Published for http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/, March 8, 2012

Secretary of Defense Panetta is taking flack from Andrew McCarthy for his response to Senator Graham about the conditions under which the Obama administration would use military force. Graham was trying to pin Panetta down as to whether the Obama administration considers international authorization from the U.N. or other multilateral institution to be necessary — and, in particular, whether similar authorization from Congress is not necessary.

Concerns about a hypothetical use of military force in Syria motivated the question, but it was the anything-but-hypothetical experience of Libya that framed it. In the Libyan operation, the Obama administration clearly demonstrated that they would not intervene militarily until they received the international cover of authorization from some combination of the U.N., NATO, and the Arab League. However, the Obama administration just as clearly demonstrated that they were willing to act without similar authorization from Congress. To many in Congress, this seemed to privilege international institutions above the U.S. Constitution and the constitutional role for Congress.

McCarthy does a good job of clearing the uncontroversial underbrush away from the controversial heart of the matter. Panetta tried to deflect the tough questions by answering easy ones, repeatedly reemphasizing two uncontroversial claims: (a) in an emergency the president has the authority to act without any further authorization and (2) whenever the U.S. acts militarily, it is better to have multilateral support for the effort. Panetta did not say, but could have, that getting such support from our allies usually requires the authorization of at least NATO and, usually, a U.N. Security Council Resolution; even if the United States did not require it, our allies would require it, so if we want the allies we have to work through those multilateral institutions.

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Published for shadow.foreignpolicy.com, February 16, 2012

Dennis Ross has made an interesting appeal for talks with Iran. He rightly points out that the current Obama strategy on Iran was to squeeze Iran with sufficiently painful sanctions so that Iran’s cost-benefit calculation would change, making the regime decide that the costs of the nuclear program were not worth the gain. Since there is evidence that the Iranians are experiencing the kind of pain the strategy called for, Ross says it is worth testing whether this has adjusted Iran’s cost-benefit calculation enough to make a deal possible.

Ross is clear-eyed about the modest prospects for success. Given the costs of the alternatives, I find Ross pretty compelling. But he buries the weak link in the strategy inside these two sentences: “Of course, Iran’s government might try to draw out talks while pursuing their nuclear program. But if that is their strategy, they will face even more onerous pressures, when a planned European boycott of their oil begins on July 1.”

As Ross surely knows, the Iranians have a standard approach for alleviating the kind of sanctions and isolation they currently face. It involves offering negotiations, but then insisting that the sanctions be lifted as a show of good faith or as a way of creating conducive conditions for fruitful talks or simply as a precondition for getting the Iranians to the table. The Iranians have been fairly adept at making it look like it was Western pressure that was hobbling diplomacy, thus creating pressure on our side to ease the sanctions. Even when the United States has stood firm, sometimes our allies and partners have wobbled. By and large, the Iranians have been more effective at using the prospects of negotiations to improve their chances of wiggling out of sanctions than our side has been at using the sanctions to improve the prospects for negotiations. And while the dynamic plays itself out, Iran has kept marching toward the nuclear threshold.

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Published for shadow.foreignpolicy.com, February 24, 2012

A couple of my recent posts have provoked my FP colleague, Tom Ricks. Provoked him to the edge of reason. As a public service, I think I ought to at least try to reel him back off the ledge.

Besides, he is an old friend who has a gazillion more readers than I do. So let’s take his arguments one at a time.

First, he objects to my observation that Republicans need not fear crediting Obama when it is due because his foreign policy successes have mostly come from following Republican (specifically his predecessor’s) policies. Tom’s rebuttal appears to be that Bush invaded Iraq and Obama did not. I’m sure Tom knows that the issue is more complex than that, but if we are going to keep it at that level of first-cut analysis, what about this table?

I am sure there are items that could go into the emptier cells, just as I am sure we could easily find more examples to reinforce the pattern displayed above. My point, which others besides Tom missed, is that it is possible to acknowledge instances where Obama has succeeded without simultaneously undermining the case for a Republican alternative.

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Published for shadow.foreignpolicy.com, February 14, 2012

It is almost banal to observe that the Iranian nuclear challenge is a hard policy problem. Back in the day, even during some dark periods on Iraq, Bush insiders tended to view the Iranian nuclear file as the more vexing problem. I remember vividly President Bush authorizing a fresh zero-based look at our Iranian policy in late 2005 even while the White House’s public posture was focused on the Iraq problem. Bush’s term ended with a sense of greater progress on Iraq than on Iran. And, measured differently, I suspect Obama’s national security team would likewise believe they have accomplished a greater proportion of their objectives regarding Iraq than Iran. It is just that thorny a problem.

Which is why I do not fully understand the arguments of the vocal and energetic anti-war faction. Perhaps I am reading the critics the wrong way, but it seems like they make the Iranian challenge an easier policy problem than it really is by arguing that all of the relevant considerations point in the the same direction. Thus, the use of force is a bad option, they say, because the costs of attacking Iran are high:

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Published for http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com, February 3, 2012

I imagine the Obama administration may be wondering whether or not to release another edition of the National Security Strategy (NSS). They released Obama’s first (and so far only) one in May 2010. Although the law mandating the NSS calls for annual updates, at the time it looked like the administration might follow the George W. Bush precedent of releasing just one per term.

The one-per-term standard makes sense for a number of reasons. First, we shouldn’t expect the overall national security strategy of the country to change on an annual basis. Second, producing a quality document takes a surprising amount of work; better to invest those resources in monitoring the implementation of the old one than in finding ways to repackage old wine in new wine skins. Third, as an administration creeps closer to the silly season of campaigning, the temptation to turn the document into a brag-sheet rather than a serious articulation of the administration’s worldview becomes irresistible. Whether or not you agreed with the content of the arguments, Clinton’s first NSS and both of Bush’s were more substantial and thus more consequential documents than the later ones produced by the Clinton administration.

However, I would not be surprised to learn that a new version is under consideration. Doubtless the campaign temptation is pulling mightily on the Obama team. President Obama will be the first Democratic incumbent in decades — maybe since Roosevelt — to have reason to believe that his bragging rights on national security are stronger than they are on domestic policy and the economy. When the applause lines are louder on national security than they are on the economy, it is easy to predict that the candidate will proffer the former more often than the latter (insert late night comic riff about Giuliani mentioning 9/11 here). Whether or not they can produce a document at least as serious as their first one, let alone on par with earlier ones is tougher to predict. Campaign-induced distortions will be a big challenge.

Yet there is one good reason why they should release another version in the current term — perhaps good enough to overcome all of my other caveats. A few weeks ago, President Obama released a much-ballyhooed “new strategic guidance” and the administration went to considerable lengths to emphasize the boldness and novelty of what they were doing. The commentariat responded in kind — a Google search of “Obama strategic pivot” produces some 1,200,000 hits.

If it really is so new and so bold, it raises the obvious question: is it new and bold enough to require changes in the (now) old NSS, from which, in theory, such defense guidance is supposed to emanate?

On the other hand, if the new strategic guidance does not require a change in the NSS, how bold and new can it be?

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Published for http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/corner, February 2, 2012

Given how many times Newt Gingrich rose from the proverbial electoral grave to become campaign-relevant again, I will not join the chorus claiming the fight for the Republican nomination is over. However, I will endorse another cliché: the primary season is at an important turning point, or at least it should be. It is high time the candidates focused on providing a compelling alternative to President Obama rather than providing a litany of reasons for detesting the other Republicans in the race.

The urgency is especially acute in foreign policy and national security. I have been fretting about this for some time now and I concede that the worst of my fears have not been realized; there won’t be a crack-up within the party over foreign policy. Moreover, I endorse the conventional wisdom that the election will be won or lost on domestic policy and the economy.

However, that is no reason to settle for sloppy critiques and platforms in the area of foreign policy. Republicans must come to terms with the fact that this will be the strongest Democrat incumbent on national security and foreign policy they have faced in decades. This has more than a whiff of damnation with faint praise, since both President Clinton and especially President Carter were hobbled with substantial national security baggage during their reelection campaign. But for precisely that reason, I think Republicans have sometimes settled for an intellectually lazy critique because, given how weak the opposing party’s record is, that seems to have sufficed.

Not this time. Obama has serious national security weaknesses and a record that warrants critique, but it is immune to superficial sound bite attacks. Soft on protecting America? The SEALs bought Obama immunity on that one when they took down Bin Laden. Naïve about the Iranian threat? Candidate Obama was demonstrably naïve about Iran and governed that way for the first half of his term, but since then has talked tough and marshaled strong sanctions.

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Published for http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com, January 24, 2012

A favorite topic for FP bloggers is the so-called gap between practicing academics and practicing policymakers. I have weighed in, but see also contributions from Dan Drezner (here or here and Steve Walt).

It is an important topic (at least to “yakademics” like me — I don’t sense it has quite the burning appeal for my non-academic Shadow Government teammates) and well worth the focused attention it has received. There are several excellent programs designed to help bridge it, including one run by Eliot Cohen and Tom Keaney at SAIS, another by my Duke colleague Bruce Jentleson and Berkeley’s Steve Weber and American U’s Jim Goldgeier, and a third by Dick Betts at Columbia. There is probably room for more such efforts.

But at the risk of undercutting the urgent language used in grant applications, I think it is only fair to point out that the situation may not be irredeemably bleak. I just had the pleasure of reading through the most recent issue of International Security, the top academic journal in the field of security studies and one of the highest-impact journals in the entire discipline of political science. I was struck by how policy relevant the issue was, without sacrificing in any way academic rigor. Mind you, the articles were too long and perhaps on the academic side to make the reading list of, say, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. But policymakers would benefit from understanding the arguments contained therein and foreign policy specialists inside the administration would benefit from digging into some of the articles more closely.

Consider the menu:

An article by Nuno Monteiro theorizing the conditions under which unipolarity conduces to peace or conflict. This is grand system theorizing in a form that is particularly “academic.” I am not entirely persuaded by his argument, but I can easily see how speechwriters and strategists would benefit from understanding the framework. [Note to entering Ph.D. students seeking dissertation topics: this article also reflects the turning of the wheel of academic fashion as the field cycles through different levels of analysis. In the early 1980s, system-level work like neorealism and neoliberalism were hot; in the 1990's state-level work like democratic peace theory was hot; in the early 2000's transnational-level work on ethnic conflict and terrorism was hot; right now individual-level work on leaders is hot; it is about time for the system-level work like this about power transitions and polarity to have another run.]

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Post published for http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/, January 20, 2012

Fareed Zakaria’s interview with President Obama on Obama’s foreign policy is a missed opportunity. Zakaria enjoyed exceptional access to President Obama, but chose to present the gauzy survey that the White House communications office might have served up (perhaps those two facts are linked?). Zakaria is certainly smart and knowledgeable enough to probe more deeply, but he didn’t, or if he did, he didn’t include it in the interview, and those deeper insights didn’t make it into his own summary analysis of the interview either.

That is a pity, because I think Zakaria is a better critic of American foreign policy than he showed this time. Here are just a few questions that a more trenchant interview might have pressed the president on:

You campaigned on the claim that climate change was a national security threat of the highest rank, as important a national security interest as dealing with the threats posed by terrorists and WMD proliferation. Yet, you have not governed that way. Yes, Congress opposed your cap-and-trade program, but they also didn’t want Obamacare yet you rammed that through. Why couldn’t you accomplish your grand strategy shift on climate change?

You campaigned on an unrelenting critique of your predecessor’s policies, yet you have kept so many of them in place. Moreover, where you have enjoyed the greatest success, say the killing of Bin Laden, it is through following techniques, tactics, and procedures developed by your predecessor. And where you have enjoyed the least success, say in Israel-Palestine, it has come after making abrupt changes. Do you think it is time now to refine your critique?

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Published for Shadow Government at www.foreignpolicy.com, January 5, 2012

There is a lively debate among theorists of civil-military relations about the appropriate levels of political activity in which the military may engage. Some advocate fairly tight restrictions, even encouraging soldiers to emulate General George C. Marshall who famously refused to vote so as to demonstrate his apolitical professionalism. Others allow for greater leeway, and encourage the military to speak out more regularly in policy debates, even when those debates have a partisan overlay.

I tend towards the restrictive end of the spectrum. I do not discourage the military from voting, for instance, but I do think it is a mistake for prominent retired senior generals and admirals to campaign actively for political candidates (I do not see a problem with veterans of whatever rank running as candidates in their own right. When they do that, they clearly cross over to the pure political side. The problem is trying to maintain the authority, even deference, that comes with professional distance while simultaneously politicking for a candidate).

For a good introduction into the complexities of this debate, I recommend reading Risa Brooks survey of the topic: her chapter on “Militaries and Political Activity in Democracies,” an excellent chapter in a recent compendium. (Full disclosure: I have a chapter in that same book, which I co-authored with a brilliant graduate student. I got permission to present and publish that article while still on the NSC staff because, when my superiors reviewed it, they declared it so academic and abstruse that no one would read it, and thus it would neither constitute a conflict of interest nor expose the White House to any risk of embarrassment — or words to that effect. Sometimes, there is utility in academic irrelevancy.)

It is also clear that there is a spectrum of opinion within the ranks. A first-rate Georgetown U. dissertation by Heidi Urben (more full disclosure: I was on her dissertation committee) documents that Army personnel have some difficulty in determining where to draw the line — is it acceptable to encourage fellow military comrades to vote? How to vote? To demonstrate the same with bumper stickers in the barracks?

So I accept that there are gray zones in the area of military and politics and that it is especially difficult to draw clear lines for reservists who have feet planted firmly in both civilian and military worlds.

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Published for Shadow Government at www.foreignpolicy.com, January 4, 2011

The Iowa results probably indicate that there will not be a big crack-up within the Republican party on foreign policy because the caucus returns are likely to be the high-water mark for the candidate with the most distinctive foreign policy platform in the field: Ron Paul. He did well enough to gain another week of press attention. But in the one contest best-suited to his unusual political operation, Paul did not beat expectations. He would have to really surprise in New Hampshire in order to remain relevant in the later primaries, and those are likely to be even tougher terrain for him.

Paul is no longer likely to be a spoiler within the party. He can still play the spoiler in the general election, if he runs a Ross Perot-style third party campaign and siphons off enough of the anti-incumbent vote to re-elect President Obama. There will be many Obama supporters cheering him on to do just that, but at least one influential Paul supporter argues compellingly against it.

Jon Huntsman is the other candidate who tried to capitalize on foreign policy divisions within the party, but he avoided Iowa altogether, thus delaying his moment of truth until next week’s primary in New Hampshire. Predictions in this campaign season have been notoriously unreliable, but I am willing to bet that New Hampshire will be more of a Waterloo than a surge for Huntsman.

That means that Romney will very likely be the nominee, and whichever runners-up remain in the race to challenge him through a few more primaries will be doing so on the basis of domestic or economic policies or personality, not national security and foreign policy. Romney already had the strongest foreign policy platform of the field, and, if I am right about the fading of Paul and Huntsman, any remaining rivals — even a surprise new not-Romney drafted from the bench — will largely echo him on foreign policy.

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