Has Iran Decided to Build the Bomb? Posted by David Shorr

Senator Lindsey Graham is convinced the goal of Iran's nuclear program is military, and the contrast between Graham's certainty and the more judicious view of President Obama's director of national intelligence highlights critical points for a peaceful resolution of the issue -- or a war. Hat tip to Eli Clifton over at Think Progress for flagging an exchange between Sen. Graham and DNI James Clapper at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this week. The bottom line of Graham's position is that a diplomatic solution is impossible, and a military confrontation is inevitable. 

Clifton's post focuses on the key elements of the intelligence assessment. Here's how Director Clapper described where Iranian policy stands in terms of building the bomb:

I think they’re keeping themselves in a position to make that decision but there are certain things they have not yet done and have not done for some time.

Underneath the careful vagueness of this statement lies a crucial point. There is a clear logic for Iran to hone uranium enrichment techniques that would make it a near-nuclear power, yet still remaining a non-nuclear weapon signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty -- which is Tehran's stated policy. Of course that leaves the questions of how far down the nuclear technology road Iran goes and how the outside world will verify that Iran's nuclear activities are civilian, questions that will have to be addressed as part of any diplomatic solution. 

Now let's look at the logic for Sen. Graham to assume the worst about Iranian intentions. I can only assume Graham reached his conclustion through an assessment of Iranian governmental players and his information on the nuclear program. And yet ... I can't help noticing that Graham's position fits the familiar Republican tougher-than-thou formula as most GOP foreign policy positions.

So with this view of Iranian intentions, Lindsey Graham presumably dismisses Iran's official line about a keeping on the civilian side of the nuclear line. My question, then, is whether it's smarter for the United States and others to toss aside Iran's promise not to build a bomb, or hang onto that pledge as the standard by which we measure their behavior. Aside from political posturing, is it really in America's interests to completely discount Tehran's stated intentions?

Let's be clear about what our alternatives are here. When I argue against assuming the worst, I'm not saying that we take Iranian statements about remaining a non-weapon state at face value. Like I said a few paragraphs ago, the point of diplomatic negotiations is to define -- and verify -- the parameters of Iran's civilian nuclear activities. In fact, I look at President Obama's policy on Iran as an effort to keep the burden of proof on the Iranians. Now over on the side of assuming the worst, that seems to me like a conclusion that diplomacy is futile. If Senator Graham and other conservatives believe Iranian leaders are determined to build the bomb, does that mean war is inevitable?  I think so.

And this is the point of the other quotation from the national intelligence director cited in Eli Clifton's Think Progress post, that Iran's course is not yet set and still susceptible to diplolmatic pressure: 

We judge Iran’s nuclear decisionmaking is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran. Iranian leaders undoubtedly consider Iran’s security, prestige, and influence, as well as the international political and security environment, when making decisions about its nuclear program.

The very possibility of a peaceful solution hinges on whether you believe an Iranian n-weapon is still an open question in Tehran.

But the issue at the heart of legislative efforts by Senator Graham and others is a different one. Recalling once again, negotiations with Iran must specify how far down the nuclear technological road they are, i.e. the fate of Iran's uranium enrichment activities. For the hard-liners in the Senate, the only acceptable answer is that Iran will be not one step down the nuclear road -- that they must walk their technical efforts all the way back. It is a Boltonesque approach that insists on the other side's total capitulation. 

As the clamor for war with Iran grows louder and louder, we must be clear what's at stake. If you were paying only faint attention to this debate (as most voters probably are), you'd think it's about keeping Iran from building nuclear weapons. But senators have been pushing to set the bar much higher, the kind of stringent requirements that make diplomacy impossible and war inevitable. Americans need to know the real question here: are you willing to go to war in order to stop Iran from spinning their centrifuges to enrich uranium?

Doing Your Homework on Nuclear Weapons Policy Posted by The Editors

This guest post by Stephen Young, senior analyst in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. It is reposted from AllThingsNuclear.org.

The Pentagon is working on finalizing nuclear weapons policy options for the president, who is preparing to make decisions that will set the size, structure and roles of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and set positions for future potential negotiations with Russia on force reductions below New START. The media was abuzz in the last 36 hours with reports that the options under consideration were 300-400, 700-800 or 1,000-1,100 deployed warheads.

At a hearing of the House Armed Services committee on Wednesday where Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified, Republican members were clearly distressed by the thought that the administration would even consider such reductions, calling it “reckless lunacy” and a “preposterous notion.” 

In that light, you may recall the committee’s attempt last year to constrain the Obama administration’s prerogative to set U.S. nuclear policy, an attempt that was essentially neutered in the final FY12 Defense authorization bill.

A few thoughts on this latest kerfuffle:

1. The new study falls well within the normal range of activities any administration undertakes. Time and again, the Pentagon, its various defense boards and affiliated think tanks have been tasked with looking at a range of stockpile sizes. Those who think it is surprising simply do not know the history. In fact, the congressionally mandated 2009 Strategic Posture Commission, often cited by Republicans as an unimpeachable source on nuclear policy, specifically set out options for deep cuts that it thought should be studied in the future. The person selected by the Commission to lead that effort to establish the options to study was none other Jim Miller, who now is directing the Pentagon’s study for the Obama administration. (See Chapter 12 of the Commission’s In the Eyes of Experts.)

2. As Secretary Panetta testified yesterday, one option that will be presented to the president is maintaining the current stockpile, in its current size. Cuts are not a foregone conclusion. 

3. Those criticizing these options act as if the president will unilaterally make these reductions tomorrow. That is not the case. As mentioned above, one of the mandates for the Pentagon study is to develop the U.S. position in the next round of arms controls with Russia. The Senate mandated that the administration seek such an agreement when providing its consent to the New START agreement in 2010. Would critics prefer that the administration approach such negotiations from a position of ignorance?

4. In 1991, when President GHW Bush unilaterally cut thousands of deployed U.S. nuclear weapons, there was nary a hit of concern from the Congress. Even more interesting, in 2001, President GW Bush simply told the Pentagon that they needed to develop a nuclear strategy based on maintaining 2,200 warheads, without asking them to first study what the implications of such a decision would be. Coming down from the then stockpile of 6,000 strategic warheads, it was a fairly dramatic call, but made without critical comment from the Congress. 

5. More importantly, if this story is accurate on the ranges of options under consideration, it is certainly true that moving to 300-400 warheads would be a major shift in U.S. nuclear policy, but it would not reduce our security. It would end the current focus, maintained since the end of the Cold War, on fighting and winning a nuclear war. Instead it would require a focus on what the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review identified as the fundamental role of nuclear weapons: deterring a nuclear attack on the US and its allies.

6. Such a policy change would truly reflect the “end to Cold War thinking” that President Obama has called for, and would allow the U.S. military to increase its focus on the threats that we do face today, rather than the threats of the past. The fact is, nuclear weapons are now a security liability for the United States, rather than an asset for our defense.  More and more military leaders, foreign policy and defense experts are recognizing that not only can we reduce the role and number of nuclear weapons, but for our own security we must.

Where’s Romney? National Security Budgeting Edition Posted by Jacob Stokes

The president’s budget for FY 2013 drops today. We already know the outlines of what it will look like. For an overview, see here. But it’s worth comparing that budget to Mitt Romney’s plan for defense spending. Ezra Klein has a solid rundown of the effects of Romney’s fiscal plans, following Romney’s speech at CPAC. As Klein notes, “Romney has, essentially, made four significant fiscal promises: He has pledged to cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP. He has pledged to cut taxes to about 17 percent of GDP. He has pledged to a floor on defense spending at 4 percent of GDP. And he has pledged to balance the budget.” We’ll look at the defense portion, because that’s what we’re focused on here at DA.

But first, a note about Romney’s criticisms of the administration’s budget plans: Romney has alleged that Obama has cut a trillion dollars from the defense budget over the next 10 years and that he’s “hollowing out” our national defense. Already today the Romney camp has called Obama’s budget an “insult” to the American taxpayer. This is of course political speak for the Budget Control Act, which was passed by Congress in a bipartisan fashion – no one in the Obama administration has voiced support for actually imposing the cuts to defense that would occur under the “sequestration” portion of the BCA. The one trillion number is supposed to force a compromise.

What the Obama administration has supported is a $487 billion reduction in the growth of Pentagon spending over 10 years. Those reductions are based on a strategy, which was released last month. As for the hollowing out claim, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service says that term is “inappropriate” for the current circumstances. One can debate the merits of sequestration-size cuts, which are possible but would be stupid to implement the way the law is currently written (i.e. with a drastic cut in the near-term, levied across all accounts equally). But one cannot argue that the administration wants the second tranche of cuts to the defense budget that would happen under sequestration. It’s simply inaccurate – they want tax increases.

Now, the reductions in growth to the military budget that the administration wants are broadly accepted. As Thom Shanker and Elizabeth Bumiller of the Times reported last month, “There is broad agreement on the left, right and center that $450 billion in cuts over a decade — the amount that the White House and Pentagon agreed to last summer — is acceptable.” Some, such as Fred Kaplan and Lawrence Korb, have persuasively argued that the administration could go further with cuts, although again, the administration has gone to great pains to say they don’t support such reductions.

Now to Romney’s plan: The Romney team made the four percent pledge for defense spending in their foreign policy white paper. Remember, the four percent figure means pegging the size of the base defense budget to four percent of GDP and does not include supplemental war funding. (For why such an approach abandons strategy, see here.) Michael Linden over at CAP did the math on this promise. He writes: “Under current projections (with the adjustments described above), defense spending will be about $560 billion in 2016, or about 2.9 percent of GDP. But Romney has promised to ensure defense spending never drops lower than 4 percent of GDP. Keeping that promise will add more than $200 billion in additional federal spending in 2016.” That’s just the base budget; it does not include war funding. Romney’s plan for Afghanistan will entail a long-term, large-scale military presence costing billions more dollars; he also criticized the drawdown in Iraq, which also has significant budgetary implications.

The Romney campaign believes such a stance will benefit them politically. As Scott Conroy of RCP reports, “Key members of Romney's foreign policy team argue that no matter what happens in the months ahead, Obama will be vulnerable in November on defense spending, his shaky relationship with Israel's leaders, and a ‘reset’ policy with Russia that many observers see as ill-fated.”

Romney’s fellow conservatives aren’t so sure though. As George will writes: 

The U.S. defense budget is about 43 percent of the world’s total military spending — more than the combined defense spending of the next 17 nations, many of which are U.S. allies. Are Republicans really going to warn voters that America will be imperiled if the defense budget is cut 8 percent from projections over the next decade? In 2017, defense spending would still be more than that of the next 10 countries combined.

Will is arguing that Republicans will have hard time arguing against the administration’s plans. Imagine how much tougher that argument gets once you’re arguing for the massive increases, both in base defense spending and war spending, that Romney’s plans propose.

Photo: Mitt Romney Flickr

Has the US Gotten Its Groove Back in the Middle East? Posted by Michael Cohen

Over the past couple of days a rather odd argument has developed around the question of international intervention in Syria - namely, that the whole process, and in fact US diplomacy in the region, has somehow been undermined by the heavy-handed manner in which the US and its NATO allies worked to topple Qaddafi in Libya.

Here's Stephen Walt's take:

Russia and China . . . supported Resolution 1973 back in 2011, and then watched NATO and a few others make a mockery of multilateralism in the quest to topple Qaddafi. The Syrian tragedy is pay-back time, and neither Beijing nor Moscow want to be party to another effort at Western-sponsored "regime change." Our high-handed manipulation of the SC process in the case of Libya may have made it harder to gain a consensus on Syria, which is arguably a far more important and dangerous situation.

Josh Foust makes a similar point and then says this:

The failure to gain international buy-in to do something -- not necessarily militarily but some response -- to the atrocities there is a direct consequence of interventionists ignoring politics in their rush to do good. Unfortunately, the people of Syria are now paying the price, and will continue to do so.

Walter Russell Mead and Scott Horton make much the same arguments. Now I should start off by saying that I was critical of US and NATO efforts in Libya and I am highly dubious about the efficacy of intervention in Syria so I'm sympathetic to the overall sentiments of these writers.

But having said I, generally speaking, find their arguments sort of ludicrous. I suppose it makes sense that Russia and China were angered about the way that NATO expanded its US mandate to topple Qaddafi, but the notion that Moscow and Beijing were surprised by this hardly seems credible. Even if Russia was shocked, shocked that NATO went further then a narrow mandate on Libya does anyone really believe that they would have then turned around and authorized a foreign military intervention in Syria - a country where Russia has very specific and long-standing strategic and economic interests.

And even if Security Council Resolution on Syria had passed it did not directly authorize the use of force and even if it did there is to date, no country that has signalled a great willingness to send troops to Syria. It likely would have changed very little on the ground. (I also can't help note the irony of complaints about the Syrian people "paying the price" over Libya being made by individuals who would have had the West do nothing in Libya).

The more obvious assessment of what happened in the UNSC is that Russia and China are using their "surprise" about Libya as an excuse for taking the morally dubious position of defending the heinous Assad regime - a position the Russians are trying somewhat half-heartedly to walk back. That otherwise intelligent US commentators are parroting the self-serving arguments of a couple of semi-authoritarian regimes like these two is a real head-scratcher.

Indeed, a more clear-eyed view of this situation might suggest that both China and Russia have not only played this whole situation rather poorly - they've been outfoxed by the United States. As Paul Bonicelli points out over at Foreign Policy, "The stance the Russians and the Chinese are taking hinders them from attaining the very goal they seek: to be seen as legitimate world leaders on par with the U.S. and the EU." 

Being on the same side as fading dictators like Assad is not exactly a high growth diplomatic strategy or one that will improve the political standing of either Moscow or Beijing. Both nations now look both isolated and even worse water carriers for some of the most loathsome regimes in the world. This is almost certainly why Russia is trying now to spearhead a diplomatic initiative with Damascus. If one didn't know better they might conclude that this whole bit of UN diplomacy has been a bit of a miscalculation for them.

For the United States, simply pushing the issue of a UNSC resolution on Syria, not to mention its actions around supporting democracy movements in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia have had the precise opposite effect. Today the US finds itself in a much more advantageous diplomatic position in the region. It's not hard to imagine this will help the US build regional coalitions in the Middle East to isolate Iran, but also in the Far East to contain Chinese regional ambitions. And much of this has been accomplished by the United States leading from behind and by working in concert with like-minded allies

Broadly speaking after the diplomatic wreckage of the Bush years the United States has, for the most part, shown itself to be a friend of democracy in the Arab world - and at a rather opportune time.

To be sure, all of this is now possible not despite the US intervention in Libya, but because of it. 

Go back one year. You had democratic movements emerging across the Arab world - in Egypt, Tunisia and potentially Syria. How would it have looked for the US to have turned its back on anti-Qaddafi rebels then? We can't know the answer for sure, but one can hardly blame the Administration for viewing with great concern the possibility that US inaction in the face of a potential humanitarian catastrophe directed at the Libyan people would significantly have tarnished the US image in the region and left the US on the wrong side of an incipient democratic movement in the Middle East. 

For the United States to have done nothing in Libya might not only have short-circuited the Arab Spring but also left the US in the unenviable position of being where Russia is today - at least indirectly on the side of the region's dictators. (Can you imagine how hard it would have been for the US to diplomatically throwdown on Syria if they had nothing on Libya?)

By acting when it did and how it did the US consolidated its own position in the Arab world and strength end the emerging role of the Arab League as an organization dedicated to speaking and acting out against the more brutal dictators in its midst. Again, this isn't a perfect story. It doesn't excuse how the Obama Administration played fast and loose with congressional approval of the Libya operation; or the continued instability in Libya - and US dealings with the government in Bahrain and Yemen, to a not insignificant degree, undermine this argument. But the overall story is a positive one - and speaks to an improved US image in the region that would have been unimaginable three years ago. And it's been done at a rather minimal political and military cost. 

Libya was a very rare and extraordinary circumstance in which the stars aligned in favor of military intervention. It's not one that can be easily replicated in Syria; but that doesn't mean it hasn't proven beneficial to US interests - and hopefully over the long run those of the Arab world. In the end, critics seemingly obsessed with proving that the Libyan intervention was a mistake should perhaps broaden their perspective a bit.

The UNSC Syria Vote, Renewal of American Leadership, and the Case for a 2nd Obama Term Posted by David Shorr

A recent post over at The Economist's Democracy in America blog says the Syria showdown at the UN between the US, Russia, and China demonstrates a crucial yet underappreciated success of Obama foreign policy:

Ten years back, America often found itself isolated, struggling to pull together "coalitions of the willing" packed with small client states. Lately, we have been finding ourselves in the majority, along with the democratic world, while Russia and China front a dwindling coalition of the unwilling.

Yes, President Obama has shown a remarkable ability to forge a united international front   on issue after issue. The quantum increase in support for US positions and initiatives is a much bigger deal than media assessments have acknowledged. As other nations have become more welcoming toward the United States' global role, the president can make a strong claim to have rehabilitated American leadership.

Actually if I'd fault the Economist writer for anything, it's that s/he lacks the courage of her own optimism. I disagree when the blogger says it's too bad Obama can't use this part of his record as a plank in his reelection platform. Voters recognize the importance of international goodwill toward the United States just as readily as the writer does. If not, then why do you think the public was so horrified to see Bush and Cheney defiantly thumbing their noses at the rest of the world? (The big mystery to me is why on earth the current crop of candidates have tacked back toward Cheney-esque chest-thumping.) More to the point, though, all signals from the White House put this success in their "top three" foreign policy achievements of the first term: winding down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, decimating Al Qaeda, and greater receptivity and trust around the world of US leadership. 

Interestingly, James Fallows of The Atlantic makes the exact same underestimation of voters in his rigorous new assessment of Obama's presidency. Here's how he concludes a graf stressing the importance of America's improved standing in the world:

These changes can make a real difference for American ideals and interests, but it is hard to mention them in American political debates without sounding “French.”

Okay, let me try this in my very best American accent (whatever that is). It is very difficult and sometimes impossible to accomplish America's international aims -- disrupt terror networks, keep the global economy strong, stem the spread of nuclear weapons -- without the support and help of others. Is the common sense of this really so hard to get across to the voting public? 

One key point is how the importance of international support applies across a wide range of issues. You can see this within the Democracy in America post, which is ostensibly about the nations aligned with America in opposition to a butcherous Syrian regime but also notes the Southeast Asian countries grateful for US help in resisting China's territorial claims in the South China Sea. In other words, those who pigeonhole such forward-leaning diplomacy as "soft power" are missing the point. 

Which brings us to the problem of Iran. Whenever you hear about President Obama's success in ratcheting up the toughest set of sanctions ever imposed on Iran, you should think about the massive diplomatic effort required to accomplish this. And it is ongoing. Our friends at Center for American Progress, for instance, remind us that discussion of Iran with China has continued throughout the past three years and is bound to be on the agenda for Vice President Xi Jinping's visit next week. 

Given America's difficult history with Iran and close alliance with Israel, there's been a tendency in the international politics of the Iranian nuclear program to view the issue as a pet cause of the United States -- rather than a truly shared nuclear proliferation problem. This is the essence of the challenge, and of the Obama administration's success, in recasting American leadership. A measure of an effective foreign policy is to convince others that the United States is upholding important norms of the international community -- preserving a social contract -- and not just a big bad superpower. That's the point of President Obama's frequent references to the obligations and responsibilities of nations, including our own (e.g. the New START nuclear arms treaty).

After reading this skepticism in The Economist and The Atlantic about America's improved international image as a campaign theme, I looked back at some of my own posts from four years ago. In 2008, candidate Obama could aim his foreign policy argument at a public deeply unsettled at how out of step with the rest of the world we had gotten -- and acutely aware what trouble it could cause us. In 2012, President Obama runs for re-election having put these ideas about a more conscientious style of global leadership into action. And his record shows that they work.

From Hama to Homs, by way of Sarajevo, Kigali (but also Skopje and Nairobi) Posted by Heather Hurlburt

It's thirty years this month since the father and brother of the current Syrian President Assad cracked down on a Muslim Brotherhood rebellion in Hama, Syria, killing somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000, according to Amnesty International's best guess.

If you wonder what the Assad family style of large-scale killing is like, here are some insights:

The fighting took two weeks; one to recapture the city from insurgents and two to "root out" insurgents and others.

The killing and destruction documented by Syrians and outsiders included dynamiting city blocks with people inside; pouring gasoline into underground tunnels and setting them on fire; aerial bombardment, extended shelling, torture.

Many Americans will remember their first encounter with this piece of history as a chapter, "Hama Rules," in Tom Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem in which he cites the current president's uncle and then-president's brother, Rifaat Assad, as boasting that he had killed 38,000 people.

It is fair to ask, as we are presented with gruesome images of a Syrian government assault on another city tonight, whether anything other than the speed and ubiquity of information technology has changed in the intervening 30 years. In recent months, a number of UN debates, academic conferences, and policy task forces have asked this question in specialist language:  Whither R2P? Responsibility to Protect or Responsibility While Protecting? Humanitarian Response in a New Age...

I suggest that three major things have changed, in a manner which speaks well for the arc of history but terribly for families cowering in terror in Syria tonight.

1. Ignorance is No Longer an Excuse. It's worth re-reading Samantha Power's 2001 Atlantic article on Rwanda, in which she persuaded a number of rather senior Clinton Administration officials (my bosses) to say that they didn't know, or didn't understand, soon enough how widespread the genocidal killing was. Whether or not that is so, it's worth noting that 1994 is the last time a Western leader attempted to claim ignorance as an excuse for inaction. No one says s/he didn't know the threat to Kosovars in 1999, or to Macedonians (an overlooked success of peaceful intervention) in 2001; or for that matter to two abject failures, Congo and Sri Lanka. A web of NGO projects were founded specifically in order to end the ignorance defense, from the International Crisis Group to the Satellite Sentinel project for Sudan and South Sudan; we have nodes and offices and procedures within governments and at the UN.

2. Sovereignty Is No Longer Absolute. Just how different are international attitudes toward how rulers treat their citizens? In 1982, the New York Times reported that

The United States Ambassador, Robert Paganelli, was summoned to a meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister Nasir Qaddour at 1:30 A.M. to receive a strong protest over the State Department's statement Wednesday that Hama had been ''sealed off by Syrian authorities'' as a result of ''serious disturbances.''

Nowadays even Russia and China declare Assad's actions unacceptable. The core insight of twenty years' work -- and twenty years of UN acronyms -- that sovereignty over people entails responsibility toward them, responsibilities in which the rest of the world has a legitimate interest, is triumphant in word. In deed, not so much.

3. Accountability Has Meaning. Hafez Assad ruled Syria longer after Hama than before, dying of heart failure in 2000 as the Middle East's longest-serving ruler. His son is unlikely to be so fortunate. His former colleagues Hosni Mubarak and Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali are on trial in their own countries, Ben Ali in absentia since Saudi Arabia has declined to return him.  Liberian strongman Charles Taylor is awaiting the verdict from the Special Court for Sierra Leone on his role in sparking that horrific violence. Slobodan Milosevic died of a heart attack while on trial in the Hague. The UN Human Rights Commissioner has called for Assad to be brought up on charges by the International Criminal Court, and the Gulf Cooperation Council appears to be considering a similar step. This would leave Assad very little ability to travel outside Syria, even were he to be successful in suppressin protests and rebellion.

4. Pressure Mounts Over Time. In 1982, Hafez Assad faced little more international pressure in week three of his campaign than he did on day one. That is simply no longer imaginable. Power documents how in 1994, calls for action in Rwanda eventually mounted among smaller countries at the UN, and in some quarters in Washington, but never reached critical mass. In Bosnia, later that same year, UN and NATO embarrassment and public anguish did eventually lead to action that, in turn, led to an end to fighting and the Dayton Accords. (I have been re-reading Madeleine Albright on this; Richard Holbrooke is also instructive.) Kosovo and Libya were both instances where loud and ugly threats from dictators spurred action; Kenya and Macedonia, almost a decade apart, successful examples of non-violent prevention; Cote d'Ivoire an often-forgotten case that had languished before Libya but, in its aftermath, allowed a small show of force to end ugly and growing post-election violence.  The international community has sometimes gotten better at saving some lives; it has gotten less better more slowly at preventing any lives from being lost and a spiral of violence from starting in the first place.

None of this is much help to the Syrians who, tonight, stand in for our simple failure as human beings to control our own worst impulses, or each other's. The UN says it quit tallying deaths last month after 5400. We have reason to hope, non-interventionists, and arm-the-SNC and do-something-ers alike, that what we have achieved in the past thirty years will help us stop that tally before it gets to 25,000 or 40,000. But if the past thirty years have taught us anything it is that hope doesn't do it alone.

How to Respond to a Changing World: Stimulant or Anesthetic? Posted by Jacob Stokes

 

Mitt Romney’s foreign policy platform rests on the notion that he will ensure another “American century,” and he has criticized Obama by saying the president “fundamentally believes that this next century is the post-American century.”

That formulation has drawn a sharp response over the last week. Fareed Zakaria argues in the Washington Post that Romney’s argument is based on a flawed reading of global politics:

This is a new world, very different from the America-centric one we got used to over the last generation. Obama has succeeded in preserving and even enhancing U.S. influence in this world precisely because he has recognized these new forces at work. He has traveled to the emerging nations and spoken admiringly of their rise. He replaced the old Western club and made the Group of 20 the central decision-making forum for global economic affairs. By emphasizing multilateral organizations, alliance structures and international legitimacy, he got results. It was Chinese and Russian cooperation that produced tougher sanctions against Iran. It was the Arab League’s formal request last year that made Western intervention in Libya uncontroversial.

Later, Zakaria blasts Romney’s criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy, saying Romney’s response ignores global realities:

By and large, you [Romney] have ridiculed this approach to foreign policy, arguing that you would instead expand the military, act unilaterally and talk unapologetically. That might appeal to Republican primary voters, but chest-thumping triumphalism won’t help you secure America’s interests or ideals in a world populated by powerful new players. You can call this new century whatever you like, but it won’t change reality. After all, just because we call it the World Series doesn’t make it one.

In Foreign Policy, Charles Kupchan expands on this second point, noting that accepting the recent and ongoing expansion and de-centralization of world power simply means accepting facts. Such a shift doesn’t equate to American “decline.” Instead, recognizing these shifts will allow the U.S. to identify the real challenges facing us in world affairs and then craft appropriate responses for husbanding American power:

To acknowledge the need for the United States to adjust to prospective shifts in the global distribution of power is not, as Duke University professor Bruce Jentleson recently pointed out in Democracy, to be a declinist or a pessimist. It is to be a realist. And safely guiding the United States through this coming transition requires seeing the world as it is rather than retreating toward the illusory comfort of denial…

Shepherding the transition to this more pluralistic world is arguably the defining challenge facing U.S. statecraft in the years ahead. Romney appears ready to pave over this challenge by denying that such change is afoot and attempting to portray Obama's policies as "an eloquently justified surrender of world leadership.”

To be sure, there’s an argument to be made that, as Tony Karon of TIME tweets, “nationalist political culture requires sustaining illusions.” In other words, Romney is in the middle of a fierce nomination fight and will likely carry the banner for the GOP in a heated general election. Drawing on themes of nationalism will almost surely help him prevail in those contests. Fair enough. Obama did much the same thing in his State of the Union speech and subsequent highly public embrace of Robert Kagan’s piece rejecting “decline.” (A tactic for which Rosa Brooks took the president to task.)

But the rhetoric has to meet reality somewhere, and that's where there’s a difference between progressive and conservative approaches to “greatness” and “decline” set of questions. As Bruce Jentleson wrote in that Democracy piece, progressives use the changing global landscape as a call to increase our ability to compete with the rest of world, confident that we can still be a—if not the—global leader across the spectrum of power (diplomatic, economic, military, soft power). As Jentleson writes, “It’s not that progressives don’t believe in American greatness; it’s that we invoke the past as stimulant not anesthetic. America can and should play a leading role in the twenty-first-century world. But to do so we need a foreign policy geared to how the world is, not how it used to be.”

In contrast, it seems Romney prefers the approach of ignoring reality. Hopefully he'll wake up. The world won’t wait.

Video: "Halftime in America" superbowl ad

Iran, Israel and Rock Star Prescience Posted by David Shorr

True story. In September 2008 I was waiting for a flight at Minneapolis airport. And so were the members of Rage Against the Machine. Which was how I found myself in a foreign policy discussion with Zack de la Rocha. (Our flight also gave me a chance to introduce Tom Morello to Ben Stein, but that's another story.)

The upshot of my chat with the RATM frontman was his observation that if Israel attacked Iran, that could pose big problems for us foreign policy establishment types. Not that de la Rocha and I would share views on Israel, but he could see tricky dilemmas down the road. Sure enough, here we are three plus years later, watching the Israeli government reaching for the lid of that very pandora's box. So a tip of the hat goes to Zack for his keen instinct.

The last few weeks have brought such a flood of analysis and commentary that there's a lot to choose from, but let me highlight and react to some of the points I found most interesting. Starting with Colin Kahl's excellent Foreign Affairs essay. Kahl offered some very useful reminders from the Iraq case. For instance, we know that bombing facilities will merely delay a nuclear program, rather than permanently halt it, because that's what happened after Israel bombed Osirak in 1981. It hardly prevented us from having to deal with the issue in the 1990s. I should quickly add that when people argue for the value of such a delay, that is hardly a strategic perspective.

The discussion of Israel's role in the first Gulf War in 1991 is quite interesting too from our current vantage point the perspective of Republicans' foreign policy message. Just to recall, President George H.W. Bush prevailed upon Israel to refrain from letting itself be pulled into the war -- despite Saddam's deliberate provocation of missile attacks on Israel. In return, Bush 41 helped shield Israel from the attacks with the Patriot anti-missile system, but the restraint shown by Israel was impressive. The main point of this restraint was that Israel's direct involvement would blur the stakes and distract from a clear focus on Iraq. In the geopolitics of the region, Israel brings added layers of conflict and sensitivity. In other words, we can't look only through the prism of America's own view of Israel as a close ally, but also the attitude and response of other players. As a matter of simple strategic calculus, duh. 

But wait, let's pause to note the huge disconnect between this kind of clear eyed-ness and the 2012 Republican competition over who can place themselves farthest to the right on the Israeli domestic political spectrum. We cannot highlight this crucial point enough. When the Republican candidates talk about the nation of Israel (see, support of) their rhetoric more accurately applies to a certain segment of opinion in Israel. One more time: the Israeli national security establishment and political elite are sharply divided over the wisdom of attacking Iran.

The other major issue, of course, is the prospect for a diplomatic resolution with Iran over its nuclear program. On this question, no one maps the terrain better than Trita Parsi, even if you don't completely agree with him. Trita has an excellent new book, A Single Roll of the Dice. But if you're not going to read the book, his blog post over at Fareed Zakarkia's Global Public Square blog lays out the core problems. 

Trita gives President Obama and his administration a lot of credit for placing Iran under heavy pressure, and for the deft diplomacy it took to build international support. His main critique concerns the trade-offs between exerting pressure (mainly sanctions) and leaving space for diplomatic negotiations. As he sees it, Obama's own so-called "pressure track" has boxed him in and potentially put a diplomatic solution out of reach. 

This is mainly a debate between different views of how to bring the Iranians to the table. From one vantage, Iran has a genuine interest in reaching an agreement, and the key things for the West are patience, diligence and a comprehensive agenda. My reading of Trita is that he sees the need for pressure, but also views it as essential to calibrate the pressure to give diplomacy enough time and patience for it to work. What these two views share is a worry that mounting Iranian mistrust may have reached a threshold that luring them to the negotiating table will be difficult to impossible. 

So where does the administration's policy come down on this question? The way I interpret it, the policy assumes Tehran is disposed against an agreement -- preferring the freedom of action to master the uranium enrichment process. Not that they're implacable and and unwilling to meet outside powers' demands for transparency and monitoring. Rather, it's an assumption that Iranian cooperation rests squarely on the cost associated with continued resistance. For critics who see an over-reliance on pressure, the administration is underestimating Iran's ability to withstand hardship. To which I'd respond that they might be overestimating it's ability to withstand isolation. Putting it another way, Iranian leaders know they can't sustain the same degree of autarky as North Korea's Kim family regime. As Iran moves closer to full-pariah status, they will start to alter their calculation.

Now finally to the core substantive quandary of this problem: whether a diplomatic solution would let Iran continue its uranium enrichment. As Trita explains, this question is actually a source of tension mainly between the United States and Israel. (Bill Keller delved into the wonkish practicalities of the issue in a recent post over at NYTimes.com.) The Israelis take a very hard line against any ongoing future enrichment by Iran. 

This is where the issue tilts toward the need to accomodate Iran somewhat in order to reach a deal -- aka the complete fantasy under Obama's predecessor of a diplomatic outcome whereby Iran totally capitulates. As it happens, the authors of an op-ed on the subject in today's NYTimes (Ambassadors Tom Pickering and Bill Luers) told us nearly four years ago in a much-cited NY Review of Books essay that zero enrichment was, practically speaking, a non-starter. Now as we look into the abyss of a new war with Iran, let me put the question directly. If an agreement can be reached that permits some enrichment -- under close international supervision -- is that a prospect really worthy of going to war?

The rumors of war have significantly notched up the danger of a real catastrophe. Meanwhile, it's the same tangled mess it's always been. Even a rock star could see that.

Photo: thetripwirenyc

Premature Evacuation? Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at Foreign Policy I have a new post up looking at the politics of Afghanistan withdrawal - and why ending not one not two wars a year before a presidential election is basically unheard of:

Barack Obama is nothing if not a trailblazing politician -- after all, when you're the first African-American elected to the nation's highest office, breaking the mold is sort of part of your political DNA. However, with the announcement by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Tuesday, Feb. 1, that the Obama administration intends to end combat operations in Afghanistan in mid-2013 he is laying out another unique course -- seeking re-election this November as the architect of two drawdowns of U.S. military engagements. This is the kind of thing doesn't happen too often in American politics.

You can read the whole thing here.

But there is one smaller point I wanted to reference. Check out what Mitt Romney had to say about Panetta's announcement:

“The president’s mistakes, some of them are calculated on a philosophy that’s hard to understand and, sometimes, you scratch you head and say: How can he be so misguided and so naive?”

“Today, his secretary of defense unleashed such a policy,” said Romney. “The secretary of defense said that on a day certain, the middle of 2013, we’re going to pull out our combat troops from Afghanistan.”

He announced that. So the Taliban hears it, the Pakistanis hear it, the Afghan leaders hear it,” said Romney. “Why in the world do you go to the people that you’re fighting with and tell them the date you’re pulling out your troops? It makes absolutely no sense.” 

First of all it's not true that the US is going to pull out combat troops in 2013; rather the US is going to be shifting away from a combat mission in 2013. That's an important distinction.

But here's the interesting part - look at what Romney said in June 2011 at a Republican debate:

It's time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can, consistent with the word that comes to our generals that we can hand the country over to the Taliban military in a way that they're able to defend themselves.

I suppose in fairness Romney didn't reveal the date that US troops would be leaving as soon as possible so I suppose he is in the clear here.

On Consistency, Precedents and Humanitarian Intervention Posted by Eric Martin

Daniel Trombly wrote a thorough and well-argued critique of three recent pieces that advocate, or at least consider, the use of military force by Western powers in Syria. While the whole piece is well worth the read, there is a particular aspect that I wanted to highlight due to its relevancy to topics previously discussed on this site.

The following is from the Anne-Marie Slaughter article that Trombly takes issue with:

If the Arab League, the U.S., the European Union, Turkey, and the UN Secretary General spend a year wringing their hands as the death toll continues to mount, the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine will be exposed as a convenient fiction for power politics or oil politics, feeding precisely the cynicism and conspiracy theories in the Middle East and elsewhere that the U.S. spends its public diplomacy budget and countless diplomatic hours trying to debunk.

Slaughter thus argues that by targeting the regime in Syria the US can debunk certain "conspiracy theories" rampant in the Middle East that claim that the United States cynically pursues its national interests, and places a higher priority on such interests than human rights concerns and democratic norms.

A variation of the argument was made in support of the Libya intervention, though it originally debuted as part of the case for invading Iraq. It remains just as dubious in each of its incarnations.

There are two primary reasons that this argument is deeply flawed:

First, it's not exactly a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that the US pursues its national interests with a certain degree of cynicism. Such a non-controversial contention is true not only of the US, but of most (if not all) other states, throughout known history.

For example, the US does actually support (and lavish aid on, and sell arms to, etc.) undemocratic states in the region with atrocious human rights records, including states like Yemen and Bahrain that violently suppressed pro-democracy movements during the recent, and ongoing, Arab Spring uprisings. Not only did we not have a responsibility to protect those beleaguered populations, apparently, but we feel justified in green-lighting large arms sales to at least one of the regimes in question.

Second, if the United States is trying to convince local populations that it has adopted a different approach whereby it prioritizes human rights and democracy over narrower self-interests, attacking an adversary like Syria (or Libya or Iraq), while continuing to support the same despotic regimes that earned it the reputation in the first place is unlikely to succeed.

If we are truly interested in setting a consistent precedent for the valuation of democracy and human rights ahead of other considerations (not that I'm suggesting that such an approach is necessarily prudent in all contexts), it seems that we should start by cutting off support for those despotic regimes that we consider "friendly" rather than using humanitarian concerns as a casus belli to target regimes that we otherwise find problematic when viewed through the prism of less sentimental national interests.

Seriously, What's The Matter with Leon Panetta? Posted by Michael Cohen

On several occasions here at DA I've raised the issue of Leon Panetta's performance as Secretary of Defense - and it seems that the man is intent on giving me even more ammunition to question his very effectiveness as Pentagon chief.

Consider his latest head-scratcher: an interview with CBS News in which he suggested a) that the Pakistani government might have known about Osama bin Laden's presence in Abbotabad and b) he confirmed that Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani doctor, worked with the United States in its efforts to kill bin Laden.Considering that Afridi is at risk of being tried in Pakistan for "high treason" this strikes me as a decidedly unhelpful statement not only for Mr. Afridi but also for any hopes the US might have in getting foreign citizens to work with US intelligence agencies in the future.

Now I'm willing to entertain the possibility that Panetta made this reveal as a way to heighten Afridi's profile and lessen the chance that Pakistan prosecutes him. Not sure how that would work but I have to consider the possibility that there is a method behind Panetta's madness - because if there isn't he just publicly sold out a person who bravely put themselves harm's way to help the United States.

As for publicly alleging that unnamed individuals in Pakistan were aware of Bin Laden's location . . . I've given up trying to figure out what Panetta is thinking. Seriously, how does this in anyway help the United States and in particular its relationship with Pakistan? Why even go there? Shouldn't the main thrust of US policy in the region to strengthen the US relationship with Islamabad not re-open old wounds. Indeed, the worst part about Panetta's statement is that he offers no evidence of Pakistani support for OBL just idle speculation.

Here's what he said: "I don’t have any hard evidence, so I can’t say it for a fact. There’s nothing that proves the case. But as I said, my personal view is that somebody, somewhere probably had that knowledge." 

If you don't have any hard evidence Leon why would you say this? 

The Pentagon's defense of Panetta's latest gaffe is that this interview came several months ago. Guess what: that's not a defense! It was a stupid comment in January 2012; it's also a stupid comment in October, November and December 2011. Of course this isn't the first time that Panetta has made a comment that forced the Pentagon to "clarify" his remarks. Indeed, it has become a regular occurrence.

You would think that someone who has been in Washington as long as Panetta would know enough not to make these sorts of public "comments." Of course, as long as he continues to stick his foot in his mouth I'll have plenty of fodder for DA posts . . . but the impact on US foreign policy is perhaps a bit less of a good thing.

Making Foreign Policy an Issue Posted by Jacob Stokes

Rich Fontaine argues on Tom Ricks’s blog that foreign policy will matter it the election. After the usual disclaimers about how economic issues will be front and center, Fontaine writes:

This does not mean, however, that voters will not consider foreign policy as they enter the voting booth. Both eventual candidates, the incumbent president included, will have to demonstrate to the electorate that they pass the commander-in-chief credibility threshold.  They must demonstrate that they have the knowledge, the temperament, the skills and the wisdom to lead a superpower in times of both peril and plenty. If they can cross this threshold, they will still have to make a winning case on domestic issues. If they cannot, no amount of focus on the American pocketbook will salvage their chances. Foreign policy will matter in 2012.

Fontaine is probably too unequivocal when he says no amount of focus on economic issues can outperform the commander-in-chief factor. But his main point, that national security will surely matter, stands. 

The Obama campaign thinks so, too, writes Michael Hirsh in the National Journal. Hirsh reports that the campaign plans to present Obama as the toughest national security president since Kennedy – what’s called the “3 AM strategy,” which of course refers to the crisis situations each president will inevitably confront. Clearly Obama campaign staffers have been reading their Nate Silver.

Hirsh’s piece goes through the huge amount of evidence and public support Obama has on his side when it comes to national security. For that, read the piece. It’s well worth it. The piece includes a quote from Michael Lagon, a former George W. Bush administration official, saying Obama is, in some ways, more sure-footed than the elder Bush. 

Hirsh’s encapsulation of the campaign’s argument against his opponents is telling as well: 

Meanwhile, the administration has been busy preparing a bill of particulars against Romney (and now one against Gingrich). “Romney has said he would have left tens of thousands of troops in Iraq indefinitely, with no plan for what they would do there or how he would end the war,” says the Obama campaign official, who delivers a kind of rap sheet: Romney has failed to outline a plan for ending the war in Afghanistan and flip-flopped on setting a timetable for withdrawal. He said it wasn’t worth “moving heaven and earth” to catch bin Laden and criticized Obama for making it clear he would take out Qaida targets in Pakistan. He flip-flopped on removing Qaddafi, first attacking Obama for demanding regime change and then celebrating it. He has proposed to drastically increase military spending without articulating how it would improve security or how to pay for it. Meanwhile, a Democratic campaign official points out that Gingrich has a history of making erratic statements about national security and once told The Times, “I don’t do foreign policy.”

Romney has gone to great lengths to establish himself as the national security candidate among the GOP field and make foreign policy a wedge issue, including giving two big speeches on the subject (for DA’s take, see here and here).

There’s a fight a-brewin’.

Photo: RotaryDialPhones.com

Iran Takes Over... the Media Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Kudos to US and international media and my analyst friends -- we have lots and lots and lots of good reporting and analysis on the Iran situation this morning.  An embarrasse des riches, as Mitt Romney might say. I'm organizing my thoughts for an Iran panel on the Hill at 1230 today, and I thought I'd share.

Military-Strategery

Three heavyweight Israelis lay out the full range of strategic considerations to be debated:

• are Iranian nukes an existential threat to Israel
• can a nuclear Iran be deterred
• What would the regional and inside-Iran consequences of an Israeli attack be
• what are the long-term security consequences of Israel launching an attack against US wishes

The Pentagon doesn't think its current bunker-buster bombs will do the trick against Iran's defenses, and has asked for heavier weapons to be developed urgently. (Wall Street Journal)

Geo-Strategery

Iran's Foreign Minister invites IAEA inspectors to extend their visit... at same time as Iran's military tests new delivery systems.

Israeli intel journalist (and author of this weekend's NY Times Mag piece predicting Israel will bomb) seems to reverse himself by suggesting to Laura Rozen that Israel is asking the West to hold it back.

The Economist says China will choose regional stability over its relations with Iran.

Beltway Strategery

Les Gelb says Obama should bite the bullet and officially offer the peaceful-enrichment-for-full-inspections-and-safeguards deal.

Sara Sorcher at National Journal reports that Senate leadership says they want to move another round of sanctions -- this one targeted at Revolutionary Guard, human rights violators, crowd control equipment... also a proposal to deny entry to US ports to any ship that has visited Iran in last 180 days.

The New Yorker's Steve Coll reads the tea leaves, says that war is not imminent, and that a strategy of "patience and persistence" should be kept on the table. 

what does all this add up to? A lot of posturing for domestic and international audiences... some progress toward the foundations of a negotiated outcome... consensus among experts and the business community, but emphatically not among political factions here or elsewhere, on what an acceptable negotiated outcome would look like... and some big opportunities for miscalculation and unintended escalation.

Reacting to Robert Kagan on American Decline Posted by David Shorr

Now that the White House and President Obama himself (thanks Josh Rogin) have given Bob Kagan a heaping helping of buzz for his New Republic piece, I want to offer a few thoughts. First off, the cheesy partisan debate over perceived decline has been bugging me for a long time, so kudos to Bob for helping spur a more substantive discussion. (Take a look at Dan Drezner and Stephen Walt to see what Bob was drawing on.)

As indicated by President Obama's warm endorsement, Kagan lays the ground for a bipartisan internationalist consensus. Responding to calls for the US to pull back from our role as a global power -- often couched in terms of being financially unaffordable -- he rightly asks about the costs of such a pullback itself. It's worth quoting at length:

If the decline of American military power produced an unraveling of the international economic order that American power has helped sustain; if trade routes and waterways ceased to be as secure, because the U.S. Navy was no longer able to defend them; if regional wars broke out among great powers because they were no longer constrained by the American superpower; if American allies were attacked because the United States appeared unable to come to their defense; if the generally free and open nature of the international system became less so—if all this came to pass, there would be measurable costs. And it is not too far-fetched to imagine that these costs would be far greater than the savings gained by cutting the defense and foreign aid budgets by $100 billion a year. You can save money by buying a used car without a warranty and without certain safety features, but what happens when you get into an accident?

American power indeed plays a constructive hegemonic function in undergirding the international economic and political order. We have the job and giving it up would be a dereliction and likely come to grief. I would stress one amendment, however. The more successfully we are at gaining international support and cooperation, the more we'll be able to buttress the international system and share the associated burdens. Indeed, that's the strategy behind President Obama's emphasis on shared international obligations and responsibilities. 

I'd like to focus on one other passage of the Kagan piece, and it's a point he, Drezner, and Walt all dwell on. Bob offers a response to the perception that "the United States can no longer shape the world to suit its interests and ideals as it once did." Confession time: I have harped on this exact challenge pretty regularly. Again, let me quote Bob at length: 

And of course it is true that the United States is not able to get what it wants much of the time. But then it never could. Much of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy: that there was once a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, and could get other nations to do what it wanted them to do, and, as the political scientist Stephen M. Walt put it, “manage the politics, economics and security arrangements for nearly the entire globe.”

He then proceeds to list the many aggravating episodes of the Cold War when other international players defied America's wishes. It's an impressive list, yet one of the examples didn't seem quite right. In 1956, France, Israel, and the UK invaded Egypt against President Eisenhower's wishes to seize control of the Suez Canal. And then were forced to withdraw. So can't we make the opposite interpretation that the crisis' outcome reinforced American influence? Was Eisenhower's influence eroded or enhanced by the episode?

I do understand Bob's warning not to consider these challenges to be 'new under the sun.' Even if we consider the problem of influencing other actors and steering events to be a hardy perennial, however, doesn't it still seem like the salient underlying challenge for foreign policy at the present moment? Can it be argued that the difficulty of exerting influence needs to be kept in mind, and is too often underestimated?

And this is where I have to play mood-killer to all this good bipartisan comity. Because I see a major gap between Kagan's sober reminder that world events don't yield so easily to America's control, and Republican talking point after talking point argument after argument that assume the opposite.

Get Real on Cuba Posted by The Editors

This post by NSN intern Ian Byrne.

During Monday night’s GOP debate in Florida, Brian Williams asked Mitt Romney what he would do as president if he received a 3 AM phone call reporting that Fidel Castro had died and “half a million Cubans may take that as a cue to come to the United States.”

Romney started with a hypothetical “thank heavens that Fidel Castro has returned to his maker and will be sent to another land,” before offering up his policy prescriptions: “Now, number two, you work very aggressively with the new leadership in Cuba to try and move them towards a more open degree than they have had in the past.”

Sorry Mitt, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Fidel’s brother Raúl is in charge of Cuba’s leadership now and will be in charge of Cuba’s leadership after Castro’s death.

Newt followed with his idea of a “Cuban Spring”:

“I would suggest to you the policy of the United States should be aggressively to overthrow the regime and to do everything we can to support those Cubans who want freedom. You know, Obama is very infatuated with an Arab Spring. He doesn't seem to be able to look 90 miles south of the United States to have a Cuban Spring.”

Romney and Gingrich doubled down on their criticism of the Obama administration’s policies and calls for regime change on Wednesday. Romney remarked that President Obama “does not understand that by helping Castro; he is not helping the people of Cuba; he is hurting them.” Gingrich lamented that the Obama administration’s policy is "almost exactly the opposite" of what it should be.

The Obama administration’s new policies aren’t all that new, as Arturo Lopez-Levy notes in Foreign Policy:

“Obama's new policy restores the "people-to-people" contacts between the United States and Cuba that existed under Bill Clinton's administration, restoring the embargo exemptions for Americans traveling for humanitarian, religious, and academic purposes that were disallowed under Bush. More direct flights to the island -- albeit chartered ones -- will be allowed, and Americans now can transfer remittances of up to $500 per quarter, as long as they aren't going to the Cuban government or Communist Party.”

(A full fact sheet of the policy revisions can be found here.)

I’d challenge Romney to highlight how the administration’s policies directly help Castro and hurt the Cuban people. Wouldn’t hurt to ask how the trade embargo benefits the people either. If Gingrich asserts that the administration’s policy is all wrong, what can he offer besides drawing policy inspiration from Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher in leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, besides the film that has any and all a conservative has ever wanted?

Romney and Gingrich offer ambiguous and tired (see: neoconservative) policy options where “might makes right.” If Gingrich believes we can look 90 miles south “to have a Cuban Spring” he has failed all duties of being a historian or a scholar.

The Arab Spring was unique in that it was, well, Arab. Cuba is not the Middle East (I can’t believe I actually have to write that) and each possess different dynamics on the ground. I imagine the people of Cuba, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Syria all have the same yearning for freedom. But as we’ve seen in the Middle East and North Africa, each process is going to be different getting from point A to point B.

The administration’s current policies appreciate the limitations of what can be done. Lifting the trade embargo would require congressional approval and any Washington-Havana communication is out of the question as diplomatic relations are nonexistent.

Our decades long policy of isolation towards Cuba has failed. The guy in charge of Cuba’s last name is still Castro. If one wants to change U.S. policy, as the candidates seem so intent on doing, perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from our recent policy towards Burma.

Anya Landau French, a Cuba policy analyst, writes that by enacting sanctions that expired within a defined period of time, the U.S. offered incentives to the Burmese government which planted the seeds for reform. Case in point: Washington will soon have a Burmese ambassador. 

Indefinite sanctions offer Cuba no incentive to reform. I imagine that Cuba sees little incentive in the prospect of being “aggressively overthrown” as well.

President Obama’s “people-to-people” policies circumvent the Cuban government and are able to operate in the constricted environment where U.S.-Cuba policy exists. If we are proposing new policy, let us take a page from the Burma playbook. If the GOP candidates want the Cuban people to truly experience freedom, perhaps they should propose something a little more groundbreaking than continuing the trade embargo. 

Einstein said that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It has been a rather kooky 54 years.

Photo: AP via MSNBC

Mitch Daniels preview* Posted by Heather Hurlburt

So rumors are flying around the interwebs that Mitch Daniels' response to the State of the Union is "partisan and nasty." That'll be funny, given Daniels' record on the national security issues that bookend the speech:

Eight months ago, the Post's Jennifer Rubin found his conservatism wanting:

On foreign policy, he said that he’s a “water’s edge” kind of guy. He is sure that the President is in a position to know a lot more about what’s needed in Afghanistan than he is. He said he didn’t think Obama had “made the case” for the Libya intervention, though this doesn’t mean there is no case. Pressed to say something critical about Obama’s foreign policy, he said that he was “uncomfortable” with the President’s “apology tours.” But he didn’t look comfortable saying it.

Jamie Rubin asked him a clever question, right out of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”: if he had just one phone call to make about some foreign policy issue and he could call either Richard Lugar or John McCain, which would it be? After a little hemming and hawing, he said that he is “always comfortable” talking with Lugar...That’d be strike three. Relying on the Senate Republican most despised by the conservative base (who’s sure to be primaried) and who has run interference for President Obama on foreign policy issues such as START and a Russian reset will set alarm bells ringing on the right. If personnel is policy, then a Daniels administration would seem to be to the left of George H.W. Bush.

Will he like Obama's call for tougher trade enforcement?  As governor, he signed $350 million of trade deals with China, but the Washington Post reports that his forthcoming book foresees a "horror movie-like" war scenario with China, in which China cuts off financing and chaos ensues in the US -- then, as a bonus, China invades Taiwan.

The same chapter agonizes about how we are now "borrowing our entire defense budget from China." Will he support the president's pledge to cut half a billion dollars from the defense budget?

Finally, Daniels - who has Syrian heritage (yeah, bet you'd forgotten that) - accepted an award from the Arab-American Institute last year and spoke movingly about his support for the Arab Spring:

Now I am so proud that brave Syrians have stepped forward, as their Egyptian and Tunisian and other counterparts have — and against, apparently, brutal threats and repressions — have stood up for the right to dream.

At the timel, conservatives called him to task for expressing too much sympathy for the Arab cause, with some alleging that he might be, by their lights, insufficiently pro-Israel. Will he disagree with the similar sentiments Obama expresses in tonight's State of the Union?

Should be fun.

*With thanks to NSN's superstar intern Ian Byrne for researching this post.

The Incredible GOP Flying Circus Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Last night in Florida, again we saw the GOP candidates for president advocate foreign policies that defy facts, Americans’ wallets and top security experts.

Fact defying: The candidates’ unchallenged misstatements included a US-Israeli joint exercise which Israel’s defense minister has said he, not the U.S., cancelled; misleading comparisons of the 2012 and 1917 US Navies that previously earned a “pants on fire” rating from nonpartisan Politifact; and an apparent lack of awareness that Fidel Castro has transferred many powers to his brother Raul and others, and experts generally don’t expect a mass exodus on his death.

Security-defying: Perhaps more surprising was the candidates’ hurry to call for using all means necessary to effect regime change in Cuba and – counter to advice from military and political leaders – in Iran; and to go against the advice of top commanders and stop talks with the Taliban.

If the rhetoric sounds familiar, there’s a reason. Each of the top three contenders’ camps is filled with architects of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Iraq War approach – people like John Bolton and Dan Senor.

Lacking leadership: The test of a president is whether he will be a commander or a manager; a buck-stops-here decision-maker or a follower of ideologues. The candidates’ eagerness to “listen to the military” has drawn critiques from top military leaders like Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey who calls total deference to the military ‘offensive.’ Last night, though, the candidates took positions from war with Iran to expanded Navy shipbuilding that the military in fact does not support. With an incumbent who has taken the tough decisions to use force and to talk to our adversaries, Americans have the right to expect more about how an alternate path would work.

SOTU dreaming on a winter's day Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Imagine if the state of the union began:

“My fellow Americans, the state of our bailed-out auto industry is strong – in fact, sales of American cars overseas is driving private-sector job creation here at home, and General Motors passed Toyota last year to become again the world’s largest automaker.”

Or this:

“My fellow Americans, one thing we can agree on, from Wall Street to Occupy Wall Street, is that we need a healthy banking sector lending money to large and small business to fuel our recovery.  And our banks are closely linked to Europe’s banks.  This year, one of the top three things I will do to keep our recovery going is to make sure that our European friends get their act together and right their banking sector – with our help if necessary. For 45 years of Cold War Americans and Europeans stood together knowing that a war that started in Central Europe would not end there.  What was true of our values then is true of our prosperity today.

Or this:

Sitting next to my wife Michelle tonight is Gene Sharp.  Most Americans have probably never heard of him, but his work on non-violent change, in the great American tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King, has made him well-known among the Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemeni and Syrian [and, if I really get going into dreamland, Bahraini] citizens who risked their lives to demand freedom and dignity. His lifetime commitment to helping others claim for themselves freedoms we too often take for granted is something of which every American can be proud – and by which every one of us can be inspired to again make our country all that it can be.

TB resistant to every antibiotic now existing could enter the US on a flight from India any day. The way to fight it is the same way we’ve controlled smallpox and polio in the past, and H1N1 and other diseases today – combining the funds and expertise of our Centers for Disease Control with the funds and expertise of the World Health Organization, Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria and other international health organizations that can bring the fight where the disease is – before it ever lands in the US.

What do all these dreamy paragraphs have in common?  They situate the Obama Administration’s considerable foreign policy and national security achievements in Americans’ daily reality.  They also do the same for the sharpest national security disagreements buried in the campaign rhetoric:

Why do we talk to our enemies? Because that’s how you get things done, in a fine tradition from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.

Why should we include our military budget in financial sacrifice? Because investments that safeguard Americans’ security and prosperity are critically-needed in economic growth, health and education.

Why does an America that walks its talk, even on hard issues like giving fair trials to people suspected of repugnant terror crimes, matter?  Why is the Golden Rule a vital source of our strength rather than an outmoded cliché? Because in a global media age, the world can see us talking and walking, and it’s those images that matter, whether it’s democracy activists in Tunisia, the mother of a Nigerian terrorist convincing her son to cooperate with law enforcement, an Al Jazeera correspondent who says she’d rather face a US court than an Iranian one, or Afghan villagers who must make a split-second decision about whether to help or harm US soldiers they encounter.

Taking a few steps back from debates about talking to the Taliban and bombing Iran would open windows to a worldview in which those decisions come more naturally – because they’re part of the same architecture that leads us to cooperate and compete with China; help Japan recover from its earthquake even as we try to surpass its auto companies; and work with democratic allies with whom we sometimes strongly disagree from Europe to Brazil to Israel. 

But I haven’t been out of government so long as to be naïve about this.  As I’ve written before, the exercise of writing the national security/foreign policy section of a president’s State of the Union is one you could market to masochists.  Hundreds of versions of dozens of paragraphs, slowly edged out by domestic priorities and whittled away by political consultants, down to a sad few paragraphs on wars, troops and –always – a nod to trade. What I’ve just done is rough out an oil painting.  Election-year messaging, rather, is somewhere between street graffiti and Etch-a-Sketch – quick, bright, simple, impermanent.

 

Grand Strategy in Four Points Posted by Jacob Stokes

In the next week or so, details of next year’s defense budget will begin to seep from the halls of the White House and the Defense Department. The budget will, at least in theory, be guided by the Defense Strategic Review released by the White House earlier this month. That document laid out a military strategy.

But the conduct of foreign affairs goes beyond issues of force structure and military doctrine (although those are, of course, essential). A military strategy should follow a grand strategy. Several attempts have been made at exploring a grand strategy for a post Iraq and Afghanistan/financial crisis-era. Richard Haass has argued for a “restoration” strategy. Dan Drezner has looked at the Obama administration’s strategy, which he characterizes as “counterpunching.” Officially, there's the National Security Strategy.

In the latest issue of Democracy (yes, I’m behind on reading), Charlie Kupchan of Georgetown and CFR puts forth four principles for a progressive grand strategy. The piece is a strong addition to the discussion. Below are those four principles, along with portions of the piece that are especially relevant in the context of the U.S. political debate:

Restore political and economic solvency: “The first first principle of a progressive agenda is that political and economic renewal at home is the indispensable foundation for strength abroad. Conservatives do not offer a credible alternative to this first plank of a progressive agenda. They not only fail to appreciate the vital link between bipartisanship and national security but deliberately seek to undermine political consensus. President George W. Bush sought to exploit, not repair, political divides; his advisers explicitly advocated polarizing policies that catered to the Republican base, not the moderate center. Since Obama entered office, Republicans have consistently sought to obstruct his foreign policies—regardless of the substantive merits.”

Balancing means with ends. “Progressives have the right formula for finding this balance between doing too much and too little. Going back to the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the progressive foreign policy agenda has consistently embraced a liberal internationalism that is equal parts power and partnership.”

Making room for the rising rest: “While perhaps emotionally satisfying, the neoconservative preference for regime change is a recipe for self-defeating adventurism; America’s recent forays into nation-building have produced scant benefits at enormous costs. The assumption that illiberal regimes yield only when forced into submission also flies in the face of history. The most notable geopolitical breakthroughs of the twentieth century came not through coercion, but bold diplomacy—Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin in Jerusalem, Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong in Beijing, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Moreover, stabilizing the global economy, ensuring energy supplies, combating nuclear proliferation and terrorism—these and many other international challenges require working with, not isolating, non-democracies.”

Reviving the Atlantic Community. “Although conservatives are often dismissive of Europe due to its lack of hard power, they generally appreciate the importance of a transatlantic community that rests on common values and interests. While neoconservatives tended to denigrate the Atlantic partnership during George W. Bush’s first term—particularly because many Europeans opposed the Iraq War—Bush changed course during his second term and worked hard to repair the Atlantic link.”

Kupchan’s piece is nicely balanced in terms of accessibility and comprehensiveness. It’s a clear blueprint for how to integrate the domestic with the international, the political with the economic and military components of power--and turn the whole mix into a coherent approach to the world. Go and read the whole thing.

Photo: CFR

Romney’s Afghanistan Plan Comes Into Focus Posted by Jacob Stokes

Thus far in the campaign, Mitt Romney has not elucidated a clear position on what he’d do in Afghanistan. Dan Balz pointed this out back in October (I commented on that piece here). Basically, early on and intermittently throughout the campaign, Romney has suggested that he wants to avoid “nation building” and that “only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan’s independence from the Taliban.” But those comments, aimed to pick up on some of the isolationist sentiment in the conservative movement, drew quick rebukes from the establishment. In response, Romney has reverted back to a more hardline position. We saw this last Monday when Romney, directly opposing the advice of his advisors, rejected talks with the Taliban. (David Ignatius has a good explanation of why this zinger was a mistake.)

It seems fair now to assume that Romney’s position on Afghanistan as explained lately and in his campaign documents and official foreign policy speeches represents his actual position, despite equivocations to the contrary. In those places, Romney has laid out several firm strategic principles. Let’s look at each of them and draw conclusions. After all, as Romney has said, “The commander in chief also has to be the educator in chief and has to communicate to the American people why he is making the decisions he’s making.” 

Principle 1: The Taliban—not just al Qaeda and international terrorism—must be completely crushed. Romney’s first strategic principle is that the mission in Afghanistan includes the total defeat of the Taliban, not just the end of international terrorism emanating from Afghanistan. In his Citadel speech, Romney asked, “In Afghanistan, after the United States and NATO have withdrawn all forces, will the Taliban find a path back to power? After over a decade of American sacrifice in treasure and blood, will the country sink back into the medieval terrors of fundamentalist rule and the mullahs again open a sanctuary for terrorists?” Romney explained that, “I will order a full review of our transition to the Afghan military to secure that nation’s sovereignty from the tyranny of the Taliban.” Romney’s foreign policy white paper also says the U.S. goal in Afghanistan is military defeat of the Taliban or at least an Afghan army that can hold them off. “He will order a full interagency assessment of our military and assistance presence in Afghanistan to determine the level required to secure our gains and to train Afghan forces to the point where they can protect the sovereignty of Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban.”

Principle 2: No talks with the Taliban until they stop fighting. The second strategic principle, articulated Monday night, is no talks with the Taliban. As Romney said then, “The right course for America is not to negotiate with the Taliban while the Taliban are killing our soldiers. The right course is to recognize they’re the enemy of the United States. It’s the vice president [Joe Biden] who said they’re not the enemy of the United States. The vice president’s wrong. They are the enemy. They’re killing American soldiers.”

Principle 3: The Obama administration’s withdrawal policy is too fast. The third strategic principle is that the current plan for withdrawing ISAF forces is too fast. This is what Romney means when he says that he would listen to the “commanders on the ground” and slow the withdrawal going into 2014. (For an explanation of why this particular construct is misguided, see here and here.)

Given these strategic principles, the promised review by a future President Romney would, almost by definition, require the U.S., to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan and to commit them to stay there indefinitely – call it a “Romney surge.” With no talks on the horizon and a U.S. commitment to their total defeat—combined with the safety of a haven in Pakistan—the Taliban would have strong incentive to keep fighting and no incentive to renounce al Qaeda and international terrorism. More broadly, increasing the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan would continue add stress to our defense budgets and require a larger force or lower troop numbers in Asia or the Middle East. The rebalancing of U.S. foreign policy would stop in its tracks.

It’s time to recognize that, despite his equivocations, Mitt Romney has the outlines of an Afghanistan policy. The media and pundits should take the candidate as his word, follow the strategic outlines he’s established to their logical conclusions and hold the candidate accountable. Right now, those strategic principles augur a forever war in Afghanistan, one that differs from John McCain’s “100 years war” in Iraq only because Romney hasn’t put a figure on his.

We know what Romney thinks. Now he needs to make the case for why that’s in the American national security interest.

Photo: Flickr

Will Romney Defend Our Turkish Allies? Posted by Heather Hurlburt

I don't really care that Rick Perry has doubled down on his attacks on Turkey's government as "Islamic terrorists," that his top foreign policy advisor* said that Ankara's democratically-elected government "has some explaining to do," and is "extremely supportive of Hamas."  (Note: if we could only get Iran's support of Hamas to look like Turkey's, what a great place the Middle East would be. But I digress.) I sympathize with our friends the fact-checkers, who think they have better things to do than respond to this kind of, well, falsehood isn't even the word for it.

No, I care -- and the Perry campaign seems to agree -- what frontrunner Mitt Romney thinks about our Turkish allies.  Like Perry advisor Victoria Coates, I too find it surprising that Romney hasn't weighed in on the controversy.  Herewith, a guide to enterprising journalists:

What is the US Relationship with Turkey? Turkey has been a member of NATO for 60 years; Turkish troops fought alongside Americans in Afghanistan.

Does Partnership With Turkey's Avowedly Muslim Government Serve American Interests? Turkey is the leading provider of shelter and humanitarian assistance to Syrian citizens fleeing Bashar al-Assad’s murderous rule. Turkey's transition away from authoritarianism over recent decades has inspired the secular and moderate leaders of transitions in our NATO ally Albania; in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country and Muslim democracy; in the former Soviet countries of Central Asia; and now in the Middle East and North Africa.

Do Human Rights Advocates View The Turkish Regime in Apocalyptic Terms? Turkey's democracy is far from perfect, and we don't agree with all of its foreign policy choices. Review Freedom House's most recent report on Turkey, which refers to it as a "country at the crossroads" with no reference to the rule of Islamic terrorists.

Things Getting Pretty Dicey With Iran Posted by David Shorr

Depending on how you look at it, tensions with Iran are mounting to: an accidental war, an intentional war, a recession-causing oil price spike, a dizzying sequence of moves / countermoves / signals, an escalating cycle of assassinations, renewed negotiations, or a combination thereof. At any rate, they're mounting. 

Even before all the drama of last week, looming sanctions against the Iranian central bank sparked a debate on whether such harsh economic measures are the functional equivalent of seeking regime change. I argue that the international pressure forged by the Obama administration has been consistent in its aim: opening Iran's nuclear program to the kind of scrutiny that will prove its civilian character. The administration has had to ratchet up the pressure because of Iranian leaders' intransigence. As I said in my post last Monday, it's vital to distinguish this policy-change goal from regime-change because "the only way Iranian leaders would cooperate in proving Iran's non-weapon status is if that would make them less, rather than more, vulnerable."

Which is why the stakes were so high when the initial version of a Washington Post story last Tuesday reported that the new sanctions weren't merely equivalent to regime-change, but that the administration's official policy is to seek the ouster of Iran's leaders. The tension between the two objectives and trade-off with the nuclear issue also made the Post's article a target of immediate criticism and fairly prompt revisions, actually two sets. (For details, see Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy's Passport blog and Jasmin Ramsey at AlJazeera.com.) So that was Tuesday.

Then on Wednesday Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was assassinated by a car bomb during his morning commute in Tehran, the sixth target (at least) of such an attack in the last several years. Unlike the Stuxnet computer virus used in 2010 against equipment in Iran's nuclear complex -- a covert project for which the US and Israeli governments seem quietly content to be perceived as joint authors -- the two allies gave starkly different reactions to the assassination (see the NYTimes report). The Israeli military spokesman indicated his satisfaction over the killing, yet also disavowing any knowledge, while the Obama Administration went to great lengths to distance itself from the attack. Dan Drezner outlines all the possible interpretations and explanations, but the short version is that Washington is extremely worried by apparent Israeli moves to escalate the crisis at a delicate moment. Not that Iranians themselves should be ruled out as potential suspects; Trita Parsi posted on Fareed Zakaria's GPS blog to note a longtime pattern of incidents just prior to planned international negotiation sessions.

Hang on, there's more on US-Israeli relations. Publicly President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu are speaking from the same page about the potential for sanctions to bring the Iranians back to the table (though Netanyahu's deputy Moshe Ya'alon seems not to have gotten the memo). Yet at the same time, the Wall Street Journal reports that behind the scenes, the US military is developing contingency plans in case Israel takes things up several notches from covert action to a military strike against Iran. This all makes for a pretty full agenda when the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey makes his first trip to Israel in his new role later this week. It's also unclear whether the postponment of a long-planned joint military exercise was due to the diplomatic friction or practical difficulties.

Seems like a moment for cool heads and deep breaths, huh. Let me offer the following points about both the diplomacy and domestic politics of this morass:

1. The idea that President Obama hasn't done enough about Iran's nuclear program is ludicrous. It's been a top priority since the day he took office, and the degree of international support for sanctions is testament to the administration's steady diplomatic full-court press. (Oh, forgot to mention that Treasury Secretary Geithner travelled to Japan and China last week to court their support for sanctions.)
2. International support is the name of the game. As the administration often reminds us, the world community is now more unified and the Iranian regime more divided -- a reverse of the situation under President Bush. The Republican presidential candidates love to talk about how they'd ignore or defy other international players, but they don't explain how that could lead to a peaceful solution. 
3. I'd rather decry Iran's assassination attempts than kill their scientists. The last time we were talking about assassination, it was an Iranian plot against Saudi diplomats in the United States. Such demonstration of Iran playing international renegade helpfully reinforced our diplomatic message; conversely, key countries hesitate when they see our ally as responding in kind. I've written before about what I call "the moral authority of the other guy looking like a jerk," a strategy I think the Obama administration has played quite well. Also, Avner Cohen asks in Haaretz where the targetting of scientists ultimately will lead.
4. We are not at -- or even near -- the point of needing to use force as a last resort. And I've written before about how the Far-Right, with their itchy trigger fingers, seem to blot out any negative repercussions.
5. It's time to take the exit ramp to negotiations. Gary Sick and Trita Parsi explain why and how.
6. Bring back the Turks and Brazilians as mediators. What Anne-Marie Slaughter said.
7. Are we sure how the domestic politics of an Iran War play? An awful lot of conventional wisdom lately about Republican tough talk being a political winner. Maybe with primary voters, I suppose. Looking toward November, I'm not so sure.
8. Do we know how a war would affect US-Israeli relations? Ditto all the predictions about an attack on Iran as a booster shot for solidarity between our two nations.

UPDATED: The book cover image in an earlier version of this post has been replaced with a more appropriate text.

Today in Retro Far-Right Alarmism: "Unilateral Disarmament!" Posted by David Shorr

If FP wonks of a certain age ever worried about losing their bearings here in a 21st Century election year, today brings the comfort of an all-too-familiar right wing shriek. Over on the Weekly Standard blog, Mark Davis today dusted off the old "unilateral disarmament" chestnut, in response to the Obama Administration's new defense strategy.

I should immediately acknowledge that the strategy indeed includes cuts in the nuclear arsenal that will be undertaken on the US' own initiative. So the reductions that have been indicated are, strictly speaking, unilateral. What's most notable about Davis' post, however, is the way he extrapolates far beyond what DoD is planning. Perhaps Davis knows that the scale of the envisioned cuts are not, in themselves, all that shocking -- given that they'll leave us with lots of nuclear weapons. 

But even as closely as I follow the rants of our ultra-conservative colleagues, the following passage struck me as a new low in willful mischaracterization:

A larger issue: President Obama, in articulating a cherished goal of abolishing nuclear weapons, seems to conceive this goal of a nuclear free world, which many experts believed was at best the work of decades, as something that could be close to finalized in his second term. How is that going to work when most nuclear powers explicitly reject our zero vision?

I almost feel a perverse awe for the audacity here. (Takes deep breath.) The president thinks he can reach zero nuclear weapons within five years?!? (Oh, hell with it.) I cannot imagine where Davis got this idea except by pulling it out of his -- well, you know. Indeed, when the president talks about this very issue of a timeframe, he says it may well take longer than his own lifetime. Or, to coin a phrase, "the work of decades." Why will it take so long? Probably because of the complex challenges of drawing down all of the world's nuclear powers. 

So with apologies to Pete Nicely (aka @LOLGOP), let me conclude by saying that if you have to invent an imaginary President Obama to run against, your ideas suck. 

The GOP's Iran Obsession Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at Foreign Policy I have a new piece up looking at why the Republican candidates for President can't stop talking about Iran's nuclear program . . . and why it might actually be dangerous for them to keep doing it:

Why are Republican candidates treating Iran like it's the modern embodiment of Nazi Germany, al Qaeda, and the Soviet Union, all wrapped up in a mischievous and explosive ball?

The long answer is Americans don't like Iran, they are afraid of nuclear weapons and images of mushroom clouds, and Muslims with weapons of mass destruction are scary. Frankly, GOP primary voters care about threats to Israel -- and sanctions and diplomacy are less impressive than the promise that American airplanes will soon be dropping bombs on reinforced bunkers.

But the short answer is this is pretty much all the GOP has. Want to claim that Obama has been soft on terror? That whole killing Osama bin Laden thing makes that a bit tough. Same goes for all the al Qaeda lieutenants who have been killed in drone strikes. What about pulling out of Iraq? Good luck finding many Americans who disagree with that decision. How about Afghanistan and Obama's call to begin pulling out troops in 2014? First, it's hard to argue that Obama didn't give war a chance in the Hindu Kush; second, Afghanistan is a less and less popular war every day. How about the claim that Obama has thrown Israel under the bus vis-à-vis the Palestinians? That's not going to make all that much of a difference. It turns out the two groups of voters most concerned about Israel (American Jews and evangelical Christians) likely already have a pretty clear sense whom they'll be voting for in November.

You can read the whole thing here

Will Pressuring Iran Backfire? Posted by David Shorr

These days we're hearing two sets of concerns about the US and international pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. From one direction, GOP presidential candidates and other ultra-hawks argue for an escalated conflict with Iran. According to them, President Obama isn't doing enough or is actually coddling Tehran. Not that the candidates really know much about the Administration's Iran policy, but that's par for the course and part and parcel of an increasingly bizarro Republican foreign policy aproach.

For some of Obama's critics, their faith in military action gives them utter confidence that attacking Iran would squelch its nuclear ambitions without the kind of backlash we might regret. (Hmm, where have we heard that before?)

Yet another set of commentators, who are less sanguine about a war with Iran, warn that tightening the screws of economic sanctions -- currently being prepared -- already puts things on a dangerous course. Prominent voices in this camp are Trita Parsi and Suzanne Maloney, two of the foreign policy community's top experts on the region and certainly warranting close attention. Indeed, the questions they raise are central: has the Obama administration put higher priority on the sanctions than on the nuclear program itself, and in the process complicated (if not doomed) the effort to reach a peaceful solution? Here's now Trita captures the core policy dilemma:

The challenge with multilateral sanctions, however, is that the diplomatic resources required to create concensus around sanctions are so great that once the sanctions threat gains momentum, the commitment of the sanctioning countries to this path tends to become irreversible.

He's also correct that the moment just prior to sanctions is a time of heightened leverage -- also a moment of opportunity, when the target of this international pressure might offer key concessions. And yes, when you hear people downplay eleventh-hour concessions as merely ploys to alleviate pressure, this misses the entire point that the aim of pressure is ... to extract concessions. 

Here's where I have to offer a counterpoint, though. In short, not all concessions are created equal. When you're doing this statecraft right, the leverage of impending sanctions produces measures that really move the parties toward a solution. But just because it's foolish to choose sanctions over meaningful concessions, doesn't mean it's wise to suspend sanctions in exchange for whatever the targeted government offers. With all the effort that goes into building support for sanctions, they should only be traded in a fair bargain.

That goes doubly when you're bargaining over a deal that had been agreed earlier on. In Trita's piece, he recounts the story of October 2009 - June 2010, the months after Iran agreed and then reneged on a plan to transfer most of their enriched uranium out of the country. As UN Security Council countries were preparing for a new sanctions vote, the leaders of Turkey and Brazil undertook a dramatic initiative to mediate and obtained a last-minute agreement that resurrected the uranium transfer. The Obama administration was not impressed, and immediately called the vote in the Council, which passed.

As Trita sees it, the administration refused to take 'yes' for an answer. But I can argue that the Iranians were trying to sell us the same horse twice. For one thing, the agreement with Brazil and Turkey didn't sufficiently account for the uranium that had been enriched in the intervening months. Contrary to Parsi's analysis, I believe the administration would have welcomed a reasonable compromise. (I look forward to reading Trita's more detailed account in his new book, A Single Roll of the Dice, which focuses on President Obama's Iran diplomacy and will be out this month.)

Suzanne Maloney similarly argues that Obama's sanctions diplomacy is undercutting its intended aim:

[T]he United States cannot hope to bargain with a country whose economy it is trying to disrupt and destroy. As severe sanctions devastate Iran's economy, Tehran will surely be encouraged to double down on its quest for the ultimate deterrent. So, the White House's embrace of open-ended pressure means that it has backed itself into a policy of regime change, something Washington has little ability to influence.

Not only is it far beyond America's control to relpace Iran's government, it is also at odds with the objective of preventing it from developing a nuclear weapon. The only way Iranian leaders would cooperate in proving Iran's non-weapon status is if that would make them less, rather than more, vulnerable. After the overblown "axis of evil" rhetoric of President Bush, it's actually been crucial for President Obama to highlight that nuclear weapons are the real issue, and not the Iranian leadership themselves.

Still, is severe international economic pressure tantamount to a regime-change policy? I don't see the two as equivalent. For me, the main point is that by resisting nuclear transparency, Iran is losing sympathy and becoming isolated. Suzanne emphasizes Iran's long record of enduring hardship and pressure, but standing completely alone in the world community is easier said than done.

A policy of "open-ended pressure" would indeed be counterproductive. It is just as important for the Obama Administration to highlight that Tehran can get out of the penalty box, as it is to build a strong international coalition to keep up the pressure. Unlike Maloney, I still think the policy can keep these two in proper balance.