Not That Into You
by The National Interest
02.04.2010
In the Newspaper Roundup, The National Interest distills the day’s foreign-policy editorials.
Not That Into You (February 4)
Europeans sure do love President Obama. During the 2008 campaign, he held his largest campaign rally overseas, proclaiming a new era of American leadership (when he hadn’t yet been elected) to a cheering throng of 200,000 wild-eyed Germans in Berlin. When he won the presidency, Continental sophisticates were overjoyed. Finally, the boorish George W. Bush was gone, and America had an intellectual, urbane and thoroughly cosmopolitan leader Europeans could identify and work with.
Alas, things didn’t work out quite this way. Instead of embracing Europe, Obama has snubbed the Continent at every turn. Now, via a tacky newspaper leak, the administration has informed the Europeans that the president won’t be attending the EU’s annual May gala in Madrid. Needless to say, many Europeans are upset. Why is their erstwhile paladin so reluctant to bring the New and Old worlds closer together?
The Wall Street Journal casts an amused eye over Europe’s quarrel with Obama in an editorial. The editors ask: “Can’t Europe take a hint?” Obama just isn’t into the Continent. He returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British. And then he abandoned the Czech Republic and Poland by axing the planned missile-defense system in both countries. “No President in recent memory,” the Journal writes, “has cared less for America’s alliance with Europe.”
And why should he? Europe doesn’t really matter anymore: “The ‘special relationship’ with Britain and close ties with the Central European allies remain critical to U.S. security, but those can be nurtured apart from the EU.” Besides, “Brazil, China, India and others in the Asia-Pacific region” are where our future interests lie. Europeans may come to find that they miss George W. Bush, who placed great value on cultivating “friendships with European leaders,” prioritized “the free Continent over others, and even” attended “all the summits the Europeans threw his way.” Perhaps Bush’s boorishness also led to a sentimentality that caused him to cherish Europe and value it beyond its importance. The cool, detached and rational Obama, however, is not burdened by such petty attachments—and Europe may come to regret its early cheerleading for him.
The Tea Partiers (February 3)
Seeing as the movement seems so uniquely American (and is staunchly against anything not American) it’s hard to believe that the Tea Party organizations sprouting up around the country have a foreign antecedent. But historian Robert Zaretsky, writing in the New York Times, thinks that they do. Well, sort of. France—of all places—had a similar explosion of populist anger in the 1950s that is reminiscent of the Tea Partiers, so much so that Zaretsky believes “a comparison between France then and America now may be instructive.”
Postwar France was a society in flux. Marshall Aid money was pouring in, transforming it from a “largely rural and agricultural” country into “a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing nation.” Inflation was rampant. The departments were inundated with an “influx of consumer and cultural goods from America.” Meanwhile, politicians in Paris paid little attention to these deep economic and social problems. The political center “evaporated in the crucible of the cold war.” In parliament, Gaullists and Catholics sparred with Communists and fellow travelers, unable to accomplish much of anything.
Many Frenchmen were terrified and angered by this new environment, and saw their cherished nation slipping away. And soon enough, their ire found a willing champion in Pierre Poujade, a “stationer in Saint-Cere, a small town in southwestern France.” Poujade launched a political movement that assailed the decadence of Paris and blamed France’s problems on “an urbane and urban professional class that had ‘lost all contact with the real world.’” His followers “bulldozed their way into town meetings, shouting down opposing candidates and threatening violence.” And in parliamentary elections, the movement’s candidates “won more than 10 percent of the votes, taking more than 50 seats in the National Assembly.”
This success, however, “proved to be Poujade’s swan song.” Once in power, the Poujadist candidates had no idea how to govern. They had anger, but no coherent political program. “Solgans and placards were poor preparation for governance,” writes Zaretsky, “and the group’s rank and file soon either retreated from the political arena or joined the traditional right.”
Now, Zaretsky is careful to caution that “historical parallelism is the duct tape of my [the historian’s] profession.” But it’s clear that there are some important similarities between the Tea Partiers and the Poujadists of old. Both were based in a nostalgic (almost romantic) conception of their nation’s history, and are indignant that that world looks to be slipping away. Not finding suitable representatives on the Right or the Left, they founded their own organizations that supposedly represent their values. And there is clearly something “great and real” in “the despair and disconnect with politics” that members of both groups experienced.
But, ultimately, outrage is not an effective way to get things done. Nor can it provide solutions to complex political problems. It is in this way that the Poujadist comparison is most apt. “Tea Party activists,” writes Zaretsky, “might find it infuriating ever to be compared to the nation they consider the anti-America. But French observers . . . may be forgiven if they feel a certain déjà vu when they see a movement that brings nothing to the ballot box except anger.”
Moving KSM (February 1)
The Obama administration’s 2009 attempt to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a New York civilian court generated a lot of criticism—including in New York itself, which chafed under the probable financial cost and security risk of having a high-value terrorist being shuttled to and from a federal courthouse in Manhattan. Bowing to such local pressure, the White House announced over the weekend that has asked the Justice Department to move the trial elsewhere. The Washington Post supports the decision in an editorial, but thinks ensuing spat reveals how silly the initial proposal to hold the trial in New York was in the first place.
To start, the Obama administration came to the decision unilaterally and did not consult any city officials, an oversight the Post calls “inexcusable.” This miffed Mayor Bloomberg, who convened his own commission to investigate how much such a trial would cost to stage. When the results came in, it was revealed that “security for the trial could cost the city upward of $200 million a year and would significantly disrupt business and residents in and near Lower Manhattan, where the federal courthouse is located.” These scary statistics moved Mayor Bloomberg to change his mind, and he subsequently “urged the administration to drop its plans for a prosecution in New York City.” The White House relented, putting the trial in a state of limbo.
While the Post supports Obama’s decision to move the trial elsewhere, it thinks the administration might have done better to consider all available options. KSM could have been tried by a military commission, which “because of new rules adopted last year, provides many of the same protections and procedures as do traditional federal proceedings.” But for now, the Post supports the idea of a federal trial—provided the Justice Department can find a new place to try Mohammed.
Dealing with Japan (January 28)
Since the end of World War II, America has had good relations with Japan. It was a bulwark of capitalist democracy against the Soviet Union and China, and thus served as the linchpin of our Cold War-era alliance structure in East Asia. With all this positive history between them, why, then, are our relations with Tokyo starting to sour?
In an editorial, the New York Times notes that the Japanese government is up in arms over an America military base located in the middle of an Okinawa city. Japan has long sought to move the base to a more convenient location, or close it entirely. Washington and Tokyo came to an agreement on the matter in 2006, which would have moved the base to a less populated part of Okinawa, and reduced the number of troops stationed at the facility.
This all sounds perfectly reasonable. But newly-elected Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama (who doesn’t view the America-Japan alliance as all that beneficial) is refusing to commit to the deal, and says he will “defer any decision until May.” The Times hopes that “the Obama administration shows flexibility and patience when two senior officials visit Japan for security talks this week.” America should “encourage Mr. Hatoyama to prove his commitment to being an ‘equal partner’ by offering solutions” to the base fracas.
Listening to Japan serves another purpose, in that it increases the chance we’ll come to an agreement quickly. The longer it languishes in an unsigned state, the more questions it will stir “about the future of the alliance.” The Times is especially worried that many younger Japanese do not “understand the full value of the security partnership” between the two countries. As China expands its military, our defense largesse “remains a bargain for the Japanese.” Our government needs to remind them how fortunate they are in a reasoned dialogue with Mr. Hatoyama.
Curbing Tehran (January 27)
As Iran’s internal crisis has deepened, some American commentators are pushing President Obama to loudly condemn the odious Ahmadinejad regime and throw in our lot with the opposition Green Movement. CFR President Richard Haass recently wrote a much-discussed Newsweek article arguing that America and other Western governments “should shift their Iran policy toward increasing the prospects for political change.” If the mullahs are booted out of power, it’s more likely Tehran will abandon its nuclear ambitions.
Robert Kagan sounds similar notes in his monthly column for the Washington Post. But he sees the stakes in much more epic terms than Haass. A political change in Iran would be “second only to the collapse of the Soviet Union in its ideological and geopolitical ramifications.” Imagine a world without a theocratic Iran. The government that supports Hezbollah, Hamas and “anti-democratic, anti-liberal and anti-Western fanaticism” would be gone. In short, the Middle East would be a much more peaceful—and perhaps more pro-American—place.
This dramatic political shift makes “regime change . . . more important than any deal the Obama administration might strike with Iran’s present government on its nuclear program.” And a new, more democratic Iran probably won’t have as much interest in developing nuclear weapons anyway. It’s not entirely unheard of for countries to scrap their nuclear ambitions—post-apartheid South Africa got rid of its nukes, and some of the former Soviet republics transferred their arms back to Russia after gaining independence. As such, “regime change in Tehran is the best nonproliferation policy.”
So how can Obama encourage the collapse of Iran’s current government? Unfortunately, Kagan doesn’t elaborate. He does say that he’s unsure President Obama has recognized the importance of the occasion: “The president needs to realize that this is his ‘tear down this wall’ moment. And that it is fleeting.” Presumably, such a moment would involve a speech (or series of speeches) directed against the Ahmadinejad regime that place America squarely on the side of the Green Movement. More dramatically, it might entail cutting all contact with the current government. In any case, time is running out. We need to choose a side—and soon.
Right Turn (January 25)
Last week, we catalogued Hugo Chavez’s blustering insanity elsewhere on our website; his claims that the Untied States seeks to occupy Haiti and that the devastating earthquake in that country was caused by a new American weapon. Jackson Diehl relates Chavez’s deepening madness in his Washington Post column, and notes that the Venezuelan president’s increasing disconnect from reality might be due to a very happy fact: the failure of his “Bolivarian Revolution.”
Diehl writes that for much of the past decade, America’s relationship with its southern neighbors was complicated by Chavez’s presence. His brand of socialism and left-wing activism attracted a lot of adherents and introduced a distinctly anti-American tinge to the foreign policies of many Latin American countries. And, for a while, the Left was on the march in the Western Hemisphere. Chavez found allies in Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and friends in Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Chile’s Michelle Bachelet. The United States seemed powerless to do anything about this, as interfering or attempting to influence the region’s politics only seemed to lend credence to Chavez’s blustering that Washington was an imperial power.
But Diehl argues that the tide is turning. Chile just elected a conservative president for the first time since the 1950s. The candidate, Sebastian Pena, condemned Venezuela during the campaign for its autocratic government, socialism and abuse of human rights. Late last year, Chavez suffered a blow in Honduras, where he attempted to seize power through a proxy, Manuel Zelaya. With the support of the United States, the country held an election and chose a moderate president. The disaster in Haiti has made Venezuela’s leader look absurd. Chavez can’t reconcile images of cheering Haitians welcoming American marines “with his central propaganda message to Latin Americans, which is that the United States is an ‘empire’ and an evil force in the region.”
With Chavez’s aggressive foreign policy on the rocks, he is also in trouble at home. Venezuela’s economy is imploding after years of socialist mismanagement. The crime rate has skyrocketed. And it is facing rolling power blackouts. This malaise has caused the caudillo’s approval ratings to drop “below 50 percent in Venezuela and to 34 percent in the rest of the region.” Although Chavez has “survived a lot of bad news before and may well survive this,” Latin America has reached a “turning point”—and liberal democracy has triumphed over Venezuela’s “authoritarian populism.”
Classifying Terror (January 22)
The Obama administration is still taking flak for the intelligence failures that almost led to another terrorist attack on Christmas Day. On Wednesday, the Senate held a hearing that included most of the nations’ top domestic security officials, including Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. When asked about whether the government acted appropriately by giving underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to law-enforcement officials, Blair stated that Washington’s conduct was a mistake. Instead, the terrorist should have been sent to the High-Value Interrogation Group. The unit assesses the intelligence value of terror suspects, and then recommends what to do with them—i.e., prepare them for prosecution or send them someplace else.
In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal argues that Blair’s assessment is a no-brainer. There’s no doubt Abdulmutallab was a terrorist, seeing as he tried to ignite his nether regions and blow up a plane. So why on earth did the Obama administration decide to hand him over to federal law-enforcement officials, instead of milking him for intelligence leads? The Journal notes that “now the government’s only hope for Abdulmutallab to say a bit more is via plea bargain, by which time his intelligence leads will likely have run cold.” In short, the White House really screwed up.
Predictably, “an anonymous Administration official” tried to spin Blair’s testimony, claiming that his statement had been “misconstrued.” The Journal, however, thinks it “heard Mr. Blair right the first time,” and that “his departure from the script reveals the dangerous folly of the Administration’s policy of treating terrorists like common criminals.”
Public Diplomacy (January 21)
Part of President Obama’s much-touted revision of U.S. foreign policy was an emphasis on dialogue with states that the Bush administration had consciously ignored—nasty places like Iran and North Korea. If only we talked to these countries, President Obama argued, they’d become less hostile and more amicable toward the United States.
If only. A year after Obama’s inauguration, it’s clear that this talk-first approach has failed abysmally, at least when it comes to Iran. On Wednesday, the rogue state rejected a compromise deal on its illicit nuclear program, refusing to send its nuclear fuel to be enriched in a third country. Now that Tehran has clearly slapped away Obama’s “open hand,” what is Washington to do?
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, James Glassman and Michael Doran note that there are three ways America can curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We could try further negotiations, hoping that they’d produce a new compromise. Bombing the country is certainly an option. Or we could hope for a new, friendlier administration in Tehran.
Of these three approaches, Glassman and Doran think the third “seems more and more realistic.” Iranians are already protesting against their government. So what can America do to help them?
What is really needed, write Glassman and Doran, is a new round of aggressive public diplomacy. Translating resistance media into Farsi—for instance, documentaries on the fall of Communism and articles on the transition of power in places like Poland and South Africa—would be a good teaching tool for Iranian dissidents. In addition to spreading these items inside Iran, Washington has a powerful asset in the Voice of America. Its Farsi language service should broadcast these anti-regime programs to the Iranian people, in addition to providing its normal news content. The Obama administration should “vigorously protest attempts by Iran to jam broadcast signals in defiance of international law,” and could “back private media . . . and help Iranians get the technology to overcome regime attempts to block and censor.” Smuggled cell phones would allow Iranian protestors to better coordinate their demonstrations, while laptops could provide a link with outside (and hence, non-regime tainted) information.
A good PR push is also needed to counter Tehran’s propaganda machine. If we place sanctions on Iran, we need to embark on a constant media offensive to link the Iranian leadership to the country’s economic privation. We need to convince the Iranian people of the truth—that it is Ahmadinejad that is responsible for their financial hardship, not America. On a smaller scale, it’d also be a good idea for the State Department to publicize the individuals and organizations responsible for the heinous crackdown on Iranian protestors.
This diplomatic push is relatively inexpensive and involves comparatively little effort from Washington—and is considerably less costly than a military intervention or another round of summitry. Unlike some of our other foreign-policy problems (like North Korea), Glassman and Doran think “the Iranian challenge appears more amenable . . . to a soft-power solution. Let’s get going.”
Voter Fraud (January 20)
President Obama certainly has a lot on his plate right now. In addition to managing the surge in Afghanistan, a struggling economy and imploding political party, he also needs to make sure our military stages a graceful exit from Iraq. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been devoting much of his time to doing so. In an editorial, the Washington Post writes that the White House needs to refocus its attention on Iraq. As you might have heard, Iraq is having an election in March, which, of course, is supposed to be free and fair. But the government of Nouri al-Maliki has barred a number of candidates from running, claiming that their links to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party make them ineligible.
There are a number of reasons to believe that this explanation is dubious. Most of the banned candidates are Sunni, which benefits Prime Minister Maliki’s mostly Shiite ticket. And it looks as if one-time Bush administration favorite and State of the Union honored guest Ahmed Chalabi is one of the instigators of “the nasty maneuver.” This would be unremarkable, other than the fact that Chalabi, in an incredible political renaissance, is “now regarded as an Iranian agent by many U.S. officials.” So, a measure disenfranchising Sunnis is instigated in part by a staunch supporter of Iran. Hmmm. Instead of promoting democracy, it looks like Maliki and his cronies are involved in an odious bit of Shiite vote stacking.
The Post believes this is unacceptable, as “an election that looked as though it would be one of the most free in the history of the Arab world would be badly degraded.” The White House, which was “surprised by the sudden decision,” is already on the case. Vice President Biden is apparently making calls to pressure Iraqi leaders to modify the ban. But the Post would prefer if the administration, including President Obama, directed more attention toward Iraq. It will need to “use all the leverage at its disposal to press for a compromise . . . that would put legitimate Sunni leaders back on the ballot.” The future of Iraq—and our presence there—depends on a stable election. We can’t screw this up.
After Gitmo (January 19)
After the failed attempt by a Yemeni-trained Islamist to ignite his drawers on a plane bound for Detroit, President Obama wisely announced a temporary ban on returning Gitmo detainees to Yemen. But Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham think that Obama’s prohibition doesn’t go far enough. They want to prevent the transfer of terrorist prisoners to any country that has “a significant al-Qaeda presence,” including Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria.
The Washington Post thinks this is a bad idea, and calls on President Obama to “reject this appeal.” A sweeping ban on transfers prevents the authorities from making decisions on a case by case basis and “ignores the administration’s moral and legal responsibility to release those who should never have been detained in the first place, regardless of country of origin.”
In addition, some of the countries on McCain and Graham’s list probably shouldn’t be there. Sure, Somalia is a mess. But Saudi Arabia and Algeria “have been better able to keep an eye on returned nationals.” So why shouldn’t we send back their citizens? Also, what about countries like the United Kingdom and Germany? They certainly have a “significant al-Qaeda presence.” Are we going to halt the return of detainees to those countries as well? McCain and Graham’s proposal doesn’t take these nuances into account.
The Post observes that if the two senators have their way, the result could be the release of terror detainees on U.S. soil—which no one wants, certainly least of all John McCain and Lindsey Graham. “A blanket prohibition,” the Post’s editors write, “also increases the risk that a federal judge will order released into the United States those detainees barred from reentering their homeland.” If we can’t send a terror suspect back to Algeria, a judge may order that he be resettled in America. Such a situation would prove highly unpopular with the American people and jeopardize the country’s safety.
Finally, the Post states that McCain and Graham’s proposal includes a positive element, in that it focuses attention on the need for President Obama to work with Congress to “craft a legal framework to govern detentions of those too dangerous to release but against whom there is not enough evidence to prosecute in a conventional court.” That way, the judicial branch would stop making national-security policy with arbitrary rulings—and be provided with guidelines for how to treat such cases in the future.
Hard Truths (January 15)
In his Friday New York Times column, David Brooks tackles a thorny issue: foreign aid. He starts by noting that the recent tragedy in Haiti was certainly a natural one. But it was exacerbated by human failure. An earthquake of the exact same magnitude hit the San Francisco area in 1989. 63 people died. Over 45,000 people have died in Haiti. Brooks writes that this isn’t a random occurrence: “This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story.” More Haitians died because the country is desperately poor and lacks a government that can enforce basic things like building codes.
Admirably, President Obama is in the process of cobbling together a massive American aid package for Haiti. But if he really wants to help the country, Brooks thinks Obama is “going to have to acknowledge some difficult truths.”
The first, and most obvious, is that foreign aid is not good at reducing poverty. Countries that receive tons of foreign aid—Haiti, for example—are floundering and haven’t exhibited much improvement. Countries that don’t get much aid—like China—are doing exceptionally well. What’s the problem? Brooks isn’t sure. But he does know that pretending that we can alleviate poverty by throwing money at third world regimes isn’t going to help anyone.
Micro-aid, or targeted, direct funding of poverty-reduction programs at the local level, was designed to serve as a solution to this conundrum. But it isn’t working either. Brooks observes that
More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of this sort in Haiti. By some estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord’s work, especially these days, but not even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.
All of these things necessitate asking an un-PC, but hugely important question: Why is Haiti poor? Let’s run through the laundry list of reasons (or excuses) such countries normally provide for their plight. Haiti was a colony populated by slaves. Well, so was Barbados, and it’s doing pretty well. Scratch that rationale. Next? Haiti was repeatedly invaded and abused by the United States, which propped up dictatorial regimes. Well, so was the Dominican Republic—which even shares “the same island and the same basic environment” as Haiti. And the Dominican Republic, while far from a model of democratic virtue and fiscal prudence, is not Haiti.
So, at least in part, the reason Haiti is poor is, well, because it is Haiti. Brooks notes that the country, “like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences.” Voodoo religion encourages people to believe that “life is capricious and planning futile.” There are “high levels of social mistrust” and “responsibility is often not internalized.” Haitian child-rearing practices are backward, and “often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.” All of these cultural forces add up, preventing Haiti from making any sort of economic progress.
Brooks thinks the closest thing we have as a solution to these problems is some sort of cultural paternalism. America’s culture, whatever its faults, is better than Haiti’s. By combining micro initiatives with an “intrusive paternalism”—Western funded schools, for example, that remove Haitians from their established social norms—it might be possible to break Haiti’s cycle of poverty, and prevent such a tragedy from happening again.
Pen & Sword (January 14)
It’s been nearly a year since President Obama took office. How’s he been doing on all things Middle East/Islam related? David Ignatius takes stock of both topics in his column for today’s Washington Post. To remind himself of where Obama started on these issues, Ignatius revisited his June 2009 Cairo address, in which he grandly called for “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and respect.” To help us reach this happy state of affairs, the president proposed a new start to the Israel-Palestine negotiations, and assured Muslims he would be an honest broker in the process.
At the time, Ignatius writes, not everyone was convinced by Obama’s promises of a sunny new diplomacy:
Arabs predicted that if Israel balked at U.S. demands, Obama would fold his hand. Hawks in America and Israel warned that Obama was being naïve; America’s Muslim adversaries wouldn’t be convinced by sweet talk about peace; they understood only the logic of force.
Since then, both groups of “doubters . . . think they have been proven right, given that Obama’s peacemaking efforts appear dead in the water, even as he escalates his war-making in Afghanistan and Yemen.”
The truth is more complicated. Ignatius wants Americans to view Obama’s rhetorical and actual efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East as an integral part of a strategy to defend the United States. Nice words and diplomatic negotiations aren’t an alternative to force and violence—instead they’re a compliment to both. If military action was able to stabilize the region, “the Israelis would have battled their way to peace long ago.” A two-pronged strategy using the pen and the sword is the way to go.
Ignatius thinks that the turmoil in Yemen will serve as a crucial “test of whether Obama can fight terrorism in a smarter way than did his predecessor, George W. Bush.” But we can’t defeat terrorists in Yemen if we don’t have a modicum of support from the local population. If we listened to the concerns of the Yemenis—which, according to Ignatius, include the Palestinian problem—then they’d be a lot more willing to help us kill violent Islamists.
So, it is important for the United States to have a positive image in the Middle East, which means Obama’s peaceful, sweeping rhetoric has a place. “We are confronting an enemy that wants to draw us deeper into battle, so that America is more isolated and unpopular,” writes Ignatius. “We avoid that spider’s trap by solving problems that matter.”
Nigeria’s Problems (January 13)
Nigeria has never really been able to get it together. Despite massive natural wealth and Africa’s largest population, the country is still mired in corruption, waste and violence. And recently, it has taken to exporting something other than oil: Islamic fanatics. The editors of the Washington Post note that Nigeria has come under a lot of scrutiny lately, as it is the home of underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Unfortunately, the country isn’t able to do much about its new-found notoriety. Its president, Umaru Yar’Adua, has been in a Saudi hospital since November. The Post reports that “Nothing was heard from him from then until Tuesday, when in response to reports of his death, he gave a brief telephone interview to the BBC.” While Yar’Adua wallows in convalescence, Nigeria is leaderless—which isn’t a good place for the country to be. One would think that the vice president, the wonderfully named Goodluck Johnson, would be able to take over Yar’Adua’s duties until the president returns to health. But, of course, there are complications. Yar’Adua is a Muslim and Johnson is a Christian. Tensions between the two communities are running high, and Muslims might see a Johnson regency as a Christian power grab. The Post hopes that Nigeria can figure something out, because time is of the essence. Washington needs the country’s help to ensure that more Nigerians don’t sign up with al-Qaeda and ignite their nether regions. This will be increasingly hard to do if the country lacks a leader we can work with.
Trade Wars (January 12)
When the editors of the New York Times are upset with a foreign country, you know that place is doing some pretty bad things. Today, the Grey Lady vents its frustration in an editorial about Communist China and its unfair currency policy. As you probably know, Beijing pegs the renminbi to the dollar to keep Chinese production costs artificially low. This allows China to maintain its competitive advantage in manufacturing, which in turn prevents industry in America, Europe and a host of developing countries from being cost effective. The result has been a flood of Chinese exports, massive trade imbalances and a Communist Party that sits on billions of dollars worth of foreign reserves—not to mention ravaged manufacturing industries in the developed world, and a near lack of them in poor countries. In short, China’s currency manipulation isn’t working for anybody, except Beijing.
Chinese leaders, of course, like it that way. But the Times thinks they are being incredibly shortsighted:
While the strategy is still working for China, it is exacerbating economic weaknesses around the globe. If China keeps it up, other countries are likely to use their last available weapon—protectionism—to stop the onslaught of artificially cheap Chinese goods.
Indeed, protectionist impulses are becoming increasingly hard to resist. While the Obama administration has refrained from doing anything extreme and Congress has been “uncharacteristically quiet . . . patience is wearing thin in Washington and everywhere.” The Indians have already “filed a stack of trade complaints against China.” And China’s developing neighbors in East Asia are starting to get angry too. A trade war would be bad news for everyone, and would most likely cripple the global economic recovery. But Beijing’s “beggar-thy-neighbor currency policy” is giving other nations good reason to enact harsh penalties against China.
The Times correctly notes that things don’t have to be this way. Instead of hoarding their foreign reserves, China’s leaders could spend some of the money “at home to pay for long-neglected social spending: on health care, education and pensions. This would provide substantial economic stimulus and improve the lives of its people.” What the editors don’t note, however, is that China’s currency policy is key component of the state’s internal stability. If the Communist Party can’t maintain those dazzling economic numbers, a lot of Chinese are going to become very unhappy. So it’s probably unlikely that Beijing will abandon its criminal currency policy anytime soon. (It is ironic, of course, that the Chinese people might be prepared to deal with a slowdown in economic growth if they saw some of the benefits of it, in some of the social programs the Times suggests. But autocratic leaders are never very good at divining their people’s will—which might mean the China is headed for a world of trouble in the near future.)
Terror (January 11)
Fareed Zakaria thinks that Washington is drawing all the wrong lessons from the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day. Writing in the Washington Post, he notes that “Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced the feelings of many when she said that to prevent such situations, ‘I’d rather overreact than underreact.’” Zakaria finds such a view “quite wrong.” The purpose of terrorism is to, well, terrorize people: “Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population.”
Thus, despite the fact that the “underpants bomber” didn’t succeed in his task, the attack was nonetheless successful in that all of America is now freaking out over the threat al-Qaeda poses to our nation. People are clamoring for tighter airport security. Republicans are blaming President Obama for failing to protect us. Zakaria believes these reactions obscure a bit of positive news: al-Qaeda is a lot weaker than it used to be. The organization was once capable of launching massive attacks on multiple targets in many countries. They’ve now been reduced to providing a willing fanatic with explosives to sew into his underwear. And “his mission failed entirely, killing not a single person. The suicide bomber was not even able to commit suicide.” What should have been an operational disaster for al-Qaeda has succeeded because it managed to scare the American people.
Zakaria thinks there has to be “some sensible reaction between panic and passivity.” He picks up on a suggestion from former-Bush administration official Philip Zelikow, who “suggests that we should try to analyze failures in homeland security the way we do airline catastrophes.” If something goes wrong on an airplane (i.e., a crash/mechanical malfunction, not terrorism), the National Transportation Safety Board “convenes a group of non-partisan experts who methodically examine what went wrong and then issue recommendations to improve the situation.” Such a process would make a lot of sense for terrorism, as the sheer number of flights, passengers and man’s capacity for error make it likely that somewhere, someone with malicious intent will slip through our net. We should look at anti-terror measures as an organic, ongoing process that changes and adapts with each attempted (or successful) attack.
Such an approach, Zakaria writes, would have a lot of advantages:
The public would know that any attack, successful or not, would trigger an automatic, serious process to analyze the problem and fix it. Politicians might find it harder to use every such event for political advantage. The people on the front lines of homeland security would not get demoralized as they watched politicians and the media bash them and grandstand with little knowledge.
Our current reaction to the attack is anything but this cool, rational response. Even more security for every passenger “makes no sense.” Instead, we need a “larger, more robust watch list that is instantly available to all relevant government agencies. . . . We need to isolate the tiny percentage of suspicious characters and search them, not cause needless fear in everyone else.”
Zakaria closes by astutely observing that calls to harshly punish the would-be underpants bomber are understandable, but ultimately misguided. His father was the one that alerted American authorities to his son’s interest in radical Islam—a very hard step for a parent to take. Zakaria asks: “If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in?” Probably not. “To keep this country safe,” Zakaria writes, “we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door.”
Blame the Bureaucracy (January 8)
It’s Friday, so everyone can be excused if they want a little comfort food. Newspaper junkies in need of such a fix can turn today to the Wall Street Journal, whose editors have returned to their natural habitat: inveighing against the evils of government bureaucracy.
Taking the White House’s counterterrorism gala on the aborted Christmas Day attack as its starting point, the Journal is pleased that President Obama at least admitted that the whole failure was his fault. Well, sort of: “Mr. Obama blamed no one in particular for the failure, not even George W. Bush. In one sense, this is refreshing.” And he ordered the various agencies involved, particularly the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), to undergo a thorough review of their practices.
While the Journal is delighted with the president’s personal candor, it is less happy with his administration’s explanation of how exactly the intelligence failure happened in the first place. In its review, the White House claimed that the CIA and NCTC purposefully had overlapping responsibilities to ferret out terror plots like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his now-infamous underpants. But these redundancies clearly didn’t function in the way they were supposed to. Both agencies dropped the ball, and failed to stop Mr. Abdulmutallab from getting on an airplane. Alas, it seems that President Obama forgot the cardinal rule of landscape architecture: when you give two people the same job to do, neither of them is to blame if the other one didn’t do it. The Journal believes this old adage applies to government departments as well:
To put it another way, if everyone is responsible, no one is. This is the tao of modern bureaucracies, and there is nothing larger, more complex, or harder to attach responsibility to than America’s intelligence labyrinth.
Agency reviews aren’t going to solve this problem. The only way forward, in the Journal’s eyes, is to slash the layers of bureaucratic incompetence that landed us in this mess in the first place. The NCTC should be a small section of CIA, not its own organization. By existing as a separate entity, it focuses less on counterterrorism and more on “micromanaging or duplicating the CIA.” By slashing the organization’s staff to “20 or 30 people—and the CIA by half”, and by driving “the bureaucracy by making the fight against terrorism a daily, personal priority,” Obama would go a long way in ensuring more accountability in the intelligence community.
The Journal slyly notes that there’s an added bonus in all this for President Obama—he actually can blame this situation on President Bush, as the latter moved to incorporate the NCTC as its own agency at the prodding of the 9/11 Commission in 2004. With that tasty morsel, everyone—from the most rabid tea partier to the president of the United States—would have their fill of comfort food.
Listen to Tokyo (January 7)
Ever since Yukio Hatoyama, the new Japanese prime minister, took office in September 2009, Washington has had rather strained relations with Tokyo. Hatoyama made some abrasive remarks about America on the campaign trail, and is seemingly making good on his promises to reassert Tokyo’s say in the relationship. Hatoyama is demanding that the United States relocate Futenma, a Marine base that is currently located in the midst of an Okinawa city. The Pentagon, of course, is miffed and a fracas has ensued that is damaging our friendship with the Japanese.
Writing in the New York Times, Joseph Nye argues that the United States needs to chill out. Hatoyama is in an incredibly difficult position. He governs with a shaky coalition of left-wing parties, some of whom are not fans of the United States. As such, on the base-moving issue, he is “caught in a vise, with the Americans squeezing from one side and a small left-wing party (upon which his majority in the upper house of the legislature depends) threatening to quit the coalition if he makes any significant concessions to the Americans.”
In any case, this Futenma dispute is a lot of fuss over something that really doesn’t matter. Why are we “allowing a second-order issue to threaten our long-term strategy for East Asia”? There are plenty of more important problems that the prickly Hatoyama has raised with America. His government “speaks of wanting a more equal alliance and better relations with China,” the latter of which is problematic from America’s perspective. Our alliance with Japan has served as “the basis for stability and prosperity” in East Asia for a half-century. If the Japanese have big problems with where that alliance is going, we need to listen to them. Angering Japan over smaller issues will only make it harder to deal with them on the ones that matter. “If the United States undercuts the new Japanese government and creates resentment” in its efforts to preserve the Futenma facility, “then a victory . . . could prove Pyrrhic.”
Iran is Stable (January 6)
The recent turmoil in Iran has encouraged speculation that the country might be on the eve of revolution, one that would sweep away the tyrannical mullahs and replace them with a more benign government. Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett beg to differ. Writing in the New York Times, the Leveretts argue that Iran’s situation is not analogous to 1979, when the shah’s regime imploded, or 1989, when Communism died. In fact, many in Iran want to keep their Islamic government. The Leveretts make much of a recent demonstration set up by the regime to counter opposition protestors, which supposedly had a million people in attendance. “Photographs and video clips,” they write, “lend considerable plausibility to this estimate—meaning this was probably the largest crowd in the streets of Tehran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s funeral in 1989.” In addition, many Iranians were repulsed that the protests took place on Ashura, a Shia day of mourning. Thus (according to the Leveretts) the opposition movement hasn’t gained many new adherents in the past few weeks.
And just what is this “opposition movement” anyway? The Leveretts don’t see it as much of a “movement” at all, as it is leaderless and divided in its aims. Some protestors, “who have received considerable Western press coverage,” want to do away with the Islamic Republic. Others, however, do not want to destroy the current system, but simply want “expanded personal freedoms and interaction with the rest of the world.” This doesn’t amount to a “comprehensive agenda,” or governing philosophy that could overthrow the theocrats.
As such, it’s pretty unlikely the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei regime will fall apart in the near future. It’d be foolish for President Obama to bet otherwise, even though many in the media are pressing him to take a harsher line toward Iran. Instead of banking on regime change in Tehran, the Leveretts believe the correct historical analogy to use as a model for our dealings with Iran is China, circa the early 1970s. Back then, Washington had hostile relations with the Communist regime. But President Nixon was able to come to terms with China and construct a beneficial relationship with the country—in the midst of the horrific Cultural Revolution, which makes Iran’s current unrest look like a tea party. The Leveretts think it would be wise for President Obama to make a similar move and construct some sort of “sustained, strategic relationship” with Tehran. Who knows? In thirty years, maybe Iran will be inundating us with cheap plastic junk and be a “responsible stakeholder” in the international community—albeit one that still murders its own citizens.
Try Him (January 5)
Over the past week, President Obama has come under fire for treating “underpants bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a criminal suspect instead of a terrorist with no recourse to the American legal system. White House aides defended the decision, and indicated that some sort of plea bargain might be in the works, in exchange for detailed information about al-Qaeda. Michael Kinsley weighs in on the debate today, lending his support to the Obama administration in an op-ed for the New York Times. Kinsley starts off by noting that Republicans have a point in their criticism of Obama’s seeming hypocrisy on terror-related issues. Why is it OK to shoot first and ask questions later when dealing with suspected terrorists in Afghanistan, but not OK to immediately imprison an obviously guilty terrorist who tried to blow up an airplane?
Kinsley says that this situation is a “gruesome anomaly.” But this conundrum didn’t “arise with the Obama administration.” Instead, it “is built into our dual role as a liberal democracy and as a legitimately aggrieved superpower.” Every day at home, people who are obviously guilty are put on trial and, yes, given access to plea bargains. It isn’t fair that “the most repulsive . . . child molester—or drug kingpin who may also have information that the government could use—gets American justice, while an innocent child killed accidentally in our pursuit of terrorists gets no justice at all.” But this dichotomy is a logical tradeoff for two very different situations: war and peace.
A government at war has different standards of behavior than a government at peace. As we aren’t engaged in a civil conflict, the domestic areas of the Untied States necessitate a different sort of law enforcement than the wilds of Waziristan. As Abdulmutallab was captured in America, he should be treated the same as “any upstanding American who tried to blow up an airplane full of people.” If we start treating one group of people apprehended in our country differently than another group of people apprehended in our country, we’re headed for a world of trouble. “What about Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber?” Kinsley asks. “What about the Columbine high school killers? Are they terrorists? Is American justice too good for them?” If Abdulmutallab isn’t classed as a criminal, these are fair questions to ask. And if we answered all of them affirmatively, would we still hold our balance, however tenuous, between a superpower at war and a liberal democracy? Kinsley doesn’t seem to be sure—and, as such, supports trying Abdulmutallab as a criminal.
Voting in Egypt (January 4)
President Obama rightly interpreted his election as a clear demonstration of America’s desire to break with the policies of the Bush administration, from financial regulation (or lack thereof) to aggressive democracy promotion abroad. In most cases, the editors of the Washington Post are likely to agree with Obama’s repudiation of all things Bush. But in one aspect of foreign policy, the Post worries that Obama is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Some of President Bush’s efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East weren’t all that bad. In Egypt, for example, American pressure encouraged the autocratic government of Hosni Mubarak to slightly loosen its grip on power. But Bush lost heart in his second term, and didn’t press the issue. In any case, Egypt remains a pretty repressive place, which doesn’t bode well for its long-term stability. An unstable Egypt isn’t good for American interests, as the country possesses a large population and is the cultural heart of the Middle East. As such, any effort to halt the spread of Islamic extremism has to include a strategy for Egypt.
The Post is concerned that the Obama administration doesn’t really care about the situation in Cairo. It lampoons Margaret Scobey, our ambassador to Egypt, for recently claiming that the Egyptian press is relatively free. Reporters are often sued for publishing stories critical of regime officials, and some opposition bloggers “have been beaten and harassed.” Despite its firm hand in dealing with uppity journalists, the Mubarak regime is intent on maintaining the forms of democracy, and is holding “two elections, for parliament and for president,” over the next two years. The Post believes that the outcome of these polls “could determine whether the corrupt power structure maintained by the 81-year-old Mr. Mubarak remains in place.” Egypt does have a nascent democratic movement, which has been “pressing hard to make the elections genuinely free.” And Mohamed ElBaradei, a respected Egyptian diplomat and former head of the IAEA, has shown interest in standing as an independent candidate for the presidential election.
So now is a good a time as any for Obama to offer his support for a democratic Egypt. But his administration hasn’t given any indication that it prefers a genuinely free presidential election, and it has even cut funding “for democracy programs in Egypt . . . by 60 percent”—which the Post thinks is “a shame.” Reforming Egypt’s government could go a long way in making Egyptians turn away from Islamist fanaticism. A free people with a stake in this world will probably be less concerned with the millennialist promises of the next. Washington can and should help Cairo cope with this important transformation.
02.05.10
Greece’s problems reveal the absurdity of the Continental currency.
02.05.10
Jones heads to Munich to talk security and listen to China’s foreign minister; Nouri al-Maliki calls out Christopher Hill; Gates announces high-tech equipment sales to NATO.
11.19.09
09.09.09
Ken Pollack, in an interview with TNI, discusses whether we would’ve been better off with Saddam Hussein, if the American military is on the brink of being kicked out of Baghdad and what the Iraq War was about in the first place. Click here to see the video.
07.27.09
David Keene discusses the future of the Republican Party and whether (and how) the GOP can be resuscitated.
Click here to see the video.
07.16.09
Bruce Riedel discusses just how close Islamabad is to collapse and why we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking the situation is getting better there.
Click here to see the video.