I am pleased to offer the following guest post by Nasser Rabbat of MIT:

Nasser Rabbat writes:

The euphoria sparked by the 2011 Arab uprisings has settled into realpolitik. The youth who initiated the protest movements split into myriad organizations or withdrew in despair. The Islamists, disciplined through decades of clandestine political action, took over in Tunisia and Libya, and are poised to wrestle power from a recalcitrant army in Egypt. The secularists, assumed to be the natural allies of the West, are weak and divided. In Tunisia and Egypt, they garnered fewer votes in the elections than predicted. In Libya, they retreated from the National Transitional Council, leaving the Islamists to occupy its most powerful positions. In Syria, still struggling against a belligerent and criminal regime that is proving hard to nudge, the secularists in the opposition are constantly bickering, whereas the Islamists are organized and goal-oriented. Arab secularism, the events seem to suggest, is a spent force. The United States and other Western governments, claiming to be responding to the realities on the ground, are engaging the Islamic parties as the defining new paradigm of Arab politics.

Is this a new turn for the West? Did the West support the secularists before the revolutions? And has Arab secularism really become irrelevant? My answer to all three questions is an emphatic no. To begin with, the record of the West in the Arab world is patently not pro-secularist. Indeed, if we are to limit our assessment to the regimes that have been consistently backed by the U.S. in the last fifty years, we will find on the top of the list Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and Morocco, all avowedly Islamic regimes, at least in their claims to legitimacy or their application of Islamic law. Conversely, some of the most ardent opponents of the U.S. have been the secular regimes of the Baath party in Syria and Iraq, though their secularism proved skin-deep and opportunistic. Moreover, when the United States decided to avenge the attacks of 9/11, perpetrated as they were by an extremist Islamist militancy, its most decisive act was to destroy the secular regime of Iraq. Eight years later, when the Americans finally withdrew from Iraq, they left behind not only a flagrantly sectarian regime, but also a political class composed largely of religious movements umbilically linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nor does history show much Western support for the budding secular tendencies in the early twentieth century, which coincided with the colonization of most of the Arab world. Pragmatism may explain why colonial powers, Britain and France in particular, preferred to deal with traditional leaders. They had political influence, economic clout, and a wide base of clients. That they adhered to conservative forms of piety added to their usefulness: They understood the mechanisms of religious authority and could manipulate them to appease potential popular unrest. The few Arab secularists, on the other hand, even though thoroughly westernized and belonging to the social elite, were seen as troublemakers. Having been profoundly influenced by the principles of the Enlightenment, they formulated strong demands for liberation, democratization, and modernization. Many clashed with the colonial authorities and paid a heavy price of imprisonment or exile.

Independence, when it finally came, fell smack at the height of the Cold War. The West, which was eventually reduced to the United States, was seeking to build alliances of nations committed to countering the Communist threat. Conservative regimes, such as those of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, were obviously the most promising allies. So the West supported them regardless of their religious agendas. When military regimes came to power in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq after the defeat of these countries in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948, they first toyed with accepting Western tutelage. Their subsequent turning to the USSR as a patron more sympathetic to their national causes, however, did not translate into espousing communism or rejecting religion. Ungodly these military regimes certainly were, but they were not secular. They neither believed in nor practiced the separation of religion and politics. They in fact heavily relied on religious symbolism to frame the image of their one inspired despot and his family or clan. This was the case of Anwar al-Sadat after Camp David and his successor Hosni Mubarak, as well as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad. Fundamentalism and its defiant social expressions actually grew under their watch, even if they had been relentlessly suppressing all Islamic political organizations, or any other political activism for that matter.

Secularists had no place in such a system. Those who dared to speak out against it found themselves dismissed from their jobs, jailed, or forced to leave their countries. Some, who persisted in their criticism of the dictators or of the rigid views of the growing Islamist extremists, like the journalists Salim al-Lawzi and Samir Kassir in Lebanon, Hidaya Sultan Al-Salem in Kuwait, Farag Foda in Egypt, and Mohammed Taha in Sudan, were assassinated. Others, unable to cobble together a political structure to unite them like the Islamists had, channeled their political activism into more intellectual and artistic pursuits. Secularism, already accused of elitism because of the social background of its proponents, became even more rarefied as it migrated either away from the pulse of the street and into the confines of academia and art or out of the country altogether.

The 2011 uprisings seemed at first to bring secularism back to the forefront as a vociferous political force. Fueled by a new breed of activists -- young, globally networked, and unbothered by considerations of class, religion or gender -- the uprisings wielded the same principles that earlier Arab secularists have advocated. But like those earlier Arab secularists, the youth did not translate their secularist rallying cries into framers of political parties able to compete for the post-revolutionary governments. Some movements, notably the 6^th of April Movement in Egypt, simply declared after the fall of Mubarak's regime that it had no plan to become a political party, then lived to regret that impulsive decision. The prominent and reasonably popular candidate for the presidency in Egypt, Mohammad el-Baradei, withdrew from the race before it began, citing as a reason the reprehensible way politics was conducted by his detractors. The few attempts to register a secularist political presence in the elections in Tunis and Egypt were swept aside by the eminently more organized Islamist parties and by their shrewd appeal to the basic religiosity of the people, especially the poor and the illiterate.

Arab secularism, however, remains on the street and online. Though outdone in the current rush to power by the Islamists, it still has the ability to reassert itself in the political arena, if not as the ruling party, at least as lawful opposition and guardian of the principles of civic freedoms. The culture of lawful opposition, long absent under the totalitarian regimes, needs to be reinserted into the political discourse. This is as important a function as good governance for the well-being of the nascent Arab democracies. To that end, the efforts of the discontented revolutionary youth and the seasoned secular intellectuals should be united under the umbrella of political parties. The West should help them by recognizing their crucial political role and by treating them as long-term partners not just as recipients of training and aid.

In February 2011, after the victory of the Egyptian revolution in which they played no significant role, some of the most famous Islamic preachers gloated that the next government will be Islamic. Secularism, they contended, should be put to rest because it reigned for fifty years and failed. But true secularism has never had a chance to rule in the modern Arab world, except perhaps in Tunisia under al-Habib Bourguiba (1957-87). Otherwise, religion was always enshrined in the fiat constitutions of all the Arab kingdoms and republics, even those that were ferociously hunting down Islamists. Moreover, Arab rulers who hid behind secular masks, whether they were civilian or military, never separated religion from their politics. Many enlisted docile forms of religion and compliant sheiks as parts of their arsenal of control. In that, they were following in the footsteps of a long tradition of inglorious religion-based rule in the Arab world, which did not really end until the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1923. It is thus more accurate to question what Islamic rule of the kind imagined by the vocal Islamist organizations will bring that was not tried before during the long centuries of what they themselves believe was an Arab decline.

Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor of the History of Islamic Architecture at MIT.

I'm pleased to present the following guest post from Nina Tannenwald of Brown University. Alert readers will note that she is writing from a constructivist rather than realist perspective, but when you're trying to avoid a foolish war, paradigmatic loyalty is a decidedly secondary consideration.

Nina Tannenwald writes:

At a time when anti-Iran hawks are beating the drums of war, the international community needs to pursue all possible routes to a peaceful solution to Iran's nuclear challenge. One route that has not been tried is harnessing moral and religious norms as a source of nuclear restraint. Incongruous as it may seem, Iran's leaders have repeatedly stated that nuclear weapons are "un-Islamic." Why not hold them to it?

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa, a religious decree, in 2004, describing the use of nuclear weapons as "immoral." In a statement to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in August 2005, the Iranian chief nuclear negotiator, Sirus Naseri, read a statement reiterating Khameini's fatwa that "the production, stockpiling, or use of nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam." Many regime figures have repeated the prohibition, including Khamanei himself, who said in 2010 that Islam considered weapons of mass destruction (WMD) "to be symbols of genocide and are, therefore, forbidden and considered to be haraam [forbidden in Islam]."

No other national leader anywhere has ever asserted that nuclear weapons are, say, "un-Christian" or "un-Jewish" (although Western religious leaders and scholars have expressed such views).

Iran's leaders could be dissembling, of course, as part of their effort to mislead the international community. But no one forced them to say this -- let alone to repeat it publicly -- and Khameini has not repudiated this fatwa even as Iran's nuclear program has advanced. It would be strange for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its adherence to Islam to keep asserting this point if it were really totally insincere.

We don't need to take the Iranians at face value, but why not take advantage of the opening their own words provide? The international community should capitalize on this element of restraint. We should hold them to it.

How might this work? Diplomats should refer to the statements approvingly and frequently. President Obama should use his rhetorical gifts to publicly acknowledge the Iranian prohibition and state that, as a person of faith himself, he respects and welcomes the testament. The goal would be to invoke Islamic moral values as a positive contribution to both Iranian and global nuclear restraint.

A second approach would involve "Track II" diplomacy. This would entail holding conferences that bring together religious scholars and ethicists from different religions, along with government officials and nuclear strategists from key countries to discuss ethical constraints on nuclear weapons. This would be a good project for foundations to support.

This strategy -- a normative one -- would not replace sanctions. Rather, by invoking Islam's moral contribution in a positive way, and by connecting it to longer term efforts toward global nuclear disarmament, it could help provide Iranian leaders with the political cover and respect to engage in negotiations over their nuclear program.

International relations scholars have a term for this kind of normative strategy: "rhetorical entrapment." Developed especially in constructivist analyses of human rights, it refers to how NGOs especially, but also states and international organizations, seek to hold leaders accountable to their publically-stated commitments to moral values or norms. Leaders can become "entrapped" in a public debate over their adherence. The act of holding the debate increases the salience and legitimacy of the norms at issue and thereby raises the legitimacy, or normative, costs to the regime of violating its own commitments.

Thus, in contrast to a realist strategy for dealing with a recalcitrant state, which emphasizes imposing material costs (sanctions, military threats), a constructivist strategy emphasizes raising the normative (legitimacy) costs of a violation. This approach assumes that leaders care about certain kinds of legitimacy (in this case, fidelity to Islam), just as the realist strategy assumes that states will be vulnerable to material sanctions and threats.

Is this normative approach to Iran pie-in-the-sky? Realists may snicker, but, historically, religious and moral norms have played an important role in shaping our thinking about nuclear weapons. Christian churches and other religious groups played a key role in the anti-nuclear weapons movements of the 1950s and 1980s. Their moral critique of nuclear weapons made it impossible to think of such a weapon as "just another weapon." Perhaps most prominent was the American Catholic bishops' influential 1982 pastoral letter criticizing nuclear deterrence as "morally flawed." This powerful statement provoked a widespread debate about the ethics of the nuclear arms race and helped undermine public support for aggressive nuclear strategies.

Iran has good reason to harbor a special revulsion toward weapons of mass destruction. It is the second largest victim of WMD attacks after Japan. Iran suffered over 100,000 casualties, both military and civilian, from Iraqi chemical weapons attacks during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Iran did not retaliate in kind partly because it was unprepared but also because Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini believed that chemical weapons were prohibited by Islam.

This experience deeply affected the national psyche of a generation of Iranians. Adding to the bitterness is the Iranian perception that the West was mostly indifferent to this suffering. Western countries quietly sided with Saddam Hussein in the war and failed to strongly condemn the chemical weapons attacks. Thus Iran surely has something to contribute to the global moral discourse on weapons of mass destruction.

The repressive Iranian regime is distasteful for reasons that go well beyond nuclear weapons, and no one who cares about the fate of the Middle East should want Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Yet significant evidence suggests that Iranian leaders, while clearly determined to acquire a nuclear capability, have not yet made a decision to actually build a nuclear warhead. Invoking the value and worth of the Iranian regime's own publically-stated moral norms may help to reinforce more realist reasons for restraint, such as economic sanctions, military threats, or fears of provoking a nuclear arms race in the region.

Like anything else, this moral appeal may not work. But there is little to lose. To date, the key international players have shown a striking lack of diplomatic imagination in dealing with the Iranian challenge. Harnessing cultural and religious resources might facilitate a peaceful solution to this looming crisis and contribute to restraint on all sides. Of course, there is also the "boomerang" effect: engaging Iran in this conversation might require us to confront the status of our own moral values with respect to nuclear weapons.

Nina Tannenwald teaches international relations at Brown University. Her book, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945, received the 2009 Joseph Lepgold Prize.

Explanatory Note: A few weeks ago, I offered some comments on John Ikenberry's new book Liberal Leviathan, based on a panel discussion from the September 2011 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. John asked if he could offer a response, and I readily agreed. Here is his reply.

John Ikenberry writes:

I thank Steve for allowing me to share some ideas from my new book, Liberal Leviathan. In an earlier post, Steve offered some thoughtful comments on the book, focusing on my "grand narrative" of America's impact on world politics. I clearly have a more positive view of America's "liberal accomplishment" over the last hundred years than Steve. Steve sees my portrait of the America-led liberal order as normative; it is more ideal than real. Where I see America generating public goods and pushing and pulling states in the direction of an open, rule-based order, Steve sees a profoundly unruly America that has inflicted violence and disorder on the global system. It is not that the United States is unusually malevolent as a great power on the global stage, Steve argues. Indeed that is Steve's point -- the U.S. is just not "exceptional." I have several responses to Steve, but my bottom line is: the U.S. may not be "exceptional," but in world historical terms it is pretty unusual - unusual in finding itself with repeated opportunities to shape world politics (1919, 1945, 1991, and again today), and unusual in the ideas, interests, and strategies that it has brought to these ordering moments. A distinctive sort of global order took shape in the shadow of American postwar power, and -- on balance -- this has been a good thing for the world, at least when compared to past (Soviet, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan) and imagined (China) alternatives.

First, let me say something about the book's argument. At one level, the book is a scholarly work on the theory of international order -- the rise and fall of international orders, the various ways that states have built international order, and the particular character and logic of liberal international order. Liberal international order is order that is open and at least loosely rules-based. The book offers a theoretical account of why powerful states might want to build order with liberal characteristics and I explore the various "versions" of liberal international order that were pursed at historical junctions during the great 200 year arc of the "liberal ascendency." I argue that the United States did build a post-WWII order that might be described as a "liberal hegemonic order." It was a hierarchical order in which the US organized relations around multilateral institutions, open trade, alliances, client states, and so forth. In some parts of the postwar system, the United States pursued crudely imperial or ruthlessly power-political agendas, but in other realms -- and in the core of the overall order - relationships exhibited liberal characteristics (multilateral rules, diffuse reciprocity, open trade, democratic solidarity, etc.). America built a global hierarchy. Some of it was "hierarchy with imperial characteristics" and some of it was "hierarchy with liberal characteristics." The book has a theory to explain why it is one way or the other in various places and times.

I go on to argue that this hegemonic order is in crisis. Importantly, it is not liberal internationalism -- as a logic of order -- that is in crisis. It is America's hegemonic role that is in trouble. There is a global struggle underway over the distribution of rights, privileges, authority, etc. I argue that this is a "crisis of success" in that it is the rise of non-Western developing states and the ongoing intensification of economic and security interdependence that have triggered the crisis and overrun the governance institutions of the old order. This is a bit like Samuel Huntington's famous "development gap" -- a situation in which rapidly mobilizing and expanding social forces and economic transformation, facilitated by the old political institutions, have outpaced and overrun those institutions. That is what has happened to American hegemony. The book ends by asking: what comes next? And I argue that the constituencies for open, rules-based order are expanding, not contracting. The world system may become "less American," but it will not become "less liberal." So that is my argument.

Second, to come back to Steve, I do think that the United States has spearheaded a "liberal accomplishment." Within the parameters of the postwar American-led system "progressive upgrades" in world politics occurred. The world economy was opened up and the "golden era" of trade and growth followed. Germany and Japan were integrated into a collaborative world order. France and Germany found a way to live together. A whole range of developing states -- in East Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Latin America grew, developed, and made democratic transitions. These accomplishments flow from the character of the order. It is an order where the "spoils of modernity" have been widely shared. It is an order where authority and leadership has not been imperial in form but shared in a variety of formal and informal governance institutions. It is an order that is "easy to join and hard to overturn."

As I said, my book seeks to identify and compare the various ways in which great powers have built order. It is, of course, dangerous to try to go beyond this and compare the "performance" of the international orders that have appeared over the ages. But I go ahead and do it. I argue that this postwar order did do a lot of macro-political things rather well - particularly if we use metrics such as wealth creation, provision of physical safety, ideals to guide the struggle for social justice, and so forth. These accomplishments were not all "made in Washington." The U.S. sometimes stood on the wrong side of these accomplishments, supporting -- as it did during the Cold War and in some cases even today -- despots and dictators, defending the rich and ignoring the poor. The global system itself underwent modernization and expansion, and societies - to the extent they could - often made their own way upward.

The United States is a paradox: it has been the country that over the course of the twentieth century made the most sustained efforts to build agreed upon global rules and institutions - but it has also been deeply ambivalent about deferring to the authority of those rules and institutions. The United States has styled itself as the guardian of peace and the status quo, but it has also projected military force, intervened abroad, and manipulated other societies. In this sense, Steve is right - the United States is a normal, not exceptional, great power. But my point is not that the United States is exceptional in the sense that it is more moral or enlightened. My point is that, despite all this, the United States has used its unusual power position to shape, push, and pull the international system in a liberal direction. To be sure, it has done this to advance its own long-term interests. It has tied its power to the creation of a particular type of international order - but it has been motivated by advancing its interests, legitimating its power, protecting its equities. A careful reading of my book will show that the "sources" for America's liberal leadership are not its liberal "values" or "ideational traditions" as such, but its strategic interests.

So, in our debate over America's grand narrative, we are really grappling with the question of whether liberal democracies and the wider world can in fact build sustainable global institutions that bias the flow of world history in a progressive direction. I think that when we look back at the last century we find glimmers of hope. There have been real accomplishments. States have found strategies and practices that facilitate restraint, accommodation, and collective action. This conviction is what makes me a liberal. The era that the world is now entering will surely put my arguments to the test!

Michael C. Desch of Notre Dame offers the following guest post:

There are lots of reasons that President Barack Obama will remain comfortably within the consensus here in the United States and oppose any Palestinian request for recognition of their statehood later this month at the United Nations. 

Not opposing the Palestinians' request for U.N. recognition would cut against the grain of U.S. policy toward the region. In a July vote marked by the level of unanimity that is usually only seen in one party "people's democracies," the House of Representatives voted 406 to 6 to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority if it moves ahead. The president is also up for re-election next year, and given the shaky state of the U.S. economy, the race will be close and he will not want to alienate any potential supporters, including the Israel lobby. 

But the problem with our "unwavering" support for the policies of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government is that it rests on a questionable assumption: That the Palestinians represent the main obstacle to peace today.

The Palestinians' and the rest of the Arab World's unwillingness to recognize the Jewish state may have been the primary road-block to peace in the past. But since the Arab League's March 2002 Beirut Declaration offering recognition of Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state and the coming to power in the West Bank of a moderate and effective government under President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad Salam, Israel now has, Hamas notwithstanding, real partners for peace. Indeed, had the Palestinians focused their struggle for self-determination in the U.N. 40 years ago, we all would have been thrilled.

But it is not clear that the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world have a partner on the Israeli side.  Former head of Israel's secret service the Mossad Meir Dagan, surely no pro-Palestinian dove, has vociferously criticized Netanyahu's lack of vision for failing to offer a credible Israeli peace initiative; a criticism that Netanyahu's ally World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder echoed. 

It is the structure of Israel's multi-party democratic political system that gives the roughly 30 percent of the Israeli public unalterably committed to retaining the occupied territories and all of Jerusalem  disproportionate influence in Netanyahu's right-wing coalition. There are other potential coalition partners for Netanyahu who support the two state solution, including the Centrist Kadima Party, but Obama needs to prod Netanyahu to embrace them.

Read on

Explanatory Note: A couple of weeks ago, I read a news story about how museums around the country were competing to exhibit the retired space shuttle Discovery, after its long and supposedly distinguished career. That's not surprising, of course, as having a shuttle on display would undoubtedly be a big draw for a lot of museums. What troubled me was the suspicion that future museum exhibits would depict the whole shuttle program in laudatory terms, instead of treating it as an foolish diversion of national resources. Space policy isn't really my thing, however, and I said to myself: "You know, you'd need a rocket scientist to write this properly!" Fortunately, I have one available: my father. He's a geophysicist who spent much of his career designing satellite packages and interpreting the data they produced, so I asked him if he'd be willing to contribute a guest post on the topic. Here's what he sent in. -- S.M.W.

By Martin Walt IV

Recent news columns have commemorated the retirement of the Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery. It is indeed noteworthy that this vehicle experienced some 39 launches and traveled 150 million miles in near-Earth space. This achievement was made possible by the imaginative engineers and scientists who conceived the Shuttle program and developed the necessary technical innovations. Recognition must also be given to the dauntless flight crews -- both military personnel and civilians -- whose courage and dedication were outstanding, especially those astronauts who volunteered to fly after two orbiters were lost in accidents that revealed serious weaknesses in the hardware and in NASA's managerial culture.

Read on

By Michael Desch

The title of Bob Woodward's new book Obama's Wars is ambiguous: Is he referring to the two on-going wars the United States is waging in Iraq or Afghanistan? But only Afghanistan can fairly be called "Obama's war," and Iraq gets very short shrift here. Why then the plural
"wars?"

Like Woodward's previous series of books Bush at War, Obama's Wars is as much, if not more, about the political war at home as it is about the war in Afghanistan itself. Of course, every war involves lots of domestic debate and struggle, and bureaucratic politics hardly wane when the balloon goes up, but the United States' most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been notable in that they have sparked more civil-military conflict on the home front than we've seen since the Vietnam War.

Low-intensity conflict between the Obama administration and the key elements of the U.S.
military charged with conducting the war in Afghanistan (ISAF Commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, and Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen) is such a constant theme in Woodward's account that the president feels the need in his valedictory interview to deny that civil-military conflict over the strategy and force-levels of the Afghanistan war is as bad as it had been during the Vietnam War (p. 377).

If civil-military relations aren't that bad, then why even mention them? The answer is clear: The Iraq and Afghan wars have seriously frayed the fabric civil-military in the United States, perhaps not yet at the level of the Vietnam War, but certainly heading in that direction.

Read on

By David M. Edelstein

Thanks to Steve Walt for inviting me to contribute to his blog while he is away on vacation. I have been a regular reader of Steve's blog since it launched, and for my first post, I wanted to pick up on a motif that I have seen running through Steve's posts: Will realists ever again support the use of military force by the United States?

Followers of this blog will by now have little doubt about how Walt felt about the Iraq War or how he views the prospects for U.S. success in Afghanistan. In fact, throughout the history of his blog, I can only recall one case in which Walt advocated the use of U.S. military force (and I think the realist credentials in that case are rather dubious).

There is a common perception in the field of political science that realists are war-mongering Neanderthals anxious to use military force at the drop of a hat. Attend any meeting (if you must) of the American Political Science Association or the International Studies Association, and one will find realists derided as the "bombs and bullets guys" as if we were all direct descendants of Curtis LeMay. What is notable about this -- and what has been notable about Steve's blog -- is just how infrequently realists have supported the use of American military force. Take the U.S. interventions of the post-Cold War period: Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Of those interventions, Afghanistan was the only one that received anything close to strong support from most realists. Others, most notably the Iraq War, received vehement opposition from the vast majority of realists. Even in the case of Afghanistan, realists expressed trepidation about the prospects for ultimate success despite early victories. 

Read on

The following commentary is by Professor Sebastian Rosato of Notre Dame University, who offers a decidedly pessimistic take on the EU's future. His new book,  Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community, will be published by Cornell University Press in January 2011.

The Untied States of Europe
by Sebastian Rosato

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about Europe's debt crisis. Optimists, such as Princeton political scientist Andrew Moravcsik, declare that "it is too soon to count Europe out." The European Union has survived plenty of crises in its time and will get through this one as well. Pessimists like Harvard historian Niall Ferguson disagree, arguing that what has happened in Greece is likely to happen elsewhere. To his mind, Europe could be on the verge of a "disastrous Europewide banking crisis" that has the potential to bring down the euro.

Given the amount of ink spilled on the Greek drama, it's easy to lose sight of the real tragedy here. Regardless of how the EU navigates the current mess, the dream of a United States of Europe -- a political, military, and economic union from Lisbon to Latvia and the Baltic to the Balkans -- is over. What most people don't realize is that this has been the case for almost twenty years.

Nothing can be done to salvage the dream because deep structural forces are at work. The Europeans formed their union during the cold war to counter the awesome power of the Soviet Union. So when the USSR collapsed in 1991 there was suddenly no need for a United States of Europe.

The events of the past two decades show clearly that the end of the cold war also signaled the end of the European dream. EU member states have made no significant move toward political or military union and have begun to unravel their economic union. Absent a serious external threat to Europe, this process will continue. In the future, the current crisis will be remembered as just another warning sign that the dream was ending.

Although calls for a European union go back centuries, they were never seriously entertained before 1945. Nation states like France and Germany jealously guarded their sovereignty -- their right to independence.

It was only in the context of the cold war that the Europeans took a big step toward creating a United States of Europe. In 1951, France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux states created the European Coal and Steel Community. In 1957, they extended the coal and steel model to the whole economy by forming the European Economic Community. Then, determined to preserve their new trading bloc, they fixed their currencies through the European Monetary Agreement. In less than a decade, they had established an economic union.

Read on

Guest post by Sean Kay

Recently in Washington, D.C., a group of experts met as part of an ongoing review to develop a new "strategic concept" for the NATO allies to approve at a heads-of-state summit to be held in late 2010.  Key speeches were presented by the NATO Secretary General Fogh Rassmussen, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.  The result, however, has been an exercise in NATO "group think" with little relevance to real strategic thinking about America and its core national security interes.

This NATO review process is failing to account for three fundamental contradictions.

First, NATO Secretary General Rassmussen stated that:  "We must face new challenges. Terrorism, proliferation, cyber security or even climate change will oblige us to seek new ways of operating. And in a time of financial and budget constraints, we need to maximize our efficiency within limited resources."  However, all of these issues are challenges far better suited for the European Union (EU) and a special US-EU relationship to manage rather than NATO.

Second, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted that:  "This Alliance has endured because of the skill of our diplomats, the strength of our soldiers, and - most importantly - the power of its founding principles."  Yet, one of NATO's core founding principles was to create a circumstance in which Europe could stand on its own two feet.  This is, effectively, NATO's last unfulfilled mission after the Cold War and it is now hindered by an institutional framework allowing Europeans to free-ride on American security provision.

Third, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated:  "The demilitarization of Europe - where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it - has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21^st."  The demilitarization of Europe, however, means that NATO has succeeded in its fundamental mission - that Europe no longer fights wars is a good thing.  Moreover, Europe has no incentive to contribute to global security missions so long as America takes the lead.  Europe has every incentive to free-ride on American power and NATO perpetuates that.

Secretary Gates did provide his audience with a dose of realism, noting that:  "Right now, the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems." What he fails to appreciate, however, is that these problems are not going to be solved by berating European allies for pursuing obvious benefit to their national interests.  Rather, the solution is to change the strategic dynamic by beginning to reduce American military commitments overseas and realigning - including cutting - defense spending to reflect new security realities.

Recently, Secretary of State Clinton testified to Congress that:  We have to address this deficit and the debt of the U.S. as a matter of national security, not only as a matter of economics."  Indeed, the most serious threat to America's geostrategic position in the world is its $12 trillion national debt.  Yet, the United States has increased its commitment to Afghanistan, seems unlikely to be able to disengage from Iraq anytime soon, faces a growing confrontation with Iran, and is simultaneously increasing its defense spending.  Meanwhile, the American public is in its most isolationist mood in decades.  It is in this context that NATO's "group of experts" seeks to add missions to the alliance, rather than rethink the role of the alliance itself.

The Department of Defense recently published its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) which states rightly that the United States must "increasingly cooperate with key allies and partners if it is to sustain peace and security" (interestingly in a December 2009 draft version of the QDR, the language read "rely" on key allies).  Yet the QDR and the new defense budget both show a United States seeking to hold onto a primacy in global security that is no longer sustainable.  The QDR notes that the US seeks to prevent and deter conflict by:  "Extending a global defense posture comprised of joint, ready forces forward stationed and rotationally deployed to prevail across all domains, prepositioned equipment and overseas facilities, and international agreements."  This is not a strategy that reflects wise prioritization by a country $12 trillion in debt.

The QDR typically emphasizes NATO as part of this global presence - and understandably points to Afghanistan as an essential component of this global partnership in a transformed alliance.  While it is increasingly said that Afghanistan is a crucial test for NATO - the reality is that NATO has already failed in Afghanistan.  In his assessment from summer 2009, General Stanley McChrystal noted that the operational culture of the NATO mission in Afghanistan would have to be fundamentally transformed.  This critical step, however, is not happening.  While the Europeans are contributing, there is nothing inherent in the ISAF command structure that requires it to be a NATO-engaged coalition.  In fact, Brussels currently has very little to do with operations in Afghanistan and Europeans might contribute more if their reputation in Afghanistan was more closely linked to the future of the European Union.

A strategic concept for NATO need not be very complicated.  There are basically two missions left for the alliance.

First, NATO should be kept as a reserve capacity built around the traditional Article 5 mission of territorial collective defense as a hedge against future geopolitical rivalry at the global or regional level.  This, however, need not require costly new initiatives to keep NATO busy, but rather should be seen as a reserve fund of alliance power - political in nature with operational doctrines available on the shelf.  NATO should continue its process of reaching out to engage Russia and abandon its provocative and self-defeating discussion of further enlargement or "global NATO" operations which are not realistic or sustainable but which create strategic costs in the US-Russian relationship.

Second, NATO's staff should be given a clear mandate to work themselves out of a job - with their final mission being to hand over full lead responsibility for regional security to the European Union.  The most fundamental missions of NATO are achieved - Europe is integrated, whole, and free.  The challenge now is to ensure that this is sustained via the European Union.  By jealously hanging onto an irrelevant dominance over European security policy, the United States hinders effective EU security integration and ironically damages America's own interests.  If the United States can't hand over lead authority in Europe where can it?

Before committing to a strategic concept driven by NATO groupthink, President Obama should convene a policy review that brings into the process a broader range of strategic thinking than a self-motivated Washington-Brussels network which habitually seeks new missions, new budgets, and continues to drain the United States of scarce resources.  Europe is not yet capable of standing alone - and these strategic shifts will not happen overnight.  However, they certainly will never happen if the United States does not make the building of the European Union, not NATO, its primary strategic goal in the transatlantic security architecture.  A fundamental and lasting alignment of the transatlantic security dynamic can be a vital legacy for President Obama - but it will require a much greater application of realism to the role of NATO than is currently being considered.

Sean Kay is Chair, International Studies and Professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.  He is also a Mershon Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and Non-Resident Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute in Washington, D.C.  He is the author of NATO and the Future of European Security and Global Security in the Twenty-first Century:  The Quest for Power and the Search for Peace.

By Justin Logan

Unipolarity is one of the hotter IR theory topics, and it's virtually impossible to discuss the subject without reference to World Out Of Balance. A terrific book by Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, it provokes the reader to rethink his or her views, and engages seriously with realism, liberalism, and constructivism.

Their argument, in a nutshell, is that scholars from the above schools have underrated the United States' ability to transcend structural constraints: realists overrate the impact of the balance of power; liberals overrate the impact of economic interdependence and international institutions, and constructivists overrate legitimacy constraints on the United States.

The authors conclude:

Our book provides the necessary analysis for concluding that the United States does, in fact, have an opportunity to revise the system -- and, moreover, that this opportunity will long endure...  Because their theories ignore or misunderstand the implications of the unipolar distribution of power, scholars have generally underestimated the U.S. potential to remake the post-1991 international system. More realistic theories with a clear-eyed appraisal of the workings of a unipolar system would lead them to see the systemic constraints they believe stand in the way of such a policy for what they are: artifacts of the scholarship of previous eras.

Now that's an argument.

The topic of unipolarity has spawned two main debates: The first over how long unipolarity is likely to endure, and the second over whether unipolarity is peaceful. But to my mind, there is a third interesting question worth examining -- the same one Gen. David Petraeus asked journalist Rick Atkinson on his way into Iraq: "Tell me how this ends?"

For many scholars, this is a moot question: Unipolarity is already ending. But even for those who think the end is further down the road, imperial overstretch -- taking on a range of commitments beyond our means -- is one way America might fall from being in a league of its own to being just first among equals.

In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Brooks and Wohlforth waved off dangers such as the long-term fiscal imbalances in the United States by observing that these problems "can be fixed." Similarly, in a roundtable review of their book, the authors admitted that they "did not compose a theory of how unipolarity ends," but they seem reasonably certain that overstretch is not a concern. Responding to criticism that power yields ambition and ambition can lead to overstretch, Brooks and Wohlforth fired back:

This is a bit like arguing that a person will dramatically increase his spending priorities if he garners a windfall -- e.g. he goes from having $1 million in assets to having $10 million in assets -- and will be more likely to become bankrupt as a result. Yet how much a consumer spends is not structurally determined by income, just as how much a state takes on its foreign policy is not structurally determined by how much power it has. A wealthy individual can go bankrupt, to be sure, but it requires poorer choices to do so than if they had fewer resources.

I'm not convinced. Long traditions in human history -- and in international politics -- suggest otherwise. Hubris has not been a common affliction of people of modest means. The pride that goeth before a fall is frequently spawned by possessions and power. Or, as Lord Acton wrote, "power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

But perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Brooks and Wohlforth's dismissal of the overstretch argument is that it was Wohlforth who argued (with two co-authors in an edited volume on the balance of power in ancient history and non-European contexts), that overstretch is a frequent cause of the demise of hegemonic systems. Summing up the findings, Wohlforth et al surmised that:

Not only is military expansion a well-nigh universal behavior, but ... such expansion is frequently characterized by myopic advantage-seeking (boondoggling), rather than aimed at long-term system maintenance (balancing), even among rivals to potential hegemons... The pattern of boondoggling is a major reason why balanced systems routinely break down, and why systemic hegemons frequently squander their advantages." (Emphasis mine.)

If unprofitable military expansion is a well-nigh universal behavior that explains the demise of systemic hegemons, it's strange that Brooks and Wohlforth have been as dismissive of the concept as they have.

Maybe I'm just being a Nervous Nellie (or maybe I've fallen victim to the Pundit's Fallacy, where a pundit assumes that the key to political success, international or otherwise, involves the adoption of the commentator's own policy views). But I think the perils of the "systemic activism" Brooks and Wohlforth are urging, represent more cause for concern than they let on.

Justin Logan is associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC.

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By Monica Duffy Toft

As American troops pull back from Iraq's urban areas, a central question is whether Iraq's forces will be able to secure the peace. If history is any guide, Iraq's security forces face a challenging task. Ending civil wars and keeping them ended is not easy. Iraq faces three critical risk factors.

First, the violence was ended by a negotiated settlement. Iraq is a unique case when it comes to the emergence of civil war, which started with invasion and occupation by an outside power: the United States and its coalition partners. Yet rather than unite and attack the invaders cum occupiers, Iraqis turned on themselves. Stopping this self-destruction has entailed a series of negotiations and agreements between the parties to form a government and rule the country. In essence, no one side emerged victorious (as most recently by the government in Sri Lanka); rather, a negotiated settlement of sorts was put into place in Iraq, with each of the main factions guaranteed a say in running the government.

On the face of it, negotiated settlements are desirable outcomes for ending violence. Violence is stopped and each party is guaranteed a voice in the government; it seems more democratic. Yet this equity in governance comes at a price: negotiated settlements turn out to be the most precarious ending to civil wars. They are twice as likely to break down than are military victories, and the recurred war that results is often even longer and bloodier than the first war. In the longer term, Sri Lanka is likely to stabilize while Iraq is not. This is the case because for negotiated settlements to work, they require trust between the contracting parties and continual negotiation and bargaining. When tensions run deep, such bargaining and comprise are difficult. What we find is that these settlements hold for one or two rounds of elections, with the elections functioning as part of the negotiated process, but often break down thereafter. Why? Because one party or both becomes frustrated that it has not won (enough) parliamentary seats, leadership positions, or desired policies. Rather than pursue the ballot box one more time, they take out their guns and challenge the system.

There are exceptions. One is El Salvador, which suffered a long and brutal civil war that ended in a negotiated settlement in 1992. It has remained at peace, and in fact, the candidate for the former rebels, the Farabundo Martî, recently won the presidency. This bodes well for democracy in El Salvador. However, such an outcome will be more difficult to achieve in Iraq. The reason is the second critical risk factor in Iraq, which is sectarian divisions, a risk factor absent in El Salvador, where the fight was class-based, not ethnic, religious, or linguistic.

Divisions based on identity are risk factors for a number of reasons. First, most identities are born in bloodshed and in opposition to an "other." This means that when stories of the birth of the nation or religion are told and retold, they often invoke an enemy that must be overcome. For the Serbs, it is the nasty Ottomans or Muslims; for the Chechens, it is Moscow's imperial yoke; and for the Shia in Iraq, it is historically the Sunnis. Such histories of fear, hatred and violence are difficult to overcome and almost impossible to erase. Thus, when political power is divided up, these identities come to the fore and often play a role in how power is divided and administered. The Shii-Sunni division is real, and it will continue to play out in Iraqi politics. Already there are warning signs, including the dominance of Shia in the security apparatus (notably the Ministry of Interior) and the lack of progress in integrating the Sunni-dominated Awakening Council members in the security forces.

A final critical risk factor is the geographical distribution of Iraqis, with Kurds dominant in the north, the Shia in the southeast, and Sunnis in the west. Living in enclaves affords them greater autonomy to not only run their own affairs, but challenge the state. Ethnic groups that are concentrated in regions of a country and are also a majority of that region's population are three times more likely to engage in violence than those that are dispersed or constitute minorities.

One bit of good news is Baghdad. Not only is the city intermingled with different populations, but urbanization has a dampening effect on ethnic violence. Nevertheless, years of violence have segregated neighborhoods, and even countries with intermingled capitals undergo serious challenges to centralized state authority (consider Belgium).

Taken alone, these risk factors might not tip the balance. In combination, it's a different story. States experiencing civil wars ended by negotiated settlement, with distrust and fear among the dominant identity groups that are concentrated into separate enclaves are difficult to manage even in well established democracies. The likelihood Iraq will emerge as a consolidated democracy is slim. More likely, either Iraq will divide, or a new strong-man -- Shii or Sunni --will emerge to keep the country together.

Monica Duffy Toft is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School and the author of The Geography of Ethnic Violence and Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars.

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