Some Sobering Thoughts on Foreign Policy

More from AEI, this time with one of the more depressing reviews of President Bush's foreign policy that you can find (I hope). Michael Rubin discusses "Broken Promises:"

President George W. Bush’s failure to uphold an assurance to Turkish officials that the United States would take action against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a terrorist group, is merely the latest in a series of broken promises. Bush has backtracked on both the philosophical underpinnings of his foreign policy as well as individual promises to specific nations and world leaders. The president’s record of broken promises will haunt future administrations and mar Bush’s foreign policy legacy.

Read the whole thing.

The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil

I thought this article by Yegor Gaidar, based on his talk at the American Eneterprise Institute in November 2006, was an interesting and straightforward explanation for the end of the Soviet empire: complications from the need to import grain and the need to earn foreign currency by exporting oil. Consider this excerpt:

Yet one of the Soviet leadership's biggest blunders was to spend a significant amount of additional oil revenues to start the war in Afghanistan. The war radically changed the geopolitical situation in the Middle East. In 1974, Saudi Arabia decided to impose an embargo on oil supplies to the United States. But in 1979 the Saudis became interested in American protection because they understood that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a first step toward--or at least an attempt to gain--control over the Middle Eastern oil fields.

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive. The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust. There were three options--or a combination of three options--available to the Soviet leadership.

That's an interesting explanation. What are the lessons learned? From the conclusion:

In this latter case, it becomes evident that the "contract" between authoritarian rulers and their subjects--which secures stability by people's tolerance of the authorities and the authorities' noninterference in people's affairs--will need to be reexamined. Such reevaluation undermines the regime. The rulers, who for the longest time have insisted that their rule is the best, find it hard to ask for and get broad societal support in a moment of crisis. In this situation, the society has a habit of answering, "For many years, we were told that we are led to a ‘brighter future,' but now you would like us to tighten our belts. Instead, tighten your belts--or leave."

Russia does not need new upheavals. During the course of the twentieth century it saw enough of them. In this regard, the understanding by the elites and society that a real democracy is not an ideological dogma or something imposed by the West, but rather an important precondition for the stable development of the country, will finally give Russia the hope of escaping crises and cataclysms. This realization is vitally important for Russia's development in the next decades.

We may not be "fighting" the Cold War at present, but we are still cleaning up the battlefield.

Krauthammer on "Never Again"

Charles Krauthammer has a fascinating column in today's Washington Post, "Never Again?" Here's the most interesting part:

For 2,000 years, Jews found protection in dispersion -- protection not for individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could survive there. They could be persecuted in Spain and find refuge in Constantinople. They could be massacred in the Rhineland during the Crusades or in the Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Insurrection of 1648-49 and yet survive in the rest of Europe.

Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism married to modern technology -- railroads, disciplined bureaucracies, gas chambers that kill with industrial efficiency -- could take a scattered people and "concentrate" them for annihilation.

The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen -- after Hitler had made his intentions perfectly clear -- that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first in 2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49, 1967 and 1973).

But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration -- putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler's work.

His successors now reside in Tehran. The world has paid ample attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Israel must be destroyed. Less attention has been paid to Iranian leaders' pronouncements on exactly how Israel would be "eliminated by one storm," as Ahmadinejad has promised.

Read the whole thing.

And Now from Argentina

I'll confess that I haven't been following the details of the Summit of the Americas, now underway in Mar De Plata, Argentina. I also haven't figured out why economic growth and higher standards of living stubbornly refuse to arrive in most Latin American countries, despite their abundance of resources and proximity to the largest market in the world.

But I'd be pretty surprised if Chavez, Maradona, Esquivel, or these fellows pictured above had a better plan for starting the process than ratifying the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.

Read all about this cast of characters here.

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In Praise of Thomas Friedman

Like a lot of people, I "discovered" Thomas Friedman after 9/11, and he was for many months thereafter the most lucid voice anywhere on the subject of the terrorist threat and how the world had changed. I still keep Longitudes and Attitudes handy in case I want to read any of his excellent columns from that period.

He has another good one in the New York Times yesterday, "Arms Sales Begin at Home." The column begins:

For the life of me, I simply do not understand why President Bush is objecting to the European Union's selling arms to China, ending a 16-year embargo. I mean, what's the problem?

There is an obvious compromise that Mr. Bush could put on the table that would defuse this whole issue. Mr. Bush should simply say to France, Germany and their E.U. partners that America has absolutely no objection to Europeans' selling arms to China - on one condition: that they sell arms to themselves first. That's right, the U.S. should support the export to China of any defense system that the Europeans buy for their own armies first. Buy one, sell one.

But what the U.S. should not countenance is that at a time when the Europeans are spending peanuts on their own defense, making themselves into paper tigers and free riders on America for global policing, that they start exporting arms to a growing tiger - China.

I'm an economist. I'm wired to think the free-rider problem is pervasive and to look for external solutions to the problem. But I'd take issue with any plan to have individual European nations arm themselves. History suggests that Europeans have a propensity to use their armaments on ... each other. But Friedman has other concerns:

But what really concerns me is Europe. Europe's armies were designed for static defense against the Soviet Union. But the primary security challenges to Europe today come from the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. If you put all the E.U. armies together, they total around two million soldiers in uniform - almost the same size as the U.S. armed forces. But there is one huge difference - only about 5 percent of the European troops have the training, weaponry, logistical and intelligence support and airlift capability to fight a modern, hot war outside of Europe. (In the U.S. it is 70 percent in crucial units.)

The rest of the European troops - some of whom are unionized! - do not have the training or tools to fight alongside America in a hot war. They might be good for peacekeeping, but not for winning a war against a conventional foe. God save the Europeans if they ever felt the need to confront a nuclear-armed Iran. U.S. defense spending will be over $400 billion in 2005. I wish it could be less, but one reason it can't is that the United States of Europe is spending less than half of what we are. And the U.S. and E.U. really are the pillars of global stability.

Okay, I'd say he's made his "paper tiger" point stick. And he closes very well:

If Europe wants to go pacifist, that's fine. But there is nothing worse than a pacifist that sells arms - especially in a way that increases the burden on its U.S. ally and protector.

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More from Stratfor

I finished reading America's Secret War. In an earlier post, I took some issue with the author's claim that:

We went into Iraq to isolate and frighten the Saudi government into cracking down on the flow of money to Al Qaeda.

I don't think that the book "proves" that this was the purpose of the war. In that earlier post, I conjectured that the strategic benefit of Iraq would have to be evaluated based on how it hastened the arrival of democracy in Iran. I read the book with this alternative in mind. On pages 250-1, the book suggests that we were in a deal with Iran--to obtain access to Iran's intelligence on Al Qaeda, we toppled Saddam in favor of a government that would have a Shiite majority. Here are the relevant two paragraphs:

Iran wanted the United States to invade Iraq. It did everything to induce the United States to do so. Its strategy was to provide the United States with intelligence that would persuade the United States that invasion was both practical and necessary. There were many intelligence channels operating between Teheran and the United States, but the single most important was Ahmad Chalabi, the Defense Department's candidate for President of Iraq. Chalabi, a Shiite who traveled extensively to Iran before the war, was the head of the Iraqi National Council, which provided key intelligence to the United States on Iraq, including on WMD. But what it did not provide the U.S. was most important: intelligence on Iranian operations in Iraq or on Iraqi preparations for a guerrilla war. Chalabi made it look easy. That's what the Iranians wanted.



The primary vector for Chalabi's information was not the CIA, but OSP under Abe Shulsky. OSP could not have missed Chalabi's Iranian ties, nor could they have believed the positive intelligence he was giving them. Bus OSP and Shulsky were playing a deeper game. These were old Cold Warriors. For them, the key to the collapse of the Soviet Union was the American alliance with China. Splitting the enemy was the way to go, and the fault line in the Islamic world was the Sunni-Shiite split. The United States, from their point of view, was not playing the fool by accommodating Iran's wishes on Iraq. Apart from all of its other virtues, they felt that the invasion would create a confluence of interests between the U.S. and Iran,

which would have enormously more value in the long run than any problems posed by the Iraqi invasion. From the standpoint of OSP--and therefore Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld--Chalabi's intelligence or lack of it was immaterial. The key was the alignment with Iran as another lever against Saudi Arabia. And there were more immediate threats as well.

Again, not proof, but an attempt to tell a coherent story in hindsight with still limited information on the government's internal decision-making. The excerpt also reflects the author's writing style, and the book makes for an interesting perspective on the War on Terror from its start through a few months ago.



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In Praise of Winston Churchill

Via Powerline, I learn that today is the 130th anniversary of the birth of Winston Churchill. It is something of an embarrassment that this isn't a national holiday the world over. Perhaps we could append it to Thanksgiving, because we should all be grateful that by the force of his indomitable will (and, at times, it seemed, his will alone) Western civilization was saved from the scourge of fascism.



One of the most fascinating accounts of his life that I have "read" (listened to the audio CD on a few roadtrips, actually) was Jon Meacham's Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship. I had always understood Churchill to have been a rock, personifying coolness under pressure as the Nazis pounded England early in the war. The book reveals more of human dimension to Churchill, particularly in the way that the friendship between the two men formed at a personal level and how it evolved as the war drew to a close and the Soviet Union emerged as the new threat to the West.

America's Secret War

STRATFOR describes itself as:

[T]he world's leading private intelligence firm providing corporations, governments and individuals with geopolitical analysis and forecasts that enable them to manage risk and to anticipate political, economic and security issues vital to their interests.

STRATFOR's founder is George Friedman, whose new book, America's Secret War, is getting some discussion in the blogosphere yesterday and today. (Start with Professor Bainbridge's link to Frank Devine's review of the book.)



The book's website contains some interesting Q&A with the author. His answer to the direct question that occupies Bainbridge and Devine is:

Q. Why did we go into Iraq?



A. We went into Iraq to isolate and frighten the Saudi government into cracking down on the flow of money to Al Qaeda. Bush never answered the question for fear of the international consequences. Early in the war, the President said that the key was shutting down Al Qaeda's financing. Most of the financing came from Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi government was refusing to cooperate. After the invasion of Iraq, they completely changed their position. We did not invade Saudi Arabia directly because of fear that the fall of the Saudi government would disrupt oil supplies: a global disaster.

I would like to see some evidence for the key proposition (which I highlighted in red). I'll read the book and search for corroborating evidence. Even if the Saudi's have changed their tune, that does not necessarily mean that achieving that result was the intent of invasion.



Before reading the book, I'm skeptical about the motive. I agree that reform (if not revolution) in Saudi Arabia is critical to peace in the Middle East, but the most pressing issue after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan was Iran. Specifically, the next interesting event would be whether the students would oust the mullahs in Iran. Our next step should have been something to tip the balance in favor of democracy and nuclear disarmament in Iran. Failing that (but hopefully only after giving it a chance to succeed), we would need to be ready for a military confrontation with the theocrats in Iran.



EagleSpeak argues, in response to the Bainbridge post, that this is what the invasion of Iraq has been:

As I have argued before, the invasion of Iraq, coupled with the invasion of Afghanistan and the turning of Pakistan completes what is essentially an encirclement of Iran. Further, as a look at a topographic map will tell you, Iraq provides far easier access to Iran's interior than other alternatives.



Saudi Arabia may contain sources of funding and even human assets for terrorism, but Saudi Arabia itself is not, in my view, a hard target to attack if American protection is removed. There is not much need to encircle it. Iran, however, is a much tougher nut to crack, from every direction except the west.

Completing the RealPolitik trifecta is a post at American Digest earlier this month, in which both theories are used to answer to the question, "Why are we in Iraq?"



And they call economics "the dismal science?"

More on Krauthammer's February Speech

A comment on my previous post prompted me to say more about why I think Krauthammer's Irving Kristol lecture is required reading for the President's debate prep team. (Strange to have to remind them, since the Vice President introduced the speaker and a whole lot of them were in attendance.) The piece contrasts four schools of thought about how the United States could conduct itself as the only superpower: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism, and democratic globalism. There are three reasons why I thought of this lecture as required reading for the Bush team:

1. It provides arguments to criticize "Liberal Internationalism," the foreign policy of the Clinton Administration and the one, from what we can infer about Kerry, that he would likely follow as President. The value of this part of the lecture to the President's debate prep would have been to counter the alternative strategy of returning once again to the UN or waiting for the French and Germans to join the coalition. For example:
   
   
   
   "Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion."
   
   
   
   "Of course it would be nice if we had more allies rather than fewer. It would also be nice to be able to fly. But when some nations are not with you on your enterprise, including them in your coalition is not a way to broaden it; it’s a way to abolish it."
   
   
2. Later, in the part of his lecture where he discusses the elements of geopolitics that "Realism" gets right (and ultimately its unhopeful limitations), he provides the succinct statement of the problem of Iraq to which I referred in my earlier post and which (largely) answers the comment that I received:
   
   
   
   "Whether or not Iraq had large stockpiles of WMDs, the very fact that the United States overthrew a hostile regime that repeatedly refused to come clean on its weapons has had precisely this deterrent effect."
   
   
   
   To make his point, the President has to focus on Iraq's refusal to comply adequately with previous attempts to get its leadership to disarm. This was one of the things the President tried and failed to do rhetorically on Thursday.
3. The entire section of the lecture on "Democratic Globalism" is relevant to providing a consistent statement of Bush's foreign policy in the Persian Gulf. Two particular passages caught my attention:
   
   
   
   "Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom."
   
   
   
   "There is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11. It’s not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world--oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism."

I think the last quote overstates it a bit (there is a whole lot of Osama bin Laden and his surrogates in this monster), but I think it is fair to say that the President's fortunes in the debate, evaluated as a debate, on Thursday would have risen had he made these points.

The Presidential Debate, A Few Days Later

I decided to let a few days pass before adding my 2 cents about the first Presidential debate last Thursday evening. I wanted some time to reflect on the parts of it that would be of lasting significance.



My main reaction as I watched it live was to feel sympathy for President Bush, since he seemed to be so off his game. There is no doubt, even after watching the debate a second time, that Kerry scored a clear victory on style--appearing composed, articulating answers clearly, standing up straight, etc. Anyone who has seen the two of them speak before would expect Kerry to win on debating style. What was surprising was how wide the margin of victory was in this respect.



On the substance of the debate, and evaluating it as a debate, I can point to a few issues that Bush won and suggest that the rest went to Kerry (even though Kerry did little to convince me that he would improve the situation in Iraq). Surprisingly, Kerry allowed himself to lose ground on the North Korea and Iran questions. North Korea has to be dealt with through the multilateral talks first. Giving North Korea the option of simultaneously engaging in bilateral talks allows it to decide which forum it will favor on some issues. Since these negotiations are voluntary, that option has value. There is no reason to strengthen North Korea's bargaining position in this manner. And Kerry's responding to an either-or question with "both" gives a mild rhetorical victory to those who say he cannot make up his mind. On Iran, the President successfully deflected Kerry's accusations of having willfully mishandled the situation.



I thought that Kerry fared better than Bush on the Iraq questions, even though the President was able to (finally) call Kerry out on the way he has referred to the action as unilateral despite the presence of allies like the UK, Australia, and Poland. Bush failed to effectively rebut the argument that the situation in Iraq is spiraling out of control. He failed to appear composed enough to assert credibly that his war strategy would prevail.



He also missed two critical opportunities to go on the offensive against Kerry. First, he should have demanded that Kerry renounce the statements made by his campaign official, Joe Lockhart, that Allawi is a puppet of the United States. Regardless of whether Kerry thinks that is true, it is clearly contrary to the interest of the United States for Allawi to lose credibility in his country and region. The article linked above shows how the President has done this on the campaign trail.



Second, Bush should have reiterated more plainly that he faced a difficult choice and followed what he perceived to be the right course of action. He has done this fairly eloquently many times (in the part of his standard Iraq speech where he describes Saddam as a madman). He should also have listed some of the countries that we tried unsuccessfully to bring on board and explained why the price they demanded was too high to pay. I think most people would have understood him. May I suggest a re-reading of Charles Krauthammer's Irving Kristol lecture, "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World," which is the clearest rationale for the war in Iraq and the choice to "go it alone" that I have heard to date. (It was written before the insurgency gained as much traction as it currently has, and so it does not deal with problems in the conduct of the Iraq war.)



On the day the United States began military action in Afghanistan, the President closed his address to the Nation with the words, "The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail." At the President's choosing, Iraq is the next front in the War on Terror. The recent setbacks on the ground in Iraq suggest a waver. And on Thursday, the President himself appeared tired and he clearly faltered. For the sake of the United States and people seeking peace and freedom around the globe, let's hope that we and our allies do not fail in our efforts to establish a democracy in Iraq.