by Robert E. Hunter

Following President Barak Obama’s decision to restore diplomatic ties with Cuba, it is remarkable to see so much speculation about whether this will set a precedent for a restoration of US ties with Iran

The word “remarkable” is chosen deliberately because, on the face of it, the two situations seem so different. The Cuban revolution has long since lost its force, with few true adherents outside of the gerontocracy, while that in Iran, if somewhat attenuated, still has a major, perhaps decisive, impact on society as well as on foreign policy.

Further, any geopolitical arguments for US efforts aimed at isolating Cuba, themselves imperfect at best, died with the Soviet Union, 23 years ago this week. But the geopolitics for the US to continue trying to isolate Iran are alive and well, flowing from some basic disagreements, not least the Iranian nuclear program but also Iran’s support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, for Hezbollah and, to a lesser degree, for Hamas. These cannot just be wished away, in contrast to the outmoded argument that somehow Cuba could act as another country’s proxy or could destabilize any part of its neighborhood.

So what can we make of a possible connection with Iran? At one level, what Mr. Obama has done takes the United States at least one step beyond the quixotic American practice of deciding whether to have diplomatic relations with other countries based at least in part on how we view their governments. (If we don’t like them or what they do, we call them “regimes,” which is a dead giveaway.)

Few other countries in the world impose their standard of a nation’s behavior, at home or abroad, in deciding whether to have at least some semblance of normal diplomatic intercourse—though there are major exceptions, such as the unwillingness of a number of Arab countries to deal formally with Israel. The US also tends to lose from imposing a test of purity regarding another country’s government or its international behavior. Not only do many countries not follow our lead but, more importantly, we deprive ourselves of the capacity to gain direct experience of the other country’s leaders.

Of course, it is rarely true that diplomatic relations are totally severed: some contacts are inevitable and are conducted by so-called “protecting powers.” In Iran, the US protecting power is Switzerland; in the United States, Iran’s protecting power is Pakistan. (All members of the United Nations also have diplomats in New York, and informal corridor contacts can always take place, “plausibly denied.”)

This round-about practice can have its price, however. For example, in 2003, when the US was about to invade Iraq—thus “putting the wind up” Iran’s clerical leadership—the Iranians made a proposal, through the Swiss, which, if it had worked out (a big imponderable) could have wrapped up the nuclear issue at that time. But in part because of the indirect nature of the proposal, the US was able simply to ignore it—such was the attitude of the US administration at the time to anyone in the Middle East out of step with US preferences. That would have been harder to do if American and Iranian diplomats had been dealing directly with one another.

Despite President Obama’s break with the tired old precedent regarding what governments we are prepared to deal with, he is not likely to follow suit with Iran, at least not just to tidy things up. US domestic politics is a major factor. The “Cuba lobby” may still have an important role to play in Florida’s politics—one of the “swing states” in US presidential elections—but the passage of time and a rising generation of young Cuban-Americans has attenuated the lobby’s power. Not so in regard to the domestic lobby that wants no part of relations with Iran. This lobby is mostly Israeli-inspired, but also includes some Christian evangelicals and a lot of neoconservatives, especially in Congress, who are not prepared to compromise with any government that is a challenge to the United States.

We thus cannot expect a “Nixon to China” opening to Iran, as much as that would bring us into line with the practice of most nations on the planet in terms of diplomatic relationships. Indeed, Obama will have enough trouble selling the opening to Cuba to Congress—whose Republican majority come January would love to deal him a setback, whatever the merits of the case. And without congressional action, a lot of what the president has in mind can’t be done. At least in this case, executive action has severe limits. Selling an opening to Iran that would have practical consequences, like the freeing-up of trade and investment with Cuba, could only be done if Iran came across on issues important to the US, with the nuclear program topping the list.

It also takes two to make something like this work. Despite the potential for success in the negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 countries on the former’s nuclear program, and despite the pressures exerted on the Iranian economy both by Western sanctions and by the Saudi-driven drop in the price of oil, it is not clear that Iran wants improved relations with the United States, at least unless the US were willing to remove at least a large part of the economic sanctions. This the United States will not do without a nuclear agreement. In fact, the hostile reception in much of Congress to the opening to Cuba has not helped the climate needed to foster success in the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program: if a relatively simple thing like getting rid of congressional strictures on dealing with a tired old Cuban oligarchy that has long since ceased posing any threat to any US national security interest is so difficult to achieve, Iranian skeptics can wonder whether President Obama could deliver on any agreement that would include sanctions-lifting. No doubt, the same point has occurred to US domestic opponents of any deal with Iran.

The geopolitics of Iran’s situation has a further twist. Despite the emphasis put on the Iranian nuclear program and the pressures from the Israeli and other domestic lobbies, this is only part of the story. Several countries in the Middle East oppose Iran’s reemergence into regional society for a much broader set of reasons and—for at least some of them—the nuclear issue is simply the one that most easily catches the attention and support of outsiders, particularly the United States.

Sunni countries oppose “apostate” Shia Iran, an ideological point reinforced by the fact that most of Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves are located in the Eastern Province, with its large Shia population. Iran also supports the Alawite-dominated Syrian government, another poll of the region’s Sunni-Shia civil war. Other Gulf Arab states (though not Oman) also feel threatened by Iran, for reasons that have nothing to do with the nuclear question. Turkey would just as soon see Iran continue to be isolated, and this also applies to Israel, which does not want to see Washington and Tehran reconciled, even if the nuclear issue were resolved, at least without a major and credible change in Iran’s attitude toward the Jewish state.

Judged in its own terms, President Obama’s opening to Cuba is a useful departure from a sclerotic policy of many US administrations that has long outlived its value for the United States, if it ever indeed had any value. But while it does say something about the president’s cast of mind, in and of itself the new Cuba policy will not have much if any influence on US policy toward Iran. In fact, if fears on the part of the opponents of change see Obama as likely to continue cleaning up the past—as a president who has fought his last electoral battle—they may simply ramp up their opposition to a sensible US approach to the current talks with Iran.

Here is where the president needs to show his mettle: to persevere with the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, provided, of course, that Iran’s leaders will do the same. Success could then open up possibilities for the two countries to work together on areas of compatible interests, including Afghanistan, freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf, countering Islamic State forces, and exploring possibilities for stability in Iraq. Such a course would put US national interests ahead of domestic politics, which is what we expect our presidents to do.

Finally, someone in the US government has followed through on President Barack Obama’s judgment that CIA-conducted and “-outsourced” torture—let’s call it by its common name—is “not who we are” as a nation.  Finally, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has given us a (still heavily-redacted) account of what the CIA did between 2002 and 2006.

There is good as well as bad news in all of this mess.  After all, the Senate Committee (or at least its Democratic members) was prepared to see the United States “come clean” about some practices that—certainly in hindsight and, for people of any true moral sense, as should have been obvious at the time—are unacceptable  to a civilized society.

How many other countries would have done the same? Quite a few it turns out, at least 28 at last count, in what are typically known as “truth and reconciliation commissions.” Notable have been those in South Africa, Argentina, and Chile. However, by contrast with crimes in those countries, mostly against their own people, what was done by US government officials and their paid servants—some US “contractors” and some foreign governments—directly affected only a few people; most of them were avowed enemies of the United States; and at least some of whom were involved in the worst foreign attack on the continental US since 1814.

The published part of the report actually contains few surprises, other than to reveal that some of the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs), an antiseptic euphemism like the Vietnam War’s “termination with extreme prejudice,” was much more brutal than hitherto reported.  More details than previously known were provided by how officials of the Central Intelligence Agency lied to Congress—a felony—and also, supposedly, to senior officials in the George W. Bush White House (which had its own share of the cover-up).  Further, the report confirmed what many terrorism experts and insiders-now-outsiders had said before: that such techniques rarely if ever produce “actionable” intelligence and certainly not in this case.

Thus, the argument is now being made widely around the world that the United States—self-styled since 1630 as a City Upon a Hill,  the producer of regular human rights reports about  every other country on the planet, and a list-keeper of other peoples’ misdeeds—has confessed to its own inhumane acts.

Yes, that is still part of the (relatively) good news.  Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca.) and her Senate committee did not have to release the report. While the journalism community would continue to sniff at the edges of scandal, and awareness of thus-and-so would long be whispered around Washington, the full picture could have probably been buried, not quietly, but still buried.

The unalloyed bad news comes in different forms. As the inevitably-to-be-leaked list grows of foreign countries that either allowed the CIA to build private, purpose-built prisons or even took part in the “extraordinary rendition” of US terrorism suspects (to be tortured away from prying American eyes), there will be domestic embarrassment for some political leaderships that have not already been called to account (e.g., as has happened in Poland). As President Obama summed it up this week: “These techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners.”

The “bad guys,” especially the thugs of the world who have been subjected to American criticism or who themselves engage in immoral actions—like al-Qaeda, Islamic State (ISIS or IS), and a host of brutal governments, many but not all in the Middle East—will now claim a US precedent for what they do, and terrorist groups will use the Senate Committee revelations as a recruiting tool.

By any standard, the US is not in their league as a miscreant.  There is the issue of provocation to balance against the immorality of the CIA’s torture program. But at the same time, there is also the issue of efficacy—was the immorality worth the price? As President Obama said of the report this week: “It reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as a nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests.” They were not only wrong; they didn’t work.

More bad news will be felt immediately by America’s diplomats abroad.  They will just have to hunker down, stick to the talking points that Washington gives them and, we hope, contrast our openness (though it took far too long) with rampant terrorism and state oppression by people who would not dream of repentance or accountability. We can also expect Schadenfreude on the part of some of our closest allies, including in Europe. “Too bad about what happened in the United States, tut, tut,” they will say. Some friendly governments will face popular resistance to cooperating with the US in other actions abroad, as this report comes hard on the heels of revelations about the National Security Agency’s spying on foreign leaders.  However, these views will be tempered among those who recognize that damage to America’s standing could also negatively impact  them, since they still need us as a security guarantor, a point that was underscored earlier this year by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

We are already seeing the worst of the bad news, and it is at home.  Senator John McCain (R-Az.), who himself was tortured in a North Vietnamese prison, has welcomed the issuance of the report; but for most other Republican members of Congress, it is the Democrats and Barack Obama who are somehow to blame for this whole business. They contest the evidence and claim that water-boarding and other EITs did indeed help forestall further terrorism on our shores.  They see a witch hunt by the current administration, although President Obama said in April 2009 that “For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it’s appropriate for them to be prosecuted.” (Whether such a pledge should have been made is another matter.) The Attorney General, Eric Holder, followed through on that pledge in August 2012 by dropping two prominent cases. Even worse are former officials of the CIA who have joined the chorus in arguing that what was done protected the nation. Their efforts at self-justification add to the case that the CIA needs a thorough house-cleaning.  The agency’s leaders during the period in question should be denied any further government service. Those who lied to Congress should be prosecuted; the lawyers who justified the breaking of laws should be disbarred. (If that could be done to a sitting president for lying about sex, surely it should be done in this case.)  And no one should be allowed to get away with saying, however they phrase it, “We were just following orders.”  That line of argument fell to pieces at Nuremberg almost seven decades ago. Prosecution?  Maybe not—though it would be true to the rule of law and would send a useful message. No further government service? Definitely. Actions, whatever the sincerity of motives, must have consequences.

Maybe some larger good can begin to come out of all this. I do not mean just, as President Obama has said:  “I will continue to use my authority as president to make sure we never resort to those methods again.” That is a worthy goal—though all-too-likely of short duration, as can be testified to by those of us who remember the hearings in the 1970s by the Senate’s Church Committee, whose report and resulting national debate should have stopped in its tracks what the CIA did after 9/11.

The larger good can be a recognition that accountability needs to be returned to government, in general – a quality that has never been in great supply. The last senior political figure to quit over an issue of principle and policy was Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1979, following the abortive hostage rescue mission in Iran.  While Britain tried to sort out responsibility after its prime minister, Tony Blair, misled his country into joining the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, we have never done so and never will. We have never held accountable the small group of senior officials who consciously misled not just the president of the United States but also the American people, thereby leading the country into one of the most costly mistakes ever in US engagement abroad.

There can be no doubt that we are a great nation; we are basically a moral society, and the overwhelming majority of people in government, including most but unfortunately not all elected politicians, Republicans and Democrats, are so as well and work to do what they think is the best for our country.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has started us thinking once again about the demands of creating “a more perfect union” and has reminded us that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Let us hope that we also make a serious start on raising both the standard and the practice of accountability, across the board, to validate President Obama’s statement: “Today is also a reminder that upholding the values we profess doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us stronger and that the United States of America will remain the greatest force for freedom and human dignity that the world has ever known.”

by Robert E. Hunter

It’s too early to tell all there is to be told about the negotiations in Vienna between the so-called P5+1 and Iran on the latter’s nuclear program. The “telling” by each and every participant of what happened will surely take place in the next several days, and then better-informed assessments can be made. As of now, we know that the talks did not reach agreement by the November 24 deadline—a year after the interim Joint Plan of Action was agreed—and that the negotiators are aiming for a political agreement no later than next March and a comprehensive deal by June 30.

This is better than having the talks collapse. Better still would have been a provisional interim fill-in-the-blanks memorandum of headings of agreement that is so often put out in international diplomacy when negotiations hit a roadblock but neither side would have its interests served by declaring failure.

An example of failing either to set a new deadline or to issue a “fill in the blanks” agreement was vividly provided by President Bill Clinton’s declaration at the end of the abortive Camp David talks in December 2000. He simply declared the talks on an Israeli-Palestinian settlement as having broken down, rather than saying: progress has been made, here are areas of agreement, here is the timetable for the talks to continue, blah, blah. I was at dinner in Tel Aviv with a group of other American Middle East specialists and Israel’s elder statesman, Shimon Peres, when the news came through. We were all nonplussed that Clinton had not followed the tried and true method of pushing off hard issues until talks would be resumed, at some level, at a “date certain,” which had been the custom on this diplomacy since at least 1981. One result was such disappointment among Palestinians that the second intifada erupted, producing great suffering on all sides and a setback for whatever prospects for peace existed. Poor diplomacy had a tragic outcome.

This example calls for a comparison of today’s circumstances with past diplomatic negotiations of high importance and struggles over difficult issues. Each, it should be understood, is unique, but there are some common factors.

Optimism

The first is the good news that I have already presented: the talks in Vienna did not “break down” and no one walked away from the table in a huff. The other good news is that the official representatives of the two most important negotiators, the United States and Iran, clearly want to reach an agreement that will meet both of their legitimate security, economic, and other interests. Left to themselves, they would probably have had a deal signed, sealed, and delivered this past weekend if not before. But they have not been “left to themselves,” nor will they be, as I will discuss below.

Further good news is that all the issues involving Iran’s nuclear program have now been so masticated by all the parties that they are virtually pulp. If anything is still hidden, it is hard to imagine, other than in the minds of conspiracy theorists who, alas, exist in abundance on any issue involving the Middle East. A deal to be cut on specifics? Yes. New factors to consider? Highly unlikely.

Even more good news is that the United States and the other P5+1 countries (US, UK, Russia, China, France plus Germany), have got to know much better than before their official Iranian counterparts and overall Iranian interests, perspectives, and thinking (US officials, long chary of being seen in the same room with “an Iranian,” lag behind the others in this regard). We can hope that this learning process has also taken place on the Iranian side. This does not mean that the actual means whereby Iran takes decisions—nominally, at least, in the hands of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei—is any less opaque. But even so, there is surely greater understanding of one another—one of the key objectives of just about any diplomatic process.

A partial precedent can be found in US-Soviet arms control and other negotiations during the Cold War. The details of these negotiations were important, or so both sides believed, especially what had to be a primarily symbolic fixation with the numbers of missile launchers and “throw-weight.” This highly charged political preoccupation took place even though the utter destruction of both sides would be guaranteed in a nuclear war. Yet even with great disparities in these numbers, neither side would have been prepared to risk moving even closer to the brink of conflict. Both US and Soviet leaders came to realize that the most important benefit of the talks was the talking, and that they had to improve their political relationship or risk major if not catastrophic loss on both sides. The simple act of talking proved to be a major factor in the eventual end of the Cold War.

The parallel with the Iran talks is that the process itself—including the fact that it is now legitimate to talk with the “Devil” on the other side—has permitted, even if tacitly, greater understanding that the West and Iran have, in contrast to their differences, at least some complementary if not common interests. For the US and Iran, these include freedom of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz; counter-piracy; opposition to Islamic State (ISIS or IS); stability in Afghanistan; opposition to the drug trade, al-Qaeda, Taliban and terrorism; and at least a modus vivendi in regard to Iraq. This does not mean that the US and Iran will see eye-to-eye on all of these issues, but they do constitute a significant agenda, against which the fine details of getting a perfect nuclear agreement (from each side’s perspective) must be measured.

Pessimism

There is also bad news, however, including in the precedents, or partial precedents, of other negotiations. As already noted, negotiations over the fate of the West Bank and Gaza have been going on since May 1979 (I was the White House member of the first US negotiating team), and, while some progress has been made, the issues today look remarkably like they did 37 years ago.

Negotiations following the 1953 armistice in the Korean War have also been going on, with fits and starts, for 61 years. The negotiations over the Vietnam War (the US phase of it) dragged on for years and involved even what in retrospect seem to have been idiocies like arguments over the “shape of the table.” They came to a conclusion only when the US decided it was time to get out—i.e., the North Vietnamese successfully waited us out. Negotiations over Kashmir have also been going on, intermittently, since the 1947 partition of India. The OSCE-led talks on Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenia versus Azerbaijan) have gone on for about two decades, under the nominal chairmanship of France, Russia, and the United States. All this diplomatic activity relates to a small group of what are now called “frozen conflicts,” where negotiations go on ad infinitum but without a lot of further harm done.

But with the exception of the Vietnam talks, all the other dragged-out talking has taken place against the background of relatively stable situations. Talks on Korea go nowhere, but fighting only takes place in small bursts and is not significant. Even regarding the Palestinians, fighting takes place from time to time, including major fighting, but failure to get a permanent end of hostilities does not lead to a fundamental breakdown of “stability” in the Middle East, due to the tacit agreement of all outside powers.

Dangers of Delay

The talks on the Iranian nuclear program, due to restart in December, are different. While they are dragging along, things happen. Sanctions continue and could even be increased on Iran, especially with so many “out for blood” members of the incoming 114^th US Congress. Whether this added pressure will get the US a better deal is debatable, but further suffering for the Iranian people, already far out of proportion to anything bad that Iran has done, will just get worse. Iran may also choose to press forward with uranium enrichment, making a later deal somewhat—who knows how much—more difficult to conclude and verify. Israel will have calculations of its own to make about what Iran is up to and whether it should seriously consider the use of force. And chances for US-Iranian cooperation against IS will diminish.

So time is not on the side of an agreement, and any prospects of Iranian-Western cooperation on other serious regional matters have been further put off—a high cost for all concerned.

Due to the contentious domestic politics on both sides, the risks are even greater. In Iran, there are already pressures from the clerical right and from some other nationalists to undercut both the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, and the lead negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, both of whom, in these people’s eyes, are now tainted. We can expect further pressures against a deal from this quarter.

The matter is at least as bad and probably worse on the Western side—more particularly, on the US side. The new Congress has already been mentioned. But one reason for consideration of that factor is that, on the P5+1 side of the table, there have not just been six countries but eight, two invisible but very much present, and they are second and third in importance at the table only behind the US itself: Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Both countries are determined to prevent any realistic agreement with Iran on its nuclear program, even if declared by President Barack Obama, in his judgment, to satisfy fully the security interests of both the United States and its allies and partners, including Israel and the Gulf Arabs. For them, in fact, the issue is not just about Iran’s nuclear program, but also about the very idea of Iran being readmitted into international society. For the Sunni Arabs, it is partly about the struggle with the region’s Shi’as, including in President Bashar Assad’s Syria but most particularly in Iran. And for all of these players, there is also a critical geopolitical competition, including vying for US friendship while opposing Iran’s reemergence as another regional player.

The United States does not share any of these interests regarding Sunni vs. Shi’a or geopolitical competitions among regional countries. Our interests are to foster stability in the region, promote security, including against any further proliferation of nuclear weapons (beginning with Iran), and to help counter the virus of Islamist fundamentalism. On the last-named, unfortunately, the US still does not get the cooperation it needs, especially from Saudi Arabia, whose citizens have played such an instrumental role in exporting the ideas, money, and arms that sustain IS.

Thus it is to be deeply regretted, certainly by all the governments formally represented in the P5+1, that efforts to conclude the talks have been put off. The enemies of agreement, on both sides, have gained time to continue their efforts to prevent an agreement—enemies both in Iran and especially in the United States, with the heavy pressures from the Arab oil lobby and the Israeli lobby in the US Congress.

What happens now in Iran can only be determined by the Iranians. What happens with the P5+1 will depend, more than anything else, on the willingness and political courage of President Obama to persevere and say “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” to the Gulf Arab states, Israel, and their allies in the United States, and do what he is paid to do: promote the interests and security of the United States of America.

Follow LobeLog on Twitter and like us on Facebook

Twenty-five years ago, on “9/11”—November 9^th in European date-notation—the Berlin Wall opened and, it seemed, everything changed. Freedom was no longer just an aspiration across much of Europe but a rising reality. The transformation was so profound that it is now hard to remember the bad old days of communist oppression and Soviet dominance, when peoples all across Central Europe lacked hope for the future and feared the secret police.

A quarter century beyond the settlement of the 75-year European civil war (1914-89), what is the balance of achievement following that remarkable overturning of European history and of much of global politics and economics? There is much good, but also some bad, and history did not “come to an end.”

The Soviet empires—internal and external—are both gone, and so is the Cold War, which was the most dangerous time in all of history, when the planet was at risk of being destroyed. The world escaped, although as the Duke of Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo: It was a damn close-run thing.

Other good things happened, notably a definitive answer to the 120-year-old question: “What do we do about Germany?” It became unified, was anchored to the West, and, with the wisdom of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, it surrounded itself with NATO and the EU and sank the Deutschmark in the Euro. Thus Germany is again becoming economically the top nation in Central Europe, but there is no valid basis for fearing a German national menace.

Meanwhile, President George H.W. Bush led in working to create a “Europe whole and free” and at peace. The US stayed in Europe, NATO was not wrapped up but has continued to keep European history pacified. Central Europe was taken off the geopolitical chessboard with the Partnership for Peace Program and, for many countries, NATO and EU membership. Ukraine was encouraged in its Western, democratic vocation, but without first being pulled into a Western alliance system that could be perceived as a challenge to Russian Federation. (The fact that a succession of Ukrainian governments largely funked the task is another matter).

The first President Bush, followed by Bill Clinton, also tried to prevent the growth of revanchism in Russia, to avoid what happened with the Treaty of Versailles, whose punitive features against Germany helped produce Hitler. This effort, too, went awry, as leaders in the G. W. Bush and then Barack Obama administrations forgot this central lesson and heaped fuel on the fire of Russian nationalism that was set alight by Vladimir Putin. Maybe the result (in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine) would have been the same, under Putin or any other Russian leader who appealed to his people’s sense of lost position and prestige, but the US failure to take account of legitimate Russian concerns certainly did not help.

There have been other negatives, unintended byproducts of success following the Berlin Wall’s opening. Many West European countries wisely shifted limited security resources from military spending not needed after the Cold War to economic support for Central Europe—beginning with the Federal Republic of Germany’s investment of trillions of Euros in the old East Germany. But the US did not. Today in the United States, non-military instruments are starved while it maintains the mightiest military in history at a time where there is no “peer competitor.” Thus, while priding itself on being the “indispensable nation,” the US was caught short by the Ebola epidemic and has done so much less in other countries compared to the good it could do and the security it could promote in the broadest sense of that term.

The US did not totally ignore Will Roger’s warning: “When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got to have been looking for it.” But after our “9/11,” the US did overdo Afghanistan by trying to get its political and social cultures to leapfrog centuries of development; and the US then committed one of the worse follies in American history, by invading Iraq for no good reason. The results have been  more than 5,000 US servicemen and women dead, thousands more wounded, little promise in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and more than 3 trillion dollars of treasure wasted when it could have been used to refurbish the American homeland and create a more solid and lasting basis for US power and influence.

It is doubtful that either excess—in Afghanistan or Iraq—would have been possible during the Cold War, when the United States had to be worried about a superpower competitor, prepared to promote its own, contending interests. The lesson for today has to be that, just because it is possible to do something, it is not necessarily wise or prudent to do it.

So chto delat? As Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” Here are some ideas, mostly for America:

• Reassess what we do in the outside world. What is needed for our security and that of friends and allies, and what can be “given a pass” or handed off to others (including our European friends)? Where is it wiser, in our own interests, to stand apart rather than to become engaged?

• Recruit a first-class team of people in the Obama administration who know how to “think strategically.”  This essential quality began to decline near the end of the Cold War and continues on a steep downward trajectory. With the collapse of the Cold War’s organizing principle, it seemed that less strategic thinking was needed. Yet it has been just the reverse, when so much is in play, there are so many variables, the US cannot “do it all,” it cannot count on the American people to support all foreign ventures, and it thus faces a greater need to set priorities and to make choices than it did when the Soviet threat could justify a wide range of courses of action and involvement. At the same time, press the think-tank community to do the same, instead of continuing to serve largely as means of building political consensus to implement an agreed foreign policy—when there is no clarity of strategy purpose and methodology around which to build a consensus to meet America’s future needs.

• Put more money into USAID, change the balance of funding between military and non-military instruments from the current 13:1 to a ratio that will better enable us to promote our interests and values, and recreate the United States Information Agency, one of our best “unsecret weapons” that was foolishly scrapped.

• Recommit the US to being a European power. Washington’s interest in NATO dropped to an all-time low before Mr. Putin stirred up interest by his misbehavior in Ukraine. Now that interest is sinking again, and the number of people in Washington fully engaged in European security or in other aspects of US engagement in Europe is declining radically. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is charged with implementing decisions of last September’s NATO summit in Wales, in part to reassure Central European allies wary of Russia, but it is doling out only peanuts for people in and out of government to think through what has to be done.

• Challenge the Europeans allies to do even more for security on the continent and in selected places beyond—not through increased defense spending in each allied country to at least 2% of GDP, an American obsession left over from the Cold War. Most of that 2% should go to non-military political and economic instruments to help integrate Central Europe more fully in Europe, to do more in Africa, and to get on with the critical work of building a solid Ukrainian economy. Also tell the Ukrainians to dismantle their kleptocracy and tell Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, either to restore his country’s democracy or both NATO and the EU will send it packing.

• Start work on a long-term security structure for the Persian Gulf and other parts of the Middle East. End the illusion that getting rid of the Assad regime in Syria is the answer to anything—it would likely only produce more regional chaos and a Shi’a bloodbath. Meanwhile, put the Saudis and others who have turned a blind eye to the export of terrorism and the fostering of al-Qaeda and Islamic State, to stop immediately the flow from their countries of Islamist ideas, money, and arms, as the price of continued good relations with the US.

More needs to be done to deal effectively with the requirements of a world newly created in the wake of the end of the Cold War’s certainties, a product of the Berlin wall’s opening, but this is enough to be getting on with. It befits America’s role as a great power, a champion of freedom, a protector of those most in need of protecting, a beacon of hope. It is what we expect in terms of leadership by our president and Congress. It would be a fitting commemoration of what a lot of courageous people did across Central Europe a quarter century ago. Can we be less committed and far-sighted than they were?

by Robert E. Hunter

At West Point last May, President Obama said that “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.” He continued “…US military action cannot be the only—or even primary—component of our leadership in every instance.”

With the growing crisis over the spread of the Ebola virus, not just in West African countries but also now in the United States, the appropriate response to the president’s words should be a rousing “And how!”

The fact is that even after the end of the Cold War returned to us the security of the two broad oceans that we lost in December 1941, the application of resources to the US role in the world has not adjusted to that reality. Even the “wake up call” of 9/11 did not require the level of response that the US applied. We did not have to try remaking Afghanistan in a Western image after toppling the Taliban. We did not need to invade Iraq and try there, too, to remake a society when we had no capacity to do so—a lesson we should have learned in Vietnam. Even in accepting that the US would continue to have interests abroad and would continue to be looked to by so many countries as the “indispensable nation,” we didn’t have to focus that task, year upon year, on—very expensive—military instruments.

Since the end of the Cold War, a succession of administrations, along with every Congress since the opening of the Berlin Wall, has refused to conduct a serious review of US engagement in the outside world—what really matters to us?—and to accept that the military instrument is only one tool, and an increasingly smaller tool compared to what can be lumped together as “non-military instruments.” Even when we throw in to the mix of essential interests the promoting of American values, the military is rarely the biggest part of the answer. Sometimes, it has been necessary in “holding the ring,” as NATO did in Europe until the Soviet Union fell apart because of the rot in the system; but even then the US military was only the “shield,” not the “sword” of change.

Since the end of the Cold War, we have failed to follow Isaiah’s admonition: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” Rather, at least in relative terms, we followed Joel—the latest word in the Old Testament on this subject: “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”

There is no need to rehearse the trials and errors in US foreign and security policy in the post-Cold War world, at least in dealing with the causes of conflict and how to prevent them.

Just look at the numbers: we have spent three trillion dollars and more on Afghanistan and Iraq, but a mere pittance on helping other societies help themselves. We spend $7.3 billion on the Transportation Security Administration, and we take off our outer garments and our shoes every time we get on an airplane, but until this past weekend there was next to no effort put into containing the spread of one of the most hideous diseases that has come down the pike since the Black Death several centuries ago. Ask yourself: if you were to get on a plane, tomorrow, coming from some international departure point, which would you be more worried about: a terrorist bomb or a passenger infected with Ebola and entering the phase of being contagious?

For the fiscal year that has just started, the Pentagon has asked for $495.6 billion just in base budget authority while the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention get about $37 billion between them—and that is for everything. Using the categories of the Office of Management and Budget, military matters get, depending on the finer points of definition, between 13:1 and 17:1 as much as all non-military US government engagement in the outside world put together.

During the Clinton administration, the late Senator Jesse Helms engineered the demise of the United States Information Agency—a major element of showing people who we are rather than just telling them what a particular administration wants them to hear; and he nearly crippled the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Even now, USAID (2015 budget request: $1.4 billion) has to rely to a major extent on contractors and, while we heard recently that it is fielding 2,800 hospital beds in West Africa to meet the Ebola outbreak, it should have been able to field 10,000 or even 100,000.

The US military does an outstanding job in helping people in need in disaster zones, and is now beginning to help in places affected by Ebola, but why should the Pentagon have to take the lead, rather than other agencies far better equipped in terms of people and technique? Simple answer: one has the bucks and the congressional interest-group backing, the other goes begging.

President Obama has done better than his recent predecessors in talking up what the United States needs to do to show the world the values that we are made of, as well as analyzing many of the causes of what ails the less developed and more conflicted parts of the world. But his budget people, along with the “military industrial complex” (now 53 years since being called out by President Dwight Eisenhower) and Congress haven’t got the message. This is the message about what directly threatens the United States and what the American people really need their government to do in order to feel—and to be—more secure.

As the United States ramps up to fight yet another war in the Middle East, it is not ready to deal with so many other matters of direct importance to the American people (Ebola, etc.) or that could help keep new wars from being necessary. (By the way, at the moment 59 US embassies abroad do not have an ambassador because of Senate deadlock on confirmations). The White House, which is supposed to take the lead, has been largely silent about asking Congress for the resources needed to do the diplomacy, the aid, the involvement of non-military government agencies, the support of non-governmental organizations, and the mobilization of other countries to act with us (where, in fact, we are near the bottom of the heap among members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of GDP share spent on foreign assistance: a mere .19 percent). Even in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, where we have had a heavy footprint, there has been grossly inadequate engagement of most of the US government’s non-military agencies that could be delivering a lot more in areas that include health, education, counter-narcotics, rule of law, and other human resources.

As Americans—and as members of the human species—our hats should be off to organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carter Center, and Doctors Without Borders for what they are doing in the realm of global health, including in West Africa. But where is the president’s leadership and Congress’ followership in terms of a critical shift of resources? The “nail” that has to be hit right now is Ebola, but our leaders have so far been unwilling to build the right hammer. They are instead building more military hammers that are even less relevant to American security.

Follow LobeLog on Twitter and like us on Facebook

by Robert E. Hunter

Since the United States invaded Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, and began an era of major military operations in Southwest Asia and the Middle East, “what next” has been sometimes posed, but never adequately answered.

To this day, it is not possible to define what the US would realistically like to see happen in the region. Instead, it has limited itself to tactical steps (e.g., degrade and destroy al-Qaeda and the Islamic State) or Mission Impossible, the total remaking of essentially alien societies.

Direct terrorist threats to the US from Southwest Asia and the Middle East have substantially declined, but efforts to create a New Afghanistan and New Iraq have almost totally failed. The cost: many thousands of Americans killed along with many more locals, tens of thousands maimed, and three trillion dollars and counting.

The US has committed several key errors, some out of lack of knowledge, some out of the felt need to respond to external events, and some in misguided response to the desires of US partners in the region.

After 9/11, the US chose not only to extirpate those responsible for the first attack on the continental United States since 1814, but also to overthrow the Taliban regime, occupy the country, pull in all 27 other NATO allies to help, and try—but fail—to create a New Afghanistan. Then in 2003, a small group of advisors around President George W. Bush leveraged popular reaction to 9/11 to invade Iraq, one of the greatest foreign policy mistakes in US history.

The results have to be seen as having made the late Osama bin Laden the most powerful—or at least the most consequential—person in the world so far in this century.

With the invasion of Iraq, the US blundered into the midst of civil war in the Middle East. It overthrew a Sunni regime that dominated a Shia majority population. Most of the troubles the US now faces in the Middle East flow from that fact. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states have sought to “redress the balance,” in particular by getting the US to overthrow the minority Alawite (Shia) regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But in deciding at least in principle to do so, Washington never asked the question “What next?” and the linked question “Cui bono?” (“Who benefits?”). Or if it did pose these questions to itself, it never adequately answered them, certainly never in public.

Thus the United States became an active party in a Sunni-Shia civil war, first unwittingly on the Shia side (invasion of Iraq) and subsequently on the Sunni side. It has also been supporting the geopolitical interests of states that oppose Iran, among other countries, which are competing for power among themselves, thus double-binding the US in support of others’ regional agendas that should mean little or nothing to the United States and its interests.

Meanwhile, radical Islamist fundamentalists in a number of Sunni states poured ideology, money, and arms into Syria, as well as elsewhere in the region. Among other things, these terrorist-promoters have fostered the killing of US and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. It is not apparent that either of the last two US administrations has done anything effective to stop this flow of death from supposedly friendly Gulf Arab states.

The rise of the Islamic State (IS) seemed to catch the US by surprise, in what was an intelligence failure equal to that before 9/11. It was, however, a logical outcome of tolerating the spread of Islamist fundamentalism, along with money and arms to support it, plus calling for Assad’s overthrow without considering the likely consequences. Then came the beheading of two American journalists (now followed by the beheadings of a Briton and a Frenchman), which spurred President Obama to what is now major military action to “degrade and destroy” IS and to renewed US direct engagement in a Middle Eastern conflict with an almost completely unknowable outcome.

This has made the masked terrorist who carried out the first beheadings the second most powerful person so far in the 21st century.

The emergence of Pure Evil is a “special case” and imposes a moral imperative to act, though not just by the United States. But even if there is nearly universal repugnance to IS and its grisly business, and a united effort to expunge it, each and every country and sub-national group in the region is calculating its own interests and opportunities and what it can gain for itself from the willingness of the United States to act.

In its efforts to counter IS, which Obama put most clearly and dramatically in his speech last week to the United Nations General Assembly, the United States, among other things, has thus become even more fully immersed in the interlocking regional civil wars of Sunni/Shia and geopolitical competitions. “Exploiting America” has returned to the fore across the region.

In the process, the US will step up arms supplies to so-called moderates in Syria, in the hope that they will turn these weapons just against IS and not against Assad. Yet the question “What Next?” following Assad’s overthrow still goes unanswered. Indeed, the likely result would be a mess even worse than the current one, certainly an intensified Syrian civil war and its spilling over elsewhere even more than now. At a Senate hearing this month, three US Senators posed this problem to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey. In response, they more or less waved a magic wand and said that such a diversion of weapons from the counter-IS battle to the counter-Assad battle would not happen.

Meanwhile, the United States seems uncertain on whether or not to welcome Iranian support in countering IS, and appears to change its mind on an almost daily basis. As with Syria’s Assad, the US has major issues with Iran, in particular the time-bound negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program as well as Iran’s continued hostility toward Israel. Here, too, the US is failing to ask and answer the relevant questions about the key US security interests in the region.

Life is unfair, as John Kennedy said, and it is unfair that the US is expected, by one and all, to take the lead in trying to sort out the spreading mess in the heart of the Middle East. But if it is even to begin getting things right, within the limits that anyone, in or out of the region, can get things right, the United States has to create a clear set of goals and methods. These must include backing off on trying to overthrow the Assad regime until it is possible—if it is possible—to work toward a process whereby all groups in Syria, including Alawites, will have some sort of guarantee that they will not be slaughtered in a situation of complete chaos.

These goals and methods have to include a stop, a full stop, to the export of ideology and hate, money and arms, from the Sunni states to IS, al-Qaeda, and other terrorists. They have to include greater participation in the Middle East by America’s NATO allies and the European Union against terrorism and its causes, in politics and economics if not in military action. To paraphrase Robert Browning on Heaven: “Or what’s an alliance for?” They have to include a reasonable approach to what we must hope is the concluding phase of the nuclear talks with Iran, plus Iran’s adoption of a reasonable foreign policy, while understanding that it will never be fully accepted back in the world unless it stops certain collateral efforts, as in the Israeli-Palestine conflict where Tehran has no legitimate national interest.

At the same time, the US has a right to ask Pakistan to stop activities that decrease the chances that Afghanistan will have a chance to succeed as a nation after the US and NATO radically reduce their force engagement at the end of this year. The US has a right to ask the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to stop his efforts (paralleling those by some of the Gulf Arab states) to cause the nuclear talks with Iran to fail.

The day has passed when regional parties, purporting to be friends and allies, can ask the United States to sort out their problems while offering little or nothing in return—or even making matters worse for America.

At heart, the Obama administration needs, finally, to seriously answer the question: “What Next?” along with the connected questions “What For?” (that is, “What are our real interests?”) and “How, over time, can we get there?” Until these questions are answered to the best of the administration’s ability and until it acts upon the answers, Osama bin Laden and the masked IS butcher will continue to be the 21st century’s two most consequential people.