American troops watch President Barack Obama in South Korea (White House photo)

James Fallows has a very interesting five-part series of posts (one, two, three, four, five) making the case that the U.S. media has been unfair in its portrayals of Barack Obama’s trip to China and that things actually went considerably better than the chatterers in DC would have you know.

He makes a strong case, but it’s difficult to get around the point that it’s hard to see why the President would fly to China unless the U.S. and Chinese foreign ministries already had some serious agreements ready to sign. There wasn’t a major multilateral conference in China that Obama had to attend. China’s not a longstanding American ally that gets a courtesy call just to say “hi.” If China and the United States weren’t prepared to announce major breakthroughs on major issues, that’s fine, but then why not save the trip for some future date when the breakthroughs are ready? There are worse things than a big trip that doesn’t end up with any key takeaways—the Bush administration appeared to have reached a one-sided nuclear deal with India a few years ago merely because they didn’t want to leave a presidential trip to India empty-handed—but it’s bound to leave people puzzled. At the end of the day, being president is a very busy job . . . what’s the need for superfluous trips?  

I think an underrated success of the Obama administration has been the way he pulled us back from the brink of a pointless Cold War dynamic the Bush administration had landed us in in South America. And he did it pretty easily—basically just resolving to stay out of any wars of words with Hugo Chavez, shake hands, and focus on concrete issues. It turns out that for all the huffing and puffing, there’s really no actual conflict between the United States and Latin America’s leftists.

But this seems to have left Chavez a bit adrift and looking to push the envelope. How else to explain the idea of praising Idi Amin in a speech:

About former Ugandan President Idi Amin, Mr Chavez said: “We thought he was a cannibal… I don’t know, maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot.”

Idi Amin seized power in 1971. About 300,000 people were killed during his eight-year rule.

That’s really not the kind of statement that bolsters one’s confidence in the man’s commitment to liberalism and democracy. I would link to a Human Rights Watch report on Chavez’s impact on Venezuela’s political institutions but everyone knows that HRW is a non-credible group obsessed with unfair slams on Israel so their criticism of Chavez must somehow be part of their vast conspiracy.

US Capitol Building

This is far from his main point, but David Shorr’s observation that “it’s not clear that our political system is still able to ratify significant treaties” seems important to me. I mean, if you think it’s hard to get 60 Senators to agree to something, just try finding 67 willing to vote in favor of a major treaty.

In part it’s a shame that more people can’t have a more reasonable view on things like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But in part, this is a really weird quirk of our constitution grounded in an era, over 2000 years in the past, when both the U.S. political system and the role of treaties in the international arena was totally different. Consequently you get absurd scenarios in which the US is the only country that won’t join the UN Convention on the rights of the child.

I don’t much like the idea of a fixation with either safe havens or COIN driving national security policy, but it’s hard to deny that safe havens really are a problem and that small conflicts against irregular troops really do seem likely to define our future more than big wars against other major powers. And if that’s the case, then we need to deal with it.

I think the sort of COIN vs Big Army debate is basically at right angles to what I’m trying to talk about.

Insofar as we’re just talking about “what should the joint chiefs of staff be thinking about” then it’s true that “fighting wars with major countries” is not the correct answer. But what I want to emphasize is that just because “prepare to fight wars with them” isn’t the thing we should be thinking about when we think about major countries doesn’t change the fact that the major countries are, well, the major ones. If our relationship with major countries is now less military-focused than it was in Cold War days (when preventing the USSR from threatening Europe and Japan was key) that shows that the military is less important than it used to be not that relationships with major countries are less important than they used to be.

Which is to say that even if it’s completely appropriate for planners at the Pentagon to be spending most of their time thinking about “small wars” and COIN, I want the president to be spending more time thinking about China, India, European integration, Japan, etc. than about governance in rural Afghanistan. Now as it happens, my colleague Nina Hachigian co-authored a great book on rising powers with Mona Sutphen who’s now Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House, so hopefully my fears aren’t coming true.

An interesting BBC report looks at the possible influx of al-Qaeda affiliates into Mali, the landlocked West African country that’s perennially found on lists of the poorest countries in the world. Which reminds me of something I wrote recently in The National:

Which brings us to the curious fact that the deepening US engagement in Afghanistan is part and parcel of a revolution in strategic thinking which holds that space itself – not lush farmland, but simply space – is a vital commodity over which the Pentagon must hold sway. This is the crux of the “safe havens” issue: the fear that somewhere on Earth there might exist a remote locale in which al Qa’eda can gather without fear of the local police. At first glance, it seems like a compelling argument: America has been hunting al Qa’eda for eight years; a hunted group might seek refuge in a safe haven; therefore we must shut down the safe havens. On reflection, however, this apparently simple objective implies an astonishingly ambitious grand strategy, with boundless costs and little prospect for success. It’s a strange inversion of America’s Cold War priorities, which focused first and foremost on securing the rich industrial territories of Western Europe and Japan, and secondarily on securing access to the oil reserves of the Middle East, while evincing little concern for obscure conflicts in impoverished states.

It’s a sort of ugly turn of phrase, but I’ve tried referring to this as the “backwaterification” of American foreign policy. Instead of paying the most attention to the places that matter most—traditionally Europe, Japan, and the Gulf now joined by China, Brazil, smaller industrialized Asian countriesm etc.—the logic of safe havens is for our focus to drift toward the places that matter least. Places like (no offense to any Maliens in the audience) Mali. The optimistic view of this is that thanks to the events of 1989, the the world in 2009 is a less troubled place than the world of 1969 so things that wouldn’t necessarily have counted as a big deal in the past are now the biggest problems around. The negative view would be that our thinking about international engagement has become so lopsided toward the defense department that we’re now focusing the bulk of our attention on plausible candidates for military intervention (Somalia! Yemen!) while neglecting the parts of the world where the important things are happening.

China has emerged as pretty clearly the number two country in the world power hierarchy, but as David Schorr observes it’s not really clear that China has any desire to be an important world power:

As President Obma urges China to be a “source of strength for the community of nations” — i.e. help with the heavy lifting on international challenges such as global warming and nuclear proliferation — Chinese leaders prefer to downplay expectations. They’re not witholding their support and assistance, but they are parcelling out their contributions quite cautiously, rather than putting themselves at the forefront of global problem solving. Think of it as a tendency to do positive things for negative reasons. Unfortunately, it may not be enough to deal effectively with 21st century international challenges.

I spent several days in Beijing last week taking part in discussions co-organized by the Stanley Foundation with the Centre for International Governance Innovation and the China Institutes on Contemporary International Relations. This Chinese ambivalence about providing leadership was expressed in a variety of ways, including the description of China as “a global actor, not a global power.” Indeed, the true aim of key Chinese strategic concepts such as peaceful rise or harmonious world seems to be a frictionless foreign policy to conserve every ounce of effort for the challenges of domestic stability and economic growth.

The crux of the matter is that while China’s combination of scale and rapid growth make it, de factor, a big player on the world stage it’s also a profoundly poor Russia. Russia is much poorer than the United States, but it still has a GDP per capita of $16,000 or so. Brazil clocks in at just above the world average of $10,000 and South Africa is just below that number. China, meanwhile, rates as slightly poorer than Angola or Namibia. There’s no real precedent in the modern system of great powers for one of the major countries to be so economically underdeveloped. Combine that with the questionable durability of China’s political system, and you can see why the leadership mostly wants to focus on staying in power and getting richer.

That, however, leads to a bit of a leadership vacuum at the top, especially when you consider that a very sizable portion of the world’s potential wealth and power is tied up in the European Union where lack of institutional capacity makes it impossible to deploy it effectively. The result is to give the United States a more preeminent position than the underlying fundamentals would suggest at first glance. This actually creates some problems for us—seen in Obama’s exhortation—but of course the United States suffers from some schizophrenia on this front. Sometimes we’re seen urging China (or, indeed, the European Union or Japan) to play a bigger role in the world, but other times we’re clearly glad that nobody else is interesting in wielding global power in a manner that checks our own hegemonic aspirations.

Spencer Ackerman reports on considerable internal disgruntlement with Barack Obama’s choice of Rajiv Shah as new head of USAID. You can see where the complaints are coming from, but they also seem pretty unconvincing to me:

Another USAID contractor, in an email forwarded to TWI, had a mixed reaction. The contractor said it was “exciting to see a relatively young, brilliant man take the reigns and perhaps steer [government] aid in a revised direction” and praised the nominee’s management experience. But the contractor, reflecting a sentiment expressed in several of the emails, said Shah’s nomination was “yet another (or maybe a stronger) indication that Obama is shifting from nation building/good governance to heath care and food security initiatives. This may not bode well for D&G,” a shorthand for development and governance.

Foreign aid has a very mixed track record. On the one hand, great things have been achieved in the past in the field of public health and famine prevention. On the other hand, efforts to produce sustained economic growth and foster good governance have tended to fail. Under the circumstances focusing the efforts of an under-resourced aid agency on the fields of endeavor where we know aid can do good and alleviate human suffering seems like a perfectly reasonable choice.

Tom Shannon is a career foreign service officer. He’s also US Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere. Has been since 2005. Was appointed to the job by George W Bush. Five months ago, Barack Obama appointed him to be Ambassador to Brazil. He’s obviously well-qualified. He sailed through committee. And then because Jim DeMint is a bad human being, he was subjected to a months-long hold. Then DeMint relented. So now it’s Senator George LeMieux of Florida’s turn to screw things up with a hold.

Neither DeMint nor LeMieux invented the abuse of the hold procedure, but the Republican Party of the 111th congress has taken this to such new heights that it’s about time the Senate take some responsibility and start organizing itself like a legislative body of an important country and not like a country club. The ability for one senator to delay confirmation of key executive branch personnel indefinitely for no real reason has never been a good idea. At times, this power has been abused to advance policy goals I believe in. Oftentimes it’s used to advance bad policy goals. More recently, it just seems to be being used as a matter of principle—maximum feasible obstruction. It needs to be changed.

Europe, having been liberated from nuclear terror at the conclusion of the Cold War, proved unable to muster the gumption to deal with Yugoslavia on its own, or, as the case of Afghanistan shows, to demonstrate much enthusiasm for any great collective effort. Which leads to the question: What does the European Union truly stand for besides a cradle-to-grave social welfare system? For without something to struggle for, there can be no civil society—only decadence.

Thus, with their patriotism dissipated, European governments can no longer ask for sacrifices from their populations when it comes to questions of peace and war. Ironically, we may have gained victory in the Cold War, but lost Europe in the process.

Spencer Ackerman observes that there’s something rather crazy about the view that the Cold War was waged “so that European soldiers would one day become our cannon fodder.” One might further note that it’s not at all clear that the American public has any real desire to sacrifice anything in Afghanistan. It seems to me that one of the key props of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been the consensus on both the right (Bush, The Weekly Standard) and the center (Blue Dogs, The Washington Post) that it’s not necessary to raise hundreds of billions in tax revenue in order to pay for hundreds of billions in war expenditures. By far the fastest way to end the war in Afghanistan would be to ask General McChrystal’s staff to produce a plan to make it deficit neutral and find sixty votes in the senate for his financing plan.

In a larger sense, however, Kaplan is merely highlighting the fundamental difference between neoconservative thinking and thinking undertaken by people with a moral compass. As Alex Massie says, present-day Europe’s state of peace, prosperity, and physical security is a good thing. Neoconservatives, however, see war and death as good things. Irving Kristol told Corey Robin that market-oriented conservatism is too “boring” (”The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.”) so you need to inject some death and destruction into the mix to keep things interesting.

The world would be a better place if people looking for cheap thrills would stick to the black metal scene or maybe take up extreme sports rather than foreign policy punditry. But the point is that it’s extremely dangerous to take advice from people with this mindset—they’re not even trying to enhance the country’s security, they’re trying to embroil the country in wars.

Russian soldier in Kosovo

Justin Logan observes that The Weekly Standard seems to have spun its Great Wheel of Enemies again and today we’re supposed to be getting ready to fight not Iran or North Korea but Russia.

After three paragraphs of suggesting that we should be doing more to get involved in military confrontations with Russia, John Noonan tosses off “No one wants to be drawn into conflict with the Russians” but then comes the inevitable “but”:

But it’s useful to remember that time after time, we’ve extended our hand to Moscow only to have it slapped away. Putin clearly has grand aspirations for his burgeoning CSTO, with Poland shaping up to be the new Germany in another round of US-Russian geo-political chess. If Moscow only understands the stern language of action and resolve, then the Obama administration must atone for shabby treatment of our key Polish allies and move quickly to strengthen defensive ties between our two nations.

The part about Moscow only understanding the stern language of action and resolve appears to have been generated by a crude computer program of some sort. Stripping away Noonan’s oodles of overheated rhetoric, however, it appears that rather than “grand aspirations,” Putin has just about the most banal aspirations of all—under his rule Russia will seek to influence events in much smaller and weaker countries that are in its immediate geographic vicinity.

Meanwhile Michael Goldfarb appears to be coming out against the civil rights movement in this post, perhaps under the influence of Max Boot’s trenchant critique of Brown v Board of Education.

Mehdi Karubi

In one of the most telling and least-perceptive columns of the year, Jackson Diehl went to hear a spokesman for Iranian opposition leader Mehdi Karoubi speak at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and came away appalled. Karoubi, you see, wants political reform in Iran and not the neoconservative political agenda for the region. But rather than inspiring any rethinking of anything, Diehl just huffs and puffs.

The basic reality that neocons are going to have to grapple with if their nominal pro-democracy agenda ever makes any headway is that opposition leaders in places like Iran, Russia, China, etc. are still patriotic citizens of their home countries. I wouldn’t go the whole realist hog and say that the nature of the domestic regime has no relevance to foreign policy, but it has much less than the American discourse often seems to assume. In general, countries that have some specific fear of being overwhelmed by a stronger neighbor (think Poland) are going to be interested in more American power in their area, whereas countries that see themselves as fighting for a place in the sun (think Iran or China) will chafe at American power. We often see a construction wherein Iranian pursuit of the knowledge necessary to construct a nuclear weapon is somehow an outgrowth of Islamist ideology when, in fact, countries such as Japan and Sweden have pursued this path and the majority of nuclear weapons states are democracies.

Political democracy is great. And it does make cooperation on issues of mutual interest easier. But it doesn’t change the fact that there isn’t always mutual interest. It’s hard to envision a Chinese government embracing the Tibet independence movement (imagine the head of a large Indian tribe raising funds in Russia for an independence drive) or a Russian government smiling at the prospect of Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO (imagine Mexico signing a military alliance with China) under any form of government.

So let’s take a time out to note that the Obama administration’s approach to Honduras looks to be paying off in the form of a deal that will temporarily re-instate President Zelaya in advance of new elections to be held in January. The US has an unfortunate history of backing coups in Latin America and an unfortunate history of heavy-handed involvement in Latin American domestic politics, so threading the needle between heavy-handed involvement and coup-backing was difficult. But they got the job done, and as Tim Fernholz says the results are likely to be appreciated throughout the region.

The United States is about average overall. Our standout categories are trade and security, we do badly on environment and aid metrics. Nicest overall country is Sweden.

It turns out, rather, that neither the Poles nor the Israelis care overmuch about the other; rhetorical support for the neocon vision of liberty/missile defense/bunker busting/awesomeness/sexy/democracy/whiskey collapses in the face of real world material interest. In the end, it’s almost as if our allies value material and institutional commitments to their defense more than they value a nebulous American reputation for “toughness”.

Something the United States seem to have lost site of, is that alliance with and assistance from the country with the biggest economy and the largest military on the planet is a valuable thing to have. This is especially true because since we’re geographically isolated up here in North America and also a friendly democracy with a somewhat robust commitment to human rights, most countries and organizations are going to see us as a more desirable partner than whatever the locally available alternative is. This is something that ought to be turned to our advantage. Pretty much everyone needs us more than we need them, which ought to give us all the leverage.

But a hawkish disposition and an obsession with toughness tend to erode our ability to play hard to get. For example, consider the widespread ideas that we’re fighting a “necessary” war in Afghanistan and that the cooperation of Hamid Karzai is vital to our success in that war. These two ideas, when put in combination, lead to the slightly absurd conclusion that securing the cooperation of Hamid Karzai is necessary for the national security of the most powerful country on earth. In the real world, it should be the other way around. We have interests in Afghanistan that it would be nice to successfully pursue. But Karzai’s interests are much more fundamental than ours. What’s necessary—or at least closer to necessary—is for him to secure our cooperation by acting in a way that’s helpful. And it’s the same for Poland and Georgia and all the rest. Relationships with friendly clients are nice to have, but the wise superpower should know how to play hard to get.

At an American Enterprise Institute event today — “Should Israel Attack Iran?” (yes, they’re obviously trying to get peoples’ attention) — former Ambassador Martin Indyk revealed an interesting wrinkle to the story of Eastern European missile defense system, which the Obama administration canceled last month, a move conservatives have heavily criticized as — what else? — appeasement.

Recounting recent meetings with Israeli national security officials, Indyk said that “the Israelis were upset at the way that Bush had offended Russia with missile defense” in Eastern Europe. The Israelis, like many Americans and most of the rest of the world, saw the deployment of untested missile defense technology in Poland and the Czech Republic as needlessly provocative of Russia, whose support is seen as necessary for any effort to bring Iran’s nuclear program under control.

A simple point but an easy one. Right-wing Israelis can easily afford to hope for the United States to take a neoconnish line on Iran. And right-wing Poles can afford to hope fro the United States to take a neoconnish line on Russia. But the desires of right-wing Israelis are in significant tension with those of right-wing Poles. And officials in the United States of America can’t realistically take a maximalist line on every point of geopolitical tension. Regional powers basically have their priorities set for them by circumstances. But the hegemon has the luxury of deciding what it cares about. That luxury, however, doesn’t eliminate the basic need to decide.

Nathan Glazer has an article about Irvin Kristol in TNR that, on its second page, makes the interesting argument that Kristol, despite being the “grandfather of neoconservatism,” didn’t actually hold the beliefs about national security policy that we now identify with that term:

Irving found the limitation of The Public Interest to domestic affairs confining and founded The National Interest, recruiting the wonderful Owen Harries from Australia to edit it and hoping it would provide a platform for a more realistic (I think that is the term he favored) approach to foreign policy. Oddly enough, such an approach was in contradiction with what came be known as “neoconservative” foreign policy: Irving was skeptical early on about imposing or promoting democracy in South Korea or Vietnam (he was wrong about South Korea), and, undoubtedly, he would have been equally skeptical about its prospects in Iraq and Afghanistan. The term “neoconservatism” was hijacked. In its early application, in the 1970s, it referred to the growing caution and skepticism among a group of liberals about the effects of social programs. It was later applied to a vigorous and expansionist democracy-promoting military and foreign policy, especially in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There was some reason to the hijacking–after all, a second generation of “neoconservatives,” some of it literally second-generation, was promoting this policy. But some of us who were labeled early as neoconservatives, a characterization not of our choosing, such as Daniel P. Moynihan, Daniel Bell, and myself, found it astonishing and unsettling.

Justin Vaïsse takes a more scholarly approach and reaches a similar conclusion in an FP article written about a month ago. I think this conclusion is pretty hard to square with the final five grafs of Kristol’s article on the “neoconservative persuasion” in the August 2003 Weekly Standard.

I think the way you put this together is with the observation that even though the high-level theoretical content of the realpolitiker 70s version of neoconservatism and the Wilsonian 2000s version of neoconservatism seem very different, the operational content is extremely similar. You have support for higher defense budgets, a tendency toward threat-inflation and hysteria, a belief in an aggressive military posture and extensive saber-rattling, hostility to negotiations, and hostility to international law both in theory and in practice. This was initially presented to the world as a “realistic” alternative to lefty critiques of US support for anti-communist dictators and more recently appeared as an “idealistic” critique of lefty reluctance to launch wars, but the continuity between the views is enormous.

Ethiopia is in the grips of a new food crisis that the UN World Food Program says will require $285 million in international assistance over the next six months to avert mass starvation.

I don’t think we should construe the existence of famine conditions in the Horn of Africa (there are problems beyond Ethiopia) as a reason not to send additional troops to Afghanistan. But I do think it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t look at individual elements of our foreign policy in isolation, or see the Afghanistan situation with tunnel-vision. Is there some reasonable calculus of risks in which it makes sense to spend tens of billions of dollars on prevent a situation of chaos in Central Asia but doesn’t make sense to spend a fraction of that in the Horn of Africa? Alternatively, if the US lacks the tools and skills to solve profound governance and economic problems in the Horn of Africa why do we have the needed skills and tools to solve them in Central Asia?

Martin Plaut, the BBC’s Africa analyst, has this to say about the role of bad public policy in contributing to the situation:

There is no doubt poor and erratic rains have hit the Ethiopian harvest. But large parts of the country have not been hit by drought. So why the current crisis?

It is in part the result of policies designed to keep farmers on the land, which belongs to the state and cannot be sold. So farms are passed down the generations, divided and sub-divided. Many are so small and the land so overworked that it could not provide for the families that work it even with normal rainfall.

At present only 17% of Ethiopia’s 80 million people live in urban areas. Keeping people in the countryside is a way of preventing large-scale unemployment and the unrest that this might cause.

This does seem like a system that will make it very hard to increase agricultural productivity. Meanwhile, Oxfam has an excellent new report out called “Band Aids and Beyond” about the need for donors to do more in the way of giving communities the tools they need to prevent food crises, rather than just throwing them aid after disaster strikes. If I may toot my colleagues’ horn for a moment, CAP had a report on a similar, though somewhat broader, theme “The Price of Prevention: Getting Ahead of Global Crises” back in November.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has declared his country ready to take part in a revised US missile defence plan. Mr Tusk told visiting US Vice-President Joe Biden that Poland was “ready to participate”. [...]

After meeting the Polish prime minister Mr Biden said: “We appreciate Poland has stepped up and agreed to host an element of the previous missile defence plan, and we now appreciate that Poland’s government agrees with us that there is now a better way… with new technology and new information, to defend against emerging ballistic missile threats.”

That was sarcasm, of course. Contra neocon bleating on the subject, Poland’s participation in the Bush-era scheme was always unpopular in Poland and the Czech Republic so finding an alternate approach is fine with everyone.

UN officials calculate that 1.5 million children per year die of diarrhea, often easily preventable:

Ann Veneman, the head of Unicef said this was a ‘tragedy.’

‘Inexpensive and effective treatments for diarrhea exist, but in developing countries only 39 percent of children with diarrhea receive the recommended treatment,’ Veneman said.

A new vaccine was developed for Rotavirus, an organism responsible for more than 40 percent of all diarrhea, but it remains out of reach in most of the developing world, the UN said.

That’s former Bush cabinet member Ann Veneman, so it’s not like this is special socialist math or anything. I find it endlessly frustrating that these kind of stories go unremarked in elite political commentary circles, but whenever there’s some pseudo-plausible argument that launching a bloody, multi-billion dollar invasion of Iraq or Sudan or Burma or whatnot everyone’s buzzing about it.

The GAVI Alliance funds a rotavirus program in conjunction with the CDC and the WHO that could almost certainly use more funding. This kind of issue is also an excellent example of the kind of health problem where we should be trying to rely more on prizes than on patents to finance R&D.

Verifiable reductions in Russia nuclear missile stockpiles are a large gain for American national security. In order to get Russia to agree to reductions in their nuclear stockpiles, we need to agree to reduce our own stockpiles. Reductions in U.S. stockpiles are a gain for Russian national security, but they’re not a loss to American national security. We have no intention of launching a nuclear first strike on Russia, after all, and there’s nothing we could possibly gain from doing so. But of course American political leaders don’t want to agree to mutual reductions in weapons stockpiles unless the reductions are verifiable. Even though conservatives seem, in general, to have no comprehension of national security issues whatsoever I would think they could grasp this point since “trust, but verify” is inscribed in the Little Red Book of Quotations from Ronaldus Magnus.

And, again, for us to verify Russian disarmament we need to let the Russians verify American disarmament. And, again, there’s no loss to us in the this. The United States isn’t going to secretly keep missiles on line and we’re not going to launch a nuclear war with Russia. A deal for verifiable mutual disarmament is a huge, huge win for America. But as Joe Cirincione tweets out, the right is spinning the deal as some kind of unilateral concession to Russia.