Responsibility is not progress.

Stephen Walt’s exchange with Paul Wolfowitz in Foreign Policy magazine over how great (bad) realism is mostly consists of the predictable rote bludgeoning. But the last line of his expression of the need for an offshore balancing posture stuck with me:

Wolfowitz may be correct about one thing: Barack Obama is probably not a “realist.”  The president is essentially a pragmatist, and his foreign policy does not seem to flow from any particular ideological vision.  But with the possible exception of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, his administration is chock full of traditional liberal internationalists, many of whom backed the Iraq war in 2003 and who still believe that it is America’s mission to go out and right wrongs wherever they may arise.  That’s why we are plunging deeper into Afghanistan, why Hillary Clinton spent a couple of weeks telling Africans how to run their countries, and why the foreign-policy establishment continues to think we are making progress every time Washington has to assume responsibility for fixing some foreign problem.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Grand Strategy , Offshore balancing, walt

A Theory of Change

Today, as we steer a new course at the United Nations, our guiding principles are clear: We value the U.N. as a vehicle for advancing U.S. policies and priorities, and universal values…We work for change from within rather than criticizing from the sidelines. We stand firm in defense of America’s interests and values, but we don’t dissent just to be contrary. We listen to states great and small. We build coalitions. We meet our responsibilities. We pay our bills. We push for real reform. And we remember that in an interconnected world, what’s good for others is often good for America as well.

—UN Ambassador Susan Rice, speaking today at NYU.

Brian

Filed under: Grand Strategy, International Organization, Liberalism, Practicing Politics, Who We Are, the next order

Baitullah Mehsud is dead. Long live Baitullah Mehsud!

Conventional military wisdom holds that if you take out the head, the rest of the body will follow—if the leaders of armed groups are killed, the organization will operationally collapse soon after. There are a number of good reasons to think this is the case: Rigid hierarchies and chains of command mean that decision making is usually paralyzed without someone at the top to guide the overall endeavor. It’s not the worst plan in the world, then, to target military leaders in order to ease the defeat of their armies.

Hence, last week’s air strike on Pakistan’s Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, which apparently killed the bastard. But rumors are now surfacing that Mehsud isn’t dead after all. So we’re going after him again. That’s well and good, but there’s a chance that it won’t make much more than a short-run difference in the fight against the Taliban.

When we talk about terrorist organizations, we usually refer to them as “networks” in order to capture their informal and often decentralized decision making structures. What this means, if we take the frame to its logical conclusion, is that attacks on leaders may have little effect on the survival of the network in the long run. The strength of a network comes from its nodes—killing off leaders might just spur the emergence of a new figurehead who can unify support without unifying operational leadership. In other words, if you kill Mehsud, you might just get another one in his place.

Terrorist networks, if they are truly networks, are dangerous at the level of their potential to adapt and emerge in new contexts. Defeating them requires taking out their bases of support, not just their leaders. Now, it’s possible that the Taliban has taken on a different structural form. The point, though, is that not every group of armed thugs is created equal. Different structures imply different responses. When the Obama folks get around to crafting a strategy for Af-Pak, they’d do well to consider that.

My two posts on symbolism are tabled for the time being while I finish up a project. If only we could all be full-time bloggers.

Brian

Filed under: Grand Strategy , Af-Pak, terrorism

Let’s make a 5 billion dollar deal.

Not at all surprisingly, Henry Kissinger lays out the case against the former first-lady’s husband’s trip to North Korea with nuance and equanimity. His op-ed in the New York Times rightly focuses our reflections away from the present emotional photo-op and on the strategic consequences, wondering Obama’s move to free the incarcerated journalists sets a precedent for other countries looking for world attention in the future—and if this case is unique because of the DPRK’s nuclear program, is that not another incentive to develop a program? North Korea has been incorrigibly cynical about its diplomacy, bilateral talks are unworkable, and the nuclear question must be resolved. The trip was therefore an errant and perhaps harmful distraction. These reflections are typical of realist thinkers, but Kissinger gives a characteristically thoughtful expression—but that doesn’t make him right.

Kissinger’s interpretation misses the mark: Clinton’s trip has little to do with hostages, or bilateral talks, and everything to do with bringing the DPRK back to the six-party table with the intention to progress on the nuclear question. It is anything but an errant distraction. Remember that Clinton was the last President to make progress on the North Korean nuclear program, producing the imperfect but practicable Agreed Framework in 1994 that will represent the general outlines of any eventual solution. Remember, too, that when the framework was abrogated in 2003 it was American recalcitrance as much as North Korean that caused to setback. The North Koreans have shown their willingness to accept a basic bargain of energy and status incentives in return for nuclear concessions. Whether we can strike the right balance is a function of the expectations of the countries going into the talks, and in North Korea, expectations have everything to do with status. Obama lost very little in sending President Clinton to negotiate for the release of the two journalists, and perhaps put the six-party talks on their first firm footing.

Bolton and others suppose that deals like the Framework give “the North and other rogue states a roadmap for maximizing the benefits of illicit nuclear weapons.” But extortion has hardly been the problem so far. The $5 billion price tag of two light water reactors was shared by South Korea, Japan, and the EU; KEDO funding never exceeded half a billion U.S. dollars annually; and the diplomatic representation? costs nothing but some plump in the Bolton’s rage-walrus mustache. The opposite of the opposite of the How to Steal a Billion dynamic (being unable to accurately weigh the benefits of very large sums of money) is this: it’s difficult to know when you’re getting a bargain, but this is one. North Korea loses nothing by continuing to develop weapons. Microsoft’s revenue (3Q 2008) was nearly three times that sum; Warren Buffett made headlines in September 2008 by investing $5 billion in Goldman Sachs; in March, the government spent $5 billion in financial assistance to auto part makers. Or we could pay off the North Koreans and keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of Myanmar and god knows who else. $5 billion, split four ways, plus fuel oil, and one Clinton handshake is a bargain. Cut the deal, once and for all. Clinton’s trip is the first step.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Arms Control, Grand Strategy , DPRK

Symbolism matters

I’m working two posts on the role of prestige and status considerations in international affairs. (Big topic, I know. It’s not like I have a new job or anything.)

Symbolic gestures have received little play from political scientists. Meanwhile, practitioners—diplomats, bureaucrats, and political appointees—understand the significance of symbolism and how to deploy it to win political victories, but this understanding operates at the tactical level. Policy-types have good intuitions about flattery, symbolic gestures, and the significance of words as well as deeds. We know it’s good diplomacy to deploy high-profile envoys in order to exact concessions from seemingly egotistic regimes. We’re less clear on 1) how prestige influences decisions and 2) how prestige motivations can be used to advance U.S. interests, particularly when actions taken by states in pursuit of prestige run up against U.S. interests. In other words, we’re missing some understanding of prestige and political symbolism at the strategic level. The next two posts will attempt just that.

Prestige and status are fundamental to the international system, but so far we can only deal with it on a day-to-day level. This is, in some ways, a uniquely American problem. We ignore how other countries seem themselves relative to us and others to our own disadvantage.

—Brian

Filed under: Grand Strategy, Practicing Politics , prestige

Why not unilateral disarmament?

George Perkovich and James Acton, who have recently and rightfully positioned themselves at the forefront of the new nuclear abolitionists, have a piece in the most recent Bulletin that rebuts certain caricatures of the mature disarmament position. The strongest thread that comes out of the piece is this: ‘as long as other states have nuclear weapons, the United States should maintain a credible nuclear deterrent. Period.’ Noting that ‘nuclear disarmament isn’t an end in itself; it’s a means to enhanced national and global security,’ they argue that the United States should not ‘give them up until the threats that require them have ceased.’ The authors are to be commended for taking an holistic and pragmatic view to nuclear disarmament; if we are to abolish nuclear weapons, it will probably have to be through these means. To be certain, this is the only argument that will command any sort of following among those of influence in the United States.

But is it right? I’m less certain of that. For one, this op-ed, and the longer report from which it derives, seems to make security a prerequisite for disarmament—which, as we have said, is meant to be a means to security. If disarmament cannot demand its intended effect as prerequisite, it must be a cautious starting point by itself.

Beyond the critical point, there are two ways to go about making the argument that Perkovich and Acton are being unnecessarily cautious. The first is to assert that in any endeavor, some country must lead and leadership entails costs. This is a typical solution to collective action problems taught in first-year undergraduate courses. The United States, for example, incurred enormous costs in lives and finances to lead what was intended to be a global war on terror. The costs of leadership with respect to nuclear disarmament would be assessed in terms of increased risk in the event of war or surprise attacks from the remaining nuclear states, or perhaps an increased inability to successfully deter the opponents of our allies. The same moral holds here as they do in our intro courses: the hegemon is uniquely well-positioned to incur these costs, in this case because of a favorable geostrategic position and our overwhelming preponderance in conventional deterrence. By leading the way, we could prove that the costs are not great and can be tolerated; the more states that join in the process, the lower the costs become.

While I think this argument could very well be decisive, I think it is not the right one. I think it is more accurate to say there are so few costs to unilateral disarmament as to make the previous reflections irrelevant. Conventional arms can deter at least as well as nuclear arms, given the unlikelihood of nuclear retaliation even in response to a nuclear attack. Furthermore, the risk of nuclear surprise attack is vanishingly small: China is perhaps the only adversarial country with the capacity to attack us with a nuclear weapon; despite the discussion this scenario receives, it really should be too farfetched to contemplate.

Pavel Podvig asked in the Bulletin recently: what if North Korea were the only nuclear state? He concluded: it would probably be a more comfortable one in which they are the ninth. The strategies of the most powerful states in confronting North Korea would change not at all and so it would suffer not at all: ‘nuclear  weapons add nothing to existing nuclear weapon states’…abilities…’ to confront proliferators.

The obverse argument is this: what if the United States was the first modern post-nuclear state? Probably nothing negative of consequence, and perhaps enormous good. Note that the arguments above are not positive ones about the good of unilateral disarmament. That post comes tomorrow (perhaps).

For now let me end where Perkovich & Acton do: what next? If the United States were to pursue unilateral disarmament, the first step would be to signal our intentions to our allies and attempt to gain supporters. (There are recent indications that the United Kingdom would be particularly amenable to taking that step.) Then, declare our intentions and a timetable to coincide with a buildup of conventional arms in the DMZ and other difficult spots. At the same time, offer to put in place a collective security system by which the United States and its allies underwrites the security of all disarming states from attack. Futhermore, establish an international consortium to provide low enriched uranium for nuclear power plants under the same model that URENCO does currently, and subsidize its production to make costs for nuclear fuel appreciably cheaper than parochial secret programs could produce.

The United States is the only country that can make clear in no uncertain terms that nuclear weapons are the implements of a past that humanity wishes to transcend, and that nuclear states are barbarous, backward states. It should.

Filed under: Arms Control, Grand Strategy, the next order , disarmament, abolition, perkovich & acton, podvig

The first next nuclear posture.

Since President Obama in April declared the United States’ intention to seek a world without nuclear weapons, the race has been on to reformulate American nuclear doctrine for the coming transitional periods. To this end, the National Security Archive recently published a fascinating briefing book on the formulation of nuclear doctrine in the first years of the Cold War that I fully recommend reading through. Admiral Arleigh Burke’s preference for a finite deterrence based around 400 warheads on nuclear submarines (which were thought then to be nearly invincible) was eventually extinguished when a RAND report tilted Robert McNamara and the Kennedies toward the Air Force’s preferred nuclear tripod of intercontinental missiles, submarines, and the Strategic Air Command bomber fleet. This, combined with a counterforce doctrine that is of course the nuclear posture that prevailed through the Cold War and now beyond.

But even if finite deterrence—or, more recently, minimum deterrence—was not the correct posture for the Cold War, surely it deserves at least another look now. Burke’s exclusive reliance on nuclear submarines may not have been appropriate for the later years of the Cold War, and it may not be appropriate now, but surely the original intuition that nuclear deterrence can hold firm without preemptive strike capability was right—and even moreso in a world in which we face no existential nuclear threat.

Until we can grasp this promise, the early sixties will simply stand as another in a long line of instances in which the moderate argument on American grand strategy could not hold its ground against more extravagant alternatives.

Filed under: Arms Control, Grand Strategy , disarmament, minimum deterrence, burke, mcnamara

Nice.

“America needs to learn to discipline itself into a strategy of gradualism that seeks greatness in the accumulation of the attainable.”

—Henry Kissinger in The Economist’s World in 2009

Filed under: Grand Strategy , Kissinger, quotes

Tacit air supremacy.

Danger Room today has a characteristically-interesting post on the likely demise of the F-22 program under Obama and Gates and the inability of the Air Force to guarantee air supremacy with the F-35 and less than 2,250 planes. 

Conflicting reactions are easy to come by. On the one hand, a possibility of the United States losing air superiority—no matter how slim—is a monumental change in global security structures. Air and sea superiority—what Posen called ‘command of the commons’—has been the cornerstone of American hegemony since the second World War. The Air Force claim of ‘guaranteeing’ air superiority is sensationalist and has clear bureaucratic motivation, but it is not meaningless. On the other hand, the possibility really is quite slim. For one, despite further advances in Russian air-to-air capabilities, no country can currently match the United States in firepower. More importantly, the future balance of power in air superiority is even more imbalanced: having demonstrated a capacity to put F-22s in the sky, the United States procurement machine could field more better fighters faster than any country on the planet. In a peaceful world, this is the true rubric of deterrence. 

This is also the concept of tacit deterrence, sketched here earlier, which offers a proposal to the current predicament: the F-22 is not perfect; start to build the next fighter, to fight the next war—not the wars we don’t have now.

—a.j. mount

Filed under: Grand Strategy , f-22, Gates, tacit deterrence

Secretary Clinton

“Confidants” are apparently confirming that Hillary Clinton has accepted the top job at the State Department. Polls suggest that most people think this is a good idea. Yglesias is skeptical:

My primary preference for Obama over Clinton was that I thought his foreign policy judgment had been superior, and I know I wasn’t alone in that respect. For those of us in that boat, this has been a disconcerting turn of events.

Two things. First, to the crowd of people skeptical about the prominence of Clintonites on the alleged short lists, I give you Spencer Ackerman on the role of young and talented foreign policy thinkers in the next few administrations. Most of the seasoned talent out there rose to prominence in the Clinton administration; it was just about the only game in town. Keep in mind that a good deal of the progressive-leaning foreign policy shops out there grew during the dark days of the first GWB term.

Second, I see Yglesias’s point, but I don’t think Clinton’s comparative hawkishness will yield much heartache. Her initial support for the war was certainly disconcerting. But support for Iraq can’t become a litmus test for foreign affairs competence. The reason we have extensive vetting procedures and Senate confirmation hearings is precisely because shibboleths are poor demonstrations of judgment. UPDATE—Of course, you can argue that vetting and hearings are also poor demonstrations of judgment, that these dog and pony shows are an exercise in the socialization of the next generation of would-be policy makers that trains them to eschew risky decisions and stay under the radar. And you would be right. But that’s why I’m a blogger, and not up for a cabinet appointment.

I’m also inclined to believe that Clinton’s mortal sin was not being a hawk, per se, but rather listening to Mark Penn’s suggestion that she run as a hawkish “moderate” Democrat. Major policy decisions are handed to Foggy Bottom from the White House. Crisis management will probably be handled by Obama’s in-house national security team. Meanwhile, all indications are that Clinton can handle the more mundane and, thankfully, institutionalized aspects of foreign affairs that the State Department handles with little fame or prestige.

—Brian

Filed under: Grand Strategy , 44