did not kill millions of Arabs
they killed each other
Americans did not kill Cambodians - they killed each other
S. Korea is free thanks to us.
What would it have been like if all of Korea was Kim's
it was Red China and Russia spreading their disease down to SE Asia
that started the whole thing
As for Iraq - hard to believe that Iraqis would have been better off with Sadam left in place and he invaded Kuwait
Was Iraq II a mistake
Was Vietnam a mistake
Was Korea a mistake
many would argue yes
Was Afghanistan something we should not have done?
Well there was Muslim terrorism and it was real.
The author would also say the Lincoln was not our best President but our worst
Thanks to him 750,000 (more recent estimates ) excess Americans died .
-
Well articulated.
-
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/22/amputation-ied-walter-reed-soldier-fungus/4038281/
Thank you for your service?
You fucked up, you trusted us?
We turned the Taliban into the 26th largest army in the world and they didn’t even have to pretend to not be the fucking Taliban.
-
yes I get it
but the terrorists were coming from Afghan and Pocky stan
so should we not have gone there
the attempt at building a democracy was folly
but we had to push back -
or not ?
keep the terrorists there not hear
what do you tell the near 3,000 people who died on 9/11?
-
Good points both.
-
yes I get it
but the terrorists were coming from Afghan and Pocky stan
so should we not have gone there
the attempt at building a democracy was folly
but we had to push back -
or not ?
keep the terrorists there not hear
what do you tell the near 3,000 people who died on 9/11?
Do you think the global jihad is done with us? We pissed away lives, limbs and treasure and handed the global jihad a massive win.
-
Incompetence can do that.
-
yes I get it
but the terrorists were coming from Afghan and Pocky stan
so should we not have gone there
the attempt at building a democracy was folly
but we had to push back -
or not ?
keep the terrorists there not hear
what do you tell the near 3,000 people who died on 9/11?
Do you think the global jihad is done with us? We pissed away lives, limbs and treasure and handed the global jihad a massive win.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/afghanistan-again-becomes-a-cradle-for-jihadism-and-al-qaeda
-
"Do you think the global jihad is done with us? We pissed away lives, limbs and treasure and handed the global jihad a massive win."
Should we have not gone?
Should we have stayed "to mow the lawn" as necessary?
-
"Do you think the global jihad is done with us? We pissed away lives, limbs and treasure and handed the global jihad a massive win."
Should we have not gone?
Should we have stayed "to mow the lawn" as necessary?
9/12/2001 should have been where Mecca, Medina and Afghanistan were turned into radioactive glass.
-
A touch glib, don't you think?
-
A touch glib, don't you think?
No. Violence works, overwhelming violence works overwhelmingly well.
To defeat the global jihad, you must gut Islam.
-
How is that working for Russia?
-
"to defeat the global jihad, you must gut Islam"
there are a billion worldwide Muslims ?
what are you suggesting?
-
How is that working for Russia?
They are winning.
-
"to defeat the global jihad, you must gut Islam"
there are a billion worldwide Muslims ?
what are you suggesting?
What are the 5 pillars of Islam?
-
OK I looked it up
so ?
-
OK I looked it up
so ?
So, if the hand of allah failed to stop Mecca from becoming an ocean of radioactive glass, wouldn’t that spark a serious crisis of faith? Maybe Mohammed (piss be upon him) was just a Arab Charles Manson and shaheeds don’t get 40 Virginians…
-
C'mon GM, we had YEARS of this conversation in the aftermath of 911. Look up all the threads on this forum with Islam in the name!
So please don't talk to us like we are not aware of the depth of the conceptual problems within Islam.
That does not mean we should nuke entire nations of people because they are ruled by fanatical religious despots.
-
C'mon GM, we had YEARS of this conversation in the aftermath of 911. Look up all the threads on this forum with Islam in the name!
So please don't talk to us like we are not aware of the depth of the conceptual problems within Islam.
That does not mean we should nuke entire nations of people because they are ruled by fanatical religious despots.
And this is why the west is crumbling and we can’t win wars.
-
Because we did not we nuke entire countries the West is going to fall?!?
-
Because we did not we nuke entire countries the West is going to fall?!?
The will to win matters. What was the last actual war we won?
-
1992 Gulf war
~1996 Kosovo
destroyed Isis - they were hiding in holes
yes some still exist. but we immobilized them
they hide in Pakistan and Afghan I think - Africa
and now in Texas :roll:
-
1992 Gulf war
~1996 Kosovo
destroyed Isis - they were hiding in holes
yes some still exist. but we immobilized them
they hide in Pakistan and Afghan I think - Africa
and now in Texas :roll:
Funny post!
-
I almost forgot
Reagan kicked the commies asses in Grenada too! :-D
-
I almost forgot
Reagan kicked the commies asses in Grenada too! :-D
Now that was a war!
-
Alrighty Snarkmaster :-D
"Because we did not we nuke entire countries the West is going to fall?!?"
"The will to win matters. What was the last actual war we won?"
The will to win matters? DUH!!! That said this does not mean that nukes are the answer.
-
“Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is a national security issue that threatens our alliances and our standing in the world. Our objective is to assist Ukraine sufficiently to enable them to defeat Russian forces and restore their sovereignty. This effort is not about regime change in Russia; it is about respecting the sovereignty of free nations. Also, this is a proxy war being waged by Russia’s ally China against the United States. Due to their assistance to Russia and China’s recent action in the Middle East, it would be naive to call this anything but Chinese aggression. Our allies and our enemies are watching us. It is on us to assist our democratic allies in defending themselves against authoritarian aggression. If we do not, this aggression will spread and the void we leave will be filled by authoritarian regimes like China, Iran, North Korea and an empowered Russia if they triumph over Ukraine.”
-
March 15, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
Ukraine and the Long War
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
Editor’s note: By definition, geopolitics moves slowly. It’s a drawn-out explanation for the long-term trajectory of nations, one that all too often gets lost in the shuffle of our modern news cycles. Those of us who study geopolitics, then, tend to repeat ourselves more than we’d like because a nation’s trajectory changes neither quickly nor dramatically. Its behavior necessarily elicits repetition – and for us, that’s a good thing. But even we welcome the occasional reminder that what we said in the past holds true today, and that when a forecast comes to fruition it benefits our readers not because we said it but because it’s true. With that in mind, we republish a piece written a year ago by George Friedman discussing what a long war in Ukraine will look like. It reads as if it could have been written at any time, as any good geopolitical analysis should.
For as often as it happens, nations typically don’t elect to enter wars if they know they will be long, drawn-out, uncertain and expensive affairs. They enter wars when they think the benefits of winning outweigh the risks, or when they think they have the means to strike decisively enough to bring the war to a quick resolution. Long wars result from consistent and fundamental errors: underestimating the will and ability of an enemy to resist, overestimating one’s own capabilities, going to war for incorrect or insufficient reasons, or underestimating the degree to which a powerful third party might intervene and shift the balance of power.
If a nation survives the first blow, then the probability of a victory increases. This is particularly the case in the long war. The nation initiating the war tends to have committed available force at the beginning, maximizing the possibility of an early victory. The defending power has not yet utilized its domestic forces or those of allies prior to the attack. Therefore, the defender increases its military power much more rapidly than the attacker. The Japanese could not match American manpower or technology over time. The United States underestimated the resilience of the North Vietnamese, even in the face of an intense bombardment of their capital. There are exceptions. The Germans in 1914 failed to take Paris, and in the long war were strangled by the British navy and ground down on the battlefield.
This is not a universal truth, but long wars originate in the attacker's miscalculation, and with some frequency with the attacker moving with the most available force, while the defender, surviving the initial attack, has unused resources to draw upon. It is possible for the long war to grind down the defender's resources and will, but having survived the initial attack, the defender likely has both will and resources to draw on, while the attacker must overcome the fact that it is fighting the enemy’s war, and not the one it planned.
The war in Ukraine is far from over and its outcome is not assured. But it began with a Russian attack that was based on the assumption that Ukrainian resistance would be ineffective, and would melt away once Russia came to town because the Ukrainians were indifferent or hostile to an independent Ukraine. This faulty assumption is evidenced by the relatively casual deployment of Russian armor. It also explains the Russian strategy of both bombing and entering cities. It’s difficult to subdue cities by bombing alone (think London, Hamburg and Hanoi). They are resilient, and the tonnage needed to cripple them is exorbitant. And they are notoriously advantageous for their defenders, who are more familiar with alleyways, roads, dead ends, and so on. The fact that the Russians operated this way indicates that they had low expectations of their enemy. This is to say nothing of Russia’s massive intelligence failure, which misread the enemy. (There are reports that the chief of the FSB intelligence agency's Ukraine unit has been placed under house arrest.) The most important failure was the failure to see that Ukraine would counter with a large, relatively decentralized infantry force.
The protraction of the war allowed the West and its allies to initiate economic warfare against Russia on an unprecedented scale. It takes time to implement economic warfare, and the Russians gave away precious time. Similarly, Moscow didn’t anticipate the substantial military aid that would flow into Ukraine, particularly the kinds that were ideally suited for a light infantry force.
None of this has defeated the Russians, of course, but it has created a crisis. A military force shocked by the inaccuracy of intelligence must determine without confidence in its intelligence what to do next. Russia thus seems to have abandoned the goal to occupy all of Ukraine or even Kyiv, shifting instead to a strategy of creating a land bridge from Russia to Crimea. If there is no military dimension to the future, this is a reasonable retreat for the Russians. But a long, relatively narrow salient – military-speak for a bulge or vector – is vulnerable to many forms of interdiction. This leaves the Russian salient at the mercy of Ukrainian action at the time and place of Kyiv’s choosing.
The question of the long war depends on Russian resources, without which there is nothing to discuss. Russia is apparently short on infantry, or it would not be recruiting and trying to integrate Syrian and other soldiers. The possibility of having forces that don’t speak Russian and haven’t experienced Russian training would only be considered by a force short of manpower. And such a force, depending on how it is integrated and what the mission would be, would be taking a large risk in maintaining large-scale operations.
The problem has thus become political. The initial war plan failed. The Russians are certainly able to continue the war, but they apparently need more people and an overall better logistics system, which is hard to improve in the face of constant combat. The United States, facing the same essential problem, chose to continue the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost was substantial but did not threaten core national security because of the vast oceans between the war and the homeland. The Ukraine war is on Russia’s doorstep, and an extended war, with intensifying distrust of the government, can result in a trained Ukrainian special forces group expanding the fighting into Russia. Russians cannot assume immunity.
It is painful, from a political point of view, for presidents and chiefs of staff to admit failure and cut their losses. The desire to keep trying, coupled with a reluctance to admit failure, carries with it myriad problems. Russian President Vladimir Putin needs an honest intelligence review, but he had one before invading. It was not a lie; it was just wrong. In a long war, the defender has the opportunity to grow strong, and the attacker is likely maxed out in anticipation of victory and the intent to throw everything into it. If Russia has resources not deployed and held in reserve for another possible threat, and doesn’t ruthlessly cut its losses, it will be joining a long line of defeats, from Algiers to Khartoum to Hue.
-
Alrighty Snarkmaster :-D
"Because we did not we nuke entire countries the West is going to fall?!?"
"The will to win matters. What was the last actual war we won?"
The will to win matters? DUH!!! That said this does not mean that nukes are the answer.
Oh, perhaps we should try nation building? Maybe give it a half assed try for a few decades then throw up our hands and abandon those that actually fought along side us while shipping masses of unvetted savages to the US and leave billions of weapons and equipment for the Taliban?
Do you teach the same method for knife fighting? Just kind of half-assedly poke the attacker rather than really stabbing them? If I won, I might be criticized!
You win wars by either killing the enemy until they can no longer fight, or they lose the will to fight.
-
You construct straw men.
Nukes ultimately are a answer of genocidal nature. Not all wars are of genocidal nature.
"You win wars by either killing the enemy until they can no longer fight, or they lose the will to fight."
This is a much better articulation.
-
You construct straw men.
Nukes ultimately are a answer of genocidal nature. Not all wars are of genocidal nature.
"You win wars by either killing the enemy until they can no longer fight, or they lose the will to fight."
This is a much better articulation.
Did we genocide Japan?
-
In that we were the only nuclear power, that was not the issue.
In a world of many nations with nukes, the logic changes into MAD vs. First Strike Genocide.
-
In that we were the only nuclear power, that was not the issue.
In a world of many nations with nukes, the logic changes into MAD vs. First Strike Genocide.
Do you think Russia or China would have cared if we nuked Mecca 9/12/2001?
China especially would have been cool with it. It would save them some trouble trying to sequence various ethnicities’ DNA for targeted bio weapons.
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403599.php
-
Do you think Russia or China would have cared if we nuked Mecca 9/12/2001?
probably not
but the Pakistanis would not have been happy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#:~:text=Pakistan%20thus%20became%20the%20seventh,achieved%20by%20KRL%20in%201984.
and Iran would not remember that fondly.
you might have hundreds of millions of Muslims joining the terrorist forces
so we could simply nuc them too ?
:wink:
-
Once one does it, others want to do it, and others want to develop the ability to do it.
-
Do you think Russia or China would have cared if we nuked Mecca 9/12/2001?
probably not
but the Pakistanis would not have been happy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#:~:text=Pakistan%20thus%20became%20the%20seventh,achieved%20by%20KRL%20in%201984.
and Iran would not remember that fondly.
you might have hundreds of millions of Muslims joining the terrorist forces
so we could simply nuc them too ?
:wink:
This the same Pakistan that rescued Bin Laden and hid him ?
-
Once one does it, others want to do it, and others want to develop the ability to do it.
Despite being 80+ year old technology, and with all the technology purchased /stolen from the west and the islamic world still struggles with it.
I guess generations of cousin marriage has consequences.
As you seem to have forgotten, the core orthodox belief of islam is that the world is to be ruled by them and all jews are to be slaughtered as part of islamic prophecy.
But don't make them mad!
:roll:
-
"As you seem to have forgotten, the core orthodox belief of islam is that the world is to be ruled by them and all jews are to be slaughtered as part of islamic prophecy."
You are capable of a far better level of conversation than this.
Just because we disagree with your call to "Nuke 'em all" does not mean we have forgotten this. The forgetfulness is yours. TOGETHER via this forum we have laid one helluva foundation in this regard.
-
"As you seem to have forgotten, the core orthodox belief of islam is that the world is to be ruled by them and all jews are to be slaughtered as part of islamic prophecy."
You are capable of a far better level of conversation than this.
Just because we disagree with your call to "Nuke 'em all" does not mean we have forgotten this. The forgetfulness is yours. TOGETHER via this forum we have laid one helluva foundation in this regard.
What is your path to victory?
-
"What is your path to victory?"
I asked this the other day to John Bolton
Mark Levin Lindsay Graham Biden et al
besides the chorus of sending F 16 s to untrained Ukrainian pilots ( and a quick search mentions how Russians have over 1,000 jets and many may be better than F16s )
we need to be sure they can win F16s F 16s F 16s
blah blah blah
does anyone who stops tho think that if we send them say 50 F16 s that will be the end of it.
then it will be cruise missiles , then go ahead and send in missiles drones jets into Russian territory then when that fails then what?
As for nucs on Islamists I would not be able to sleep at night
I don't want our country to start being mass murderers and then beginning the cycle of nucs - the downside just too terrible
-
"What is your path to victory?"
I asked this the other day to John Bolton
Mark Levin Lindsay Graham Biden et al
besides the chorus of sending F 16 s to untrained Ukrainian pilots ( and a quick search mentions how Russians have over 1,000 jets and many may be better than F16s )
we need to be sure they can win F16s F 16s F 16s
blah blah blah
does anyone who stops tho think that if we send them say 50 F16 s that will be the end of it.
then it will be cruise missiles , then go ahead and send in missiles drones jets into Russian territory then when that fails then what?
As for nucs on Islamists I would not be able to sleep at night
I don't want our country to start being mass murderers and then beginning the cycle of nucs - the downside just too terrible
If you think they won't nuke Israel and the US given the chance, you are going to be very surprised at what is coming.
-
no I won't be surprised
but I don't want to start it.
I mentioned yrs ago
that I thought Obama made a grave error in not allowing Israel to bomb the Iran nuc site(s)
though I admit, from what little I know about it from reading (armchair "expert"),
israel may not have succeeded in demolished hardened bunkers
that we allowed Iran to build over many yrs
So maybe, I don't really know enough to know what I am talking about ...... :|
But I don't trust obamster/& the catsup heir that is for sure
-
"What is your path to victory?"
As best as I can tell we face full spectrum war.
First order of business is to reclaim control of our border and within our borders. This will include deporting many millions (and yes the Dreamer principle needs to apply too-- number unknown, but could be in the millions).
Worth noting well is that the need to deport is not yet part of socially acceptable conversation, even among those clear on the need to assert our border.
How many millions? The Yale-MIT study (during the Obama years or the Trump years?) is the best of which I am aware and it put the number at 22-24 million. How many of these are Deamers? Depends on the criteria of course, but without going down the rabbit hole I'll say I'd put the number at 2 million, but political compromise of up to 5-7 million is acceptable to me. Add in the 6-7+ million under Biden so far.
IMHO 30 million is a reasonable working number.
In the context of the full spectrum war already under way, it needs to be clearly noted that large groups of military age males from various countries and cultures hostile to America have entered our country. The working assumption needs to be that some/many of them are under direction from not only the Cartels, but also China, Russia, Iran, Islamofascistsan, etc.
Look at what 19 Saudis, under the direction of certain elements within the Saudi government, accomplished after taking the time to get well integrated!!!
Our supply chains are already diminished and their fragility revealed.
We are a people divided between Americans and AmINOS-- Americans In Name Only. In the thralls of collective militant enthusiasm lemming-like they follow the nudges of the forces of the Prog-Goolag-Infowar-Surveillance-Globalist State.
What do we think will happen here in America if/when conflagrations elsewhere in the world kick off and the fifth columns among us put match to the "objective conditions" of Michael Yon all around us?
-
How America Can Win the Information War
Confirm Elizabeth Allen, whose office produced a brilliant video called ‘To the People of Russia.’
By Joe Lieberman and Gordon Humphrey
March 17, 2023 2:55 pm ET
When Xi Jinping visits Moscow next week, Vladimir Putin will doubtless ask for weapons to replenish his badly depleted arsenal. Whatever scheme they concoct will further endanger U.S. national security and that of our allies.
A broader danger confronts us in the new axis of evil that spans Europe, the Middle East and Asia. China and Russia have combined with Iran. All three are determined to replace U.S. leadership in the world and to destroy freedom wherever it exists. China’s threats to take Taiwan by force, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Iran’s threats to “annihilate” Israel raise the possibility of simultaneous aggression. Together, this axis may confront us with one of the most serious challenges ever to our security, values and prosperity.
The threats to global stability and the US homeland are growing. How will the war in Ukraine end? Can China and the US develop a less combative relationship? Join historian and Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead and editorial page editor Paul Gigot for an interactive conversation on the threats to US security.
To prevail, the U.S. must employ every tool of national power. Regrettably, one of the most forceful and inexpensive weapons has withered over the last 20 years: advocacy—the marshaling of truth and fact to persuade foreign audiences. Recall the important part played by the U.S. Information Agency in winning the Cold War. Its Voice of America broadcasts persuaded Soviet citizens that life on our side of the Iron Curtain was better than theirs.
VOA didn’t rely on news alone; it employed editorial writers and even contracted for made-in-Hollywood films. If sole reliance on news sufficed, today’s war criminal and serial violator of human rights, Mr. Putin, wouldn’t stand high in Russian polls. Instead, the U.S. must bring back advocacy meant to persuade. That’s where wits come in.
Defeating propaganda with truthful advocacy is more difficult than in USIA’s heyday. Our adversaries outspend us by orders of magnitude and, using bots and social media, dump disinformation into millions of computers, eyes, ears and brains every day. They have massively stepped up their game. So must we.
Overtaking adversaries requires the president to order explicitly the development of a long-term program of advocacy surpassing that of our adversaries in budget, creativity and technology. Leading such an effort requires an official who is highly experienced in communications and public relations and who has the heft to overcome bureaucratic timidity and inertia. President Biden has nominated precisely such a person, Elizabeth Allen, to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.
Ms. Allen served as deputy communications director at the White House when Mr. Biden was vice president. That background indicates she’ll have the ear of the president whenever the bureaucracy needs a push. That’s vital to success.
The office is charged by law with “detecting and countering disinformation emanating from abroad” and actively advocating the “values and policies of the United States.” The Senate would serve the nation well by speedily confirming Ms. Allen with a bipartisan vote.
While public diplomacy is on the minds of senators, they should join with their colleagues in the House to review thoroughly all aspects of our messaging of foreign citizens. To quote a recent Heritage Foundation paper: “The State Department’s public diplomacy programs abroad are skewed toward fringe aspects of U.S. domestic social issues and away from core, enduring U.S. values. ‘Woke’ diplomacy does not fit within the State Department’s own strategic plan and does not advance U.S. national security.”
As a prototype demonstrating the kind of advocacy that should be produced at scale, consider the first-of-its-kind video made recently by the undersecretary’s office, “To the People of Russia.” It echoes Mr. Biden’s assurance to the Russian people: “You are not our enemy.”
It’s a masterpiece of advocacy, richly illustrated, that begins by recalling the time when as allies the U.S. and Russia won World War II. It speaks of our cooperation in space and compliments the Russian people for their great contributions to the arts and sciences. Toward the end, a clip of Mr. Putin’s war appears, accompanied by the words: “We do not believe this is who you are. We stand with each of you who seeks to build a more peaceful future.” The video played on Telegram, the platform widely used by Russians seeking alternatives to Moscow’s propaganda.
Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and now deputy chairman of the Security Council, was outraged after viewing the video, labeling the U.S. government “sons of bitches” for what he called use of the techniques of Joseph Goebbels. That Mr. Medvedev found the video offensive attests to the Kremlin’s fear of a popular uprising like that in Iran.
The office of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed occupant in more than five years, which speaks volumes about the neglect of the power of advocacy. To leave so important a national-security post filled by a series of short-term, temporary acting officials is unacceptable.
The U.S. invented the internet and virtual private networks that defy most censorship. Until it gets serious about advocacy it will continue to lose the information war by default. The price is the continuation of a 17-year-long decline in the number of free nations and, ultimately, a sharp decline in the West’s security, freedom and prosperity.
Mr. Lieberman was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000 and a U.S. senator from Connecticut, 1989-2013. Mr. Humphrey was a Republican U.S. senator from New Hampshire, 1979-90.
-
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/twenty-years-after-the-us-invasion-of-iraq
I know , I hear it now
"BUT THIS IS DIFFERENT - EGGS TO ORANGES ! "
me : maybe
-
The corrupted, illegitimate feral government is at war with half the American public.
How America Can Win the Information War
Confirm Elizabeth Allen, whose office produced a brilliant video called ‘To the People of Russia.’
By Joe Lieberman and Gordon Humphrey
March 17, 2023 2:55 pm ET
When Xi Jinping visits Moscow next week, Vladimir Putin will doubtless ask for weapons to replenish his badly depleted arsenal. Whatever scheme they concoct will further endanger U.S. national security and that of our allies.
A broader danger confronts us in the new axis of evil that spans Europe, the Middle East and Asia. China and Russia have combined with Iran. All three are determined to replace U.S. leadership in the world and to destroy freedom wherever it exists. China’s threats to take Taiwan by force, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Iran’s threats to “annihilate” Israel raise the possibility of simultaneous aggression. Together, this axis may confront us with one of the most serious challenges ever to our security, values and prosperity.
The threats to global stability and the US homeland are growing. How will the war in Ukraine end? Can China and the US develop a less combative relationship? Join historian and Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead and editorial page editor Paul Gigot for an interactive conversation on the threats to US security.
To prevail, the U.S. must employ every tool of national power. Regrettably, one of the most forceful and inexpensive weapons has withered over the last 20 years: advocacy—the marshaling of truth and fact to persuade foreign audiences. Recall the important part played by the U.S. Information Agency in winning the Cold War. Its Voice of America broadcasts persuaded Soviet citizens that life on our side of the Iron Curtain was better than theirs.
VOA didn’t rely on news alone; it employed editorial writers and even contracted for made-in-Hollywood films. If sole reliance on news sufficed, today’s war criminal and serial violator of human rights, Mr. Putin, wouldn’t stand high in Russian polls. Instead, the U.S. must bring back advocacy meant to persuade. That’s where wits come in.
Defeating propaganda with truthful advocacy is more difficult than in USIA’s heyday. Our adversaries outspend us by orders of magnitude and, using bots and social media, dump disinformation into millions of computers, eyes, ears and brains every day. They have massively stepped up their game. So must we.
Overtaking adversaries requires the president to order explicitly the development of a long-term program of advocacy surpassing that of our adversaries in budget, creativity and technology. Leading such an effort requires an official who is highly experienced in communications and public relations and who has the heft to overcome bureaucratic timidity and inertia. President Biden has nominated precisely such a person, Elizabeth Allen, to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.
Ms. Allen served as deputy communications director at the White House when Mr. Biden was vice president. That background indicates she’ll have the ear of the president whenever the bureaucracy needs a push. That’s vital to success.
The office is charged by law with “detecting and countering disinformation emanating from abroad” and actively advocating the “values and policies of the United States.” The Senate would serve the nation well by speedily confirming Ms. Allen with a bipartisan vote.
While public diplomacy is on the minds of senators, they should join with their colleagues in the House to review thoroughly all aspects of our messaging of foreign citizens. To quote a recent Heritage Foundation paper: “The State Department’s public diplomacy programs abroad are skewed toward fringe aspects of U.S. domestic social issues and away from core, enduring U.S. values. ‘Woke’ diplomacy does not fit within the State Department’s own strategic plan and does not advance U.S. national security.”
As a prototype demonstrating the kind of advocacy that should be produced at scale, consider the first-of-its-kind video made recently by the undersecretary’s office, “To the People of Russia.” It echoes Mr. Biden’s assurance to the Russian people: “You are not our enemy.”
It’s a masterpiece of advocacy, richly illustrated, that begins by recalling the time when as allies the U.S. and Russia won World War II. It speaks of our cooperation in space and compliments the Russian people for their great contributions to the arts and sciences. Toward the end, a clip of Mr. Putin’s war appears, accompanied by the words: “We do not believe this is who you are. We stand with each of you who seeks to build a more peaceful future.” The video played on Telegram, the platform widely used by Russians seeking alternatives to Moscow’s propaganda.
Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and now deputy chairman of the Security Council, was outraged after viewing the video, labeling the U.S. government “sons of bitches” for what he called use of the techniques of Joseph Goebbels. That Mr. Medvedev found the video offensive attests to the Kremlin’s fear of a popular uprising like that in Iran.
The office of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed occupant in more than five years, which speaks volumes about the neglect of the power of advocacy. To leave so important a national-security post filled by a series of short-term, temporary acting officials is unacceptable.
The U.S. invented the internet and virtual private networks that defy most censorship. Until it gets serious about advocacy it will continue to lose the information war by default. The price is the continuation of a 17-year-long decline in the number of free nations and, ultimately, a sharp decline in the West’s security, freedom and prosperity.
Mr. Lieberman was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000 and a U.S. senator from Connecticut, 1989-2013. Mr. Humphrey was a Republican U.S. senator from New Hampshire, 1979-90.
-
A potent point GM and with it a deep is revealed.
In so many ways, the WSJ and people of that orientation share many things with us-- with free market and American Creed type thinking front and center.
The way they see the power they seek for this woman being used, actually seems to me like a good message for communicating with Russia and is one worthy of our remembrance and use methinks.
The blind spot is not seeing that the actual use of this power will be quite other than they envision, and once in place will be forever.
-
Pasting GM's posting of this in another thread over to here too.
This thought needs to be internalized and all thinking resting on the laurels of the previous era jettisoned.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/2023/03/14/the_age_of_american_naval_dominance_is_over_887126.html
-
https://sonar21.com/you-have-witnessed-history-today-in-moscow-and-it-is-consequential/
-
I have been pounding the table here and elsewhere on the implications of driving Russia into China's arms for quite some time.
-
I have been pounding the table here and elsewhere on the implications of driving Russia into China's arms for quite some time.
It will go down as Biden's greatest foreign policy success!
-
https://sonar21.com/you-have-witnessed-history-today-in-moscow-and-it-is-consequential/
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/937/015/original/cec3d04f4b1caf9d.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/937/015/original/cec3d04f4b1caf9d.png)
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/936/997/original/4e6ee3354ee034d7.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/936/997/original/4e6ee3354ee034d7.png)
-
What to Make of Xi's Russia Trip and China's Growing Involvement in Ukraine
12 MIN READMar 22, 2023 | 21:38 GMT
Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow confirms the two leaders' mutual desire for deeper economic and political cooperation, as well as Beijing's desire to position itself as a viable mediator in Ukraine and Moscow's desire to freeze the war along current battle lines. Xi arrived in the Russian capital on March 20 for a three-day state visit to Russia. Informal talks between the Chinese president and his Russian counterpart that night lasted nearly five hours. And on March 21, Xi continued talks with Putin in an expanded format, including high-ranking officials from both sides. The two leaders signed joint statements on their comprehensive partnership and their plans to develop key areas of Russian-Chinese economic cooperation by 2030, along with documents on cooperation in various areas, most notably a memorandum of understanding on industrial and infrastructural cooperation in the Russian Far East. Putin and Xi discussed the war in Ukraine, increasing military-technical cooperation between their countries and deepening economic ties, particularly in the energy sphere.
This was Xi's first trip to Russia and his second in-person meeting with Putin since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Among the agreements Putin and Xi signed was an updated protocol to their 1997 bilateral agreement on regular meetings of the heads of government. Updating and enshrining agreements for regular high-level contact may be part of an effort to solidify the increasingly close trajectory of Russia-China relations beyond the country's current two leaders and their personal relationship.
Writing in the Russian government's state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Xi said his visit to Russia was aimed at ''strengthening friendship, cooperation and peace,'' adding that he was ''ready, together with [Putin], to outline new plans and measures in the name of opening up new prospects for China-Russia relations.''
On March 20, Xi told Putin that Russia had ''made great strides in its prosperous development'' under his ''strong leadership,'' and that he was ''sure'' Russians would ''strongly support'' Putin in the country's presidential election next year. These remarks suggest that Beijing views Putin's claimed territorial acquisitions in Ukraine as laudable and make the Russian leader particularly worthy of reelection.
While the relationship between China and Russia is mutually beneficial, Moscow is increasingly tying its economic and political fate to Beijing and the power imbalance is deepening. The personal rapport between Xi and Putin, built up over the course of these many years, has facilitated the countries' ever-deepening relations. Since becoming China's president in 2013, Xi has visited Russia eight times and has met with Putin in-person 40 times, more than any other world leader. But more importantly, China views Russia as its only major ally that both shares its desire to erode the Western-led world order, and is willing to take significant diplomatic and economic risks in pursuit of that goal. Beijing also sees Russia as a critical source of cheap energy and natural resources that could help fuel China's economic advancement — and Moscow, likewise, sees China as a massive market for its economically crucial exports of raw materials. In addition, Russia similarly views China as a key strategic partner in its growing strategic competition with the West, as well as a lifeline for imports of crucial technology and goods. But Moscow's growing international isolation in the wake of the February 2022 Ukraine invasion and the West's subsequent sanctions campaign has started to skew the power balance in the relationship by increasing Russia's political and economic reliance on China. This was made evident during Xi's visit on March 21, when Putin floated the idea of using the Chinese yuan for ''payments between Russia and the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America,'' which contrasts with Putin's initial efforts following the invasion to promote his own country's currency — the now toxic ruble — for greater use abroad. Turning the yuan into a widely-used international currency is vital to China's push to replace the United States as the world's superpower and erode the U.S. dollar's dominance in global transactions. By proposing an initiative that would further that goal, the Kremlin is likely trying to signal its ardent support for Beijing and, in turn, solidify the case for more robust Chinese economic support and possibly military aid in Ukraine, based on the assumption that Xi would not want to see such a profusely pro-Beijing regime as Russia's destabilized by further setbacks on the battlefield. But Putin's proposal to use the yuan in Russia's transactions will nonetheless likely fuel growing claims that Moscow is increasingly assuming subordinate status in its relationship with China.
In his March 21 remarks summing up the visit, Xi noted that ''Chinese-Russian ties have gone beyond bilateral relations and are of vital importance for the modern world order and the fate of mankind.''
China has been Russia's largest trading partner for the past 13 years, but the two countries' trade ties have only grown since the Ukraine invasion. According to Chinese customs data, Russia-China mutual trade turnover rose by 30% in 2022 to $190.27 billion, with China accounting for 40% of Russia's imports and 30% of its exports last year.
In January, Russia for the first time became the top natural gas supplier to China in terms of total exports both by pipeline and in LNG form. Russia's LNG deliveries to China in 2022 rose by 43.9%. On March 21, Russia's state-owned gas giant Gazprom announced it had reached a record level of daily gas volume supplied to China through the Power of Siberia pipeline. Putin recently emphasized that negotiations on the Power of Siberia-2 project, which aims to connect the gas fields in western Siberia to China (fields that, prior to the Ukraine conflict, supplied gas to Europe), were in the final stages.
China used the meeting in Russia to promote its ''peace plan'' for Ukraine, an effort that is not necessarily meant to end the war but to position Beijing as a credible mediator and divide the West. During their recent meeting in Moscow, Xi and Putin also discussed China's 12-point proposal to end the war in Ukraine (which Beijing first unveiled on Feb. 24, the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion).The disruptions caused by the ongoing war have rattled both China's economy and the global economy, with the world's grain and fuel supplies being hit particularly hard due to Ukraine and Russia's previous dominance over each market, respectively. To mitigate these economic shocks, China probably wants the war to end, and Beijing knows Moscow can cast its current territorial gains in Ukraine as a victory. Its so-called ''peace plan'' will also enable China to justify its continued deepening of relations with Russia, including potentially future Chinese weapons sales to Russia, as Beijing would argue any support for Moscow is insignificant given what the West is already supplying Ukraine. Ukraine, for its part, will probably say it isn't inherently opposed to China's proposal, at least in spirit, to avoid spoiling relations with a potential intermediary and the global superpower most capable of influencing Moscow. Beijing will then claim that, since Moscow and Kyiv support its ''peace plan'' in spirit, it is the United States that is serving as the major obstacle to peace in Ukraine —- an argument intended to turn Europe against Washington and fuel war fatigue in the West, as well as in developing countries around the world where China is seeking to expand its influence.
China believes it could be a credible mediator in the war, primarily because there aren't many alternative candidates for the role.
Turkey hosted earlier peace talks and helped broker the grain export deal between Moscow and Kyiv in July. But Turkey is also a NATO member, major arms supplier to Ukraine, and fully supports Ukraine's positions at international bodies such as the United Nations. Other potential candidates, such as the Persian Gulf states, either don't have a big enough stake in the Ukraine war to want to serve as a mediator, or lack the diplomatic heft to take on such a role. Beijing, by contrast, is a major investor and trading partner with both Ukraine and Russia, and has always framed its stance on the two countries' conflict as neutral, regardless of the veracity of this statement.
By taking a greater diplomatic role in the Russia-Ukraine war, China may also be trying to capitalize on its recent success in brokering the March 10 normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran that ended the powerful Persian Gulf neighbors' seven-year rift. The historic pact, which Saudi and Iranian officials signed in Beijing, also further highlights China's growing ability to mediate global conflicts where the United States is either unwilling or unable to do so.
China's 12-Point 'Peace Plan' for Ukraine
The first point of China's plan reads that the ''sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld,'' in line with the ''purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter.'' This statement is primarily intended to be in line with Beijing's position on Taiwan, but Russia and Ukraine will interpret it in opposite ways. For Russia, this represents the recognition of the legality of its annexations in eastern Ukraine that took place in 2022. For Ukraine, this means the recognition of its internationally recognized borders prior to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. The first point would be extremely contentious if China-mediated peace talks ever take place, and makes it highly unlikely that the 12-point plan would actually end the war. Points two, three and four (titled ''Abandoning the Cold War mentality,'' ''Ceasing hostilities'' and ''Resuming peace talks, respectively) aim to further the narratives justifying Russia's invasion, as well as enable the Russian military to regroup in Ukraine by solidifying its gains along current battle lines — goals shared by both Moscow and Beijing. Most of the later points, such as point eight on ''Reducing strategic risks'' and point nine on ''Facilitating grain exports,'' are largely geared toward furthering China's economic goals and giving voice to the concerns of states of the developing world.
The trip's timing raises questions regarding Beijing and Moscow's expectations for the coming months, most notably regarding Ukraine's likely spring offensive, additional Chinese military-technical support for Russia, and the West's efforts to counter Beijing and Moscow's partnership. Reports in February indicated Xi's visit was being planned for April or May, suggesting the summit may have been moved up to better promote Beijing's ''peace plan.'' This possibility is supported by other circumstantial evidence. For one, the exact timing of the visit was kept highly secret and did not become available until about a week before Xi's arrival. In another potential sign that the trip was initially scheduled for another date, Putin and other top Russian officials — including Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Foreign Sergei Lavrov — all had other significant engagements on the day that Xi arrived in Moscow that left them unable to greet the Chinese president on the tarmac on March 20 (Xi was instead greeted and sent off two days later by Dmitry Chernyshenko, Russia's deputy prime minister for tourism, sport and culture). Some of the potential reasons why Xi's trip may have been moved up include:
Recent leaks that China plans to send Russia weapons threw a wrench in Beijing's plan to cast itself as a ''peace broker'' in Ukraine. A potential explanation is that Beijing originally set out to pair its peace proposal for Ukraine with joint meetings with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but was then surprised by Western intelligence leaks in recent weeks that China was planning to sell drones to Russia as soon as April. If Beijing did have plans to start offering significant covert weapons assistance to Moscow, the accelerated timeline of Xi's visit could have been an adjustment in plans to enable Beijing to go through the motions of proposing a "peace plan" (and having the West summarily shoot it down) before committing to offering Russia weapons support. This way, Beijing could at least say it attempted peace prior to stepping up support for Moscow, and claim that the West's refusal to negotiate gave China no choice but to come to Moscow's aid and provide it with defense-technological support to sustain the war. Even if Beijing didn't plan to provide significant weapons aid to Russia, the intelligence leak of the potential Chinese drones sales could have threatened to let the narrative of China's potential role in a peace settlement for Ukraine run away from Beijing.
Russia is about to make a major move in Ukraine, and wanted to talk it over with China first. If Xi's trip to Moscow was, in fact, moved forward, it could indicate Russia is preparing to significantly escalate its war in Ukraine in the coming weeks and months (like mobilizing more troops in response to an expected Ukrainian attack), and that Putin wanted to personally discuss his strategy and receive assurances of China's continued support before making such a major move.
Russia and China wanted to start sowing divides in the West before a major U.S.-hosted international summit. On March 29-30, the United States will co-host the second Summit for Democracy, which Beijing and Moscow see as a potential architecture for an international coalition to oppose them on the world stage. Beijing's ''peace plan'' and Xi's promotion of the strategy during his trip to Moscow could help create division among summit participants regarding the West's stance on the Ukraine war.
-
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fr_EdNmWcAQ47qk?format=jpg&name=medium)
-
China dumping US treasuries, we still have a way to go before they dump it all...i.e. Taiwan war is still far away.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FsD8xZ7XgAE4fBM?format=jpg&name=medium)
-
Eyeballing that at a 30% decline from the peak , , ,
There is someone I would like to share that with. May I ask for the URL?
-
Sorry, found it on my daily surfing...not sure where. Here's a different link, select the 10 y change.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/holdings-of-us-treasury-securities/holdings-of-us-treasury-securities (https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/holdings-of-us-treasury-securities/holdings-of-us-treasury-securities)
-
Thank you.
-
March 29, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
India's Emerging Foreign Policy
The South Asian powerhouse will not content itself with being merely an ally of the West.
By: Kamran Bokhari
India’s economic rise has validated its historical efforts to maintain a diverse set of foreign relations. Russia’s war in Ukraine is both an opportunity and a challenge for New Delhi’s foreign policy approach. While managing pressures from Western governments to help isolate Moscow, the Indians have also been trying to assert themselves on the world stage. The South Asian powerhouse will not content itself with being merely an ally of the West and instead will maintain its policy independence, with implications for the U.S.-Chinese rivalry.
New Delhi’s G-20 summit negotiator, Amitabh Kant, said on March 15 that the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine has diverted the world from more pressing global issues. Speaking to reporters, Kant said: "Europe cannot bring growth, poverty, global debt, all developmental issues to a standstill across the world. Can that one war bring the entire world to a standstill?” The Indian official called on the global community to “move on” and for Europe to “find a solution to its challenges.” These unusually strong remarks come on the heels of similar comments from Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who said Europe needed to get out of the mindset that its problems are the world’s problems while the issues plaguing the international community are not of concern to the Europeans.
This is some extraordinarily tough language from India, particularly considering that it has avoided condemning the Russians for invading Ukraine. New Delhi has also sharply increased its oil imports from Moscow since the war began a little over a year ago. However, it is unclear why the world’s soon-to-be most populous nation chose to be so harshly critical of the Europeans.
Indian Imports of Russian Oil
(click to enlarge)
One explanation for this unusual behavior is that India is pushing back on the growing criticism over its reluctance to join Western-led international efforts to isolate Russia. But resisting such pressures does not require the Indians to go on the diplomatic offensive against the Europeans. After all, moderation and balance have historically been the defining tenets of New Delhi’s foreign policy doctrine. Even during the Cold War, India emphasized its nonaligned status even though it was an ally of the Soviet Union.
In the three decades since the Cold War, India has become closer to the West, particularly the United States. More recently, New Delhi has become a key U.S. ally and an important component of Washington’s efforts to counter China, as is evident from its membership in the Quad security alliance. Meanwhile, there is growing strategic collaboration between the United States and India, particularly on the economy, defense and technology. This would explain why the Indians avoided criticizing Washington and instead chose to focus on its European allies.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that Washington is the one spearheading the global efforts to support Ukraine against Russian aggression. The Europeans are secondary actors in what is a U.S. strategic imperative; not to mention that many within the continental bloc have been reluctant to confront Russia because of the economic cost. New Delhi is also well aware that if Moscow were to succeed in weakening Ukraine, that could render European security more vulnerable.
Therefore, it is clear that India was criticizing U.S. strategy, even if obliquely. And this is despite the fact that Washington has looked the other way while New Delhi has increased trade with Moscow and even though India’s business dealings with Russia are helping President Vladimir Putin bypass sanctions. Furthermore, the Biden White House, which one would expect to be more critical of India’s drift toward illiberal democracy under the Modi government, has been rather muted. Therefore, there isn’t much pressure on India that could explain New Delhi’s criticism of the Western focus on Ukraine.
India and Russia's Growing Trade Relationship
(click to enlarge)
India is clearly asserting itself on the world stage, and understandably so. Only six months ago, it replaced former colonial power the United Kingdom as the world’s fifth-largest economy. In mid-February, India’s largest airline, Air India, purchased almost 500 commercial jets at a price tag of $132 billion, the largest deal in aviation history. Then last week, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida traveled to New Delhi, where he unveiled a new Indo-Pacific initiative aimed at countering China’s influence in the region.
New Delhi’s emergence as a global player comes at a time of great strategic churn. The conflict in Ukraine has accelerated the decline of Russian influence. China’s rise has reached an inflection point, though it will remain the principal competitor to the United States for the foreseeable future. The United States itself is facing major challenges, especially on the home front, which will consume the better part of the next decade.
The Indians will be navigating this highly fluid global environment as they continue to trek toward shaping global events. It would be a mistake for the United States to see India as an ally along the lines of Japan or Germany. India’s domestic political evolution, with the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism, will complicate its relations with the United States and arrest New Delhi’s efforts to project international influence. More importantly, U.S. and Indian interests will not always align, as is evident from India's current dealings with Russia.
That said, as the international system evolves it will have a major effect on India’s foreign policy. Currently, New Delhi is heavily reliant on Moscow for its defense needs, but the war in Ukraine has disrupted that supply chain. Last week, the Indian Air Force said that Russia is unable to fulfill its commitment and that a “major delivery” that was expected this year would not be coming, forcing the air force to slash its modernization expenditure by a third compared with last year. Though in the short term it is difficult for India to diversify away from Russian military platforms, it is likely to gradually turn to the United States for its defense needs.
Similarly, China is a major point of U.S.-Indian convergence, even as India does not want to be a mere junior partner in U.S. efforts to counter China. But here again India faces constraints, especially those shaped by geography. The Indians are increasingly dealing with Chinese assertiveness on their shared Himalayan frontier. According to a March 21 U.S. News & World Report story, last December Washington provided real-time intelligence to the Indian military on Chinese positions and force strength ahead of a Chinese army incursion in India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.
Ultimately, India will rely on the United States for its national security needs. The degree to which New Delhi will lean on Washington remains to be seen, especially as the Indian economy continues to grow. There is a reason that the two sides in late January launched the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies, a collaboration involving the two governments, the private sector, research laboratories and academia intended to strengthen their partnership in quantum communications, semiconductor development, defense, commercial space and more. India’s relationship with the United States, and by extension the country’s role on the world stage, will be a unique one.
-
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCSSTUS1&f=W
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/saudi-arabia-makes-voluntary-cut-500000-barrels-day-may
-
https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa-saudi-arabia-iran-china/how-beijing-helped-riyadh-and-tehran-reach-detente
or exactly what China got out of it other
then more influence
SA and Iran were interested in negotiations for some time
and US could not be intermediately for reasons outlined.
I would hazard a wild guess China bought SA out with promises to buy (more?) oil
from them.
-
https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa-saudi-arabia-iran-china/how-beijing-helped-riyadh-and-tehran-reach-detente
or exactly what China got out of it other
then more influence
SA and Iran were interested in negotiations for some time
and US could not be intermediately for reasons outlined.
I would hazard a wild guess China bought SA out with promises to buy (more?) oil
from them.
SA is siding with the strong horse.
https://aacons.substack.com/p/saudis-seek-a-strong-horse
-
One for all, all for one..Biden is a disaster. He has pi$$ed off the entire world. By middle of this year, the Europeans will realize they have been taken for a ride and deindustrialized, giving the US a head start over them. Now the OPEC countries are cutting production, they wont let Biden fill the Petroleum Strat Reserve cheaply. The war with Ukr adds to the inflation ...
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fstyl6aWIAcUBqr?format=jpg&name=small)
-
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/under-dire-threat-these-five-dangers
-
China is the peace maker...while the US wages proxy war. World is changing..
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FtBW5JHagAII1vD?format=jpg&name=small)
-
Zeihan is always interesting, this one particularly so. For example, I did not know that Japan has the world's second largest blue water navy. That said, that is but a datum. It is the big picture analysis here intrigues me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leyoYtunqPQ
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19562/new-world-order-iran-russia-china
-
From Twitter...I hope someone is paying attention.. Things can change slowly, then suddenly.
The Empire is Imploding:
1. Raytheon Director dies in plane crash
2. Classified Pentagon Ukraine and Middle East docs leaked
3. Saudi openly divorces USA and ties nuptials with Iran and China
4. De-dollarization trade agreements signed
5. Taiwan strait controlled by China
6. Yemen war coming to an end
7. Israel overwhelmed by Hezbollah and Hamas
8. Regime change in Pakistan about to be reversed
9. Syria welcomed back into the Arab states
10.Russia almost done in Bakhmut, nearing victory
11. Belarus getting tactical nukes
12. France slowly getting kicked out of African states
13. Honduras breaks with ties Taiwan, adopts one China policy
14. Leaked Jan 6th video shows Biden gov lying to American people
15. Iran getting SU-35s, countering Israeli aggression
16. Azerbaijan cucking, unable to war over NK due to Iranian resistance
17. China domestic chip manufacturing advancing rapidly
18. American banking system on brink of collapse
19. UAE considering reducing ties with Israel due to Al-Aqsa violations
Only a fraction of it all.
20. Mass-protesting in France, Macron struggling to keep control
21. Sy Hersh release another bombshell piece on America’s bombing of Nordstream
22. Erdogan and Turkey getting more aggressive after US ambassador meets opposition leaders
23. UK engulfed in cost of living crisis, food and fuel becoming inaccessible to many
24. Brazil re-orienting policy to achieve BRICs+ dominance
25. SWIFT system alternative developed by Russia-Iran, increasing being adopted
26. An unusual increase in train derailments, factory explosions, chemical spills, and contamination events across the USA (due to maintenance issues AND foreign state operations)
27. Russian warship docking in Saudi Arabian ports for the first time in many years, indicating Saudi moving towards eastern nations to provide its defenses
28. AMLO in Mexico nationalizing key energy and oil industries despite protests from Washington, this is in the backdrop of increasing anti-American sentiment from Mexico
29. Malaysia in discussion with China to develop a new 'Asian Monetary Fund', an alternative to the neo-liberal and much criticized IMF - - potentially allowing many countries to escape America's debt trap
30. Demand for Zimbabwe's gold coins skyrocketing, following calls by African leaders to stop using the USD as a primary currency. Potentially the first of many steps leading to the creation of an African-led financial structure.
31. Iran enriching uranium to a level of 83.7%, bringing them closer to acquiring nuclear weapons and potentially causing key Israeli allies in the region to withdraw support for an Israeli military attack on Iran
-
thanks ya
My only mention is the banking "crises " while a bit problem I have read is only around 1/10th of '08. bad but not a catastrophe
that said
our country IS falling apart
and your list only includes the international scene. :-o
we here could add many more domestic institutions that are collapsing
and we are being split apart
thanks to the Dems , DEI , LBTaoparenanprsn...., racism , Dem lawfare, bureaucrats, climate change religions, etc.
-
Its time...the US seems to be moving away from Ukr.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FtQ65fhXoAIM4MX?format=jpg&name=medium)
-
I see Macron is busy stabbing us in the back in his meeting with Xi by saying France/Europe should not be following US with regard to Taiwan.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/macron-says-europe-should-reduce-dependence-on-us-dollar-after-meeting-with-chinas-xi_5182353.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-04-10&src_cmp=uschina-2023-04-10&utm_medium=email&est=A0tXQPTK64ECEJk1O9JzBed7JVEewg9ALvxsFZ%2FfNmJ2Yy3X%2BVRV%2FAi6HR3XEiy1Em4T
-
Macron has seen the writing on the wall and is hedging his bets, same as Orban in Hungary. Cheap energy from Russia is no longer available. Pi$$ing off China could destroy the EU economy, as almost everything comes from China. It is said even medical antibiotics mostly come from China and even the US could suffer massively, if China stops selling critical items. Ukr is expected to lose. Uncle Sam is looking at China, which is the real threat. Russia was never a threat. Ukr was a pawn on the chess board to collapse Russia, that did not happen due to American miscalculation. The US is thinking of moving on...just like in Vietnam, Iraq, Afgh..
-
Agree.
On Hannity tonight SH said that China looked likely to invade soon and directly stated several times that in his opinion Biden would do nothing.
He's probably right-- and if he is we will be in free fall.
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/395/578/original/05889521018caada.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/395/578/original/05889521018caada.png)
-
Macron has seen the writing on the wall and is hedging his bets, same as Orban in Hungary. Cheap energy from Russia is no longer available. Pi$$ing off China could destroy the EU economy, as almost everything comes from China. It is said even medical antibiotics mostly come from China and even the US could suffer massively, if China stops selling critical items. Ukr is expected to lose. Uncle Sam is looking at China, which is the real threat. Russia was never a threat. Ukr was a pawn on the chess board to collapse Russia, that did not happen due to American miscalculation. The US is thinking of moving on...just like in Vietnam, Iraq, Afgh..
This.
-
Two Part Question for everyone here:
Do we support Taiwan against China?
Do we fight as part of that support?
-
Two Part Question for everyone here:
Do we support Taiwan against China?
Sure.
Do we fight as part of that support?
With what? Our fake and gay navy?
We will suffer WWII level casualties, if not worse. That's if it stays non-nuclear.
We are years away from refilling the munitions expended in the Ukraine boondoggle. We are at the very start of an epic financial crisis. The SPR is empty.
The FUSA is falling apart at the seams, so let's get WWIII going!
-
So, your answer is "No"?
In which case China captures Taiwanese superchip manufacturers and America is fuct?
-
So, your answer is "No"?
In which case China captures Taiwanese superchip manufacturers and America is fuct?
We are.
Those factories will be destroyed. The PRC doesn't care.
-
So, your counsel is to accept our defeat and the world-wide supremacy of the ChiComs?
-
So, your counsel is to accept our defeat and the world-wide supremacy of the ChiComs?
What is this "our" you speak of?
-
"With what? Our fake and gay navy?"
if we could only get gays to fight communism like they do Republicans
we would have the world's most furious and rabid fighting force
:-P
-
"With what? Our fake and gay navy?"
if we could only get gays to fight communism like they do Republicans
we would have the world's most furious and rabid fighting force
:-P
It's not that the deviants are strong, it's that the republicans are so weak in comparison.
-
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/05/china-contact-united-states-00090495
The CCP has better things to do.
-
Blinks in charge, no worry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUxKsG5YrPE
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/a-dad-rocker-in-the-state-department
song for Xi ( :-o):
https://www.google.com/search?q=tony+blinken+parody&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&oq=tony+blinken+parody&aqs=chrome..69i57.4821j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:7d90fdf3,vid:AtNsKrxFRhU
as bad a musician he is it still would have been far more successful career for him than one as a. "diplomat".
-
Blinks in charge, no worry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUxKsG5YrPE
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/a-dad-rocker-in-the-state-department
song for Xi ( :-o):
https://www.google.com/search?q=tony+blinken+parody&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&oq=tony+blinken+parody&aqs=chrome..69i57.4821j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:7d90fdf3,vid:AtNsKrxFRhU
as bad a musician he is it still would have been far more successful career for him than one as a. "diplomat".
https://thejewishnews.com/2021/01/20/all-the-jews-joe-biden-has-tapped-for-top-roles-in-his-administration/
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/the-size-of-the-u-s-jewish-population/
You are NOT allowed to notice this!
-
Ummm , , , what is your point here GM?
-
Ummm , , , what is your point here GM?
Notice anything disproportionate?
-
If China takes Taiwan, the US will make a big fuss, probably close the Malacca straights, supply weapons etc, but after expending great treasure in a few years Taiwan will be lost. The geography, history and size of China is not in Taiwan's favor. We have the Crimea model and the Donbass model to go by. Nations fight for what they believe is their land (as eg Ukr and Russia are doing now). We are the world's policeman, these are not our wars, which is the reason we wont win them. At best we can put our thumb on the scales to influence the outcome. To win wars, both money and lives must be expended in large numbers. I dont see any appetite for that.
-
Having said that, some like Marty Armstrong are convinced that the US wants war...ideally before the 2024 elections. No wartime President has lost an election, after which comes the CBDC's.
-
Having said that, some like Marty Armstrong are convinced that the US wants war...ideally before the 2024 elections. No wartime President has lost an election, after which comes the CBDC's.
They would use that to force many things on their agenda.
-
"Ummm , , , what is your point here GM?"
"Notice anything disproportionate?"
Well duh. And what conclusion would you have us draw from it?
-
"Ummm , , , what is your point here GM?"
"Notice anything disproportionate?"
Well duh. And what conclusion would you have us draw from it?
Civic nationalism is a failure. The founders were wrong about religious tests.
-
I want to be clear here:
You are advocating religious tests such as a limit or exclusion for Jews?
-
I want to be clear here:
You are advocating religious tests such as a limit or exclusion for Jews?
In the next constitution, observant Christians ONLY!
-
Whoa :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
-
Whoa :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
I know, imagine the nightmare of not having Blinken, Schumer, Mayorkas and Garland holding the levers of power.
-
Ummm , , , , or me.
But of distinctly greater importance is that what you are advocating here is quite un-American.
-
Ummm , , , , or me.
But of distinctly greater importance is that what you are advocating here is quite un-American.
Oh really? If I could show the founding fathers America today, what would they say?
-
That you are quite wrong.
-
Scolding Isn’t a Foreign Policy
America needs friends, and it isn’t going to win them by delivering lectures.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell MeadFollow
April 17, 2023 6:21 pm ET
Internationally, it was another grim week for the Biden administration, the United States of America, and world peace. Brazil, the country with the largest population, economy and landmass in Latin America, reinforced its alignment with China as its president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva pledged to work with Xi Jinping to build a new global order and called on the European Union and the U.S. to stop shipping weapons to Ukraine. Indian officials reported that China is supporting the development of a military listening post on Myanmar’s strategic Great Coco Island in the Bay of Bengal. Saudi Arabia, which flirted a few weeks ago with opening diplomatic relations with Israel, is intensifying its oil cooperation with Russia and now seeks a meeting with Hamas. Farther south, a Sudanese military faction backed by Russia’s Wagner Group battles for control of Africa’s third-largest nation.
The usual spinners and makeup artists are doing their best to make the disorderly unraveling of the American-led world order look like a visionary triumph of enlightened foreign policy, but former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers expressed a more cogent view. Describing America’s increasing loneliness on the world scene, Mr. Summers said, “Somebody from a developing country said to me, ‘What we get from China is an airport. What we get from the United States is a lecture.’ ”
When the Biden administration steps down from the bully pulpit, good things can still happen. A year ago, Ferdinand Marcos Jr.—son of the U.S. Cold War ally and Philippine strongman whose 1986 overthrow was hailed by democracy activists as a milestone in world history—ascended to his father’s former office after a decisive victory in a less-than-pristine election. The democracy lobby was appalled. Six Democratic senators, including three members of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken warning him to prioritize democracy and rule-of-law issues. Their core prescription for managing the Filipino leader was the same one they prescribe for almost every American bilateral relationship: Lecture more, and when that fails, use sanctions.
Fortunately, the administration was smarter than this. While the Philippines ranks low on the Freedom House global freedom index and ranks high on Transparency International’s measurement of perceived corruption, its location makes the country’s cooperation vital for any serious attempt to deter China from an invasion of Taiwan. Stroking and petting the democracy lobbyists while insulating the relationship from their ill-counseled meddling, Team Biden persuaded Mr. Marcos to allow the U.S. access to four new strategically important bases on its territory as the two countries launched their largest joint military exercise in three decades.
This is surely a better outcome than anything the Biden administration has accomplished by the impassioned stream of moralistic lectures it unleashed against the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
On Mr. Blinken’s recent visit to Vietnam, he again chose morality over moralism, refraining from criticizing the Communist Party of Vietnam for its many policies that displease the democracy lobby in the interest of shoring up the coalition of states aiming to prevent Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.
Dean Acheson, Harry S. Truman’s secretary of state, thought deeply about the place of morality in foreign policy. “The righteous who seek to deduce foreign policy from ethical or moral principles are as misleading and misled as the modern Machiavellis who would conduct our foreign relations without regard to them,” he said in 1964.
America’s Cold War policy aimed at stopping the spread of Soviet tyranny was, Acheson rightly believed, deeply moral. Today, the Chinese Communist Party has become an expansionist, tyrannical power whose inordinate ambition endangers freedom world-wide. America’s interests and values both lead us to oppose that ambition, even as we seek to avoid the catastrophe of another great-power war.
Too many self-described democracy activists want the U.S. to dissipate its diplomatic energy in moralistic posturing. They would rather we prioritized sermons and sanctions over building a multilateral coalition to check Chinese expansion. Their problem is not that they love righteousness too much. It is that they have thought too little and too superficially about what righteousness really demands.
Moral foreign policy often requires pragmatism. Defeating Nazi Germany required an alliance with the equally evil Soviet Union. And President Nixon’s rapprochement with Mao’s China, then at the horrifying acme of the Cultural Revolution, similarly was driven by the need to counter the greater threat posed at that time by the Soviet Union.
After the Cold War, many Americans thought that global moral improvement had replaced national security as the principal goal of American foreign policy and that pragmatic calculation was a form of moral cowardice.
Those illusions can no longer be sustained.
America needs friends now, and nobody likes or trusts the village scold.
-
April 18, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Logic of American Strategy and War
By: George Friedman
In recent weeks I have focused on the social and economic evolution of the United States. Obviously, we also need to discuss U.S. strategic policy. Domestic policy tends to be more dynamic than strategic policy, which follows from more persistent things like imperatives. The United States is secure from an attack on land. Neither Canada nor Mexico has the ability to wage or interest in waging a land war against the United States. Therefore, the fundamental threat to American national security must come from the sea. Still, American strategy has within it a logic. It lacks the cyclical logic of domestic politics but is shaped by the necessities imposed by place and enemies.
America’s entry into World War I was triggered by a German attack on U.S. shipping. In World War II, Washington’s key motive was the same. If Germany cut off lines of supply between the U.S. and Britain, it could isolate Britain and attack it at will. Having secured the Atlantic and a base of operations in Britain, Germany could threaten the East Coast. In the Pacific, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, if fought sensibly, could have secured sea lanes from Hawaii to the West Coast and possibly enabled Japan to impose its will there. Even the Cold War was primarily naval. Germany was indeed the line of contact with the Soviet Union, but the vital supply lines ran from the U.S. to Europe, and NATO could be crippled by cutting off those supplies. Toward that end, the Russians deployed submarines and supersonic anti-ship systems.
The Germans (twice), the Soviets and the Japanese each saw the defense of their nations as rooted in maritime war against the United States. The German failure permitted D-Day to take place, the Soviet failure made a Soviet ground offensive in Europe impossible, and the Japanese failure led to Hiroshima and the U.S. occupation of Japan. In each case, the ability of the U.S. to maintain lines of supply and block enemy attacks was the key to the defense of the United States and its economy, and in each case, American strategy was built on deterrence. In the event that U.S. security was not entirely at risk at sea, Washington created barriers to block enemy powers from moving assets toward Atlantic or Pacific ports. It was understood that the immediate threat might be trivial compared to the long-term threat. Therefore, it was essential to engage Germany as early as possible – to contain the long-term threat while it still entailed combating ground forces and before the sea threat had fully materialized. This was also critical in the Pacific against Japan. It should be noted that in Vietnam, where the U.S. had no land-sea strategy, matters ended badly.
In Ukraine, there is an element of this strategy. Russia, if it were to defeat Ukraine, would be at NATO’s border and could attack westward. The U.S. is practicing a strategy of preemption at a relatively low cost in terms of U.S. casualties to prevent the very unlikely move of Russia to the Atlantic coast. Maritime action is used to drive back land forces. This was the strategy used against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and it is now being used against Russian forces in Ukraine. In this use of sea power, there is significant indirectness designed to impose an element of risk on ground forces deep in their own territory. It is a strategy normally too subtle to easily see.
Therefore, U.S. naval strategy in Ukraine is designed primarily to block waterways that could facilitate Russian movement – namely the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. It is not the heart of the broader U.S. strategy.
It is with respect to China that this strategy is being most seriously tested. The primary strategy of the U.S. must be to maintain control of the Pacific and maintain lines of supply to allies to prevent an opening for China. The heart of the strategy is to apply varying pressures on China so that it is forced to balance and rebalance its forces. As an example, China’s seizing Taiwan is not possible given the time needed for a task force to reach the Taiwan coast, during which it would be open to attack by the United States. This limits the ultimate Chinese threat to the U.S. coasts. Naval warfare (and here I include naval air power, as has been normal since World War II) combines two strategies, one limiting Chinese movement at sea and the other opening the possibility of threatening the Chinese homeland.
The Chinese constantly threaten Taiwan, but until now they have never acted because of the likely intervention of the U.S. Navy. The U.S. has a far inferior ground force – primarily to be transported by naval power, which would be a challenge – to pose a threat to a Chinese invasion. It is naval power that prevents Chinese action. There is a logic between the United States and China, a logic of geography, technology and fear that is in its way consistent and ties us in an internal cycle that naval war generates.
Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote the book on this strategy more than a century ago. It is a strategy that is still in place, replete with subtle interaction with land power. When U.S. military action was unsuccessful, as in Vietnam, it failed either because the terrain was not susceptible to naval power or because naval power was not used. However, as I have tried to show, U.S. warfighting strategy, particularly on the strategic level, has never changed. China is constrained by that power, Russia is blocked from effective use of waters on its periphery, and other hostile powers seek to avoid U.S. naval power, whereas the U.S. uses it as a central force.
The idea of a consistent domestic model is more difficult to grasp than that of a consistent military strategy. But the latter has a persistent reality of geography and a persistent solution of naval power aligned with technology and strategy. Even when the connection between naval power and a war deep on land seems to make that strategy pointless, there is constant pressure for the enemy to go to sea. The Soviet Union was forced to enter the North Atlantic as was Germany in spite of their focus on land operations. It is vital to understand the naval dimension of all American wars.
-
That you are quite wrong.
They would be horrified and disgusted at what their country had become.
https://ccta.regent.edu/2020/08/03/preserving-a-constitution-designed-for-a-moral-and-religious-people/
Show me an actual observant Jew in the US government. All I can find is members of the Synagogue of satan.
https://sd11.senate.ca.gov/news/20190122-senator-wiener-introduces-legislation-end-discrimination-against-lgbt-people-regarding
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/sen-scott-wiener-proposes-to-offer-drag-queen-101-as-part-of-the-k-12-curriculum/
-
"They would be horrified and disgusted at what their country had become."
Agreed! AND they would be horrified and disgusted at your proposal.
"https://ccta.regent.edu/2020/08/03/preserving-a-constitution-designed-for-a-moral-and-religious-people/"
All of us here are well aware of this.
"Show me an actual observant Jew in the US government. All I can find is members of the Synagogue of satan."
And your solution is to apply a primitive bigoted heuristic excluding all Jews and any who are not observant Christians? Have you not noticed how lefty/Prog many Christians are?
-
"They would be horrified and disgusted at what their country had become."
Agreed! AND they would be horrified and disgusted at your proposal.
"https://ccta.regent.edu/2020/08/03/preserving-a-constitution-designed-for-a-moral-and-religious-people/"
All of us here are well aware of this.
"Show me an actual observant Jew in the US government. All I can find is members of the Synagogue of satan."
And your solution is to apply a primitive bigoted heuristic excluding all Jews and any who are not observant Christians? Have you not noticed how lefty/Prog many Christians are?
Those aren't Christians. There is no lack of Christians calling out "churchianity". Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see observant Jews calling out the satanic jews destroying America.
As far as a primitive heuristic excluding people, tell me about Israel's immigration laws.
-
"They would be horrified and disgusted at what their country had become."
Agreed! AND they would be horrified and disgusted at your proposal.
"https://ccta.regent.edu/2020/08/03/preserving-a-constitution-designed-for-a-moral-and-religious-people/"
All of us here are well aware of this.
"Show me an actual observant Jew in the US government. All I can find is members of the Synagogue of satan."
And your solution is to apply a primitive bigoted heuristic excluding all Jews and any who are not observant Christians? Have you not noticed how lefty/Prog many Christians are?
Those aren't Christians. There is no lack of Christians calling out "churchianity". Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see observant Jews calling out the satanic jews destroying America.
As far as a primitive heuristic excluding people, tell me about Israel's immigration laws.
"A moral and religious people"
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/c477c1a922c230d0.jpeg)
-
"Perhaps I missed it"
Yes, you have, beginning with me.
-
"Perhaps I missed it"
Yes, you have, beginning with me.
Any Rabbis or Jewish groups condemning Scott Weiner and/or the star of David on the skittles flag?
-
In the American Creed and under the American Constitution, we judge people as individuals, not by group heuristics.
You are acting flagrantly in contradiction to that.
-
In the American Creed and under the American Constitution, we judge people as individuals, not by group heuristics.
You are acting flagrantly in contradiction to that.
Can I immigrate to Israel?
-
Hot news flash. Israel does not live under the American Constitution. We here do.
-
Hot news flash. Israel does not live under the American Constitution. We here do.
News flash, the constitution has been a dead letter since the coup in 2020.
Explain to me how it’s ok for Israel to restrict who can join it’s nation to protect it’s Jewish character, but European Christian nations aren’t allowed to. Why is white genocide ok?
-
Hot news flash. Israel does not live under the American Constitution. We here do.
News flash, the constitution has been a dead letter since the coup in 2020.
Explain to me how it’s ok for Israel to restrict who can join it’s nation to protect it’s Jewish character, but European Christian nations aren’t allowed to. Why is white genocide ok?
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=840,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/519/042/original/d89f75f8ef77b45e.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=840,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/519/042/original/d89f75f8ef77b45e.jpg)
-
It is better economic conditions, that causes people to move. They usually take up jobs, the locals wont do. Kalifornia would collapse without the mexican farm workers as an example. Secondly, as the working population declines in the west, these new workers will end up supporting the retirements of the old!
The key criteria in selecting immigrants should be integration with local population and absence of terroristic/violent tendencies.
-
sounds like Nikki Haley's plan
A bit like GW Bush - can't stop the migrants so try to convert them to be Republicans .
Problem is there will not be a Republican Party by then.......
-
"Explain to me how it’s ok for Israel to restrict who can join it’s nation to protect it’s Jewish character, but European Christian nations aren’t allowed to. Why is white genocide ok?"
Because it is contrary to our Constitution.
RACE IS NOT THE ISSUE.
The problem here is LAWLESSNESS.
OUR IMMIGRATION LAWS (which could stand improvement with an eye to admitting those with things to offer America) ARE NOT BEING ENFORCED.
IF OUR LAWS WERE ENFORCED, WE WOULD BE FINE.
-
April 19, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Battle for Eurasia’s Borderlands
Today the Black Sea, tomorrow the South China Sea.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
Borderlands have long been an object of scrutiny in the realm of geopolitics, as they represent a point of convergence, interaction and oftentimes conflict between nations and political systems. The significance of these regions cannot be overstated, as they often serve as a crucible for political and military struggles, as well as a site for intricate diplomatic negotiations and maneuvers. In addition, borderlands frequently witness the interplay of different economic and social systems, giving rise to distinct hybrid cultures and identities.
Classical geopolitical analysis, which focuses on the political, economic and military domains to understand a country's geopolitical imperatives, has traditionally been ill-equipped to account for the complexities of borderland regions, beyond their geographical location. However, my own research project related to an upcoming book I'm currently writing on the borderlands, beginning with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and my work on current events for Geopolitical Futures, have highlighted the diversity of roles played by borderlands in regional and global stability.
Core Borderlands and Geopolitical Nodes
As I delved deeper into the theories of Halford Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman and Alfred Thayer Mahan – all prominent geopolitical thinkers from different eras and political environments – I began to discern a common denominator for the world's borderlands or, more precisely, the borderlands of the world's continents. These regions are characterized by their strategic location, distinctive socio-economic features, and sustained interest from major and middle powers seeking to ensure their stability. Indeed, the very stability of these borderlands is paramount, as without it, the risk of war and conflict looms large, threatening to spill over into neighboring regions and potentially reshaping the geopolitical landscape of an entire continent.
The notion of what I call a “core borderland” emerges as a crucial concept in understanding the stability of the international system. The Eurasian continent’s core borderland is in Central Asia, where the influences of Europe, Russia, China, India, Iran and Pakistan converge, much as it was for their ancestors. Afghanistan is a prime example of a core borderland, as evidenced by the sustained interest of major powers in its stability over time. This is also why Afghanistan can never completely be controlled.
Eurasian Borderlands
(click to enlarge)
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has created a power vacuum in Central and Southwestern Asia, triggering changes that have reverberated across Europe and its borderlands. The timing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not coincidental; it follows a sustained period of U.S. withdrawal from the Greater Middle East, not to mention the global pandemic. Meanwhile, other European powers, such as Poland and Turkey, have moved to consolidate their positions in their borderlands. As a result, tensions have risen in these historically vital areas of international trade and investment. I call these areas “geopolitical nodes,” places of strategic importance where two or more regional or global powers meet. Unlike a core borderland, where major powers’ interests collide, a geopolitical node hosts major trade routes that sustain interdependencies between states.
In their theories, both Mackinder and Spykman point to potential geopolitical nodes without necessarily calling them that. Mahan elevated naval power, but by combining elements of their theories, it is apparent that the Black Sea and the South China Sea are Eurasia’s most important geopolitical nodes.
Throughout history, the Black Sea has been a meeting point for empires, facilitating contact between Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It remains a vital hub for regional stability. However, it is also the node most affected by the war in Ukraine. The body of water at the other end of Central Asia is the South China Sea, a relatively recent node that is rapidly growing in importance. The South China Sea is home to a third of maritime trade by value, mostly due to China’s resurgence in recent decades. Meanwhile, over the past decade, in preparation for the war in Ukraine, Russia has sought alternate trade routes to Europe that bypass the Black Sea and has increased its presence in the South China Sea.
The U.S., which remains the classical global maritime and land power, is facing two competitors. The first is a resurgent Russia, a regional land power that is looking to stretch its reach beyond Europe. The second is a new kind of Eurasian competitor, China, which is both continental and maritime.
The core borderland, where they meet, is Central Asia. In this sense, Afghanistan has been the perfect metaphor for how empires clash and coordinate. The nodes of the Black Sea and the South China Sea are balancing off one another as they interact through the strategies pursued by the U.S., Russia and China. The longer the conflict in Ukraine lasts, the more uncertainty there is in the Black Sea waters and the more pressure there is on China, on the shores of the South China Sea, to join the global economic war.
Russia-China Rivalry
Russia has played a quiet but important role around the South China Sea for the past 20 years. Even though it has close ties with Beijing, Moscow has been steadily arming rival claimants to South China Sea waters like Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, Malaysia, while also trying to build defense ties with the Philippines and Indonesia. In addition, Russia has contributed significantly to the development of offshore energy resources in both the South China Sea and the so-called North Natuna Sea, off the coast of Indonesia. While Western energy companies frequently reduced investments in contested areas to avoid conflict with China, their Russian counterparts filled any significant investment gaps. The $400 billion, 30-year energy agreement signed in 2014 between the China National Petroleum Corp. and Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom marked the start of Russia’s diplomatic pivot to Asia. It was also the year that Russia invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
In 2001, Russia’s trade with Europe was almost triple its trade with Asia ($106 billion versus $38 billion). In 2019, European trade was $322 billion compared with Asia’s $273 billion. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Europe cut trade and investment ties with Moscow, while Asia embraced it.
Russia's outreach was especially well-received in Southeast Asia. Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar – its traditional allies in Indochina – stepped up their defense cooperation with Moscow. Over the past two decades, Vietnam alone has spent $7.4 billion on Russian weapons, including cutting-edge fighter jets and submarines. Importantly, the two largest countries in Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia, looked into extensive defense agreements with Russia. Moscow sent its defense attache to the Philippines for the first time ever, and Russian warships started frequenting Manila Bay. Rodrigo Duterte, the then-Philippine president, made history by becoming the first Philippine head of state to visit Moscow twice, and he actively pursued energy and defense agreements with Russia in 2019.
Additionally, Russian energy firms increased their presence in Vietnam's exclusive economic zone and supported Indonesia's own energy exploration efforts off the Natuna Islands coast. As a result, in an interesting turn of events, Moscow found itself arming and supporting China's maritime adversaries throughout Southeast Asia.
Russia tried to lessen the pressure on Beijing by routinely holding joint military exercises with China, spanning the East China Sea, Central Asia and the Far East. Moscow largely agreed with Beijing's position on both the U.S. naval presence in the region and The Hague's 2016 arbitration tribunal ruling that invalidated the majority of China's expansive South China Sea claims.
An enterprising Russia has positioned itself as a dependable third force to both the West and China, taking into account Southeast Asian countries' innate propensity for strategic diversification. Beijing has largely tolerated its supposed ally's strategic buccaneering in its own maritime backyard because it wants to keep Moscow on its side, especially in the midst of a raging conflict of its own with the West. But this precarious situation could be drastically changed by President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine, which has made Russia the world’s most sanctioned country.
The majority of Southeast Asian countries have been appalled by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which led to their fateful vote in favor of the U.N. General Assembly resolution denouncing the invasion in 2022. Describing the crisis as an "existential issue," Singapore, the region's most developed nation, has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia. Others have done the same.
The increasingly complex Western sanctions won't just make it difficult for Moscow to reach major defense and energy agreements; the country's growing reliance on China may cause it to withdraw strategically from the South China Sea. Beijing will probably pressure Moscow to refrain from arming and supporting its adversaries in the South China Sea and elsewhere as its power continues to eclipse Russia’s. This would further mean that China will be well-positioned to assert its own sphere of influence in Southeast Asia in general and the South China Sea in particular, at the expense of Russia.
For Europe, the geopolitical node in the South China Sea is distant. However, Russian moves in Asia are likely to trigger a U.S. reaction, especially if they lead to a change in China’s strategy. This would, in turn, directly impact Europe.
Our world is fraying at the edges, beginning in the European borderlands but potentially stretching into Asia. Geopolitical nodes will become only more important as supply chains are reformulated, competition for raw materials grows and technological change fragments cyberspace and more. The most critical nodes are the Black Sea and the South China Sea, where the U.S., Russia and China contend for influence and control.
-
"Explain to me how it’s ok for Israel to restrict who can join it’s nation to protect it’s Jewish character, but European Christian nations aren’t allowed to. Why is white genocide ok?"
Because it is contrary to our Constitution.
RACE IS NOT THE ISSUE.
It most certainly is.
The problem here is LAWLESSNESS.
It is, and ignoring the obvious reality that some groups struggle with lawful, civilized behavior in both their origin countries and in the rapidly declining west is the cause. You know it just as well as I do. Let me know when you move to a black neighborhood so your kids can attend a predominantly black school. "Race is just a cultural construct" Let me know when you catch Sickle Cell Anemia. When you see a headline like "Massive brawl in Disneyland" do you think it must be ethnic Koreans in Orange County that are responsible? It's not racist to be a realist.
OUR IMMIGRATION LAWS (which could stand improvement with an eye to admitting those with things to offer America) ARE NOT BEING ENFORCED.
IF OUR LAWS WERE ENFORCED, WE WOULD BE FINE.
No we wouldn't. If we had a vastly homogeneous population like the US did generations ago, we'd have the great country we had generations ago. Diversity isn't our strength. You can ignore reality, it's very popular today. You can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/663/491/original/0f2b10c30d3976b4.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/663/491/original/0f2b10c30d3976b4.jpeg)
-
"No we wouldn't. If we had a vastly homogeneous population like the US did generations ago, we'd have the great country we had generations ago."
If we imparted the American Creed, if we lived by the American Creed, we would be fine. But we don't and so we aren't.
"Diversity isn't our strength."
On this we agree. "E pluribus unum" is our strength.
Disparate impact and other racial Marxism be damned, prospective immigrants should be selected on the basis of what they have to contribute to America. Period.
-
"No we wouldn't. If we had a vastly homogeneous population like the US did generations ago, we'd have the great country we had generations ago."
If we imparted the American Creed, if we lived by the American Creed, we would be fine. But we don't and so we aren't.
A good percentage of the world scoffs at the American Creed. Lots of people holding US passports mock those ideas.
"Diversity isn't our strength."
On this we agree. "E pluribus unum" is our strength.
Yeah, funny enough the Latin roots of that refer to familial bonds. Humans aren't Lego blocks that can easily be swapped out. Societies are complex ecosystems. Advanced Western societies can't make up for aborted children by importing masses from the 3rd world. No matter how much you might want it to be so, Western nations don't make 3rd worlders into functional members of their nations through magic soil. Somalis are going to Somali, no matter if it's Mogadishu, Malmo, or Minneapolis. The masses of Somalis we get aren't Ayaan Hirsi Ali. We get this:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/minnesota-mall-stabbing-could-represent-the-realisation-of-us-terror-fears-a7316211.html
Disparate impact and other racial Marxism be damned, prospective immigrants should be selected on the basis of what they have to contribute to America. Period.
We.don't.even.have.a.border.
We don't have a country.
Plan accordingly.
-
In the meantime, the US withdraws embassy staff from Sudan, but leaves behind 16,000 Americans. Not sure how the left behind will co-ordinate their withdrawl...with the embassy staff all gone ?.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/sudan-army-initiates-foreign-evacuations-american-citizen-dies-ceasefire-collapses (https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/sudan-army-initiates-foreign-evacuations-american-citizen-dies-ceasefire-collapses)
-
In the meantime, the US withdraws embassy staff from Sudan, but leaves behind 16,000 Americans. Not sure how the left behind will co-ordinate their withdrawl...with the embassy staff all gone ?.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/sudan-army-initiates-foreign-evacuations-american-citizen-dies-ceasefire-collapses (https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/sudan-army-initiates-foreign-evacuations-american-citizen-dies-ceasefire-collapses)
It's so hard to parse out the malevolence from the incompetence with this Mal-administration.
-
In the meantime, India is bringing back all its citizens. Below is one picture. India has good relations with Gulf states, and they help arrange it.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FuebZjDaQAEsVsI?format=jpg&name=medium)
-
"In the meantime, the US withdraws embassy staff from Sudan, but leaves behind 16,000 Americans. Not sure how the left behind will co-ordinate their withdrawl...with the embassy staff all gone?."
Agreed on the big picture but in the interest of accuracy:
I forget where, but I saw that the overwhelming majority are dual citizens who choose to live there.
-
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/how-china-could-save-putins-war-ukraine?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fatoday&utm_campaign=How%20China%20Could%20Save%20Putin%E2%80%99s%20War%20in%20Ukraine&utm_content=20230426&utm_term=FA%20Today%20-%20112017
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19609/leadership-vacuum
-
no not world wide web
here he refers to WORLD WIDE WOKE
US proselytizing the world with LBGTQ.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/04/baby-in-stroller-stopped-just-before-rolling-into-busy-highway/
Gays united ;
take over the world
if you disagree we will not chop off your head - just get you fired , harass you, try to destroy you, dox you, prevent you from getting a salary loans etc.
WTF is this ?
can we stop this crazy madness ?
-
Is that the link you intended?
-
Principal Beats Principle in the World Order
The new communists appeal to the world’s poor by promising to make them rich.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell MeadFollow
May 8, 2023 6:24 pm ET
Foreign ministers of the Arab League meeting in Cairo, May 7. PHOTO: KHALED ELFIQI/SHUTTERSTOCK
Sunday’s Arab League vote to readmit the blood-stained Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad should be a wake-up call for Washington. Longtime American allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have flipped from backing the U.S.-led effort to isolate and ultimately overthrow Mr. Assad to supporting the Sino-Russian goal of reintegrating him into the regional order.
Many factors go into such decisions, but the Arab League move is part of a wider trend that Washington can’t afford to ignore. It isn’t only nondemocratic countries like the Gulf Arab states tilting toward Russia and China these days. Democracies like Brazil and South Africa are rejecting American pleas to rally behind democratic Ukraine against autocratic Russia. Across the so-called Global South, few countries, democratic or not, are rushing to enlist in President Biden’s anti-autocracy crusade.
Winning friends and influencing people in the Global South was a challenge for American strategists during the Cold War. It will be more difficult this time around. If Washington policy makers and the broader foreign-policy community don’t understand the new challenge, American diplomacy will face setbacks and frustrations.
Chinese communists today aren’t only better at economics than Mao and the Soviet chowderheads; they are also smarter politically. The old communists wanted to conquer the world by alliances with the underdogs and the poor. Today they align with the rich.
During the Cold War, the rulers of most countries feared nothing more than a communist takeover at home. If local communist parties took power, they would murder or exile their opponents, confiscate their wealth and throw their supporters in the gulag. In Mao’s time the Chinese Communist Party similarly promoted communist insurgencies or communist parties, in Vietnam and across the region.
Today’s communism wears a very different face. No social revolutions, no fanatical armies of revenge-minded peasant guerrillas storming the presidential palace. Instead, as Russia sells weapons, China will sell the high-tech security and surveillance systems that can help rulers everywhere crush workers or peasants who dare challenge the status quo.
Sino-Russian support comes without lectures. Kleptocracy, money laundering, human-rights violations, drug cartels: No questions will be asked of rulers willing to align with the new system. Enrichissez-vous! Make yourselves rich is the message China and Russia broadcast today to the world’s rich.
The old communists sought to mobilize what they categorized as oppressed classes against existing elites. Today’s adversaries want to mobilize existing elites against a global status quo that, they argue, favors yesterday’s Group of Seven powers and rich countries over the rising powers of the Global South.
The American response in East and Southeast Asia, where the competition is fiercest, has been to stress the danger of Chinese hegemony and territorial claims to neighboring states while playing down American commitments to such controversial topics as human rights in sensitive countries like the Philippines. Their national interests, Washington tells local governments, are joined to those of the U.S. If China becomes too dominant, their security, their territorial integrity and even their independence could be at risk.
This argument often makes a powerful impression. But in the world in which we live, not all ruling elites are patriotic. Many prefer the private interests of their families and friends to something as abstract and idealistic as the national good. The country that offers the greatest economic advantages and political security to powerful rulers and elites is likely to have a great deal of political and even strategic pull.
In other parts of the world, like the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, Washington’s core arguments resonate less with elites. China and Russia pose no security threat to countries like Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, and the revisionist powers seem to offer a way to check what many in the Global South see as the overbearing power of the U.S. and the rest of the G-7.
What elites and ordinary people in the Global South want is something that makes many greens and progressives in the G-7 countries unhappy. They want economic growth, they want lots of it, and they want it now.
Wired and connected as never before, ordinary people all over the Global South can see how people live in the rich world, and they want that for themselves. Their rulers know that their power depends on delivering the goods such growth brings.
To win over both popular and elite audiences in the Global South, the U.S. must embrace the politics of growth. Our world order must be, and must be seen to be, the surest, fastest path to raising living standards all over the world. That’s what we did after World War II. We must find a way to do that again today.
-
May 10, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
Can Russia Gang Up on the West?
Groupings such as the BRICS and the SCO have been harmed by the sanctions regime too.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
In February 2022, the global economy started what became an unprecedented event: The West, led by the United States, severed trade, financial and personal ties with Russia, a country that spans 11 time zones, sits at the heart of Eurasia and is essential to global commerce as a supplier of key commodities. Before that, similar punitive measures tended to target countries on the edge of the global economy like Venezuela and Iran. Unsurprisingly, global growth forecasts for 2023 have been revised downward.
The International Monetary Fund reported in April that the baseline prediction for growth is 3.4 percent in 2022, 2.8 percent in 2023 and 3 percent in 2024. But it also warned that in the event of increased financial sector stress, global growth would fall to around 2.5 percent in 2023, with advanced economies growing at or below 1 percent. Meanwhile, the IMF predicted that Russia's economy will grow 0.7 percent more quickly than Germany's and the United Kingdom's, both of which are forecast to enter a recession (and experience negative growth), and will keep pace with growth in France and Italy in 2023. In other words, Russia's economic growth is expected to compete with, if not outperform, four of the G-7 countries leading the sanctions charge.
IMF Forecasts for GDP Growth
(click to enlarge)
The West believed that by impounding Russian foreign exchange reserves held abroad, imposing harsh restrictions on Russian banks and individuals, and severing trade in technology and raw materials, the Russian economy would collapse and force President Vladimir Putin to abandon the war in Ukraine. Less than two months after the invasion, the IMF forecast that Russia’s economy would contract by 8.5 percent in 2022 and by 2.3 percent this year. Since then, however, the fund has revised its estimates upward by a cumulative 9.4 percentage points. Sure, at least some of the IMF forecasting comes from Russian figures that are arguably inflated – but the Russian economy nonetheless resisted sanctions during the first months of 2022.
In fact, Russia was prepared for the sanctions. It had been under them since it took Crimea in 2014, and the West had advertised its intentions well ahead of the invasion. The West failed to recognize as much, and it overestimated its power to dominate the most critical parts of the global economy. The West was also inexplicably slow to realize that, when cornered, authoritarian governments deprioritize rational economic considerations and spur Western conventions.
Meanwhile, China, India, Malaysia and Singapore have begun to import more Russian oil. Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Armenia and other former Soviet republics have acted as middlemen for Western exporters and Russian importers on anything from cell phones to machine tools. Thus developed a network of parallel imports and informal shipping fleets. Legal loopholes, opportunistic business activity and a lack of collaboration by emerging economies have conspired to blunt the impact of sanctions.
Even so, it would be a mistake to say the sanctions have failed. There are clear indications that they are affecting the Russian economy, so from the West’s perspective, they are better than allowing Russia to support the war with a limitless budget funded by export payments.
Indeed, Moscow has already been forced to sell commodities at lower prices and to pay a premium for technology (due to the price of avoiding legal obstacles and the increased cost of transportation, not to mention the investment needed to create new trade corridors). This year, Russia's federal budget is under strain from military and security spending, which accounts for a record-high one-third of total expenditure, and from mandatory import substitutes. The Kremlin can afford to cover these expenditures for now, but any external shock could severely undermine Russian finances.
To mitigate these risks, Russian authorities are squeezing the economy for more revenue. In April, Putin changed the way the country taxes oil businesses by basing levies on the Brent crude worldwide benchmark price minus a predetermined discount, rather than the price of Urals, the country's principal export crude, which has been trading at a lower price than Brent in recent months. Moscow expects to net 600 billion rubles ($8 billion) in revenue from the levies. The government also announced last month that the publication of statistics on oil, gas and condensate production will be suspended until April 2024, indicating further trouble may affect the industry. It’s unclear how the departure of Western companies has affected energy production, but the Kremlin isn’t taking any risks: It’s asking all Western firms leaving the country to pay a contribution to the federal budget equal to at least 10 percent of the market value of their assets (on top of a 50 percent discount on property values). The moves are clearly meant to offset the losses in the hydrocarbons sector, the revenue from which declined by 45 percent year on year in the first four months of 2023 because of sales at discounted prices.
Given Russia's bleak fiscal outlook, the role of the country’s oligarchs will become increasingly important. Russian elites, including senior officials and corporate leaders, are highly pragmatic and often apolitical. Like Moscow itself, they were prepared for sanctions but were ill-equipped to deal with a forever war of attrition. Restoring international operations and finding new customers is therefore their primary concern, even though they will continue to do business with the Kremlin. Their current reward for doing so is large cash flows from Asia and the global south. With limited opportunities to get back on the Western market, Moscow must make sure that Russian companies enjoy a friendly environment elsewhere.
This is why for the past year Moscow has focused on building its leadership role within the Eurasian Economic Union and promoting its interests in multinational organizations such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These groups are designed to challenge the U.S. hegemony by promoting their members' view of a multipolar world. But they are often too mired in rivalry and conflicting interests to get much done. Larger members like Brazil and India see these organizations as places to confer with their peers while maintaining their strategy of non-alignment. The smaller players seek access to wider markets for growing their profits.
Larger emerging markets such as Brazil and India have actually benefitted from Russia’s parallel imports, but for the most part, smaller ones were hurt, however indirectly, by the Western sanctions regime. They may be indifferent to the Ukraine conflict itself, but they have every reason to try to insulate themselves against further risk, even if that means cooperating with Russia. And the BRICS is an ideal forum within which to do so. The bloc focuses on economic policy coordination to establish better terms for its members to participate in the world economy. It eschews the imposition of values on its members, most of whom broadly share the belief that a multipolar world is a more profitable world for them. This explains the bloc’s appeal to less affluent countries that can’t go toe-to-toe with the G-7, and it explains why 18 more countries have applied for membership since its founding in 2006. The 15th BRICS summit will be held in South Africa in August, where it will examine, among other things, the admission of 17 new members from Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East. (The United States asked to attend the meeting but was denied.)
BRICS and NDB Membership
(click to enlarge)
More recently, a two-day summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Goa, India, brought together the majority of the Asian and Eurasian members of the nascent BRICS grouping. The meeting was advertised as an opportunity to begin working through internal conflicts and to capitalize on the economic opportunities from improved relations. The SCO is similar to BRICS in that it is dominated by China and Russia, but the organization is primarily concerned with regional security challenges, including the fight against regional terrorism, ethnic separatism and religious extremism. It has largely focused on Asia but has slowly expanded its aperture as new members join.
Shanghai Cooperation Organization Members
(click to enlarge)
Perhaps the most important takeaway from the meeting in Goa was that Russia and India concluded that they can’t fully de-dollarize their bilateral trade. The value of India's Russian imports increased from $9.86 billion to $41.55 billion in the previous fiscal year, while Russia's contribution to Indian imports rose from 1.6 percent to 6.5 percent. During the same period, India's exports to Russia reached $2.8 billion, resulting in a $38.74 billion imbalance for New Delhi.
All of this is impressive. Russia is currently making money by exporting crude oil to India, but it is having difficulty accessing the funds since the rupee is not freely convertible. As a result, $400 million in Russian dividends belonging to Indian corporations have been stranded in Russia. According to Russia’s foreign minister, Moscow has acquired "billions" of limited convertible rupees from accounts in Indian banks in trade settlements it cannot use.
Russia now has a significant trade surplus with India, but it has no purpose for all the rupees it has amassed because India produces little that Russia wants to buy. And, because India has a large trade imbalance, it has been unable to earn enough foreign money to completely pay for its Russian imports in other currencies. And though many believe bilateral payments are still made in U.S. dollars, as well as dirhams, yuans and "several other currencies," Russia hoped to convince India to agree on a rupee settlement mechanism to help lower currency conversion costs and make sure it can continue working with India if the West imposes sanctions on third countries. Having a bilateral mechanism gives Moscow the flexibility it needs, especially since India has no interest in making its rupee fully convertible.
Moscow’s failure to reach an agreement with India shows the limit of its influence on one of the prominent BRICS members. Moreover, the fact that Beijing announced its foreign minister would visit Germany and France days after the SCO summit ended – the same day Brussels said it would consider sanctions on Chinese companies for supporting Russia’s war machine – suggests Moscow hasn’t convinced Beijing to side with it and help the de-dollarization process either. The potential for the West to tighten sanctions and hit third countries that are facilitating trade with Moscow is clearly a concern among larger BRICS members.
Though the expansion of the SCO and the BRICS is one of the unintended consequences of Western sanctions, bucking U.S. hegemony is impossible so long as all emerging countries want dollars to fund growth – and so long as they are unwilling to give up the Western market. In that sense, they can’t form a realistic alliance that Russia can use against the West. If anything, the groupings demonstrate why Western sanctions against Russia are working, albeit slowly and problematically for everyone involved.
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19653/biden-china-aggression
-
Putin’s War Is America’s Opportunity
Ukraine will emerge as a formidable force in Europe—and one aligned with the U.S.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell MeadFollow
May 29, 2023 3:45 pm ET
People take shelter in a subway station in Kyiv, Ukraine, May 29. PHOTO: ROMAN PILIPEY/GETTY IMAGES
American policy conversations about Ukraine often assume that Ukraine is a problem. For some, it represents a distraction from China. Others fear Russian escalation and retaliation. Still others worry about the financial cost of supporting Ukraine’s army and propping up its war-blighted economy.
These concerns are real and have their place, but they miss the main point. Vladimir Putin’s ill-judged, ill-planned and ill-prosecuted war has ignited a national awakening in Ukraine. The country emerging from Putin’s War will be a formidable new force in Europe whose interests and outlook place it firmly in alignment with the U.S.
On a visit to Kyiv last week, I spoke with Ukrainians including business executives, software wizards, survivors of the Russian occupation in Bucha and veterans of the bitter fighting in Mariupol. There was griping in plenty. The country is under martial law. Corruption remains widespread. Inflation is making life difficult, and with refugees huddled into makeshift shelters where 60 people sometimes share a communal kitchen, daily life can be full of hardship. Russian missiles streak across the sky and every home has been touched by the war’s human toll. But I didn’t hear from one person who believed Ukraine should trade Crimea or the Donbas for peace.
Ukrainians were clear-eyed about their situation. They expect a long war and a hard peace. “My grandfather fought the Russians,” said one veteran of the fighting in Mariupol, “and I think my children and grandchildren will have to fight them too.” Those words were echoed by soldiers and civilians across the city.
To understand today’s Ukraine, think of Israel. After centuries of oppression culminating in the unspeakable violence of the 20th century, Israelis are determined to take their fate into their own hands and are willing to make the economic and personal sacrifices necessary to defend their independence.
Ukrainians seem to have reached a similar place. The two world wars, the Russian Civil War and Stalin’s genocidal cruelty subjected Ukraine to unspeakable suffering during the 20th century. Now, as Mr. Putin and the yapping propagandists of Moscow’s bloodthirsty media threaten the country with a new dark age, Ukrainians have, quite simply, had enough. They don’t know how this will end, and they don’t know how long and how far the West will be willing to support them, but they are ready to do what it takes.
The Ukraine that emerges from this baptism by fire will be a formidable country with a battle-tested army, and it is going to transform the strategic landscape. It will join Poland, the Baltic republics and the Scandinavian countries in a defense-minded bloc against Russian expansion. While danger persists, that bloc will be committed to the trans-Atlantic alliance and see the U.S. as an essential partner in its defense. It will use its weight in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union against any attempts by weaker-willed Europeans to triangulate between Washington and its opponents.
Any end to the war widely perceived as a defeat for Mr. Putin will do more than create a powerful new ally for the U.S. It will also underline the value of an American alliance. That the U.S. and its allies could enable a smaller country to defeat Russia, still anachronistically seen as a superpower by much of the world, will strengthen the American alliance network and dent the prestige of the revisionist powers.
The stakes are still higher. Mr. Putin’s war is the first major international conflict of the information age, and Ukraine, which had a significant core of software engineers and IT experts beforehand, is developing new methods of war fighting. Sometimes using off-the-shelf gadgets bought directly by front-line soldiers with money from family and friends, Ukraine’s tech wizards play a key role in enabling Ukraine’s numerically inferior army to hold off Russian attacks.
Software engineers who joined the army at the start of the war have been called back from infantry brigades and, with new recruits leaving lucrative tech industry jobs to enlist, have formed fast-moving, informal units that develop methods of analyzing battlefield information to get granular insight into Russian plans.
Ukrainians want deeper partnerships with American tech companies and the Pentagon. Just as the uniquely close American cooperation with Israel’s tech sector boosts American capabilities, tech cooperation with Ukraine will help U.S. business and the U.S. military maintain and even increase their lead over Beijing.
Helping Ukraine is not a charity project to be undertaken out of sentiment. Nor is it a strategic distraction that weakens our hand in the Indo-Pacific. In his blindness and folly, Vladimir Putin has handed the U.S. a golden opportunity. We should seize it with both hands
-
Hopium overdose.
:roll:
1. Where does Ukraine get the troops?
2. Where does it get the weapons?
Putin’s War Is America’s Opportunity
Ukraine will emerge as a formidable force in Europe—and one aligned with the U.S.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell MeadFollow
May 29, 2023 3:45 pm ET
People take shelter in a subway station in Kyiv, Ukraine, May 29. PHOTO: ROMAN PILIPEY/GETTY IMAGES
American policy conversations about Ukraine often assume that Ukraine is a problem. For some, it represents a distraction from China. Others fear Russian escalation and retaliation. Still others worry about the financial cost of supporting Ukraine’s army and propping up its war-blighted economy.
These concerns are real and have their place, but they miss the main point. Vladimir Putin’s ill-judged, ill-planned and ill-prosecuted war has ignited a national awakening in Ukraine. The country emerging from Putin’s War will be a formidable new force in Europe whose interests and outlook place it firmly in alignment with the U.S.
On a visit to Kyiv last week, I spoke with Ukrainians including business executives, software wizards, survivors of the Russian occupation in Bucha and veterans of the bitter fighting in Mariupol. There was griping in plenty. The country is under martial law. Corruption remains widespread. Inflation is making life difficult, and with refugees huddled into makeshift shelters where 60 people sometimes share a communal kitchen, daily life can be full of hardship. Russian missiles streak across the sky and every home has been touched by the war’s human toll. But I didn’t hear from one person who believed Ukraine should trade Crimea or the Donbas for peace.
Ukrainians were clear-eyed about their situation. They expect a long war and a hard peace. “My grandfather fought the Russians,” said one veteran of the fighting in Mariupol, “and I think my children and grandchildren will have to fight them too.” Those words were echoed by soldiers and civilians across the city.
To understand today’s Ukraine, think of Israel. After centuries of oppression culminating in the unspeakable violence of the 20th century, Israelis are determined to take their fate into their own hands and are willing to make the economic and personal sacrifices necessary to defend their independence.
Ukrainians seem to have reached a similar place. The two world wars, the Russian Civil War and Stalin’s genocidal cruelty subjected Ukraine to unspeakable suffering during the 20th century. Now, as Mr. Putin and the yapping propagandists of Moscow’s bloodthirsty media threaten the country with a new dark age, Ukrainians have, quite simply, had enough. They don’t know how this will end, and they don’t know how long and how far the West will be willing to support them, but they are ready to do what it takes.
The Ukraine that emerges from this baptism by fire will be a formidable country with a battle-tested army, and it is going to transform the strategic landscape. It will join Poland, the Baltic republics and the Scandinavian countries in a defense-minded bloc against Russian expansion. While danger persists, that bloc will be committed to the trans-Atlantic alliance and see the U.S. as an essential partner in its defense. It will use its weight in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union against any attempts by weaker-willed Europeans to triangulate between Washington and its opponents.
Any end to the war widely perceived as a defeat for Mr. Putin will do more than create a powerful new ally for the U.S. It will also underline the value of an American alliance. That the U.S. and its allies could enable a smaller country to defeat Russia, still anachronistically seen as a superpower by much of the world, will strengthen the American alliance network and dent the prestige of the revisionist powers.
The stakes are still higher. Mr. Putin’s war is the first major international conflict of the information age, and Ukraine, which had a significant core of software engineers and IT experts beforehand, is developing new methods of war fighting. Sometimes using off-the-shelf gadgets bought directly by front-line soldiers with money from family and friends, Ukraine’s tech wizards play a key role in enabling Ukraine’s numerically inferior army to hold off Russian attacks.
Software engineers who joined the army at the start of the war have been called back from infantry brigades and, with new recruits leaving lucrative tech industry jobs to enlist, have formed fast-moving, informal units that develop methods of analyzing battlefield information to get granular insight into Russian plans.
Ukrainians want deeper partnerships with American tech companies and the Pentagon. Just as the uniquely close American cooperation with Israel’s tech sector boosts American capabilities, tech cooperation with Ukraine will help U.S. business and the U.S. military maintain and even increase their lead over Beijing.
Helping Ukraine is not a charity project to be undertaken out of sentiment. Nor is it a strategic distraction that weakens our hand in the Indo-Pacific. In his blindness and folly, Vladimir Putin has handed the U.S. a golden opportunity. We should seize it with both hands
-
"Hopium"-- good one.
As I have discussed here over the years, I like George Friedman's analytical framework about how geography determines the underlying realities of geopolitics.
The space between Germany and Russia has been the source of back and forth for centuries, most recently WW1 and the Ribbentroff Agreement leading to WW2, then the Soviet conquest of East Europe, then NATO going east, etc etc.
Unlike the feckless idiots in charge right now, WRM is outlining a coherent vision of our geopolitical goal.
I agree with his assessment of Uke will.
A major American weak link has been that we don't follow through what we start. Reasonable people can disagree over whether going into Iraq was a good idea, but as I have repeatedly pounded the table here for over ten years now, Obama-Biden pulling out of Iraq was a huge historical error.
As stupid as it was to trigger this war (contrast Trump, who was both strong and subtle in this) we are in it now. In the aftermath of Afghanistan, to pull the rug from under the Ukes now would persuade all those with skin in the Taiwan game that we are no longer a serious country.
Gotta go to work!
-
The “Palestinians” have tons of will. Israel still exists.
Will is nice, but they are running out of troops and our cupboard is empty.
You can’t will your way into weapons or manpower.
China knows how unserious the FUSA is. They own the dottering corruptocrat puppet more than the deep state does.
The PLA leadership will trade 100,000 troops to kill 10.000 of ours. The PLA leadership openly brags about this. Think the public is up for WW II level losses? Worse than WWII? We don’t even have the will to secure our cities because someone might call us racist.
No one with an IQ above room temperature trusts us, and for good reason.
"Hopium"-- good one.
As I have discussed here over the years, I like George Friedman's analytical framework about how geography determines the underlying realities of geopolitics.
The space between Germany and Russia has been the source of back and forth for centuries, most recently WW1 and the Ribbentroff Agreement leading to WW2, then the Soviet conquest of East Europe, then NATO going east, etc etc.
Unlike the feckless idiots in charge right now, WRM is outlining a coherent vision of our geopolitical goal.
I agree with his assessment of Uke will.
A major American weak link has been that we don't follow through what we start. Reasonable people can disagree over whether going into Iraq was a good idea, but as I have repeatedly pounded the table here for over ten years now, Obama-Biden pulling out of Iraq was a huge historical error.
As stupid as it was to trigger this war (contrast Trump, who was both strong and subtle in this) we are in it now. In the aftermath of Afghanistan, to pull the rug from under the Ukes now would persuade all those with skin in the Taiwan game that we are no longer a serious country.
Gotta go to work!
-
"The PLA leadership will trade 100,000 troops to kill 10.000 of ours. The PLA leadership openly brags about this. Think the public is up for WW II level losses? Worse than WWII?"
We are too fat to run away.
-
"The PLA leadership will trade 100,000 troops to kill 10.000 of ours. The PLA leadership openly brags about this. Think the public is up for WW II level losses? Worse than WWII?"
We are too fat to run away.
China and the world knows how weak and decadent we are. Feeding the last of the Ukes into the meatgrinder doesn't change this.
-
By: Geopolitical Futures
Growing together. On day one of the 10th Arab-China Business Conference in Riyadh, 30 investment agreements worth a total of $10 billion were signed, according to the Saudi government. The Saudi foreign minister said Arab countries and China were eager to develop their partnership, while the energy minister said Riyadh was ignoring Western criticism of the growing Sino-Saudi relationship. The rift goes all the way to the top: Last week, reports surfaced that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman threatened the United States with “major economic consequences” if it tried to punish the kingdom for cutting oil production.
-
June 16, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
The State of the World
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
Looking at the current state of the world is a requisite step in forecasting. The way countries interact is shaped by necessity – be it economic, military or political. Their interactions may be hostile or cooperative, but interact they must. The world, then, is a kaleidoscope of contact, the significance of which is constantly changing. The task of the moment is to make sense of these patterns to better understand the future.
Central to that task is to discard the trivial and identify the important. Since the noise in the global system rarely correlates to long-term significance, the foundation of our method must be to extract the essential by focusing on the constraints imposed by reality. But that also demands that we understand the moment, because we live in the moment and must accommodate it, and because the shape of the world at the moment is the beginning of a forecast. Grasping this moment and creating a map of the important makes everything possible. In short, simplifying the world makes it understandable.
At this moment, the world pivots around the United States. It is the world’s largest economy and most powerful military force, and boasts the most powerful geographic position. It faces no threat on land, and there is no nation with the naval capability to invade it. It therefore faces no existential threat and has the greatest room for maneuver, plotting its course with fewer ramifications and easily recovering from consequences when it faces them.
The world has three other major forces: China, which is trying to emerge from centuries of external and internal friction and is now confronted with the question of whether its progress is sustainable; Russia, a one-time global power that seeks to recover what it lost in the 1990s; and Europe, which is trying to piece itself back together from the fragmentation that cost it its place atop the world order. The only other potentially significant force is India, whose incomparably factionalized landscape often prevents it from realizing its potential. There are dozens of other lesser powers, each sovereign to some extent, each exploiting other nations and each being exploited. They must be mapped and measured, too, as they can often punch above their weight.
We can summarize the world by summarizing the conflicts endemic to the major powers, as well as by the way the conflicts draw in lesser powers. One conflict is Russia's attempt to regain its strategic depth by forcing Ukraine to return to Russia. The other is the conflict between China and the U.S., in which China seeks to control its eastern waters, and the U.S. seeks to block it and thus retain its dominion over the seas. Europe, the historical foundation of the global system, has been at war with itself throughout its history and is now waging that war in ways that are both complex and difficult to understand. It will be addressed in due course.
The first conflict began under the Russian assumption that Ukraine would quickly be overrun – long before the United States could bring its power to bear. The failure to quickly defeat Ukraine has significantly weakened the Russian military and hurt its economy. The question most pertinent to our forecast is whether the existing Russian political system can recover, assuming continued military failure and economic duress.
The second conflict stems from China’s need for maritime access to trade. Exports are the foundation of its economic growth and its best weapon against domestic unrest. China’s imperative for access to the world’s oceans threatens America’s interest in protecting itself by controlling the seas. The U.S. has just completed building a cordon sanitaire from Japan to Australia, and India is fighting a small war with China on land. Meanwhile, the U.S. has imposed economic pressure that has weakened the Chinese economy and created a degree of economic unrest.
Much of this is obvious, of course, but the obvious is the beginning of understanding the world and forecasting. The obvious minus the noise is the essence of geopolitical reality. And grasping the simplest reality is the best waypoint we can muster to keep our bearings in the complexities of the world. You can’t permit the obvious to stand alone, but you also can’t forget one core fact: that the United States, like Britain or Rome before it, is the principal force shaping the world right now. The future comes later.
-
And yet the American Republic is dead.
June 16, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
The State of the World
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
Looking at the current state of the world is a requisite step in forecasting. The way countries interact is shaped by necessity – be it economic, military or political. Their interactions may be hostile or cooperative, but interact they must. The world, then, is a kaleidoscope of contact, the significance of which is constantly changing. The task of the moment is to make sense of these patterns to better understand the future.
Central to that task is to discard the trivial and identify the important. Since the noise in the global system rarely correlates to long-term significance, the foundation of our method must be to extract the essential by focusing on the constraints imposed by reality. But that also demands that we understand the moment, because we live in the moment and must accommodate it, and because the shape of the world at the moment is the beginning of a forecast. Grasping this moment and creating a map of the important makes everything possible. In short, simplifying the world makes it understandable.
At this moment, the world pivots around the United States. It is the world’s largest economy and most powerful military force, and boasts the most powerful geographic position. It faces no threat on land, and there is no nation with the naval capability to invade it. It therefore faces no existential threat and has the greatest room for maneuver, plotting its course with fewer ramifications and easily recovering from consequences when it faces them.
The world has three other major forces: China, which is trying to emerge from centuries of external and internal friction and is now confronted with the question of whether its progress is sustainable; Russia, a one-time global power that seeks to recover what it lost in the 1990s; and Europe, which is trying to piece itself back together from the fragmentation that cost it its place atop the world order. The only other potentially significant force is India, whose incomparably factionalized landscape often prevents it from realizing its potential. There are dozens of other lesser powers, each sovereign to some extent, each exploiting other nations and each being exploited. They must be mapped and measured, too, as they can often punch above their weight.
We can summarize the world by summarizing the conflicts endemic to the major powers, as well as by the way the conflicts draw in lesser powers. One conflict is Russia's attempt to regain its strategic depth by forcing Ukraine to return to Russia. The other is the conflict between China and the U.S., in which China seeks to control its eastern waters, and the U.S. seeks to block it and thus retain its dominion over the seas. Europe, the historical foundation of the global system, has been at war with itself throughout its history and is now waging that war in ways that are both complex and difficult to understand. It will be addressed in due course.
The first conflict began under the Russian assumption that Ukraine would quickly be overrun – long before the United States could bring its power to bear. The failure to quickly defeat Ukraine has significantly weakened the Russian military and hurt its economy. The question most pertinent to our forecast is whether the existing Russian political system can recover, assuming continued military failure and economic duress.
The second conflict stems from China’s need for maritime access to trade. Exports are the foundation of its economic growth and its best weapon against domestic unrest. China’s imperative for access to the world’s oceans threatens America’s interest in protecting itself by controlling the seas. The U.S. has just completed building a cordon sanitaire from Japan to Australia, and India is fighting a small war with China on land. Meanwhile, the U.S. has imposed economic pressure that has weakened the Chinese economy and created a degree of economic unrest.
Much of this is obvious, of course, but the obvious is the beginning of understanding the world and forecasting. The obvious minus the noise is the essence of geopolitical reality. And grasping the simplest reality is the best waypoint we can muster to keep our bearings in the complexities of the world. You can’t permit the obvious to stand alone, but you also can’t forget one core fact: that the United States, like Britain or Rome before it, is the principal force shaping the world right now. The future comes later.
-
:cry: :cry: :cry:
-
MARC: Trump's comments here show insight IMHO.
=========================
Trump Calls Wagner Rebellion in Russia a ‘Big Mess’
By Frank Fang
June 25, 2023Updated: June 25, 2023
Former President Donald Trump called the conflict between the Russian military and Wagner mercenaries a “big mess” on Saturday.
Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin called for an armed uprising against Russia’s military leaders, after alleging that Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, had ordered an attack, killing some 2,000 Wagner soldiers at their field camps in Ukraine.
Prigozhin’s forces managed to seize Rostov-on-Don, a southern Russian city near the Ukrainian border and home to the headquarters of the Russian Southern Military District, which oversees Moscow’s war efforts in Ukraine. Then, Prigozhin ordered his forces to march toward Moscow, a military advancement that he called a “march for justice.”
On Saturday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal, with Prigozhin agreeing to move to Belarus and Moscow dropping criminal charges against him. Prior to the deal, President Vladimir Putin vowed the rebels would face “inevitable punishment.”
“A big mess in Russia, but be careful what you wish for. Next in may be far worse!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account on June 24.
Trump, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the White House in 2024, has said that he would end the war between Ukraine and Russia within 24 hours if elected. Recently, the former president revealed that he told Putin several years ago that there would be “hell to pay” if Russia invaded Ukraine.
In a separate post on Saturday, Trump claimed that President Joe Biden will deal with the situation in Russia in whatever way Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants him to do.
“Remember, Hunter & Joe illegally took large amounts of money from both countries, but China right now is the bigger threat,” Trump said. “China & Russia, until Biden came along, have always been natural enemies, with China wanting large portions of largely unpopulated Russian land to have for their much larger population.”
Trump’s remarks came just days after an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower revealed that Hunter Biden used his father as leverage in a 2017 business deal with a Chinese businessman with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Trump added that the chaos in Russia could present China with an “unthinkable opportunity.”
“This is China’s heretofore unthinkable opportunity, much bigger than Taiwan,” Trump wrote.
China
Weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Putin and Xi met in China and the two leaders improved bilateral ties by announcing that there would be “no limits” to their cooperation.
The two leaders met again in Russia in March, with Xi telling Putin that the two neighbors “are driving changes” that haven’t “happened in 100 years.” Geopolitical analysts have said Xi’s remarks—to which Putin responded by saying he agreed—show that the two leaders are pushing to create a new China-led global order.
Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, suggested on Saturday that Xi would want more control over the Chinese military after learning about Prigozhin’s armed rebellion.
Xi, to invade Taiwan, “would have to give some admiral or general full operational control over the #Chinese military. #Xi was wary before, and now, seeing #Prigozhin’s rebellion, the Chinese leader will be even more reluctant to cede control. We can deter #China,” Chang wrote via Twitter.
In a separate post on Twitter, Chang added, “#XiJinping, watching events in #Russia, is going to exert even tighter control inside his own country. It would be a good time to leave #China.”
The CCP claims that Taiwan is a part of its territory even though the island has never been under the communist regime’s rule. Internationally, Taiwan is widely recognized as a de facto independent entity, with its own constitution, democratically elected government, and military.
In January, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu warned that China is “more likely” to invade Taiwan in 2027, the year Xi could be seeking his fourth term as Party leader.
However, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House select committee on China, told Nikkei Asia in an interview earlier this month that an armed conflict could break out between Taiwan and China before 2027.
“I think 2027 might be the end of the window, not the beginning of it,” Gallagher said.
-
The Riddle, Mystery and Enigma of Prigozhin’s Coup Attempt
One thing is clear after the rebellion in Russia: The U.S. was right to support Ukraine after Putin’s invasion last year.
Gerard Baker
By
Gerard Baker
Follow
June 26, 2023 1:04 pm ET
Vladimir Putin delivers remarks in Moscow, June 24. PHOTO: PAVEL BEDNYAKOV/POOL SPUTNIK KREMLIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Watching events unfold in Russia this weekend was like viewing an accelerated newsreel of modern Russian history.
For a while it was 1917 all over again, with a little 1905 and 1989 thrown in. A revolution erupting after a disastrous foreign war. In his remarks on Saturday, Vladimir Putin invoked the 1917 precedent, revealing that he sees himself as more Nicholas II than Vladimir Lenin.
Then there was the symbolic spectacle of a lightning march on Moscow. As social-media feeds filled with images of military convoys rolling along highways and pictures of defensive bulwarks hauled into place at the gates to the capital, it was suddenly a re-enactment of 1812 or 1941. Unlike Napoleon and Hitler, Yevgeny Prigozhin seemed to have gotten his timing right, bearing down on the city in the accommodating midsummer sun.
As the climax seemed to near, an optimist could see hints of 1953 and the death of Stalin—the decades-long rule of a brutal dictator ending in chaos and ignominy, accompanied by the merest hope of something springlike to follow. Somewhat disappointingly, it turned out to be 1991, another dime-store coup that folded like a cheap suit on its first encounter with reality. Unlike that final, desperate bid to rescue communism from the ash heap of history, this one didn’t last even a few days. No detention of the beleaguered leader in his Black Sea dacha, no drunken infighting among the coup plotters. Just a few fiery words, some video vignettes, and it was back to barracks, boys.
Everything that happens in Russia elicits a library of conspiracy theories. Even some Western officials, as they attempted to digest this strange spectacle, wondered if it all might have been staged. Mr. Putin is a master of false-flag operations. Was this a scheme to demonstrate the calm invincibility of the great leader, a warning that as he faces down his enemies at home, he will show the same resilience abroad? There was even room for a helpful cameo role for Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Mr. Putin’s most faithful stooge, to burnish his fading credentials as hero of the Soviet Union.
You could be forgiven for believing anything. But this seems improbable. It’s hard to see how it helps the Russian leader to have his leadership denounced by a close ally and then, after he had threatened to demolish the mutineers, to sign up to what amounts to a gentle plea bargain.
More likely the sheer impossibility of his supposed mission became evident to Mr. Prigozhin and he took whatever bargain he could to extricate himself and settled for spending the rest of his days in the lovely idyll of Belarus, where he is doubtless being lined up for an early appointment at an open window in a tall building.
The image Mr. Putin’s Russia presented these last few days isn’t one of strength but of a crumbling husk of a former empire, and its main value should be as a powerful rebuttal to the strange little army of Putin apologists in the U.S.
It will be some time before we understand what just happened and what it portends for Mr. Putin, his regime and the war in Ukraine. But we can surely already see that the abortive Wagner mutiny has revealed how wrong the critics of America’s support for the war have been.
Mr. Prigozhin’s denunciation of the invasion and the official Russian casus belli is a rebuke to the voices in the West who blamed the U.S. and its allies for the Russian violence. If even the Wagner Group’s leadership can see through the official Kremlin fictions, is it too much to ask that prominent American political leaders and so-called strategic thinkers cease peddling them?
The weekend coup attempt should also quiet the voices of those who argue that U.S. support for Ukraine is some distraction from the larger challenge of China. The longer this war continues, the more damage is done to Russia’s capability and prestige, and the more ineptitude it exposes in Moscow, the greater the headache for its ally “without limits” in Beijing.
It is clearer than ever that Xi Jinping has shackled himself to a twitching corpse, one booby-trapped with nuclear weapons, but a dead weight all the same. Long live that alliance.
A retired senior military figure told me recently that for years a key aim of U.S. military strategy has been to develop weapons designed to inflict maximum damage on Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. As he noted with a grim smile, that is exactly what those munitions have been doing—with the added bonus that not a single American life has been put at risk.
Why would we stop inflicting that damage on China’s biggest ally now? And now that the Putin regime’s enfeebled rottenness has been laid bare, why wouldn’t we intensify our efforts to help Ukraine pursue its justified defense to a logical conclusion?
-
Pasting YA's post from Russia-US-Europe to here:
https://michael-hudson.com/2023/06/america-has-just-destroyed-a-great-empire/
-
There is a lot of strong analytical framework in there, but this
"We are seeing the Global Majority trying to create an independent and peacefully negotiated choice as to just what kind of an international order they want"
and the subsequent passages do not resonate for me.
-
The article does not resonate with me either. Russia is the victim? US is the aggressor? Not in my view.
-
The article does not resonate with me either. Russia is the victim? US is the aggressor? Not in my view.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16116-document-05-memorandum-conversation-between
-
Very relevant material.
-
July 5, 2023
Open as PDF
Forecasting Russia
By: George Friedman
The points below are drawn from my book, "The Next 100 Years," which was published in 2009. In the points that follow, I try to explain how I reached these conclusions.
The United States in particular tends to first underestimate and then overestimate enemies. By the middle of the 2010s, the United States will again be obsessed with Russia. There is an interesting process to observe here. The United States swings between moods but actually, as we have seen, executes a very consistent and rational foreign policy.
In the long run, the United States dismisses enemies but, as tension rises, vastly overestimates them. Consider this cycle with China. Distance breeds a sense of security. The greater the contact, the greater the American tendency to underestimate itself and overestimate the opponent. Intimacy causes the United States to magnify problems. It also generates massive military spending to catch up to the enemy, which tends to shy away from direct combat.
It will matter a great deal where the fault line lies. If Russia’s resurgence is to be a minimal crisis, the Russians will dominate Central Asia and the Caucasus and possibly absorb Moldova, but they will not be able to absorb the Baltic states, or dominate any nations west of the Carpathians. If the Russians do manage to absorb the Baltics and gain significant allies in the Balkans, like Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece – or Central European countries such as Slovakia – the competition between the United States and Russia will be more intense and frightening.
Russia's need to move westward is hardwired into Moscow’s fears of attack by the West. Its interests span the area from the Balkans to the Baltics. But its primary interest must be to its west, to and past the Carpathian Mountains, the direction from which wars come. The U.S. interest is command of the seas – an interest that entails blocking the rise of major European navies. Russia has the distant potential to field a significant navy in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The United States therefore sees Russian defense as potentially offensive and is thus compelled to respond, primarily using allied ground forces for major combat while it controls air and naval forces.
In the end though, it won’t truly matter. Russian military power will be severely strained confronting the fraction of American military power that the United States decided to wield in responding to Russia’s moves. Regardless of what the rest of Europe does, Poland and the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, will be committed to resisting Russian advances and will make any deal the United States wants in order to gain its support. The line therefore will be drawn in the Carpathian Mountains this time, rather than in Germany as it was during the Cold War. The Polish northern plains will be the main line of confrontation, but the Russians will not move militarily.
The idea guiding this forecast is that the nations most threatened by Russian power would ally with the United States to block Russian advances toward and beyond the Carpathians. For Russia, strategic depth is fundamental. Forecasting, then, requires diving into the imperatives of a nation. Russia’s fundamental imperative is to create distance between itself and the potential enemy west of the Carpathians.
The causes that ignited this confrontation – and the Cold War before it – will impose the same outcome as the Cold War, this time with less effort for the United States. The last confrontation occurred in Central Europe. This one will take place much farther to the east. In the last confrontation China was an ally of Russia, at least in the beginning. In this case China will be out of the game. Last time, Russia was in complete control of the Caucasus, but now it will not be, and it will be facing American and Turkish pressure northward. In the last confrontation Russia had a large population, but this time around it has a smaller and declining population. Internal pressure, particularly in the south, will divert Russian attention from the west and eventually, without war, it will break. Russia broke in 1917, and again in 1991. And the country’s military will collapse once more shortly after 2020.
Demographics will cause Russia to fail. Europe and America also have demographics problems, but they are able to overcome them through technology. Russia’s technological prowess grants great advances in very limited areas, not in the broad spectrum needed. The United States brings to bear massive technologies that it shares with its allies. Russia must fight the type of war it fought in the past. In 1917, its exhaustion of manpower caused the government to collapse. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed partly because it was unable to compete with American military technology. Similarly, the war in Ukraine has imposed on Russia a primarily conventional conflict requiring large numbers of troops, which have incurred high casualties. I predicted the collapse of the Russian army because of its inability to create technology and field a large and trained military force. I am predicting the next phase of the collapse that began in 1991. Obviously, the Russian military is resilient, but then again, the U.S. entered the war overestimating Russian power.
The second essential variable is, as always, constraints. Russia can achieve its imperative by moving its border westward, thereby putting more distance between itself and its enemies. But it is constrained by the size of its population and the vast number of men needed to initiate and sustain combat.
There are two keys to forecasting: a ruthless, objective understanding of imperatives, followed by an equal comprehension of constraints. It demands, in other words, an understanding of what Russia must have and raises the question of why it doesn’t have it. Forecasting is for the simple-minded. The most obvious things are the most useful.
-
July 7, 2023
Open as PDF
Make Some Room for the Global South
By: Allison Fedirka
The world is in the throes of an economic and political reorganization. The COVID-19 pandemic made virtually every country rethink the fundamental structure of its economy, and the supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine not only added to those considerations but added an unexpected political flavor to the realignment already underway. Although most attention has been paid to traditional powerbrokers such as the U.S., Russia and China, available evidence suggests that whatever world order emerges will very likely have some room for countries in the Global South.
Traditional geopolitics tends to view the world through an east-west paradigm. This reflects the fact that the world’s wealthiest and most advanced economies, as well as the most powerful militaries, reside in the Northern Hemisphere. Powerful countries’ relationships with competitors and threats were thus based on the east-west outlook. The north-south division of the world loosely follows geographic location but has its roots in economic affairs. The North essentially refers to wealthy countries with industrialized market-based economies, while the South refers to poorer, developing countries with commodity-based economies. Historically, this has been characterized by a high degree of economic disparity, perpetuated by a global economy that favored developed countries at the expense of developing ones.
And because countries of the Global South reside on what traditionally has been the periphery of the geopolitical system, they tend to animate global events less than they react to them. Such was the case throughout the 20th century. In the wake of World War II, a bipolar international system emerged, defined nearly absolutely by the principals of the Cold War. The world became a battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union to expand their respective sphere of influence. Many nations rightly saw this tug of war as a threat to their autonomy and sovereignty; they had value for Moscow and Washington, but they had little power to act on their own.
In an attempt to insulate themselves from the whims of stronger powers, weaker countries established the Non-Aligned Movement to address political threats and the G-77 to right economic asymmetries. Global economic forces over which they had little control caused both to fail. In the 1970s, interest rates increased, unemployment rose, growth stagnated, wages declined and overall demand fell. Amid this chaos, developing countries found themselves in the middle of a liquidity crunch. The drop in commodity prices and decline of exports due to protective tariffs also hurt the already delicate economies of developing nations, many of which entered debt crises in the 1980s. Though the end of the Cold War and the rise of globalization offered them some respite, the countries of the Global South remained marginalized players in a new geopolitical system.
But now they have an opportunity amid a new kind of chaos. Countries are now hypersensitive to supply chain vulnerabilities and are trying to reduce risk, from source materials to transportation routes. Alternatives to the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) financial system, as well as trade in local currencies, have become more attractive to countries with low supplies of U.S. dollars. Distortion in the commodities markets (and the associated mineral grabs) have redefined the geopolitical value of some countries. Armed with new rules that determine what resources, location and conditions give a country economic leverage, Brazil and India lead the field. India has become economically essential for Russia and politically and militarily important to the United States. Brazil is trying to leverage its position against the European Union by negotiating better terms for the long-awaited EU-Mercosur free trade agreement. Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan find themselves being courted by Russia, Turkey, China, the U.S. and the EU.
The real game-changer, however, lies in the emerging competition among the advanced economies for the favor of the Global South. In the past, the North was politically and economically dominant enough to unilaterally set the terms of engagement with the South. But with the reconstruction of the global economy and the North facing economic, social and political constraints, the North must rely more on cooperation.
A major overture came from France in mid-June, when Paris asked to attend the upcoming BRICS summit due to be held in August in Johannesburg, South Africa. If invited, France would become the first country from the wealthy North to participate in a meeting of the grouping, which comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Paris said it wanted to increase its cooperation with the Global South and stressed the importance of dialogue even when disagreements exist. Under President Emmanuel Macron, France has worked to shed its image as an old colonial power and engage with the South on a more equal footing. Paris also wants to disrupt the Global South’s implicit backing for Russia by offering it alternatives. Moscow dismissed Paris’ request out of hand, though the decision will ultimately be up to South Africa as the host country.
A short time later, the Japanese government published a document that highlighted the growing importance of the Global South to the international system. Its 2023 White Paper on International Economy and Trade divided the global economy into three blocs: the West, led by the U.S.; the East, led by China and Russia; and neutral nations. It said that building and strengthening cooperation with the Global South was a priority, with particular emphasis on India, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and African countries via the Tokyo International Conference on African Development framework. In addition, early this year Japan’s foreign minister toured Latin America. Tokyo also warned that economic warfare and U.S.-China decoupling would harm both sides, while creating arbitrage opportunities for the Global South. As a result, Japanese firms plan to shift major investments from China to members of ASEAN and others in the Global South.
The opportunities for the Global South to rise to geopolitical prominence are not without their challenges. For one thing, "Global South" is a term of convenience. In reality, most of the Global South’s interactions occur at the bilateral level. This is why larger southern states like India and Brazil are so active right now – as big countries, they can get away with things that others cannot. Further, many Global South countries suffer from chronic domestic instability, which constrains their ability to capitalize on the fluctuating tides. Finally, it remains to be seen whether the North can reestablish its dominance over the South. Nevertheless, if the Global South were to start acting on the geopolitical system rather than always living at the mercy of the North, it would mark a major change in the 21st century.
-
Bloomberg.com: Delays at naval shipyards mean that nearly 40% of US attack submarines are out of commission for repairs, about double the rate the Navy would like, according to new data released by the service. As of this year, 18 of the US Navy’s 49 attack submarines — 37% — were out of commission, according to previously undisclosed Navy data published by the Congressional Research Service. That leaves the US at a critical disadvantage against China’s numerically superior fleet. The maintenance backlog has “substantially reduced” the number of nuclear submarines operational at any given moment, cutting the “force’s capacity for meeting day-to-day mission demands and potentially putting increased operational pressure” on submarines that are in service, CRS naval analyst Ronald O’Rourke said in a July 6 report
-
Russia’s Influence on India Wanes Even as Affection Lingers
Though they both want to create a multipolar world, Moscow has tied itself to Beijing, New Delhi’s rival.
Sadanand Dhume
By
Sadanand Dhume
Follow
July 20, 2023 5:03 pm ET
Will India’s longstanding love affair with Russia ever end? At first glance, the odds appear slim. Despite drawing closer to Washington over the past two decades, New Delhi has maintained tight diplomatic and military ties with Moscow. But Russia’s and Vladimir Putin’s popularity among Indians won’t prevent Moscow’s star from fading. The rapid rise of China, combined with Russia’s relative economic and technological backwardness, all but ensures that India-Russia ties will diminish over time.
A recent Pew survey of 24 countries found that 57% of Indians view Russia either somewhat favorably or very favorably, the highest proportion in all countries surveyed. And 59% of Indians are confident that Mr. Putin would “do the right thing regarding world affairs.” (In the U.S., that figure is 7%.) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year doesn’t appear to have hurt Mr. Putin’s standing in India. The proportion of Indians expressing confidence in the Russian strongman rose 17 points compared with a similar survey in 2019.
India has steadfastly refused to condemn the Russian invasion. Instead, India has taken advantage of discounts, dramatically increasing purchases of Russian oil. Before the invasion, Russia accounted for around 2% of India’s oil imports. In May, India imported 40% of its oil from Russia, nearly 2 million barrels a day. And for India, the world’s largest importer of weapons, Russia remains its top arms supplier, providing the bulk of its strike force capability as well as technology for cruise missiles and nuclear-powered submarines.
What explains India’s affinity for Russia? Both countries have long sought to create a multipolar world to replace the unipolar one that emerged after America’s triumph in the Cold War. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained New Delhi’s view in a recent interview with the Economist. Eurasia houses three big powers: Russia, China and India. “It’s been a cardinal principle of our foreign policy, which still remains valid, that maintaining a strong relationship and a good relationship with Russia is essential,” he said.
Russia also benefits from close ties it built with India during the Cold War. Indians still remember the Soviet Union using its United Nations Security Council veto to back India on Kashmir, as well as Russia’s support during the 1971 war with Pakistan, which led to the birth of Bangladesh. Indians with an anti-American attitude admire Mr. Putin for standing up to the West. For its part, Russia has used its relatively advanced military industry—and competitive prices—to lock India into long-term dependence for technology that Indians say they can’t get elsewhere.
But it is clear that Moscow’s influence in India has declined dramatically—and will continue to decline. Fifty years ago, India had a planned economy and relied overwhelmingly on the Soviet Union for diplomatic support and military hardware. Committed communists and communist sympathizers held senior positions in India’s government. Marxist intellectuals dominated its universities and media, and communist parties were a force in electoral politics. The KGB station in New Delhi was among the largest in the world. Soviet publishers cranked out cheap books to woo the Indian middle class.
Today, virtually nobody in India has even heard of the Russian nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, and Indian elites probably care more about Kim Kardashian than Karl Marx. Unlike during the Cold War, hardly anyone in India studies Russian. As the Indian security expert Happymon Jacob pointed out in Foreign Affairs last year, before the recent spike caused by oil and fertilizer, bilateral trade between India and Russia was only $13 billion in 2021, less than 10% of U.S.-India trade. More than 4.4 million people of Indian origin live in the U.S. Indians in Russia number fewer than 30,000, many of whom are students who couldn’t get into medical school anywhere else.
Most important, Russia’s closest ally, China, is also India’s biggest threat. As the Indian strategic thinker C. Raja Mohan pointed out in a recent column, in the 1990s India sought a multipolar world, but today it faces the more urgent challenge of creating a multipolar Asia to stop the region from becoming China’s backyard. Only America can help India with critical technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing. And India can no longer rely on Russian weapons and diplomatic support in its confrontation with China along the disputed Himalayan frontier. According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute data, between 2012 and 2022 Russian arms as a proportion of India’s weapons imports fell by 65%. The proportion sourced from the U.S., France and Israel over the same period grew 288%.
India-Russia ties survived the end of the Cold War because it made sense for both countries, but flailing in Ukraine and drawing ever closer to Beijing has made Moscow a much less attractive partner for New Delhi. As Mr. Jacob wrote, “When Indians think of their strategic partnerships, Russia is referred to in the past tense and the United States in the future.”
-
INDO-PACIFIC
Russia, China shun like-minded North Korea from anti-U.S. war games
BY ANDREW SALMON THE WASHINGTON TIMES SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA | North Korean forces remain at the base while Chinese and Russian warships conduct joint drills in what appears to be a counter to tightening cooperation between the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies.
The paradigm is puzzling, particularly given the value Pyongyang could contribute to a coalition of anti-U.S. powers in the region.
The isolated state commands a strategic location in Northeast Asia and deploys a constant stream of harsh rhetoric toward the United States and its allies. It fields weapons of mass destruction and a 1 million-strong military.
Yet it has joined none of the land, air and naval drills that China and Russia have conducted in recent years on the Eurasian landmass or in the Sea of Japan or the South China Sea.
North Korea’s odd-man-out status looks even more unlikely when viewed historically. Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang were aligned against U.S.-led forces during the 1950-1953 Korean War, which ended in a truce 70 years ago.
While North Korea stays on the sidelines, 2023 is proving a golden year for U.S.-led initiatives to rally allies in the region against the increasingly assertive China and Russia.
Enabled by conservative administrations in Manila, Seoul and Tokyo and galvanized by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Washington is overseeing a tightening web of alliances and strategic basing structures from northern Australia and western South Korea to Japan’s Ryukyu chain and the Philippines’ northern region of Luzon.
Last week, a U.S. nuclear-capable submarine docked in South Korea — the first such port call in decades. The two allies also held the inaugural meeting of the Nuclear Consultative Group, which they created after a bilateral summit in Washington in April.
Given this, the ever-bristling, risktolerant Pyongyang might appear to be a perfect regional partner for an anti-U.S. alliance, but experts say China and
Russia keep North Korea at arm’s length for diplomatic, military and even reputational reasons.
“The North Koreans don’t have the capability [to join the drills]. That is the practical reason,” said Go Myong-hyun, a North Korean watcher at Seoul’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies. “The other reason is that North Korea is toxic. If China or Russia develop the perception that they have influence over it, they would be held responsible for its behavior.”
North Korea, traditionally jealous of its strategic autonomy, has reasons for standing alone.
Beijing and Moscow have no formal alliance but say their partnership has no limits. Although most of Moscow’s forces are mired in Ukraine, that partnership is visible in the Indo-Pacific. Troops in Russia’s Far East, notably those based in Vladivostok, drill with Chinese counterparts.
Chinese and Russian vessels are conducting “Northern Interaction 2023” this month in the East Sea/Sea of Japan. Three Russian destroyers and a corvette are exercising with two Chinese destroyers, two frigates and a supply ship.
Drills have included the massive- scale “Vostok 18” land exercises in 2018, which Chinese army units joined, and regular joint warplane flights over waters separating South Korea and Japan.
Despite its hostility toward Washington, North Korea participated in none of the exercises despite some seeming overtures on both sides.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, China and Russia have extended diplomatic assistance to North Korea by blocking U.S.-led efforts to add international sanctions on the regime for its missile testing program.
The Biden administration has accused North Korea of supplying ammunition to Russia to help in the Ukraine operation, but Pyongyang denies the allegations.
Russian media personalities’ statements that North Korea could send labor or even combat troops to the war zone have not been borne out.
Given the need for allies, it would seem North Korea would be a useful — if eccentric — partner for an anti-Western coalition. One reason an alliance has not been formed is diplomatic. Even authoritarian states such as China and Russia are leery of dealing with brutal and mercurial North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“Open military cooperation with a rogue state would have a bad impact on the reputation of both China and Russia as North Korea is an open challenge to the U.N.-designated world system,” said Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on North Korea who teaches at Seoul’s Kookmin University.
China, he said, “positions itself as a protector of multilateralism against U.S. hegemony, while Russia understands that its seat on the U.N. Security Council is one of its most important foreign policy assets and doesn’t want to change it.”
Another reason relates to national prejudices.
“There is a tradition of despising North Korea in China, and especially in Russia,” Mr. Lankov said. “You are not going to please [Russian President Vladimir] Putin by comparing him to Kim. For generations of Russians, North Korea was seen as a bizarre, comical and highly unpleasant dictatorship.”
Mr. Lankov suggested that Russians’ traditional views of North Korea are similar to Americans’ views of Latin American dictatorships in the decades after World War II.
The relationship between Seoul and Washington has had ups and downs, but the South Korean public is grateful for U.S. support during the Korean War. That is visible in the excellent treatment of visiting veterans and the public support for Seoul’s alliance with Washington despite several bilateral irritants.
U.S. troops remain in South Korea, but Chinese units withdrew from North Korea in 1958. That reflects Pyongyang’s differing stance toward its erstwhile allies.
“For North Korea, it was a quid pro quo relationship. They look at the support from the Chinese and Soviets as a larger pursuit of communist goals, so to them, it was only natural that these nations should have supported them,” said Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean general. “And North Korea also promotes the idea that during the [Chinese Civil War], many Koreans fought for the communists, so it was a balance.”
Yet another reason relates to the North Korean military. While China and Russia boast modern warships and aircraft, struggling Pyongyang has focused on a few asymmetric assets that do not complement conventional forces.
“North Korea concentrates on what matters: nuclear arms, ballistic missiles and light infantry/ special forces,” said Mr. Lankov. Its naval and air forces, by contrast, are given inferior equipment and “don’t have the fuel to operate over longer distances.”
North Korea under Mr. Kim has increasingly isolated itself while pursuing a policy of maximum strategic autonomy, relying on no ally to protect it. That approach has been strained by North Korea’s extensive economic reliance on China, which Pyongyang’s leadership resents.
“North Korea understands that too much influence from Russia or China threatens their supreme leader,” Mr. Chun said. “So they try to keep a good distance.”
-
Biden's Legacy: The Axis of Tyrannies
A New World Order Dominated by China, Russia and the Iranian Regime, with North Korea Heading Up the Rear
by Majid Rafizadeh • July 29, 2023 at 5:00 am
[T]he weak and possibly compromised administration of U.S. President Joe Biden appears to have enabled and empowered the autocrats of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, all of whom seem to be working overtime to create a new authoritarian world order with themselves at the helm.
Iran, which has already declared a new world order, is, even beyond its accelerating nuclear weapons program, swiftly trying to reshape the world militarily and geopolitically wherever Western nations appear to be losing power. The Iranian regime also appears to be wasting no time indoctrinating it citizens with anti-Western and anti-American points of view.
Since the Biden Administration assumed office in 2021, its vacuum of leadership in the Middle East has led to the increasing influence of China and Iran in the region; the decision by the Gulf nations to dodge the US and tilt towards China, and even to the China-brokered deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran that further sidelines the U.S.
"The Chinese have a strategy they've been following. We kind of wander around from day to day." – Former National Security Adviser John R. Bolton, WABC 770 radio, March 12, 2023.
In November 2022, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed, "Death to America will happen. In the new order I am talking about America will no longer have any important role." The Iranian regime, now that it is aligned with Putin's Russia and the Chinese Communist Party, would probably be delighted to conquer the US.
As the Biden Administration has unfortunately created a leadership vacuum throughout the world, its apparent risk-paralysis and feeble leadership seem quickly to be leading to a new world order led by the Axis of Tyrannies: China, Russia and Iran, with North Korea heading up the rear.
The weak and possibly compromised administration of U.S. President Joe Biden appears to have enabled and empowered the autocrats of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, all of whom seem to be working overtime to create a new authoritarian world order with themselves at the helm. Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation leaders' summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on September 15, 2022. (Photo by Alexandr Demyanchuk/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)
"The greatest of all evils is a weak government," said Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of the UK (1868, 1874-80)." This comment sadly brings us to the weak and possibly compromised administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, which appears to have enabled and empowered the autocrats of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, all of whom seem to be working overtime to create a new authoritarian world order with themselves at the helm.
Iran, which has already declared a new world order, is, even beyond its accelerating nuclear weapons program, swiftly trying to reshape the world militarily and geopolitically wherever Western nations appear to be losing power (here, here and here). The Iranian regime also appears to be wasting no time indoctrinating it citizens with anti-Western and anti-American points of view
-
But of course! They bought him!
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19839/china-outmaneuvered-biden
-
August 11, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
Benchmarking China
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
For some time, China has been regarded as an economic miracle, a country whose rise would in due course put it atop the global economy. The justification for this expectation rested on the rate of growth China has enjoyed since Deng Xiaoping took over the chairmanship of the Chinese Communist Party and called on the Chinese people to enrich themselves. This marked the end of Maoism and ushered in an economic surge. It was and had to be what some call a dead cat bounce. If you throw down a dead cat hard enough, it will bounce. China is, of course, far from a dead cat, but in 1978 when Deng took over, it seemed like the economy was quite dead, if not a cat. China’s surge over the next decades was simply the economy’s response to being released along with the marginalization of Marxism-Leninism.
The growth was remarkable but not unprecedented. Similar stories occurred in the United States and Japan. This is a cycle I have written about before, but it is relevant to understanding China today. In 1890, the United States was 25 years removed from the Civil War. During that period, economic and financial instability reigned. The U.S. could manufacture, but the domestic market was limited, so the U.S. was forced to look abroad. Its exports surged until, in the early 1900s, the United States was manufacturing nearly half of all manufactured goods in the world. These exports built American industry, which benefited as well from World War I. This went on until the 1920s when the war had ended and Europe's ability to afford imported goods slumped. The U.S. faced the reality all countries that export face: It was hostage to the ability of its customers to buy. This led to the Great Depression, and recovery did not come until World War II ended and domestic demand resumed.
Japan went through a similar cycle. Its economy devastated by war, Japan began its recovery around 1950. It too was built on combining manufacturing skills and exports, starting with minor products. (“Made in Japan” tended to indicate low quality.) Its prime market was the United States. Over time, the quality and competitiveness of Japan’s exports surged. Japanese automobiles badly hurt the American auto industry beginning in the 1970s. In the U.S., political and economic resistance to Japanese imports swelled. The backlash, along with a banking system in Japan that lacked controls, created the Lost Decade, which forced a new model on Japan after a 40-year boom – about the same length of time as America’s boom decades earlier. I have no idea why 40 years is the number, but it seems to be.
China’s economic miracle began around 1980 following the Cultural Revolution, which was as brutal as any war. In need of reconstruction, China followed the American and Japanese models of relying on exports, first based on price and later on technical sophistication. China’s gross domestic product exploded, and it became the second-largest economy in the world. But there was a flaw in thinking of it that way, as its per capita GDP ranked 76th in the world. Because of its vast population, China can be relatively unproductive and still generate amazing numbers. This made China’s rise different from those of the U.S. and Japan, where the growth of GDP reflected efficient productivity.
Still, China grew until hitting a limit on rates of return on capital in the real estate industry and, of course, COVID-19. But this week, China reached another benchmark: deflation. We all hate inflation (except when we try to sell our house). But deflation reduces the value of all products, and it means the nominal value of assets and income falls while debts stay the same. This affects one’s ability to leverage a business, particularly real estate, which is a form of saving in China. Instead of banking their money, Chinese buy apartments and houses. Under deflation, the value of their property declines while their debt holds steady. It is not odd, therefore, that another major Chinese real estate company appears to be staggering. Deflation in China is not yet significant, but it is setting expectations as to what is going to come. Exports are falling in the face of a global downturn, which, as we have seen, really hits exporters. The single most striking number is that unemployment among Chinese 16-24-year-olds is at 22 percent. This is an explosive part of the population to be without a job and underscores the stagnation of business activity.
Another point is that while the local governments in China's interior have less than half the debt, they are the regions most likely to default. China’s interior is vast and poor, and when Mao wanted to overthrow the government, he went to the interior on the Long March to raise an army from among the people who lived there. They have benefited the least from the boom, and bitterness from this region is the most dangerous to Beijing. How Chinese debt is distributed matters a great deal. The U.S. had its civil war before an economic surge, and Japan had World War II. China too had a civil war, but it is not clear that it settled fundamental political matters.
The bad news in China’s economy goes on and on, and the U.S. is piling on by blocking its access to technology and investment. The direction China is heading resembles Japan and the U.S. but without the stable base and resources they had. It is possible that this is simply a cyclical event, but the political foundation in China is very different. Plus, we are at the strange 40-year point, which suggests that China will be a force in the future but that this current surge is ending.
The Philippines rudely rejected this week a Chinese demand to withdraw from a contested atoll in the South China Sea. Philippine rudeness is a decent measure of China’s decline.
-
Biden’s New Approach to the Middle East
As Iran balks, Israel and Saudi Arabia are now seen as crucial to U.S. global strategy.
By
Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Aug. 14, 2023 6:27 pm ET
152
Gift unlocked article
Listen
(5 min)
image
President Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 15, 2022. PHOTO: BANDAR ALJALOUD/ASSOCIATED PRESS
As the Biden administration offered the mullahs in Tehran a $6 billion ransom for five American citizens, it was also offering Iran’s archrival Saudi Arabia unprecedented defense commitments and cooperation on a civilian nuclear program to help persuade Riyadh to normalize relations with Israel.
Inquiring minds want to know: Why is Joe Biden working so hard to do favors for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? And why is he shoveling cash to the mullahs while working to empower their enemies?
These are good questions. Brokering a Saudi-Israeli peace deal will be expensive. It will cost in the region, where both Israel and Saudi Arabia will look to extract as many concessions and sweeteners as possible before giving Washington what it wants, and it will be expensive at home. The human-rights activists who dominate much of the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy apparatus will scream bloody murder if Mr. Biden embraces Bibi and MBS. Isolationists in both parties will ask why the Biden administration is deepening American security commitments in the Middle East instead of continuing to withdraw.
Two perceptions seem to be driving the new Biden approach. First, while continuing diplomatic outreach to Iran demonstrates that Team Biden hasn’t given up on reaching some kind of understanding with Tehran, for now at least it is accepting that the mullahs don’t want to play ball.
Second, the administration appears to have a new appreciation of the importance of the Middle East, and therefore of leading powers like Saudi Arabia and Israel, for American global strategy. Being the primary security and economic partner of the countries that dominate the world’s most important oil reserves still matters. America’s position in the Middle East gives us leverage over China’s energy supplies. It can ensure that the Middle East sovereign wealth funds prefer our tech and industrial sectors over those of our rivals. It can maintain the profitable defense relationships that help keep American arms makers ahead in a competitive arena.
This was all as true in January 2021 as it is today, but after 2½ years in office the administration now seems to get it. Team Biden now appears to understand that diplomatic relations and deepening formal security ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia could be the foundation of a new regional security architecture that secures critical American interests while reducing the long-term need for American military presence in the region. Getting the Saudis and the Israelis to “yes” will be difficult, but success would be transformational.
READ MORE GLOBAL VIEW
Geopolitical Climate DenialismAugust 7, 2023
The Delicate U.S. Task of Courting IndiaJuly 31, 2023
The Movement Shaping a Modern IndiaJuly 24, 2023
The biggest problem with the new approach is a familiar one: Iran. The mullahs will inevitably see a U.S.-backed regional security system aligning Israel and Saudi Arabia as a direct threat to their drive for regional hegemony. Iran has the capacity to cause a crisis in the Middle East any time it likes. It can accelerate the production of enriched uranium. It can attack shipping in the Gulf. It can order its proxies to launch missiles or stage terror attacks.
Team Biden seems to be hunting for a mix of carrots and sticks that will keep Iran quiet as the U.S. collaborates with the regime’s most bitter foes to build a powerful regional security architecture. Pallets of cash here, Marines on foreign-flagged tankers there. Can the U.S. pacify Iran while reassuring allies? We shall see.
There will be other problems, also familiar. Getting to yes will require the cooperation of two leaders who have little respect for Team Biden. Biden-era policy toward Saudi Arabia, pivoting awkwardly from icy contempt to oaths of undying affection, is a series of what my students would call “big yikes”—cringe-inducing rookie mistakes. And the chemistry between Mr. Netanyahu and the Democratic foreign-policy leaders of the Obama-Biden era has never been good.
Then there are the Palestinians. Although decades of Saudi and broader Arab frustration with Palestinian political incompetence have substantially reduced their influence in the region, the Palestinians haven’t fallen off the map. Saudi public opinion, and the government’s self-respect, will not permit Riyadh to reach agreements with Israel that set the Palestinians entirely off to one side. With most of the Israeli cabinet dead-set against any concessions, and the Palestinian leadership at a low ebb of authority and legitimacy among its people, addressing this problem could be even more difficult than usual.
Nevertheless, the Biden administration’s embrace of the Trump-era vision of Middle East regional security based on Arab-Israeli reconciliation with American support has opened the door to new and perhaps more creative diplomacy in a region that is critical to the global balance of power and world peace. That is a very good thing.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/09/11/paper-tiger-isolationism/
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/mistakes-of-the-past-haunt-us-china-relations-5484625?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-09-07&src_cmp=uschina-2023-09-07&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=China&est=przLS1o68k27YYlNuszJRPytsF%2FxU8nIA3kaw8mouKyGVpM98%2FtOT1ZrpxEvNmO2Eevq
-
As India rises, the G-20 Reveals a Shifting World Order
China and Russia seethe, Europe shrinks and America dithers.
Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Sept. 11, 2023 6:39 pm ET
Global gabfests rarely produce significant results, and last weekend’s Group of 20 summit in New Delhi was no exception. The carefully drafted and painfully negotiated declaration will be forgotten as quickly as all its predecessors. The war in Ukraine will rumble on exactly as if the language on the war had not been tweaked to favor the Russian position. The invitation to the African Union to participate in future G-20 summits won’t change the way the world works.
But even if the G-20 summit was no landmark in world history, it reflected three important continuing shifts. One of them works to America’s advantage. The other two will be more challenging to navigate.
The first and, from an American standpoint, the most beneficial of these developments is the emergence of India as one of the world’s leading powers and as an increasingly close partner of the U.S. The G-20 summit was a personal diplomatic triumph for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. With both the Chinese and Russian leaders absent, Mr. Modi dominated center stage at a world gathering just weeks after India joined the elite club of countries that have landed probes on the moon.
India’s rise is overall a positive for America, but the second big trend is more difficult. China, Russia and some of their partners are stepping up their opposition to the American-led world order that has dominated global politics since World War II. One of their goals is to build an illiberal anti-American coalition in the Global South. Both Moscow and Beijing would like the growing group of countries known as BRICS+ to replace such meetings as the G-20 and the Group of Seven as the primary forums in world politics.
India has a different approach. Its critique of the global status quo shares some features with the Sino-Russian view, but ultimately India wants to reform, not demolish, the world system. As Russia moves closer to China, and as India’s fears about Beijing’s agenda grow, the competition between China and its allies and India and its supporters in the Global South will intensify.
The third trend, the accelerating decline in Europe’s global influence and reach, is more challenging still for the U.S. Observers have long warned that Europe’s slow economic growth, demographic decline, military weakness and unrealistic approach to world politics would constrain the Continent’s role in world affairs. One conclusion from New Delhi is that the long-deferred day of reckoning seems to have arrived.
This has been a year of disaster for Europe’s global standing. France has been largely expelled from a once-dominant position across much of Africa. Mr. Putin has revealed Europe’s impotence in Ukraine. The primary goal of Turkish foreign policy used to be joining the European Union. Today Turkey has largely turned its back on Europe, and European influence throughout the Middle East is in precipitous decline. China appears poised to challenge the German automobile industry. High European energy prices are hastening the continent’s deindustrialization.
Europe’s relative marginalization at the weekend summit reflected these developments. Mr. Modi and President Biden dominated the diplomatic action in New Delhi. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping both stayed home but had more impact on the agenda than the seven European leaders who attended in person.
For most of the world, the overrepresentation of Europeans in global institutions is the greatest flaw in the international architecture. The redistribution of global power and influence away from Europe to rising powers in Asia and elsewhere is, for most G-20 countries, the most important action item on the “global governance” agenda that the world faces today.
READ MORE GLOBAL VIEW
How to Help Ukraine Win the War of AttritionSeptember 4, 2023
The View From the Kremlin Isn’t All BadAugust 28, 2023
Power Matters More Than DiplomacyAugust 21, 2023
This is a problem for the Biden administration. On the one hand, working with India and other moderate states in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere requires the U.S. to support a sensible agenda of global reform that inevitably will reduce Europe’s role. Looking further ahead, to the extent that American policy makers genuinely care about a working global political and economic order, the survival of that system requires reforming it to reflect Europe’s declining clout.
Yet when it comes to outcomes rather than architecture, Europe is Team Biden’s closest global ally. It is the Europeans and for the most part only the Europeans who share the climate-change, human-rights, democracy and general wokeness goals at the heart of Mr. Biden’s global agenda. Most of the world’s rising powers are profoundly skeptical when it comes to the liberal policy goals that unite American Democrats and their European counterparts. As Europe’s voice in global institutions fades, the Biden administration’s chief goals will become much harder to achieve.
India rising, China and Russia seething, Europe shrinking and America dithering. The G-20 meeting in New Delhi changed little but revealed much.
-
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/three-years-abraham-accords-biden-iran-deal-threatens-unravel-all
Sen. Joni Ernst
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/macron-not-wrong-about-china-us-should-worry?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1836
-
Hope he's right , , , What about the change of personel at the top of the nuke force?
===========September 19, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Chinese Mystery
By: George Friedman
Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu has disappeared. Some reports say he was meeting with Vietnamese officials when he was escorted away, but according to other reliable reports, he was detained before the meeting and thus had to cancel it. Chinese sources report that he is under investigation for corruption. In addition to leading the Ministry of Defense, Li is one of China’s five state councilors, which makes him an extremely important figure outranking other ministers.
This follows the disappearance in June of Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who was later replaced by Wang Yi. His removal is still unexplained, but his strong anti-American rhetoric did not sit well with China’s need to mend relations with the U.S. and secure foreign capital. In addition, several senior economic and banking figures have been dismissed recently, although not with the calculated drama obviously intended to raise questions.
These incidents call to mind the removal of former Chinese President Hu Jintao from the closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party last October. Hu’s removal was aired on television, while Li’s came at the last minute before a planned meeting with dignitaries from a country that China is trying to woo. China knew the impact these removals would have. Li and Qin were the two figures most responsible for Chinese foreign affairs – the former for national defense and the latter for politics. The world was startled. The Vietnamese are going to wonder whether a nation that treats its defense minister this way is stable enough to rely on. There are subtler ways to retire or arrest someone, but Beijing did not choose them. Clearly, China wanted both incidents to be noticed.
In a sense, a massive shakeup of the Chinese government is overdue, particularly if President Xi Jinping plans to keep his job. Xi took office in 2013, when the Chinese economy was surging and China’s strategic position was strengthening. There was in some circles a sense that China would surpass the United States in economic and military power. In the decade since, the Chinese economy has weakened dramatically, to the point that economic well-being at all levels of society has declined, without Xi taking effective steps to reverse the dip.
Related to this problem was the idea that China could surge its international and strategic power. Xi was obsessed with the United States, as many countries are for various reasons. He sought to create linkages to block the United States with programs like the Belt and Road Initiative, an economic plan in which economics was subordinate to national security. Xi positioned Belt and Road as the foundation of a fundamental shift in the balance of power, which failed. Simultaneously, China was challenging American naval power in the South China Sea, particularly around Taiwan.
Xi did not understand the degree to which China depended on the United States for its economic system. The United States was China’s number one source of exports, while U.S. investments and technology transfers anchored and drove China’s economic growth. Xi had positioned the United States as China’s main adversary for domestic and foreign reasons. Given past performance and ignoring the dynamic that was critical to China’s growth, China achieved its goal of being seen as the likely successor to the United States.
The problem that Xi had was that the United States took him seriously as well. Xi did not understand that the U.S. was built around economic cycles. As down cycles occurred, China would be affected, and as U.S. fear of China surged, a range of measures were implemented against China. Though the U.S. actions were not China’s primary problem, they were a significant complication. At the same time, China overestimated its naval development and technical capacity while seeming to underestimate U.S. capacities. The recent deepening of U.S. alliances with the Philippines and Papua New Guinea completed a line blocking China from the Aleutians to Australia, weakening Beijing’s strategic position significantly.
China is and will continue to be a significant country, but it is far from being able to challenge the United States. Xi miscalculated the importance of U.S. markets and capital and the willingness of the U.S. to deploy major force against China.
All this happened on Xi’s watch. He was superb at claiming premature victories in the domestic economy and global relations. He convinced the Chinese people of what he wanted them to believe. In such circumstances, a change of government would be inevitable and routine. But Xi is unable or unwilling to step aside. There may be conspiracies against him, and there are far more haunting his mind. He is hard-pressed to show that he knows their secrets and wields vast power, demonstrated by the arrest of high-ranking officials as publicly as possible. He is repeating the mistake that he made with the United States, convincing the Americans of China’s might and triggering a response that left China off balance to say the least. Xi’s enemies may well believe that he sees all and has the power to stop them, but that simply motivates them to be more effective. Xi can’t resign or admit failure. So ministers must disappear, and former presidents must be removed from meetings in sight of the world.
-
The Rules-Based International Order Is Quietly Disintegrating
It hasn’t been this threatened since the 1930s.
Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Sept. 25, 2023 6:06 pm ET
The most important fact in world politics is that 19 months after Vladimir Putin challenged the so-called rules-based international order head-on by invading Ukraine, the defense of that order is not going well. The world is less stable today than in February 2022, the enemies of the order hammer away, the institutional foundations of the order look increasingly shaky, and Western leaders don’t yet seem to grasp the immensity of the task before them.
This isn’t just about the military threats to the international system in such places as Ukraine and the Taiwan Strait. Even as the global geopolitical crisis becomes more acute, the core institutions and initiatives of the American-led world order and the governments that back them are growing progressively weaker and less relevant.
The United Nations was supposed to be the crown jewel of the rules-based order, but lately the power and prestige of this perennial underperformer has sunk to new lows. Among the leaders of the five permanent members of the Security Council, only Joe Biden bothered to show up for the General Assembly last week. Emmanuel Macron was too busy welcoming King Charles III on an entirely ceremonial state visit to Paris. Apparently neither the British king nor the French president thought the U.N. important enough to affect his plans. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak blew off a letter from the heads of more than 100 international-development nongovernmental organizations urging him to attend, the first prime minister in a decade to skip the annual meeting.
Mr. Putin and China’s Xi Jinping also ditched the U.N. meeting, but they weren’t staying at home and washing their hair. Both ostentatiously demonstrated their contempt for Western norms by inviting international pariahs for high-profile visits. Just before the U.N. meeting, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un headed to a Russian space-launch site, where Mr. Putin courted him and both leaders bragged about their deepening relations. And during the General Assembly, Mr. Xi welcomed Syria’s beleaguered Bashar al-Assad to Hangzhou.
There was a time when people would have cared what the U.N. had to say about international crises ranging from the string of coups across Africa and the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict to the alleged Indian involvement in the assassination of a Khalistan activist in Canada. Nobody today thinks that the deadlocked Security Council or the farcical General Assembly has a constructive role to play in these matters.
It isn’t only the United Nations. Messrs. Xi and Putin also ditched this month’s Group of 20 summit in New Delhi. Meantime, China was busy demonstrating its utter contempt for the World Court ruling against its “Nine-Dash line” territorial claims in the South China Sea. Beijing continues to develop military facilities on Mischief Reef, part of the internationally recognized Exclusive Economic Zone belonging to the Philippines, and increasingly polices its claimed maritime boundaries in defiance of Western protests.
The World Trade Organization is a shadow of its former self. As protectionist sentiment intensifies around the world, the WTO is largely toothless and voiceless. The Doha Round of trade talks collapsed years ago, and there is no prospect of a revival of the free-trade agenda that was an integral element of the rules-based order from the Bretton Woods negotiations during World War II on.
Arms-control and disarmament negotiations, another pillar of the rules-based order, are off the agenda. China has launched a massive nuclear buildup. Russia seems more interested in threatening the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine than in disarmament. As Iran nears the nuclear threshold, the early signs of a proliferation cascade are visible in the Middle East. Mr. Kim’s trip to Russia signals the final collapse of U.S. attempts to constrain North Korea’s nuclear program through U.N. sanctions. South Korea, where a majority of voters favor developing nuclear weapons, is paying attention. The development of hypersonic missiles, cyber attacks and biological weapons persists, with no meaningful attempt to address these problems through multilateral institutions, arms talks or anything else this side of the law of the jungle.
States are imploding and the rule of law is disappearing across large parts of the world. In Latin America, narco-trafficking crime organizations have infiltrated or supplanted weak states. Something similar is happening in the Sahel, with jihadist groups and bandits openly defying the authority of shambolic governments. Russia, China and Iran are happily fishing in these troubled waters, with few signs of effective Western responses to a growing security threat. The ignominious collapse of French power across Africa has been more dramatic, but the palsied incompetence of American responses to the erosion of civil order among our own neighbors is at least equally disgraceful, and equally grave.
Threatened by powerful and relentless adversaries from without, undermined by political decadence and institutional decay from within, the rules-based international order has not been this imperiled since the 1930s.
-
A ‘Trumpier’ Second-Term Foreign Policy
This time he’d hire people who agree with him, not seasoned establishment figures.
Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Oct. 2, 2023 6:14 pm ET
283
Gift unlocked article
Listen
(5 min)
image
Donald Trump speaks at a 2024 campaign rally in Dubuque, Iowa, Sept. 20. PHOTO: SCOTT MORGAN/REUTERS
Donald Trump has a historic lead in the Republican primary, and while November 2024 is a long 13 months away, national polls point to a close race that Mr. Trump could win. It is time to think about what a second Trump term would mean for American foreign policy. Thanks to his first-term record, his statements since leaving office, and the views of Trump associates and confidants such as Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence, it’s possible to discern what a MAGA 2.0 foreign policy might look like.
A second Trump term would almost certainly be “Trumpier” than the first. For much of his first term, Mr. Trump surrounded himself with well-known conservative foreign-policy figures and senior military leaders, often deferring to their advice. More experienced, more confident in his own judgment and less deferential to others’ expertise, Mr. Trump likely will fill senior positions with people who reflect rather than challenge his instincts and priorities.
There will be resistance from inside the government, but this time around it won’t come from senior officials, only from career civil servants in the Pentagon, State Department and the Treasury, aided by allies in the intelligence world. Expect explosive leaks, bureaucratic slow-walking and a permanent state of trench warfare in the government machine.
Mr. Trump’s talent for disruption will likely have larger and more lasting consequences in a second term than in the first. He has never been a supporter of the rules-based international order, and he attaches little importance to its institutions, from the United Nations to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He prefers transactional agreements with other powerful world leaders and considers his reputation for unpredictability one of his greatest assets in international affairs.
This makes him a disconcerting figure for American allies. On the one hand, threatening an American withdrawal from NATO to force such countries as Germany to honor their spending commitments is something Mr. Trump might very well try. On the other, he could surprise the world—and key American allies in Asia—by a willingness to seek some kind of grand bargain with Xi Jinping.
Ukraine policy is harder to predict. If the aid pipeline to Ukraine is already drying up because of congressional Republican opposition, by next spring President Volodymyr Zelensky may choose to open negotiations with Moscow well before the American election. In any case, even if a second Trump administration ends aid to Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s determination to increase American oil and gas production and boost military spending make a lasting reconciliation with Moscow unlikely.
READ MORE GLOBAL VIEW
The Rules-Based International Order Is Quietly DisintegratingSeptember 25, 2023
Climate Policy and World OrderSeptember 18, 2023
As India Rises, the G-20 Reveals a Shifting World OrderSeptember 11, 2023
Geographically, experienced Trump hands like Mr. Grenell suggest that the Western Hemisphere would be a major second-term focus. Re-establishing order on America’s southern border matters much, much more to Team Trump than the future of Crimea. Expect a mix of threats, promises and a willingness to dance with the devil (perhaps even the Maduro government in Venezuela) in a single-minded focus on addressing the migration crisis.
Climate policy will shift dramatically. Mr. Trump shares President Biden’s belief that “foreign policy for the middle class” entails large-scale federal intervention to protect American industry. But whereas Mr. Biden orients his massive program of industrial planning toward his climate-change goals, Mr. Trump will more likely intervene on behalf of fossil fuels, traditional heavy industry and the defense sector.
A second Trump term would see continuities as well. After grumbling and resistance, the Biden administration has embraced the essence of Mr. Trump’s approach to important leaders such as the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the president of Turkey and the prime ministers of Israel and India. A brief but expensive era of name-calling and vainglorious human-rights posturing has been replaced by pragmatic bargaining. Trumpian indifference to human rights and democracy could also affect relations with governments like the military rulers of Myanmar.
For many decades, foreign governments have tried to curry favor in Washington through developing business relationships with friends, associates and at times relatives of American presidents.
The interest of many Trump associates in lucrative business arrangements is as well known overseas as Hunter Biden’s interest in “consulting.” The profoundly corrosive and damaging erosion of norms around presidential conflicts of interest will continue and perhaps accelerate in a second Trump term.
There is a final area of continuity that shouldn’t be ignored. Mr. Biden’s global strength has been constrained by international skepticism about the durability of his party’s hold on power. Similar doubts will dog Mr. Trump if he returns to the White House in 2025. The U.S. under Mr. Trump would remain deeply polarized, and foreigners would discount Mr. Trump’s promises and threats, as they have done Mr. Biden’s, to the degree that they believe that American policy will shift radically again in 2029.
-
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/causes-and-consequences-ukraine-crisis-203182?page=0%2C1
-
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/robert-gates-america-china-russia-dysfunctional-superpower?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=The%20Dysfunctional%20Superpower&utm_content=20231006&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week%20-%20112017
The Dysfunctional Superpower
Can a Divided America Deter China and Russia?
By Robert M. Gates
September 29, 2023
Isabel Seliger
Sign in and save to read later
Print this article
Send by email
Share on Twitter
Share on Facebook
Share on LinkedIn
Get a link
Page url
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/robert-gates-america-china-russia-dysfunctional-superpower
Get Citation
Request Reprint Permissions
Play
Download Article
The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia. And no one alive can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today.
The problem, however, is that at the very moment that events demand a strong and coherent response from the United States, the country cannot provide one. Its fractured political leadership—Republican and Democratic, in the White House and in Congress—has failed to convince enough Americans that developments in China and Russia matter. Political leaders have failed to explain how the threats posed by these countries are interconnected. They have failed to articulate a long-term strategy to ensure that the United States, and democratic values more broadly, will prevail.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have much in common, but two shared convictions stand out. First, each is convinced that his personal destiny is to restore the glory days of his country’s imperial past. For Xi, this means reclaiming imperial China’s once dominant role in Asia while harboring even greater ambitions for global influence. For Putin, it means pursuing an awkward mixture of reviving the Russian Empire and recapturing the deference that was accorded the Soviet Union. Second, both leaders are convinced that the developed democracies—above all, the United States—are past their prime and have entered an irreversible decline. This decline, they believe, is evident in these democracies’ growing isolationism, political polarization, and domestic disarray.
Stay informed.
In-depth analysis delivered weekly.
Taken together, Xi’s and Putin’s convictions portend a dangerous period ahead for the United States. The problem is not merely China’s and Russia’s military strength and aggressiveness. It is also that both leaders have already made major miscalculations at home and abroad and seem likely to make even bigger ones in the future. Their decisions could well lead to catastrophic consequences for themselves—and for the United States. Washington must therefore change Xi’s and Putin’s calculus and reduce the chances of disaster, an effort that will require strategic vision and bold action. The United States prevailed in the Cold War thanks to a consistent strategy pursued by both political parties through nine successive presidencies. It needs a similar bipartisan approach today. Therein lies the rub.
The United States finds itself in a uniquely treacherous position: facing aggressive adversaries with a propensity to miscalculate yet incapable of mustering the unity and strength necessary to dissuade them. Successfully deterring leaders such as Xi and Putin depends on the certainty of commitments and constancy of response. Yet instead, dysfunction has made American power erratic and unreliable, practically inviting risk-prone autocrats to place dangerous bets—with potentially catastrophic effects.
XI’S AMBITIONS
Xi’s call for “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” is shorthand for China becoming the dominant world power by 2049, the centenary of the Communists’ victory in the Chinese Civil War. That objective includes bringing Taiwan back under the control of Beijing. In his words, “The complete unification of the motherland must be realized, and it will be realized.” To that end, Xi has directed the Chinese military to be ready by 2027 to successfully invade Taiwan, and he has pledged to modernize the Chinese military by 2035 and turn it into a “world-class” force. Xi seems to believe that only by taking Taiwan can he secure for himself status comparable to Mao Zedong’s in the pantheon of Chinese Communist Party legends.
Xi’s aspirations and sense of personal destiny entail significant risk of war. Just as Putin has disastrously miscalculated in Ukraine, there is a considerable danger Xi will do so in Taiwan. He has already dramatically miscalculated at least three times. First, by departing from the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s maxim of “hide your strength, bide your time,” Xi has provoked exactly the response Deng feared: the United States has mobilized its economic power to slow China’s growth, begun strengthening and modernizing its military, and bolstered its alliances and military partnerships in Asia. A second major miscalculation was Xi’s leftward swing in economic policies, an ideological shift that began in 2015 and was reinforced at the 2022 National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. His policies, from inserting the party into the management of companies to increasingly relying on state-owned enterprises, have profoundly harmed China’s economy. Third, Xi’s “zero COVID” policy, as the economist Adam Posen has written in these pages, “made visible and tangible the CCP’s arbitrary power over everyone’s commercial activities, including those of the smallest players.” The resulting uncertainty, accentuated by his sudden reversal of that policy, has reduced Chinese consumer spending and thus further damaged the entire economy.
If preserving the power of the party is Xi’s first priority, taking Taiwan is his second. If China relies on measures short of war to pressure Taiwan to preemptively surrender, that effort will likely fail. And so Xi would be left with the option of risking war by imposing a full-scale naval blockade or even launching an all-out invasion to conquer the island. He may think he would be fulfilling his destiny by trying, but win or lose, the economic and military costs of provoking a war over Taiwan would be catastrophic for China, not to mention for everyone else involved. Xi would be making a monumental mistake.
Despite Xi’s miscalculations and his country’s many internal difficulties, China will continue to pose a formidable challenge to the United States. Its military is stronger than ever. China now boasts more warships than the United States (although they are of poorer quality). It has modernized and restructured both its conventional forces and its nuclear forces—and is nearly doubling its deployed strategic nuclear forces—and upgraded its command-and-control system. It is in the process of strengthening its capabilities in space and cyberspace, as well.
Xi’s sense of personal destiny entails significant risk of war.
Beyond its military moves, China has pursued a comprehensive strategy aimed at increasing its power and influence globally. China is now the top trading partner of more than 120 countries, including nearly all of those in South America. More than 140 countries have signed up as participants in the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s sprawling infrastructure development program, and China now owns, manages, or has invested in more than 100 ports in some 60 countries.
Complementing these widening economic relationships is a pervasive propaganda and media network. No country on earth is beyond the reach of at least one Chinese radio station, television channel, or online news site. Through these and other outlets, Beijing attacks American actions and motives, erodes faith in the international institutions the United States created after World War II, and trumpets the supposed superiority of its development and governance model—all while advancing the theme of Western decline.
There are at least two concepts invoked by those who think the United States and China are destined for conflict. One is “the Thucydides trap.” According to this theory, war is inevitable when a rising power confronts an established power, as when Athens confronted Sparta in antiquity or when Germany confronted the United Kingdom before World War I. Another is “peak China,” the idea that the country’s economic and military power is or will soon be at its strongest, while ambitious initiatives to strengthen the U.S. military will take years to bear fruit. Thus, China might well invade Taiwan before the military disparity in Asia changes China’s disadvantage.
But neither theory is convincing. There was nothing inevitable about World War I; it happened because of the stupidity and arrogance of Europe’s leaders. And the Chinese military itself is far from ready for a major conflict. Thus, a direct Chinese attack on or invasion of Taiwan, if it happens at all, is some years in the future. Unless, of course, Xi grievously miscalculates—again.
PUTIN’S GAMBLE
“Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, the political scientist and former U.S. national security adviser, once observed. Putin certainly shares that view. In pursuit of Russia’s lost empire, he invaded Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022—with the latter adventure turning out to be a catastrophic miscalculation with devastating long-term consequences for his country. Rather than dividing and weakening NATO, Russia’s actions have given the alliance new purpose (and, in Finland and, soon, Sweden, powerful new members). Strategically, Russia is far worse off now than it was before the invasion.
Economically, oil sales to China, India, and other states have offset much of the financial impact of sanctions, and consumer goods and technology from China, Turkey, and other countries in Central Asia and the Middle East have partly replaced those once imported from the West. Still, Russia has been subjected to extraordinary sanctions by virtually all developed democracies. Countless Western firms have pulled their investments and abandoned the country, including the oil and gas companies whose technology is essential to sustain Russia’s primary source of income. Thousands of young tech experts and entrepreneurs have fled. In invading Ukraine, Putin has mortgaged his country’s future.
A broadcast of Chinese military drills, Beijing, August 2023
Tingshu Wang / Reuters
As for Russia’s military, even though the war has significantly degraded its conventional forces, Moscow retains the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Thanks to arms control agreements, that arsenal includes only a few more deployed strategic nuclear weapons than what the United States has. But Russia has ten times as many tactical nuclear weapons—about 1,900.
This large nuclear arsenal notwithstanding, the prospects for Putin seem grim. With his hopes for a quick conquest of Ukraine dashed, he appears to be counting on a rough military stalemate to exhaust the Ukrainians, betting that by next spring or summer, the public in Europe and the United States will tire of sustaining them. As a temporary alternative to a conquered Ukraine, he may be willing to consider a crippled Ukraine—a rump state that lies in ruins, its exports slashed and its foreign aid dramatically reduced. Putin wanted Ukraine as part of a reconstituted Russian Empire; he also feared a democratic, modern, and prosperous Ukraine as an alternative model for Russians next door. He will not get the former, but he may believe he can prevent the latter.
As long as Putin is in power, Russia will remain an adversary of the United States and NATO. Through arms sales, security assistance, and discounted oil and gas, he is cultivating new relationships in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. He will continue to use all means at his disposal to sow division in the United States and Europe and undermine U.S. influence in the global South. Emboldened by his partnership with Xi and confident that his modernized nuclear arsenal will deter military action against Russia, he will continue to aggressively challenge the United States. Putin has already made one historic miscalculation; no one can be sure he will not make another.
AMERICA IMPAIRED
For now, the United States would seem to be in a strong position vis-à-vis both China and Russia. Above all, the U.S. economy is doing well. Business investment in new manufacturing facilities, some of it subsidized by new government infrastructure and technology programs, is booming. New investments by both government and business in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and bioengineering promise to widen the technological and economic gap between the United States and every other country for years to come.
Diplomatically, the war in Ukraine has handed the United States new opportunities. The early warning that Washington gave its friends and allies about Russia’s intention to invade Ukraine restored their faith in U.S. intelligence capabilities. Renewed fears of Russia have allowed the United States to strengthen and expand NATO, and the military aid it has given Ukraine has provided clear evidence that it can be trusted to fulfill its commitments. Meanwhile, China’s economic and diplomatic bullying in Asia and Europe has backfired, enabling the United States to strengthen its relationships in both regions.
The U.S. military has been healthily funded in recent years, and modernization programs are underway in all three legs of the nuclear triad—intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers, and submarines. The Pentagon is buying new combat aircraft (F-35s, modernized F-15s, and a new, sixth-generation fighter), along with a new fleet of tanker aircraft for in-flight refueling. The army is procuring some two dozen new platforms and weapons, and the navy is building additional ships and submarines. The military continues to develop new kinds of weapons, such as hypersonic munitions, and strengthen its offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities. All told, the United States spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined, including Russia and China.
Sadly, however, America’s political dysfunction and policy failures are undermining its success. The U.S. economy is threatened by runaway federal government spending. Politicians from both parties have failed to address the spiraling cost of entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Perennial opposition to raising the debt ceiling has undermined confidence in the economy, causing investors to worry about what would happen if Washington actually defaulted. (In August 2023, the ratings agency Fitch downgraded the United States’ credit rating, raising borrowing costs for the government.) The appropriations process in Congress has been broken for years. Legislators have repeatedly failed to enact individual appropriations bills, passed gigantic “omnibus” laws that no one has read, and forced government shutdowns.
As long as Putin is in power, Russia will remain a U.S. adversary.
Diplomatically, former President Donald Trump’s disdain for U.S. allies, his fondness for authoritarian leaders, his willingness to sow doubt about the United States’ commitment to its NATO allies, and his generally erratic behavior undermined U.S. credibility and respect across the globe. But just seven months into the administration of President Joe Biden, the United States’ abrupt, disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan further damaged the rest of the world’s confidence in Washington.
For years, U.S. diplomacy has neglected much of the global South, the central front for nonmilitary competition with China and Russia. The United States’ ambassadorships are disproportionately left vacant in this part of the world. Beginning in 2022, after years of neglect, the United States scrambled to revive its relationships with Pacific island nations—but only after China had taken advantage of Washington’s absence to sign security and economic agreements with these countries. The competition with China and even Russia for markets and influence is global. The United States cannot afford to be absent anywhere.
The military also pays a price for American political dysfunction—particularly in Congress. Every year since 2010, Congress has failed to approve appropriations bills for the military before the start of the next fiscal year. Instead, legislators have passed a “continuing resolution,” which allows the Pentagon to spend no more money than it did the previous year and prohibits it from starting anything new or increasing spending on existing programs. These continuing resolutions govern defense spending until a new appropriations bill can be passed, and they have lasted from a few weeks to an entire fiscal year. The result is that each year, imaginative new programs and initiatives go nowhere for an unpredictable period.
The Budget Control Act of 2011 put in place automatic spending cuts, known as “sequestration,” and reduced the federal budget by $1.2 trillion over ten years. The military, which then accounted for only about 15 percent of federal expenditures, was forced to absorb half that cut—$600 billion. With personnel costs exempted, the bulk of the reductions had to come from maintenance, operations, training, and investment accounts. The consequences were severe and long-lasting. And yet as of September 2023, Congress is headed toward making the same mistake again. A further example of Congress letting politics do real harm to the military is allowing one senator to block confirmation of hundreds of senior officers for months on end, not only seriously degrading readiness and leadership but also—by highlighting American governmental dysfunction in such a critical area—making the United States a laughingstock among its adversaries. The bottom line is that the United States needs more military power to meet the threats it faces, but both Congress and the Executive Branch are rife with obstacles to achieving that objective.
MEETING THE MOMENT
The epic contest between the United States and its allies on one side and China, Russia, and their fellow travelers on the other is well underway. To ensure that Washington is in the strongest possible position to deter its adversaries from making additional strategic miscalculations, U.S. leaders must first address the breakdown in the decades-long bipartisan agreement with respect to the United States’ role in the world. It is not surprising that after 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Americans wanted to turn inward, especially given the United States’ many problems at home. But it is the job of political leaders to counter that sentiment and explain how the country’s fate is inextricably bound up in what happens elsewhere. President Franklin Roosevelt once observed that “the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate.” But recent presidents, along with most members of Congress, have utterly failed in this essential responsibility.
Americans need to understand why U.S. global leadership, despite its costs, is vital to preserving peace and prosperity. They need to know why a successful Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion is crucial for deterring China from invading Taiwan. They need to know why Chinese domination of the Western Pacific endangers U.S. interests. They need to know why Chinese and Russian influence in the global South matters to American pocketbooks. They need to know why the United States’ dependability as an ally is so consequential for preserving peace. They need to know why a Chinese-Russian alliance threatens the United States. These are the kinds of connections that American political leaders need to be drawing every day.
It is not just one Oval Office address or speech on the floor of Congress that is needed. Rather, a drumbeat of repetition is required for the message to sink in. Beyond regularly communicating to the American people directly, and not through spokespersons, the president needs to spend time over drinks and dinners and in small meetings with members of Congress and the media making the case for the United States’ leadership role. Then, given the fragmented nature of modern-day communications, members of Congress need to carry the message to their constituents across the country.
Putin addressing Russian military units, Moscow, June 2023
Sergei Guneev / Reuters
What is that message? It is that American global leadership has provided 75 years of great-power peace—the longest stretch in centuries. Nothing in a nation’s life is costlier than war, nor does anything else represent a greater threat to its security and prosperity. And nothing makes war likelier than putting one’s head in the sand and pretending that the United States is not affected by events elsewhere, as the country learned before World War I, World War II, and 9/11. The military power the United States possesses, the alliances it has forged, and the international institutions it has designed are all essential to deterring aggression against it and its partners. As a century of evidence should make clear, failing to deal with aggressors only encourages more aggression. It is naive to believe that Russian success in Ukraine will not lead to further Russian aggression in Europe and possibly even a war between NATO and Russia. And it is equally naive to believe that Russian success in Ukraine will not significantly increase the likelihood of Chinese aggression against Taiwan and thus potentially a war between the United States and China.
A world without reliable U.S. leadership would be a world of authoritarian predators, with all other countries potential prey. If America is to safeguard its people, its security, and its liberty, it must continue to embrace its global leadership role. As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said of the United States in 1943, “The price of greatness is responsibility.”
Rebuilding support at home for that responsibility is essential to rebuilding trust among allies and awareness among adversaries that the United States will fulfill its commitments. Because of domestic divisions, mixed messages, and political leaders’ ambivalence about the United States’ role in the world, there is significant doubt abroad about American reliability. Both friends and adversaries wonder whether Biden’s engagement and alliance-building is a return to normal or whether Trump’s “America first” disdain for allies will be the dominant thread in American policy in the future. Even the closest of allies are hedging their bets about America. In a world where Russia and China are on the prowl, that is particularly dangerous.
Restoring public support for U.S. global leadership is the highest priority, but the United States must take other steps to actually exercise that role. First, it needs to go beyond “pivoting” to Asia. Strengthening relationships with Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and other countries in the region is necessary but not sufficient. China and Russia are working together against U.S. interests on every continent. Washington needs a strategy for dealing with the entire world—particularly in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, where the Russians and the Chinese are fast outpacing the United States in developing security and economic relationships. This strategy ought not to divide the world into democracies and authoritarians. The United States must always advocate for democracy and human rights everywhere, but that commitment must not blind Washington to the reality that U.S. national interests sometimes require it to work with repressive, unrepresentative governments.
China and Russia think the future belongs to them.
Second, the United States’ strategy must incorporate all the instruments of its national power. Both Republicans and Democrats have grown hostile to trade agreements, and protectionist sentiment runs strong in Congress. This has left the field open for the Chinese in the global South, which offers huge markets and investment opportunities. Despite the Belt and Road Initiative’s flaws, such as the enormous debt it piles on recipient countries, Beijing has successfully used it to insinuate China’s influence, companies, and economic tentacles into scores of countries. Enshrined in the Chinese constitution in 2017, it is not going away. The United States and its allies need to figure out how to compete with the initiative in ways that play to their strengths—above all, their private sectors. U.S. development assistance programs add up to a small fraction of the Chinese effort. They are also fragmented and disconnected from larger U.S. geopolitical objectives. And even where U.S. aid programs are successful, the United States maintains a priestly silence about its accomplishments. It has said little, for example, about Plan Colombia, an aid program designed to combat the Colombian drug trade, or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which saved millions of lives in Africa.
Public diplomacy is essential to promoting U.S. interests, but Washington has let this important instrument of power wither since the end of the Cold War. Meanwhile, China is spending billions of dollars around the world to advance its narrative. Russia also has an aggressive effort to spread its propaganda and disinformation, as well as incite discord in and among democracies. The United States needs a strategy for influencing foreign leaders and publics—especially in the global South. To succeed, this strategy would require the U.S. government not merely to spend more money but also to integrate and synchronize its many disparate communications activities.
Security assistance to foreign governments is another area in need of radical change. Although the U.S. military does a good job training foreign forces, it makes piecemeal decisions about where and how to do so without sufficiently considering regional strategies or how better to partner with allies. Russia has increasingly provided security assistance to governments in Africa, especially those with an authoritarian bent, but the United States has no effective strategy to counter this effort. Washington must also figure out a way to accelerate the delivery of military equipment to recipient states. There is now a roughly $19 billion backlog of weapons sales to Taiwan, with delays ranging from four to ten years. Although the holdup is the result of many factors, an important cause is the limited production capacity of the U.S. defense industry.
U.S. Marines in the Baltic Sea, September 2023
Janis Laizans / Reuters
Third, the United States must rethink its nuclear strategy in the face of a Chinese-Russian alliance. Cooperation between Russia, which is modernizing its strategic nuclear force, and China, which is vastly expanding its once small force, tests the credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent—as do North Korea’s expanding nuclear capabilities and Iran’s weapons potential. To reinforce its deterrent, the United States almost certainly needs to adapt its strategy and probably needs to expand the size of its nuclear forces, as well. The Chinese and Russian navies are increasingly exercising together, and it would be surprising if they were not also more closely coordinating their deployed strategic nuclear forces.
There is broad agreement in Washington that the U.S. Navy needs many more warships and submarines. Again, the contrast between politicians’ rhetoric and action is stark. For a number of years, the shipbuilding budget was basically flat, but in recent years, even as the budget has increased substantially, continuing resolutions and execution problems have prevented the navy’s expansion. The main obstacles to a bigger navy are budgetary: the lack of sustained higher funding to the navy itself and, more broadly, underinvestment in shipyards and in industries that support shipbuilding and ship maintenance. Even so, it is difficult to discern any sense of urgency among politicians for remedying these problems anytime soon. That is unacceptable.
Finally, Congress must change the way it appropriates money for the Defense Department, and the Defense Department must change the way it spends that money. Congress needs to act more quickly and efficiently when it comes to approving the defense budget. That means, above all, passing military appropriations bills before the start of the fiscal year, a change that would give the Defense Department badly needed predictability. The Pentagon, for its part, must fix its sclerotic, parochial, and bureaucratic acquisition processes, which are especially anachronistic in an era when agility, flexibility, and speed matter more than ever. Leaders in the Defense Department have said the right things about these defects and announced many initiatives to correct them. Effective and urgent execution is the challenge.
LESS TALK, MORE ACTION
China and Russia think the future belongs to them. For all the tough rhetoric coming from the U.S. Congress and the Executive Branch about pushing back against these adversaries, there is surprisingly little action. Too often, new initiatives are announced, only for funding and actual implementation to move slowly or fail to materialize altogether. Talk is cheap, and no one in Washington seems ready to make the urgent changes needed. That is especially puzzling, since at a time of bitter partisanship and polarization in Washington, Xi and Putin have managed to forge impressive, if fragile, bipartisan support among policymakers for a strong U.S. response to their aggression. The Executive Branch and Congress have a rare opportunity to work together to back up their rhetoric about countering China and Russia with far-reaching actions that make the United States a significantly more formidable adversary and might help deter war.
Xi and Putin, cocooned by yes men, have already made serious errors that have cost their countries dearly. In the long run, they have damaged their countries. For the foreseeable future, however, they remain a danger that the United States must deal with. Even in the best of worlds—one in which the U.S. government had a supportive public, energized leaders, and a coherent strategy—these adversaries would pose a formidable challenge. But the domestic scene today is far from orderly: the American public has turned inward; Congress has descended into bickering, incivility, and brinkmanship; and successive presidents have either disavowed or done a poor job explaining America’s global role. To contend with such powerful, risk-prone adversaries, the United States needs to up its game in every dimension. Only then can it hope to deter Xi and Putin from making more bad bets. The peril is real.
-
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/10/08/watch_national_security_advisor_sullivan_said_mideast_is_quieter_than_any_time_since_911_--_eight_days_before_massive_hamas_attack.html
Bragging about Middle East being quiet under their watch 8 days prior did not age well.
Nor did our cash payment and easing of sanctions on Iran, financing this war on Israel to the tune of $60B.
"Terror emboldened and financed."
Put that with your Biden Harris Obama bumper stickers.
-
US would love to take out Iran, on the pretext of their role in supporting Hamas. However, Iran controls the Hormuz strait. Oil could go up to $200, the US SPR is low, elections are near. Biden is in a bind.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F79tk3HXoAAyr2w?format=jpg&name=small)
-
"Can a Divided America Deter China and Russia?"
To answer his title question, no.
Can an America united under principles of appeasement and isolation deter them? Also no.
How about an America united under a strong, popular leader, with a strong economy, a strong defense, and strong commitment to deter tyrannical expansion? That might be worth a try.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeBG6njY03g
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/beijings-silence-on-hamas-attacks-on-israel-sparks-concern-of-its-role-in-middle-east-politics-5508633?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-10-13&src_cmp=uschina-2023-10-13&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=China&est=s%2FzwgID0C7aSd%2FfCqISHxkYxq9%2F50nqF%2Bpka3xJlSimDA8S21KVKJ%2F1eynbL%2B9lKsUL6
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/we-cant-separate-the-new-axis/
-
second
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/11/israel-hamas-and-the-end-of-pax-americana/
-
https://news.yahoo.com/ben-rhodes-u-telling-israel-015932629.html
I can only hope this guy is NEVER near another White House ever again.
-
This could likely be filed more that one place. I will be quite surprised if A 10s do hit Hamas targets, but would give the Biden admin grudging points if that occurs:
https://weapons.substack.com/p/big-power-involvement-in-the-gaza?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR0CkyijXBciegC_4ZD3WpZAZ5dfIWMlQibU4FTsd2gL7XqHcscViSYqQuQ
-
"would give the Biden admin grudging points if that occurs"
- We take considerable pride in giving people like Biden credit when deserved and ripping or correcting our own side when wrong. Wish the MSM would do that.
-
" - We take considerable pride in giving people like Biden credit when deserved and ripping or correcting our own side when wrong. Wish the MSM would do that."
YES.
I am seeing some efforts by some at FOX to praise Biden's strong words, but so far IMHO Biden's words in important aspects are but Kabuki theater -- where is holding Iran to account? What about Biden lifting oil sanctions ($40B?!?) and the $6B and pardoning the Iranian spies?
-
This piece speaks to Crafty's questions in the post above, and asks who in Washington knew about the Israeli attacks, when did they know it, and was that info concealed so as to not upset any Irani apple carts:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/biden-administration-tries-hide-knew-impending-massacre-leaving-iran-untouched-hamas-lee-smith?fbclid=IwAR2teIvtIEYdnMCX8MT_jWON5C7rJSKNw5y9BuU9v79Bw6CI16Fof3Vre0k
-
Pasting this here on behalf of BBG.
https://johnhelmer.org/the-existential-trap-the-pentagon-has-just-fallen-into-it-as-biden-tries-to-avoid-carters-hostage-rescue-disaster/#more-71116
I would note that I have been predicting this fustercluck in which we find ourselves for quite some time now.
-
second
October 24, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
Russia, Ukraine and Thinking Extreme Thoughts
By: George Friedman
In a recent article, I wrote that the war in Ukraine is over, but nobody knows how to end it. What I meant by that was that the general outline of the military aspects of the war is locked in, and the conflict is contained. The war was started by the Russians, who wanted to take control of Ukraine to create a buffer zone that would prevent the United States and Ukraine from threatening Russia. The United States intervened by sending weapons to Ukraine to block a Russian advance that could threaten NATO and Western Europe. The Ukrainians wanted to block the Russians from taking any territory from their homeland.
The war was part of a series of defensive moves by Russia, the United States and Ukraine, with each more offensive and dangerous than the last. The Russian thrust failed to break the Ukrainians and the Americans. Their defensive capabilities, coupled with their fear of defeat, blunted the Russian advance. The Russians’ fear prevented them from abandoning their constant efforts to disrupt the defenses.
The Russians are not, in my opinion, breaking their enemies. At the same time, the Ukrainians will not be able to break the Russians, in part because the improbability of success will limit any attack, and because the United States, having succeeded in blocking threats to its interest, has little will to sustain the battle. This would seem to impose the endgame on all sides, but the matter is more complex.
Any settlement not emanating from the total defeat of one side would have to address the root cause of the war, which was Russia's fear of a future attack. Russia would have to be induced to a deal by both the realization of the improbability of military success and some reduction of its sense of vulnerability via the annexation of a significant part of Ukraine, but far from all of it. The problem for Ukraine is that such a settlement could serve merely as an interlude until Russia refreshes its force and resumes the attack. Ukraine cannot be certain of U.S. military support at a later date and therefore would face a difficult military situation.
In a war that ends without the total defeat of one side, the fear is that any settlement would simply be a prelude to a renewed conflict and defeat down the road. The Russian view would be that any cession of land would be insufficient. The Ukrainians fear that the cession of land would make Russia far more dangerous, and the Americans would be afraid of endless war causing domestic resistance and vulnerability to other threats.
In examining what appears to be a hopeless situation, we need to consider Russia’s non-military needs. The Soviet Union was impoverished, and its military position was not as strong as many thought. Its fall left Russia in a similar position. There was no radical solution. Russia needs to rectify this situation at a time when its military weakness is even clearer. For Russia, turning itself into a nation that is in the first rank economically is fundamental. Using military force to achieve this hasn’t worked.
The United States faces a choice between ongoing war or effectively capitulating to Russia. Russia’s fear of attack coincides with the reality that the United States intends to cripple Russia economically. In supporting Ukraine, that is clearly Washington’s intent, but before the war, the U.S. approach was more like indifference. After World War II, the United States took an almost economic track toward its former enemies. Rather than breaking the Japanese and German nations, something that would have been quite rational, the United States undertook programs of reconstruction, enabling both Japan and West Germany to emerge as world-leading economic powers.
The Americans understood after the treatment of Germany following World War I that trying to crush a nation could cost the United States and the world a great deal, whereas rehabilitating the defeated helped to avoid wars of revenge while enhancing the global economic system. It also opened the door to military and political alliances. West Germany joined NATO, and Japan became a long-term American ally.
I have tried to show that the war has ended – in the sense that no one is in a position to achieve their goal – but that a peace settlement that sustains itself is extremely difficult. If the United States follows the World War II model in which, rather than demanding surrender, which is not possible for Moscow, it focuses on a relationship based on rebuilding rather than destroying Russia, it might withdraw from a war that is over, while the Russians might pursue their economic interest: developing an economy that places them in the top rank of nations.
Russia is filled with valuable natural resources, a workforce that requires training and an industrial plant that needs rebuilding. This would not be a government project beyond some encouragement, but an investment opportunity. The U.S. government did not create Toyota or Daimler-Benz. The strategy humanized barbaric enemies.
I am not by any means a pacifist, nor am I given to heartwarming fantasies. What I am doing is facing the fact that the United States is involved in a war that will not yield to common sense because of the reasonable fears of all sides. And I am reaching back to the lessons of World War II and how the U.S. treated its defeated enemies. Russia is not defeated and has the power to continue the war, even if it does not win. This is not in America’s interest, but turning Russia from an insecure enemy to an investment opportunity would be. And, of course, U.S. troops would remain in Europe for now, if needed.
There is nothing idealistic in this. It is simply the way American wars tend to end. Therefore, it is intended as a solution in the national interest. Whether it will be followed or anyone will agree is uncertain, but the question is: How many years is a war in gridlock worth?
-
WRM surprises to the downside with this one.
=====================================
Can China Help in the Middle East?
It is a more formidable potential adversary than Russia or Iran but shares interests with the U.S.
Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Oct. 25, 2023 6:14 pm ET
44
Gift unlocked article
Listen
(6 min)
imageNational security adviser Jake Sullivan and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Malta, Sept. 16. PHOTO: LIAN YI/XINHUA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
As Team Biden contemplates the ruins of its Middle East diplomacy and scrambles to throw more U.S. military assets into the region in the hope of deterring Iran, it is looking to an unlikely partner. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi will be in Washington this week for talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
Mr. Wang’s visit was originally part of a diplomatic process preparing the way for a trip by President Xi Jinping to next month’s Asia-Pacific economic summit in San Francisco. But as Mr. Blinken underlined in remarks to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, America wants help from China to prevent a wider war in the Middle East.
It isn’t a totally crazy idea. China imports a lot of Middle Eastern oil, and supply shortfalls and price hikes won’t help a Chinese economy struggling with the collapse of its real-estate market and a potential financial crisis. If China does want to play a major role, it is well prepared to do so. Because of a planned handover between China’s 44th and 45th naval escort task forces in the People’s Liberation Army Navy, both forces are currently active in the Persian Gulf, making Beijing, temporarily, the leading naval presence in the strategic waterway.
MARC: WELL, THAT IS A HELLUVA COINCIDENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
On paper, Team Biden and Team Xi seem to want pretty much the same things in the Middle East. China’s envoy Zhai Jun is touring the Middle East, Chinese state media reports, to promote dialogue, achieve a cease-fire and restore peace, as well as to promote a two-state solution. That sounds a lot like what Mr. Blinken says.
The outreach to China over the Middle East comes amid other signs of a warming trend in Sino-American relations. Since Messrs. Sullivan and Wang met last spring in Vienna, the American secretaries of state, Treasury and commerce and climate envoy John Kerry have all visited Beijing. Messrs. Sullivan and Wang reunited in Malta last month. Mr. Xi himself sent a friendly message that was read at the Oct. 24 dinner in New York of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He called the U.S.-China relationship crucial to the world and expressed Chinese willingness to cooperate with the U.S. to respond to global challenges.
Turning to China for help in the Middle East would be a shift from the Biden administration’s initial foreign policy. Its early goal was to park Russia and pacify Iran to concentrate America’s economic, diplomatic and military assets on the greater threat of a rising China. Potentially, the new policy could be exactly the opposite: an attempt to park China to focus more effectively on Russia and Iran.
From the standpoint of a rattled administration frantically trying to respond to a string of unanticipated events, there’s a lot to be said for working with Beijing. China, while a more formidable potential adversary than Russia or Iran, has common interests with the U.S. that the two more radical adversaries lack. Both China and America like global economic stability and quiet in the Middle East. Both countries benefit from a world that is open to commerce and investment.
Team Biden’s experiences with a world in flames and Team Xi’s worries about China’s economic problems are probably concentrating minds in Washington and Beijing about options for at least a period of détente.
One hopes for the best, but as the Biden administration has learned, parking adversaries is harder than it looks. China doesn’t want the Middle East consumed in a regional war that causes a global energy crisis, but it does want to break American power in the region. President Obama turned to Russia to bail him out of his embarrassing predicament after he blew off his own red line against Syria’s use of chemical weapons in its civil war.
Russia duly “cooperated” by collecting at least some of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile, but the price to American power and prestige was far higher than Mr. Obama understood. To this day, the position Russia gained in Syria by “helping” Mr. Obama is a major factor in the destabilization of the region and the growing danger to American allies.
The Biden administration has pursued a largely effective anti-China policy. (MARC: ?!?!?!?) It has fostered alignments among America’s regional allies, imposed severe constraints on China’s access to cutting-edge technologies, and pressured European allies to stiffen their posture toward Beijing.
These moves, one suspects, haven’t inspired China’s leaders with much affection for President Biden or a desire to support his re-election. And opposition to the U.S.-based world system lies deep in the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Xi seems influenced by the party’s most hard-line and totalitarian elements.
Rescuing Mr. Biden from a pickle in the Middle East may not be all that high on Mr. Xi’s priorities. More likely, China hopes that a weakened America, facing a cascade of international threats, torn by internal polarization and dissension, and heading for a contentious election is losing its ability to manage international crises.
Having seen how great a price Team Biden has been willing to pay in trying to park Russia and Iran and how slow Washington has been to grasp the adversarial nature of these relationships, the Chinese may be tempted to toy with the administration as Vladimir Putin and Iran did, pocketing more concessions for an agreement that never quite comes.
There is only one thing we can be sure of. The hungrier Team Biden looks, the more expensive China’s “help” will be.
-
Our trusted partners, the Chinese.
How is their reputation handling the Muslim population?
From the article:
"On paper, Team Biden and Team Xi seem to want pretty much the same things in the Middle East. China’s envoy Zhai Jun is touring the Middle East, Chinese state media reports, to promote dialogue, achieve a cease-fire and restore peace, as well as to promote a two-state solution. That sounds a lot like what Mr. Blinken says."
Is that what WE want?
Something is wrong with this picture.
Mead closes with this:
"There is only one thing we can be sure of. The hungrier Team Biden looks, the more expensive China’s “help” will be."
I think he gets it; this is a very bad idea.
-
"Because of a planned handover between China’s 44th and 45th naval escort task forces in the People’s Liberation Army Navy, both forces are currently active in the Persian Gulf, making Beijing, temporarily, the leading naval presence in the strategic waterway."
WELL, THAT IS A HELLUVA COINCIDENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Indeed, one might very plausibly infer that Xi encouraged Iran to have Hamas act at this very moment-- as our Eisenhower Carrier group steams towards the waters south of Iran.
-
Hints, Bluffs and Uncertainty
By: George Friedman
The practice of foreign policy, like many other practices, consists of hints and bluffs amid uncertainty. There’s value in making the worthless seem invaluable and the baffling appear to be self-evident. And yet there were several events in the past week that signal things that I, at least, can’t quite fathom.
First, U.S. President Joe Biden is going to China to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. I’m not sure what he expects to achieve and therefore unsure why he’s going. But he’s the president of the United States, and I’ll allow that he must know something that makes him think the trip worthwhile. Still, China’s foreign minister – the one who replaced the one who disappeared – said that the meeting will be contentious. Given that China’s economy is fragile and that its military position was weakened by a U.S.-Philippines agreement earlier this year, China is signaling that the meeting will require American sincerity.
American sincerity is in short supply always but particularly when China is trying to bluff. China needs U.S. imports and investment, and more frankly, it needs the U.S. to have a weaker strategic position. Since that isn’t going to happen anytime soon, the remaining option is to pretend that the U.S. is the one in need.
Meanwhile, an interesting statement was issued in Belarus, a place where interesting things rarely emerge. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that the war in Ukraine is at an end, and that neither Ukraine nor Russia has the ability to defeat the other. Each side must accept this reality, he said, and should negotiate an end to the conflict.
Recall that Lukashenko owes his position to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who intervened on his behalf after nationwide protests broke out over what was widely regarded as a sham election. Recall, too, that Lukashenko gave sanctuary to many in the Wagner Group after its failed insurrection, apparently with Putin’s blessing. Put simply, Lukashenko is Putin’s subordinate. So it’s highly unlikely that he would have issued such a statement without first clearing it with Putin. And if Putin gave the go-ahead, it means Moscow may well be prepared to negotiate. Putin, of course, cannot admit as much because it would indicate weakness. If forced to admit weakness, post-war Russia would be left to the mercy of the West, especially the U.S. The paradox in foreign affairs is that the more you need a deal, the less likely you are to get one.
Finally, Biden announced that the United States officially stands by Israel. Though this isn’t a huge surprise, it still seems a massive commitment. But in reality, it’s hard to know what it means. Israeli forces are trained for precisely the battle they are facing in Gaza. So, too, is Hamas. The U.S. has the largest and best-equipped military in the world, but because the armed forces could be deployed to the Arctic as easily as to the jungle, their training tends to be broader. A better way to put it is that U.S. forces are trained to be flexible. Israel is a small country surrounded by potential enemies, so its military is trained in much more specific ways, conditioned to respond to and defeat its attackers on certain terrain and in certain circumstances. To fight in Gaza, U.S. forces would have to be rapidly organized and armed for a fight Israeli forces have been focused on for a long time.
In other words, Israel does not need U.S. ground forces. Integrating them into the battle would delay Israeli action. Israel already has air superiority, as well as an ability, however imperfect, to take out incoming missiles. And U.S. has already committed to Israel billions of dollars for its defense over the years. American participation, then, may simply be a matter of vocal support for a long-time ally rather than an actual commitment to battle.
International affairs has a strange dishonesty in it. Mystery is an inherent vice. China can’t simply define what it needs from the United States, so it pretends that it needs nothing. Washington can’t simply tell China what it is prepared to do because doing so would signal that it knows China’s needs. Putin can’t say what has become common knowledge to everyone, so he had Lukashenko say it.
There are two reasons for these kinds of diplomatic dances. One is pride. Admitting need indicates weakness, and no one wants to be taken advantage of. But second and more important, admitting need reveals intentions, and all nations have a political need to hide their intentions. It’s a cryptic business, yes, but when taken together, all these little signals create a mutual understanding because the complexities of truth and denial make it impossible to understand what is intended. And even when the intention is benign, the safest course is to construct a more threatening intention so as not to be trapped in another’s scheme.
I do not argue that we should change our behavior or reform the practice of foreign affairs. The situation is what it is. I merely point out that humans are strange creatures engaging in strange games. This may seem obvious, but because wars are built on this process, it isn’t trivial.
-
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/11/podcast-a-conversation-with-col-austin-bay-about-americas-proxy-wars.php
Covers Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Hamas, Iran, China, Taiwan.
Many interesting points. 55 minutes.
If complete victory over Russia were possible, China would want Siberia. (which is not a win for us)
Ukraine already has won in a sense, but taking back territory lost would be VERY hard.
Israel intelligence failure. Paragliders were trained in Lebanon. Hard to detect.
What does Iran want? What is the next phase planned by Hamas, Hezbullah? Turkiye is still cooperating with Israel, despite rhetoric.
China strategy. They prefer slowly surrounding what they want like the game of Go (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)
Geography and defenses of Taiwan. Growing Chinese Navy, ships and artillery.
Would China do it? You have to be prepared for that and the preparation is the deterrent.
If the US gets bogged down in the Middle East, yes that raises the risk of China making a move.
US weakness is our current leadership class.
The Afghan debacle, American leadership weakness and incompetence definitely encouraged Putin and Iran.
NATO successful. Biden failure. We are in a very high risk time.
Tribalism vs colonialism in east and central Africa.
-
Yup.
-
November 8, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF
The World Aflame
By: George Friedman
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled “The World Begins to Reorder Itself.” There is certainly a new order coming, but unlike the reordering that took place after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, this reordering will emerge from wars and potential wars. The Ukraine war has been raging for nearly two years. There are hints that a peace agreement might be reached, but the conflict continues. The war between Hamas and Israel has been underway for about a month, and it is perhaps the most bitter and unrelenting war seen in a place where unrelenting warfare has become an art.
It goes on. I have heard from two people I trust highly that Serbia is preparing for war. Serbia and Kosovo fought a bloody war in 1998-99 in which the U.S. and NATO sided with Kosovo and conducted a bombing campaign against Serbia. I hope these sources are wrong, but I think this will happen and spread beyond the Balkans.
The Chinese have been intruding on the margins of the Philippines. The Japanese have publicly stated that they will work to strengthen Philippine defenses and help by sending warships in the event China attacks. Japan has also announced that it is increasing cooperation with Malaysia. In addition, China and India have been fighting an off-and-on border war. Japan told India that it was prepared to offer unspecified support.
China has been under substantial economic stress. I do not think it has the naval strength that others believe it does, but it is still a major power. Thus, the Japanese decision to challenge China, even given U.S. support, represents a new role for Japan in the Western Pacific, and one China might be unable to live with. China’s slowing economy is also weakening its government.
Tukey seems to be intruding politically throughout Central Asia, which is an area of extreme importance to Russia. This creates a potentially explosive situation.
The tensions in Southeast Asia, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia are not connected in any significant way. This is not like World War II, where nations were linked to each other, like Germany and Italy or the U.S. and Britain. In that case, the spreading of war was supported by common interests. In the current global system, there seems to be no connection between the various ongoing and potential wars.
That seems to indicate that a wildfire of global war will not occur. But it is hard to understand why there seems to be a proliferation of ongoing and potential conflicts without a common foundation. It may mean that nothing major is really happening, and the idea of disagreements escalating into wars is unfounded. But as always, there are questions that I can’t answer. Why are the Japanese rattling a saber at the same time Palestinians and Israelis are at war and the Balkan states are shuddering? It is not only that there is a set of war realities and possibilities but that they are happening at the same time.
The question may not be answerable, but the U.S. is likely part of the mosaic. Many reasonably feel that the U.S. should get more involved in wars, even if they are not directly of interest to us. But the U.S. is the global hegemon, the world's largest economy and the greatest military power. These factors entangle the U.S. with the majority of the countries in the world, whether through economic linkages or military alliances. The advantage is that the U.S. has choices. But like Britain and Rome before it, the U.S. must be involved selectively. The U.S. crushed Japan in World War II, won a war in the Balkans, helped create Israel and helped mold Ukraine. As we look at this list of wars and possible wars, the U.S. is deeply involved in many ways. Thus, the country I have left out of the list is the United States, which tragically may be drawn into wars with little time to think. That is a topic for historians to consider. Now, we must be concerned with whether my trusted friends have any idea what they are talking about. Most rumored wars never happen.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/12/the-fragility-of-civilization/
-
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Talking-Geopolitics_Podcast-The_Emerging_World_Order-transcript.pdf
-
Don’t Count on Economic Woes to Deter China
Xi hasn’t shortchanged the military and boasts of his country’s ability to withstand hardships.
By Michael Gallagher
Nov. 28, 2023 12:54 pm ET
During his September trip to Vietnam, President Biden dismissed a reporter who asked for his thoughts on the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to Taiwan. “I think China has a difficult economic problem right now,” Mr. Biden said. “I don’t think it’s going to cause China to invade Taiwan. And matter of fact, the opposite—it probably doesn’t have the same capacity that it had before.”
Mr. Biden’s response perhaps explains why his administration’s China policy has veered away from competition and toward accommodation. The hope is that Beijing’s economic woes will make it more conciliatory. But that assumption badly misunderstands the power-hungry nature of the Chinese Communist Party and the lessons of history.
China doubtless has problems. Many commentators have asked if we’ve reached “peak China,” the point at which demographic headwinds and self-destructive economic policies combine to slow the once mighty engine of the Chinese economy, perhaps for good.
But there is good reason to be skeptical that China’s economic difficulties will on their own prevent conflict. Building a first-class military and reclaiming Taiwan are among President Xi Jinping’s priorities. Even if the economy sags and Mr. Xi has to cut back in other areas, the military will get the funds it needs. The Pentagon’s recently released annual report on Chinese military and security developments makes clear that, notwithstanding a significant slowdown in China’s rate of economic growth, Beijing “can support continued growth in defense spending for at least the next five to 10 years.”
Economic pain may actually be a feature of Mr. Xi’s strategy, not a bug. He thinks the U.S. is weak and unwilling to suffer hardship. China endured the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and still held together, albeit through intense repression and at the expense of tens of millions of Chinese lives. In the event of a Taiwan conflict, sanctions and supply-chain disruptions would wreak havoc on the global economy. Even if China were harder hit, Mr. Xi might bet that Western societies would buckle first, particularly given his proactive steps to prepare for war. As Mr. Xi put it at the start of the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, China must “prepare for a rainy day, and be ready to withstand major tests of high winds and high waves.”
Additionally, Communist Party leaders may perceive a near-term window of relative advantage before China’s structural problems grow even worse. Scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley have warned that the middle to late 2020s could pose a particularly dangerous window for Taiwan for precisely this reason.
At the same time, high unemployment, economic stagnation and popular discontent are existential challenges for the Communist Party. An invasion of Taiwan might provide an effective distraction. If Mr. Xi can’t provide jobs for China’s young people—youth unemployment reached 21% this summer before the Chinese government decided it should stop reporting the figure—or hit previous growth targets, a successful conquest of Taiwan might become more, not less, desirable. If anything, it could become a gambit to jump-start growth, put people to work and unite the country.
Other authoritarian countries have waged war despite domestic economic challenges. Consider Russia under Vladimir Putin. After years of strong growth in the mid-2000s, the Russian economy slowed beginning with the 2008 financial crisis. In the year leading up to the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Russia grew at less than 2%. Declining oil prices and sanctions have since put a damper on the nation’s economy. Between the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine, Russia’s growth averaged barely 1%. Nevertheless, Mr. Putin invaded and kept his war machine running, which caused further economic pain in the face of additional sanctions.
Another relevant example is Imperial Japan during the interwar period. Like China today, Japan saw a long boom give way to stagnation, with annual growth falling from an average of 6.2% in 1914-20 to 1.8% in 1921-29, and then to 0.7% in 1930-31 as Japan, like the rest of the world, battled the Great Depression.
The final two years are particularly instructive. The effects of the global crash combined with an abrupt appreciation of the yen, stemming from Japan’s return to the gold standard, led to a paralyzing economic contraction called the Showa Depression. The Showa Depression didn’t, however, temper Japan’s external ambitions. As the nation’s economy was contracting, Tokyo—which had three years earlier signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war—invaded Manchuria in September 1931, kicking off the chain of events that would later lead to total war in the Pacific.
The Chinese Communist Party’s recent behavior contradicts Mr. Biden’s hypothesis. As the Chinese economy has slowed, Chinese coast guard and maritime militia vessels have rammed Filipino coast guard and military-resupply ships in the South China Sea. The Philippines is a U.S. ally. The Chinese military has conducted more than 180 unsafe and unprofessional intercepts of U.S. forces over the past two years—a dangerous spike that has brought U.S. and Chinese forces within feet of deadly collisions. China’s threats to Taiwan also escalate daily, including unprecedented incursions by People’s Liberation Army forces over the “median line” in the Taiwan Strait.
War with China isn’t inevitable. But we can’t rely on an economic deus ex machina to prevent a conflict. Rather than wager peace on wishful thinking, American policy makers—from the president to Congress—must move heaven and earth to deter China and prevent a conflict before it is too late.
Mr. Gallagher, a Republican, represents Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District and is chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party
-
Rep. Mike Gallagher R-Wisc no relation to a guy with same name on radio, is one of the good ones on national security.
Economic hardship at home won't stop China from attacking Taiwan.
Conversely, I doubt this regime could ever get overthrown from within when things are going well. 21% youth unemployment and other stagnating economic indicators, it seems to me, might someday lead to internal dissatisfaction and upheaval.
Who knew that technological advancements, internet and AI for example, would empower authoritarian regimes instead of undermine them.
-
Henry Kissinger’s Strategic Mind
Excerpts of the former secretary of state’s contributions to the Journal editorial pages.
Nov. 30, 2023 6:41 pm ET
31
Gift unlocked article
Listen
(10 min)
image
Henry Kissinger in 2015. PHOTO: BAO DANDAN/ZUMA PRESS
Henry Kissinger died Wednesday at 100. These are excerpts from his contributions to the Journal editorial pages over the years
“Vietnam: View of a New Nixon Aide,” Dec. 19, 1968:
However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or “prestige,” they are not empty phrases; other nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness. . . . In many parts of the world—the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, even Japan—stability depends on confidence in American promises. Unilateral withdrawal, or a settlement which unintentionally amounts to the same thing, could therefore lead to the erosion of restraints and to an even more dangerous international situation. No American policymaker can simply dismiss these dangers. . . .
OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
WSJ Opinion Potomac Watch
The Legacy of Henry Kissinger
SUBSCRIBE
Add to Queue
Explore Audio Center
No war in a century has aroused the passions of the conflict in Vietnam. By turning Vietnam into a symbol of deeper resentments, many groups have defeated the objective they profess to seek. However we got into Vietnam, whatever the judgment of our actions, ending the war honorably is essential for the peace of the world. Any other solution may unloose forces that would complicate prospects of international order. A new Administration must be given the benefit of the doubt and a chance to move toward a peace which grants the people of Vietnam what they have so long struggled to achieve: An opportunity to work out their own destiny in their own way.
“Old Wine in New Bottles,” with Brent Scowcroft, Nov. 12, 1984:
Old myths never die; unlike old soldiers, they do not even seem to fade away. So it is with the fairy tale assiduously fostered in the ’70s after the Vietnam War was safely out of the way and Watergate made it impossible to implement the new mock-tough rhetoric: that a group of wooly-headed and naive individuals headed by Richard M. Nixon were hornswoggled by the wily Soviets in the SALT agreements and that those agreements in turn were the proximate cause of our later international troubles in the ’70s.
In the heady days immediately following Watergate, no charge involving President Nixon seemed too preposterous, including the one that this man, once reviled as an unreconstructed cold warrior, was a gullible victim of sentimental rhetoric.
At first, that theory was put forward by conservatives who, once in office, found it necessary to run for reelection on a commitment to arms control no different from Richard Nixon’s—if stated somewhat more sentimentally.
But recently a new group of spinners of the mock-tough epic poetry has emerged: Some liberals of the ’60s seem to want to gain the good will of the now-dominant conservatives by a version as self-serving as it is cynical. . . .
We think it essential that our country not be split between those who seek agreement for its own sake and others who chase the illusion that abandoning arms control solves our strategic or diplomatic problem. The opposite is true. We cannot hold together our alliances or our people if we abandon commitment to arms control. What we can and must do is to give that commitment a content compatible with our national security, the evolving technology and our values.
“A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” with George P. Shultz, William J. Perry and Sam Nunn, Jan. 4, 2007:
Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. . . . Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures toward achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage. The effort could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations. Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair or urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or possible.
We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.
“A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse,” Oct. 17, 2015:
The prevailing U.S. policy toward Iran is often compared by its advocates to the Nixon administration’s opening to China, which contributed, despite some domestic opposition, to the ultimate transformation of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The comparison is not apt. The opening to China in 1971 was based on the mutual recognition by both parties that the prevention of Russian hegemony in Eurasia was in their common interest. And 42 Soviet divisions lining the Sino-Soviet border reinforced that conviction.
No comparable strategic agreement exists between Washington and Tehran. On the contrary, in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear accord, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described the U.S. as the “Great Satan” and rejected negotiations with America about nonnuclear matters. Completing his geopolitical diagnosis, Mr. Khamenei also predicted that Israel would no longer exist in 25 years.
Forty-five years ago, the expectations of China and the U.S. were symmetrical. The expectations underlying the nuclear agreement with Iran are not. Tehran will gain its principal objectives at the beginning of the implementation of the accord. America’s benefits reside in a promise of Iranian conduct over a period of time. The opening to China was based on an immediate and observable adjustment in Chinese policy, not on an expectation of a fundamental change in China’s domestic system. The optimistic hypothesis on Iran postulates that Tehran’s revolutionary fervor will dissipate as its economic and cultural interactions with the outside world increase.
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
“The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order,” April 4, 2020:
The surreal atmosphere of the Covid-19 pandemic calls to mind how I felt as a young man in the 84th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge. Now, as in late 1944, there is a sense of inchoate danger, aimed not at any particular person, but striking randomly and with devastation. But there is an important difference between that faraway time and ours. American endurance then was fortified by an ultimate national purpose. Now, in a divided country, efficient and farsighted government is necessary to overcome obstacles unprecedented in magnitude and global scope. Sustaining the public trust is crucial to social solidarity, to the relation of societies with each other, and to international peace and stability.
Nations cohere and flourish on the belief that their institutions can foresee calamity, arrest its impact and restore stability. When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed. Whether this judgment is objectively fair is irrelevant. The reality is the world will never be the same after the coronavirus. To argue now about the past only makes it harder to do what has to be done.
The coronavirus has struck with unprecedented scale and ferocity. Its spread is exponential: U.S. cases are doubling every fifth day. At this writing, there is no cure. Medical supplies are insufficient to cope with the widening waves of cases. Intensive-care units are on the verge, and beyond, of being overwhelmed. Testing is inadequate to the task of identifying the extent of infection, much less reversing its spread. A successful vaccine could be 12 to 18 months away. . . .
The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. A global retreat from balancing power with legitimacy will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally. Yet this millennial issue of legitimacy and power cannot be settled simultaneously with the effort to overcome the Covid-19 plague. Restraint is necessary on all sides—in both domestic politics and international diplomacy. Priorities must be established.
“ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution,” with Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, Feb. 25, 2023:
As the technology becomes more widely understood, it will have a profound impact on international relations. Unless the technology for knowledge is universally shared, imperialism could focus on acquiring and monopolizing data to attain the latest advances in AI. Models may produce different outcomes depending on the data assembled. Differential evolutions of societies may evolve on the basis of increasingly divergent knowledge bases and hence of the perception of challenges. . . .
Leadership is likely to concentrate in hands of the fewer people and institutions who control access to the limited number of machines capable of high-quality synthesis of reality. Because of the enormous cost of their processing power, the most effective machines within society may stay in the hands of a small subgroup domestically and in the control of a few superpowers internationally. After the transitional stage, older models will grow cheaper, and a diffusion of power through society and among states may commence.
A reinvigorated moral and strategic leadership will be essential. Without guiding principles, humanity runs the risk of domination or anarchy, unconstrained authority or nihilistic freedom. The need for relating major societal change to ethical justifications and novel visions for the future will appear in a new form. If the maxims put forth by ChatGPT are not translated into a cognizably human endeavor, alienation of society and even revolution may become likely.
Without proper moral and intellectual underpinnings, machines used in governance could control rather than amplify our humanity and trap us forever. In such a world, artificial intelligence might amplify human freedom and transcend unconstrained challenges.
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/12/01/when-john-mccain-warned-antony-blinken-was-dangerous-to-america/
-
should Turkey be kicked out of Nato?
Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952 1. However, there have been debates on whether Turkey should remain in NATO. Some experts argue that Turkey’s recent actions, such as its purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system, its military intervention in Syria, and its human rights record, have made it an unreliable ally 12. Others argue that Turkey is a strategically important member of NATO, given its location and its role in the fight against ISIS 23.
According to a commentary by Doug Bandow in The American Conservative, NATO needs to have a serious conversation about what to do when a member can no longer be trusted 1. The author argues that Turkey’s democratic infirmities and its later military coups were overlooked when it joined the alliance 1. However, after the Soviet collapse, NATO rushed past the European Union to welcome the detritus of the Soviet empire, proclaiming the alliance’s determination to promote democratic reform 1. Even as NATO’s lead member wandered the globe bombing, invading, and occupying nations at will—resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths along the way— alliance members proclaimed their democratic credentials 1.
Despite the controversies surrounding Turkey’s membership, some experts believe that Turkey is still a valuable member of NATO 23. According to a report by the USC Global Policy Institute, Turkey’s historical and strategic significance as a member of the alliance has not changed 2. The report argues that NATO needs Turkey as a partner rather than as an adversary, and expelling the country would undoubtedly result in increasingly hostile relations between Ankara and NATO members in the Mediterranean and Balkans 2.
In conclusion, the question of whether Turkey should remain in NATO is a complex one, with arguments on both sides. Ultimately, it is up to NATO to decide whether Turkey’s actions are consistent with the alliance’s values and goals.
-
From my libertarian days I remember Doug Bandow as a mega-isolationist.
"Even as NATO’s lead member wandered the globe bombing, invading, and occupying nations at will—resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths along the way"
This author can fukk off IMHO.
-
Henry Kissinger on Power and Morality
His objective was to build, tend and repair a sustainable balance in global affairs.
Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Dec. 4, 2023 6:19 pm ET
“Now what can the old fox mean by that?” Klemens von Metternich is supposed to have said when the great French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord died in 1838. Like Talleyrand, my friend and teacher Henry Kissinger spent half a century in the world of high politics, survived the political eclipse of his original employer, grew rich over the course of a controversial career, and demonstrated intellectual and political agility that led some to hail him as a genius and others to curse him as a monster.
OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
WSJ Opinion Potomac Watch
The Legacy of Henry Kissinger
Nothing about the public reaction to Kissinger’s death would have surprised him. He had been the object of intense adulation and passionate loathing for more than 50 years. Although he enjoyed the admiration much more than the hate, he was used to both. More than that, he appreciated both sentiments at something like their real worth.
One element of Kissinger’s diplomatic talent was an almost preternatural intuition that let him grasp the worldview of his interlocutors, often understanding them better than they understood themselves. He felt the full intellectual and moral weight of the attacks against him but found the burden less than crushing. This wasn’t because he held morality in contempt. It was because he thought most criticism of his decisions in office reflected a shallow understanding of politics. That understanding, he believed, was often filtered through a partisan reading of history that overlooked the sins of Democratic presidents as it picked obsessively at the faults of Republicans.
Kissinger understood something that too many Americans, on the left and right, find difficult to grasp: Power and morality aren’t opposites. Rather, power is the platform that makes moral action possible for a state. And morality isn’t a set of rules and laws that states are expected to obey. Rather, in international relations, morality involves creating an order that prevents the anarchy and slaughter of great-power warfare. Such an order gains legitimacy not by its perfect adherence to a religious or secular moral code, but by its ability to preserve values and conditions that allow civilizations, and the human beings who inhabit them, to flourish.
The disastrous follies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had left the U.S. in a difficult predicament when Richard Nixon brought Kissinger into the White House in 1969. The overreaching hubris of technocratic intellectuals like McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, along with the naive liberal determinism of Walt Rostow and others, had led the U.S. into an unwinnable and unsustainable war. Worse, as the Soviets reached strategic nuclear parity with the U.S. and the Bretton Woods economic order buckled when the gold standard lost credibility, the entire post-World War II order was in danger of collapse. There was, Nixon and Kissinger believed, no elegant escape from this predicament. Devils had to be supped with, promises had to be broken, and sometimes blood would be left on the floor.
For Kissinger, the construction, tending and repair of a sustainable balance in global affairs was the supreme moral and political challenge of statecraft, especially as nuclear weapons threatened to make great power war unsurvivable. If the restoration of balance required embracing Mao Zedong at the height of his sanguinary career, so be it. If it required more bombs in North Vietnam and Cambodia, then send in the B-52s. Any guilt or shame attached to such moves belonged in his view to those whose follies had left the U.S. with nothing but bad choices.
Politically, Kissinger was a victim of his success. Once America’s position in the world had been restored, Americans turned in revulsion from the methods and the men responsible for turning the tide. Liberals such as Jimmy Carter wanted American foreign policy to focus on human rights. Conservatives such as Ronald Reagan wanted to replace Kissingerian détente with a more robustly anti-Soviet approach. Neither camp fully understood that the ability to pursue far-reaching ideological goals was a consequence of Kissinger’s achievement.
Statesmen err, sometimes with tragic consequences, as rapid-fire decisions are made in an era of crisis. Kissinger always accepted that. He could be sensitive, but I never saw him get truly angry with someone who argued that a decision he made in office was in error.
Although he was angrier when people impugned his morals than when they attacked his decisions, what frustrated Kissinger most was not that some academics and writers held him in moral disdain. It was that he never succeeded in getting a critical mass of Americans to embrace the approach to statecraft that, in his view, offered the greatest chance to secure American interests while preserving our increasingly fragile civilization from the ravages of war.
-
In China, Henry Kissinger Was the Ultimate Door-Opener
The engineer of U.S.-China opening wielded his influence and unparalleled access over five decades
By James T. Areddy and Charles Hutzler
WSJ
Updated Nov. 30, 2023 6:26 pm ET
Henry Kissinger influenced how the U.S. and China interacted until the final weeks of his life.
His death Wednesday at age 100 sparked recollections in both nations about how the former secretary of state’s secret trips to Beijing more than a half-century ago paved the way for the momentous 1972 visit by then-President Richard Nixon that allowed the U.S. and China to form a relationship.
The remembrances have been especially warm in China, where Kissinger occupied a singular role: He was the one American granted consistent access to Beijing’s most senior leaders back to Mao Zedong.
Over the years, Kissinger applied his skills navigating the corridors of power into roles that made him wealthy and kept him influential. China was quick to say Wednesday that Kissinger took more than 100 trips to China, and while many were low-key, successive Chinese heads of state used his visits to signal to Washington their interest in dialogue.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping—who greeted Kissinger in Beijing in July despite otherwise strained bilateral ties—dispatched condolences to President Biden. “Dr. Kissinger was an old friend and a good friend of the Chinese people, as well as a pioneer and architect of China-U. S. relations,” a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry told a news briefing in Beijing.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1973. Over the years, Kissinger made more than 100 trips to China, according to Beijing. PHOTO: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
U.S. presidents after Nixon took counsel from Kissinger, too. But as U.S. views toward China hardened, successive administrations cooled to the engagement he advocated. Biden said he was a young senator when he first met Kissinger and he noted that Kissinger offered views on policy discussions long after he retired.
“Throughout our careers, we often disagreed. And often strongly,” the president said. “But from that first briefing—his fierce intellect and profound strategic focus was evident.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken credited Kissinger for “countless history-bending decisions” and his “lasting imprint,” including on Blinken’s own China interactions.
The U.S. opening to China engineered by Kissinger was a globe-changing event. The two governments had been estranged for more than two decades, fought against each other in the Korean War and stood on opposing sides of the Vietnam War, in which Beijing funneled resources and manpower to the North Vietnamese side.
Rapprochement with China helped the U.S. extricate itself from Vietnam. It allowed Beijing and Washington to make common cause against the Soviet Union, which vied with Mao’s government for influence in the Communist bloc and among developing nations.
That undeclared alliance paved the way later in the 1970s for diplomatic relations and a severing of formal U.S. ties with Taiwan and made it easier for American businesses to pour into China after Mao’s successors gingerly introduced market-based policies.
The U.S. opening to China engineered five decades ago by Henry Kissinger, shown in Beijing in 2018, was a world-changing event. PHOTO: THOMAS PETER/REUTERS
Kissinger’s influence remained strong in Beijing after his government service ended in the 1970s, not least because he was viewed as a consistent advocate for engagement between the governments.
“Relations between China and the United States need not—and should not—become a zero-sum game,” Kissinger wrote in “On China”—a 500-page attempt to explain China to American readers that was published in 2011, when Beijing’s exercise of its growing power was testing ties. He maintained that view even as relations later plummeted.
Kissinger’s strategic, realpolitik mindset and preference for back-channel negotiations aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s pragmatic approach to challenges and its disdain for public debate. His methods also suited American boardrooms, where Kissinger was regarded as the ultimate door-opener in China.
Tracking Kissinger’s efforts to resolve a series of challenges for foreign businesses in China, Isaac Stone Fish’s 2022 book, “America Second: How America’s Elites Are Making China Stronger,” questions whether economic interests affected his counsel on broader U.S.-China relations.
Stone Fish uses archival material to show how in May 1989 Kissinger formed a $75 million China Ventures fund with a Chinese government-owned business—then argued against retaliatory American government sanctions on Beijing after the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators the following month.
Being seen with Henry Kissinger burnished the image of Chinese leaders like Jiang Zemin, shown with the former secretary of state in 1995, because of his direct connection to icons like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. PHOTO: JIM BOURG/REUTERS
Because of the kind of advice he dispensed, Kissinger “allowed the Communist Party to have greater control over foreign companies, and for companies to be closer to the party and for Kissinger to accumulate wealth and influence,” Stone Fish said.
His privately run New York advisory, Kissinger Associates, doesn’t report financial figures nor discuss its client roster, but industry watchers say the firm has worked in China on behalf of numerous blue-chip American corporations, often to sort out their problems. “He was careful. He had access to Chinese leaders because they were interested in his views on foreign policy,” said J. Stapleton Roy, a former U.S. ambassador to China and executive at Kissinger Associates. Kissinger often took corporate executives with him to meet the leaders, but he let them handle discussions of their business problems in China rather than ask for favors, and in that way protected his access, Roy said.
While loquacious on China’s place in global affairs over the years, Kissinger tended to sidestep discussion of its human-rights record. When he was pressed on the subject during an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page in 2011, Kissinger said his policy “is to talk to [Chinese leaders], but my personal view isn’t to denounce it publicly.”
After U.S.-China ties plumbed a new low this year over Taiwan, U.S. technology controls, Ukraine and a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, the Biden administration tried to arrest the downward spiral by sending a string of high-level officials to Beijing.
Amid that outreach, Kissinger showed up in the Chinese capital in July, not long after turning 100, sitting with Chinese leader Xi in the same ornate government guesthouse where the American diplomat negotiated with Premier Zhou Enlai a half-century earlier to prepare for Nixon’s trip.
That meeting with Zhou, Kissinger told Xi, showed “the relations between our two countries would be central to the peace in the world and to the progress of our societies.”
Henry Kissinger had traveled to China as recently as July, shortly after turning 100, and met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the official government guesthouse. PHOTO: HUANG JINGWEN/ZUMA PRESS
Xi praised the “splendid strategic vision” of that past groundbreaking diplomatic effort. To Kissinger, Xi said: “We’ll never forget our old friend.”
Beijing had been playing hard to get with the Biden administration. So the tone of the Kissinger encounter was noted in Washington. When Xi later agreed to come to the U.S. for a summit with Biden, Chinese diplomats wanted Kissinger to introduce the Chinese leader at a planned banquet in San Francisco with American CEOs. After they learned that Kissinger was too frail to travel, they asked if he could make an introduction by video. That didn’t happen.
Still, in addressing the business crowd, Xi cited his meeting with Kissinger as part of the push to restore relations.
In Beijing, because of Kissinger’s direct connection to icons like Mao and Zhou, being seen with him helped burnish Chinese leaders’ image.
While Kissinger found open doors in Beijing, his influence with recent U.S. presidential administrations waned. Officials listened to him but didn’t necessarily buy into his view of the necessity of U.S.-China cooperation.
In October, a frail but lucid Kissinger noted that he had spent literally half his life on Chinese-American relations, and warned a New York audience that “the two countries have a unique ability to bring peace and progress to the world, and they also have a unique ability to destroy the world if they’re not together.”
—Chun Han Wong contributed to this article.
Write to James T. Areddy at James.Areddy@wsj.com and Charles Hutzler at charles.hutzler@wsj.com
-
Victory Seems Not to Be an Option for Biden
The Afghan pullout set a precedent for weakness in Ukraine and the Middle East.
By Garry Kasparov (MARC: Russian, former world chess champ)
Dec. 10, 2023 5:20 pm ET
With less than a year until the election, President Biden’s legacy is beginning to take shape. He is leaving a record of defeat.
From Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza, Mr. Biden has adopted Barack Obama’s playbook of leading the free world from behind. On Dec. 1, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made his fourth visit to Israel since the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7. His remarks focused on what Israel shouldn’t do in Gaza rather than on how to defeat the Hamas terrorists who are still holding around 140 hostages.
Mr. Biden’s Obama-era team—national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Burns and climate envoy John Kerry—adore grand bargains that make them feel like masters of the geopolitical universe. What the U.S. gives up in these deals is usually clear. But it’s rarely apparent what America and her allies get in return. Washington sent billions in cash to Iran for unverifiable promises and restrained Ukraine to try to win favor with Russia.
It’s convenient for Mr. Biden that MAGA Republicans oppose aid to Ukraine; he can blame them for his failure to deliver. While it’s true that Congress is playing politics with American credibility and Ukrainian lives, so is Mr. Biden, who has the power to arm Ukraine today if he wished. The tanks, ATACMS, big drones and jets that Ukraine needs to win the war are collecting dust in American warehouses instead of destroying the Russian military.
On Nov. 18, I represented the Russian Action Committee at the 15th Halifax Security Forum. Remarks there by Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur and others strengthened my belief that the U.S. is deliberately allowing the Russian occupation to continue. Two vital arteries feed Vladimir Putin’s army and enable his occupation: the Crimean land bridge and the Melitopol railway. According to several analysts, a single barrage of properly loaded ATACMS could destroy both and starve Mr. Putin’s invading army of supplies. Withholding these armaments is a choice.
At every point of conflict in his presidency, Mr. Biden’s modus operandi, like Mr. Obama’s, has been to make concessions to create the illusion of diplomatic success. Mr. Biden appears intent on cutting yet another deal to make the problem of Ukraine go away—for the moment. The same shortsighted fecklessness led Mr. Obama to back off from defending Ukraine in 2014 when Mr. Putin first invaded and annexed Crimea, leading inevitably to his full-scale invasion in 2022. My great fear is that Mr. Biden’s envoys are now discussing with Mr. Putin the partition of Ukraine along the current front lines.
Mr. Biden has refused to support Ukraine’s immediate admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. I predict he will offer NATO membership for the unoccupied parts of Ukraine as a carrot to coerce President Volodymyr Zelensky into accepting this unholy partition. A considerable part of Russia’s frozen assets in the West—held as a bargaining chip by Mr. Biden—could be given to Ukraine as a sweetener.
I also worry that when Mr. Biden met with China’s Xi Jinping on Nov. 15, he might have offered concessions to China in return for Mr. Xi’s support in pressuring Mr. Putin to accept such a proposition. It would condemn millions of Ukrainians to persecution and ethnic cleansing—and any cease-fire would last only until Mr. Putin is ready to take another bite of Europe.
Allowing Mr. Xi to act as a global power broker would follow Mr. Biden’s dismal pattern. He abandoned Afghanistan out of fear of staying longer, and the incompetent American retreat emboldened Mr. Putin to invade Ukraine. By letting Mr. Putin get away with invasion and atrocities in Ukraine, Mr. Biden’s advisers emboldened Iran-backed Hamas to invade Israel. When the Biden administration eased oil sanctions on Venezuela, dictator Nicolás Maduro responded by cracking down on elections and preparing to annex half of neighboring Guyana.
If Mr. Biden allows Mr. Putin to take more Ukrainian territory by force today, he would embolden Mr. Xi to invade Taiwan tomorrow. Weakness invites aggression. War and terror spread until the leaders are neutralized.
If Mr. Biden armed Ukraine for victory, Mr. Putin wouldn’t survive long. His downfall would cripple a circle of thugs and terrorists from Caracas to Tehran. It’s also possible that Russia as it exists today wouldn’t survive. So what? Recall that many foreign-policy experts, including President George H.W. Bush, attempted to preserve the Soviet Union out of fear of what might happen if it fell. I’m grateful they failed.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to an unparalleled expansion of global freedom, an opportunity that Ukraine and others seized. Mr. Putin and his KGB gang ripped that from our grasp. The end of the Russian mafia state would be a mortal blow to the forces of terrorism and tyranny. Israel and Ukraine are fighting the same fight. The Biden administration should be doing everything possible to help them win instead of holding them back.
Mr. Kasparov is chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and a co-founder of the Russian Action Committee.
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20223/world-at-war
-
NATO and Donald Trump
Congress tries to take out an insurance policy against a President’s unilateral U.S. withdrawal.
By
The Editorial Board
Follow
Dec. 18, 2023 6:37 pm ET
143
Gift unlocked article
Listen
(3 min)
image
Former President Donald Trump PHOTO: REBA SALDANHA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. alliances are more important than ever in an increasingly dangerous world, so it’s notable that Congress is taking out an insurance policy against a President who might decide to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on his own authority. Now, who might that President be?
OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
WSJ Opinion Potomac Watch
The Trial of Jimmy Lai Begins in Hong Kong
SUBSCRIBE
Add to Queue
Explore Audio Center
In the annual defense policy bill that passed last week, Congress included a provision requiring a U.S. President to consult Congress before withdrawing from NATO. The bipartisan measure, sponsored by Sens. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), would require assent from two-thirds of the Senate or an act of Congress. The enforcement mechanism is withholding funds for such a withdrawal.
Congress’s concern here is clearly Mr. Trump. He has long disliked U.S. forward military deployments in places like South Korea, and he has railed against NATO in particular. “By some accounts,” he tweeted in 2018, “the U.S. is paying for 90% of NATO, with many countries nowhere close” to spending 2% of their economy on defense. The tweet ended with a signature “NO!”
Mr. Trump is right that the Europeans have allowed their defenses to atrophy to the point of embarrassment, though the picture is improving. Some 11 of 31 members meet the alliance goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense, up from three in 2014, according to data the alliance released over the summer.
In any case, American defense spending isn’t charity. A stable Europe is a core U.S. strategic interest, a lesson Americans learned twice in the 20th century at tremendous cost. The risks of abandoning NATO have compounded since Mr. Trump left office, with Russia’s Vladimir Putin launching a land war on the European continent.
But a bent toward isolationism is one of Mr. Trump’s core impulses. Former national security adviser John Bolton recounts in his memoirs that Mr. Trump unloaded on NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg that “NATO was egregious, complaining that Spain (he had just met the King) spent only 0.9% of its GDP on defense.” Mr. Bolton and others talked Mr. Trump out of trying to pull back from the alliance, only for him to ask again “why we didn’t just withdraw from NATO entirely.”
Mr. Trump’s rhetoric often exceeds his grasp, and he failed to follow through on many of his unilateral threats. But who knows what Mr. Trump might attempt as part of his promise to settle the war in Ukraine in “24 hours.”
The problem with Congress’s NATO provision is that it probably couldn’t stop a determined President. The Constitution grants broad powers to the Commander in Chief on foreign policy, and the precedents include George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and Jimmy Carter’s renegotiation of control over the Panama Canal. Congress could employ the power of the purse in an attempt to stop implementation of a withdrawal, but that couldn’t stop the actual decision.
The NATO provision is nonetheless useful in showing Europe that U.S. support for the alliances is strong and bipartisan. And for showing any isolationist President, whether a populist of the right or left, that the political price for withdrawal would be high.
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20238/china-unrestricted-warfare
-
sceond
Biden’s Foreign-Policy Doom Loop
As U.S. power is seen to recede, risks rise in the South China Sea and elsewhere.
Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Dec. 18, 2023 5:50 pm ET
Share
With less than a year before a challenging election, the Biden administration risks getting caught in a political doom loop. President Biden’s perceived weakness at home undermines his authority in dealing with foreign leaders, while the deteriorating global picture erodes his popularity at home.
Mr. Biden’s foreign-policy efforts have not exactly been crowned with success. In Ukraine, Western squabbles and policy misfires have given Vladimir Putin reason to hope that victory might be heading his way. In the Middle East, as the original wave of Western sympathy for Israel following the Hamas terror attack fades, calls for a cease-fire that would leave Hamas in control of Gaza steadily mount. More ominously still, Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq are stepping up their assaults, with the Houthis now attacking peaceful commerce in the vital Red Sea.
This is not a world that is becoming more stable, and it is not a world in which American interests or values are becoming more secure. It is not a world in which America’s rivals and enemies are gaining respect for the president. It is not a world in which America’s waning powers of deterrence can long hold back the rising tide of aggression and war.
The Indo-Pacific has been quieter lately, but only because China remains committed to its creeping gradualism, or “cabbage leaf strategy.” Building new islands, equipping them as military bases, harassing American ships and planes, challenging Taiwanese airspace, staging invasion exercises: The cabbage slowly grows, one leaf at a time.
These days, China is looking toward rich fishing grounds and the adjacent shoals and atolls that, under widely recognized legal principles, form part of the Philippines’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The EEZ’s Scarborough and Second Thomas shoals have long attracted fishing fleets. Increasingly, they are attracting aggressive Chinese maritime militia and coast-guard forces as well.
The Philippines controlled the Scarborough Shoal before 2012, but China pushed Manila aside, advancing Beijing’s legally baseless claims to most of the South China Sea. Philippine fishing boats still attempt to fish in these troubled waters, but Chinese maritime militia and coast-guard vessels harass and obstruct them, deploying inflatable boats, buoys and a “long-range acoustic device” that temporarily incapacitate Philippine crew members. This month Chinese ships fired water cannons and rammed Philippine vessels trying to bring fuel and food to Philippine crews in the area.
Looking for diplomatic solutions, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific economic summit in San Francisco last month. While Biden administration officials hailed improved U.S.-China relations following the summit, Beijing’s response to the Philippines was chilly. Jose Manuel Romualdez, the Philippine ambassador to the U.S., said Mr. Xi’s answers to Mr. Marcos’s requests were “disappointing,” “evasive” and “noncommittal.” Mr. Xi “didn’t say anything,” Mr. Romualdez told the Japanese newspaper Nikkei Asia.
Chinese provocations have only increased since the summit. Chinese forces are moving against the Philippine presence in the Second Thomas Shoal. “It’s pure aggression,” Phillipine Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. told the Associated Press. A wooden-hulled ship he was aboard, posing no threat to Chinese vessels, was blasted by water cannons and bumped by Chinese forces as it brought supplies to a small military force stationed on a long-marooned Philippine navy ship at the shoal.
China turned up the heat another notch on Dec. 11, when 11 Chinese vessels entered the Second Thomas Shoal, with up to 27 vessels present all week. “Next after the water cannon is probably ramming and also they will attempt to board our vessel,” Philippine Vice Adm. Alberto Carlos told CNN Philippines.
Amid escalating Chinese pressure, Philippine officials are trying to rouse Washington and its allies to respond. Calling the South China Sea a flashpoint comparable to the Taiwan Strait, Ambassador Romualdez told Nikkei that conflict near the Philippines could be “the beginning of another war, world war.”
When I visited U.S. naval commanders in Pearl Harbor this fall, I heard similar concerns. As American power globally is perceived to recede, chances of escalation in the South China Sea rise.
It is the same sad story all over the world. The doom loop is real. Unless Mr. Biden restores his credibility and that of the nation he leads, we must expect more conflict, and more cabbage leaves, before an election on which, as Team Biden incessantly repeats, the fate of American democracy depends.
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20257/china-russia-dangerous-combination
-
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/12/26/catherine-herridge-makes-dark-prediction-for-2024-believes-a-black-swan-event-looms-1422767/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
-
America Needs a Middle East Strategy
The U.S. can bring the Gulf Arabs closer while doing much more to contain the Iran menace.
By Seth Cropsey
Dec. 26, 2023 6:07 pm ET
Nearly two months into Israel’s ground campaign, all eyes are on the Gaza Strip. Yet divisions over Gaza point to a disconnect between U.S. policy and strategic reality. The Middle East is headed toward a major war, for which the U.S. needs a strategy well beyond Gaza.
Since late November, the Biden administration’s approach to the Gaza war has been to issue generic statements of discontent for domestic audiences absent policy action. Washington and Jerusalem disagree on their visions of postwar Gaza. The administration sees the Palestinian Authority as the most viable partner for governance there. Israel can’t accept this, given the authority’s corruption, incompetence and unpopularity in Gaza and the West Bank. A Palestinian Authority-governed Gaza would relapse into Hamas-style radicalism, if not direct Hamas rule.
Oct. 7 was the first step in a new phase of Iran’s campaign against Israel and America. Iran is a revolutionary regime akin to Napoleonic France or the Soviet Union. Tehran’s goal since 1979 has been to export the Islamic revolution throughout the Middle East. Israel’s military power and the U.S.-Israel relationship are the main impediments, as they are the only two actors that can seriously damage Iran.
Tehran’s strategy, shaped by now-dead Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, is a broad campaign of state capture. In Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, Iran has sponsored proxies with the goal of co-opting the security services and building an alliance called the Axis of Resistance. Axis members have diverse goals but are united in their hatred of Israel and the U.S.
The axis can’t defeat Israel conventionally. It has to grind Israel down in a war of attrition, imposing overwhelming political, economic and societal costs. Winning requires disrupting the U.S.-Israel alliance, since as long as Washington backs Jerusalem’s survival, Israel will be too strong to undermine.
Iran’s actions since Oct. 7 have accelerated its attrition war. Israel’s mobilization and deployment of armored assets to the north deterred immediate Iranian intervention. Yet Iran has deployed and now maintains some 100,000 Iraqi fighters in Syria. It has mobilized Hezbollah and placed the Syrian Arab Army’s most cooperative elements on a war footing. Whatever happens in Gaza, this threat remains.
Hamas’s role in the plan is clear. Its control of Gaza was a useful pressure point against Israel, raising the potential for encirclement. But the real prize is the West Bank, home to three million Palestinians and bordering Jordan’s two million Palestinians. The desiccated Palestinian Authority has lost control of many urban areas in the West Bank. During November’s hostage-prisoner swap, Hamas organized parades throughout the West Bank, including in the authority’s Ramallah stronghold.
Iran’s expanding presence in Syria poses a continuous threat to the West Bank, given back-channels that can move weapons and ammunition from Damascus through Jordan. A Hezbollah rocket bombardment and ground incursion are possible.
The Iranian presence in Syria and Lebanon also menaces Jordan. Any threat to Jordan is a threat to Israel, since a hostile Amman would mean Israel is encircled. Hence the threat in the West Bank and the threat to Israel’s north have merged.
Iran’s stronghold in Syria is this strategy’s linchpin. Without Damascus as a supply hub, Iran would struggle to maintain forces in Lebanon and pressure on the West Bank. Israel has manifest cause to conduct a lightning strike to the north, employing an air-power-heavy campaign and ground war to achieve a swift victory. Iran understands that only the U.S. can restrain Israel, forcing it to fight the slower war of attrition that favors Iran.
Already, Tehran has sowed divisions between Washington and Jerusalem. The Biden administration refused to name Iran as directly responsible for any events leading up to or following Oct. 7 or the 100-plus attacks on U.S. Mideast bases since that day. Over the weekend, the U.S. finally accused Iran of an attack. The Chem Pluto, “a Liberia-flagged, Japanese-owned, and Netherlands-operated chemical tanker” bound for India, was hit 200 nautical miles from the Indian coast, according to the Pentagon. Given the location, a drone launched from Iranian territory likely conducted the attack. Washington’s fixation on Gaza is deliberate myopia. The U.S. still views the current situation as a crisis to be managed, not a strategic competition to be won.
Prudent policy could prevail if the U.S. frames the competition properly. The struggle for the Mideast, which is likely to escalate, is part of the broader struggle for Eurasian control that pits the U.S. and its allies against revisionist China, Russia and Iran. Just as the U.S. has a strategic stake in Ukrainian victory, it has an equal stake in deterring Chinese intervention in Taiwan and defeating Iran’s bid for dominance. Geopolitics requires a horizon beyond crisis management. The sooner Washington adopts this perspective, the better the odds of coherent strategy.
The U.S. can isolate Iran’s proxies in Syria and Lebanon. It could conduct an air campaign in Syria in response to Iranian attacks on U.S. bases, employing its two regional carrier strike groups and other assets in the Arabian Peninsula. The goal is eroding Iran’s combat capacity.
Washington can also can resurrect sanctions against Iran. The U.S. has let several financial sanctions lapse in pursuit of a chimerical détente that Tehran views with contempt. Refreezing Iranian assets and pressuring third-party clearinghouses such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to isolate Iranian money would hamper Tehran’s ability to project power in the short term. A few months of such pressure crippled Iranian exports in the late 2010s and ate into the regime’s resources. Working with Europe on a comprehensive technological monitoring program to disrupt Iranian and Russian cooperation also would help Ukraine.
Most critically, the administration should publicly accept the need for Israeli military action in Syria and Lebanon in the next year. By shifting rhetoric from support for Israel’s anti-Hamas campaign to support for Israel’s anti-Iran campaign, the U.S. can signal its enduring commitment to a peaceful Mideast. This will position the U.S. as the only viable partner for the Gulf Arabs. It will open other opportunities with Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. that the administration has sought without success since the Ukraine war began. America must move the Arab world toward Washington, not leave it on the sidelines.
Mr. Cropsey is the president of the Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is author of “Mayday” and “Seablindness.”
-
I agree with her but must point out predicting the unpredictable is a bit of a contradiction.
Author of Black Swan doesn't even count worldwide covid pandemic as a black swan event as it was predictable. (I question that.)
At this time coming into 2020, Trump and the US economy were rolling, covid was hidden in Wuhan, Derrick Chauvin was a respected officer, George Floyd was high on fentanyl, Antifa has no venue, Donetsk was Ukrainian, America still voted at polling places with election judges, Marco Rubio was ascending and Biden was a political dud. Well that last one never changed.
-
Respect for Herridge as a reporter. A big loss for FOX when she left.
-
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-12824-us-troops-suffer-fatalities?publication_id=1351274&post_id=141137862&isFreemail=true&r=379fkp
-
A well-reasoned piece IMHO:
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2024/01/29/conservatives-give-war-a-chance-n2634209?fbclid=IwAR1onrx-4H7GiusLAxZzW313Qtbqik4Z4U07MSXq504u_U5sjF_qM8nGgRw
-
Attempting to spread the topics addressed broadly here among the relevant threads.
This piece contains references to LOTS of scary prescience, noting predictions of current entanglements made earlier. Indeed, allow me to pile on: if Biden is reelected or some other “Progressive” torchbearer replaces the ambulatory corpse he appears to have become, the partially executed four front World War III will be fully realized as our enemies know Biden and his “Progressive” handlers don’t have the aptitude or stomach for a world war, that the US is currently as politically fractured (and intentionally made so) as it has been since the 1860s, and that in our environmental and Ukraine munition supply zeal we’ve demonstrated that we are unable to arm ourselves to the degree needed to engage on the scale imagined here:
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/01/27/the_geopolitics_of_world_war_iii_1007840.html
-
High quality piece there BBG.
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20384/global-order-nuclear-iran
-
February 13, 2024
View On Website
Open as PDF
Putin’s Perspective on the Russia-Ukraine War
By: George Friedman
Russian President Vladimir Putin did something unprecedented last week: He held a two-hour press conference directed at the American public. It was not exactly a press conference, in the sense that Tucker Carlson, a talk show host perceived as sympathetic toward Russia, was the only reporter present. But neither was it, strictly speaking, an interview, as for most of the program, Putin held forth without the benefit of questions. In a sense, this made it more valuable because it allowed Putin to set out his views in an interesting and important way that might not have been possible had Carlson asked questions that were focused on an American perspective.
Instead, we got a genuine Russian perspective on the war in Ukraine, and Putin appeared to be a reasonable and thoughtful man. He made some very dubious claims, but every leader makes dubious claims while appearing statesmanlike, and Putin’s behavior drove home to an American audience that his position is not without some merit. He also made clear that he is a Russian patriot working for Russian interests, and it is in this spirit that we should take his claims. He did not want to appear like Stalin. He also seemed enormously knowledgeable, far beyond most politicians, though he did have the advantage of knowing what was to be said as well as a translator who always stood between him and his audience. But I believe this was Putin, helped by prepackaged questions, providing a sense of his broad knowledge. If this worked, then he showed that Russia was ruled by a sophisticated thinker. However, given the interview’s length and complexity, the American public may have given up early and not listened to the complete interview.
Still, the historical context, the targeting of an American audience, and the extraordinarily detailed description of Russia and Russian history seem to be setting the stage for negotiations. In defense of Russia’s attack, Putin charged the U.S. and NATO with dishonesty and duplicity in facing Russia, which was simply pursuing its historical imperative. This was no ordinary program, nor was it self-indulgent rambling; Putin’s emphasis on the failure of negotiations in Turkey early in the war makes this clear.
Putin’s central presentation concerned Russian history. He explained how Russia was formed many centuries ago and contrasted this with Eastern Europe’s formation. In this way he argued that Ukraine had always been part of Russia, physically and linguistically. Unstated but implicit in his argument, Ukraine is Russia, and the invasion of Ukraine simply represents the Russian world’s return to an older reality. This is why, according to Putin, Russia’s actions in Ukraine constitute a special military operation and not an act of war. He also spoke of Poland, hinting that Poland and Lithuania are renegades whose roots are inseparable from Russia. The discussion of Russian history was lengthy, but it was not merely academic. Putin’s argument was that history binds a place to its surroundings and its inhabitants and, in this case, gives Russia the right to make claims on foreign territory. I admired the way he slipped in his claims to the region in a way that might be dismissed or overlooked. He did, however, lay the foundation for Russian claims in Poland.
Some of what Putin said was confusing. For example, he asserted that the current Ukrainian government and its predecessors were Nazis and therefore were an enemy of Russia. He cited two men who had become Nazi collaborators before concluding that this made Ukraine a remnant of Nazi Germany and therefore hostile to Russia and other countries that had fought Hitler. This left me confused, as there is no country that was occupied by the Germans that didn’t have collaborators, from France to the Netherlands and so on. Some may have been ideologically Nazis, but all were seeking to survive or prosper. Putin made this argument from the beginning, but if followed logically it would compel Russia to invade most of Europe as a moral obligation. Putin showed himself to be highly sophisticated, so he must understand what he is saying and depend on the world to not understand his claims or take them seriously.
In another part, while expressing his readiness to negotiate, Putin said the United States was damaging itself by using the dollar to compel foreign powers to align with its worldview. He then claimed, in his most baffling remarks, that China’s economy dwarves America’s and that its economic future is bright. It is as if he has missed China’s reality in the two years since Ukraine was attacked. He said this in the context of claiming that a new economic order is emerging, and for that to happen, China must drive it. It is interesting that Putin’s seriously deep analysis of things, even if parts are debatable, concluded with obviously wrong assertions, but he was at it for a long time and was probably tired.
One other thing that struck me was his remarks about Russia’s intercontinental hypersonic missiles. The speed and maneuverability of hypersonics make defense against an attack – in the U.S. or elsewhere – very difficult. I advocated the development of intercontinental hypersonics in my book “The Future of War.” The U.S. has not yet fielded a hypersonic missile, nor do I have any evidence that it is developing an intercontinental version. If Russia’s intercontinental hypersonic missile is as capable as Putin suggested, then that may have been the most significant thing he said.
The rest of Putin’s remarks consisted of complaints about NATO and the United States and his insistence that the uprising in Kyiv in 2014 was the real beginning of the war. He left unexplained how Russia could have ignored such a terrible threat for so long.
Putin is the president of a modern nation-state, so he must explain his policies to his people and try to influence other governments and foreign publics. The goal is not to be truthful but persuasive in order to put other governments under carefully shaped pressure. What can be said is that Russia has stepped fully into modernity with an excellent presentation of truth and myths while allowing Carlson a few rebuttals. Putin saw him as friendly but a wild card, so few cards were dealt to him.
-
https://americanmind.org/salvo/saving-americas-future-from-the-blob/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=294382011&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8an-zpCsOHsTzWoqF-47zhDCfee3VX1AZB784bu8koIE_DCIjFi0yoFKjPZtEXA1sd6kMHNBVknhKClZL-10PFZb0yUQ&utm_content=294382011&utm_source=hs_email
===========================
https://dc.claremont.org/restoring-american-manufacturing-a-practical-guide/
-
From a 'related link' in the Russia-China story:
"Russia must know that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought."
- NATO General Secretary, Jens Stoltenberg
https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/vladimir-putin-nuclear-war-targets-32243272
Think about that. NATO leader (from Norway) admits it. The reason nuclear war, any war, would not be fought is deterrence. Peace through strength. If you attack you will regret it.
Meanwhile we neglect to replenish our munitions and modernize our fleets to meet the known risks, much less being ready to face the unknown unknowns.
NATO estimates that Norway will spend 1.7% of GDP on defense in 2023.
https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/norway-defense-and-aerospace-technologies
Oops, wasn't that supposed to be 2%.
May 2, 2023 - Norway aims to raise its defence spending to at least 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2026, in line with a long-held goal among members of the NATO alliance, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said on Tuesday.
[Doug] I thought Putin wasn't a threat. Are they afraid of Britain, Sweden?
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fagtI6MOCUo
-
Uncle Sam’s Guide to Peace and Prosperity
American economic and military might can underwrite a new economic and security commons.
By Kevin Warsh
March 19, 2024 1:31 pm ET
WSJ
Economic and geopolitical instability are frequent bedfellows. That’s because policy errors are contagious. Absent the creation of a new American-led economic and security framework, it’s doubtful the U.S. can sustain prosperity and achieve a durable peace.
Massive government spending, surging debt burdens and bank rescues over the past several years have alarmed America’s allies and emboldened its adversaries. The surge in inflation has added considerable weight to America’s woes. It shocked central banks, knocked the economy, and prompted foreign adversaries to challenge America’s geopolitical standing.
The U.S. government is striving to mask the country’s economic and financial troubles. In the past several months, the Treasury Department has issued more short-term bills and fewer long-term notes than expected. Its machinations have lowered 10-year Treasury yields by nearly 1 percentage point, to about 4%. The Federal Reserve has gotten into the act, too. It pledged at its year-end press conference to deliver interest-rate cuts and other policy easing in the new year.
The immediate results include a melt-up in asset prices, a loosening of financial conditions, and higher and less stable prices. Hardworking Americans aren’t fooled. They see the country going down the wrong track. And they watch adversaries plotting to take advantage. Bad actors operating in the Black, Red and South China seas are undeterred. A foreign axis of resistance is unimpressed by the American economic engine, unintimidated by U.S. military might, and unconvinced Washington will rise to the geopolitical challenge. The axis seeks to divide our allies and, worse, to sow domestic discord. U.S. deterrence is flailing. American diplomats are being asked to carry too heavy a burden.
The relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the world is more fragile than it’s been in half a century. French statesman Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) feared that peace might be no more than the interlude between wars. If he’s right, current prosperity will serve as a fleeting interval between economic shocks.
A powerful economic and security commons, in George Shultz’s original framing, was established in 1945. After the devastation of the Great Depression and two world wars, the U.S. fortified its economy and strengthened alliances in a dangerous world. Americans benefited enormously from a surge in economic growth and heightened well-being for decades. America’s leaders made clear that empire-building wasn’t the goal. Rather it was to make the U.S. safer and stronger by supporting allies who supported us.
American peace and prosperity grew shaky in the late 1970s. Economic malaise and runaway inflation, institutional dysfunction and cultural decay, and a weakened military posture caused Americans to lose faith in their country’s prospects. U.S. allies no longer trusted us, and adversaries scarcely feared us. Failed efforts to rescue American hostages held by the mullahs in Iran was illustrative. America’s hegemony risked eclipse.
Ronald Reagan changed all that. He vanquished the Soviet Union and debilitated its proxies. His administration rebuilt an economic and security commons suited to the times. With a bolstered military, the U.S. held close to its allies and deterred its adversaries, occasionally with force. Strong, noninflationary growth and higher standards of living became the norm. The peace dividend wasn’t only prosperity. It was peace, and it lasted for two decades.
The 21st century has brought new challenges: terrorist attacks on the homeland, wars in the Middle East, a financial crisis and a global pandemic. The American economy swings between booms and busts. People have lost faith in institutions. Moral confusion clouds debates about the nation’s history. Finally, a big runup in prices has harmed the least well-off. It’s surprising that populism isn’t more popular.
America’s leaders ought to build a new economic and security commons. The U.S. should act as a sturdy point in a turbulent world. Strong, unapologetic national-security policy begins with a prosperous, sustainable economy. The U.S. must demonstrate again the superiority of its economic system. Washington’s conduct of fiscal, monetary, regulatory and trade policy needs fixing so soft power can share the burden with hard power.
Outspending the nation’s capacity is dangerous. Absent a fiscal anchor, the list of buyers retreating from America’s debt markets won’t be limited to those who wish us trouble.
Monetary policy requires a revamped framework, too. Inflation isn’t caused by workers earning too much and living too well. It’s caused by the government living too well—spending, printing and borrowing too much.
Government-directed industrial policy, as currently practiced, is akin to the command-and-control dictates of foreign regimes. Better for the private sector to out-innovate, outgrow and outsmart the competition. Regulators should take heed of U.S. comparative advantages—including in the energy sector—and better respect the separation between the private sector and the government.
China is actively courting many U.S. trading partners, promising privileged access in exchange for allegiance to Beijing. A revamped economic and security commons should be at least as clear and formidable as sanctions policy with adversaries. Put plainly, if a country acts as a trusted security partner of the U.S. and treats American businesses and citizens as it treats its own, the U.S. will act reciprocally. If, however, foreign countries disfavor U.S. interests, they won’t gain the precious benefit of American protection or ready access to U.S. technology or markets. I prefer a new paradigm to bring allies and partners into closer collaboration. Adversaries would take notice, not comfort.
Neither peace nor prosperity are self-reinforcing. The U.S. margin for error is small. Establishing a new security and economic commons may be difficult, but it’s necessary and pressing.
Mr. Warsh, a former member of the Federal Reserve Board, is a distinguished visiting fellow in economics at the Hoover Institution.
-
I found this post by YA in the India thread very interesting and so paste it here:
=============================
I was impressed with the understanding of India by Alexander Dugin, a Russian thinker close to Putin. His understanding of things is very close to that of the Indian mind. Have not seen any other Western commentator, and definitely no American commentator with this level of accuracy. Dugin by the way says Russia should side with China!, which may be the correct response for Russia.
https://twitter.com/Agdchan/status/1781435242865123423
India Aims to Emulate Chinese Strategy
To the surprise of many, India currently boasts the fastest-growing economy in the world. In 2023, the country’s GDP grew by 8.4%. By 2027, it is projected to become the third-largest economy globally. If this trend continues, India might surpass the USA and even China in the 2030s.
India is also leading in demographics and the IT sector. The Indian diaspora now controls a significant segment of Silicon Valley, and the UK’s prime minister is Rishi Sunak, who is ethnically Indian, albeit with liberal-globalist views. Interestingly, a prominent conservative politician in the Republican Party, a staunch Trump supporter of Indian origin, Vivek Ramaswamy, represents a complete ideological antithesis to Sunak. In any case, Indians are advancing.
We are witnessing an entirely new phenomenon — the emergence of a new global centre right before our eyes. India owes these successes largely to a new turn in policy that coincided with the rise to power of the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party. Indeed, modern India was founded during decolonisation by a different party, the left-leaning and progressive Indian National Congress. Of course, the highest value for Indians after gaining independence was liberation from the impacts of colonialism, yet India remained a member of the post-colonial Commonwealth of Nations, where Britain dominated, and clung firmly to the democracy introduced by the British. Moreover, it even took pride in being ‘the largest democracy in the world’. The Congress was content that the country had achieved political independence from its former rulers but agreed to emulate the socio-political, economic, and cultural paradigm of the West.
For the first time, the Congress’s monopoly on power in India was challenged by the victory of an alternative right-conservative party — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — in the 1996 elections for the lower house of parliament (Lok Sabha). This party was founded based on the extremely conservative movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1980.
In 2014, Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister from this party and has held the position ever since. According to analysts, Modi has every reason to retain his post following the 2024 elections, which commence on 19 April and conclude on 1 June.
The rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Modi’s personal political charisma have fundamentally changed India. Interestingly, the official name of India under Modi was changed to its Sanskrit version — Bharat. This reflects that Modi relies on a completely different ideology than that of the Indian National Congress.
Initially, in the Indian struggle for independence from the British, there were two main approaches: one was gentle and pacifist, embodied by Mahatma Gandhi, who advocated non-violent resistance; the other was more militant and uncompromising, represented by figures such as the Indian traditionalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the founder of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Keshav Hedgewar, and the nationalist Vinayak Savarkar.
As the British departed from the country, they comfortably entrusted power in India to the Congress (having previously severed several territories populated by Muslims — Pakistan and Bangladesh — as well as Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Nepal), believing that this party would keep India within the Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence and lead it along the path of modernisation and Westernisation (with regional specifics), thereby maintaining some form of colonial control.
In contrast, the main opponents of the Congress had believed from the very start of the struggle for independence that India was not just a country or a former colony but the territory of a mighty and distinct civilisation. Today, we refer to this concept as a ‘civilisation-state’. This idea was first articulated by Kanaiyalal Munshi and came to be known as Akhand Bharat, ‘Undivided India’, or ‘Greater India’.
In 2022, Narendra Modi declared the main goal to be the ‘decolonisation of the Indian mind’. Before us emerges an India we hardly knew — a right conservative India, a Vedic civilisation-state, and a Greater India on the path to total sovereignty.
Certainly, a superficial observer might notice a contradiction: India is geopolitically aligning more with the United States and Israel, becoming involved in an escalating border conflict with China (hence India’s participation in several regional anti-China blocs such as the QUAD), and relations are intensifying with the Islamic world — both within India and towards Pakistan. If Indian traditionalists are concerned with the ‘decolonisation of the Indian mind’ and combating Western material civilisation, what do they have in common with the US?
To resolve this ambiguity, one might look to the history of modern China’s rise. Representatives of the American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), especially Henry Kissinger in the late 1970s, proposed a bilateral partnership to China against the USSR, aiming to ultimately dismantle the socialist bloc. China, under Deng Xiaoping, capitalised on this and gradually transformed over forty years from an economic client of the US into a powerful independent pole, with which the US is now competing and, essentially, engaged in a trade war. The escalating issues surrounding Taiwan suggest that this confrontation might soon enter a hot phase.
Now, the same globalist forces in the West have decided to support India — this time against China. Modi, considering the Chinese experience, has adopted this strategy. But just as China used globalisation for its purposes, strengthening rather than losing its sovereignty, so too does Greater India intend to act. Initially, considering the objective realities of international politics, to strengthen its power, raise the welfare of its vast population, expand domestic market volumes, military might, and technological potential, and then, at the opportune moment, emerge as a fully independent and sovereign pole.
The globalists understand this strategy best. For instance, George Soros and his Open Society Foundations — which is banned in the Russian Federation and openly aims to combat tradition, sovereignty, and independent cultures and societies — have declared war on Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. In doing so, Soros not only supported the opposition Congress but also actively fomented social and ethnic strife in India, specifically calling for the Dalits (a widely prevalent caste of untouchables) to rise up against Modi. This represents another version of the ‘colour revolution’ that the globalists are orchestrating.
Russia needs to recognise the fundamental changes occurring in India. This is a completely different country from the one with which we had quite close relations during the Soviet period. Yes, Indians still regard Russians with great fondness and nostalgia. This applies not only to the leftists in the Congress (where, incidentally, under the influence of Soros, voices of Russophobia are becoming increasingly loud) but also to the right-wing traditionalists. In this case, the key factor is not inertia but a clear understanding that Russia itself declares itself as a civilisation-state, is a major force in building a multipolar world, and is also currently undergoing its own kind of ‘decolonisation of consciousness’. If India has certain conflictual issues — especially in border areas — with China, another civilisation-state and another pole of the multipolar world, nothing similar exists with Russia, even in the long term.
That said, we absolutely should not be moving closer to India by sacrificing our close strategic partnership with China. On the contrary, we are vitally interested in settling relations between these two great powers because if conflict breaks out between them (as the West is indeed pushing for), the prospects for a multipolar world will be indefinitely delayed. Russia is now defending its traditional values. Thus, we should better understand all those who are standing up to defend their own.
Then the energy partnership, strategic plans for the North-South transport corridor, processes of Eurasian integration, cooperation in high technology (with India currently being one of the global leaders in IT), and the financial sector will acquire a new ideological dimension: traditionalists, interested in civilisational sovereignty and in stopping the expansion of Western hegemony, will understand each other much better.
Translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister
===================
*India as a civilization state
*China
*Globalism (George Soros and Open Society Foundations openly aim to combat tradition, sovereignty, and independent cultures and societies)
*Russia Russia itself declares itself as a civilisation-state, is a major force in building a multipolar world,
-
Obviously, this is a pimple on an elephant's ass in the big picture of things, but it so clearly illustrates the cross civilization cultural issues described in the Russian piece that YA posted:
https://dailycaller.com/2024/04/22/biden-admin-trans-india-state/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rundown&pnespid=r_V6CiBdMvMT1_Pd_znqHc_DshCnUZgvcOjj37JspxZmJbcbehDzc1okH6Zcsd9Plv0EnXFT
-
April 24, 2024
View On Website
Open as PDF
European Views on US Global Posture
Perceptions aren't consistent with reality.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
The notion that all countries operate within constraints is one of the main pillars of geopolitics. It came up repeatedly during my recent visit to the United States, where I attended several talks on European and Russian affairs. Though we at GPF try to stay out of the D.C. bubble, it’s nonetheless important for us to know what those in the bubble are saying, especially since Europe right now appears so consumed by what’s happening in Washington.
I traveled to the U.S. with a delegation of experts and policymakers from Romania. Analysts and officials from other parts of Europe, including Germany and Poland, were also in attendance. The main topics on the agenda were security and, of course, Ukraine. The event coincided with heated discussions in the U.S. Congress over aid packages for Ukraine and Israel. Though the situation in Israel is potentially hugely impactful for American politics, the conflict in Ukraine is the main focus for many policymakers in Europe. After all, the war there has shifted NATO’s containment line and transformed Eastern Europe into a literal battleground.
Considering that Kyiv is hugely dependent on military aid from Washington, European lawmakers are making concerted efforts to learn more about the constraints within which U.S. politics and politicians operate. Europeans typically have a narrow view of U.S. politics, mainly focusing on the presidency and the administration, which they perceive as ultimately responsible for maintaining the United States’ global leadership role and, by extension, the Western security structure.
That’s because the Europeans tend to believe the U.S. political system mirrors those in Europe, where foreign policies are forged by governments and primarily driven by urgent security threats to their borders. The Europeans thus get either nervous or excited every time another U.S. presidential election comes around, believing that a change in the presidency could alter how Washington interacts with the world. In doing so, they misjudge the way U.S. politics works, believing falsely that the presidency overrides every other institution in the United States, especially when it comes to strategy and foreign policy.
In fact, the U.S. president isn’t as powerful as many assume – and that’s by design. The nation's founders didn’t want to assign too much authority to one person in the political hierarchy. They instead built a system of checks and balances, splitting power among three branches of government: the legislative (Congress), the executive (the president) and the judiciary (the courts). This division of powers guarantees that no branch can overpower the others. Congress enacts legislation, which the president can veto, which Congress can in turn override with two-thirds majorities in both houses. Congress also controls the federal budget, and thus can limit funding for the president’s agenda. The president is commander-in-chief of the military but cannot declare war; that power belongs to Congress. The president also appoints federal judges and other officials, but the Senate must confirm the appointments. The courts, meanwhile, interpret laws and can strike down legislation that they rule unconstitutional. All this means that a president’s powers are limited by the legislative and judicial branches of government – even if his party holds a majority in Congress.
The president thus has a limited ability to wield power over U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, the United States’ global posture isn’t a product of its politics or policymaking to begin with. America's evolution as the leader of the Western world was largely driven by economic interests and the idea that global markets, mobility and interconnectivity would bring profit to U.S. businesses and drive economic growth and development. The role of the private sector – sometimes in coordination with the government – is central to the country’s global standing. Though interactions between companies and politicians are complex, one of the ways in which businesses influence foreign policy is by lobbying representatives in Congress to pursue policies that meet their interests abroad. This pressure resulted in legislation that made it possible for administrations to implement strategies that, over time, turned the U.S. into an economic leader and superpower. This role enabled the government to maintain domestic stability and pursue growth.
Still, the United States’ approach on Ukraine is often perceived in Europe as a reflection of the administration’s global priorities. During my visit to Washington, Congress was discussing a new Ukraine aid package, which was finally passed on Saturday. Many of the Europeans present at the talks tied the matter to America's leadership role in the world. To many Americans, however, aid for Ukraine is treated more as a matter of domestic politics than foreign affairs. Recent polls indicate Americans are equally split between thinking the U.S. is doing too much for Ukraine and wanting the U.S. to do more.
Another topic of discussion was the security situation around the Black Sea. In 2022, a bill was introduced in Congress that would authorize the National Security Council to direct an interagency strategy to increase coordination with NATO and the European Union, deepen economic ties, and strengthen the security and democratic resilience of partners in the Black Sea region in accordance with U.S. values and interests. The bill was passed in 2023 and has become of increasing interest to the business community in both the U.S. and the Black Sea region.
Western businesses increasingly see opportunities here, especially with the Ukraine war and sanctions on Russia disrupting more traditional routes through which they conduct trade around the world. The Danube has become an alternate trade route linking the so-called Middle Corridor (which connects Southeast Asia to Europe through Central Asia and Turkey instead of Russia) to Germany’s North Sea coast. New rail and road projects linking Romania’s port of Constanta to Gdansk in Poland also have been discussed to help integrate European markets and build a strong containment line in Eastern Europe.
The future of these and other infrastructure projects will depend on how states and businesses address the fallout of the war, its duration and the strategies of both Russia and Ukraine for rebuilding after its conclusion. Any investment plans in Ukraine will need to take into account Russia’s long-term strategy, announced in 2023, to counter Western influence around the world. Thus, the Black Sea region can’t be decoupled from the future of Ukraine – as some suggested during my trip to Washington. Should Ukraine be forced to negotiate ceding parts of its territory to Russia, Kyiv could fall under Russian influence in the longer term – which wouldn’t require a massive investment from Moscow considering the socio-economic realities in Ukraine today. The biggest risk many grappled with was that Ukraine could become a failed state, a black hole between Europe and Russia that Moscow could eventually control.