Last week IPS Washington Bureau Chief Jim Lobe discussed how Barak Obama and Mitt Romney might differ with respect to Iran based on Obama’s record and Romney’s campaign thus far.
Q: How might the approach to Iran differ depending on who does end up in power at the end of the [...]]]>
Last week IPS Washington Bureau Chief Jim Lobe discussed how Barak Obama and Mitt Romney might differ with respect to Iran based on Obama’s record and Romney’s campaign thus far.
Q: How might the approach to Iran differ depending on who does end up in power at the end of the day?
Jim Lobe: I think that’s very difficult to predict. On the one hand the Obama team is quite determined to avoid any military action if at all possible and indeed we have what are described as “leaks” out of the White House this weekend covered by the New York Times indicating that Obama is for one-on-one talks with Iran. Although the White House denied that report, there seems to be a lot of buzz around it. So presumably something is going on and it seems also the Europeans are encouraging such an approach at this point and it’s something that Obama himself had promised when he ran for president 4 years ago — that he wanted to engage the Iranians directly.
Romney, on the other hand, is unlikely to do so. In fact, his campaign has strongly denounced these leaks, as has, for example, the Wall Street Journal, which is a strong supporter of Romney. As to what Romney would actually do, again, I think it’s very difficult to predict. He has a range of advisers from kind of traditional realists like Robert Zoellick, who is a former president of the World Bank, to a group of thinkers who are described best as neoconservatives, who are extremely hawkish on Iran and whose views are very close to those of Bibi Netanyahu, who would like nothing better than to somehow get the United States to attack Iran or Iran’c nuclear facilities at the very least.
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With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney virtually tied with Election Day less than two weeks away, Muslim voters could play an unexpected critical role in deciding the outcome Nov. 6.
A poll of 500 registered Muslim voters released here Wednesday found that more than two-thirds (68 percent) currently plan to vote [...]]]>
With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney virtually tied with Election Day less than two weeks away, Muslim voters could play an unexpected critical role in deciding the outcome Nov. 6.
A poll of 500 registered Muslim voters released here Wednesday found that more than two-thirds (68 percent) currently plan to vote for Obama and only seven percent for Romney. But a surprisingly large 25 percent said they were still undecided between the two main party candidates.
And tens of thousands of those undecided voters are disproportionately concentrated in three “swing” states – Ohio, Virginia and Florida – where the candidates are focusing their campaigns in the last two weeks.
“The Muslim vote could be decisive in several battleground states,” said Naeem Baig, chairman of the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT), which co-sponsored the survey and whose political arm is expected to formally endorse candidates before the election.
The poll, which was conducted during the first two weeks of October, also found large majorities of respondents who said that the U.S. should support rebels in Syria (68 percent) and that Washington was right to intervene with NATO in last year’s revolt against the Qadhafi regime in Libya (76 percent).
Respondents were roughly evenly divided on whether the U.S. has provided sufficient support to the uprisings in the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring.
Precisely how many Muslim citizens there are in the United States – and hence how many Muslim voters – has been a matter of considerable debate. The U.S. Census is forbidden to ask residents their religious affiliation.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), another co-sponsor of the survey and an 18-year-old grassroots organisation that has become one of the country’s most active national Muslim groups, estimates a total U.S. Muslim population at between six and seven million, or about the same as the total number of U.S. Jews.
The Pew Research Center, on the other hand, last year estimated the total number of Muslim Americans at 2.75 million, of whom about one million were children and hence ineligible to vote. It found that more than 60 percent of U.S. Muslims are immigrants, and, of those, more than 70 percent are citizens.
Most native-born Muslims are African Americans, who, together with Arabs, Iranians, and South Asian comprise roughly 80 percent of the total U.S. Muslim population.
CAIR estimates the total number of registered Muslim voters at at least one million. Ohio, according to CAIR’s estimates has around 50,000 registered Muslim voters; Virginia, around 60,000; and Florida, between 70,000 and 80,000.
Historically, Muslim Americans have been split in their voting behaviour, but in the 2000 election 72 percent voted for George W. Bush primarily because his campaign met at length with Muslim organisations and, during a key debate with then-Vice President Al Gore, the former president spoke out against the use of secret evidence in deportation hearings and racial profiling. Four national Muslim organisations eventually endorsed his candidacy.
But, disillusioned with his administration’s harsh response to 9/11, including the detention of hundreds of Muslim men, the passage of the so-called Patriot Act, as well as the war in Iraq, U.S. Muslims abandoned Bush.
In the 2004 election, 93 percent of Muslims voted for the Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry; another five percent for third-party candidate Ralph Nader, and only one percent for Bush, according to surveys conducted at the time.
The Democratic shift continued in 2008 when nearly 90 percent of Muslim voters cast their ballots for Obama and only two percent for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain.
Whether that level of support will be retained for Obama, however, is unclear, according to CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, who said Muslims were in some respects disappointed by Obama’s inability or failure to fully follow through on some of his campaign pledges to amend or rescind the more onerous provisions of the Patriot Act and close the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba.
Like the general public, he noted, Muslims have also been disappointed by the president’s performance on the economy and reducing unemployment.
In addition, noted Oussama Jammal, who chairs a public affairs committee of the the Muslim American Society (MAS), noted that Obama’s greater use of drones to strike suspected Al-Qaeda and other Islamist militants in Pakistan “is not selling well in the (Muslim) South Asian community”.
Revelations regarding “unprecedented surveillance” of mosques and the use of agents provocateurs by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have also hurt Muslim confidence in Obama, according to Baig.
The 500-person sample on which the poll was based was drawn from a data base of nearly 500,000 Muslim American voters that was, in turn, developed by matching state voter-registration records with a list of some 45,000 traditionally Muslim first and last names prevalent in a variety of the world’s Muslim-majority ethnic groups.
Respondents included 314 men and 186 women across the country. Twenty-six percent of respondents were born in the U.S.; while 71 percent were not. (Three percent declined to answer the question.) Ninety-three percent said they had lived in the U.S. 10 years or more.
Of the total sample, 43 percent said they were of South or Southeast Asian ancestry; 21 percent, Arab; eight percent, European; and six percent from Iran and Africa each, an indication that African American Muslims, who are estimated to comprise about 30 of all Muslim Americans, may have been under-represented.
Half of respondents said they attend a mosque at least once a month.
The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus five percent.
In addition to its findings about presidential preferences, the poll found that a whopping 91 percent of respondents intend to vote in this year’s election. In the last presidential election in 2008, only about 57 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.
It also found that the percentage of those who considered themselves closer to the Democratic Party grew from 42 percent in 2006 to 66 percent today, while affiliation with the Republican Party remained roughly the same at between eight and nine percent since 2008. Fifty-one percent of respondents said they considered the Republican Party, several of whose presidential candidates during the primary campaign made blatant Islamophobic remarks, hostile to Muslims.
Asked how important they considered 16 current foreign and domestic issues education, jobs and the economy, health policy, and civil rights were called “very important” by four out of five respondents. Seventy-one percent said they considered “terrorism and national security” in the same category, while two-thirds of respondents named the “possibility of war with Iran”.
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Robert Wright points out why a first-term President Mitt Romney would be more susceptible to hardline pressure on Iran than a second-term President Barack Obama:
Second-term presidents think legacy, and nothing says legacy like peacefully and enduringly solving a problem that’s been depicted as apocalyptic. So expect Obama to pursue serious negotiations [...]]]>
Robert Wright points out why a first-term President Mitt Romney would be more susceptible to hardline pressure on Iran than a second-term President Barack Obama:
]]>Second-term presidents think legacy, and nothing says legacy like peacefully and enduringly solving a problem that’s been depicted as apocalyptic. So expect Obama to pursue serious negotiations with Iran (which he hasn’t really done yet) if he wins the election. And he’ll be able to pursue them liberated from concerns about re-election, which means he can largely ignore blowback from Bibi Netanyahu, AIPAC, and other elements of the Israel lobby. That sort of freedom is important if he wants to bargain seriously with Iran.
…
Any first-term president who hopes for re-election (that is, any first-term president) is mindful of lobbies, whether the sugar lobby, the Cuba lobby, or the Israel lobby. So any new president would likely have a harder time peacefully solving the Iran problem than a second-term President Obama. But for Romney this disadvantage is compounded by two factors.
Laura Rozen’s recent interview with former Mossad director Efraim Halevy focuses heavily on diplomatic options for the US, Israel and Iran in the impasse over the Iranian nuclear program. Halevy, like former Mossad director Meir Dagan and a number of past and present US and Israeli national security officials, opposes preventive [...]]]>
Laura Rozen’s recent interview with former Mossad director Efraim Halevy focuses heavily on diplomatic options for the US, Israel and Iran in the impasse over the Iranian nuclear program. Halevy, like former Mossad director Meir Dagan and a number of past and present US and Israeli national security officials, opposes preventive military action against Iran because he fears it will lead to the collapse of the international sanctions regime, a regional war and only embolden Iran to build and deploy nuclear weapons as a deterrent in the years following the attack.
Particularly interesting is Halevy’s description of Obama and Romney’s approach to the Iran issue.
Obama has placed emphasis on negotiations. In this current election for the US presidency, his hands are tied. He cannot proceed, because he cannot appear soft on Israel’s security.
Negotiating with Iran is perceived as a sign of beginning to forsake Israel. That is where I think the basic difference is between Romney and Obama. What Romney is doing is mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war. Therefore when [he recently] said, he doesn’t think there should be a war with Iran, this does not ring true. It is not consistent with other things he has said. […]
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Robert Wright has an excellent piece at the Atlantic exploring the “hidden causes” of the protests against the United States across the Muslim world. The violence, which it’s important to emphasize is never excusable, is receiving little serious analysis in the mainstream media.
Robert Wright has an excellent piece at the Atlantic exploring the “hidden causes” of the protests against the United States across the Muslim world. The violence, which it’s important to emphasize is never excusable, is receiving little serious analysis in the mainstream media.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali – who sympathized with Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik back in May – published a cover story in this week’s Newsweek titled, “Muslim Rage & The Last Gasp of Islamic Hate.” She wrote:
The Muslim men and women (and yes, there are plenty of women) who support — whether actively or passively — the idea that blasphemers deserve to suffer punishment are not a fringe group. On the contrary, they represent the mainstream of contemporary Islam.
That type of simplistic analysis, says Wright, fails to ask or answer the real questions about why parts of the Muslim world hold deep-seated resentment towards the US. Wright blogs:
[W]hen a single offensive remark from someone you’ve long disliked can make you go ballistic, the explanation for this explosion goes deeper than the precipitating event. What are the sources of simmering hostility toward America that helped fuel these protests? Here is where you get to answers that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney wants to talk about and that, therefore, hardly anybody else talks about.
Wright goes on to list drone strikes, the US’s unconditional support of Israel (sometimes at the expense of progress in the peace process), and American troops in Muslim countries as some of the explanations for the eruption of anger. “…[W]hen American policies have bad side effects, Americans need to talk about them,” he writes.
Indeed, reflecting on US policies in the Middle East is a verboten topic during the presidential election. Mitt Romney, in comments surreptitiously recorded at a fundraiser and released this morning, quipped:
I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, “There’s just no way.” And so what you do is you say, “You move things along the best way you can.” You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem… All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it. We don’t go to war to try and resolve it imminently.
But the media and Obama and Romney’s unwillingness to publicly acknowledge the geopolitical dangers for the US in the Middle East does come at a a very human cost. Back in March 2010, Gen. David Petraeus set off a firestorm when his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee linked the lack of progress in the peace process with security risks for the US. Petraeus said:
Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.
Petraeus’ comments, later echoed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CENTCOM commander Gen. James Matthis, were met with denunciations by Israel hawks. The Anti-Defamation League event went so far as to label Petraeus’ views as “dangerous and counterproductive.”
With anger in the Muslim world towards the US erupting over the past week, observers are left with two options: Accept an Islamophobic, if not outright racist, narrative of irrational Arab and Muslim anger towards the US or start asking tough questions about US policy, as well as US strategic interests, in the Middle East.
Some of the US’s most prominent strategic thinkers have already warned about the geopolitical and security dangers facing the US as a result of failed policies in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the TV news cycle and the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney appear to have little bandwidth to openly discuss the strategic challenges facing Americans in the Middle East, even while US diplomats are finding themselves in harms way.
]]>Adding to a central point of David Remnick’s article in the New Yorker earlier this week — that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone too far with his pressure campaign against President Barak Obama and alienated allies in the process — are additional arguments in the National Interest, the [...]]]>
Adding to a central point of David Remnick’s article in the New Yorker earlier this week — that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone too far with his pressure campaign against President Barak Obama and alienated allies in the process — are additional arguments in the National Interest, the National Journal (print edition), Al-Monitor and the Atlantic:
Paul Pillar explains how “Netanyahu’s Arrogance” may contribute to the reshaping of US-Israel relations:
Maybe Netanyahu’s arrogance, greater than the norm even for Israeli prime ministers dealing with the United States, may be a force that eventually reshapes the relationship. It can do so by making it painfully clear to Americans what they are dealing with. M. J. Rosenberg evidently is talking about this when he goes so far as to say that Netanyahu “poses an existential threat to the Jewish state.” He is referring to the damage being done to the relations with the superpower patron—that “all Netanyahu is accomplishing with his ugly saber-rattling is threatening the survival of the US-Israel relationship.” That may well be the effect of Netanyahu’s behavior on the relationship, but perhaps we should not speak of this in terms of threats. Replacing the current pathological relationship with a more normal one certainly would be good for U.S. interests. Ultimately, however, it also would be good for the interests of Israel, which, in order to get off its current path of endless conflict and isolation, desperately needs the sort of tough love that it is not getting now.
James Kitfield argues that “by inserting himself into a U.S. presidential election, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has jeopardized the long-term health of the alliance”:
But more important, this pressure on a U.S. president waging a tough reelection campaign all but guarantees that the enmity between Obama and Netanyahu will only worsen, to the point where they, like Shamir and Bush, may not talk frankly or show their true cards. What if one country wants to strike and other isn’t ready? What if one country strikes and then both need to coordinate the aftermath? If the leaders aren’t on the same page, their countries aren’t likely to be either. Netanyahu’s gambit has lowered trust when the stakes–war and a nuclear-armed rogue–are highest.
Barbara Slavin says Netanyahu’s misreading of US attitudes is harming his own strategy:
Recent polls show that 70% of the American people do not think it is worth attacking Iran to try to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons — and a majority would not join an Israeli strike against Iran. For someone partly raised and educated in the United States, the Israeli prime minister is profoundly misreading the American mood.
Instead of pushing the US government to agree to “red lines” beyond which Iran cannot cross, Netanyahu is alienating US officials and many other Americans — including those who count themselves pro-Israel. The Israeli prime minister is repeating a pattern of ill-considered behavior that made the administration of Bill Clinton so furious at him that Clinton’s campaign advisers eagerly went to Israel in 1999 to work for Netanyahu’s then political rival, Ehud Barak.
And while being less daring than the others, even Jeffrey Goldberg is trying to explain why Netanyahu is taking the risk of “alienating” Obama:
]]>So why risk alienating the man who he believes will probably be president until January of 2017? Because Netanyahu genuinely believes that Obama, at the crucial moment (whether it is this year, next year or the year after), will flinch and allow Iran to cross the nuclear threshold. This is why he is pestering the President for red lines. I’ll get into the red line discussion later, but the nub of the issue now is Netanyahu’s view of Obama.
News and views relevant to US Foreign policy for Sept. 14
“Moments of Truth in Libya and Egypt”: Marc Lynch, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, discusses the significance of the protests in Egypt and Libya for US relations. Although the events in Libya – [...]]]>
News and views relevant to US Foreign policy for Sept. 14
“Moments of Truth in Libya and Egypt”: Marc Lynch, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, discusses the significance of the protests in Egypt and Libya for US relations. Although the events in Libya – where terrorists apparently used the fortuitously-timed public demonstrations as cover for a preplanned operation targeting US diplomats – have seen the Pentagon dispatch drones and warships to the country, Lynch notes that the difference in official and public responses in Egypt and Libya says much about how leaders in these places view US influence over them:
In short, the response from Libya suggests a broad national rejection at both the governmental and societal level of the anti-American agitation. The leaders have said the right things and have done their part to quickly pre-empt a spiral of conflict and recrimination between Americans and Libyans.
…. In Egypt, on the other hand, President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood has been notably invisible. To this point, we have heard no statements from Egyptian government officials condemning the assault on the embassy, no expressions of concern or sympathy, no suggestion of any fault on their own side. The Muslim Brotherhood had previously been planning rallies against the notorious film, and at the time of this writing has not canceled them. Even when they finally issued a statement condemning the violence in Libya, they were not forthcoming on Cairo.
An exchange between the Muslim Brotherhood’s public relations people and the US embassy in Cairo highlighted the differences with respect to Egypt. Though the Brotherhood condemned the attack on the Cairo compound in English, the US Embassy noted that on its Arabic-language social media feeds, the Brothers were praising the men who stormed the Cairo compound and had called for further protests outside of the embassy on Friday.
As Foreign Affairs commented:
The Muslim Brotherhood’s sponsorship of the film protests might be an ill-advised attempt at the diversionary politics Mubarak was a master of, but the costs are high. . If Egypt’s ultra-Salafists take a harder line on the film or manage to co-opt the protests, Morsi could easily lose ground to them.
More protests have since taken place outside US embassies in Tunisia, Sudan and Yemen and have resulted in the breach of the facilities by the protestors. The Obama Administration is now facing further criticism that it had advance warning of threats made against US facilities abroad on 9/11 this year but did not raise alert levels, and over remarks Obama made in a television interview following the Cairo protests stating that while the US did not consider Egypt an ally, it also did not consider Egypt an enemy.
Officially, Egypt is classified as a “major non-NATO ally” and receives US$1.5 billion in military assistance annually. The State Department has since walked back the president’s remark.
“Egypt trying to persuade Iran to drop Assad”: The Associated Press reports that the Egyptian government is seeking to work out an exit for the Assads from Syria with Iran’s support, in exchange for normalizing relations with the Islamic Republic:
Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi made the offer when he met last month with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran, officials close to the Egyptian presidency said. Morsi’s visit to Iran, to attend a summit of the 120-nation Nonaligned Movement, was the first by an Egyptian president since the 1979 Islamic Revolution there, when diplomatic ties between the countries were cut.
….
Cairo would agree to restore full diplomatic ties, a significant diplomatic prize for Iran given that Egypt is the most populous Arab nation and a regional powerhouse. Morsi would also mediate to improve relations between Iran and conservative Gulf Arab nations that have long viewed Shiite Iran with suspicion and whose fears of the Persian nation have deepened because of Iran’s disputed nuclear program. …. Morsi’s argument is that neither Assad nor the rebels fighting his regime appear to be capable of winning the civil war, creating a stalemate that could eventually break up the Arab nation with serious repercussions for the entire region, the officials said.
“Israel’s window for action against Iran ‘is getting much smaller,’ says Ambassador Oren”: The Times of Israel carries an interview with Israel’s US ambassador, Michael Oren. Questioned by his interviewers as to what isn’t “well between the US and Israel,” Oren downplays the significance of public disputes between the two countries and accusations of partisanship, responding that “in the strategic issues, the spectrum of our common interests and communications is vast”:
When we talk about Iran, we proceed on the assumption that we have a structural difference. The structural difference is that Israel is a small country, living in Iran’s backyard, with certain capabilities. And Israel is threatened almost daily with national annihilation. And of course the United States is a big country, far away from Iran, with much greater capabilities, and not threatened with national annihilation.
…. Clearly, things have been said which might not have been helpful for the situation. But at the same time in the last few weeks the prime minister had telephone conversations with American officials — he had an hour-long conversation with the president the other night — and things are also said not for public consumption. And they are part of this very intimate, candid and continuous dialogue that we have with the United States.
When asked, Oren denied that Netanyahu has been using the elections to push the US further towards Israel’s “red lines.” His boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, recently gave a rare interview to The Jerusalem Post – stating much the same – in an apparent effort to deflect criticism that he is rooting for a Republican victory in November.
“Boxer Expresses Disappointment Over Israeli Prime Minister’s Remarks”: Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a widely-reported letter this Wednesday criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for politicizing debate over the Iranian nuclear program. Boxer emphasizes the increased sanctions on Iran and military aid the US has provided to Israel since Obama took office, and asks that he clarify his views of the US-Israel relationship:
In light of this, I am stunned by the remarks that you made this week regarding U.S. support for Israel. Are you suggesting that the United States is not Israel’s closest ally and does not stand by Israel? Are you saying that Israel, under President Obama, has not received more in annual security assistance from the United States than at any time in its history, including for the Iron Dome Missile Defense System?
As other Israelis have said, it appears that you have injected politics into one of the most profound security challenges of our time – Iran’s illicit pursuit of nuclear weapons.
I urge you to step back and clarify your remarks so that the world sees that there is no daylight between the United States and Israel. As you personally stated during an appearance with President Obama in March, “We are you, and you are us. We’re together. So if there’s one thing that stands out clearly in the Middle East today, it’s that Israel and America stand together.”
“Romney’s foreign policy: An ideology that dare not speak its name”: The Washington Post carries an interview with Alex Wong, the foreign policy director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, in which Wong parries questions over whether or not Romney is a neoconservative himself:
Q: Does he embrace neoconservatism?
A: “You know,” said Wong, “throughout this campaign Governor Romney has indicated that his view on the world is peace through strength, American leadership, in guaranteeing an American century, that this new century continues to be an American century. And that’s the governing philosophy of Governor Romney on peace through strength.”
Q: So does he consider himself a neoconservative?
A: “What I’m saying is,” said Wong, “Governor Romney’s embrace of American values and interests and his call for American leadership is a philosophy of peace through strength.”
The interviewer, Jason Horowitz, later commented on the exchange in a separate article:
]]>His [Romney’s] reaction this week [to the violence in Libya and Egypt] made it clear that when it comes to Republican foreign policy, the neocons are still the only game in town.
…. Romney and his advisers — Wong declined to say whether they were consulted before the candidate weighed in on the the embassy chaos — are tripling down on the clear contrasts offered by neoconservatism’s trumpeting of values, which lends itself nicely to campaign seasons but is more complicated in actual governance (see the war in Iraq).
By John Feffer
via Tom Dispatch
Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” — a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all [...]]]>
By John Feffer
via Tom Dispatch
Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” — a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all things global — has been a smart move politically at home. It has largely prevented the Republicans from playing the national security card in this election year. But “smart power” has been a disaster for the world at large and, ultimately, for the United States itself.
Power was not always Obama’s strong suit. When he ran for president in 2008, he appeared to friend and foe alike as Mr. Softy. He wanted out of the war in Iraq. He was no fan of nuclear weapons. He favored carrots over sticks when approaching America’s adversaries.
His opponent in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn this hesitation to use hard power into a sign of a man too inexperienced to be entrusted with the presidency. In 2007, when Obama offered to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran, Clinton fired back that such a policy was “irresponsible and frankly naïve.” In February 2008, she went further with a TV ad that asked voters who should answer the White House phone at 3 a.m. Obama, she implied, lacked the requisite body parts — muscle, backbone, cojones– to make the hard presidential decisions in a crisis.
Obama didn’t take the bait. “When that call gets answered, shouldn’t the president be the one — the only one — who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq war from the start,” his response ad intoned. “Who understood the real threat to America was al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Who led the effort to secure loose nuclear weapons around the globe.”
Like most successful politicians, Barack Obama could be all things to all people. His opposition to the Iraq War made him the darling of the peace movement. But he was no peace candidate, for he always promised, as in his response to that phone call ad, to shift U.S. military power toward the “right war” in Afghanistan. As president, he quickly and effectively drove a stake through the heart of Mr. Softy with his pro-military, pro-war speech at, of all places, the ceremony awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Obama’s protean abilities have come to the fore in his approach to what once was called “soft power,” a term Harvard professor Joseph Nye coined in his 1990 book Bound to Lead. For more than 20 years, Nye has been urging U.S. policymakers to find different ways of leading the world, exercising what he termed “power with others as much as power over others.”
After 9/11, when “soft” became an increasingly suspect word, Washington policymakers began to use “smart power” to denote a menu of expanded options that were to combine the capabilities of both the State Department and the Pentagon. “We must use what has been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural — picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation,” Hillary Clinton said at her confirmation hearing for her new role as secretary of state. “With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy.”
But diplomacy has not been at the vanguard of Obama’s foreign policy. From drone attacks in Pakistan and cyber-warfare against Iran to the vaunted “Pacific pivot” and the expansion of U.S. military intervention in Africa, the Obama administration has let the Pentagon and the CIA call the shots. The president’s foreign policy has certainly been “smart” from a domestic political point of view. With the ordering of the Seal Team Six raid into Pakistan that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden and “leading from behind” in the Libya intervention, the president has effectively removed foreign policy as a Republican talking point. He has left the hawks of the other party with very little room for maneuver.
But in its actual effects overseas, his version of “smart power” has been anything but smart. It has maintained imperial overstretch at self-destructive expense, infuriated strategic competitors like China, hardened the position of adversaries like Iran and North Korea, and tried the patience of even long-time allies in Europe and Asia.
Only one thing makes Obama’s policy look geopolitically smart — and that’s Mitt Romney’s prospective foreign policy. On global issues, then, the November elections will offer voters a particularly unpalatable choice: between a Democratic militarist and an even more over-the-top militaristic Republican, between Bush Lite all over again and Bush heavy, between dumb and dumber.
Mr. Softy Goes to Washington
Mr. Softy went to Washington in 2008 and discovered a backbone. That, at least, is how many foreign policy analysts described the “maturation” process of the new president. “Barack Obama is a soft power president,” wrote theFinancial Times’s Gideon Rachman in 2009. “But the world keeps asking him hard power questions.”
According to this scenario, Obama made quiet overtures to North Korea, and Pyongyang responded by testing a nuclear weapon. The president went to Cairo and made an impressive speech in which he said, among other things, “we also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But individuals and movements in the Muslim world — al-Qaeda, the Taliban — continued to challenge American power. The president made a bold move to throw his support behind nuclear abolition, but the nuclear lobby in the United States forced him to commit huge sums to modernizing the very nuclear complex he promised to negotiate out of existence.
According to this scenario, Obama came to Washington with a fistful of carrots to coax the world, nonviolently, in the direction of peace and justice. The world was not cooperative, and so, in practice, those carrots began to function more like orange-colored sticks.
This view of Obama is fundamentally mistaken. Mr. Softy was a straw man created from the dreams of his dovish supporters and the nightmares of his hawkish opponents. That Obama avatar was useful during the primary and the general election campaign to appeal to a nation weary of eight years of cowboy globalism. Like a campaign advisor ill-suited to the bruising policy world of Washington, Mr. Softy didn’t survive the transition.
Consider, for example, Obama’s speech in Cairo in June 2009. This inspiring speech should have signaled a profound shift in U.S. policy toward the Muslim world. But what Obama didn’t mention in his speech was his earlier conversation with outgoing president George W. Bush in which he’d secretlyagreed to continue two major Bush initiatives: the CIA’s unmanned drone air war in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands and the covert program to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program with computer viruses.
Obama didn’t just continue these programs; he amplified them. The result has been an unprecedented expansion of U.S. military power through unmanned drones in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan as well as Somalia and Yemen. The use of drones, and the civilian casualties they’ve caused, has in turn enflamed public opinion around the world, with the favorability rating of the United States under Obama in majority Muslim countries falling to a new low of 15% in 2012, lower, that is, than the rock-bottom standard set by the Bush administration.
The drone campaign has undermined other smart power approaches, including that old standby diplomacy, not only by antagonizing potential interlocutors but also by killing a good number of them. Along with the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, often cited as one of Obama’s signal accomplishments, the drone war has by now provoked a slow-motion rupture in relations between Washington and Islamabad.
The covert cyber-war initiative against Iran’s nuclear program, conducted with Israeli cooperation, produced both the Stuxnet worm, which wreaked havoc on Iranian centrifuges, and the Flame virus, which monitored its computer network. Instead of vigorously pursuing diplomatic solutions — such as the nuclear compromise that Brazil and Turkey cobbled together in 2010 that might have defused the situation and guaranteed a world without an Iranian bomb — the Obama administration acted secretly and aggressively. If the United States had been the target of such a cyber attack, Washington would have considered it an act of war. Meanwhile, the United States has set a dangerous precedent for future attacks in this newest theater of operations and unleashed a weapon that could even be reverse-engineered and sent back in our direction.
Nor was diplomacy ever actually on the table with North Korea. The Obama team came in with a less than half-hearted commitment to the Six Party process — the negotiations to address North Korea’s nuclear program among the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas, which had stalled in the final months of George W. Bush’s second term. In the National Security Council, Asia point man Jeffrey Bader axed a State Department cable that would have reassured the North Koreans that a U.S. policy of engagement would continue. “Strategic patience” became the euphemism for doing nothing and letting hawkish leaders in Tokyo and Seoul unravel the previous years of engagement. After some predictably belligerent rhetoric from Pyongyang, followed by a failed missile launch and a second nuclear test, Obama largely dispensed with diplomacy altogether.
Hillary Clinton did indeed move quickly to increase the size of the State Department budget to hire more people and implement more programs to beef up diplomacy. That budget grew by more than 7% in 2009-2010. But that didn’t bring the department of diplomacy up to even $50 billion. In fact, it is still plagued by a serious shortage of diplomats and, as State Department whistleblower Peter van Buren has written, “The whole of the Foreign Service is smaller than the complement aboard one aircraft carrier.” Meanwhile, despite a persistent recession, the Pentagon budget continued to rise during the Obama years — a roughly 3% increase in 2010 to about $700 billion. (And Mitt Romney promises to hike it even more drastically.)
Like most Democratic politicians, Obama has been acutely aware that hard power is a way of establishing political invulnerability in the face of Republican attacks. But the use of hard power to gain political points at home is a risky affair. It is the nature of this “dumb power” to make the United States into a bigger target, alienate allies, and jeopardize authentic efforts at multilateralism.
A Kinder, Gentler Empire
Despite its rhetorical flexibility, “smart power” has several inherent flaws. First, it focuses on the means of exercising power without questioning the ends toward which power is deployed. The State Department and the Pentagon will tussle over which agency can more effectively win the hearts and minds of Afghans. But neither agency is willing to rethink the U.S. presence in the country or acknowledge how few hearts and minds have been won.
As with Afghanistan, so with the rest of the world. For all his talk of power “with” rather than “over,” Joseph Nye has largely been concerned with different methods by which the United States can maintain dominion. “Smart power” is not about the inherent value of diplomacy, the virtues of collective decision-making, or the imperatives of peace, justice, or environmental sustainability. Rather it is a way of calculating how best to get others to do what America wants them to do, with the threat of a drone strike or a Special Forces incursion always present in the background.
The Pentagon, at least, has been clear about this point. In 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued for “strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power.” The Pentagon has long realized that a toolbox with only a single hammer in it handicaps the handyman, but it still persists in seeing a world full of nails.
At a more practical level, “smart power” encounters problems because in this “integration,” the Pentagon always turns out to be the primary partner. As a result, the work of diplomats, dispensers of humanitarian aid, and all the other “do-gooders” who attempt to distinguish their work from soldiers is compromised. After decades of trying to persuade their overseas partners that they are not simply civilian adjuncts to the Pentagon, the staff of the State Department has now jumped into bed with the military. They might as well put big bull’s eyes on their backs, and there’s nothing smart about that.
“Smart power” also provides a lifeline for a military that might face significant cuts if Congress’s sequestration plan goes through. NATO has already shown the way. Its embrace of “smart defense” is a direct response to military cutbacks by European governments. The Pentagon is deeply worried that budget-cutters will follow the European example, so it is doing what corporations everywhere attempt during a crisis. It is trying to rebrand its services.
Always in search of a mission, the Pentagon now has its fingers in just about every pie in the bakery. The Marines are doing drug interdiction in Guatemala. Special Operations forces are constructing cyclone shelters in Bangladesh. The U.S. Navy provided post-disaster relief in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, while the U.S. Army did the same in Haiti. In 2011, the Africa Command budgeted $150 million for development and health care.
The Pentagon, in other words, has turned itself into an all-purpose agency, even attempting “reconstruction” along with State and various crony corporations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is preparing for the impact of climate change, pouring R & D dollars into alternative energy, and running operations in cyberspace. The Pentagon has been smart about its power by spreading it everywhere.
Dumb vs. Dumber
As president, Obama has shown no hesitation to use force. But his use of military power has not proven any “smarter” than that of his predecessor. Iran and North Korea pushed ahead with their nuclear programs when diplomatic alternatives were not forthcoming. Nuclear power Pakistan is closer to outright anarchy than four years ago. Afghanistan is a mess, and an arms race is heating up in East Asia, fueled in part by the efforts of the United States and its allies to box in China with more air and sea power.
In one way, however, Obama has been Mr. Softy. He has shown no backbone whatsoever in confronting the bullies already in America’s corner. He has done little to push back against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his occupation policies. He hasn’t confronted Saudi Arabia, the most autocratic of U.S. allies. In fact, he has leveraged the power of both countries — toward Iran, Syria, Bahrain. A key component of “smart power” is outsourcing the messy stuff to others.
Make no mistake: Mitt Romney is worse. A Romney-Ryan administration would be a step backward to the policies of the early Bush years. President Romney would increase military spending, restart a cold war with Russia, possibly undertake a hot war against Iran, deep-six as many multilateral agreements as he could, and generally resurrect the Ugly American policies of the recent past.
But President Romney wouldn’t fundamentally alter U.S. foreign policy. After all, President Obama has largely preserved the post-9/11 fundamentals laid down by George W. Bush, which in turn drew heavily on a unilateralist and militarist recipe that top chefs from Bill Clinton on back merely tweaked.
Obama has mentioned, sotto voce, that Mr. Softy might resurface if the incumbent is reelected. Off mic, as he mentioned in an aside to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a meeting in Seoul last spring, he has promised to show more “flexibility” in his second term. This might translate into more arms agreements with Russia, more diplomatic overtures like the effort with Burma, and more spending of political capital to address global warming, non-proliferation, global poverty, and health pandemics.
But don’t count on it. The smart money is not with Obama’s smart power. Mr. Softy has largely been an electoral ploy. If he’s re-elected, Obama will undoubtedly continue to act as Mr. Stick. Brace yourself for four more years of dumb power — or, if he loses, even dumber power.
John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is an Open Society Fellow for 2012-13 focusing on Eastern Europe. He is the author of Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam (City Lights Books). His writings can be found on his website johnfeffer.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which John Feffer discusses power — hard, soft, smart, and dumb — click here or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2012 John Feffer
]]>Author and senior editor at the Atlantic Robert Wright has a knack for highlighting important Iran policy-related statements made by leading U.S. politicians. Here he is clearing up any confusion about Mitt Romney’s “red line” on Iran when compared to that of President Obama after Peter Baker of the [...]]]>
Author and senior editor at the Atlantic Robert Wright has a knack for highlighting important Iran policy-related statements made by leading U.S. politicians. Here he is clearing up any confusion about Mitt Romney’s “red line” on Iran when compared to that of President Obama after Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote that they aren’t that different. (Of course, as Paul Pillar has noted, the President’s red line isn’t exactly something to gloat about since it practically commits the U.S. to a disastrous war that would be far worse than living with a nuclear-armed Iran if the Islamic Republic did indeed make the decision to take the plunge):
]]>Some people are trying to find signs of moderation in Romney’s reference to his “fervent hope” that “diplomatic and economic measures” will succeed. But the fact is that by making the mushy-to-the-point-of-useless term “capability” the red line (or red blur), he has empowered Israel to say at any point, “Sorry, but diplomatic and economic measures have failed; the bombs were dropped this morning.”
I agree with Peter Baker that there aren’t many clear differences between Obama and Romney on foreign policy. But now we do have at least one: Romney says Israel can bomb Iran any time it wants and America will be happy to inherit the blowback. Obama doesn’t say that. I’d call that a difference of doctrinal proportions.