James A. Russell

The predictions of doom in the Middle East that are dominating thinking in the foreign policy commentariat of Washington and other capitals over the spread of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could use a little perspective.

An unlikely source of insight transpired the other day when [...]]]> via LobeLog

James A. Russell

The predictions of doom in the Middle East that are dominating thinking in the foreign policy commentariat of Washington and other capitals over the spread of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could use a little perspective.

An unlikely source of insight transpired the other day when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not known for clear-headed strategic thinking, equated Hamas with ISIS. The suggestion was part of a long-running Israeli narrative that seeks to link its periodic muggings of the Palestinians with the American-led war on Islamic extremists launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Netanyahu’s suggestion, however, is not far off the mark when it comes to framing regional events—though not for the reasons that he would think. The fact is that the Middle East is mired in several overlapping and competing national wars of liberation and state formation by various factions and states that seek a common variable in these wars: political power and authority over a demarcated geographic area. ISIS and Hamas are certainly participants in these wars, as are the Israelis.

None of these wars are in any way remarkable by historical standards—a point worth remembering as the Obama administration faces massive pressure to “do something” about the advances of ISIS. Americans generally suffer from short historic memories and easily forget their role in post-World War II era wars including in China (1949), Vietnam (1950s-60s), and Greece (1948).

Like the United States, Britain and France involved themselves in these wars directly and indirectly—most of which turned out badly for the Western powers. If anything, the involvement of outside powers in these wars prolonged them—much to the detriment of the groups involved in the struggle for political power.

The Middle East’s wars of national liberation and state formation were never really settled—hence the prevalence of the phenomenon today. The longest running is the unfinished war of Israeli independence launched in 1948. It’s unsettled because Israel’s borders are still in question due to its ongoing annexation of territory that presumably one day will become part of the state. It seems clear that the annexation fits within the governing Likud Party’s vision of “greater Israel,” which includes the Palestinian territories (Judea and Samaria) that stretch all the way to Jordan River.

This war is ongoing because Hamas and Likud share the same objective—achieving a state that stretches from Gaza to the Jordan River. Hamas is a classic radical religious nationalist movement that seeks to create its own state and, like Israel, is prepared to use force to achieve its goals. Thrown into this mix is the Palestinian Authority, the group that initially took up arms to achieve Palestinian independence but which as of late has tried in vain to achieve its objectives of state formation at the negotiating table.

We can expect this war to continue for the foreseeable future. The involvement of the United States and the blank check it has given to Israel has prolonged the battle; the Israelis have to take no responsibility for their actions and hence have no real incentive to reach a negotiated settlement until the Likud achieves its objective.

The other main war for national independence and state formation in the Middle East involves the fight for political power and authority in the Mukhabarat States of Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq—where (except in Saudi Arabia) the security sector created during colonization seized political power after the external powers departed. Libya is also engaged in a war of state formation that, like in Syria and Iraq, will likely be bloody and take a number of years.

Egypt’s internal battles between the security sector and the Islamists, which raged for 20+ years before briefly subsiding in the 1990s, look as if they may start up again due to these two group’s opposing and perhaps irreconcilable goals for the shape and identity of the state. For its part, Algeria won its civil war against the Islamists in the 1990s. In Tunisia, there may be a process of peaceful transition away from the Mukhabarat regime of Ben Ali to some form of representational government that involves all political parties.

In Syria, Iraq, and Libya, the national wars of liberation and state formation are currently underway. ISIS must be seen as an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable consequence of the battle for power in Syria, which has seen the Saudi-Gulf State support network funnel arms, people, and money into the fight against the Assad-Mukhabarat regime.

The historic genealogy of ISIS reaches back into US-occupied Iraq and the Saudi-Pakistani-US supported war by the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Its intellectual and religious roots lie within the toxic mix of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi clerics and the Sayyid Qutb-inspired militant Islamic resistance to Nasser in Egypt.

To a limited extent, Hamas can be considered a distant cousin of ISIS; both spring from radical Sunni Islamic political and religious ideology. Importantly, however, they are engaged in fundamentally different wars of liberation that involve different actors with various objectives in the contest for political power and authority.

In Iraq, the 2003 US invasion turned the existing political order on its head and unleashed long-repressed political aspirations that have blossomed, like in Syria, into another national war of liberation and state formation. ISIS now straddles the Iraqi-Syrian border, and one of the casualties of this war may be the Sykes-Picot boundaries that divided up the Ottoman Empire.

Saudi Arabia is noticeably absent, at least for now, in this intra- and transnational discord in part because, like other Gulf States, it has bought off its population with subsidized good living and sent its radicals to blow themselves up elsewhere. The regime’s periodic muggings of the Shia population in its Eastern Province are supported by the majority of the population. One day, however, the radicals that survived will come home just like those who did from the Afghan jihad in the 1990s.

The only good news on this front is that there is no widespread political support for the Sunni extremist ideology espoused by groups like ISIS. These groups tend to have short shelf lives precisely because they alienate the very people they seek to govern. The bad news is that these groups’ struggle for political power will likely be long and bloody—in part because they are not interested in a negotiated settlement and/or in sharing power with other actors. The blood-soaked Algerian Civil War provides a historic example of what can happen when entrenched, committed Islamic extremists take on an established security establishment.

More bad news: developed states have had almost universally poor results with their interventions in these national wars of liberation and state formation. In almost every case, the developed states were forcibly kicked out of their former domains. The British headlong retreat from Aden in 1967, the French defeat in Vietnam and Algeria, and the American defeat in Vietnam all represented important signposts as the wars of national liberation became prominent in the post-World War II era.

Moreover, the attempts to intervene in these disputes were often marked by ill-informed choices in backing local participants. The American backing of Chiang Kai-shek turned out particularly badly as did the backing of Nguyen Van Thieu. Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai must also now be added to the list of bad choices by the United States.

The hysteria sweeping the West today over who’s up and who’s down in the battle for power in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere in the region needs to be placed in this historic context. There is nothing remarkable about these wars. The lessons of past attempts to involve us in these localized struggles suggest that caution should be exercised in committing our militaries to affect the outcomes. A regrettable but perhaps enduring lesson of international politics is that sometimes keeping your powder dry and being patient is just the best option.

Protesters gathered in Ahrar Square, in the Iraqi city of Mosul, on April 3, 2013 against US-backed Nouri al-Maliki’s government. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

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by James A. Russell

The apparent beheading of American journalist James Foley adds a particularly gruesome and tragic twist to the sports event-like reporting of our attempts to thwart the advances of the Islamic State in Iraq over the last week. Foley’s execution will only ensure that the “what to do about [...]]]> via LobeLog

by James A. Russell

The apparent beheading of American journalist James Foley adds a particularly gruesome and tragic twist to the sports event-like reporting of our attempts to thwart the advances of the Islamic State in Iraq over the last week. Foley’s execution will only ensure that the “what to do about ISIS” quandary confronting US policy makers in Washington will rise to the top of President Obama’s “to do” list.

Yesterday, we blew up some Islamic State armored personnel in northern Iraq. Tomorrow, who knows where our airplanes and missiles will strike? The public sits in rapt attention. Have we stopped the Islamic State today along Route 1 or somewhere else? Who will be the next unlucky hostage to forfeit his or her life in this awful real life drama?

America’s return to military action in Iraq — this time without ground troops – bespeaks yet another attempt to rescue the country and the region from the multiple and disastrous unintended consequences of invading Iraq in 2003.

What’s left of Iraq litters the landscape like shattered glass, its people scattered in surrounding countries, and posse-like militias taking the law in their own hands amid the wreckage of military and government institutions we tried to build from the ground up at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of US lives.

We will be no more successful this time around than we were from 2003-10, when the US dumped a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of troops into what Winston Churchill described earlier in the 20th century as the “odium of the Mesopotamia entanglement.”

A strategic result today, no matter how many airstrikes we launch or how many Special Forces advisers we send in, is highly unlikely. The Islamic State cannot be “bombed” out of existence, no matter how outraged the public may be about its war crimes or Foley’s murder. Our Special Operations teams also cannot kill all the Islamic State leadership, no matter how well their skills have been honed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The ordering of airstrikes and the dispatch of more advisers to Iraq is emblematic of a central strategic problem that has faced many presidents in the post-World War II era: fighting limited wars for limited objectives in the nuclear era.

The US’ answer to the defeat of its conscript army in Vietnam was the creation of the volunteer, professional Army. For the United States, the creation of this force was in many ways the most significant strategic consequence of the country’s defeat in Vietnam.

The idea behind this army seemed sound: a smaller, better-trained force would prove more tactically proficient than its conscript-manned predecessor. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, the hope was that turning over military campaigns to the professional army would divorce the public from the mostly negative experiences of using force, which would give military and political leaders a freer hand in using it around the world.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States deployed the best-trained and equipped army in the world against guerillas. As was the case in Vietnam, the Army and Marine Corps achieved no strategic effect before returning home — except in a negative sense with the breakup Iraq. After 10 years in the field, the US Army and Marine Corps could not be any better at fighting irregular wars — yet their tactical proficiency could not alter the negative strategic and political circumstances of the wars they fought.

What’s the lesson here? President Obama looks at these interventions as having failed and, on the one hand, seems understandably reluctant to send the Army back to places like Iraq. That caution would lead you to believe that the United States is thinking more carefully about interventions that amount to policing actions in the developing world. Sadly, however, that is not the case.

Like the post-Vietnam period, the main unintended consequence of our failures in Iraq and the so-far hung jury in Afghanistan has gone largely unnoticed around the country.

While failing to impose our will on guerilla adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, we essentially doubled down by expanding the country’s reliance on Special Forces and their proficiency at irregular war.

Not only have we expanded the size of the special forces and effectively created a fifth-arm of military services, we have also empowered the now global Special Operations Command (SOCOM) to orchestrate our special forces and irregular war campaigns. SOCOM will wield the same bureaucratic, institutional, and budgetary command as the regional commander-in-chiefs.

That is a counterintuitive and strange reaction to 14 years of fighting in which we achieved tactical proficiency at irregular war but could not wield that proficiency to strategic effect. Even stranger, the expansion of US reliance on Special Forces and the creation of an associated larger bureaucratic empire have happened with little public or political debate.

Who decided to create this service with its own manpower and funding? What makes us think that being clever and tactically proficient in irregular war will be any more successful in the future than it has proven to be over the last 14 years?

Why should failure at irregular war lead to bigger budgets for SOCOM and larger numbers of Special Forces? Why can’t the Army and the Marine Corps do these missions — as they demonstrated during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? These important questions are absent from America’s broken national discourse.

As a result, we better get used to the special event-like reporting on the Islamic State, which draws on the Iraq and Afghanistan template for developing world interventions. Just don’t expect these interventions to achieve strategic effect.

The inability to think through the lessons of more than a decade of irregular war symbolizes the intellectual fog gripping the foreign and national security policy establishment that has confused and blurred the distinctions between tactics and strategy.

We will be no more successful in future developing world military interventions than we have been in the past unless we stop believing that clever tactics supported by well-trained troops will somehow achieve our objectives.

Launching airstrikes at Islamic State convoys and sending in more advisers to Iraq is just another example of the triumph of tactics over strategy and fails to grasp the political dimensions of the struggle for power in Mesopotamia. We cannot police the politics of these struggles by bombing antagonists. We should not send teams of Special Forces into these situations just because we can.

Sending in advisors and authorizing airstrikes over Middle Eastern conflict zones involves the US in the domestic politics of situations we don’t fully understand and that do not directly threaten our interests.

Until we grasp the central truths about the distinction between strategy and tactics and the limits of our military power, we will continue to thrash around ineffectually in yet another attempt to address the problem of fighting limited wars for limited objectives.

Photo Credit: DoD photo by Airman 1st Class Cliffton Dolezal, US Air Force

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by James A. Russell

Watching the US-backed Israeli bombardment of Gaza makes me ashamed to be an American. The sight of US-made bombs bursting in the air, in hospitals, in homes, and over beaches is a far cry from the sense of American exceptionalism engendered by Francis Scott Key’s observations of the [...]]]> via LobeLog

by James A. Russell

Watching the US-backed Israeli bombardment of Gaza makes me ashamed to be an American. The sight of US-made bombs bursting in the air, in hospitals, in homes, and over beaches is a far cry from the sense of American exceptionalism engendered by Francis Scott Key’s observations of the British shelling of Baltimore during the war of 1812.

That sense of American exceptionalism, which has been an important part of our national psyche, has also wended its way through the nation’s foreign policy and the intellectual traditions that have supported it.

As noted by historian Walter McDougall in his eloquent and timeless essay, “Back to Bedrock: The Eight Traditions of American Statecraft” (Foreign Affairs, March/April 1997), Americans always wanted to believe that their country’s foreign policy traditions, which ineluctably flowed from the principles of our founding fathers, stood for some higher moral purpose. This in turn meant we could pursue our ideals at home and abroad with a clear conscience and the ability to tell right from wrong.

To be sure, intellectual traditions drawing upon historic ideals and moral purpose have always cloaked the cold-hearted, realist foreign policies designed to enhance America’s influence and power around the world. But it is also true that these ideals and realist policies went hand in hand — despite the obvious inconsistencies.

For example, the West’s Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union undeniably drew upon that sense of American exceptionalism; we characterized the global struggle as one that pitted freedom against oppression. We were always on the right side of this fight, as countries around the world consciously and obviously sought to free themselves from the yoke of communist oppression in pursuit of democracy and pluralist governance.

That sense of exceptionalism and moral purpose also provided the intellectual bedrock for the domestic political consensus that characterized politics in the post-World War II era. Republican and Democratic administrations for the most part pursued sensible, centrist policies at home and abroad.

After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, however, the US stumbled into the post-Cold War era, which, after a short hiatus, became replaced by the war on terror in which anti-modern Islamic terrorists replaced the Soviet boogeyman. Upon transitioning into the era of terror and foreign wars, that domestic consensus slowly but surely unraveled as the Republican party withdrew from the centrist coalition that had governed the US in the post-World War II world and denounced any attempts at sensible compromise.

Perhaps the most grievous casualty of the war on terror has been the US’ sense of exceptionalism and higher moral purpose. Instead, we are left with the cold, hard facts of today’s America: assassinating people via robots without due process, hauling suspects off to foreign jails to be tortured, enabling and supporting reprehensible regimes so long as they swear fealty to the terror war, and a government at home that routinely pries into its citizens’ private communications (not to mention those of our allies), all justified as necessary evils for safety and security.

Now our tax dollars are funding the bombing of Gaza while our elected representatives from both sides of the aisle scarcely raise an eyebrow. Ironically, the American political and monetary blank check granted to Israel has only hastened its descent into pariah state status and international isolation — the very opposite objective that the Israelis and we claim to be pursuing.

Of course, the American reaction to the events of Gaza and the latest era of American foreign policy says more about us and our lost sense of purpose than it does about Israel’s bad behavior. This loss has enveloped the republic and its domestic politics as the Republican Party has lurched off the ideological map into its exclusionary room full of mirrors.

We can no longer agree on such rudimentary steps as fixing the country’s deteriorating road system. Instead our government responds mainly to the needs of those corporations and individuals with enticing check books while the rest of us are left with crumbling roads.

The muted reaction to Gaza by our government and our elected representatives is partly a response to the money wielded by donor groups controlled by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has become the National Rifle Association of American foreign policy.

All this reveals a country that has lost the sense of conscience and purpose that were once the bedrocks of the world’s greatest democracy. Unless we find a way to recover our intellectual center of gravity, we will continue to watch as US-made bombs burst over Gaza and elsewhere with a shoulder shrug and an Alfred E. Neumann “what me worry” attitude as our great republic crumbles around us.

Photo: IDF artillery forces fire into the Gaza Strip on July 16.

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by James A. Russell

The sight of Afghans lining up in droves on April 5 to cast their ballots braving threats of violence offers us some heartening images in a world that seems awash in bad news with Russia’s destructive behavior, continued anarchy and death in Syria, and other parts of the [...]]]> via LobeLog

by James A. Russell

The sight of Afghans lining up in droves on April 5 to cast their ballots braving threats of violence offers us some heartening images in a world that seems awash in bad news with Russia’s destructive behavior, continued anarchy and death in Syria, and other parts of the world teetering dangerously on the precipice between peace and war.

The pictures coming out of Afghanistan may partially salve the wounds of those that bore the brunt — and paid for — the 13-year war waged by the West against the Taliban. Those estimated 7 million Afghans that lined up to vote clearly deserve the sympathy, admiration, and respect of the international community.

Curiously, however, the images of those brave Afghans made me think of a famous quote attributed to Napoleon at some point in the early 19th century, in which he is said to have pointedly asked: “What’s the war about?”

We may draw comfort from the storyline being reported on the Afghan elections, but is that what the war was about?

The understandably favorable press coverage of the Afghan elections in some ways diverts our attention from the more troubling and largely unexamined aspects of America’s decade-plus of war in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost more than a trillion dollars, led to over a million refugees, and thousands dead and maimed civilians and soldiers.

How is it that what started out as a straightforward, punitive expedition to go after the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks became the most ambitious experiment in social and political engineering and the longest war in American history? When did we decide to do this, exactly? Did we think about the potential costs of such an ambitious effort and, perhaps most important, did we ever ask ourselves whether the stakes in Afghanistan justified the magnitude of the effort?

To be sure, it is not unknown for policy goals in wars to become inflated and/or changed so fundamentally as to bear little relationship to the initial reasons for the war. What started out in August 1914 as a war of Serbian independence gradually morphed its way into a war to contain Germany and then became the war to end all wars. In Vietnam, what began as war against communism in southeast Asia evolved into yet another grand experiment in social engineering that then became joined at the hip with the idea of “peace with honor,” which needlessly extended the war’s carnage.

More recently, the US invasion of Iraq must be considered a poster board of this phenomenon, in which we cycled through at least a dozen post-invasion war objectives before settling on another grand and misguided social engineering project.

A disturbing feature of the Afghan and Iraq wars was that the enemy had little to do with the inflation of our policy goals over the course of our involvement. They resisted our presence simply because we were occupying their countries. In both of those wars, the enemy imposed no new or distinctive political requirements on us that forced us to inflate our policy goals beyond all recognition. The undeniable truth is that we imposed these inflated goals upon ourselves and did so with little apparent deliberation, debate, or thought.

How did this happen? Seeking an answer is certainly worthy of debate and discussion — even if we are forced to confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves. It’s hard not to point a finger at what has become the feckless nature of American politics, today dominated by rigid ideology on the right, money, and special interests, all of which have led to the disintegration of common sense across party lines in foreign and domestic policy.

This fractured domestic political landscape in some ways paralleled the broken decision-making process that governed strategy and foreign policy after 9/11, which produced decisions with catastrophic consequences to American interests and objectives around the world. In this environment, soldiers were sent off to war for made up reasons by ideologues that were never challenged in a democracy that is based on a system of checks and balances. We lacked political and military leaders and a public that paid close attention while demanding no answers to Napoleon’s timeless question.

As for the Afghan elections — we should all be glad that Afghans are voting, but we should be under no illusions that a successful election means that Afghanistan will develop into a pluralistic political system that solves internal differences peacefully at the ballot box. We can only hope that’s what will happen in a process that may take generations to unfold.

Perhaps more significantly, it is manifestly unclear whether any government in Afghanistan can survive given the malign intentions of Pakistan, which has aided and abetted the Taliban and other insurgent groups with arms, money, training and a safe haven from which to plan their attacks in Afghanistan. Pakistan shows no inclination to abandon its plans to destabilize the country despite America’s best efforts to buy it off with billions of dollars over the course of the war.

These are uncertainties that cloud Afghanistan’s future — whatever the outcome of the apparently successful elections. Our inability to address and answer Napoleon’s pointed question about the war in Afghanistan says more about us than those brave Afghans casting their votes for a better future, although we could surely use a little more of their courage in our own democracy.

Photo: Voters line up at a polling station on Jalalabad Road, Kabul city, on April 5, 2014. Credit: Casey Garret Johnson

by James A. Russell

News that the Obama administration is considering releasing the convicted spy Jonathan Pollard as part of an attempt to breath life into the Israel-Palestine peace talks is a sign of negotiations that have become a road to nowhere.

Secretary of State John Kerry and the Obama administration deserve [...]]]> via LobeLog

by James A. Russell

News that the Obama administration is considering releasing the convicted spy Jonathan Pollard as part of an attempt to breath life into the Israel-Palestine peace talks is a sign of negotiations that have become a road to nowhere.

Secretary of State John Kerry and the Obama administration deserve credit for attempting to convince both parties to take steps that serve their interests: to reach peaceful accommodation for an independent Palestinian state. The negotiations, however, recall an essential time honored truth of life and politics: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

The Obama administration may wish to release Pollard, but it should be under no illusions that his release will somehow increase Israel’s enthusiasm for peace talks with the Palestinians. Israel would enthusiastically welcome Pollard as a national hero, and then go back to its US-subsidized good life behind its walls that protect the beautiful beaches and café’s of Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

As the occupying military power, the Israelis hold most of the cards in the asymmetric bargaining framework. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benajmin Netanyahu, the Israelis continually demonstrate their abiding disinterest in living peacefully with the Palestinians despite the obvious benefits that a settlement would offer.

The view from Israel

Israel regards its strategic problems in purely military terms and sees no benefits to a different set of political relationships that might make its neighbors less hostile. A deal with the Palestinians might unlock the door to these possibilities, but Israel would have to decide to insert the key into the lock to find out what’s on the other side. One can only conclude that Israel has no interest in altering political relations with its neighbors and creating a more cooperative regional political framework.  Life is good on their Mediterranean beaches.

Ignoring the requests of their benefactor and most important political supporter, Israel continues to build new settlements in illegally occupied lands and continues to squeeze the Palestinian population on the West Bank into constricted cantonment areas surrounded by troops and roadblocks that make the concept of an independent state simply impossible.

Some reports suggest that Israel is even insisting on what would amount to a permanent Israeli military presence in the Jordan River valley as part of a settlement. What country in the modern world could agree to such a situation and still be regarded as a country?

For their part, the Palestinians have little leverage in the negotiations since they are under military occupation and are being actively denied the ability to function as a coherent state. They have already acceded to Israeli demands to set up their own security force, but are left without the accompanying political institutions to provide governance and public services. So the Palestinians are left in a perennial catch-22 situation in which the Israelis demand that they act like a state while Israel simultaneously denies them the ability to function as one.

This returns us to the issue of the Jonathan Pollard. Americans forget that the Israelis rented out an apartment on Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC filled with copying machines to deal with the volume of top secret classified material that Pollard passed to his Israeli handlers. Israel allegedly passed some of that information to the Soviet Union in exchange for an increase in the numbers of Soviet Jews allowed to emigrate to Israel.  Pollard is said to have provided thousands of sensitive classified documents to Israel that were never returned to the United States. The Reagan-era Cold Warrior Caspar Weinberger would no doubt turn over in his grave if he knew what was afoot with Pollard today.

Cold War remnants

In some ways, the focus on Pollard is emblematic of an issue and an epoch in US international relations that has disappeared into the rearview mirror — at least for the United States. Today, the United States talks of the pivot to Asia and is left with a series of politico-military relationships throughout the Middle East formed during the heat of the Cold War that have lost much of their strategic impetus. Israel is no exception to this phenomenon.

The main US Cold War allies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel — all joined by a congruence of interests — are slowly but surely becoming unglued in the 21^st century as the winds of change blow across the region. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are now the forces of counter-revolution simultaneously seeking to preserve monarchy, a military dictatorship, and a permanent occupation — all of which places these countries on the wrong side of history.

For the United States, these relationships made sense in the Cold War as it sought to hold the line against Soviet influence and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, as it helped build the epicenter of the global oil industry that exists to this day in the Persian Gulf.

The US-Israeli relationship was cemented in this period, and Israel today stands as the unrivaled regional military superpower courtesy of the United States.  The US-Saudi relationship was similarly constructed, with the United States helping the House of Saud construct a security apparatus second to none in the region.  The story of the US-Egyptian relationship is similar — with the Egyptian security apparatus built and funded with US money and military equipment.

New interests

At one time, the Arab-Israeli dispute was seen as a lynchpin to regional stability and critical to US interests. Today, however, that calculus has changed. The conflict has devolved into a persistent irritant for the United States but has lost its importance in the global scheme of things as a strategic imperative.

Today, the stakes in the Iran nuclear program are far more significant for American interests and are justifiably receiving the attention of senior decision-makers in the Obama administration. Moreover, the US ability to influence the direction of the region’s political evolution in places like Syria, Tunisia, Bahrain and Egypt are limited. The United States cannot manage these regional problems all by itself.  Similarly, it cannot manage the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, particularly when America’s main ally actively refuses to take steps for peace that are in its own interests. If Israel wants to live in a permanent state of hostility with its neighbors, then so be it.

Secretary of State John Kerry is actively seeking solutions to the many problems facing the United States around the world. The Arab-Israeli dispute keeps getting lower on America’s list of global and strategic priorities; it has turned into a road to nowhere. Keep Pollard in jail or give him up, but, more importantly, the United States must move on from the Cold War era and leave these antagonists to their own devices and fate.

Photo: Israelis protest for the release of Jonathan Pollard. Credit: Reuters/Ammar Awad

by James A. Russell

Russia’s storming of the Ukrainian naval base in Crimea just as Iran and world powers wrapped up another round of negotiations in Vienna earlier this week represent seemingly contradictory bookends to a world that some believe is spinning out of control.

It’s hard not to argue that the [...]]]> via LobeLog

by James A. Russell

Russia’s storming of the Ukrainian naval base in Crimea just as Iran and world powers wrapped up another round of negotiations in Vienna earlier this week represent seemingly contradictory bookends to a world that some believe is spinning out of control.

It’s hard not to argue that the world seems a bit trigger-happy these days. Vladimir Putin’s Russian mafia thugs armed with weapons bought with oil money calmly annex the Crimea. Chinese warships ominously circle obscure shoals in the Western Pacific as Japan and other countries look on nervously. Israel and Hezbollah appear eager to settle scores and start another war in Lebanon. Syria and Libya continue their descent into a medieval-like state of nature as the world looks on not quite knowing what to do.

The icing on the cake is outgoing Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s telling the United States to get stuffed and leave his country — after we’ve spent billions dollars of borrowed money and suffered thousands of casualties over 13 years propping up his corrupt kleptocracy. Karzai and his cronies are laughing all the way to their secret Swiss banks with their pockets stuffed full of US taxpayer dollars. Why the United States thinks it needs to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan remains a mystery — but that’s another story altogether.

In the United States, noted foreign policy experts like Senator John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Condoleeza Rice have greeted these developments with howls of protest and with a call to arms to reassert America’s global leadership to tame a world that looks like it’s spinning out of control. They appear to believe that we should somehow use force or the threat of force as an instrument to restore order. Never mind that these commentators have exercised uniformly bad judgment on nearly all the major foreign policy issues of the last decade.

The protests of these commentators notwithstanding, however, it is worth engaging in a debate about what all these events really mean; whether they are somehow linked and perhaps emblematic of a more important structural shift in international politics towards a more warlike environment. For the United States, these developments come as the Obama administration sensibly tries to take the country’s military off a permanent war-footing and slow the growth in the defense budget — a budget that will still see the United States spend more on its military than most of the rest of the world combined.

The first issue is whether the events in Crimea are emblematic of a global system in which developed states may reconsider the basic calculus that has governed decision-making since World War II — that going to war doesn’t pay. Putin may have correctly calculated that the West doesn’t care enough about Crimea to militarily stop Russia, but would the same calculus apply to Moldova, Poland, or some part of Eastern Europe? Similarly, would the Central Committee in Beijing risk a wider war in the Pacific over the bits of rocks in the South China Sea that are claimed by various countries?

While we can’t know the answer to these questions, the political leadership of both Russia and China clearly would face significant political, economic, and military costs in choosing to exercise force in a dispute in which the world’s developed states could not or would not back down. These considerations remain a powerful deterrent to a resumption of war between the developed states, events in Crimea notwithstanding– although miscalculations by foolhardy leaders are always a possibility. Putin could have chosen some other piece of real estate that might have led to a different reaction by the West, but it seems unlikely.

The second kind of inter-state dispute troubling the system are those between countries/actors that have a healthy dislike for one another. Clearly, the most dangerous of these situations is the relationship between India and Pakistan — two nuclear-armed states that have been exchanging fire directly and indirectly for much of the last half century. By the same token, however, there is really nothing new in this dispute that has remained a constant since both states were created after Britain’s departure from the subcontinent.

Similarly, the situation in the Middle East stemming from Israel’s still unfinished wars of independence remains a constant source of regional instability. Maybe one day, Israel and its neighbors will finally decide on a set of agreeable borders, but until they do we can all expect them to resort to occasional violence until the issue is settled. Regrettably, neither Israel nor its neighbors shows any real interest in peaceful accommodation.

The third kind of war is the intra-national conflicts like those in Syria, the Congo, and Libya that some believe is emblematic of a more general slide into a global state-of-nature Hobbesian world in which the weak perish and the strong survive. If this is the case, what if anything can be done about it?

Here again, however, we have to wonder what if anything is new with these wars. As much as we might not like it, internal political evolution in developing states can and often does turn violent until winners emerge. The West’s own evolution in Europe took hundreds of years of bloodshed until winners emerged and eventually established political systems capable of resolving disputes peacefully through politics and national institutions. The chaos in places like Syria, the Congo, Libya, and Afghanistan has actually been the norm of international politics over much of the last century — not the exception.

This returns us to the other bookend cited at the outset of this piece — the reconvened negotiations in Vienna that are attempting to resolve the standoff between Iran and the international community. These meetings point to perhaps the most significant change in the international system over the last century that has seen global institutions emerge as mechanisms to control state behavior through an incentive structure that discourages war and encourages compliance with generally accepted behavioral norms.

These institutions, such as the United Nations, and their supporting regulatory structures like the International Atomic Energy Agency have helped establish new behavioral norms and impose costs on states that do not comply with the norms. While we cannot be certain of what caused Iran to seek a negotiated solution to its standoff with the international community over its nuclear program, it is clear that the international community has imposed significant economic costs on Iran over the last eight years of ever-tightening sanctions.

Similarly, that same set of global institutions and regulatory regimes supported by the United States will almost certainly impose sanctions that will increase the costs of Putin’s violation of international norms in Russia’s seizure of Crimea. Those costs will build up over time, just as they have for Iran and other states like North Korea that find themselves outside of the general global political and economic system. As Iran has discovered, and as Russia will also discover — it’s an expensive and arguably unsustainable proposition to be the object of international obloquy.

For those hawks arguing for a more militarized US response to these disparate events, it’s worth returning to George F. Kennan’s basic argument for a patient, defensive global posture. Kennan argued that inherent US and Western strength would see it through the Cold War and triumph over its weaker foes in the Kremlin. As Kennan correctly noted: we were strong, they were weaker. Time was on our side, not theirs. The world’s networked political and economic institutions only reinforce the strength of the West and those other members of the international community that choose to play by the accepted rules for peaceful global interaction.

The same holds true today. Putin’s Russia is a paper tiger that is awash in oil money but with huge structural problems. Russia’s corrupt, mafia-like dictatorship will weaken over time as it is excluded from the system of global political and economic interactions that rewards those that play by the rules and penalizes those that don’t.

As for other wars around the world in places like Syria, we need to recognize they are part of the durable disorder of global politics that cannot necessarily be managed despite the awful plight of the poor innocent civilians and children — who always bear the costs of these tragic conflicts.

We need to calm down and recognize that the international system is not becoming unglued; it is simply exhibiting immutable characteristics that have been with us for much of recorded history. We should, however, be more confident of the ability of the system (with US leadership) to police itself and avoid rash decisions that will only make these situations worse.

Photo: A Russian armoured personnel carrier in Simferopol, the provincial capital of Crimea. Credit: Zack Baddorf/IPS.

by James A. Russell

Wow. This is what we were expecting from a guy that ran for president as a transformational figure but has left so many of us disappointed as he declined to dive into the scrum to get the ball.

But now? A deal where none thought one was possible. A deal [...]]]> via LobeLog

by James A. Russell

Wow. This is what we were expecting from a guy that ran for president as a transformational figure but has left so many of us disappointed as he declined to dive into the scrum to get the ball.

But now? A deal where none thought one was possible. A deal in spite of his multiplying number of detractors on the home front and in Jerusalem. You have to give credit where credit is due.

If there is an abiding lesson from the Iran nuclear deal, it is that the US still holds the cards in seeking solutions to the world’s myriad problems.   US political power and authority still matter – and we need a president and empowered, able deputies that can wield it.  Hello Barack!  Great job John.  Welcome to the big leagues!  Keep it going.

Isn’t this how its supposed to go for the world’s superpower?  The United States orchestrated the P-5+1 unity with deft and subtle diplomacy every step of the way.  French opposition was handled, the UK played its usual supporting role, the Russians actually chimed in, and the Israelis were politely but firmly kept at arm’s length.  That’s what you call diplomacy.  Do we think Jim Baker or Henry Kissinger would have done it any differently?

Perhaps most importantly, the deal hammered out in Geneva reflects things many thought had been lost in the Obama Administration – US global leadership, tough but sensible bargaining, compromise where necessary, and an agreement that ultimately makes the world a safer place in spite of detractors in Congress parroting lines supplied by the Israeli lobby.

We find out that the breakthrough with Iran was accompanied and perhaps enabled by a backchannel with Iran reminiscent of the Cold War era in which Kissinger was dispatched on various occasions to Brezhnev’s hunting dacha in the woods around Moscow.  This time, William Burns and various others traveled on service elevators in hotels in Oman to meet with Iranian interlocutors earning their civil servant paychecks in their tireless search for peace in service of their country.

Another abiding lesson of the Iran deal is that smart, empowered cabinet secretaries can accomplish a lot if they are given a long leash and lots of gas to fly their airplane around the world.  Hillary Clinton flew around a lot but accomplished little during her four years.  John Kerry arrived, threw himself into difficult problems and is trying to move the ball forward and is apparently empowered by the White House.  He won’t solve the all worlds problems — witness the Palestinians twisting in the wind — but at least he’s trying. Barack: keep on filling up his airplane with gas — the world still needs US leadership and maybe you need to take some of these trips with him.

One of the things missing from this White House from day one was the sense of teamwork and purpose that was supposed to have operationalized Obama’s transformational message during the campaign. In its place, we got a suspicious, insecure White House that distrusted and never really understood the vast governmental system that is was supposed to be in charge of. Many have watched in astonishment at the unused, broken inter-agency foreign policy process that has been pushed aside in favor of serendipitous, centralized decision-making by a few in the White House.

In this case, however, it seems clear that the White House relied on its team, delegated authority and reaped the rewards.  Maybe there was a good reason that 59+ million Americans voted for John Kerry when he ran for president in 2004. Maybe the Obama Administration should start asking around in the State Department and the Defense Department what other good ideas are out there to address the world’s problems.

To be sure, the first phase of the agreement is the opening round in a series of negotiations that will prove difficult as Iran is forced to return its nuclear program to comprehensive safeguards administered by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The next round of negotiations will have their ups and downs — just as the arms control talks with the Soviets did all those many years ago.

Moreover, domestic political opponents of accommodation with Iran represent another obstacle to finally sealing the deal over the next six months. Fueled by opposition to anything Obama wants and the Israeli lobby’s war chants, Obama’s enemies in Congress will criticize him every step of the way. The Obama Administration will have to go to the mat and ask all those former high-level officials to trot on up to the Hill to reiterate their support in order to forestall new sanctions and relax the existing ones if negotiations with Iran yield fruit over the next six months.

This is the kind of leadership we expect from a president.  America yearns to be led in the right direction. It’s what the country voted for when it elected Barack Obama. The country doesn’t endorse, the sclerotic and paranoid vision of right-wing republicans that seek to destroy what’s left of the America dream in their tireless pursuit of helping only the wealthiest Americans and other special interests.

Welcome to the scrum, Mr. President. Where have you been?

by James A Russell

Whether we Americans like it or not, there is a profound struggle for control over our nation’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Push has finally come to shove, with the unseemly sight of Israeli government officials and AIPAC lobbyists fanning out on Capitol Hill to actively [...]]]> via LobeLog

by James A Russell

Whether we Americans like it or not, there is a profound struggle for control over our nation’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Push has finally come to shove, with the unseemly sight of Israeli government officials and AIPAC lobbyists fanning out on Capitol Hill to actively discredit the Obama’s administration’s attempt to craft a deal with Iran to bring the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program back under comprehensive international safeguards. After being supported for decades by tens of billions in American taxpayer dollars, free defense equipment, and unquestioning and limitless political support on countless occasions, Israel has shown its gratitude by biting the hand of its principal benefactor.

All Americans both in and out of government would do well to consider an abiding truth in the standoff with Iran over its nuclear program: there is no military solution to this problem. Iran has the money, technical capability, and the infrastructure to build a nuclear weapon if chooses to do so. Bombing Iran to destroy a nuclear weapons program that the US intelligence community states does not exist only ensures that Iran will eventually build its own bomb. No amount of Israeli or US bombs can alter these essential realities.

The stakes in this struggle or control over our foreign policy couldn’t be higher — from both a negative and positive perspective: the future of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime as an instrument to control the spread of nuclear weapons; the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran and a resulting arms race in its already unstable region; and another regional war pitting some combination of Israel, the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council states against Iran and its clients.

Alternatively, an interim deal with Iran as a step towards a comprehensive agreement to limit Iran’s program opens up the prospect of a more favorable strategic framework throughout the region and an end to the 34-year undeclared war between the United States and Iran. Such a settlement offers the alluring prospect of a way to lower regional tensions and to cooperatively address the myriad problems faced by the region and the international community in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere.

US interests in this situation are clear. Above all, we seek to reinforce the role of the NPT in controlling the spread of nuclear technology and preventing a breakdown in the regime that could lead to an increase in the numbers of nuclear-armed states around the world. It is also in US interests to reduce the prospects for another war in the Gulf and Middle East that it is in no position to prosecute. Like it or not, America’s decade of irregular war in Iraq and Afghanistan has emptied the country’s coffers and left its military exhausted. The United States does not have enough brigade combat teams to go to war with Iran and it could not bomb the Islamic Republic in perpetuity even if it wanted to like it did with Iraq during the 1990s.

During the Cold War, the United States crafted its foreign policy in ways that furthered and protected the country’s interests as well as those of its allies. The general political alliance between the United States and Western Europe took place under the collective defense arrangement of NATO, which in itself provided a consultative mechanism, to iron out differences that lead, for example, to the controversial and difficult decision to deploy additional nuclear weapons to Europe in the 1980s.

In the Middle East, there is no such collective defense arrangement and no organizational consultative mechanism to work out differences. US interests diverge in this matter from its two regional “twin pillars,” though for different reasons. Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu has staunchly and successfully opposed all attempts at peaceful accommodation with Israel’s enemies — aided and abetted by American money and political support. While Israel has legitimate concerns about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, it favors steps that would virtually guarantee that outcome. Netanyahu prefers the politics of confrontation that suit his interests and those of his political supporters on the right-wing of Israeli politics. This approach, however, does not serve American interests.

The case of Saudi Arabia is somewhat different. Like Israel, it relied on the United States for political and military support for a generation to protect what was once a fragile state from its surrounding enemies. In the last decade, however, the commonality of interests between Saudi Arabia and the United States has started to shrink — differences that are now laid bare in our competing approaches to the political changes sweeping the region.

Saudi Arabia now stokes the fires of regional and intra-national discord by playing the destructive sectarian card to mobilize Sunnis against the hated, apostate Shi-ites. In so doing, the regime serves its own interests by mobilizing support against its external enemies and diverting attention from its own corrupt, authoritarian rule. The Saudis want little to do with democracy in any form and remain uninterested in any accommodation with Iran. Such policies may suit the al-Saud in Riyadh, but they do not serve American interests.

There was a day when there was never a question about whether the United States was capable of going its own way and pursuing policies that primarily served its own interests. To be sure, the fractured domestic political landscape at home has unalterably changed as the Republican lurch to the far right has made it impossible to govern based on a shared vision of what is good for the country. Today, there is no commonly accepted vision of America’s national interests as money has poured into our political process, serving the interests of the rich few — leaving most of the rest of the country behind.

Like the Israelis and the Saudis, Republicans today live in an aura of continuous and never-ending conflict and show little interest in accommodation on the many political issues of the day. This landscape combines with a President that has demonstrated little political acuity and adeptness in courageously standing against his political foes at home. Will he fold his tent or stand up to do what’s best for our country? Right now, the answer is far from clear.

These factors have combined to produce an unprecedented crisis in the history of our Republic: are we a country that can pursue policies that are good for the country or for a select few? The jury is out.