Foreign Policy In Focus

Watch for more "smart power."

While President Obama has been battling the Republicans in Congress over the looming fiscal crisis, his new administration and national security team are taking shape with diverse consequences especially on US foreign policy in the Middle East. President Obama has nominated veteran Senator John Kerry to be his secretary of State to replace Hillary Clinton. It is also reported that Obama is considering former republican Senator Chuck Hagel to head either the department of defense or the CIA. Both men, if confirmed, will be important in shaping the president's foreign policy and are aligned with his political vision for America and its role in the world especially its relation with the new emerging Arab World.

UN ambassador Susan Rice who had withdrawn her nomination for the Secretary of State position over the Bengazi controversy, and was Obama's first choice for the job, will either keep her current job as the US ambassador at the UN, or as many Washington insiders point out will get the National Security Advisor post as a consolation prize.

Kerry, Hagel and Rice are known to be proponents of using Smart Power, which has been the hallmark of the first Obama administration, and that used a combination of hard and soft power by utilizing diplomacy, capacity and coalition building, political pressure, and the projection of military power to achieve US policy objectives.

Choosing Senator Kerry to head the State Department means that President Obama will not depart from the basic tenets of his foreign policy especially in the Middle East. Senator Kerry, with over 30 years of foreign policy experience at the Senate, is known to advocate negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and his views on this subject do not include using the US military war machine as an instrument of foreign policy. In addition, Kerry's views on the Arab Israeli conflict are not far off from those of the president.

In fact Kerry's stature in Washington will lend President Obama a much-needed political cushion to deal with his nemesis Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to jump start the so called “peace-process”.

An indication of a new approach of the US policy in region was evident when Mr. Obama sent Secretary Clinton to the Middle East during the latest Gaza war last November in order to stop the Israeli planned ground invasion in its tracks.

During the war in Gaza, President Obama, feeling much more confident after his reelection for a second term, made sure to deliver a humiliating defeat to Netanyahu by forcing him to stop his planned ground invasion of Gaza.

To do that, President Obama along with his senior advisors first made public statements and pronouncements supporting Israel's position and its right to defend itself against Hamas and its missiles. No word was mentioned during this brief war about the plight of Palestinians or about the brutal Israeli bombardment of Gaza that took the lives of scores of innocent Palestinian civilians.

In this approach Obama first fortified his domestic standing as being unequivocally pro-Israel and better silenced his would-be critics, including Netanyahu himself, than had he charted a more balanced course that spoke of both sides of the conflict instead of Israel alone. With his domestic front is safe and secured, President Obama sent Secretary Clinton to forcefully prevent Netanyahu from acting on his threats to invade Gaza which would have inflamed the Arab World, especially the new Egypt against the US.

This quiet and clever strategy seemed to have worked better for Obama than his former approach of appearing to be publicly pressuring Israel to give up its illegal settlement-building in the Palestinian territories and pressuring it to engage in meaningful peace talks with the Palestinians.

Although it is unclear whether president Obama will push for a Palestinian-Israeli direct or indirect talks in 2013 or later given the weakness of the Palestinian side and the instability in the two most important Arab states, Egypt and Syria.

In the meantime, the reported choice of former Nebraska republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who is known to criticize Israeli policies in the region and also criticized its lobby in Washington, to be his Secretary of Defense will likely solidify the president's positions on Iran, and Palestine-Israel by choosing his security team with strong Washington experience and not afraid to speak their minds. That said, however, Mr. Obama is facing his first test on the Middle East as the right-wing pro-Israeli groups are mounting a vicious campaign the thwart the nomination of Mr. Hagel on the grounds of his past remarks regarding Israel, Hamas, and Iran. In 2006 Hagel described in a newspaper interview a “Jewish Lobby” that is “intimating a lot of people.”

The final piece in Obama's national security team is ambassador Susan Rice who is very close to the president and is expected to be rewarded with the National Security Advisor post. Rice put her own political future on the line by defending the president on the Bengazi terrorist attack while the Obama reelection campaign was entering its dangerous close-race zone. Rice is known to be a proponent of using smart power that will utilize the use of the entire components of US national power -- diplomacy, military, scientific and cultural -- to achieve the US strategic objectives around the world.

Ali Younes is a writer and analyst based in Washington D.C. He can be reached at: aliyounes98@gmail.com and on Twitter at @clearali.

In an article for Foreign Affairs titled Clear and Present Safety, Micah Zenko of the Council for Foreign Affairs and Michael Cohen of the Century Foundation argue, per the subhead: "The United States Is More Secure Than Washington Thinks."

First, from a post at the Century Foundation blog post by Cohen about the subject of his article:

And yet for a variety of reasons this singular reality of global affairs in the 21st century is pretty much not reflected in our foreign policy and national security decision-making. If you want a good explanation as to why this is -- I present to you the words of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, who in testifying before Congress earlier this month said this, “I can’t impress upon you that in my personal military judgment, formed over thirty-eight years, we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime, right now.”   

To which Cohen wrote in reaction:

Someone who holds such views would barely be qualified to teach undergrad IR no less be the highest ranking officer in the American military.

In Foreign Affairs, Zenko and Cohen wrote:

Within the foreign policy elite, there exists a pervasive belief that the post–Cold War world is a treacherous place, full of great uncertainty and grave risks. … Perhaps more than any other idea, this belief shapes debates on U.S. foreign policy and frames the public’s understanding of international affairs. 

There is just one problem. It is simply wrong. The world that the United States inhabits today is a remarkably safe and secure place. It is a world with fewer violent conflicts and greater political freedom than at virtually any other point in human history. All over the world, people enjoy longer life expectancy and greater economic opportunity than ever before, no great-power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon.

Just a couple of reservations … like Stephen Zinker with his The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, they might have been better served by making their argument in terms somewhat less sanguine. For example, "a remarkably safe and secure place" might have read "a less dangerous place." I only mention it out of concerns for credibility with the threat hyping crowd.

More to the point, the authors write: "The United States faces no plausible existential threats." Though the authors allude to climate change, more attention could have been paid to it. As for its co-holder of the championship belt for existential threats -- nuclear weapons -- they write:

Overblown fears of a nuclear Iran are part of a more generalized American anxiety about the continued potential of nuclear attacks. Obama’s National Security Strategy claims that “… Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, the risk of a nuclear attack has increased.” 

If the context is a state-against-state nuclear conflict, the latter assertion is patently false. The demise of the Soviet Union ended the greatest potential for international nuclear conflict. China, with only 72 intercontinental nuclear missiles, is … not a credible nuclear threat. … [The] threat of a nuclear device ending up in the hands of a terrorist group has diminished markedly since the early 1990s. … [And] even in Pakistan, the chances of a terrorist organization procuring a nuclear weapon are infinitesimally small. 

To a disarmament advocate, this seems of a piece with how, since the demise of the Cold War, much of the American public has tucked its fear of nuclear war into bed for the duration. But it's never a good idea to go to sleep on the subject of nuclear risk, no matter how terrifying it is. Not to be a nag, but all it takes is one accident, etc.

In fact, we may have dodged yet another bullet when a fire broke out on the Russian nuclear sub Yekaterinburg, which may have been loaded with nukes at the time. With nuclear weapons, thus far, the angels have been on our side. I guess they figured the c. 160 million who died in wars on earth in the 20th century was enough for a while. But all it takes is one angel to defect to Lucifer …

Still, Zenko and Cohen have performed a valuable service with their article, especially since it appears in the influential Foreign Affairs. Their conclusion is powerful:

Indeed, the most lamentable cost of unceasing threat exaggeration and a focus on military force is that the main global challenges facing the United States today are poorly resourced and given far less attention than “sexier” problems, such as war and terrorism. These include climate change, pandemic diseases, global economic instability, and transnational criminal networks. … If the main challenges in a 99 percent world are transnational in nature and require more development, improved public health, and enhanced law enforcement, then it is crucial that the United States maintain a sharp set of nonmilitary national security tools. American foreign policy needs fewer people who can jump out of airplanes and more who can convene roundtable discussions and lead negotiations. 

The last decade’s surge in military spending has pushed military contracting deeper into the foundations of our economy. Reversing this process, and transferring the savings to support the green economy, are necessary components of the project to build the new economic foundation we need.

Here is a quick take on how little the President’s budget request, released this week, is going to help.

First a few bright spots. This budget is a milestone of sorts. For the first time, it offers less money to the military next year than we are spending this year. This is not the way the term “spending cut” tends to be defined in Washington-speak. Mostly “cuts” are made to last year’s expansive projections of the future. As in: the doubling of my salary that I projected last year didn’t happen, therefore I took a salary cut. All those military spending cuts referred to in previous years have been that kind.

With respect to support for the green economy, the budget does call for increases in spending on specific clean energy programs over what Congress appropriated last year.

Pull back just a little to see a slightly bigger picture, and things don’t look so good.

First, that military spending cut? It’s real (for the first time) but it’s about 1% of the Pentagon’s total. Not exactly transformational. The administration thought about eliminating one of our three nuclear weapon delivery systems (bombers, submarines, and land-based missiles); they thought about killing the most expensive weapon system of all time, the F35; they thought about having 10 rather than 11 aircraft carriers (no other country has even one to challenge them). They did none of these things.

And after next year the military budget will, according to plan, go back up. We will spend more in real terms over the next ten years than we spent during the previous ten. This after 13 straight years of increases. This while we spend more than the next 17 countries put together.

The Obama administration did invest about $80 billion in the green economy through the Recovery Act. But that money is mostly gone now. While their budget does make targeted investments—like $310 million for solar and $95 million for wind—overall spending on clean technology in this budget has almost been cut in half. The climate change budget includes, in addition to funding from the Energy Department, EPA money for pollution control, Treasury Department loan guarantees for clean tech investment, GSA purchases of fuel-efficient vehicles, and Housing and Urban Development funds for building weatherization. Those programs totaled $27.6 billion in the 2012 budget. In 2013 their allotment is $15 billion.

Of course, to the extent Republicans are in charge, this will be much worse. They want to increase military spending far beyond what the Obama administration has in mind. And they’re hoping that the trillion-dollar “sequestration” currently planned for 2013 will be allowed to fall on everything but the Pentagon budget.

Neither plan, needless to say, is transformational. For that, we have America Is Not Broke.

Cross-posted from OtherWords.

Washington's talking about cutting the military budget. Whoopee.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently revealed plans to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the Pentagon's budget in the next decade, with possibly more reductions on the way.

We're going to have fewer soldiers, fewer warplanes and ships, and not so many missiles. We'll cut back a bit on nuclear weapons. If Congress buys this plan, the Pentagon's $530 billion-a-year base budget, which excludes extras like the wars we're actually fighting, would shrink to a mere $472 billion by 2013. Double whoopee.

Not everyone is happy with the plan. Critics say that so piddling a sum as $472 billion would leave us naked to our enemies. We wouldn't even be able to fight two wars at a time, they say.

To which Panetta replies, maybe not. But we'll be able to fight one major war and have enough strength left over to "spoil" a second enemy's malign intentions elsewhere. Half a whoopee.

I've always been suspicious of the two-war strategy. To me, it's like having a two-car garage. You may not really need two cars, but if you have a two-car garage, chances are you'll own two cars sooner or later. One-and-a-half wars are plenty. If we have more enemies than that, let them take a number and form a line.

Visit OtherWords to read Donald Kaul's column in its entirety.

Each year Conn Hallinan's blog Dispatches From the Edge awards news stories and newsmakers that fall under the category of “Are you serious?” Here are 2011’s winners. 

The Golden Lemon Award to Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest arms company, whose F-22 Raptor fighter has some “performance” problems: the pilots can’t breathe.

The U.S. Air Force was forced to “stand down” its fleet of 160+ F-22s—at $150 million apiece, the single most expensive fighter in the world—when pilots began experiencing “hypoxia-like symptoms” from a lack of oxygen. But the company got right on it, according to Lockheed Martin vice president Jeff Babione, who said he was “proud to be a part” of the team that got the radar-evading aircraft back into the air—for five weeks. When pilots continued to have problems, the F-22 fleet was grounded again.

According to the Air Force, no one can figure out why oxygen is not getting to the pilots, but that pilots “would undergo physiological tests.” To see if the pilots can go without air?

Runner-up in this category is Lockheed Martins’ F-35, at $385 billion the most expensive weapon system in U.S. history. The cost of an individual F-35 has jumped from $69 million to $113 million a plane, and while this is cheaper than the F-22, the U.S. plans to eventually purchase more than 16 times the number of F-35s than F-22s. It seems the F-35 fighter has “cracks” and “hot spots” that, according to the director of the program, Vice Adm. David Venlet, are “hard to get at.”

Dispatches suggests that the Air Force issue ice packs and super glue to pilots.

The P.T. Barnum Award to Dennis Montgomery, a computer programmer who scammed the U.S. government for more than $20 million. Montgomery claimed he had software that could spot terrorist conspiracies hidden in broadcasts by the Qatar-based Arabic news network, Al Jazeera. He said his program could also detect hostile submarines and identify terrorists in Predator drone videos.

The Bush administration took his claims so seriously that in December 2003 it turned back flights from Britain, France and Mexico because the software had “discovered” the plane’s flight information embedded in an Al Jazeera crawl bar. The White House, fearing the planes would be used to attack targets in the U.S., actually talked about shooting the planes down.

The CIA eventually concluded the software was a fabrication, but rather than rebuking those in charge during the hoax—Donald Kerr and George Tenet—both men got promotions. The spy agency also didn’t bother to tell anyone in the military, so in 2009 the U.S. Air Force bought the bogus software for $3 million.

C. Northcote Parkinson Award to the U.S. Defense Department for upholding the British sociologist’s dictum that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Parkinson—a social scientist with a wicked sense of humor—was hired after World War II to examine the future of the Royal Navy. He concluded that, given the military’s deep love of fancy gold lace, as well as its addiction to bureaucracy, eventually there would be more admirals than ships. Needless to say, that is exactly what happened.

But it is not just the Brits who yearn for the golden epaulets. According to the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), the U.S. military is adding brass to its ranks at a record pace. While the enlisted ranks have grown by 2 percent from 2001 to 2011, three and four star generals and flag rank admirals have increased 24 percent, one and two star generals and admirals by 12 percent, and lower ranking officers by 9.5 percent.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made an attempt to cut the ranks of the top brass, but as soon as Leon Panetta took over the post, he reversed the cuts and added six more generals. In fact, at the same time as the Pentagon was cutting the enlisted ranks by 10,000 in anticipation of an end to the Iraq War, it added 2,500 officers.

According to POGO, “Today’s military is the most top-heavy force in U.S. history.” Between 2012 and 2021, POGO estimates that the six new generals Panetta appointed will cost taxpayers $14 million.

However, there may be a silver lining here. Generals and admirals don’t fight, that’s the job of enlisted men. At this rate the U.S. will run out of privates and the business of war will be left to generals and admirals. If that comes to pass, Dispatches predicts an outbreak of pacifism.

The Confused Priorities Award is a three-way tie between British Prime Minister David Cameron, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and former Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern.

In the midst of a savage austerity program, with massive cutbacks in social spending, Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal government will spend up to $40 billion on a new generation of missile-firing submarines. While British Defense Secretary Liam Fox said the submarine was necessary to maintain the country’s nuclear deterrence, critics say the program is really a boondoggle for BAE Systems, the United Kingdom-based arms company that will make the new weapon system.

Canada’s Harper got into the winner’s circle by spending over $100 million on summit meetings and pork barrel projects for Conservative cabinet member Tony Clement. The summit expenditures included $13,711 for “glow sticks,” $62 million for accommodations, and $4.3 million for a temporary fence to keep Canadians away from the lake where the Group of 8 meeting took place. Half of the summit money was used to build an office building in Fraser’s district, as well as develop airports and communities that the cabinet member could take credit for. In the meantime, Harper slashed spending for health care and education, and cut $200 million from environmental protection and monitoring.

Ahern, Taoiseach of the Irish Dail from 1997 to 2008, oversaw the bank speculation and real estate bubble that destroyed Ireland’s economy in 2008. Ahern claimed that no one told him that the financial situation was so dire, although an investigation by independent analyst Rob Wright found that the Fianna Fail government had repeatedly been warned that a crash was coming. Asked what his greatest regret was, Ahern replied that it was his failure to build a stadium to match those in Arab states. “I think unfortunately when I see little countries like Qatar and Kuwait…talking about their 10 stadiums and we never succeeded in getting one national stadium. That’s an achievement I tried hard to do but I didn’t get.” 

The White Elephant Award to the Greek Army for considering taking 400 free M1A1 Abrams tanks from the U.S. “This is a free offer,” said Greek army spokesman Yiannis Sifakis.

Well, sort of free.

The Abrams, the U.S.’s main battle tank, is a 67.6-ton behemoth that burns 10 gallons of gas just to start, and gets 1.6 gallons to the mile. The tanks will also cost $11 million to transport to Greece.

In the meantime, the Greek Socialist government has laid off tens of thousands of workers, cut wages, slashed health care, increased sales taxes, and advanced the retirement age. Massive demonstration and general strikes have convulsed major cities, and the country is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Maybe the army is thinking that if German banks try to repossess the country, those 400 Abrams tanks might come in handy (if Greece can afford to gas to run them)?

The Dr. Frankenstein Award to former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright for her sponsorship of Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, a man accused of murdering Serb prisoners during the 1999 Yugoslav War and selling their body parts.

Reporting on the scandal in CounterPunch, reporter Diana Johnstone, author of “Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions,” cites a report by Swiss Senator Dick Marty implicating former Kosovo Liberation Army commander Thaci of running “safe houses” during the war where Serb prisoners were tortured and killed.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a human rights organization with 47 member states, sponsored the Marty investigation.

“An undetermined but apparently small number of prisoners were transferred in vans and trucks to an operating site near Tirana international airport [Albania], from which fresh organs could be flown rapidly to recipients,” the Marty Report says. “Captives were killed, usually by a gunshot to the head, before being operated on to remove one of more of their organs.” Kidneys seem to have been the major harvest.

Thaci has also been linked to the heroin trade and prostitution.

Albright and her aide, the late Richard Holbrooke, pushed Thaci into the leadership of Kosovo during the Rambouillet negotiations leading up to the war. According to Johnson, far more prominent leaders of the Kosovo delegation to those talks were pushed aside, and Thaci—known in law enforcement circles as “The Snake—became the face of the Albanians secession movement.

Asked about the Marty Report, U.S. State Department spokesman Phillip Crowley said the Americans would continue to work with Thaci because “any individual anywhere on the earth is innocent until proven otherwise.” Of course, it also helps that Thaci approved the construction of a massive U.S. base in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel, giving the U.S. its first military foothold in the Balkans.

The Surreal Award to the U.S. Justice Department for finally agreeing that lawyers defending prisoners at Guantanamo can view classified files that were prominently displayed on the WikiLeaks website. The Department ruled that lawyers may access the documents, but cannot “download, save, print, or disseminate” the material, a ruling that attorney David Remes said was “still surreal.”

The Grinch Award to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for complaining that Colombia’s minimum wage was too high, and driving up the cost of labor. The minimum wage is $1.80 an hour and, for full-time workers, brings in around $300 a month.

The Historical Re-write Award to Jean-Francois Cope, general secretary of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Union for Popular Movement and the man behind the “Burka Ban.” Cope organized a recent conference on secularization that, according to French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, led to “a stigmatization of Muslims.”

Cope defended the conference as “controversial but necessary,” adding that “the values of France are like the Three Musketeers: liberty, equality, fraternity.” Except that the Alexander Dumas novel was set in 1625, and the Musketeers were fighting for Louis XIII and the Catholic Church. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” was the slogan of the 1789 French Revolution, and was not highly thought of in the Feudal court of Bourbons. 

The creative Language Award to the Obama administration for its denial that the American bombing of Libya constituted a war. It was, according to the White House, a “time-limited, scope-limited military action.”

For more of Conn Hallinan's essays visit Dispatches From the Edge. Meanwhile, his novels about the ancient Romans can be found at The Middle Empire Series.