by Robert E. Hunter

What have we learned in the last half-century about America’s role in the world, and especially about going to war? A neat question, and one that is framed from my own experience, if readers will indulge me.

Exactly 50 years ago today, I was working in the Lyndon [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Robert E. Hunter

What have we learned in the last half-century about America’s role in the world, and especially about going to war? A neat question, and one that is framed from my own experience, if readers will indulge me.

Exactly 50 years ago today, I was working in the Lyndon Johnson White House, on the domestic side — mostly on education and other aspects of the Great Society, as deputy to Douglass Cater, one of the giants of the trade. I was 24, though with two years of foreign policy under my belt, as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics. I cite my tyro status only as partial exculpation for not foretelling the tragedy that was about to ensue for the United States as it became more deeply embroiled in a conflict, to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, “in a far-away country between peoples of whom we know nothing.”

A half-century ago, I read in my White House office the press release just put out by the White House that talked of an attack by North Vietnam on two US destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, in a place called the Tonkin Gulf.  From that point on, to use a common but in retrospect bitter phrase, “we were off to the races.” The Tonkin Gulf Resolution — technically the Southeast Asia Resolution — followed, and the US became mired in a conflict the purposes of which are still being debated.

But as a White House staff person with top-secret security clearance, I had an advantage over the average American. Rummaging through the files after I joined the staff in July 1964, I came across a draft that had been sitting there for some time which, with emendations, became — you guessed it — the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Ready to be used, just waiting for an “incident” to set it in motion.

It is now generally understood that the “attack” on the two US destroyers was likely a radar blip and the “fog-of-not-quite-war,” and that, in any event, the US had been engaged in provocative naval actions against North Vietnam.

But so what? I do not ask that question to be cynical, but to introduce another important fact: the US entry into what became the Vietnam War (with sidebars in Laos and Cambodia) was at first immensely popular in the country. It was even more popular in Congress, with a unanimous vote for the Resolution in the House and with only two negative votes in the Senate: Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon (both Democrats), and both were defeated in their next re-election campaigns. The floor manager for the resolution in the Senate was the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. J. William Fulbright. Later he argued loud and long that he had been lied to, and that was most likely true. Yet again, so what? He, like the rest of Congress, was primed for such an incident and a full-throated response, which implemented a pledge from President Kennedy’s Inaugural Address: “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

It was only after, when the magnitude of the war became apparent — in particular the impact of the draft on the American middle class and the disproportionate Vietnam service by African-Americans on Great Society programs — that the pendulum of public opinion began to swing.

Another fact worth considering: the actual decisions on the US escalation in Vietnam (given that the first “advisors” were sent under Eisenhower and the first “escalation” took place under Kennedy) were taken by a small group of people in the administration; almost all of them had been appointed by President John F. Kennedy. They included Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (and, in time, his State Department brother, William Bundy), and the brothers Rostow — Walt Whitman and Eugene Debs. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s leading speechwriter for the Vietnam escalation was Richard Goodman who, like many of the other Kennedy holdovers in the Johnson administration, later turned against the war (a good thing, I believe) and also personally against Johnson (a bad thing, given their early role in pushing Johnson to escalate — though, of course, a president is ultimately responsible).

One irony is that a decade earlier, when the French were besieged at Dien Bien Phu and asking for US military help, President Eisenhower consulted with Congress. The Democratic leader in the Senate gave Eisenhower the answer he wanted (“Don’t even think about it”). That was Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Fast-forward to 2003. A small group of people in the George W. Bush administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice — aided-and-abetted by Secretary of State Colin Powell — drove the inexperienced President Bush into what was clearly the worst foreign policy mistakes by the United States since Vietnam: the invasion of Iraq.

But also think of the background. While the margins were narrower in Congress and in the nation than at the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, invading Iraq still had majority support, and an overwhelming majority of the US media formed a cheerleading section for the invasion. The “incident” then did not have the immediacy of the Tonkin Gulf attack, but it was a delayed and secondary reaction to 9/11 — and, as with the purported attack on US vessels 40 years before, it was viewed as an affront to America.

So what does all this mean for us, now? Have we learned anything from these two events, which have done much to shape America’s role in the world during the last half-century, and which, in the case of invading Iraq, continues to pose a serious challenge to US foreign policy? Would that I could say that we have been chastened by both developments. At least it is possible to say that the current president, Barack Obama, has not let himself be bamboozled or buffaloed by those in the Congress, the media, and in some parts of the country — but not even a plurality — who want him to get the US again embroiled in wars that do not directly impact US security. He has been getting the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan, though neither looks very good right now — but how much does the current course of events in these countries directly impact US security? The debate on this question has not even begun.

Obama has also so far resisted going to war with Iran (despite heavy pressure to do so from Israel and its Congressional and media supporters). He did not go to war to get Syria to get rid of its chemical weapons (and has received virtually no credit for achieving that result without firing a shot). He has also kept the US out of war in various other places including Gaza, Yemen and Pakistan (though the US is engaged with drones in the latter two places), kept the US from putting “boots on the ground” in Libya, and resisted meeting (Russian) fire with (NATO) fire in Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine. The “jury may still be out” in regard to each of these developments, but so far Obama has not taken steps that would be irrevocable, that would enlist the unthinking passions of the US Congress and American people, and that would represent his losing control of his own administration, as was (arguably) true with Johnson and (certainly) true with George W. Bush.

This is at least a start on the major debates we need to have about the proper role of the US in the world, especially regarding issues of war and peace, the impact of our actions on America’s standing as “the indispensable nation,” and the renewal of our capacity for genuine strategic thinking that died soon after the end of the Cold War and that is still absent even in the Obama administration.

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by Shireen T. Hunter

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, there was hope that a main barrier to implementing the principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter and creating a more law-based international system and order had been removed, offering the chance that states, both great and small, would endeavor to [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Shireen T. Hunter

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, there was hope that a main barrier to implementing the principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter and creating a more law-based international system and order had been removed, offering the chance that states, both great and small, would endeavor to organize their relations on the basis of law and principle and not sheer power and ambition.

Perhaps those who nurtured such hopes were too naïve and let their desires for the future overshadow their experience of the past. Whatever the case, they were soon cured of their illusions by the turn of events. Instead of ushering in a new political order for the 21^st  century, the end of the USSR led to a revival of the politics of the 19^th century. Those who had won the Cold War began to dream of global hegemony and reshaping whole regions according to an ill-defined program of democratization. The concept of humanitarian intervention, first advanced by one-time French Minister of Culture and later Foreign Affairs Bernard Kouchner, became the ideological vehicle for this new age of global intervention much as the Civilizing Mission (mission civilisatrice) had been for the colonial age. Ironically, those clamoring for this type of intervention dismissed so-called Christian ethics with their humanitarian components because these ethics were too soft and did not approve of the use of force. Instead, they called for a pagan ethos, which they saw as more muscular and uninhibited by the moral considerations of the supposed dawn of the new age.

Meanwhile, Russia, which as the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War, started to dream of resurrecting its lost empire instead of focusing on curing its internal ills. And other would-be imperial powers, such as China, were just waiting in the wings.

After the calamitous consequences of this new version of old mind-sets, one hoped that the allure of nineteenth-century politics, with its imperial divide and conquer propensities, would have subsided. Instead, some of the less powerful countries began to dream of empires and spheres of influence, and of manipulating existing states’ fault lines in order to achieve their goals; hence Turkey’s neo-Ottoman project, Saudi Arabia’s Sunni Khilafat, and the mirage of a Shia Crescent.

The latest development along this line has been the desire for a so-called new Sykes-Picot agreement, referencing a May 1916 Franco-British drawing of prospective borders in the Middle East, as modified by the San Remo Treaty of 1920. The new agreement would presumably remake the Middle East and possibly parts of South Asia’s political map, supposedly on an ethnic and sectarian basis that is more realistic than that which currently exists. In fact, such ideas emerged after 2001 and were reflected in articles such as Blood Borders, which showed how countries like Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan could be divided into more homogenous ethnic and sectarian entities.

These themes, however, were never seriously pursued by any government until the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the recent crisis in Iraq. Now some countries seem to be actively encouraging Iraq’s disintegration, or while officially opposing it, are secretly supporting it.

Yet these countries, most of which have their own disgruntled ethnic and religious minorities, do not realize that Iraq’s dismemberment would in all likelihood also encourage centrifugal tendencies in other neighboring states. For example, the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan thinks that somehow Turkey would remain immune to the impact that an independent Kurdistan in Iraq would have on the aspirations of Turkey’s Kurds. Yet, in all probability, an independent Iraqi Kurdistan would in due course seek to incorporate other Kurdish-inhabited areas into the new state, especially because of the Greater Kurdistan dreams of Masud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Region.

Nor would Kurds be the only minority in Turkey who might want to separate. For example, the disintegration of Syria and the emergence of a separate Alawite state might encourage Turkey’s Arab minority, many of whom are Alawites, to join that state. They have been subjected to pressure and discrimination, which has increased in recent years, and they live close to the Syrian border in lands claimed by Syria. A Shia state in southern Iraq, meanwhile, would become a magnate for Shias in Saudi Arabia, another persecuted minority, and in Bahrain, with its persecuted Shia-majority population.

What is more frightening is that this process of separation and realignment would be extremely violent and brutal. There would be no velvet divorces, as happened in Czechoslovakia in 1993. This process would also very likely lead to confrontation among current states. These upheavals ultimately could and probably would reach areas of crucial international importance due to their oil resources. So far, there has been a degree of nonchalance regarding regional conflicts because they have not affected the supply and/or price of oil and thus the interests of key international players. But there can be no guarantee that this would always be the case.

Moreover, the new states, which could emerge out of a disintegrative process, would not be viable, partly because even these supposedly more homogenous states would still be fragmented unless they took the form of Lilliputian entities. They would depend on their neighbors: some for access to the sea, others for resources, and hence would become extremely vulnerable to pressure. Certainly, the creation of these entities would not resolve such intractable problems as the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Kashmir problem, even if there were several states in Syria or an independent Baluchistan.

Thus the solution to current and potential problems should not be a new wave of semi-colonial gerrymandering. Instead, the international community should encourage wherever possible federal or semi-federal relationships and regional integration and cooperation. Certainly outsiders should not encourage the use of force to bring about change.

In Central Europe, with the exception of the velvet divorce of Czechs and Slovaks, the collapse of the Soviet Union’s external empire did not lead to the repeat of the injustices of the various treaties agreed to after World War I in 1919-20. Instead, one requirement for admitting Central European countries to NATO and the EU was that they would retain their existing borders and foreswear past territorial claims on neighbors. This approach has never been encouraged and tried in the Middle East and South Asia. The current unitary states might have run their course and Iraq may be the first of many facing the challenge of remaining intact. But the creation of other smaller and less-viable unitary states is no solution.

Instead, key international and regional players should resist fanning the flames of ethnic and sectarian discord, in hoping to benefit from them. They should focus on realistic arrangements that respond to the needs of various peoples, without dismantling the entire state system, because these flames will inevitably also engulf outside players. As the saying goes, those living in glass houses should not throw stones.

Photo: Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers near the northern Iraqi border with Syria Credit: Reuters

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With bilateral US-Iran talks taking place in Geneva today, notably topped for the US by Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns, who led earlier secret exchanges, negotiations between Iran and world powers might be entering their final phase  — or not.  

Such is the nature of difficult negotiations, involving countries that, in [...]]]> by Robert E. Hunter

With bilateral US-Iran talks taking place in Geneva today, notably topped for the US by Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns, who led earlier secret exchanges, negotiations between Iran and world powers might be entering their final phase  — or not.  

Such is the nature of difficult negotiations, involving countries that, in the case of the United States and Iran, have a 35-year history of bad relations. Such is also the nature of negotiations where the stakes are so high.

Should the negotiations fail, at the extreme Iran might move toward developing nuclear weapons, though it stoutly denies this intention. To keep it from doing so, the US has pledged that the military option “remains on the table,” though it devoutly prefers not to use it or to have its hand forced by Israel.

The qualifier “or not” is necessary because the actual negotiations have been conducted more privately than one would have expected; because the notional deadline of July 20 isn’t a true deadline at all; and because, as happens with such hotly contested and highly complex issues as are involved here, there can be “many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip” even when everyone is acting with the best of intentions.

Counters to skepticism that this round of talks will produce a final agreement include the fact that just about every issue that could be raised has been talked virtually to death. A host of experts has been engaged. The finer points of all issues have long been on the table and have been masticated by all sides “from here to Sunday.”

Indeed, if there are any points where the interests of the parties are not crystal clear, it is not from lack of trying. That doesn’t mean that the different parties — perhaps all of them — have not held back that one last point in hopes of getting a slightly better deal at the 11^th hour, in particular to be able to argue to critics back home, of which there is a plethora, that, in the end “we showed them [fill in the blank] that we are tough bargainers.”

Shades of the Cold War

This is not the first time that negotiations of this importance have come down to the wire in this fashion. During the Cold War, this was typically part of every set of US-Soviet arms control talks, which were just as abstruse, just as contentious to the last niggling detail, and just as freighted with the political need for each side to argue that it had obtained the best deal that was humanly possible.

The parallel is apt. In both cases, long before the negotiating end-game, the people sitting at the table across from one another have understood the terms, both great and small, of the deal that will best suit all claimants and can produce a diplomatic solution. But in both cases, US-Soviet arms control negotiations and talks on the Iranian nuclear program, the devil is very much not “in the details,” but in the politics, and not even in the last little compromises that each side needs in order to counter the critics back home.

The politics are about the nature of the basic relationships between the contending parties. In US-Soviet relations, the need was for both sides to be able to claim that they were equals, that the nuclear symbols of relative power were finely balanced. Whether one side or the other had a few more missiles or warheads or “throw weight” had no strategic significance in the event of conflict: utter destruction to both sides was guaranteed. But the symbols of “equality” or, more prosaically, of “face,” were critical.

Of course, Iran cannot represent itself as the equal of any of its interlocutors, by any relevant measure, but both it and its negotiating partners need to emerge from the talks with a clear sense that they have preserved what is politically essential to them.

There is a second parallel between the Cold War and now. Arms control talks between the US and Soviet Union were only partly about weapons themselves and being able to represent to publics and other countries that “parity” — a stand-in for perceptions of power — was achieved. At least as important was the experience of both sides in getting to know and understand one another in terms of interests, expectations, ambitions, hopes, and fears. The fact that US-Soviet arms control negotiations took place was as important as the results produced, and they played a central role in developing détente and eventually making possible the end of the Cold War.

That positive political result may not result from the P5+1’s (US, UK, France, China, Russia + Germany) negotiations with Iran, but it should not be ruled out. Already, with new leadership in both the United States (President Barack Obama) and Iran (President Hassan Rouhani, generally supported by the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei) the possibilities for détente and perhaps an end to the US-Iran Cold War are being developed at the bargaining table. This is much to be hoped, given that, outside of contention over nuclear matters, there is a good deal that can move Iran and the West in similar directions, not least regarding Afghanistan’s future, possibly also Iraq’s, shared opposition to al-Qaeda and its ilk, and other interests like counter-piracy and freedom of navigation, especially through the Strait of Hormuz.

There is also a third parallel. In its arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, US presidents faced intense domestic political opposition to reaching agreements with the enemy. In retrospect, no American in his right mind can still declare his opposition to the détente with the Soviet Union pursued by several presidents. At the time, however, critics abounded, leaders were excoriated, and nay-sayers in Congress did their best to undercut the efforts of the White House.

The domestic politics factor

It is far from clear that President Rouhani can surmount opposition in Iran to reaching a deal with the “Great Satan,” even though, at last count, he seems to have the support of the Supreme Leader. Meanwhile, many powerful Iranians, especially in the clerical establishment, fervently hope that the current talks will collapse. Indeed, they would welcome the West raising the stakes so high in the diplomatic end-game that Rouhani will fail.

That is also true in the United States, and this may ultimately result in the undoing of a potential agreement, whatever proves to be possible at the bargaining table.

President Obama is under intense pressure, especially from a significant part of Congress, to be unyielding on a range of matters — the details of which are less relevant than their use to cause him to flounder. Indeed, he has struggled to keep Congress from pressing for increased economic sanctions against Iran, at the very moment when US bona fides are being tested in regard to implementing last November’s Joint Plan of Action and to offering sanctions relief indispensable to a final agreement.

The interests of others

The key to this struggle over the president’s capacity to act in the US national interest is the fact that, unlike the case of US-Soviet arms control negotiations, he must also consider the perspectives of a range of countries in the Middle East, notably Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It’s not just that the US has to be certain that Iran cannot retain a capability at some point in the future to “break out” and move toward a bomb –which is also very much in the American interest. It is also that both Israel and most of the Gulf Arabs oppose, on any terms, potential reconciliation between Iran and the West and especially the United States. This element of their concern is not about security, per se, but about power, and especially Iran’s potential regional role, post-sanctions and post-isolation.

These states are concerned in particular by the prospect of normalized US-Iran relations. It is no surprise therefore, that several of America’s Middle East partners are, at best, ambivalent about signs of possible success in negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program. From their perspective, they would welcome the trammeling of Iran’s possible nuclear ambitions; but they oppose Iran’s remerging as a full-fledged competitor for power and influence in the region, potentially a collateral product of success in the negotiations.

The implications of such a development obviously need to be considered by the United States, as leader among Western states, both in the Middle East and beyond, as the possibility emerges of an end to the Iranian-Western Cold War.

As much as they would like the status quo to continue, some local states, notably some Gulf Arabs, are not sitting on their hands. They are already exploring the possibility of changed relations with Iran, as demonstrated by recent high-level exchanges of visits with Tehran. Egypt is also adjusting, symbolized by its invitation to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s inauguration this week (Iran is sending its deputy foreign minister). China and Russia are meanwhile ready to step up economic and other ties; and the private sector throughout the West is restlessly waiting at the starting gate.

In the final analysis, if President Obama and his Iranian counterparts can weather domestic opposition to an agreement — where Obama faces congressional opposition that is heavily influenced by Israel — we will witness the beginning of fundamental change in the Middle East. It is far from clear, however, that the US government has begun to think through the consequences of this and started to plan accordingly.

Photo: Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman photographed here during last years negotiations in Geneva, will be among the top-level diplomats meeting for bilateral talks in the Swiss city today. June 9-10. Credit: ISNA

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U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan. The “war on terrorism” now seems so last decade. U.S. military spending has leveled off, and the Pentagon is looking at some fairly serious reductions after 2015. Last month, President Obama finally pulled the various threads of his foreign policy approach into a  by John Feffer*

U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan. The “war on terrorism” now seems so last decade. U.S. military spending has leveled off, and the Pentagon is looking at some fairly serious reductions after 2015. Last month, President Obama finally pulled the various threads of his foreign policy approach into a “doctrine” that emphasizes incremental diplomacy and leaves military intervention as a last resort.

We are, it would seem, at an epochal moment in U.S. history. The Reagan and Bush Jr. administrations attempted to deepsix the Vietnam syndrome and resurrect the U.S. military as the principle tool of U.S. foreign policy. But after the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the syndrome has returned in an industrial-strength version. Finally, it seems as if the United States is willing to take the cop out of cooperation.

But before we stick flowers into the barrels of the Special Forces’ combat assault rifles and celebrate the transformation of the CIA’s drones into Amazon delivery vehicles, let’s evaluate what will likely be a very substantial backlash to the Obama doctrine. Depending on what happens in the mid-terms and more importantly the next presidential elections in 2016, we might be looking at yet another effort to drive a stake through the heart of the Vietnam-Afghanistan-Iraq syndrome and reassert, once again, American military power.

In the last presidential election, we narrowly escaped a return to the foreign policy of the 1980s with Mitt Romney. Next time around, the hawks from both major parties minus the libertarians — the War Party — may well offer something considerably more retrograde: perhaps a return to the 1890s and a celebration of American empire under Teddy Roosevelt.

But it won’t be just one war — Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain! — that the War Party will want the Pentagon to prepare to fight. Nor will it be the two or two-and-a-half wars of the Cold War heyday. Instead, the next generation of U.S. militarists — the Project for the NewNew American Century — will be talking about girding our loins for three wars. Before detailing this three-front global conflict, let me explain how we’ve been at this point already twice in the recent past.

Long before Obama unveiled his doctrine, the last two Democrats in the White House also tried, in their half-hearted ways, to restrain the Pentagon and elevate the State Department. For Jimmy Carter, his first two years in office marked the high point of détente and the military drawdown from the Vietnam years. Even though he turned considerably more hawkish in the second half of his term, Carter became a symbol of everything weak about the Democratic Party and its foreign policy. The events of 1979 — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution — also conspired against President Malaise. Carter’s opponent in the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan, promised to stand up to the Russians, the Iranians, and anyone else who dared challenge Old Glory.

Bill Clinton, too, presided over a reduction of the U.S. military leviathan in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Clinton was by no means a pacifist. The United States was involved in the wars in former Yugoslavia and several attacks on al-Qaeda and its ilk during the 1990s. But the great sin of the Clinton administration, to its critics on the right, was its commitment to multilateralism. The Clinton administration actually seemed to believe in the United Nations and such associated efforts as the International Criminal Court. Beginning in 1997, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) pushed a program that would eerily resemble the eventual foreign policy of the George W. Bush presidency, including a major uptick in military spending and regime change in Iraq. As in 1979, the events of September 11 helped to propel U.S. foreign policy in a different direction.

PNAC is dead and gone, and the Bush doctrine is buried in the sands of the Middle East. Obama has reached back to the earlier traditions of his Democratic predecessors for inspiration, borrowing a measure of modesty from Carter and a measure of multilateralism from Clinton. And Obama has encountered the same congressional resistance to his de factotempering of American exceptionalism. Behind the Obama doctrine lurks a certain implicit assumption: that a safety net of international norms can both cushion the relative decline of the United States and contain the rise of other powers like China. Of course, Washington would like to game the system as much as possible to prolong the U.S. unipolar moment and ensure a comfortable imperial retirement. If all goes according to plan, the only conflicts that will take place will be over the terms of America’s golden parachute and our 401(k) plan (to be negotiated at trade talks, with Chinese investors, and with European banks).

But nothing ever goes according to plan. And here are three reasons why, drawn entirely from recent headlines.

On May 1, China set up an oilrig in the South China Sea in waters that Vietnam also claims. Vietnam has used YouTube to show China ramming its ships. Both sides have fired water cannons at each other. Chinese fighter jets patrol the sky above the disputed territory. Vietnam and U.S. allies Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines have all pressed Washingtonto check China’s more assertive claims to territory in the East and South China Seas. They want a more vigorous Pacific pivot to Asia.

On May 11, voters in two regions in eastern Ukraine supported greater autonomy in a referendum rejected by the central government in Kiev. Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to intervene if the interests of ethnic Russians in Ukraine are threatened. Although he has promised to withdraw the 40,000 troops currently near the border, no such troop movements have been detected. Clashes between Ukrainian government forces and separatists in eastern Ukraine threaten to spiral into a civil war. New NATO members in East-Central Europe are wary of Russia’s more assertive claims to territory near their eastern borders. Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak, for instance, has called on the United States to “re-pivot” to Europe.

Then there’s Africa, where the United States created a new Africa Command shortly before Obama took office and where the Pentagon has recently ramped up its operations to more than a mission a day. Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group that seeks to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state, kidnapped more than 200 girls from their school last month. It’s only the latest act of extremism from a group that Washington put on the foreign terrorism list last year. It’s not clear whether the Nigerian radicals have any ties to al-Qaeda. But the war on terrorism has entered a new phase in which smaller U.S. forces partner with governments on the ground in Africa to battle non-state actors. Although some in the United States have called for an “African pivot,” no one in the region has issued such an invitation. They don’t really have to. We’re already there.

So far, the Obama administration has been rather cautious in addressing all three of these challenges. The U.S. Navy maintains more than half of its fleet in the Pacific, the Army still has bases in Europe, and Special Forces are deployed throughout Africa. But the administration has not advised military intervention in any of the three cases (though the use of drones and some “boots on the ground” in Africa certainly go beyond mere non-military strategies).

It’s also not likely that a Republican president would do anything appreciably different, although the party has practically Photoshopped Neville Chamberlain into the Oval Office. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is likely to throw his hat in the ring for 2016, has called for perhaps the strongest responses to Russia and China. But even he has stopped short of calling for actual U.S. military intervention. After all, Americans are now thoroughly cynical about sending U.S. troops to fight overseas.

But remember: the United States maintained its two-war doctrine more as a yardstick for measuring how much money to allocate to the Pentagon. In the 1980s, hawks were not pushing the United States to start a war with the Soviet Union or Iran. Rather, they wanted to maintain the capabilities to fight both wars simultaneously if need be.

Here’s the nightmare scenario for 2016. The War Party will fight against any cuts in Pentagon spending and argue for upping the allocation in order to fight three wars simultaneously: against Russia, against China, and against non-state actors wherever they threaten U.S. interests. Sound unlikely? The Bush administration was able to transform a ragtag group of crazies — which, admittedly, had directly attacked the United States and killed nearly 3,000 people — into the “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century.” Imagine what the War Party, if it controlled the White House and Congress, could do with the likes of Russia, China, and the heirs of the heirs of all those murderous ideologies? If we’re lucky, we’ll avoid any outright conflict. But the price will nevertheless be bankruptcy. Forget about that imperial 401(k) plan.

It’s often pointed out that the British Empire finally collapsed because of the debts incurred by England during World War II. Washington extended London a mountain of loans to fight the war, and when the loans came due, the United States effectively replaced England as the hegemon of the “free world.”

But the process was not so cut and dried. “In July 1950, on the eve of the Korean War,” writes Tony Judt in Postwar, “Britain had a full naval fleet in the Atlantic, another in the Mediterranean and a third in the Indian Ocean, as well as a permanent ‘China station.’ The country maintained 120 Royal Air Force squadrons worldwide and had armies or parts of armies permanently based in Hong Kong, Malaya, the Persian Gulf and North Africa, Trieste and Austria, West Germany and the United Kingdom itself.” Five years after the end of World War II, someone forgot to give the British the news that their term was over.

The United States that Barack Obama inherited in 2008 was similarly a “dead empire walking,” and China now serves as the bankroller that the United States was in the 1940s. A prudent president, Obama has attempted to maintain U.S. position in the world at a lower cost and with less blowback. His critics on the left, myself included, want less empire and more prudence. But we must also acknowledge the deluge that might come après Obama and make the last few years seem like halcyon days.

If the War Party wins in 2016, all bets are off. We will prepare to fight in the Eurasian heartland, the South China Sea, and the resource-rich lands of Africa — because if we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here. Just when it seemed like we were about to give peace a chance, the United States will suddenly revert to a three-war doctrine. 2016 will be 1979 and 2001 all over again. And, as we all know, bad luck always comes in threes.

*John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF). This article was first published by FPIF and was reprinted here with permission.

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 Robert E. Hunter

Almost from the day the Cold War ended, pundits, professors, and professionals alike have been wondering Quo Vadis? for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This has happened despite the facts that NATO (at times also with what is now the European Union) has stopped two [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Robert E. Hunter

Almost from the day the Cold War ended, pundits, professors, and professionals alike have been wondering Quo Vadis? for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This has happened despite the facts that NATO (at times also with what is now the European Union) has stopped two wars in Europe (Bosnia and Kosovo), written finis to the 120-year German Problem, taken almost all of Central Europe off the geopolitical chess board, fought as far afield as Afghanistan, played at least a supporting role in toppling Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi, and reached out to Ukraine, Russia, and countries in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. And, oh, NATO has also ensured that the United States would remain a European power, itself no mean feat.

Not a bad bit of work for the last quarter century, for an alliance that is still seen as “lacking direction,” “lacking a purpose,” and “lacking a future.” In fact, all three points were answered many years ago: NATO’s key purpose is to provide strategic and political confidence in a region that, when that confidence died 100 years ago this August, produced an era of history’s worst carnage.

Well, those who have still wondered about NATO’s future need wonder no longer. Once again, it seems, the Russians have ridden to the rescue, this time not as Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union but as Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. By seizing Crimea, albeit through the form of a referendum, Putin has told the West that Russia, to steal a phrase from US president Ronald Reagan, “is back, standing tall.”

Perhaps Putin has a greater appetite, at one end of the scale seeking to seize more territory in Ukraine or elsewhere (doubtful though possible) or at the other to intimidate other former members of the Russian and then Soviet Empires (almost certain). Or even if Crimea “…is the last territorial claim that [Putin has] to make in Europe,” and even if Western policies did contribute to what Putin has now done, it is clear that Russia is violating both the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum under which Ukraine agreed to ship to Russia those nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil when the USSR was disbanded.

The West has had to react. So far, this has consisted mainly of strong statements by Western Alliance leaders; visits to Ukraine and elsewhere by officials that include US Vice President Joseph Biden; limited but growing economic sanctions imposed on the Russian economy and Mr. Putin’s cronies; financial promises to Ukraine; and some NATO military demonstrations. Given that Ukraine is not a member of NATO and thus not entitled to the commitments against external aggression contained in the NATO’s Treaty’s Article 5, direct military intervention by any NATO country or the Alliance as a whole has been ruled out. Further, given the geography — as was true with isolated West Berlin in the Cold War — if there were need for the West to react much more strongly against unambiguous Russian aggression, escalation would likely have to be “horizontal” (that is, done some other way in some other place) rather than “vertical” (e.g., sending troops up against the Russians). Thus NATO military demonstrations have been limited to air policing over the three Baltic States (most vulnerable among NATO allies to further Russian intimidation), aerial surveillance, and previously-scheduled military and naval exercises.

Despite these limitations, with Russia’s seizure of Crimea NATO did overnight gain a new sense of purpose, or so it seems. But not so fast. In the first place, not all members of the Western Alliance are convinced that Putin will continue to make other “territorial claims” and many are reluctant to impose truly swinging economic sanctions — Russia clearly needs the outside world and can’t retreat as Lenin and Stalin did, but Western economies and companies also have a stake in dealing with the Russian Federation. Also, while new NATO allies in Central Europe are naturally more concerned about their own security and, in particular, Western security guarantees (especially by the US), allies to their West are not likely to be spooked to the same degree — this is the distinction once drawn by former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld between “Old” and “New” Europe.

Further, some thoughtful statesmen in the West and perhaps even some “silent” leaders in Russia are wondering whether what has happened in Crimea means that the pursuit of President George H. W. Bush’s vision of a “Europe whole and free” and at peace has to be abandoned for all time. Obviously, even if that process could be renewed, with its aspiration of someday including Russia in broader European political, economic, and security structures supplementing NATO, it would now have to be a long time in the future. Also obviously, Russia will suffer grievously from what Putin has already done, not from the West’s short-term pin-prick sanctions, but from longer-range existential sanctions; no serious person or institutions in the West will easily again trust Russia.

For NATO, the EU, and individual Western states, there needs to be a balance struck. First is to make sure that Putin is under no illusions that he has taken a momentous decision — call it drawing an unspoken, existential red line; that he has broken rules that Russia must abide by if it wants to be involved in the outside world; and that in time he and Russia will pay a price that is likely to be greater than his immediate gains. All this is being done and will be reinforced by President Barack Obama’s trip to Europe next week, where he meets with G-7 leaders in The Hague — real money for Ukraine, please — and at the EU and NATO in Brussels.

Second, however, is to do what is possible in the West not to accept that there is a new Cold War, with all of the apparatus implied in terms of institutions, actions, statements, psychology, and rigidities.  Most Western leaders, including President Barack Obama, seem to get this point, especially since Russian support is still needed in other places, most immediately in regard to nuclear talks with Iran — though many people in the US commentariat are pushing hard in the other direction, without their having to count the costs.

Third is to structure today’s opposition to what Russia has done in Crimea in a way that it is not irreversible — i.e. a new Cold War by inertia. This is easy to say but hard to do, in a culture (ours) where diplomacy is too often represented as cowardice and compromise as something for chumps. (For example, it is hard for the West, and especially Americans, to understand that what Putin has done in Crimea is not “100% different” from what the West did in wrenching Kosovo from Serbia; or that we have indeed on many occasions taken advantage of the Soviet Union’s having “lost” the Cold War and the Russians inability, at least until now, to push back. That doesn’t excuse what Putin has done, but to avoid becoming prisoners of our own perspective and rhetoric we must at least make an honest assessment of how everyone got to this point.)

Fourth, we need to recognize that, while the Crimea and Ukraine crises are an immediate shot in the arm for NATO, in terms of showing its continued relevance in Europe (or, more particularly, underscoring that the United States is still needed strategically in Europe), these crises do not answer the long-term Quo Vadis? question. Added Western conventional military power would have almost no effect on the situation, since war has been ruled out short of an unambiguous Russian military (or cyber?) attack on a formal NATO ally. Military demonstrations of solidary with frightened Central European states can be done with what NATO has now. Parliaments throughout the Alliance will still be reluctant to increase defense budgets — for what long-term purposes, they will ask?

Further, European allies will still need to show the United States that they will support US strategic objectives elsewhere in the world, as they have done in Afghanistan, in order to keep the US pinned to Europe strategically. If the Ukraine situation does stabilize and Putin does no more sabre rattling, the US will again shift a considerable part of its central preoccupations to the Middle East and East Asia, especially China. Thus NATO’s European allies must still ponder what they can and will do elsewhere in the world to support the US strategically, almost regardless of what happens in Ukraine and its vicinity in the period ahead. Indeed, by underscoring that only the United States can deal with Russia, the requirement for the allies to support the US elsewhere has been redoubled.

As of now, therefore, the NATO summit in Wales this September has been saved from being a dud, inevitably underscoring that the mission in Afghanistan is running down without much of lasting value to show for it, and without much political will to craft a serious future for NATO. Just going on about Crimea is no lasting answer and, unless Putin gets fully into the aggression business, can be no substitute for getting on with the serious business of figuring out the Alliance’s future. There still needs to be a new Transatlantic Compact that brings together all elements of economic, political, military, and strategic relations to bind the Atlantic nations together in the post-Cold War, 21^st century. But there is no indication, now, that either the ideas, the US leadership, or European receptivity will be found, either at the Wales summit or afterward. Crimea can be no substitute for addressing these more fundamental matters: it is a tonic for NATO as an institution, a pick-me-up, but not a cure.

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 Henry Precht

They used to say during the Cold War that the Pentagon was prepared to fight two and a half wars at the same time. Actually, I can’t think of such a fraught moment in post-World War II history. Vietnam came along after Korea; Reagan took on Grenada and Panama [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Henry Precht

They used to say during the Cold War that the Pentagon was prepared to fight two and a half wars at the same time. Actually, I can’t think of such a fraught moment in post-World War II history. Vietnam came along after Korea; Reagan took on Grenada and Panama after ducking out of Lebanon. Only when George W. Bush pushed troops into Afghanistan and Iraq did we come close to the theoretical limit of our force projection capabilities.

It wasn’t the same with diplomacy: One crisis at a time has been the cap on American Great Power role-playing. The classic case was President Jimmy Carter’s taking a pass on the budding Iranian revolution while at the same time nudging Egypt and Israel into a peace settlement. A 500 percent batting average isn’t too bad, however.

If the one crisis at a time rule still applies, let us extend a bit of sympathy to the Obama White House. I count four major, on-going crises, five pretty big ones holding a serious potential to get worse plus a host of seedlings that should be brought under control. The biggies are:

• The clash with Russia over Ukraine;
• The Syrian civil war;
• The Iranian nuclear program;
• The Israel-Palestine peace negotiations.

You can make your own list of the slightly lesser dangers by throwing darts at a map. Let’s limit ourselves to examining the four major threats:

• China’s assertiveness in the Pacific;
• Pakistan under threat of Islamic extremists;
• Egypt’s move to strong-man rule;
• Venezuela’s internal strife;
• Europe’s fragile economy.

Plainly, the Ukrainian trouble harbors the widest and most severe long-term threat: A renewed Cold War, higher energy costs, ruined economies around the globe and the unrest that will provoke, distortion of domestic priorities — the list goes on and on. Domestic politics and distaste for Russian President Vladimir Putin afflict American diplomacy; domestic sentiments, history and Putin’s pride bear upon Russia’s. The way out is fairly clear: both sides have to switch off their rhetoric and hostile gestures, walk their positions back and prove stronger than their Ukrainian clients. The elements of a settlement can objectively be foreseen: a freeze by all on moves towards Crimea; a new regime in Kiev displacing right-wing elements; free, supervised elections later this year; and generous financial help from both East and West.

Once Ukraine is headed in that direction, work must be resumed on Syria to stop the killing. To do that Russia’s help will be essential as will that of Saudi Arabia (for dealing with the rebels) and Iran (for dealing with Assad). Moscow’s influence will be important with the latter; Washington’s crucial with the former. Assad, having killed so many of his people, must accept early retirement to be replaced by eminent Syrians acceptable to both sides who will in some months oversee national elections. Reconstruction will be the priority task and Saudi money the only possible supplier for that. Again, Washington will have to find the time and means to be persuasive with its royal client.

The same talents in Washington will have to be applied to persuade Riyadh that its interests will be protected when a nuclear deal with Iran is completed — which must happen if the US is to get Iran on board for a Syrian settlement.

And what of Israel? Will Jerusalem twiddle thumbs as the world weaves new alignments? Hardly. No Israeli leaders — or friend in Congress — will sit quietly while Obama offers an olive branch to Tehran while throwing a punch at Israel’s presence on the West Bank. Something will have to give and, as has happened in the past, that will mean peace talks must be slowed down and US pressure quietly eased. Perhaps the Saudis can be persuaded to appease the Palestinians, especially if we agree not to take the side of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt — which we certainly weren’t going to do in any event.

Can all or any of this be accomplished by a one-crisis-at-a-time administration, especially in a very difficult election year with a crowed domestic agenda before a rebellious Congress? No one knows, but if the usual crisis management limitation governs, a potentially explosive Ukraine must obviously receive the highest priority.

The administration’s diplomatic skills should be sufficient to put together a solution — given the time to nurture the necessary connections in Western and Eastern Europe. A measure of luck will, as always, be essential. But the largest lacuna may lie in the requirement for political bravery. The time will have to be found to muster up courage not profiled in Washington in many, many years.

Photo: President Barack Obama convenes a National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room of the White House to discuss the situation in Ukraine, March 3, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza