As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on March 8th, 2010:
In today’s Washington Post Jackson Diehl writes about something that has puzzled me for a while: President Obama has not cultivated the close working relationships with other world leaders that previous presidents have.
This is triply paradoxical. On the one hand, Obama is exceptionally popular abroad with elites and the general public. Leaders pay relatively little political cost in working closely with Obama, unlike, for example, the abuse Prime Minister Blair suffered for his close relationship with Bush.
On the other hand, to the extent that Obama has put his own stamp on American grand strategy so far it has been in the extraordinary lengths he has gone rhetorically to accommodate the complaints levied against the United States. Indeed, the heart of Obama’s first year strategy has been restoring the “soft power asset base” of the United States by conceding many foreign critiques, clearing the decks for leaders to start anew with America if they want to. This may help explain the first hand, Obama’s general popularity.
And on the third hand, the dictates of international diplomacy inevitably focus on the personalized diplomacy of the top leaders. This was true even when communications technology frustrated the effort; consider the risks President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill ran to hold a secret summit in the North Atlantic. This is even more true today when the communications/transportations costs of close contact between global leaders approaches zero. The president’s time is still a scarce and precious resource, sought by far more global demandeurs than the White House can satisfy. But beyond this constraint, there is practically no limit to the closeness of the personal relationship that the president can build with other leaders — if he wants to.
Read the full post here
As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on February 22nd, 2010:
I attended the same academic conference that fellow ForeignPolicy.com bloggers Dan Drezner and Steve Walt mentioned in their blogs. As I tell my students, several thousand International Relations professors in the same hotel for several days is not as much fun as it sounds, but with hundreds of panels on every conceivable topic, it can be exceptionally stimulating.
My biggest takeaway this year was the extraordinarily low profile given to Iraq, at least current-day Iraq. There were many panels and papers dealing with the invasion of Iraq, almost as many dealing with the mistakes made in the conduct of the war, a small handful of papers dealing with the tough calls that turned out better than expected (eg., the surge), but very few indeed dealing with the current situation and none that I saw with concrete, practical guidance on what to do going forward. Ironically, in this respect the academy was simply following the foreign policy pundit world, which has likewise let Iraq drop from the agenda. To be sure, Tom Ricks faithfully flags adverse developments in his “Iraq: the Unraveling” series but the only time the war emerged recently as a matter of much discussion among the commentariat was when Vice President Biden awkwardly tried to claim Iraq as one of the great foreign policy successes of the Obama Administration.
Most commentators zinged Biden for claiming credit for the surge policy he and President Obama tried to thwart as senators back in 2007, but what struck me about Biden’s boasting was how premature it was — almost as if he were claiming “mission accomplished” while there was plenty of hard work still to do. However, as Jackson Diehl argues, Biden may be the only political leader in Washington who is paying much attention to the Iraq situation.
Read the full post here
As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on February 10th, 2010:
Doves keep talking about the Iranian nuclear problem like it is a unilateralist
Ungame, the game where you win by not seeking to win. It is better thought of as multilateralist chess.
Doves have argued that the primary obstacle to reaching a grand bargain with Iran has been the unwillingness of the United States to make a sufficiently generous offer. Doves believed that President Bush willfully ignored hopeful signs out of Iran and poisoned the well of negotiations by setting “unreasonable” conditions, for instance requiring that Iran pause its enrichment program while negotiating over the issue. Doves were encouraged by Obama’s campaign critique of Bush on Iran and especially by his promise to sit down face-to-face with Iranian leaders to hammer out a deal. Doves take a unilateralist approach to the international coalition, focusing almost exclusively on U.S. concessions as the engine of their strategy. The dove position is remarkably immune to bad news out of Tehran. Whenever the Iranian regime spurns a U.S. offer, the problem can be pinpointed in the alleged unfairness of the offer — unfair to Iran, that is. Be more generous, and the Iranians might play along. Whenever the Iranians are caught in a deceit, the doves propose a bold gambit of making further concessions to Iran as a way to capitalize on the momentum. Pushed to its logical conclusion, the dove position is an irrefutable tautology: If we are willing to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon, and we should be, then we can have a grand bargain with Iran and we can put this matter behind us. Like the Ungame, we only need to focus on moving our pieces and listening to others. Provided we don’t really care about “winning,” then the game is really quite simple.
If you do care about winning, where winning is defined as “Iran abandons its nuclear weapons program,” then the game is better viewed as multilateral chess — strategic interaction along several vectors with multiple players holding conflicting interests.
Read the full article here
As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on February 8th, 2010:
Which is worse: getting mentioned in a comprehensive analysis of what is wrong with the Obama White house or not getting mentioned? I guess it depends on your level of seniority. But I am guessing that National Security Advisor Jim Jones is done no favors by going unmentioned in this Financial Times story.
The FT article claims that President Obama’s tight-knit core leadership team, primarily drawn from the campaign and from old Chicago hands, is responsible for the tactical and strategic missteps that have dogged the first-year of the administration. I was drawn to the Financial Times story by Steve Clemons’s discussion of it on his blog. Clemons has very good sources within the Democratic Party and is a generally reliable bellwether for the mood of establishment Democrats on foreign policy. By blogging about the FT article and adding dishy tidbits of his own (such as catching Valerie Jarrett bowing out of a public speaking engagement because of “urgent duties” back at the White House only to turn up a few minutes later at a different Washington watering hole), Clemons explicitly endorses the central thesis and calls on President Obama to shake up his staff. If the underlying FT article is truly based on “dozens of interviews,” apparently none of which is favorable to the White House team, and if Steve Clemons (and the faction he represents) is piling on, then things are in a bad way.
That’s the bigger story. But when I read the underlying FT article, my eye was drawn to a smaller story, one that Clemons does not comment upon: General Jones is not mentioned at all in the FT article, neither favorably nor unfavorably. The article discusses national security — specifically, the White House team’s travails during the Afghan Strategy Review, the botched effort to close Guantanamo Bay, and the big trip to China — but does not discuss the national security advisor.
Read the full post here
As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on February 1st, 2010:
On the eve of Groundhog Day, it is worth asking whether President Obama’s terrorism policy is facing six more weeks of bitter chill. Obama has been forced to backtrack on several signature initiatives — the commitment to close Guantanamo by Jan. 19, 2010, the commitment to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in lower Manhattan, and the hounding of Department of Justice lawyers from the Bush era over interrogation-related rulings — and it has gotten so bad that over at Politico.com they are asking whether Obama’s entire terrorism policy is unraveling. It does appear that the triangulation at the heart of Obama’s terrorism policy is in trouble, but it is not yet clear what will replace it.
Since the earliest days of his administration, Obama has attempted a deft triangulation: he has rhetorically framed his terrorism policy as a bold departure from the Bush era, but he has kept the lion’s share of the terrorism policy infrastructure that was operative under the second-term Bush administration. The “change” was dramatized with high-profile moves drenched in symbolism — the promise to close Guantanamo, the promise to investigate “abuses” from the Bush era, the release of inflammatory material over the objections of his CIA director, or the insistence on talking about terrorism with the language of law enforcement rather than war. The “continuity” was played down with quiet steps, like using Bush era arguments against habeas corpus or defending military commissions, and less quiet steps like a robust Predator drone strike campaign.
The triangulation worked as long as the media played along, letting Obama’s caricature of Bush era policies go unchallenged, rebutting the occasional critique from conservatives like Vice President Cheney by listing areas of continuity, and crediting the symbolic changes with all sorts of positive results like the improvement in global polling on America’s reputation.
This triangulation survived the nicks of a number of self-inflicted wounds, most notably the early recognition that the Guantanamo promise had been naïve. But it does not look like it will survive the harsh klieg light attention paid to Obama’s terrorism policy in the wake of the Underwear Bomber.
Read the full post here
As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on January 28th, 2010:
The foreign policy headline of the State of the Union speech is how far the president went to avoid generating a national security headline. In one of the longest of recent SOTU’s, the president’s speechwriters devoted some of the shortest space and least consequential language to national security.
The only national security news item was buried deep in a paragraph, masked with oblique language: the proposal to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Getting a Congress battered by health care and cap-and-trade to take up this controversial issue in an election year may require a larger expenditure of presidential political capital than Obama allotted in this one speech.
Most telling was the attempt to spin the Iran situation. Obama’s Iran strategy has stalled. The diplomatic overtures, spurned. The international coalition, frayed and paralyzed. Even ardent supporters of Obama’s Iran gambits are saying enough is enough. Most experts believe that 2010 will be the year of decision on Iran. Nothing in the SOTU speech hints that Obama’s advisors are girding to prepare Americans and our partners for that debate.
This will be a very consequential year for U.S. foreign policy, but little of that is foreshadowed in this speech.
Read the post here
As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on January 20th, 2010:
By Peter Feaver
I am looking forward to reading President Obama’s National Security Strategy (NSS), which should be released early this year. The NSS is the authoritative account of the president’s grand strategy — how he sees the challenges and opportunities confronting the United States in the world today and what he intends to do about it.
It is important in ways that my FP colleague, Steve Walt, seems not to understand. The NSS is an invaluable window into the thinking of the president; even if early drafts are developed by lower-ranking staff, the president and senior-most presidential aides will scrub it closely, more closely than any other governmental white paper. Because it is not a speech, it can cover terrain and develop the “theory of the case” that no one would inflict upon a listening audience. Precisely because it is a public document, it must authentically reflect the administration’s world-view; it is not a fortune cookie prediction of what the administration will do in any particular setting, but it is an authoritative statement of the principles that guide the president.
The NSS is one of the most important communications tools the president has and, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most important audiences for it is the rest of government. The NSS will tell the vast governmental establishment responsible for implementing the president’s vision just exactly what the president’s vision is.
Read the full post here
As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on January 14th, 2010:
By Peter Feaver
The horrible tragedy in Haiti is an opportunity to put the Obama administration’s mantra — “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” — to the test. Reasonable people can debate whether the administration has wasted opportunities at home (the domestic economic crisis) or abroad (Iran political crisis). But in Haiti they get a fresh chance to apply that mantra.
Of course, the primary focus should be on getting aid as quickly as possible to the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who are suffering. The Obama administration’s initial response has been adequate but hopefully is just a down-payment. More can and should be done and, I expect, will be done.
But I also expect that there are more opportunities in this crisis than merely rushing in humanitarian aid (as important as that is). While the first-responders in the administration are straining every nerve to ramp up their efforts, I hope the strategic planners in the administration (who do not have operational responsibility for responding) are also busy thinking of ways to have the response to the crisis address more fundamental concerns.
The Bush administration’s response to the late 2004 tsunami is instructive in this regard. Beyond meeting the initial humanitarian goals of helping alleviate the suffering, the Bush administration was able to have the U.S. response address three other goals:
(1) to reinforce a powerful counter-narrative to al Qaeda’s propaganda that the United States was at war with Muslims. Al Qaeda’s charge was never true — no country has done more to defend and assist Muslims in recent decades than the United States — but it resonated nonetheless. The irrefutable evidence of the United States taking the lead in helping the tsunami victims, many of whom were Muslim, and of doing more, faster than others were able to do (and doing it with military assets) still stands as the single greatest success in the ongoing war of ideas with what President Obama calls the network of violence and hatred.
Read the full post here
As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on January 13th, 2010:
By Peter Feaver
Lawrence Korb has an odd op-ed in today’s Washington Post that warrants a quick response.
Korb’s thesis has two parts. Part I is that senior military officers should give their civilian bosses their candid professional opinion, even if it is not what civilians want to hear. I heartily agree. Part II is that the Chairman of the JCS, Admiral Mullen, has violated this precept and deserves public censure.
Part II is the “interesting” part of the argument and it is so interesting it borders on explosive: Korb is charging the chairman of the JCS with a dereliction of duty. I don’t think Korb makes this case and if I were Mullen I would demand a retraction.
Korb claims that Mullen misled the Congress in late 2007 when he was pressed about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the priority then given to Iraq: “In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must,” Mullen said. “There is a limit to what we can apply to Afghanistan.”
Mullen’s response clearly indicated that in his view, Afghanistan would require additional resources but that given the constraints Iraq had to take priority for now. This is precisely the sort of cross-theater risk analysis that the chairman is supposed to give; there is nothing wrong or surprising if it differs from the view of subordinate battlefield or theater commanders, nor if it happens to conform to the view of civilian superiors. On the face of it, then, the response was not derelict.
Read the full post here
As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on January 7th, 2010:
President Obama’s national security advisor, retired Gen. Jim Jones, has warned that the initial report on the mistakes made by the administration in the run-up to the Christmas Day terrorist incident will “shock” Americans. Frankly, given the amount of dramatic rhetoric already floating in the public commentary on the issue, it is a bit shocking that the Obama team’s rollout would be itself so alarmist. If they think the American people are going to be shocked at the missteps made on their watch, then the missteps must be quite egregious, indeed.
President Obama signaled that himself on Tuesday when he gave public remarks to denounce finger pointing and then used that opportunity to point the finger so squarely at one segment of the intelligence community: the analysts. He exonerated other parts of the homeland security complex, explicitly the intelligence collectors and implicitly the point-defenders like low-level Transportation Security Agency officers, and laid the blame at the analysts and intelligence integrators whose job it is to take the disparate pieces of information of the jig-saw puzzle and put them together. Without naming the agency, he put the National Counterterrorism Center, the new entity formed after 9/11 to do precisely this function, squarely in his crosshairs.
Read the full article here
