Thursday, August 7, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Going their Own Way - America in the 21st Century
3 good articles to ponder this election season….Wisdom comes late and at cost for America. Hopefully we will learn finally to base our policies soberly/cogently in realism/shared interests and realize the need to use the locals esp the Turks, Israelis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc!! We can help around the edges for sure in this morass they call the Mid-East, but ultimately it will be up to the locals in area to seal the deal in getting their “houses” in some semblance of order. It is in their interests and our interests to bring that sustainable stability and progress.
Where were/are the James Baker’s and George Mitchell’s and Sam Nunn’s when we needed/need them back in 2001 and 2002?? Where might they be now?? The Iraq Study Group findings are starting to resonate more and more IMHO – required reading (along with anything George Kennan wrote) for BOTH McCain and Obama in starting the Long March to rebuild American Diplomacy, Statecraft, and a Cogent Grand Foreign Policy Strategy connecting our present vast policy ends-means disconnects that is so vitally needed as we go forth in the 21st century!
We need to finally get Smart and learn to Use the LOCALS to recapture and effective leadership role built around the locals and vtheir interests!! Esp in the Mid-East things never go in straight lines and we need to adjust to that fact accordingly and quick. We are slow on our feet and have been too emotional with head in the sand and not quick. Too often we speak with too many voices and incoherently. No wonder many parts of the world avert their eyes at us. Time to change that and build on what works – use the locals - learn about the locals - and we will be just fine in terms of realizing our National Interest and synching effectively with theirs….John
http://www.usip.org/isg/iraq_study_group_report/report/1206/index.html
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Going Their Own Way in The Mideast
By David IgnatiusSunday, June 1, 2008; B07 – Washington Post
What happens when a superpower becomes preoccupied by a costly war and loses some of its ability to coerce friends and enemies toward the outcomes it favors? We're seeing a demonstration of that change now in the Middle East, as Arabs and even Israel reckon with the limits of American power -- and begin to cut their own deals.
The new power dynamic is clear in two developments over the past several weeks -- the Lebanon peace deal brokered by Qatar on May 21 and the Israel-Syria peace talks, with Turkish mediation, that were announced the same day. Both negotiations could help stabilize the region, albeit not on the terms the United States might prefer.
This independence from American tutelage is arguably one advantage of the new diplomacy: It is grounded in realism among the Middle Eastern nations about their own interests, rather than in wishful thinking about what the United States can accomplish. It reflects, as well, the growing strength of Iran and its radical allies, and the diminished clout of the United States -- and in that sense, it accords with the altered balance of power in the area.
The best explanation I've seen of this rebalancing came from Beirut-based Daily Star columnist Rami Khouri: "We are witnessing the clear limits of the projection of American global power, combined with the assertion and coexistence of multiple regional powers (Turkey, Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, Hamas, Saudi Arabia, etc.)," he wrote. This new alignment, he added, "is not a full defeat for the United States -- more like a draw."
The Lebanon peace deal negotiated in Doha is a classic piece of Arab diplomacy -- a compromise that straddles disparate factions and deep hostilities for the sake of expediency. The Qataris who brokered the deal are themselves a walking embodiment of all the region's contradictions. As Nicholas Blanford noted in the Christian Science Monitor, Qatar is chummy with Iran and at the same time hosts the biggest U.S. air base in the Persian Gulf; it has open links with Israel and also sponsors the anti-Israel polemics of al-Jazeera.
Qatar stepped in to mediate after Hezbollah had defied America and its allies and taken control of West Beirut in a naked display of power. Recognizing that U.S. efforts to check the radical militia had failed, the Lebanese did the pragmatic thing -- they sued for peace under the formula the Bush administration has been resisting for more than a year. The Qatari compromise broke the logjam at last: Lebanon has a new president and an agreement for elections next year. Even some senior administration officials aren't all that unhappy with this outcome.
The Syria-Israel dialogue through Turkey is another example of Middle East realpolitik. It illustrates that when it comes to protecting its own interests, even America's closest ally in the region is going its own way.
The American-Israeli split on Syria has been widening for the past several years. One point of difference was what to do about the nuclear reactor the Syrians were secretly building at Al Kibar, in the northeastern desert, with help from North Korea. The Bush administration wanted to confront the Syrians last year with the intelligence and use the issue to pressure them to dismantle the facility. The Israelis decided they couldn't wait -- and bombed the suspected reactor site on Sept. 6.
The United States feared the Israeli attack might trigger a wider war and insisted on American-Israeli silence to avoid humiliating Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In the end, the Israelis were right in their prediction that Syria wouldn't retaliate. Instead, according to U.S. intelligence, the Syrians scrambled to hide traces of the reactor they had secretly been building.
The Bush administration was dubious about the Turkish negotiating channel, just as it had balked at the airstrike. But here again, the Israelis ignored their superpower patron. They want to exploit tensions between Syria and Hezbollah, open at least a small gap between Syria and Iran -- and in the process enhance the clout of Turkey as an alternative to a rising Iran. In this intricate dance, Washington has been essentially irrelevant.
America isn't withdrawing from the Middle East, despite its recent difficulties -- that's an Iranian fantasy. And in the long run, it's surely to America's advantage if regional powers can create a stable security architecture -- even if it isn't precisely the one we would have designed for them. We've tried imposing our own solutions, and frankly that hasn't worked very well.
The writer is co-host ofPostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues.
------
Peace Fills a Vacuum
By HUSSEIN AGHA and ROBERT MALLEY - June 3, 2008 - NYT
IN the last few weeks, three long-frozen conflicts in the Middle East have displayed early signs of thawing. Israel and Hamas may be inching toward a cease-fire that would end attacks by both sides and, perhaps, loosen the siege imposed on the impoverished Gaza Strip. The factions in Lebanon, after a long period of institutional paralysis and a near civil war, have reached a tentative political agreement. And eight years after their last negotiations, Israel and Syria have announced the resumption of indirect peace talks.
That so many parties are moving at the same time in so many arenas is noteworthy enough. That they are doing so without — and, in some cases, despite — the United States is more remarkable still.
The Gaza deal is being brokered by Egypt. Qatar mediated the Lebanese accord. Turkey is shepherding the Israeli-Syrian contacts. All three countries are close allies of the United States. Under normal circumstances, they would be loath to act on vital regional matters without America’s consent.
Yet in these cases they seem to have ignored Washington’s preferences. The negotiations either involved parties with whom the United States refuses to talk, initiated a process the United States opposes or produced an outcome harmful to its preferred local allies.
The region is in a mess, and Washington’s allies know it. They privately blame the United States and have given up waiting for the Bush administration to offer them a way out.
By acting as they did, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey gave the true measure of America’s dwindling credibility and leverage after American debacles in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. They are willing to take matters into their own hands and overlook American ambivalence about their doing so.
Intent on isolating its foes, the United States has instead ended up marginalizing itself. In one case after another, the Bush administration has wagered on the losing party or on a lost cause.
Israel wants to deal with Hamas because it — not America’s Palestinian partners — possesses what Israel most wants: the ability to end the violence and to release Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas. Israel has come around to dealing with Syria because Damascus — not America’s so-called moderate Arab allies — holds the crucial cards: Syria has a clear strategy of alliance with Iran; it supports the more powerful forces on the ground in Lebanon; and it provides refuge to opposition and Islamist forces in Palestine.
Likewise, America’s Lebanese friends had to give in to Hezbollah’s demands once it became clear that the support of the United States could not undo their country’s balance of power. Meanwhile, the process President Bush seems to care about most — that elusive Israeli-Palestinian track — is also the least likely to go anywhere.
The United States has cut itself off from the region on the dubious assumption that it can somehow maximize pressure on its foes by withholding contact, choosing to flaunt its might in the most primitive and costly of ways. It has pushed its local allies toward civil wars — arming Fatah against Hamas; financing some Lebanese forces against Hezbollah — they could not and did not win. And it has failed to understand that its partners could achieve more in alliance than in conflict with their opposition.
How much more powerful would Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and leader of Fatah, have been if, at the head of a national unity coalition, he could deliver a truce and Corporal Shalit to Israel while simultaneously broadening the support he needs to sell a peace agreement? How much stronger would Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon and his colleagues have been had they agreed two years ago to the very power-sharing accord they were forced to swallow last month?
Many questions surround these three still-incomplete deals. They could collapse or move in unintended directions. They may end up serving a quite different purpose, like constraining Syria’s, Hezbollah’s or Hamas’s ability to retaliate in the event of an American or Israeli attack against Iran. On all this there is understandable uncertainty.
But for now at least, there’s no great mystery about where the United States stands. At a critical time in a critical region, it is quite simply missing in action.
Hussein Agha is the author, with Ahmed S. Khalidi, of “A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine.” Robert Malley, the director of the Middle East Program at the International Crisis Group, was a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs to President Bill Clinton from 1998 to 2001.
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A Surprise Negotiation
By David IgnatiusWednesday, June 25, 2008; A13 – Washington Post
What's going on between Syria and Israel? Are the indirect peace negotiations through Turkish mediators that were announced last month for real? I've been talking with sources on all sides, and they present an upbeat view of a peace process that has taken many people (including top Bush administration officials) by surprise.
As with any secret diplomatic initiative, this one is surrounded by mysteries and riddles. So I'll examine the Syria-Israel dialogue as a series of puzzles and offer my best guesses about what's happening:
(1) How did these negotiations begin?
The channel opened in the fall of 2006, just after the summer war in Lebanon that had made both Damascus and Tel Aviv nervous about the destabilizing role of Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon. Syria proposed indirect "proximity" talks and insisted on Turkey, a rare friend of both countries, as intermediary.
For many months, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wasn't sure he trusted the channel. The Bush administration was skeptical about whether the process would lead anywhere, but it didn't try to stop it. About a year ago, Olmert decided to test the Syrian track. He had strong encouragement from the Israeli defense establishment -- the defense minister, Ehud Barak; the army chief of staff, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi; and Israeli military intelligence.
(2) What's in it for the two sides?
The Israeli military brass favored engagement with Syria because they didn't think the status quo in the region was sustainable. Lebanon had become a surrogate battleground between Israel and Iran, and the Israelis arguably had lost the first round. Meanwhile, the Syrians were increasing their arsenal of missiles and other weapons. The judgment in Tel Aviv was that Israel stood to lose strategically by letting things continue as they were.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad favored an opening to Israel to counter attempts by the United States, France and Saudi Arabia to isolate his country. Syrian confidence in the Turkish negotiating channel increased after Israel indicated informally that it was prepared to accept terms for return of the Golan Heights (and related issues, such as water rights) that had been reached in direct Syrian-Israeli negotiations during the 1990s.
(3) Can Syria be decoupled from Iran?
Israel's overriding goal has been to draw Syria away from its alliance with Iran. So far, the Israelis see no sign that the peace talks have achieved this goal. Syria-watchers caution that this sort of decisive transfer of loyalties is unlikely. But eventually, Syria may move away from Iran (and toward Turkey) because the Baath regime in Damascus is secular to its core -- and mistrusts the religious fervor of the mullahs. The decoupling would be cultural and political, rather than a matter of security policy.
(4) Who assassinated Imad Mughniyah in Damascus in February?
The car bomb that killed Iran's key covert operative in Hezbollah is still echoing in the Middle East. Suspicion immediately focused on Israel. But on Feb. 27, a London-based newspaper called Al-Quds Al-Arabi, with very good sources in Damascus, alleged that several Arab nations had conspired with Mossad to assassinate Mughniyah.
Adding to the speculation are reports that shortly before his death, Mughniyah was attempting to heal a split within Hezbollah between the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and its former leader, Subhi Tufaily. Tufaily's power base is the Bekaa Valley, which has lost influence in Hezbollah to Shiites from southern Lebanon. According to one Arab source, Mughniyah -- traveling under his longtime pseudonym, "Haj Ismail" -- paid a visit shortly before his death to Tufaily's village of Britel, just south of Baalbek.
Mughniyah usually traveled without bodyguards, believing that his protection was the surgical alteration of his features, which prevented even old friends from recognizing "Haj Ismail." For that reason, the Syrians insisted they weren't at fault. But a sign of tension was Tehran's announcement that a joint commission would investigate the killing, a statement that Damascus promptly denied.
(5) What about Syria's secret nuclear reactor, which was destroyed by the Israelis on Sept. 6, 2007?
Oddly enough, that attack on what CIA analysts called the "Enigma Building" may have helped the peace talks. The Israelis felt that their decisive action helped restore the credibility of their deterrence policy. The Syrians appreciated that Israeli and American silence allowed them time to cover their tracks. Finally, the fact that Assad kept the nuclear effort a secret, and that he managed the post-attack pressures, showed Israelis that he was truly master of his own house, and thus a plausible negotiating partner.
Where were/are the James Baker’s and George Mitchell’s and Sam Nunn’s when we needed/need them back in 2001 and 2002?? Where might they be now?? The Iraq Study Group findings are starting to resonate more and more IMHO – required reading (along with anything George Kennan wrote) for BOTH McCain and Obama in starting the Long March to rebuild American Diplomacy, Statecraft, and a Cogent Grand Foreign Policy Strategy connecting our present vast policy ends-means disconnects that is so vitally needed as we go forth in the 21st century!
We need to finally get Smart and learn to Use the LOCALS to recapture and effective leadership role built around the locals and vtheir interests!! Esp in the Mid-East things never go in straight lines and we need to adjust to that fact accordingly and quick. We are slow on our feet and have been too emotional with head in the sand and not quick. Too often we speak with too many voices and incoherently. No wonder many parts of the world avert their eyes at us. Time to change that and build on what works – use the locals - learn about the locals - and we will be just fine in terms of realizing our National Interest and synching effectively with theirs….John
http://www.usip.org/isg/iraq_study_group_report/report/1206/index.html
-----
Going Their Own Way in The Mideast
By David IgnatiusSunday, June 1, 2008; B07 – Washington Post
What happens when a superpower becomes preoccupied by a costly war and loses some of its ability to coerce friends and enemies toward the outcomes it favors? We're seeing a demonstration of that change now in the Middle East, as Arabs and even Israel reckon with the limits of American power -- and begin to cut their own deals.
The new power dynamic is clear in two developments over the past several weeks -- the Lebanon peace deal brokered by Qatar on May 21 and the Israel-Syria peace talks, with Turkish mediation, that were announced the same day. Both negotiations could help stabilize the region, albeit not on the terms the United States might prefer.
This independence from American tutelage is arguably one advantage of the new diplomacy: It is grounded in realism among the Middle Eastern nations about their own interests, rather than in wishful thinking about what the United States can accomplish. It reflects, as well, the growing strength of Iran and its radical allies, and the diminished clout of the United States -- and in that sense, it accords with the altered balance of power in the area.
The best explanation I've seen of this rebalancing came from Beirut-based Daily Star columnist Rami Khouri: "We are witnessing the clear limits of the projection of American global power, combined with the assertion and coexistence of multiple regional powers (Turkey, Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, Hamas, Saudi Arabia, etc.)," he wrote. This new alignment, he added, "is not a full defeat for the United States -- more like a draw."
The Lebanon peace deal negotiated in Doha is a classic piece of Arab diplomacy -- a compromise that straddles disparate factions and deep hostilities for the sake of expediency. The Qataris who brokered the deal are themselves a walking embodiment of all the region's contradictions. As Nicholas Blanford noted in the Christian Science Monitor, Qatar is chummy with Iran and at the same time hosts the biggest U.S. air base in the Persian Gulf; it has open links with Israel and also sponsors the anti-Israel polemics of al-Jazeera.
Qatar stepped in to mediate after Hezbollah had defied America and its allies and taken control of West Beirut in a naked display of power. Recognizing that U.S. efforts to check the radical militia had failed, the Lebanese did the pragmatic thing -- they sued for peace under the formula the Bush administration has been resisting for more than a year. The Qatari compromise broke the logjam at last: Lebanon has a new president and an agreement for elections next year. Even some senior administration officials aren't all that unhappy with this outcome.
The Syria-Israel dialogue through Turkey is another example of Middle East realpolitik. It illustrates that when it comes to protecting its own interests, even America's closest ally in the region is going its own way.
The American-Israeli split on Syria has been widening for the past several years. One point of difference was what to do about the nuclear reactor the Syrians were secretly building at Al Kibar, in the northeastern desert, with help from North Korea. The Bush administration wanted to confront the Syrians last year with the intelligence and use the issue to pressure them to dismantle the facility. The Israelis decided they couldn't wait -- and bombed the suspected reactor site on Sept. 6.
The United States feared the Israeli attack might trigger a wider war and insisted on American-Israeli silence to avoid humiliating Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In the end, the Israelis were right in their prediction that Syria wouldn't retaliate. Instead, according to U.S. intelligence, the Syrians scrambled to hide traces of the reactor they had secretly been building.
The Bush administration was dubious about the Turkish negotiating channel, just as it had balked at the airstrike. But here again, the Israelis ignored their superpower patron. They want to exploit tensions between Syria and Hezbollah, open at least a small gap between Syria and Iran -- and in the process enhance the clout of Turkey as an alternative to a rising Iran. In this intricate dance, Washington has been essentially irrelevant.
America isn't withdrawing from the Middle East, despite its recent difficulties -- that's an Iranian fantasy. And in the long run, it's surely to America's advantage if regional powers can create a stable security architecture -- even if it isn't precisely the one we would have designed for them. We've tried imposing our own solutions, and frankly that hasn't worked very well.
The writer is co-host ofPostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues.
------
Peace Fills a Vacuum
By HUSSEIN AGHA and ROBERT MALLEY - June 3, 2008 - NYT
IN the last few weeks, three long-frozen conflicts in the Middle East have displayed early signs of thawing. Israel and Hamas may be inching toward a cease-fire that would end attacks by both sides and, perhaps, loosen the siege imposed on the impoverished Gaza Strip. The factions in Lebanon, after a long period of institutional paralysis and a near civil war, have reached a tentative political agreement. And eight years after their last negotiations, Israel and Syria have announced the resumption of indirect peace talks.
That so many parties are moving at the same time in so many arenas is noteworthy enough. That they are doing so without — and, in some cases, despite — the United States is more remarkable still.
The Gaza deal is being brokered by Egypt. Qatar mediated the Lebanese accord. Turkey is shepherding the Israeli-Syrian contacts. All three countries are close allies of the United States. Under normal circumstances, they would be loath to act on vital regional matters without America’s consent.
Yet in these cases they seem to have ignored Washington’s preferences. The negotiations either involved parties with whom the United States refuses to talk, initiated a process the United States opposes or produced an outcome harmful to its preferred local allies.
The region is in a mess, and Washington’s allies know it. They privately blame the United States and have given up waiting for the Bush administration to offer them a way out.
By acting as they did, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey gave the true measure of America’s dwindling credibility and leverage after American debacles in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. They are willing to take matters into their own hands and overlook American ambivalence about their doing so.
Intent on isolating its foes, the United States has instead ended up marginalizing itself. In one case after another, the Bush administration has wagered on the losing party or on a lost cause.
Israel wants to deal with Hamas because it — not America’s Palestinian partners — possesses what Israel most wants: the ability to end the violence and to release Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas. Israel has come around to dealing with Syria because Damascus — not America’s so-called moderate Arab allies — holds the crucial cards: Syria has a clear strategy of alliance with Iran; it supports the more powerful forces on the ground in Lebanon; and it provides refuge to opposition and Islamist forces in Palestine.
Likewise, America’s Lebanese friends had to give in to Hezbollah’s demands once it became clear that the support of the United States could not undo their country’s balance of power. Meanwhile, the process President Bush seems to care about most — that elusive Israeli-Palestinian track — is also the least likely to go anywhere.
The United States has cut itself off from the region on the dubious assumption that it can somehow maximize pressure on its foes by withholding contact, choosing to flaunt its might in the most primitive and costly of ways. It has pushed its local allies toward civil wars — arming Fatah against Hamas; financing some Lebanese forces against Hezbollah — they could not and did not win. And it has failed to understand that its partners could achieve more in alliance than in conflict with their opposition.
How much more powerful would Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and leader of Fatah, have been if, at the head of a national unity coalition, he could deliver a truce and Corporal Shalit to Israel while simultaneously broadening the support he needs to sell a peace agreement? How much stronger would Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon and his colleagues have been had they agreed two years ago to the very power-sharing accord they were forced to swallow last month?
Many questions surround these three still-incomplete deals. They could collapse or move in unintended directions. They may end up serving a quite different purpose, like constraining Syria’s, Hezbollah’s or Hamas’s ability to retaliate in the event of an American or Israeli attack against Iran. On all this there is understandable uncertainty.
But for now at least, there’s no great mystery about where the United States stands. At a critical time in a critical region, it is quite simply missing in action.
Hussein Agha is the author, with Ahmed S. Khalidi, of “A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine.” Robert Malley, the director of the Middle East Program at the International Crisis Group, was a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs to President Bill Clinton from 1998 to 2001.
------------------------------------------------------------------
A Surprise Negotiation
By David IgnatiusWednesday, June 25, 2008; A13 – Washington Post
What's going on between Syria and Israel? Are the indirect peace negotiations through Turkish mediators that were announced last month for real? I've been talking with sources on all sides, and they present an upbeat view of a peace process that has taken many people (including top Bush administration officials) by surprise.
As with any secret diplomatic initiative, this one is surrounded by mysteries and riddles. So I'll examine the Syria-Israel dialogue as a series of puzzles and offer my best guesses about what's happening:
(1) How did these negotiations begin?
The channel opened in the fall of 2006, just after the summer war in Lebanon that had made both Damascus and Tel Aviv nervous about the destabilizing role of Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon. Syria proposed indirect "proximity" talks and insisted on Turkey, a rare friend of both countries, as intermediary.
For many months, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wasn't sure he trusted the channel. The Bush administration was skeptical about whether the process would lead anywhere, but it didn't try to stop it. About a year ago, Olmert decided to test the Syrian track. He had strong encouragement from the Israeli defense establishment -- the defense minister, Ehud Barak; the army chief of staff, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi; and Israeli military intelligence.
(2) What's in it for the two sides?
The Israeli military brass favored engagement with Syria because they didn't think the status quo in the region was sustainable. Lebanon had become a surrogate battleground between Israel and Iran, and the Israelis arguably had lost the first round. Meanwhile, the Syrians were increasing their arsenal of missiles and other weapons. The judgment in Tel Aviv was that Israel stood to lose strategically by letting things continue as they were.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad favored an opening to Israel to counter attempts by the United States, France and Saudi Arabia to isolate his country. Syrian confidence in the Turkish negotiating channel increased after Israel indicated informally that it was prepared to accept terms for return of the Golan Heights (and related issues, such as water rights) that had been reached in direct Syrian-Israeli negotiations during the 1990s.
(3) Can Syria be decoupled from Iran?
Israel's overriding goal has been to draw Syria away from its alliance with Iran. So far, the Israelis see no sign that the peace talks have achieved this goal. Syria-watchers caution that this sort of decisive transfer of loyalties is unlikely. But eventually, Syria may move away from Iran (and toward Turkey) because the Baath regime in Damascus is secular to its core -- and mistrusts the religious fervor of the mullahs. The decoupling would be cultural and political, rather than a matter of security policy.
(4) Who assassinated Imad Mughniyah in Damascus in February?
The car bomb that killed Iran's key covert operative in Hezbollah is still echoing in the Middle East. Suspicion immediately focused on Israel. But on Feb. 27, a London-based newspaper called Al-Quds Al-Arabi, with very good sources in Damascus, alleged that several Arab nations had conspired with Mossad to assassinate Mughniyah.
Adding to the speculation are reports that shortly before his death, Mughniyah was attempting to heal a split within Hezbollah between the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and its former leader, Subhi Tufaily. Tufaily's power base is the Bekaa Valley, which has lost influence in Hezbollah to Shiites from southern Lebanon. According to one Arab source, Mughniyah -- traveling under his longtime pseudonym, "Haj Ismail" -- paid a visit shortly before his death to Tufaily's village of Britel, just south of Baalbek.
Mughniyah usually traveled without bodyguards, believing that his protection was the surgical alteration of his features, which prevented even old friends from recognizing "Haj Ismail." For that reason, the Syrians insisted they weren't at fault. But a sign of tension was Tehran's announcement that a joint commission would investigate the killing, a statement that Damascus promptly denied.
(5) What about Syria's secret nuclear reactor, which was destroyed by the Israelis on Sept. 6, 2007?
Oddly enough, that attack on what CIA analysts called the "Enigma Building" may have helped the peace talks. The Israelis felt that their decisive action helped restore the credibility of their deterrence policy. The Syrians appreciated that Israeli and American silence allowed them time to cover their tracks. Finally, the fact that Assad kept the nuclear effort a secret, and that he managed the post-attack pressures, showed Israelis that he was truly master of his own house, and thus a plausible negotiating partner.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Monday, April 9, 2007
Friday, April 6, 2007
Comprehensive Entitlement Reform
These cites form an excellent strawman starting point to address in a bipartisan manner the question of Social Security Reform as well as the overall Entitlements question. Please chime in....John
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Social Security Finances…How Best to View the Problem
http://www.concordcoalition.org/issues/socsec/issue-briefs/SSBrief4--Measurement.htm
Over-simplified measures of Social Security's long-range financing problems create debates that can be distracting. Regardless of how the program's future deficits are presented, the program's benefits are entitlements that are financed by taxing the nation's economic output. Ultimately, the resources the program requires will have to be drawn from the economy of the future, and it is the dimension of that draw then that best reflects the problem
If the federal government could eliminate its budget deficits and use excess Social Security receipts to buy down the federal debt, then the idea that excess Social Security taxes could be saved would be plausible. But there is nothing in the post World War II period that suggests the government will run budget surpluses for any sustained period of time -- particularly those equaling the size of the Social Security surpluses. And there is nothing to suggest that a commitment by one Congress to set them aside will be binding on the next. As budget developments of the past few years year amply demonstrate, Congress' "lockbox" promises in no way guarantee prudent fiscal behavior.
Looked at this way, it is not the deficits between income and outgo that best reflect the Social Security problem -- it is Social Security's rising costs. If allowed to grow as scheduled, the share of the nation's payrolls that the program requires will grow from 11 percent today to 17 percent over the next 25 years, and to more than 19 percent over the next 75 year. As a share of what the nation produces, it will grow from 4.26 percent of GDP today to 6.14 percent of GDP in 2030 and 6.39 percent in 2080. Either way one looks at those numbers, it means that Social Security's draw from the economy will rise by 50 percent or more over the next few decades… that's the problem.
The bottom line is that, no matter how it is measured, there are just two ways to address Social Security's financing gap without over burdening tomorrow's workers and taxpayers: reduce Social Security's long-term cost and make the remaining cost more affordable by increasing national savings and hence the size of the future economy. A workable reform plan should do both.
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http://www.concordcoalition.org/issues/socsec/doc/050203testimonyexecsummary.htm
Framework of Reform, The Future of Social Security - Robert Bixby, Exec Dir, The Concord Coalition, Testimony at Senate Special Committee on Aging, Feb 3, 2005
Executive Summary
Any Social Security reform plan should be designed to meet three fundamental objectives--ensuring Social Security's long-term fiscal sustainability, raising national savings, and improving the system's generational equity:
• Reform should ensure Social Security's long-term fiscal sustainability. The first goal of reform should be to close Social Security's financing gap over the lifetimes of our children and beyond. The only way to do so without burdening tomorrow's workers and taxpayers is to reduce Social Security's long-term cost.
• Reform should raise national savings. As America ages, the economy will inevitably have to transfer a rising share of real resources from workers to retirees. This burden can be made more bearable by increasing the size of tomorrow's economy. The surest way to do this is to raise national savings, and hence ultimately productivity growth. Without new savings reform is a zero-sum game.
• Reform should improve Social Security's generational equity. As currently structured, Social Security contributions offer each new generation of workers a declining value (“moneysworth”). Reform must not exacerbate--and ideally it should improve--the generational inequity underlying the current system.Meeting these objectives will require hard choices and trade-offs. There is no free lunch. Policymakers and the public need to ask the following questions to assess whether reforms honestly face up to the Social Security challenge--or merely shift and conceal the cost:
• Does reform rely on trust-fund accounting? Trust-fund accounting obscures the magnitude of Social Security's financing gap by assuming that trust-fund surpluses accumulated in prior years can be drawn down to defray deficits incurred in future years. However, the trust funds are bookkeeping devices, not a mechanism for savings. The special issue U.S. Treasury bonds they contain simply represent a promise from one arm of government (Treasury) to satisfy claims held by another arm of government (Social Security.) They do not indicate how these claims will be satisfied or whether real resources are being set aside to match future obligations. Thus, their existence does not, alone, ease the burden of paying future benefits. The real test of fiscal sustainability is whether reform closes Social Security's long-term annual gap between its outlays and its dedicated tax revenues.
• Does reform rely on hiking FICA taxes? Hiking payroll taxes to meet benefit obligations is neither an economically sound nor a generationally equitable option. The burden will fall most heavily on lower and middle-income workers and on future generations. Younger Americans in particular will be skeptical of any plan that purports to improve their retirement security by increasing their tax burden and by further lowering the return on their contributions.
• Does reform rely on new debt? Paying for promised benefits--or financing the transition to a more funded Social Security system--by issuing new debt defeats a fundamental purpose of reform. To the extent that reform relies on debt financing, it will not boost net savings and may result in a decline. Without new savings, any gain for the Social Security system must come at the expense of the rest of the budget, the economy, and future generations. Resort to borrowing is ultimately a tax increase for our kids.
• Does reform rely on outside financing? Ideally, reform should achieve all necessary fiscal savings within the Social Security system itself. Unrelated tax hikes and spending cuts may never be enacted, or if enacted, may easily be neutralized by other measures, now or in the future. Unless the American public sees a direct link between sacrifice and reward, the sacrifice is unlikely to happen.
• Does reform use prudent assumptions? There must be no fiscal alchemy. The success of reform should not depend upon rosy projections of future economic growth, presumed budget surpluses or lofty rates of return on privately owned accounts. All projections regarding private accounts should be based on realistic assumptions, a prudent mix of equity and debt, and realistic estimates of new administrative costs.
While fixing Social Security's problems, reform must be careful to preserve what works. Social Security now fulfills a number of vital social objectives. Policymakers and the public need to ask the following questions to assess whether reform plans would continue to fulfill them:
• Does reform keep Social Security mandatory? The government has a legitimate interest in seeing that people do not under-save during their working lives and become reliant on the safety net in retirement. Moving toward personal ownership need not and should not mean “privatizing” Social Security. Any new personal accounts should be a mandatory part of the Social Security system. Choice is not important in a compulsory social insurance program whose primary function is to protect people against poor choices.
• Does reform preserve Social Security's full range of insurance protection? Social Security does more than write checks to retirees. It also pays benefits to disabled workers, widows, widowers, and surviving children. A reformed system should continue to provide insurance protection that is at least equal to what the current system offers.
• Does reform maintain Social Security's progressivity? While individual equity (“moneysworth”) is important, so too is social adequacy. Social Security's current benefit formula is designed so that benefits replace a higher share of wages for low-earning workers than for high-earning ones. Under any reform plan, total benefits, including benefits from personal accounts, should remain as progressive as they are today.
• Does reform protect participants against undue risk? Under the current system, workers face the risk that future Congresses will default on today's unfunded pay-as-you-go benefit promises. While reducing this “political risk,” personal account reforms should be careful to minimize other kinds of risk, such as investment risk, inflation risk, and longevity risk--that is, the risk of outliving ones assets.
If we reform Social Security today, the changes can be gradual and give everybody plenty of time to adjust and prepare. If we wait much longer, change will come anyway--but it is more likely to be sudden and arrive in the midst of economic and political crisis.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Social Security Reform – Hard Choices Ahead
http://www.concordcoalition.org/issues/
As our leaders in Washington consider the best way to remedy Social Security’s long-term funding gap, it is essential for them to confront the hard choices that a meaningful reform plan requires. They should reject both the “do nothing” approach and the “free lunch” plans that rely on substantial long-term borrowing to appear painless. Both offer a false hope. Deficit financing is neither a viable nor a responsible way of avoiding the hard choices that must be made on contribution and benefit levels.
The basic case for reform is a matter of arithmetic, not ideology. Well within the lifetime of America’s baby boomers, the current system faces a growing gap between what it promises in benefits and what we are setting aside to pay for it. Doing nothing to address this problem will eventually result in steep tax hikes, deep spending cuts, or massive borrowing from the public.
Ensuring a more sustainable system will require change, meaning that someone either in the form of higher is going to have to give up something contributions, lower benefits or a combination of both. No Social Security reform will succeed unless this fact is acknowledged up front.
Responsible reform options must make sense within the context of sound fiscal conditions and the need to raise national savings. Moreover, the fiscal challenges facing Social Security, while substantial, are not as great as the long-term fiscal, moral, and technological challenges we face on Medicare reform. If we can’t make the hard choices on Social Security we can never hope to tackle the problems of our health care entitlements. In all the reform ideas we must realize that there are no free lunches. Further borrowing with no new contributions or contemporaneous benefit cuts, raises many concerns. We must ask these questions on any meaningful reform:
Do they add to national savings?
A fundamental goal of reform should be to improve national savings. As America ages, the economy will have to transfer a rising share of resources from workers to retirees. This will be easier in a prosperous growing economy. The best way to ensure this is to raise national savings, and ultimately productivity growth. Social Security reform that relies on deficit financing will not boost net national savings, and may even result in lower savings if households respond to the new personal accounts by saving less in other areas. Without additional savings, any gain for the Social Security system must come at the expense of the rest of the budget, the economy, and future generations.
Could it worsen the already precarious fiscal outlook?
The 10-year cost of roughly $2 trillion would come on top of the $5 trillion deficit that appears likely if current fiscal policies are continued. Yet the greater fiscal danger with most such plans is that they require additional borrowing for decades to come. In the most widely discussed plan produced by the 2001 President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, the magnitude of the borrowing equals or exceeds the cost of the new Medicare drug benefit well into the 2020s. Meanwhile, the increased deficits and debt exceed the promised savings until the 2050s. Official projections already indicate that current fiscal policies are unsustainable long before then and the new deficits would only make the problem worse. Savings programmed for the 2050s won’t be enough to prevent us from going over the cliff well before that time.
Could it send a dangerous signal to the markets that we are not taking our fiscal problems seriously?
With our large budget deficit and low domestic savings rate we are borrowing record amounts from abroad. This year’s increase in foreign debt is likely to approach $700 billion. If we “pay for” Social Security reform by running up the debt further, rather than making hard choices, it would signal to increasingly wary financial markets that Washington has no intention of doing what is necessary to get its fiscal house in order. This would increase the risks of a so-called “hard landing” such as a spike in interest rates, rising inflation and a plunging dollar. Promises that all the new debt will be paid back starting in about 50 years are unlikely to satisfy the concerns of those who are watching to see what Washington does now to improve its fiscal position. If markets looked out 50 years, current interest rates would be through the roof. Because the trade-offs that genuine reform requires can appear painful, many leaders try to find excuses for not confronting the hard choices. Yet the truth is clear. Social Security reform involves real resource trade-offs. It’s time to get serious about reform—and face up to the hard choices.
-----------------------------------
Social Security Finances…How Best to View the Problem
http://www.concordcoalition.org/issues/socsec/issue-briefs/SSBrief4--Measurement.htm
Over-simplified measures of Social Security's long-range financing problems create debates that can be distracting. Regardless of how the program's future deficits are presented, the program's benefits are entitlements that are financed by taxing the nation's economic output. Ultimately, the resources the program requires will have to be drawn from the economy of the future, and it is the dimension of that draw then that best reflects the problem
If the federal government could eliminate its budget deficits and use excess Social Security receipts to buy down the federal debt, then the idea that excess Social Security taxes could be saved would be plausible. But there is nothing in the post World War II period that suggests the government will run budget surpluses for any sustained period of time -- particularly those equaling the size of the Social Security surpluses. And there is nothing to suggest that a commitment by one Congress to set them aside will be binding on the next. As budget developments of the past few years year amply demonstrate, Congress' "lockbox" promises in no way guarantee prudent fiscal behavior.
Looked at this way, it is not the deficits between income and outgo that best reflect the Social Security problem -- it is Social Security's rising costs. If allowed to grow as scheduled, the share of the nation's payrolls that the program requires will grow from 11 percent today to 17 percent over the next 25 years, and to more than 19 percent over the next 75 year. As a share of what the nation produces, it will grow from 4.26 percent of GDP today to 6.14 percent of GDP in 2030 and 6.39 percent in 2080. Either way one looks at those numbers, it means that Social Security's draw from the economy will rise by 50 percent or more over the next few decades… that's the problem.
The bottom line is that, no matter how it is measured, there are just two ways to address Social Security's financing gap without over burdening tomorrow's workers and taxpayers: reduce Social Security's long-term cost and make the remaining cost more affordable by increasing national savings and hence the size of the future economy. A workable reform plan should do both.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.concordcoalition.org/issues/socsec/doc/050203testimonyexecsummary.htm
Framework of Reform, The Future of Social Security - Robert Bixby, Exec Dir, The Concord Coalition, Testimony at Senate Special Committee on Aging, Feb 3, 2005
Executive Summary
Any Social Security reform plan should be designed to meet three fundamental objectives--ensuring Social Security's long-term fiscal sustainability, raising national savings, and improving the system's generational equity:
• Reform should ensure Social Security's long-term fiscal sustainability. The first goal of reform should be to close Social Security's financing gap over the lifetimes of our children and beyond. The only way to do so without burdening tomorrow's workers and taxpayers is to reduce Social Security's long-term cost.
• Reform should raise national savings. As America ages, the economy will inevitably have to transfer a rising share of real resources from workers to retirees. This burden can be made more bearable by increasing the size of tomorrow's economy. The surest way to do this is to raise national savings, and hence ultimately productivity growth. Without new savings reform is a zero-sum game.
• Reform should improve Social Security's generational equity. As currently structured, Social Security contributions offer each new generation of workers a declining value (“moneysworth”). Reform must not exacerbate--and ideally it should improve--the generational inequity underlying the current system.Meeting these objectives will require hard choices and trade-offs. There is no free lunch. Policymakers and the public need to ask the following questions to assess whether reforms honestly face up to the Social Security challenge--or merely shift and conceal the cost:
• Does reform rely on trust-fund accounting? Trust-fund accounting obscures the magnitude of Social Security's financing gap by assuming that trust-fund surpluses accumulated in prior years can be drawn down to defray deficits incurred in future years. However, the trust funds are bookkeeping devices, not a mechanism for savings. The special issue U.S. Treasury bonds they contain simply represent a promise from one arm of government (Treasury) to satisfy claims held by another arm of government (Social Security.) They do not indicate how these claims will be satisfied or whether real resources are being set aside to match future obligations. Thus, their existence does not, alone, ease the burden of paying future benefits. The real test of fiscal sustainability is whether reform closes Social Security's long-term annual gap between its outlays and its dedicated tax revenues.
• Does reform rely on hiking FICA taxes? Hiking payroll taxes to meet benefit obligations is neither an economically sound nor a generationally equitable option. The burden will fall most heavily on lower and middle-income workers and on future generations. Younger Americans in particular will be skeptical of any plan that purports to improve their retirement security by increasing their tax burden and by further lowering the return on their contributions.
• Does reform rely on new debt? Paying for promised benefits--or financing the transition to a more funded Social Security system--by issuing new debt defeats a fundamental purpose of reform. To the extent that reform relies on debt financing, it will not boost net savings and may result in a decline. Without new savings, any gain for the Social Security system must come at the expense of the rest of the budget, the economy, and future generations. Resort to borrowing is ultimately a tax increase for our kids.
• Does reform rely on outside financing? Ideally, reform should achieve all necessary fiscal savings within the Social Security system itself. Unrelated tax hikes and spending cuts may never be enacted, or if enacted, may easily be neutralized by other measures, now or in the future. Unless the American public sees a direct link between sacrifice and reward, the sacrifice is unlikely to happen.
• Does reform use prudent assumptions? There must be no fiscal alchemy. The success of reform should not depend upon rosy projections of future economic growth, presumed budget surpluses or lofty rates of return on privately owned accounts. All projections regarding private accounts should be based on realistic assumptions, a prudent mix of equity and debt, and realistic estimates of new administrative costs.
While fixing Social Security's problems, reform must be careful to preserve what works. Social Security now fulfills a number of vital social objectives. Policymakers and the public need to ask the following questions to assess whether reform plans would continue to fulfill them:
• Does reform keep Social Security mandatory? The government has a legitimate interest in seeing that people do not under-save during their working lives and become reliant on the safety net in retirement. Moving toward personal ownership need not and should not mean “privatizing” Social Security. Any new personal accounts should be a mandatory part of the Social Security system. Choice is not important in a compulsory social insurance program whose primary function is to protect people against poor choices.
• Does reform preserve Social Security's full range of insurance protection? Social Security does more than write checks to retirees. It also pays benefits to disabled workers, widows, widowers, and surviving children. A reformed system should continue to provide insurance protection that is at least equal to what the current system offers.
• Does reform maintain Social Security's progressivity? While individual equity (“moneysworth”) is important, so too is social adequacy. Social Security's current benefit formula is designed so that benefits replace a higher share of wages for low-earning workers than for high-earning ones. Under any reform plan, total benefits, including benefits from personal accounts, should remain as progressive as they are today.
• Does reform protect participants against undue risk? Under the current system, workers face the risk that future Congresses will default on today's unfunded pay-as-you-go benefit promises. While reducing this “political risk,” personal account reforms should be careful to minimize other kinds of risk, such as investment risk, inflation risk, and longevity risk--that is, the risk of outliving ones assets.
If we reform Social Security today, the changes can be gradual and give everybody plenty of time to adjust and prepare. If we wait much longer, change will come anyway--but it is more likely to be sudden and arrive in the midst of economic and political crisis.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Social Security Reform – Hard Choices Ahead
http://www.concordcoalition.org/issues/
As our leaders in Washington consider the best way to remedy Social Security’s long-term funding gap, it is essential for them to confront the hard choices that a meaningful reform plan requires. They should reject both the “do nothing” approach and the “free lunch” plans that rely on substantial long-term borrowing to appear painless. Both offer a false hope. Deficit financing is neither a viable nor a responsible way of avoiding the hard choices that must be made on contribution and benefit levels.
The basic case for reform is a matter of arithmetic, not ideology. Well within the lifetime of America’s baby boomers, the current system faces a growing gap between what it promises in benefits and what we are setting aside to pay for it. Doing nothing to address this problem will eventually result in steep tax hikes, deep spending cuts, or massive borrowing from the public.
Ensuring a more sustainable system will require change, meaning that someone either in the form of higher is going to have to give up something contributions, lower benefits or a combination of both. No Social Security reform will succeed unless this fact is acknowledged up front.
Responsible reform options must make sense within the context of sound fiscal conditions and the need to raise national savings. Moreover, the fiscal challenges facing Social Security, while substantial, are not as great as the long-term fiscal, moral, and technological challenges we face on Medicare reform. If we can’t make the hard choices on Social Security we can never hope to tackle the problems of our health care entitlements. In all the reform ideas we must realize that there are no free lunches. Further borrowing with no new contributions or contemporaneous benefit cuts, raises many concerns. We must ask these questions on any meaningful reform:
Do they add to national savings?
A fundamental goal of reform should be to improve national savings. As America ages, the economy will have to transfer a rising share of resources from workers to retirees. This will be easier in a prosperous growing economy. The best way to ensure this is to raise national savings, and ultimately productivity growth. Social Security reform that relies on deficit financing will not boost net national savings, and may even result in lower savings if households respond to the new personal accounts by saving less in other areas. Without additional savings, any gain for the Social Security system must come at the expense of the rest of the budget, the economy, and future generations.
Could it worsen the already precarious fiscal outlook?
The 10-year cost of roughly $2 trillion would come on top of the $5 trillion deficit that appears likely if current fiscal policies are continued. Yet the greater fiscal danger with most such plans is that they require additional borrowing for decades to come. In the most widely discussed plan produced by the 2001 President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, the magnitude of the borrowing equals or exceeds the cost of the new Medicare drug benefit well into the 2020s. Meanwhile, the increased deficits and debt exceed the promised savings until the 2050s. Official projections already indicate that current fiscal policies are unsustainable long before then and the new deficits would only make the problem worse. Savings programmed for the 2050s won’t be enough to prevent us from going over the cliff well before that time.
Could it send a dangerous signal to the markets that we are not taking our fiscal problems seriously?
With our large budget deficit and low domestic savings rate we are borrowing record amounts from abroad. This year’s increase in foreign debt is likely to approach $700 billion. If we “pay for” Social Security reform by running up the debt further, rather than making hard choices, it would signal to increasingly wary financial markets that Washington has no intention of doing what is necessary to get its fiscal house in order. This would increase the risks of a so-called “hard landing” such as a spike in interest rates, rising inflation and a plunging dollar. Promises that all the new debt will be paid back starting in about 50 years are unlikely to satisfy the concerns of those who are watching to see what Washington does now to improve its fiscal position. If markets looked out 50 years, current interest rates would be through the roof. Because the trade-offs that genuine reform requires can appear painful, many leaders try to find excuses for not confronting the hard choices. Yet the truth is clear. Social Security reform involves real resource trade-offs. It’s time to get serious about reform—and face up to the hard choices.
U.S. Grand Strategy in the 21st Century
“Any message we may try to bring to others will be effective only if it is in accord with what we are to ourselves, and if this is something sufficiently impressive to compel the respect and confidence of a world which, despite all its material difficulties, is still more ready to recognize and respect spiritual distinction than material opulence.” – George F. Kennan
“You are saying,” the politician replies, “that we ought to sit back and do nothing.” On the contrary I believe we can do a great deal. But ought implies can. We have no moral obligation to do what we cannot do. Rory Stewart NYT Op-Ed 3/26/07
Grand Strategy Backgrounder
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040402252_pf.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR2007032301591.html
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/pdf/iraqReport_120606_part1and2.pdf
http://www.usip.org/isg/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-3.html
http://www.stratfor.com/
http://www.leavenworth.army.mil/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/09/AR2007010901333.html
http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/03/rory-stewart-what-we-can-do.html
http://64.49.203.13/article.phpID=6491&PHPSESSID=880a4c3d2db490c6ea356b9af494d80b
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/ppns/report/FinalReport.pdf
A Path to Common GroundThe Iraq Study Group Plan Could Break the Logjam By James A. Baker III, Thursday, April 5, 2007; A17, Washington Post I wholeheartedly agree with a point Lee Hamilton made in his March 25 op-ed, " A%
A Path to Common GroundThe Iraq Study Group Plan Could Break the Logjam
By James A. Baker III, Thursday, April 5, 2007; A17, Washington Post
I wholeheartedly agree with a point Lee Hamilton made in his March 25 op-ed, " A Partnership on Iraq," regarding the need for a unity of effort in Iraq. He is correct that the United States will probably falter unless President Bush and Congress reach a bipartisan consensus in the coming months.
Unfortunately, more than 100 days after the Iraq Study Group released its report, we are further than ever from a consensus. Recent narrow votes in the House and Senate, largely along partisan lines, illustrate our country's continuing division on this critical issue.
The best, and perhaps only, way to build national agreement on the path forward is for the president and Congress to embrace the only set of recommendations that has generated bipartisan support: the Iraq Study Group report. The Iraq Study Group was composed of five Democrats and five Republicans. Each of us has strong wills and views. But we managed to find consensus for 79 recommendations that we suggested be carried out in concert. Our leaders could still use this report to unite the country behind a common approach to our most difficult foreign policy problem.
The report does not set timetables or deadlines for the removal of troops, as contemplated by the supplemental spending bills the House and Senate passed. In fact, the report specifically opposes that approach. As many military and political leaders told us, an arbitrary deadline would allow the enemy to wait us out and would strengthen the positions of extremists over moderates. A premature American departure from Iraq, we unanimously concluded, would almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence and further deterioration of conditions in Iraq and possibly other countries.
The goal of the United States should be to help Iraqis achieve national political reconciliation and greater effectiveness of their security forces, the report said, so that Iraqis can assume more of the security mission. This in turn could allow for an orderly departure of U.S. troops. An important way to encourage Iraqis to work together is to hold them to the type of benchmarks that Congress, President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have all considered. If the Iraqi government does not meet those benchmarks, the United States "should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government," the report said. But we did not suggest that this be codified into legislation. The report doesn't recommend a firm deadline for troop removal unless America's military leadership believes that the situation warrants it.
Nothing has happened since the report was released that would justify changing that view. Setting a deadline for withdrawal regardless of conditions in Iraq makes even less sense today because there is evidence that the temporary surge is reducing the level of violence in Baghdad. As Baghdad goes, so goes Iraq. The Iraq Study Group said it could support a short-term surge to stabilize Baghdad or to speed up training and equipping of Iraqi soldiers if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines such steps would be effective. Gen. David Petraeus has so determined.
The president announced a " new way forward" on Jan. 10 that supports much of the approach called for by the Iraq Study Group. He has since said that he is moving to embrace our recommendations. The president's plan increases the number of American advisers embedded in Iraqi army units, with the goal that the Iraqi government will assume control of security in all provinces by November. It outlines benchmarks and indicates that the Iraqi government must act to attain them. He has approved ministerial-level meetings of all of Iraq's neighbors, including Syria and Iran; the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council; and other countries.
The International Compact for Iraq and the Iraqi-led neighbors conference are a good start. But more can be done. The president should beef up regional diplomacy, particularly that involving Syria and Iran, by establishing an Iraq International Support Group to encourage the participation of countries that have a critical stake in preventing Iraq from falling into chaos. He should move to further engage all parties to seek a comprehensive peace between Arabs and Israelis. And he should enhance the training of Iraqi forces and push harder for national reconciliation by Iraqis as called for by the study group so as to permit the orderly reduction of U.S. forces.
But most important, the president should reiterate his intention to embrace the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and ask congressional leaders to join him. They should do so. If they do not, the burden of rejecting a unified bipartisan approach would fall on them.
Moving forward this way, which would require compromise by both sides, would be far better than continuing a political dogfight that can only undermine U.S. foreign policy goals in Iraq and the Middle East.
The writer, a former secretary of state, was co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group.
--------------------------
A Partnership on Iraq
By Lee H. HamiltonSunday, March 25, 2007; B07, Washington Post
President Bush staked out his position on Iraq in January, and the House has now staked out its own. Deep divisions between these positions signal a stalemate among our political leaders. There is no unity of effort. Yet the president and the Democratic majorities in Congress will remain in office for nearly two years. They must seek a bipartisan consensus in the months ahead; otherwise, our efforts in Iraq will falter.
The American people have soured on the war. They clearly are looking for a responsible transition for U.S. forces out of Iraq. The House supplemental spending plan outlines a transition, as do proposals pending in the Senate. Moving forward, the president and Congress must become partners, and not antagonists, toward this end.
A strategy of sustained pressure on the Iraqi government to advance national reconciliation, provide security and improve the lives of the Iraqi people offers the best chance of advancing stability. U.S. military forces have performed valiantly, but they cannot by themselves accomplish these goals -- only Iraqis can. As President Bush told the nation on Jan. 10, "only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people."
To that end, the House bill lays out the steps that the Iraqi government must take. These benchmarks are not new. They have been widely agreed upon by the White House and the Iraqi government, as have target dates for completion. At issue is the conditionality of U.S. support. Time and again, Iraqis have missed deadlines. Time and again, deadlines have been extended, and U.S. political, economic and military support has continued and even increased.
The House bill breaks this cycle. By compelling the president to report Iraq's performance to Congress, the House provides a necessary mechanism to track progress. By tying continued U.S. support -- including the presence of U.S. troops -- to benchmarks, it uses the strongest possible leverage to press Iraqi leaders to meet their commitments.
The House outlines a 2008 target date for U.S. forces to leave Iraq. It sets a direction for policy but leaves implementation to the president. The residual force it authorizes gives the president considerable flexibility to protect U.S. interests with a substantial presence of U.S. troops. The president manages the war and makes the decision about the force level needed to defend U.S. military forces and civilians in Iraq, conduct counterterrorism operations and train Iraqi security forces. This transition is flexible, not fixed. It is responsible, not precipitate.
Even with the more assertive congressional role outlined in the bill, determinations on Iraqi benchmark performance and certifications on the readiness of U.S. military units are left to the president. He has the authority to waive limitations on troop deployments. The president must retain this flexibility and authority as commander in chief.
But more needs to be done. Just as a narrow focus on a "surge" of U.S. forces will not bring stability to Iraq, neither will a narrow focus on the readiness of U.S. forces and the conditions of U.S. support. What we need is a "surge" of political, economic and diplomatic engagement as well.
The Senate leadership's resolution speaks appropriately to the importance of a comprehensive approach and a diplomatic offensive in the region. The administration's efforts to engage all of Iraq's neighbors -- including Iran and Syria -- in a regional forum represent a good first step. These efforts must be energized with high-level contacts. They must be sustained through careful preparation and follow-through, as well as the creation of an international support group on behalf of national reconciliation in Iraq and stability in the region.
Congress and the administration should also place greater emphasis on training Iraqi security forces, both police and military. Unless their training becomes the primary mission of U.S. forces, it will be difficult to withdraw U.S. combat troops.
The House bill is a step forward. Yet it is only one step in a process that will unfold in many ways over several months. With our young men and women in harm's way, the debate will be understandably passionate.
It is my hope that out of this debate a better policy on Iraq will emerge: That is how our Founders designed the system to work. The president must respect the views of the American people and the role of Congress, and Congress must respect the president's responsibility for carrying out foreign policy.
To bring the war to a responsible conclusion, our leaders have an obligation to come together. They must find a bipartisan consensus and rally public opinion behind it. The best way to move forward in Iraq is to unify America's effort.
The writer, a Democratic representative from Indiana from 1965 to 1999, was co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group.
------------------------------
Lessons for One Last Try
By David IgnatiusWednesday, January 10, 2007; A13 , Washington Post
What makes sense in Iraq? The political debate is becoming sharply polarized again, as President Bush campaigns for a new "surge" strategy. But some useful military guideposts can be found in a new field manual of counterinsurgency warfare prepared by the general who is about to take command of U.S. forces in Baghdad.
Lt. Gen. David Petraeus supervised the development of the manual when he ran the Army's training center at Fort Leavenworth, before he had any idea he would be heading back to Baghdad as the top commander. In that sense, the document reflects a senior officer's best judgment about what will work and what won't -- independent of the details of the current "to surge or not to surge" debate. The manual was published by the Army last month and can be downloaded at http://www.leavenworth.army.mil/.
Two themes stood out for me as I read the document. The first is that success in counterinsurgency requires a political strategy as much as a military one. The second is that broad political support back home -- which buys time on the battlefield -- is the crucial strategic asset in fighting such wars.
The manual doesn't offer any specific advice for the current debate. But its precepts do raise some basic questions for Bush as he frames his new strategy: Will the new approach build bipartisan support for Iraq policy? And will it open a path toward an Iraqi political solution, as opposed to an American military effort to impose order?
"Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man's warfare -- it is the graduate level of war," reads a quotation from a Special Forces officer in Iraq that opens the first chapter. And this theme runs throughout the manual: Many of the prescriptions that apply to normal wars don't apply to counterinsurgencies. Indeed, if they are used, they will backfire. In a summary of "unsuccessful practices," here's the No. 1 mistake: "Overemphasize killing and capturing the enemy rather than securing and engaging the populace."
The field manual summarizes some of the lessons that commanders have learned in Iraq: Long-term success "depends on the people taking charge of their own affairs and consenting to the government's rule." Killing insurgents "by itself cannot defeat an insurgency." Local commanders "have the best grasp of their situations" and should have the freedom to adapt and react to local conditions. As many officers ruefully admit, the Army is learning these lessons three years late -- but perhaps that's still in time to make a difference.
My favorite part of the manual, which I suspect Petraeus had a big hand in drafting, is a section titled "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations." The headings give the flavor of these unconventional ideas: "Sometimes, the More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You May Be." (Green Zone residents, please note: "If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents.") "Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Reaction." "Some of the Best Weapons for Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot." And this military version of the Zen riddle: "The More Successful the Counterinsurgency Is, the Less Force Can Be Used and the More Risk Must Be Accepted." (As the host nation takes control, "Soldiers and Marines may also have to accept more risk to maintain involvement with the people.")
The abiding lesson of this manual comes in one of Petraeus's paradoxes, and it ought to be engraved as the cornerstone of U.S. policy going forward, regardless of whether there is a troop surge: "The Host Nation Doing Something Tolerably Is Normally Better than Us Doing It Well." In making this point, Petraeus cites the godfather of counterinsurgency warriors, Gen. Creighton Abrams, who said when he was U.S. commander in Vietnam in 1971: " We can't run this thing. . . . They've got to run it."
It's Petraeus's luck, good or bad, that he has a chance to see whether these precepts of counterinsurgency warfare can still work in Iraq, despite all the mistakes made over the past three years. His chances will be slim if President Bush and the Democratic Congress can't agree on a bipartisan plan for Iraq. Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, put it succinctly on "Meet the Press" last month: "This can't be Bush's war" -- it has to be the country's. That's the real danger of a troop surge: It sets up a showdown between the president and his critics that could shred the chances for a stable, sustainable policy that might embody some of the military lessons we have finally learned.
-------------------------------------------------
White House Fact Sheet: The New Way Forward in Iraq – January 10, 2007
Highlights of the Iraq Strategy Review (PDF) Background Briefing by Senior Administration Officials In Focus: Renewal in Iraq
The President's New Iraq Strategy Is Rooted In Six Fundamental Elements:
Let the Iraqis lead;
Help Iraqis protect the population;
Isolate extremists;
Create space for political progress;
Diversify political and economic efforts; and
Situate the strategy in a regional approach.
Iraq Could Not Be Graver – The War On Terror Cannot Be Won If We Fail In Iraq. Our enemies throughout the Middle East are trying to defeat us in Iraq. If we step back now, the problems in Iraq will become more lethal, and make our troops fight an uglier battle than we are seeing today.
Key Elements Of The New Approach:
Security Iraqi:
Publicly acknowledge all parties are responsible for quelling sectarian violence.
Work with additional Coalition help to regain control of the capital and protect the Iraqi population.
Deliver necessary Iraqi forces for Baghdad and protect those forces from political interference.
Commit to intensify efforts to build balanced security forces throughout the nation that provide security even-handedly for all Iraqis.
Plan and fund eventual demobilization program for militias.
Coalition:
Agree that helping Iraqis to provide population security is necessary to enable accelerated transition and political progress.
Provide additional military and civilian resources to accomplish this mission.
Increase efforts to support tribes willing to help Iraqis fight Al Qaeda in Anbar.
Accelerate and expand the embed program while minimizing risk to participants.
Both Coalition And Iraqi:
Continue counter-terror operations against Al Qaeda and insurgent organizations.
Take more vigorous action against death squad networks.
Accelerate transition to Iraqi responsibility and increase Iraqi ownership.
Increase Iraqi security force capacity – both size and effectiveness – from 10 to 13 Army divisions, 36 to 41 Army Brigades, and 112 to 132 Army Battalions.
Establish a National Operations Center, National Counterterrorism Force, and National Strike Force.
Reform the Ministry of Interior to increase transparency and accountability and transform the National Police.
Key Elements Of The New Approach: Political Iraqi:
The Government of Iraq commits to:
Reform its cabinet to provide even-handed service delivery.
Act on promised reconciliation initiatives (oil law, de-Baathification law, Provincial elections).
Give Coalition and ISF authority to pursue ALL extremists.
All Iraqi leaders support reconciliation.
Moderate coalition emerges as strong base of support for unity government.
Coalition:
Support political moderates so they can take on the extremists.
Build and sustain strategic partnerships with moderate Shi'a, Sunnis, and Kurds.
Support the national compact and key elements of reconciliation with Iraqis in the lead.
Diversify U.S. efforts to foster political accommodation outside Baghdad (more flexibility for local commanders and civilian leaders).
Expand and increase the flexibility of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) footprint.
Focus U.S. political, security, and economic resources at local level to open space for moderates, with initial priority to Baghdad and Anbar.
Both Coalition And Iraqi:
Partnership between Prime Minister Maliki, Iraqi moderates, and the United States where all parties are clear on expectations and responsibilities.
Strengthen the rule of law and combat corruption.
Build on security gains to foster local and national political accommodations.
Make Iraqi institutions even-handed, serving all of Iraq's communities on an impartial basis.
Key Elements Of The New Approach: Economic
Iraqi:
Deliver economic resources and provide essential services to all areas and communities.
Enact hydrocarbons law to promote investment, national unity, and reconciliation.
Capitalize and execute jobs-producing programs.
Match U.S. efforts to create jobs with longer term sustainable Iraqi programs.
Focus more economic effort on relatively secure areas as a magnet for employment and growth.
Coalition:
Refocus efforts to help Iraqis build capacity in areas vital to success of the government (e.g. budget execution, key ministries).
Decentralize efforts to build Iraqi capacities outside the Green Zone.
Double the number of PRTs and civilians serving outside the Green Zone.
Establish PRT-capability within maneuver Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs).
Greater integration of economic strategy with military effort.
Joint civil-military plans devised by PRT and BCT.
Remove legal and bureaucratic barriers to maximize cooperation and flexibility.
Key Elements Of The New Approach: Regional
Iraqi:
Vigorously engage Arab states.
Take the lead in establishing a regional forum to give support and help from the neighborhood.
Counter negative foreign activity in Iraq.
Increase efforts to counter PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party).
Coalition:
Intensify efforts to counter Iranian and Syrian influence inside Iraq.
Increase military presence in the region.
Strengthen defense ties with partner states in the region.
Encourage Arab state support to Government of Iraq.
Continue efforts to help manage relations between Iraq and Turkey.
Continue to seek the region's full support in the War on Terror.
Both Coalition And Iraqi:
Focus on the International Compact.
Retain active U.N. engagement in Iraq – particularly for election support and constitutional review.
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Geopolitics and the U.S. Spoiling Attack
By George Friedman – Stratfor (analysis@stratfor.com)
The United States has now spent four years fighting in Iraq. Those who planned the conflict never expected this outcome. Indeed, it could be argued that this outcome represents not only miscalculation but also a strategic defeat for the United States. The best that can be said about the war at the moment is that it is a strategic stalemate, which is an undesired outcome for the Americans. The worst that can be said is that the United States has failed to meet its strategic objectives and that failure represents defeat.
In considering the situation, our attention is drawn to a strange paradox that has been manifest in American foreign policy since World War II. On the one hand, the United States has consistently encountered strategic stalemate or defeat in particular politico-military operations. At those times, the outcomes have appeared to be disappointing if not catastrophic. Yet, over the same period of time, U.S. global power, on the whole, has surged. In spite of stalemate and defeat during the Cold War, the United States was more in 2000 than it had been in 1950.Consider these examples from history:
Korea: Having defeated the North Korean army, U.S. forces were attacked by China. The result was a bloody stalemate, followed by a partition that essentially restored the status quo ante -- thus imposing an extended stalemate.
Cuba: After a pro-Soviet government was created well within the security cordon of the United States, Washington used overt and covert means to destroy the Castro regime. All attempts failed, and the Castro government remains in place nearly half a century later.
Vietnam: the United States fought an extended war in Vietnam, designed to contain the expansion of Communism in Indochina. The United States failed to achieve its objectives -- despite massive infusions of force -- and North Vietnam established hegemony over the region.
Iran: The U.S. containment policy required it to have a cordon of allies around the Soviet Union. Iran was a key link, blocking Soviet access to the Persian Gulf. The U.S. expulsion from Iran following the Islamic Revolution represented a major strategic reversal.
Iraq: In this context, Iraq appears to represent another strategic reversal -- with U.S. ambitions at least blocked, and possibly defeated, after a major investment of effort and prestige.
Look at it this way. On a pretty arbitrary scale -- between Korea (1950-53), Cuba (1960-63), Vietnam (1963-75), Iran (1979-1981) and Iraq (2003-present) -- the United States has spent about 27 of the last 55 years engaged in politico-military maneuvers that, at the very least, did not bring obvious success, and frequently brought disaster. Yet, in spite of these disasters, the long-term tendency of American power relative to the rest of the world has been favorable to the United States. This general paradox must be explained. And in the course of explanation, some understandings of the Iraq campaign, seen in a broader context, might emerge.
Schools of Thought
There are three general explanations for this paradox: 1. U.S. power does not rest on these politico-military involvements but derives from other factors, such as economic power.
1) Therefore, the fact that the United States has consistently failed in major conflicts is an argument that these conflicts should not have been fought -- that they were not relevant to the emergence of American power. The U.S. preoccupation with politico-military conflict has been an exercise in the irrelevant that has slowed, but has not derailed, expansion of American power. Applying this logic, it would be argued that the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway under its own weight -- as will the Islamic world -- and that U.S. interventions are pointless.
2) The United States has been extraordinarily fortunate that, despite its inability to use politico-military power effectively and its being drawn consistently into stalemate or defeat, exogenous forces have saved the United States from its own weakness. In the long run, this good fortune should not be viewed as strategy, but as disaster waiting to happen.
3) The wars mentioned previously were never as significant as they appeared to be -- public sentiment and government rhetoric notwithstanding. These conflicts drew on only a small fraction of potential U.S. power, and they always were seen as peripheral to fundamental national interests. The more important dimension of U.S. foreign policy was statecraft that shifted the burden of potential warfare from the United States to its allies.
So, regardless of these examples, the core strategic issue for the United States was its alliances and ententes with states like Germany and China. Applying this logic, it follows that the wars themselves were -- practically speaking -- insignificant episodes, that stalemate and defeat were trivial and that, except for the domestic political obsession, none were of fundamental importance to the United States.
Put somewhat differently, there is the liberal view that the Soviet Union was not defeated by the United States in the Cold War, but that it collapsed itself, and the military conflicts of the Cold War were unnecessary. There is the conservative view that the United States won the Cold War in spite of a fundamental flaw in the American character -- an unwillingness to bear the burden of war -- and that this flaw ultimately will prove disastrous for the United States. Finally, there is the non-ideological, non-political view that the United States won the Cold War in spite of defeats and stalemates because these wars were never as important as either the liberals or conservatives made them out to be, however necessary they might have been seen to be at the time.If we apply these analyses to Iraq, three schools of thought emerge.
The first says that the Iraq war is unnecessary and even harmful in the context of the U.S.-jihadist confrontation -- and that, regardless of outcome, it should not be fought.
The second says that the war is essential -- and that, while defeat or stalemate in this conflict perhaps would not be catastrophic to the United States, there is a possibility that it would be catastrophic. And at any rate, this argument continues, the United States' ongoing inability to impose its will in conflicts of this class ultimately will destroy it.
Finally, there is the view that Iraq is simply a small piece of a bigger war and that the outcome of this particular conflict will not be decisive, although the war might be necessary. The heated rhetoric surrounding the Iraq conflict stems from the traditional American inability to hold things in perspective.
There is a reasonable case to be made for any of these three views. Any Stratfor reader knows that our sympathies gravitate toward the third view. However, that view makes no sense unless it is expanded. It must also take into consideration the view that the Soviet Union's fall was hardwired into history regardless of U.S. politico-military action, along with the notion that a consistent willingness to accept stalemate and defeat represents a significant threat to the United States in the long term.
Resource Commitments and Implications
Let's begin with something that is obviously true. When we consider Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Iran and even Iraq, it is clear that the United States devoted only a tiny fraction of the military power it could have brought to bear if it wished. By this, we mean that in none of these cases was there a general American mobilization, at no point was U.S. industry converted to a wartime footing, at no point were nuclear weapons used to force enemy defeat. The proportion of force brought to bear, relative to capabilities demonstrated in conflicts such as World War II, was minimal.
If there were fundamental issues at stake involving national security, the United States did not act as though that was the case. What is most remarkable about these conflicts was the extreme restraint shown -- both in committing forces and in employing available forces. The conservative critique of U.S. foreign policy revolves around the tendency of the American leadership and public to recoil at the idea of extended conflict. But this recoil is not a response to extended war. Rather, by severely limiting the force available from the outset, the United States has, unintentionally, designed its wars to be extended. From this derives the conservative view that the United States engages in warfare without intending victory.
In each of these cases, the behavior of the United States implied that there were important national security issues at stake, but measured in terms of the resources provided, these national security issues were not of the first order. The United States certainly has shown an ability to mount full-bore politico-military operations in the past: In World War II, it provided sufficient resources to invade Europe and the Japanese empire simultaneously. But in all of the cases we have cited, the United States provided limited resources -- and in some cases, only covert or political resources. Clearly, it was prepared on some level to accept stalemate and defeat. Even in cases where the enemy was engaged fully, the United States limited its commitment of resources.
In Vietnam, for example, the defeat of North Vietnam and regime change were explicitly ruled out. The United States had as its explicit goal a stalemate, in which both South and North Vietnam survived as independent states. In Korea, the United States shifted to a stalemate strategy after the Chinese intervention. So too in Cuba after the Cuban missile crisis; and in Iran, the United States accepted defeat in an apparently critical arena without attempting a major intervention. In each instance, the mark of U.S. intervention was limited exposure -- even at the cost of stalemate or defeat. In other words, the United States consistently has entered into conflicts in which its level of commitment was extremely limited, in which either victory was not the strategic goal or the mission eventually was redefined to accept stalemate, and in which even defeat was deemed preferable to a level of effort that might avert it. Public discussion on all sides was apoplectic both during these conflicts and afterward, yet American global power was not materially affected in the long run.
The Spoiling Attack
This appears to make no sense until we introduce a military concept into the analysis: the spoiling attack. The spoiling attack is an offensive operation; however, its goal is not to defeat the enemy but to disrupt enemy offensives -- to, in effect, prevent a defeat by the enemy. The success of the spoiling attack is not measured in term of enemy capitulation, but the degree to which it has forestalled successful enemy operations. The concept of a spoiling attack is intimately bound up with the principle of economy of force. Military power, like all power, is finite. It must be husbanded. Even in a war in which no resources are spared, some operations do not justify a significant expenditure. Some attacks are always designed to succeed by failing. More precisely, the resources devoted to those operations are sufficient to disrupt enemy plans, to delay an enemy offensive, or to create an opportunity for political disruption of the enemy, rather than to defeat the enemy. For those tasked with carrying out the spoiling attack, it appears that they are being wasted in a hopeless effort. For those with a broader strategic or geopolitical perspective, it appears to be the proper application of the "economy of force" principle.
If we consider the examples cited above and apply the twin concepts of the spoiling attack and economy of force, then the conversion of American defeats into increased U.S. global power no longer appears quite as paradoxical. In Korea, spoiling Communist goals created breathing space elsewhere for the United States, and increased tension levels between China and Russia. A stalemate achieved outcomes as satisfactory to Washington as taking North Korea would have been. In Cuba, containing Fidel Castro was, relative to cost, as useful as destroying him. What he did in Cuba itself was less important to Washington than that he should not be an effective player in Latin America. In Vietnam, frustrating the North's strategic goals for a decade allowed the Sino-Soviet dispute to ripen, thus opening the door for Sino-U.S. entente even before the war ended. The U.S. interest in Iran, of course, rested with its utility as a buffer to the Soviets. Being ousted from Iran mattered only if the Iranians capitulated to the Soviets. Absent that, Iran's internal politics were of little interest to the United States.
If we apply the twin concepts to Iraq, it is possible to understand the reasons behind the size of the force deployed (which, while significant, still is limited relative to the full range of options brought to bear in World War II) and the obvious willingness of the Bush administration to court military disaster. The invasion four years ago has led to the Sunnis and Shia turning against each other in direct conflict. Therefore, it could be argued that just as the United States won the Cold War by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split and allying with Mao Zedong, so too the path to defeating the jihadists is not a main attack, but a spoiling attack that turns Sunnis and Shia against each other. This was certainly not the intent of the Bush administration in planning the 2003 invasion; it has become, nevertheless, an unintended and significant outcome.
Moreover, it is far from clear whether U.S. policymakers through history have been aware of this dimension in their operations. In considering Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Iran, it is never clear that the Truman, Kennedy, Johnson/Nixon or Carter/Reagan administrations purposely set out to implement a spoiling attack. The fog of political rhetoric and the bureaucratized nature of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus make it difficult to speak of U.S. "strategy" as such. Every deputy assistant secretary of something-or-other confuses his little piece of things with the whole, and the American culture demonizes and deifies without clarifying.
However, there is a deep structure in U.S. foreign policy that becomes visible. The incongruities of stalemate and defeat on the one side and growing U.S. power on the other must be reconciled. The liberal and conservative arguments explain things only partially. But the idea that the United States rarely fights to win can be explained. It is not because of a lack of moral fiber, as conservatives would argue; nor a random and needless belligerence, as liberals would argue. Rather, it is the application of the principle of spoiling operations -- using limited resources not in order to defeat the enemy but to disrupt and confuse enemy operations. As with the invisible hand in economics, businessmen pursue immediate ends without necessarily being aware of how they contribute to the wealth of nations. So too, politicians pursue immediate ends without necessarily being aware of how they contribute to national power. Some are clearer in their thinking than others, perhaps, or possibly all presidents are crystal-clear on what they are doing in these matters. We do not dine with the great. But there is an underlying order to U.S. foreign policy that makes the apparent chaos of policymaking understandable and rational.
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RORY STEWART: What We Can Do
Monday, March 26, 2007 - NYTimes
We must acknowledge the limits of our power and knowledge in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and concentrate on what is achievable. The question is not “What ought we to do?” but “What can we do?”This is rarely discussed. When I ask politicians whether we can defeat the Taliban, they reply that we “have to” defeat the Taliban. If I ask whether we can actually do any good by staying in Iraq, they reply that we have “a moral obligation” to the Iraqi people.By emphasizing moral necessity, politicians can justify almost any risk, uncertainty or sacrifice and make compromise seem cowardly and criticism treasonous. When I suggest recognition of Moktada al-Sadr or negotiation with the Taliban, I am described as an appeaser. But these moral judgments are fragile, and they increasingly cloak despair, paralysis and preparation for flight.We are learning, painfully, that many of the problems in Iraq or Afghanistan — from violence and state failure to treatment of women — are deeply embedded in local beliefs, political structures and traumatic histories. Iraqis and Afghans do not want their country controlled by foreigners and non-Muslims. A powerful and effective minority is trying to kill us.
The majority is at best lukewarm: they may dislike Sadrists or the Taliban, but they prefer them to us.We are also now aware how little we can comprehend. Our officials are on short tours, lack linguistic or cultural training, live in barracks behind high blast walls and encounter the local population through angry petitions or sudden ambushes. We will never acquire the subtle sense of values, beliefs and history needed to create lasting changes, still less as we once intended, to lead a political, social and economic revolution.
Paul Bremer, then the top American administrator in Iraq, told us in October 2003 that we had six months to computerize the Baghdad stock exchange, privatize state-owned enterprises and reform the university curriculum. Now he would be grateful for stability. The American and British people have sensed that their grand objectives are unachievable, and since no one is offering any practical alternative, they are lapsing into cynicism and opposition.
Meanwhile the paralyzed leaders, afraid of their impotence, flit from troop increases to flight, from engagement to isolation. We must prevent this by acknowledging our limits, while recognizing that although we are less powerful and informed than we claimed, we are more powerful and informed than we fear.
A year ago, for example, I felt it would be almost impossible to help re-establish ceramics, woodwork and calligraphy and restore part of the old city of Kabul. I worried that Afghans were uninterested, the standards too low, the prices too high, the government apathetic and international demand nonexistent. But I found great Afghan energy, courage and skill and received imaginative and generous support from the U.S. government. Unexpected markets emerged; the Afghan administration helped; men and women found new pride and incomes. There are many much better established and more successful projects than this all over Afghanistan.
My experience suggests that we can continue to protect our soil from terrorist attack, we can undertake projects that prevent more people from becoming disaffected, and we can even do some good. In short, we will be able to do more, not less, than we are now. But working with what is possible requires humility and the courage to compromise.We will have to focus on projects that Iraqis and Afghans demand; prioritize and set aside moral perfectionism; work with people of whom we don’t approve; and choose among lesser evils.
We will have to be patient. We should aim to stop illegal opium growth and change the way that Iraqis or Afghans treat their women. But we will not achieve this in the next three years. We may never be able to build a democratic state in Iraq or southern Afghanistan. Trying to do so through a presence based on foreign troops creates insurgency and resentment and can only end in failure.
“You are saying,” the politician replies, “that we ought to sit back and do nothing.” On the contrary I believe we can do a great deal. But ought implies can. We have no moral obligation to do what we cannot do.
Rory Stewart’s latest book is “The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq.” He runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul and is a guest columnist this month.
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Smart Power
In search of the balance between hard and soft power.
Reviewed by Joseph Nye, Jr.
W hen I developed the concept of soft power a decade and a half ago, the conventional wisdom was that the United States was in decline. As the late Senator Paul Tsongas put it in 1992, "the Cold War is over, and Japan and Germany won." As I was trying to understand why the declinists were wrong and why I thought the United States would be the leading country of the twenty-first century, I totaled up American military and economic power and realized that something was still missing: the enormous capacity of this country to get what it wants by attraction rather than through coercion. This attractive, or "soft," power stemmed from American culture, values, and policies that were broadly inclusive and seen as legitimate in the eyes of others.
Today that soft power has diminished, as public opinion polls around the world show. There are many reasons for this decline, but the most important trace back to the fact that in its first term, the Bush Administration focused heavily on hard military and economic power in ways that subverted our soft power. Neoconservatives and assertive nationalists in the Administration believed that we were the only superpower and that others had little choice but to follow us into Iraq and out of multilateral institutions, such as the Geneva Conventions.
When President Bush spoke to the United Nations about terrorism in the first year of his second term, he said that "this war will not be won by force of arms alone …We must also defeat them in the battle of ideas." He was right, belatedly. And the Administration’s actions still belie his words. In the information age, success is not merely the result of whose army wins, but also whose story wins. Hard military power is not enough. We also need the soft power of attraction.
The current struggle against extremist jihadist violence is not a clash of civilizations, but a civil war within Islam. We cannot win unless the Muslim moderates win. While we need hard power to battle the extremists, we need the soft power of attraction to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Muslims. Polls throughout the Muslim world show that we are not winning this battle, as the graphic images and detailed stories of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have done enormous damage to the credibility and soft power that we need to win this struggle. In Jordan and Pakistan, two front-line states, Pew polls show that Osama bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, three-quarters of the population had positive feelings about the United States in 2000; today, this figure has been reduced by half.
Despite these failures, there has been too little political debate about the squandering of American soft power. Of course, soft power was intended to be an analytic term, not a political position. Perhaps that is why, not surprisingly, it has taken hold in academic analysis (and in other places like Europe, China, and India), but not on the American political hustings. Especially in the current political climate, it makes a lousy slogan–post-September 11 emotions left little room for anything described as "soft." We may need soft power as a nation, but it is a difficult political sell.
Indeed, Bush’s embrace of unilateral hard military and economic power after September 11, and the Democrats’ hesitant criticism of the president from an often soft power-based point of view, has meant that the soft-power/hard-power dichotomy has lined up along partisan lines: Republicans are for unilateral hard power, Democrats are for multilateral soft power but hesitant and ineffective in pressing the point. Given the American public’s fears, it’s no surprise that the former has proved more popular than the latter, as seen in the last presidential election. Politically, soft is out; hard is in.
That is the central thesis of Hard Power, a well-reasoned book by two young stars in the Washington think-tank firmament: Kurt Campbell, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. For them, the soft/hard split in American foreign policy thinking isn’t just bad for the Democrats but for the country: "What is needed, whichever party prevails in the coming elections, is a more sophisticated approach to this broad array of rising transnational issues," they write. "Yet Democrats and indeed moderates will not have the chance to apply such a nuanced approach unless they can master the first order matters of national security–that is, how and when to put force on targets." [Full disclosure: Campbell worked for me in the Pentagon during the Clinton Administration.]
Much of the book is a prescription for how Democrats can recapture the foreign policy lead by more effective advocacy of hard power. They must handle the war in Iraq (no precipitous withdrawal); manage the military (rearrange, but don’t cut the defense budget); improve homeland security; win the "long war" against terrorism; develop a better strategy for energy and environmental security; pursue nonproliferation better; and cope with China’s ascent. On all these issues, they want the Democrats to become more comfortable with hard power.
One can quibble or disagree with some of their policy proposals. For instance, if their preferred strategy on Iraq proves untenable, what is their fallback position? They are probably too kind to the Department of Homeland Security and yet not kind enough about the Administration’s "responsible stakeholder approach" to China. And on energy and the environment, given that we are not going to become independent of world oil markets any time soon, they do not address adequately how we should adjust our military and political posture in the Persian Gulf. But, overall, this book provides a thoughtful discussion of the hard-power dimensions of critical security issues. Any candidate would be wise to read it.
In their analysis, Campbell and O’Hanlon identify three possible approaches to foreign policy and national security challenges among Democrats. The "Hard Power Democrats" are a smallish band who believe the Bush Administration’s central shortcoming is not in the conception of national security strategy per se, but rather in its implementation. The "Globalists" believe that most of the true challenges to national security cannot be dealt with effectively through military means and wish to broaden the definition of national security to include more transnational issues. The "Modest Power Democrats" believe that, given both pressing domestic issues and the corrosive effect of recent initiatives like the war in Iraq, it is time for the United States to step back from global politics. This group is not only unhappy with Bush’s strategy but also with the internationalism of the Washington Democratic establishment, whom they see as "Republican-lite." They believe we should retreat to being a shining light on the hill and a beacon to the world. Taken separately, each of these camps takes one side or the other in the soft-power/hard-power dichotomy.
Campbell and O’Hanlon’s solution consists of a strategy that combines the "Hard Power" and "Globalist" approaches to the world while resisting strenuously any suggestion of a retreat from global affairs. Fundamentally, what they are calling for is what I have termed "smart power," which stems from the belief that soft power is not necessarily better than hard power and that the two should be complementary parts of an effective strategy. In the battle against jihadist terrorism, for example, we must kill our enemies and also reduce their numbers through deterrence, suasion, and attraction. Or in countries where immediate alternatives to current regimes are nonexistent or unacceptable and stark economic and military punishment is not practical, "patience and soft power must be married with principle and hard power if the United States is to be effective."
Yet what Campbell and O’Hanlon do not say enough about is how to strike this balance between soft and hard, largely because they say so little about the dynamics and instruments of soft power. For example, many official instruments of soft power–public diplomacy, broadcasting, exchange programs, development assistance, disaster relief, military-to-military contacts–are scattered throughout the government, and there is no overarching strategy or budget that even tries to integrate them with hard power into an overarching national security strategy. We spend about 500 times as much on the military than we do on foreign broadcasts and exchanges. Is this the right proportion? How would we know? How would we make trade-offs?
And how should the government relate to the nonofficial generators of soft power–everything from Hollywood to Harvard to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation–that emanate from our civil society? Campbell and O’Hanlon do not tell us, and that sort of guidance is sorely needed.
Consider Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s recent comments in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. "Some of the most critical battles" in the Administration’s war on terrorism, he wrote, "may not be in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Iraq but in newsrooms in New York, London, Cairo and elsewhere." The good news is that Rumsfeld is beginning to realize that the struggle against terrorism cannot be won by hard military power alone. The bad news is that he still does not understand soft power. Even when the Bush Administration pays lip service to soft power, they do not understand how to implement it. They think that hearts and minds are won the same way as new customers, through slick ads and p.r. Yet Rumsfeld forgets the first rule of advertising: If you have a poor product, not even the best advertising will sell it.
Rumsfeld’s mistrust of the soft power approach contains a grain of truth, however accidental. Of course, soft power is not the solution to all problems. For example, even though North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il likes to watch Hollywood movies, that is unlikely to affect his decision to give up his nuclear weapons program. Such a choice would be determined by hard power, particularly if China would agree to more economic sanctions. Nor will soft power be sufficient to stop the Iranian nuclear program, though the legitimacy of the Administration’s new multilateral approach may help to recruit other countries to a coalition that isolates Iran. And soft power got nowhere in attracting the Taliban government away from its support for Al Qaeda in the 1990s. It took hard military power to remove them. That said, other goals, such as the promotion of democracy and human rights, are better achieved by soft power. Coercive democratization has its limits, as the Bush Administration found out in Iraq.
The lesson here is that it is a mistake to count too much on hard or soft power alone. Only smart power will move us forward. During the Cold War, the West used hard power to deter Soviet aggression, while it used soft power to erode faith in communism behind the Iron Curtain. That was smart power. To be smart today, Europe should invest more in its hard-power resources, and the United States should pay more attention to its soft power. For Europe, that means more military capability, such as that demonstrated by Great Britain and the Netherlands in Afghanistan. For the United States, it means more multilateralism, more institution-building, policies more consistent with our values, and more of the humility that Bush promised as a candidate in 2000 but soon forgot. After all, bombs and bayonets do not protect us from avian flu, slow global flooding, or create democracy.
Yet how those bombs and bayonets are used can be important to American soft power. A well-run military can be a source of attraction for other nations. For example, military cooperation and training programs can establish transnational networks that enhance our country’s soft power. Similarly, the impressive job of the American military in providing humanitarian relief after the Indian Ocean tsunami and the South Asian earthquake in 2005 helped burnish the luster of the United States. On the other hand, Pentagon psychological operations that planted paid stories in the Iraqi press (at the same time that the State Department was trying to train Iraqi journalists about a free press) undercut American credibility and soft power.
Moreover, the misuse of military resources can undercut soft power and, by extension, a nation’s overall power and influence. For example, in Europe after World War II, the Soviet Union had a great deal of soft power that stemmed from its resistance to Adolf Hitler. They squandered it by the illegitimate ways in which they used their hard power against Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Brutality and indifference to just-war principles can also destroy legitimacy. The efficiency of the initial American military invasion of Iraq in 2003 created admiration in the eyes of some foreigners, but that soft power was undercut by the subsequent inefficiency of the occupation and the scenes of mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the policies of detainment without hearings at Guantánamo.
While the Bush Administration is now beginning to recognize the importance of soft power, the challenge is how to balance it with hard power in a coherent and effective way. To do that, both sides of the "power" divide–hard Republicans and soft Democrats–need to engage in a dialogue that stresses the integration of these two dimensions into an effective strategy. If progressives refuse to criticize openly the Administration for ignoring soft power and our public discourse is limited solely to hard power, our discussion of national strategy will be like one hand clapping, with each party trying to sound tough by trumpeting hard power. Instead, we would be wise not to imitate the Bush conservatives but to develop a smart-power doctrine that recognizes the importance of both hard and soft power and seeks ways to integrate them. This book is a good step toward the former, but it does not do enough to explain the tough part, which is the latter. And without that, American smart power will remain beyond our reach.
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Forging A World Of Liberty Under Law U.S. National Security In The 21st Century Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security
A national security strategy for the 21st century must address all the dangers we face – diffuse, shifting and uncertain as they are – and seize all the opportunities open to us to make ourselves and the world more secure. It must begin with a clear set of objectives to be achieved and must be shaped according to a set of criteria that will maximize its likelihood of success. It must also be based on a set of overarching premises and principles that will allow us to chart a consistent general course in the world while still adapting individual policies to the context of individual countries, problems, and crises.
In 1948 George Kennan defined national security as “the continued ability of the country to pursue the development of its internal life without serious interference, or threat of interference, from foreign powers.” We are accustomed to thinking about national security threats as politically motivated behavior by a foreign actor, but increasingly we need to think of them as emanating from multiple sources, not just other states. The basic objective of a national security strategy seems obvious: to protect the American people and the American way of life. This report breaks down that overarching goal into three more specific goals: a secure homeland, a healthy global economy, and a benign international environment.
A Secure Homeland
The starting point of any national security strategy must be to protect the United States from foreign conquest, attacks on our people and infrastructure, and fatal epidemics.
Just when a conventional military attack on U.S. territory by a rival state, whether by land, sea, or even air, seems unthinkable, the likelihood of an unconventional attack has put our homeland at greater risk than at any time since our early history. As we know from painful experience, terrorists can wreak death and destruction on a growing scale; moreover, the threat of nuclear terrorism looms greater than any other nuclear threat because of the limits of traditional concepts of deterrence against adversaries who would willingly martyr themselves. We also cannot discount the possibility that a regime hostile to the West may develop the capability to launch a few devastating salvos of revenge against the United States or our allies in a future regional conflict involving American forces.
The security of the homeland extends beyond basic protection from direct violent attacks. It also means securing our economy, our utilities, our health care system, and our principal means of communication from a catastrophic cyber-attack. An attack on our food and water supply could lead not only to widespread death, but also to the forced destruction of crops, livestock, and even processing plants, as well as the closing of aquifers. Our reliance on space technology (e.g. satellites) as the linchpin of our civilian and military infrastructure means that an attack in space could severely disrupt our daily lives. Finally, the combination of the rapid global spread of new human diseases, antibiotic-resistant strains of old diseases, and the possibility of bioterrorist attack designed to spread disease means that our population must grapple with the threat posed by an old enemy, one we thought vanquished by the medical advances of the 20th century.
A Healthy Global Economy
Beyond the natural ups and downs of the business cycle, American national security depends on a healthy national economy. More than ever before, however, the strength of our national economy is integrally connected to the health of the global economy. We compete with other countries on a daily basis and rightly seek advantages and a competitive edge; ultimately, though, the prosperity of other nations, open markets, and free trade are critically important to sustaining the American way of life.
Over the longer term, global economic development and international economic integration contribute to stability and peace within countries and regions. They do not make positive outcomes inevitable, but they certainly make these outcomes more likely. By contrast, economic hardship can be immensely destabilizing. It is no accident that after World War II the Truman administration made the development of an open Western economy its top strategic priority – to avoid the fate of the 1930s and to provide a bulwark against communism.
In the 21st century, reaping the economic and political benefits of a healthy national and international economy means being prepared to deal with the risks inherent in globalization, including financial crises, supply shocks, and recessions in important markets. One of the most important ways that the United States is dependent on the global economy is that America has a low savings rate and therefore has to import savings from abroad, leading to a large and growing current account deficit. An additional problem is that managing the global economy, the foundations of which date back to the 1940s, will become increasingly difficult. Although the global economy has long been multi-polar, during the Cold War the other poles in the global economy were close allies of the United States. Today, however, China is a potential adversary and India, which has traditionally been neutral, is hardly as close a friend as Japan or the European Union (E.U.). Moreover, the contemporary economic concerns that stem from
the rise of new economic powers – such as outsourcing, state financing of corporate takeovers, or increased energy consumption – are not even within the mandates of existing institutions.
The economic development of China and India, which together account for over one-third of the world’s population, as well as other potentially large economies like Brazil, Russia, Mexico, and ultimately South Africa and Nigeria, is a positive-sum game, offering enormous opportunities to the world’s consumers and producers alike. But managing these countries’ growth, integrating them fully into evolving regional and global economic institutions, and addressing their concerns will be a challenge
that we must meet. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in his novel The Leopard, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
A Benign International Environment
In 1941 Americans learned that the security of their homeland and the viability of the American way of life as a free society depended upon developments in the rest of the world, thus settling an argument that had raged for two generations and had its roots in the nation’s founding. Simply put, we learned that aggressors in far away lands, if left unchecked, would some day threaten the United States. The implications of this lesson were profound. Rather than recoiling in isolation from great power politics, we decided as a nation that it was imperative to play an active and leading role in the world. Conventional wisdom describes this shift as a necessary response to the very real expansionist threat posed by the Soviet Union. And indeed, the transformation of the Soviet Union from ally to adversary helped overcome what would otherwise almost certainly have been greater domestic resistance to the depth and scale of America’s global involvement in the early years of the Cold War. But American postwar engagement with the world also reflected deeper lessons of the 1930s, lessons that transcended any particular geopolitical configuration.
The crystallization of this shift in American thinking came in NSC-68, the seminal 1950 memo that reorganized and reoriented our national security policy for the Cold War. It laid out the doctrine of containment, but also emphasized our need “to build a healthy international community,” which “we would probably do even if there were no international threat.” We needed then, and we need now, a “world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.” In the 1940s the United States advanced this goal by building international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, with initiatives like the Marshall Plan, and by encouraging European integration. We also routinely sacrificed our short-term economic and commercial interests to our longer-term security interests, seeing a value in providing global public goods that helped to support and stabilize both regional and global institutions. The results served the interests of many other countries, making it easier for us to pursue our interests as well.
The international system that existed in the late 1940s has changed dramatically; what is needed to make it benign has also changed. However, the objective of creating and maintaining a benign international environment remains crucial to our long-term security, today more than ever due to increasing global interdependence. In practice, it means safeguarding our alliances and promoting security cooperation among liberal democracies, ensuring the safety of Americans abroad as well as at home, avoiding the emergence of hostile great powers or balancing coalitions against the United States, and encouraging liberal democracy and responsible government worldwide.
Criteria For A Successful Grand Strategy
1. Multidimensional: Post-9/11, America has understandably been focused overwhelmingly on terrorism. But a successful long-term national security strategy must be a post-post-9/11 strategy. It must take into account the totality of America’s interests and be able to meet multiple threats and challenges simultaneously. It must be coherent and based on a set of overarching principles, but must also function like a Swiss army knife, able to deploy different tools for different situations on a moment’s notice. We must be serious about terrorism but serious too about East Asia, pandemic disease, and globalization. It is neither safe nor wise to identify only one enemy and to prepare single-mindedly to confront it. We must instead identify an entire range of threats, hone our capacity to assess their relative risk, and then develop a diversified portfolio of strategies to address them as they arise.
2. Integrated: U.S. strategy must integrate our hard power with what Joseph Nye has called our soft power, allowing us to use all of our assets in pursuit of our objectives. This effort requires devoting as much attention to bolstering the civilian components of our national security infrastructure as to strengthening the military. Our soft power is our power to get what we want by attracting others to the same goals, rather than bending them to our will. It requires careful attention to how others may perceive us differently than we perceive ourselves, no matter how good our intentions. It also requires regular communication and engagement among U.S. officials and their foreign counterparts in formal and informal networks, listening as well as talking. Finally, it means drawing not only on government, but also on the assets and initiative of both the private and non-profit sectors.
3. Interest-Based, Not Threat-Based: To create maximum points of engagement and leverage, a successful strategy must begin by identifying and pursuing common interests with other states rather than insisting that they accept our prioritization of common threats. Even where other nations agree, for instance, on the need to fight terrorism, they may rank the rise of a neighboring power, environmental dangers, disease, disruption of their energy supply, or other threats as higher priorities. Finding ways to develop frameworks of cooperation based on common interests with individual nations or groups of nations minimizes frictions, maximizes common assets, and increases the likelihood of cooperative deployment of those assets to achieve common objectives.
4. Grounded in Hope, Not Fear: Focusing on threats, and above all insisting on the preeminence and global scope of one specific threat, feeds a pervasive sense of fear. U.S. strategy must advance the larger and more positive purposes behind our power. America has never defined those purposes in purely defensive or protective terms. We have also sought to stand for a particular set of values in the world and to promote those values in ways consistent with our security and our morals. That is why Americans so readily see U.S. power as a force for good. The most enduring source of American national security is to do everything possible to ensure that citizens of other countries see U.S. power the same way, not only so that they do not perceive us as a threat and balance against us, but also so that they are willing to join their power with ours in the service of larger common goals.
5. Pursued Inside Out: Increasingly, what happens inside states matters to the United States as much as what happens between them. Our vulnerability to terrorist attacks, for instance, depends upon the capability and intentions of police forces in countries like Pakistan and Indonesia, while our vulnerability to global pandemics depends upon the strength of the public health systems in China and Thailand. However, the United States is often ill-equipped to influence the domestic development of an adversary or rival, both because other states are suspicious of American motives and because of the limits of relying primarily upon military power. Squaring this circle is a necessary and critical step. U.S. strategy must include the creation of institutions and mechanisms whereby the international community as a whole can help strengthen government capacity and encourage sound practices within states without using force or illegitimate modes of coercion.
6. Adapted to the Information Age: A national security strategy for the 21st century must operate in a world where information moves instantly, actors respond to it instantly, and where all the major actors are connected in real time, allowing individual decisions to become mass movements in weeks and months rather than years. Where specialized small units come together for only a limited time for a defined purpose – whether to make a deal, restructure a company, or plan and execute a terrorist attack. In this world, we need to be fast, flexible, and nimble, capable of grouping and regrouping as necessary and capable of coordinating many different actors engaged in a common effort. We also need to be able to “know what we know:” to figure out quickly and efficiently what information we have and to transmit it to everyone who needs to know it and to figure out what information we do not have and how to get it.
Spreading Governmental Reform Abroad
In a world of popular, accountable, and rights-regarding (PAR) governments, the United States would have many more, and more effective, partners in our efforts to fight terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pandemic disease, economic crises, and a host of other threats. The best way to help bring governments up to PAR is to connect them and their citizens in as many ways as possible to governments and societies that are already at PAR and to provide them with incentives and support to follow suit. We need to create these myriad points of on the common interests shared by the United States and any particular country or group of countries and then devising the policies and mechanisms necessary to pursue those interests.
Working System of International Institutions
We need a system of effective global institutions to harness cooperation on problems we simply cannot tackle unilaterally or even bilaterally. These institutions cannot all be formal organizations. On the contrary, harnessing cooperation in the 21st century will require many new kinds of institutions, many of them network-based, to provide speed, flexibility, and context-based decision making tailored to specific problems. This combination of institutions, and the habits and practices of cooperation that they would generate – even amid ample day-to-day tensions and diplomatic conflict – would represent the infrastructure of an overall international order that provides the stability and governance capacity necessary to address global problems. (UN, NATO, Intl finance and Econ Orgs etc)
Role of Force
At their core, both liberty and law must be backed up by force. Domestically, this is why the state maintains a police force and a military. At the international level, of course, no such enforcement mechanism exists. A national security strategy dedicated to forging a world of liberty under law must reckon with the necessity and perils of the use of force both within nations – to safeguard liberty and uphold the rule of law – and among them – to ensure that some nations cannot destroy the liberty of all.
Summary
A Grand Strategy cannot consist simply of responses to many different threats. As Henry Kissinger observed in 2002, “the war on terror is not the ultimate test of U.S. foreign policy, which is, above all, to protect the extraordinary opportunity that has come about to recast the international system.” The Princeton Project seeks to help America grasp this opportunity to lay the foundations for advancing America’s interests on every front, rather than just vanquishing one enemy. While America’s tactics and short-term policies must take the world as it is, a long-term strategy should strive to shape the world as we want it to be. That positive vision should serve as a plumb-line through crises and changing administrations.
This report’s vision of a world of liberty under law grows out of both knowledge and conviction. As demonstrated by both reason and social science, a world of liberal democracies would be a safer and better world for Americans and all people to live in. It is thus in America’s deepest interest to pursue such a world. But America must also pursue a values-based foreign policy to be true to itself – the cold calculations of realism, in its eternal quest for a balance of power, can never long satisfy the American people.
“You are saying,” the politician replies, “that we ought to sit back and do nothing.” On the contrary I believe we can do a great deal. But ought implies can. We have no moral obligation to do what we cannot do. Rory Stewart NYT Op-Ed 3/26/07
Grand Strategy Backgrounder
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040402252_pf.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR2007032301591.html
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/pdf/iraqReport_120606_part1and2.pdf
http://www.usip.org/isg/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-3.html
http://www.stratfor.com/
http://www.leavenworth.army.mil/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/09/AR2007010901333.html
http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/03/rory-stewart-what-we-can-do.html
http://64.49.203.13/article.phpID=6491&PHPSESSID=880a4c3d2db490c6ea356b9af494d80b
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/ppns/report/FinalReport.pdf
A Path to Common GroundThe Iraq Study Group Plan Could Break the Logjam By James A. Baker III, Thursday, April 5, 2007; A17, Washington Post I wholeheartedly agree with a point Lee Hamilton made in his March 25 op-ed, " A%
A Path to Common GroundThe Iraq Study Group Plan Could Break the Logjam
By James A. Baker III, Thursday, April 5, 2007; A17, Washington Post
I wholeheartedly agree with a point Lee Hamilton made in his March 25 op-ed, " A Partnership on Iraq," regarding the need for a unity of effort in Iraq. He is correct that the United States will probably falter unless President Bush and Congress reach a bipartisan consensus in the coming months.
Unfortunately, more than 100 days after the Iraq Study Group released its report, we are further than ever from a consensus. Recent narrow votes in the House and Senate, largely along partisan lines, illustrate our country's continuing division on this critical issue.
The best, and perhaps only, way to build national agreement on the path forward is for the president and Congress to embrace the only set of recommendations that has generated bipartisan support: the Iraq Study Group report. The Iraq Study Group was composed of five Democrats and five Republicans. Each of us has strong wills and views. But we managed to find consensus for 79 recommendations that we suggested be carried out in concert. Our leaders could still use this report to unite the country behind a common approach to our most difficult foreign policy problem.
The report does not set timetables or deadlines for the removal of troops, as contemplated by the supplemental spending bills the House and Senate passed. In fact, the report specifically opposes that approach. As many military and political leaders told us, an arbitrary deadline would allow the enemy to wait us out and would strengthen the positions of extremists over moderates. A premature American departure from Iraq, we unanimously concluded, would almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence and further deterioration of conditions in Iraq and possibly other countries.
The goal of the United States should be to help Iraqis achieve national political reconciliation and greater effectiveness of their security forces, the report said, so that Iraqis can assume more of the security mission. This in turn could allow for an orderly departure of U.S. troops. An important way to encourage Iraqis to work together is to hold them to the type of benchmarks that Congress, President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have all considered. If the Iraqi government does not meet those benchmarks, the United States "should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government," the report said. But we did not suggest that this be codified into legislation. The report doesn't recommend a firm deadline for troop removal unless America's military leadership believes that the situation warrants it.
Nothing has happened since the report was released that would justify changing that view. Setting a deadline for withdrawal regardless of conditions in Iraq makes even less sense today because there is evidence that the temporary surge is reducing the level of violence in Baghdad. As Baghdad goes, so goes Iraq. The Iraq Study Group said it could support a short-term surge to stabilize Baghdad or to speed up training and equipping of Iraqi soldiers if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines such steps would be effective. Gen. David Petraeus has so determined.
The president announced a " new way forward" on Jan. 10 that supports much of the approach called for by the Iraq Study Group. He has since said that he is moving to embrace our recommendations. The president's plan increases the number of American advisers embedded in Iraqi army units, with the goal that the Iraqi government will assume control of security in all provinces by November. It outlines benchmarks and indicates that the Iraqi government must act to attain them. He has approved ministerial-level meetings of all of Iraq's neighbors, including Syria and Iran; the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council; and other countries.
The International Compact for Iraq and the Iraqi-led neighbors conference are a good start. But more can be done. The president should beef up regional diplomacy, particularly that involving Syria and Iran, by establishing an Iraq International Support Group to encourage the participation of countries that have a critical stake in preventing Iraq from falling into chaos. He should move to further engage all parties to seek a comprehensive peace between Arabs and Israelis. And he should enhance the training of Iraqi forces and push harder for national reconciliation by Iraqis as called for by the study group so as to permit the orderly reduction of U.S. forces.
But most important, the president should reiterate his intention to embrace the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and ask congressional leaders to join him. They should do so. If they do not, the burden of rejecting a unified bipartisan approach would fall on them.
Moving forward this way, which would require compromise by both sides, would be far better than continuing a political dogfight that can only undermine U.S. foreign policy goals in Iraq and the Middle East.
The writer, a former secretary of state, was co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group.
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A Partnership on Iraq
By Lee H. HamiltonSunday, March 25, 2007; B07, Washington Post
President Bush staked out his position on Iraq in January, and the House has now staked out its own. Deep divisions between these positions signal a stalemate among our political leaders. There is no unity of effort. Yet the president and the Democratic majorities in Congress will remain in office for nearly two years. They must seek a bipartisan consensus in the months ahead; otherwise, our efforts in Iraq will falter.
The American people have soured on the war. They clearly are looking for a responsible transition for U.S. forces out of Iraq. The House supplemental spending plan outlines a transition, as do proposals pending in the Senate. Moving forward, the president and Congress must become partners, and not antagonists, toward this end.
A strategy of sustained pressure on the Iraqi government to advance national reconciliation, provide security and improve the lives of the Iraqi people offers the best chance of advancing stability. U.S. military forces have performed valiantly, but they cannot by themselves accomplish these goals -- only Iraqis can. As President Bush told the nation on Jan. 10, "only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people."
To that end, the House bill lays out the steps that the Iraqi government must take. These benchmarks are not new. They have been widely agreed upon by the White House and the Iraqi government, as have target dates for completion. At issue is the conditionality of U.S. support. Time and again, Iraqis have missed deadlines. Time and again, deadlines have been extended, and U.S. political, economic and military support has continued and even increased.
The House bill breaks this cycle. By compelling the president to report Iraq's performance to Congress, the House provides a necessary mechanism to track progress. By tying continued U.S. support -- including the presence of U.S. troops -- to benchmarks, it uses the strongest possible leverage to press Iraqi leaders to meet their commitments.
The House outlines a 2008 target date for U.S. forces to leave Iraq. It sets a direction for policy but leaves implementation to the president. The residual force it authorizes gives the president considerable flexibility to protect U.S. interests with a substantial presence of U.S. troops. The president manages the war and makes the decision about the force level needed to defend U.S. military forces and civilians in Iraq, conduct counterterrorism operations and train Iraqi security forces. This transition is flexible, not fixed. It is responsible, not precipitate.
Even with the more assertive congressional role outlined in the bill, determinations on Iraqi benchmark performance and certifications on the readiness of U.S. military units are left to the president. He has the authority to waive limitations on troop deployments. The president must retain this flexibility and authority as commander in chief.
But more needs to be done. Just as a narrow focus on a "surge" of U.S. forces will not bring stability to Iraq, neither will a narrow focus on the readiness of U.S. forces and the conditions of U.S. support. What we need is a "surge" of political, economic and diplomatic engagement as well.
The Senate leadership's resolution speaks appropriately to the importance of a comprehensive approach and a diplomatic offensive in the region. The administration's efforts to engage all of Iraq's neighbors -- including Iran and Syria -- in a regional forum represent a good first step. These efforts must be energized with high-level contacts. They must be sustained through careful preparation and follow-through, as well as the creation of an international support group on behalf of national reconciliation in Iraq and stability in the region.
Congress and the administration should also place greater emphasis on training Iraqi security forces, both police and military. Unless their training becomes the primary mission of U.S. forces, it will be difficult to withdraw U.S. combat troops.
The House bill is a step forward. Yet it is only one step in a process that will unfold in many ways over several months. With our young men and women in harm's way, the debate will be understandably passionate.
It is my hope that out of this debate a better policy on Iraq will emerge: That is how our Founders designed the system to work. The president must respect the views of the American people and the role of Congress, and Congress must respect the president's responsibility for carrying out foreign policy.
To bring the war to a responsible conclusion, our leaders have an obligation to come together. They must find a bipartisan consensus and rally public opinion behind it. The best way to move forward in Iraq is to unify America's effort.
The writer, a Democratic representative from Indiana from 1965 to 1999, was co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group.
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Lessons for One Last Try
By David IgnatiusWednesday, January 10, 2007; A13 , Washington Post
What makes sense in Iraq? The political debate is becoming sharply polarized again, as President Bush campaigns for a new "surge" strategy. But some useful military guideposts can be found in a new field manual of counterinsurgency warfare prepared by the general who is about to take command of U.S. forces in Baghdad.
Lt. Gen. David Petraeus supervised the development of the manual when he ran the Army's training center at Fort Leavenworth, before he had any idea he would be heading back to Baghdad as the top commander. In that sense, the document reflects a senior officer's best judgment about what will work and what won't -- independent of the details of the current "to surge or not to surge" debate. The manual was published by the Army last month and can be downloaded at http://www.leavenworth.army.mil/.
Two themes stood out for me as I read the document. The first is that success in counterinsurgency requires a political strategy as much as a military one. The second is that broad political support back home -- which buys time on the battlefield -- is the crucial strategic asset in fighting such wars.
The manual doesn't offer any specific advice for the current debate. But its precepts do raise some basic questions for Bush as he frames his new strategy: Will the new approach build bipartisan support for Iraq policy? And will it open a path toward an Iraqi political solution, as opposed to an American military effort to impose order?
"Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man's warfare -- it is the graduate level of war," reads a quotation from a Special Forces officer in Iraq that opens the first chapter. And this theme runs throughout the manual: Many of the prescriptions that apply to normal wars don't apply to counterinsurgencies. Indeed, if they are used, they will backfire. In a summary of "unsuccessful practices," here's the No. 1 mistake: "Overemphasize killing and capturing the enemy rather than securing and engaging the populace."
The field manual summarizes some of the lessons that commanders have learned in Iraq: Long-term success "depends on the people taking charge of their own affairs and consenting to the government's rule." Killing insurgents "by itself cannot defeat an insurgency." Local commanders "have the best grasp of their situations" and should have the freedom to adapt and react to local conditions. As many officers ruefully admit, the Army is learning these lessons three years late -- but perhaps that's still in time to make a difference.
My favorite part of the manual, which I suspect Petraeus had a big hand in drafting, is a section titled "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations." The headings give the flavor of these unconventional ideas: "Sometimes, the More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You May Be." (Green Zone residents, please note: "If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents.") "Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Reaction." "Some of the Best Weapons for Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot." And this military version of the Zen riddle: "The More Successful the Counterinsurgency Is, the Less Force Can Be Used and the More Risk Must Be Accepted." (As the host nation takes control, "Soldiers and Marines may also have to accept more risk to maintain involvement with the people.")
The abiding lesson of this manual comes in one of Petraeus's paradoxes, and it ought to be engraved as the cornerstone of U.S. policy going forward, regardless of whether there is a troop surge: "The Host Nation Doing Something Tolerably Is Normally Better than Us Doing It Well." In making this point, Petraeus cites the godfather of counterinsurgency warriors, Gen. Creighton Abrams, who said when he was U.S. commander in Vietnam in 1971: " We can't run this thing. . . . They've got to run it."
It's Petraeus's luck, good or bad, that he has a chance to see whether these precepts of counterinsurgency warfare can still work in Iraq, despite all the mistakes made over the past three years. His chances will be slim if President Bush and the Democratic Congress can't agree on a bipartisan plan for Iraq. Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, put it succinctly on "Meet the Press" last month: "This can't be Bush's war" -- it has to be the country's. That's the real danger of a troop surge: It sets up a showdown between the president and his critics that could shred the chances for a stable, sustainable policy that might embody some of the military lessons we have finally learned.
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White House Fact Sheet: The New Way Forward in Iraq – January 10, 2007
Highlights of the Iraq Strategy Review (PDF) Background Briefing by Senior Administration Officials In Focus: Renewal in Iraq
The President's New Iraq Strategy Is Rooted In Six Fundamental Elements:
Let the Iraqis lead;
Help Iraqis protect the population;
Isolate extremists;
Create space for political progress;
Diversify political and economic efforts; and
Situate the strategy in a regional approach.
Iraq Could Not Be Graver – The War On Terror Cannot Be Won If We Fail In Iraq. Our enemies throughout the Middle East are trying to defeat us in Iraq. If we step back now, the problems in Iraq will become more lethal, and make our troops fight an uglier battle than we are seeing today.
Key Elements Of The New Approach:
Security Iraqi:
Publicly acknowledge all parties are responsible for quelling sectarian violence.
Work with additional Coalition help to regain control of the capital and protect the Iraqi population.
Deliver necessary Iraqi forces for Baghdad and protect those forces from political interference.
Commit to intensify efforts to build balanced security forces throughout the nation that provide security even-handedly for all Iraqis.
Plan and fund eventual demobilization program for militias.
Coalition:
Agree that helping Iraqis to provide population security is necessary to enable accelerated transition and political progress.
Provide additional military and civilian resources to accomplish this mission.
Increase efforts to support tribes willing to help Iraqis fight Al Qaeda in Anbar.
Accelerate and expand the embed program while minimizing risk to participants.
Both Coalition And Iraqi:
Continue counter-terror operations against Al Qaeda and insurgent organizations.
Take more vigorous action against death squad networks.
Accelerate transition to Iraqi responsibility and increase Iraqi ownership.
Increase Iraqi security force capacity – both size and effectiveness – from 10 to 13 Army divisions, 36 to 41 Army Brigades, and 112 to 132 Army Battalions.
Establish a National Operations Center, National Counterterrorism Force, and National Strike Force.
Reform the Ministry of Interior to increase transparency and accountability and transform the National Police.
Key Elements Of The New Approach: Political Iraqi:
The Government of Iraq commits to:
Reform its cabinet to provide even-handed service delivery.
Act on promised reconciliation initiatives (oil law, de-Baathification law, Provincial elections).
Give Coalition and ISF authority to pursue ALL extremists.
All Iraqi leaders support reconciliation.
Moderate coalition emerges as strong base of support for unity government.
Coalition:
Support political moderates so they can take on the extremists.
Build and sustain strategic partnerships with moderate Shi'a, Sunnis, and Kurds.
Support the national compact and key elements of reconciliation with Iraqis in the lead.
Diversify U.S. efforts to foster political accommodation outside Baghdad (more flexibility for local commanders and civilian leaders).
Expand and increase the flexibility of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) footprint.
Focus U.S. political, security, and economic resources at local level to open space for moderates, with initial priority to Baghdad and Anbar.
Both Coalition And Iraqi:
Partnership between Prime Minister Maliki, Iraqi moderates, and the United States where all parties are clear on expectations and responsibilities.
Strengthen the rule of law and combat corruption.
Build on security gains to foster local and national political accommodations.
Make Iraqi institutions even-handed, serving all of Iraq's communities on an impartial basis.
Key Elements Of The New Approach: Economic
Iraqi:
Deliver economic resources and provide essential services to all areas and communities.
Enact hydrocarbons law to promote investment, national unity, and reconciliation.
Capitalize and execute jobs-producing programs.
Match U.S. efforts to create jobs with longer term sustainable Iraqi programs.
Focus more economic effort on relatively secure areas as a magnet for employment and growth.
Coalition:
Refocus efforts to help Iraqis build capacity in areas vital to success of the government (e.g. budget execution, key ministries).
Decentralize efforts to build Iraqi capacities outside the Green Zone.
Double the number of PRTs and civilians serving outside the Green Zone.
Establish PRT-capability within maneuver Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs).
Greater integration of economic strategy with military effort.
Joint civil-military plans devised by PRT and BCT.
Remove legal and bureaucratic barriers to maximize cooperation and flexibility.
Key Elements Of The New Approach: Regional
Iraqi:
Vigorously engage Arab states.
Take the lead in establishing a regional forum to give support and help from the neighborhood.
Counter negative foreign activity in Iraq.
Increase efforts to counter PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party).
Coalition:
Intensify efforts to counter Iranian and Syrian influence inside Iraq.
Increase military presence in the region.
Strengthen defense ties with partner states in the region.
Encourage Arab state support to Government of Iraq.
Continue efforts to help manage relations between Iraq and Turkey.
Continue to seek the region's full support in the War on Terror.
Both Coalition And Iraqi:
Focus on the International Compact.
Retain active U.N. engagement in Iraq – particularly for election support and constitutional review.
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Geopolitics and the U.S. Spoiling Attack
By George Friedman – Stratfor (analysis@stratfor.com)
The United States has now spent four years fighting in Iraq. Those who planned the conflict never expected this outcome. Indeed, it could be argued that this outcome represents not only miscalculation but also a strategic defeat for the United States. The best that can be said about the war at the moment is that it is a strategic stalemate, which is an undesired outcome for the Americans. The worst that can be said is that the United States has failed to meet its strategic objectives and that failure represents defeat.
In considering the situation, our attention is drawn to a strange paradox that has been manifest in American foreign policy since World War II. On the one hand, the United States has consistently encountered strategic stalemate or defeat in particular politico-military operations. At those times, the outcomes have appeared to be disappointing if not catastrophic. Yet, over the same period of time, U.S. global power, on the whole, has surged. In spite of stalemate and defeat during the Cold War, the United States was more in 2000 than it had been in 1950.Consider these examples from history:
Korea: Having defeated the North Korean army, U.S. forces were attacked by China. The result was a bloody stalemate, followed by a partition that essentially restored the status quo ante -- thus imposing an extended stalemate.
Cuba: After a pro-Soviet government was created well within the security cordon of the United States, Washington used overt and covert means to destroy the Castro regime. All attempts failed, and the Castro government remains in place nearly half a century later.
Vietnam: the United States fought an extended war in Vietnam, designed to contain the expansion of Communism in Indochina. The United States failed to achieve its objectives -- despite massive infusions of force -- and North Vietnam established hegemony over the region.
Iran: The U.S. containment policy required it to have a cordon of allies around the Soviet Union. Iran was a key link, blocking Soviet access to the Persian Gulf. The U.S. expulsion from Iran following the Islamic Revolution represented a major strategic reversal.
Iraq: In this context, Iraq appears to represent another strategic reversal -- with U.S. ambitions at least blocked, and possibly defeated, after a major investment of effort and prestige.
Look at it this way. On a pretty arbitrary scale -- between Korea (1950-53), Cuba (1960-63), Vietnam (1963-75), Iran (1979-1981) and Iraq (2003-present) -- the United States has spent about 27 of the last 55 years engaged in politico-military maneuvers that, at the very least, did not bring obvious success, and frequently brought disaster. Yet, in spite of these disasters, the long-term tendency of American power relative to the rest of the world has been favorable to the United States. This general paradox must be explained. And in the course of explanation, some understandings of the Iraq campaign, seen in a broader context, might emerge.
Schools of Thought
There are three general explanations for this paradox: 1. U.S. power does not rest on these politico-military involvements but derives from other factors, such as economic power.
1) Therefore, the fact that the United States has consistently failed in major conflicts is an argument that these conflicts should not have been fought -- that they were not relevant to the emergence of American power. The U.S. preoccupation with politico-military conflict has been an exercise in the irrelevant that has slowed, but has not derailed, expansion of American power. Applying this logic, it would be argued that the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway under its own weight -- as will the Islamic world -- and that U.S. interventions are pointless.
2) The United States has been extraordinarily fortunate that, despite its inability to use politico-military power effectively and its being drawn consistently into stalemate or defeat, exogenous forces have saved the United States from its own weakness. In the long run, this good fortune should not be viewed as strategy, but as disaster waiting to happen.
3) The wars mentioned previously were never as significant as they appeared to be -- public sentiment and government rhetoric notwithstanding. These conflicts drew on only a small fraction of potential U.S. power, and they always were seen as peripheral to fundamental national interests. The more important dimension of U.S. foreign policy was statecraft that shifted the burden of potential warfare from the United States to its allies.
So, regardless of these examples, the core strategic issue for the United States was its alliances and ententes with states like Germany and China. Applying this logic, it follows that the wars themselves were -- practically speaking -- insignificant episodes, that stalemate and defeat were trivial and that, except for the domestic political obsession, none were of fundamental importance to the United States.
Put somewhat differently, there is the liberal view that the Soviet Union was not defeated by the United States in the Cold War, but that it collapsed itself, and the military conflicts of the Cold War were unnecessary. There is the conservative view that the United States won the Cold War in spite of a fundamental flaw in the American character -- an unwillingness to bear the burden of war -- and that this flaw ultimately will prove disastrous for the United States. Finally, there is the non-ideological, non-political view that the United States won the Cold War in spite of defeats and stalemates because these wars were never as important as either the liberals or conservatives made them out to be, however necessary they might have been seen to be at the time.If we apply these analyses to Iraq, three schools of thought emerge.
The first says that the Iraq war is unnecessary and even harmful in the context of the U.S.-jihadist confrontation -- and that, regardless of outcome, it should not be fought.
The second says that the war is essential -- and that, while defeat or stalemate in this conflict perhaps would not be catastrophic to the United States, there is a possibility that it would be catastrophic. And at any rate, this argument continues, the United States' ongoing inability to impose its will in conflicts of this class ultimately will destroy it.
Finally, there is the view that Iraq is simply a small piece of a bigger war and that the outcome of this particular conflict will not be decisive, although the war might be necessary. The heated rhetoric surrounding the Iraq conflict stems from the traditional American inability to hold things in perspective.
There is a reasonable case to be made for any of these three views. Any Stratfor reader knows that our sympathies gravitate toward the third view. However, that view makes no sense unless it is expanded. It must also take into consideration the view that the Soviet Union's fall was hardwired into history regardless of U.S. politico-military action, along with the notion that a consistent willingness to accept stalemate and defeat represents a significant threat to the United States in the long term.
Resource Commitments and Implications
Let's begin with something that is obviously true. When we consider Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Iran and even Iraq, it is clear that the United States devoted only a tiny fraction of the military power it could have brought to bear if it wished. By this, we mean that in none of these cases was there a general American mobilization, at no point was U.S. industry converted to a wartime footing, at no point were nuclear weapons used to force enemy defeat. The proportion of force brought to bear, relative to capabilities demonstrated in conflicts such as World War II, was minimal.
If there were fundamental issues at stake involving national security, the United States did not act as though that was the case. What is most remarkable about these conflicts was the extreme restraint shown -- both in committing forces and in employing available forces. The conservative critique of U.S. foreign policy revolves around the tendency of the American leadership and public to recoil at the idea of extended conflict. But this recoil is not a response to extended war. Rather, by severely limiting the force available from the outset, the United States has, unintentionally, designed its wars to be extended. From this derives the conservative view that the United States engages in warfare without intending victory.
In each of these cases, the behavior of the United States implied that there were important national security issues at stake, but measured in terms of the resources provided, these national security issues were not of the first order. The United States certainly has shown an ability to mount full-bore politico-military operations in the past: In World War II, it provided sufficient resources to invade Europe and the Japanese empire simultaneously. But in all of the cases we have cited, the United States provided limited resources -- and in some cases, only covert or political resources. Clearly, it was prepared on some level to accept stalemate and defeat. Even in cases where the enemy was engaged fully, the United States limited its commitment of resources.
In Vietnam, for example, the defeat of North Vietnam and regime change were explicitly ruled out. The United States had as its explicit goal a stalemate, in which both South and North Vietnam survived as independent states. In Korea, the United States shifted to a stalemate strategy after the Chinese intervention. So too in Cuba after the Cuban missile crisis; and in Iran, the United States accepted defeat in an apparently critical arena without attempting a major intervention. In each instance, the mark of U.S. intervention was limited exposure -- even at the cost of stalemate or defeat. In other words, the United States consistently has entered into conflicts in which its level of commitment was extremely limited, in which either victory was not the strategic goal or the mission eventually was redefined to accept stalemate, and in which even defeat was deemed preferable to a level of effort that might avert it. Public discussion on all sides was apoplectic both during these conflicts and afterward, yet American global power was not materially affected in the long run.
The Spoiling Attack
This appears to make no sense until we introduce a military concept into the analysis: the spoiling attack. The spoiling attack is an offensive operation; however, its goal is not to defeat the enemy but to disrupt enemy offensives -- to, in effect, prevent a defeat by the enemy. The success of the spoiling attack is not measured in term of enemy capitulation, but the degree to which it has forestalled successful enemy operations. The concept of a spoiling attack is intimately bound up with the principle of economy of force. Military power, like all power, is finite. It must be husbanded. Even in a war in which no resources are spared, some operations do not justify a significant expenditure. Some attacks are always designed to succeed by failing. More precisely, the resources devoted to those operations are sufficient to disrupt enemy plans, to delay an enemy offensive, or to create an opportunity for political disruption of the enemy, rather than to defeat the enemy. For those tasked with carrying out the spoiling attack, it appears that they are being wasted in a hopeless effort. For those with a broader strategic or geopolitical perspective, it appears to be the proper application of the "economy of force" principle.
If we consider the examples cited above and apply the twin concepts of the spoiling attack and economy of force, then the conversion of American defeats into increased U.S. global power no longer appears quite as paradoxical. In Korea, spoiling Communist goals created breathing space elsewhere for the United States, and increased tension levels between China and Russia. A stalemate achieved outcomes as satisfactory to Washington as taking North Korea would have been. In Cuba, containing Fidel Castro was, relative to cost, as useful as destroying him. What he did in Cuba itself was less important to Washington than that he should not be an effective player in Latin America. In Vietnam, frustrating the North's strategic goals for a decade allowed the Sino-Soviet dispute to ripen, thus opening the door for Sino-U.S. entente even before the war ended. The U.S. interest in Iran, of course, rested with its utility as a buffer to the Soviets. Being ousted from Iran mattered only if the Iranians capitulated to the Soviets. Absent that, Iran's internal politics were of little interest to the United States.
If we apply the twin concepts to Iraq, it is possible to understand the reasons behind the size of the force deployed (which, while significant, still is limited relative to the full range of options brought to bear in World War II) and the obvious willingness of the Bush administration to court military disaster. The invasion four years ago has led to the Sunnis and Shia turning against each other in direct conflict. Therefore, it could be argued that just as the United States won the Cold War by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split and allying with Mao Zedong, so too the path to defeating the jihadists is not a main attack, but a spoiling attack that turns Sunnis and Shia against each other. This was certainly not the intent of the Bush administration in planning the 2003 invasion; it has become, nevertheless, an unintended and significant outcome.
Moreover, it is far from clear whether U.S. policymakers through history have been aware of this dimension in their operations. In considering Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Iran, it is never clear that the Truman, Kennedy, Johnson/Nixon or Carter/Reagan administrations purposely set out to implement a spoiling attack. The fog of political rhetoric and the bureaucratized nature of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus make it difficult to speak of U.S. "strategy" as such. Every deputy assistant secretary of something-or-other confuses his little piece of things with the whole, and the American culture demonizes and deifies without clarifying.
However, there is a deep structure in U.S. foreign policy that becomes visible. The incongruities of stalemate and defeat on the one side and growing U.S. power on the other must be reconciled. The liberal and conservative arguments explain things only partially. But the idea that the United States rarely fights to win can be explained. It is not because of a lack of moral fiber, as conservatives would argue; nor a random and needless belligerence, as liberals would argue. Rather, it is the application of the principle of spoiling operations -- using limited resources not in order to defeat the enemy but to disrupt and confuse enemy operations. As with the invisible hand in economics, businessmen pursue immediate ends without necessarily being aware of how they contribute to the wealth of nations. So too, politicians pursue immediate ends without necessarily being aware of how they contribute to national power. Some are clearer in their thinking than others, perhaps, or possibly all presidents are crystal-clear on what they are doing in these matters. We do not dine with the great. But there is an underlying order to U.S. foreign policy that makes the apparent chaos of policymaking understandable and rational.
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RORY STEWART: What We Can Do
Monday, March 26, 2007 - NYTimes
We must acknowledge the limits of our power and knowledge in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and concentrate on what is achievable. The question is not “What ought we to do?” but “What can we do?”This is rarely discussed. When I ask politicians whether we can defeat the Taliban, they reply that we “have to” defeat the Taliban. If I ask whether we can actually do any good by staying in Iraq, they reply that we have “a moral obligation” to the Iraqi people.By emphasizing moral necessity, politicians can justify almost any risk, uncertainty or sacrifice and make compromise seem cowardly and criticism treasonous. When I suggest recognition of Moktada al-Sadr or negotiation with the Taliban, I am described as an appeaser. But these moral judgments are fragile, and they increasingly cloak despair, paralysis and preparation for flight.We are learning, painfully, that many of the problems in Iraq or Afghanistan — from violence and state failure to treatment of women — are deeply embedded in local beliefs, political structures and traumatic histories. Iraqis and Afghans do not want their country controlled by foreigners and non-Muslims. A powerful and effective minority is trying to kill us.
The majority is at best lukewarm: they may dislike Sadrists or the Taliban, but they prefer them to us.We are also now aware how little we can comprehend. Our officials are on short tours, lack linguistic or cultural training, live in barracks behind high blast walls and encounter the local population through angry petitions or sudden ambushes. We will never acquire the subtle sense of values, beliefs and history needed to create lasting changes, still less as we once intended, to lead a political, social and economic revolution.
Paul Bremer, then the top American administrator in Iraq, told us in October 2003 that we had six months to computerize the Baghdad stock exchange, privatize state-owned enterprises and reform the university curriculum. Now he would be grateful for stability. The American and British people have sensed that their grand objectives are unachievable, and since no one is offering any practical alternative, they are lapsing into cynicism and opposition.
Meanwhile the paralyzed leaders, afraid of their impotence, flit from troop increases to flight, from engagement to isolation. We must prevent this by acknowledging our limits, while recognizing that although we are less powerful and informed than we claimed, we are more powerful and informed than we fear.
A year ago, for example, I felt it would be almost impossible to help re-establish ceramics, woodwork and calligraphy and restore part of the old city of Kabul. I worried that Afghans were uninterested, the standards too low, the prices too high, the government apathetic and international demand nonexistent. But I found great Afghan energy, courage and skill and received imaginative and generous support from the U.S. government. Unexpected markets emerged; the Afghan administration helped; men and women found new pride and incomes. There are many much better established and more successful projects than this all over Afghanistan.
My experience suggests that we can continue to protect our soil from terrorist attack, we can undertake projects that prevent more people from becoming disaffected, and we can even do some good. In short, we will be able to do more, not less, than we are now. But working with what is possible requires humility and the courage to compromise.We will have to focus on projects that Iraqis and Afghans demand; prioritize and set aside moral perfectionism; work with people of whom we don’t approve; and choose among lesser evils.
We will have to be patient. We should aim to stop illegal opium growth and change the way that Iraqis or Afghans treat their women. But we will not achieve this in the next three years. We may never be able to build a democratic state in Iraq or southern Afghanistan. Trying to do so through a presence based on foreign troops creates insurgency and resentment and can only end in failure.
“You are saying,” the politician replies, “that we ought to sit back and do nothing.” On the contrary I believe we can do a great deal. But ought implies can. We have no moral obligation to do what we cannot do.
Rory Stewart’s latest book is “The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq.” He runs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul and is a guest columnist this month.
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Smart Power
In search of the balance between hard and soft power.
Reviewed by Joseph Nye, Jr.
W hen I developed the concept of soft power a decade and a half ago, the conventional wisdom was that the United States was in decline. As the late Senator Paul Tsongas put it in 1992, "the Cold War is over, and Japan and Germany won." As I was trying to understand why the declinists were wrong and why I thought the United States would be the leading country of the twenty-first century, I totaled up American military and economic power and realized that something was still missing: the enormous capacity of this country to get what it wants by attraction rather than through coercion. This attractive, or "soft," power stemmed from American culture, values, and policies that were broadly inclusive and seen as legitimate in the eyes of others.
Today that soft power has diminished, as public opinion polls around the world show. There are many reasons for this decline, but the most important trace back to the fact that in its first term, the Bush Administration focused heavily on hard military and economic power in ways that subverted our soft power. Neoconservatives and assertive nationalists in the Administration believed that we were the only superpower and that others had little choice but to follow us into Iraq and out of multilateral institutions, such as the Geneva Conventions.
When President Bush spoke to the United Nations about terrorism in the first year of his second term, he said that "this war will not be won by force of arms alone …We must also defeat them in the battle of ideas." He was right, belatedly. And the Administration’s actions still belie his words. In the information age, success is not merely the result of whose army wins, but also whose story wins. Hard military power is not enough. We also need the soft power of attraction.
The current struggle against extremist jihadist violence is not a clash of civilizations, but a civil war within Islam. We cannot win unless the Muslim moderates win. While we need hard power to battle the extremists, we need the soft power of attraction to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Muslims. Polls throughout the Muslim world show that we are not winning this battle, as the graphic images and detailed stories of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have done enormous damage to the credibility and soft power that we need to win this struggle. In Jordan and Pakistan, two front-line states, Pew polls show that Osama bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, three-quarters of the population had positive feelings about the United States in 2000; today, this figure has been reduced by half.
Despite these failures, there has been too little political debate about the squandering of American soft power. Of course, soft power was intended to be an analytic term, not a political position. Perhaps that is why, not surprisingly, it has taken hold in academic analysis (and in other places like Europe, China, and India), but not on the American political hustings. Especially in the current political climate, it makes a lousy slogan–post-September 11 emotions left little room for anything described as "soft." We may need soft power as a nation, but it is a difficult political sell.
Indeed, Bush’s embrace of unilateral hard military and economic power after September 11, and the Democrats’ hesitant criticism of the president from an often soft power-based point of view, has meant that the soft-power/hard-power dichotomy has lined up along partisan lines: Republicans are for unilateral hard power, Democrats are for multilateral soft power but hesitant and ineffective in pressing the point. Given the American public’s fears, it’s no surprise that the former has proved more popular than the latter, as seen in the last presidential election. Politically, soft is out; hard is in.
That is the central thesis of Hard Power, a well-reasoned book by two young stars in the Washington think-tank firmament: Kurt Campbell, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. For them, the soft/hard split in American foreign policy thinking isn’t just bad for the Democrats but for the country: "What is needed, whichever party prevails in the coming elections, is a more sophisticated approach to this broad array of rising transnational issues," they write. "Yet Democrats and indeed moderates will not have the chance to apply such a nuanced approach unless they can master the first order matters of national security–that is, how and when to put force on targets." [Full disclosure: Campbell worked for me in the Pentagon during the Clinton Administration.]
Much of the book is a prescription for how Democrats can recapture the foreign policy lead by more effective advocacy of hard power. They must handle the war in Iraq (no precipitous withdrawal); manage the military (rearrange, but don’t cut the defense budget); improve homeland security; win the "long war" against terrorism; develop a better strategy for energy and environmental security; pursue nonproliferation better; and cope with China’s ascent. On all these issues, they want the Democrats to become more comfortable with hard power.
One can quibble or disagree with some of their policy proposals. For instance, if their preferred strategy on Iraq proves untenable, what is their fallback position? They are probably too kind to the Department of Homeland Security and yet not kind enough about the Administration’s "responsible stakeholder approach" to China. And on energy and the environment, given that we are not going to become independent of world oil markets any time soon, they do not address adequately how we should adjust our military and political posture in the Persian Gulf. But, overall, this book provides a thoughtful discussion of the hard-power dimensions of critical security issues. Any candidate would be wise to read it.
In their analysis, Campbell and O’Hanlon identify three possible approaches to foreign policy and national security challenges among Democrats. The "Hard Power Democrats" are a smallish band who believe the Bush Administration’s central shortcoming is not in the conception of national security strategy per se, but rather in its implementation. The "Globalists" believe that most of the true challenges to national security cannot be dealt with effectively through military means and wish to broaden the definition of national security to include more transnational issues. The "Modest Power Democrats" believe that, given both pressing domestic issues and the corrosive effect of recent initiatives like the war in Iraq, it is time for the United States to step back from global politics. This group is not only unhappy with Bush’s strategy but also with the internationalism of the Washington Democratic establishment, whom they see as "Republican-lite." They believe we should retreat to being a shining light on the hill and a beacon to the world. Taken separately, each of these camps takes one side or the other in the soft-power/hard-power dichotomy.
Campbell and O’Hanlon’s solution consists of a strategy that combines the "Hard Power" and "Globalist" approaches to the world while resisting strenuously any suggestion of a retreat from global affairs. Fundamentally, what they are calling for is what I have termed "smart power," which stems from the belief that soft power is not necessarily better than hard power and that the two should be complementary parts of an effective strategy. In the battle against jihadist terrorism, for example, we must kill our enemies and also reduce their numbers through deterrence, suasion, and attraction. Or in countries where immediate alternatives to current regimes are nonexistent or unacceptable and stark economic and military punishment is not practical, "patience and soft power must be married with principle and hard power if the United States is to be effective."
Yet what Campbell and O’Hanlon do not say enough about is how to strike this balance between soft and hard, largely because they say so little about the dynamics and instruments of soft power. For example, many official instruments of soft power–public diplomacy, broadcasting, exchange programs, development assistance, disaster relief, military-to-military contacts–are scattered throughout the government, and there is no overarching strategy or budget that even tries to integrate them with hard power into an overarching national security strategy. We spend about 500 times as much on the military than we do on foreign broadcasts and exchanges. Is this the right proportion? How would we know? How would we make trade-offs?
And how should the government relate to the nonofficial generators of soft power–everything from Hollywood to Harvard to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation–that emanate from our civil society? Campbell and O’Hanlon do not tell us, and that sort of guidance is sorely needed.
Consider Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s recent comments in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. "Some of the most critical battles" in the Administration’s war on terrorism, he wrote, "may not be in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Iraq but in newsrooms in New York, London, Cairo and elsewhere." The good news is that Rumsfeld is beginning to realize that the struggle against terrorism cannot be won by hard military power alone. The bad news is that he still does not understand soft power. Even when the Bush Administration pays lip service to soft power, they do not understand how to implement it. They think that hearts and minds are won the same way as new customers, through slick ads and p.r. Yet Rumsfeld forgets the first rule of advertising: If you have a poor product, not even the best advertising will sell it.
Rumsfeld’s mistrust of the soft power approach contains a grain of truth, however accidental. Of course, soft power is not the solution to all problems. For example, even though North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il likes to watch Hollywood movies, that is unlikely to affect his decision to give up his nuclear weapons program. Such a choice would be determined by hard power, particularly if China would agree to more economic sanctions. Nor will soft power be sufficient to stop the Iranian nuclear program, though the legitimacy of the Administration’s new multilateral approach may help to recruit other countries to a coalition that isolates Iran. And soft power got nowhere in attracting the Taliban government away from its support for Al Qaeda in the 1990s. It took hard military power to remove them. That said, other goals, such as the promotion of democracy and human rights, are better achieved by soft power. Coercive democratization has its limits, as the Bush Administration found out in Iraq.
The lesson here is that it is a mistake to count too much on hard or soft power alone. Only smart power will move us forward. During the Cold War, the West used hard power to deter Soviet aggression, while it used soft power to erode faith in communism behind the Iron Curtain. That was smart power. To be smart today, Europe should invest more in its hard-power resources, and the United States should pay more attention to its soft power. For Europe, that means more military capability, such as that demonstrated by Great Britain and the Netherlands in Afghanistan. For the United States, it means more multilateralism, more institution-building, policies more consistent with our values, and more of the humility that Bush promised as a candidate in 2000 but soon forgot. After all, bombs and bayonets do not protect us from avian flu, slow global flooding, or create democracy.
Yet how those bombs and bayonets are used can be important to American soft power. A well-run military can be a source of attraction for other nations. For example, military cooperation and training programs can establish transnational networks that enhance our country’s soft power. Similarly, the impressive job of the American military in providing humanitarian relief after the Indian Ocean tsunami and the South Asian earthquake in 2005 helped burnish the luster of the United States. On the other hand, Pentagon psychological operations that planted paid stories in the Iraqi press (at the same time that the State Department was trying to train Iraqi journalists about a free press) undercut American credibility and soft power.
Moreover, the misuse of military resources can undercut soft power and, by extension, a nation’s overall power and influence. For example, in Europe after World War II, the Soviet Union had a great deal of soft power that stemmed from its resistance to Adolf Hitler. They squandered it by the illegitimate ways in which they used their hard power against Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Brutality and indifference to just-war principles can also destroy legitimacy. The efficiency of the initial American military invasion of Iraq in 2003 created admiration in the eyes of some foreigners, but that soft power was undercut by the subsequent inefficiency of the occupation and the scenes of mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the policies of detainment without hearings at Guantánamo.
While the Bush Administration is now beginning to recognize the importance of soft power, the challenge is how to balance it with hard power in a coherent and effective way. To do that, both sides of the "power" divide–hard Republicans and soft Democrats–need to engage in a dialogue that stresses the integration of these two dimensions into an effective strategy. If progressives refuse to criticize openly the Administration for ignoring soft power and our public discourse is limited solely to hard power, our discussion of national strategy will be like one hand clapping, with each party trying to sound tough by trumpeting hard power. Instead, we would be wise not to imitate the Bush conservatives but to develop a smart-power doctrine that recognizes the importance of both hard and soft power and seeks ways to integrate them. This book is a good step toward the former, but it does not do enough to explain the tough part, which is the latter. And without that, American smart power will remain beyond our reach.
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Forging A World Of Liberty Under Law U.S. National Security In The 21st Century Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security
A national security strategy for the 21st century must address all the dangers we face – diffuse, shifting and uncertain as they are – and seize all the opportunities open to us to make ourselves and the world more secure. It must begin with a clear set of objectives to be achieved and must be shaped according to a set of criteria that will maximize its likelihood of success. It must also be based on a set of overarching premises and principles that will allow us to chart a consistent general course in the world while still adapting individual policies to the context of individual countries, problems, and crises.
In 1948 George Kennan defined national security as “the continued ability of the country to pursue the development of its internal life without serious interference, or threat of interference, from foreign powers.” We are accustomed to thinking about national security threats as politically motivated behavior by a foreign actor, but increasingly we need to think of them as emanating from multiple sources, not just other states. The basic objective of a national security strategy seems obvious: to protect the American people and the American way of life. This report breaks down that overarching goal into three more specific goals: a secure homeland, a healthy global economy, and a benign international environment.
A Secure Homeland
The starting point of any national security strategy must be to protect the United States from foreign conquest, attacks on our people and infrastructure, and fatal epidemics.
Just when a conventional military attack on U.S. territory by a rival state, whether by land, sea, or even air, seems unthinkable, the likelihood of an unconventional attack has put our homeland at greater risk than at any time since our early history. As we know from painful experience, terrorists can wreak death and destruction on a growing scale; moreover, the threat of nuclear terrorism looms greater than any other nuclear threat because of the limits of traditional concepts of deterrence against adversaries who would willingly martyr themselves. We also cannot discount the possibility that a regime hostile to the West may develop the capability to launch a few devastating salvos of revenge against the United States or our allies in a future regional conflict involving American forces.
The security of the homeland extends beyond basic protection from direct violent attacks. It also means securing our economy, our utilities, our health care system, and our principal means of communication from a catastrophic cyber-attack. An attack on our food and water supply could lead not only to widespread death, but also to the forced destruction of crops, livestock, and even processing plants, as well as the closing of aquifers. Our reliance on space technology (e.g. satellites) as the linchpin of our civilian and military infrastructure means that an attack in space could severely disrupt our daily lives. Finally, the combination of the rapid global spread of new human diseases, antibiotic-resistant strains of old diseases, and the possibility of bioterrorist attack designed to spread disease means that our population must grapple with the threat posed by an old enemy, one we thought vanquished by the medical advances of the 20th century.
A Healthy Global Economy
Beyond the natural ups and downs of the business cycle, American national security depends on a healthy national economy. More than ever before, however, the strength of our national economy is integrally connected to the health of the global economy. We compete with other countries on a daily basis and rightly seek advantages and a competitive edge; ultimately, though, the prosperity of other nations, open markets, and free trade are critically important to sustaining the American way of life.
Over the longer term, global economic development and international economic integration contribute to stability and peace within countries and regions. They do not make positive outcomes inevitable, but they certainly make these outcomes more likely. By contrast, economic hardship can be immensely destabilizing. It is no accident that after World War II the Truman administration made the development of an open Western economy its top strategic priority – to avoid the fate of the 1930s and to provide a bulwark against communism.
In the 21st century, reaping the economic and political benefits of a healthy national and international economy means being prepared to deal with the risks inherent in globalization, including financial crises, supply shocks, and recessions in important markets. One of the most important ways that the United States is dependent on the global economy is that America has a low savings rate and therefore has to import savings from abroad, leading to a large and growing current account deficit. An additional problem is that managing the global economy, the foundations of which date back to the 1940s, will become increasingly difficult. Although the global economy has long been multi-polar, during the Cold War the other poles in the global economy were close allies of the United States. Today, however, China is a potential adversary and India, which has traditionally been neutral, is hardly as close a friend as Japan or the European Union (E.U.). Moreover, the contemporary economic concerns that stem from
the rise of new economic powers – such as outsourcing, state financing of corporate takeovers, or increased energy consumption – are not even within the mandates of existing institutions.
The economic development of China and India, which together account for over one-third of the world’s population, as well as other potentially large economies like Brazil, Russia, Mexico, and ultimately South Africa and Nigeria, is a positive-sum game, offering enormous opportunities to the world’s consumers and producers alike. But managing these countries’ growth, integrating them fully into evolving regional and global economic institutions, and addressing their concerns will be a challenge
that we must meet. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in his novel The Leopard, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
A Benign International Environment
In 1941 Americans learned that the security of their homeland and the viability of the American way of life as a free society depended upon developments in the rest of the world, thus settling an argument that had raged for two generations and had its roots in the nation’s founding. Simply put, we learned that aggressors in far away lands, if left unchecked, would some day threaten the United States. The implications of this lesson were profound. Rather than recoiling in isolation from great power politics, we decided as a nation that it was imperative to play an active and leading role in the world. Conventional wisdom describes this shift as a necessary response to the very real expansionist threat posed by the Soviet Union. And indeed, the transformation of the Soviet Union from ally to adversary helped overcome what would otherwise almost certainly have been greater domestic resistance to the depth and scale of America’s global involvement in the early years of the Cold War. But American postwar engagement with the world also reflected deeper lessons of the 1930s, lessons that transcended any particular geopolitical configuration.
The crystallization of this shift in American thinking came in NSC-68, the seminal 1950 memo that reorganized and reoriented our national security policy for the Cold War. It laid out the doctrine of containment, but also emphasized our need “to build a healthy international community,” which “we would probably do even if there were no international threat.” We needed then, and we need now, a “world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.” In the 1940s the United States advanced this goal by building international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, with initiatives like the Marshall Plan, and by encouraging European integration. We also routinely sacrificed our short-term economic and commercial interests to our longer-term security interests, seeing a value in providing global public goods that helped to support and stabilize both regional and global institutions. The results served the interests of many other countries, making it easier for us to pursue our interests as well.
The international system that existed in the late 1940s has changed dramatically; what is needed to make it benign has also changed. However, the objective of creating and maintaining a benign international environment remains crucial to our long-term security, today more than ever due to increasing global interdependence. In practice, it means safeguarding our alliances and promoting security cooperation among liberal democracies, ensuring the safety of Americans abroad as well as at home, avoiding the emergence of hostile great powers or balancing coalitions against the United States, and encouraging liberal democracy and responsible government worldwide.
Criteria For A Successful Grand Strategy
1. Multidimensional: Post-9/11, America has understandably been focused overwhelmingly on terrorism. But a successful long-term national security strategy must be a post-post-9/11 strategy. It must take into account the totality of America’s interests and be able to meet multiple threats and challenges simultaneously. It must be coherent and based on a set of overarching principles, but must also function like a Swiss army knife, able to deploy different tools for different situations on a moment’s notice. We must be serious about terrorism but serious too about East Asia, pandemic disease, and globalization. It is neither safe nor wise to identify only one enemy and to prepare single-mindedly to confront it. We must instead identify an entire range of threats, hone our capacity to assess their relative risk, and then develop a diversified portfolio of strategies to address them as they arise.
2. Integrated: U.S. strategy must integrate our hard power with what Joseph Nye has called our soft power, allowing us to use all of our assets in pursuit of our objectives. This effort requires devoting as much attention to bolstering the civilian components of our national security infrastructure as to strengthening the military. Our soft power is our power to get what we want by attracting others to the same goals, rather than bending them to our will. It requires careful attention to how others may perceive us differently than we perceive ourselves, no matter how good our intentions. It also requires regular communication and engagement among U.S. officials and their foreign counterparts in formal and informal networks, listening as well as talking. Finally, it means drawing not only on government, but also on the assets and initiative of both the private and non-profit sectors.
3. Interest-Based, Not Threat-Based: To create maximum points of engagement and leverage, a successful strategy must begin by identifying and pursuing common interests with other states rather than insisting that they accept our prioritization of common threats. Even where other nations agree, for instance, on the need to fight terrorism, they may rank the rise of a neighboring power, environmental dangers, disease, disruption of their energy supply, or other threats as higher priorities. Finding ways to develop frameworks of cooperation based on common interests with individual nations or groups of nations minimizes frictions, maximizes common assets, and increases the likelihood of cooperative deployment of those assets to achieve common objectives.
4. Grounded in Hope, Not Fear: Focusing on threats, and above all insisting on the preeminence and global scope of one specific threat, feeds a pervasive sense of fear. U.S. strategy must advance the larger and more positive purposes behind our power. America has never defined those purposes in purely defensive or protective terms. We have also sought to stand for a particular set of values in the world and to promote those values in ways consistent with our security and our morals. That is why Americans so readily see U.S. power as a force for good. The most enduring source of American national security is to do everything possible to ensure that citizens of other countries see U.S. power the same way, not only so that they do not perceive us as a threat and balance against us, but also so that they are willing to join their power with ours in the service of larger common goals.
5. Pursued Inside Out: Increasingly, what happens inside states matters to the United States as much as what happens between them. Our vulnerability to terrorist attacks, for instance, depends upon the capability and intentions of police forces in countries like Pakistan and Indonesia, while our vulnerability to global pandemics depends upon the strength of the public health systems in China and Thailand. However, the United States is often ill-equipped to influence the domestic development of an adversary or rival, both because other states are suspicious of American motives and because of the limits of relying primarily upon military power. Squaring this circle is a necessary and critical step. U.S. strategy must include the creation of institutions and mechanisms whereby the international community as a whole can help strengthen government capacity and encourage sound practices within states without using force or illegitimate modes of coercion.
6. Adapted to the Information Age: A national security strategy for the 21st century must operate in a world where information moves instantly, actors respond to it instantly, and where all the major actors are connected in real time, allowing individual decisions to become mass movements in weeks and months rather than years. Where specialized small units come together for only a limited time for a defined purpose – whether to make a deal, restructure a company, or plan and execute a terrorist attack. In this world, we need to be fast, flexible, and nimble, capable of grouping and regrouping as necessary and capable of coordinating many different actors engaged in a common effort. We also need to be able to “know what we know:” to figure out quickly and efficiently what information we have and to transmit it to everyone who needs to know it and to figure out what information we do not have and how to get it.
Spreading Governmental Reform Abroad
In a world of popular, accountable, and rights-regarding (PAR) governments, the United States would have many more, and more effective, partners in our efforts to fight terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pandemic disease, economic crises, and a host of other threats. The best way to help bring governments up to PAR is to connect them and their citizens in as many ways as possible to governments and societies that are already at PAR and to provide them with incentives and support to follow suit. We need to create these myriad points of on the common interests shared by the United States and any particular country or group of countries and then devising the policies and mechanisms necessary to pursue those interests.
Working System of International Institutions
We need a system of effective global institutions to harness cooperation on problems we simply cannot tackle unilaterally or even bilaterally. These institutions cannot all be formal organizations. On the contrary, harnessing cooperation in the 21st century will require many new kinds of institutions, many of them network-based, to provide speed, flexibility, and context-based decision making tailored to specific problems. This combination of institutions, and the habits and practices of cooperation that they would generate – even amid ample day-to-day tensions and diplomatic conflict – would represent the infrastructure of an overall international order that provides the stability and governance capacity necessary to address global problems. (UN, NATO, Intl finance and Econ Orgs etc)
Role of Force
At their core, both liberty and law must be backed up by force. Domestically, this is why the state maintains a police force and a military. At the international level, of course, no such enforcement mechanism exists. A national security strategy dedicated to forging a world of liberty under law must reckon with the necessity and perils of the use of force both within nations – to safeguard liberty and uphold the rule of law – and among them – to ensure that some nations cannot destroy the liberty of all.
Summary
A Grand Strategy cannot consist simply of responses to many different threats. As Henry Kissinger observed in 2002, “the war on terror is not the ultimate test of U.S. foreign policy, which is, above all, to protect the extraordinary opportunity that has come about to recast the international system.” The Princeton Project seeks to help America grasp this opportunity to lay the foundations for advancing America’s interests on every front, rather than just vanquishing one enemy. While America’s tactics and short-term policies must take the world as it is, a long-term strategy should strive to shape the world as we want it to be. That positive vision should serve as a plumb-line through crises and changing administrations.
This report’s vision of a world of liberty under law grows out of both knowledge and conviction. As demonstrated by both reason and social science, a world of liberal democracies would be a safer and better world for Americans and all people to live in. It is thus in America’s deepest interest to pursue such a world. But America must also pursue a values-based foreign policy to be true to itself – the cold calculations of realism, in its eternal quest for a balance of power, can never long satisfy the American people.
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