Foreign Policy In Focus

President Obama said during his State of the Union address that he would focus on things he could do alone — without having to depend on a badly divided, partisan Congress. And the powerful imagery he summoned in support of voting rights — real, implementable voting rights, based on the example of a 102-year-old voting rights hero, could and should indeed be a critical focus of executive energy. His story of Desiline Victor waiting six hours to vote in North Miami even brought members of Congress — at least some of them — to their feet in a powerful ovation.

But Obama didn’t seem to include in the list of “things he could do alone” the solo, individual decisions that are fundamental to the role of commander in chief. And that role could include, without Congress having to have any role in it, bringing home all the troops from the failed war in Afghanistan. Ending it. Totally. Quickly.

Bringing home half the troops this year reflects the pressure of massive public opposition to the war — but it’s far from enough. All 66,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan should be pulled out by the middle of this year. And that role of the president, without Congress, could include announcing that the “winding down” of the U.S. war in Afghanistan won't be transformed into an expanding drone war waged in shadows across the world.

When Obama claims that budget cuts “would jeopardize our military readiness,” he is signaling a rejection of what his own nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, acknowledged is the need to cut the “bloated” military budget.

And crucially, when we look at areas in which the President can make executive decisions, independent of the whims of a paralyzed, partisan congress, is there any clearer example than the Obama administration’s strategy of targeting and killing “terror suspects,” along with unknown numbers of civilian “collateral damage” in Obama’s Global War on Terror 2.0? 

We heard a claim about those drone assassinations during his address, that “we have kept Congress fully informed of our efforts.”

There's no way that would fly, given recent revelations of the administration’s efforts to claim a legal right to murder anyone, U.S. citizen or not, who they “believe” may be guilty of something they identify as a terrorist attack. So Obama went on. “I recognize that in our democracy, no one should just take my word that we’re doing things the right way. So, in the months ahead, I will continue to engage with Congress to ensure not only that our targeting, detention, and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world.”

What about the KILLING of the people he calls terrorists, beyond detention and prosecution? The reference to checks and balances referred back to the Justice Department’s claim that “due process” didn’t necessarily mean anything having to do with courts and judges, the claim that a decision by a “decision-maker” — not even necessarily the president — was enough to qualify as due process sufficient to take someone’s life, way beyond taking their liberty and their pursuit of happiness.

Focusing on the executive actions you can take without Congress is a great idea, Mr. President. But not unless that focus includes reversing the individually taken military actions that brought such disgrace on your administration’s first term.

Phyllis Bennis is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. Her books include Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN. www.ips-dc.org

Both President Obama and Governor Romney have to break their silence on climate change in the third and final presidential debate tonight. Unfortunately it appears they’ll get little help from moderator Bob Schieffer, who has chosen to focus on war, the Middle East, and China, while presumably lumping all other matters of global importance under “America’s role in the world.” 

It may not fit neatly into the categories presented tonight, but the next president’s approach to climate change will impact the real security of our nation, and global economic and political stability. Global warming – and the extreme weather, displacement, scarcity conflicts, and humanitarian crises it promises to bring with it—will affect every aspect of U.S. foreign policy. To be a responsible electorate on November 6^th, we need to know how each candidate plans to address the threat of climate disruption.

The best first step to addressing global climate change is reducing greenhouse gas pollution at home in the United States—still the world’s biggest overall climate culprit. The incoming president should start by ending tax breaks to dirty energy like coal, oil, and gas, beefing up investment in clean wind, solar, and energy efficiency, and letting the EPA do its job of enforcing existing rules to protect the planet. The last thing we need is a pair of politicians falling all over each other on the debate floor to prove who loves coal better and who’s going to open up more gas and oil fields.

Barring an apology for their wanton wooing of the fossil fuel industry in previous debates, here are four things I hope to hear both candidates talk about getting done on climate and the environment in the next four years:

1. Stand up for multilateralism and global democracy. When U.S. envoy Todd Stern first addressed the 192 member countries of the UN climate convention after Obama’s inauguration, he received a standing ovation. Since then he’s worked to steadily lower expectations of what the United States—and democratic spaces like the United Nations—can accomplish on climate. Regrettably, it’s worked. Confidence in the UN as the best forum in which to seal a global climate deal is staggeringly low. But a growing chorus of international civil society and official voices alike is calling for the United States to bargain in good faith for a fair and effective climate treaty in 2015, or step aside and let the rest of the world do so.

We need to get verbal confirmation that our next leader understands the magnitude of the threat that climate change poses, and hear how he would promote multilateral efforts to solve this global challenge.

2. Put his money where his mouth should be. Taking global warming seriously means spending money to help poorer countries steer away from cheap but polluting energy toward low-carbon development. It also means paying our fair share to support communities as they adapt to the effects of warming already “locked in” by existing emissions. It’s a moral obligation and a legal commitment, but it also makes economic sense. Every dollar we spend today staving off climate chaos saves three in future disaster response costs. And since climate change threatens to derail and even roll back development gains in the global south, paying for prevention is part of protecting 60 years of U.S. investment in reducing poverty.  

The candidates should signal support for international climate finance by naming innovative proposals to raise funds like a financial transaction tax (popularly known as a Robin Hood Tax)—a tiny tax on trades of stocks, bonds, and derivatives that can raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year—and committing to put that money in the Green Climate Fund.

3. Don’t trade away our future. Trade may not seen like a climate issue, but the United States is in the midst of negotiating a free-trade agreement (FTA) called the Trans-Pacific Partnership that could stop us, and our allies, from passing laws that protect the planet and our families. FTAs give countries—and even companies—the power to sue governments for policies that they say hurt their bottom line. In a current case, Japan and the European Union are suing Canada for Ontario’s new feed-in tariff program to increase the share of green energy in province electricity markets and encourage “made-in-Ontario” goods and labor.  Sadly, the United States has sided against the climate, submitting an official brief calling Canada’s support of local renewable power “trade-distorting.” The United States could be in the same boat in the future if a member of the TPP doesn’t like one of our environmental regulations. Add to the mix a major potential ramp-up in natural gas exports to Asia, and the biggest free-trade agreement on the table is a climate disaster waiting to happen.

Both Obama and Romney should talk tonight about how their policies on trade would protect our environment and local jobs, and what they would do to correct past mistakes that undermine our partners’ forward-looking initiatives.

4. Champion real security for all. The debate tonight will no doubt focus heavily on security and the military, and there’s no better reminder of the urgency of climate change than voices from the front line. From the 2007 Blue Ribbon Panel to current Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, security officials have been sounding the alarm about the increased risks of instability that global warming poses. The next president needs to make clear his plans for bolstering human security in the face of climate chaos, steps that could include cutting the military budget and spending those dollars instead on helping communities keep good jobs in the transition from military manufacturing to solar panel production. 

It may not be realistic to expect these words to fall from either candidate’s lips—and if we don’t hear most of what I’ve outlined here, I’ll be disappointed, but not surprised. But if the next president doesn’t take climate change seriously as a central issue in his foreign policy platform, then he’s not being realistic either.

Janet is co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies.

As presumably ousted Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi remains in absentia, as Saif al-Islam Gaddafi emerges a free man after his alleged “capture,” as fighting continues in Tripoli, as murmurs pick up of NATO ground troops in Libya, and as myriad questions linger about the cohesion of the rebel forces who ousted Gaddafi and the intransigent loyalist forces who remain, it is easy enough to conclude that Libya’s civil war is far from settled.

Certainly, most post-mortems on the subject pay some or another degree of lip service to this particular narrative inconvenience, even as they also tell us what “lessons” there are to be gained from America’s latest encounter with regime change in the Middle East – on the vindication of “leading from behind,” on the extent to which President Obama is owed credit, on the effectiveness of NATO’s various methods of infiltrating the rebel ranks and coordinating their activities, and so forth.

This is more or less to be expected; journalists and bloggers have pressing deadlines and hungry audiences – and also perhaps editors who would find it remiss of them to pass up such a salient media hook just to gain a little more nuance or perspective.

However, there is something a bit unseemly about some of the coverage so far, and mostly it comes from progressive or Democratic-leaning outlets: boasting.

This was perhaps best encapsulated by a Think Progress tweet flagged by Glenn Greenwald, which asked, “Does John Boehner still believe military operations in Libya are illegal?” Greenwald, clearly irked, responded, “The towering irrationality of this taunt is manifest…  What comments like this one are designed to accomplish is to exploit and manipulate the emotions surrounding Gaddafi's fall to shame and demonize war critics and dare them to question the War President now in light of his glorious triumph.”

Greenwald points out, as have others since, that hardly anyone, whether critic or champion, ever doubted the ability of a NATO bombing campaign to oust Gaddafi. The realization of this objective (which, although it seems quaint to point out now, was not the objective authorized by the UN Security Council) is immaterial to questions about the legality, practicality, or appropriateness of the war – and this was of course a war, despite the White House’s weirdly Orwellian insistence to the contrary.

To the credit of Think Progress, which usually does commendable work uncovering the networks and rhetorical excesses of neoconservatives and sundry other militarists in the Washington establishment, it has also run cautionary posts about the “shades of Iraq” in Libya and on the uncertainties that lie ahead for the country. But for the most part these have succeeded or run alongside a handful of posts blasting various members of the GOP for “refusing” to credit President Obama with Gaddafi’s fall, or else a celebratory post showcasing a “Thank You” banner for the U.S. and its allies held up by Libyan demonstrators in Benghazi.

Certainly Libya is no Iraq or Afghanistan. And no doubt the hypocrisy of certain GOP politicians’ pronouncements on Libya, vis-à-vis their views on Iraq or Afghanistan (or even their previously stated views on Libya), has often bordered on breathtaking. It’s also admittedly hard not to be moved by the surreal scene of a U.S. president being honored in an Arab city – and not least at what the revolutionaries have accomplished so far.

But mostly I am taken by the similarities of such remarks to those that have appeared in neoconservative publications like Commentary, where editor Jonathan Tobin called the day of Tripoli’s fall “a bad day for Libyan intervention critics,” or the National Review, where torture apologist extraordinaire John Yoo declared that “Qaddafi’s fall should embarrass GOP isolationists,” even generously assessing the affair “a half-victory” for Obama.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter in the long run (or now, for that matter) whether the GOP gives any credit to Obama. And the efficacy of “leading from behind” is hardly the fundamental question about the U.S. approach to Libya, no matter how much mud some Republicans threw at it.

The crux of the matter is that even if the president led the NATO coalition from behind, he led his country into war from practically another planet. The administration scarcely shrugged when Congress voted against authorizing the Libya campaign, an authorization the administration had only sought belatedly because it was insisting all along that the United States was not actually “at war.” By then NATO was already waging a thinly veiled, open-ended campaign for regime change that hardly squared with the UN mandate to protect civilians in Benghazi (a mandate the United States may well have helped secure by agreeing to look the other way as Saudi Arabia helped quash the nascent democratic uprisings in Bahrain and beyond).

Unseemly developments still emanate from Tripoli: the $1.6 million reward Libyan business leaders have placed on Gaddafi’s head, for one, or the all-too-eager preparations of multinational oil companies to extract new contracts from the rubble of the Gaddafi regime – perhaps on the tail of UN or NATO ground troops. Progressives should be warier about gloating over another war that smells unsubtly of oil.

One hopes this chapter ends happily for the Libyan people, and certainly the taunts of Libya hawks will be endurable if it does. But no progressive should celebrate yet another circumvention – this one by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, no less – of the mechanisms intended to prevent the wanton and unaccountable waging o­f war.

(Pictured: Tomahawk missile launched at Gaddafi's forces.)

“Broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake,” said President Obama on Monday, addressing the National Defense University in Washington, DC. Instead of a policy of regime change, the United State will stick to “the task that I assigned our forces – to protect the Libyan people from immediate danger.” 

That is all well and good, except that the immediate danger is the rule of Muammar Gaddafi (“Gaddafi has not yet stepped down from power, and until he does, Libya will remain dangerous”) and the means by which we are we protecting the Libyan people are military attacks against Gaddafi’s forces (“We struck regime forces approaching Benghazi to save that city and the people within it. We hit Gaddafi’s troops in neighboring Ajdabiya, allowing the opposition to drive them out. We hit Gaddafi’s air defenses, which paved the way for a no-fly zone. We targeted tanks and military assets that had been choking off towns and cities, and we cut off much of their source of supply”).

So, what we’re not doing is regime change. What we are doing is making war on Qaddafi’s forces until he has been deposed from power. I leave it to the good judgment of the reader whether these are distinct concepts. 

There’s nothing new in presidents lying about military missions to make them more palatable to the voting public, so Obama’s characterization of the Libyan action is not of paramount importance or even interest. But the fact of regime change really is, and it carries damaging implications for American diplomatic prospects in Iran and other countries going forward.

The problem is this: if Gaddafi can relinquish his weapons program and stop supporting international terrorism and still be targeted for regime change, no other country has any incentive to do either of those things. The mission in Libya is a rod that the State Department has crafted for its own back.

“The oldest test in diplomacy is simply this,” Christopher Hitchens puts it, “Who are your friends? Who are your enemies? Do they know that they are? And is it more dangerous to be your friend than your enemy or is it more dangerous to be your enemy than your friend? Are your enemies apprehensive? Are your friends rewarded?”

Well, no one crowed more loudly than Hitchens himself when, apparently out of Iraq-inspired fear of US invasion, Gaddafi surrendered his illegal weapons. And the negotiators who spearheaded the effort to extract contrition from Gaddafi over Lockerbie were furnished with no small amount of hagiography. And yet, neither of these efforts disqualified Gaddafi as a recipient of violent deposition.

Hitchens, in accusing Ahmadinejad’s Iran of “staking what looks like its entire credibility on negating the concept of non-proliferation,” notes that Iran’s weapons program “must mean a lot to them because they could certainly get a great deal of aid, acceptance, trade, prosperity, stability, if they would give up the idea of their own nuclear device.”

He makes a similar point on Iran’s proxy party in Gaza, Hamas, which retains as part of its manifesto the discredited piece of fascist propaganda, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hitchens recommends we demand that Hamas abandon this: “You can say, ‘Will you do that or won’t you? Because if you won’t, it must mean a lot to you, given what you could get by repudiating it.’”

Well, in order for these overtures to carry any weight at all, the U.S. has to ensure that rogue and unsavory parties willing to change course really do stand to gain. The bombs falling on Libya today argue to the contrary.

Samantha Power and Paul Wolfowitz and their ilk will tell us that Libya’s about-face on weapons and terrorism were good for what they were and produced a certain ease of tensions with the US, but Gaddafi’s brutality against the Libyan revolutionaries demanded a response like the inspiringly-named Operation Odyssey Dawn. (Wait: did I just lump liberal interventionists in with neocons? Yes.) 

But it is not as though Gaddafi engineered a violent crackdown on peaceful protestors (which is happening in U.S.-backed Bahrain and Yemen, not apparently to Ms. Powers and Mr. Wolfowitz’s consternation); the protestors in Libya were tribal rebels, amassing guns to go and kill Gaddafi and his cohorts. As splendid as it would have been if they’d succeeded (the more painful, the more splendid), there is no meaningful charge that Gaddafi’s response to the looming revolution should have been non-violent, and no reasonable person could have expected as much. 

These optics are bad for the US. It looks as though America has had it in for Gaddafi all along, and no action of his could have had any effect. Even if the optics are deceptive, it’s perception that matters when our diplomats sit down opposite hostile powers elsewhere in the world, not least in Tehran.

Or does Obama think we’ve exhausted diplomacy with Iran?

J.A. Myerson, Executive Editor of the Busy Signal, is the Artistic Director of Full of Noises and a teaching artist with Urban Arts Partnership. He writes primarily on American Politics and Human Rights. Follow him on Twitter.

Those watching President Obama's speech last night may have been puzzled by his references to transitioning to NATO, as if the United States were bowing out of conducting Libyan airstrikes.

In an Associated Press fact-check of the speech, Calvin Woodward explains (emphasis added).

In transferring command and control to NATO, the U.S. is turning the reins over to an organization dominated by the U.S., both militarily and politically. In essence, the U.S. runs the show that is taking over running the show. . . .

As by far the pre-eminent player in NATO . . . the United States will not be taking a back seat in the campaign even as its profile diminishes for public consumption [and] the same "unique capabilities" that made the U.S. the inevitable leader out of the gate will continue to be in demand. They include a range of attack aircraft, refueling tankers that can keep aircraft airborne for lengthy periods, surveillance aircraft that can detect when Libyans even try to get a plane airborne, and, as Obama said, planes loaded with electronic gear that can gather intelligence or jam enemy communications and radars.

The United States supplies 22 percent of NATO's budget [and] the supreme allied commander Europe [is] a post always held by an American.

As for any grand speech on the part of the United States revealed in the speech, Daniel Nexon writes at Duck of Minerva via the Progressive Realist:

I might be wrong, but I don't consider the "Humanitarian-intervention-against-militarily-weak-fossil-fuel-producing-countries-in-strategically-important-regions-that-are-also-located-near-many-large-NATO-military-bases-and-are-run-by-dictators-who-kind-of-piss-us-off-and-have-no-powerful-allies Doctrine" the stuff of Grand Strategy. But if you read between the lines, that's pretty much the gist of what Obama had to say tonight.