Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Record on Foreign Policy
Cato foreign policy experts weigh in on President Obama’s record in his first 100 days:
Christopher Preble, Director Foreign Policy Studies:
President Obama deserves credit for making a few modest changes in U.S. foreign and defense policy, and he has signaled a desire to make more fundamental shifts in the future. Some of these may prove helpful, while others are likely to encounter problems. In the end, however, so long as the president is unwilling to revisit some of the core assumptions that have guided U.S grand strategy for nearly two decades — chief among these the conceit that the United States is the world’s indispensable nation, and that we must take the lead in resolving all the world’s problems — then he will be unable to effect the broad changes that are truly needed.
Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President Defense & Foreign Policy Studies; Christopher Preble:
On the plus side, Obama moved quickly to fulfill his most important foreign policy promise: ending the war in Iraq. That said, the policy that his administration will implement is consistent with the agreement that the outgoing Bush administration negotiated with the Iraqis. Given that the war has undermined U.S. security interests, and our continuing presence there is costly and counterproductive, Obama should have proposed to remove U.S. troops on a faster timetable.
Malou Innocent, Foreign Policy Analyst:
The jury is still out on the other major, ongoing military operation, the war in Afghanistan. That mission is directly related to events in neighboring Pakistan, which is serving — and has served — as a safe haven for Taliban supporters for years. President Obama deserves credit for approaching the problem with both countries together, and also in a regional context, which includes Iran, as well as India. Still unknown is the scope and scale of the U.S. commitment. President Obama has approved a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. Some have suggested that still more troops are needed, and that these additional troop numbers might prevail for 10-15 years. That would be a mistake. The United States should be looking for ways to increase the capacity of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to confront the extremism in their countries, and should not allow either to grow dependent upon U.S. military and financial support.
Christopher Preble and Ted Galen Carpenter:
On Iran, President Obama made the right decision by agreeing to join the P5 + 1 negotiations, but that is only a first step. The two sides are far apart and President Obama has not signaled his intentions if negotiations fail to produce a definitive breakthrough. Sanctions have had a very uneven track record, and are unlikely to succeed in convincing the Iranians to permanently forego uranium enrichment. If the Iranians are intent upon acquiring nuclear weapons, military action would merely delay Iran ’s program, and would serve in the meantime to rally support for an otherwise unpopular clerical regime, and a manifestly incompetent president.
Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow; Christopher Preble:
A related problem is North Korea‘s ongoing nuclear program, an area where the president and his team seem to be grasping for answers. President Obama was mistaken if he believed that that the UN Security Council would render a meaningful response to Pyongyang’s provocative missile launch. It was naive, at best, for him to believe that even a strong rebuke from the UNSC would have altered Kim Jong Il’s behavior. The president must directly engage China, the only country with any significant influence over Kim. The North’s reckless and unpredictable behavior does not serve Beijing’s interests.
Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow; Christopher Preble:
Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are correct to apply greater scrutiny to bloated Pentagon spending, and to terminating unnecessary weapon systems, but the budget will actually grow slightly, at a time when we should be looking for ways to trim spending. If President Obama decided to avoid Iraq-style occupations, we could cut our ground forces in half. If we stopped planning for near-term war with China or Russia, the Air Force and Navy could be much smaller. Unless we commit to a grand strategy of restraint, and encourage other countries to provide for their own defense, it will be impossible to make the large-scale cuts in military spending that are needed.
Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies; Benjamin Friedman; Christopher Preble:
Two other quick points. President Obama has moved away from some of the overheated rhetoric surrounding counterterrorism and homeland security, including dropping the phrase ‘War on Terror”. This was the right approach. The language surrounding the fight against terrorism is as important — if not more important — than the actual fight itself. Equally useful is his pledge to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and his renunciation of the use of torture and other illegal means in the first against al Qaeda. These steps send an important message to audiences outside of the United States who cooperation is essential.
Ian Vasquez, Director, Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity; Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Project Coordinator for Latin America.
President Obama has signaled a slight change on US-Cuba policy by softening some travel and financial restrictions. It is not as far as we would have liked, but it is a step in the right direction — toward greater engagement, as opposed to more isolation, which was the approach adopted by the Bush administration.
For more research, check out Cato’s foreign policy and national security page.
New at Cato
Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here.
- “Bright Lines and Bailouts: To Bail or Not To Bail, That Is the Question”: Vern McKinley and Gary Gegenheimer have a new Policy Analysis that discusses the failure of bank bailouts.
- In a new piece at National Interest (Online), Doug Bandow offers a new strategy for dealing with Kim Jong Il.
- Nat Hentoff reports on Obama’s broken promises of transparency in the Washington Times.
- Make no mistake: “Of course it was torture,” says Gene Healy in this week’s Examiner column.
- In Tuesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, foreign policy analyst Benjamin Friedman discusses the record of Defense Secretary Robert Gates under Obama.
Fighting Piracy through Nation Building?
Even though I was on vacation last week, I followed the story of the Maersk-Alabama and Captain Richard Phillips with great interest. And I exulted when three of the four pirates met their end. The safe return of the Maersk-Alabama and her entire crew was a clear win for the cause of justice, and could serve as a model. Future efforts to protect ships from pirates are likely to include some combination of greater vigilance on the part of the shipping companies and crews, in collaboration with the navies of the many different nations who have an interest in keeping the sea lanes open and free. (This is one of the themes that I develop in my new book, and that I will discuss next Monday at Cato.)
We do not need to reorient our grand strategy to deal with pirates. We don’t need to reshape the U.S. Navy to fight a motley band of young men in leaky boats. As my colleague Ben Friedman has written, piracy is a problem, but decidedly minor relative to many other global security challenges.
But some are criticizing the approach taken to resolve last week’s standoff. They say that the only way to truly eliminate the piracy problem is to attack and ultimately clean out the pirates’ sanctuaries in lawless Somalia. This “solution” fits well with the broader push within the Washington foreign policy community that would deal with our security problems by fixing failed states.
I have gone on at length, usually with my colleagues Justin Logan and Ben Friedman, on the many reasons why an overarching strategy for fixing failed states is unwise and unnecessary. I won’t expand on that thesis here, other than to point out that of all failed states in the world, Somalia is arguably the most failed. “Fixing” it would require a massive investment of personnel, money, and time — resources that would be better spent elsewhere.
Mackubin Owens offers one of the more intriguing defenses of this approach in a just published e-note for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Owens likens a strategy of fixing Somalia to Gen. Andrew Jackson’s military operations in Florida, a story that features prominently in John Lewis Gaddis’s Surprise, Security and the American Experience. As Owens notes, when some members of President James Monroe’s cabinet wanted to punish Jackson for exceeding his mandate — in the course of his military campaign he captured and executed two British citizens accused of cavorting with the marauders who had attacked American citizens — Secretary of State John Quincy Adams jumped to Jackson’s defense and proposed a different tack. He demanded that Spain either take responsibility for cleaning up Florida or else give it up. And we all know what happened. Under the terms of Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, Florida became a territory of the United States. Some 26 years later, it became our 27th state.
I’ve vacationed in Florida many times. Walt Disney World is wonderful for the kids; I’ve been there six times. I spent three memorable days watching March Madness in Miami a few years back. Spring training baseball is great fun. Adams couldn’t have imagined any of these things when he acquired a vast swampland; he cared only that Florida under Spanish control, or lack thereof, posed a threat.
Will the Military Industrial Complex Save American Foreign Policy?
Missing from most of the commentary on the Secretary of Defense’s big defense spending speech yesterday is the fact that the program cuts he proposed are largely a result of freezing the topline — keeping defense spending level (once you adjust for inflation) for the next decade.
For nearly a decade the country has really had two defense budgets – one for imagined conventional wars against states like China, another from nation-building, peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. The first budget requires a small ground force and lots of big platforms operated by the Air Force and Navy. The latter requires much larger ground forces, a few niche capabilities like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, and less high technology wonders.
The current American love affair with counterinsurgency has resulted in a gradual shift of dollars from the conventional budget to the unconventional one. We are reversing the old idea that the American way of war is to replace labor with capital, or manpower with technology. We are becoming a land power first. We have been increasing manpower in the Army and Marines — adding 90,000 new troops — and paying them way more (compensation per service member is up by almost half since 1998). Personnel costs are taking more of the budget. And for more complex reasons, including health care costs, the operations and maintenance part of the budget – essentially the day to day cost of running the military — has also been growing fast when measured per service member. (For details on these issues, read this testimony by Stephen Daggett of the Congressional Research Service.)
That was bound to squeeze the other big parts of the defense budget — research, development and procurement of new weapons systems. There is too much future cost in the budget for everything to fit without topline growth, so something had to give. Big weapons programs are where the most give is, if you don’t want to cut manpower.
That conflict was delayed while the budget topline grew, but now that it is flat, it erupts. The manpower intensive military that follows from our current policies is eating into the conventional military that delivers manufactoring jobs across the country and the high-technology dreams of our military leaders.
What will be interesting to see is whether this shift encourages those leaders and their friends on the Hill to take up the arguments that people like me have been making for years: that small wars are mostly dumb wars. Preparation for these wars didn’t much hurt the military industrial complex before, now it does.
An additional note: Gates’ criticism of the acquisition process was on the mark. Rather than blaming out of control weapons costs on the kind of contracts we write or crafty contractors, as the President seems to, Gates noted correctly that the trouble is the requirements process — what we want, not how we buy it.
National Defense, Keynesianism, or Just Pure Rent-Seeking?
Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) is fighting hard to maintain production of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, which happens to be made by Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Ga. But Isakson insists that he’s not fighting for the plane just because it’s made in Georgia. No, he tells NPR, it’s important to recognize that it’s actually made by 90,000 workers in 49 states, and you don’t want to lose those jobs at a time of high unemployment.
In a letter to President Obama, he spelled out his argument, albeit with slightly different numbers:
Over 25,000 Americans work for the 1,000+ suppliers in 44 states that manufacture the F-22. Moreover, it is estimated that another 70,000 additional Americans indirectly owe their jobs to this program. As we face one of the most trying economic times in recent history it is critical to preserve existing high paying, specialized jobs that are critical to our nation’s defense.
To be sure, Isakson does insist that the plane is vital to national security, an argument that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Cato’s Chris Preble challenge. But it doesn’t say much for Republican arguments against President Obama’s wasteful spending when Republican senators argue that we should build a hugely expensive airplane as a jobs program.
Translation: “No”
On Fox News Sunday this week, Chris Wallace asked Secretary of Defense Robert Gates about the capability of Al Qaeda to mount attacks on the United States:
The President said that Al Qaeda is actively planning attacks against the U.S. homeland. Does Al Qaeda still have that kind of operational capability to plan and pull off those kinds of attacks?
Gates: They certainly have the capability to plan . . . .
Gates went on to discuss how Al Qaeda has arguably “metastasized,” with elements appearing elsewhere in the world, uncontrolled by Al Qaeda in Western Pakistan, but trained and inspired from there. He told Wallace that he thought Al Qaeda is “a very serious threat.”
But, the “capability to plan”? Who in the world doesn’t have the “capability to plan”? The better answer to Wallace’s question would have been “No.”
What Gates described is an Al Qaeda very different from the one that attacked the United States on 9/11. It’s more an idea than an organization, an idea that America-haters the world over are drawn to when American leaders tout Al Qaeda as a top threat. Anyone around the world can declare themselves a part of “Al Qaeda” and most of our media and political leaders will believe it, becoming needlessly fearful just because of the label.
With the focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan this week, President Obama and Secretary Gates had to discuss Al Qaeda. But they could have done more to show world audiences that Al Qaeda is weakened, and that terrorism is a weaker tool against the United States and the West than it was.
While maintaining the vigilance necessary to prevent any attack, issuing these more moderate kinds of communications would reduce the attractiveness of terrorism to potential terrorists. Smarter, more subdued communications is as important a part of strategic counterterrorism as directly fighting today’s terrorists.
Later in the interview, Gates smartly deflected Wallace’s questions about how the new administration eschews “war on terror” rhetoric. Nicely done.
Awesome, Fearsome, Awesome – Or Maybe Silly
This video is making the rounds because Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) muses in it that perhaps the Internet shouldn’t have been invented.
He immediately grants, “That’s a stupid thing to say” – perhaps for political reasons, or perhaps because he recognizes that the Internet makes us much better off despite every risk it carries and security flaw in it.
But he goes on to overstate cybersecurity risks excessively, breathlessly, and self-seriously. Not quite to the point of stupid – maybe we can call it “silly.”
The Department of Defense, he says, is “attacked” three million times a day. Well, yeah, but these “attacks” are mostly repetitious use of the same attack, mounted by “script kiddies” – unsophisticated know-nothings who get copies of others’ attacks and run them just to make trouble. The defense against this is to continually foreclose attacks and genres of attack as they develop, the way the human body develops antibodies to germs and viruses.
It’s important work, and it’s not always easy, but securing against attacks is an ongoing, stable practice in network management and a field of ongoing study in computer science. The attacks may continue to come, but it doesn’t really matter when the immunities and failsafes are in place and continuously being updated.
More important than this kind of threat inflation is the policy premise that the Internet should be treated as critical infrastructure because some important things happen on it.
Of cyber attack, Rockefeller says, “It’s an act . . . which can shut this country down. Shut down its electricity system, its banking system, shut down really anything we have to offer. It is an awesome problem.”
Umm, not really. Here’s Cato adjunct scholar Tim Lee, commenting on a report about the Estonian cyber attacks last year:
[S]ome mission-critical activities, including voting and banking, are carried out via the Internet in some places. But to the extent that that’s true, the lesson of the Estonian attacks isn’t that the Internet is “critical infrastructure” on par with electricity and water, but that it’s stupid to build “critical infrastructure” on top of the public Internet. There’s a reason that banks maintain dedicated infrastructure for financial transactions, that the power grid has a dedicated communications infrastructure, and that computer security experts are all but unanimous that Internet voting is a bad idea.
Tim has also noted that the Estonia attacks didn’t reach parliament, ministries, banks, and media – just their Web sites. Calm down, everyone.
But in the debate over raising the bridge or lowering the river, Rockefeller is choosing the policy that most enthuses and involves him: Get critical infrastructure onto the Internet and get the government into the cyber security business.
That’s a recipe for disaster. The right answer is to warn the operators of key infrastructure to keep critical functions off the Internet and let markets and tort law hold them responsible should they fail to maintain themselves operational.
I have written elsewhere about maintaining private responsibility for cyber security. My colleague Ben Friedman has written about who owns cyber security and more on the great cyber security freakout.
The Problem of Guantanamo
The Constitution obviously does not leave Americans helpless in fighting against those who wish them ill. But it also sets standards of conduct that should not — indeed, cannot — be carelessly tossed aside.
The prison at Guantanamo Bay has become such an international symbol of the U.S. abandoning its principles because it reflects an anti-terrorism policy gone badly awry. First, the Bush administration was both callous and careless in imprisoning people, even paying unreliable tribal allies for captives. Second, the U.S. government created no effective and objective truth-determining process to assess guilt. Third, Washington employed torture, violating both domestic and international law.
No doubt dangerous terrorists have been incarcerated at Gitmo. But so too have many innocent people. Indeed, the claims of former State Department Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson are particularly sobering:
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, admitted today that of the approximately 800 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay since the controversial detention center opened, only “two dozen or so” were actually terrorists. Wilkerson told the Associated Press today that “there are still innocent people there,” and that “some have been there six or seven years.”
Wilkerson made other comments earlier in the week in an internet posting entitled “Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay.” In that posting he said that “several in the US leadership became aware of the lack of proper vetting very early on and thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.”
Wilkerson also claimed that then-Secretary Powell and Richard Armitage were pressuring for the repatriation of as many detainees as possible, and that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney were unphased by the fact that “among the detainees was a 13 year old boy and a man over 90,” standing in opposition to returning detainees.
Even if Wilkerson exaggerates–and he has been a credible witness so far–he points to the price America has paid for failing to live up to its principles. The U.S. has locked up many who were neither terrorists nor otherwise dangerous. Doing so undoubtedly has helped turn some people in and out of Gitmo towards violence against America. And mistreating the innocent has badly sullied America’s reputation as a shining city upon a hill.
Confronting terrorism will never be easy. But violating America’s principles is no way to defend the America in which we all claim to believe.
Defense Cost Overruns
Wow, a bipartisan effort to actually do something about government waste. From the Washington Post today:
A bill to end cost overruns in major weapons systems would create a powerful new Pentagon position — director of independent cost assessments — to review cost analyses and estimates, separately from the military branch requesting the program.
Those reviews, unlike in the current process, would take place at key points in the acquisition process before a weapons program can proceed, according to legislation sponsored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
This seems like a step forward, but cost overruns are a big problem across the entire federal government, not just at the Pentagon. Federal financial management of energy, highway, and computer projects has been appalling, for example. I’ve written about this here and elsewhere.
The government needs to buy weapons, and so we should try to improve the Pentagon process as best we can. However, the federal government does not need to buy highways, airports, air traffic control computers and many other things that have chronic cost overruns. Those items should be privatized.
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