NATO and the real interests of the US

All the talk about the 2% spending target for NATO countries, and now Trump's my-4%-is-bigger-than-your-2% nonsense, is beginning to get to me. Ewen MacAskill and Pippa Crerar report (Donald Trump tells Nato allies to spend 4% of GDP on defence Guardian 07/11/2018):

Trump left the assembled presidents and prime ministers [at the NATO summit] floundering, unsure whether he was serious about the 4% target, double the existing Nato target of 2%, which many do not meet, or whether it was just a ploy.

After making the announcement, Trump walked out.

The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, confirmed the 4% figure. “During the president’s remarks today at the Nato summit he suggested that countries not only meet their commitment of 2% of their GDP on defence spending, but that they increase it to 4%,” she said.

A percentage of GDP target for defense spending is an entirely arbitrary number. What counts is whether the defense budget is appropriate to a foreign policy that takes into account realistic security risks. And also how well the money is spent. A country with a smaller GDP like Greece - and one that has shrunk incredibly due to the EU's austerity policies - may need to spend more than 2%, but countries like Germany and France maybe less. Greece actually is spending more than 2% now.

Markus Becker in Gerade noch mal gut gegangen Spiegel Online 12.07.2018 gives the following percentages for the five NATO countries that currently spend more than 2% of GDP on defense:

Britain: 2.1%
Greece: 2.3%
Estonia: 2,1%
Latvia: 2.1%
United States: 3.5%

This is the total percentage for the US, not a percentage spent only on European defense.

Über-Realist Stephen Walt in The EU and NATO and Trump — Oh My! Foreign Policy 07/02/2018 refers to the painfully obvious point that "Trump’s evident distaste for these institutions [NATO AND G-7] mostly reveals his own ignorance and lack of strategic acumen." That's actually putting it generally.

Walt is actually being generous in putting it that way. A desire to join in Vladimir Putin's foreign policy - for whatever reasons - probably also plays a major role. Even though he likely doesn't really understand that either. Not that he would act differently if he did!

Walt gives his realist-theory view of US interests in Europe, which despite myself I have to admit is persuasive as far as it goes:

The U.S. interest in Europe is fairly straightforward. In addition to their mutually beneficial trade and investment relations, the United States has long sought to preserve an overall balance of power in Europe. ...

There is no potential hegemon in Europe today, however — neither Germany nor Russia has the population, economic strength, and military clout to take over the whole place — and thus there is no serious threat to the regional balance of power. Thus, the United States could (and should) reduce its military role and gradually turn European security back to the Europeans. [my emphasis]

And in line with that view, he thinks that it makes practical sense for the EU nations to maintain cohesion in the Union and take on a bigger role in continental defense. And, "Given that the United States still has an
interest in a tranquil Europe, a strong EU would be even more valuable if the U.S. security role in Europe were to decline."

But he doesn't think Trump is making any kind of realistic evaluation of US interests in his foreign policy: "The national interest is irrelevant; it’s the Nielsen ratings that count."

On escalating in Syria

"There is no good case for U.S. escalation in Syria." - Paul Pillar

Paul Pillar describes Russia's current stalemate situation in Syria and why he thinks the Russian leadership considers it acceptable for the time being (Syria: Still a No-Win Situation The National Interest 06/05/2017):

The interests of the Syrian regime’s most important ally—Russia—are a key determinant of this stalemate. Russia has succeeded, at a cost acceptable to it, in achieving its objectives of shoring up its only client regime in the Middle East, securing its modest naval and air presence in the country, and demonstrating that it still is a player to be reckoned with in that part of the world. Moscow has an interest in not having those accomplishments erased. To try to do more than that, with a sweeping rollback of remaining opposition positions in Syria, would start to entail unacceptable costs to the Russians. Attempting to own all of Syria, à la Afghanistan in the 1980s, is not in Russia’s interest.

Pillar is not suggested that the US should meddle more in Syria to tweak the Russians. We tried that in Afghanistan in the 1980, when we backed the brave, fiercely independent mujaheddin fighters. Well, that's what we called them then. We usually call them Muslim terrorists now. Pillar writes:

The makers of U.S. policy should bear in mind how little stake the United States has in specific outcomes in Syria, beyond the concern with exportable extremism and political violence (and they should remember that even ISIS was exported from Iraq, where it was born under a different name as a consequence of the U.S. invasion and occupation). Avoidance of situations that risk sucking the United States into a larger military clash will be important. A sample of the risks of such escalation recently occurred when U.S. forces attacked a pro-regime militia, said to be supported by Iran, when it got what the U.S. military regarded as uncomfortably close to an installation that U.S. forces use in southern Syria. [my emphasis]

He concludes with a pragmatic suggestion, which the Trump Family Business Administration will likely ignore, "Meanwhile the Trump administration needs to discard its penchant for regarding every outcome in terms of wins and losses. So regarded, when you have a no-win situation such as Syria, that means the only possible outcome is a loss. And even when parties we don’t like suffer a loss, that does not necessarily help U.S. interests."

Ueber-Realist Stephen Walt also has some current advice for US policy in the Middle East. Walt is a fan of "offshore balancing" in foreign policy. Here's how he recommends the US apply it in the Middle East (Making the Middle East Worse, Trump Style Foreign Policy 06/09/2017):

There is no potential hegemon in the Middle East today, and as yet no external “peer competitor” like the former Soviet Union who might conceivably dominate the region. There is therefore no need for the United States to double down on its present commitments to any Middle Eastern countries. None of America’s current partners deserve unconditional support on either strategic or moral grounds: 1) Egypt is a brutal military dictatorship with a failing economy and of modest strategic value; 2) Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist theocracy, is helping destroy Yemen and Syria, and engaged on a massive economic reform project that may fail catastrophically; 3) Israel is marching rightward toward full-fledged apartheid; and 4) Turkey is a mockery of democracy that has gone from “zero problems with neighbors” to problems with nearly all of them. Trump is easily seduced by foreigners who cater to his vanity — as his Saudi hosts clearly realized — but stroking the president’s ego is not the same as contributing to the U.S. national interest.

Facing an environment like this, a smart superpower would hedge. Instead of trying to create some sort of Sunni axis, the United States should return to the underlying logic of its earlier approach.The core U.S. interest in the Middle East, as in other vital areas, is to preserve a rough balance of power and prevent any single state (or external great power) from dominating. The Middle East is as divided today as it has ever been, which means the core U.S. objective is easy to achieve. Accordingly, the United States should be reaching out to countries like Iran, instead of jumping deeper into bed with Tel Aviv, Cairo, Riyadh, and Ankara. As the director of the CIA’s political Islam strategic analysis program, Emile Nakhleh, recently wrote, “Taking sides in the perennial sectarian feud between Sunni and Shia Islam or between Saudi Arabia and Iran is, in the long run, inimical to American national security and interests in the Islamic world.”

Hillary Clinton and the fusion of neocon and liberal-interventionist foreign policy

Paul Pillar has a very good, brief analysis of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy, The Safety and Sameness of Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy The National Interest 06/02/2016. He begins by endorsing Clinton's main line of criticism against Donald Trump's foreign policy:

Clinton is correct that what has passed for Trump's ideas on foreign policy “are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas – just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.” Trump's efforts to sound coherent have been laden with contradictions and declarations that resemble bumper stickers more than carefully thought-out policy proposals. Some of his most specific and distinctive pronouncements belong in the realm of the fantastic, such as excluding all Muslims from the country, building a huge wall and somehow getting a neighbor to pay for it, and encouraging Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea to get nuclear weapons. Just when he has seemed to have made a suggestion that sounds fresh and constructive, such as referring to neutrality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he suddenly veers in a much different direction.

Pillar's critique of Clinton's policy comes from his outlook that US foreign policy "has, through several administrations, been suffering from some fundamental misdirections." And he notes of her recent major foreign policy address:

... she repeatedly fell back into aspects of a Washington conventional wisdom that have made for the persistence of problems rather than the solution of them. This was true, for example, in portions of her discussion of relationships with allies and adversaries. She showed a good understanding of what diplomacy with adversaries consists of when she remarked that these are “countries that share some common interests with us amid many disagreements” and that “Donald doesn’t see the complexity” involved. But she gave no acknowledgment that there also are mixtures of common interests and disagreements—indeed, not just disagreements but conflicting interests—in relations with countries commonly considered allies. This arose, for instance, when amid her appropriate defense of the diplomacy leading to the nuclear agreement with Iran she started talking about the security of Israel—without mentioning that the Israeli government has done all it can to subvert and kill the very agreement she was defending.

He also argues that it is actually hard to tell the difference between the policy of military escalation against ISIS that Trump advocates and that which Hillary proposes. And he expresses reasonable concern over Clinton's American Exceptionalism:

Clinton's overall approach is grounded in that central tenet of Washington conventional wisdom that, as she put it in the speech, “America is an exceptional country,” that “we lead with purpose, and we prevail,” and that “if America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum – and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void.” The awful metaphor of a vacuum, with the misleading notion that in any troubled place in the world if the United States does not occupy it then bad vapors will whoosh in, has underlain thinking that has repeatedly meant costly trouble for the United States, including in some of the places where U.S. troops are found today.

And he calls attention to an important report that seems to reflect Hillary's hawkish foreign policy positions:

The longstanding, despite being damaging, conventional wisdom central to Hillary Clinton's thinking on foreign policy mirrors what was laid out at greater length in the recently released report from the Center for New American Security titled “Extending American Power”. As critical readers of that report have noted, it represents a mashing of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism and a recipe for repeating many of the failures that have contributed to the very unease and wishing for change that have helped to build support for Donald Trump, notwithstanding how little he has to contribute in the way of solutions.

The CNAS report could turn out to be an important as a guide to the foreign policy of a Clinton II Administration. (Extending American Power May 2016) And it has justifiably received some serious attention, including:

Jim Lobe, Hillary’s Foreign Policy: a Liberal-Neoconservative Convergence? LobeLog Foreign Policy 04/29/2016

Jim Lobe, The Neocon-Liberal Hawk Convergence is Worse Than I Thought LobeLog Foreign Policy 05/25/2016

Alastair Crooke, Neocons and Liberal Interventionists — Like Hillary — Are Converging on Foreign Policy World Post 06/08/2016

The title itself is a cue to how common its become to assume that "extending American power" is in and of itself a worthwhile goal. Extending American power is a good thing only if it benefits the American people and the world. If the goal is focused on narrow ends, such as enabling American vulture funds to plunder developing countries, extending American power for that purpose is more destructive and harmful than beneficial.

And if the US attempts to shape events according to arrogant and unrealistic assumptions about what US military power can accomplish in political terms, even policies pursued for good and just ends can be horribly destructive.

This report promises to be an important source during this campaign and beyond. For now, I'll just note that the section on the Middle East specifically advocates the no-fly zone escalation in Syria that Hillary Clinton advocates. It also treats Iran effectively as an enemy of the United States has to actively oppose. Remarkably, the paper emphatically rejects the notion that the historic nuclear agreement with Iran should even be allowed to help produce better US relationships with Iran: "Tehran should understand that Washington is not expecting the nuclear agreement to lead to a changed relationship with the government of Iran. The nuclear agreement should not be linked to Tehran’s expectation of some kind of détente or broader opening to the United States."

This is standard neocon militarism and imperialism for the Middle East. And of course the report takes it as a given that the military budget needs to be increased. At some point, the democratic movement in the United States will have to once again making a major reduction of the military budget and a re-ordering of priorities in foreign policy a major issue and get it accomplished.

This is also striking, "there is no doubt that the management of the U.S.-China relationship is the single most consequential challenge for U.S. foreign policy." Not nuclear arms control. Not managing climate change.

I'm also struck by the frankness with which the CNAS report describes Britain as a Trojan Horse for the United States in the European Union:

Add the danger of British departure from the European Union (EU) and the migration crisis and one can imagine significant ruptures in Europe that would have a very severe effect on the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the transatlantic community. ...

Europe has always functioned best when the three or four leading European powers worked together cooperatively, in partnership with the United States. In recent years, the traditional “troika” of Great Britain, Germany, and France has weakened considerably. British foreign and defense policies have weakened its leadership role in Europe and the world more generally. Germany has been left in the uncomfortable position of providing not only economic but also political and strategic leadership in Europe. The United States should work to pull this “troika” back together, with the addition of Poland (assuming of course that its government demonstrates respect for the highest standards of democratic governance), to provide strategic leadership within the European Union. For all that institution’s shortcomings, the United States has an interest in the preservation and health of the EU. ...

The United States has a particular interest in Britain remaining a strong and active player within the EU. A British departure would weaken Britain, Europe, and the transatlantic community. Among Britain’s strengths, and one aspect of its value as an ally, has been its ability to play a leadership role in Europe, providing a transatlantic perspective that can sometimes be absent from European councils. A strong Britain in a strong Europe is a key American interest. American diplomacy must strive to do the hard work of maintaining not only an alliance but a vibrant, cohesive, and powerful transatlantic community. That means increasing the level and frequency of U.S. participation in high-level meetings even when a crisis does not exist.

Such increased transatlantic dialogue should encompass the whole range of global strategic challenges. Whether or not Europe has a critical role to play or is threatened by every global crisis, it will help all of us if Europe and the United States share perspectives, knowledge, and consideration of the moral and strategic challenges they face around the world. If the two sides of the Atlantic hope to share responsibility for defending the liberal world order, they ought to have, as much as possible, a common understanding of what that entails. [my emphasis]

In other words, the United States wants an obedient EU, strong enough to be useful to American policy, but not strong enough to challenge American geopolitical priorities in the world, and Britain is the main US proxy within the EU.

The report also expresses considerable urgency in rejecting the adoption of "offshore balancing" as a strategic approach, a concept advocated by representatives of the Realist school of foreign policy like Stephen Walt: "The next administration must make abundantly clear that it has no interest in pursuing an off-shore balancing strategy [in the Middle East], such as the “new equilibrium” some have suggested, which envisages a significant U.S. military drawdown from the region." (See Stephen Walt, Offshore balancing: An idea whose time has come Foreign Policy 11/02/2011; scroll down)

The Janus face of foreign policy "realism"

I read two posts today that together display the strengths and drawbacks of the "realist" theory of foreign policy thought.

Stephen Walt, my favorite advocate of the realist viewpoint, explains it briefly in What Would a Realist World Have Looked Like? Foreign Policy 01/08/2016:

Realism sees power as the centerpiece of political life and sees states as primarily concerned with ensuring their own security in a world where there’s no world government to protect them from others. Realists believe military power is essential to preserving a state’s independence and autonomy, but they recognize it is a crude instrument that often produces unintended consequences. Realists believe nationalism and other local identities are powerful and enduring; states are mostly selfish; altruism is rare; trust is hard to come by; and norms and institutions have a limited impact on what powerful states do. In short, realists have a generally pessimistic view of international affairs and are wary of efforts to remake the world according to some ideological blueprint, no matter how appealing it might be in the abstract.

He gives several examples of how a failure of realistic thinking has led to bad foreign policy decisions for the US.

Paul Pillar is also someone I often quote here. And his analyses are impressive. He identifies with the "realist" approach. But the examples he gives in The Forgotten Benefits of Offshore Balancing National Interest 01/27/2016 are a reminder of the grim side of foreign-policy "realism":

During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, for example, the United States was officially neutral. When it appeared that Iraq would have difficulty keeping up the fight, the Reagan administration tilted toward Baghdad—a tilt that, in light of history that would unfold two decades later, made for strange bedfellows. Saddam Hussein's role as the original aggressor, his use of chemical weapons, and humanitarian considerations involving the enormous costs of the war to both sides took a back seat to the idea that the United States would not benefit from either side being a clear winner. It would be better from the standpoint of U.S. interests and the prevention of anyone gaining regional hegemony to have both sides suffer from an exhausting stalemate. The idea was valid, although the same U.S. policymakers later mishandled policy toward the war with what became the Iran-Contra scandal. [my emphasis]

James Carden also discusses the extent to which the "realist" perspective has been sidelined in practice in official circles in How Neocons Banished Realism Consortium News 01/16/2016.

He notes, as Walt also indicates, that the "liberal interventionists" have become largely indistinguishable from the neocons in practice.

Stephen Walt on the downside of liberal internationalist foreign policy

I usually refer to Stephen Walt as a foreign policy Über-Realist because he's a leading representative of the "realist" school of foreign policy.

In Democracy, Freedom, and Apple Pie Aren't a Foreign Policy 07/01/2014, he makes this observation on bipartisan foreign policy faults:

But the real blame lies elsewhere. All three post-Cold War presidents have made their fair share of errors, but there is a common taproot to many of their failings. That taproot has been the pervasive influence of liberal idealism in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, an influence that crosses party lines and unites Democratic liberal internationalists with Republican neoconservatives. The desire to extend liberalism into Eastern Europe lay behind NATO expansion, and it is a big reason that so-called liberal hawks jumped on the neocon bandwagon in Iraq. It explains why the United States tried to export democracy to Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, instead of focusing laser-like on al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks. It was the foundation of Bill Clinton's strategy of "engagement and enlargement," George W. Bush's "liberty doctrine," and Barack Obama's initial embrace of the Arab Spring and decision to intervene in Libya. It is, in short, the central thread in the complex tapestry of recent U.S. foreign policy.

He doesn't break it out separately, but part of the problem with liberal internationalism is that in economic policy its liberal in the classic free-market, let the billionaires and corporations do what they want sense. The economic aspects of foreign policy as seen in the so-called Washington Consensus in prescriptions for developing countries and in the eurozone has come to be known as neoliberalism. And its recommendations for lowering wages, drastically cutting pensions and public services and trade treaties that undermine democratic sovereignty have proved to be generally disastrous for those not part of the One Percent.

Walt also notes (my emphasis):

But the moral appeal of these basic liberal principles does not mean that they are a sound guide for the conduct of foreign policy.

Realism is more an academic than a political category. Foreign policy practitioners - diplomats, government foreign policy analysts, advisors, etc. - after the Second World War were fairly eclectic in practice. But all of them prided themselves on their hard-headed opposition to the Soviet Union, which was rightly or wrongly seen by liberals and conservatives alike as an existential threat to the United States. Once the nuclear arms race proceeded to a certain point, of course, both the US and the USSR were existential threats to each other in the most literal sense.

Broadly speaking, liberal internationalism in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson was the dominant foreign policy model in the Democratic Party, and to a large extent remains so today. It was liberal internationalist ideas tempered by pragmatic considerations that lead Kennedy to escalate involvement in Vietnam and later developed major doubts about its effectiveness and advisability. It was a liberal internationalist outlook that led LBJ to escalate the war into one involved major commitments of US ground troops. It was a liberal internationalist outlook that informed the criticism of the war made by Democrats like Robert Kennedy and George McGovern.

You can trace that line through the Presidencies of Carter, Clinton and Obama, as well.

The nationalistic isolationism represented today by Rand Paul, and the libertarians/"paleo-conservatives" has been an undercurrent in the Republican Party since the Second World War, and was dominant before that.

The mainstream Republican position after the war, though, was a conservative-nationalist version of liberal internationalism. Republican support of NATO and the United Nations represented the internationalist side of this Republican outlook. The Eisenhower Administration's notion of "tripwire/massive retaliation" in nuclear policy and "rollback" of Communism in Eastern Europe are examples of the conservative/nationalist impulse.

The Realist outlook also has variations, in both its academic and practical versions. Henry Kissinger during the Nixon and Ford Administrations practiced much more of a Realist foreign policy in relation to the USSR and China, as evidenced by McGovern's agreement with the basic lines of those policies in the 1972 Presidential contest. Whether their Vietnam policy was driven more by ideology, great-power arrogance or domestic political considerations is a matter of continuing debate. It would be hard to make a case that it was based on a small-r realistic assessment of the realities of the war.

By the first Bush Administration, the neoconservatives had developed into a major force in the Republican Party. One could argument that was already the case during the Reagan Administration. Their heritage from Trotskyism to Henry Jackson Democratic hawkishness to Team B and beyond were chronicled ably by many sources during the buildup to the Iraq War and its grim aftermath. Sidney Blumenthal describes the mid-2000s in The neocons' next war Salon 08/03/2006; he wrote about the neocons two days earlier in his book, The Rise Of The Counter-Establishment (1986). Jack Hunter presents a "paleo-conservative" view of the neocons in What’s a Neoconservative? The American Conservative 06/23/2011.

Neocons promote a frankly imperialist power politics, using the rhetoric of spreading democracy and opposing dictatorship to justify it. Leaving aside the remarkable cynicism some of their leading lights such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith over the Iraq War, the neocons generally regarded the expansion and reinforcing of American power and influence as benign and desirable and value shows of "toughness" and "determination" in a way that considers war as a routine tool of foreign policy. They have been as suspicious of the UN as the John Birch Society mentality informing the Tea Party and Old Right Isolationism. They generally are anti-internationalist, in the sense that they have contempt for foreign alliances. Except in the case of Israel, whose most aggressive, warlike policies they support and want the US to support.

Realist theorist of international relations argue that the practice of nations tend to be based on patterns of behavior that in practice often override ideological considerations. Applying a Realist theory to foreign policy involves being aware of those patterns, using them to the advantage of one's own country, and being carefully empirical in evaluating situations. Dan Drezner gives a helpful description of this tendency in The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion Perspectives on Politics 6:1 (Mar 2008).

He cites some of the best-known advocates and scholars of the Realist theory past and present, including Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics), Andrew Bacevich (The New American Militarism), George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Hans Morgenthau (Politics among Nations with Kenneth Thompson), Stephen Krasner (Defending the National Interest) and John Mearsheimer.

Drezner gives us a helpful reminder that academic purity isn't how politicians approach decision-making in noting that many of George W. Bush's arguments for going to war in Iraq, particularly the non-existent WMDs, sounded more like Realist arguments than either liberal-internationalist or neocon ones. Most of his article is devoted to challenging the assumption, which ironically Realists tend to make, that the US public is more attracted to idealist solutions (liberal internationalist, neocon) than to the Realist view. He references a number of studies showing that the US public in fact is generally sympathetic to some important realist arguments. It's especially interesting to me that he challenges the deeply flawed argument identified especially with political scientist John Mueller that the US public's support of a war is dependent on the amount of US casualties and basically nothing else.

Sumantra Maitra has an informative take on Realism and its competitors in U.S. Foreign Policy: Back to Realism International Affairs Review 01/13/2013. She uses capital-r Realism the way I'm prone to do. And contrasts it with what she calls the Romantic approach, encompassing both the neocon and liberal internationalist view. She sees an important turning point in US foreign policy with Reagan's famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, which included his famous line, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!" For Republicans, that is a great moment celebrated in Cold War triumphalism. Maitra sees its significance differently:

... Reagan’s Brandenburg speech in 1987 marks the direct shift from a foreign policy of confrontational brinkmanship at worst, and defensive detente at best, to the start of the absolutist promotion of the rhetoric of "freedom." It was the beginning of the all-encompassing idea of liberal democracy, more specifically Romanticism in foreign policy. Over the next two decades, foreign policy of major Western powers had two different directional approaches, neither of which can be defined clearly under Liberalism or Realism. For example, the immediate aftermath of the Cold War and most of the nineties was marked with optimism of epic proportions fueled by the belief in the inevitability of the Western value system and liberal democratic governance as the ultimate way to the future, multilateralism, and the emerging concept of humanitarian intervention.

She expresses great optimism that in the US and the West generally, the Realist approach to international affairs is winning out over the Romantic ones.

I'm not so optimistic on that score. But I do find myself attracted more to Realist analyses of foreign policy than to liberal internationalist ones or the neocon view. And I like Maitra's use of Romantic to apply to both liberal interventionism (a variant of liberal internationalism) and neoconservatism. Because in practice, they often join together to advocate for unnecessary wars and adventurism short of war. As Walt says in the quote at the top, "so-called liberal hawks jumped on the neocon bandwagon in Iraq."

It's also important to remember that foreign policy in practice is notoriously resistant to the application of any kind of dogma, including a Realist one. The Realist Hans Morgenthau, for instance, seriously proposed de-industrializing postwar Germany and requiring it to remain a "pastoral," agricultural country.

The "catch" in Realism's placing principles of national security aggrandizement at the center of their understanding of foreign relations is that national security, national well-being and expansion of national influence are all shaped to some degree by ideas, values and sentiments.

So even with Realism, the search for a dogma that can consistently guide policy in an optimizing direction will go on.

Tags: liberal internationalism, neoconservatives, stephen walt, us foreign policy

Stephen Walt on the Presidential candidates' positions on Israel policy

Stephen Walt finds a silver lining in the bipartisan support in the Presidential campaign for hawkish Israeli policies (What 'unshakeable commitment' to Israel really means 07/30/2012):

The good news, such as it is, is that both Romney and Obama are probably lying. No matter how many times each of them talks about the "unshakeable commitment" to Israel, or even of their "love" for the country, they don't really mean it. They are simply pandering to domestic politics, which is something that all American politicians do on a host of different issues. Of course, they will still have to shape their policies with the [Israel] lobby's clout in mind (as Obama's humiliating retreat on the settlement issue demonstrates), but nobody should be under the illusion that they genuinely believe all the flattering stuff that they are forced to say.

Walt is one of the more prominent academic critics of the extremely deferential US policy toward Israeli governments:

There's also a tragic irony in all this. In his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that the two presidents who did the most to advance Arab-Israeli peace were Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush. Carter negotiated the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and Bush 41 led the 1991 Gulf War coalition and assembled the 1992 Madrid Peace Conference. According to Ben-Ami, Carter and Bush made progress on this difficult issue because each was willing "to confront Israel head one and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America."

In other words, each was willing to do precisely what Romney is now telling you he won't.

Tags: israel, stephen walt

American foreign policy and chronic Democratic defensiveness on national security

Joan Walsh brings up an important historical point about the effects of the post-Second World War Red Scare and the heavy role of Cold War polemics in creating the Democrats' more-than-annoying and often debilitating habit of apologizing for being Democrats, especially on foreign policy (Are liberals national security hypocrites? Salon 06/21/2012):

Liberals had to declare they weren’t Communists or Soviet-loving pacifists in the 1940s and '50s, until John F. Kennedy saved them by out-hawking Richard Nixon about a fantasy "missile gap." Then they went from having to separate themselves from New Left antiwar revolutionaries in the '60s and '70s, to fending off Reagan's claim that they'd appeased the Soviet Union by refusing to build his beloved Star Wars boondoggle. Bill Clinton's tough strikes against the former Yugoslavia and Iraq shook that image a little bit (in fact, Republicans became the anti-interventionists). But after 9/11, Republicans were back to charging that Democrats appeased the enemy, and Democrats were back to groveling to prove that wasn't true. A stunning 29 Senate Democrats voted to authorize the Iraq war, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Now I know it wasn't just about Vietnam, but about China. Liberals have spent the last 60-plus years pleading with the nation to understand they’re not un- or anti-American.

She's referring in particular to the analysis of Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson in their book, The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism From Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama (2012).

Swords to plowshares: a favorite symbol of the democratic opposition  in East Germany 

I won't try to rehash the Cold War in this post. While Joan's sketch in that paragraph just quoted is true as far as it goes, there is another side to the Democrats' defensiveness and the Republicans' verbal belligerence. Both the Korean War, prosecuted first by the Truman Administration, and the Vietnam War, prosecuted first by the Kennedy and Johnson Administration - following a policy background laid by the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations.

There is a lingering nostalgia for Dwight Eisenhower's Presidency among some left-leaning political analysts. Truthdig's Robert Scheer periodically writes nostalgically about Ike's skepticism of militarist assumptions. However, the Eisenhower Administration's nuclear posture of "tripwire/massive retaliation" actually was a high-risk strategy. Reducing the likelihood of nuclear war under the operative assumptions of the Cold War meant pursuing a policy of diversifying military options away from the Eisenhower level of reliance on nuclear weapons. And most Democrats in 1960 actually did believe that there was a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, though the belief was incorrect.

It's true that the Cold War political history left the Democrats too defensive on foreign policy for their own good and the country's. But the more proximate cause is the bipartisan acceptance of the post-Cold War foreign policy of global dominance, or global hegemony, as analyzed by Realist foreign policy theorist like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. (See Dan Drezner, You can't generalize from George W. Bush 12/28/2010; Mearsheimer, Imperial by Design The National Interest Jan/Feb 2011Walt, More to read from Mearsheimer Foreign Policy 12/20/2012) American dominance pre-dated the fall of the Berlin Wall, of course. Gareth Porter's Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (2005) shows how that fact seduced the US into disaster in Vietnam.

As Mearsheiner puts it in the article just cited:

The root cause of America’s troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States rejected all these other avenues, instead pursuing global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda.

Global dominance has two broad objectives: maintaining American primacy, which means making sure that the United States remains the most powerful state in the international system; and spreading democracy across the globe, in effect, making the world over in America’s image. The underlying belief is that new liberal democracies will be peacefully inclined and pro-American, so the more the better. Of course, this means that Washington must care a lot about every country’s politics. With global dominance, no serious attempt is made to prioritize U.S. interests, because they are virtually limitless.

This grand strategy is "imperial" at its core; its proponents believe that the United States has the right as well as the responsibility to interfere in the politics of other countries. One would think that such arrogance might alienate other states, but most American policy makers of the early nineties and beyond were confident that would not happen, instead believing that other countries — save for so-called rogue states like Iran and North Korea — would see the United States as a benign hegemon serving their own interests. [my emphasis in bold]

The bipartisan consensus around a global-dominance/global-hegemon foreign policy includes a lot of self-deluding overconfidence, aka, arrogance from politicians of both parties. As Walt observes in The Myth of American Exceptionalism Foreign Policy Nov 2011:

Finally, any honest accounting of the past half-century must acknowledge the downside of American primacy. The United States has been the major producer of greenhouse gases for most of the last hundred years and thus a principal cause of the adverse changes that are altering the global environment. The United States stood on the wrong side of the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa and backed plenty of unsavory dictatorships -- including Saddam Hussein's -- when short-term strategic interests dictated. Americans may be justly proud of their role in creating and defending Israel and in combating global anti-Semitism, but its one-sided policies have also prolonged Palestinian statelessness and sustained Israel's brutal occupation.

Bottom line: Americans take too much credit for global progress and accept too little blame for areas where U.S. policy has in fact been counterproductive. Americans are blind to their weak spots, and in ways that have real-world consequences. Remember when Pentagon planners thought U.S. troops would be greeted in Baghdad with flowers and parades? They mostly got RPGs and IEDs instead.

Tags: john mearsheimer, stephen walt, us foreign policy

The Pentagon's publicity clout

Stephen Walt has a post commenting on two meetings of the safely establishment Council on Foreign Relation (CFR) in which senior military officials are offered a prominent presence (Military-Intellectual complex? Foreign Policy 04/27/2012) :

None of this is all that surprising, but am I the only one who sees it as more evidence of the creeping militarization of U.S. foreign policy? The Pentagon already spends several billion taxpayer dollars each year on public relations; does CFR need to give it another platform from which to purvey its views? More importantly, will any well-known advocates of a more restrained and less militarized global posture be given a chance to lay out their views at the annual meeting? What about experts who think U.S. military leaders were at least partly responsible for the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan?

America's founding fathers were wary of excessive military influence, and by the end of his long career, so was President (and five-star general) Dwight D. Eisenhower. They understood that in a free society, powerful institutions should be confronted and held accountable. Since 9/11, however, we've seen a predictable but growing deference to military expertise and advice. Politicians bend over backwards to tell us how much they support "the troops" and hardly anyone in office is willing to challenge military leaders openly. Just read Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars, and you get a good sense of how civilian authorities can get rolled by those in uniform.

Tags: militarism, stephen walt

More on Obama and war with Iran

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt weigh in on the current US-Israel dispute over starting a war with Iran in Mr Obama must take a stand against Israel over Iran Financial Times 03/04/2012. (Be careful clicking around on the Financial Times site; they have a low limit on the number of free articles you can see per month.) Walt supplements it with The real disagreement between Obama and Netanyahu Foreign Policy 03/05/2012.

Walt summarizes the contrasting positions this way:

My basic take is that Netanyahu's view and Obama's view are essentially mirror-images of each other. Netanyahu says Iran is an "existential" threat to Israel, while he sees the Palestinians as just a problem to be managed. So he wants Iran's nuclear program ended, and by force if necessary, while the peace process drags on interminably. By contrast, Obama sees Iran as a problem to be managed through patient diplomacy, but he thinks the Palestinian issue is the real existential threat to Israel's future (and a continued liability for U.S. strategic interests). He'd like to put that one to rest ASAP, except that he's been forced to back down every time he's tried and he knows he can't say much about it between now and November.

Mearsheimer and Walt write of the Palestinian issue:

The gulf between Washington and Jerusalem is just as wide on the Palestinian issue. Mr Netanyahu opposed the 1993 Oslo accords, which sought to resolve the conflict and establish Palestinian self-rule. The only "state" he would countenance today is a set of disconnected and disarmed enclaves under de facto Israeli control. He was elected in 2009 on a platform rejecting Palestinian statehood, and his cabinet is populated with politicians who want to control the West Bank forever. His government continues to expel Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and to expand Israeli settlements there.

By contrast, Mr Obama is committed to helping create a viable Palestinian state living alongside Israel in peace. As he said in Cairo in June 2009, a two-state solution is “in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest, and the world’s interest”. He knows the combination of US support for Israel and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians fuels anti-Americanism throughout the Arab and Islamic world, and contributes to the global terrorism problem.

In fact, the Palestinian issue is the real existential threat to Israel. More than 500,000 Israeli Jews now live in the occupied territories, and continued settlement building will lead to a single state between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea. Given demographic trends, this “Greater Israel” could not be both a Jewish state and a full democracy. Instead, it would be an apartheid state, threatening Israel’s legitimacy and long-term survival. As Ehud Olmert, former prime minister, said in 2007, if the two-state solution fails, Israel "will face a South African-like struggle for equal voting rights". And if that happens, he warned, "the state of Israel is finished". [my emphasis]

More accurately, the state of Israel as a Jewish state will be finished. It can still be a democratic state with freedom of religion, depending on how the transition occurs.

Surprises can certainly happen, but it seems to me that the possibility for a two-state solution has approached the vanishing point.

Glenn Greenwald in Obama, Iran and preventive war Salon 03/05/2012 agrees that in his speech to AIPAC on Sunday, "part of what Obama was doing was denying Netanyahu’s demands that the American 'red line' be moved to where the Israeli 'red line' is." But he also notes that Obama was definitely threatening preventive war, which is illegal in international law, and illegal for very good reasons. Speaking of Obama's threats against Iran in his AIPAC speech, he writes:

Is that not the classic case of a "preventive" war (as opposed to a "preemptive" war), once unanimously scorned by progressives as "radical" and immoral when the Bush administration and its leading supporters formally adopted it as official national security doctrine in 2002? Back in 2010, Newsweek‘s Michael Hirsh documented the stark, fundamental similarities between the war theories formally adopted by both administrations in their national security strategies, but here we have the Bush administration’s most controversial war theory explicitly embraced: that the U.S. has the right not only to attack another country in order to preempt an imminent attack (pre-emptive war), but even to prevent some future, speculative threat (preventive war). Indeed, this was precisely the formulation George Bush invoked for years when asked about Iran. This theory of preventive war continues to be viewed around the world as patently illegal — Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Minister last week said of the "all-options-on-the-table" formulation for Iran: some of those options "are contrary to international law" — and before 2009, the notion of "preventive war" was universally scorned by progressives.

Again, one can find justifications, even rational ones, for President Obama’s inflexible commitment of a military attack on Iran: particularly, that this vow is necessary to stop the Israelis from attacking now (though it certainly seems that the U.S. would have ample leverage to prevent an Israeli attack if it really wanted to without commiting [sic] itself to a future attack on Iran). And I've noted many times that I believe that the Obama administration — whether for political and/or strategic reasons — does seem genuinely to want to avoid a war with Iran, at least for now. [my emphasis]

Tags: barack obama, iran war, third subject, israel, john mearsheimer, preventive war, stephen walt

Libya, Syria and the perils of intervention and arrogance

Among the various serious problems of our mainstream press in the US is the scarcity of foreign affairs and international coverage, which means that reporters, editors and publishers are even more susceptible to spin from the government and various narrow interest groups. Stephen Walt looks at one consequence of the NATO regime change operation in Libya, which was sold to the public - and to the the UN - as a humanitarian mission to protect civilians in Will victory in Libya cause defeat in Syria? Foreign Policy 02/06/2012. Russia and China recently vetoed a proposed UN Security Council resolution addressing the repression in Syria. Walt writes:

You'll recall that UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized military action in Libya to protect civilians. The resolution was directly inspired by the fear that Qaddafi loyalists laying siege to the rebel town of Benghazi were about to conduct some sort of massacre there. In response, Res. 1973 authorized member states "take all necessary measures…to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory." France, the United States and other foreign powers quickly went beyond this mandate, using airpower and other forms of assistance to help the rebels defeat Muammar Qaddafi's forces and oust him from power.

One can argue that this was the right course of action anyway, because getting rid of a thug like Qaddafi was worth it. That's a debate for another day, although I would note in passing that post-Qaddafi Libya remains deeply troubled and the collapse of the regime seems to be fueling conflicts elsewhere. But what if the Libyan precedent is one of the reasons why Russia and China aren't playing ball today? They supported Resolution 1973 back in 2011, and then watched NATO and a few others make a mockery of multilateralism in the quest to topple Qaddafi. The Syrian tragedy is pay-back time, and neither Beijing nor Moscow want to be party to another effort at Western-sponsored "regime change." It is hardly surprising that Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin condemned the failed resolution on precisely these grounds. In short, our high-handed manipulation of the SC process in the case of Libya may have made it harder to gain a consensus on Syria, which is arguably a far more important and dangerous situation. [my emphasis]

He makes a number of qualifications, e.g., the obligatory reference to Qaddafi being a bad guy, Russia and China doing themselves and the UN Security Council some harm by vetoing the anti-Syria resolution.

But his basic point is important. The US is pursuing a global-dominance strategy, which Walt would prefer to see replaced by an "offshore balancing" strategy requiring a less massive military and considerably less military intervention.

The current strategy assumes that the United States can and should intervene to change governments where there is a perceived pressing need and the target country does not possess nuclear weapons (Iraq, Libya - and Iran?). National sovereignty in those cases is treated as a short-run annoyance to be overcome, not as an important basic element in international relations.

But for all the rest of the nations of the world that are not the sole superpower, those questions are important. And it's perfectly understandable that even more powerful nations like Russia and China are very hesitant to support a UN humanitarian resolution that they have reason to believe could be used for another NATO regime-change war.

And, as Walt's post emphasizes, it is a setback for anyone genuinely concerned about the "obligation to protect" that is now part of international law. In a better-organized world, there would be some standards by which an international operation could be authorized to stop a genocidal operation.

But in a world still so addicted to war as ours is, and with the US pursuing a policy that involves considerable disregard of sovereignty and far too much willingness to engage in acts of war and subversion against regimes we consider undesirable, it's hard to see how the "obligation to protect" can be meaningfully enforced by the UN. I don't mean to dismiss what the UN does accomplish in its peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. But what it can accomplish, even through powerful members states, in cases of civil war or massive civil disturbance is often limited to minimizing the harmful consequences, not fixing the problems that are generating them.

Tags: libya war, syria, stephen walt

Perils of Papa Doc Paul

There's no way Ron "Papa Doc" Paul and his base constituency are going to be part of a political coalition that could be called liberal or progressive. At the same time, thanks to the nature of our media culture right now, the only kind of broad criticisms of US global military strategy and interventions that most people have heard on TV recently are those coming from Papa Doc. For liberal critics of those policies, Papa Doc's framing is a real problem, not only because of his kooky conspiracy theories but because he often couches them in the false-but-mainstream austerity-economics argument that the US is going broke and can't afford more borrowing or deficits.

Gene Lyons takes on Papa Doc and his movement for the second time in two weeks, Digging in Ron Paul's Survival Kit Arkansas Times 01/11/2012:

While he's often cagey about how he expresses it, Ron Paul's whole history as a conspiracy theorist is right out of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" — the 19th century forgery that's kept anti-Semites buzzing for generations. ...

Reader Mel Birge of Portland, Oregon argues that's precisely why Paul makes such a terrible spokesman. Complaining of "sitting in synagogue for the last dozen years listening to pseudo Middle-East experts give the same frantic talk about the danger of Iran nukes and how the US must stop it," he believes such a war "is no way in the United States' interest."

But he also thinks Paul's "anti-semitic paranoia allows AIPAC, the Neocons and their fellow travelers to paint the entire Iran war opposition with the Ron Paul brush. That's the danger of Ron Paul that you should speak of: He snuffs out substantive discussions on Iran. The media feasts on him and the Neocons love it because he's his own straw man."

Charlie Pierce in his look at the state of the Republican Presidential race, We're All in Romney's Great Adventure Together Now Esquire Politics Blog 01/11/2012, writes that we could have Papa Doc as a visible factor in the Presidential election for months to come:

Which leaves us with the fascinating question of Dr. Ron Paul. He finished a decent second last night, crushing the campaign of Jon Huntsman. He is in an odd place. He is not a contender for the nomination in any real sense. However, he can continue to move through the cycle, not seeking conventional success, but piling up delegates pledged only to him. (If the rumors around Manchester on Tuesday night are true, and Paul's campaign has managed to raise $10 million over the past few days, then he can go on forever. That amount of money to his campaign is $100 million to a more conventional one.) This will give him a center of personal power with which Willard, and the rest of the party, will have to find some way to cope. Paul has stubbornly - and shrewdly - refused to state categorically that he will not bolt the party in the general election. He can string the whole business along, talking in his giddy survivalist code about "fiat money," and nobody will be in any position to take him on. He is going to stay on his own hook; in 2008, across the river in Minneapolis, Paul set up his own convention in opposition to the Republican National Convention. He can do whatever mischief he wants from now until the end of the summer, and nobody's in any position to make him stop. That is the only story left, save for the epic Horatio Alger saga of Willard Romney, Boy of the Streets, proud American, and proof positive that, in this great country, any son of an auto millionnaire and former governor of Michigan can grow up almost to be president. [my emphasis]

Papa Doc is a destructive, retrograde influence in American politics, and not solely inside the Republican Party. But progressive critics of the militarism and interventionism of our current foreign policy also have to deal with the reality that, in the 2012 election cycle, the main general criticism of the current approach to foreign policy that many voters will hear - the only one many voters are likely to register - is that coming from Papa Doc.

That doesn't mean we have to pretend that Papa Doc's general perspective is anything other than the Old Right isolationism and Bircher conspiracy-mongering that it is. The core concept of Papa Doc's foreign policy is hyper-nationalism and xenophobia, which is how it fits in with anti-immigrant and pro-segregation parts of Papa Doc's toxic ideology. And it certainly doesn't mean that the motley crew of segregationists, militia types and assorted cranks who make up Papa Doc's core constituency are even potential allies in any meaningful sense of the word for a progressive movement.

But it does mean that we need to pay attention to which parts of Papa Doc's criticisms of foreign policy are resonating with the public, or have the potential to resonate with a larger audience.

Stephen Walt takes a careful look at Papa Doc's effect on the larger national security debate in Why Ron Paul may actually have something right Foreign Policy 01/06/2012:

... [D]espite his bizarre views on the gold standard, climate change, social security, and the like, Paul has put his finger on a number of issues that could resonate broadly with the American people, especially if discussion were not monopolized by think tanks and insiders who are strongly committed to the status quo. Unlike most foreign policy "experts" in both parties, Paul believes the United States is an extraordinarily secure country, with a robust nuclear deterrent, no powerful enemies nearby, and at present no major power rivals of much significance. He instinctively rejects the paranoia and worst-casing that has convinced Americans that we need to roam around the world trying to remake it in our image (a task, by the way, that we're not very good at). He believes that excessive interventionism and other failed policies are a primary cause of anti-Americanism around the world, and that the United States would be more popular and safer if we focused more attention on trade and diplomacy and domestic issues instead of emphasizing military dominance and overseas meddling. He believes that a bloated national security state and a quasi-imperial foreign policy inevitably fosters greater government secrecy and erodes traditional restraints on executive power. And like former president (and five-star general) Dwight D. Eisenhower, he thinks the current military-industrial complex wields excessive influence on our politics and has become a self-perpetuating engine for counter-productive meddling abroad.

These points are all debatable, of course, but Paul is the only person in the race who even wants to discuss them. The rest of the GOP candidates are mostly competing to see who can sound the most eager for war (usually with Iran) or most willing to toss more money at the Pentagon. Barack Obama is a lot more sensible than they are, but as we've learned over the past three-plus years, neither he nor his national security team are interested in making dramatic changes in America's overall grand strategy. Instead, Obama has emerged as a strong proponent of government secrecy, a staunch defender of maintaining U.S. primacy around the world, and as an enthusiastic user of drones, special forces, and other tools of U.S. power. He did eventually wind down the war in Iraq, of course, but it hardly took a strategic genius to figure out that this was the right course.

Tags: gene lyons, radical right, ron paul, stephen walt

Stephen Walt on revolutions and the Arab Awakening

Stephen Walt has some important historical observations in reference to the Arab Awakening in Requiem for the "Arab Spring?" Foreign Policy 11/28/2011. The piece is a very good read, focused on the need "to recognize that radical reform -- even revolution -- is a long, difficult, and uncertain process, and that the ride is likely to be a bumpy one for years to come."

He makes this very important observation:

But if the history of revolutions tells us anything, it is that rebuilding new political orders is a protracted, difficult, and unpredictable process, and having a few Mandelas around is no guarantee of success. Why? Because once the existing political order has collapsed, the stakes for key groups in society rise dramatically. The creation of new institutions -- in effect, the development of new rules for ordering political life -- inevitably creates new winners and losers. And everyone knows this. Not only does this situation encourage more and more groups to join the process of political struggle, but awareness that high stakes are involved also gives them incentives to use more extreme means, including violence.

Under these conditions, it is a pipedream to think that key actors in a complex and troubled society like Egypt or Libya (or in the future, Syria) could quickly agree on new political institutions and infuse them with legitimacy. Even if interim rulers write a quick constitution, hold a referendum, or elect new representatives, those whose interests are undermined by the outcomes are bound to question the new rules and the process and to do what they can to undermine or amend them. What one should expect, therefore, are half-measures, false starts, prolonged uncertainty, and highly contingent events, where seemingly random events (a riot, an accident, an episode of overt foreign interference, an unexpected flurry of violence, etc.) can alter the course of events in far-reaching ways. Tunisia notwithstanding, what you are unlikely to get is a quick and easy consensus on new institutions. [emphasis in original]

Tags: stephen walt

Stephen Walt on some of his favorite foreign policy analysts

Stephen Walt did a Thanksgiving post with a title appropriate for a foreign policy uber-Realist like himself, Giving thanks, but for how long? Foreign Policy 11/23/2011. In it, he mentions some of his favorite foreign policy analysts:

On a purely personal note, I'm thankful for the courageous policy analysts, writers and bloggers who make it easier for me to do this blog. I'm talking about people who seek puncture conventional wisdom, challenge orthodoxies, and rock the boat on occasion. I value them because they are an antidote to the flood of cautious semi-official narratives that dominate most of the writing on foreign policy, and so they help me think outside the box. So heartfelt thanks to Carl Conetta, Phil Weiss, Juan Cole, Gordon Adams, Martin Wolf, Jerry Haber, Uri Avnery, Jim Lobe, Helena Cobban, Glenn Greenwald, M. J. Rosenberg, John Mueller, Andrew Sullivan, Spencer Ackerman, Jerry Slater, Gideon Rachman, and many others too numerous to list or even remember. I don't know a lot of the people just mentioned, and I don't always agree with any of them. Heck, I don't always agree with this guy either. But I'm glad they are doing what they do.

Tags: stephen walt

For Obama to be seen as a defender of Social Security, he probably has to, you know, defend Social Security

I mentioned the other day that Mark Shields in last Friday's appearance on the PBS Newshour talked like he was oblivious to the fact that President Obama in the debt ceiling negotiations this year proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Or to the fact that Obama in his Thursday job speech against suggested cuts to Medicare. Or that Obama's push to get even more savings from the "Super Congress" than is already mandated will almost certainly involve Obama again proposing large cuts to "entitlements," i.e., Social Security and Medicare.

Now I'm starting to think it's a clumsy talking point being promoted by the Democratic Party, after seeing Ed Kilgore's Why the Perry-Romney Slugfest Plays Right Into Obama’s Hands The New Republic 09/12/2011. He argues that Perry's hardline on cutting Social Security will help Obama with his preferred re-election framing:

... there is a more subtle but possibly even more significant additional consequence of Republicans arguing over whether to demolish or merely slash Social Security and Medicare [that how it affects the Republican primaries]: It will materially aid Barack Obama's high-stakes effort to make the 2012 presidential election a choice between two very different visions of American government, rather than a referendum on his administration and its handling of the economy. [my emphasis]

Now Kilgore does allude to Obama's own electoral problems on Social Security and Medicare:

So long as the president does not pull the trigger on a deficit reduction deal with congressional Republicans on Social Security and Medicare that could blur these differences, the Romney-Perry battle could crucially change the nature of the general election. And the invisible primary’s focus on Social Security and Medicare is likely to become even more intense tonight, as the Republican candidates hold another debate in senior-rich Florida. Every moment they spend sparring over the New Deal and Great Society is a boon to Barack Obama. Even if the incumbent cannot win a referendum on his own presidency, he can win a competition between the ghost of Barry Goldwater and the ghosts of FDR and LBJ. [my emphasis]

This sounds like major wishful thinking to me. Obama can only make Social Security and Medicare strong points in his favor if he can really present a sharp contrast between himself and the Republicans on the issue. Unless he suddenly morphs into a New Deal Democrat he's never been - and morphs really soon - he's not going to be able to make a credible case as a defender of those two major programs he himself has proposed to cut.

Today's Republicans have no problem at all with the most screaming hypocrisy in their campaigning. They campaigned in 2010 on Medicare cuts that Obama hadn't proposed making, and it was a successful issue for them. To get there, they misrepresented the projected Medicare savings under the Affordable Care Act as cuts.

In 2012, they will be able to accuse Obama - this time truthfully! - with proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Most voters, hell, most reporters, aren't going to parse their claims closely enough to have a good sense of which set of cuts will be worse. As long as the Republicans can blur the issue of whether they or Obama is proposing more cuts to Social Security and Medicare, that will prevent Obama's campaign from making it a decisive issue in their favor.

This is bewildering. If Obama is counting on Social Security and Medicare to be decisive issues to offset the drag on his campaign of depression conditions in unemployment, he can only make that work by becoming a hardline defender of Social Security and Medicare. He's not going to do that by continuing to fetishize the deficit and blathering about "strengthening for the future" Social Security and/or Medicare.

As Stephen Walt reminds us in A one-term president? Foreign Policy 09/06/2011:

... there's a lot of solid political science research showing that incumbent presidents have a very tough time when the economy is in the doldrums, and it's hard for me to see how Obama can get things moving again, especially when the GOP leadership has every incentive to thwart his efforts, even if it means keeping Americans out of work for another year or so.

Tags: 2012 election, ed kilgore, medicare, social security, stephen walt

The new stage in the Libya War

Maybe the new stage will be called peace, democracy and improved government. Or it may be called a protracted civil war. Let's hope for the best.

Robert Dreyfuss gives an account of The Fall of Qaddafi The Nation 08/22/2011. Juan Cole, who is a careful observer and has also been an enthusiastic supporter of the NATO intervention, writes about the turn of events over the weekend in Top Ten Myths about the Libya War Informed Comment 08/22/2011.

While the fall of Qaddafi's government is certainly a dramatic event, it could be the start of a more problematic stage of US/NATO involvement in Libya's internal politics. The Afghanistan War began nearly 10 years ago, and the pariah Taliban government in Kabul fell to the US-backed Northern Alliance quickly. The 10th anniversary of the start of that war will arrive in a few weeks. There is no end to the war in sight.

The supposedly rapid success of US Special Forces and airpower enabling the Northern Alliance to take Kabul quickly boosted then-Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in his conviction that Saddam Hussein's government could be overthrow with a minimal force. The neocons had visions of the US knocking off one Middle Easter regime after another with relatively little effort. Baghdad fell, the famous statue of Saddam came down. And then the looting in Badgdad started. Rummy cackled on TV at how silly it was to worry about the chaos in the capital city. But virtually all accounts of the Iraq War now agree that the looting in Baghdad was a disastrous turning point for the occupation. American troops are still in Iraq, though they are under pressure from the pro-Iranian government that resulted from the US invasion to get out later this year. The Pentagon is trying to keep troops there indefinitely.

Air war true believers saw the Kosovo War of 1999 as proof that airpower could win wars with virtually no ground troops involved. Serbian troops were able to proceed with ethnic cleansing during the air campaign. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were able to proceed with the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo under the subsequent NATO-protected regime. NATO troops remain in Kosovo today.

US military involvement in Libya isn't over. And this apparently ill-thought-out military intervention could have unpleasant consequences, even if things go well with the new government that will initially be the current Transitional National Council (TNC). As Dreyfus writes, "So who’s in charge in Libya now? We don't know. Qaddafi wasn’t entirely wrong when he said that he was under assault by Islamists, though Islamists were probably not the main component of the opposition and the so-called Transitional National Council (TNC)."

And as he also reminds us, this government was installed with difficulty through the heavy use of NATO firepower in aggressive military operations. It's worth remembering that the UN resolution authorizing foreign intervention gave a green light to establishing a no-fly zone to impede government massacres of civilians. The US and NATO went considerably beyond that:

What does Qaddafi’s departure mean? First, what it doesn’t mean is that the United States and NATO are powerful actors in the region. It took nearly six months for the full might of NATO, bombarding every Libyan tank and armored personnel carrier that moved, decimating Qaddafi’s command-and-control system, and serving as the air wing of the fractious Libyan opposition, to clear the way to Tripoli.

Our policymakers should be restrained about making "Tripoli" into another "Kabul" and assume that this is some hot new model for regime change on the cheap.

Then there is the fact that the Qaddafi regime had cooperated with what should always be one of the very highest priorities of American foreign policy, nuclear nonproliferation:

And we can all hope and pray that the “Libyan model”—an armed opposition backed by US and NATO air power—isn’t the model for Syria or, worse, Iran. At the very least, President Assad of Syria will look at Libya and draw the appropriate conclusion, namely, that he must at all costs prevent the emergence of a Syrian "Benghazi." For Ayatollah Khamenei, the equally mentally imbalanced leader of Iran, he’ll draw parallel conclusions, one of which will be that Qaddafi was foolish to give up his nuclear weapons quest in the 2000s and trust the West, which then seized the first opportunity to impose forcible regime change. Khamenei will likely conclude the Qaddafi would still be in power if he had had nuclear weapons, and although that conclusion would be idiotically wrong — the West would long ago have invaded Libya to stop it from getting the bomb [???] — Khamenei is going to think so, anyway, making a deal between the United States and Iran far more difficult. [my emphasis]

Über-Realist Stephen Walt gives advice on Avoiding a 'Mission Accomplished' moment in Libya Foreign Policy 08/22/2011:

The danger is that we will have another "Mission Accomplished" moment, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy, NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen, President Obama, and their various pro-intervention advisors give each other a lot of high-fives, utter solemn words about having vindicated the new "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine, and then turn to some new set of problems while Libya deteriorates. And as an anonymous "senior American military officer" told the New York Times: "The leaders I've talked to do not have a clear understanding how this will all play out."

Neither do any of the rest of us. We can all hope that the worst doesn't happen and that Libya's new leaders exhibit Mandela-like wisdom and restraint. Nobody expects perfection, of course; I can live with the "I told you sos" from hawkish liberal interventionists if it all works out reasonably well. But it will be no small task to construct a workable government in Libya, given the dearth of effective institutions and the potential divisions among different social groups. And then there's all that oil revenue to divide up, which tends to bring out peoples' worse instincts.

As in Iraq, therefore, ousting a discredited dictator is likely to be the easy part, and the hard part is just beginning. Aren't you glad the United States and Europe have lots of time and money to devote to rebuilding yet another potential failed state? [my emphasis]

Tags: juan cole, libya war, robert dreyfuss, stephen walt

Libya War: expect to be there a long time

Stephen Walt writes in Whatever happened to the war in Libya? Foreign Policy 07/11/2011:

... back when NATO first got involved [in the Libya War], a number of people made the obvious comparison to the 1999 war in Kosovo. Both wars were launched on impulse, there were no vital strategic interests involved, and both wars were fought "on the cheap" through the use of air power. NATO leaders expected the targets to succumb quickly and were surprised when their adversaries (Milosevic in 1999, Qaddafi today) hung on as long as they did.

But there's another parallel that deserves mention too. Serbia eventually surrendered, and I expect that Qaddafi or his sons will eventually do so too. But in the case of Kosovo, NATO and the U.N. had to send in a peacekeeping force, and they are still there 10 years later. And Kosovo has only about 28 percent of Libya's population and is much smaller geographically (some 10,000 square kilometers, compared with Libya's 1,800,000 sq. km.). So anybody who thinks that NATO, the United Nations, or the vaguely defined "international community" will be done whenever Qaddafi says uncle (or succumbs to a NATO airstrike) should probably lower their expectations and prepare themselves for long-term involvement in a deeply divided country. [my emphasis]

And they are likely to encounter some problems in that longer mission; see C.J. Chivers, Reporter’s Notebook: Reading the Rebels in Western Libya, Pt. I New York Times 07/10/2011.

Tags: kosovo war, libya war, stephen walt

Obama's words, personality and policy

I've become particularly fond of David Bromwich's analyses of President Obama. His close reading of Obama's speeches often yields some perceptive insights.

In Obama: His Words and His Deeds 06/16/2011 (07/14/2011 issue), Bromwich brings the story up to date:

Few members of Congress as yet hold a fully articulated objection to America’s wars in Asia and North Africa. But other causes in play may trouble the President’s determination to show his sympathy with the Arab Spring by military action in Libya. Obama has an unfortunate propensity to be specific when it would serve him well to avoid particulars, and to become vague at times when dates, names, numbers, or "a line in the sand" is what is needed to clarify a policy. On Libya, he was specific. He said the American commitment would last "days, not weeks." It has now lasted a little under three months. Reliable reporters such as Anthony Shadid of The New York Times and Patrick Cockburn of The Independent have suggested that an end to the conflict is nowhere in sight.

The narrow aim of enforcing a "no-fly zone" to protect civilians, asserted by Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton as the limit of American aims, turns out to have been a wedge for an air war against Qaddafi, a war, in fact, as thorough as is compatible with avoidance of harm to civilians. The surest thing one can say about the end of this engagement is that the US—along with France, Great Britain, and perhaps also Italy, which arranged the intervention—will at some point install a client state and fit out a friendly government with a democratic constitution.

Stephen Walt is less generous in his evaluation of Obama's bizarre claim that the Libya War doesn't constitute "hostilities" by the United States under American law. In Obama, we're at war. Stop insulting us. Foreign Policy 06/16/2011, Walt writes:

... the Obama administration is claiming that it doesn't need congressional authorization for its Libyan intervention under the War Powers Act. Why? Because what we are doing doesn't amount to "full-blown" hostilities.

Oh, please. Let's start with the definition of "war" itself. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as "a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups within a country." Now, let's see: what are we doing in Libya? What we know is that we've sent cruise missiles, and drones and U.S. aircraft to attack military targets in various places, including several attacks on Qaddafi's own compound. We are continuing to provide targeting information to our NATO allies, who are conducting additional raids on their own. Although U.S. ground troops are not present in force, it's a safe bet that U.S. special forces are operating in various places, probably helping provide some of that targeting info. And of course because the Obama administration isn't telling us everything that it's doing, we have no clear way of knowing exactly how involved we really are.

By any reasonable, common-sense standard, in short, we are at war. It doesn't matter that we aren't using our full strength to help the rebels or that other states are doing more than we are. The plain fact is that the United States is using its military forces and intelligence capabilities to attack Libyan forces. In plain English, we are killing (or helping to kill) Qaddafi loyalists (and occasionally innocent civilians), in an openly-acknowledged campaign to drive him from power. Sounds like war to me, and to anybody else who isn't being paid to find ways to evade or obscure reality. [my emphasis in bold]

Walt's comments points to one of the limitations of Bromwich's approach. Bromwich generally does a good job of looking at the policy context of Obama's words. But he tends to treat seeming inconsistencies in Obama's words as some sort of personality quirk. And in doing so, he sometimes makes useful assumptions, such as comments about his own personal wealth that suggest a strong identification with the wealthy and powerful. But it can also downplay policy and political concerns that make even more obvious explanations.

For instance, he writes:

Obama has always preferred the symbolic authority of the grand utterance to the actual authority of a directed policy: a policy fought for in particulars, carefully sustained, and traceable to his own intentions. The danger of the built-up speech venues — the Nobel Prize speech of December 2009 was another example — is that they cast Obama as the most famous holder-forth in the world, and yet it is never clear what follows for him from the fact that the world is listening. These settings make a president who is now more famous than popular seem not popular but galactic.

The speeches also display as a strength a personal trait that can seem, instead, an indulgence. For Obama, protracted moods of extreme abstraction seem to alternate with spasmodic engagement. The blend is hard to get used to. His detachment from congressional negotiations on health care and cap-and-trade was resented by Democrats, while leaders of the Palestinian Authority were at a loss to account for the dissociation from active pursuit of a settlement that followed his Cairo speech of June 2009. His decision to back the Libyan rebels was an instance of sudden engagement, against the prudential advice of a secretary of defense whom Obama trusts and admires. [my emphasis]

Yet he writes further on:

Obama in his Nobel Prize speech - which was in large part a defense of American conduct after 1945 and in smaller part a plea for the legitimation of humanitarian wars such as he has now committed the US to support in Libya - went on to say of the duties of a great power: “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.” The idioms of duty and utility are strangely mixed in that sentence. How can we be sure that an act that the President would like the world to see as benevolent will be seen as benevolent? It is surely easier to have that feeling if one knows oneself as the preeminent power, and believes oneself to be carried forward by the momentum of the world. [my emphasis]

Why do we need a psychological explanation postulating that Obama experiences "protracted moods of extreme abstraction [which] seem to alternate with spasmodic engagement" and that one of the latter moments was the Libya intervention, when Bromwich's observation that Obama used his Nobel speech in part for "the legitimation of humanitarian wars such as he has now committed the US to support in Libya" indicates rather than Obama was looking for such an opportunity as a matter of policy? There are indications, certainly, that the Libya intervention was poorly thought through. And even that Obama may have been suckered into thinking it was going to be quick and easy. But we don't need a speculation about a tendency on the President's part to "spasmodic engagement" to explain it plausibly.

Using grand phrases to deflect criticism from disappointing policies is a routine part of political speech and statecraft. Bromwich is also giving political theater too much credit in the matter of the health care negotiations. The White House was heavily involved with them but didn't make a big public deal about them. In summer of 2009, the White House cut their notorious deal with health industry lobbyists to make sure no public option would be included in the health care reform.

Bromwich gives a lot of attention to Obama's public rhetorical sparring with Benjamin Netanyahu. He thinks the Israeli Prime Minister got the best of Obama. But Bromwich leaves the impression that this is mainly because Obama failed to understand Netanyahu's rhetorical strategy. It seems more relevant to look at Obama's record to date, which strongly suggests that he never intended to apply major pressure to Israel to stop the West Bank settlements, which is essential to any remaining hope of negotiations leading to a viable two-state solution. A more parsimonious explanation of Obama's behavior is that he wanted to wave a diplomatic fig leaf to indicate that he tried to do something to get Israel to negotiate.

But Bromwich is being realistic when he writes, "Obama, as much as any American leader, is captivated by an image of America as the world-historical touchstone of generous conduct toward other nations." Politics, of course, require him to convey the impression to the public that he believes something along those lines. But Bromwich's conclusion in this case is consistent not only with Obama's words but his policy conduct.

Bromwich also seems to miss a basic and simple point here:

Walter Bagehot in The English Constitution divided government into two components, the dignified part and the efficient part. The dignified part is concerned with matters of ceremony, the arrangement and conduct of state occasions for celebration or mourning, the issuance of joint communiqués with foreign leaders and commands delivered from a majestic height. The efficient part is the part of government that governs - by making laws above all, but also by striking bargains between factions, and filling the positions of upper, middle, and lower functionaries, and threshing out party platforms on the way to becoming laws.

And he notes that Obama seems to have a distinct preference for the former. But one obvious distinction between the President and the British prime minister, and also the heads of many parliamentary governments, is that the President is both head of state (the role played by the Queen in Britain and the King in Spain) and head of government. That "dignified part" is a Constitutional role for the US President in a way that it is not for the British and Spanish prime ministers or the German Chancellor.

Also, how is Obama different in that way from other Presidents? The late John Kenneth Galbraith used to observe with his characteristic tone of sardonic amusement that Presidents and diplomats loved to go to summits and make foreign visits. And that the motivation was frequently primarily the pleasure of the trip. Think of Richard Nixon. As much as he may have enjoyed the less "dignified" aspects of his job, when was he enjoying himself more? Traveling to China and being hailed as a world statesman? Or sitting in his office with Haldeman and Ehrichman worrying about Jewish plots against him and planning domestic espionage crimes and figuring out ways of hushing them up?

This is also a useful observation on Bromwich's part:

The position of a moderate who aspires to shake the world into a new shape presents a continuous contradiction. For the moderate feels constrained not to say anything startling, and not to do anything very fast. But just as there is trouble with doing things on the old lines, there is trouble, too, with letting people understand things on the old lines. At least, there is if you have your sights set on changing the nature of the game. Obama is caught in this contradiction, and keeps getting deeper in it, like a man who sinks in quicksand both the more he struggles and the more he stays still. This is one lesson of his passage from inaction in Egypt to action in Libya, and from his summons of reform in Cairo in June 2009 to the guarded speech from the sidelines in May 2011. [my emphasis]

Here it's hard to avoid making judgments about Obama's personality, or at least the appropriateness of his leadership style to the current situation. A lot of frustrated Democrats have been saying, in some form or another, that the public interest in general and the Democratic Party in particular needed a transformative President. But Obama is instead a transactional one. And that's no doubt related to his own temperament and personality in some part. But it's also rooted in Obama's embrace of the neoliberal/Washington Consensus economic orthodoxy. He's a Democratic President who's made sure to keep the phasing out of Medicare and Social Security on the national agenda! It may be a personality quirk. But it's also a policy orientation.

Something similar is true in foreign policy broadly. Obama may want to wind down involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan to levels that are less politically disturbing. But his actions in Afghanistan have been consistent with the position he took in the 2008 campaign of supporting that war and promising to escalate it. The Libya War also shows that he buys into the interventionism that has loomed far too big in American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. And his embrace of the Patriot Act, his legal pursuit of whistleblowers and journalists, and his extreme claims for government secrecy and the right to designate Americans abroad for assassination on his own authority all indicate that Obama supports the basic structure of the national security state as Cheney and Bush defined it.

Obviously, the personality of a person with such enormous power as the President of the United States is a legitimate and necessary matter for study and concern. But when actions fit into a clear and intelligible policy context (whether or not one approves of the policies), we don't need to postulate personality quirks to explain them.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich, libya war, stephen walt