Author Archive
He Is the Very Model of a Modern Right-Wing Foreign Policy Thinker
Jim Lobe points us to the thoughts of Andrew McCarthy, a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, on Barack Obama’s reticence to urge other people to spill their blood in Iran. A few choice bits below:
“The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.”- “The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — ‘equal rights’ and ’social justice’ are always more rally-cry propaganda than real goals for totalitarians, and hatred of certain groups is always a feature of their societies.”
- “It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs, so Obama’s instinct was to do the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters.”
- “It’s a mistake to perceive this as ‘weakness’ in Obama. It would have been weakness for him to flit over to the freedom fighters’ side the minute it seemed politically expedient. He hasn’t done that, and he won’t. Obama has a preferred outcome here, one that is more in line with his worldview, and it is not victory for the freedom fighters. He is hanging as tough as political pragmatism allows, and by doing so he is making his preferred outcome more likely. That’s not weakness, it’s strength — and strength of the sort that ought to frighten us.”
As Lobe notes, this prompted a rare “that’s over the line” type response from National Review editor Rich Lowry, but McCarthy is having none of it. Instead, McCarthy says that by no means were his earlier remarks out of bounds, and argues that Obama is going to transform the United States into the sort of country that the Islamic Republic will be fond of.
That’s the sort of calm, reasoned debate we’ve come to expect from the establishment Right. I’m trying to think, which conservative thinker does this sort of thing finds its lineage in? Burke? Kirk? Carl Schmitt? It’s tough to say.
Why Obama Should Stay Silent on Iran
President Obama should keep quiet on the subject of Iran’s elections. At least two pernicious tendencies are on display in the Beltway discussion on the topic. First is the common Washington impulse to “do something!” without laying out clear objectives and tactics. What, after all, is President Obama or his administration supposed to do to “support protesters” in Iran in the first place? What would be the ultimate goal of such support? Most importantly, what is the mechanism by which the support is supposed to produce the desired outcome? That we are debating how America should intervene in Iran’s domestic politics indicates the sheer grandiosity of American foreign policy thought.
The second, related tendency is that of narcissism: to make foreign countries’ domestic politics all about us. In this game, American observers anoint from afar one side the “good,” “pro-Western” team and the other the “bad,” “radical” one and urge Washington to press its thumb on the good side of the scale. But doing so would risk winding up Iranian nationalism, a very real force that binds Iranians together more tightly than their differences pull them apart.
If Iran’s government has overreached, the right response is schadenfreude. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of guys. Meanwhile, President Obama has a full plate of problems to deal with in his own country. Whatever government emerges from the Iranian political process, we’re going to have to deal with it. Until then, whatever President Obama’s personal prayers or wishes are for Iran, he ought to keep them to himself.
“United States”: Singular Noun, or Plural?
Paul Starobin, the author of an informative primer on foreign policy realism, had an interesting piece in the weekend’s Wall Street Journal on the topic of breaking up the United States.
Devolved America is a vision faithful both to certain postindustrial realities as well as to the pluralistic heart of the American political tradition—a tradition that has been betrayed by the creeping centralization of power in Washington over the decades but may yet reassert itself as an animating spirit for the future. Consider this proposition: America of the 21st century, propelled by currents of modernity that tend to favor the little over the big, may trace a long circle back to the original small-government ideas of the American experiment. The present-day American Goliath may turn out to be a freak of a waning age of politics and economics as conducted on a super-sized scale—too large to make any rational sense in an emerging age of personal empowerment that harks back to the era of the yeoman farmer of America’s early days. The society may find blessed new life, as paradoxical as this may sound, in a return to a smaller form.
[...]
Today’s devolutionists, of all stripes, can trace their pedigree to the “anti-federalists” who opposed the compact that came out of Philadelphia as a bad bargain that gave too much power to the center at the expense of the limbs. Some of America’s most vigorous and learned minds were in the anti-federalist camp; their ranks included Virginia’s Patrick Henry, of “give me liberty or give me death” renown. The sainted Jefferson, who was serving as a diplomat in Paris during the convention, is these days claimed by secessionists as a kindred anti-federal spirit, even if he did go on to serve two terms as president.
The anti-federalists lost their battle, but history, in certain respects, has redeemed their vision, for they anticipated how many Americans have come to feel about their nation’s seat of federal power. “This city, and the government of it, must indubitably take their tone from the character of the men, who from the nature of its situation and institution, must collect there,” the anti-federalist pamphleteer known only as the Federal Farmer wrote. “If we expect it will have any sincere attachments to simple and frugal republicanism, to that liberty and mild government, which is dear to the laborious part of a free people, we most assuredly deceive ourselves.”
Bonus points to Starobin for pointing to the same passage from George Kennan that I’ve taken to quoting. Kennan worried whether “‘bigness’ in a body politic is not an evil in itself.” As a result, he wondered “how it would be if our country, while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government, were to be decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.”
The most obvious objection with which Starobin doesn’t deal is that you’d have a hell of a time selling this scheme on Washington, which happens to have–how to put this politely?–the means to ensure it gets what it wants.
A related objection would be the eternal political question “who gets the guns?” What sort of armed forces would a decentralized United States possess? Under whose control would they be? Would we distribute nuclear weapons to each of the States in order to ensure none of them would get too skittish?
People smarter than me have argued that size isn’t an obstacle to republican government in the case of the United States. Note, though, the first of the four premises on which the pro-size argument rests:
In the first place it is to be remembered that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws. Its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any…
If the case for centralism rests on premises like these that are artifacts of a long-since-squandered legacy, we probably ought to reconsider the arguments against centralism. At the very least, those of us who want a very small government ought to think hard about the viability of a situation in which a small, weak federal government administers a giant, powerful nation.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
Roxana Saberi Was Released
This is fairly old news, but in the event anyone had been hearing about the story only at C@L, I failed to note that last week the U.S. reporter I’d been posting about was released from prison in Iran. She has left the country, flying to Austria with her family.
Interesting back story on the circumstances surrounding her arrest here. Whatever the details, it’s good news that she was released.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Defense Spending and “Global Public Goods”
Matt Yglesias picks up on a discussion between Will Wilkinson and Joseph Heath about American conservatives’ curious enthusiasm for providing “global public goods” (GPGs) in the form of enormous military spending to attempt to secure sea lines of communication (SLOCs) and do other things that are dubbed GPGs.
I think Matt is onto something bigger when he writes that
a considerable portion of American defense spending is genuinely wasteful. If we didn’t do it, it just wouldn’t be done. After all, it’s important to understand that excess capacity in military equipment is about as close as you can get to a real-world example of entirely wasteful public sector activity.
The economists tell us that one of the main properties of public goods is that they ought to be under-provided. As Matt writes, it seems like we’re over-providing what are being called “public goods” here. To my mind, this strongly implies that they aren’t public goods.
(Then again, if we’re going to accept that the entire globe is the jurisdiction to which the U.S. government is supposed to be providing public goods, you’re back to public goods — that is, we’re under-supplying the GPG of global security.)
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
Kaiser vs. “Czar”
Just when you thought you’d seen everything, ol’ Kaiser Bill emerges from the Beyond to castigate the U.S. president:
Mr. President,
Gott im Himmel! Enough with the czars!
You’ve named 18 so far, according to something I read in Foreign Policy. That includes a border czar, a climate czar, an information technology czar and — I don’t think Thomas Jefferson grew enough hemp in his lifetime to dream up this one — the “faith-based czar.” Your car czar, Steve Rattner, was in the news last week, trying to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy.
It took Russia 281 years to accumulate that many czars. Even with hemophilia, repeated assassinations and a level of inbreeding that would gag a Dalmatian breeder. You did it in less than 100 days.
And every one of them hurts. I think I speak for all passed-over Victorian despots when I say that.
[...]
…maybe it’s time for a new autocrat to get some air time. Time for something that will stand out even in a White House with a czar in every cubicle.
President Obama’s archduke of information technology announced today . . . Pricks up the ears, doesn’t it?
In Detroit, the president’s car sultan . . . Instant respect. Mainly because those who defy the car sultan might be killed by eunuch assassins.
Or might I humbly suggest the title of an enlightened ruler who — unlike the czars — actually worked well with parliament and the nobility (in your terms, that would be “Congress” and “Oprah”). Somebody whose record is nearly unblemished, except for one invasion of Belgium that everybody’s totally over now.
Today, President Obama congratulated his new climate kaiser . . .
Goosebumps.
Yours in friendship, Wilhelm II
Update on Roxana Saberi
Roxana Saberi
For readers interested in the ongoing case of Roxana Saberi, an American journalist imprisoned in Iran on highly dubious charges, this sad story will get you up to date. After having given unofficial indications that she would be released shortly, the Iranian government sentenced Saberi to 8 years in prison on April 18. She is now apparently 5 days into a hunger strike. Trita Parsi runs down some informed speculation about the relationship between the upcoming Iranian elections, the U.S.-Iran situation, and Saberi’s arrest here.
Please keep Roxana in your thoughts and prayers. Evin prison is bad news, and she doesn’t belong there.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Pirates as Proto-Governments? You Bet!
I have to confess I don’t understand why Roger Pilon and Ilya Shapiro are criticizing our colleagues Ben Friedman and Peter Van Doren below. At the risk of being cast as yet another cog in the insidious piratofascist fifth column, I’d like to defend Ben and Peter.
Roger and Ilya reproach Ben and Peter for likening pirates to “pseudo-governments” and mount an impassioned defense of the nation-state as deserving a place in a different category from pirates.
On the distinction between the two, they write: “A tax, at least in principle, and most often in practice, is a charge for a service rendered –- not necessarily a wanted or an evenly distributed service, to be sure…” To be sure, indeed! There’s a term for charging people for an unevenly distributed and unwanted service. It’s called racketeering. Their description of taxation could apply quite well to a mafia.
Roger and Ilya would prefer to keep pirates and governments in two discrete categories but provide little reason why other than the above. But if they dislike the analogy, their problem is not with Ben or Peter or Noam Chomsky or St. Augustine, but rather with a body of well-developed academic literature. In particular, one of the preeminent scholars of the formation of national states, the late Charles Tilly, wrote a famous book titled Coercion, Capital, and European States that would help color in the gaps for them. The short version is that European elites came to form national states as a means for protecting their fiefdoms from other proto-states, which frequently had predatory aims, and that this process sometimes had the incidental effect of protecting the populaces that lived under state jurisdiction and could be used as means for making war against the neighbors.
Tilly also wrote a well-known essay titled “War Making and State Making As Organized Crime” that makes the following claim: “Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum.” Tilly went on:
In retrospect, the pacification, cooptation, or elimination of fractious rivals to the sovereign seems an awesome, noble, prescient enterprise, destined to bring peace to a people; yet it followed almost ineluctably from the logic of expanding power. If a power holder was to gain from the provision of protection, his competitors had to yield. As economic historian Frederic Lane put it twenty-five years ago, governments are in the business of selling protection … whether people want it or not.
Governments and pirates both “put the victim to a choice between two of his entitlements — his freedom and his property.” In the literature on state formation, this isn’t a controversial point. I’m really surprised to see that it is for two libertarians.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
The State of Play in the Bomb-Iran Debate
Via Philip Weiss, I see that last week Karim Sadjadpour and Martin Indyk debated Elliott “Get Down Out of Those Trees and Be Democrats” Abrams and Joshua Muravchik on the proposition: “America cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran and must go to any lengths to prevent it.” It’s a topic that’s been of interest to me for some time now.
Indyk and Sadjadpour acquitted themselves rather well, but it made me chuckle to see Abrams and Muravchik throwing some very familiar-smelling handfuls of argument into the discussion. I thought it might be worth passing a few of them along.
An Intellectual Counterinsurgency
My friend (and noble peacemaker) Spencer Ackerman points us to Tom Ricks’ take on the Army’s new stability operations manual:
I wonder if the very title of the manual is incorrect. After all, we didn’t invade Iraq to provide stability, but to force change. Likewise in Afghanistan. And once we were there, we didn’t aim for stability, but to encourage democracy, which (the thought is not original with me) in a region like the Middle East generally undermines stability. I mean, if all we wanted was stability, why not find a strongman and leave?
What we really are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think, is instability operations… Personally, I think the mission of changing the culture of Iraq was nuts — but that was the mission the president assigned the military.
I think a more intellectually honest title for the manual would be “Revolutionary Operations.” Don’t hold your breath.
Ricks is right, but he misses a larger problem. The argument of the folks who want to develop COIN capabilities has become completely circular.
Take, for example, the worry of Lt. Gen William Caldwell, in unveiling the original release of FM 3-7, that we live in an “era of uncertainty and persistent conflict.” Accordingly, says Caldwell, we need capabilities to produce stability. Hence, the stability operations field manual.
This elides the fact that if we had to take an impartial look at where the instability is coming from, a hell of a lot of it is emanating from Washington, DC. Our Rube Goldberg political science theories, based in large part on liberal international relations theory, have led us to knock over governments and pursue radical transformation everywhere from Latin America to Eastern Europe to the mountains of Central Asia, the jungles of Vietnam, and the sands of Iraq.
Then, when confronted with the wreckage of our policy, we convince ourselves that we are gravely threatened by the instability we have created, and must enhance our capabilities to rectify this instability. Less kindly, it’s like the Tennessee Valley Authority with guns, Humvees and translators.
Look at the new “whole-of-government” counterinsurgency guide, for example. The issuance of the volume was predicated on the logically-true-but-practically-misleading claim that “in today’s world, state failure can quickly become not merely a misfortune for local communities, but a threat to global security.” (emphasis mine) The COIN manual then quickly proceeds to tell us that any decision to do COIN “should not be taken lightly; historically COIN campaigns have almost always been more costly, more protracted and more difficult than first anticipated.” Then it quickly becomes a cookbook on how to use the Agriculture, Treasury, and Transportation Departments to transform the way foreigners run their countries.
My colleague Ben Friedman recently remarked that “Both Creighton’s Abrams’ reforms ensuring that the president had to activate the reserves to start a war and the Weinberger-Powell doctrine were sneaky usurpations of authority. They were also realistic efforts to avoid bad wars and on balance good things.” He’s right. It would be good if we were devoting a tenth the resources toward stopping the next policy disaster as we are devoting to figuring out how to execute self-destructive policies more effectively.
In short, if, as the leading COIN advocate of the moment tells us, the best way to fight the “war on terrorism” is by engaging in a “global counterinsurgency,” we’re in deep, deep trouble. As long as the only people who can stop us are ourselves, I’m afraid we won’t be stopped.
Power, as Karl Deutsch once wrote, is “the ability to talk instead of listen. In this sense, it is the ability to afford not to learn.” And we’ve got loads of power.
Your Apropos-of-Nothing Observation of the Day
Fun with juxtaposed quotes:
Durkheim taught that in religious worship, society adores its own camouflaged image. In a nationalist age, societies worship themselves brazenly and openly, spurning the camouflage.
-Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 56.
and
Addressing Congress [in 2003], Bush declared that “the course of this war is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.” A form of religious nationalism permeated the whole address. Bush took words from a hymn, “There’s Power in the Blood,” to refer to the “power, wonder-working power,” of “the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people” — words which in the hymn are used of the lamb, Jesus Christ.
-Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 128.
Crazy as I thought those days were at the time, the more you think about it, the crazier they seem. You’d think American Christians would have found this sort of thing mindblowingly offensive. Yet, they sort of seem to have dug it.
Nationalism. Powerful stuff.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
Update on Roxana Saberi
My father sends along this story regarding Roxana Saberi, the American freelance journalist who has been detained by the Iranian government for more than a month. It is encouraging news.
Our hope and prayers are that the Iranians deliver on this pledge. Better still would be if they simply stopped doing this sort of thing altogether.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
The Continuing Puzzle: What is the Iranian Government Doing?
The Iranian government has detained another American journalist, Roxana Saberi of NPR. I was waiting to post on this in the event that a concerted effort to free her got spun up, but I’m not seeing anything as yet, so I thought I’d just relate the news.
I met Ms. Saberi once. We were both panelists at a discussion of Iran policy about two years ago, in front of a group of several hundred high school students who were on some sort of DC visit. I found her to be reserved in manner, judicious in thought, and entirely unthreatening. It is unfortunate that the Iranian government does not acknowledge this.
In any case, she should be freed immediately. The Iranian government gets nothing from this sort of thing other than bad press, as it surely recognized when it pointlessly detained and ultimately released Haleh Esfandiari less than two years ago. The Iranians may be using Saberi to wind up (or vent) nationalism in the advent of the June elections, but overall you’d think the Iranian government had more important matters to attend to.
Let her go.
UPDATE: I’m reminded that it isn’t just Saberi that the Iranians have detained. Two Iranian doctors working to prevent HIV have apparently been sent to prison on the grounds that they were “involved in provoking street demonstrations and ethnic unrest in different parts of the country.”You’d think if the Iranians were really concerned about ethnic unrest in different parts of their country, they’d refrain from doing things like having state-run newspapers publish cartoons representing Azeris as cockroaches.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Will the ‘Rise of the Counterinsurgents’ Lead to Fewer Counterinsurgency Wars?
Matt Yglesias picks up on the Bacevich review I referenced below and points to a post from counterinsurgency (COIN) scholar Andrew Exum in which Exum argues that learning to do counterinsurgency better will lead to our doing less of it:
No one who really understands COIN wants to do it. Liberal interventionalists and neo-conservatives are likely to be much more enthusiastic than the practitioners themselves. Counter-insurgents, often knowing something of what they speak through practical and hard-won experience, realize all too well just how difficult and costly big schemes drawn up in Washington become when they have to be operationalized. Counter-insurgency is hard. Best to avoid it, actually.
This doesn’t make much sense. Exum has previously excoriated COIN skeptic Gian Gentile for pursuing an “anti-COIN crusade.” But by Exum’s reasoning above, it is Exum who should be on an anti-COIN crusade. Instead, Exum thinks that DOD needs to allocate more resources to doing COIN.
Academically, Exum is interested in insurgencies. And indeed — they’re interesting. But for the COIN clique to think that their realistic appreciation of the difficulties of COIN and their private reticence to do it is going to outweigh their technocratic advice and willingness to obey orders in the minds of policymakers, I think they’re gravely mistaken. The work of the COIN crowd is going to create the impression in the minds of policymakers that the military knows how to win counterinsurgencies and therefore we don’t need an “Iraq syndrome.” But we do need an Iraq syndrome.
Take, for one example of my argument, the thinking of Bush NSC official Peter Feaver.* He thinks, as I do, that making COIN doctrine central to American foreign policy thought is going to create a future in which US foreign policy will continue to look like that of President Bush. Except for Feaver, that’s a feature, not a bug:
The problem with Chris’s post on COIN is that it takes the existing debate at face value, as if it really were a debate about the best way to do COIN or its place in American national security. I don’t think it is.
Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the COIN critics Chris cites are sincere patriots who honestly believe what they have written and have no deeper agenda. Setting them aside, the larger debate seems driven by one of three deeper considerations. First, anti-COIN is a convenient way to argue against American military involvement in any fashion because the most urgent near-term threats requiring military operations involve COIN. So if your ideology tells you that the dominant problem in the world is American militarism; if you look at recent history and can only find cases where we did use military force and shouldn’t have and can find no cases where we did not use military force and should have; if you think that getting defeated in Iraq (or Afghanistan) would have a salutary chastening effect on American adventurism; if any or all of that applies, then it makes sense to argue against Gates’ emphasis on COIN now. If the U.S. military cannot or will not do COIN, then the U.S. military cannot and will not be operational.
Does Exum think this policymaker’s view is wrong? Aberrant? I think its descriptive content is exactly accurate and characteristic. Orienting planning and resources more toward COIN is likely to lead to more counterinsurgency wars. I’m pretty confident in this prediction. If somebody disagrees, I’d like to hear a better fleshed out argument behind the idea that telling policymakers “we now know how to do COIN pretty well” will lead to those policymakers to decide we ought to do it less.
UPDATE: Professor Feaver writes in to say that by “Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the COIN critics Chris cites are sincere patriots who honestly believe what they have written and have no deeper agenda” he meant to make the positive statement that these people are patriots with noble intentions and didn’t mean to intimate they could be insincere patriots of questionable honesty with deeper agendas. He also disputes the factual accuracy of the Times article linked above and points to this Commentary piece as the definitive account of his work at the Bush NSC.
Why Are We Trying to Get Better at Counterinsurgency?
Chris Preble and I have long wondered why American foreign-policy experts believe that “fixing failed states” is important for U.S. national security. History (and the literature on “state failure”) is replete with dozens of poorly- or ungoverned places that present no threat whatsoever to U.S. national security. “Failedness” and “threatening” generally are not correlated.
Afghanistan, the one failed state which indeed posed a threat to us, was a problem not because of its educational programs or its agricultural methods, but rather because its government was cooperating with a terrorist group that was planning to attack us. In order to head off that threat, we didn’t need girls to be in school, a strong national government, or to crack down on poppy production, although if the Afghans want my opinion I think it’s obviously wiser to have girls in school. (Nay on the other two.) What would have prevented that threat was killing or capturing the people planning it–a result that would have left Afghanistan just as “failed,” but non-threatening. So why, if what we’re trying to do is fight terrorism, have we suddenly gotten so gung-ho about nation building and counterinsurgency?
It’s a puzzle that Andrew Bacevich is scratching his head over in reading COIN guru David Kilcullen’s memoir. It’s worth a read. (Your only known alternative for insights like these and projections as to what the future holds for U.S. foreign policy in this regard is to come to Chicago to attend Chris’s and my talk at the Midwest Political Science Association convention April 2.) In lieu of that, give Bacevich a read:
According to a currently fashionable view, the chief operative lesson of the Iraq War is that counterinsurgency works, with U.S. forces having now mastered the best practices required to prevail in conflicts of this nature. Those who adhere to this view expect the Long War to bring more such challenges, with the neglected Afghan conflict even now presenting itself as next in line. Given this prospect, they want the Pentagon to gear itself up for a succession of such trials, enshrining counterinsurgency as the preferred American way of war in place of discredited concepts like “shock and awe.” Doing so will have large implications for how defense dollars are distributed among the various armed services and for how U.S. forces are trained, equipped and configured. Ask yourself how many fighter-bombers or nuclear submarines it takes to establish an effective government presence in each of Afghanistan’s 40,020 villages and you get the gist of what this might imply.
Yet given the costs of Iraq—now second only to World War II as the most expensive war in all U.S. history—and given the way previous efforts to pacify the Afghan countryside have fared, how much should we expect to spend in redeeming Afghanistan’s forty thousand villages? Having completed that task five or ten years hence, how many other villages in Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Egypt will require similar ministrations? And how many more accidental guerrillas will we inadvertently create along the way?
Kilcullen the apostate knows full well that an approach that hinges on wholesale societal transformation makes no sense. The consummate counterinsurgency professional understands that the application of technique, however skillful, will not suffice to salvage the Long War. Yet as someone deeply invested in that conflict, he cannot bring himself to acknowledge the conclusion to which his own analysis points: the very concept of waging a Long War as the antidote to Islamism is fundamentally and irrevocably flawed.
If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn’t be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda’s game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?
When it comes to dealing with Islamism, containment rather than transformation should provide the cornerstone of U.S. (and Western) strategy. Ours is the far stronger hand. The jihadist project is entirely negative. Apart from offering an outlet for anger and resentment, Osama bin Laden and others of his ilk have nothing on offer. Time is our ally. With time, our adversary will wither and die—unless through our own folly we choose to destroy ourselves first.
Has President Obama Bitten Off More than He Can Chew?
Beneath all the thrashing over the giant deficit spending bill, President Obama has another thorn in his side: Iraq. Reuters now reports that the military has crafted an analysis of three plans for withdrawing from Iraq: one taking 16 months, one taking 19 months, and another taking 23 months. It’s not clear from the article where the 19- and 23-month proposals came from. It’s a bit strange, though, that the president’s own plan has been put in a position now as being the extremely fast plan for withdrawal, juxtaposed against the two others. Who asked for other plans?
Reuters reports further that Gen. Petraeus (CENTCOM) and Lt. Gen. Odierno (MNF-I) favor the longest of the three plans.
All of this shouldn’t be surprising, though: Tom Ricks’ new book on Iraq (which I’ve not seen) features this little tidbit in the promotional materials:
“For Petraeus, prevailing in Iraq means extending the war. Thomas E. Ricks concludes that the war is likely to last another five to ten years—and that that outcome is a best case scenario. His stunning conclusion, stated in the last line of the book, is that ‘the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered by us and by the world have not yet happened.’”
So in the midst of the partisan scrap over the giant spending package, the Reuters story makes it look like like Obama may have to take on Petraeus and Odierno if he thinks he’s going to get us out of Iraq any time soon.* Who’s optimistic?
* Marc Lynch of GWU and Foreign Policy made essentially this argument previously, and was slapped down by an Odierno spokesman. Let’s see if these Obama vs. Petraeus/Odierno stories (and responses from military spokespeople) keep getting written.
Dear Congressman Frank,
Thank you for making this point. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
Respectfully,
Justin Logan
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy; Tax and Budget Policy
Pat Lang on Israel/Palestine
National Journal’s Sydney Freedberg asks a group of distinguished foreign policy types, “Is the two-state solution dead?” Pat Lang offers some sensible remarks:
It is expected ritual to say that the Palestinians and Israelis want peace. What is never specified as part of that incantation is the description of just what sort of peace each group wants. Here it is… What they still want (on both sides) is to win in the contest for that sad, beautiful, stony little strip of land and for their own group to live in peace and possession of the country.
There is no external power preventing the sides from making peace. If the Israelis and Palestinians wanted peace more than they want to win, they would make peace. They do not make peace because there is not enough good will toward the “other” among them to allow peace to exist. No. I no longer really believe that the inhabitants of Israel/Palestine want peace for other than their own side in the bloody mess that has persisted there throughout their lives.
Someone has said on this blog that the United States lacks the ability to “make peace” between these two peoples. That is profoundly true. It is part of our national illusion that we Americans think of the rest of the world as though we are the guardians of distant, unruly and childish folk who act in strange, inexplicable and unreasonable ways. We tend to believe that their quarrels are errors in information or simply bad behavior of the kind seen in school yards. This mistake on our part is persistent….
Then, however, I’d humbly submit that Lang goes astray in arguing that while neither side appears ready to make the sacrifices required for a workable peace deal, the problem will ultimately “require an external formulation of a peace settlement when they ARE ready.”
Why am I skeptical? Because, as Lang admits, what would be required for this to work is “a consensus of the interested parties across the Middle Eastern, Islamic and Western regions, a consensus that does not shrink from domestic political pressure, that does not fear to apply the inherent leverage provided by huge annual budgetary contributions to both sides and that values human life and happiness more than it does momentary advantage.” If both sides were ready for peace, why would pulling budgetary levers be required? Alternatively, it seems terribly unlikely that pulling budgetary levers could make either side amenable enough to genuine concessions to make peace work. And aside from the extreme unlikelihood of the blessed convergence described above happening in our lifetimes, I’m reminded of George Kennan’s concern in the 1970s about the responsibilities that come with imposing a settlement:
Feith: Bush Snookered Country into War
If, like me, you have a masochistic streak and aren’t yet tired of peeling back the layers of hubris, sophistry, stupidity and arrogance behind the war in Iraq, you might want to pick up the latest copy of Political Science Quarterly, with a review essay by Robert Jervis covering George Tenet’s and Douglas Feith’s books side-by-side. (Sorry, the essay isn’t online.)
In it, Jervis wades through a lot of the sorry history we already know, but makes some interesting observations and teases out some striking inferences, particularly from Feith’s book, of which he is more critical. Perhaps the most interesting argument Jervis makes in the piece is that, by any fair definition of the verb “to lie,” Feith makes clear that the administration lied in taking the country to war:
Feith’s central justification for the war is that even without active WMD programs or ties to al Qaeda, Saddam’s regime was by virtue of its tyrannical nature and previous behavior such a menace that it had to be removed. Inspections would fail not because Saddam might hide things, but because they were irrelevant to the real problem. This makes some sense, but renders the administration’s public position dishonest, since it insisted that its target was Saddam’s WMD programs, not his regime. In Feith’s telling, even if Saddam had cooperated with the inspectors, had shown that he was not actively pursuing WMD, and had dismantled some dubious equipment, he would have remained an intolerable threat because he could have resumed his dangerous activities at some time in the future. ”President Bush had already committed his Administration to changing the regime in Iraq” (p. 305), just as the critics claimed. The diplomacy and the insistence on inspections were a charade; only by going into exile or being replaced in a coup could Saddam have avoided an invasion, and not only were these possibilities slim, they risked leaving in place the Baathist regime, which is why Feith opposed such proposals when they emanated from the CIA (p. 200). Thus, although only in January 2003 did Bush tell his cabinet that “war is inevitable” (p. 342), in fact this was implicit much earlier. While Feith is correct to say that the administration did not lie about its mistaken beliefs that Saddam had active WMD programs and perhaps believed that [he] had ties to al Qaeda, if his account is correct, these were not the essential grounds for war.
[...]
Dean Acheson justified the extreme rhetoric in the early years of the Cold War by the need to make things “clearer than truth.” This is not unusual, although not immune from criticism. But if Feith is correct, what Bush did was much more than exaggerate and present the world in excessively vivid colors. The misrepresentation was fundamental. Feith sees the administration’s failure to clearly present its reasoning as a missed opportunity to build support for the long-term war on terrorism. I doubt it, but it does mean that if Feith’s understanding of the administration’s policy is correct, it lied to the American people about why they needed to go to war.
Jervis has done a lot of work on this topic (see here, for example), and has a book coming out on intelligence and intelligence failures. He is also the author of a (the?) text on the psychology of international politics.
A Question for Christian Brose
In a post at Foreign Policy magazine, former Condoleezza Rice speechwriter Christian Brose points to his participation in the drafting of a Rice speech that I’ve long found vexing. The passage I found most puzzling was this:
American Realism is an approach to the world that arises not only from the realities of global politics but from the nature of America’s character: From the fact that we are all united as a people not by a narrow nationalism of blood and soil, but by universal ideals of human freedom and human rights. We believe that our principles are the greatest source of our power. And we are led into the world as much by our moral ideas as by our material interests. It is for these reasons, and for many others, that America has always been, and will always be, not a status quo power, but a revolutionary power - a nation with New World eyes, that looks at change not as a threat to be feared, but as an opportunity to be seized.
Emphasis mine. Suffice it to say that this is not the conventional view by historians of American diplomacy. It is a revisionist view that has been advanced mostly by those on the extreme left and extreme right. Those on the left generally believed that the economic concept of the Open Door thrust America ever outward, in search of markets for its products and to deploying force to feed the machine of American capitalism. The right-wing interpretation basically agrees with this economically deterministic view but also overlays what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call a “neoconservative” ideological orientation onto basically the entire history of American foreign policy. Kagan, for example, interprets the foreign policy vision of the Founders as being in general alignment with the view that it would be a good idea for the United States to unravel and reweave the social and political fabric of the Middle East.
It would be really interesting for Brose to explain what he and Rice meant by this. Was it an endorsement of the Kagan interpretation of American diplomatic history? Does Brose really place the revolutionary character of American diplomacy before, say, 1898? What does he think about the book his Foreign Policy colleague Aaron Friedberg wrote about the role anti-state American ideology played in preventing the United States from even becoming a player on the world stage, much less a “revolutionary power” before 1945? (Cf., Fareed Zakaria.)
Moreover, if, as Brose and Rice argue, the United States has “always been a revolutionary power,” wouldn’t it necessarily follow, for example, that Soviet diplomacy from 1945 onward was fundamentally defensive and that the Cold War was, itself, an American creation? After all, how, if we were always a revolutionary power should the Soviets have responded after we dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan and began aiming our rhetorical sights on them?
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Welcome Stephen Walt to the Blogosphere
I’m sorry to be late to this party, but it’s really great to see Stephen Walt blogging for Foreign Policy magazine. Walt is now clearly the most high-profile academic realist in the blogosphere, and it’s terrific he’s blogging. A lot of people like to call themselves realists inside the Beltway, but they’re basically all liberals, in IR terms. Actual realists have long been egregiously underrepresented in the American government, the American media, and basically everywhere in the U.S. outside the academy. More people need to hear realist voices. Realists wisely opposed the Iraq war, and have a host of ideas about how the world works that, if they gained greater sway in Washington, might help prevent the next couple of screw-ups the government is planning for us.
Here’s a good post from Walt on defense spending. Walt writes that you’d think, since the United States enjoys a terribly benign threat environment, just elected a liberal Democrat president, and is facing an economic meltdown, the bloated defense budget ought to be on the chopping block:
Here’s why it won’t happen any time soon. As Cindy Williams, former director of the National Security division of the Congressional Budget Office and now a senior research scientist at MIT, points out in an as-yet unpublished paper for the Tobin Project, DOD is insulated from serious cuts by an array of impressive political advantages. First, its budget is more than 50 percent of all federal discretionary spending, and its sheer size gives it a lot of bureaucratic clout. Second, the Pentagon has a large domestic constituency: there are 1.4 million men and women in uniform, 850,000 paid members of the National Guard and Reserve, and 650,000 civilian employees. Forget GM, Ford and Chrysler: the Department of Defense is the largest single employer in the whole country. Now add the companies that provide goods and services for the military. Their employees amount to about 5.2 million jobs, which is a pretty impressive domestic constituency. And don’t forget those 25 million veterans, who are hardly shrinking violets when defense spending is concerned. Finally, a well-financed group of Beltway bandits and Washington think tanks stand ready to question the patriotism of any politician (and especially any Democrat) who tries to put the Pentagon on a diet.
Matt Yglesias responds to this with a note of surprise, and then an endorsement:
It seems unlike a realist to cite domestic political dynamics as the cause of national security policy, but clearly this is correct.
This is a pretty common objection when realists talk about foreign policy, as opposed to international politics, but it belies a misunderstanding of the theory. Realists talk a lot about structure in the international political context: various structures of the balance of power push states in one direction or another. If Mexico were twice as powerful as the United States, different structural forces would be acting on us. Realists note that structures “shape and shove” but don’t determine foreign policies. Kenneth Waltz memorably wrote in 1997 that states “are free to do any fool thing they care to, but are likely to be rewarded for behavior that is responsive to structural pressures and punished for behavior that is not.”
One of the things that’s really curious about today’s world (and another about which Walt has written) is the strange condition of unipolarity. Given the size of the power disparity between the United States and, well, everybody else, there are few structural constraints acting on American policymakers. So one major input, structure, that should play a powerful role in constraining statesmen’s options, isn’t really working.
Thus far the results have been pretty disappointing. American policymakers have tended to expansionism, to recklessness, and to grand strategies based on trying to dominate the world. A (hopefully) interesting theoretical question I’m kicking around is, Under unipolarity, what constraints are acting, given that structure really isn’t, and is there any reason to believe that any of these constraints will start limiting American strategic options any time soon? If there are no binding constraints in sight, aren’t we very likely (destined?) to continue with the primacy strategy we’ve followed more or less since 1991?
Thus far, it seems like the domestic inputs that Walt and Cindy Williams point to have provided policymakers a completely blank slate to do anything they wish–except choose grand strategies based on restraint. A lot of us yearn for a strategy of restraint, but it seems to me that it’s going to take some pretty serious tinkering with domestic politics to get us there, given the factors described above and the absence of meaningful structural constraints. As it is, we’re dealing with fundamentally unchecked power. Which both realists and libertarians ought to be wary of.
A Case for Climbing Out of the Middle East
Cato-at-liberty readers frustrated with the United States’ travails in the Middle East may want to have a look at John Mearsheimer’s article in the current Newsweek, “Rebalancing the Middle East.” Mearsheimer makes the case for offshore balancing, which is to say removing forward deployed U.S. forces from the region and scaling back our objectives to center on merely precluding one power from gaining hegemony over the whole region. He closes on this note:
Offshore balancing wouldn’t eliminate all the problems we face in the Middle East. But it would be considerably less expensive in both human and financial terms. It’s not a foolproof strategy, but it’s probably as close as we can get.
Mearsheimer’s version is a lot less “offshore” than some of us would like, but his case is worth a look. Trying to run the Middle East is just one fruitless government program we could cut and save trillions of dollars in the coming years. Libertarians ought to consider it.
The Broad-Mindedness of Richard Holbrooke
Lots of scuttlebutt today involving the name “Richard Holbrooke.” An emblem of the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment, Holbrooke is revered by some for his ruthlessness and ability to crack heads. A dedicated global interventionist, Holbrooke is high on the list of “people antiwar Democrats don’t want involved in an Obama administration.” In addition to ruthlessness, let’s take a walk down memory lane and attempt to determine how well Holbrooke would fit in an Obama administration that is supposed by many to be broad minded and determined to evaluate all arguments on a policy before leaping in. Here’s Holbrooke in 1994 chairing a meeting with mid-level officials to discuss NATO expansion:
Without having spoken to [Anthony] Lake or to the president, Holbrooke told the interagency group that there was a presidential policy to enlarge NATO that needed implementation. Holbrooke also made clear that [Warren] Christopher had asked him to set up and run the mechanism to expand NATO.
The new assistant secretary of state had a reputation for abrasiveness, and at this meeting, he demonstrated why. General [Wesley] Clark has recalled:
[Joseph] Kruzel spoke first, since he was the policy guy, and said, “Why is this the policy? It’s supposed to be an interagency process.” Holbrooke crushed him like a bug. He said, “It is policy.” Ash Carter walked out of the room. Then, as the meeting was about to conclude, I said, “I don’t know that a decision has been made.” Holbrooke said, “Anyone questioning this is disloyal to the country and to the president.” My ears turned bright red…and I demanded that he take it back. The room stopped. I got ready to leave. Holbrooke took it back.
That’s from James Goldgeier, Not Whether But When, pp. 73-74. So here you have it. Pursuing disastrous policies while impugning the motives of career military officials and labeling them anti-American if they have the temerity to object? Check. As compared to the tactics of the Bush administration, that’s not exactly “change,” but I sure can believe it.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
Scholarship or Advocacy?
I was interested to see that AEI’s Michael Rubin has published a paper titled “Can a Nuclear Iran Be Contained or Deterred?” Rubin makes several points.
First, he argues, there is a real chance that Iran may just launch an unprovoked nuclear first-strike against Israel: “There is reason to take the worst case scenario seriously.” He bases this judgment on a quote from Rafsanjani boasting to a domestic audience that Iran may be willing to suffer the nuclear strikes that would result from any Iranian strike against Israel, and argues that the anti-nuclear war statements from numerous other Iranian officials (he only cites one) “should not be taken at face value. They may be taqiya, religiously sanctioned dissimulation meant to lull an enemy.”
What he ignores is the track record of diplomatic behavior in Iran indicating that the most basic imperative of international relations–national self-preservation–has figured prominently (alongside brinkmanship and risk-taking) in modern Iranian diplomacy. Attempting to divine intentions from conflicting public statements or even operational plans (which reminds one of the “Team B” experiment) is far less helpful in ascertaining whether the regime values self-preservation than is evaluating what the regime has done when faced with overwhelming force.
Rubin offers two observations on nuclear deterrence, the first of which is either confused or problematic: that for deterrence to work, Iran’s leaders must “prioritize the lives of its citizenry above certain geopolitical or ideological goals.” Rubin does not cite any academic research on this point, but it should go without saying that his deterring actor–the United States–would be unlikely to focus any response on a countervalue strike as opposed to counterforce. That is, the United States would not focus on holding Iranian citizens hostage to deter the Iranian government from striking, but rather would hold the Iranian government itself and Iranian military capabilities hostage. Rubin’s framing of the issue is skewed toward the former conception, which makes it look much more likely (”well, the Iranian government mistreats its people anyway“) that the Iranian regime could convince itself that it could disregard the enormous costs of American retaliation. Any conceivable response to an unprovoked nuclear strike would mean, at a bare minimum, the end of the Islamic Republic and an end to its “geopolitical or ideological goals,” unless those goals are achieved with self-immolation and handing the mantle of Islam to the Sunnis.
Rubin’s essay makes a number of other highly questionable assumptions and judgments. The unfortunate reality is that the paper appears to have been published without a literature review, which would have uncovered a number of previous studies that dealt directly with the subject of his study and came to different conclusions. I published a paper on the topic in 2006, but there is also Barry Posen, the director of MIT’s Security Studies Program, who authored a paper on the same topic, also in 2006. There is also Christopher Hemmer, a professor at the U.S. Air War College, who authored a paper on the topic in the Autumn 2007 issue of Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College.
It is important when researching topics as central as these to examine the existing scholarly work to determine whether there have been previous discussions that could serve to refine one’s own thinking. The fact that this study (and the study that Dr. Rubin coauthored for the Bipartisan Policy Center) has been published without a literature review raises serious questions about the standards backing up the scholarship.
New York Times: Less Difference between Candidates on Foreign Policy than Meets the Eye
Today’s Times features an article by David Sanger discussing the two campaigns’ claim that the candidates have “sharply different views about the proper use of American power.” Sanger tallies the ledger and finds “contradictions that do not fit the neat hawk-and-dove images promoted by each campaign.”
Much of what Sanger covers, and his general conclusion, appeared in my Policy Analysis published earlier this month, “Two Kinds of Change: Comparing the Candidates on Foreign Policy.” But Sanger points to an interesting contradiction within the McCain camp on Iran. Sanger writes:
Questions to both campaigns in the past few weeks have yielded another example of role reversal. While Mr. McCain seems willing to consider that Iran might someday be trusted to produce its own nuclear fuel, Mr. Obama does not. The director of foreign policy for the McCain campaign, Randy Scheunemann, said that if Iran was in compliance with United Nations resolutions, “it would be appropriate to consider” letting it produce uranium under inspection, which Iran has said is its right.
This is interesting. As I wrote in my paper,
In response to a two-question questionnaire sent to the candidates by the Institute for Science and International Security, McCain indicated that “there can be no such thing as an adequately controlled nuclear fuel cycle in Iran.”He went on to propose that Iran rely on foreign sources of fuel, and claimed that “There is no circumstance under which the international community could be confident that uranium enrichment or plutonium production activities undertaken by the current government of Iran are purely for peaceful purposes.”
Here (.pdf) is the ISIS report in question. I’m not fond of the “flip flop” gotcha game, but this appears to be an interesting shift on the part of the McCain camp. Something an enterprising journalist might want to follow up on.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
Nothing New Under the Sun
Remember the “Ledeen Doctrine” that Jonah Goldberg used to promote the Iraq War? ( It’s unavailable for some reason on the National Review website Here it is on NRO ):
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
It turns out that aside from the strategic and moral bankruptcy of the doctrine, it isn’t even original to Ledeen or Goldberg:
These half-civilized Governments such as those of China, Portugal, Spanish America, all require a dressing down every eight or ten years to keep them in order. Their minds are too shallow to receive an impression that will last longer than some such period and warning is of little use. They care little for words and they must not only see the stick but actually feel it on their shoulders before they yield to that argument which brings conviction.
That’s Lord Palmerston in 1850, addressing the House of Commons, as cited in Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.
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