Blogs

A few weeks ago on The Skeptics, Justin Logan authored a post that highlighted a major dilemma in the U.S.-China relationship: how can America contain China’s rise as a military power, particularly in East Asia, if it simultaneously provides the largest market for Chinese exports? China’s rise as a military power is only possible because of its economic growth and the U.S. is in inextricably linked to this. U.S.-China trade is absolutely vital to both countries economies, but it is also what will allow China allocate more wealth toward their military.

Chinese President Hu Jintao’s recent visit to Washington and Secretary of Defense Gates’s visit to China the prior week, highlights this dilemma well. While Secretary Gates had mixed results attempting to forge stronger ties with China's militarily, President Obama proudly announced new economic deals with China. Secretary Gates’s trip was mired by the apparently out-of-left-field flight test of a Chinese stealth fighter. And this of course riled up anti-China hawks who feel this is enough evidence for the Pentagon to continue weapons procurement aimed at preparing for conflict with Beijing.

Amid ongoing turmoil in Tunisia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke yesterday with the country’s foreign minister as well as its prime minister. During a press conference with her Spanish counterpart, Clinton said that she is “encouraged by the direction that they are setting towards inclusive elections that will be held as soon as practicable.” Despite positive signs, there’s still a long way to go, she added. Jeffrey Feltman, an assistant secretary of state, is in Tunis this week.

Meanwhile, the unrest in Tunisia has inspired similar demonstrations in Egypt. Secretary Clinton called on the Egyptian government to show restraint in dealing with protestors, saying Washington believes the Egyptian government is stable and attempting to serve the needs of its people.

Also during her press conference with Spanish Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimnez, Clinton touched on Guantanamo Bay. Though the process is taking a while (soon after entering the White House in 2009, Obama announced the prison would be closed), the secretary of state said that “there is no doubt about our commitment”—Washington is “absolutely committed to closing” the detention facility.

The protests in Egypt against President Hosni Mubarak might be snowballing into something big. The New York Times reports "tens of thousands of people" protested in "several Egyptian cities," tearing down posters of their autocratic leader in what organizers called the "Day of Revolution."  But, though there were clashes between protestors and security forces, and the government shut down Twitter access, Time magazine quotes one police captain as saying with a shrug: "We can contain them at any time." See the Times's Lede blog for several video clips of the hubbub. The Washington Post is now saying that calm has returned to Cairo's streets.

President Obama keeps returning to his theme of a reunited union. In the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, it has become a popular, if somewhat vague, political theme. Obama, in his gauzy invocation of a return to American greatness, sounds increasingly like Ronald Reagan. His 2012 campaign theme may be that it is dawn in America again.

But Reagan had a real plan--cut taxes, beef up the military, deal with the Soviet Union, stay out of foreign wars. Does Obama? So far his approach is simply to split the difference or, better yet, dodge the big issues. Social Security. Tax reform. Nary a word. Obama will shove off those issues. He wants to get reelected.

The GOP faces a potentially perilous political road in focusing on debt. Republicans could end up sounding like the new Herbert Hoovers. Obama, meanwhile, will stimulate his way to another term.

Obama was most forceful on foreign policy. Benjamin Friedman asks on this website if the GOP will go isolationist, and says no. Obama is turning out to be in almost lockstep with it. He almost sounds like George W. Bush as he vows to prevail in Afghanistan. Even as Pakistan appears to be going bloody. The wife of Pakistan's president, by the way, had to pay 100,000 pounds in VAT on the diamonds and other jewelry she recently bought in London, according to Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books.

Ah, our fItful ally Pakistan. Confronted with so much bad news, it is scarcely surprising that Obama opted to deliver sunnier message. Essentially, it was work a little harder, invest in solar power, and America can make its comeback. We shall see, and soon.

This week I visited the Los Alamos National Laboratory—the oldest of the national labs, born as part of the Manhattan Project and still occupying the mesa in northern New Mexico where J. Robert Oppenheimer assembled during World War II the brainpower that figured out how to make atomic bombs. Although the lab today leverages its expertise to address a wide variety of problems, its prime mission still focuses on atomic bombs. Its number one job is to ensure the effectiveness and safety of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. The lab is responsible for making sure the devices would work the way they are supposed to, no matter how long they have been in the stockpile.

LANL is still a concentration of brainpower. It boasts over 2,000 Ph.D.s among its 11,000 employees. Its work is full of cutting edge endeavors—the fastest this, the most powerful that. And yet a visit reveals a juxtaposition of the new and the old. A short distance down the road from the world's most powerful X-ray machine (used to make images of what goes on inside a simulated nuclear device during the first few fractions of a second after detonation) is a bunkered and shuttered building where tests were performed on Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, to confirm its critical mass. Also nearby, on the grounds of the laboratory, are some of the centuries-old ruins of Native American structures found in the area.

When President Barack Obama addresses the nation tonight, the expansion of America’s Afghan military bases will be notably absent from his remarks. Given the administration’s commitment to job creation and economic recovery, it may want to disclose that much of those activities over the next several years will be taking place in Central Asia, rather than America.

Nick Turse, associate editor of TomDispatch.com and author of the The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, has done a fantastic job collating which of America’s forward operating bases (FOBs) are being expanded, improved, and hardened:

Frank Gaffney, a prominent neoconservative, knows a lot about missiles. He was deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration and resigned to protest its outreach to the Soviet Union. Whether he knows much about Muslim terrorism is another question.

Gaffney is the co-author of a new book detailing another threat to America. He is alleging, among other things, that Suhail Khan, a member of the board of the American Conservative Union, is a mole for the Muslim Brotherhood. Khan is a former senior George W. Bush political appointee and exactly the kind of exponent for moderate Muslim outreach that America needs. He also claims that Grover Norquist, also on the board of the ACU (and of the Nixon Center) is acting in a nefarious fashion to help the Brotherhood. Gaffney argues, if that term can be used here, that it is axiomatic that the Brotherhood would attempt to infiltrate the conservative movement. There is no reason that conservatives would be exempt from the wiles of Islamic malefactors, so Gaffney argues. Khan, it must be said, conducted himself with the greatest dignity as he countered Gaffney, who alleged that his father was a bad actor. In fact, as Suhail patiently observed, he is simply a former high-tech engineer.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has been “courageous” and has taken “absolutely necessary” steps to fight drug cartels in his country according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She said the United States would continue to provide equipment and training to Mexico to help in the fight. In a press conference with her Mexican counterpart Patricia Espinosa, Clinton commented, “The drug traffickers are not going to give up without a terrible fight.” After meeting with Espinosa she flew to Mexico City for a chat with Calderon.

Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East Jeffrey Feltman is in Tunisia to talk about an ongoing political crisis there. Yesterday, he had a sitdown with the Tunisian foreign minister, and today he will meet with a whole range of officials, politicians and civil-society members to underscore U.S. support for the people. According to State Department spokesman PJ Crowley, Feltman will touch on “ways in which the U.S. can be a constructive partner as Tunisia charts the course forward.”

Meanwhile, Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for Eastern Asian and Pacific affairs, is in Hawaii today heading up a delegation from various government agencies. And there’s a lot on his agenda: a trilateral security talk with Australia and Japan, discussions about Pacific island issues, an Asian Development Bank meeting, a trilateral talk with Australia and New Zealand, and a State of the Pacific Dialogue.

Hezbollah has hand-picked a new prime minister for Lebanon, less than two weeks after the militant group walked out on now-former–Prime Minister Saad Hariri's government. The new leader (likely to be confirmed by Lebanon's parliament) is Najib Miqati, a Sunni billionaire who served briefly in the same role for a few months in 2005. Although Miqati said he was a "consensus candidate," his predecessor Hariri has said he will not join the new government (calling the change in leadership a "coup d’état"), and his supporters "took to the streets" in opposition to Hezbollah in what New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid says offered "an image of what many feared Hezbollah's victory might unleash." Miqati is expected to oppose the UN tribunal alleging Hezbollah's role in the assassination of ex–Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (Saad's father), the reason the Shia politico-terrorist group upended Lebanon's government in the first place. Washington Post correspondent Leila Fadel reports that Hezbollah's "apparent strength" seems to signal "a significant shift" for Lebananon, "away from alliances with the United States and Saudi Arabia, and toward Iran and Syria."

For an example of an approach that is destructive to reason and reasonableness in any discussion having anything to do with Israel, see the recent opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin that dismisses as coming from “the usual crowd of Israel bashers” an open letter addressing the appropriate U.S. posture toward a United Nations Security Council resolution critical of continued Israeli construction of settlements. Read the letter, too, of course, and also see a subsequent comment by Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, who initiated the letter. As Clemons points out, nothing in the letter could be construed as bashing or hating Israel; the subject is one specific, particularly damaging Israeli policy and how it should be handled in international diplomacy.