Have sanctions gotten more effective?

You don’t need an insider’s view of Iran’s nuclear program to know that there are several big problems with the Obama administration’s presumptive sanctions strategy.

In interviews, Mr. Obama’s strategists said that while Iran’s top political and military leaders remained determined to develop nuclear weapons, they were distracted by turmoil in the streets and political infighting, and that the drive to produce nuclear fuel appeared to have faltered in recent months.

If Iran qua corporate actor is incapable of responding to international outreach, there’s little reason to believe that sanctions will generate the kind of far-reaching and fulminant challenge that might force Iran to give a little. The idea of Iran as a corporate actor no longer makes sense now that internal strife has exacerbated factional rivalries and paralyzed foreign policy making. In such a fractured domestic environment, new sanctions become a matter of influencing the balance of power among the factions. Weakening the Revolutionary Guards might only have the effect of further paralyzing domestic decision making by raising other parties to relative parity.

Then there are the usual difficulties with targeting the Guards particularly. They have their money hidden and their reach is extensive. The Iranian political economy has incorporated and worked around sanctions, and its fundamentals remain more or less the same.

However, the biggest problem with sanctions is that the threat Iran’s nuclear activities pose is not political. Iran’s enrichment efforts are dangerous because they’re still happening. Centrifuges are running and undergoing fine-tuning and long-term testing. Uranium is being produced. And stockpiled. The reason the TRR deal was so ingenious was because it removed Iran’s big pile of uranium (the threat) from the picture and allowed everyone some room to breathe. With the right safeguards and verification efforts, this threat can be managed and minimized.

But organizational inertia being what it is, sanctions will most likely have no effect on the progress or product of Iran’s nuclear activities. Political intervention can, but political action is exactly what is not happening in Iran right now. So while the mullahs dither and the P5+1 debates new sanctions, the threat grows because scientists and engineers will do what they do until some big-wig tells them otherwise.

One slightly more interesting part of this report, if true, is something that has been circulating in press reports for the past few weeks.

In addition, international nuclear inspectors report that at Iran’s plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines that are currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems.

Arms Control Wonk has repeatedly pointed out that while the number of operating centrifuges varies, the number of machines undergoing installation has steadily increased. Covert action and technical problems might be having an effect on the rate of installation, but since the centrifuges themselves are in place, if off, this only kicks the can down the road a little. A related indicator of progress might be the rate at which uranium is getting fed into the machines, but even variations here don’t mean much in the long run.

Brian

Filed under: Nuclear , Iran

Health care and engines of progress.

Via Kottke comes a beautiful National Geographic statistical graphic that illustrates just how phenomenally wasteful the American health care system is. The accompanying explanatory paragraph begins: “The United States spends more on medical care per person than any country, yet life expectancy is shorter than in most other developed nations and many developing ones. Lack of health insurance is a factor in life span and contributes to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year.” In short, it says that we spend more than half over as much as the next country for well below average care. No other argument should have been necessary for health care reform—and no argument should be necessary for continued reform. We should not lose sight of the fact that although health care reform was the most important legislation passed in a generation, the most important legislation of the next decade might very well be fixing and extending this health care bill. I’ve been writing a longer post detailing the proposals (which are myriad and inspiring)—but for now this was too pretty and too striking to leave on my desktop.

So I’ll leave this here and say Happy New Year, and this: this year was important for this country—productive, progressive, necessary—but it only mended some of the bleeding. During the term of President Bush, this country lost a decade of economic, social, and political progress; under American leadership, the international system lost a decade of diplomatic progress. President Obama and other ardent progressives stopped this skid with a Herculean effort this year but have left us without momentum. If the arch of the moral universe is to bend toward justice, we progressives must be engines in these next years.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Health , cost, lost decade

Defending national vulnerability.

The recent imposition of draconian new restrictions on foreign travel to the United States give occasion to express something I’ve been mulling over for a while now. To set the stage, notice that these new restrictions are disruptive in no small measure: they mean an extra screening with wands or pat-downs, they mean that many passengers cannot get up to use the restroom in flight, that travelers are restricted to one carry-on, and that they will wait in long lines at foreign airports.

“I don’t feel good,” said Mee Hyun Koo. “It’s uncomfortable, scary.”

Over the weekend, the United States government had been vague about the steps it was taking to increase travel safety, saying that it wanted the security experience to be “unpredictable” and that passengers would not find the same measures at every airport.

And all this, mind you, when no-one died, no-one was injured, when he may not even have been trying to explode a plane, and despite evidence of a wider terror plot and with a President who is fervently trying to break with the hysteria and constant fear of his predecessor. But none of this is what worries me most. What worries me most is that these restrictions were imposed unilaterally: no other country in the world has autarchic regulations on the same scale. And what motivates them is this pervasive search for perfect security that the United States cannot seem to stop dreaming for. Leave aside the fact that it will never be more than a vain and bizarre dream—think of what it does to a country to expect invincibility.

Vulnerability is good for a country. Vulnerability means that we have the strength to absorb a blow and soldier on. It means that we are confident in our way of life and our national character. It means that we trust in the American people to preserve this confidence and spirit even in dire times. Vulnerability means being engaged with the rest of the world and willing to negotiate. Mutual vulnerability was a pillar of Cold War diplomacy, when politics was at its most paranoid, and indeed the cultivation of mutual vulnerability was a stated aim of successive arms control agreements and force posture. We simply do behave better when we accept our own vulnerability.

Think of what this means to each passenger coming from overseas—even if they come from Canada or Europe: what they learn of the United States is that we think of our borders as fortress walls; they learn that we are willing to impose any inconvenience on the rest of the world for the slightest possibility of danger. They do not learn that we are uncompromising; these restrictions declare that we are incapable of reasoning about costs and benefits with regard to terrorism even under the most favorable possible conditions.

They learn that the United States is made of candy-glass, like totalitarianism without the tanks.

Foreigners learn these things about us, and we also teach them to ourselves. I know nothing truer about international politics: terrorism is not an existential threat to the United States and the worst thing we could do is to treat it as such. This is President Obama’s failure. It would be nice to think that the new year will be better.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Who We Are , hysteria, strength, vulnerability

The delicious balance of terror.

At a fundamental level, the debates of nuclear strategy are not so much about throw-weight and yield as they are about the difficulty of the enterprise. Is deterrence easy to establish and maintain, or does it require significant and sustained management? Is deterrence an exercise imbued with complexity and borne by cool headed logicians? Or will any adversary capable of making cost/benefit calculations hesitate once he considers the probable consequences of launching a nuclear attack?

This is really not so much a debate about whether deterrence is robust as it is whether it’s robust on the margin, for any situation under a range of changing inputs and circumstances. Wohlstetter and those that walk in his long shadow argued pretty successfully that technological changes require constant reflection about the stability of the strategic balance.

Missiles were to be dispersed, bombers kept on alert, warning systems updated; nuclear war needed to be thought through. But others—let’s call them deterrence optimists—argued this relationship is much more robust than the pessimists led on. Some of the details matter—whether nuclear forces are second-strike capable, whether the international political environment can admit scenarios in which nuclear retaliation is morally acceptable, if horrifying—but the overwhelming majority of the technical vagaries resist the kind of analytical rigor that Wohlstetter reached for.

Consider, for the sake of analogy, cooking.

I don’t take much stock in Cooks Illustrated. Don’t get me wrong: Cooks will teach you how to brine a turkey. But the underlying philosophy of the magazine and its founder is that cooking good food is hard and fleeting, that it takes precise measurement and fine-tuned recipes. Maybe even graduate training in food science. Christopher Kimball’s elitist culinary ken is endearing in its dweebishness, but it basically represents a deeply antisocial approach to food. Folks will be more likely to stay home and eat healthful meals if they’re delicious, but if Cooks had its way, far fewer people would be cooking at home. The opportunity cost of people’s time is high, and most people (you know, on the margin) would rather have a little more time to themselves than calibrate a meat thermometer.

Delicious food isn’t nearly as hard to come by as Kimball would have you believe. Mark Bittman has built a career out of demonstrating that good food isn’t out of the reach of anyone with a heat source, a handful of good ingredients, and a sharp knife. On balance, this kind of planning and preparation also threatens to be inimical to eating seasonally: Farmers markets aren’t exactly recipe friendly sources of ingredients.

Once a few basic rules are established, there is a sizable margin for experimentation and substitution. Sometimes it doesn’t work. More often than not, however, friends and families will forgive the occasional ugly tart and delight in good food prepared with care. What made Julia Child so compelling for so many people was her willingness to laugh at the unpredictability of cooking and to experiment with techniques and ingredients.

Unlike cooking, nuclear deterrence allows no margin for error. But deterrence is about establishing robust fundamentals while weighing the opportunity cost of changes at the margin. Perhaps we do need smaller and smarter nukes to deter the threat of new nuclear-armed powers. But Lieber and Press need to weigh the strategic benefits from procuring those capabilities against the political costs of building more usable weapons. For one, the United States’ ability to exact nonproliferation commitments, particularly from countries with the ability to develop nuclear weapons, will be shot if it develops vastly more usable nuclear weapons. Most important, however, the strategic benefits themselves are dubious, since an enemy using nuclear weapons in a Hail Mary attempt at regime survival is probably not thinking very rationally to begin with. Can the United States count on Kim Jong Il to make rational cost/benefit decisions when U.S. forces are surrounding Pyongyang?

The President needs a menu of options for responding to a nuclear attack on US territory, allies, or forces overseas. But nuclear strategy isn’t haute cuisine. We know what works, and trying much harder than that can have worse consequences than we imagined or intended.

Happy holidays, and bon appétit.

Brian

Filed under: Nuclear, food, strategy , Deterrence

Up or down votes on defense procurement.

I just wanted to point quickly at a policy brief CNAS put out by Ethan Kapstein on reforming America’s defense procurement. The brief is derived from a longer article from the journal Business and Politics that compares the American system to the recently-reformed French analogue. The upshot is to underscore the importance of recruiting expert engineers as procurement officers, careful ex-ante cost analysis, and limiting the role of Congress. It’s pretty straightforward, but here’s something I didn’t know: the French National Assembly makes up or down votes on military budgets whole, like the U.S. Congress can do for trade bills. Kapstein doesn’t take the plunge and recommend it, but maybe he should have. I’ve heard worse ideas—like continuing the expensive, delayed, shoddy status quo.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Military , procurement

Shaking your money makers—and when I say ’shake’ I mean Tobin tax.

There has long been a tacit maxim in public policy that new proposals will ideally be financed by new taxes that are relevant to the proposal. Solutions to tragedy of the commons problems, for example, advocate taxing intemperate corporations or actors to force them to internalize the externalized costs of their action. One of my favorite examples of this is taxing cigarettes to pay for treatment of childhood asthma or lung cancer research. (Of course, the maxim is a socially suboptimal solution—even if smokers pay for treatment of kids with asthma, they’ve still created kids with asthma!) The maxim is not always followed, but it’s usually thought of desirable if a proposal can be pitched that way; it’s rhetorically compelling to argue that those who cause a mess should be the ones responsible for cleaning it up.

The last week has seen an interesting trend away from this maxim in international deliberations over climate change. Two new proposals have called for levying the vast sums that fly about the international financial system in order to assist developing countries in transitioning their economies to more sustainable footings. The first is George Soros’ well-publicized idea to release Special Drawing Rights money for the loans, an idea that apparently caught China’s eye. S.D.R.s are reserve assets backed by the gold reserves of the International Monetary Fund which are indexed to a basket of important currencies and often used to provide liquidity to countries facing capital shocks—essentially a virtual currency. If S.D.R.s can be used to bail developed countries out of a financial crisis they created—and they did, to the tune of $150 billion—why not use them to transition developing economies away from reliance on carbon.

The second is a very old, and very compelling idea that has gained a surprising new life among European leaders. In parallel to the announcement that they would lead a €2.4bn commitment to help developing countries adjust, Sarkozy and Gordon Brown called on the IMF to seriously consider the imposition of a Tobin tax on international financial transactions. Originally developed by the American economist James Tobin as a way to alleviate the radically destabilizing effects of international currency speculation, the proposal advocates that major financial exchanges impose a miniscule tax (one tenth of one cent on the dollar) on all large international transactions. The sum would be negligible for legitimate foreign direct investment but would be debilitating for currency speculators. Jeff Frankel’s work [pdf] for NBER on the subject is an extraordinarily clear and balanced investigation of Tobin’s proposal. Tobin also made a suggestion regarding what to do with the revenue earned from the tax (which could be vast): end poverty. Now the revenue is supposed to be used for structural adjustment assistance.

In both cases, the maxim seems to have fallen by the way-side: international financial institutions are to be held responsible for solving global warming. Of course, there may well be nothing wrong with this: solving global warming is clearly a moral imperative and international politicians should use the most effective means at their disposal to do so (provided they do not cause comparable harm, of course). It got me to thinking, though, that Thomas Pogge would see nothing wrong with considering Tobin’s original proposal as satisfactory of the responsibility maxim: his arguments that the global financial architecture as complicit in causing and perpetuating global inequality would lead him to the conclusion that a Tobin tax, or some S.D.R.-like provision scheme, are not an unfair way of addressing global poverty. Is he wrong? Maybe not. Why shouldn’t we hold a system that creates wealth efficiently for developed countries but not for undeveloped countries responsible for redressing the imbalance?

a.j.m.

Filed under: International Organization, sustainability, the next order , pogge, poverty, tobin tax

The urban professional’s sartorial trilemma.

While the Mundell-Fleming trilemma remains undoubtedly important and all that, consider a similar impossibility triad nearer to the hearts of young urban professionals. Start by recognizing three desirable properties of a morning commute: wearing dress clothes, riding a bicycle, and leaving the house fully dressed. A brief reflection on each will suffice to establish their definition and inherent appeal. First, moderately attractive dress clothes are necessary for a young professional to project an air of authority, competence, and attractiveness. For the more discerning specimens of said group, chinos, car shoes, and silk v-necks will not suffice; pleated wool slacks (which get caught in a chain and dislike moisture), long skirts (which clash with a bike’s top tube), leather-bottomed shoes (which dislike pedals), ironed dress shirts and blouses (which bags wrinkle) are a must. Further compounding the problem, most office-suitable dress clothes are poorly suited to the climatological extremes of a city like Washington. Second, in a fairly flat and congested city like Washington, riding a bike is imperative. It’s faster than a car, avoids the parking conundrum, keeps you out of a metro tube, and lets you feel the world before sitting in meetings all day. Third, leaving the house fully dressed allows many benefits: there is no awkward switching phase in a lobby bathroom, it saves precious bag space, and lets one adjust and arrange things in the comfort of one’s home.

Clearly, all three are desirable, but for any given trip, only two of the three are possible. Of course, as with Mundell-Fleming and other trilemma, points in the interior of the triangle are possible options. And, of course, some slight compromises can be made on each point to try to slip the trilemma’s grasp: the shoe leather on the bottom of oxfords can be replaced by rubber; vests can ameliorate the shirt-wrinkling trouble; a mixte can let a girl wear a skirt; for those who prefer clipless pedals, a pair of oxfords can be left under the desk at work, as can an odd jacket on the back of a door. Still, the trouble seems inescapable. Feel free to send along any other coping methods you’ve found.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Cloth , bikes

A primer on the Naxalite insurgency.

Many Americans who have been trained to fixate on Islamist terrorism—who watched the Mumbai attacks of this time last year in horror—will be surprised to learn that India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently described not Islamist terrorists but a Maoist insurgency as India’s greatest security threat. But so he did. I knew very little about the Naxalites before reading about them tonight, so I thought I’d pass a primer on.

The Naxalite insurgency is a surprisingly widespread and well-organized campaign that originates in the central-Eastern Chhattisgargh state and has spread from there, usually in forested areas populated sparsely by adivasis (still-marginalized tribal peoples). Violence has been throttling up lately, and deaths from the conflict reached nearly 1,000 last year; some estimates place the strength of the insurgent force at 20,000. The New York Times points out that the number of Indian security forces killed approaches the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan last year. The insurgents employ sophisticated tactics that appear to aim at waging a sustainable fight that cuts to the center of the Indian state—before entering a new region, insurgents will conduct detailed social surveys to determine which social grievances can be exploited; Iron ore investment and roads are being pushed out of forested regions; IEDs and landmines plague the police forces; and a number of ambushes have surrounded and killed large numbers of official troops (including seventeen in October).

The government’s official response (which, according to the Indian constitution, must be deployed by state authorities) has only recently taken the problem seriously. October and November of this year saw the preparation of some 70,000 counterinsurgency troops for combat in the region (more than the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan). The government’s previous policy rightly drew widespread criticism: official opted to provide arms and training for the Salwa Judum, a—supposedly spontaneous—group of militant villagers and child soldiers from the region, who reportedly have a penchant for raising noncombatant villages, summary execution, rape, and other wartime atrocities. Caught between two vicious paramilitary groups, the local population is being pressed into refugee camps.

Unfortunately, the only response available are the usual COIN platitudes—areas must be swept and development projects must win over the local population, &c. Being an expert in neither India nor counterinsurgency, of course I can’t do any better. But, as the Economist recognizes, the Naxalite insurgency is a frightening one, that strikes at the very heart of frailties in the Indian state: “Other terrorists attack the Indian state at its strong points—its secularism, its inclusiveness, its democracy. Naxalism attacks where it is weakest: in delivering basic government services to those who need them most.”

a.j.m.

Filed under: War , COIN, India, Naxalites

This just-in from the annals of Republican strategy

Read this Wonk Room piece for a good plain-English summary of Jon Kyl’s obstructionist tactics on nuclear issues to date.

Where Bergmann sees confusion and equivocation, I just see one facet of a larger Republican strategy to discredit and derail the president’s agenda. Kyl has ported many talking points from the health care debate to the START issue with little modification.

In July, the Post got its hands on the Republican health care talking points. A “key message point” was that the Administration was moving waaay too fast to resolve a problem as large and complex as health care (emphasis mine unless otherwise noted).

The Obama Experiment with our health could change everything we like about our health care — and our economy.

This big a risk, that risky an experiment is not something leaders on either side should rush through Congress in a few days or weeks.

Slow down, Mr. President. We can’t afford to get health care wrong.

President Obama is experimenting with America, too much, too soon, and too fast.

The Republican message on START is eerily similar: By working to get New START signed by December, the administration is playing fast and loose with US nuclear posture. A GOP memo on the START follow-on released in September warned

If the Administration can complete an agreement consistent with these principles and submit it with sufficient time for the Senate to complete a thorough review by the time START expires, then it is more likely to gain the two-thirds majority necessary for Senate consent.

And in June, Kyl warned the Administration in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that

Similarly, US desire to complete the negotiations quickly is resulting in too many concessions, particularly on missile defense: “…we may end up abandoning a needed defense of the U.S. and our European allies from the looming Iranian threat.

Other, frankly facile arguments include the length of the proposals themselves. Remember all that griping about a health care bill too long for most Americans to read? From the GOP memo, again:

Nine years and 700 pages later, the United States and Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on July 31, 1991.

The Moscow Treaty is three pages long and came to pass after six months of negotiation.

The message comes through loud and clear: by negotiating a big bad arms control treaty, rather than a short and sweet one, the President only has himself to blame if the Senate fails to ratify the treaty. (A pettier blogger might point out that if the Moscow Treaty had been a little longer and included half the verification measures set to expire in four days, maybe Rose Gottemoeller wouldn’t have spent the bulk of the last few months in the belly of an airliner.)

Kyl, who as GOP whip has got his hands into most Senate business, thinks that by politicizing the arms control he can drag it and the president down more effectively than if he had to argue the treaty on its merits. This is where the parallels between the health care debate and START end, because while the White House has all hands on deck for health care, there has been woefully little high-level engagement of Congress on nuclear issues.

SORT notwithstanding, the Senate hasn’t ratified an honest-to-god treaty in years. If Obama hopes to accomplish any meaningful fraction of his disarmament agenda, he needs to start engaging and educating key senators and their staff. Indeed, he should have started a long time ago. But that hasn’t happened, and Kyl has moved in to fill the vacuum with half-truths, cheap-shots, and the lowest of low politics.

Brian

Filed under: Arms Control, Domestic , New START

Cheaper guns and better butter?

This incredibly wonky table from a report by the people who bring you Foreign Policy in Focus caught my eye last week.

One thing that’s obvious is how lavishly more expensive the stuff on the right is compared to the stuff on the left. Not only that, but relatively small shifts in resources from the left column to the right can produce disproportionately positive improvements in overall security. By scrapping a single DDG-1000 you could double the amount of money spent on nonproliferation, etc. Given the success of Nunn-Lugar programs, that could be money more efficiently spent.

Politics gets in the way of the right decisions—no arms controller worth her political salt would advocate cutting the stockpile stewardship budget before the CTBT is ratified, and weapons platforms have historically had stronger constituencies than the often idiosyncratic reforms on the right.

But what often gets left out in these types of discussions is why weapons platforms are so expensive relative to measures that, while less sexy, could have a huge impact on long-term security, and whether this relationship is tenable.

On the one hand, weapons platform development is inherently capital-intensive. Research and development requires significant investment with little guarantee of success. Success is usually considered “worth” the high costs of development. When we had to plan to fight the Soviets over Germany, these costs were justified. On the other hand, we may soon be entering a time when high-technology high-cost weapons platforms are neither militarily necessary nor popular.

Even if counterinsurgency doctrine falls short of becoming the new defense orthodoxy, the needs of current conflicts and the undeniable tendency toward COIN-centric planning means that the average cost of your average weapons platform may get a lot cheaper in the next decade—more A-10 warthog close air fighters (per unit cost: $13 million) than F-22s (per unit cost: $100.1 million). Whether this trend toward building the weapons we need vs. the weapons some people demand depends in part on how effectively Gates’s Pentagon can cleave congress away from the teat of defense contractors.

Meanwhile, look at the stuff on the right—institutional funding/reforms, capacity-building, preventive measures—these measures could quickly get more expensive. For example, according to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

Adaptation actions can be grouped into three broad categories:

(a) Actions that climate-proof socio-economic activities by integrating future climate risk;

(b) Actions that expand the adaptive capacity of socio-economic activities to deal with future and not only current climate risks; (capacity building, or decreasing the opportunity costs of alternative socio-economic activity)

(c) Actions that are purely aimed at adapting to impacts of climate change and would not otherwise be initiated. (costs endogenous to climate change adaptation)

Examples for each category include capacity-building, research and assessments, disaster risk reduction and risk management, and specific interventions. The adaptation component to be funded could either constitute the whole action (Category C) or part of the socio-economic activity (Categories A and B).

Increasing the costs of carbon-positive activities, building the social capacity to respond to climate change externalities, decreasing the opportunity costs of climate-friendly activities, and decreasing the intristic costs of adaptating to climate change…these costs could quickly get pretty high.

It will probably continue to be the case that weapons development is an expensive endeavor. But it remains the case as well that even as the steps on the right column get relatively pricier, the long-term security benefits justify the expense. Institutional reform, capacity-building, direct assistance, preventive measures—even a 100% increase in the resources available for some of these efforts can pay enormous security dividends. Meanwhile, one more attack submarine will do little to improve the chances of catching Bin Laden, and I don’t think we’ll be facing a big attack sub challenge from the Chinese any time soon.

The challenge is to fund the right mix of weapons technologies that can respond to extant physical threats while developing the capacities and funding measures that can reduce the causes of insecurity in the first place. The optimum level of security, in other words, depends on funding the right mix of reactive “kinetic” capabilities and preventive structural reforms. Kinetic capabilities at minimum deny only tactical success to adversaries, and at best they deter attacks in the first place. Long-term international stability depends on addressing root causes, not just on strategic stability. It’s a fundamentally progressive idea whose time has come.

(Hat tip to NoH and Travis Sharp)

Brian

Filed under: Military, the next order , defense spending