The new year may have brought with it some signs of progress toward a comprehensive deal between world powers and Iran, lending credence to one of Graham Fuller’s 2015 predictions for the Middle East. However, any movement toward a nuclear agreement must now contend with a potentially game-changing complication: the desire of a new and more hawkish Republican-led Congress to impose additional sanctions on Iran regardless of how the talks are progressing.
The Associated Press reported on Friday that the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China) had reached a tentative agreement with Iranian negotiators on a plan to have Tehran ship some portion of its stockpiled low enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia. The agreement would presumably be along the lines of the arrangement that was first reported by IPS’s Gareth Porter in October whereby Iran’s stockpiled LEU, as well as much of its newly enriched LEU, would be converted by the Russians into fuel for its Bushehr civilian nuclear facility.
If the AP report is accurate, the deal could represent a major breakthrough in one of the core areas of dispute between the parties: the size of Iran’s uranium enrichment program. The P5+1 have sought to limit the number of centrifuges that Iran would be allowed to operate under the terms of a deal in order to lengthen the amount of time it would take the Iranians to produce enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a single nuclear bomb if it chose to pursue one (Iran’s “breakout time”). But Iran has balked at the idea of reducing its centrifuge program. However, another element in the “breakout time” calculation (part of the so-called “Rubik’s Cube” of a final nuclear deal) is the amount of LEU that Iran has stockpiled. Were Iran to agree to ship its LEU (which can be fairly easily enriched to levels required for weaponization) to Russia for conversion into fuel rods (which cannot be easily converted to a weaponizable form), then Iran’s “breakout time” could be extended with only a relatively minor –and perhaps even no — reduction in Iran’s current centrifuge capacity.
It should be noted that the AP report contained no specifics, saying simply that “both sides in the talks are still arguing about how much of an enriched uranium stockpile to leave Iran.” It also offered no indication that the deal would motivate the US/P5+1 negotiators to alter their demand that Iran cut its current number of operating centrifuges by over 50%, to 4500, under a final deal. In addition, Iran’s foreign ministry quickly dismissed the AP report, with spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham saying that “no agreement has been reached yet on any of the issues [being discussed] during nuclear talks,” although that denial could reflect diplomatic posturing on Iran’s part.
Other news out of Tehran, however, has offered a more encouraging sign that the sides may be moving closer to a deal. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Sunday argued that Iran should be prepared to accept some limits on its uranium enrichment program if doing so could help achieve a larger aim:
Speaking to an economic conference in Tehran, Rouhani both countered hard-line critics worried Iran will give up too much while also attempting to signal his administration remains open to negotiation with the six-nation group leading the talks.
If “we are ready to stop some types of enrichment which we do not need at this time, does it mean we have compromised our principles and cause?” Rouhani asked.
He responded: “Our cause is not linked to a centrifuge. It is connected to our heart and to our willpower.”
Rouhani’s remarks caused a bit of a social media storm, with some reputable analysts, including Suzanne Dimaggio who heads the Iran initiative at the New American Foundation, suggesting that a final deal is on the horizon.
Important speech by #Iran‘s @HassanRouhani today: “Our ideals are not bound to centrifuges.” Preparing for a deal. http://t.co/f9CB66RT9G
— Suzanne DiMaggio (@suzannedimaggio) January 4, 2015
Additionally, Rouhani seemed to suggest that he could put the terms of a final nuclear deal to a national referendum, possibly in order to bypass potential opposition from hardliners in the Majles (Iran’s parliament) and higher up the country’s religious and political hierarchy. As Juan Cole notes, the results of such a referendum could still be overruled by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but Khamenei may be reluctant to overrule the will of a majority of the Iranian public.
Unfortunately, these positive developments take place amid the rise of a new threat to the ongoing negotiations, not from hardliners in Iran’s parliament but rather from hardliners in the newly installed (as of Saturday) US Congress. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) visited Israel late last month and told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that there would be a vote on the previously stymied Kirk-Menendez bill (to impose additional sanctions on Iran) sometime in January, and that the new Congress would “follow [Netanyahu’s] lead” on dealing with Iran and the nuclear talks. Putting aside the astonishing sight of a US senator pledging allegiance to a foreign leader, sanctions are a clearly decisive issue for Tehran. The imposition of another round of broad US sanctions, even if they are made conditional on Iran abandoning the talks or breaking its obligations under the existing negotiating framework, would strengthen hardliners in Tehran who have long argued that Washington cannot be trusted. The Obama administration has pledged to veto any additional sanctions on Iran so long as talks are ongoing, but that may not matter; Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) told reporters last week that he expects the new Congress to pass a new sanctions bill with veto-proof majorities in both the House and the Senate.
The most recent extension of the talks called for a final framework to be in place by March 1 and for a full deal to be reached by July 1. It seems likely that most Republicans in Congress will do their best to scuttle the talks before either of those deadlines can be reached, putting negotiators (who will meet again Jan 15. in Geneva) on an even tighter timeframe.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Lindsey Graham, who is not a stupid person, can be so embarrassing. Speaking at a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem Saturday, Graham said the following in response to Bibi’s call for “more sanctions, and stronger sanctions” against Iran.
But you, above all others, have said that sanctions are what got Iran to the table, and it will be the only thing that brings them to a deal that we can all live with.
I’m here to tell you, Mr. Prime Minister, that the Congress will follow your lead. [Emphasis added.]
What a remarkable thing to say to a foreign leader when he’s hosting you in his country, especially when the president of your own country is clearly not happy with that prime minister’s approach to this particular problem.
But that’s not all he said. He implied that people in the US intelligence community, which has insisted for more than seven years now that Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon, should have their driver’s licenses revoked whenever they return from overseas assignments, meetings or vacations.
To those who believe the Iranians have not been trying to develop a nuclear weapon, if you come to America, you should not be allowed to drive on our highways. Clearly, this regime for years has been deceiving the international community, has been trying to pursuit [sic], in my view, a nuclear weapon.
And then there’s this little gem offered to a leader who, as prime minister or the leader of the opposition, has steadfastly opposed the peace-making efforts of three US presidents, including George W. Bush, and who enthusiastically encouraged the United States to invade and occupy Iraq, among other incredibly stupid moves.
And what brings me here so many times, is common and shared values and common and shared enemies.
The fate of one country determines the fate of the other.
God bless the people of Israel, and you can count on the United States Congress, Republican and Democrat, to be there for you when you need us the most. [Emphasis added.]
Now, to be fair to Graham, he did not explicitly endorse Netanyahu’s call for “more sanctions, and stronger sanctions” despite his promise that Congress will follow Bibi’s “lead” in dealing with Iran. Instead, he promised that Congress will vote on the Kirk-Menendez bill, or what I originally called the “Wag the Dog Act of 2014,” next month, the approval of which, according to virtually all knowledgeable observers, will result in the collapse not only of the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, but also of the international sanctions regime. (For a more specific analysis, you can examine Ed Levine’s assessment of the bill after it was introduced last year.)
Graham, like Netanyahu himself, also insisted that he supports the administration’s efforts to negotiate a deal. “I would love nothing better than a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear ambitions,” he said. “I support the Administration’s effort to try to bring this to a peaceful conclusion.” But then he went on to insist that any final agreement must include the abandonment by Tehran of its uranium enrichment capabilities—a demand that all of the P5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China plus Germany) consider totally unrealistic.
Now, Graham often has had a problem with getting a little carried away in his public rhetoric. Reacting to President Obama’s State of the Union Address last January, and particularly his remarks about imposing sanctions against Iran, the South Carolina senator warned that “the world is literally about to blow up.” At the 2010 Halifax International Security Forum, Graham reportedly stunned the audience—and apparently embarrassed his hosts—by calling for a full-scale attack on Iran beyond its nuclear facilities.
So my view of military force would be not to just neutralize their nuclear program, which are probably dispersed and hardened, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard. In other words, neuter that regime.
But then last June, Graham, while on the rounds of the Sunday talk shows and apparently freaked out about Islamic State’s sweep in northern and western Iraq, called for Washington to work with Iran (and presumably with the hated Revolutionary Guard) to protect Baghdad. The US has to “have to have some dialogue with the Iranians that says, ‘let’s coordinate our efforts,’ but has some red lines,” he said on one show. “The Iranians can provide some assets to make sure Baghdad doesn’t fall,” he said on yet another. “We need to coordinate with the Iranians. To ignore Iran and not tell them, ‘Don’t take advantage of this situation,’ would be a mistake.”
More recently, Graham denounced the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee’s report on Benghazi as “full of crap.”
It’s pretty clear that Graham can sometimes get excitable, especially when the TV cameras are rolling.
Assuming that the Kirk-Menendez bill does come to the floor next month, however, the big question is whether it will attract enough Senate Democrats to render its passage veto-proof (because there’s no doubt whatsoever that Obama will veto it). That will take 33 Democrats and/or independents and/or Republicans. At this point, I think the president should not have too much trouble getting those votes, and the fact that Graham has now taken the lead on this while on foreign soil will likely make it easier for Obama to get the Democratic support he needs. But Graham’s assurance that a Republican-led Congress will “follow [Netanyahu’s] lead” (against a US president, if necessary) should prompt a few of his fellow-Republicans to reflect just a little on the implications of such deference by a powerful US senator to a foreign leader.
Graham also had a lot to say about Hamas and withholding funding for the United Nations if it becomes more involved in seeking an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. You can read the whole transcript of his appearance with Netanyahu here and judge for yourself.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Since Obama’s announcement last week that he will normalize relations with Cuba, a number of commentators have analyzed what impact this might have on US-Iranian ties, particularly with respect to the ongoing negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.
Aside from neoconservatives, such as Elliott Abrams, and other hawks, like Lindsey Graham and John McCain—who predictably deplored the move and worried that Obama’s move portends US surrender at the negotiating table—the Wilson Center’s Aaron David Miller was one of the first to do a more thoughtful analysis of what it might mean for Iran policy. In his post, entitled “After Cuba Comes Iran,” Miller argued that, despite the key differences between the two countries, Obama’s decision to normalize ties with Havana “should be a clear sign of where he might like to go with Iran on the nuclear issue in coming months.”
Paul Pillar, a regular contributor to the National Interest, also alluded to the possibility that the Cuba initiative, coupled with Obama’s more assertive policy shifts on immigration and climate change, could indeed indicate where Obama wants to go with Iran and expressed the hope that these moves will encourage him to inject into the US negotiating position the flexibility that will be needed to conclude an agreement.
In another important contribution published by Voice of America Tuesday, the Atlantic Council’s Iran expert, Barbara Slavin argued what I’ve been thinking (but hadn’t put pen to paper) for the past week:
For those in the Iranian government who are pushing for a long-term nuclear deal with Washington, seeing Obama use his presidential authority to relieve the embargo against Cuba despite the vocal objection of some in Congress should increase confidence that he can waive key nuclear-related sanctions against Iran in a similar fashion.
In my opinion, Obama’s willingness to make a bold foreign policy move that is certain to provoke heated opposition from not insignificant domestic constituencies (that are also overrepresented in Congress) should—contrary to the narratives put out by the neoconservatives and other hawks—actually strengthen the Rouhani-Zarif faction within the Iran leadership who are no doubt arguing that Obama is serious both about reaching an agreement and forging a new relationship with the Islamic Republic.
I asked Farideh Farhi—whose analysis of internal Iranian politics and foreign policy is, as far as LobeLog (among many others) is concerned, the best available—about this Wednesday. She replied by email as follows:
I think Obama did himself a lot of good in changing the perception of him in Iran, as well as the rest of the world, as a weak and indecisive president. I think that perception just received a beating and will help those in Tehran who are making the case that Obama is serious and can deliver on substantial sanctions relief or that he is the best person to deal with (given the fact that he is relieved of election pressures). To be sure, all this will be focused on nuclear negotiations and not normalization of relations that developed in the Cuba situation, but if it happens, it will certainly be a breakthrough that may gradually open the path towards normalization.
Farideh pointed in particular to the official reaction by Iran’s Foreign Ministry to Obama’s Cuba announcement as offering some indication about how it was being interpreted in Tehran. That statement emphasized the president’s acknowledgment that more than 50 years of isolation and sanctions against Cuba had not worked and “I do not believe we can continue doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result.” Obama’s remarks about having learned “from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos,” according to Farideh, were also likely to be seen favorably in Tehran as Obama’s repudiation of “regime change.” (Related points were made in another analysis, “If It’s True on Cuba, It’s True on Iran,” published in the Huffington Post by Trita Parsi and Ryan Costello shortly after Obama’s announcement.)
I would add that the fact that the Castro brothers, who have “resisted” Yanqui imperialism and “global arrogance” for even longer than Tehran, are now willing to establish a new relationship with their own “Great Satan” may also count for something in the internal debate that swirls around Ayatollah Khamenei’s office. If, after all, revolutionary Cuba is willing to turn the page with their historic nemesis—defiance of which has largely defined Cuba’s out-sized standing and status in the world—shouldn’t hardcore revolutionaries around Khamenei at least consider the idea, if not of normalisation (which appears out of the question for the moment), then at least moving with greater confidence toward some rapprochement?
That view is shared by Kenneth Katzman, the senior analyst of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the Congressional Research Service. “I think we should also not minimize how the Cuba rapprochement might play in the inner counsels in Tehran,” he said in an email. “Surely, Rouhani and Zarif can now go to the Supreme Leader and say ‘The Castro brothers are at least as distrustful of the United States as you are, and they were able to reach a deal with the United States. Why wouldn’t you do the same??”
Of course, opponents of Obama’s normalization of ties with Cuba will try to rally a Republican-led Congress behind their efforts to restrain Obama’s efforts by, among other measures, denying funding for an embassy, refusing to confirm a nominee as ambassador, and introducing legislation designed to constrain the president’s authority to waive or lift certain sanctions or further ease the trade embargo. And, if they succeed, particularly with respect to the sanctions issue, there’s no doubt that such action will be used by hard-liners in Tehran to argue that Obama lacks the power to follow through on any promises he makes about lifting sanctions and related concessions, in a nuclear deal.
But it’s pretty clear that Obama is determined to fight such actions, and it’s most unlikely that anti-Castro diehards like Marco Rubio and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen will be able to gather enough Democratic supporters to overcome a presidential veto. Indeed, given the strong support for Obama’s action from such quarters as the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Foreign Trade Council, and various agricultural lobby groups whose members are eager to significantly increase their exports to Cuba, normalization’s foes may find it more difficult than they anticipate to rally a large majority of Republicans behind them despite the party leadership’s determination to deny Obama any kind of foreign policy success.
At the same time, any serious effort by the anti-Castro forces on Capitol Hill will pose some difficult questions for key players on Iran, especially the Israel lobby and the various groups associated with it. The Cuba and Israel lobbies have worked closely together for decades—their common interests have converged perfectly in the persons of the outgoing chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former House Foreign Committee chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. And now is the moment when the Cuba lobby needs all the help it can get. Moreover, if the leadership of the Israel lobby believes that normalization with Cuba will make a nuclear deal and rapprochement with Iran substantially more likely, will it decide that this is a fight worth fighting? Of course, the leadership is not monolithic, especially on a question that, at least on the face of it, is so far removed from Israel itself, and it will be very difficult to mobilize all but the lobby’s most right-wing constituents behind preventing normalization with Cuba. But it will be fascinating to watch.
Photo: US President Barack Obama talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani of during a phone call in the Oval Office, Sept. 27, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
]]>by Jim Lobe
The latest issue of the New Yorker features a lengthy article by Connie Bruck on the recent travails of AIPAC, especially its unsuccessful efforts since last November to increase sanctions on Iran, and its steady Likudnik drift, which has increasingly alienated its more liberal and Democratic supporters in Congress.
The article, “Friends [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
The latest issue of the New Yorker features a lengthy article by Connie Bruck on the recent travails of AIPAC, especially its unsuccessful efforts since last November to increase sanctions on Iran, and its steady Likudnik drift, which has increasingly alienated its more liberal and Democratic supporters in Congress.
The article, “Friends of Israel,” makes clear (in case any additional evidence were required) that the group’s intention all along was to sabotage the ongoing negotiations between Iran and world powers, which we at LobeLog chronicled pretty intensively during the key five-month period, and casts more insider light on the pressure exerted by AIPAC, related groups, and key donors on Democratic lawmakers. Consider this passage, for example:
[Majority Leader Eric] Cantor and [Minority Leader Steny] Hoyer have been steadfast supporters of AIPAC, and its members have held at least a dozen fund-raisers for them each year. But last December AIPAC’s efforts to implement sanctions against Iran were so intense that even this well-tempered partnership fractured. When Congress returned from its Thanksgiving recess, legislators in the House began discussing a sanctions bill. According to the former Congressional aide, Cantor told Hoyer that he wanted a bill that would kill the interim agreement with Iran. Hoyer refused, saying that he would collaborate only on a non-binding resolution.
Cantor sent Hoyer resolution that called for additional sanctions and sought to define in advance the contours of an agreement with Iran. “The pressure was tremendous—not just AIPAC leadership and legislative officials but various board members and other contributors, from all over the country,” the former congressional aide recalled. “What was striking was how strident the message was,” another aide said. “‘How could you not pass a resolution that tells the President what the outcome of the negotiations has to be?’” Advocates for the sanctions portrayed Obama as feckless. “They said, ‘Iranians have been doing this for millennia. They can smell weakness. Why is the President showing weakness?’” a Senate aide recalled.
AIPAC was betting that the Democrats, facing midterms with an unpopular President, would break ranks, and that Obama would be unable to stop them. Its confidence was not unfounded; every time Netanyahu and AIPAC had opposed Obama he had retreated. But Obama took up the fight with unusual vigor. …As the Cantor-Hoyer resolution gathered momentum, House Democrats began holding meetings at the White House to strategize about how to oppose it.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, attended the meetings, at some political risk. Wasserman Schultz represents a heavily Jewish district in South Florida, and has been a reliable signature on AIPAC’s letters and resolution; she has boasted of concurring with a hundred per cent of its positions. Now the lobby e-mailed out an “AIPAC Action Alert,” including the text of a story about the meetings in the conservative Washington Free Beacon, in which she was described as “siding with the Mullahs over the American people.” The alert asked AIPAC’s executive-council members to contact her office, ask if the story was true, and challenge her opposition to Cantor-Hoyer. Stephen Fiske, the chair of the pro-Israel Florida Congressional Committee PAC, sent a similar alert to Wasserman Schultz’s constituents, setting off a cascade of calls to her office. (Fiske told the Free Beacon that the callers included a team of young students: his son’s classmate at a Jewish day school in North Miami Beach.) Wasserman Schultz was furious. Soon afterward, she flew to Israel for the funeral of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. On the trip, she remarked to a colleague, “They’re doing this to me?” [Emphasis added.]
Eventually, of course Hoyer disassociated himself from the initiative, and, as the months unfolded, AIPAC’s campaign to undermine the negotiations by enacting new sanctions legislation in both the House and Senate became increasingly partisan, jeopardizing the group’s carefully cultivated image of bipartisanship, until it finally essentially gave up the effort in March. The article offers many such anecdotes, but, of course, the sentence I bolded above helps to confirm the theory that AIPAC’s aim wasn’t to strengthen President Obama’s hand in the P5+1′s (US, UK, France China, Russia plus Germany) talks with Iran; on the contrary, the objective—entirely consistent with Netanyahu’s wishes, was to blow up the talks.
I particularly appreciated Bruck’s pretty extensive quotation of remarks by former Washington State Democratic Rep. Brian Baird whose on-the-record frankness about AIPAC was undoubtedly made possible by the fact that he left Congress in 2010 and apparently has no intention of running again. Baird, one of the very congressmen who traveled to Gaza after the 2009 war, explains the relationship between fund-raising and AIPAC:
“‘The difficult reality is this: in order to get elected to Congress, if you’re not independently wealthy, you have to raise a lot of money. And you learn pretty quickly that, if AIPAC is on your side, you can do that. They come to you and say, ‘We’d be happy to host ten-thousand-dollar fund-raisers for you, and let us help write your annual letter, and please come to this multi-thousand-person dinner.’” Baird continued. “Any member of Congress knows that AIPAC is associated indirectly with significant amounts of campaign spending if you’re with them, and significant amounts against you if you’re not with them.”
“…When key votes are cast, the question on the House floor, troublingly, is often not ‘What is the right thing to do for the United States of America?’ but ‘How is AIPAC going to score this?’” He added, “There’s such a conundrum here, of believing that you’re supporting Israel, when you’re actually backing policies that are antithetical to its highest values and, ultimately, destructive for the country.” In talks with Israeli officials, he found that his inquiries were not treated with much respect. In 2003, one of his constituents, Rachel Corrie, was killed by a bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier, as she protested the demolition of Palestinians’ homes in Gaza. At first, he said, the officials told him, ‘There’s a simple explanation—here are the facts.” Or, “We will look into it.” But, when he continued to press, something else would emerge. “There is a disdain for the U.S., and a dismissal of any legitimacy of our right to question—because who are we to talk about moral values?” Baird told me. “Whether it’s that we didn’t help early enough in the Holocaust, or look at what we did to our African-Americans, or our Native Americans—whatever! And they see us, members of Congress, as basically for sale. So they want us to shut up and play the game.”
While it may seem somewhat unrelated, this last point recalled for me a couple of op-eds published in the New York Times during the most recent war in Gaza on the subject of liberal Zionists (who, not coincidentally, reside almost exclusively in the Democratic Party, and their reaction to the evermore-rightward and aggressive drift of Israeli politics and policy. Both were written by Israelis; the first by Shmuel Rosner, an Israeli writer and fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, which is supposed to study and make recommendations about relations between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora; the second, by Antony Lerman, the former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and author of “The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist.” In his column, “Israel’s Fair-Weather Fans,” Rosner essentially tells liberal Zionists who have warned Israel’s leadership that their right-wing policies are putting at risk the support of liberal US Jews to, in Baird’s words, “shut up and play the game.”
If all Jews are a family, it would be natural for Israelis to expect the unconditional love of their non-Israeli Jewish kin. If Jews aren’t a family, and their support can be withdrawn, then Israelis have no reason to pay special attention to the complaints of non-Israeli Jews.
…If they still want to root for a Jewish state, there’s no substitute for Israel. If they believe there is a need for Jewish sovereignty, Israel is the only option available to them. As the song says, there’s no other country even it it’s on fire.
For his part, Lerman more or less agrees that liberal Zionists in the US have become largely irrelevant, at least in terms of influencing Israeli policies and actions, and thus his title, “The End of Liberal Zionism.”
“Today, the dominant organizations, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as a raft of self-appointed community leaders, have swung to the right. They have made unquestioning solidarity with Israel the touchstone of Jewish identity—even though majority Jewish opinion is by no means hawkish.
…In reality, the only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe.
Noting that the collapse of the latest US efforts for peace talks, as well as Netanyahu’s de facto rejection last month of the possibility of an independent Palestinian state (despite his previous grudging commitments to a two-state solution), Lerman argues that liberal Zionists have reached a dead end.
Liberal Zionists must now face the reality that the dissenters have recognized for years: A de facto single state already exists, where rights for Jews are guaranteed while rights for Palestinians are curtailed. Since liberal Zionists can’t countenance anything but two states, this situation leaves them high and dry.
Of course, this reality also means that liberal Zionists—who undoubtedly constitute a majority of American Jews (who in turn constitute a major source of political campaign funding for Democrats)—face a choice between their Zionism, as defined by Netanyahu and AIPAC, on the one hand and their liberal values on the other. The two appear to have become mutually exclusive.
]]>by Derek Davison
They say “everybody’s a critic,” and they’re right. Who wouldn’t want to be a critic? Not only is criticism important, but being a critic can be fun and easy. The Greek historian Plutarch once wrote, “It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man’s [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
They say “everybody’s a critic,” and they’re right. Who wouldn’t want to be a critic? Not only is criticism important, but being a critic can be fun and easy. The Greek historian Plutarch once wrote, “It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man’s oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome,” and he was also right. As long as you don’t have to come up with an alternative, being a critic is awesome.
Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham carefully consider the many problems with US foreign policy.
When it comes to President Obama’s foreign policy, no two people have availed themselves of the ease and joy of being critics more than Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Luckily, the American news media is always ready to offer them optimal TV time to expound on their nuanced view that Things Are Really Bad Right Now, Because Barack Obama. They’re a formidable pair; the venerable senators’ foreign policy critiques are so often in agreement that when even a sliver of daylight appears between the two, it’s literally national news.
For the critic, then, the only hard and fast rule is to avoid talking about what you would do at all costs. However, when Senator Graham shared his critical thoughts about Obama’s foreign policy record July 20 on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he let his guard down a little, and we got a glimpse of what a Lindsey Graham foreign policy agenda might look like:
DAVID GREGORY:
Well, Senator, there’s a lot to unpack there, specifically with regards to Russia. This crisis over the downing of the Malaysia Airlines flight. What did Secretary Kerry not say? What is the administration not yet prepared to do that you think must be done?
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM:
One, he didn’t call Putin the thug that he is. He didn’t call for arming the Ukraine so they can defend themselves against rebel separatists supported by Russia. All of the enemies of our nation are being well supplied. Russia and Iran are helping Syria. 160,000 Syrians have been slaughtered, John Kerry, by Russian-supplied weapons to Assad.
While “arming the Ukraine” to help it defeat an enemy it’s already soundly defeating on the battlefield might seem a bit redundant (also, it’s not “the” Ukraine, but I digress), it’s really the first part of the Graham Agenda that could break new ground in international diplomacy. It’s impossible to know for sure without reviewing all the relevant literature, but it seems safe to say that Senator Graham’s “Call Other Leaders Names if You Don’t Like Them” tactic is a real innovation in the field.
Imagine the implications of the Graham Plan on the world stage. If President Obama were to call Vladimir Putin a “thug,” for example, he would decisively “pwn” the Russian leader and thus fundamentally shift the balance of power throughout Eurasia. Similar “pwns” of other key US adversaries, if deployed strategically, could have comparable effects.
While Senator Graham is understandably reluctant to reveal the rest of his foreign policy playbook, given how much it could benefit President Obama and damage Republican chances of a big victory this fall, we have exclusively obtained a few of his other key insights from a reliable source, though we are unable to confirm the authenticity. Still, it’s no exaggeration to say that this is world-changing stuff:
- Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev: “Thug Junior”
- Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi/Caliph Ibrahim: “Jerk-Faced Jerk”
- Chinese President Xi Jinping: “Putzy McPutzerson”
- Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: “Captain Doody-Head”
- Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: “Polly Prissypants”
- Hamas leader Khaled Mashal: “Mr. I.P. Freely”
- Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar: “Amanda Hugnkiss”
- Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri: “President Lamewad”
- Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: “El Matón”
- Former Cuban President Fidel Castro: “Barack Obama”
Hopefully someone will be able to make good use of this information. The future security of the United States — indeed, of the entire world — could hang in the balance.
Photo: Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) during a break in testimony at the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 7, 2013. Credit: US Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley/DOD
]]>by Jasmin Ramsey
The talks in Vienna over Iran’s nuclear program will likely continue past the July 20 deadline for reaching a final deal. President Barack Obama noted “real progress” but hinted at an extension yesterday after being briefed by Secretary of State John [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
The talks in Vienna over Iran’s nuclear program will likely continue past the July 20 deadline for reaching a final deal. President Barack Obama noted “real progress” but hinted at an extension yesterday after being briefed by Secretary of State John Kerry, who held several meetings with the Iranians this week.
On Wednesday, an Iranian diplomat told the Japanese Kyodo News that the talks could be extended by two months, but there’s still no official word. The editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post have meanwhile come out on the side of continued negotiations.
Presently there’s not a lot of buzz around the question of whether Congress will push for more sanctions on Iran. Indeed, senior Senate aides told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that they do not see the same level of tension over a possible extension compared with the beginning of the year.
Still, as Jim wrote earlier this week, key lawmakers here in Washington are trying to make sanctions relief to Iran conditional on Congressional approval.
While the prospects of reaching a comprehensive deal any time soon are far from certain, one thing is for sure: important actors, from all sides of the political spectrum inside Iran, support the diplomatic process. Indeed, just this week the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI) released a study showing leading Iranian activists’ support for the negotiations.
The report, Voices from Iran: Strong Support for the Nuclear Negotiations, shows that support for a successful deal are equally forthcoming not only among human rights victims and former political prisoners, but also among those who believe that the negotiations themselves would have no effect on the human rights situation in Iran.
“Opponents of the nuclear talks cannot use human rights concerns as a tool to undermine the negotiations,” said Hadi Ghaemi, Executive Director of the Campaign. “The very individuals who have suffered the most from the human rights crisis in Iran remain fully committed to the negotiations.”
More than two-thirds of the 22 key human and civil rights defenders interviewed said they felt an agreement resulting in the lifting of sanctions would improve the economic conditions of ordinary people, who would then be enabled to focus on improving civil liberties.
“Every single human rights advocate — along with journalists, editors, private business owners and so on — I have met in Iran hopes for the resolution of the nuclear conflict and eventual ending of sanctions for two basic reasons: one is economic and one is political,” said independent scholar and LobeLog contributor Farideh Farhi.
“As one prominent human rights advocate told me, the right to economic livelihood is also a human rights issue. Given the comprehensive nature of US-led sanctions, these folk see them as major violations of the Iranian peoples’ rights and want them removed,” said Farhi, who is currently in Tehran.
“Politically, while the lifting of sanctions is not presumed to automatically lead to better treatment of dissidents and critics by the state, there is hope that the reduced threat perception and reduced fear of regime change will eventually lead to the further loosening of the political environment,” she added.
“Conversely, there is fear that a breakdown in the nuclear negotiations may lead to the intensification of domestic factional and institutional conflicts, which have historically harmed the more vulnerable political and civil rights activists as well as members of the press,” she said.
This should be important news for US, Canadian (also see here) and EU politicians who appear worried that seriously engaging Iran on its nuclear program will lead to worsened human rights violations and/or believe further punitive measures at this time will improve the situation.
As Jim noted:
While [House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif and ranking member Eliot Engel, D-NY] were releasing their letter, on one side of the Capitol, Sen. Mark Kirk, by far the biggest Congressional recipient of AIPAC-related funding in his 2010 re-election campaign, teamed up with Marco Rubio, the keynoter at last year’s Republican Jewish Coalition convention, to introduce The Iran Human Rights Accountability Act on the other. Among other provisions, it would impose visa bans and asset freezes against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. It’s just the kind of thing that generates a lot of goodwill in Tehran. Indeed, one of the Act’s chapters could only be interpreted as “regime change:” it declares the “policy of the United States” to be laying “the foundation for the emergence of a freely elected, open and democratic political system in Iran that is not a threat to its neighbors or to the United States and to work with all citizens of Iran who seek to establish such a political system.” Another gift to the hard-liners in Tehran who are as eager to undermine their negotiators in Vienna as the hawks here are to blow up the negotiations.
“The study makes clear that anyone concerned about human rights in Iran should not use human rights to undermine a nuclear deal,” Mike Amitay, a senior policy analyst at the Open Society Policy Center, told LobeLog. “Human rights issues should be addressed in tandem with support for the negotiations and in a way that does not undermine the success of the negotiations.”
“In this regard, recently introduced rights legislation is counterproductive and offered now as an attempt to scuttle a deal,” he said.
By the way, here’s Josh Fattal, who spent 2 years as an American hostage in Iran’s notorious Evin prison, urging Congress to support the nuclear talks with Iran:
The most important point I’d like to impress on our negotiators and members of Congress is that this is a historic opportunity. Additionally, the human toll from decades of confrontation is immeasurable. My suffering as a political hostage in Evin Prison from 2009 to 2011 was a result of decades of mutual hostility between the U.S. and Iran. But, taken in context, I got off relatively easy with only 26 months behind bars. A resolution to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear capacity will finally lead us down a different path that no longer punishes the Iranian people for the actions of their leaders.
Photo Credit: The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
Sometimes I just cannot begin to imagine what it’s like to be an Arab citizen of the United States, much less a Palestinian one.
There are many people with personal connections to Israel and to Gaza who are frightened, safely sitting in the US and worrying about their friends and family in [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
Sometimes I just cannot begin to imagine what it’s like to be an Arab citizen of the United States, much less a Palestinian one.
There are many people with personal connections to Israel and to Gaza who are frightened, safely sitting in the US and worrying about their friends and family in that region. A lot of them draw comfort from their communities and from the various sources, mostly social media, where they can find not only reports, but also messages of sensitivity and solidarity for their people (often at the expense of the other). But the experience is still very different for Jews and Arabs. Especially in Washington, DC, a Jewish-American citizen can always take comfort that no matter how worried she may be about her relatives in Be’ersheva or Ashkelon or Sderot, the US government is expressing support for Israel. But a Palestinian citizen? Not so much.
Right now, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is pushing nearly identical bills through the House of Representatives, which has already passed one, and the Senate. The bills — both “Sense of Congress” bills, which express a view but bring about no concrete action – declare absolute support for Israel, call Hamas’ violence “unprovoked,” and, in the Senate version only, call on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian unity government.
What can that feel like to a US citizen who has relatives or friends in Gaza?
While Hamas’ indiscriminate firing at Israeli civilians is reprehensible and criminal, claiming its attacks were unprovoked is simply incorrect. As I detailed previously, the attacks were not only provoked, but the provocation was clearly planned by the Netanyahu government. This isn’t exactly ancient history; all this began just a few weeks ago. But the narrative in Washington, in most of the mainstream media, and in much of Israel has been completely turned on its head. Israel’s actions in bringing about these events have been forgotten.
The Senate, probably more keenly aware than most House members that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s goal from the beginning was to dismember the Palestinian unity “government,” added that clause to its call. But what is really striking here is not just the usual one-sidedness of an AIPAC-backed resolution. That is, of course, expected.
What is truly stunning is the stark absence of any mention of the people getting killed. None of those people, so far, are in Israel. At this writing, the death toll in Gaza stands at 174 people, of whom at least 32 are children. 80% of those killed are estimated by the United Nations to have been non-combatants.
No one who pays any attention to the politics of Israel-Palestine would expect Congress to blame Israel for those deaths. No one would expect Congress to comment on the illegal bombings of private homes by Israel, which have killed dozens of innocents. No one would expect Congress to question whether this entire operation constitutes “legitimate self-defense” as permitted by international law.
But even Congress, as intertwined with AIPAC as it has been for so long, could be expected to express some regret at the loss of life. In the past, congressional statements have included such regrets, often saying that they are inevitable because of Hamas’ actions, its embedding itself in civilian areas, etc. They could have done this again. But even that gesture, it seems, is too much for this Congress.
What message does that send to Palestinian-Americans? To all Arab citizens?
It sends the message that Arab life, and especially Palestinian life, is not just cheap, it’s meaningless. It sends that message not only to those citizens, but to all US citizens, and it communicates to the entire world that the deaths of Palestinians are not worth any notice by the United States.
But by allowing AIPAC to speak for us all through our Congress we are allowing the collective voice of the United States to scream to the world that the immeasurably greater destruction raining down on innocent Gazans means nothing to us. The only consolation, and it is microscopic, is that the bills have received fewer co-sponsors – 41 in the Senate and 166 in the House — than what AIPAC bills normally acquire. So far it has received insufficient support for an immediate vote, and has been referred to the Foreign Relations Committee. AIPAC will be pushing the committee hard to get it through.
If it comes to the Senate floor, it will almost certainly pass. Yet no matter how supportive of Israel one may claim to be, it is hard to imagine the moral justification for a statement from Congress that offers, at this time, exclusive support for Israel, where, thankfully, no one has been killed, while not even mentioning Gaza, which has lost 174 people and counting. Is this really a message that the majority of Americans would want to send to the rest of the world? I think not.
Photo: Children play atop a bullet-riddled building in Gaza on April 10, 2011. Credit: UN/Shareef Sarhan
by Wayne White
Coverage of the Iraqi crisis from the media to Capitol Hill has been characterized by scary worst-case scenarios and exaggerations of the military capabilities of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Yet this Islamic extremist group has probably already seized most of the important Iraqi real estate it [...]]]>
by Wayne White
Coverage of the Iraqi crisis from the media to Capitol Hill has been characterized by scary worst-case scenarios and exaggerations of the military capabilities of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Yet this Islamic extremist group has probably already seized most of the important Iraqi real estate it is going to get. It is vital for the US to avoid simply doing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s sectarian dirty work for him and returning Iraq to its previously miserably unbalanced status quo. Under the circumstances, however, avoiding that misstep poses daunting challenges.
The successes of ISIS in Iraq do represent a dicey problem for Iraqi authorities in Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in the north. ISIS now commands the majority of Iraq’s Sunni Arab heartland as well as a large swathe of mixed ethno-sectarian areas, albeit those with substantial Sunni Arab populations. However, very little territory remains outside ISIS’ current holdings where a Sunni Arab extremist movement would be received with open arms or even passive resignation.
Collapse of dysfunctional army units
Admittedly, the performance of Iraqi Army units assigned to Sunni Arab areas like Mosul has been dismal. Retreating in the face of a few thousand lightly armed militants largely without a fight would have been bad enough. However, the loss of all cohesion, mass desertion, and the abandonment of valuable armaments, ammunition, and equipment compounded the collapse and gave additional advantages to ISIS.
These events revealed just how badly crippling internal problems have undermined the Iraqi Army. This has been especially so since Iraq’s dominant Shia establishment made it effectively impossible for American military advisors and trainers to remain in Iraq beyond the US withdrawal in 2011.
Throughout the ranks, the army has suffered from a high degree of politicized, sectarian, or bribe-generated appointments and promotions, debilitating corruption, and a severe lack of intelligence concerning Sunni Arab areas of the country. Its political favoritism and corruption appear to exceed what prevailed during the Saddam Hussein era. The units that collapsed apparently had no clue ISIS was about to attack Mosul. There have also been suggestions that self-serving unit commanders were more concerned about their personal safety than rallying their troops.
Tamping down the panic
As I noted on June 11, Maliki and his cronies woefully underestimated Sunni Arab tolerance for and potential pushback against years of exclusion and abuse. Now, however, a stunned and reeling Iraqi government probably is overestimating ISIS. Correspondingly, in the wake of its run of unexpectedly easy successes, ISIS might well be returning the favor by underestimating Iraqi Army units and militias in Baghdad.
In any upcoming fighting in Baghdad and the south, ISIS would be far more vastly outnumbered than it was in Mosul and likely to encounter armed Shia elements mustering quite a bit of fanaticism of their own. Only one portion of the army was routed in the north; a city many times the size of Mosul would be a huge mouthful for so small a force of ISIS fighters; and Iranian combatants could very well join the fight.
Moreover, despite Senator Lindsey Graham’s comment yesterday that the US “should have discussions with Iran” about the Iraq crisis, this may be irrelevant. Whether talks occur or not, Tehran, already closely aligned with the present Iraqi government, will likely act as it sees fit in Iraq to serve Iranian interests — regardless of US views on the matter.
Finally, if, as expected, the US commences air strikes, ISIS’ task of moving farther south would be that much more daunting. Near the top of the target list of those anticipated US air (and drone) strikes should be major pieces of military equipment seized by ISIS in the north. That would prevent ISIS from deploying them over the border into Syria (already in progress) or putting them to use in its upcoming clashes with Iraqi government forces.
Homeland imperiled by ISIS gains?
Those harping on ISIS’ “threat to the Homeland” are exaggerating that aspect of the problem. Since adopting the ISIS moniker in April 2013, and during operations by its antecedents since January 2012 in Syria (and going back 10 years in Iraq), ISIS has posed little threat to US interests outside Syria and Iraq.
Of late, its efforts have been consumed by its struggle to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, combat moderate and other Islamist rebel rivals in Syria, and recently moving against the Iraqi government. There is a threat to the US to consider, but that is likely to emerge further down the line (but, ironically, could be heightened by US air strikes against ISIS in defense of Maliki & Co.)
One potential direct threat to the US that has also existed as part of the Syrian rebellion since 2012 is that of numerous US and other Western European citizens fighting with ISIS and the extremist al-Nusra Front. The prospect of those militants entering the US at some point (US visa requirements are typically waived for Western Europeans) does pose a threat. That threat is magnified by the difficulty Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies have had in gathering precise data on the identities of such individuals.
Trying to harness the Maliki government
Extracting substantial change in the Iraqi government’s abusive behavior toward its Sunni Arab community poses an extremely tough challenge for US policymakers. Holding back US air and other military support to secure this agreement could render getting assurances the easiest part of this endeavor.
If substantial portions of Sunni Arab Iraq were recovered from ISIS, it is difficult to envision how Iraqi government compliance with a more tolerant policy could be monitored reliably. And accountability is critical; Maliki has broken such pledges before. In fact, it would be best all-round if Maliki could be dumped as prime minister in the ongoing negotiations to form Iraq’s post-election government, but there are no indications that his Shia backers would cooperate.
Further complicating this crucial issue, the upcoming mainly sectarian face-off will inevitably result in atrocities on both sides. Already, ISIS has claimed and videoed its execution of large numbers of captured Iraqi soldiers, inflaming the atmosphere. The recruitment of Shia volunteers (with many hardened Shia militiamen undoubtedly among them) along with the possible employment of elite Quds Force cadres from Iran has also been reducing Baghdad’s control over the behavior of its own combatants.
Atrocities will undermine the ability of even a well-intentioned government in fielding a policy of communal toleration. Even worse, instead of a fast-paced government campaign to drive ISIS out of most of its Iraqi holdings, portions of the coming fight might resemble the more prolonged and grueling 2003-08 US-Iraqi struggle against the Sunni Arab insurgency and ruthless Shia militias.
Sorting out a workable way to thread this complex needle toward a new Iraqi national sectarian compact should be as high a priority for the Obama administration as military measures meant to defeat ISIS. The international community could perhaps be drawn into the task of monitoring Baghdad’s compliance in the coming years. Still, preventing a return to pre-crisis sectarian hostility is likely to be as difficult as the immediate military task of containing and rolling back ISIS — if not more.
This article was first published by LobeLog and was reprinted here with permission.
Photo: Carry weapons and waving Iraqi flags, volunteers join the Iraqi army to fight militants from the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in eastern Baghdad June 15, 2014.
]]>“Speak loudly and carry a small stick.” That pretty much sums up the advice provided by a steady stream of withering critics of President Obama’s foreign policy.
Spurred by off-the-cuff remarks the president made at a news conference in the Philippines last April, the elite blogosphere lit up across the spectrum [...]]]>
“Speak loudly and carry a small stick.” That pretty much sums up the advice provided by a steady stream of withering critics of President Obama’s foreign policy.
Spurred by off-the-cuff remarks the president made at a news conference in the Philippines last April, the elite blogosphere lit up across the spectrum with attacks on Obama’s “small ball” diplomacy. Apparently his detractors think that ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while avoiding costly new military entanglements, preventing terrorist attacks on American soil, ratifying a strategic arms limitation treaty with Russia, removing chemical weapons from Syria, freezing Iran’s nuclear program, closing secret detention facilities, and mounting a humanitarian response to Haiti’s massive earthquake don’t count for much.
Amid all the puffery, what few seem to recognize is how closely Obama’s foreign policy hews to what Stephen Walt describes as the realist philosophy. The president has refrained not only from “naïve idealism” but also from “threat-mongering and the misguided military engagements that flow from both tendencies.” An approach that “relies on the United States deploying every possible economic and institutional lever before resorting to armed force,” as the Washington Post characterized the Obama doctrine, is a sign of wisdom, not of weakness.
In defending his steady, pragmatic approach to the complex challenges around the world, Obama lashed out against those who have failed to learn the lessons of the Iraq war. “Frankly,” he said, “most of the foreign policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures that the American people had no interest in participating in and would not advance our core security interests.”
No Boots on Ground
Neither the American public, Congress, nor most of Obama’s hawkish critics actually have the stomach for “boots on the ground,” be it in Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere else that red lines have been crossed, rights trampled, and lives destroyed. After over a decade of war that left the U.S. economy in tatters, such an approach would not be politically sustainable. Recent polling data shows that nearly half of Americans want the United States to reduce its role in global affairs, and a majority say that Washington should “mind its own business” internationally.
True, the “alternatives” proposed by right-wing critics of Obama’s foreign policy often fall short of outright intervention overseas. They recommend arming opposition forces, conducting provocative military exercises, pre-positioning military equipment, ratcheting up sanctions, and taking firm rhetorical stances. But while they caution against drawing “red lines,” their prescriptions amount to throwing a few Molotov cocktails and then retreating to the safety of their armchairs.
Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) call for supplying the Ukrainians with anti-armor and anti-aircraft systems, shifting military assets eastward, and urgently expanding NATO. Representative Buck McKeon (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, asserts that “radios, body armor, night-vision goggles and such could well alter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculus.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer would have us respond to Russia by creating “the possibility of a bloody and prolonged Ukrainian resistance to infiltration or invasion.”
What President Obama understands is that sending weapons to ill-equipped and poorly trained forces is highly unlikely to deter far more capable adversaries or to change the eventual outcome. On the other hand, it is quite likely to prolong the suffering of civilians, increase the risk of weapons ending up in the wrong hands, and draw us ever closer to direct military confrontation. And once we intervene, we have a responsibility to think about not just “the day after,” but the months and years and decades after.
The Lessons of Libya
This, in fact, is precisely the lesson we learned in Libya, where factional fighting has intensified over the last weeks. As the Washington Post editorialized, “The Obama administration and its NATO allies bear responsibility for this mess because, having intervened to help rebels overthrow Gaddafi, they then swiftly exited without making a serious effort to help Libyans establish security and build a new political order.” Post-conflict recovery requires significant commitments that often include boots on the ground. For instance, nearly 15 years after the end of the conflict, NATO retains 5,000 troops to keep the peace in Kosovo.
Libya has been a cautionary lesson for the Obama administration: political order is rarely established on the battlefield. Leaving military action, direct or indirect, as a last resort is not an indication of indecisiveness or lack of resolve. It’s an acknowledgement that the use of force has a poor record of creating lasting stability at an acceptable cost. And it’s a refusal to take on long-term financial commitments without informed public consent.
Owning the Legacy
Ultimately, however, Obama’s foreign policy legacy will not be secured unless he addresses head-on the belief that we have the right, the responsibility, and the power to achieve our objectives by threats, intimidation, and coercion. Many of the greatest challenges to our own national, economic, and human security — climate change, pandemic disease, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the desperation of over a billion people living in extreme poverty — transcend borders and defy military solutions.
It’s time to give up on the notion that we can or should control the world. Instead we should focus on building a more effective and constructive model for engaging with it. Given a better articulation and the development of new diplomatic tools, this could be the enduring value of the Obama doctrine.
*Diana Ohlbaum is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former senior professional staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
This article was first published by Foreign Policy in Focus and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>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 [...]]]>
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.
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