When you do SysAdmin by proxy in Somalia, you enlist children as warriors

NYT story says child soldiers exist "across the globe," but truth is, they exist only inside my Gap.

When people say it's not our role to do the SysAdmin work in these places, they just need to understand who gets pressed into service when Core great powers don't show up.

Take a good look at the kid's face, because he's working for you.

Feel any holier about our non-interference?

Iran a year later

Summary news analysis piece in NYT a year later.

Iran has changed since the political crisis of June 12, 2009.

In scores of interviews conducted over the past several months with Iranians from all strata of society, inside and outside the country, a clear picture emerged of a more politically aware public, with widened divisions between the middle class and the poor and — for the first time in the Islamic republic’s three-decade history — a determined core of dissenters who were opposed to the republic itself.

The political grievances have merged with more pragmatic concerns, like high unemployment and double-digit inflation, adding to the discontent.

“I was on the bus the other day and there was a man, you would not believe the kind of information he had,” said a 59-year-old who works for the government. “He started to talk about the foreign currency reserves of different countries and began to criticize the government.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad and his patron, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are stronger today than they were a year ago, political experts say, although their base of support has narrowed.

They are relying heavily on force and intimidation, arrests, prison terms, censorship, even execution, to maintain authority. They have closed newspapers, banned political parties and effectively silenced all but the most like-minded people. Thousands of their opponents have fled the country, fearing imprisonment.

As a formal political organization, the reform movement is dead.

All pretty much know--unfortunately.

Now for the change:

The crisis accelerated and institutionalized a transfer of power that began with the first election of Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2005. The shift was from the old revolutionaries to a generation that came of age during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, hard-liners who deeply resented the relatively liberal reforms promoted by former President Mohammad Khatami.

The vanguard of the new political elite is now the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which oversees Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and has extended its control over the economy and the machinery of state. It has improved its ability to control the street, to monitor electronic communications and keep tabs on university campuses, and its alumni head the government’s security organs.

This is the key thing to understand: the new generation is not the original revolutionary one led by the mullahs, who now serve more at the pleasure of the Guards than the other way around. It is the Iran-Iraq War generation, and here's where the comparison to Brezhnev's crew in the USSR is salient.

These guys want their sacrifice recognized and rewarded. They're survivalists, not ideologues. Their quest is regime survival, not revolutionary fervor. They see nukes providing them global recognition for their deeds, safety for their regime, and a means enabling Iran's continued rise as a great power--along with energy.

This package is not new to us, nor is it unique. We have the tendency to swallow its propaganda and remember its motives in the past tense, and this hobbles our thinking.

For now, the nukes are perfect for Iran: gets everyone talking that vice the regime-v-opposition, keeps the whole Islam-v-Israel thing up front, plays to national honor, etc. So long as it's just Israel as counterparty, there's no danger of negotiations being forced upon Iran.

But once that twosome is joined, most likely in rapid time by Saudi Arabia and/or Turkey, then the international pressure by great-power patrons will be intense.

And when Iran starts having to talk with the devil, just like the Sovs did in their own quest for global recognition, the revolution is extinguished for good, because revolutions cannot survive such deals with "unplacable foes."

So everybody thinks nukes locks Iran into all sorts of new power, when it's the other way around. Nukes will be no more usable for Iran than they've been for anybody else.

In the end, nukes will be the Revolutionary Guards' undoing, just like the Sovs.

The USSR cuts its first nuke deal in 1972, and 17 years later the Wall falls. It'll be a much shorter timeline with Iran.

"Runaway general"? Hardly. Runaway mouths? Definitely

I just read the Rolling Stone piece and found the tone of disrespect somewhat stunning.  The media immediately references my piece on Fox Fallon from 2008, but I'm more impressed with the differences than similarities-- as in, Fallon disagreed with the president on substance while McChrystal's gripes strike me as stylistic (e.g., Obama struck him as uncomfortable before brass) and superficial.

Fallon never said anything disrespectful of his superiors in front of me, nor did his staff.  The admiral just fundamentally disagreed on the possibility of going to war with Iran and wasn't shy about sharing that opinion in the press, which he did repeatedly prior to my piece (which he later said misrepresented his views while quoting him accurately--to the tune of over 1,500 words).

Here, McChrystal does just the opposite:  never really disagreeing with his superiors while openly disrespecting them.  I say "openly" because he and his staff did it repeatedly in front of a reporter they knew was there to report on what he saw and heard--just like I did.  

Is that enough to get him fired?  That's Obama's call.  The fact that McChrystal is quoted both directly and in a secondary manner (through his staff) making truly derogatory remarks about so many principals (VP, NS adviser, our AMB in-country, Holbrooke) is problematic going forward, but firing the right guy for the right job when he agrees with your policy is likewise a hard choice for the president.

In the end, it all comes down to the relationship itself.  A magazine story can damage such a relationship but it cannot define it. Fallon was on thin ice with the White House when my story appeared, making it the final nail in the coffin. If Obama's relationship with McChrystal is solid, the Rolling Stone story won't be enough to trigger his sacking. But if it was already fragile/strained, then it may become the excuse.  But my guess is that McChrystal and Obama-Biden are on an entirely different trajectory over Af-Pak than Fallon and Bush-Cheney were over Iran.

Karzai has already cast his lot with Pakistan

Subtitle of Guardian piece (via WPR Media Roundup) says it all:

Afghanistan's former head of intelligence says President Hamid Karzai is increasingly looking to Pakistan to end insurgency

Even with the evolution of our tactics, it's hard to blame Karzai for the choice. Obama gives him all indication of bailing before 2012, and the rushed effort in the south seems increasingly bogged down thanks to a very patient and brutal response from the Taliban.

There's been no effective regionalization of the solution set, leaving Pakistan the looming large neighbor of note, so what else do we expect of Karzai?

He's covering his bets.

Our frustration with Iran is borne of our obsession with nukes

WAPO story.

A year ago, Iran was on its way to becoming a pariah state. Dozens of governments accused Iranian leaders of stealing the presidential election and condemned the brutal crackdown on protesters that followed. The country faced sanctions and international scorn over its controversial nuclear program.

Now, even as the U.N. Security Council prepares to impose its fourth round of sanctions on Iran with a vote slated for Wednesday, Tehran is demonstrating remarkable resilience, insulating some of its most crucial industries from U.S.-backed financial restrictions and building a formidable diplomatic network that should help it withstand some of the pressure from the West. Iranian leaders are meeting politicians in world capitals from Tokyo to Brussels. They are also signing game-changing energy deals, increasing their economic self-sufficiency and even gaining seats on international bodies.

Iran's ability to navigate such a perilous diplomatic course, analysts say, reflects both Iranian savvy and U.S. shortcomings as up-and-coming global players attempt to challenge U.S. supremacy, and look to Iran as a useful instrument.

Honestly, the first word out of my mouth at reading the opening paras of the piece was "bullshit"--at least regarding the line of America's "shortcomings as up-and-coming global players attempt to challenge U.S. supremacy, and look to Iran as a useful instrument."

I do think the Iranians are savvy, and that we shoot ourselves in the foot every time we reduce them to some caricature of irrational religious nutcases.  I see Ahmadinejad as a very clever fellow, who piously led his Revolutionary Guards right into a successful and impressively bloodless military putsch, effectively giving the president his goal of a party-based dictatorship that supplants the theocracy in too many ways to count. His veterans of the Iran-Iraq war feel they've earned their dictatorship, and all the economic earnings that go with it. In that way, they remind me plenty of Brezhnev's grubby, unimaginative crew.  And like Brezhnev's bunch, they know full well that getting nuclear weapons is a huge credentializing signpost.

I stipulate all that.

I also stipulate that rising great powers, when forced to by our singular obsession with nukes, will take advantage of Iran's equally laser-like focus on nuclear weapons.  But none of these powers want Iran in that position, don't kid yourselves, because it does nothing for them and rising great powers tend to be about as unsentimental and ungenerous as they come about potential rivals.

What drives this whole show more than anything else is our insistence that damn near everything in our foreign policy agenda take a back seat to the all-crucial goal of preventing that which will not be prevented.  We made/make our effort in Iraq take a backseat to it.  Ditto for Afghanistan.  Ditto for our lackluster attempts in recent years to do anything about the Palestinians. We hold a good chunk of our relationships with a host of crucial rising great powers hostage to this dynamic--all of this to no avail.

In the end, we'll be forced down the path that was always there: we'll simply greet Iran's achievement with a clear promise to liquidate the entire place if they ever choose to be so stupid as to launch one of those missiles or expect that some bomb passed to others will not be traced back to them.

And then we let those jackasses live with their "amazing, world-changing achievement" that will earn them nothing.

Or we can continue pretending that all this effort has real meaning and impact, when neither is true.

I've said it before and I will repeat it endlessly: there is nothing magical or unprecedented about a "Shiite bomb." They work like all the rest. We have the only history of using them.

We shouldn't forget that now, much less go all wobbly over such a peon power. If Russia was revealed by history and globalization as just Upper Volta with nukes, what exactly does that make Iran?

And don't tell me the oil and gas make it different, or the religious ideology. This is all about power; when we imagine otherwise we insult everybody's intelligence.

The New Core not doing what they're told!

I want you to frickin' behave!Pair of NYT articles about "pliable ally" Turkey now playing "thorn" and China's PLA types being all blunt in their criticism of U.S. foreign policy and perceived meddling (always, the Taiwan thing!).

Naturally, the NYT frets: these are signs of America's diminished power.

Boo hoo! say I.  Integrating rising great powers into a stable system ain't for sissies or whiners or the self-doubting types.

The fear and the reality:

Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”

From Turkey’s perspective, however, it is simply finding its footing in its own backyard, a troubled region that has been in turmoil for years, in part as a result of American policy making. Turkey has also been frustrated in its longstanding desire to join the European Union.

“The Americans, no matter what they say, cannot get used to a new world where regional powers want to have a say in regional and global politics,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul. “This is our neighborhood, and we don’t want trouble. The Americans create havoc, and we are left holding the bag.”

Turkey’s rise as a regional power may seem sudden, but it has been evolving for years, since the end of the cold war, when the world was a simple alignment of black and white and Turkey, a Muslim democracy founded in 1923, was a junior partner in the American camp.

Twenty years later, the map has been redrawn.

Washington does want everybody in their lane all right; it's a very old habit born of a superpower rivalry.  And now, there are so many types in DC who are desperate to recast China's rise in the same manner.  So when China doesn't start being more American right quick, we get nervous.  And those fears expand that much more when previous strategic employees like Turkey start acting like they think they're actual partners--as in people who balance each other's interests instead of just obeying!

Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu seems to have a head on his shoulders:

“Economic interdependence is the best way to achieve peace,” he said at his home in Ankara last weekend. “In the 1990s we had severe tension all around us, and Turkey paid a huge bill because of that. Now we want to establish a peaceful order around us.”

Nations sharing economic interdependencies do get meddlesome in their neighbors's affairs.  For a long time, the biggest dependencies for most nations were bilateral ones with the US or a former colonial power. Nowadays, these interlocking relationships are all over the place, so rising powers are taking all sort of cues from all sorts of players, meaning America's voice, while awfully important, no longer drowns out everybody else's.

And so we better get used to being lectured to by powers who expect to do their sharing of lecturing--in addition to the usual receiving of lectures from us.

As for Chinese flag officers getting more forceful in public and closed-door sessions with US officials, understand two things (and no, I don't direct the following rant particularly at the general who made the forceful comments in front of Gates at the recent Asian security gathering, because his comments struck me as pretty routine in their grievance airing):

First, way too many of these guys are political and economic retrogrades, like they are most everywhere else on the planet (yes, there's been huge, beyond-evolutionary improvement in our ranks these past two decades but I do remember the Cold War dinosaurs well). Yes, they know their own business well enough, but almost to a man, these guys have no normal-world experience outside a life lived exclusively in the military. Put a mike in front of them and they will make some of the stupidest economic and political statements you've ever heard.  We've gotten used to a whole new generation of flag officers in the West who are so smooth in these circumstances that they sound like PR machines (minus any ideological DNA), but these skills don't yet exist in places like China, where they will utter the most foolishly bold comments with little sense as to how they are perceived (or what bullshit they're spouting).  And even when they speak in more military terms, their lack of awareness of any connectivity between their dreams of warfare and that big old world of economics out there is just stunning.  They will brag on all sorts of capabilities with almost no understanding of the real-world limits of those capabilities. They're blowhards--pure and simple.

And yeah, our experts and our media tend to lap it up big-time: "Oh my God! Did that Chinese general just say/write that!"). Why? The usual self-serving reasons.

Second, also understand that Chinese general have almost no experience in international or bilateral venues. Most of these guys have been kept under wraps for their entire careers. When I've spoken at military conferences in recent years, it's not unusual to find out that such-and-such an event was only the first or second time the PLA has ever participated, so the experience base just isn't there. These guys therefore tend to be a strange combo of loose cannons and overly-scripted.  The more we interact with them and the more they interact with the world, this experience gap will fade, and I've met plenty of mid-level PLA officers (my age) who impress the hell out of me for their superbly sophisticated minds and better skills at expressing themselves, so we won't be waiting for long.

Per the embedded link above to the WAPO story about a Chinese navy admiral voicing the opinion that all that's good in US-Chinese relations is due to them and all that's bad is due to America, I have no doubt that this sort of blunt one-sided is truly thrilling for Chinese officials to witness.  They do feel like they're doing all they can and they do harbor significant--and hardly irrational--fears that America will inevitable make them its primary enemy--just out of habit.  We will witness plenty such, getting-it-off-their-chest bravado in coming years, and we should take it stride--just like the Brits did with us a century ago.  The Chinese have--quite frankly--no idea what they're getting themselves into with assuming more of a global leadership role.  So let their arrogance lead them into situations that their wisdom will eventually rescue them from.  You can't force socialization on this scale; the Chinese will be who they imagine themselves to be for as long as possible, refusing to change--again, just like we acted for a very long time (arguably, the Chinese will have no such luxury in this rapidly evolving globalization era). 

Primary point of this admittedly snotty rant: don't get wrapped around the hype.  Countries, just like people, grow into roles. Whether they're "ancient civilizations" or not, their current rise puts them in unfamiliar territory, and no, there ain't no ancient Chinese secrets for what lies ahead.  Everybody is making it up as they go along, because a global landscape with multiple rising, prosperous, and strangely peaceful great powers is completely unprecedented.

But it was bought with your US tax dollars, so show some pride and act--as they say in the NFL--like you've been in the great-powers' endzone before.  As always: play up to potential and not down to the competition, but respect the competition.

First rule of commitment: if you have to say it, it ain't there

Wash Times piece by way of WPR's Media Roundup.

The gist:

The Obama administration is deeply committed to its relationship with India despite concerns to the contrary, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday.

William J. Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, tackled a prevalent belief in India that the Obama administration is less committed to a relationship with India than his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Mr. Burns, who previously served in the Bush administration, said there was bipartisan commitment in Washington to the U.S.-India relationship.

My, what a vessel and what a message.  You just know it has to be true.

Word count on Obama's national security strategy

WPR piece by Miles E. Taylor that does the usual word count, but does it well.

First off:

More-astute observers have had a difficult time characterizing the strategy document, mainly because it is quite long compared to past national security policy declarations and, in many regards, appears similar to them in substance. But when you drill down into the text, word by word, it becomes clear that the NSS reveals a lot both in what it doesn't say on important subjects, as well as in what it does say on others.

Agreed.  Most such docs are gloriously collections of nouns and modifiers like "interests" and "vital."  This one has all the usual boilerplate in spades, to a mind-numbing degree really.  It has the lawyer's feel all over it.

Now for the what's up and what's down:  American values and democracy and terrorism and actual enemies are down, cyber and education and healthcare are up.

Predominate signal in my mind?  We are healing our nation.  The rest of you please go about your business.

Honest, I guess, but perhaps too much so.

WPR's The New Rules: Obama's Strategic Patience

A lot of national security experts would like a lot more fire -- and firepower -- from our president. Op-ed columnists across America worry that our friends no longer trust us and that our enemies no longer fear us. President Barack Obama's quest for more-equitable burden-sharing among great powers seems to be getting us nowhere, so why bother with more-equitable benefit-sharing?

Read the column in full at World Politics Review.

Afghanistan's minerals deposits now super-sized by U.S. geologists

Beneath the sheep be lithium

NYT story via Michael Smith and David Damast and HuskerInLA.

I know the temptation for crowing here is intense, but I would suggest going very easy on the cascading assumptions.  There are a lot of reasons why this news has remained unknown this deep into globalization's expansion.

The "shocker" here is that U.S. geologists have confirmed what has been long suspected: Afghanistan's mineral riches are significant. Just like with Iraq, once outside experts got some free range, a lot more reserves were found.  Frankly, that'd be true for any Gap nation that's remained largely cut-off from the outside world for reasons of too much dictatorship or not enough law. Hell, it was true for Russia on oil.

This is being presented as a game-changer, but I think the overselling is premature.

First off, understand that the mining world doesn't exactly get turned upside down on this basis.  This is great news and potentially game-changing for Afghanistan if a lot of things go right--for a long time, but it will not alter any larger realities in the global marketplace (where China is the demand center of the global mining industry), except to end this nonsense notion that somehow Bolivia controls the bulk of the world's lithium (Whew! Dodged that would-be superpower!).  There is lithium being found in plenty of places, trust me.  The same discounting can now be applied to China's alleged cornering of the entire rare earth market--also a vastly oversold fear.

Mineral riches in the range of $1T certainly shove Afghanistan into the big-boy category (past estimates said Afghanistan was Syria-sized in oil and had just enough minerals to qualify as resource-cursed--a line I've used to very ho-hum effect in the brief for two years now, suggesting that no American audience I've ever come across would suddenly jump and say, "Yeah baby, this changes everything!") , but the primary reason why the place has never been sufficiently checked out before now has been the security situation/lack of governance, and that doesn't exactly change overnight on the basis of this information. Nor will it change--I suspect--the Obama administration's unwillingness to sign up for a significant combat presence that drags into the next election at anywhere near the level to maintain enough security to get balls seriously rolling.  "Blood for lithium" doesn't exactly ring the average American citizen's bell.  It also won't likely make the Taliban any less fierce in their fighting--anything but.  If you don't believe me, then please remember that the Naxalite Maoists in India do best in areas where mining deals strikes the local as inequitable.

Most importantly (and this is what Enterra learned in our Development-in-a-Box work in Kurdish Iraq), the discovery doesn't change but only reveals the lack of counterparty capacity in Afghanistan--as in, plenty of outside parties willing to engage in the transaction, but Afghanistan's government is nowhere near capable of playing the counterparty.  And yeah, it takes two to tango.  Remember the first thing Jed Clampett did after he moved to Beverly Hills:  he got himself a Mr. Drysdale.  There will be a lot of entities vying for that role in Afghanistan, and in many ways, it would be better if that role wasn't hogged by the Americans.

Finally, don't assume any of this is a big surprise to the Chinese, whose overly-generous 30-year deal on the Anyak copper mine now looks like the start of a beautiful and logically far larger relationship.  China, after all, has a border with Afghanistan (76 clicks long); we don't.  The basic pattern long cited here of Americans doing the Leviathan heavy-lifting while the Chinese reap the SysAdmin winnings isn't exactly snapped by this news--anything but.

So as before, I think the key remains getting a whole lot more rising great powers deeply--and I mean DEEPLY--interested in helping secure Afghanistan for the long haul.  Mining isn't a slam-dunk but years upon years upon years of stability required for the riches to flow, and then they have to flow with some transparency and positive popular impact, otherwise you can find yourself in an endemic conflict situation that's just Afghanistan-the-failed-state-as-we've-known-it now supercharged by a fungible source of funding for any side willing to kill enough to control its resulting wealth.

Before anybody gets the idea that somehow the West is the winner here, understand that we're not the big draw on most of these minerals--that would be Asia and China in particular.  What no one should expect is that the discovery suddenly makes it imperative that NATO do whatever it takes to stay and win and somehow control the mineral outcomes, because--again--that's now how it works in most Gap situations like Africa.  We can talk all we want about China not "dominating" the situation, but their demand will drive the process either directly or indirectly.  There is no one in the world of mining that's looking to make an enemy out of China over this, and one way or another, most of this stuff ends up going East--not West.

If anything, this news should be used to leverage more of a security contribution out of regional great powers--to include China.  So less of a game changer than perhaps a very welcome game accelerator--as in, China is a lot better positioned to reap the mineral rewards that is Afghanistan, with the question being, "How long does it take for China to step up security-wise and stop low-balling its effort there?"  Certainly, the notion that we turn Afghanistan and all its minerals over to Karzai's cronies, Pakistan's ISI and the Taliban strikes me as truly cracked, but the truth remains:  we and our Western allies aren't enough to make the security situation happen on our own--not for the long timelines required.  If it were that easy, these discoveries would have been made decades ago.

I'm not trying to diminish the importance of the findings here (although, again, whenever an isolated place like this finally gets checked over, the "stunning" surprise is the same--as in, there's lots more than anybody knew previously); I'm just saying the macro dynamics aren't all that altered.

So again, less a game-changer than potentially a tremendous game-accelerator.  China is now that much more incentivized to accelerate its penetration, and it would be nice to see that happen on a timetable that helps us while effectively drawing Beijing into more explicit partnership.

Or we can pretend this is going to remain a NATO-dominated show that somehow achieves Afghanistan's potential as a long-term supplier of important minerals to the global economy.

If I've said once in the brief, I've said it a thousand times (literally!):  Americans cannot integrate a nation-state on the other side of the planet into the global economy all on our own.  Our Leviathan can rule any battlespace, but the SysAdmin's victory is necessarily a multilateral one.

Here's the simplest reality test I can offer you:  if we're just at the initial discovery phase now, we're talking upwards of a decade before there will be mature mines.  Fast-forward a decade in your mind and try to imagine the US having a bigger presence in Afghanistan than China.  I myself cannot.

Start with that realization and move backward, because exploring any other pathway will likely expose you to a whole lotta hype.

The national security strategy that isn't

Cartoonist here

Reading the new National Security Strategy, one is struck by how little it actually talks about national security and instead speaks mostly about America's economic renewal (security assets listed include a strong economy, fiscal discipline and access to affordable healthcare).  

All the right things are said about enlisting the aid of rising great powers, and everybody, including the FT, admires the calmer tone, but this document doesn't really clarify the war aims in Afghanistan--for example. 

The NSS is often a list-drill, but this one is especially incoherent:

It also warns against imposing US values, yet says that building "government capacity" is essential.  Or take domestic counter-terrorism.  Rightly, the White House wants the issue kept in proportion--yet the strategy promises ever more resources for aviation security and intelligence gathering as though cost, disruption, and infringement of civil liberties were no object.

To me, the document sort of begs off on the question of US leadership, which is certainly a route for encouraging others to do more.  But it signals an America that's adjusting, adjusting, adjusting--without much ambition for leading.  

Again, maybe this is all we can expect with this administration, but it strikes me as largely a waiting strategy.

The flag follows trade

Gist:  America under Obama seeks to enlist the aid of rising great powers in shaping the international order for the better.  Problem is, most of these powers are just feeling their oats, and their fist instinct ain’t to take orders from Washington.

Hence, say I, all this “world without the West” bravado, which is thrilling for those pushing it, but it will wear off once larger realities set it.

Hillary Clinton quote:  “Convincing people to go alone with us requires different skills and ways to exercise our power than it did 50 or 100 years ago.”

True enough for 50 years ago, but 100 years ago WE were the rising power that required difference skills from established ones seeking to enlist our help, so some finer sense of the historical sequencing here, please.

Series of cool charts in the piece lay out a logic I first spelled out in PNM:  politics follows trade nowadays, unlike during the Cold War when trade (and investment) followed the flag.  That too is part of the Cold War peace dividend staring us in the face.  The charts show how, for Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey, China now trades with each to the same degree—or better—than the US did in the past or trade.

This is an inescapable reality:  first comes the trade, then the investment, then the infrastructural network ties, then the political friendship, and then the confluence of security interests.

Expecting anybody to choose us over China with those dynamics unfolding inexorably over time is to ignore reality.

So no, we won’t be fighting China, and neither will any other rising power—save maybe India, but even that seems far fetched.

And yeah, that too is part of the Cold War peace dividend, although it’s really part of America’s larger international liberal trade order-cum-globalization peace dividend, and it should most definitely be viewed that way.  No hegemonic power before us was ever able to structure a system in which numerous great powers could rise simultaneously and peacefully.

But again, America “doesn’t do grand strategy” because we’re all dreamy pinheads, according to the East Coast liberal establishment’s conventional wisdom.

Smart Haass piece on the Koreas crisis

"Smart Haass" has a nice ring to it, yes?

WSJ op-ed by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and holder of the George Kennan slot at State under Bush-Cheney (early, not late).

Call out text summarizes it perfectly:

Pass the South Korea free trade agreement and give up negotiating with Kim Jong Il.

The FTA has been sitting with Congress for 3 years.  Instead of passing some meaningless message, why not pass that instead?

(Feel free to slap your own forehead and utter, "Duh!")

Other than that, skip the usual diplo show with nutty Kim and signal that you're just waiting for his death to screw the place over as much as possible.

Okay, I spiced up that last bit.

Reason why?  Make it clear to China that when the event goes down, we'll just watch while things get dicey for them as much or more than they do for Seoul.

Meanwhile, we should publicly explore the reality of a unified Korea with our southern friends, says Haass, and let China come to that conversation as it sees fear--I mean, fit.

May have spiced up that last-last bit a bit too.

Smart guy, dumb book: US grand strategy completely misrepresented

Find the book here, because I won't.

Certainly not on the basis of the WAPO review referenced (or three hours of reading through dozens of pages via Google), which nonetheless describes it as a hot read in the Obama White House.

Few things would depress me more but surprise me less.

This is a classically non-economic view of American grand strategy (certain to appeal to the lawyerly Obama administration), which, if I could define in one phrase, would be "open door" for the last century-plus.

The result?  It's called globalization, my friends, the most world-shaping phenom known to humankind.  It's only the most individually liberating and enriching "empire" the world has ever witnessed.  That's what American "hubris" bought us.

Still loath your country's impact on human history across the 20th century?

Globalization--that's the base.  Everything Beinart targets in this book is superstructure.

This is self-criticism bordering on self-hatred simply because it's view is so DC, so pol-mil, and so public-sector as to miss the gargantuan forest for the trees.

But examine the source:  

Beinart is a classic Washington scholar-journalist-pundit -- a Yale and Oxford graduate who has edited the New Republic, stamped his wonk pass at the Council on Foreign Relations and now hangs out at the New America Foundation and the City University of New York.

So go figure, global economics is a distant concept, as is life outside the Beltway or Manhattan's best salons. It's truly compelling when someone of that breadth of experience targets the narrow thinking of Washington insiders.  The pot was never more correct in calling the kettle black (though I thought it crucial to the storyline to hear that Joe Kennedy bought son Jack prostitutes in his youth--see page 133; if only Beinart spent such effort understanding global economics!).

But how to explain globalization's rise in its modern form? How to explain all the poverty reduction, wealth growth, technological advance, and reduction in warfare?  How to explain the defeat of the Sovs?  How to explain the moratorium on great-power war without crediting the US on nukes?  A world of numerous rising great powers with no great-power war?  These are all accidents of history?  Weird, unexpected byproducts? How come none of this is possible UNTIL America becomes THE world power?  Is all that purely coincidental? Unintentional success amidst our non-stop strategic delusions?

Of course, you can go the sophisticated self-hating route and declare it all "their" victory, but please . . ..

So here we get the usual left-wing condemnation of the whole based on--frankly--the least meaningful parts. This is the Left's mirror-imaging of the same narrow vision of the Right's neo-cons.  Frankly, there isn't an intelligent businessman among them both.

Grand strategists understand that the military part is just time-buying.  Kennan knew that.  His containment strategy was sheer genius and it worked (and yes, by defining it as a "narrow political strategy" it's necessarily a vast economic one).  TR and FDR knew that, and set in motion America's grand strategic impulse that has remade the entire planet for the better.

But no, let's skewer Wilson one more time, whine on about irrelevant Vietnam, and credit Reagan with winning the Cold War (though, his cheapening of it by supporting anti-communist rebels is correctly defined as genius) when it was really Nixon and Kissinger that let loose the dogs of globalization with China.

I think Beinart is a smart guy.  I also think he's doing public therapy for supporting the war in Iraq (the reviewer's point; read the opening pages and watch Arthur Schlesinger spill his martini and you too can cringe at the tragedy of it all), and on that score, you can count the whole endeavor up in terms of public treasure and blood, but again, we're talking only a tiny fraction of reality. If you think the story of globalization's penetrating embrace of the Middle East is captured completely by our Iraq operation, then I will leave you alone to your thoughts. Ditto if you can't see how that intervention sped things up.  But no, that public debate ended years ago for most people, hence the need to declare--pre-emptively--failure on a continuing grand strategic impulse that has spanned decades and continues to project into many more with its current-day actions.

America the nation does grand strategy just fine; Washington just lacks grand strategists.

But you won't find any of that larger impulse in Beinart's narrow tome.  Search the book at Amazon, like I just did for the word globalizaton.  You won't find a single entry!

No, wait a tick!  There's a single reference on page 290 to "globalization" (yes, it only appears in "quotation marks" because it's not real but some queer fantasy of Francis Fukuyama and the Clintonistas!) as being the Washington Consensus in extremis (American-style capitalism plus full-blown American-style democracy).  This is presented as an intellectual sophistry perpetrated by the Clinton White House, and dutifully rejected by the planet as "Americanization."

Imagine that, "globalization" is just the result of some Clintonian triangulation!

I gotta tell you, this sort of analysis is just bizarre in its willfully narrow ignorance.

How this passes as serious judgment on American grand strategy is beyond me. There are basically no references to the global economy either, except two passing ones to a near global economic meltdown in the late 1990s and the global financial crisis of 2008. That's it. American grand strategy is just the wars we fought and the places where we sent troops.

You can't find thinking more preciously biased than this other than in your average undergraduate course on U.S. foreign policy in too many American colleges to name, but such is the state of punditry in Washington--that island of public-sector unreality.

This is why I wrote my 85-page history of America in "Great Powers" from the prism of our experiment in globalization-in-miniature (19th Century) begetting our projection of that model across the 20th.  That "hubris" is the greatest single force for good the world has ever witnessed from a nation state.  Beinart just doesn't recognize that reality because he does not know where to look.  Nothing in his training or career forces him to look beyond the narrow confines of his comfortable conversations with like-minded types.  This is why I don't read Foreign Affairs.  I can't afford the de-education.

Grunstein on "what has Iran really won?"

Map found here (the flashing bits are the shifting line in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war--another "longest war")

I just really like this bit:

It is by now the consensus view that the primary strategic beneficiary of the Iraq War has been Iran. By this view, the removal of a hostile regime in Baghdad has not only moved Iraq into the Iranian sphere of influence, but has also opened the floodgates for Tehran to extend its influence westward throughout the Middle East. 

This analysis, while compelling, begs the question: If Iran has "won" the Iraq War, just what has it really won? In a best-case scenario of a stable Iraq, it still amounts to a potentially volatile and dangerous relationship, and definitely a high-maintenance one, just next door. If the recent negotiations over Baghdad's coalition government are any indication, maintaining that stability among Iran's Shiite clients, friends and allies in Iraq will require significant diplomatic investment. That investment will only increase once U.S. forces are no longer present to serve as a firewall against potential conflict outside Iran's circles of friends. And in a worst-case scenario of simmering ethno-sectarian violence or outright civil war, Iran has simply inherited a veritable sinkhole of political, financial and military resources.

The Big Bang moves in mysterious ways.

The rest of the piece is a critical deconstruction of the Turkey-Brazil deal and how Iran once again "triumphed."

The drumbeat for US-Russia cooperation continues

WSJ story.

Okay, so not exactly unprecedented, but just like with the proposed joint production of an airlift platform, we're talking two powers that cannot easily muster the requisite resources for cutting-edge work on their own.

Here we've got the Russian Deputy PM talking with our NASA boss about pushing for joint exploration past the expiration date of the International Space Station (round 2020 or so)--i.e., out into the solar system for real.

As it is, we're already dependent on the Russians for transport to low-earth orbit once we retire the Shuttles.

Ivanov's big sale?  It costs a lot to explore space.

I think this is good.  Let the Chinese conquer the moon and we go beyond with our old space pals.

The Politics Blog: 5 Ways to Get Help on the North Korean Mess (from China)

Is Kim Jong-Il mad or what? As if this weekend's Eastern diplomatic swing to ease tensions over the sinking of a South Korean warship didn't seem fruitless or frustrating enough, now the world's least-favorite despot is really screaming to respect his authorit-ah by freezing ties with Seoul this morning.

Having long ago reversed its own "sunshine policy" toward its evil twin, South Korea now seems truly fed up. President Lee Myung-bak checked all the usual boxes over the weekend (cut remaining trade, block sea lanes, resume pysops, seek UN Security Council resolution, etc.), then pointedly added a call for regime change, vowing that North Korea "will pay a price." But before you go screaming World War III on today's developments, take heart: The solution, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remains in "intensive consultations" with Beijing over both NorKo and Iran's nuclear program, remains in China. And the time for tough choices seems to have arrived, both for Beijing and the Obama administration.

I have long argued — and since persisted, with regard to both Pyongyang and Tehran — that the U.S. should punt on Iran's nukes (there's nothing undeterrable about a Shia bomb) and target North Korea for regime change. I still believe that. Engaging with Iran serves tangible, near-term purpose (e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-vs.-Hamas/Hezbollah), while toying with Kim serves none. And I still believe that China is in the driver's seat, whether we're talking Beijing's $80-billion investment in Iran's energy sector or its dreams of lifting $6-trillion worth of NorKo's mineral reserves (at bargain basement prices). Understanding that China must save face as well as sunk costs, here's my plan for making everyone — save Israel and Kim — more, shall we say, respectf-ah in the short run.

Read the full post at Esquire's The Politics Blog

Europe matters less to America' future as a world leader

Richard Haass in the FT.

Gist found in conclusion:

US-European ties and Nato were destined to become weaker given the end of the cold war. Alliances tend to be created and to thrive in eras of predictability and consensus over threats and obligations.  The post-cold war, post-9/11 world is much more fluid than this.

The combination of structural economic flaws, political parochialism and military limits will accelerate this transatlantic drift.  A weaker Europe will possess a smaller voice and role.  Nato will no longer be the default partner for American foreign policy.  Instead, the US will forge coalitions of the willing to deal with specific challenges.  These clusters will sometimes include European countries, but rarely, if ever, will the US look to either Nato or the EU as a whole.  Even before it began, Europe's moment as a major world power in the 21st century looks to be over.

Wrote the same thing myself in WAPO--in April 2004 ("Forget About Europe.  What about these allies?"), in which I posited that future allies were more likely to be located in the rising powers of the age instead of the declining ones.

Haass doesn't go that far, thus the lamenting tone of the piece.

I see no such reason for despair.  As interests align, so will behavior, but this is a process of many years, and most influentials on our side have already given up on many of these states (e.g., the BRICs, Turkey, Brazil, etc) because, in their impatience, they just don't see it happening (e.g., "We've been nice to China for almost 40 years and they're still Chinese!").  This process doesn't move on our timetable.  It has to do with THEIR perceptions of having made it, not our fears of their coming up fast.

Look at America 40 years into its tremendous rise:  right after WWI we basically turned away from the world and basically putting off our global leadership role for another two decades--and we didn't have, for example, the legacy of a huge, impoverished rural population to manage, like China or India or even Brazil has.

So we get impatient and despair.  We see old friends falling away and don't spot any potentiality in rising competitors.  We forget ourselves.

The Middle East after Iraq

Very nice World Politics Review piece by Gregg Carlstrom.

The premise:

In dozens of statements, interviews and news conferences since taking office, Obama has been adamant about sticking to the withdrawal timetable, which calls for removing all U.S. combat troops by August 2010 and a complete U.S. withdrawal by the end of 2011 . . . 

And Obama is by no means bucking domestic public opinion in holding so steadfastly to that promise now. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released in January found that 62 percent of Americans support his timeline for withdrawal . . . Domestic politics, in other words, argue strongly against delaying the withdrawal. 

And yet, the prospect of doing just that continues to be a hot topic in Washington. Tom Ricks, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, published a paper in February urging the Obama administration to scrap the timeline. Conservative commentators and analysts -- Max Boot, for example -- think the U.S. should maintain a long-term military presence in Iraq. Lawmakers routinely ask civilian and military officials whether the deadlines are flexible. 

At times, the Pentagon has also seemed far more circumspect than the White House about the timetable.

Publicly, the Iraqis take great pride whenever US troops pull back or out of a city or region, but privately, Iraqi officials are more circumspect, says Carlstrom.

Internally, the future is rather bright:

"What's left of the insurgency is pretty quiet these days," said Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation. "And there's never going to be a time when they have a greater motivation to attack than now."

Why now at the end?  Insurgencies always ramp up violence when the occupier is leaving, in order to claim "victory!" So expect some additional effort.

The real concerns are "external":  e.g., the internal border with the KRG (Kurds) and the real one with Iran and Syria (but more so Iran).

I certainly agree with Carlstom here about the look of an inevitable post-2011 presence:

But most analysts say that any American presence will look much different after 2011 than it does today: A few thousand troops, mostly serving in an advisory and training role, or performing functions that Iraqi forces can't yet handle. The Iraqi military is also executing an ambitious procurement plan, with the air force, for example, planning to purchase more than 400 new planes over the next decade. U.S. troops will certainly help train the military on its new hardware. 

Regionally speaking, it is as I've long argued, a question of competing Shia-Sunni poles potentially using Iraq as a proxy-war site.  But Carlstrom reassures here:

Iran's role in Iraq does continue to grow, as evidenced by the parade of Iraqi officials visiting Tehran before and after the parliamentary election. Saudi Arabia represents the other pole, a Sunni Arab counterweight to the Persian Shiites in Iran. But both countries are mistrusted by a plurality of Iraqis -- and not always for sectarian reasons. For instance, the Shiite Sadrist movement, with its staunchly nationalist views, often holds Iran at arm's length. Against that backdrop, some analysts say, the U.S. could carve out a durable diplomatic role in Iraq. 

What may temper Obama on all this:  Bob Gates fears a final-scene-of-Charlie-Wilson's-war outcome, as in, penny wise and pound foolish.

I agree and don't see how Obama can stick with his zero troops notion, unless it naturally incorporates several thousands of non-combat personnel--essentially pure SysAdmin.