Hillary

Back in 2007, we wrote that AIPAC has an "almost unchallenged hold on Congress." Little has happened since then to alter that conclusion, and we will probably get another demonstration of Congressional spinelessness this week. On Tuesday, the House is scheduled to vote on H.R. 867, an AIPAC-sponsored resolution denouncing the recent Goldstone Report on possible war crimes by Hamas and Israel during the Gaza War last year. You can read the resolution here. You should then read Judge Goldstone's response here, which points out the errors in the House resolution. And then read historian Tony Judt's eloquent statement here. If you're convinced that the resolution makes a mockery of America's professed commitment to justice and human rights, then you might express that sentiment here or here. Or just call your Congressman's office and tell him/her to grow a backbone and vote against it.

Meanwhile, over in Israel itself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is completing the Obama administration's humiliating retreat from the principles set forth in the president's Cairo speech of less than five months ago. In a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Clinton did not criticize continued Israeli home demolitions in East Jerusalem (a practice she had previously denounced), and praised Netanyahu for making "unprecedented concessions" on settlement expansion. Huh? This is Clintonian double-talk worthy of her husband. Netanyahu's "concession" was to insist that Israel would keep building whatever and wherever it wished in East Jerusalem, and would also continue the "natural growth" of settlements in the West Bank, but would not start any completely new settlements for awhile. Bear in mind that virtually every country in the world regards all of the settlements -- both the unauthorized outposts and the vast neighborhoods built by the Israeli government -- as illegal under international law, and the United States used to say this too. And for this "concession" the Palestinians are supposed to enter into another meaningless round of discussions, while the bulldozers and construction crews continue to eat away at the land on which they hope to establish a state of their own. To praise Netanyahu's position as an "unprecedented concession" is like discovering someone is robbing your house, and then expressing gratitude when they offer to do it a bit more slowly.

The two-state solution was on life-support when Obama took office, and at first it appeared he might make a serious effort to nurse it back to health and make it a reality. At least, that's what he said he was going to do.  Instead, he and his Secretary of State are in the process of pulling out the plug. But what will they do when "two states for two peoples" isn't an option and everybody finally admits it, and the Palestinians begin to demand equal rights in "greater Israel?" Will the United States support their claims for equality, democracy, and individual rights, or will it continue to defend and subsidize what will then be an apartheid state? Well, if it's up to our courageous reps in Congress, you know what the answer will be.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Moscow earlier this week, seeking Russian support for tighter sanctions on Iran. And what did she get for his efforts? A few nice photo ops, plus an unambiguous "nyet" from Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov.

I have a couple of questions.

Did she go there believing that she really would get a meaningful commitment for tighter sanctions from the Russians? Or did she know beforehand that she wasn't going to get anywhere, but felt she had to go through the motions anyway?

Frankly, I don't know which answer would worry me more. If it's the former, she's getting very bad advice from her Russia experts, who clearly have no idea how Russia's leaders perceive their own interests. If the latter, she has no business wasting time and effort on a lost cause and giving Lavrov the opportunity to score points by stiffing her in public. The Secretary of State of a great power shouldn't be flying off to foreign capitals with the diplomatic equivalent of a tin cup, pleading with them to comply with our wishes. You're supposed to wait until your assistants have got the deal more-or-less in place, and then you show up to make the final push and iron out the last sticky details. Either way, this just wasn't very smart diplomacy.

And let's not overlook the obvious possibility that Lavrov was right: right now isn't an opportune time to threaten Iran with more sanctions. The initial round of talks were encouraging (though there's still a long way to go), and brandishing threats is probably the best way to derail them before any additional progress is made. There are undoubtedly people in the United States (and Iran) who would like to see that happen, but I didn't think Hillary was one of them.

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I had a very pleasant R & R -- thank you -- and I'm grateful to Justin Logan for filling in with such clear and well-argued pieces on unipolarity and Iran's nuclear program. I would only add that I'm a big fan of the work that Bill Wohlforth and Steve Brooks have done in recent years, despite my various disagreements with some of what they've written, and I'm glad that Justin put their work up in bright lights.

I managed to avoid the Internet almost entirely while I was away, and even skipped the New York Times most days. So I'm playing catch-up on the week’s events, and have only a few thoughts on recent developments.

On North Korea: The freeing of the two journalists strikes me was a clear case of pragmatic realism in action, and President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton deserve points for their calm, clear-eyed approach to a vexing but ultimately not-very significant problem. They achieved the U.S. goal -- getting the two women out -- and Kim Jong Il got a photo op but nothing more. Even getting a former president to drop in isn't all that significant these days, because North Korea has welcomed former presidents before. True, North Korea got Bill to visit without having to pay his normally whopping speaker's fee, but they also didn't get a speech. Indeed, the fact that they seem to place so much value on a brief drop-in by an ex-president reveals a lot about the regime's pathetic need for attention. As for the former president, he deserves credit for staying on message and not grandstanding while he was there, though the real work was almost certainly done behind-the-scenes and he didn't have to do any actual negotiating.  

In the end, the whole business was not that big a deal (except for the two journalists and their families, of course), and I think it confirms the value of not over-reacting every time Pyongyang does something annoying. Being annoying is its only diplomatic asset these days, but our best course is to treat them as a minor irritant and reserve most of our attention for more important problems. And it's probably good for Hillary if Bill has something constructive to do every now and then.

So props all around, and I would love to hear how conservative critics of the administration's handling of the problem would explain their positions to the journalists or their families.

On Afghanistan: The Times reports today that the Obama administration is still trying to come up with suitable "benchmarks" to measure progress in Afghanistan. Taking time to develop meaningful yardsticks for success or failure is a good idea in theory, but such measures are usually elusive in the context of counterinsurgency warfare. Body counts are a terrible measure, for example, because rising counts may simply reflect greater insurgent activity (and recruitment), and signs of diminished insurgent activity may simply mean that they are lying low. Testimony from civilians is also suspect, because they have obvious incentives to tell whoever is currently in charge of their village or region whatever they think the occupier wants to hear. Remember what a South Vietnamese general told a U.S. official back in the 1960s, in reference to the late Robert McNamara: "Ah, les statistiques! Your Secretary of Defense loves statistics. We Vietnamese can give him all he wants. If you want them to go up, they will go up. If you want them to go down, they will go down."

More broadly, the fact that Obama's team is having a tough time devising good measures is another sign that we don't really know what we are doing there. And I mean that in two senses: 1) what are we trying to accomplish, and 2) what ARE we doing there? I'd also remind everyone that the Bush administration spent a lot of time laying out various "benchmarks" in Iraq, and then focused primarily on the ones where there was progress.

Via Matt Yglesias (linking to Mark Kleiman), we've also learned that the U.S. expenditures on Afghanistan are now more than five times greater than the country's entire annual GDP. That allocation of resources might make sense if we were trying to corner the opium market and sell it ourselves, but otherwise, it suggests that we aren't thinking very clearly about our strategic priorities. It was reasonable to spend a lot of money deterring Soviet expansion in Europe during the Cold War, and one can make a similar case for spending money to preserve a balance of power in the Persian Gulf, because Europe was a "key center of industrial power" and oil is the lifeblood on which the world economy runs. But spending five times more than it would cost to buy up everything a country produces (and committing the U.S. to do so for many years to come), is like putting an elaborate burgler alarm on a tar-paper shack, and then hiring an expensive security service to guard it for the next decade. Not smart.

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Since Barack Obama became president back in January, his administration has launched a dizzying array of foreign policy initiatives. They've "pushed the reset button" with Russia, gotten serious about a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, and doubled down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama has extended an open-hand to Iran, made a major speech to the Muslim world, pressed ahead on climate change, and talked about major reductions in nuclear arsenals. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden added a few more items to the agenda just last week, suggesting that the United States might extend a security umbrella in the Middle East should Iran develop nuclear weapons, reaffirming U.S. security commitments in South and South-east Asia, and cozying up (a bit gingerly) to controversial Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. And Clinton’s earlier speech to the Council on Foreign Relations made it clear that she thinks that nothing much is going to get done without active U.S. involvement (while noting that the United States couldn’t do it all alone).

On the one hand, these initiatives (and Obama's own charisma) have gone some distance toward repairing America's tarnished international image.  A recent survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project showed a significant improvement in America's image around the world, and especially among U.S. allies in Europe. Chalk one up for a democratic system: holding regular elections does allow a country to get rid of incompetent leaders and hope for something better.

But the fact that more people around the world have a "favorable" impression of the United States does not mean that their governments are going to roll over and give Washington whatever it wants. Indeed, there are already signs that Obama’s ambitious agenda is facing significant resistance. India and China are not on board with Obama's proposals for a climate change agreement, which means that the entire project is in jeopardy. The Afghan and Pakistani governments are expressing reservations about U.S. strategy in Central Asia, and the past record suggests that neither government will play straight with Washington when dealing with the jihadi issue. North Korea remains defiant and Iran shows no sign of succumbing to Obama's charm offensive. Israel is digging in its heels on settlements and America's Arab friends are reluctant to begin normalizing relations with Israel in the absence of genuine (as opposed to rhetorical) progress towards a two-state solution. Even the Europeans stiffed the administration on its proposals for coordinating responses to the economic crisis, and key NATO allies are doing less in Afghanistan even as the United States does more. Trouble spots like Somalia or Sudan remain as intractable as ever, and I haven't even mentioned drug violence in Mexico or anti-Americanism in other parts of Latin America.  

Moreover, trying to advance the ball on so many different fronts simultaneously carries its own risks. In particular, it provides governments that are opposed to some or all of Washington's agenda with an obvious way to respond: they can "just say no." In Taming American Power, I labeled this strategy "balking," (a term suggested to me by Seyom Brown) and I argued that it was a common way for weak states to prevent a dominant power from imposing its will. In a world where the United States remains significantly stronger than any other power, few states want to get into a direct test of strength with Washington. But American power is not so vast that it can simply snap its fingers and expect everyone to do its bidding. 

Why? Because exercising leverage is itself costly, and the more you do in one area, the more latitude that opponents somewhere else are likely to have. There are still only 24 hours in a day, and the White House can't devote equal attention and political capital to every issue. So states that don’t want to do what Obama wants can delay, dither, obfuscate, drag their feet, or just say no, knowing that the United States doesn’t have the resources, attention span, staying power, or political will to force their compliance now or monitor it afterwards.  

An even better tactic (perfected by a number of close U.S. allies) is to pretend to comply with American wishes while blithely going ahead with their own agendas. So NATO allies promise to increase their defense efforts but never manage to do much; Israel promises to stop building settlements but somehow the number of illegal settlers keeps growing, the Palestinians pledge to reform but make progress at a glacial pace, Pakistan suppresses jihadis with one hand and subsidizes them with the other, Iran agrees to negotiate but continues to enrich, China says it will crack down on copyright violations but the problem remains pervasive, and so on.

In On War, Carl von Clausewitz famously described what he termed the "friction" of warfare; the accumulated set of minor obstacles and accidents that made even the simplest of objectives difficult to achieve. The same problem can arise in foreign policy: even when everything is simple, "the simplest things are very difficult." States that oppose what the United States is trying to do have lots of ways of increasing that friction without triggering an actual crisis. In other words, Obama's foreign policy may fail not because he loses some dramatic confrontation, but simply because a whole array of weaker actors manage to grind him down. In this scenario he doesn't get vanquished, just "nibbled to death by ducks." 

Obama took office with energy, a new vision, an experienced team, and lengthy "to-do" list. But one can already sense the forward motion slowing, which will encourage opponents to dig their heels in deeper and throw more obstacles in his path. If the administration keeps trying to do everything at once, there is a real danger that their actual foreign policy achievements will be quite modest. The sooner they decide which goals they think they can actually bring off, and focus their energies there, the more likely they are to succeed.  And a few tangible successes now might actually make the other items on their agenda easier to accomplish later on.

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Before I catch up on other developments -- like the new "plan" for Afghanistan/Pakistan, the Netanyahu government in Israel, the G20 summit, etc. -- I thought I’d pass along a few things I learned during my visit to Singapore last week. Here are a few quick impressions, based on my conversations with a number of academics and senior policymakers there, and by a roundtable discussion with Ashley Tellis, Yuen Foon Khong, Vinod Aggarwal, C. Raja Mohan, and myself (sponsored by the S Rajaratnam School and moderated by its Dean, Barry Desker).

First, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got full marks for her Asia trip last month. The decision to make Asia her first foreign destination was much appreciated (especially given the short shrift the region had received under Bush), and the people I spoke with were also impressed by how she handled herself along the way. Singaporeans are looking forward to welcoming Obama there for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in November. If the Obama administration is looking to refurbish ties with various Asian allies (and they should), the groundwork has been laid and the effort will be welcome.

Second, nobody in Singapore seemed enthusiastic about America doubling down in Central Asia. There was some grudging acceptance that the United States still had a role to play there, but even the strongest advocates of U.S. involvement in that conflict saw it as a grim necessity rather than an opportunity. Several officials emphasized that it was important that the United States not get bogged down there. Agreed.

Third, one senior official offered a cautionary note about the recent U.S. opening to Iran. While fully supportive of the initiative, he emphasized that Tehran was bound to drive a hard bargain and that negotiations would be prolonged and difficult. Another person with whom I spoke surprised me by suggesting that if Iran's clerical leadership is interested in dealing with Washington, they will work to ensure the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, thereby keeping a "bad cop" in the Presidency to enhance their bargaining position. I would have thought the opposite -- that it would be easier to engineer a detente between Washington and Tehran if Ahmadinejad were no longer in office -- and it will be interesting to see who's right.

Fourth, virtually everyone I spoke with hoped Obama & Co. would get the U.S. economy moving ASAP, and argued that this was the only way to jump-start the rest of the world. This sentiment is easy to fathom (Singapore's economy is heavily dependent on world trade and is projected to shrink by 5-10 percent this year), but I found myself wondering if it is either realistic or healthy of other countries to expect so much from Uncle Sam. The days where the United States could singlehandedly serve as the engine of the world economy are probably behind us, and prospects for a coordinated global response seem increasingly bleak. Although everyone supposedly understands that "beggar thy neighbor" policies made the Great Depression worse, the global response to the crisis has been "every state for itself" and signs of protectionism are beginning to re-emerge. The draft G20 communique reportedly takes a firm stand against this trend, but it is going to take principled and courageous leadership to resist these pressures. All in all, a good test to see if we've learned anything from the 1930s. 

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Some mildly good news: in a partially smart diplomatic move, the Obama administration has reportedly offered to trade the deployment of missile defenses in eastern Europe for active Russian support to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program. According to the NY Times story, the deal requires not just Russian support (presumably for more extensive economic sanctions), but rather depends on Iran "halting any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles."

This is a clever offer at first glance, because it gives up an expensive program that we don't need (missile defenses) in an attempt to get something we do want (better relations with Russia, and a deal with Iran on its nuclear program). Missile defense has been a costly chimera for decades, for two main reasons. First, any country sophisticated enough to put a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile could probably develop low-cost countermeasures that would thwart our defenses. Second, any country that could develop missiles and a bomb small enough to mount on one wouldn't have much trouble smuggling a few weapons into Europe or the United States. This situation would actually be worse than a missile attack, because we might not even know where the attack had come from and thus would not be able to deter it by threatening retaliation. Spending billions on missile defenses is like locking the front door and leaving the back door wide open, with a sign inviting the burglars to come on in.

But the offer to Moscow has a down-side: it means that the fate of the missile defense program is actually in Iran's hands, not Moscow's, and the precise terms of the deal remain unclear. There's still no evidence that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program (though obvious reasons to be suspicious) and little evidence that it will give up control of the full nuclear fuel cycle simply because the United States ramps up the diplomatic pressure or gets Russia and China to agree to stiffer sanctions. It's even less likely that Iran would give up its ballistic missile program. It might be possible to get a deal that addressed Iran’s regional security concerns (including our various efforts to foment regime change there) in exchange for tighter guarantees against their pursuit of an actual weapons capability, but that requires us to go in without big preconditions and without a lot of harsh rhetoric. Merely tightening the screws on Tehran hasn't worked in the past and is unlikely to work in the future. And if Russia does agree to help us, Iran still balks, and we go ahead and deploy the missile defenses in Eastern Europe anyway, Moscow is bound to feel betrayed.

Now for the bad news: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently thinks diplomacy with Iran isn't going to work anyway. Perhaps she just misspoke (itself not a good sign), or perhaps this illustrates a point I've mentioned before: effective diplomacy requires lots of coordination, so that an initiative in one area isn't undermined by something you do or say somewhere else. Or maybe this incident suggests that the whole idea of talking to Iran is simply laying the diplomatic groundwork for a more direct military campaign later on. Thus far, the Obama administration hasn't strayed very far from the Bush administration's failed approach, which was in essence to tell Tehran "first, you do what we want, and then we'll talk to you about the things you care about." Obama does say we're willing to talk, but there's no sign that we are planning to make them a "yes-able" offer and his secretary of state apparently thinks direct diplomacy isn’t going to work.

This behavior is deeply puzzling, because a military strike on Iran is an unattractive option and we ought to be energetically looking for a diplomatic alternative. Beginning that process with a lot of tough talk and saying that we aren't expecting success doesn't strike me as a very promising way to start the process. Maybe it's just a coincidence that this sounds like the strategy new Iran point man Dennis Ross endorsed last summer, and not that different from the approach that the Israeli government is reportedly urging on Secretary Clinton during her visit to Jerusalem. As I've said before, if you think the debate on a military strike on Iran ended when Bush left office, think again.  

And while we're on the subject of Iran, here's a thoughtful column by Roger Cohen, warning against the simplistic stereotyping that has come to dominate most American discourse about the Islamic Republic. Cohen is neither naïve about Iran nor an advocate of appeasing the likes of Ahmadinejad, yet his nuanced discussion immediately drew the usual hail of criticism from neoconservative pundits, with one of them suggesting that he be fired.

I have a different question: why are Cohen's commentaries confined to the Herald Tribune and the Times blog? Why doesn't Cohen have a regular column on the Times op-ed page, especially now that William Kristol is gone? Cohen's views are balanced, he writes well, and he is often willing to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, which is what a good columnist should do.  If op-ed page editor Andrew Rosenthal wants to raise the level of discourse on his page he’d offer the guy a regular spot.

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While reading the official transcript of Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton's opening statement at her confirmation hearing yesterday, I had a brief moment of excitement somewhere around paragraph twenty-five.  Here's what made me sit up straight (emphasis added):

Of course, we must be realistic about achieving our goals. Even under the best of circumstances, our nation cannot solve every problem or meet every global need. We don't have unlimited time, treasure, or manpower. And we certainly don't face the best of circumstances today, with our economy faltering and our budget deficits growing.

So to fulfill our responsibility to our children, to protect and defend our nation while honoring our values, we have to establish priorities. Now, I'm not trying to mince words here. As my colleagues in the Senate know, "establishing priorities" means making tough choices. Because those choices are so important to the American people, we must be disciplined in evaluating them -- weighing the costs and consequences of our action or inaction; gauging the probability of success; and insisting on measurable results."

"She gets it!" I thought. But then I read on and discovered what "making choices and setting priorities" actually means. Among other things, it means:
 
1. "Deepening our engagement" with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries in central Asia;

2. "Actively" pursuing a strategy in the Middle East that addresses Israel's security needs and the Palestinians' "legitimate" political aspirations, challenges Iran to end its nuclear program and sponsorship of terror, persuades Syria to abandon dangerous behavior and "strengthens relationships" with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other regional states;

3. Making new efforts to secure nuclear materials, get other states to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons, ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and renew negotiations for a Fissile Material Cutoff treaty;

4. Working to strengthen U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia, to include NATO, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and India;

5. Pursuing cooperative relations with Russia and China, while standing up for core U.S. values;

6. Working closely with Canada and Mexico on economic issues and drug trafficking, and returning to a policy of "vigorous engagement" with the rest of Latin America;

7. "Combating al-Qaida's efforts in the Horn of Africa; helping African nations to conserve their natural resources; stopping war in Congo; ending autocracy in Zimbabwe and human devastation in Darfur; supporting African democracies like South Africa and Ghana; and working aggressively to reach the Millennium Development Goals in health, education, and economic opportunity";

8. Leading an "urgent, coordinated response to climate change," and continuing active efforts to address global AIDS, global poverty, global health, global education and, of course, promoting democracy and human rights;

And after covering every continent, she declared that this laundry list was just "a few of our top priorities" (my emphasis) and said she expected to "address many more in the question-and-answer session." And she did.

These goals may all be perfectly worthy in themselves, and it would have been undiplomatic for her to spell out the countries, regions, or issue she deemed less important. Nonetheless, Clinton's remarks were not those of someone eager to make choices or set priorities, even though she deployed clever new concepts like "smart power." Clinton did not say which of these problems merited the most resources or the most immediate attention, which problems were the most easily solved and which might be intractable, or how the United States might deploy its power strategically, so that our actions in one area made solving other problems easier, instead of operating (as we often do) at cross-purposes.

It was an impressive performance in some respects -- she's mastered her brief, showed admirable poise, and made it clear that she's on the same page with the president-elect. But taken as a whole, her testimony was entirely consistent with the well-engrained tendency for great powers to assume that what happens anywhere matters everywhere, and especially matters to them. I'm no isolationist, but it would be refreshing to hear a more rigorous assessment of our vital interests and a clearer acknowledgement of the limits of U.S. power, especially these days.

The good news: her presentation was clearly not this. Not surprisingly, it reminded me of this. But has anyone told her that it's not the 1990s anymore?

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