The National Interest Blogs

Romney, Kerry Miss the Point on Threats: Size Matters

Justin Logan — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:15:05 +0000

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is the latest person to mock Mitt Romney’s declaration that the Russian Federation “is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” It was a pretty silly statement, particularly given the fact that Russia is a demographic basket case and a very humble economic power. But there’s all sorts of weirdness going on in Romney’s assertions and those of his critics.

Take, for example, Wolf Blitzer’s follow up to the Romney assertion:

BLITZER: But you think Russia is a bigger foe right now than, let's say, Iran or China or North Korea? Is that - is that what you're suggesting, Governor?

ROMNEY: Well, I'm saying in terms of a geopolitical opponent, the nation that lines up with the world's worst actors. Of course, the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran. A nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough.

But when these - these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, when - when Assad, for instance, is murdering his own people, we go - we go to the United Nations, and who is it that always stands up for the world's worst actors?

It is always Russia, typically with China alongside.

General McChrystal and Academic Freedom

Paul R. Pillar — Fri, 25 May 2012 02:57:41 +0000

Paul R. Pillar

An opinion piece at The Atlantic by Gian Gentile, identified as a U.S. Army colonel who teaches history at West Point, offers one of the strangest interpretations of academic freedom I have seen. The subject is the teaching of a course at Yale by Stanley McChrystal, the retired U.S. Army general and former commander of forces in Afghanistan. Referencing a recent article in the New York Times about McChrystal's teaching gig at Yale, Colonel Gentile castigates what he describes as “Yale's extraordinary act” of imposing “special conditions” on students by treating McChrystal's classes as off the record. The colonel goes on to talk about accountability and to note proudly that cadets are free to take anything he says in his classes at West Point and to tell it to the world.

Black Mormons and Identity Politics at the Times

Lewis McCrary — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:20:04 +0000

Lewis McCrary

The New York Times wants to understand how people in the flyover states are feeling about the upcoming presidential contest. So they sent reporter Susan Saulny to Utah investigate a key battleground constituency: African-American Mormons. The result was a splashy photo-laden piece for its National section titled "For Black Mormons, a Political Choice Like No Other."

The headline is an attention getter. But is this story really worthy of numerous column inches in what many consider the newspaper of record? As Saulny admits, African-Americans "represent only a tiny fraction of the six million Mormons in the United States."

If African-American Mormons are so rare, then why not focus on a group more likely to impact the November result? Mormons who support the decidedly anti-Romney Ron Paul probably far exceed the number who happen to be black. Haven't libertarian Mormons also been presented with a "choice like no other"?

Roughly one-third of the nation's six million Mormons live in Utah, a state that is usually one of the most solid red for Republicans. While Saulny did talk with African-American Mormons living outside Salt Lake City—including the "hundreds" who live in such blue places as Washington, Chicago and New York—this small number isn't likely to have much impact on election results.

Susan Saulny

The New York Times

The Baghdad Talks and the Politics of Inflexibility

Paul R. Pillar — Thu, 24 May 2012 03:47:16 +0000

Paul R. Pillar

In looking at the state of play after a day of talks in Baghdad between Iran and the P5+1, one has to ask how much of what is impeding progress is the work of those having a stake in the negotiations failing and how much results from misunderstanding how international negotiations work. The public picture of what transpired across the table on Wednesday is incomplete, but evidently the principal sticking point is Western refusal so far to consider any relaxation of any of the sanctions already imposed on Iran. This refusal is being maintained despite Iran having made it clear it is willing to give up enrichment of uranium to the 20 percent level, a move that would get to the heart of what ostensibly is the main Western concern about how close Iran is to a nuclear-weapons capability. In return for this concession, the negotiators, led by the European Union's Lady Ashton, reportedly are dangling such tidbits as spare airplane parts and fuel rods for the Iranian reactor that produces medical isotopes. While those are not quite trivial throwaways, they pale in comparison with the sanctions, the lifting of which is the main reason Iran has to negotiate. And it is not as if incremental easing of the mountain of sanctions that have been piled up over the years would leave the P5+1 with no remaining pressure points as leverage over Iran. Far from it.

535 Secretaries of State

Ted Galen Carpenter — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:59:49 +0000

Ted Galen Carpenter

Congress, especially the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, has become hyperactive on the foreign-policy front in recent weeks. In rapid succession, the House passed two important amendments to the defense-authorization bill, both of which have the potential to cause major complications for U.S. diplomacy in East Asia. The latest measure would require the sale of sixty-six F-16 C/D model fighters to Taiwan, which drew an immediate, angry response from Beijing. The earlier amendment would press the Defense Department to redeploy nuclear weapons to South Korea. President George H. W. Bush removed such weapons at the beginning the 1990s.

Why Romney Doesn't Need Image Consultants

Alexa L. McMahon — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:24:39 +0000

Alexa L. McMahon

Lately many commentators have whipped themselves into a foam claiming that Obama can “define” Mitt Romney in a way that would prevent a GOP win in November. They claim we’re at a critical time for image branding, when voters’ minds are still open and uncluttered before the convention. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan does not agree.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Nyhan argues that journalists are overblowing the risk that Romney will be pigeonholed early. Contrary to the notion that Americans’ minds are a blank slate for whatever image the Obama camp wants to paint of Romney, Nyhan cites research that suggests otherwise: “The latest Gallup poll finds that 91% of Americans already have an opinion of [Romney].” They’ve also found that “Romney’s favorable numbers are predictably improving as Republicans and GOP-leaning independents return to the fold.”

To further dampen the hype of journalists pushing the “image war,” Nyhan consulted with fellow political scientists Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson. They found that pre-convention “news about the campaign affects voters but is eventually forgotten and thus has little impact on the final outcome.” It seems that candidates’ images are more often a reflection of their past performance than a cause of it.

Brendan Nyhan

Columbia Journalism Review

Will Colin Powell Back Romney or Obama?

Jacob Heilbrunn — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:37:51 +0000

Jacob Heilbrunn

Will Colin Powell support Mitt Romney? Powell, who has just published his latest memoir, It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership, isn't saying if Romney will work for him. On National Public Radio's All Things Considered, he stuck to his message that it's too early to tell: "I'm not prepared to say," the general announced.

The Soft Power of Equal Opportunity

Paul R. Pillar — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:15:09 +0000

Paul R. Pillar

A major story coming out of China in recent weeks—partly as a by-product of the story of fallen princeling Bo Xilai and his wife—has been the extent to which family members of Chinese leaders exploit their privileged positions for personal and professional gain. The offspring of senior leaders are way ahead of their countrymen in attending the best private universities in the West. Family members get installed in executive positions in state-owned enterprises, or in other business endeavors dependent on actions of the state, where they can enrich themselves. These reports suggest a sharp socio-economic stratification and class structure in which political power and economic privilege go hand-in-hand. This raises many questions about social strains, political tensions and possible future political evolution inside China. But it also figures into the global competition for influence between China and other major powers, and that bears directly on U.S. interests.

Wieseltier Ignores the Costs of Intervention

Robert Golan-Vilella — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:53:33 +0000

Robert Golan-Vilella

Leon Wieseltier’s latest column in the New Republic aims to expose the hollowness of Washington’s current policy regarding the ongoing violence in Syria. In reality, his piece does more to demonstrate the weakness of his own case for intervention.

Wieseltier’s principal target is the appeal to “complexity” as a justification for staying out of the fight. He says that realists and others have simply dismissed the prospect of intervention by saying that the situation in Syria “is complicated.” His response is that every significant public-policy issue is complicated, and that therefore “the appeal to complexity is almost always selective.” He terms this “the paralyzing effect of nuance,” contending that those who raise the issue of complexity are exploiting it “as a warrant for passivity.”

Wieseltier never defines exactly who is making this argument or quotes anyone directly. Small wonder, since he is attacking a total straw man. No one has simply said, “The situation in Syria is complicated, therefore we should stay out—end of story.” Rather, the case against intervention more often goes something like this: “There are no plausible policy options right now that present a good probability of achieving the desired outcome (removing Bashar al-Assad from power) at an acceptable cost.” Nothing in Wieseltier’s piece gives us any reason to doubt that this is true. He says he wants the United States to “take decisive action” but never defines what he means by that.

Leon Wieseltier

The New Republic

Negotiations with Iran: What Has Changed?

Justin Logan — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:06:22 +0000

Justin Logan

On May 23, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) will enter into talks with the Iranian leadership about the latter’s nuclear program. The Baghdad talks come after talks last month in Istanbul. A number of observers have raised expectations for the talks in Baghdad. The latest hopeful development is IAEA chief Yukiya Amano’s declaration, on the heels of his visit to Tehran, that he expects a structured agreement for inspections to be signed “quite soon.” Any progress toward a diplomatic solution would be preferable to backsliding or a collapse. Unfortunately, the talks are unlikely to live up to the high expectations.

Beyond Amano’s visit to Tehran, the big change since last month’s talks is French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s loss to the socialist François Hollande, who appears less truculent on Iran than was Sarkozy. Previously, Sarkozy was the hardest-driving member of the P5+1, so Hollande’s victory is likely to bring the P5+1 into closer harmony. More broadly, the considerable anxiety over the prospect of an outright collapse of the euro is likely to diminish European interest in focusing too much attention overseas.

The Wright Approach

Robert W. Merry — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:36:04 +0000

Robert W. Merry

Let’s stipulate that there’s no political advantage in Republicans resurrecting the question of the true nature of President Obama’s twenty-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whatever it was before the Illinois senator left Wright’s church during the 2008 presidential campaign. And let’s accept that whatever there is to be said about that relationship probably has already been said.

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker seems to agree with those stipulations. Yet she raises disturbing questions in response to reports that a GOP political strategist and billionaire donor contemplated raising the issue again in an effort to defeat Obama’s reelection bid. The reaction was so swift and severe that they quickly abandoned the idea.

Parker asks the question of just how close Obama was to the fiery Chicago preacher, whose fulminations could be called anti-white racism. As Parker notes, Wright inspired the title of one of Obama’s books. He conducted the Obamas’ wedding ceremony and baptized the Obama girls. He led the family prayer when Obama announced his first presidential run. That seems like a pretty close relationship, and it begs the question of what Obama really thought about Wright’s persistent anti-white rhetoric.

And yet she notes: “Four years later, the mere mention of Wright by political opponents is considered racist.” She raises questions of political equity when the putative Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, is forced on the defensive by such an independent ad proposal, which was leaked to The New York Times and appeared on the paper’s front page.

“Romney is nothing like a racist,” writes Parker, “yet suddenly he is forced to distance himself from ads about which he knew nothing.”

Kathleen Parker

The Washington Post

Terrorism of a Bygone Era

Paul R. Pillar — Mon, 21 May 2012 01:51:20 +0000

Paul R. Pillar

Muammar Qaddafi and Hafez al-Assad, 1971The death of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi in Libya means the departure of a living link to an era of terrorism that was much different from what we see today. The 1980s was the peak of modern state-fomented international terrorism. The decade began with American diplomats being held hostage in Tehran. The next few years saw lethal terrorism carried out directly by several states. Iran conducted a sustained campaign of assassination of exiled Iranian dissidents. Syria attempted to blow up Israeli airliners. North Korea blew up a South Korean airliner and conducted a bombing in Burma intended to kill the visiting South Korean president. The Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi was active in terrorism on multiple fronts, including the bombing of a night club in Berlin frequented by U.S. servicemen. And it was Qaddafi's regime that killed 270 people by bombing Pan Am flight 103 in 1988—a crime for which Megrahi was the only person ever convicted.

What Brussels Can Learn From Ancient Rome

Lewis McCrary — Fri, 18 May 2012 21:19:35 +0000

Lewis McCrary

The Eurozone has so far lasted 13 years. But Rome's single currency lasted for 400 years, as Gilles Bransbourg, a researcher at New York University pointed out this week on the public radio show The World.

How was an ancient world power able to achieve this kind of economic unity over such a large and diverse area? According to Bransbourg, the Romans didn't demand uniformity: They let conquered peoples keep their local currencies in use alongside Roman denominations.

This was all part of a larger strategy of the Romans, who realized in keeping a far-flung empire together it helped to "leave as much as possible to local authorities." (This sounds like the modern principle of subsidiarity, to which EU officials have often payed lip service, but in practice ignored.)

Bransbourg speculates that "If the euro had been devised not as a monopolistic currency," but instead as an additional means of exchange, then Greece and other troubled economies would not have been given perverse incentives—low interest rates enabled by the European Central Bank—to borrow too much. Prior to the euro, many nations participated in an arrangement called the European Currency Unit (ECU), an artificial basket of currencies of member states. Bransbourg suggests that the EU might want to back away from a single currency and reestablish something like the ECU.

Gilles Bransbourg

The World

Enslaved by Citizenship?

Robert W. Merry — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:24:41 +0000

Robert W. Merry

If you’re curious about Michele Bachmann’s recent foray into Swiss citizenship or outraged over Eduardo Saverin’s decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship and run off to Singapore with his Facebook winnings, Jacqueline Stevens has a way to slake such curiosity and assuage such outrage: Abolish the United States.

Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University, hates nationalism so much that she wants to rid the world of nations. As she puts it, writing in The New York Times: “We need governments, but we don’t need nations.”

The good professor thinks it’s ridiculous for countries to convey citizenship on the basis of territorial birth. Why not let people just wander the globe looking for the best place to live, and then everyone can be the citizen of whatever country in which he or she happens to alight? She explains, “People should be free to move across borders; they should be citizens of the states where they happen to reside—period.”

I like that “period.” It denotes the finality of her argument and its presumed impregnability from silly nationalists such as myself.

But if I may, Professor, how do you figure that this approach would, as you say, “help end inequality among countries, by letting people move for greater opportunity”?

In fact, as anyone with half a brain knows, such a global practice, even if practicable, wouldn’t end inequality among countries at all. It would instead create chaos and poverty, as rich countries would be brought down by an inundation of teeming—and unabsorbable—masses desperate to better their station while poor countries would deteriorate into ghost countries.

Jacqueline Stevens

The New York Times

NATO Summit Will Reaffirm Afghanistan’s Weakness

Malou Innocent — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:33:41 +0000

Malou Innocent

The focus of the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago will be Afghanistan. President Obama is expected to speak of the need for solidarity from the international community. His only major success will be a pledge from NATO members to commit funds to Afghanistan well beyond 2014. Difficult questions surrounding the mission’s long-term sustainability will remain unanswered. But any long-term plan for stabilization must put Afghans in the lead. That is the country’s true path to self-sufficiency.

The estimated cost of paying for the 230,000-350,000-strong Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) hovers between $4-6 billion, annually. The President will seek $1.3 billion from allies, which in an age of austerity will be difficult for NATO partners, leaving the United States to foot much of the bill.

Although it is cheaper to fund Afghan forces than deploy foreign troops, long-term operations, maintenance, and sustainment costs for the ANSF may continue through 2025. Building security and governance to the point where locals can stand on their own is an indefinite commitment, not an exit strategy.

The real story of the summit is that Untied States and NATO officials plan to extend their financial support to Afghanistan in the face of war-weary publics at home, brazen insurgent attacks in the capital, and a string of scandals involving coalition forces and their Afghan counterparts. Lingering issues that will go unresolved include the quality of the ANSF, the seemingly indefatigable insurgency, and the long-talked about negotiated peace settlement with extremists and regional powers.

Spinning Up For Baghdad

Paul R. Pillar — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:39:52 +0000

Paul R. Pillar

We know a round of nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 is imminent when we hear an upsurge in not only straightforward analysis of the issues but also proactive efforts to spin whatever the talks may yield. Much of the straightforward analysis has a tone of optimism, against the background of a positive tone in the previous meeting between the parties last month in Istanbul. The spinning is coming from various quarters but most conspicuously from those having an interest in the failure of negotiations with Iran. The pro-failure interests include the government of Israel and those who follow its lead, for whom indefinite persistence of the idea that Iran and its nuclear program pose the greatest threat to peace and stability in the Middle East provides the ideal diversion of attention from other, genuinely destabilizing matters they would prefer the world to overlook.

Euro 2012 and the Price of Repression

Doug Bandow — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:09:41 +0000

Doug Bandow

Ukraine has suffered a tortured post-Soviet independence. Its second president, Leonid Kuchma, was accused of ordering the murder of an opposition journalist. Kuchma’s successor, Viktor Yushchenko, was pro-Western but utterly ineffective, even incompetent. The current president, Viktor Yanukovich, turns out to be almost as pro-Western, but his chief ability appears to be beating up his opponents.

Now, he and his country are paying the price for his politicized prosecution of his last electoral opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko. At least eight foreign leaders, led by the presidents of Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany, threatened to boycott a Central and Eastern European summit scheduled last weekend at Yalta in the Crimea. With so many heads of state indicating they weren’t coming, Kiev was forced to postpone the gathering.

Moreover, Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, has told the Ukrainian prime minister not to attend a EU-Ukraine meeting scheduled for next week. The Yanukovich government looks especially foolish being banned from a meeting about the country it governs. And several European leaders are pressing for a boycott of the Euro 2012 soccer tournament, scheduled for next month and cohosted by the Ukraine and Poland. The event, in which Ukraine has invested $9 billion worth of facilities, will go on, but only under a cloud—and the guarantee of numerous media stories about Tymoshenko’s condition and Yanukovich’s governance.

Rough Seas Ahead for Navy’s Surface Fleet?

Christopher A. Preble — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:00:49 +0000

Christopher A. Preble

In its markup of the National Defense Authorization Act, the House Armed Services Committee proposed a number of changes to the Obama administration’s plans for the U.S. Navy. The NDAA rescinds the retirement of three cruisers and restricts retirement of ballistic-missile submarines (so as not to fall below a minimum of twelve). The bill also contains an amendment which authorizes a GAO review of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program. The amendments collectively reflect the committee’s concern that the navy won’t be able to fulfill its current missions with fewer and perhaps less capable ships. Unfortunately, no one is asking whether any of those missions could be modified, eliminated or shifted to others.

I will address some of those issues at a Cato policy forum this Monday, May 21, at noon. I am particularly thrilled to be joined by Undersecretary of the Navy Robert O. Work, Ben Freeman of the Project on Government Oversight and Eric J. Labs of the Congressional Budget Office. Those three make this an all-star cast to discuss the future of a U.S. surface fleet that is undergoing some major changes. With the retirement of the navy’s cruisers and frigates, the development of bigger and more complex destroyers, and the introduction of the LCS, tomorrow’s surface fleet will look quite different than today’s.

Obama's Flawed Yemen Strategy

Abby Arganese — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:35:41 +0000

Abby Arganese

This week, Micah Zenko answered a nagging foreign-policy question: What, exactly, are we doing in Yemen?

His conclusion: nothing good.

Writing on his Politics, Power, and Preventive Action blog, Zenko puts forth several solid arguments illustrating the flaws in the Obama administration’s Yemen policy, which he calls “America’s Third War.” Broadly, these points fall into three categories.

The first is blowback. Citing the increasing number of drone strikes (“there have been more drone strikes in the past month . . . than in the preceding nine years”), he aptly warns of the resentment likely to be engendered among average Yemenis. One need look no further than the “fervent and impassioned opposition to drones” in Pakistan to see the danger here.

The second is a lack of clearly defined targets. One consequence of waging a quasi war, it seems, is having only quasi-defined strategic goals. Zenko points to contradictions within the administration, with one expert describing Obama’s strategy “to kill or capture about two dozen of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous operatives” and another expressing the administration’s determination to destroy and eliminate the “more than a thousand members” remaining in al-Qaeda.

Just who should be in the crosshairs is also at issue; since “AQAP’s antigovernment insurgency and its terrorist plotting against the West are two sides of the same coin,” the odds of targeting only anti-American terrorists and avoiding run-in-the-mill insurgents are low. To come full circle, unintentionally targeting insurgents engenders the sort of resentment that could make them terrorists.

Micah Zenko

CFR

A New Greek Tragedy: Exit From The Euro?

Jacob Heilbrunn — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:56:20 +0000

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Greece a failed state? Somehow Mr. Panagiotis Pikramenos, just appointed prime minister, does not seem to convey the sense that he will be more than a caretaker leader until the next batch of elections on June 17. If Greece keeps holding elections with this frequency, it will appear as though it's trying to emulate the last days of the Weimar Republic. And Germany does not appear to be in a mood for additional bailouts to rescue Greece. So with the failure of its political parties to form a ruling coalition, Greece looks to be heading into the final act of traditional Athenian tragedy known as exodus. In this instance, an exodus would mean abandoning the euro and absorbing the brutal buffetting that, so proponents of leaving the euro claim, would be painful but temporary. Having left the euro, Greece would be free to return to the good, old drachma, enjoying the benefits of a devalued currency to increase its exports even if inflation and interest rates go up.

So far, Greece has been holding or, to put it more precisely, trying to hold, its Western European neighbors—mainly Germany—hostage. Greece is exercising an outsized influence. The painful austerity measures insisted upon by German chancellor Angela Merkel have helped usher in the ouster of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, whose successor François Hollande is championing growth. Which is fine. Growth is a legitimate way to shrink state debt. But in Hollande's case, it may be wondered precisely what kind of growth he has in mind. During the elections he stated he would increase the size of the state sector, which would reduce unemployment but not necessarily improve growth figures. In fact, such measures might prove inimical to it.

Peaceful Protest and Palestinian Rights

Paul R. Pillar — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:05:40 +0000

Paul R. Pillar

The agreement that ended a hunger strike by as many as two thousand of the Palestinians held prisoner by Israel is modest, uncertain and shaky. Negotiated with the involvement of Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, the deal calls for Israel to ease the conditions of detention in several respects. About twenty prisoners will be taken out of solitary confinement. Family members from the Gaza Strip will be permitted prison visits, which have been denied them in recent years. Prisoners under “administrative detention”—incarceration in which neither they, their families, nor anyone else in the outside world are told anything about why they are imprisoned—are supposed to be detained beyond six months only if evidence about them is brought before a military court. The prisoners reportedly made some vaguely defined commitment about not engaging in any activity that would support terrorism. It is unclear whether a couple of the prisoners who have been engaging in hunger strikes longer than the rest will end their fasts.

Obama’s Hubby State

Robert W. Merry — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:53:34 +0000

Robert W. Merry

Of all the commentary unleashed by "The Life of Julia," the Barack Obama campaign’s interactive web ad that follows a faceless cartoon "everywoman" through life, probably the most perceptive is Jessica Gavora’s analysis in the Washington Post Outlook section. Gavora notes that the ads touch on such life milestones as education, work, motherhood, retirement. But one is missing: marriage.

There is a reason for this: Democratic operatives increasingly see unmarried women as a crucial voting bloc. Indeed, she says, these women represent "the most reliably Democratic voting group outside African Americans" –manifest in Obama’s 71-to-29 percent majority among such voters in 2008.

But there is a problem. These women don’t vote in the same numbers as married women. So "Julia" really is a clever get-out-the-vote effort aimed at luring to the polls a much higher proportion of these reliable Democratic voters. And the way to do that is to tout government programs designed to assist and benefit women—educational assistance at early stages of life, equal-pay requirements for later life stages, set-asides for entrepreneurial women seeking Small Business Administration loans, free health screenings, insurance for contraceptives, retirement benefits. In other words, just about cradle to grave.

Jessica Gavora

The Washington Post

Why Americans Are Less Hawkish than Their Leaders

Benjamin H. Friedman — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:14:39 +0000

Benjamin H. Friedman

American leaders are reliably more hawkish than Americans. That gap marks a failure in democratic decision making. Under some circumstances, the free marketplace of ideas not only fails to produce good policy but actually thwarts it.

That problem underlies a new joint study published by the Stimson Center. Based on a survey of 665 Americans, the study shows that when presented with arguments for and against cutting the defense budget, Americans want to cut it—a lot. Respondents rated general arguments for and against cutting total defense spending, finding most arguments convincing but dovish arguments generally more so. They preferred cutting defense spending to raising taxes or cutting other spending (though Republicans somewhat preferred cutting other spending). Asked to set a defense-spending level for next year, nine-tenths of Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans cut it. The survey then listed defense-spending categories, gave standard pro and con arguments for each, and asked respondents for their recommendation on each. Their biggest cuts, by percentage, came from the war in Afghanistan and nuclear weapons. The average total cut amounted to about 18 percent of the nonwar defense budget.

New Paper Argues for Immediate, Practical Cuts in Military Spending

Christopher A. Preble — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:35:10 +0000

Christopher A. Preble

A new report published today by the Project on Defense Alternatives argues for $17–$20 billion in immediate savings to the fiscal-year 2013 defense budget. I coauthored the report along with Benjamin Friedman of Cato and PDA’s Carl Conetta, Charles Knight and Ethan Rosenkranz. Those savings come from eighteen line items—personnel, weapons systems and programs—that could be implemented quickly. Adjustments to U.S. national-security strategy are not a prerequisite for these options, which are relatively low-hanging fruit.

The 2013 defense-authorization bill will move to the House floor this week. Many members are expected to offer amendments, some allowing savings in the defense budget. During the debates that are about to ensue,, it is important to keep in mind just how large the defense budget has become. As our paper notes, the national defense base budget constitutes 52 percent of discretionary spending, separate from the war account. Since 2000, it has risen by 90 percent in nominal terms and 42 percent in real terms. If Washington is serious about addressing the nation’s massive fiscal challenge, many programs will have to be cut or reformed. The Pentagon should not be expected to bear all of the costs; other departments and agencies will also have to contribute. But there has not yet been a significant decline in the Pentagon’s base budget, contrary to what some have claimed.

Sergeant Bergdahl, War and Terrorism

Paul R. Pillar — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:01:35 +0000

Paul R. Pillar

The only current American prisoner of war, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, remains in captivity largely because of the mistaken equating of war fighting with counterterrorism. That false equation has contributed to the suffering of many other Americans in uniform and their loved ones. It lent believability to the Bush administration's rationale to launch the Iraq War, and it has underlain continuation of the Afghanistan War for a decade after Operation Enduring Freedom achieved its immediate counterterrorist objectives. The hardship of Sergeant Bergdahl and his family simply adds to that toll.

The exact circumstances of Bergdahl's capture in Paktika Province in Afghanistan in June 2009 are somewhat in doubt, but not in doubt is that he was a combat soldier in a military unit conducting counterinsurgency operations. His capture was not some block-the-street-with-a-car terrorist kidnapping in a city. His captors were insurgents against whom NATO is waging its counterinsurgency campaign.