Foreign Policy

Saturday, September 20, 2008

COIN vs. Conventional Diplomacy

Via Small Wars Journal, two complementary articles on the increasing encroachment of the military instrument on civil development and humanitarian functions. The first, a CSM op-ed by Catholic Relief Services director Ken Hackett, criticizes the recent use of naval gunboats to bring humanitarian aid to Georgia in the aftermath of the recent conflict with Russia. The second, a National Defense University monograph by Patrick Cronin (.pdf), discusses the ways in which the increasingly political nature of irregular warfare has put pressure on the traditional civilian-military balance of power in conflict zones.

Hackett's criticism is based on the need for humanitarian organizations to maintain impartiality in order to operate in conflict zones without being targeted by either side. Cronin's discussion, exemplified by this citation of Bob Gates, illustrates why that is an increasingly anachronistic, if perfectly valid, argument:

[T]he lines separating war, peace, diplomacy, and development have become more blurred, and no longer fit the neat organizational charts of the 20th century.

With the military already on COIN footing, the State Dept. is under increasing pressure to play doctrinal catch-up. The risk is twofold. First, once diplomacy and development have been adapted to the needs of the conflict zone, they will increasingly be deployed to them, to the detriment of other areas in need of our development aid. Second, once development becomes an element of the American war-fighting instrument, it will increasingly be governed by military logic. Here's Hackett:

. . .When the role of aid is to control or influence foreign governments or other parties in a conflict, the danger is that, instead of taking care of people's needs, the aid will simply fan the flames of the instability that led to the conflict in the first place. . .

The initial setbacks in our counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq have been the cause of a great deal of soul searching among the military community, and rightly so. The result has been the formulation of a broad "whole of government" approach to conflict, exemplified by the particularly effective team of Ambassador Crocker and Gen. Petraeus. But we shouldn't become intoxicated by our success to the point that we see the world exclusively through the lens of conflict, and conflict exclusively through the lens of counterinsurgency. Success in irregular warfare demands a "whole of government" approach, but the whole of government must not be reduced to the demands of irregular warfare.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   

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Thursday, September 4, 2008

Off-Duty Cop

The current issue of Military Review (.pdf, via Small Wars Journal) contains a quiet but significant article by Christopher Housenick titled "Winning Battles but Losing Wars" (p. 91). The overlap with French Gen. Vincent Desportes' analysis -- synopsis here (.pdf), interview here (.pdf) -- is pretty striking, especially with regards to the ways in which attacks on state infrastructure in the initial destructive phase of an intervention will inevitably hamper reconstruction efforts in the stabilization phase. According to Desportes, the challenge before Western militaries isn't to ". . .conduct a 'better war'. . .[but to] aim for a 'better peace.'"

The question underscores the need for a doctrinal evolution in American military strategy. So far, that's been limited to the still hotly contested COIN vs. conventional capacity debate. (Col. Gian Gentile, a WPR contributor here and here, has a recent CSM op-ed, also via SWJ, on the subject.)

I've been developing the argument this week that the debate should be broadened to include our global conception of the military instrument. So long as war is conceived of from a strategic and doctrinal perspective as an all or nothing proposition (that's to say total, with an objective of regime change and unconditional surrounder), the American military will be extremely constrained in its possible deployments. That, in turn, has an impact on American foreign policy.

Now, I'm not advocating for a banalization of military interventions or an embrace of limited war. What I'm suggesting is that American strategic doctrine is poorly adapted to the current geopolitical landscape of rapidly emerging, diffuse centers of influence. And so long as that doctrine hasn't been re-examined, we'll be susceptible to the same kind of strategic miscalculations that led us to underestimate the length and cost of our engagement in Iraq.

American power, both hard and soft, took its current shape in the global conditions of the post-WWII/Cold War era. Overwhelming and decisive force in the conduct of a total war was a sound approach to those conditions. But in many ways, those conditions were a strategic parenthesis, as was the post-Cold War unipolar moment. Now, both the geopolitical and military contexts have changed, and we need to adapt the ways in which we conceive of and apply our influence and power as a function of those changes.

That means finding a balance between America's historic traditions of isolationism on the one hand and global crusader on the other. The conflicts to come might not rise to the level of a crusade, but neither will we be able to comfortably ignore them. There will be no shortage of time- and resource-consuming stabilization and reconstruction operations to choose from, but there's also a growing risk of limited conventional conflicts, whether between regional rivals or larger powers and their weaker neighbors. We are no longer the world's reluctant policeman, neither in the eyes of the world, nor in our own. But we have yet to identify what role we will play, across the spectrum of hard and soft power. We'd better do so before events catch us offguard.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   International Relations   

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Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Coordinating Interagency Integration

If you haven't seen it on the WPR front page yet, give John Nagl's and Brian Burton's piece on the need for building civilian institutional capacity for counterinsurgency and nation-building operations a look. Obviously conflict zones are going to command a great deal of American attention and resources, and as Nagl and Burton make clear, unless civilian agencies adapt their training and institutional orientation, they will increasingly see their expertise farmed out to, or absorbed by, the military. As the article also makes clear, that won't happen until these agencies are funded and staffed to a level appropriate with their essential contributions to these efforts.

The piece emphasizes the need for more interagency "integration" of operations, but one question it leaves unanswered is who ultimately will play the overall coordinating role:

. . .The demands of large-scale counterinsurgency and reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq are increasingly clear: The United States must integrate civilian reconstruction expertise with military force in conflict zones. Ad hoc measures, like the establishment of the civil-military Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan and Iraq, were an important step towards creating this capability but are an incomplete solution. Recent State Department-led initiatives, which include the establishment of the Civilian Response Corps as well as the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (CRS) and the Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative, represent an effort to establish effective civilian control of the political, economic, and social dimensions of nation-building operations.

One of the problems identified with PRT's is that, lacking any uniform command structure, they are essentially coordinated by the agency controlling the funding stream. More often than not these days, that's the Pentagon. As Nagl and Burton put it, the State Dept. initiative is only a first step. An overarching conceptual framework of how interagency integration functions might be a useful second one.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Afghanistan   Foreign Policy   Iraq   

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Thursday, July 24, 2008

Obama in Berlin

I admit that I got chills up my spine when I heard that 200,000 people showed up to hear Barack Obama speak in Berlin. I don't know what it feels like to have almost a quarter of a million living, breathing human beings, spread out in front of you off into the distance, hanging on your every word. For that matter, there probably aren't too many people alive who know what that feels like. But I imagine it's not you're ordinary, everyday kind of adrenaline rush. (The only video I found so far of the event is kind of anti-climactic, though, since the audience is a little offbeat in their applause, probably due to the language barrier, but also due to the sheer time it took for the sound to reach them, and it seemed to hamper Obama's delivery.)

Anyway, I read a transcript of the speech, and truth be told wasn't that impressed. It hits all the right notes in terms of repairing the mistrust within the trans-Atlantic alliance, which Obama implicitly but correctly identifies as existing on a popular level. (The arrival of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy has already largely repaired the damage on a political level.) The two areas where he got bold were on global warming (on which he basically said, "Our bad, we'll get it right next time."), and Afghanistan, where he called for Europe and NATO to double down. On the first, I'm in agreement, on the second, I'm not.

After years of using the removal of military resources from Afghanistan as a club to beat the Bush administration over the head with for its conduct of the war in Iraq, Democrats (and increasingly Republicans) have come to believe that with more troops in Afghanistan we can achieve our objectives. I'm far from convinced that that's the case, and think that the claims of how important success there is to NATO's future are exagerrated.

More practically, calling for greater troop contributions from Europe ignore the fact that it's not going to happen. England's looking to reduce its engagement, Germany has already ponied up, and France has already downsized the contingent it committed to send at the April NATO summit.

The Afghanistan reference is pure Obama, who often uses his privileged iconic position to deliver a gentle chiding lecture. In that, it might disabuse his German listeners of what Josef Joffe calls in The New Republic "their infatuation with Obama":

After Inauguration Day, alas, Europe and the world will not face a Dreamworks president, but the leader of a superpower. Whether McCain or Obama, the 44th president will speak more nicely than did W. in his first term. He will also pay more attention to the "decent opinions of mankind." But he will still preside over the world's largest military, economic, and cultural power.

Finally, Obama closed with a call to "remake the world once again," a theme that I'm not terribly comfortable with. The speech probably works from a political perspective, in that by making demands of Europe and not assuming unilateral responsibility for the challenges the trans-Atlantic alliance has faced, he hasn't provided John McCain with any ammunition to use against him. It also probably did nothing to diminish his popularity in Europe. But if Afghanistan becomes central to Obama's European policy, he's in for some tough sledding.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  European Union   Foreign Policy   

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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The Militarization of American Foreign Policy

I've made a point of not bringing the subject up for a while, because it's never good to get fixated on an idea and see everything through that lens for too long. But believe me, it hasn't been easy. So if none other than Robert Gates himself up and goes there (via U.S. Diplomacy), then I think I'm entitled to cut myself a little slack:

Overall, even outside Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has become more involved in a range of activities that in the past were perceived to be the exclusive province of civilian agencies and organizations. This has led to concern among many organizations – including probably many represented here tonight – about what’s seen as a creeping "militarization" of some aspects of America’s foreign policy.

This is not an entirely unreasonable sentiment. . . But that scenario can be avoided if. . .there is the right leadership, adequate funding of civilian agencies, effective coordination on the ground, and a clear understanding of the authorities, roles, and missions of military versus civilian efforts, and how they fit, or in some cases don’t fit, together.

There's also this, on what makes America strong:

. . .[M]uch of our national security strategy depends on securing the cooperation of other nations, which will depend heavily on the extent to which our efforts abroad are viewed as legitimate by their publics. The solution is not to be found in some slick PR campaign or by trying to out-propagandize al-Qaeda, but through the steady accumulation of actions and results that build trust and credibility over time.

It's striking to see a Secretary of Defense with such a keen understanding of -- and obvious affection for -- diplomacy. A lot of folks have been calling for Gates to stay on in the next administration as SecDef. Funny that no one's mentioned him as Secretary as State material.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   

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Saturday, June 14, 2008

Sarkozy's World

If you have an interest in French politics, you probably already know about Art Goldhammer's blog, French Politics. It's the most in depth and intelligent English language treatment of French domestic politics I've seen, equal parts policy analysis and cultural criticism. It's also the principle reason I don't spend more time writing about the subject here.

Art also has a piece on Sarkozy's foreign policy in e-International Relations which dovetails nicely with this week's WPR series on the French strategic posture review. I've seen Sarkozy's method referred to as that of an "avocat d'affaires" before (literally business lawyer, but with a dealmaker connotation). But Art draws the interesting parallel between the emerging global order and the political playing field Sarkozy navigated in his rise to power. There's a method to the madness, and Art does a good job of nailing it down.

As he suggests, the world order taking shape favors Sarkozy's style of working multiple deals simultaneously, although it's easy to imagine circumstances arising that could force his hand and make him pick a side once and for all. In the past, France has always responded by choosing France's side, for better or worse. But with Sarkozy increasingly identifying France as part of the "family of the West," this time might be different.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   La France Politique   

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Friday, June 13, 2008

Interview with Hubert Vedrine

The last installment of the French strategic posture review series is up over at WPR. It's the full text of my interview with former French Foreign Minister, Hubert Vedrine:

WPR: A quick question, off topic. Do you have any observations about the American presidential race?

Vedrine: I think that Bush's departure is going to provoke a huge relief around the world (except maybe in Israel, or in two or three other countries, and even there, I'm not sure). That it's going to create very high expectations with regard to the new president, expectations that will be strong if it's McCain, very strong if it's Hillary Clinton, and giant if it's Obama. Because there's a sort of Obama effect that I explain by the fact that the President of the United States is a little bit the President of the world. More than the Secretary General of the United Nations, in any case. And Obama is a personality who can give the impression that he understands the outside world. That's never happened before. Clinton managed to do it through his intelligence, but Obama gives the impression that he can do so by the path he's taken. So it's not the fact that he's black, that doesn't matter, either negatively or positively. It's the fact of his mixed background, in and of itself. That's an idea that could have an absolutely enormous impact in a large part of the world. And afterwards, there will obviously be a shock, and the higher the expectations, the bigger the shock will be. Because the President of the United States is, after all, the President of the United States. He's not the President of Brazil, or of China. But it could create an absolutely amazing moment.

The rest has to do with Sarkozy's foreign policy, the emerging world order, and France's place in it. Vedrine is a fascinating and gifted thinker, and one of the foreign policy world's "eminences grises". Definitely give it a look.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   International Relations   La France Politique   

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Thursday, June 12, 2008

Intervention Fatigue

I'm not sure about Phil Carter's take on the Madeleine Albright NYTimes op-ed that's generating a good deal of discussion. Here's the key passage from Albright's piece:

. . .And despite recent efforts to enshrine the doctrine of a “responsibility to protect” in international law, the concept of humanitarian intervention has lost momentum.

The global conscience is not asleep, but after the turbulence of recent years, it is profoundly confused. Some governments will oppose any exceptions to the principle of sovereignty because they fear criticism of their own policies. Others will defend the sanctity of sovereignty unless and until they again have confidence in the judgment of those proposing exceptions.

At the heart of the debate is the question of what the international system is. Is it just a collection of legal nuts and bolts cobbled together by governments to protect governments? Or is it a living framework of rules intended to make the world a more humane place?

Carter steers that last question back to a more practical one:

The next president -- whether Obama or McCain -- will have to do more than right the course in Iraq and Afghanistan. He must also decide what to do in places like Darfur, Burma and countries unknown, where both our ideals and interests will beg us to act. Other questions relate to this one, such as the role of international institutions and America's policy on respecting national sovereignty. But the crucial question for our next commander-in-chief will be whether, why and how he employs American power abroad.

Outside of self-defense and treaty obligations, the major arguments for intervention as they have shaped up over the past ten years are humanitarian reasons (liberal hawks), Western values (neocons), and the globalization stability function that's emerging. The arguments aren't necessarily exclusive. Interventions against terrorism, for instance, are defended based on a mixture of self-defense, values (democracy promotion), and stability. In fact, I think the argument can be made that on the level of American domestic opinion they might actually be mutually dependent.

The problem Albright has identified has more to do with the international wariness of American intentions due to the neocons' legacy more than the other two, and while the next president will in fact have to make the decisions Carter enumerates, he will have to do so in the context of a more complex constellation of interests and consensus. (Nikolas Gvosdev has some very interesting thoughts on that here.) Albright has already illustrated the ways in which the former influences the latter. The question Carter leaves out is how the latter will influence the former.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   International Relations   

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Monday, June 9, 2008

No Solutions, No Problem

The funny thing for me about Robert Kagan is that I very rarely ever disagree with his analysis of the problem. It's his solutions that I usually have trouble with. So I really liked this Globalist interview, which is limited to one-sentence responses to analytical questions. I'm having trouble deciding which of these two I like the most. On whether a Barack Obama presidency would fundamentally change American foreign policy:

So long as U.S. power in all its forms is sufficient to shape the behavior of others, the broad direction of U.S. foreign policy is unlikely to change.

And on what the "crux" is for China (whatever that means):

The Chinese have learned that -- while it is possible to have capitalism without political liberalization -- it is much harder to have capitalism without cultural liberalization.

That last point is what I was trying to express in this post about what will happen to China's rise when it exhausts "copy & paste" capitalism and finds itself in desperate need of innovation. But I'm not Kagan, so it took me four paragraphs.

Meanwhile, how funny is it that not only does Kagan live in Brussels, but his wife, Victoria Nuland, is the U.S. ambassador to NATO? (The one who's been touting EU defense recently.) Think he makes her job more difficult from time to time? For that matter, think he needs a royal taster when he goes out to eat? Classic.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   International Relations   

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Friday, June 6, 2008

The Pivot

If you haven't read today's WPR cover piece by Shawn Brimley and Vikram Singh, you should. I've been convinced for a while that more than any individual issues, or even collection of issues, this election is going to boil down to a generational choice. I don't know the demographics of U.S. voters well enough to know who that really favors. That said, the logic of the piece seems to argue for Obama without mentioning his name, although that might not be the authors' intention, and it might be my reading of it. I'm curious to hear from anyone who disagrees.

I remember some discussion about the Bush administration's tendency, in the days before 9/11, to emphasize state-based threats in a way that seemed destined to miss those posed by non-state actors. Obviously state-based threats still exist. But even the Bush administration's response to them, e.g. the idea of "containing" Iran, smacks of a certain strategic anachronism.

Brimley and Singh mention the way young voters experience the world via connectivity, which reminded me of a book I recently started (but have yet to finish) by Harold Innis titled, Empire & Communications. It discusses how the physical form of communication, from stone to clay tablets to papyrus to paper, impacted the organizational structure of the empires that used them. It triggered an undeveloped thought that, in some way, states will need to adapt the way in which they wield strategic power to the communication structure of the internet: rapid, fleeting nodes of hyperlinks, quickly dispersing only to reform elsewhere. This election seems like as good a place to start as any.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   Politics   

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Monday, June 2, 2008

Rolling Back AFRICOM

I always feel a sense of satisfaction when the mainstream press catches up to a story that WPR has been out ahead of, like the scaling back of AFRICOM (here from a few weeks back in the CSM, and here from today in the WaPo and over at Phil Carter's Intel Dump). It's a fascinating story that combines a novel vision of an interagency military command with some highminded operational objectives, and throws them headlong into the wall of Africa's political realities, both historical and contemporary.

There's a lot going on here, and while AFRICOM is being downgraded to a more modest enterprise for now, I've got a hunch we'll be hearing more about it, if only as a prototype for the hybrid model of the future. What I find most concerning is that after initial efforts to create a truly interagency command structure, the final version features a military command with integrated, but apparently subordinate, civil components. That seems to represent less a desire of the Pentagon's civilian leadership than of the civilian branches that prioritize funding.

Most of the pushback against the Army's newly minted COIN doctrine has centered around its impact on classical warfighting capabilities. My own qualms have more to do with the way they militarize what in essence are civilian humanitarian functions, either outright or by appropriation. The more our humanitarian operational resources get fitted with military camo, the more likely we'll be to seek out warzones to stabilize, while ignoring other humanitarian priorities that don't require up-armored vehicles and interagency PRT's.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   

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Monday, May 19, 2008

Easy Targets

Odd convergence when the news wires carry stories of President Bush and Osama bin Laden both chastising Arab leaders on the same day. Here's Bush:

After basking in a showy celebration of America’s close ties with Israel, President Bush criticized other Middle East leaders on Sunday, prodding them to expand their economies, offer equal opportunity to women and embrace democracy if they want peace to become reality.

Here's bin Laden:

Osama bin Laden released a new message on Sunday denouncing Arab leaders for sacrificing the Palestinians and saying the head of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah did not really have the strength to take on Israel.

What's striking, besides the accuracy of both criticisms ("exploiting the Palestinians" would be closer to the truth), is the hostility they're bound to meet from the Arab leaders in question, suggesting that the only thing we've got going for us in terms of our Middle East policy these days is the lack of serious competition. 

President Bush went on to declare that peace in the Middle East was possible by the end of the year, but that it requires "tough sacrifices." For a more serious analysis of the situation, I recommend Jon Alterman's WPR piece on Bush's failed Middle East policy, but make sure to put on your welding goggles, because the thing's got sparks shooting off of it. Among the list of faulty assumptions Alterman identifies as having contributed to the failure, this one has probably gotten the least attention:

. . .[T]he conviction that among the most powerful tools that the U.S. government could use against its foes was withholding recognition and refusing dialogue. It is hard to find a single instance in which such boycotts were effective.

In a region where American support is a double-edged sword, that one should have been predictable. But accepting reality is apparently not among the "tough sacrifices" President Bush is willing to make.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   The Middle East   

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Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Saving Burma

Those suggesting we should conduct a "coercive humanitarian intervention" in Burma would do well to consider this, from a WaPo article that otherwise describes the junta's efforts to mask the country's underlying dysfunction:

The primary focus of the rulers is to ensure unity in a country with 130 ethnic groups, many of which have fought the military -- dominated by the Bamar ethnic majority -- for six decades.

The moral arguments for intervening in Burma are irrefutable. And in a world where decisions were made free of any practical considerations, they'd suffice. So while I can't really say I object to the idea of a "coercive humanitarian intervention," I do object to the way in which it's being proposed.

We've already seen what happens when you remove a violent, repressive regime that holds an ethnically volatile population together. Even if the kind of militarized relief efforts being proposed don't trigger a war whose outcome would spell the end of the Burmese regime, there is the non-negligible possibility that they would destabilize it to the point that the country slides into anarchy.

In other words, the argument that needs to be supported is not whether to provide relief to the victims of Cyclone Nargis, but whether to declare Burma an international protectorate, and engage in the nation-building operations that will necessitate. With the added condition that the entire operation will have to take place outside the auspices of the UN, with no help and probably a good deal of hostility from the part of Pekin.

Given the moral calculus involved, that's still an argument that can be legitimately defended. But we should be clear about the task we're taking on, and just how we intend to accomplish it.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   

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Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Obama and Soft Power

We've got an interesting discussion of Barack Obama's foreign policy agenda over at the World Politics Review blog. Hampton kicked it off with a critique of Obama's embrace of transformative soft power, to which Matthew Yglesias responded, drawing a response from both Hampton and myself. It's worth a read, because I think everyone raised some valid points.

Also, for anyone who's discovered Headline Junky recently, I do most of my posting weekdays at the WPR blog. So make sure to drop by. And while you're there, check out the rest of the site. The contributors are high-powered, and the range of subject matter is pretty incredible. And to get up on my soapbox a bit, it offers an outlet for writers who happen to work the lower-profile beats, as well as smart coverage for readers interested in parts of the world that get overlooked elsewhere. I know that there's something of an information glut out there, but that only means that smart sites like WPR should be rewarded.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   

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Friday, May 2, 2008

Middle Power Mojo

I got some pushback via email on this post about Turkey, and the idea of formulating American foreign policy to take advantage of the leverage offered by regional "Middle Powers." In particular, the question was raised whether having the same policy as Turkey vis à vis Iran is more important than preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and more generally whether harmonizing policy with our regional allies should trump our own policy goals. The short answer is no.

The longer answer is that the Turkey-Iran example is complicated by the fact that I think we're trying to impose a flawed tactic (sanctions), in order to achieve an unrealistic strategic goal (containment). And the result is that countries like Turkey, India, and Pakistan, to say nothing about China and Russia, are lukewarm at best. Now, I'm not at all naive about the Iranian regime, and I think that it would be a strategic disaster if it acquired a nuclear weapons capacity. Not for any existential threat it posed to Israel, and much less to us (because I think that Tehran is susceptible to strategic deterrence), but for the destabilizing impact it would have on regional and global non-proliferation. More importantly, it's a safe bet that the Turks have no burning desire to see a nuclear-armed Iran. For that matter, neither do the Russians.

So, to walk the whole thing back a bit, I'm suggesting two things. First, and this was the central argument of my post, we should focus on enlisting the key regional leverage points, which I called the "Middle Powers," to do the heavy lifting for us in terms of regional policy, because for a whole host of reasons, the lighter our footprint right now, the better. Second, to do that, we need to start by finding the common policy goals with our regional allies, and use that as the starting point for formulating policy. In the case of Iran, that would be preventing the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, but not necessarily containment. America is no longer in a position where it can impose unpopular policies on its regional allies, so we need to find ways to achieve our goals through generating consensus, not twisting arms.

A third point, but one that is more difficult to standardize, involves identifying regional players who have got their mojo (for lack of a better word) working and piggy back on their momentum. Turkey, for instance, has demonstrated a very impressive ability to achieve its foreign policy goals over the past several years. France under Sarkozy has shown a knack for picking winners. It would be foolish to let pride keep us from taking advantage of our friends' lucky streaks.

It goes against years of instinct and habit, but until we restore both our soft and hard power, American influence might be best applied by enlisting savvy and sympathetic Middle Powers, and then following their lead.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   Iran   Turkey   

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Thursday, May 1, 2008

Obsolete Trade-offs

Matthew Yglesias flags this remark by Randy Scheunemann, John McCain's top foreign policy aide, in the context of an interview on Georgia and U.S.-Russia relations:

Well, I think first of all the administration has said very clearly and publicly that there will be no trade-offs. Trade-offs like that are kind of a relic of a bygone era of power politics.

Yglesias then responds with a pretty heavy dose of snark:

That's right, he thinks the entire process of bargaining for mutual advantage that lies at the core of diplomacy -- and, indeed, of almost all constructive human interaction -- is a relic of a bygone era of power politics. In the brave new future, either the Russians give way on all points, or else we raise up the national missile defense system and it's bombs away.

Now, I'm not a big fan of John McCain's foreign policy proposals, in particular as regards Russia, so I'm probably closer to the broader lines of Yglesias' vision than those of Scheunemann. But I think Scheunemann might be right here, and Yglesias wrong, but for reasons that neither seem to recognize.

The Bush administration's stance on trade-offs that Scheunemann cites is based on the misguided notion that each dossier can somehow be approached "objectively," and decided on the merits, independently of other dossiers. From this perspective, trading off concessions on one dossier (e.g. Kosovo) against advantages on another (e.g. NATO expansion) is unnecessary, because each individual conflict will be resolved based on a universal (and universally accessible) standard of fairness and justice. That turns a willfully blind eye to the fact that interests often determine values, or at least the perception of values, and that no nation will willingly sacrifice its interests, much less its advantages, based on notions of right and wrong with which it either disagrees or believes are not equally applied.

Nevertheless (and this gets back to the point I made here about America being a necessary but no longer a sufficient power), as the potential configurations for sufficient multilateral coalitions multiply, each individual crisis will increasingly determine the particular coalition necessary to reach a tipping point for its resolution, independently of other crises. The proliferation of regional multilateral institutions to confer legitimacy on a coalition-based intervention, for instance, will increasingly dilute the veto-power of the permanent Security Council nations. Obviously, there will still be overlap; Russia's stance on Georgia can only be understood as a reaction to Kosovo's declaration of independence. But the opportunities for blocking diplomatic progress that make trade-offs necessary and possible will become increasingly rare as the available detours around them become more accessible.

This kind of strategic environment almost demands that trade-offs be replaced by short memories and the ability to compartmentalize both crisis interventions and conflict resolutions, in order to resist the inherently destabilizing effect such a fluidity of tactical alliances might have. The alternatives, whether to impose a declining American hegemony or to resist the emergence of alternate avenues of consensus, are simply no longer possible.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   International Relations   

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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

The Limits of Military Power

There's a discussion this week over at TPMCafe of Matthew Yglesias' imminently available book, Heads in the Sand. It focuses on Yglesias' vision of a "liberal internationalism," by which he means the forward leaning diplomatic engagement, under the auspices of a multi-lateral system of institutions and laws, that characterized American foreign policy throughout the Cold War. Specifically, on his blog, Yglesias has targeted the use of pre-emptive war as an effective non-proliferation strategy.

I call attention to it not only because it's an interesting discussion, but also because it folds in nicely with this short monograph (.pdf) by Carl Connetta, which I found on the Projects on Defense Alternatives website, and which serves as something of a backstory to Yglesias' argument. Connetta points out that, starting with the First Gulf War, America has become seduced by the image of a surgical, omnipotent military capacity.

. . .Back in April 2003, flush with the illusion of victory, President Bush had asserted that:

By a combination of creative strategies and advanced technologies, we are redefining war on our terms. In this new era of warfare, we can target a regime, not a nation.

This is the "new warfare hypothesis" and it did not originate with President Bush. It has helped shape US thinking about the utility of force since the 1990-1991 Gulf War. . .

This is the image that Donald Rumsfeld tried to impose not only on the invasion of Iraq, but on the Army in general. And I think possibly before the ideological and strategic explanations that Yglesias offers for recent American interventionism, but at the very least in addition to them, this tempting image of military power as a clean and efficient policy tool accounts for a great deal of the temptation to use it as a panacea to what otherwise would be considered problems in need of a political solution.

I've discussed the growing militarization of stabilization and humanitarian operations before. Connetta points out that pre-emptive threat prevention, too, used to be the diplomats' bailiwick:

In the past, threat prevention and "environment shaping" were largely in the purview of the State Department. But a feature of our post-Cold War practice has been the increasing intrusion of the Pentagon on the provinces of State. Parallel to this, diplomatic functions have been increasingly militarized. Thus, today, coercive diplomacy plays a bigger role relative to traditional "give-and-take" diplomacy. Similarly, "offensive counter-proliferation" -- that is, arms control by means of bombardment -- has grown in importance relative to non-proliferation efforts. Even US programs in support of democratization and development have gained a khaki tint.

The outcomes in both Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated that military power remains a blunt instrument, with unpredictable and costly consequences. Even given the narrowest and most clearly defined missions, it rarely achieves unassailable outcomes (consider that the Iraq War has been in part explained by the failure to topple Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War).

But not only have we expanded the mission set considerably, it's also become commonplace in policy discussions to concede the need to grow the military. The perverse logic, as Connetta points out, consists of demanding a greater capacity without questioning what it ought to be used for:

. . .What we have demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the most powerful nation on earth, unobstructed by a peer rival, commanding 22 percent of the world product, and consuming 50 percent of all defense spending cannot -- in six years -- bring a modicum of stability to two countries containing just 1 percent of the world’s population. . .

These outcomes might and should teach us something useful about the limits on the utility of military power.

Both Yglesias and Connetta demonstrate the way in which the American foreign policy discourse has been overtly militarized. Part of that has to do with the domestic political residue of the Vietnam War and the rise in the 1990's of the liberal hawk movement as a response (one of Yglesias' central theses), part of it has to do with the Pentagon's bureaucratic imperative to grow, and part of it has to do with the very real trauma of the attacks of 9/11. The key point is that the military has done everything we've asked it to do, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem is not so much that we haven't given it what it needs to accomplish the task, although that is certainly the case, but that we've asked it to do too much to begin with.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   

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Thursday, March 6, 2008

The Real Impact Of 9/11

A month is a long time in the era of online news and opinion, but I just stumbled on a Project on Defense Alternatives monograph from back in February that's really worth a mention. Carl Conetta makes a pretty convincing argument that the major significance of 9/11 was political, not strategic, and that the true historical pivot point of our time remains the fall of the Soviet Union.

Conetta begins with the paradox of American military primacy in the post-Cold War era. This nugget is enough to make any foreign policy writer green with envy:

With Soviet collapse, America won a windfall in a currency of power that - because of Soviet collapse - was simultaneously devalued.

He also makes the good point that while the 90's saw the birth of the liberal hawk movement, the embrace of American military intervention was far from universal, and often faded soon after the initial engagement with the enemy:

The disappearance of the Soviet threat also made it difficult to form a stable US domestic consensus on overseas military activism. During the 1990s, almost every contingency operation - Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kosovo - quickly became a point of acute contention. Outside the context of the global East-West struggle, America's security stakes in many far-flung conflicts seemed attenuated. Neither the notion of "humanitarian interests" nor that of "important if not vital interests" were sufficient to quell dissent. . .

Conetta articulates a three-point plan for developing domestic political consensus for military activism abroad in the post-WWII era, one that bears a remarkable resemblance to the selling of the Iraq War:

• First, the national security stakes in foreign involvements must be perceived as real, present, and substantial;
• Second, the United States must retain freedom of action abroad. In alliance or other multinational endeavors, it must possess a distinct leadership role; and,
• Third, the modes of action must be perceived as "decisive" - that is: perceived as likely to yield clear, positive results. . . In military operations, it implies the demand for clear, invariant objectives and for using overwhelming force to win them quickly.

This gets us to the crux of Conetta's argument, namely that 9/11 changed everything not in the world, but in American public opinion:

What made a more energetic and proactive interventionary policy broadly acceptable within the United States was the 9/11 attacks - together with the initial impression that the US armed forces would be used in ways best suited to their capabilities. What has proved far less acceptable - and, indeed, has been the Bush administration's undoing - is the desultory occupation duties that followed the initial, conventional victories in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Concetta goes on to argue that the failure of the nation-building experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate the fallacy of America's post-9/11 conception of military intervention:

What the next US administration can learn from this is that the "war on terrorism" framework, together with popular fears about the spread of weapons of mass destruction, can enable greater military activism, but only of a certain type: fast and decisive. An entirely different matter are protracted campaigns of occupation and those that either seem detached from clear security threats or seem to diverge from the warfghting model. It is disconcerting, then, that the American policy "center" seems to be trending away from a recognition of this lesson. Instead, it is gravitating to a putative midpoint between the Clinton and Bush administration positions.

By this he means the kinds of "peace and stability operations" (PSO's) that are now commonly referred to as nation-building. He wraps up by summarizing the true cost of not accurately assessing the failure of our recent military interventionism:

This failure points to a more fundamental one: seized by a sense of military primacy, we have failed to appreciate the difference and the distance between achieving military effects and achieving political-strategic ones.

This paragraph in particular jumped out at me, because it seems to encapsulize the national security debate embodied by an Obama-McCain presidential campaign:

In light of America's misadventure in Iraq - its great costs and poor results - it seems unlikely that the US public will be easily won [over] to attempt similar experiments on a grander scale. Not even the "war on terrorism" or the notion of a "global Islamic insurgency" seem sufficient motivators.

Clearly, McCain is running on the assumption that Iraq still satisfies the three-point checklist Connetta articulates above. Obama (and, to a lesser extent, Clinton) makes the case that the predominant challenge facing America is the political-strategic aftermath of the Iraq War, rather than the (mistaken) national security threat that lead to our invasion. The national security aspect of the campaign will boil down to which of the two competing narratives the American voters embrace.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   Iraq   

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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Foreign Policy And The Press

There's been a lot of back and forth about David Signer's WaPo piece this weekend taking the major media to task for ignoring foreign policy in its coverage of the presidential campaign. Ilan Goldenberg at Democracy Arsenal has got all the links and some original insights that warrant a glance.

I'd add that part of the problem has to do not with a lack of interest so much as a sense even among journalists that foreign policy is better left to experts and the specialized press. Most people are comfortable discussing the political calculus of tax cuts, even if they aren't economists. Same goes for universal healthcare or education reform and a whole host of other domestic policy issues. But how many people really have an opinion on the expansion of NATO into Russia's periphery, or the best way to counter Chavez-style neo-Bolivarism in South America? Both foreign and domestic policy have concrete impacts on the lives of the end consumer of the news, but the former (outside of the big ticket items) are often more indirect than the latter, and more difficult to trace.

I'm also not sure how relevant it is to talk about foreign policy when what we really mean is a multitude of foreign policies, some broad and regional, others more narrow and local. Ideally they form a coherent strategic whole, but sometimes the result ends up being something of a patchwork of contingency and convenience that combines to offer a least bad rather than an ideal approach. While Matthew Yglesias is right in saying that the president has far greater control over foreign policy than domestic policy, it is often in the form of reacting to events on the ground rather than formulating and implementing a grand strategy. Which leaves me somewhat immune to foreign policy white papers and addresses, as well as the coverage they might inspire.

Meanwhile, although the major media has been remiss in this regard, the foreign policy press has been doing its job. Case in point is Ximena Ortiz's rundown of the three remaining candidates' foreign policy records, statements and agendas. None of them gets off easy, but Barack Obama scores some points for owning up to it when he changes his position. Worth a read.

Cross-posted to World Politics Review.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   Media Coverage   

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Friday, February 22, 2008

An Officer And A Gentleman: The Return Of American Militarism

I'd been meaning to write a piece yesterday about what I thought was my very insightful observation that this week's events in Kosovo serve as a sort of bookend for the "liberal hawk" movement that began with the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia and later passed through Afghanistan and Iraq, with less than stellar results. But Matthew Yglesias already got there in this American Prospect piece.

So instead I'm going to put the "liberal hawk" dynamic into the broader context of the rehabilitation of war as a foreign policy tool in the post-Viet Nam era, a theme which will allow me to trot out for the first time my "An Officer and a Gentleman" theory of American military renewal.

Of course, liberals were the last to sign on to the idea that America could use its military as a positive force in the world, and it took the crisis of conscience of the Yugoslavian tragedy to push them over the edge. The rest of the country had been seduced by the precision missiles and video game graphics of Operation Desert Storm. But it's easy to forget that before American triumphalism (reborn) could reach the sands of Kuwait, it had to pass through the moral vacuum of El Salvador and Nicaragua, the slapstick shores of Granada, and the cocaine-fueled police action in Panama.

The halting and tenuous progression from covert operation to training exercise to limited ground assault over the course of a decade illustrates the degree to which it would have been inconceivable in 1980 -- the year that Ronald Reagan proclaimed Morning in America* -- to deploy the American military (upon which any American resurgence depended) in a grand campaign. Not just because the nation would not have stood for it. The kids just weren't having it. Running against Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n Roll for possession of the cannon fodder generation's soul, the old military virtues of discipline and self-sacrifice weren't polling so high.

Enter Richard Gere, tattooed and shaggy haired, on a motorcycle. Like the bastard child of Easy Rider, he's an outcast and a misfit, only instead of heading out to the counter-cultural frontier with its now-discredited promise of freedom and transcendence, he has turned back for one last chance to come in from the cold: OCS, Officer Candidate School. Upon his arrival, Gere's nemesis, Louis Gossett Jr., summarizes the moral calculus that has brought the candidates and the country to where they now find themselves: while he, Gossett Jr., was serving his country in Vietnam, they were off getting high. Now it's time for penance.

The rest of the movie, down to the theme song performed by a newly rehabbed Joe Cocker (Joe Cocker, for crine out loud), is a brutal rejection of the excesses of the wayward left during the Sixties. Love no longer ushers in the Age of Aquarious. It lifts us up to where eagles -- and not doves -- fly. David Keith's repressed perversion immediately signals him as the film's "hidden threat". And sure enough, it's his ultimate awakening to his "real self" (that Holy Grail of the self-actualized generation) that gives the movie its tragic turn, since it turns out that his "real self" is nowhere near as compelling for the town girl he's been romancing as his officer's bars.

Richard Gere, on the other hand, knows better than to let anything as insignificant as his authentic self (a seething cocktail of self-absorption and inferiority complex) get in the way of accomplishing the task at hand. And the task at hand is to restore the image of the military's patriarchal values, in this case by kicking Louis Gossett Jr.'s ass (actually his balls) in an Oedipal coming-of-age ritual, and by making military dress uniforms look sexy again. By the time he returns to the factory to sweep Debra Winger off her feet and onto the back of his motorcycle, he has embraced the value of the Army's tough love. Whereas the previous generation had let it all hang out, Gere rides off with the girl because he has learned how to suck it up.

A year after the film's release, American forces were braving the dangerous shores of Grenada. The long march that would culminate in the rise of the liberal hawks had begun.

*Thanks to Justin, I stand corrected. (Morning in America was actually Reagan's campaign theme in 1984.) See comments for why I left it in the post.

Posted by Judah in:  Arts & Letters   Foreign Policy   

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Monday, February 18, 2008

Back To Nationalism

Via Laura Rozen, President Bush has recognized Kosovo's independence and will officially establish diplomatic relations. So there you have it.

Paris, London, Rome and Berlin have also all moved rapidly to "avoid creating a vacuum with indecisive behavior," according to German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. But despite having unanimously approved a support mission including police and judicial training teams, as well as maintaining the 15,000 strong KFOR deployment, the EU has left it up to member states to determine their position individually, due to internal divisions on the question. Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia are opposed to formal recognition due to fears that it might set a precedent for their own separatist minorities.

That's the beauty of the EU (a collective sovereignty or a collection of sovereignties, depending on the need of the moment) but also its internal contradiction, which yesterday's Le Monde editorial described well:

It remains no less the case that Europe is playing against type. Founded to transcend nationalisms, it now gives the impression that it's rewarding Kosovar nationalism. In the name of what will it then oppose the self-determination of the Serbs...of Northern Kosovo, or even that of the Serbs...in Bosnia-Herzegovina? (Translated from the French.)

Le Monde went on to point out that if this is to be the conclusion -- rather than a new chapter -- of the instability in the Balkans, then all of Europe will have to invest politically, especially to present Serbia with the image of a European consolation prize to make up for its current loss.

Posted by Judah in:  European Union   Foreign Policy   International Relations   

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Monday, February 18, 2008

Homer Simpson Diplomacy

Without getting into any of the more substantial aspects of Kosovo's declaration of independence, one thing seems pretty straightforward about the timing of the announcement: it sucks. Setting aside for a moment the merits of the case (and I think there are valid arguments on both sides of the issue), the Kosovo negotiations have been dragging on for years. Stretching them out for another month or two would not have meaningfully changed anything, except to avoid pissing off Russia and China (both opposed to the move) on the eve of a decisive Iran sanctions resolution. In a complicated geopolitical landscape, it's a good rule of thumb to steer clear of the inherently avoidable landmines. D'oh.

Update: By the way, in case you're wondering why China is opposed to Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence, the answer lies just across the Taiwan Strait.

Posted by Judah in:  European Union   Foreign Policy   International Relations   

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Friday, January 25, 2008

We Try Harder

That's the ad campaign that Avis launched in the early sixties to turn its no. 2 position in the rent-a-car business into a strength:

The results were dramatic…

In 1962, just before the first 'We try harder' ads launched, Avis was an unprofitable company with 11% of the car rental business in the USA. Within a year of launching the campaign Avis was making a profit, and by 1966 Avis had tripled its market share to 35%.

It's the first thing I thought of when I saw that Chinese President Hu Jintao had met with the chairman of Kazakhstan's senate on the latter's state visit to China. Now it's not surprising that China would want to provide a warm welcome to its neighbor, especially its neighbor that ranks eleventh in the world in both gas and oil reserves. But a president giving face time to the visiting senate leader of a "minor country" is almost a breach of diplomatic protocol, and it's the sort of thing that's hard to imagine an American president doing, even though the impact of the gesture is undoubtedly significant.

On a related note, compare the travel itineraries of President Bush, who just made his first visit to the Middle East after seven years as president, to Nicolas Sarkozy, who in less than a year has visited the Middle East, North Africa, China and now India, signing major contracts and nuclear cooperation agreements everywhere he goes, and vastly improving France's strategic position in the process. The president of the United States might very well be the most powerful person on earth, but that shouldn't get in the way of trying hard.

Posted by Judah in:  China   Foreign Policy   La France Politique   

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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Balancing Resolve With Restraint

In a monograph for the Army War College, Nobel prize-winning economist Roger Myerson uses game theory to explain why, contrary to the assumptions of the Bush administration's doctrine of unilateralism, reinforcing multilateral institutions and subsequently respecting the restraints they place on American use of force reinforces the effectiveness of American deterrence. A policy balancing resolve (the willingness to respond to aggression) with restraint (the willingness to accept limits on the use of force) provides the necessary disincentives to aggression while maintaining the incentives for cooperation. If, on the other hand, a country knows it's going to catch hell whether it cooperates with the US or not, it has no incentive to cooperate.

The key, according to Myerson, is a reliable reputation for reasonable restraint among the international community. Our promises of restraint must not only be as clearly communicated as our threats of military action, they need to be as credible as well:

Thus, if we want our application of military force to deter our potential adversaries, rather than stimulate them to more militant reactions against us, then we should make sure that the limits of our forceful actions are clear to any potential adversaries. We need a reputation for responding forcefully against aggression, but we also need a reputation for restraining our responses within clear limits that depend in a generally recognized way on the nature of the provocation. These limits must be clear to our potential adversaries, who must be able to verify that we are adhering to the limits of our deterrent strategy, because it is they whom we are trying to influence and deter. (p. 21)

In the light of Myerson's analysis, the idea that America must at times submit its use of force to the judgment of the international arena takes on a central evaluative function:

When Americans judge our leaders for effectiveness in foreign policy, the central question should be how our policy is perceived by the foreigners whom we want to influence and deter. Letting these foreigners judge our reputation for adhering to our deterrent strategy can help us to guarantee its credibility. So a policy of submitting American military actions to international judgment and restraint can actually make America more secure. (p. 23)

Myerson's theoretical models reinforce a recurring sentiment in foreign policy circles that American foreign policy is in need of a corrective period of restraint. It's also comforting to know that the multi-lateral system works on a theoretical level to deter conflict in an increasingly multi-polar world. With any luck the Bush doctrine will soon be squarely behind us, and the suggestion that we should be formulating our deterrent policy based at least in part on the perceptions of those we're trying to deter will no longer be portrayed as a lack of resolve, but as an abundance of wisdom.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   International Relations   

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Monday, January 21, 2008

Narrower Than Zero

The LA Times has a sadly comic article on how the Bush administration is now narrowing its "foreign policy horizons" for its last year in office. Apparently, instead of magically solving all of the problems he either created or ignored, President Bush has decided it might just be better to play out the clock and let someone with more competence handle them come 2009.

One administration official claimed that they're still aiming high, but aded, "What you can do versus what you end up doing is always different." In this case, they can't do much and will end up doing less. But I guess that's what you get when you elect a guy president whose only travel abroad was a beer run into Tijuana.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   

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Friday, January 18, 2008

The End Of Deterrence

Recently reports surfaced that Pakistan had used huge chunks of American cash grants to procure military hardware better suited to a conventional conflict with India than to the counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations the money had been earmarked for. The obvious conclusion was that as long as Pakistan feels more threatened by India than it does by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the problem on the Afghan border will remain a low priority in Islamabad. Another obvious conclusion was that a coherent American policy in the region would be to encourage to the greatest degree possible a detente between the two nuclear-armed countries, thereby progressively freeing Pakistan up to concentrate on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency.

Instead, Lockheed Martin is in discussions with New Delhi to help the Indians polish off their homegrown ballistic missile defense system. The system, once perfected, would effectively counter the threat of both Pakistan's and China's strategic forces, destabilizing what's already a precarious regional balance of power and possibly provoking a nuclear weapons build-up. Of course, America could not very credibly try to dissuade India from developing its own missile defense system, given our own insistence on dismantling the ABM regime. But we shouldn't be helping them put the finishing touches on it either.

The issue brings into focus one of the less-covered developments of the past seven years. The attacks of 9/11 demonstrated how non-state actors could use assymetric tactics to render conventional deterrence useless. Simultaneously, the Bush administration has worked tirelessly to render conventional deterrence between state actors obsolete. The net result is a world in which the threat environment has dramatically proliferated and diversified, and the disincentives to using force have been dramatically reduced. Either one would be alarming. The two together are potentially catastrophic.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   India   Pakistan   

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Friday, January 18, 2008

French Touch

Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias have both flagged the news that France has just signed an agreement with the UAE to establish a permanent military base just across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran. Kevin cites Marc Lynch, who writes:

Early spin has suggested that this will allow France to better cooperate with the US against Iran, but this seems shortsighted. A long-term French strategic position in the Gulf challenges American exclusivity, and potentially undermines the fundamental architecture of the hegemonic American position in the Gulf. (Link included from original.)

Matthew suggests that the latter might be a good thing, in that it will re-balance the dysfunctional relationship between American military commitments and European strategic interests.

The fact is, there's a bit of all three going on. The base in question is for the moment largely symbolic given its limited size and the fact that it won't be operational for a year at least. But its location at the bottleneck of the Strait of Hormuz and very close to Iran does in fact constitute a pressure point on Tehran. That France happens to be the most forceful and most credible advocate right now for preventing Iran from developing a nuclear fuel enrichment capacity is significant. Their position is not so much in alignment with ours on Iran so much as it is an ideal version of what ours should have been from the start: Clear-sighted, non-hysterical, with firm demands and rewarding incentives.

On the other hand, as I argued on the very first day of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency, he has a very ambitious vision for France's role in the world, and he's pretty savvy about getting what he wants. As for the French presence he's establishing, it's not limited to the military and it's not limited to the Gulf. Sarkozy has been using a nuclear energy foreign policy to establish France's strategic position throughout the Arab world. In the eight months since he took office, he has already signed civil nuclear cooperation agreements with Morocco, Libya, Algeria, and the UAE, while offering assistance to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Significantly, this is in direct opposition to the American line of discouraging the proliferation of civil nuclear capacity in the Middle East, especially in the circumstances now surrounding the Iranian standoff.

So while Matthew is correct in suggesting that Europe in general and France in particular having the capacity to put their military money where their mouth is will balance the trans-Atlantic relationship, that will in effect be a development that lessens America's strategic leverage in the world. In other words, good-by to the world's reluctant policeman, hello to the long-announced French vision of the multi-polar world. This isn't going to happen overnight, but it is definitely the way Sarkozy would like to see things develop.

That it's ineluctable does not necessarily mean that it will be advantageous to the US. The alternative, however, of an America that serves as the military firewall to all the world's brushfires, is no longer sustainable.

Posted by Judah in:  European Union   Foreign Policy   La France Politique   The Middle East   

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Wooing Ankara

I once wondered whether the loss of Turkey might end up being the worst strategic outcome of the Iraq War. It looks like that was a bit premature, as American-Turkish relations have thawed out considerably in the aftermath of last November's meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Erdogan. A great deal of that has to do with the operational agreement they reached to help Turkey target the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan.

But if the PKK is the high profile issue that drove the headlines, the subtext of this rapprochement is the "Turkey-USA-Iraq trilateral energy working group", a seriously underreported initiative on the part of the Bush administration to win back Ankara's goodwill. Basically it amounts to an attempt to pry Turkey away from its flirtation with the Russian-Iranian energy-based tactical alliance with the promise of a central role in the development and distribution of Iraqi oil and gas reserves. It's also part of a larger package dating back to last March by which Turkey would become a regional energy hub connecting the European gas grid with Eurasian supplies, and making Turkey the point of transit for 6-7% of the world's daily oil consumption by 2012.

But it gets more interesting. Turkey has long had plans for developing a domestic nuclear energy program. Apparently there are now discussions in the works for turning it into a regional uranium enrichment hub. A meeting this Friday in Instanbul on the matter will be attended by representatives of the IAEA, the US, Russia, France and the UK.

Of course, a lot of the plan depends on whether Turkey and the US manage to address the PKK issue without alienating the Kurds, as well as on whether the US can keep Iraq from falling apart. But all in all it's a deal that ought to keep Ankara happy.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   Turkey   

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Pipeline Diplomacy

Contrary to what an article I cited yesterday claimed, The New Anatolian reports that Russia did in fact increase its gas deliveries to Turkey to make up for the shortfall resulting from the shutdown of its Iranian pipeline. It also reported that following discussions between Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and Iranian President Ahamdinejad, Iran's deliveries should be back to normal come Monday.

Still, there are a lot of reasons to think this whole episode had more to do with regional jockeying than with the weather, although as always with pipeline diplomacy, that served as an excuse. Not much mention was made in the American press of the American proposal that Turkey serve as a regional energy hub for Iraqi and Eurasian energy traffic, but I think it's a huge development, central to the way the Bush administration envisions the short-term strategic alignment in the region: using a combination of energy-poor Turkey and energy-rich Iraq and Azerbaijan to counter Russia's influence in Eurasian energy markets and Iran's expansion in the Middle East.

The sticking point had been the PKK, but the Kurds are above all else businessmen. And since Turkey is already the largest investor in Iraqi Kurdistan, they've got a lot of incentive to let Turkey and the US take care of the PKK, so that afterwards they can all take care of business.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   Iran   Iraq   Russia   Turkey   

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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Sending It Down The Line

Just before New Year's, Turkmenistan shut down the gas pipeline supplying Iran with 5% of its domestic consumption. The reason was ostensibly technical malfunctions, but the malfunctions have oddly enough not yet been repaired. As the shutdown coincides with a fierce cold front that has gripped the region and sent temperatures plummeting, Iran in turn all but shut down the pipeline that supplies Turkey with roughly the same amount of Iranian gas that Iran imports from Turkmenistan. Russia, which has in the past made up Turkey's gas shortfalls, in this case not only refused, but suggested it would be forced to reduce its deliveries as well, due to a supply shortage.

The entire episode demonstrates either, a) the ways in which weather can impact on international relations; or b) the complex energy calculus underlying, and at times working at cross-purposes to, some of the strategic re-alignments in the region. And for a number of reasons, not least of which being that this is not a weather forecasting site, I'm going to go with "b".

For a little background, Russia recently secured a contract with Turkmenistan for its gas reserves. The deal was considered a serious blow to American and Western European hopes for securing Turkmenistan's gas supplies independently of Russia. It was also part of what some suggested was a broader cartel strategy by which Russia and Iran would carve up the gas market: Western Europe for Russia; Asia for Iran. Tehran's imminent pipeline and purchase deal with Pakistan, as well as its negotiations with China and India to develop domestic gas and oil fields can be understood in this context.

But the same deal between Russia and Turkmenistan is also the source of this week's rolling pipeline shutdown, because Russia agreed to pay twice the price that Turkmenistan gets from Iran, and the "technical malfunctions" notwithstanding, it's no secret that Turkmenistan is looking to renegotiate with Tehran.

As for Turkey, it's also no secret that both Iran and Russia were counting on taking advantage of recent tension between Ankara and Washington to forge closer relations with Turkey. Both Iran's decision to pass the gas shortage down the line and Russia's decision to sit on its hands coincide with the recent rapprochement between Ankara and Washington, culminated by President Bush's warm reception of Turkish President Abdullah Gul two days ago at the White House. The visit was the occasion not only to reaffirm America's strategic relationship with Turkey, but also to roll out a very ambitious role for Turkey as a regional energy hub for both Iraqi and Eurasian gas and oil reserves.

As the episode demonstrates, none of these tactical alliances are stable. The entire region is in a flux, and it's not at all clear how things will settle in the long run. The uncertainty, while volatile and unfamiliar, can also be used to our advantage, should we adopt an intelligent and flexible strategic approach. Our enemies and rivals of today might turn out to be, if not our friends of tomorrow, at least useful leverage points.

One thing is certain. There's a bunch of Greeks freezing their souvlakis off who had nothing to do with this whole mess.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   Iran   Russia   Turkey   

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Thursday, January 3, 2008

Guns And Butter

It's worth keeping in mind that, while American concern focuses on the twists and turns of the investigation into Benazir Bhutto's assassination and how secure Pakistan's nuclear installations are, Pakistanis are just as concerned about a national wheat shortage and electricity outages due to power supply not meeting demand. In other words, the daily challenges of life in a developing country.

With all the attention I give here on the site to geopolitical strategy, this is a good opportunity to point out that development aid can and should play an essential role in our national security posture. The fact that a country which has benefitted from $10 billion dollars in American aid over the past six years is experiencing a wheat shortage demonstrates a shortsightedness not only on the part of Islamabad, but also on the part of Washington.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   

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Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Musical Chairs

I make it a habit, during media-dominating events like the Iowa caucuses or the Bhutto assassination, to keep an eye on some of last month's crises, like the Turkey-PKK conflict or the Iranian nuclear standoff. The idea being that some interesting things occur when the world's attention is diverted. And sure enough, today it was reported that Saeed Jalili, the man Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appointed to head Iran's nuclear negotiating team last month, just reshuffled the rest of the team to include two Ahmadinejad loyalists. The move is sure to harden the Iranian negotiating position in future rounds of talks.

In other news out of that part of the world, a region-wide game of musical chairs has broken out, only instead of chairs, they're playing for gas supplies. Apparently Turkmenistan closed off the pipelines ensuring Iran's domestic supply, which led Iran to severely limit its exports to Turkey to cover the shortfall. Turkmenistan blamed the shutdown on technical complications, but the entire episode brings into stark focus Iran's curious status as an energy importing country, despite sitting on oceans of gas and oil reserves.

Both developments play out against the backdrop of the "pipeline wars" going on in the region. Russia just sealed a deal for a pipeline linking Turkmenistan's gas supply to Europe, while China and India are busy lobbying for the right to develop Iranian gas and oil fields. Throw in Iran's recent pipeline deal with Pakistan and you've got the guiding logic behind the tactical alliance between Russia and Iran: the European gas market for Russia, the Asian market for Iran, even if both countries are in need of renewed investment to fully exploit their reserves.

But if their energy alliance incarnates the threat posed by the emerging multi-polar world to America's interests, it also represents the opportunities presented. In the same way that the end of the bi-polar world order removes the necessity of aligning with the United States, it also removes the necessity of aligning against us. In the context of an aggressive American posture, Russia and Iran seem like natural bosom buddies. But a shift in American policy towards either could just as easily provoke their latent rivalry.

Perhaps the biggest foreign policy mistake committed by the Bush administration, besides the Iraq War, is believing that we could afford to contain both Russia and Iran at the same time. One or the other, or one then the other. But not both at once.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   Iran   Russia   

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Wednesday, January 2, 2008

The Engagement's Off

Nicolas Sarkozy raised eyebrows last month when he dispatched two top advisors to Damascus in an effort to engage Syria on resolving the Lebanese presidential standoff. Sarkozy claimed at the time that he'd gotten Washington's tacit approval on the initiative. The move was at best a gamble and at worst an act of desperation, trading off the enhanced prestige it would lend to Syria for a face-saving outcome to France's months-long effort to mediate the crisis.

In the end, the continued failure to arrive at an agreement -- which this week led to a tit-for-tat series of declarations from Paris and Damascus announcing the suspension of cooperation -- amounts to a confirmation that Syria's influence in the region can't be wished away. On the other hand, those who have criticized the Bush administration for failing to engage Syria (and I count myself among that group) need to acknowledge that engagement is a tactic, not a strategy, and that for it to work, there needs to be willingness on both sides of the table to reach an agreement.

Meanwhile Lebanon remains without a President.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   La France Politique   The Middle East   

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Monday, December 31, 2007

Hammers And Nails

Ever since I read this Matthew Yglesias post about America's fixation on political personalities -- in this case Benazir Bhutto -- in determining its foreign policy, the following phrase has been buzzing around in my head: History might be determined by leaders, but policy is determined by interests. Of course, notwithstanding her checkered past and her uncertain democratic bona fides as a leader, Benazir Bhutto did, in fact, represent the best bet for American interests in Pakistan. In fact, according to some analysts, her vocal support for a hardline against Islamic extremists and openness to American military operations in the Pakistan-Afghan border area were more likely to get her elected in Washington than in Islamabad.

But the related question, which Steve Clemons raised here (see the Brzezinski quote), is what role America should play in the internal politics of other countries. The question itself has only limited application. Obviously, when France or England (or Portugal for that matter) choose their head of state, America doesn't exert its influence one way or the other. We wait for the electoral outcome and adapt to the winner. If it's someone we're comfortable with, so much the better. If not, we make due.

But then there's a whole slew of countries where America feels it has both the capacity and the obligation to intervene. The former, as demonstrated by events in Pakistan, is debatable. The latter is a legacy of the Cold War, where American interests were calculated in the context of a US-Soviet zero-sum game. The immediate consequence of 9/11 was to provide a needed replacement for the Cold War logic of American intervention, putting an end to America's brief flirtation with the idea of a post-American global order, where the "reluctant policeman" would somehow enforce the world's interests as opposed to its own. The world that emerged on September 12, 2001 had suddenly been re-polarized along the paranoid/hysterical neocon faultline of "us vs. them".

Over the past six years, our efforts to force the world's multi-polar pegs into bi-polar holes have led to a string of strategic miscalculations. At the same time that we've abandoned efforts to re-construct and solidify failed states, we've interfered with, undermined or overthrown functioning, if abhorrent, ones. Now it's time to apply more intelligence and restraint to our foreign policy. We still have regional interests around the globe, and we should still advance them forcefully. But we need to begin with the assumption that we can determine neither the leadership nor the policy priorities of the countries we're dealing with. There are just too many moving pieces and the necessary logic to organize them all into a coherent whole is too complex.

As the old saw would have it, when all you've got is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. It's perhaps understandable that the trauma and shock of 9/11 caused America, in looking at all the varied tools in its kit, to see only hammers. Somewhere in there, there's an old forgotten jigsaw that we could probably use right about now. But it might even be too limiting to think of our foreign policy as a toolbox. What we need today is more a maestro's baton.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   

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Sunday, December 23, 2007

The Global Awakening

Kevin Drum already took care of what the Maliki government's promise to disband armed Sunni groups once they've calmed "restive areas" means for our efforts at establishing a stable Iraqi state. So I'll limit my observations to the fact that defining "Awakened" as "pointing the weapons you bought with our money at somebody other than us" is obviously incompatible with the notion of a central government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Our enthusiasm for it as a method reveals not only the legal fiction that is the current Iraqi central government, but also our acceptance that arriving at a more legitimate replacement will almost certainly require the outbreak of a full-scale Iraqi Civil War.

On a broader level, though, the Anbar Awakening model needs to be understood as part of an emerging temptation in American foreign policy circles to accept the fragmentation of multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian states to their lowest common denominator. An outright Iraqi Civil War will almost certainly result in the partition of Iraq into three separate states, even if the degree to which they'll be federated remains to be seen. That's the direction the Anbar Awakening model leads to, and that's how it needs to be understood when it's proposed for defusing the insurgencies in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The problem in Iraq is similar to that of Kosovo, namely that there are other regional powers that have interests diametrically opposed to ours. Just as Russia has its reasons to oppose the Western-backed unilateral declaration of independence in Kosovo, so do Turkey and Iran have vested interests in preventing the emergence of a Kurdish region that increasingly resembles an independent nation-state. The same can be said for Pakistan and Iran vis a vis Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas.

America's fatigue with nation-building is understandable. But if accepting the atomization of failed states simply displaces the instability of local conflicts to the regional rivalries between global power, we run the risk of trading shortterm tactical convenience for longterm strategic advantage.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   International Relations   Iraq   

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Friday, December 21, 2007

Let's You And Him Fight

In an Asia Times Online article, M K Bhadrakumar argues that Russia's tactical alliance with Iran must principally be understood in the context of the rivalry between Washington and Moscow for Eurasian energy supplies and transit points. Specifically, Europe's growing dependence on gas that either comes from or travels through Russia runs the risk of splintering the strategic interests of the Atlantic alliance. That's why Washington has been intent on encircling and containing Russia's resurgence, and Moscow on tightening its grip on gas fields and pipelines leading to Europe.

Iran represents a potential wedge, since by directing their gas supplies to the European market they weaken Russia's leverage. Russia's cooperative line with Tehran on bi-lateral energy policy is designed to divide the pie (Russian gas to Europe, Iranian gas to Asia) in such a way to maximize both countries' influence and triangulate America's strategic alliances.

But nothing about the Russian-Iranian tactical arrangement gives the impression that it's an indelible longterm alignment. So strategically, it seems intuitively obvious that Washington's got to decide on one of two options: either a broad deal with Russia, or a broad deal with Iran. But to ratchet up the pressure on both of them simultaneously will surely result in driving them even further into each other's arms.

Which leads me to wonder if American strategic thinking isn't at a natural disadvantage compared to countries where instead of a two-party system in domestic politics, there are multi-party parliamentary coalitions that make a political calculus of "You're either with us or against us" inconceivable.

Posted by Judah in:  Foreign Policy   Iran   Russia   

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Thursday, December 20, 2007

NATO In Afghanistan And Beyond

This Middle East Times editorial on NATO's faltering efforts in Afghanistan is throught-provoking for the questions it raises (and largely leaves unanswered) about the broader impact the alliance's first out-of-theater deployment might have on its future. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Afghanistan seemed like an ideal test-case to define the post-Cold War NATO's role as a multi-lateral global security organization.

Six years later, with the mission having evolved from nation-building to a counter-insurgency campaign that is fraying the alliance's cohesion and commitment, that initial optimism seems near-sighted. And while most attention has focused on how the lack of resource commitment on the part of member nations has limited the campaign's effectiveness, less has been paid to the structural problems that plague the NATO/ISAF effort, in particular the incompatible rules of engagement among the various country's contingents.

Meanwhile back in Europe, dramatically different perceptions of how to deal with Russia have divided the alliance along the lines of the former Iron Curtain, with attitudes reversed from those of the Cold War-era. Now it's Eastern European capitals, with memories of Soviet domination, that advocate a more aggressive containment strategy in the face