Rational International

Identity Matters: Italy

2008-06-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

Anyone taking a passing glance at European political trends in the past few months might be prompted to ask, along with Alex Harrowell, 'what's going on in Italy?' Harrowell amplifies the considerable angst expressed by the Guardian's Martin Jacques over some of the cultural touchstones that accompanied recent Italian elections. Rome, which has not had a conservative mayor since Italian fascism collapsed in 1943, has elected Gianni Alemanno, a Berlusconi ally who ran on a vociferously anti-immigrant platform, to lead the city's government. At Alemanno's victory rally, his supporters gave the Roman salute while evoking Mussolini, shouting, "Duce! Duce! Duce!" The shift to the nationalist - detractors would say xenophobic - right played out nationally as well, putting Berlusconi in power at the head of a coalition that includes the regionalist and virulently anti-immigrant Northern League, as well as the National Alliance, which descends directly from the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

The new government wasted no time fulfilling its promises to crack down on immigrant communities, initiating a massive, high-profile police sweep of migrant shanty-towns and arresting hundreds on various charges. Perhaps more unsettling to those whose political sympathies don't lie with the Italian right, though, were the concurrent vigilante attacks against immigrant communities. The New York Times reports:

On Saturday, [May 10,] several hundred Italians attacked a camp of Roma, or Gypsies, on the eastern outskirts of Naples brandishing sticks and throwing homemade incendiary devices, after a 16-year-old Roma girl was accused of trying to steal a baby. The police were called to restore order and no one was injured, but the episode led national news programs.

This got a paragraph in the Times, but to me this is the real story. Based on accusations of baby stealing (sounds a bit like 'well poisoning' to me, though evidently it's more than just an unattributed rumor), a crowd of Italians rampaged through an immigrant community with clubs and molotov cocktails. That's not just letting off a bit of political steam. That's an ethnic riot - a pogrom if you like - in Western Europe, in the twenty-first century. That the government responded not with outrage that such a dispicable event had blackened Italy's good name, but rather with a police sweep through immigrant shanty-towns, suggests that anti-immigrant violence now has the tacit backing of the Italian state (if you can read Italian, check out some of the charming responses that local school children gave to the violence).

That statement might seem a bit harsh, but the patterns of ethnic violence that we begin to see exhibited in Italy have parallels in other areas of the World. I have referred before to the work of Paul Brass on "institutional riot systems" and the way in which they fuel and direct anti-Muslim violence in India. Based on my (admittedly superficial) reading of the current state of events in Italy, it appears that there are formal elements within the Italian political system that both fuel and feed off of violence against and hatred toward perceived outsiders.

Please understand, I'm not suggesting that Italy is on the verge of breaking out into the kind of orgiastic ethnic violence that has been seen in areas of India and other parts of the World. I have too much faith in the Italian people and in Italian - and European - legal and governmental institutions (however comically dysfunctional they may appear at times) to think that such atrocities would be tolerated there. Still, given the recent virulence of some on the Italian right, given the fact that unabashedly anti-immigrant parties now have a very prominent place in the Italian government, and given the fact that other European countries are or will soon be facing similar political and demographic dilemmas, it is worth analyzing what brought things to this point, and thinking about holistic steps that European elites can take to keep their integrative project from backsliding into poisonous ethnic chauvinism.

Italian Identity

It is worth noting that immigration is relatively new as a national issue in Italy when compared with the experience 0f other European countries. Indeed, until the 1970s, more people emigrated from Italy than immigrated to it (a professor of mine once pointed out that a famous scene in Antonioni's film La Notte had to be understood in the context of an Italy in which black people were virtually non-existent). Before then, the principal cleavage of Italian national identity was regional; in particular, the cultural and economic divide between the industrialized north and the rural, largely impoverished south. Kowalczyk and Popkewitz, in a paper from a few years ago, write that the immigration issue has re-mapped Italian identity, submerging (if incompletely) the north-south divide by introducing a new group to be confined to "otherness." The attitude of many Italians is perfectly encapsulated by an anonymous quote in the paper: "An Italian thief is a thief, a Moroccan thief is a Moroccan."

Channeling Frustrations

There is another element that I think may be at work here, albiet as only part of the story. The Italian political system, it would seem, is in rather severe straits. Italy's economy is anemic, its government inefficient, and its elites corrupt. I bring this up cautiously, because I am generally skeptical of arguments that rest on "false consciousness," whereby people filter the problems and insecurities in some aspects of their lives through an unrelated ideological construct in order to make sense of them. I think this is too often used as an intellectually lazy crutch by (particularly left wing) academics who don't want to admit that not everyone is a socialist who just doesn't know it yet. Still, I think that it is true that, with organization and foresight, political elites can construct narratives that channel and focus generalized frustration in particular directions, at least in certain circumstances.

Italy's political-economic stagnation is serious, and the usual stopgap measures that governments have used in the past to mollify the Italian populace (economic protectionism, currency devaluation) are now off limits due to the constraints of the E.U. In such an environment, the creation of a narrative of immigrants as a cancer on Italian society (never mind that, with Italy's pathetic birthrate, they are in fact an urgent economic necessity), fits logically into a larger picture of national malaise and an uncertain future. Some of the Northern League's iconic posters (one reading "Further from Rome, Closer to You," another calling for "Fewer Taxes to Rome, More Money to Pensioners," and another provocative one that pictures an American Indian and reads "They Allowed Immigration, Now They Live on Reservations") support this link between frustration with Italy's political institutions and virulent animus towards immigration from abroad. Certain Italian elites have managed - at least among some constituencies - to link immigration to the widely shared sense that something is rotten in the state of Italy. The fact that some on the radical right, who are now in positions of real power, have openly advocated state violence against immigrants, as well as made reference to the mobilization of extra-legal mobs to support their cause, adds up to an environment that is conducive to the kind of ethnic violence that Italy witnessed in May.

What is to be Done?

As I noted when opening this series, the multi-level reconstruction of the notion of citizenship that is now taking place in Europe - wherein citizenship is at once local, national and European - is almost certain to produce a certain amount of dislocation. Sensible immigration policies that seek to integrate immigrants into Italian society through schools, job and language training, and social support are critical to reversing the kind of ethnic balkanization that can prime a population for violence and regressive politics. Likewise, extensive government reforms that restore popular faith in civic institutions may be able to blunt the appeal of purosangue narratives of Italian identity.

It is finally worth noting that Italy's shift to the nationalist right - though notable for its extremity - is not unique within Europe. Problems of identity will need to be confronted at every step of Europe's integrative project. Europeans need to find a better way of navigating their perils.

And I'm Left Speechless

2008-05-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

So, apparently the Fulbright Program, a government-sponsored institution that provides scholarships for students from around the World to come study in the United States (and vice versa on occasion) has decided to withdraw the grants that it had awarded to Palestinian students in Gaza, because Israel will not let them leave.

Does anyone else occasionally feel as though they've become a character in some post-war French absurdist play on which the curtain just won't close?

First off, the Israelis really won't let some of Palestine's best and brightest leave Gaza to come to the United States to study? It makes sense I suppose. After all, what possible good could come from allowing the intellectual roses that have managed to grow in soil poisoned by forty years of occupation, poverty and war to see a side of Western culture and society that doesn't involve precision-guided missiles and helicopter gunships? That would indeed be dangerous.

And even if Israel really is too short sighted to see that cropping the dreams of Gaza's future intellectual elite might not be in its own best interest, why on Earth would the United States withdraw the grants? Representatives of the Fulbright Program have expressed "concern that the grant money for the Palestinians would go to waste if they were forced to remain in Gaza."

So, what? We can't afford it? For some perspective, the President's 2009 budget request for all State Department educational and cultural exchange programs - increased from last year - amounts to $522.4 million, or about seventeen and a half hours in Iraq, give or take a few minutes. Would it really be that difficult to keep the portion of that money dedicated to Palestinian recipients available should Israel reverse its stance? Are we really so insensitive to the plight of the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, that we won't at least make a symbolic gesture in support of their socioeconomic development?

I feel as though there ought to be more to say, but this leaves me simply at a loss for words.

Breaking the Camel's Back?

2008-05-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

Quick hit: Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has finally stopped being coy and called for Kadima to find new leadership. She stopped short of directly calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Olmert, but for the first time she is publicly counting herself with those who support his ouster. Let's see if this pushes Olmert over the edge.

Identity Matters: Language

2008-05-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

By way of introduction to what I intend to be a series of posts examining the politics of identity in the twenty-first century (a subject that any regular readers will know is near and dear to my heart), I'd like to direct readers to a great post at Freakonomics on language and globalization. Four thinkers give their thoughts on the interaction between economic globalization, cyberspace, colonial legacies, and language. I found a few quotes to be particularly illuminating.

John Hayden, president of Versation, speculates on the effects that emerging economies will have on the primacy of English as the World's lingua franca:

English is a tool, just like a piece of technology. Much of the world’s economy is tied up in English-speaking countries and for that reason, English is like a cell phone provider offering the best plan. But if the dollar continues to drop, the most viable option could shift. Mexico and Korea don’t need English to communicate if Korea begins to find it profitable to learn Spanish.

Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at UPenn, addresses some of the more overtly political implications of language in the coming years:

Much of today’s linguistic politics are rooted in the residues of colonial rule, itself an earlier form of globalization — but paradoxically, the recent spread of former colonial languages is sometimes driven by local resistance to domination by outsiders...

Kurdish officials resist being forced to do business with the central government in Arabic, and sometimes insist on English, even if their command of Arabic is excellent. They recognize that they can’t force the central government to deal with them in Kurdish, but they see English, the language of the former colonial power, Britain — and of the current occupying power, the United States — as a symbol of resistance to the cultural and political hegemony of the Arabic-speaking majority...

And at the same time that big languages like English, French, Chinese, and Arabic have been spreading among present or past imperial subject populations, local linguistic nationalism has been increasing in strength, and winning some victories.

In Belgium — which is number one in the 2007 KOF Index of Globalization — Flemish cultural nationalism, very much based on language, is threatening to split the country in two...

Paradoxically, the force that freed “regional and minority” languages throughout Europe was exactly the economic and political unification created by that poster child of globalization, the European Union.

If you’re going to combine many countries with different national languages — and do it by political compromise rather than by military conquest — then you can’t impose any single national language on the result. And once you admit a dozen or so national languages to official status in the resulting union, why not throw in a hundred more — even if the local nation-states have been busily trying to promote national unity by suppressing them for the past few centuries?

Hayden and Liberman touch on a whole mouthful (brainful?) of issues, which I couldn't begin to fully address here; but, I'll offer a few thoughts on which I hope to later expand. There are many "dark sides" to the emergence of the global economy, and though I think that globalization on the whole has been - and can continue to be - an immensely positive phenomenon for people all over the World, our political institutions have done a poor job addressing the very serious environmental, economic and cultural dislocation that has accompanied its emergence. The immense changes that have taken place in the past few decades have upended the lives of billions of people in the space of a single generation, affecting not merely the size of their pocketbooks and the cleanliness of their drinking water, but also the way in which they perceive their place in the emerging global order. The complex mix of family, tribe, race, gender, religion and language that defines the boundaries of political kinship is changing, and if we as a species are to address the myriad economic, political and environmental challenges that face us, we must have a handle on the opportunities and limitations that such changes will present.

Liberman's comments on the European Union, for example, are particularly intriguing. Europe as a society is playing a fascinating multi-level game with the identity of its citizens. Just as the ethno-nationalist project that has occupied European peoples for the better part of two hundred years has come to fruition, Europeans are being encouraged to subsume their national identities in favor of a larger, pan-European one. At the same time, increased immigration from other areas of the World is challenging Europeans' identities at a time when they are uniquely plastic. Responses have run the spectrum from ethno-localist xenophobia to cosmopolitan acceptance, with most people falling somewhere in between. Language, as the premier marker of nationalism in the modern era, remains powerful in its potential to both unify and divide Europeans as they lurch haltingly towards their post-modern "paradise."

The situation around the rest of the Globe is no less complex.

Before I launch into what I hope will be a fruitful discussion, I do want to make a couple of things clear. First, though a person's political identity is, in my opinion, a social construct - "imagined" if you like - that is not the same thing as saying that it is false. The facile crutch of "false consciousness" has blinded thinkers and politicians from Marx to Obama to the very real concerns of people whose identities are inseparable from their dignity, and who legitimately seek to pass both on to their descendants. Second, identity is not an inherently moral concept. What a person does with their identity, whether they harness it for peace and unity or for power and violence, is of course morally relevant, but identity itself simply is. If we as citizens - and this is one issue in which citizen involvement at all levels of global society is absolutely crucial - are going to navigate the complex and treacherous waters of twenty-first century geopolitics, we must all give due respect to the values and aspirations of communities with whom we do not feel an immediate bond, and we cannot do that while sitting in perpetual judgment.

Much has happened in recent weeks that is highly relevant to this discussion, from elections in Europe to violence in India and South Africa. I hope to address many of them soon, but in the mean time, I would love to hear what readers think of this issue, where they see trends in global political identity heading, and what role, if any, language plays.

Cluster Bombs

2008-05-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

The BBC reports today that more than one hundred countries have agreed to back an international ban on the production, transfer, stockpiling and use of cluster munitions. The problems associated with these weapons - chiefly that unexploded "bomblets" remain on the battlefield and pose a danger to civilians long after the fighting ends - were put on full display after Israel's extensive use of cluster munitions during the 2006 Lebanon war.

The report notes that the U.S., China and Russia (among others) have refused to back the agreement, raising some question as to how effective it will actually be. Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch evidently believes that the treaty has some value, noting that a similar group of countries refused to sign the 1997 treaty banning land mines, but that the stigma created by the ban has established a strong norm against their use to which even non-signatory countries have adhered.

This is actually a very interesting test case that political scientists would do well to watch over the next decade or two. I recall from my undergraduate days that the debate over what effect, if any, behavioral norms have on international actors remains one of the principal controversies of the study of international relations. Whether or not a normative principal established by the world community, but rejected by a number of Great Powers, can nevertheless compel compliance is the kind of question that theorists love to ask but seldom get to test. The next time the U.S., Russia, China or Israel goes to war (and trust me, there will be a "next time" for at least some within that group), see how, if at all, they use cluster munitions. It would make for a great paper.

Fearing to Negotiate

2008-05-22T06:28:00.001-07:00

I've done several posts now on the wisdom (or not) of holding high-level talks with unfriendly groups and regimes. I do indeed have ideas about other topics, to which I hope to move very shortly, but given recent events, as well as the continuing national dialogue about how the United States ought to relate to groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and governments like those in Damascus and Tehran, I think one final post is in order.

Today's Times features an op-ed by Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins that critically examines Kennedy's willingness to negotiate with Kruschev - a relevant topic because of its lately ubiquitous use as an example of America's appropriate diplomatic flexibility in the face of a determined adversary. Thrall and Wilkins essentially argue that for all of Kennedy's lofty talk about 'never negotiating out of fear, but never fearing to negotiate,' the talks were in fact a disaster, convincing Kruschev that Kennedy could be pushed around and leading the U.S.S.R. to dangerously escalate the Cold War in Berlin and Cuba.

Recent days have also revealed that Israel, against American advice (though with American knowledge), has been negotiating with Syria through Turkish intermediaries on the final status of the Golan Heights. I must say I was surprised to hear this (I've always been a bit skeptical of Israel's true willingness to give back the Golan, since Syria hasn't been able to put the kind of intense pressure on Israel that groups in the West Bank and Gaza have), and am reluctant to be too optimistic about the results, particularly given Olmert's current political weakness, but am happy to hear that the issue has been taken up in a real way for the first time in nearly a decade.

Finally, against some fairly steep odds, Lebanon's feuding factions seem to have reached a power sharing deal that should keep the recent violence there from metastasizing into a full scale war (at least for now). Though Hezbollah's increasing political power is cause for serious concern, a war in Lebanon would be an absolute disaster for both American and Israeli interests in the region, and the agreement at least gives everyone some breathing space.

Lest the reader think I am merely jotting disparate sentences about recent events to post in an incoherent mess, let me explain my thinking. As I have argued before, Washington's strategy of attempting to isolate its adversaries in order to induce either changes in behavior or changes in regime - a strategy that it has pursued with a fair degree of consistency since the end of the Cold War - is now ill-matched to the global balance of power. I do take Thrall and Wilkins' point, though, that high-level negotiations, when pursued without appropriate diplomatic preparation, a detailed and focused agenda, and clear attainable goals, can be even more counterproductive than silence. Many think, for example, that poor preparation before the Israeli-Arab peace talks in the waning days of the Clinton/Barak/Hafez al-Assad administrations left all sides unclear about each others' final goals, and led everyone involved to take overly hard-line bargaining positions, which came across as simple obstinacy, leading to the breakdown of the talks even though a mutually acceptable solution was there for the signing. The Camp David talks were not in and of themselves problematic - they tried to address the real and resolvable strategic concerns of everyone involved - they were just badly executed.

This brings us to recent news. The power-sharing deal in Lebanon means that war (which would irrevocably harden the regional balance of power) has been averted but at the price of a strengthened Hezbollah. The fact that Israel has been negotiating with Syria gives the United States an opening (which we should have seized long ago) to "flip" Damascus, helping to engineer a mutually acceptable settlement on the Golan in exchange for Syria ceasing to support (and ceasing to be a conduit of Iranian support for) Hamas and Hezbollah. This would have the dual effect of cutting off an important source of arms and political cover for Hezbollah in Lebanon, opening the way to re-strengthen the pro-western factions there over time, as well as severely weakening Iranian proxies in the Levant, putting the U.S. in a stronger position to negotiate with Tehran over its nuclear program and Iraq.

That's how one negotiates in a strategically practical and intelligent way.

Don't get me wrong, negotiations aren't a panacea. They can, and do, fail. I don't want to come off as naively assuming that if everyone just sat down and had a good talk all of our problems in the Middle East would be solved. Iraq is still oscillating between low and high levels of sectarian bloodletting, with U.S. troops and Persian Gulf oil (now priced at $135 a barrel and rising fast) stuck in the middle. Much depends on the byzantine workings of the Iranian and Syrian governments, and the extent to which power brokers there believe it is in their interest to refashion their relationships with Israel and the West. Much depends too on the political viability of the Israeli government (opposition parties are already claiming that Israeli-Syrian talks are just a means of distracting from Ehud Olmert's legal troubles), its willingness to make the concessions that are necessary for peace, and the ability of the United States to apply sufficient pressure to all sides (as Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani of Qatar seems to have done in Lebanon). Hamas and Hezbollah, of course, could also prove to be spoilers, particularly if they feel that their backs are to the wall (which is why, albiet with many misgivings, I think it's time to begin talking with them as well).

The bottom line is that, voluminous depressing headlines aside, the political situation across the Middle East is actually quite plastic at the moment. Ending up in a strong position will take cunning, flexibility and foresight on the part of American leaders. All the more reason, in my view, to put an end to our absurd refusal to negotiate.

Bush and King Abdullah

2008-05-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

So, according to the Times, President Bush's requests that Saudi Arabia increase its oil production and lower its prices have once again been rebuffed by the Saudi political leadership at a high-level, highly public, meeting. You know, at this point, you'd at least think the President could do a bit of prep work to establish whether or not these visits will produce any tangible results so as to avoid repeatedly embarassing both himself and the United States. It's bad enough to be begging the Saudis for oil. It's downright humiliating to be refused.

Almost makes you nostalgic for the times when we were considering just taking the stuff.

Almost.

The Long, Unfortunate Shadow of Munich

2008-05-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports today that President Bush issued a "veiled attack" on Senator Obama during his address to the Israeli Knesset. From the article:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Mr. Bush said. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

First off, that's not much of a veil. That's a pretty direct attack on Obama's foreign policy proposals, and his campaign responded quickly and angrily, calling the President's remarks an "extraordinary politicization of foreign policy." I've repeatedly avoided getting into the tit-for-tat of the American election, so I won't belabor the specifics. Suffice to say that my view of the situation is closer to that of Mr. Obama than to that of Mr. Bush. The President's address, though, brings up a larger issue that has nagged me for some time, to which I would like to take an opportunity to speak.

I would like to respectfully request that statesmen, political scientists, pundits and analysts the world over stop making historical analogies to the Munich conference, and to the supposed universal folly of "appeasement." Any benefits of Munich as an instructive historical precedent are now far outweighed by the analogy's power as an intellectually lazy rhetorical cudgel that is too often used to bludgeon any diplomatic initiatives that are, well, diplomatic. Not every autocratic country is Nazi Germany. Not every foreign dictator we don't like is Hitler. Not every threatening situation is most appropriately handled by eschewing diplomacy in favor of a "firm stance."

Please understand, I am not suggesting that thinkers and decision-makers stop allowing history to inform their judgement. Such a course would be asinie in the extreme. I would submit, though, that an oversimplified and overgeneralized reading of the events that immediately preceded the Second World War has haunted Western political elites for more than half a century. Aversion to "appeasement" among the post-war generation played a role in escalating the Cold War beyond any sane level, it played a role in America's tragic inability to rationally assess the situation in Vietnam, and in a more contemporary context, it played a central role in the thinking that led to the Iraq war, and is now informing those who would advocate the same in Iran. The "lessons of Munich" - that dictators must always be strongly opposed, that firey rhetoric must always be taken at face value, that diplomatic give-and-take is a fatal sign of weakness, that we must always be ready to fight to defend our perceived interests - obscure the reality of an international problem far more frequently than they illuminate it. Invoking such "lessons" unfairly paints those with different views as modern-day Chamberlains, unable to perceive the intractible perfidity of a determined enemy, and thus frames the debate in narrow and destructive terms wherein the only appropriate response to a problem is sanction and force, and all who think otherwise are weak, or cowardly, or both.

To bring things back to specifics, Iran is not Nazi Germany. Though the Iranian regime is anti-democratic, and espouses values that are indeed antithetical to those of the liberal West, the notion that Iranian armies and proxies are poised to make a genocidal sweep across the Middle East is absurd. Even the Iranian nuclear threat, though serious, shows every sign of being able to be contained with an intelligent deterrence policy (should things come to that). Iran does not have a particularly impressive industrial base. Its infrastructure is mediocre, its economy is sclerotic (propped up only by high oil prices), and its regime is unpopular. Even the outrageous statements about Israel made by President Ahmadinejad should be taken with a grain of salt, remembering that the Iranian President is not the head of state, and that he is acutally at odds with much of Iran's clerical leaders.

Obama's willingness to talk with the Iranian leadership is not a sign of weakness or delusion. It is a sign that he understands that there are things we want from Iran (cooperation in Iraq, nuclear disarmament, reduced political and material support for Hamas and Hezbollah) and things Iran wants from us (a security guarantee, diplomatic relations, a lifting of sanctions, membership in the WTO), and that a deal might be possible that is more amenable to American interests than the current situation. Clear-headed strategic thinking is sorely needed among American leaders today. It is time to stop letting ideological blinders, reinforced by poor analysis and bad history, get in the way.

Military Procurement

2008-05-13T10:40:00.001-07:00

Today, we find a member of the Bush Administration who is, at least at first blush, making some pretty good sense. The New York Times reports that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates "issued a clear warning to the military and its industrial partners on Tuesday that expensive, new conventional weapons must prove their value to current conflicts, marked by insurgency and terrorism, if they hope for a place in future budgets."

You probably can't hear it, but that's the hallelujah chorus singing in the background.

The article goes on to say that Gates's pronouncements "are certain to alarm advocates of the newest generations of high-tech and high-cost weapons programs, in particular the Army’s Future Combat Systems and the Air Force’s F-22 advanced warplane. Both have come under the scrutiny of Pentagon budget officers questioning whether either would be required for missions similar to the current operations in Iraq or Afghanistan." Alarmed, and rightfully so. If I were C.E.O. of a high-end defense contractor (or a congressman with one in my district), I'd certainly be making a few phone calls right now. Still, this is a welcome injection of sanity into the perennial debate over the United States' bloated defense budget.

Actually, to be honest, I'm a little bit conflicted about all of this. On the one hand, given the gargantuan government budget defecits that are driving down the American dollar and generally contributing to the erosion of America's global economic good standing, I'm glad to hear that the defense department is beginning to reorient its priorities away from half-trillion dollar boondoggles whose value has yet to be proven in the real world. On the other hand, while Iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly remain the central focus of the American military over the next three to five years, I'd actually be in favor of reorienting American defense policy (and, concurrently, its global posture) away from such conflicts in the medium-to-long term. Invading countries, conducting large-scale occupation and counterinsurgency operations, and generally continuing to act like we've acted over the last decade is not in the best interest of the United States. Such heavy handed tactics are reminiscent of the nineteenth century, are seldom worth their material and political cost, and given the increasing multipolarity of the international system, will likely be strategically un-feasible before too long anyhow.

I would generally be in favor of tailoring American military capabilities to operate best at the very highest and very lowest levels of power projection (and please understand that I am speaking as a layman, not as a soldier or highly-trained strategic analyst). In other words, I would be in favor of increasing the role of special forces, intelligence, and other flexible mechanisms to quickly and effectively strike at small terrorist groups that operate in numerous corners of the globe (without the burden of changing regimes and building countries from the ground up), as well as maintaining America's technological advantage to ensure our ability to fight major conventional conflicts on the sea and in the air. Large scale, long-term ground operations like we now see in Iraq and Afghanistan should be avoided.

In some senses, this vision would mean that high-end aircraft, new ships, and other expensive military hardware would remain important. I refer back, though, to my earlier praise of Richard Betts's Foreign Affairs piece on American defense expenditures, in which it is argued that we ought to continue aggressively funding research and development of cutting edge defense technologies, without taking on the burden of broadly equipping our military with such hardware until such time as the international situation truly demands it (disconcerting as China's recent military expansion is, we're a long ways away from a showdown with Beijing). As such, we don't need to order hundreds of the latest F-22 fighters. We do want to start designing the plane to replace them.

I suppose I should also mention, cliche though it is at this point, that the pushback from Congress against cuts in many current defense projects will likely be fierce. Here's hoping that Secretary Gates's pragmatism carries through to the next administration, and that enlightened leadership can slowly begin to steer the American military-industrial complex towards a defense posture that is better tailored to the World of the twenty-first century.

Update from Lebanon

2008-05-13T05:23:00.000-07:00

The BBC reports this morning that the Lebanese Army has announced it is prepared to use force to disarm the gunmen that have been clashing across the country in recent days. Though such suppression would be ecumenical in theory, in practice it would mean the army going up against the armed wing of Hezbollah, which has been the principal force working to undermine the current Lebanese government (such as it is). The United States has gotten into the act, with President Bush saying that "the US would ensure the Lebanese military had 'the practical equipment' it needed to act against Hezbollah's armed wing." The American Navy has evidently also sent the missile destroyer USS Cole into the Eastern Mediterranean. According to the BBC, "[sources] have warned that any hint of American intervention would lead it to abandon the few red lines it has observed in its campaign to undermine the government."

I have a few thoughts. First off, as the article above notes, the fact that the army has remained neutral in the current political deadlock has been the major factor keeping Lebanon from spiraling into another round of full-blown civil war. If I were an American decision-maker, I would be very wary of encouraging or enabling any actions that could push Lebanon over the edge, because once full-blown fighting starts, stopping it will likely be wholly beyond our ability. Lebanese militias fought viciously for fifteen years without fundamentally changing the country's political balance, stopping only once the conflict's outside backers (Syria and Israel) deemed continued fighting to be no longer to their advantage. Any major fighting in Lebanon would surely draw in (at least through proxies) Iran, Syria, Israel, and likely the United States. This would give Iran yet another battleground on which to cause headaches for the U.S. at a time when it can ill afford them, and make cutting a deal on Iraq and nuclear development even more difficult. Likewise, it would further undermine what remains of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and shelve any notion of serious Israeli-Syrian talks.

Oh, and of course there'd be mass death, displacement and destruction in Lebanon. There's that to think about too I suppose.

I of course understand that Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have now upped the ante to the point that cooling tensions will be difficult (the government moved to shut down Hezbollah's communications infrastructure, Hezbollah and its allies have barricaded much of Beirut and shut down the capital's airport, which has led to fighting between Sunni and Shia forces). There is also the issue, as Rayyan al-Shawaf argues in the Daily Star, that Lebanon will always be perched on the brink of conflict until both Hezbollah, its allies, and its Sunni and Christian tribal counterparts have their militias disarmed and the Lebanese army attains a reasonable monopoly of violence. Shawaf notes that one reason for the army's neutrality so far is a fear that, in the event of full-blown fighting, it may split along sectarian lines as it did during the last civil war, and the only institution capable of holding the state together will have disintegrated. I sympathize with Shawaf's desire for the army to be more assertive, but very much understand his and others' fears that escalating the conflict will only fragment things further.

I have no particularly sage advice for how to handle Lebanon at this point. Politics there are too complex for me to follow in the kind of detail necessary to map out a detailed solution that would be palatable to the key players involved (this is a problem, as best I can tell, that is shared by regional experts - witness this editorial in the Daily Star that, for all its attempts to seem wise, doesn't propose any kind of concrete way out of the current mess), but for now, were I in any kind of position of influence, I would counsel the army to remain a relatively neutral referee, because once the last bastion of Lebanese stability gets involved in the fighting, all bets will likely be off.

The Trials of Ehud Olmert and Next Steps in Israel

2008-05-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

Anyone who pays attention to Israeli politics (which perennially vie with those of Italy for the title of 'most apathy-inducingly labrynthine') knows that Ehud Olmert is in some trouble. In some ways this isn't a new situation. He's been in trouble at least since the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, and in my opinion has been overmatched by events around him since Ariel Sharon's stroke earlier that year. Still, even by the standards of his rather dubious tenure as Israeli PM, Olmert is having some pretty serious problems these days.

He's being investigated for corruption related to some putative campaign contributions. The charges may or may not have any merit. Corruption seems to go hand in hand with modern Israeli politics (even more so than with those of other countries), and frivolous charges trumped up for political advantage certainly aren't unknown. Still, I have a difficult time seeing how Mr. Olmert is going to survive this affair while maintaining any ability to effectively govern. Already hobbled by the remaining political aftertaste of his government's abysmal performance in Lebanon, leader of a shaky centrist coalition that, in its desire not to antagonize either side of the Israeli political spectrum simply fiddles while Jerusalem burns, Olmert confers no possible benefit - either to Israel or to his own legacy - by stubbornly clinging to his post. A recent scathing editorial in Haaretz makes the case for Olmert's removal better than I ever could:

...the prime minister must realize he has lost his ability to continue leading the state. After the disclosure of the investigation's details, few people believe him, believe in him, lend credence to his statements and accept his claims that he is capable in his situation of focusing on affairs of state. His position has been undermined, even if he continues to bear the title of prime minister. He is incapable of leading the state into battle, if such were to become necessary, just as he is incapable of reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians or Syrians. If he tries to initiate anything out of the ordinary, the criminal investigations against him will be exploited to undermine his authority to make or implement decisions.

The day-to-day running of the state is also vulnerable to the continuing erosion of his position resulting from the suspicions swirling around him. What then is the logic behind perpetuating the government in the conditions in which Olmert has trapped himself?

My thoughts exactly. Olmert's troubles mirror those of the Israeli polity more generally. Even as an American (and thus no stranger to intractable political deadlock), I must marvel at the inability of one of the most representative governments in the world to implement crucial state policy that is supported by the great balance of its constituents. Part of this obviously has to do with the chaos on the Palestinian side and the "facts on the ground" created by the Israeli settler movement that immensely complicate any effort to solve the current political crisis (either through a deal or through unilateral disengagement), part of it has to do with the extreme political fragmentation that has arisen in Israel over the last two decades (Kadima, the largest party and anchor of the current Israeli government, has only 29 seats in the Knesset for a whopping 24% of the total - in some ways it's a wonder that the government has lasted as long as it has) and part of it has to do with the fact that the Israeli populace has completely lost confidence in its own political class. This last problem is perhaps the most troubling, because people will not sacrifice for leaders who they do not trust, and now more than ever a permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will take sacrifice. Israel needs a leader, and it cannot afford to wait.

In his handicapping of the current situation, Attila Somfalvi envisions two possible scenarios following an Olmert resignation (which, despite my previous premature predictions, might actually happen this time). First, he envisions Ehud Barak pulling Labor out of the Kadima-led coalition, forcing elections. Somfalvi notes that Barak would have a difficult time justifying propping the government up any longer, and would have to trigger elections if only to prove he still has a spine.

The problem, of course, is that vagaries of political polling in Israel aside, many people think that Likud would win, presumably forging a government with the National Religious Party, Yisrael Beiteinu and a smattering of other conservative groups to prop up a right wing coalition. Some people may not think that this would be the end of the World. Sometimes, after all, the political pendulum must be allowed to swing fully in one direction in order to be able to swing back the other way. My problem with this scenario though, even if it provided moral vindication to the Israeli center-left and positioned it for future victories, is that Likud's conception of Israeli foreign relations has now become so divorced from strategic reality as to be almost farcical (a farce in which many, many people end up dead). The pursuit, in this day and age, of "Greater Israel" as a practical matter of state policy ignores every lesson learned since 1967, and unlike the 1990s, peace negotiations will not survive another hiatus while the Israeli right wing indulges its expansionist fantasies. Israel needs a government with the will and muscle to make peace. That won't come from Likud, and it won't come from Ehud Barak gloriously jumping on a political grenade.

It might come from a revitalized Kadima, and a revitalized Kadima might come from current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. My limited understanding is that Livni remains one of the few political figures in Israel who can command a certain amount of respect from the Israeli populace. Somfalvi seems to think that she can hold Kadima's coalition together, even though Shas may have some slight problems with her gender as well as her previous statements about the relationship between religion and the state. If she can be viewed as sufficiently separate from the many failures of Kadima's tenure at the head of the Israeli state, she may be able to muscle the Knesset into doing what is necessary to advance the cause of peace. Thus far she hasn't played her hand particularly agressively, but she may want to before too long. Too much is at stake to continue the current deadlock.

Blogging at Foreign Policy Watch

2008-05-11T14:11:00.000-07:00

On a brief administrative note, I will be guest-blogging over the course of the coming Summer at Foreign Policy Watch, which any regular readers know I have linked heavily in the past. I will be cross-posting most of what I write there at Rational International, and I'll probably have a few posts that go up exclusively here, so by all means continue to check out both blogs. I'm honored that Jeb over at FPW has invited me on. It's a great blog and I'm excited to get started.

If They'd Only Give a BIT of Thought to PR...

2008-05-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

There is news today that the Pentagon will rescind the assignment of Maj. General Jay W. Hood, who had been slated to be posted as America's top commander based in Pakistan. The turnaround comes after vociferous protests in Pakistan, given one of General Hood's previous posts as commander of the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay.

I'm going to ask the reader to pause for a moment to let that sink in.

The Pentagon took a previous commander of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, the symbol of American perfidity and hypocricy worldwide, the place where prisoners have been tortured, Islam defamed, and America's global standing reduced to a pile of radioactive sludge, and they sent him to Pakistan.

Deep breath.

Please understand that this is not necessarily an indictment of General Hood himself. I don't know what role he did or didn't play in everything that went on (and still goes on) at Guantanamo. I have absolutely no idea how much influence he had over the mission he was given, so I won't criticize him for it. I won't excuse him, but I won't criticize him because I simply don't know the facts.

One doesn't have to be clairvoyant, however, to recognize that sending a man rightly or wrongly tainted by his association with one of the great geopolitical scandals of the early twenty-first century - a man under whose tenure, by the way, Korans were allegedly flushed down toilets, sparking protests and riots across the Muslim world - to a country like Pakistan is a terrible, terrible idea. At least the Pentagon has been sensitive enough to the protests to cancel the assignment, but the fact that nobody picked up on the problems it would cause worries me. It worries me, because it sends the signal that at least some high up in our military and civilian establishment still have not gotten it through their heads the catastrophic extent of the damage that Guantanamo Bay has done to Ameircan credibility around the world, and until they figure it out they cannot hope to remedy the problem.

Battles in Lebanon

2008-05-09T05:31:00.001-07:00

So it would seem that things in Lebanon are slowly but surely escalating. There have been open street battles in Beirut over the last day, with Shiite militias pushing aside rival forces. Though calm appears to have returned, albiet in a fragile state, I haven't seen any indication that a larger political solution is viable yet. Majority leader Hariri's proposal to make Army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman President as a solution to the deadlock doesn't seem to have gained any traction with Hezbollah. That group's response to the proposed deal troubled me especially:

...Al Manar television, which is run by Hezbollah, said the group had rejected Mr. Hariri’s proposal. The station cited a pro-Hezbollah official, who said the group and its allies would reject any ideas for ending the conflict that were not proposed by Mr. Nasrallah.

I really hope that's just posturing. It's one thing to reject a deal, it's another thing to categorically reject the notion of any deal not proposed by one's own side. If Hezbollah has basically decided that they are in a position to dictate terms - and who knows, before long they may be - then I'm not sure what the way is out of this mess.

Violence in Lebanon

2008-05-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

There are reports this morning that gunmen have begun taking Lebanon's political gridlock to the streets, escalating the worst crisis since the end of the country's civil war. This hasn't gotten much play in the news (evidently there was some kind of election thing last night) but needs to be paid attention to. Unfortunately, I doubt there's much the U.S., or any outside actors with the possible exception of Syria and Iran who both have a degree of influence over Hezbollah, can do about all this. American credibility in Lebanon is, from what I can tell, completely shot since our greenlighting of Israel's bombing campaign back in 2006. This crisis, in many ways, stems from the political instability created in the aftermath of that conflict. Was it Machiavelli who said that wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you like?

The Moral Complexity of Nationalism

2008-05-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

Barnett Rubin at Informed Comment has a piece entitled Against Holocaust Denial, Against Naqba Denial that ought to be required reading for anyone who pays attention to 21st Century geopolitics. Though the principal focus of Rubin's post is the (extraordinarily well articulated) history of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, he manages to highlight the painful tension that underlies the very notion of nationalism everywhere, and provides powerful insight into who we all are as members of political communities.

To be sure, I don't accept everything implied by Rubin's analysis. In particular, I am more forgiving, even supportive, of the Zionist project than he. I do, though, take to heart the tragic contradiction at the bedrock of modern nationalism that his account illuminates; namely, that nationalism, taken to its logical conclusion, is both abhorrent to liberal morality and necessary to its exercise.

Allow me to explain. The story Rubin tells, of genocide, migration and ethnic cleansing, of a catastrophic chain reaction of misery from Spain to Russia to Jerusalem to Tehran, lies at the heart of the modern world. The creation - still in progress - of the political communities in which we all reside has necessarily involved the disruption of that same community for others. The nations of Western Europe were midwifed by the oppression and expulsion of national minorities and the forcible suppression of local culture. Through a complex interplay of private enterprise and state policy, Provence, Bretagne and Languedoc became France, Piemonte, Sicilia and Napoli became Italy, and dozens of tiny duchies, principalities and bishoprics east of the Rhine became Germany. As old continental and colonial empires - which had been ethno-linguistic melting pots, composed with no thought to nationalist logic - faded, even more dramatic events preceded the formation - again, still in progress in many places - of modern nation-states. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire set off nationalist powder kegs across the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Within a few decades, the hellish tides of the Second World War swept across the continent, leading to history's greatest genocide, as well as to unprecedented population movements as Soviet troops cleared conqured territories of ethnic Germans. Meanwhile, the great European colonial Empires gave way to the resistance of nascent national movements worldwide, and in the wake of their retreat left a state system grafted onto polygot mosaics of ethno-linguistic and religious communities. As in Europe, this often led to conflict to resolve the tension of states and political communities that were alien to each other. Millions of refugees flowed back and forth across the borders of India and Pakistan, fleeing the violence and chaos that accompanied partition. Jewish and Arab inhabitents of British Palestine violently tore their land asunder, bringing one of the modern world's most intractable conflicts into full flower. Sectarian divisions flared up in new states across Asia, Africa and the Middle East as people sought harmony between the bounds of geography and those of identity.

I won't belabor the point further. Suffice to say that the conflict in Israel and Palestine is but one example (albiet a very instructive one) of the fundamental conflict of liberal nationalism. With its notions of individual freedom, liberalism does not sit well with a conception of political identity that, to quote Benedict Anderson, is "both limited and sovereign" in the sense that nations can by definition never be universalized (we cannot imagine a scenario in which the whole world is French) and must find political expression in a sovereign community. Nationalism necessarily includes some, excludes others, and thus limits the freedom of all.

On the other hand, from a practical perspective, a liberal society requires that its members have a basic level of affinity with one another, a kind of loose bond of political kinship that can serve as glue for the social contract. Since the industrial revolution, nationalism has proven to be by far the strongest adhesive. Jerry Muller's recent Foreign Affairs piece Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism should be required reading for anyone interested in a brief exposition of nationalism's enduring vitality. Even one of the founding lights of the modern study of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, the British socialist who famously labeled nations "imagined communities" was spurred to write not out of a belief that progressive ideologies like socialism would trump nationalist feeling, but out of puzzlement at nationalism's enduring power even within (what was at the time) the communist world. The fact is that nationalism is a uniquely effective social glue, perhaps a necessary one if the freedoms promised by liberal champions are ever to be exercised.

Coming back to Rubin's piece, the question becomes what is to be done going forward. Europe presents both a compelling and unsettling model to follow. On the one hand, European populations seem to be slowly-but-surely recasting their political community based on shared value affinity and history that goes well beyond their own national groups. On the other hand, as Muller argues, that transformation may only be possible in an environment where the separatist nationalist project - the desire to give every nation a state and every state a nation - has largely succeeded. It should rightly bother us that this success rests on some of the greatest atrocities - murder, ethnic cleansing and conquest - in the history of mankind. Need the route to the transcendence of our more parochial national attachments be paved in misery and soaked in blood?

I answer with a qualified "no." Even if the kinds of actions that were once employed to bring about ethno-nationalist unity weren't as ethically problematic as they are in this day and age, the major movements of global population that emigration has brought about in recent years make the creation of nationally homogeneous societies impossible today. One needs only to look at the problem Japan is having with an aging populace to see that state policies of ethnic stasis create as many problems as they prevent. Still, this only further illuminates the need for ethnic polities to be honest about the contradictions of their own pasts, and to recognize the necessity of carving out space - within and without state borders - for nationalist aspirations to operate. Sometimes this will happen through the devolution of power and the recognition of group rights, problematic as this can be for true liberals. Other times this will mean a re-fashioning of a dominant national identity to include the history and ideals of those formerly confined to "otherness." This is something that, on balance, the United States does exceptionally well, and with enlightened leadership is something that we can help other societies to achieve.

Nationalism in the 21st century needn't be the immiserating, bloody mess that it was during the 20th. That will only be avoided, though, if we are honest about our collective history, honest about the tensions that exist within our own ideals, and honest about the fact that neither is going away any time soon.

Pandas to Tokyo

2008-05-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

You know, with all the tension between China and various foreign powers these days, you have to wonder if they're going to run out of pandas.

Hezbollah Training Iraqis in Iran

2008-05-05T05:22:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times reports that the American military has found compelling evidence that Hezbollah has training camps set up in Iran for the purposes of training Iraqi Shiite militias. I'm still digesting this, but my first reaction, assuming that the reports are credible, is that it undermines the notion that Iranian support for Iraqi militias is confined to certain enclaves within the Iranian military and intelligence services and is not part of Iranian state policy. Arms leaking over the border is one thing. I can legitimately imagine that Tehran could not completely control that even if it wanted to. I have a tough time believing, though, that Hezbollah could be operating multiple training camps within Iran without the consent, if not the direction, of the Iranian central government. Coupled with Iran's suspension of talks with the U.S. over Iraqi security matters this morning, this does not bode well.

On J Street

2008-05-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

The invaluable weekly "News from the Front" roundup of news on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over at Foreign Policy Watch has directed me to a pair of op-eds in the Jerusalem Post relating to the new lobbying organization J Street. J Street aims to provide a more progressive counterweight to AIPAC and other hard-line pro Israel lobby groups, describing itself as the "political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement." It is dedicated to the notion that the United States can best help Israel by working aggressively towards negotiating a peace deal with Palestine, rather than by reflexively supporting some of the Israeli government's less constructive policies.

The first op-ed, by Isi Leibler, blasts J Street as essentially an anti-Israel group in disguise. The second, by Andrew Silow-Carroll, takes a somewhat more nuanced view, noting that all would benefit if mainstream U.S. politicians didn't have to obsessively pander to the right wing. Both pieces are worth reading, but I must say the first one made my head hurt a bit. In arguing that the Israeli government already bows compulsively to U.S. pressure (a pretty misguided notion if you ask me - often as not it seems to be the other way around), Leibler asserts:

...the Olmert government has lost the confidence of its people precisely because of unilateral concessions which undermine Israel's security and embolden terrorists. His government is an amen chorus which capitulates to every demand imposed on it by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It has provided weapons to the Palestinians which will almost certainly once again be redirected against Israel; it has released and granted amnesty to terrorists; and despite bitter opposition from the IDF, it has closed checkpoints and acceded to demands compromising security which have already resulted in Israeli casualties.

I suppose, in the strictest sense, Leibler is right (though I'm frankly pretty tired of policy being made based on a desire not to "embolden" one's enemies; once people are at the point where they're willing to blow themselves up in the middle of nightclubs, motivation becomes a pretty academic issue). The Olmert government has indeed made some concessions in recent months, opening a few border crossings, closing a few checkpoints etc. Anyone being honest, though, would acknowledge that Israel has consistently refused to make concessions on the one issue that really matters: settlements. As I have said before, Israelis need to decide - soon - whether they are truly willing to mortgage the future of their nation to the minority of hard-liners who view Israel's occupation of the West Bank as a religious calling. As Mr. Silow-Carroll points out, Prime Minister Olmert understands full well the implications of such a course. He is quoted as saying that:

"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights [among Palestinians of the occupied territories], then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."

In other words, Israel simply cannot continue to occupy the West Bank and remain a democratic and Jewish state. That Mr. Olmert evidently lacks the political muscle to act on this realization is regrettable, but does nothing to diminish its prescience.

I am not so naive to think that a final peace deal in the Levant would be based exactly on the 1967 "Green Line." More than half a million settlers live in the West Bank. Some will almost surely have to stay there. The problem, though, is that settlements have been built so as to carve up the territory in such a way that it could never constitute a viable state. No sovereign people can be expected to navigate a maze of foreign military checkpoints in order to move around in their own territory. George Kennan once said that power makes a mockery of sovereignty. Such a situation would be more than a mockery; it would be a farce.

Finally, it is worth noting that, over the last decade, the political situation in Israel and Palestine has deteriorated dramatically. The Palestinians are weak and divided, with half their people under military occupation and beholden to a semi-functioning government of questionable legitimacy, and the other half trapped in an impoverished, crowded battle zone, beholden to a government that is not even recognized or dealt with by the rest of the world. The Israelis, meanwhile, are stuck in political deadlock with the far right slowly creating "facts on the ground" that increase the difficulty of a final deal with each passing day.

In this environment, an American lobby that pushes for both sides to make real concessions and come to a lasting peace strikes me as long overdue.

The Vagaries of a Common Currency

2008-05-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

Today's Times has a terrific article on the tenth anniversary of the Euro (my how time flies). Evidently a resurgent German economy combined with a falling dollar has been reopening the north-south economic divide between prosperous northern Europe, which wants to keep inflation in check, and more sclerotic, export-driven (and therefore highly sensitive to currency fluctuation) southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal), which wants a weaker Euro to push up exports and raise standards of living.

The article, though, echoes my sense that European integration, at least at the economic level, long ago passed the point of no return. As much as the incoming Berlusconi government might like to have a lira to devalue and thereby juice the Italian economy, the overall political and economic costs of abandoning the centerpiece of the Maastricht Treaty wouldn't be worth it by a long shot. Still, it'll be interesting to see how such tensions play out in the coming years, and in particular how the newer E.U. states of Eastern Europe line up. I'll need to do a bit more research into the state of their economies in order to make any kind of informed analysis (and even then it'd be on the amateurish side - my economics knowledge doesn't get much past the Macro 101 level), but stay tuned in any case.

Chuckles

2008-04-30T21:03:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty frivolous aside, but Robert Schlesinger (son of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., son of Arthur Schlesinger) was on the Daily Show this evening, wearing an eye-poppingly multicolored bow tie. Anyone who has ever seen pictures of his father should recognize the homage. A great interview as well.

UPDATE: You can catch the interview here.

Pakistan

2008-04-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

Check out Arif Rafiq's recent piece on the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. A very insightful and practical set of prescriptions in my view. He refers to Senator Biden's proposal as a model for building a relationship with the Pakistan people, not just the upper echelons of Pakistan's government, and advises Washington to stop interfering in Pakistan's internal politics.

I have a couple of quibbles. I'm not sure how realistic it would be to replace NATO troops in Afghanistan with those from non-bordering Muslim nations like Turkey and Indonesia, but I guess it might be worth a shot some day. Also, I'm not always sure what authors mean when they say that the U.S. shouldn't "interfere" in others' internal politics. If what Mr. Rafiq means is that Washington ought to be dispassionate and uninterested in Pakistan's political winds, that strikes me as pretty unrealistic. If, on the other hand, he means that America should step back, and try to influence Pakistan's long term political development by putting itself on the right side of events rather than trying to tinker in the country's political minutae, then in my view he's being quite insightful.

In any case, definitely worth a read for anyone interested.

Ahmadinejad in India

2008-04-29T07:47:00.001-07:00

The New York Times reports that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is currently on a high-profile visit to India. Though no major new breakthroughs in Indian-Iranian relations (which are fairly good, and based on real mutual strategic interests) are expected, the visit gives the Indian government a chance to show its independence from the United States by dealing with a leader openly loathed by Washington. I'm sure some people in this town are wringing their hands at the visit, but frankly, I think in the long run, it's a net positive for the U.S. It allows the Indian government to deflect criticism that it is Washington's pawn without having to make concrete strategic moves that would damage America's position in South Asia. It might even help get our stalled nuclear deal back on track, which I continue to support, albiet cautiously.

More to the point, India will never be an American client state, nor, probably, a steadfast ally in the Western European mold; however, solid relations with India are both achievable and desirable for Washington, if only because the state has cultivated links with so many other important international actors (Iran, Russia, China, Japan) that will require a delicate hand in the coming decades. Engaging India as a strategic partner in managing such relationships - both the good and the bad - makes imminent practical sense. America's relationship with Iran is going to have to change, either for better or worse, over the next decade. Overall I think it's a good thing that a potential American partner on Persia's doorstep keep relations open with Tehran.

And I So Naively Thought We'd Be Able to Avoid This...

2008-04-28T10:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's New York Times article about Debbie Almontaser, a New York educator who helped start a public school with an Arab focus, is making me cringe a bit. The article describes Almontaser's vision for the school thusly:

Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”

Sounds like a terrible concept doesn't it?

Evidently there have been numerous problems at the school, most of which aren't really the concern of this blog (I'm not particularly qualified to make pronouncements on modern primary and secondary pedagogy), but the upshot is that Ms. Almontaser has been forced out of her position as principal by "a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda." Significantly, the article puts this incident into a larger context of groups in America that have begun bracing against what they call "soft jihad" waged by law-abiding citizens who seek to promote a creeping Islamicization* of American society.

The article takes particular note of Daniel Pipes, a trained historian who heads up the Middle East Forum and who helped lead the oh-so-constructively-named "Stop the Madrassa Coalition" against Ms. Almontaser's school. According to the article:

...as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted their gaze to a new frontier, what they describe as law-abiding Muslim-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.

Mr. Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law.

The danger, Mr. Pipes says, is that the United States stands to become another England or France, a place where Muslims are balkanized and ultimately threaten to impose sharia.
“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Mr. Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system — the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like — you can promote radical Islam.”

A gym at Harvard adopting female-only pool hours? Quel horreur! I'd better hide my booze and get used to eating halal, because it would seem like a full-blown Islamic revolution is right around the corner!

In all seriousness, though, to act as though minor accomodations to a few Islamic cultural practices represent the first step toward imposing sharia law in the United States is simply absurd. Some European countries are having problems with their Muslim populations because of a combination of foolish immigration policies, status-quo economic management, and the perpetuation of inflexibly antiquated conceptions of their own political communities. The French have a model of "Frenchness" that is exclusivist to the point that nobody from another culture could ever hope to strike a proper balance between fidelity to their own traditions and accomodation with those of the society around them (this phenomenon, ironically enough, was one of the catalysts of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century). The United States is supposed to be different. We are supposed to have the kind of nationalism that is supple, that absorbs others' cultures and traditions even as it assimilates them into its own. I am supremely confident that we will be able to incorporate Muslims into American society without sacrificing our sovereignty to some nebulous "radical" threat posed by Islamic practices.

Confident, that is, as long as conservative yahoos who have Samuel Huntington complexes and are somehow offended by foot washing basins in public bathrooms - people like Mr. Pipes - are relegated to the margins of national discourse. A good rule of thumb to keep in mind when talking about American politics - one that goes all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts - is that whenever someone starts talking about vague, underground, conspiratorial movements to radically alter the face of American society, it's probably bull$@#!. The fact that a few cabbies won't give you a ride because you're carrying booze, or that a few colleges have put foot sinks in their bathrooms so that Muslim students can wash their feet before prayer without breaking their necks, or that for a few hours a week some pools are restricted to women, isn't a sign of some nefarious plot to islamicize American society. It's a sign that institutions are making some reasonable accomodations to the cultural practices of the people around them. It's the very definition of an appropriate, balanced, liberal response to cultural difference. Last time I checked, after all, Christmas was still a Federal holiday. I doubt we'll hear Mr. Pipes complaining about that any time soon.

*I have no idea if this is actually a word, but I like it and have decided to use it going forward.

Weapons in Lebanon

2008-04-24T08:18:00.003-07:00

The Washington Post reports today that Lebanese civilians are beginning to arm themselves in anticipation that there will be no resolution to the country's political deadlock. This is evidently reflected in skyrocketing prices for small arms. All I can say is this can't be good.

Hamas and a Peace Deal

2008-04-21T05:16:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Carter - a man for whom I have enormous respect, whatever some of his detractors say - has reported that the leadership of Hamas has told him that they would be open to a peace deal with Israel if it were approved by Palestinian citizens in a referendum, even if the deal contained some provisions with which Hamas disagreed. I must admit that I've been back and forth about whether or not Israel and the international community should bring Hamas into peace negotiations. I very much understand that Israel doesn't want to negotiate with a group that continues to deny its right to exist and thereby put that issue "back on the table" so to speak, but I think it's time to face up to the strategic reality that Israeli sanctions haven't brought about the collapse of the Hamas government in Gaza, and that as long as Hamas controls such a large portion of the Palestinian populace, no agreement will be possible without its assent. The Hamas leadership's statements to Carter might be sincere or they might be tactical, but for hard-nosed strategic reasons I think it's time to give them the benefit of the doubt and bring Hamas to the table in some capacity, if only because there aren't many other viable options.

A Liberal Israel Lobby

2008-03-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

Read this article.

Taiwan

2008-03-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports that a number of factors, including the heavy cracktown on Tebetian dissent by the Chinese government, have made upcoming elections in Taiwan unexpectedly close. The Nationalist party, which still favors some type of reunification with the mainland, was on course to win by a substantial margin, but the recent actions of the Chinese government seem to have given the voters some pause. Taiwan strikes me as an area in which the United States should be more heavily engaged. Our policy of strategic ambiguity in the China-Taiwan dispute has kept things relatively quiet over the last several decades, but as China's power grows along with Taiwanese sentiment for independence, it would behoove the United States to facilitate negotiations for some kind of permanent status agreement between the two countries (or "political entities" if you prefer) before we find the issue forced, and we are caught between the options of abandoning an ally and risking major war.

Parag Khanna

2008-03-18T11:21:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the absurdly long absence. I've got a few posts in the works and I promise I'll be back into form soon. For those of you in the D.C. area, I highly recommend you come to the Politics & Prose bookstore this evening for a 7:00 talk by Parag Khanna, author of the new book The Second World. I'm in the process of reading it and it's an absolute tour de force.

Settlements

2008-03-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

Responding to rocket attacks from Hamas is one thing. I understand that the Israeli government has a responsibility to protect its own people. To be honest, though, the continued officially-sanctioned building of settlements in disputed territory, coupled with the government turning a blind eye to unsanctioned ones, is beginning to seriously undercut my sympathy with Israel's position vis a vis the Palestinians. All through the last two decades of on-and-off negotiations with the Palestinian authority, the Israelis have made no serious effort to curb settlement activity. From a perspective of U.S. policy, if the Israeli government is really not willing to restrain the more reactionary, destructive impulses of some Israeli citizens, we ought to re-think the nature of our relationship with the country.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that we abandon the Israelis, but the level of aid and political cover that the American government gives to that of Israel has got to have some relationship to U.S. strategic interests. Israel's continued colonization of the West Bank is clearly and unequivocally not in the interest of the United States. Our foreign policy ought to begin reflecting that.

Good Idea of the Evening

2008-03-05T17:43:00.000-08:00

A recently released report commissioned by Britain's Royal Society has called for the creation of an international database of global nuclear programs in order to improve nuclear forensic capabilities and provide incentives for governments to secure their nuclear materials. The idea is that if there were a global databank detailing the scope, extent and nature of civilian and military nuclear activity, it would increase the chances that smuggled nuclear material or - God forbid - the remains of a nuclear attack would be traced back to their source. If governments know that they will be blamed for rogue groups using their nuclear stocks, they will take better care of them. Also, in the chaotic atmosphere that would surely follow a nuclear attack of unsure provenance, having the outlines of an appropriate response in place beforehand would reduce the possibility of knee-jerk reactions that could amplify the crisis.

Best of all, the Society's proposal has few downsides for most international actors, meaning that it is realistically implementable. Certainly opaque nuclear powers like Israel and emerging powers like Iran would be reluctant to disclose the information necessary to participate, but even if they remained outside of the databank regime, it would serve its purpose, as the chances that their nuclear materials would be identified would be increased through the process of elimination. For most established nuclear powers, whose arsenals play the role of strategic backstop, the diminished threat of 'loose nukes' would be well worth the marginally uncomfortable disclosure process. Here's hoping this idea is picked up by those in positions of global leadership.

Abbas Resumes Peace Talks

2008-03-05T06:37:00.000-08:00

So, for what they're worth, Abbas has agreed to back down from his suspension of peace talks with Israel. He had previously demanded a truce between Israel and Hamas as a condition for talks to continue. While I think it's great that Abbas has decided that continuing talks is preferable to a bloody stalemate, his original point is well taken. Israel understandably doesn't want to enter into full-fledged peace negotiations with Hamas, which would confer upon the group the status of a legitimate governing entity, but it strikes me as both reasonable and prudent to negotiate a cease fire, if only to stop the photographs of Israeli military strikes in Gaza from reaching the West Bank and further undermining Abbas's already tenuous position.

And the Rationale Would Be...?

2008-03-04T09:59:00.001-08:00

Blake Hounshell over at FP Passport makes an interesting and logical point about the way that the U.S. sometimes uses its military. How, precisely, is a missile destroyer off the Lebanese coast supposed to bolster the current government? Hounshell notes that all the move is likely to do is remind the Lebanese of U.S. sea-to-land shelling during the 1980s (I actually had a Lebanese professor in college, one of whose earliest memories was the sound of American shells shrieking overhead into the mountains), ratcheting up tensions rather than calming them. I'm not a military man. Perhaps the ship has some political or strategic value that I just don't see. Still, while gunboat diplomacy can be useful in certain circumstances (I at least understand, for example, sending more U.S. ships into the Gulf to send a message to Iran), it doesn't seem to hold much potential to improve things in Lebanon.

On Iran and Nuclear Weapons

2008-03-03T09:55:00.000-08:00

The IAEA today has stepped up its criticism of Iran's nuclear program, following a presentation last week by the agency's chief inspector, which presented evidence that Iranian scientists have been engaging in work "not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon."

I, along with most engaged citizens, breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing last November's National Intelligence Estimate which showed that Iran had likely stopped nuclear weapons development in 2003. I was relieved not out of any belief that Iran's nuclear ambitions had been curbed, but out of a sense that any justification that the Bush Administration might use to unilaterally attack Iran before leaving office had evaporated. The damage to America's geostrategic position caused by such an attack would have been incalculable and irreparable. Along with many people better informed than myself, though, I worried that the NIE would make dealing with Iran's nuclear program more difficult, as it would provide cover to members of the international community who were wary of confronting Iran in the first place, and who underestimated the threat that a nuclear Iran would pose to global security. Unfortunately, those fears now appear to be well-founded, as the U.S. and France remain the only countries really standing tough against Iran on the issue (my how unthinkable such a situation would have seemed only a few short years ago).

Let us be clear: an Iran armed with operational and deliverable nuclear weapons would be a serious threat to both regional and global security. I don't share the worries of some that a nuclear Iran would endure self-immolation in a messianic quest to destroy Israel - I give the Iranian leadership more credit than that - and I also doubt that the Iranians would give a nuclear device to a terrorist group, both because state governments are loathe to relinquish control over nuclear weapons and because acts of nuclear terrorism would almost certainly be traced back to their source. The greater danger comes from the multidimensional nuclear chess game that would emerge in the Middle East as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and perhaps others followed Iran down the nuclear path. I tend not to agree with the notion of "nuclear peace" whereby nuclear weapons are said to introduce stability to inter-state relations. Rather, I paraphrase the wisdom of former Secretary of Defense McNamara - someone who once looked into the abyss of nuclear war - who said that the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons can only lead to disaster. In the blindingly complex chess game of Middle Eastern politics, nuclear weapons cannot be placed on all sides of the board.

It has been a common for U.S. officials to say that 'all options remain on the table' with regard to stopping Iran's nuclear program. The problem, though, is that such statements have not yet been true. The United States has not shown itself particularly willing to offer carrots - security guarantees, diplomatic recognition, trade agreements - to match its sticks, and so has been negotiating at a profound disadvantage. I would recommend Reuel Marc Gerecht's piece in the Times recently as a way forward in Iran that is neither blindly hawkish nor willfully blind about the problems Iran poses. Global security demands that Iran not attain nuclear capabilities, but toothless sanctions and foolish obstinancy won't stop that from happening. It's time for a different approach.

Visit to Iraq

2008-03-03T06:45:00.000-08:00

Shaun Mullen makes a depressingly good point.

The Modern Slave Trade

2008-02-29T06:52:00.000-08:00

If anyone is looking for some happy, uplifting news to perk them up in time for the weekend, I'd suggest checking out E Benjamin Skinner's article in Foreign Policy (subscription required) titled "A World Enslaved," based on four years of research into the modern slave trade. This is an issue that has finally gained some popular currency in recent years, but I imagine that even well-informed people would be shocked by the scale of modern slavery. I certainly was. Here are just a few gems from Skinner's piece:

There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history...

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl... for 50 bucks...

In South Asia, which has the highest concentration of slaves on the planet, nearly 10 million languish in bondage...

300,000 children are in domestic bondage in Haiti...

In a Bucharest brothel... I was offered a mentally handicapped suicidal girl in exchange for a used car. But for every one woman or child enslaved in commercial sex, there are at least 15 men, women, and children enslaved in other fields, such as domestic work or agricultural labor...

You really have to read the article to get the full effect. The section in which Skinner negotiates the purchase of a 12 year old girl in Haiti, complete with adoption papers so that she can be taken back stateside, is particularly charming. I'm still digesting this, and I plan on picking up Skinner's forthcoming book, but to say the least this is an issue about which world governments need to get far more serious. India, evidently, is one of the principal centers of global slavery. I continue to be a huge proponent of improving American relations with India, but if we're going to berate the Chinese government for locking up journalists, we might at least mention to the Indians that cleaning up their act with regard to slavery would pay diplomatic dividends.

The (theoretical) ban on the global slave trade was supposed to have been one of the lasting achievements of the nineteenth century. We're well overdue in making that achievement mean something to millions in bondage around the world.

Delicious Irony

2008-02-28T10:03:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Jerry Muller's "Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism" in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. It's a solid article, and I'll be posting a critique before too long, but I couldn't help but chuckle as I read the concluding paragraphs, which summed up why Muller thinks that parochial ethnic nationalism will remain a powerful force in contemporary politics. On the opposite page sat an advertisement for the Center for Global Affairs at NYU with the headline; "As a global citizen, to whom do I pledge allegiance?" Who ever said social scientists don't have a sense of humor?

Open Source Warfare

2008-02-28T08:52:00.000-08:00

The always fascinating John Robb has a great (if disheartening) profile of Henry Okah and his development of open source warfare in Nigeria. Two thoughts: 1) we have to find a source of energy other than oil and 2) we need to start creating much more nimble institutions of governance to deal with this kind of threat.

Khaled Hamza

2008-02-28T05:33:00.001-08:00

Check out Shadi Hamid's piece at Democracy Arsenal on the arrest of Khaled Hamza, a Muslim Brotherhood activist in Egypt.

In Praise of the Serbian Foreign Minister

2008-02-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

Vuc Jeremic, the foreign minister of Serbia, has an op-ed in today's Times criticizing the willingness of the West to go along with the independence of Kosovo, writing that to accept Kosvo's independence is to abjure the binding principles of the postwar international system, principles that "include the sovereign equality of states, the respect for the territorial integrity and the inviolability of internationally recognized borders." Mr. Jeremic is absolutely right. The independence of Kosovo does indeed alter the involability of those principles, and it's about damn time.

While I'm sure Serbians aren't particularly happy about being the test-case for the slowly emerging post-Westphalian international order, the fact is that the notion of self-determination of peoples is slowly catching on as a countervailing force to state sovereignty in the twenty first century, particularly when governments don't live up to their "responsibility to protect" their own citizens. In a world as economically, politically and culturally interdependent as ours, it makes little sense to hold the notion of sovereignty, formulated in 1648 as Europe climbed out of the Middle Ages, as sacrosanct in the same manner it was so held a century ago.

This, of course, brings up a whole boatload of difficult questions. Would I be okay with a state seceding from the U.S. (I suppose it depends which one you're talking about...)? 140 years ago America fought a vicious civil war to prevent just such an eventuality. What is different now? Hypothetically, what process would make such an act legitimate? Perfect answers, of course don't exist. That is the nature of living in transitional times. Important philosophical pillars of the international system must remain in tension. As a matter of principle, though, I do believe that when a sub-state group's experiences - of isolation, of oppression, of coercion - render it no longer meaningfully attached to the political community that it is supposed to inhabit, it has the right to see such separation institutionally enshrined. Kosovo has done this. Along with the Serbian foreign minister, I suspect that it will be followed.

Antisystem Movements

2008-02-27T10:54:00.000-08:00

Anyone who is at all interested in democratic development ought to find a bookstore that stocks the Journal of Democracy. I have yet to pick up a copy that didn't have numerous articles worth reading. The latest issue has an excellent piece by Sheri Berman (I can't link to the full text; as an aside, I really hope this open model of academic publishing catches on) titled "Taming Extremist Parties: Lessons from Europe" in which she chronicles the political history of Western European communist parties from the end of World War I through the fall of the Soviet Union. She contrasts the generally radical, "antisystem" behavior of these parties during the interwar years (behavior which, paradoxically, contributed to the collapse of democracy and the rise of fascism in much of Western Europe) with the more democratically engaged communist movements of the postwar era.

She attempts to find some common ground between "optimists" who believe that democratic participation has a tendency, through a variety of mechanisms, to de-radicalize and "tame" extremist parties, rendering them less threatening to the democratic system as a whole, and "pessimists" who believe that extremist parties merely use elections as a means to an end without ever truly subordinating their agendas to democratic processes, pursuing a policy of "one man, one vote, one time." Obviously, this issue is germane to today's Middle East, where the question of how Islamist parties ought to be treated by local governments and the international community as a whole remains hotly contested. It is also relevant to places like India, which continues to experience challenges from radical movements that operate both within and without democratic institutions.

In a nutshell (and this is but the roughest sketch of her argument), Berman believes that when democratic institutions are reasonably strong, the mechanisms that the optimists believe will moderate extremist parties do just that (briefly, they identify a "Downsian" phenomenon whereby radical movements must moderate their positions in order to garner a reasonable plurality of votes, a "Michelsian" phenomenon which posits a moderating influence of bureaucratic structures that are necessary in order to compete in elections, and a "pothole theory" of democracy whereby radical programs are sidetracked by the more mundane necessities of day-to-day governance). When state and democratic institutions are weak and have shallow roots in the populace at large, however, extremist parties face fewer pressures to moderate their tactics and goals, and may use elections and an open civil society to foment discord and promote more radical agendas.

Berman notes that the dark days that followed the First World War, when Western Europe was facing unprecedented economic and political crises and Russian Bolshevism actively supported worldwide revolution through the Comintern, were ripe environments for extremist movements. Support for communist movements at the time "varied... in inverse proportion to the health of a country's democratic regime." In Germany, France and Italy, communist movements garnered significant support (though nowhere near a majority of the populace), and had few real incentives to accept the ultimate legitimacy of democracy. They ran slates in elections, but also engaged in violent, destabilizing activity that the weak governments and state institutions at the time could not tamp down. They followed accepted Leninist tactics, expelling moderates from their parties and undermining the governments in which they sometimes half-heartedly participated. In short, they remained radical in their aims as well as in their tactics. It was in part their unwillingness to moderate and ally with the centrist coalitions that held Western European democracies together that fomented fascist transformations leading up to the Second World War.

At first glance, one might have expected a similar radicalization of communist politics in the period after World War II, when the economic and political foundations of Europe lay in ruins. Despite this environment, though, postwar European communist parties slowly but surely integrated themselves into a truly democratic framework, distancing themselves from Soviet patronage, rejecting violence and other destabilizing activity, and eventually accepting the legitimacy of the European postwar social democratic framework (though they obviously continued to promote a very left-wing agenda). Berman argues that the relative strength of democratic and state institutions during this period made destabilizing activity more difficult and less effective, and that with time communist parties saw no choice but to accept the ultimate primacy of the democratic process.

Berman herself, though, alludes to the fact that her analysis is somewhat incomplete when applied to contemporary antisystem movements, acknowledging that "to say that the pessimists' worries are likely to be borne out only when democratic regimes are weak and ineffective is hardly comforting, since it is chiefly such regimes that are grappling with these problems today." The question is why Western Europe developed strong states and democracies after World War II, particularly in places like Germany and Italy that had so spectacularly failed to do so during the interwar period. Berman doesn't provide any real answers, noting only that the pessimists' argument risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and, citing the experience of the European social democrats, warning against seeing extremism where accommodation might be possible.

Her reluctance to tackle the critical issue - why democracy succeeded after the War where it had failed before it - is understandable. Full answers to such questions are the stuff of doctoral dissertations (one day perhaps), but they are critical to an ability to apply the European cases to contemporary regimes, so I'll at least offer a few thoughts. First, in the immediate aftermath of War, when democratic regimes were at their weakest, the presence of several million Allied troops on the European continent certainly helped stabilize things. The prospect of prolonged military occupation, for example, persuaded the French Communists (who had what amounted to an army and were the most coherent organization in postwar France) to use the ballot box, rather than the streets, as their route to power. These troops, in effect, permitted state building on steroids, giving reconstructed democratic governments the ability to quickly achieve Weber's "monopoly of violence" over their territories without too much struggle.

Second, Allied (and especially American) aid to Europe in the years after the war was crucial. William Hitchcock, in his recent history of postwar Europe, argues that, while aid from the Marshall plan was not necessarily vital to European economic recovery (for all of the plan's scale, it contributed but a fraction of Europe's postwar GDP), but did provide governments with critical budgetary breathing space, allowing them to construct social service regimes in addition to investing in economic recovery. American money allowed the shaky centrist governments of the postwar period to make tangible differences in the lives of their citizens, easing economic and psychological social pressures and dampening the appeal of antisystem activities.

More complex internal dynamics were certainly at work in the states of Western Europe as well, but I highlight the effect of external forces because they relate most closely to what the democratic powers of our own time can do to encourage nascent democracies and stave off the destabilizing influence of antisystem organizations. The events of recent years have shown that invasion and occupation are (to be charitable) less-than-optimal ways of shoring up democracy. It worked in Western Europe after the continent had been pounded into dust by the greatest calamity in human history. Not the kind of thing to repeat if we can help it. Still, aid, if intelligently structured, can be effective in shoring up weak transitions to democracy. Senator Biden's recent remarks on U.S. policy in Pakistan present a decent blueprint for what such constructive aid might look like. Berman's example of the ill-conceived ostracization of the pre-war Social Democrats also points to the wisdom of distinguishing antisystem movements from movements whose programs we simply don't like. Many Islamist parties in the Middle East have shown a practical willingness to participate in democratic institutions. As long as they aren't running armed militias at the same time, we ought to be open to them.

Given the complexities of the modern global system, coming up with coherent, flexible ways of responding to movements that eat at that system's foundation can only become more important in the coming years. Kudos to Dr. Berman for her contribution.

Biden on "This Week"

2008-02-24T11:45:00.000-08:00

Check out Joe Biden on Stephanopoulos's show this morning. I really hope this guy gets some kind of posting in the next administration. He's one of the best we've got when it comes to an intelligent foreign policy.

Interview with Richard Haass

2008-02-21T08:11:00.001-08:00

Check out the McKinsey Quarterly's interview with Richard Haass on the interaction of global business and global politics. Definitely worth the marginally annoying registration process.

And the World Keeps Spinning 'Round

2008-02-20T17:55:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, you leave for a long weekend to hit the slopes in New Hampshire and not much happens. Other times, you come back to find dictators resigning, others losing elections, countries gaining independence and the Navy trying to prevent the sky from falling (and/or test antisatellite weaponry). I should go skiing more often.

Frankly, I'm still digesting most of this. I know as a blogger/person with an over-inflated sense of self-importance I should be spouting off opinions and prognostications, but this is all moving pretty fast. Here's hoping those with some real power are doing a better job keeping up. More to come.

Israel "Vague" on Assassination

2008-02-14T11:38:00.000-08:00

I'm in absolutely no position to comment definitively one way or another on this issue, but it does strike me that if Israel hadn't been behind Mugniyah's death, they'd be much more forceful in their denials than they have been:

Senior Israeli officials have not commented publicly about the assassination, widely hailed here as a brilliant intelligence coup. Instead, there was an ambiguously worded statement issued by the office of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday distancing Israel from the act, and what the Israeli news media described as “mysterious smiles.”
Some here saw Mr. Olmert’s vaguely worded statement — “Israel rejects the attempt by terrorist elements to ascribe to it any involvement whatsoever in this incident” — more as a nonadmission of responsibility than an outright denial.

I don't know about you, but if lots of people thought that I'd killed someone, and I hadn't, I don't think I'd be smiling much, mysteriously or otherwise.

A New Arms Race

2008-02-08T06:33:00.000-08:00

The BBC reports that Vladimir Putin has publicly stated that he now sees world powers as locked in "a new phase in the arms race." Evidently upset at the continuing expansion of NATO, and bolstered by oil revenues that allow renewed spending on Russia's military, Putin is slowly but surely positioning Russia to balance (or at least partially offset) U.S. military dominance. Some of his talk of an "arms race" is likely bluster for domestic consumption, but it isn't something the U.S. can afford to ignore. Nor, in my view, is the traditional response of ratcheting up our own military strength by further orders of magnitude called for (even if it were affordable). Some level of military balancing between the U.S. and emerging powers is likely inevitable in the coming years - that's how strategic relations work - but there are things we can do to cool tensions. Whether or not we continue building our missile shield (I'm a bit agnostic on the whole concept and could be convinced either way), now would seem like a great time to begin serious talks on further substantial nuclear disarmament.

I've written before in support of the notion that our current nuclear posture does little to ensure American security, and may actually compromise it. Negotiating with other world powers to seriously reduce nuclear stocks would show that the U.S. is serious about wanting its missile shield as a defensive measure against rogue states, rather than as the first step in a nuclear endgame. It would also be a way to cool rising tensions with powers like Russia and China at little strategic cost. It won't happen under the Bush Administration (they're the ones who've wanted to expand our arsenal after all) but it's something that ought to be on the next president's agenda.

Fire the Graphics Department

2008-02-07T18:02:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the sub-par picture. I got this latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly in the mail today, and evidently they haven't posted an image of the cover anywhere on the Web yet. Ah, the magic of cell phone cameras. Now, I look to magazines like the Atlantic for something resembling intelligent discourse on current culture and politics. Generally speaking, they deliver, but this cover had me pretty annoyed. I understand that provocative headlines and arresting images sell magazines, and I'm not expecting Kant's Critique of Practical Reason to be spelled out in the bylines, but could we please try for something a bit more sophisticated than betting lines on the victor of the latest Crusade? It's the twenty-first century for God's sake. It would be nice if some of the more respectable popular media could bring a little bit of subtlety and sophistication to the way they present the complex global interaction of identity, faith, economics and power.

What really gets me is that the issue actually has a number of well-researched, insightful articles on the globalization of religious politics, none of which are particularly inflammatory. The cover, though, does nothing to communicate this, presenting the oh-so-original image of a clashing cross and crescent with a sensationalized headline about which religion will "win." Oy.

Obama and Israel

2008-02-07T05:03:00.000-08:00

Jeb has a great post over at Foreign Policy Watch about the presidential candidates' positions on Israel. I don't want to get into this fight too deeply, but why precisely is there this notion that Obama is some stealth anti-Israeli candidate? Has he ever publicly questioned the right of the Jewish state to exist? Has he ever publicly questioned America's commitment to Israel's security? What, in other words, has he done to make people so distrustful of his committment to the U.S.-Israeli relationship, other than to occasionally (and correctly) point out that a two state solution is in the strategic interest of everyone, and that the hardline position on Iran doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere? As the Editors of Haaretz point out, most criticisms of Obama's Israel stance - lacking as they do any substantive foundation - fall back on the notion that his Middle East positions in general are "leftist." I'm still baffled. This is a guy who publicly stated that he would unilaterally strike at militant bases in Pakistan without Islamabad's consent. Yes, he has said that he would alter our diplomatic approach to the region, but have we really reached the point where anyone who advocates talking with diplomats rather than smart bombs is considered "leftist"? Anyways, like I said, I don't want to get dragged too far into this one, but it's at least some food for thought.

Military Spending

2008-02-04T05:03:00.000-08:00

So it would appear that the latest budget request from the Pentagon would put U.S. military spending at its highest level - adjusted for inflation - since the Second World War. Clearly, much of this has to do with the strain of fighting two wars for six years running, but in a larger sense, it highlights an important difficulty the United States will have to confront in the not-too-distant future; namely, how to reconcile its defense budget with its economic and geopolitical standing. I've written in several places that America will soon be inhabiting a world that is functionally multipolar. In such an environment, it is questionable whether or not it makes strategic sense to maintain a global military presence on the kind of scale that we currently do. More to the point, it is questionable whether the American people will, in the long term, be willing to continue footing the bill. If our global posture is not politically viable at home, then it will seesaw wildly between strategic extremes to nobody's benefit. This weekend's news is just more indication that we need to start having this conversation now, rather than when the situation reaches critical mass in a decade or two.

Group Loyalty

2008-02-02T06:14:00.000-08:00

Check out John Robb's post on group loyalty in the age of Globalization over at Global Guerrillas. Definitely worth a read.

Look Who's Talking

2008-02-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

I admit it. I'm a bad political junkie. I didn't watch the Democratic debate last night, even though the field has now been winnowed to two people, and it was billed as the epic final confrontation before "Tsunami Tuesday" next week (I love the hyperbolic names that bored CNN producers come up with for these things). I had hockey tickets. So it goes.

I did, however, make a point of reading the transcript when I got home, and to be frank I was pretty impressed by the amount of substantive discussion that went on. Granted, now that the number of people on stage is more manageable, the candidates don't have to talk about their positions and proposals in less time than Jeopardy contestants get to buzz in with an answer, but still, good show by both Sens. Clinton and Obama.

I've said on numerous occasions that I won't make this blog about the U.S. election, so I promise I'm going somewhere with this. One of the principal places that Clinton and Obama have differed on foreign policy is on the question of negotiating with regimes that the U.S. doesn't like. Obama has said that he would be willing to meet, without preconditions, with the leadership of countries like Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Syria etc. Clinton, along with many of her backers, has called that stance naive, saying that such meetings would lead to propaganda victories for unfriendly regimes without necessarily benefiting the United States. Obama in turn has accused Clinton of continuing the failed policies of the Bush administration, albiet with some minor tweaks. And so on ad infinitum. I address this issue, though, because to me it seems to indicate not just a tactical difference in how the two leaders would conduct foreign policy, nor simply a shallow attempt to advance their own respective campaign narratives ("experience" versus "change"), but rather to reflect a genuine difference in perception of the geostrategic position of the United States.

First, let me clear the debate of some straw-man arguments. I assume (and it is an assumption) that when Obama says he would be willing to meet with unfriendly regimes "without preconditions," he is not so naive as to literally mean that there would be no diplomatic preparations in advance of such a summit. Obviously, without some agreement as to the issues on the table and the basic goals to be aimed for, a meeting with Chavez or Ahmadinejad would be useless and perhaps counterproductive. I assume that when Obama mentions "preconditions" he is referencing the common position taken by the Bush administration that unfriendly regimes must evince significant changes in behavior (like halting uranium enrichment) before the United States will deign to grant them an audience. This is the strategy he rejects and (as best I can tell) Clinton embraces. To suggest that President Obama would simply get on a plane, land in Tehran, call up Ahmadinejad and ask to sit down for a cup of coffee - as some have implied - is absurd, and isn't worthy of serious discussion.

The real question that needs to be answered before deciding which one of these strategies is appropriate is straightforward: how much power does the United States have relative to other actors in the international system? I have attempted to address this question before, and the answer is complex but vital. If, as the neoconservative worldview would have it, the United States posesses an enduring, historically unprecedented concentration of power, then the Bush/Clinton strategy makes perfect sense. If the world is truly unipolar, then to be cut off diplomatically and economically from the United States is to be left out in the cold. To be cut off from Washington is functionally the same as being cut off from everywhere else.

If, however, the world is (or is fast becoming) functionally multipolar, the strategy breaks down. In such a situation, while a relationship with Washington may bring many benefits, it is far from essential. There are other power centers to which countries can look for diplomatic, military and economic support. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders understood this reality, and so made a greater effort to woo foreign capitals, always concerned that the Soviets would make a better offer.

I doubt that it will surprise any regular readers that I take to the latter viewpoint. Perhaps, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, when Russia was imploding, China and India were still emerging from their long sleep, and Europe could not yet be referred to as a singular entity, a strategy based on a unipolar world made some sense. These days, though, it is misguided. Indeed, the situation now is even more complex than it was during the Cold War, as relationships are no longer dependent on ideology, and need not firmly place a country into a single "camp." Iran, one of Washington's principal bogeymen of late, has managed to forge economic and political relationships with authoritarian regimes like China and Russia, democratic ones like India and the E.U., and a host of other "second world" states, giving it all the political advantage it needs. Certainly, patching up the relationship with the United States would be desirable for many in Tehran, but they understand that they needn't prostrate themselves before Washington in order to do it. They're getting along fine without us.

In such an environment, the notion that just the opportunity to negotiate with the United States should be incentive enough to alter regime behavior does not withstand scrutiny. The U.S. is extremely powerful, and will remain so for the forseeable future, but it is not omnipotent, and cannot conduct diplomacy as though it is. The simple act of negotiating with a regime does not confer upon it our approval. It does, however, acknowledge the fact that Washington cannot will that regime out of existence. That's the reality. It's time we recognized it.

And Now in the Realm of the Obvious...

2008-01-31T10:47:00.000-08:00

A new report from Human Rights Watch accuses Western nations of turning a blind eye to "sham" democracies that they find economically and strategically useful. In other news, the Earth is round and revolves around the Sun.

At least we're forcing them to make a pretense of democracy now. I suppose, in a somewhat disheartening way, that counts as progress.

On Point - China and India

2008-01-31T06:52:00.001-08:00

If anyone has a spare 45 minutes (or is looking for a diversion at work) check out yesterday's On Point interview with Tarun Khanna about the economic, political and cultural consequences of the rise of China and India (yes I'm 23 and listen to NPR, yes I'm okay with that). It's a pretty nuanced program that gets past a lot of the stereotypes and mindless debates on the subject that you tend to hear on American airwaves.

Goodbye to Hegemony, Hello to...?

2008-01-30T09:50:00.000-08:00

For those who didn't catch it, be sure to check out Parag Khanna's piece in Sunday's New York Times Magazine entitled "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony." In it, Khanna joins the now crowded pack of international relations scholars trying to work out what the international system of the twenty first century (Friedman's "post-post-Cold War era") is going to look like. Fukuyama famously launched the neoconservative vision of a U.S./liberal-dominated "end of history" that now looks increasingly defunct, Huntington proposed his "clash of civilizations," and various other thinkers have offered realist and liberal internationalist perspectives as well. I'm certainly leaving some out, but you get the idea.

In asking (and answering) the questions that such theorists address, they are actually addressing three distinct issues. First, where will power be concentrated in the world of the twenty first century? Second, how will that power be operationalized? Third (for Americans), how ought the United States respond to the situation? All three questions are exceedingly important, because they lead in very different directions. If you are a neoconservative, for example, you believe that power will be disproportionally concentrated in the political and economic institutions of the United States, and operationalized primarily through leveraging America's unassailable advantages in economic and military strength. Thus, as the only entity with enough power to maintain global stability, the United States has both a moral responsibility and national imperative to maintain, by force if necessary, military and economic hegemony. If you take to Huntington's argument, on the other hand, power will begin to concentrate at the center of a number of socio-cultural blocs (civilizations), and will be most easily operationalized by leveraging the common cultural and philosophical mindsets within those blocs. Thus, the United States (and other countries) ought to align its political, economic and military intsitutions with those of societies with which it shares common cultural and historical bonds (basically, Canada and Europe). I could go on, but this is a blog, not a book, and you get the point.

Khanna's vision is somewhat more complex. First off, he asserts that any notion of U.S. hegemony was ephemeral in the first place and is now definitively over. The idea that America will bestride the world as a modern colossus, unequaled and unchecked, is being disproven daily both by America's clumsy ineptitude at running its purported Empire and by the meteoric rise of new powers like China and India. I have no argument with him so far. I wish very much that the post Cold War United States had taken a position of real global leadership, rather than acting as an over-reluctant sherrif during the 1990s and then as an over-eager bully during the Bush years, but it didn't, problems festered, other powers began to counter-balance U.S. strength, and here we are.

Khanna next proposes that the twenty first century power centers will be the societies of the United States, the E.U., and China, which will exercise considerable control over their own regional blocs while competing for resources, markets and influence in the regional blocs of others. To grossly oversimplify, he's proposing a tripolar world rather like that envisioned by Orwell in 1984, albiet with marginally different political geography and (hopefully) less outright military conflict. He sees many of the secondary powers (countries like India, Russia and Brazil) as the "swing states" of this new system, offering their resources and markets to whichever superpowers make the best offer, without entangling themselves in enduring, Cold War style alliances. The system he describes is fluid, dynamic, and one to which the United States needs desperately to readjust by strengthening its diplomatic corps, re-tooling its economy, and maintaining a flexible global posture.

Khanna's analysis has much that is quite valuable. Certainly his rejection of American hegemonic pretensions is right on, and his emphasis on soft power, economic strength and strategic flexibility is extraordinarily important. His point that even superpower control over independent-minded regional blocs will be flimsy at best should be given serious attention.

That said, the tripolar world he describes strikes me as a bit of a stretch. As Matt Dupuis at Foreign Policy Watch points out, he barely even mentions India, even though it may well emerge as a political and economic center of gravity comparable to that of China, and I don't recall seeing the word "Japan" anywhere in the article. Also, while his assertion that Russia's independent influence will decline precipitously due to its collapsing population rings true to my ears, his tongue-in-cheek dismissal of the country as "the Sino-Finnish border" seems a bit premature. I actually think his analysis of the E.U. as a coherently-operating political entity is right on, because future means of operationalizing power - through economic prowess operating in an open system rather than mercentalist domination enforced at the barrel of a gun - won't require completely centralized political structures in order to work. Still, the relative gradations of power that will be wielded by numerous international actors in the coming century make the notion of a "big three" group of superpowers seem like a pretty artificial distinction.

I see the world of the twenty first century as being genuinely multipolar, with the U.S. playing (for a time) a role similar to that of nineteenth century Great Britain: as the most powerful state in a group of other quite powerful states. Europe, Japan, China, Russia, India, perhaps Brazil, and eventually others all deserve a seat at the table, and policymakers shouldn't exclude them because of preconceptions of who counts as a "true" superpower. Still, Khanna's vision is important (I can't wait for the book), and deserves serious scrutiny and debate. He successfully melds cultural, economic, military and political factors into a coherent view of the coming geopolitical structure, and though I think his views could be tweaked, they are doubtless very important.

Weinberger on Free Trade

2008-01-27T11:59:00.000-08:00

Amen to Seth Weinberger over at Security Dilemmas. He puts up an excellent response to those who defend free trade while rejecting any notion that we must compensate those who lose from it. Even if we have no moral responsibility to compensate those who lose their jobs and livelihoods due to the (generally positive) effects of globalization - I believe that we do, but let's grant the point for the sake of argument - it is politically necessary to do so. Otherwise, the realities of living in a democracy will make trade unsustainable, to nobody's benefit. This is a perfect example of why economists need to study a bit of political science, and vice versa. Otherwise they simply talk past each other.

More News from Pakistan

2008-01-27T11:51:00.000-08:00

So, it looks as though even the flimsy rationale that the Administration has been giving for supporting Pakistan's military government - that they are cooperating with us against Islamist militants, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban - doesn't really hold up. Lovely. Remind me again what we gained by putting ourselves on the wrong side of Pakistan's democracy movement?

Gazprom and Serbia

2008-01-24T19:24:00.000-08:00

Check out this post by Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros. I know next to nothing substantive about Eastern European/Balkan politics. I do know enough to say that Russia's dealings in the Balkans, Kosovo's drive to independence, the West's desire to expand NATO, and the ever-complex world of Russian energy resources deserve more public attention and public debate than they have been getting. Enjoy.

Stare in Pace Romano Prodi

2008-01-24T13:28:00.001-08:00

And the ever-dysfunctional, ineffectual government of Romano Prodi has now fallen. Will something better replace it? Beppe Grillo and I doubt it.

Realism, the Commentariat, and Variety in Political Thought

2008-01-24T11:45:00.001-08:00

Eugene Gholz at Across the Aisle has posted a worthwhile critique of an excellent article at Salon.com by Stephen Walt, in which Walt bemoans the lack of realists in the popular foreign policy commentariat. Starting with the recent hiring of William Kristol at the Times, Walt laments that, in the popular press, there is little analytical variation regarding the United States' appropriate global role. He sees columnists and others basically split between liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, both of whom support the notion of the United States as a transformative global leader, ready to project (and at times enforce) its will and values upon the Globe. Walt (and Gholz) argue that the differences between these groups are peripheral: they advocate different policies because they disagree on priorities and means, not because their worldviews are fundamentally at odds. Walt argues that realists need to have a greater voice in public discourse, and that if the Times really wants to hire someone with a fresh voice, it should look to proponents of the realist school.

I'm not a realist (frankly I'm not really sure that I'd call myself an anything at this point), but I'm basically in agreement with Walt. I take issue with Gholz's assertion that there aren't any good candidates because most realists exist in academia. Where else should good public intellectuals come from? Paul Krugman's an academic. Teaches at Princeton. He doesn't seem to have a problem banging out a couple of columns every week. More to the point, though, I agree that public discourse - again, in the popular press, not just in Greek-letter academia - would benefit from the realist perspective. While, during my time as an undergraduate, realism was often presented as the most violent, bellicose way of looking at international relations due to its emphasis on balance-of-power politics, I have come to appreciate the humility with which realists approach the international system. The kind of transformational, almost messianic fervor with which neoconservatives often approach foreign policy questions could stand to be tempered a bit.

I don't agree with everything Walt and his ideological colleagues say. In particular, I tend to think that spreading Democracy (intelligently) is a major strategic interest of the United States, not a dangerous pie-in-the-sky diversion. I also think Walt overemphasizes the similarities between the neoconservative and liberal internationalist worldviews. Still, a perspective like his would be interesting and beneficial to get on a more regular basis. Maybe he can submit his resume to the Salzburgers when Kristol's tenure is up next year.

The Planning of "Ethnic" Violence

2008-01-24T06:31:00.000-08:00

Today's BBC has a worthwhile article pointing out Human Rights Watch allegations that much of the "ethnic" (I'll explain the quotes in a second) violence ravaging Kenya is being planned and directed by political elites there. Again, worth reading, but hardly surprising to anyone who has looked at historical patterns of communal violence.

The nature of media coverage of such strife is a persistent complaint of people who study ethnic conflict and ethno-nationalist politics. By framing violence as "ethnic," without adding much context to the term, reporters unwittingly frame it as a result of ancient, hardened, immutable social divisions that spontaneously flare up from time to time (I - along with many others, prefer the term "communal," because it leaves open the possibility for boundaries to change). Furthermore, by using the word "riot" to describe the actual incidents, reporters conjure up images of pent-up anger, randomly exploding into wanton destruction (in the context of Africa, it also unwittingly reinforces racist stereotypes about tribal conflict). Recent history - from the Kristallnacht to the Rwandan Genocide to the 2002 Hindu-Muslim clashes in Gujarat - has shown that such violence is nearly always planned and directed by communal elites. "Pogrom" might be a more appropriate term.

The extent to which elites are responsible for such action (and, conversely, the extent to which the people "on the street" who actually engage in much of the destruction and killing can be viewed as sheep who follow their leaders blindly) remains a matter of debate. Personally, I'm not willing to pin all the blame on those who stoke the conflict. The dynamics by which communal identity is constructed and directed are too complex for such simplistic explanations. Still, it is good to see that some media outlets finally point out the calculated nature of communal violence.

Strategic Inanity

2008-01-17T11:45:00.000-08:00

Ever the font of useful information and analysis, BBC News has an excellent summary of many of the energy issues facing the emerging economies of China and India currently up on its website. As I was reading through, most of it seemed informative, if pretty standard for anyone who has been following the issue of global energy supplies over the last few years. Standard, that is, until I came upon the following quote:

China is eager to exploit clean coal technology, but Western companies are not that keen to part with it for hard-nosed commercial reasons.

"What if China got all this clean coal technology and their economy would develop even faster? What would happen to the big economies like the USA and India?" says the BBC's China editor Shirong Chen.

Really? Seriously? We're really worried about giving the Chinese access to clean coal technology because we want to slow down their economic growth? As though China continuing to belch CO2 and sulphur into the atmosphere isn't going to adversely affect our economic growth? As though un-checked global warming isn't going to create security challenges that make the conflict in the Taiwan Strait look like a game of footsie? Can the American business community and the American foreign policy community really be this shortsighted?

Okay, deep breath. This is the BBC's China editor, not the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Commerce or State. Shirong Chen isn't the official mouthpiece of U.S. energy policy. Still, this comment just illustrates the perversity of "realist," zero-sum strategic thinking when it is divorced from all context and perspective.

Yes, it's true, helping China develop clean energy technologies will have the side effect of assisting the economic development of a strategic competitor. If we don't provide such help, though, and China supplants the United States as the world's exhaust pipe, the global instability created by widespread drought, crop failure, famine, natural disasters and all the rest of the near-Biblical consequences of global warming that climatologists have identified will dwarf any threat that China poses to U.S. economic and strategic interests. It bears mentioning, for example, that the Muslim world with whom the U.S. is having such difficulty rests almost entirely within the equatorial regions that will be hardest hit by the crisis.

Rather than be nervous about helping a rival, the United States ought to view the cooperative devleopment of renewable and clean energy as a potential boon to stability in Asia. The United States, Japan, China and India will consume the vast majority of the world's energy in the coming decades. They have a strategic interest in applying their collective intellectual capital (which is formidable) towards a solution to the problem, rather than fighting over the table scraps of the global hydrocarbon economy while vainly trying to insulate themselves from the larger consequences.

This kind of foolishness needs to stop.

Securing Private Security

2008-01-11T11:12:00.000-08:00

This charming recent piece in the New York Times provides yet another reminder - as if we needed one - that modern societies need to seriously re-think the roles played by private military contractors like Blackwater. It would appear that, in a 2005 incident, Blackwater forces attempted to use riot gas to clear traffic from an intersection in Iraq, in blatant and serious violation of U.S. military policy and (quite likely) international chemical weapons treaties. In addition to causing havoc and injury among local Iraqis who were doing nothing more provocative than commuting, the release of CS gas in this instance functionally disabled a group of U.S. soldiers manning a nearby checkpoint.

Stepping back from this one specific breach of sane conduct, this incident highlights, it would seem, much of what is wrong with the way private military contractors are currently used. The soldiers at the checkpoint, for example, apparently had no means of communicating with either the Blackwater helicopter that was dropping CS canisters, nor the convoy for which they were trying to clear the way. Everything I have read would indicate that, for all intents and purposes, private contractors operate as functionally separate from the Coalition forces in Iraq. It should come as no surprise, then, that the two groups often step on each other's toes. Because they are, evidently, only loosely integrated into the Coalition military command structure, they often take actions that are strategically counterproductive to the larger war effort. Looking again at the CS gas incident, the use of chemical weapons, and even smoke grenades, makes life harder for the Coalition by feeding enemy propaganda that the Americans are engaging in chemical attacks on Iraqi civilians. U.S. soldiers may make distinction between themselves and their private counterparts. The Iraqi populace, for the most part, does not.

As anyone who has not been living under a rock for the last year realizes, this is hardly the first time that the relative impunity with which private contractors in Iraq operate has caused problems (indeed, by the standards of some recent events, the CS incident is pretty benign). Some have proposed significantly scaling back the use of private contractors in war zones, saying that the regular military should be able to do more of the job. I am not entirely convinced that, in the long term, that is the right solution.

Some of the very structural issues that can make the use of private contractors problematic also make them potentially valuable assets for global peace and stability. As the World, or at least the Western World, begins to move into a post-modern age in which great power wars are of decreasing concern and the ability to raise and employ mass citizen armies is politically constrained, the ability of governments to augment their forces with private contractors provides an important buttress to the capacity of the state. It allows leaders to avoid the political costs of employing vast numbers of regular troops, most of whom have little choice in the matter, while still accomplishing policy goals.

Many people would say that is precisely the problem. Leader's shouldn't be able to mask the true cost of military conflict by outsourcing the fighting, but rather should have to prove to their populations that a particular military operation is worth sacrificing for. I am sympathetic to this argument. Certainly, the current administration's extensive employment of private contractors has allowed it to (badly) conduct a war that would have otherwise been politically unviable. That said, the smart use of private contractors could solve many of the problems traditionally associated with drumming up support for humanitarian missions and collective security. The Clinton Administration's reluctance to go into Rwanda in 1994 stemmed directly from the experience in Somalia. Casualties sustained by the military in Mogadishu had made humanitarian intervention unpalatable to the American public, and so the genocide was allowed to spin out of control, eventually engulfing all of central Africa in the bloodiest conflict since World War II. The hemming and hawing that accompanied other (marginally) more successful security missions in places like Bosnia and Kosovo stemmed in large part from the same issues, as has the anemic global response to the ongoing crisis in Darfur.

The reputation of many private military contractors - the detractors of whom make no bones about calling them "mercenaries" - has now been seriously damaged due to their association with various atrocities in the U.S.-occupied Middle East. In order to sufficiently rehabilitate them in the eyes of the world, and in order to ensure that they behave as professional soldiers, accountable for their actions, a global legal regime must be established to govern their use. I would suggest, for example, that they be subject to the military justice system of whatever legitimate military authority operates in their theater of war (in the case of the United States, this means the Uniform Code of Military Justice). Furthermore, steps need to be taken to be sure that there is a proper integration of private contractors into the military command and control structure, at least to the extent that it is compatible with their specific contracts. This would ensure that they do not operate as a force unto themselves and undermine the mission that they are hired to support. The UN, in particular, needs to formulate the institutional capacity to effectively, and safely, use private contractors in its security missions.

The world is changing, and I believe that the privatization of at least some state security functions in the twenty-first century is not ipso facto a bad thing. We must, though, adapt our military and legal institutions to face this new reality.

Oy! Another One

2008-01-07T06:40:00.000-08:00

According to the New York Times, another strongman may emerge in Pakistan over the next few months. Evidently the U.S., grasping at straws, is beginning to put their hopes for stability in Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who has replaced Musharraf as Army chief. Look, I know we don't have any good options in Pakistan, and certainly we'll have to deal with whoever heads up the Pakistani security forces - the Army simply has too much power there not to - but could we please begin to deal with Pakistan as a country, rather than simply looking to cultivate relationships with the boss-of-the-moment?

Kristol at the Times

2007-12-30T14:47:00.000-08:00

By the way, is anyone else as baffled as I am that the New York Times has named Bill Kristol as a regular columnist?

Krugman on Pakistan

2007-12-28T15:42:00.000-08:00

My my, it's been a while hasn't it? First off I'd like to apologize to any of my readers who were wondering if I'd started a new life as a hermit in the mountains of central Asia. I can offer no good explanation for my long absence, save a hectic holiday season and the fact that the Muses, fickle creatures that they are, have paid me few visits of late. I make it my New Year's resolution to resume something resembling a regular blogging schedule from here on out.

I am moved to comment on this blurb written a few days ago by the Times's Paul Krugman. Dr. Krugman is a man whose views I greatly respect. I think he is one of the most clear-headed and relevant voices of liberal thought in America today, and he is a better economist than I could ever hope to be. All that said, his comments on the recent Bhutto assassination in Afghanistan reflect a unidimensionally ideological approach to foreign policy that I find quite troubling. For those of you who couldn't be bothered to follow the link, here's the key quote:

This isn’t about you; in fact, as far as I can tell, it isn’t about America. It’s about the fact that Pakistan is a very messed-up place. This has very bad consequences for us, but it’s hard to see what, if anything, it says about US policy.

If you’re a tough guy (or gal) who believes in exerting US power — never mind, there are just too many heavily armed people in Pakistan for anyone but Norman Podhoretz to believe that we could throw our weight around. If you believe you can bring new understanding to the world through your enlightened outlook — sorry, there are too many people in Pakistan who don’t want to be enlightened. If you believe that we’d have more influence in the world if we hadn’t squandered our resources and good will in Iraq (which I do) — well, sorry, that influence wouldn’t extend to being able to bring peace and light to Pakistan.

This isn’t about us, and it’s out of our control.

Pardon my French Dr. Krugman, but [DELETED: Expletive referring to the excrement of a large farm animal]. Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but only a bit. For the sake of fairness, I will acknowledge that Krugman's analysis - to the extent that it merits the term - of the Pakistani political crisis hits on some important realities. For example, it is true that we cannot use the first infantry division to make Pakistani politics less volatile. I know of nobody, Podhoretz included, who advocates such a policy. We live in a definitively post-Imperial age in which global populations are too politicized to use as pawns in Georgetown living room chess games. The political direction of Pakistan will ultimately be set by the Pakistanis, and it is delusional to think that U.S. policy can "fix" the myriad political problems there.

Krugman, though, takes this advisable humility to its illogical extreme, arguing that events in Pakistan "[aren't] about us, and [are] out of our control." Pakistan is officially designated a Major Non-NATO Ally by the U.S. government. We have sold them over $10 billion in military equipment since 2001. Pakistan borders Afghanistan, Iran, and India, is currently serving as al-Qaeda's principal base of operations, and is a nuclear-armed state. Again, out of fairness, Krugman implicitly acknowledges Pakistan's strategic importance, but I am puzzled as to why he thinks American policy is irrelevant to events there. American negotiators were important to the (flawed) agreement that brought Bhutto back to Pakistan in the first place. American aid to the Pakistani military - particularly aid that allows it to maintain strategic parity with India - helps maintain Musharraf's support within his own army. To argue that the U.S. has no leverage in Pakistani politics strikes me as a bit small minded.

Part of the problem is that Krugman sets up straw men by grossly oversimplifying American policy options. He seems to think that we can either bomb Pakistan, or we can try to use moral suasion to direct political outcomes there. He's right that neither strategy would be particularly effective, but we have more nuanced options. Were the United States to start engaging Pakistan as a country, rather than just as a political regime, we could very likely have a positive effect both with regard to Pakistan's stability and our own security. The strategy outlined by Senator Biden in recent months, for example, would begin to repair America's image in Pakistan, help state-building there, and provide political actors with incentives to both strengthen democracy and go after violent extremists in a committed manner. Despite Krugman's infantalizing dismissal of Pakistani political culture ("there are too many people... who don't want to be enlightened"), my reading has indicated that the majority of the Pakistani population is either secular or moderately islamist. They don't need to be "enlightened," they need a political system that responds to their desires. The United States can help by investing in Pakistan, rather than whichever strongmen/women happen to be sitting in Islamabad at any given moment.

After fifty years of (largely frustrating) experience managing global politics, it is understandable why Dr. Krugman and many of his generation have given up on the notion that American power can be used effectively half a world away. While such humility is a welcome contrast to the overreaching doctrines of recent years, it is overly pessimistic of the leadership that America is yet able to provide.

Pakistan: What Now? (Part Two)

2007-11-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

The big news out of Pakistan today, apart from the Musharraf government's continued beatings of street protesters, is Benazir Bhutto's call for large-scale anti-government demonstrations this coming Friday. The article touches on two important points. First, Ms. Bhutto is key to any acceptable solution to the current crisis, as she is the only one capable of mounting a large-scale political assault on Musharraf's government. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that her popularity, combined with U.S. pressure, will keep her from being detained by Musharraf any time soon, so she now stands as the primary locus of viable opposition. Second, the article mentions that her planned march "runs more than 160 miles from the eastern city of Lahore to Islamabad, the heart of Punjab, the country’s largest and most powerful province... The vast majority of the country’s army hails from Punjab, and the military has hesitated in the past to fire on civilians in the province. Widespread popular unrest there could cause senior Pakistani army commanders to turn on General Musharraf and ask him to resign..."

In other words, Ms. Bhutto has (it would seem) concluded that the best way to strike at Musharraf is to undermine his legitimacy within the ranks of his own military. This echoes comments made by Senator Biden on Sunday's Face The Nation, where he suggested withdrawing the high tech military aid (F-16 fighters and such) that allows the Pakistani military to keep pace with that of India in order to convince others within the army that Musharraf has become a liability.

My suggestion, then, is this: come Friday, at the height of Bhutto-led protests through Punjab, the Administration ought to announce the indefinite suspension of all military aid to Pakistan, offering to resume it only once Pakistan is put under functional civilian leadership legitimized through free parlimentary elections. The simultaneous internal and external pressure, if timed correctly, might just create the tipping point necessary to break the deadlock.

What was the Court Thinking?

2007-11-06T12:52:00.001-08:00

Continuing to peruse coverage of the crisis in Pakistan, I stumbled upon an interesting tidbit in a Times article from a couple of days ago: "A close aide to General Musharraf said the Pakistani leader had decided to declare an emergency when he was told last week by a Supreme Court justice that the court would rule within days that he was ineligible to continue serving as president. The ruling would have been unanimous, according to the aide."

Wow.

If this is true, of course, it only further confirms that Musharraf's "state of emergency" is nothing more than a naked power grab, but we knew that already. What surprises me, to be frank, is that the Court was actually going to annul the General's election. I had, of course, heard the talk about the Court's deliberations hanging like a "sword of Damocles" over Musharraf's head and such, but from the coverage I was reading it seemed fairly obvious that he was never going to let himself be removed from power by judicial fiat. To rule against the General struck me as the Court's "Samson option," allowing them to deal a body blow to Musharraf if he did not play ball, remove his uniform and allow free parlimentary elections, but at the cost of forcing the General to reinstitute military rule, albiet with much-weakened credibility.

Why, then, did members of the Court not try to use their upcoming ruling as a backroom bargaining chip to wrest political concessions from Musharraf without backing him into a corner? If they in fact tried to do that and failed, why did they not issue their ruling immediately before Musharraf could take extraconstitutional steps? I don't live in Pakistan, and I know little about the people and personalities that make up the Pakistani Supreme Court, but as a casual observer it strikes me that the Judges massively overplayed their collective hands.

Pakistan: What now?

2007-11-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

I hosted a poker game at my house last Friday. It was nothing too intense, just a low-stakes game between friends, but I managed to lose - very quickly. I am not much of a poker player, you see, and tend to play out fast because I have a hard time leaving chips in the pot. Right in front of me, I can see all that I have invested in a particular hand, and I just can't help chasing it with more, until the final card turns and my losses, now greatly amplified, are laid bare.

I bring up my deficiencies at cards because they strike me as a perfect metaphor (which I promise I won't torture for very long) for the current U.S. conundrum in Pakistan. Over the weekend, General Musharraf abandoned all pretense of constitutional restraint and declared a state of emergency - his detractors are calling it martial law - supposedly in response to a "visible ascendancy in the activities of extremists and incidents of terrorist attacks" and the fact that "some members of the judiciary are working at cross purposes with the executive and
legislature in the fight against terrorism and extremism." The full text of the proclamation contains a long justificatory preamble, but its crux is expressed in a beautifully terse final sentence: "I hereby order and proclaim that the constitution of the Islamic republic of Pakistan shall remain in abeyance."

As the editorial board of the Washington Post has pointed out, the bet that Washington has placed on Musharraf - that he could prove both a reliable ally in the battle against the Taliban and an agent of democratic reform - a bet that Washington has continued to chase with each dissappointing turn of the cards, has finally turned sour, and America has left a lot of cash, credibility and political capital on the table.

Much of the intial comment on the state of emercency and the U.S. reaction has focused on tut-tutting the fact that, once again, support of a third-world strongman has blown up in America's face. That's all fine, I suppose, though the foreign policy community and commentariat (myself included) was far too late in calling attention to the problems with U.S. policy toward Pakistan, and even now I haven't seen very much suggested by way of a credible alternative path, so all the righteousness rings a tad hollow. That is to say, much as I enjoy bashing Administration foreign policy, the U.S. relationship with Pakistan is too complex, and our problems therein too intractable, to waste time pointing fingers. We've lost the bet. The question is, what now?

The U.S. response (echoing much of the Western world, or is it the other way around?) has been fairly tepid thus far. The Administration made a point of letting the U.S. press know in the days before the crisis erupted that it had specifically warned Musharraf against instituting emergency rule, so one would imagine that such direct flouting of Washington's will would have serious consequences. And yet, knowledgable sources seem to feel that the U.S. will not significantly interrupt aid to Pakistan (at least not military aid, which is the only kind that might matter to a military government), and aside from international hand-wringing, Musharraf seems unlikely to face much in the way of serious external pressure to reverse course. He seems to be making the most of the situation, arresting political opponents, sending troops to crush dissent in the streets, and taking whatever steps he deems necessary to eliminate immediate threats to his rule.

The problem for the United States, of course (apart from the ethical dilemma of supporting an un-democratic leader which, if you'll pardon my cynicism, I think we've gotten over by now) is that this can't last. Musharraf, by most counts, has lost most of his support outside of the military, and as the Shah demonstrated long ago in Iran, that is not a viable way to rule a state. Even if America's only concern in Pakistan were stability (and, much as it pains me to say it, it is our principal concern at the moment) we would be well-advised to attempt to engineer a course correction and force Musharraf to relent.

We must, first off, be honest about what we can achieve.

The power of the Pakistani military is such that Musharraf, or whoever heads the army in the future, must have some place in civilian politics, else it will simply take control. First off, the United States ought to make it clear that we are not going to engineer the general's ouster, but neither will we tolerate a lenghthy continuation of the current state of affairs. We should encourage Musharraf to doff his uniform, allow non-rigged elections to proceed as currently scheduled, and re-instate the Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. The quid pro quo ought to be that a re-constituted Supreme Court ratify Musharraf's election (of course, at this point such a step might be a bit too obvious to everyone involved to be taken seriously, but it's a way forward). Musharraf has made his point - he can crush his opponents if he so chooses - so perhaps he can be persuaded to back off.

I cannot help but think, though, that all this is a pipe dream. Arif Rafiq has a somewhat more sobering and, I am sorry to say, realistic assessment of what will likely happen: America will wring its hands and hope against hope that the General changes his mind, and Musharraf, realizing that he has passed the point of no return, won't. Rafiq mentions the option of allowing Musharraf a safe exit from Pakistani politics (a nice farm house on a vinyard in the Willamette Valley perhaps?); but, to be frank, my read is that if Musharraf wanted that he would have arranged for it now, rather than sending soldiers into the streets. If the General will not budge from his current stance, the question of withdrawing aid and dealing with a hostile, autocratic, nuclear Pakistan that plays tacit host to al Qaeda must be considered. I am not yet ready to actively counsel such steps, but the United States is fast running out of options.

On the Lighter Side

2007-11-02T12:28:00.001-07:00

A joke only a political scientist could love.

Inflection Points and Strategic Solvency

2007-10-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

I was preparing to summarize and comment on an excellently-argued piece by Richard Betts in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, but it would seem that Ilian Goldberg at Democracy Arsenal beat me to the punch with a great summary, so I'll try not to be overly redundant. The article argues that U.S. defense expenditures need to be "strategically solvent" and appropriately matched to reasonable and achievable international goals. He argues that the half-trillion plus dollars that we currently spend on defense is both much more than is necessary to provide basic security, and much less than is necessary to achieve global imperial dominance. Particularly in an environment of economically-burdensome public debt that grows by the minute, our current defense posture, Betts argues, makes little sense. Without going into too much detail (again, just read the article, or at least the excerpts, which I promise are worth your time), he advocates a reorientation of U.S. security policy towards increased special forces and intelligence to combat trans-national threats, coupled with the ability to mobilize superior conventional forces should we enter into the sort of environment that requires them. Thus, spending on military research and development is important, and should perhaps be increased, but the maintenance of a large army and navy in peacetime makes no sense in a post-Cold War world. The United States should maintain a technological edge over, for example, China, such that we could mobilize to defeat it if and when the threat it poses becomes real as opposed to theoretical, but we need not be perpetually and fully mobilized to fight at the drop of a hat.

The article brings to mind two related points that are worth considering. The first is related to an essay by Robert Kelly posted by Seth Weinberger at Security Dilemmas; namely, the conceptual tendency of U.S. leaders to 'state-ize' threats, and then deal with them as such. In other words, because the U.S. military has enjoyed considerable success defeating other states, we have a tendency to want to view new threats as state-like organizations that can be defeated with a vigorous application of military power (I would argue that Israeli leadership has suffered from the same conceptual problem since the end of the 1973 war). For a more light-hearted, but still intelligent treatment of the issue, take a look here. Instead of adapting our capabilities to relevant threats, we try to adapt relevant threats to our capabilities, with problematic results.

For example, recent proposals to add additional divisions to the army are being treated as practical, hard-headed responses to the array of security threats the United States now faces. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation, though, as to how another armored division will help combat shadowy, trans-national terrorist groups. These additions are likely to come too late to make a difference in Iraq or Afghanistan, so I fail to see what they will accomplish, unless (perish the thought) we intend on repeating the Iraq experience any time soon. Increasing the size of our military, though, is the historically standard hedge against emerging security threats, so it is the knee-jerk response of American leaders, whatever its objective merits. National security would be improved if decision makers could lift such cognitive blinders, and commit scarce resources in a more holistic and appropriate way.

Taking a wider view, Betts's article also raises the issue of America's geopolitical standing in the 21st Century. I have argued elsewhere that the United States is likely to see it's relative power decline precipitously over the next hundred years. Though America will almost certainly remain a major player in the global system, its position will likely be akin to that of 19th Century Great Britain - the most powerful state in a group of powerful states - and unlike the hegemony that it now enjoys. The transition to an international system of "asymmetric multi-polarity," though, will not go smoothly if the United States bucks against a sensible reorientation of its global posture to reflect the increasing political and economic power of nations like China, India and Japan.

Particularly in Asia, America will almost certainly have to accept a reduction in influence and military dominance, as the aforementioned states increasingly take control of their own back yards. The sensible way to do this would be for the United States to use its remaining influence to head off serious disputes and build up regional, multilateral institutions to manage economic development, trade and (increasingly) environmental policy. The foolish way would be to continue to claim regional military hegemony and to enforce American will through domineering bilateral relationships until the strategic, political and economic solvency of such an approach collapses, leaving a divided, tension-ridden region behind as we slink back across the Pacific.

Drawing on the work of political scientists such as A.F.K. Organski, who proposed what is known as Power Transition Theory, and Charles Doran, who introduced the notion of "inflection points" in nations' relative power, I would argue that there is at least some relationship between the relative trajectory of nations' power and the likelihood that they will come into conflict. As the events of recent years have demonstrated with painful clarity, there is a temptation for U.S. leaders to confuse U.S. predominance with omnipotence, and overreach the bounds of its long-term capabilities. Meanwhile, leaders of a state like China, the economic and political power of which is growing with astonishing speed, could overestimate their own power (particularly if some part of the U.S.-maintained political regime in Asia is dissatisfying to them) and spark conflict. As the dominant power in Asia, it is incumbent upon the United States to give China sufficient room to flex its muscles, while drawing boundaries around core interests (such as the security of South Korea and Japan) and creating an environment that gives China no incentive to foment international discord. Turning back to the question of defense spending, then, engaging in a de facto arms race with the Chinese in Asia is both economically unsustainable and strategically unwise.

Viewed in such a way, Betts' call for a bit of sanity in American military outlays is a breath of fresh air. He even has the political acumen to propose a slogan that U.S. politicians can use to launch the debate: "Half a trillion dollars is more than enough."

Indeed.

Collective Punishment in Gaza

2007-10-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

This fascinating little item in the BBC allows me to add Israel to the list of countries whose legislatures seem hell-bent on working against their own national interest. Evidently, the Knesset has approved a measure authorizing Israel to cut power to Gaza in response to rocket attacks coming out of the small strip. Though the government has not specified exactly if or when it will act on this authorization, the plan's architect, Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai has spoken of cutting power "gradually, without causing anything that could create a humanitarian problem, like hospitals." Evidently the plan is to begin by cutting power for fifteen minutes following specific rocket attacks, then gradually increasing the length of time if/as the attacks continue.

Leaving aside for a moment Minister Vilnai's forgivable lapses in English grammar, this latest development touches on several important issues. First, however the Israeli government tries to spin it, this policy is a blatant form of collective punishment. I can see no tangible tactical military advantage to cutting power to Gaza, certainly not for incremental periods of time. Forgive me for stating the obvious fact that the rockets being fired at Israel don't plug into anything. Clearly, the objective is to impose pain on the people of Gaza in order to undercut whatever tacit support they give to groups that fire the rockets. That intelligent military and civilian leaders would employ such reasoning in this day and age simply baffles me. Ever since World War II, when the strategy of collective punishment was employed on an industrial scale, it has been obvious that it almost universally backfires. Rather than weakening and dividing an enemy's populace, it unites it through shared hardship and a common enemy. This is why drill sergants and team coaches often collectively punish those in their charge; to increase their effectiveness and cohesion. Israel, fresh from it's debacle in Lebanon in 2006, which greatly increased the prestige and popularity of Hezbollah in large part because Israel collectively punished the Lebanese populace as a whole for the group's actions, should have learned this lesson better than anyone. The notion that somehow Gazans will curtail their support for Hamas and other violent groups in response to Israel adding yet another hardship to their already difficult lives flies in the face of every conceivable historical precedent. Israel's leaders ought to know better.

There is also the question of legal and ethical justification for such tactics - which is weak at best, whatever semantic gymnastics Israeli lawyers have managed to perform (see "hostile entity") - but the question shouldn't even come up; on purely strategic grounds, this is an asinine policy.

I of course understand why the government feels it must do something - one cannont tolerate such violence indefinitely - but I would have thought it obvious to rational Israelis at this point that the realities of asymmetric conflict mean that a truly secure border with Palestine will come only in the context of a comprehensive and fair peace settlement. Absent that, groups in Palestine will always find some way to remind Israel of their discontent. The announcement that Israel will now hold Gazan's basic welfare hostage to the whims of the Knesset - justified or not - is simply one more counter-productive indignity that weakens Fatah and makes negotiating more difficult. It will also further reduce international sympathy for Israel's position at a time when it can ill-afford to lose the political capital.

Israeli leaders should resist the urge to engage in knee-jerk, ineffective responses to Gazan attacks and look at the situation with a more dispassionately strategic eye. Such a view, in my opinion, illuminates only one reasonable path: that of aggressive diplomacy.

Turkey, Congress and the Armenian Genocide

2007-10-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

I have been watching the ongoing nervous dance between Ankara, the White House and Capitol Hill over the question of the Armenian Genocide with some interest. On many levels, the whole thing smacks of political theater; however, especially on the international stage, political theater can have serious consequences for both the actors and audience. To bring readers up to speed, the House of Representatives, lobbied enthusiastically by the Armenian-American community, has been toying with the notion of passing a resolution recognizing the massacres and ethnic cleansing that took place against Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire as a genocide. The Turkish government, understandably sensitive about the issue, and viewing the resolution as an official slap in the face from a close ally, has voiced considerable protest, warning that the bill's passage could jeopardize the logistical support that Turkey gives U.S. forces in Iraq. Faced with such an environment, the bill's once overwhelming support has waned (though not vanished) and it remains unknown whether the measure will ultimately pass.

This is one debate in which I am genuinely sympathetic to both sides, and have a difficult time forming a concrete opinion. On the one hand, the Armenians were unquestionably victims of a genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks. No remotely serious person who is acquainted with history, and whose view is not filtered through particularly strident Turkish nationalism, can or should deny that for so much as half a second. The Turkish government maintains that the killings that took place were simply the inevitable byproduct of quelling "civil unrest" in a time of war. That a modern democratic government would make such claims is disgusting. As many as 1.5 million Armenians were systematically driven from their homes, gathered into camps and massacred. If the term "genocide" does not apply to such events, then the word has no meaning. The Turkish people owe it to themselves to examine their past with a less skewed lens, and in so doing scrub some soot from their national consciousness. Furthermore, for the United States Congress to bow to the pressure of those who would paper over the crimes of history for the sake of political convenience imparts upon it a moral stain.

Still, principle's sweet nectar must at times be drunk diluted by reality's brine. Whatever the sins of Turkey's past, the fact is that Turkey, though too often overlooked, is strategically indispensable to U.S. and Western interests. It is one of our oldest Muslim allies, the only Muslim country in the Middle East that could presently be called a democracy, a member of NATO, a friend to Israel, and a critical supply route for U.S. forces in Iraq. It is also going through a political realignment that makes its future international posture somewhat plastic. The is precisely the last time that Turkey needs a rhetorical slap in the face by the U.S. Congress.

Events in recent days only leave more cause for worry. The Turkish Parliament has, with much fanfare, authorized Turkey's army to strike at Kurdish militant bases across the Iraqi border. Clashes with militants on Turkey's side have led to a mounting death toll, and there is real reason to believe that Turkey may become more than a side player in Iraq quite soon. The possibility that such incursions could escalate - quickly - into the broader regional war that has been the nightmare of U.S. planners for some time is not remote. At the very least, Turkey's intervention would create serious problems in the one area of Iraq that the United States counts on to remain relatively calm. Were such actions to be coupled with a reduction of logistical support for the U.S. military, it would be a strategic disaster for the United States, end what remaining chance Turkey has to enter the E.U., and lead to a decisive rupture with the West that would seriously harm everyone involved.

In this climate, then, I take pause at the notion that Congress would proactively decide, with no strategic purpose and for no more than rhetorical gain, to remind Turkey of a part of its history that it would just as soon forget. Thus, reluctantly, with lowered eyes and a soft voice, I would counsel against this resolution.

Can Democracy Solve Climate Change?

2007-10-10T10:08:00.001-07:00

I've very much enjoyed the interesting and sometimes quirky blogs that the New York Times has brought together over the past year or two (check out Freakonomics if you haven't yet done so), and I've found the varying and sometimes contrarian opinions expressed by Stanley Fish to be particularly engaging. He has the kind of plodding, old-time academic style that I've actually grown to enjoy in recent years, and he puts it to work in a masterful way. Still, I have to strenuously disagree with a point he made in a recent post answering questions on the merits of democracy:

One question I was asked seemed to me to involve a category mistake: “Can democracy solve climate change?” Solving the problems of climate change, if it can be done, will be a matter of advances in technology and alterations in personal and corporate behavior in response to state directives and regulations. No political system is either naturally suited to the task or barred by definition from performing it. Politics and technology are independent variables.

Dr. Fish makes several serious mistakes in his flippant dismissal of so important a question. First, he treats "advances in technology" as a variable that is not only independent of politics (which I'll get back to in a moment), but of resources. In other words, in this day and age, the speed with which particular technologies advance is largely (though obviously not totally) a function of the amounts of a society's material resources and human capital that are applied to advancing them. The United States may well possess the necessary brain power and material resources to develop the kinds of energy technologies that will be needed to arrest the worst aspects of climate change, but that will mean very little if we fail to apply those resources vigorously and efficiently. Whether or not we do that, in turn, is a function of decisions made by those members of our society - mostly government leaders and captains of industry - that dictate the ends to which scarce resources are dedicated. To argue that somehow the structural environment in which such people operate does not affect the ultimate speed and direction of technological advances seems a bit small-minded.

Indeed, the anthropologist-biologist-geographer-sociologist-historian - I suppose I'll just call him a polymath - Jared Diamond has written two incredible volumes, Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, that detail the interaction of environment, culture, technology and politics in the development and decline of human societies (criticisms of Diamond's work as "environmental determinism" which are mentioned in the above links strike me as simplistic, and mis-represent his arguments as a whole, which are more nuanced). Consider also the work of a man like Joseph Needham, the orientalist (before Edward Said made the word pejorative) who opened the history of Chinese science to the West, which highlights the very different technological trajectories that societies can take based, at least in part, on their political structure. The level and nature of feedback between different elite classes of society, as well as between elites and non-elites, can have a profound effect not only on the development of particular technologies, but on the fate of societies as a whole. To make myself a bit more clear, I'll point out a few examples:

Printing

The printing press (combined with movable type) that most see as a key springboard of western modernity was not, as popular lore would have it, developed from thin air by Gutenberg and his predecessors, but rather was an import from the Chinese, who had developed the technique centuries earlier. Needless to say, this technology had a very different impact in Europe than it did in China.

In the context of the politically-unified Middle Kingdom, ruled as it was by a centralized authority that derived legitimacy from a combination of force and a nebulous Confucian philosophical milieu that emphasized the importance of hierarchy to social harmony and correct behavior, the development of print did not have particularly tumultuous social effects. To be sure, the technology streamlined government administration, fostered intellectual exchange, and was doubtless beneficial to the overall economy, but it did not threaten the prevailing social order, because that order was not predicated on an elite monopoly of particular information (it is worth noting as an aside that, except in certain administrative areas, movable type never caught on in China, partly because it is a far more cumbersome technology when applied to a language with thousands of written characters, and partly because of the aesthetic importance the Chinese placed on a writer's calligraphic talents; however, block printing was ubiquitous).

In Europe, of course, print fundamentally undermined the feudal hierarchy atop which stood the Vatican, because that hierarchy was not based on any unified political and administrative structure, but rather on a set of ideas that depended upon a small cadre of elites holding an interpretive monopoly. As long as the organs of the Catholic Church remained the principal repositories and transmitters of knowledge, especially theological knowledge, the authority of the Church was basically secure (Marxists might call this 'engineered false consciousness'). Once printing allowed for the wide, multi-linguistic dissemination of the purported textual basis of Church power (the Bible), as well as criticisms of that power, the entire system broke down. Furthermore, while printing in China remained primarily an administrative tool and/or an intellectual cottage industry, in the West it mixed with capitalism to remake Europe's ethno-linguistic map. In their desire to increase the size of their market, European printers unwittingly codified localized dialects into unified regional languages, creating "print communities" that were the embryos of modern European national groups (see Benedict Anderson's seminal work Imagined Communities for a better treatment of the argument that I just tried to summarize in a sentence).

Chinese Shipping

The case of the printing press may do a fine job demonstrating how technology can affect the development of politics, but can politics truly affect the development of technology? Absolutely. Recall the voyages of Zheng He, the Chinese admiral who led a massive treasure fleet around the Indian Ocean in the decades before Columbus. His travels are indicative of a level of ship-building technology and navigational knowledge that far surpassed that of other contemporary civilizations, yet much of it was lost in the centuries that followed his last voyages because of a political decision by the Ming court to stop such ventures and restrict Chinese contact with the outside world. Had China not been so bureaucratically unified, such decisions may well have carried less weight, and history may have witnessed Spanish Conquistadores vying with Chinese soldiers for control of the New World.

Guns in Japan

Recall also the deliberate halt called to the development of firearms in Japan following the ascent of the Tokugowa Shogunate. Guns, at first purchased from European traders, then indigenously produced, had played a central role in the many decades of fratricidal conflict that preceded Tokugowa ascension. Because Ieasu Tokugowa (correctly, perhaps) saw such devices as a greater threat to his rule than their utility merited, he arranged for their almost complete elimination in Japan, and Japanese firearm technology began to fall behind. This would have fateful consequences when Commodore Perry's gunships sailed into Tokyo Harbor in 1852.

Stem Cells in the United States

Finally, those who require a demonstration of the effect that politics can have on technological development need look no further than the contemporary United States which, despite impressive wealth and some of the most advanced biotechnology facilities and researchers on Earth, devotes almost no resources to one of the great biomedical frontiers of our time: embryonic stem cells. This is entirely because structural peculiarities in the American political system make it advantageous for the President to defy the will of the majority and put a de facto moratorium on such research. It is also worth noting that this moratorium is enforced not through prohibiting the research outright, but by holding back the resources necessary for it to bear fruit.

Regime Stability and Economics
All this history to emphasize just how important the political structure and climate of a society can be to the development and trajectory of important technology. Had Ming China been more decentralized, the rise of a new Emperor may not have brought Chinese naval development to such a grinding halt. Had the Tokugowa shoguns not halted firearms production, Japanese batteries may have been able to repulse Commodore Perry's ships. Were America's current leaders not so politically beholden to a minority of social conservatives, U.S. biotechnology might develop more freely.

Dr. Fish, though, understands that solving the question of climate change is not just a technological challenge, but an economic and behavioral one as well. Though many scientists predict that the sacrifice in current production and growth necessary to bring global warming to heel pale in comparison to the future production and growth sacrificed by letting it continue unchecked, it still bears mentioning that adjusting modern societies to sustainable energy usage will involve some material sacrifice, as well as changes in economic behavior. The problem, which Fish evidently fails to recognize, is that some political systems are better structured than others to respond flexibly to changing economic circumstances rather than sprinting at full speed towards their own collapse.

A prime example noted by Diamond and others is that of Easter Island. As best we can tell, that society evolved a fragmented political structure that incentivized elites to one-up each other in religious monument-building in order to maintain political legitimacy. These public works programs eventually overtaxed the society's (very) scarce resources, leading to a catastrophic economic meltdown accompanied by revolution, war and famine, reducing the remaining population to half-starved subsistence. Had the Easter Islanders' political order been better suited to managing resources, perhaps with more constructive feedback mechanisms between elites and the general population, more would remain of their civilization than haunting, eyeless statues.

In sum, a society's political structure is intimately related to the pace and direction of its technological development as well as the efficiency and flexibility with which it manages available resources. I return to the question, then, of whether or not democracy is a superior means of political organization when it comes to the question of climate change. Some might reasonably argue that it isn't. Authoritarian regimes, which have a certain capacity to insulate themselves from public discontent, might in theory be better suited to make the kinds of gargantuan economic adjustments necessary to move their societies away from a carbon economy (Orwell was famously impressed - and terrified - by the ability of Nazi authoritarian industrialism to organize Germany's mighty war machine). If those hurt by the adjustments have no voice in government, then the political road might be more easily cleared.

This logic, though, suffers from some empirical difficulties. First, there is little evidence that most autocrats take the problem of climate change particularly seriously. The Russian government seems to actually count on some benefits from the World heating up, and Chinese leaders seem inclined to pursue growth at all costs, climate be damned. Pettier dictatorships and juntas from the Middle East to Myanmar seem all too willing to follow this logic as well. While the World's democracies have few bragging rights in this area, their are fewer inherent contradictions between their political structures and the steps that will need to be taken to address global warming. I would direct readers to a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Elizabeth Economy which highlights the quandry currently faced by China's rulers: take concrete steps to address climate change, and one harms growth. Breakneck growth, in turn, is the only legitimating factor the CCP has left. China's authoritarian government cannot impose economic pain without undermining its own power. It is not alone in this regard.

Democratic states, by contrast, are more flexible. Yes, individual governments can be frustratingly slow to recognize and confront serious problems, and election year pandering can make democratic leaders reluctant to demand sacrifice, but well consolidated democratic systems have proven capable of withstanding stresses that would topple the most iron-fisted dictator. A president may risk his job by telling harsh truths, but he seldom risks democracy itself. Thus, democratic development and climate solutions should be looked at neither as unrelated issues nor as competing imperatives, but rather as complementary goals.

Barack Obama, Nuclear Weapons, and the Wrong Kind of Experience

2007-10-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

As I've said previously, this isn't a blog about the the U.S. Presidential Campaign. I don't want to step too far into the whole morass that is campaign blogging, and I don't intend on spilling ink analyzing contenders' laughs, comparing fund-raising numbers, or, for that matter, making specific endorsements. That said, every once in a while something resembling intelligent discourse on global affairs manages to filter its way through the campaign noise, and in such cases I'll briefly comment.

In this case, I'd like to call attention to a speech made Tuesday by Barack Obama, the inexperience of whom is frequently derided in the campaign's prevailing press narrative. Obama called for the United States to work earnestly toward the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world. Some might brush this off as overly-idealistic fluff, unworthy of a serious presidential contender, but I think it is time to put nuclear non-proliferation, coupled with nuclear disarmament, back on the agenda for serious political thinkers.

I'd like to call readers' attention to a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky. This man knows something about nuclear weapons; he is a particle physicist who worked on the original Manhattan project, was an adviser to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Carter, and had a front-row seat to the evolution of nuclear technology over the last century. Panofsky, echoing such left-wing peaceniks as George Shultz, William Perry and Henry Kissinger, convincingly argues that, whatever their past merits, nuclear weapons have no place as a serious component of a modern U.S. global posture, and that what limited role they have as a strategic backstop could be played with a dramatically reduced arsenal. Furthermore, he argues that the political and strategic costs of an over-inflated nuclear posture far outweigh the benefits, and that the current American nuclear arsenal actually makes us less secure.

Before I continue, I would like to emphasize that we have, in some ways, made progress in nuclear disarmament. During the mid-1980s, for example, the combined U.S.-Soviet nuclear arsenal topped 70,000 warheads. In retrospect, the insanity of such a buildup is difficult to comprehend. A recent hypothetical study on the effects of a small regional nuclear war (such as an Indo-Pakistani exchange) predicts tens of millions of immediate casualties, and catastrophic damage to the global climate that would shake the foundations of modern civilization.

That's with the detonation of approximately 100 small weapons.

The notion that some of the most intelligent people in both the United States and the USSR found it necessary to build nuclear arsenals that could independently render the Earth uninhabitable several times over simply defies my understanding (before people chime in with explanations, I understand the internally consistent logic of attempting to mitigate the possibility of a nuclear first-strike, but the logic of psychosis is often internally consistent). Since the Cold War, both superpowers have considerably cut back their arsenals, but the United States remains in possession of over 10,000 warheads including reserve stocks (they are scheduled to be reduced by 2012, but still remain in the thousands). This is well above the level necessary to deter a foreign nuclear attack, and the maintenance of so many weapons does nothing to enhance American security.

Even more counterproductive, though, has been the Administration's pursuit of a new generation of nuclear warheads, in the form of the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program. If the purpose of nuclear weapons is to provide a strategic backstop - a red line drawn around vital security interests that hostile powers may not cross - marginal improvements in quality and reliability will have negligible effect (the notion that, were the United States to launch 400 warheads, two or three might conceivably fail is not likely to significantly alter a potential adversary's cost-benefit calculus). Still more dangerous are plans advanced by some in the government to design a new generation of miniature "bunker buster" nuclear weapons with the intention of using them in situations other than all-out nuclear war.

Whatever tactical advantage might be gained from such developments would be more than outweighed by the damage done to American credibility as a champion of non-proliferation, as well as by the unnecessary re-escalation of an increasingly crowded nuclear arms race. By continuing to give robust nuclear forces a central role in U.S. global policy, we not only expose our non-proliferation efforts to well-grounded charges of hypocrisy (there is that little clause in the NPT that requires nuclear states to work towards eliminating their arsenals), hindering our ability to rally global opinion against potential proliferators like Iran, we also reinforce the norm that only states with nuclear weapons are worthy of international standing. The Iranian nuclear program, for example, certainly has some basis in defensive realism; but, harping on about Iranian nuclear "rights" plays well with the population and shores up the regime in Tehran precisely because the Iranian people view nuclear capabilities as markers of international prestige. Efforts to convince them otherwise ring somewhat hollow when lead by states with thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert.

When we consider the current U.S. nuclear posture, then, we ought to remember that maintaining a large nuclear arsenal comes with serious political and strategic costs, while delivering limited benefits. Coming back to the campaign, Obama recently stated at a debate that he would not use nuclear weapons in the fight against terrorism. His rivals (Sen. Clinton in particular) chided him for his supposed naivete and inexperience, but upon reflection, many commentators wondered what possible use nuclear weapons would be against groups of guerillas holed up in the mountains of Pakistan. The exchanges reminded me of a quote by a certain Lord Salisbury while stationed in British India:

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Whatever happens with the campaign, Senator Obama may be commended for injecting a drop of that.

Memo to Prime Minister Olmert Re: Get Serious or Get Out of the Way

2007-09-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

To: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
From: A concerned global citizen
Re: Israel must begin negotiating on final status issues
cc: Pres. George W. Bush; Sec. State Condoleeza Rice; Chairman Mahamoud Abbas; Mid-East Envoy Tony Blair

Prime Minister Olmert, I will be blunt; if you want to salvage your legacy as a leader of your people, you must end your government's intransigence and foot-dragging in preparation for this Fall's peace conference with the Palestinian leadership. You must take bold steps - now - to signal to the Israeli and Palestinian populace that you possess both the will and capability to make the sacrifices that will be necessary to forge a lasting peace. If you do not possess the will, or are in fact too politically neutered to make the aforementioned hard choices, then please resign and allow Ms. Livni, your Foreign Minister, to make them for you.

I hardly need to recite the problems that you and your people currently face. Gaza, the withdrawal from which was meant to make Israel more secure, has become a bed of extremism, a security headache, and a serious obstacle to any final negotiated settlement with your neighbors. It has also given lie to the notion that Israel can unilaterally withdraw from the Palestinian territories, entirely on its own terms, and expect the conflict to end. Palestinians will need a viable state that is both legally and functionally independent from Israeli control, with the capacity to deliver dignity and prosperity to its citizens, before Israel can expect to reap any peace dividend. Furthermore, as you well know, the legitimacy of your negotiating partner - Abbas's Fatah - is fast waning. The only way it can be bolstered is through a demonstration that negotiating with Israel has the capacity to accomplish something real. Wait too long to give that demonstration, Mr. Prime Minister, and you will have nobody left with whom to speak.

Your government, in recent days, has been reluctant to speak of a peace deal in anything other than vague and general terms, calling discussion on the most difficult issues "premature." Nonsense. The basic outline of what a mutually acceptable peace deal would look like - a dismantling of all but the largest West Bank settlements, land swaps to make up for those that remain, a division of sovereignty in East Jerusalem, and material compensation to the Palestinians in exchange for annulling their "right of return" - was decided on years ago. The Devil, as always, remains in the details, but such details will not work themselves out on their own, and the more time is wasted, the more toxic and un-resolvable the situation is likely to become.

I understand the appeal of trying to focus on small, achievable interim measures. It requires less political sacrifice, and has - in theory - the potential to rebuild trust between your people and theirs. The time for such measures, though, is past. They have too often provided both sides with an excuse to obfuscate and delay discussing final status issues, the resolution of which won't magically become less difficult with time. If you desire peace, and are willing to push your people to sacrifice, now may be your last best chance to demonstrate it. If, however, your (lack of) domestic political standing prevents you from leading an effort to resolve fundamental questions of peace, if you lack the credibility to stand up to Likud and the Mafdal and Gush Emunim and everyone else at home who is an obstacle to peace because the rest of your population is too disgusted with you to lend its support, then Mr. Prime Minister you should step aside in favor of someone less tainted by past failure. That you had the courage to do so might at least add some gloss and polish to an otherwise corroded legacy.

Walt, Mearsheimer and Israel

2007-09-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

Once again I feel I have to apologize for the long hiatus since my last post. The Muses have been visiting infrequently, and life seems at times to be the enemy of decent blogging. I return to give my two cents to a sensitive but important debate now raging in the academic and popular press; namely, the controversy surrounding the recent publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. For those who have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, these two eminent political scientists have launched an academic fusillade against the U.S.-Israeli special relationship and the domestic lobby that they charge maintains it. The book is actually an extension of an article that the two authors published last year in the London Review of Books, which was equally controversial.

Part of me hesitates to dip my toe into this particular debate, because it has become so vitriolic so quickly. Charges of anti-semitism have been frequently leveled at the authors as well as at others who share their views (recall the furor that greeted Jimmy Carter last year), and even the less strident criticism has tended to be fairly passionate. This reaction to the book is not entirely surprising, as the authors' argument that a (largely Jewish) pro-Israel lobby in the United States has far-reaching power over American Mid-East policy has uncomfortable echoes of old anti-semitic notions of nefarious Jewish cabals controlling the levers of government. Furthermore, the authors' stinging analysis of Israeli history, and their charge that U.S. policy has systematically enabled the worst instincts of the Jewish State in recent decades - to the detriment of all involved - amounts to a crushing repudiation of policies that have been consistently applied by both Republican and Democratic policymakers for years. Controversy, thus, is to be expected. That these arguments are being leveled by two highly respected realists, rather than by some Chomsky-esque left wing ideologue only increases the pitch.

Before I get to my analysis I feel I should stop here and clarify my own position. I am a strong supporter of Israel. I believe Israel has a right to exist, as a Jewish state, in Palestine, in peace, prosperity and security. Furthermore, I will be the first to acknowledge that short-sighted intransigence of Arabs of many factions has shamefully and inexcusably exacerbated and extended one of the World's most intractable and bloody conflicts. I believe strongly that Israel has a right and an obligation to defend itself against all threats to its security, conventional and otherwise, and I believe that right extends to the use of military force. All that said, I believe that no remotely impartial observer can deny that Israel has sometimes engaged in policies that were tactically foolish, strategically counterproductive and, on occasion, ethically indefensible. At such times, I believe that it is the responsibility of the United States to encourage Israel to change course, and I agree with Walt and Mearsheimer that we have often failed in that obligation.

With that in mind, I'd like to state emphatically that The Israel Lobby is not an anti-semitic work. It does not argue that the lobby does anything exceptional or nefarious, merely that it is quite adept at engaging in the kind of interest group politics that are part and parcel of American policy-making. Critics that take this line, in my view, misrepresent the argument that they critique, to nobody's benefit. I certainly understand the point made by the ADL's Abe Foxman, who argues that the book must be appraised in light of the history of anti-semitic canards into which it taps - however unintentionally - but the authors take great pains to repeatedly emphasize the differences between their point of view and that of true anti-Semites.

I do not accept the authors' argument wholesale by any means. It has weak links that lead to some overly strident and misguided conclusions. Still, I have difficulty finding fault with its core message. The authors' first point - that Israel is a poor strategic asset of the United States - has some merit, at least from the perspective of a traditional realist. Israel has not appreciably helped ensure American access to Persian Gulf oil, has not provided military assistance or political cover to advance American goals, and has indeed sapped the United States of much of its political capital in the region. Their argument that the US has little moral obligation to provide Israel with support is, in my opinion, weaker. The authors are overly harsh in their criticisms of Israeli democracy, which stem largely from the notion that the Jewish ethnic preference is incompatible with American values. True, Israeli citizenship is based on a different national idea than is that of the United States, but the same can be said of Korea, Japan, Germany (until recently at least) as well as many other democracies to whom America gives its support. That Israel is a Jewish democracy does not make it less of a democracy. Also, the authors' analysis of Israeli history, which is harsh to say the least, relies almost entirely on the work of Israel's "New Historians," who have recently shined a far more critical light on their nation's past than have their more traditional colleagues. I won't deny that the work of this group is valuable, but to my knowledge it remains quite controversial, a fact that Walt and Mearsheimer fail to acknowledge.

The authors' analysis of the lobby's influence on US negotiation during the failed Oslo process is also open to dispute. While they make their case for general lobby influence quite well, they may overstate its influence in such diplomatic environments. Dennis Ross, a former diplomat under the Clinton Administration, notes that many of the seemingly pro-Israel positions taken by the United States during the negotiations were driven by a strategic assessment of what the Israeli negotiating team could get through their own Knesset, not by fear of the Israel lobby back home.

Perhaps the most controversial assertion of the book, that the Israel lobby was instrumental in pushing the United States to invade Iraq, is well argued, but suffers from a logical slip that is a function of how the authors define "the lobby." They broaden their definition from simply AIPAC and other formal pro-Israel lobbying groups to include pro-Israel reporters, pundits, and intellectuals, taking special aim at the neoconservatives. While their claim that the neoconservatives tend to be vociferous supporters of Israel is hard to dispute, the authors make too much of the extent to which a pro-Israel agenda drove the neoconservative consensus around the invasion of Iraq. To put it another way, the authors note that the Israel lobby was not the only group pushing for an invasion of Iraq, but that absent the lobby's pressure the invasion likely would not have happened. The problem with this counterfactual, though, is that it imagines the neoconservatives (a key constituency supporting the invasion) not simply as supporters of Israel, but only as supporters of Israel. I would argue that even if Israel did not exist, the broader philosophy of American power that the neocons advocate would still have led them to support a march on Baghdad. Thus, while it may be true that the Israel Lobby pushed for invasion, many of its supposed representatives did so based on a broader imperial agenda of which Israel was only a small part.

Finally, the authors in places fall prey to the assumptions of the "realist" paradigm to which they subscribe. In particular, their analysis of the dangers posed by an Iranian nuclear bomb is overly dismissive. They argue, almost in passing, that the logic of deterrence still applies, that Israel and the United States are both nuclear powers, that Iranian leadership is rational, and that at the end of the day a nuclear-armed Iran could be lived with as easily as a nuclear-armed China or USSR. I don't necessarily disagree with this arguments' premises - that nuclear-armed Ayatollahs aren't about to vaporize the Middle East on a fanatical whim - but I am less confident than they are that the logic of deterrence will always and in every situation prevail. I understand enough history to know that human civilization hung by a fraying thread during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I tend to agree with Robert McNamarra that the indefinite combination of human fallibility with the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons will eventually lead to catastrophe. Every new nuclear state - and if Iran joins the club you may rest assured that it will be followed - increases the odds that the house of cards will fall.

All that said, you need not agree with every word that Walt and Mearsheimer write to appreciate their core argument, nor do you need to be a disciple of realism to understand the strategic value of their insight. If anything, The Israel Lobby has the capacity to start an important, long-overdue conversation about America's true interests in the Middle East. I happen to think that protecting Israel remains one of those interests, but we must always be sure to do so with both eyes open.

Cozying Up to a Nuclear India

2007-08-13T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'm a very opinionated person. Question me on just about any topic, and chances are I'll enthusiastically give you my opinion. I'm self-aware enough to acknowledge that this trait extends to subjects about which I am reasonably well informed (politics), less well informed (economics) and completely ignorant (quantum physics). For this reason, I have been surprising myself of late in my inability, despite a decent amount of reflection, to form a strong opinion regarding the U.S. Government's latest proposed treaty with India.

US relations with India have always been complex. India's steadfast refusal during the Cold War to become overtly entangled in the US-Soviet conflict (and its tendency to lean in Moscow's direction on the occaisions that it did), along with US support for Pakistan, India's refusal to join the global non-proliferation regime, American opposition to the creation of Bangladesh, and New Delhi's perceived intransigence on a myriad of less pressing concerns kept bilateral relations cool for much of the last half-century. On the other hand, India has - with a notably short hiatus during the 1970s - maintained itself as a robust and well-functioning democracy in the post-independence era. For a large, desperately poor, poly-ethnic, poly-lingual, poly-religious post-colonial state, that is no small feat, and in the post-Cold War era it has borne fruit.

With the imperatives of Cold War alliances no longer driving American foreign policy, and ossified socialist ideology no longer guiding Indian economic policy, the stage was set during the 1990s for dramatically improved political and economic ties between the two countries. For a demonstration of how far reconciliation had come, one need look no further than America's slap-on-the-wrist response to Indian nuclear tests in 1998. Given America's erstwhile commitment to strict enforcement (with one notable exception in the Levant) of the non-proliferation regime, the fact that such tests did not evoke a stronger response from Washington indicated that the United States was willing to accept, and even welcome, India's ascent to great power status.

The controversy now surrounding the implementation (or not) of the United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act encompasses many of the basic strategic questions that the United States and India face as they seek to more clearly define their relationship in the 21st Century. The deal presents the United States tempting benefits coupled with some vexing strategic drawbacks.

For those arguing against the treaty, the most significant problem lies not at the deal's periphery, but at its very heart: to bring India into the official nuclear club without insisting that it halt the expansion of its weapons program undermines what little credibility remains in the global non-proliferation regime. The US has already allowed an Israel-sized hole to be carved out of the regime's fabric; to cut a similar space for India would send a message to the (unfortunately growing) number of countries which now covet nuclear weapons that "when it comes to nuclear proliferation, Washington's only real policy is to reward its friends and punish its enemies." I would actually take it further than the Times. The message it sends is that nuclear weapons are fine, as long as your country isn't Muslim. At a time when the US is desperately trying to put international pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear program, trying to head off weapons development in other areas around the Middle East, and trying to implement a tenuous rollback of North Korean nuclear stockpiles, such a message would be dangerous indeed.

Furthermore, a policy that legitimizes Indian nuclear arms would only make the United States more toxic to the public in Pakistan, a country that remains of high strategic importance. Given the critical nature of the Pakistani government support (whoever may be leading that government on a given day), a policy that elevates Pakistan's chief rival into the nuclear club uncontested, while treating Pakistani nuclear stocks with considerably more apprehension seems tailored to anger precisely the wrong people. In some ways, the instability of Musharaff gives the United States some wiggle room in this regard (to whom else can he turn?); but, it also raises the risk that if his government falls - an eventuality that looks more likely with each passing day - the one that replaces it will try to shore up legitimacy by adopting an anti-American posture.

Thus, it is clear that the proposed agreement carries with it considerable risk. In many other ways, though, the treaty makes sense. Even the skeptical Times editorial board acknowledges that "bringing India... in from the cold is not a bad idea." A populous democracy and budding economic powerhouse, India is precisely the kind of ally that the United States needs in the coming decades, particularly in Asia. India's non-Aligned legacy has left it in a diplomatically flexible position that the United States can leverage to constructively manage relationships with authoritarian capitalist powers like Russia and China, and even erstwhile adversaries like Iran. Xenia Dromandy, writing in the Washington Quarterly, notes that India has made it clear that it will not be a US pawn, and that there are some areas in which Indian and American interests will diverge, but that the two countries have broadly similar, and complementary international goals. Neither government is anxious to see Iran go nuclear. Both countries are threatened by global Islamic extremism. Both governments want to manage China's rise as a responsible international stakeholder and limit its disruptive influence. Both countries have considerable economic and political capital invested in globalization (and both must manage domestic backlashes against it). More than anything, both are democracies, and as such are capable of trusting each others' governments given half a reason to do so.

Despite all this, however, a positive Indo-American relationship is not assured. There are many in India who regard the United States as a bullying, imperialist power intent on reducing India to a suboordinate status. India must, of course, deal with its own considerable Muslim population, which by all accounts shares the loathing of Washington that now prevails in the rest of the Islamic world. Even the relatively light restrictions placed on India's nuclear program by this latest deal have generated a storm of protest from BJP nationalists who are incensed by what they view as an affront to Indian soveriegnty. Failing to shepherd this deal to final approval would be an unabashed insult to the vital center in India that seems eager to play a more engaged and constructive role in world affairs. Given the importance of strengthening the US-Indian alliance in the coming years, such an insult would carry grave strategic costs.

In the end, I give cautious support to this agreement's final approval. While I recognize the damage that the deal will do to what remains of the international non-proliferation regime, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that those who seek to break out of its strictures will not be persuaded one way or another by a US-Indian nuclear agreement (though they may use it as ex-post-facto justification for their own ambitions). Americans should remember that they, along with the other four nuclear signatories to the NPT, have an obligation to continue reducing their own arsenals concurrent with the obligation of the rest of the global community to forgo their own weapons development. If the United States wants to make a gesture to hold up the NPT, it should start by reducing its own stocks. Overall, given the vital role that India must play in any successful 21st Century American strategy, and given the fact that India has proven to be a relatively responsible nuclear player over the past quarter-century, I believe that this deal's benefits outweigh its costs.

Withdrawal from Iraq

2007-08-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

Matt over at Foreign Policy Watch has put up an interesting post on the ever-present question of how the United States ought to play out the endgame in Iraq. He points to a recent op-ed by Henry Kissinger on the subject. Herr doktor outlines (in terms that are a bit vague for my taste) the necessity of aggressive regional diplomacy to stem a violent breakup of Iraq and invest all relevant regional players in some type of engineered solution that avoids the total implosion of the Middle East. At the end of his post, Matt asks "What is your favorite exit strategy from Iraq (fantasy or not)? And which celebrity foreign policy hand would endorse it?"

The comment boxes over at FP Watch are small, so I thought I would take up the question here. As I may have previously intimated, some variant of the increasingly popular Biden-Gelb plan for U.S. disengagement makes the most sense from my perspective. Briefly, the plan draws on the experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Dayton accords, arguing that Iraq, along the lines of its own Constitution, should be transformed into a very loose federal confederation, in which the day-to-day business of governing (including the provision of security for the Iraqi populace) is devolved to regional power centers, and the central government exists primarily to distribute oil revenues. The argument is premised on the notion that once security and a stable political environment have been established, much of the impetus for ethnic violence, which thrives in chaos, will be diminished. The plan's architects are careful to point out that they are not proposing an outright partition of Iraq along the lines of Palestine or India. Tom Ashbrook, speaking to Senator Biden recently on NPR, rightly pointed out that such stark arrangements have historically not worked out very well. The hope is that the presence of a weak central government to adjudicate disputes will help avoid inter-ethnic warfare and undercut whatever interests regional powers such as Turkey and Iran have in stoking such conflict (or participating in it outright).

This plan has been around in some form for the better part of two years, and has garnered no shortage of legitimate criticism. The first point is that de jure legitimization of ethnic politics will encourage ethnic cleansing in Iraq. While the plan's champions have tried to deemphasize this fear, in my opinion it is well-placed. Senator Biden has been quick to point out that significant ethnic cleansing is already taking place in Iraq, that it is in effect a fait accompli; however, I think he is being overly simplistic. There are still many parts of Iraq, particularly urban Iraq, with mixed ethnic populations (they may have retreated into enclave neighborhoods; however, that will be of little consequence in a city such as Baghdad, which is an island of ethnic diversity surrounded by a Sunni sea). Those populations would likely be encouraged to move (and I use the word "encouraged" in its most euphemistic sense). We should come out and admit, right now, that this strategy will almost certainly lead to significant ethnic cleansing. Frankly, at this point I see no way to avoid this eventuality irrespective of American action. The challenge will be to keep a lid on the worst of the violence, and keep such population movements from metastasizing into a larger war.

A second problem with the plan is the role it calls the central government to play. If the government's primary responsibility is to be oil distribution, mechanisms will have to exist to make sure that it is capable of doing so in an equitable way. As many people have pointed out, most known Iraqi oil exists in the Shia and Kurd-dominated areas of the country. The government will need a base level of functionality and legitimacy to be able to carry out effective and transparent transfers of this wealth around the country. If it is unable to do so, for example if a largely Shia-dominated government denies Iraq's Sunni population its fair share, it could end up accelerating a civil war rather than preventing one. The optimist would hope that the aforementioned separation of the parties would cool ethnic tensions enough to make the government function more smoothly, but this outcome is far from assured.

A final problem with this solution is that a devolution of security responsibilities to what are now ethnic militias could lead to internacine conflict within ethnic groups to see which organization would predominate. An aggressive diplomatic effort to unite these disparate groups behind a single mission and purpose would have to accompany the overarching strategy in order to avert the total collapse of Iraqi society. In this vein, real regional diplomacy to limit the extent to which Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran intervene in Iraqi ethnic politics - diplomacy that would assure all states of their vital interests, guaranteed by a continued robust (albiet somewhat withdrawn) US presence in the region - could presumably pull this off.

As I've made quite clear, this plan is no silver bullet. Its successful implementation will require incredible skill, quite a bit of luck, and may all end in tears regardless. The situation in Iraq is such that the United States is left choosing between abysmal options. Middle East diplomacy, in the short term, has been reduced to the level of damage control. Despite all its difficulties, Biden-Gelb strikes me as the best strategy in this regard.

American Policy Towards Islamism

2007-08-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

...the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

-George Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct"

I take momentary pause from my larger foray into grand strategy in response to several interesting pieces I have read in recent weeks, all of which speak, however indirectly, to a reevaluation of American policy towards Islamist movements around the World. An op-ed by Nicholas Thompson advocates a revival in Kennan-esque strategic thinking as it relates to America's conflict with radical Islam. He argues that Kennan's thinking was often misinterpreted as advocating the kind of bellicose, military containment that subsequently prevailed during the Cold War era; in reality Kennan was supposedly advocating a purely political strategy in which the United States used persuasion and superior example to counter Soviet perfidity. I just re-read Kennan's original article, and I am not entirely convinced that his interpretation is correct (I fail to see how Kennan's advice that "Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points" does not imply at least some level of military action); but I see what he is driving at. American resources and political capital would be much better applied building schools in Muslim countries than providing high tech weapons to ostensibly friendly Muslim governments.

The second piece I found interesting was posted by Jeb at Foreign Policy Watch, detailing the emergence of a womens' rights movement within political Islam (Jeb struggles, as do the movement's advocates, with the term "feminism," as many of the movements' precepts clash with those of western feminist thought). This is significant because a key concern of many in the West, particularly western liberals, is that Islamist movements are inherently hostile to many of the basic human rights for which liberals have spent centuries fighting and for which they hope one day to gain universal recognition. To be sure, such movements are in their infancy, and I have little confidence that the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood would immediately adopt a progressive Islamic position on such issues the moment they took power; but the fact that such principles of human dignity are gaining political space within the broader Islamist movement demonstrates that Islamist thinking need not be inherently hostile to core progressive human values.

Finally, Shadi Hamid of the Project on Middle East Democracy has argued in several forums (here and here) that the United States needs to recognize that Islamism is the only viable reformist ideology in the Muslim world, and that vainly pushing for liberal reforms that lack popular constituencies while continuing to support corrupt but secular autocrats is a recipie for disaster. He suggests that the United States open dialogue with any Islamist movement that renounces violence and commits itself to political participation through the democratic process (this would include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the AKP in Turkey, as well as non-violent movements in Morocco and Jordan, but exclude Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which have armed wings). He argues that democratic participation is likely to moderate some of their policy prescriptions that Americans find distasteful, such as curtailment of women's rights and opposition to Israel, while giving the population of the Middle East a constructive outlet for their political frustrations that will undercut support for truly radical and violent groups such as al-Qaeda and Hamas.

Tying this all together, I would argue that American Cold War Policy went most dangerously astray when U.S. leaders failed to look at local Communist and Socialist movements in a nuanced way, seeing agents of Moscow in what were actually nationalist movements that expressed their desire for self-determination and justice in the language of Marx. This logic led America to abandon all of her "moral and political leadership" in places like Vietnam and Iran, with devastating consequences. If the United States is serious about building a democratic Middle East, one with the institutions capable of undercutting the threat to global peace that Radical Islam represents, it will have to realize that not everyone invoking the name of Allah need be counted among its enemies. It will require the courage to abandon the false stability of corrupt autocrats and embrace the uncertainty of moderate Islamism. If that does not prove possible, I fear we shall continue to stumble about in moral, political and strategic darkness.

Goals

2007-07-27T19:14:00.000-07:00

Plato would have been a terrible blogger. True, contemporary weblogs in many ways epitomize his style. They are dialogues with pulses, providing both contentions and space to refute them; yet, they are not conducive to the kind of reasoned, plodding, stuffy, rich, erudite, archaic and considered manner in which he and his classical contemporaries set out their arguments. This is not meant as a criticism of blogs (I am writing one, after all), but rather as a simple observation. Blogs are excellent places to hint at ideas, gain insight into others' thinking, test hypotheses and stab with but one eye open into the intellectual darkness. In that spirit, I initiate the first (somewhat shorter) follow up to my last post on grand strategy.

In that post, I identified three key questions that needed to be answered in developing a grand strategy for 21st century foreign policy. The first concerned goals. Somewhat shy of two years ago, I attended a foreign policy conference at West Point. The agenda for the various working groups was expansive, encompassing every inhabited inch of the Earth and every major international issue currently affecting its inhabitants. What I found most interesting about the gathering, though, was that the discussions all functioned under the premise that that United States constituted the indisputable epicenter of global politics and economics, and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. American hegemony was not debated, it was assumed.

I recall finding this consensus both intriguing and somewhat troubling, as I do not imagine my nation's position of prominence to be so pervasive or secure. For one thing, though other factors certainly matter, for most of modern history a nation's power has been roughly commensurate with it's relative GDP, and the American share of global wealth has been declining steadily since the end of the Second World War. For another, the United States is doing a woefully pitiful job making the necessary investments in technology and intellectual capital that will be necessary to arrest that decline in the next century. More significantly, though, I am not particularly bothered by the notion that my country's moment as global hegemon may be peaking. The temptations of empire, from Cuba to the Philippines to Vietnam to Iraq, have frequently demanded economic, political and moral costs far beyond their worth. What does concern me, though, is the type of international order that will predominate in what Tom Friedman has called the post-post-Cold War World.

Various theories about the vicissitudes of inter-state relations posit that the most dangerous periods in an international system are those in which great powers' positions are changing. Status quo states used to playing a central role tend to jealously guard their position and overestimate their own capabilities, while revisionist ones charge ahead, drunk on the possibilities of the future. Absent careful management, these frictions have in the past exploded into conflict. In the macro-historical sense, one can interpret the two great wars of the 20th Century as the earthquakes that accompanied the tectonic shift of global influence away from Western Europe and into Asia and the New World. All this to say that it is imperative for U.S. leadership not to overestimate American capabilities, wasting economic resources, political capital and human lives in a futile quest to retain global hegemony. A unified Europe, a resurgent Russia, a more independent Japan, a newly-empowered India and, of course, a rising Chinese juggernaut will all be jockeying for influence in the coming decades.

Rather than try to keep a lid on such developments, American leaders should prepare to settle into a global regime of "asymmetric multipolarity," in which the United States occupies a place similar to 19th Century Great Britain: as the most powerful state in a group of powerful states. America can expect to remain quite influential, but the era in which the U.S. can simply impose its will on the World is fast coming to a close (the era was, mercifully for all involved, short). The principal goals of American foreign policy ought to center around making this asymetrically multipolar world a decent place to live and conduct statecraft. To my mind, this means; a) maintaining and extending the regime of international commerce that serves as the principal hedge against major military conflict, especially in the presence of durable authoritarian capitalist powers like Russia and China, while beginning to construct institutions of global economic justice that will make such linkages politically solvent; b) engaging in an aggressive (but non-military) campaign of democracy promotion to ensure constructive outlets for political greivances and undercut the appeal of radically disruptive ideologies (such as salafist Islam); c) taking a position of serious global leadership on the issue of global warming and sustainable energy production in order to head off the one global issue with the potential to bring the whole system crashing down.

My next question had to do with obstacles to those goals' achievement. That is for another post. So much for limiting my verbosity and length. I would be interested in any comments.

A Grand Strategy

2007-07-18T10:55:00.001-07:00

The notion of building a global grand strategy for the United States (or indeed for any country) is both inherently appealing and frighteningly daunting. Some modern equivalent to George Kennan’s famous article The Sources of Soviet Conduct, which provided the guiding framework for U.S. Cold War policy for the better part of four decades, is the Holy Grail of international relations scholarship. Far more qualified writers than I have felled forests in search of it, so it is with trepidation and a healthy dose of humility that I even approach the subject. With a bachelor’s degree and a blog read by few, I know that I am not likely to produce some great fountain of new insight; however, I do hope to provide what few readers venture here with some ideas to consider and questions to answer, with the aim of bringing our citizenry closer to consensus over a coherent, consistent and effective global posture.

On June 3rd, 1997, the founders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) opened their statement of principles by stating that “American foreign and defense policy is adrift.” Though I absolutely deplore nearly every major initiative that this neo-conservative group has championed since that day, in that statement they they were (and continue to be) completely correct. With the Cold War now fifteen years behind us, U.S. policy makers lack a coherent vision of what role the United States should play in the world of the 21st Century, never mind how to play it. Should it be America’s goal to remain the center of a unipolar global order, keeping its status as the World’s sole superpower with all the expense, risk, responsibility and reward that such a stance entails? Should the United States retreat to a more isolationist position, forgoing concerns and entanglements halfway around the globe in favor of maintaining order and prosperity within its own borders? Should it adopt a ‘Western’ posture, increasing ties with nations (particularly in Europe) that share American cultural, economic and ideological affinities at the expense of other regional or civilizational blocs? Should America try to adopt a more institutionalized form of leadership, enmeshing friend and foe alike in constraining international economic and political arrangements while forgoing her military predominance?

Clearly, these questions only hint at the range of options available to American leaders in the coming decades; however, such queries are themselves premature absent an answer to some far more basic ones. They may seem almost absurdly obvious, but it strikes me that many disagreements over specific policy stem from these more basic disputes:

What ought America’s overriding goals be?
The answers to this question are far from self-evident. Across the ideological spectrum, many critiques of American policy stem from disputes over what the United States ought to try to accomplish in the World. Basic goals, such as ensuring security and reasonable prosperity for American citizens, are seldom seriously contested; however, other aims are more controversial. Should democracy promotion be a major American project, or is it a paternalistic, pseudo-imperial diversion from the nation's core interests? Should American leaders, in what W. Russell Mead terms "Hamiltonian" fashion, focus primarily on building a beneficial international economic regime to the exclusion of more overtly political crusades? Should America content herself to preserve her own security and freedom, absent any larger international mission? I offer no answers now, but only note that goals must be matched with absolute and relative capabilities.

What are the principal threats to those goals' achievement?
In times past, the answer to this question would have been obvious: other states. At least up until the Second World War, and perhaps for some time after that, the principal threat to the peace, prosperity, and international aims of most great powers were embodied in the military capacities of other powers. Foreign policy, for all its diplomatic complexities, consisted basically of making sure enough land, water, ships, tanks, guns and soldiers stood between one's country and the ships, tanks, guns and soldiers of everyone else's (I'm obviously oversimplifying a bit). With the exception of the occasional trans-border pandemic, the only significant threat to international harmony was inter-state warfare.

While a quick glance at the front page of any newspaper is enough to demonstrate that this threat has not disappeared, the late twenieth century has seen the emergence of new obstacles to the smooth functioning of the international system. The emergence of trans-national terrorism has the potential to seriously disrupt global economic and poilitical connectivity (see Global Guerillas for a running demonstration of this threat). The rapid movement of people, goods and information around the globe raises the risk of widespread death from explosive pandemics or proliferating WMDs. Perhaps most frighteningly, the anticipated effects of global warming - increased natural disasters, famine, climate readjustment, receding coastlines - have the potential to initiate a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions, precipitate widespread state collapse, emiserate hundreds of millions of people, and deal a crippling blow to any notions of development and progress. A responsible American approach to 21st Century foreign policy must take into account these changing circumstances.

What is the most effective strategy to overcome those threats?
The answer to this question is, of course, well beyond the scope of one post (or one book for that matter); however, any effective global strategy must meet three criteria. First, it must be integrated and holistic. American goals have too often been stymied by conflicting applications of different instruments of policy. If U.S. policy makers, for example, seek to liberalize global trade while at the same time using financial leverage to force foreign governments to curtail the social services that make such a trade regime politically possible, they work at cross purposes. Once threats have been identified, American military, diplomatic and economic resources must be coherently applied to overcome them.

Second, it must be reasonably flexible. The great advantage of Kennan's strategy of containment was its flexibility within the context of its guiding principles. Where U.S. Cold War policy went most dangerously adrift, it did so when such principles were either completely abandoned (as when supporting Augusto Pinochet) or too rigidly applied (as in Vietnam). Any grand strategy must provide a set of operating principles that set clear boundaries for American foreign policy, but also allow room to maneuver within those boundaries.

Third, a successful grand strategy must be politically solvent. Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz mention this in a recent article in Foreign Affairs. Without endorsing or rejecting their larger argument, I note simply that the United States is a democracy, however imperfect it may be. Any foreign policy that imposes costs that the American people are unwilling to bear cannot be sustained for very long. As it is the essence of a grand strategy that it provide stable and durable guidance to policy makers over a period of many years, it will be of little use if it asks of the people more than they are willing to give. This may seem obvious, but the point is often lost on more traditional realists who look at America's latent economic and military assets and imagine that the U.S. can maintain global hegemony for years to come if it simply applies them vigorously. The fact is, few Americans have a taste for empire, and even fewer are willing to make significant sacrifices for it. On the other hand, Americans have shown a willingness to sacrifice for a policy the goals and methods of which they understand and support. A successful American strategy must involve the consistent informed consent of the American populace. Anything less is unworthy of the United States.

Readers will notice that I have put forth many more questions here than I have answers. In future posts, I may propose some, but I close with the hope that, going forward, America as a country, through the workings of its political process, will be able to construct a consistent and coherent strategy to confront the many serious but too often ignored crises of our age. If we cannot do that, we ought to abrogate global leadership, for we do not deserve it.

Pakistan (reprise)

2007-07-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

First off, I apologize for the long hiatus since my last post. I can claim no great justification, other than the fact that I must divide my free time between reading and writing, and I've been reading some good books of late. For obvious reasons, I'd like to return briefly to the subject of Pakistan. The standoff at the Red Mosque seems to have ended in about the bloodiest possible way (though I was heartened by reports indicating that a number of the children being held as de-facto hostages inside the complex managed to escape as the government assault began). The political fallout from this event is just beginning, and I am not so intimately knowledgable about Pakistani politics as to be able to give specific predictions about what form it will ultimately take; however, this incident does serve to highlight the increasingly fragile state of the Pakistani regime.

Currently, the Musharraf government is engaging in counter-insurgency operations in Baluchistan (the expense of which could perhaps be avoided if Islamabad would provide the people of the province with some reasonable compensation for the natural gas reserves it seeks to extract there), low-level warfare against Taliban elements in the border region near Afghanistan, and now conflict with Islamists in its urban centers. All this is not to say that the regime is in danger of collapse, merely that it is facing increasingly disruptive and violent pressure from multiple domestic actors in multiple locations, in addition to a crisis of legitimacy among the populace as a whole. John Robb at Global Guerrillas calls attention to recent rioting in Karachi over a simple power-outage, presciently pointing out that if any of the now numerous violent anti-government organizations were to adjust their tactics to assault basic public infrastructure, they could very well throw Pakistan into chaos.

Some might argue that all of this only reinforces the necessity of funnelling resources to Musharraf's government in order to allow him to keep a lid on all this unrest. This certainly seems to be the working logic of the current administration. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Daniel Markey makes a well-reasoned case for sticking with Musharraf, at least for now, because if the U.S. pushes too hard for any political solution that alienates the military, the military will simply engage in an overt seizure of power. I am sympathetic to this notion, and agree that the U.S. needs to tread carefully, but simply defending the status quo is sure to lead to blowback of the worst kind in years to come. The fact that the militants inside the Red Mosque don't seem to have garnered a whole lot of mass support in recent days indicates that the population has not become dangerously radicalized, but Pakistanis are clearly growing impatient with the political stagnation that plagues their country, and if that frustration is not given a constructive outlet, it will find a destructive one.

I don't suggest abandoning Musharraf outright - Markey is correct in his estimation that this would only lead to more desparate repressive measures - but we have to tailor our support to Pakistan such that we serve as an agent of positive change, not of repression. This means that in addition to selling Musharraf F-16 fighters, we build and fund schools, community groups, health organizations, even mosques (indirectly of course). U.S. objectives in Pakistan, and indeed in many places in the Muslim world, will be furthered by the development of civil society organizations with socio-political space to operate outside of radical Islamic institutions. The presence of such networks has often made the difference between constructive political reform (as in post-colonial India) and chaotic and destructive revolution (as in Iran). News from Pakistan provides us with no shortage of warning signs. We should heed them.

Nationalism, Trans-National Threats, and the Political Zeitgeist of the Twenty-First Century

2007-06-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

I'm never quite sure how to view David Brooks. On the one hand, I don't share his overarching political philosophy, at least not when it comes to most U.S. domestic issues (not the subject of this blog I know), and I have found that during the Bush years, he has wasted far too much ink in half-hearted defense of Administration policy with which I don't think he really agrees. On the other hand, more than any other columnist at his institution, he has the capability to insightfully compare and analyze not merely different points of view, but different philosophies and world-views in a way that gives each one due intellectual respect. It is in this spirit that I draw attention to this recent piece.

In it, he describes two visions of twenty-first century global politics recently elucidated by two eminent political scientists, John Ikenberry of Princeton and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Ikenberry, who has been sharply critical of Bush foreign policy, outlines his vision for an American grand strategy for the coming century in terms that dimly resonate with the international orders of centuries past. Whereas the greatest and most dangerous internal contradictions in the various global orders of the past two centuries, be they based on a multipolar or bipolar balance of power or on a unipolar hegemonic dominance, were state-based (the greatest security threats were large-scale inter-state warfare), today such contradictions are more diffuse. Whereas the appropriate grand strategy in times past was "positional," meaning that great powers' primary goals were to position themselves advantageously vis a vis one another, today's grand strategy should be "milieu-based," focusing on building up the norms and institutions that prevent diffuse, shifting threats such as terrorism, environmental degradation and state collapse from threatening the foundations of international order. To quote Ikenberry:

If the world of the 21st century were a town, the security threats faced by its leading citizens would not be organized crime or a violent assault by a radical mob on city hall. It would be the breakdown of law enforcement and social services in the face of constantly changing and ultimately uncertain vagaries of criminality, nature, and circumstance.

I lack space and time to go into all of his prescriptions in detail, but Ikenberry implores American leadership to re-focus on enmeshing U.S. power in international institutions and "grand bargains" with other democracies and emerging powers that will legitimize U.S. leadership and enable the global order to flexibly respond to the threats of the coming years.

According to Brooks, Robert Kagan sees things quite differently. I don't doubt that he does. Kagan's most popularly-known work of recent years is his pre-Iraq War treatise Of Paradise and Power, in which he argues that Europe's passage into a post-national paradise has led it to self-imposed weakness, and thus it seeks to "balance" against the United States by deligitimating it's efforts to enforce international security and promote its interests. A cursory look through this work is enough to see that Kagan sees the world in terms (more or less) of a traditional realist. In Kagan's view, primary international actors are nation states, and ones that, for all their post Cold War niceties, still fundamentally lack the shared values that would make Ikenberry's vision of a liberal global order feasible. Nationalism, for Kagan, is not going away any time soon (perhaps not even in Europe), and traditional inter-state jockeying will remain the principal task of world leaders in the coming years.

As I fear my treatment of these authors' work betrays, I tend to agree with Ikenberry more so than with Kagan. While I share Brooks' sentiment that Ikenberry is overly dismissive of the remaining political power of nationalism, particularly in states like China and India that have no recent historical experience as great powers, but look to such status in the near future, state-based nationalism will soon cease to be the driving force behind the foundations and threats to global order. I say this not because I believe nationalism will disappear, but because the glue of the modern international system - complex economic interdependence, rapid movement of technology and intellectual capital around the globe, high-speed communication etc. - mitigates the practical power of nationalist feeling. On the other hand, non-national threats - terrorism, global warming, environmental degradation, state collapse - are actually amplified by the interconnected nature of that system. A refugee crisis half a world away can disrupt the global economy such that people in the United States are affected by it. That was far less true fifty years ago.

My point, put simply, is that Ikenberry's threat analysis is prescient. While I am less optimistic than either he or Kagan are that the U.S. can remain the center of this century's global order, I think that this will be far less significant if America can create a robust, stable liberal order that will allow for the disbursement of power to other global centers without the kind of disruptions that have accompanied such shifts in the past. I can think of no better legacy for America to leave behind after its moment in the imperial sun.

Gaza

2007-06-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

I was happy to see this recent op-ed by Martin Indyk about the recent fall of Gaza to Hamas militants, because it showed me that I am not the only person to see some potential long-term benefits to Hamas's new position. It's nice not to feel crazy, after all.

Let me be clear that I do not view the Hamas coup as positive in the expansive sense of the word. Certainly for the people of Gaza, who will now be subject to even further economic and political isolation, not to mention government by a group of fanatics, the recent fighting has not yielded very encouraging results. In the larger scheme of things, however, the fact that Hamas now controls Gaza while being - for now anyway - pushed out of power in the West Bank solves one of the principal dilemmas created by last year's elections, in that there now exists a Palestinian entity with whom Israel and the quartet can negotiate. Hamas's victory at the polls made it impossible for outside forces to have any substantive discussions with Palestinian representatives without including a group that manifestly could not be dealt with. Any hope of a settlement was frozen by the balance of power within Palestine. Now, with Hamas in control of Gaza, but also largely confined to Gaza, the Palestinian government in the West Bank should be able to negotiate Israel without having to perform diplomatic gymnastics simply to sit down at the table.

The recent declaration by the United States that sanctions would be immediately dropped on any Palestinian government that does not include Hamas, combined with the Israeli pledge to begin releasing customs revenues that it has been holding for more than a year, should provide a boost to the Abbas government, and could set the stage for new rounds of negotiations. The entry of Barak into the Israeli government as the head of Labor in the governing coalition could also inject legitimacy that Olmert's government has lacked since last summer's disaster in Lebanon.

Extracting positive results from this foundation, though, will take courage and delicacy on everyone's part, especially that of Israel. Regardless of who is in charge in the Gaza strip, Palestinians rightly view it as their territory, and those living there as their countrymen. Israel would be naive to think it can productively negotiate with Fatah in the West Bank while inflicting misery on the Hamas-controlled citizens of Gaza. That said, Hamas has the power to derail a re-started peace process if given too free a hand to launch attacks against Fatah or Israel or both. Israeli policy, and the policy of those nations and institutions that try to play mediating roles, will have to be tailored not only to inflict harm on Hamas, but to show the Palestinian populace that this time, finally, really, after all these years, they have something to gain by supporting a government that is willing to negotiate.

First steps have been encouraging, but more need to be taken. One of the main lessons of the failed Oslo negotiations during the 1990s was that interim 'confidence building measures' are of supreme importance. Successive Israeli governments tried to press the Palestinians to work out one, large-scale, grand bargain type deal all at once, because then they would have something to show the Israeli people to counter the images of settlers being dragged from their homes. The problem was that, absent many of those steps being taken in the interim, before final issues were settled, few in Palestine had any confidence that the Israelis were truly prepared to give them a viable state. Therefore, I propose that the Israeli government begin aggressively dismantling all West Bank settlements that it has not itself authorized. There are many such illegal (under Israeli law) outposts, and they infuriate the Palestinian rank and file. Such action would show the people of the West Bank that Israel is serious about talking again, now that it has a real partner, and it would show the people of Gaza that their current rulers will get them nowhere.

Wagging Our Own Tail: Changing U.S. Policy toward Pakistan

2007-06-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting piece out of the Center for Strategic and International Studies on America's relationship with Pakistan and the administration of President Pervez Musharaff. It gets to the heart of a fundamental tension that has bedeviled American foreign policy since the United States first took the stage as a great power in the late nineteenth century; namely, the extent to which America supports foreign governments that are ideologically and ethically problematic but that serve (by whatever estimation) American interests abroad.
This tension is largely inevitable. On the one hand, the United States has always conceived of itself as a champion of liberty whose foreign dealings should transcend crass Machiavellian politics in favor of promoting a liberal economic and political world order. On the other hand, to be a great power (and thus have the ability to influence world events) is to roll in the muck of international relations. In order to preserve its place, promote its interests, and indeed advance the moral and ideological causes that befit its lofty ideals, America cannot always keep her hands clean. She must, at times, prioritize threats, make compromises with unsavory actors, and engage in, for lack of a better phrase, imperial undertakings. In practice, this can mean allying with (or, if we are to abandon euphemism, buying) regimes with less-than-exemplary human rights records, loose relationships with the rule of law and limited democratic or popular legitimacy. F.D.R. best summed up the strategy when referring to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García: "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

So ends theory.

In practice, some imperfect synthesis of idealism and practicality must govern American policy. The long-term interests of the United States would not be served by comprehensive disengagement from world affairs, or even from the internal affairs of other nations. On the other hand, it has been all too easy for successive U.S. governments to exaggerate the importance of client state networks. America won the Cold War because people across the Soviet Empire became fed up with a decrepit, broken system and abandoned it in favor of what they saw as a better model. America's selling weapons to the Shah, supporting the Contras in Central America, propping up corrupt dictators in Vietnam and funneling cash and arms to the Afghani Mujihadeen put some pressure on the USSR, and in the early days of the conflict may have checked the Soviets’ more expansionist impulses, but I have a difficult time believing that such activities played a decisive role in the contest's outcome.

On the other hand, many of America’s more ill-considered client relationships have come back to haunt her both during the Cold War and especially during its highly fluid aftermath. An exhaustive list would be impractical here, but consider the anti-American vitriol that gripped the Iranian populace after years under the Shah’s repressive rule; anger that enabled Khomenei and his followers to grab the levers of the Iranian state. Consider too the virus of Islamic terror that was allowed to take root in the desolation of post-war Afghanistan once America lost interest in her erstwhile clients there. The U.S.’s pseudo-colonial legacy in its own hemisphere must bear much of the blame for the popularity of anti-American grandstanding in Latin America, from the aging example of Fidel Castro to its newer, somewhat more clownish incarnation in Hugo Chavez. I bring up these points to illustrate the care, vision and foresight that must, but too often does not, inform America’s decisions regarding which governments to support and how. Patron-client relationships may be useful; however, particularly in the modern context, they are fraught with dangers.

I therefore tentatively propose some general questions which American policy-makers ought to ask themselves before commencing or renewing support for regimes worldwide.

· To what extent does this regime govern according to liberal ideals? I am not a neo-conservative. I do not believe that each and every government around the world can or should instantaneously transform into a democracy along Western lines. That said, I am conscious of the fact that the people around the world who most loudly denounce liberal ideas as ‘incompatible’ with their own people’s cultural and historical experience tend to be those with some stake in theocratic or authoritarian rule. If a regime manifestly and clearly ignores the most basic tenets of human freedom and dignity, U.S. planners ought to be wary of committing American resources and political capital to propping it up.

· To what extent does the regime have the will or institutional capacity to reform? U.S. support for less-than-savory governments is often justified in terms of “constructive engagement” (a phrase used during the Reagan era to explain American dealings with apartheid South Africa). The notion is that American support buys leverage over the regime’s behavior, leverage which over time can pressure the regime into evolving more robust liberal institutions without all the violence, chaos and uncertainty that would accompany a more rapid shift. Though this is often dismissed as a cynical justification for political expedience, history has at times vindicated the strategy. The end of the Second World War saw Taiwan and South Korea ruled by repressive, authoritarian dictatorships that received unflagging military and economic aid from the United States. Over the years, however, the regimes in both those countries have transformed into reasonably well-consolidated democracies. The question for American planners, though, is in what direction the tide is moving. Is there evidence of a growing middle class that is frustrated by authoritarian political strictures, or is the populace made up of a tiny kleptocracy ruling over a sea of impoverished, embittered farmers and laborers? The former situation may have the potential to evolve into something more in line with American principles, the latter is a time-bomb waiting to explode. Little good has come from supporting governments that consistently repress and infuriate their own people, and the long-term result is likely to cause the U.S. far more headaches than the short-term strategic gains are worth.

· Is the tail wagging the dog? The whole point of a client state network, especially when one considers the compromises with one’s own values that must be made in order to build it, is to create a network of allies that will, when pressed, serve one’s strategic interests. Often, though, great powers have unwittingly gotten themselves into situations where their clients actually exercise the most leverage. Nasser’s Egypt during the 1950s is a classic example. The Egyptian dictator skillfully played the Soviet Union and the United States off one another, engaging in a bidding war for loyalty through which he extracted economic aid and high-tech weapons from both countries without having to significantly compromise the sovereignty of his own. In a more modern context, ‘moderate’ regimes across the Muslim world frequently present themselves as the only bulwark against the amorphous specter of radical Islam, extracting aid and political support by making themselves seem to be the only viable option, while making no substantive moves towards political reform. The veracity of their dire claims is, in my view, disputable at best, and American statesmen should consider reevaluating the extent of U.S. support for such governments.

This brings us, then, back to Pakistan. The news out of Islamabad in recent months raises some troubling questions about the effectiveness of American policy there. Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has significantly stepped up aid to the Musharaff regime, reasoning that Pakistan must play a vital role in any American attempt to stabilize Afghanistan and combat radical Islam more generally. Our grants of weapons and economic assistance have indeed contributed to a more robust Pakistani army that could in theory be of great help to the United States, but the evidence indicates that America is not getting a favorable strategic return on its investment. The authors at CSIS note that the rank and file of the Pakistani army, the organ of state that has received the most significant American support, has significant sympathies for many radical Islamic groups. Indeed, since the early days of the American invasion, reports have surfaced of the Pakistani military undermining U.S. intelligence gathering and anti-terrorist operations, while doing a woefully pitiful job fighting the tribal militias that give quarter and support to al Quaeda and Taliban forces. We should not forget that Osama bin Laden is generally believed to be hiding somewhere in the Pakistani hinterlands.

Meanwhile, on the political front, Gen. Musharaff is clearly wearing out his welcome in the eyes of the Pakistani populace. The army that American has helped build up is being used as an instrument of repression by an increasingly authoritarian military regime. The system of checks and balances that had heretofore given the government some measure of accountability, in particular the Judiciary, are being blatantly assaulted by Musharaff, arousing the ire of a population fed up with the General’s brand of politics. CSIS also notes that American aid for Pakistani education – one of the ways American can help the people of Pakistan rather than just the army – has been barely worth mentioning. This is significant because radical Islamic institutions often provide an alternative for Pakistanis seeking an education. It should be remembered that one of the major reasons that the Iranian Revolution took on an Islamic character was that Muslim institutions provided the only open political space under the rule of the Shah. We must work to make sure that the same situation does not evolve in Pakistan.

I am heartened to see that, unlike so many times in the past, events are causing many American elites to question the nature of U.S. support to Musharaff before things reach critical mass. It is my hope that a reorientation of American policy can convince Musharaff to negotiate a political settlement that will put his nation back on the road to democracy. Though her government was widely derided as corrupt, a return of Benazir Bhutto to some type of power-sharing arrangement could mollify the populace temporarily while a constitutional transfer of power is arranged. None of this will happen; however, if Musharaff believes he has unconditional American support (if his tail can wag our dog, so to speak). The U.S. must be willing to risk some instability for the sake of encouraging change in Pakistan. By all reports, the percentage of the population that subscribes to the tenets of radical Islam there remains miniscule, but such ideologies are fed and grow in an environment of stagnation and repression, and have particular potency in the context of revolutionary chaos. The Pakistani people deserve to be trusted enough to determine the political future of their country before things get to that point, and the United States ought to recognize that standing in the way of positive change is likely as not to come back to haunt it in years to come.

Setting Israel's Oil Wells Alight

2007-06-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

I was only six during the first Gulf War, so my memories of the event are spotty; however, I do remember the iconic images of Kuwait's oil fields burning, spewing acrid black smoke into the air and blotting out the Middle Eastern sun. Those images have since been burned into the public consciousness, symbols of wealth and opportunity evaporating in the face of ugly and senseless conflict.

I bring them up because of a recent Tom Friedman op-ed about "Israel's oil wells." No, the Jewish state hasn't all of a sudden discovered black gold under the sands of the Negev. Rather, Friedman refers to the astonishing, admirable amount of intellectual capital that Israel has managed to build among its populace. The engineers, software designers and other thinkers that Israel has nurtured with its first-class education system have poised the nation to be a leader in the 21st century global economy. This is all the more reason that Israel must, for the love of all that is sacred, find a way to solve the festering conflict with its Palestinian neighbors.

Israel's economic, intellectual and cultural accomplishments have indeed been staggering (Friedman notes that Israel is second only to the United States in companies listed on the NASDAQ), and Israelis deserve all the credit in the world for building a society so uniquely poised to make positive contributions to human progress. Endemic conflict, though, has the potential to render such achievements moot.

Israelis have, over the last twenty years, managed to free themselves from the kinds of conventional existential threats that they faced in the early decades of the state's existence. They no longer stare down the barrels of Syrian and Egyptian tanks (at least not those that could attack with any credibility). As many have pointed out, Israel's current security threats (with the notable exception of Iran) are more amorphous, coming in the form of glorified gangs long on hatred but short on resources. It is tempting to think that, with the right mix of security measures, Israel can simply put these threats out of mind. Such thinking is flawed.

Time and odds will, eventually, catch up with Israel absent a real peace settlement. Hard as the West might try to stop them, weapons of mass destruction continue to proliferate, and it will only be so long before some of them fall into the hands of Hamas or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad or any of the myriad bands of thugs that harass Israel's borders and plague her cities. As long as such organizations can draw legitimacy from Israeli occupation, they will be conduits through which an existential threat can manifest itself. There is also some truth to the notion that the democratic legitimacy of the Israeli state is undermined by its creeping colonization of the West Bank. There is a fundamental tension between working to guarantee the human rights of one group while suppressing those of another. This tension has been experienced by Britain in Ireland (and India, and Burma and...), France in Algeria, the United States in its own south, Japan in Korea and in countless other countries that have tried to walk the tightrope between democracy and empire (ancient Rome and Athens provide the archetypal examples). For the sake of every Israeli citizen, not to mention every Palestinian, I hope that the Israeli government can summon the courage to confront its own citizens, dismantle its settlements, and make the hard choices necessary to forge a lasting peace. If it cannot, Israel's oil wells may well go the same way as Kuwait's: up in smoke.

Defeat in Iraq

2007-06-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

A recent op-ed in the New York Times by William Shawcross and Peter Rodman entitled “Defeat’s Killing Fields” examines the prospect of defeat in Iraq in light of America’s historical experience in Vietnam. The fact that these two authors evidently sparred over the conflict in Indochina back when it was raging gives the piece some weight, and I commend the two writers for attempting to inject some historical perspective into the Iraq debate – a place where it is urgently needed yet often sorely lacking – but I take issue with some of their conclusions.

They are right to point out that the rosy view taken by some of the US defeat in Southeast Asia – the notion that in retrospect the loss of the war really wasn’t all that consequential – ignores important bits of history. The American pullback certainly did clear the way for some of the horrific abuses of the Cambodian and Vietnamese Communist regimes, from Pol Pot’s killing fields to Vietnam’s reeducation camps. It is also true that the discrediting of America’s interventionist resolve provided some encouragement for renewed expansionist tendencies on the part of the Soviets.

That said, the authors also make some dubious arguments, particularly when they advance the notion that, had the U.S. not intervened in Vietnam and exhausted the will and resources of Communist expansionism in Asia, the worst predictions of the domino theory would have come to pass. With all respect to those with more experience and education than I, this notion simply flies in the face of history. The most critical strategic error made by the planners of the Vietnam War was to view the Communist world as a monolithic block that would continue rolling forward absent decisive intervention. Communism, which often as not served as an ideological vehicle through which anti-colonial sentiments found their fullest expression, wasn’t what needed to be contained. Rather, it was Soviet expansion that posed a serious threat to U.S. interests, and that could have been managed with a much lighter hand, as America was able to do successfully in Latin America, Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

This history – both what Shawcross and Rodman get right and what they get wrong – does have some bearing on the situation in Iraq. First, the authors are exactly right when they say that defeat in Iraq will have serious negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy in the coming years:

…anyone who thinks an American defeat in Iraq will bring a merciful end to this conflict is deluded. Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate.

They cite a full-fledged and grizzly civil war, a massive refugee crisis, an increase in attacks by emboldened champions of radical Islam, and an empowered Iran as the principal and virtually certain consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq. They note antecedents for all of these problems in the American endgame in Southeast Asia, and I can’t say that the evidence, historical or modern, leads me to serious disagreement. Indeed, I am trying to steel my psyche for the horrific news I fully intend to hear out of Mesopotamia in the coming years.

I have some major qualms with the authors’ argument, however. First, and most relevant, they don’t propose what an American alternative ought to be. Looking at the current situation in Iraq, where even America’s “surged” forces cannot control more than one third of the Iraqi capital, the notion that America is capable of bringing the conflict to a successful military conclusion seems absurd. Indeed, absent drastic measures like the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Americans through conscription, I don’t see how the U.S. military can effectively continue to fight this war for much longer, never mind win it. The same was true in Vietnam. The American defeat was serious and carried negative consequences, but was a full-fledged victory ever really feasible there? Few now think so.

America’s task as it currently stands is not to choose between victory and defeat, but rather between setback and catastrophe. Simply picking up and leaving with no thought to the probable aftermath will almost certainly lead to all the negative consequences that the authors mention, and likely quite a few that they don’t. Managing the U.S. withdrawal in such a way that leaves the framework for an eventual Iraqi peace (something along the lines of the Dayton accords), while at the same time engaging in a serious “carrot and stick” policy with regard to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and putting real pressure on Israel to allow for the reopening of a genuine peace process in the Levant has the potential to stabilize the region and allow the United States to regroup and reassess its strategic priorities. This scenario would still be risky, messy and bloody, but it might avert the kind of regional implosion that could occur were the American army to simply retreat.

The real question, to my mind, is whether or not that course of action will still be possible in January of 2009 when there is leadership change in Washington, because until that time comes, this is all just talk.

Women and Politics

2007-05-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

In the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, Swanee Hunt of Harvard's Kennedy School has written an interesting piece calling for greater political participation by women around the World. The article is well argued, and raises many points that are worthy of further analysis. Let me acknowledge first that as a reasonably well-off white male in an industrialized liberal society, I approach Dr. Hunt's article with limited personal experience of the problems she attempts to address. I will therefore try to approach her argument with some humility, and critique it in the manner in which porcupines mate: very carefully.

Hunt's thesis, boiled down to its essence, is that women continue to face serious structural and ideational barriers to their effective participation in high-level politics, and that both women and politics would benefit from those barriers being broken down. At this level, Dr. Hunt and I are in complete agreement. In almost every society, historical and modern, women have inhabited different socio-economic spaces than men. Greater representation in the political sphere would undoubtably bring important issues to the table that had theretofore been given short shrift. Beyond obvious gains for women themselves in terms of legal equality, reproductive rights, equitable economic opportunity and other "women's issues" (I use quotes because I dislike the term - issues of equity and opportunity are in my opinion issues for every member of every society), female perspectives would be of value across the policy spectrum.

By way of example, I recall a professor of mine once telling a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a development agency that wanted to build a road in a certain rural village. The agency's representatives consulted with men of the village from various walks of life, all of whom agreed that a new, well-paved road would be an excellent project that would stimulate the local economy and should be started right away. Before construction began, someone suggested that they consult with some of the village's women, many of whom began pointing out problems that simply did not occur to the men. The road's high embankments and lack of sidewalks would make it too dangerous for children to walk to school. Likewise, the proposed route cut off access to a critical local water source and would necessitate walking much further and wasting much more time and energy simply to keep a household going.

True or not, the story points out the value of women's participation in the policy-making (gender lines, of course, are not nearly so clear-cut in most cases). I am with Dr. Hunt up to this point, though I do question whether or not the many positive correlations she cites between women's political participation and increases in good governance are spurious (whether good governance and women's political participation aren't both dependent on an forward-looking political culture). I begin to take more issue with her argument, however, when she suggests that female participation will change politics qua politics, rather than simply policy-making. In making her point, she adopts a more intellectually sophisticated version of the men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus argument, positing that "A critical mass of female leaders will change norms ... generally speaking, stereotypical 'feminine' qualities (such as the tendency to nurture, compromise, and collaborate) have been confirmed by social science research. The world needs those traits." According to Hunt, a greater preponderance of women in politics would reduce the amount of "swagger" involved in governing. Politics would be less cut-throat and more conciliatory.

My first reaction here is to question the ability of "social science" to separate innate female traits from those developed as a result of occupying social space that encourages them. I simply can't imagine how one would control for that. I'm sure Dr. Hunt has a better knowledge of the literature than I do, but since citing sources doesn't seem to be something Foreign Affairs encourages, I'll have to revel in the uncertainty.

Some (Hunt included) consider the nature-nurture debate irrelevant. Women clearly do posses more of these traits - for whatever reason - so we should take advantage of them. To my mind, though, it is quite relevant. Politics - defined as the art of managing the distribution of power and resources, and distinct from policy-making - is by nature an arena that rewards a certain self-interested rationality, combined with an large ego and a desire for power as an end in itself. For those who look at me as cynical, I would point out that some of the most visionary leaders of the last century, from Churchill to Roosevelt to Kennedy, were as power hungry as they come. That the impulse to acquire power has also produced Mao and Hitler is not lost on me, but the fact is that people who do not desire power generally don't acquire it, and those that do generally don't know what to do with it (Jimmy Carter is a case in point). To that end, women (and men, for that matter) who exhibit the kinds of nurturing, conciliatory traits that Hunt exalts are likely to have neither the desire nor the audacity to seize the reins of state. Indeed, Hunt notes in her article that women tend to view politics as a "dirty game" and thus eschew it. It all comes down to one's view of politics - does it involve "swagger" because it is a man's game and men naturally act that way, or is it a man's game because men have historically been encouraged to develop the kind of brazen attitude necessary to play it?

Dr. Hunt tends toward the former explanation, I tend toward the latter. Judith Warner recently had an excellent piece on the myth of innate female moral superiority. She argues that womens' historical tendency to play more nurturing roles in society has been largely a function of social position, not of biology. This is relevant because, logically, people who would be most likely to go into politics - women and men - would be the people with the desire and capability to amass power at others' expense. That women have not been historically socialized to play this role may account for Dr. Hunt's observation that women predominate in the area of NGOs and other elite institutions that are less power-dependent.

Again, for the record, I am not arguing for a second that women do not deserve a larger place in politics. I believe that from the perspective of policy-making, greater female participation would be enormously beneficial. I believe women are capable of being just as visionary, just as strong, just as capable leaders as men. I also believe, though, that they are capable of being just as avaricious and corrupt. The world, indeed, does need more women in politics, but Dr. Hunt is overly optimistic in her estimation of what this would accomplish.

Contra Krauthammer (Vol. 2)

2007-05-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

Everyone's favorite psychiatrist-turned-pundit Charles Krauthammer has released this jaunty little diatribe excoriating George Tenet's new autobiography as an absurd reinvention of history. Full disclosure: I have not read Tenet's book nor, frankly, do I intend to. Post-political memoirs can make for illuminating reading, but only when they are written with the benefit of time and distance, and with some purpose at least marginally more expansive than the issuing of a post-hoc "screw you" to one's erstwhile critics. As far as I'm concerned, Krauthammer is being overly charitable when he characterizes George Tenet's legacy as "mixed." The fact is, irrespective of his success in engineering the takedown of the Taliban, Tenet's role as an enabler of the Bush Administration's catastrophe in Iraq borders on unforgivable. As Maureen Dowd in one of her rare bits of insight recently argued, if Tenet had as many problems with the Administration's Iraq plans as he now alleges he did, he should have resigned. If something as important as war does not merit a bit of personal sacrifice on behalf of reason and principle, I don't know what does. The same, by the way, goes for Colin Powell.

I do agree with Krauthammer that Tenet seems to be reinventing history, or at least heavily sanitizing it. That, however, is as far as my agreement goes. Krauthammer's reasons for rejecting Tenet's story could not be more misguided. I offer the following passage:

Tenet writes as if he assumes no one remembers anything. For example: "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat."

Does he think no one remembers President Bush explicitly rejecting the imminence argument in his 2003 State of the Union address in front of just about the largest possible world audience? Said the president, " Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent" -- and he was not one of them. That in a post-Sept. 11 world, we cannot wait for tyrants and terrorists to gentlemanly declare their intentions. Indeed, elsewhere in the book Tenet concedes that very point: "It was never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise."

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, both Krauthammer's and Tenet's arguments depend on what the meaning of "imminent" is. In the interest of being thorough, I'll turn to Webster for a moment:

imminent : ready to take place; especially : hanging threateningly over one's head.

This definition at least partially helps to concretize the debate. In the parlance of international relations and international law, "imminence" has historically indicated the presence of a clear, immediate and obvious threat. The classic modern example is that of Arab armies massing on Israel's borders in 1967. However much some have argued after the fact that the Syrians and the Egyptians didn't really want to invade, most outside observers agree that the kind of military mass-mobilization that occurred in the Sinai and along the Golan Heights in that fateful year constituted an "imminent" threat in the legal sense of the term. Essentially, the threat was so great, and the harmful intentions so obvious, that it was Arab actions that initiated a de facto state of war, irrespective of who fired the first shots.

It is this interpretation of imminence that Bush rejected in 2003. The President argued that the destructive capacity of some modern weapons, combined with the potential stealth with which they can be delivered, precludes the luxury of being able to wait until both the existence of a threat and the intention to make good on it are beyond question. Frankly, I agree with the President, at least in part. The world is a dangerous place, and there are absolutely times when security demands preemptive action. Notice, though, that I say preemptive and not preventative. Preemptive wars eliminate threats that have a good chance of being carried out (even if the threat is somewhat less blatantly obvious than it would be under the original "imminence" standard), preventative wars simply eliminate threats. The distinction is fine, but important. Under the standards of preventative war, "imminence" merely indicates some vague notion of danger, inflated with dishonest language, that justifies striking first.

Iraq was decidedly a preventative war. Saddam was attacked based on the threats that he could, eventually, if given the right environment and enough breathing space, pose to U.S. interests. The problem was that Iraq was sold to the American people as a preemptive war. We were led to believe that the Iraqi regime had both the means and the will to attack the American people at any time, and that its removal was vital to our immediate physical security. Bush may have rejected the "imminence argument" in theory; however, he relied upon it in rhetoric, painting Iraq as an imminent threat and using that portrayal to drag his country into a catastrophic war. Again, I suppose it all depends on how you define the word "imminent."

Krauthammer tries to blur the distinction with another bit of irritating historical gymnastics. Evidently, Bush Administration policy towards Iraq was really nothing new:

For the entire decade following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq was the single greatest threat in the region and therefore the most important focus of U.S. policy. U.N. resolutions, congressional debates and foreign policy arguments were seized with the Iraq question and its many post-Gulf War complications -- the weapons of mass destruction, the inspection regimes, the cease-fire violations, the no-fly zones, the progressive weakening of sanctions.

Krauthammer, of course, ignores the elephant in the room, namely that while the post-Gulf War United States was always "extremely concerned" about Iraq, it never tried to invade and topple the regime there. By way of historical comparison, it was the difference between the 1970s era of U.S.-Soviet detente and the 1980s era of brinksmanship and escalation. During both periods, the U.S. was "extremely concerned" about the Soviet Union - the two countries remained enemies after all - but the aggressiveness with which America dealt with that concern changed markedly. Of course the Clinton Administration was concerned with containing Saddam and limiting his power in the region. Nobody is suggesting that the Bush Administration should not have been equally vigilant; however, to posit that Clinton-era containment and Bush-era invasion were merely two sides of the same coin is absurd. The Administration clearly understood how drastic the change in policy was, which was why they had to mount such a large-scale public information campaign (I'm charitably in avoiding the word "propaganda") in order to convince people of the serious and, yes, imminent nature of the Iraqi threat.

I take serious issue with one final passage, because it exemplifies a phenomenon that goes beyond Mr. Krauthammer, namely the tendency of the Iraq debacle's architects to justify their actions by noting that it was not only neo-conservatives who supported the war:

The decision to go to war was made by a war cabinet consisting of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. No one in that room could even remotely be considered a neoconservative. Nor could the most important non-American supporter of the war to this day -- Tony Blair, father of new Labor. ... Outside of government, the case for war was made not just by the neoconservative Weekly Standard but -- to select almost randomly -- the traditionally conservative National Review, the liberal New Republic and the center-right Economist. Of course, most neoconservatives supported the war, the case for which was also being made by journalists and scholars from every point on the political spectrum -- from the leftist Christopher Hitchens to the liberal Tom Friedman to the centrist Fareed Zakaria to the center-right Michael Kelly to the Tory Andrew Sullivan.

First off, to claim that Bush's war cabinet was free of neo-conservatives is ridiculous. Both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were signatories to the Project for the New American Century's 1997 Statement of Principles, along with Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby among others. Maybe in Kruathammer's mind they aren't real neo-cons, but their vision of a world led in perpetuity by a muscular, unilateral, democracy-promoting, militarily-mighty United States makes them partisans in my view.

As for the notion that the Iraq war was supported from across the ideological spectrum, Krauthammer is depressingly right, at least in the most literal sense. That broad support, though, stemmed largely from the belief that Saddam's Iraq posed a much larger, much more imminent threat to the United States and it's regional interests than was actually the case. This notion did not come from thin air, but rather from dubious intelligence that was cherry-picked and inflated by the Administration with the deliberate purpose of framing public debate in a way that the threat posed by Iraq would not be seriously questioned. The New Republic article that Krauthammer links to makes that abundantly clear. I do not suggest that the American media and intellectual establishment did not fail to approach the Administration's claims critically - they did so fail, miserably in fact - merely that they had a marginally better excuse.

Tenet's book may rewrite history. Frankly, if I were George Tenet, I'd like the opportunity to do so myself. Still, Charles Krauthammer and his neo-conservative colleagues have plenty of their own explaining to do.

Post-Olmert Israel

2007-04-29T18:49:00.000-07:00

I must admit I feel a bit bad for Ehud Olmert. Saddled with the responsibility of leading one of the first legitimate centrist political movements in Israeli history after it had been decapitated in infancy by Ariel Sharon's stroke, Olmert found himself, a mere mortal, trying to do the work of a Titan. Given that he lacked the founding-father credibility of his predecessor, not to mention any sort of charisma, he was bound to be a bit of a disappointment. I must emphasize, though, that I feel only a bit bad as I watch the Prime Minister suffer all the slings and arrows that the outrageous fortunes of Israeli politics can hurl at him. It's one thing to not quite measure up to expectations. It's quite another to lead one's country into a disaster. As the Winograd Commission's recent report documents in scathing detail, Olmert and his top civilian and military advisors, notably the Secretary of Defense and the IDF's Chief of Staff, were headache-inducingly incompetent in the way they conducted last summer's war against Hezbollah. Reading the report, it is difficult to imagine precisely what these people thought their attack was going to accomplish (as a side note, I do find it depressingly ironic that the report, with modified names, would be a piercingly accurate description of the current American administration's prosecution of the war in Mesopotamia).

In any case, what's done is done. Looking forward to a post-Olmert environment (call me foolish, but when mass demonstrations and his own Cabinet Ministers are calling for his resignation, I don't see how he can hang on for very long, protests to the contrary aside), the question is how the Israeli people will react to this whole mess. Will they retreat to the false comfort of a Neanderthal like Netanyahu, or will they somehow choose a government with a mandate to tackle the painful choices that Israel must make in the coming years? As many people have pointed out, Israel is by most measures in very good shape at the moment. The economy is humming along nicely (growth measured recently at 8%), with the high-tech sector booming and foreign direct investment up, but Israel's political class seems completely bereft of leadership capabilities (anyone noticing a theme on this blog?). In the last twenty years, the bulk of Israeli popular opinion has moved in the direction of some kind of accommodative peace with its regional neighbors. The question is whether or not that energy (or should it be called exhaustion?) can be channeled into concrete results absent strong leadership. Oddly enough, Israel's post-Olmert future could be quite interesting.