Archive for the ‘Foreign Policy and National Security’ Category
Thursday Links
- Why the Tea Partiers should not date the GOP: “This movement is simply saying: ‘We are fine without you, Washington. Now for the love of God, go attend a reception somewhere, and stop making health care and entrepreneurship more expensive than they already are.’”
- Why President Obama should be open to cutting military spending: “A real test of a leader’s wisdom and strength would recognize that more spending does not equal greater security.”
- A growing disconnect: “A nasty spat has erupted between Washington and Beijing over the Obama administration’s arms sales to Taiwan….The bulk of the evidence suggests that storm clouds are building in the US-China relationship.”
- Podcast: “Obama’s Permanent Bailouts” featuring Mark Calabria.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics
Charles Krauthammer, Rocket Scientist
Last evening on FoxNews, host Bret Baier reported that the Iranians had launched a rocket carrying ”a mouse, two turtles, and a can of worms” into space. He asked the panelists to speculate on the implications.
Charles Krauthammer inveighed “if you can put a mouse into space, you can put a nuke in New York, in principle.” Given that they are clearly developing the technological capabilities that would allow them to nuke New York, Krauthammer concluded, “our only hope on the nuclear issue or any other is a revolution and to help that revolution ought to be our task.”
Well.
To her credit, Jennifer Loven of the AP wasn’t having any of it. “It’s an incredibly large leap,” she pointed out, ”between a mouse in space and a nuke in New York….[I]t’s a…ginormous gap.”
How “ginormous”? The analogies are imperfect, but I can throw a football a fair distance. In principle, I could start in the Super Bowl.
More seriously, there are modest parallels to the subject of my first book — the mythical missile gap of the late 1950s. The missile gap was precipitated by the launch of the Sputnik satelite in October 1957. Millions of Americans became convinced that the beeping silver sphere orbiting the earth signified that the Soviets could, in principle, drop a nuclear weapon on any city in the United States. This misconception was helped along by some opportunistic fearmongering by, chiefly, Democrats who delighted in embarassing President Dwight Eisenhower. And the ploy worked. The Dems rolled up huge victories in the mid-term election of 1958, and John F. Kennedy capitalized on the missile gap to help get elected president in 1960.
The actual missile gap — in the U.S. favor — was irrelevant. It would have been equally irrelevant if the roles were reversed, with the Soviets in possession of hundreds of ICBMs, and the U.S. with only a handful of shorter range weapons. Even if the Soviets had perfected the ability to throw a nuclear warhead onto U.S. territory, what ultimately prevented them from doing so was not technological but psychological — they were deterred by our vast arsenal. And they continued to be so deterred for decades until the entire edifice of Soviet power came crashing down, from within, without any significant assistance from the United States.
Would Krauthammer contend that Eisenhower’s refusal to overthrow the Soviet regime in 1958 was “an embarassing failure?” The Soviets did, after all, actually have nuclear weapons, many of them. The Iranians have none, and have not even mastered the enrichment cycle, let alone the long process toward weaponization. By implying that the only thing that stops the Iranians from immediately nuking New York is their technical capabilities, Krauthammer demonstrates a shocking ignorance of some of the most basic principles of international relations, beginning with deterrence. This makes him a horrible political scientist.
But as a rocket scientist, he’s even worse.
Holder on the Hot Seat
Today Politico Arena asks:
Terror suspects: Eric Holder’s defense (nothing new here)–agree or disagree?
My response:
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Law and Civil Liberties
The Pentagon Shouldn’t Get a Pass
Today’s Politico includes an op ed that I co-authored with Heather Hurlburt of the National Security Network. It was the first time that the two of us collaborated, and I was very pleased with the end result. Most of the clever turns of phrase are Heather’s including the title, “The Wrong Manhood Test.” And I’m grateful to Harrison Moar and Charles Zakaib for helping me on Monday to sift through the gargantuan defense budget, and pull out the relevant facts.
Heather and I don’t agree on everything. We faced off at Bloggingheads.tv several months ago to discuss my book, The Power Problem, and I’m sure that we’ll continue to spar from time to time in the future. But the bottom line from the op ed is this:
…because our national security rests on our economic health as well as on the strength of our military, a liberal and a libertarian can agree that the Pentagon should no longer get a pass. Congress must stop funding projects to satisfy parochial domestic interests. The Pentagon must stop buying weapons systems that are already outdated, unworkable or both. And the administration must carefully define our vital security interests, reshape our grand strategy to more equitably distribute the burdens of policing the globe and reduce the occasions when our military will be called on to fight.
There is more than enough blame to go around. Congress is already girding for battle over some pet projects singled out for elimination or cut backs, including the C-17 transport and the additional engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The Pentagon continues to plan for contingency operations around the world, and assumes that the U.S. security umbrella will remain open over Europe and East Asia for the indefinite future. And the White House has signaled (they have yet to formally produce a national security strategy) that while it would like the allies to help out, it doesn’t want them to get too capable. (See, most recently, Secretary Clinton’s remarks re: European defense.)
The governing assumption, therefore, is that, as the just-released QDR explains,
America’s interests and role in the world require armed forces with unmatched capabilities and a willingness on the part of the nation to employ them in defense of our interests and the common good.
The time for finger pointing over the Pentagon’s budget is over. If we can’t address the obvious inefficiencies and waste in military procurement, then when can we? If we can’t today envision a time in the future when other countries will play a larger role in their own defense, then will we ever? “If the Department of Defense can’t figure out a way to defend the United States on a budget of more than half a trillion dollars a year,” in Bob Gates’s immortal words, “then our problems are much bigger than anything that can be cured by buying a few more ships and planes.” (h/t Justin Logan)
Amen to that. So let’s stop defining our security by the number of ships and planes that we buy, and start thinking about ways to responsibly contain, and ultimately bring down, military spending.
Obama’s Troubles and U.S. Foreign Policy
At their National Security Experts blog, The National Journal asks:
President Obama is in a rough political patch…So, what does his weakened position mean for his handling of foreign affairs and for the tack that allies, rivals and outright enemies take toward the U.S.?
I don’t believe that the president will rely on a major foreign policy initiative to turn around his political fortunes. He has many things on his plate right now. He spent just nine minutes on foreign policy in the SOTU, and the American people have clearly signaled a desire to focus on problems here at home.
I’m not entirely happy with this turn of events. I think the country’s turn inward — in the form of trade protectionism, nativism, and anti-immigrant sentiment — is particularly worrisome. But the wise course for those in Washington is to come up with a foreign policy that can be sustained with a modicum of popular support. They should find a way for us to be engaged in the world without being in charge of it.
So far, I see no evidence of a change away from the assumptions that have guided U.S. foreign policy through four post-Cold War administrations, two Republican and two Democrat (plus GHW Bush for part of his term). The just released QDR repeats many of the same mantras about U.S. power as a global public good that we’ve heard for years.
Up to now, the practice has been to distort and confuse the purpose of U.S. foreign policy. The policy elite in Washington and New York know that the public expects the U.S. military to be used to advance American security, when in fact much of what it does underwrites the security of others. As Michael Mandelbaum wrote several years ago, “To make sacrifices largely for the benefit of others counts as charity, and for Americans, as for other people, charity begins at home.”
Obama and his team, and probably his successor, might manage to sustain the dominant posture for a while longer. Other countries have no great desire to assume responsibilities for their own defense, or for policing their respective regions.
But at the end of the day, all politics is local. Americans can’t be expected to care more about things that occur 8,000 miles from our shores than they do about things in the Gulf of Mexico, or in New Mexico. In an era of crushing fiscal imbalance, and an increasingly complex international environment, now is the time to revisit some of the core assumptions of the past two decades and ask: Is this where we want to be 20 years from now, with the U.S. military still the world’s policeman, and with the rest of the world anxious, querulous and resentful when we use that power, or even when we don’t?
If we choose to make a change, even a modest change in the direction of greater burden sharing with allies who have grown too comfortable under the U.S. security umbrella, we might look back on this period fondly. If we don’t, we are likely to see it as a missed opportunity.
Robert Gates, Meet Robert Gates
“If the Department of Defense can’t figure out a way to defend the United States on a budget of more than half a trillion dollars a year, then our problems are much bigger than anything that can be cured by buying a few more ships and planes.”
- Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Speech to Economic Club of Chicago, July 16, 2009
“The situation out there in the world doesn’t change and the world is getting more dangerous rather than less so. The Defense Department certainly spends a lot of money but if you look at where the Defense Department is today it certainly is within historical norms.”
- Defense Secretary Robert Gates, responding to suggestions that his new $741 billion budget should be cut, February 2, 2010
Is the Threat of Cyberattack Growing?
The New York Times dutifully reports that the Director of National Intelligence says it is. But it’s hard to know what that means. The word “cyberattack” has no usefully fixed definition.
And the important questions—plural—include: 1) whether cyberattacks—plural—are growing in number and sophistication more quickly than the capability of infrastructure owners to fend them off and recover from them; 2) which, if any, owners lack incentives to secure their infrastructure and what security externalities they might create; and 3) what levers—such as contract liability, tort liability, or regulation—might correct any such market failures.
Some lines in Director Blair’s statement are quite telling. Compare this:
Terrorist groups and their sympathizers have expressed interest in using cyber means to target the United States and its citizens.
to this:
The cyber criminal sector in particular has displayed remarkable technical innovation with an agility presently exceeding the response capability of network defenders.
Now, which class of actors are you going to worry about—the ones that dream of doing something bad? Or the ones that have the sophistication to do something bad? Probably the latter.
While calling for a federal intelligence-community role in “cybersecurity,” Blair confesses that this is more of a crime problem that the business sector needs to handle than a true national security issue in which the leading role would be played by government.
The good news is that crime syndicates don’t prosper by killing their hosts. Don’t look for catastrophic failure of our technical infrastructures arising from this most serious of “cyber” threats.
There’s no question that cybersecurity is important. But it’s also manageable. I shared my thoughts on “cybersecurity” last year with the House Science Committee.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
QDR: The Pentagon Hedges
As usual, Ben Friedman beat me to the punch regarding the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) (.pdf), and, as usual again, he nails it.
I do see some value in the exercise, however. So let’s not “forget it” just yet.
By constructing a rationale to justify our existing defense posture, and providing a blueprint for force planning into the future, the QDR can be particularly useful for taking on some sacred cows. For example, the proposals to cancel the CG(X) cruiser, shut down production of the C-17 and the F-22, restructuring the DDG-1000 destroyer and the Future Combat Systems program, are sure to rile up members of Congress who continue to treat the defense budget as just another vehicle for dispensing pork barrel goodies to a handful of constituents. By singling these programs out as inconsistent with our strategic objectives, the QDR forces the advocates of these programs to come up with different rationales, beyond the inevitable “jobs, jobs, jobs” mantra.
But the QDR can only do so much. The real culprit driving an enormous defense posture is a national security strategy which presumes that the United States is, and always will be, the world’s indispensable nation. We need a different grand strategy, one that would shift some of the burdens on our friends and allies around the world who have grown too comfortable under the U.S. security umbrella.
There is vague language in the QDR about evolving our strategic posture in different regions, and emphasis on building capacity, but the bottom line is the same as it has been for decades: a de facto permanent presence for U.S. forces in Europe and Asia, and continued attention to security in “key regions” (a phrase that appears seven times), which could be construed as everywhere in the world.
For nearly two decades, the United States has been the policeman for the world. If the senior civilian leadership in the White House had decided to push other countries to take responsibility for their own security, and for security in their respective regions, the QDR might have become a vehicle for responsibly shaping a smaller military that is explicitly oriented toward defending U.S. security. Instead, because the military is convinced that they will be expected to answer all of the world’s 911 calls for the foreseeable future, the Pentagon hedged its bets.
I can’t say that I blame them.
Manhattan Says No to Terror Trials
Today, Politico Arena asks:
Terror trials: Is it time for the administration to retreat and rethink? Is it generally mishandling the terrorism issue?
My response:
On no issue is President Obama getting acquainted with reality more clearly than terrorism, or so it seems. He blazed into office, guns holstered, as the anti-Bush, putting Eric Holder’s Justice Department in charge, not of the War on Terror, a phrase he banished from his administration’s lexicon, but of “bringing those who planned and plotted the [9/11] attacks to justice,” as Holder put it in November when he announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others would be given civilian trials in downtown Manhattan. But as the manifold costs of such a trial became increasingly apparent, and as even New York Democrats have grown increasingly restive, the White House, it seems, has backed down. We await the line of congressmen saying “Bring the trial to my district.”
How could it be otherwise? The administration’s law-enforcement approach to terrorism has been unserious and folly from the start. In an understated yet devastating piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, former CIA director Michael V. Hayden cataloged that folly, nowhere more evident than in the FBI’s handling of the would-be Christmas Day bomber, who was Mirandized and lawyered up long before he could be seriously interrogated by agents with the background to elicit the intelligence we need — not to prosecute terrorists, but to prevent future terrorist attacks. The most telling revelation in Hayden’s piece came at the end, however. In August, the government unveiled its High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) designed to interrogate people like the Christmas Day bomber, and it announced also that the FBI would begin questioning CIA officers about alleged abuses in the 2004 inspector general’s report. Was the HIG called in to interrogate the Christmas Day bomber? No — it has yet to be formed. But the interrogations of CIA officers are proceeding apace. So much for the administration’s priorities. Is it any wonder that Scott Brown’s pollsters report that terrorism, and the administration’s mishandling of the issue, polled better even than Brown’s opposition to ObamaCare?
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Forget the QDR
There is a lot not to like about the Quadrennial Defense Review, which comes out today (the National Journal posted a leaked copy Friday). Like past QDRs, this one uses vague, trendy ideas about international relations to inflate threats and justify our massive defense budget. As usual, we hear the evidence-free claims that non-state actors are getting more powerful and that the world is getting more complex and unpredictable (“change continues to accelerate”). I believe that states are hanging onto or even gaining power relative to other sorts of social organizations and that the world is no less predictable than it was in 1900 or 1950. The QDR also says that climate change is a national security problem. That’s a popular line, which as near as I can tell is a marketing gimmick. Then there the usual tripe about how great our alliances are, how strategic every country with a Marine in it is, how terrific interagency cooperation is, and so forth.
The good news is that it doesn’t really matter. Newspapers confuse the QDR with law, but it is closer to PR. It’s like a particularly important speech. It sells what Secretary of Defense is selling and justifies what the Department of Defense does. Because it comes in part from agencies it is supposed to guide, it rationalizes rather than leads. Because it is largely a consensus document, it says only what half of the Pentagon can agree on—various strains of mush. Can anyone explain what past QDR’s have accomplished? I think nothing. Sure, there are interesting tidbits about forces structure plans, but these are in the budget documents too. At best it causes DoD to justify itself, giving us analysts something to argue about.
The administration’s proposed defense budget, also being released today, matters much more to policy. It reveals more about the nation’s defense strategy than the vacuous documents that purport to do so.
Policy types love strategy documents because they are mostly technocratic idealists. They want government polices to be made by rational processes that reveal national interests, which are then laid out in plans like the QDR. They want policy to be like science. But democratic government is the push and pull of competing ideologies and interests. Public plans or strategies are part of that process. Congress should thank DoD for these mind-numbing 120 pages, throw them away, and focus on the budget.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Tax and Budget Policy
Chinese Security Scholar Calls for Overseas Basing to Counter U.S.
Dr. Dingli Shen, a scholar of security studies and Chinese and U.S. foreign policies at Fudan University, had an interesting op-ed yesterday that merits attention.
Dr. Dingli Shen
According to Shen, China should consider developing “overseas military bases,” which he says people define in today’s context as “supply bases for the navy escorting the ships cruising in the Gulf of Aden and Somalia.” Shen lists four main interests that justify overseas bases: “the protection of the people and fortunes overseas; the guarantee of smooth trading; the prevention of the overseas intervention which harms the unity of the country and the defense against foreign invasion.”
The lay reader should be clear that the United States does not look favorably on China’s developing the ability to guarantee its own smooth trading; we like having the leverage to determine, ultimately,whether we will allow foreign countries to trade. The reader should also be aware that the third interest Shen lists is a diplomatic phrasing of “being able to prevent U.S. intervention in Taiwan,” perhaps in addition to some much smaller concerns about Tibet. The Chinese do not need to do anything to pursue the fourth listed interest, preventing foreign invasion of China. So what’s left is protecting Chinese people and money overseas; wresting control of China’s sea lines of communication from the United States; and preventing U.S. intervention in ways that would “harm the unity of the country.”
Is Money Fungible?
Recently I spent some time redecorating my office to create room such that there was space for me to work that was physically apart from my computer, because I’ve come to view the internet as a huge time sink.
Apparently this endeavor of mine has failed miserably, however, because here I am blogging about something I saw on Bloggingheads TV:
In the clip above, Heather Hurlburt and Daniel Drezner discuss arguments that involve posing tradeoffs between domestic spending and foreign policy spending. Drezner sketches out an argument he ties to Obama’s Afghanistan speech: we’re in a big hole at home and we just can’t afford running around throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into places like Afghanistan and Iraq, so part of what we’re trying to do is cash out of those endeavors and keep the money we could spend there at home instead. Hurlburt describes this as part of the argument Cato’s foreign policy team–Chris Preble in particular–has been making, but that says that this approach is “not going to happen because it would seem like a public admission that there are constraints on what we can do, even though we would agree that there are massive constraints on what we can do.”
Hurlburt goes on to say that “our economy can’t recover unless the global economy recovers” and that “a big part of how quickly and in what directions our economy recovers” has to do with the U.S.-China relationship and the development of green jobs. Therefore, the “classic isolationist trope” of what Drezner described–doing less abroad so we can do more at home–doesn’t work.
I’m completely lost here. (If the kind people at BH.tv would invite me on, I could explain in vivid and expressive detail!)
A Victory for Fiscal Sovereignty and Human Rights
A Swiss court just threw a wrench in the gears of an IRS effort to impose bad U.S. tax law on an extraterritorial basis, ruling that Switzerland-based UBS does not have to hand over data to the American tax authorities. This ruling nullifies an agreement that the Swiss government was coerced into making with the U.S. government last year.
In typical arrogant fashion, the IRS already has indicated that it still expects acquiescence, notwithstanding Switzerland’s strong human rights policy on personal privacy. The Bloomberg story excerpted below has the details, but it’s worth noting that this entire fight exists solely because the Internal Revenue Code imposes double taxation on income that is saved and invested, and imposes that bad policy on economic activity outside America’s border. But just as other governments should not have the right to impose their laws on things that happen in America, the United States should not have the right to trample the sovereignty of other nations:
The failure by U.S. citizens to complete certain tax forms or declare income doesn’t constitute “tax fraud” that would require Switzerland to disclose account data, the country’s Federal Administrative Court ruled in a judgment released today. …“The prosecutors at the Justice Department are not going to be happy with this opinion,” Namorato said in an interview in Washington. …U.S. Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller declined to comment. …The Internal Revenue Service said in a statement that while the agency hadn’t reviewed the ruling it “had every expectation that the Swiss government will continue to honor the terms of the agreement.” …Switzerland distinguishes between tax fraud, which is a crime, and tax evasion, which is a civil offense.
This battle is part of a broader effort by uncompetitive nations to persecute “tax havens.” Creating a tax cartel for the benefit of greedy politicians in France, Germany, and the United States would be a mistake. An “OPEC for politicians” would pave the way for higher taxes, as explained here, here, and here.
But this also is a human rights issue. Look at what happened recently in the thugocracy known as Venezuela, where Chavez began a new wave of expropriation. The Venezuelans with money in Cayman, Miami, and Switzerland were safe, but the people with assets inside the country have been ripped off by a criminal government. Or what about people subjected to persecution, such as political dissidents in Russia? Or Jews in North Africa? Or ethnic Chinese in Indonesia? Or homosexuals in Iran? And how about people in places such as Mexico where kidnappings are common and successful people are targeted, often on the basis of information leaked from tax departments. This world needs safe havens, jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands that offer oppressed people the protection of honest courts, financial privacy, and the rule of law. Heck, even the bureaucrat in charge of the OECD’s anti-tax competition campaign admitted to a British paper that “tax havens are essential for individuals who live in unstable regimes.” With politicians making America less stable with each passing day, let’s hope this essential freedom is available in the future.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; International Economics and Development; Law and Civil Liberties; Tax and Budget Policy
Pottery Barn Rule, Take 27
Last week, Iraq’s independent electoral commission disqualified 511 candidates — most of them Sunnis — from running in the parliamentary elections scheduled for March. Today’s Washington Post reports that Vice President Joe Biden is hurrying off to Baghdad to try to convince the Iraqis to change their minds. U.S. troop withdrawals were supposed to accelerate after the elections were held and a new government seated. But the elections have already been postponed at least once, and the administration is worried that the obvious bias against Sunnis could stoke sectarian tensions.
“U.S. officials are in a precarious position,” the Post story explains:
They are stuck between the government they created and bolstered — a coalition of mostly sect- and ethnic-based coalitions dominated by Shiite Arabs — and politicians who have been branded as loyalists to the dictator deposed during the U.S.-led invasion.
If that weren’t difficult enough, Biden doesn’t want to appear to be pressuring the Iraqis, and Prime Minister Maliki and his crew don’t want to appear to have been pressured. As a senior administration official told the Post:
“[N]o one wants to be perceived as defending the rights of Baathists” and no Iraqi decision-maker wants to be the first to publicly declare that the ruling must be reversed.
It is times like these when I am reminded of Colin Powell’s infamous Pottery Barn rule. Never mind that he never publicly invoked that precise metaphor. Never mind that Pottery Barn has no rule. The point is that the average person understands the simple premise: you break it, you own it.
Machine Gun Nests in the War on Terror
Terrorism is a strategy of the weak. Without power of their own, terrorists seek to goad states into overreactions that bestow favors on their otherwise inconsequential movements and ideologies.
When a state goes to war, for example, this wastes its own blood and treasure, driving the costs of its own policies higher and weakening its own military and economy. Overreaction drives support to terrorism when innocents or perceived innocents are harmed or killed by overreacting states. And overreaction tends to energize and promote terrorism worldwide by confirming the narrative that incumbent powers are evil—the portrayal of the United States as an occupier of Muslim lands and exploiter of Muslim people is an example.
With the logic of terrorism in hand, the appropriate responses come into focus. Constant pressure on terror groups worldwide; cool, phlegmatic response to terrorist attacks; constant study of terror groups, their relationships, plans, and methods; counter-rhetoric exposing the venality and bloodiness of terror groups themselves; exploitation of fissures among the many different groups that have been drawn to the “al Qaeda” brand; and so on.
Unfortunately, many people focused intently on prosecuting the war on terror have yet to digest the nature of the challenge or orient their responses accordingly. Presuming a large, united terrorist front with substantial technical and logistical capabilities, they urge the reactions that would be appropriate for an invading state. They deride as dangerous the tailored responses dictated by sound counterterrorism strategy.
Unfortunately, they are counseling overreaction to this enemy, which is far less lethal than a state, if harder to locate and extinguish. The guns of terror warriors are the wrong caliber, and they’re pointed the wrong direction.
Daniel Popeo writes today in the Washington Examiner that legal activism aids terrorists. It doesn’t. It shows that the United States is not frightened, and is not thrown off its game, by attacks and attempts like that of December 25th. Indomitability, not ferocity, will be the hallmark of our counterterrorism success.
Review our recent forum on counterterrorism here, and our counterterrorism conference of a year ago here.
The Hopelessly Stupid Politics of the Iran NIE
The Washington policy establishment is now pulsing with excitement over news that the intelligence community (IC) is revising its 2007 statement that “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons” and that this halt “lasted at least several years.”
Funny story: The day the NIE came out, Ted Carpenter and I were arriving in Los Angeles to give at talk at the LA World Affairs Council on Iran. Immediately on our deplaning, the questions started coming: “What do you think about the NIE? How does this change things?” “What NIE?” I asked.
So amid our last minute preparations for the talk, I was scrambling to get hold of a copy, but being the Luddite I am, I couldn’t manage to get my computer to work, or to get the .pdf to open right on my Blackberry. But I was ultimately able to pull up the first sentence, quoted above, and to look at the first footnote.
That was all anybody needed to do. The footnote read:
For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.
Well, this is like saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because we found a few degraded mustard gas shells out in the middle of the desert. That wasn’t what anybody was referring to when “Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction” were a topic of conversation, so it proves only that if you redefine things you can change conclusions. Much of the nuclear infrastructure that is in dispute in Iran is contained in “civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment,” so the new definition does not include much of what people speaking in the vernacular are including when they say “Iran’s nuclear program.” So at the talk that night in LA, I said this:
the headline splashed all over the newspapers with respect to the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is that Iran in 2003 suspended, and kept in suspense, its nuclear weapons program; however, it continues to operate facilities like that at Natanz which could at some point in the future be used as part of a nuclear weapons program. So it really becomes a definitional problem in the context of what components of Iran’s industrial infrastructure are included in this nuclear weapons program and which of them are kept outside of it. From my reading of the news reporting I think that it has been at least mildly misleading.
Predictably, American neoconservatives began rending their garments and gnashing their teeth, whipping each other into a frenzy, decrying the “politicized intelligence” at the CIA (do they ever tire of that?). But really, is it too much to ask of journalists who write about national security (and, to be fair, their headline writers) to read one footnote in a document that contains about three pages of text? I’m not the smartest guy in the world, and I managed to figure out what the deal was while in a big time crunch, without access to the full document, and without a sizeable rolodex of insiders I could call to help me figure out what was going on. Still, the American journalistic community splashed headlines like “NIE: Iran halted nuclear weapons program in 2003″ and such. So in a sense, the neocons were right: the inferences people drew from reading the reporting on the NIE were inaccurate.
But this is, more than anything, a critique of the American journalistic establishment than it is the IC. Writing in the first sentence of a three-page document a provocative claim and then footnoting a definition that dramatically alters the implications of the claim is not really all that tricky. The people who assemble news stories, who did not exactly cover themselves in glory in scrutinizing government claims before the war in Iraq, were either lazy or stupid in this case as well. Given the benefits the neocons reaped from the media’s laziness or stupidity in the Iraq case, the spluttering outrage in this case was always a bit much to take.
Israel, the United States, and the Danger of War with Iran
Steve Hynd at Newshoggers looks at Heritage’s recent work on Iran and observes that it sure seems like they’re prepared for war. James Phillips says the Israelis may attack Iran but we shouldn’t try to stop them. Phillips notes uncritically Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu’s characterization of the Iranian state as a “a messianic apocalyptic cult” and points out that while the United States “has the advantage of being geographically further away from Iran than Israel and thus less vulnerable to an Iranian nuclear attack … it must be sensitive to its ally’s security perspective.”
Therefore we should accede to an Israeli preventive strike and prepare for the consequences. What’s odd about Phillips’ piece is that he doesn’t seem to think that the United States should provide its own view as to when an attack would be smart and when it would not be. Instead, we should just toss the keys to the Israelis and buckle up: “Washington should not seek to block Israel from taking what it considers to be necessary action against an existential threat. The United States does not have the power to guarantee that Israel would not be attacked by a nuclear Iran in the future, so it should not betray the trust of a democratic ally by tying its hands now.” This is a pretty high standard. It’s very difficult to guarantee a third party won’t do something in the future. If that’s the standard we’re using to determine when we allow ourselves to be sucked into wars, we’re in for a lot of wars. Moreover, I’m clear on the logic of starting a war, but why wouldn’t we, as the larger power in the relationship, want to determine the timeline on which the attack occurs? Why just defer to Tel Aviv?
Ariel Cohen
Hynd also points to an accompanying piece by Ariel Cohen that calls on the U.S. to extend nuclear deterrence over Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and to “deploy a visible deterrent, including overwhelming nuclear forces near Iran, on surface ships, aircraft, or permanent bases … designed to hold at risk the facilities that Iran would need to launch a strategic attack, thereby making any such attack by Iran likely to fail.” Interestingly in a passage he attributes to personal meetings with Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, he says the Russian leadership sees Iran as a “regional superpower” and doesn’t want to go to war with them.
Cohen also says bombing is better than non-bombing because of the “existential threat” a nuclear Iran would pose to Israel, as well as Cohen’s worry that by not bombing “the U.S. would send a message to other countries that nuclear weapons are the trump card that can force U.S. and Israeli acquiescence.” But they sort of are that sort of trump card, right? Presumably that’s why the Iranians and the North Koreans appear to have been so enthusiastic about getting some. Ultimately, says Cohen, the U.S. should drop the pretense of UN sanctions against Iran and opt instead for a sanctions coalition of the willing. We should also apply unilateral sanctions against Russia for refusing to join the Iran sanctions coalition, and we should station nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
This is getting a bit too long for a blog post already, so I’ll just point to the study I produced on the “should we bomb Iran?” question back in 2006 for those with interest. The basic outline of the argument holds up reasonably well, I think, so my thoughts are mostly contained in it. While the Heritage scholars point out that the Obama administration is unlikely to be terribly enthusiastic about bombing Iran, it’s an interesting counterfactual to think about what things might look like if John McCain had won the presidency. Imagine the Sarah Palin speeches.
Is Russia’s Gas Behavior Driven by Targets’ Domestic Politics?
Back when Russia was turning off the spigots to pipelines running through Ukraine, Official Washington was in a panic. Just a few years after the Orange Revolution was supposed to have heralded a new era of freedom and democracy in Ukraine, Russia was using its economic muscle to stifle the growth of that freedom because of the threat it felt a democratic Ukraine posed to the Putin regime’s grip on power. It was a lot like the “democratic dominoes” argument the neoconservatives deployed in promoting the Iraq war.
As Washington Post editorialist Jackson Diehl stated the case in 2007,
Putin sees the fragile new democracy in Ukraine, and an allied government in the tiny Black Sea nation of Georgia, as dire threats. If Western-style freedom consolidates and spreads in the former Soviet republics of Eastern Europe, his own undemocratic regime will be isolated and undermined. What’s more, Ukraine and its neighbors are likely to integrate with Europe rather than remaining economic and political vassals of Russia.
Secretary of State Rice warned that Russia’s behavior on energy constituted “politically motivated efforts to constrain energy supply to Ukraine” as punishment for the former Soviet republic’s pro-Western orientation. In short, the argument was that Ukrainian democracy → threat to the Russian regime → Russian gas cutoffs.
Others argued that Russia’s increasingly nasty behavior was less about the internal political contours of its neighbors and more about power politics and making sure the neighbors would be compliant with Russian interests, much like the United States has sought in the Western Hemisphere since at least the Monroe Doctrine.
Fred Hiatt: Lukashenko’s domestic reforms a threat to Russia
So if fear of democracy and liberalism were driving Russia’s behavior back then, then what is causing the current cutoff dispute with non-democratic and unfriendly-to-Washington Belarus? It’s radio silence from most of Washington, with a notable exception: the exquisitely Russophobic Washington Post op-ed page. Fred Hiatt and the Gang are sticking to their story, offering the ridiculous argument earlier this week that in fact Moscow was acting to suppress Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko’s incipient liberalism, which was evinced by Lukashenko’s having “released a few political prisoners” and “refusing to recognize the two puppet states that Moscow is backing in Georgia.”
A less ornate explanation would be that perhaps Russia is more fixated on material factors and less on ideology.
America vs. Europe
The blogosphere has been buzzing with a debate on whether America or Europe is more prosperous. A partial list of contestants includes Jim Manzi, Paul Krugman, Matt Welch, Megan McArdle, Matthew Yglesias, and Tino (don’t know who he is, but his blog has lots of good info).
I’ve addressed this issue in the past, with detailed comparisons in my Cato study on the Nordic Model, as well as a paper for the Heritage Foundation looking at Fiscal Policy Lessons from Europe.
I’m frankly shocked when people claim Europe is as rich as the United States, for the simple reason that the data showing otherwise is so abundant. The following charts, both from presumably impeccable sources, should be more than enough to end the argument. The first one is from OECD data (see page 6), showing average individual consumption per capita. I compare America to the EU-15 (Western Europe), but then also add Norway and Switzerland to the mix to boost the European score.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; International Economics and Development; Political Philosophy; Tax and Budget Policy
Helping the Haitians
The tragedy unfolding in Haiti has elicited an outpouring of sympathy, and it is hardly surprising that governments and NGOs from all over the globe are mobilizing resources to aid in recovery. Help is flowing to the shattered island: teams trained in rescue operations, emergency medical services, security personnel, and financial aid. This type of assistance will likely continue for some time.
The U.S. military is also involved. Several Navy and Coast Guard vessels shipped out almost immediately. A few thousand Marines are helping to restore order, and more might soon be on the way. Such a ground presence makes sense, provided that the mission is carefully defined, and the long-term expectations are tempered by a dose of humility. The United States has, after all, intervened repeatedly in Haiti, and it remains the poorest country in the hemisphere. One might even conclude that our interventions have contributed to Haiti’s chronic problems, a consideration which should give pause to those calling for the United States to commit to a long-term project to fix the country.
One can make an argument against sending military assets to deal with such crises. A nation’s military is designed and built for one purpose — to defend the nation — and when it is deployed for missions that do not serve that narrow purpose there is a risk that the institutions will be rendered less capable of responding to genuine threats. I question the wisdom of humanitarian intervention on those grounds in my book, The Power Problem, stipulating, among other things, that the U.S. military should be sent abroad only when vital U.S. interests are at stake.
All that said, President Obama’s decision to swiftly deploy U.S. personnel to Haiti is appropriate on at least two grounds. First, sending troops into harm’s way — and usually into the middle of a civil conflict, as we did in the Balkans and in Iraq – is very different from mobilizing our formidable military assets to ameliorate suffering after a natural disaster. The latter types of interventions are less likely to engender the ire of the people on the losing end (and there always are losers). Humanitarian missions are also less likely to arouse the suspicion of neighbors who might question the intervener’s intentions. Indeed, there was a measurable outpouring of support and goodwill toward the United States after the Bush administration deployed U.S. military personnel in and around Indonesia following the horrific tsunami of late 2004. Genuine humanitarian missions, “armed philanthropy” as MIT’s Barry Posen calls it, are likely to be far less costly than armed regime change/nation-building missions that must contend with insurgents intent on taking their country back from the foreign occupier.
Another important consideration is a country’s interests in its respective region. Humanitarian crises, even those whose effects are confined within a particular country’s borders, often pose a national security threat to neighboring states. What has happened in Haiti over the past 48 hours might meet that criteria, but the White House’s immediate motivations seem purely altruistic. My frustration is that the U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War of actively discouraging other countries from defending themselves ensures that they will have little to offer when a similar natural disaster occurs in their own backyard, which means that the U.S. military is expected to act — even when our own interests are not at stake.
But that is a discussion for another time. The scale of the tragedy in nearby Haiti cries out for swift action, and I am pleased to see that many organizations — both public and private — have stepped forward to help. I wish these efforts well.
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