My papers are graded and final grades submitted, so I'm off to Istanbul this afternoon to attend the Istanbul World Political Forum. I'll be speaking on two panels -- one on "A New and Just Global Order?" and another on "Can the Cold War Between Israel and Iran Turn to Hot War?" -- and I'm looking forward to hearing what my hosts and the other attendees think about Syria, the U.S. election, China, the Euro crisis, and a host of other issues. It's a very full schedule and there won't be a lot of time for blogging, but I will try to post something if I get a moment and the jet lag isn't too bad.

I gave a lecture last night at the Cape Ann Forum, on the topic of America's changing position in the world and what it might (should) mean for U.S. grand strategy. My hosts were gracious and the crowd asked plenty of good questions, which is what I've come to expect when I speak to non-academic groups. Indeed, I'm often impressed by how sensible many "ordinary" Americans are about international affairs in general and U.S. foreign policy in particular. And so it was last night.

One of the attendees was iconoclastic journalist Christopher Lydon, who's been a friend for some years now. Chris asked a great question: Why is there so little accountability in contemporary U.S. policy-making, and especially regarding foreign policy? To be more specific: He wanted to know why some of the same people who got us into the Iraq debacle, mismanaged the Afghanistan war, and now clamor for war with Iran are still treated as respected experts, welcomed as pundits, and recruited to advise Presidential campaigns?

I didn't have a particularly good answer for him, but I thought about it more as I drove home. I'm not sure why there seems to be so little accountability in the American establishment these days (though it is true that if you lose $2 billion dollars, it does affect your job security), but here are a few thoughts.

Part of the problem is institutionalized amnesia. The United States is busy all around the world, and if the short-term results of some action look okay then we tend to move on and forget about what we've left behind. We fought a proxy war in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and it was a controversial issue at the time, with 40,000 or so Nicaraguan perishing as a result. But eventually the war ended, and we moved on with nary a backward glance. We intervened in the Bosnian civil war, patched together a Rube Goldberg-like structure to govern the place, gave ourselves high-fives, and spend the next fifteen years telling ourselves what a success it was. Except that it wasn't. Really. Last year we helped topple the Gaddafi regime in Libya, rejoiced at the fall of a despised and brutal dictator, and then moved on again, even as Libya descends into chaos. But it's not our problem anymore, unless a contraband MANPAD eventually finds its way to some unfortunate civilian airline somewhere. And if that airliner doesn't have Americans on board, we won't worry about it very much.

Heck, I'll bet if Bush had just pulled all our troops out of Iraq after his "Mission Accomplished" photo op, we'd be hailing it as a great military victory no matter what condition Iraq was in today. ("Hey, we got rid of Saddam for them; it's not our fault if the Iraqis can't run the place...")

A second reason is the incestuous clubbiness of the foreign policy establishment. Mainstream foreign policy organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations thrive by being inclusive: It's not clear what a member in good standing would have to do in order not to be welcome there. This is actually a smart principle up to a point: Because none of us is infallible, you wouldn't want to live in a society where being wrong rendered anyone a pariah for life. But neither does one want a system where conceiving and selling a disastrous war has no consequences at all.

Third, the incestuous relationship between mainstream journalists, policy wonks, and politicos reinforces this problem. All three groups live in a symbiotic relationship with each other, and you wouldn't expect to see many people in this world donning their brass knuckles and saying what they really think about other members of the club. And because their livelihoods and well-being aren't directly affected by catastrophes that happen Far Away, why should they worry about holding people accountable and conducting their relations in a more adversarial fashion? Bad for business, man....

A related reason has to do with career paths in the foreign policy world. I'm well aware that most would-be foreign policy wannabes don't have the luxury of tenure, and a lot of them have to survive on soft money budgets at think tanks or as in-and-outers doing private sector work when their party is out of power. In a world like this, yesterday's adversary is tomorrow's ally, and that means pulling punches and doing a lot of forgiving and forgetting. In most case, a bland conformism is the best route to long-term professional success, which diminishes the tendency to render harsh judgments, even when they are appropriate.

Fifth, as U.S. neoconservatives have long demonstrated, the best defense is sometimes a good offense. No influential political faction in America is more willing to engage in character assassination and combative politics than they are, in sharp contrast to most liberals and even most realists. I'm not talking about spirited debate over the issues -- which is a key part of effective democratic politics -- I'm talking about the tendency to accuse those with whom they disagree of being unpatriotic, morally bankrupt, anti-semitic, or whatever. Their willingness to play hardball intimidates a lot of people, which in turn protects them from a full accounting for their past actions.

Finally, there is obviously less accountability for anyone who has reliable financial backing. It doesn't matter how often people at the Weekly Standard or American Enterprise Institute advocate failed policies, so long as somebody is willing to keep bankrolling them. If you've got the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, or Sheldon Adelson in your corner, you can stay in the game no matter how often you've been wrong about really big and important issues, and no matter how big a price others may have paid for your mistakes.

Strategy is all about setting priorities: Deciding which problems merit the most attention and allocating the right level of resources to each challenge. It is about not letting the urgent overwhelm the important, and not getting blown off course by random events or unexpected surprises. Whether we are talking about a country's overall policy menu, a corporate business plan, or a military engagement, success requires first identifying what really matters.

So when I read James Hansen's op-ed about climate change yesterday, my first thought was: "Boy, do we have our priorities screwed up." Here in America, we spend endless hours arguing and debating trivialities, like who is going to get to run Afghanistan (a country whose entire GDP is about one-third the size of the municipal budget for New York City). We turn issues of personal freedom and preference (like marrying whomever you want) into Grand Moral Challenges. We kvetch about a single blind dissident in China, and work ourselves into a lather over not-very-powerful countries like Iran that pose no serious threat to any vital U.S. interests. Like a paranoid nation of sheep, we accept an increasingly onerous set of security restrictions in a futile attempt to drive the probability of a terrorist attack on an airliner down to absolute zero, no matter what the cost or the inconvenience. (And some people now think the current level of TSA madness isn't enough!)

Meanwhile , we merrily go about finding new sources of hydrocarbon-based energy -- like Canada's tar sands -- and get excited about the possibility that "fracking" will free us from dependence on "foreign oil" and allow us to keep using energy at our current profligate levels. Instead of orchestrating a gradual increase in the cost of hydrocarbon-based fuels -- to discourage consumption -- politicians search instead for ways to keep the cost low (and our SUVs running).

If Hansen is right -- and his track record is pretty good -- this behavior is utterly myopic. I'm not saying that we shouldn't devote some attention to other issues -- and if you're been reading this blog, you know that I'm as guilty as everyone else of doing just that -- but I wonder how much of Barack Obama's time and attention has been spent thinking about what his administration could do to advance a sensible agenda of long-term environmental protection, as opposed to the time he's spent on things that basically won't matter a damn in a few years. Remember that big climate-change summit back in 2009? Haven't heard much about that agenda lately, have you?

When historians of the 22nd century look back on our era, I suspect we'll take a lot of heat (sorry for the pun) both for what we did, but also for what we failed to do. Especially if a lot of places that are dry land today are under water. The only good news: China and its various Southeast Asian neighbors won't be squabbling over all those bits of rock in the South China Sea that are barely above sea level now.

What to do, what to do about Syria? Hardly anyone is confident that the Annan mission will resolve the struggle between the Assad regime and the Syrian opposition. Today I want to offer a more-or-less realpolitik approach to the problem, though I am not at all certain it would work or even that it would make sense to try. Consider it an effort to think outside the box.

As I've noted before, the central problem here is that there doesn't seem to be a genuine "compromise" option available that would leave Assad & Co. in place yet guarantee the safety of the opposition and their ability to organize politically. Neither side trusts the other at all, and neither can credibly commit not to try to eliminate their rivals if they get the chance. This creates the growing risk of a long and grinding confrontation and/or civil war. In this scenario I think outside powers would eventually get involved and Assad would eventually lose, but Syria would be in very bad shape when it was all over.

This latter outcome is not in anyone's interest, and certainly not ours. Our interests are best served if Assad leaves sooner rather than later, before all-out war occurs and before the entire Syrian state collapses. So the question is: Is there anyway to convince Assad and his closest associates to leave? I don't have a surefire way to do it, but one big step in the right direction would be for Russia to shift is position and stop protecting him. In other words, what if Moscow made it clear that they were willing to grant Assad et al asylum if they left, but were not willing to help keep them in power any longer?

Recall that it was the withdrawal of Russian support that eventually convinced Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate in the 2000 war in Kosovo. The circumstances in Syria are quite different, but the logic is the same: If Assad knew he'd lost Moscow's backing, and his associates figured this out too, they might start looking for any reasonably safe exit.

If you're still with me, then the question becomes: How could the U.S. and others convince newly "re-elected" Russian president Vladimir Putin to follow this path? I'm not sure we could, but one option would be by telling Putin that we would let him take full credit for resolving this confrontation. Putin and other Russian leaders have consistently opposed the emergence of a world order where Washington gets to determine which regimes survive and which regimes fall. For this reason, an overt attempt at Libya-style "regime change" is bound to upset them and encourage them to dig in their heels. But what if we made it clear that we were willing to let them take the lead (for example, by hosting an international conference to address the issue) and eager to let them have all the credit if they were able to ease Assad out. As Harry Truman once noted, "it's amazing what you can achieve if you don't care who gets the credit."

Now comes the tricky part. I doubt Putin would buy this sort of deal unless he got some sweeteners, and unless he thought that Russian interests would suffer if they continued their present course. In other words, the carrot of diplomatic credit might have to accompanied by some additional carrots, as well as the subtle hint of a stick. As for additional carrots, I'd happily toss in concessions on European missile defense, which is a costly boondoggle we ought to be ditching anyway. As for sticks, I think we'd have to try to convince Russia that outside intervention is going to happen sooner or later, and that once it does, Assad is going to be toast no matter what Moscow does. So they can either watch a regime they've backed for 40 plus years go down the tubes -- thereby reminding the world of their growing geopolitical impotence -- or they can get with us and get the credit for resolving a thorny problem, thereby allowing Putin to reaffirm Russia's importance on the world stage. There's bound to be a certain element of Kabuki theater in all this, but that's hardly unheard of in modern diplomacy. The risk, however, is that we have to threaten to intervene ourselves, and Moscow might call our bluff in the hopes of luring us back into a nice Iraq-style quagmire.

Like I said: I see this as a bit of a hail Mary, and I'm sure that readers will be able to poke a lot of holes in the idea. Go right ahead, but please offer up your own suggestions too.

A heads-up for readers with time on their hands: I'll be delivering the annual Hisham Sharabi Memorial Lecture at the Palestine Center in Washington DC tomorrow at noon. The title of my talk is "Deja Vu All Over Again?: Iraq, Iran, and the Israel Lobby," and I'll be comparing the campaign for war against Iraq and the current campaign for military action against Iran. There are some obvious similarities between these two episodes but also some important differences, for which we can be grateful. The lecture will be live-streamed here.

 UPDATE:  You can watch a recording of the lecture here.

"How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?"

--Charles de Gaulle.

For president-elect Hollande: Bonne chance! 

I enjoy blogging for Foreign Policy, and one of the strengths of this site is that there's clearly no party line. So permit me to take issue with several items recently posted by my FP colleagues.

1. Over the weekend, Oren Kessler had an interesting piece on the relationship between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hardline Jabotinskyite father Benzion, who passed away last week at the age of 102. I don't doubt that the father-son relationship has a lot to do with Bibi's political predilections, but too much emphasis has been placed on the role of the individual here. Specifically, there is a tendency to blame Israeli expansionism and intransigence on the Likud Party, or on Bibi himself, or even on the divided and fractious nature of Israeli coalition politics. If only Israel had a different PM, so the argument runs, we'd see a turn away from settlement expansion and renewed hope for a two-state solution.

This line of thinking ignores the simple fact that settlement expansion has occurred under every Israeli government since 1967: Labor, Likud, Kadima, unity coalitions, etc. And these activities haven't been mere passive acquiescence: Each of these governments actively backed settlement expansion with subsidies, military protection, and expanded infrastructure. It's true that some Israeli leaders have been more open to some sort of two-state deal (Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert in particular), but neither leader put a completely acceptable deal on the table and both only got close to doing so when they were lame ducks about to leave office. And both continued to expand settlements while they were supposedly negotiating, which only made attempts to reach a deal harder.

Netanyahu just called for early elections, and he's likely to win a new term. But I'm not sure this development makes much difference, given the obstacles that have already been created to any meaningful form of two-state solution.

2. Dan Drezner has written several smart posts about the "surprising resilience" of Sino-American relations, as demonstrated by how the two governments handled the Chen Guangcheng case. I agree with his assessment of the diplomacy surrounding this particular incident, but I would caution against drawing any long-term conclusions from it. The real issue in Sino-American relations is not how the two governments deal with current bilateral, regional and global issues, but how they will be handled if the balance of power continues to shift. For all the publicity about China's rapid rise, it is still decidedly weaker than the United States is and it has considerable incentive to avoid major tests of strength. What worries realists is not what China might do this year, or even next year, but what a more powerful China might do in the decades ahead.

As I've emphasized before, it is entirely possible that Sino-American relations will continue to be handled in a sensible and mature fashion for many decades to come, if you assume that both sides are led by sensible and mature leaders and never by rabid nationalists, impulsive neoconservatives, or inexperienced officials who like to go with their "gut instincts." But over the longer term, how likely is that?

3. Last week Aaron Miller offered up five "bad ideas" for screwing up the Middle East. Rather than comment on his list (which I did find disappointing), I'll just offer a sixth: consistently placing U.S. Middle East policy in the hands of the same people who've repeatedly failed to achieve peace despite having lots of opportunities, and making reflexive support for the "special relationship" a litmus test for service in the U.S. government.

Just a heads-up: I was part of a "Room for Debate" symposium at the New York Times website here. There's a nice exchange of views, and regular readers of this blog won't be surprised by my forecast that if China keeps growing economically, a serious security competition between the U.S. and China is nearly inevitable. War is not inevitable, in my view, assuming we get reasonably mature and competent leaders in Washington and Beijing. So cast those ballots carefully come November (and every four years after that).

For some of my other thoughts on China's rise, see here, here, and here.