Global Archive

For the first time ever, the combined emerging markets of China, India, Russia and the Middle East will consume more crude oil than the United States (Bloomberg via 2point6billion). These are projections, but what’s surprising is the way in which the impact of an expected American economic contraction will be offset by continued growth in the emerging markets. Consider that in 2001, the American recession led to a twenty-five percent drop in crude oil prices, to roughly $20 a barrel. Contrast that to 2008, when the price is expected to rise to $120 before the end of the year. The […]

Foreign Policy’s Passport blog has got an ongoing discussion of the challenges facing UN peacekeeping operations, and why we need to meet them that’s worth checking in with here. As much as they’re sometimes looked down on, these operations secure pretty vital national interests, and actually function as major force multipliers in that they cost us way less than mounting an actual American deployment.

The most-read WPR articles during the last seven days: 1. The Limits of the Surge: An Interview with Gian Gentile2. Misreading the Surge Threatens Army’s Conventional Capabilities3. French Complicity in the Rwandan Genocide: An Interview with Jean-Paul Gouteux4. British, Russian Support May Not Save Ambitious Nuclear Power Club5. Chinese Claims of Olympic Terrorist Plots Seem Suspect6. Corridors of Power: Pope Benedict XVI’s U.S. Visit7. NATO Cancels Local Afghan Police Program Amid Sedition Fears8. With Decline in Development Aid, Japan Fears Losing Diplomatic Clout9. Success in Bucharest: The Half-a-Loaf Doctrine10. In Brazil, Internet Access Grows Rapidly, Even Among Poor

Hampton’s right. I got a little bombastic about the erosion of civil liberties during the Bush administration, which don’t really compare to WWII, and get a run for their money from the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy blacklists. I’m glad he kept me honest on that, and along the same lines, we invite anyone who disagrees with anything written here (or with how it’s written, for that matter) to drop a line. The hope is to engage a discussion around the ideas, not beat people over the head with them, and I’m certainly open to having my own opinions broadened […]

I don’t agree with Judah’s specific sentiment below that the Bush administration has seen the “worst erosion of our own democratic traditions” (WWII was much worse, for example), but I do agree with the general sentiment that liberty at home can be endangered by crusading abroad. John Quincy Adams, the first son of a president to himself become president, did too. His oft-cited July 4, 1821, speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, when he was serving as Secretary of State, is worth revisiting in this context. Here’s an excerpt: Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or […]

Missile defense has its proponents, otherwise we wouldn’t have spent $150 billion on it since 1983, with another $62.5 billion requested by the Pentagon over the next five years. Philip Coyle isn’t one of them. Judging by his resume, Coyle’s the kind of guy you want keeping an eye on program R&D, which might explain why the Pentagon paid him to do just that for seven years. In addition to his gig as Asst. Secretary of Defense and Director of Operational Test and Evaluation during the Clinton Administration, Coyle also did two stints for a combined 32 years at Lawrence […]

Thanks to Hampton for pointing out the Buruma piece. It’s always refreshing to read an articulate reminder of why it pays to be circumspect about the latest conventional wisdom. The last twenty years is littered with the wreckage of very convincing theories about the emerging geopolitical landscape, and the end of American hegemony might end up joining them. Still, Buruma’s debunking of the multi-polar world seems to point in the direction of Haass’ analysis, where America’s relative power declines due to a rising tide, but everyone else is still busy plugging the leaks that their boats are springing. As for […]

Apropos of Judah’s two posts below on Haas, Kagan and the end of America’s unipolar moment, Ian Buruma’s recent review in the New Yorker of the latest crop of books on this idea is very much worth reading. To my eye, Buruma’s critique of recent books by Kagan, Fareed Zakaria, Parag Khanna and Bill Emmott demonstrates several virtues in his thinking: a proper sense of the complex web of motivations that influence international relations; a realistic conception of what American power can achieve; and, at the same time, a recognition that a foreign policy that is completely valueless is both […]

For an altogether different, but not necessarily inconsistent, take on the post-unipolar moment than Richard Haass’ nonpolarity, Robert Kagan offers The End of the End of History. And if you can get past the first few paragraphs (ie. characterizing Russia and China as “the forces of autocracy”), he raises some very compelling points that are worth examining whether or not, as he argues, the leaders of Russia and China really do have a fundamental attachment to autocracy, and a hostility towards liberal democracy as an ideology. The usefulness of Kagan’s analysis, I think, lies less in the natural hostility he […]

This Richard Haass article from Foreign Affairs (via Andrew Sullivan) is an important addition to the gathering discussion about what will follow America’s unipolar moment. Haass, like Parag Khanna, takes for granted that unipolarity is drawing to a close, for reasons both out of our control (globalization, the rise of non-state actors, the march of history), as well as due to our actions (the Iraq War) and inaction (lack of a meaningful energy policy). Unlike Khanna, he believes that the coming age will be not a multipolar one, but a nonpolar one, where power and influence are atomized, regional, and […]

Another article that caught my eye in this month’s Military Review was this one by Dr. Cora Sol Goldstein (.pdf) titled, A Strategic Failure: American Information Control Policy in Occupied Iraq. It’s a fascinating read about the ways in which our decision to define the mission in Iraq as a liberation, as opposed to an occupation of a defeated enemy, led to lax media policies that encouraged a free press and undermined our monopoly on information. From an operational perspective, the article makes perfect sense, even if it is downright jarring to an American ear unused to the idea of […]

Kelley Beaucar Vlalos rightly calls attention to a neglected angle of the Iraq War in her American Conservative article, Women at War. Despite Congressional mandates and Army regulations to the contrary, and with little notice by either government, the media or the public at large, women soldiers have largely been integrated into the modern asymmetric battlefield in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Some strident language aside (blaming this development on “Clinton-era liberals,” for instance), Vlalos’ larger point is balanced and timely. She complements the iconic “Women of Iraq” (Jessica Lynch, Lynndie England and Janice Karpinski) with the neglected stories of rape, […]

When President Bush announced that Iraq and Afghanistan combat tours would be cut back to twelve months from their current fifteen, Phil Carter and Kevin Drum had an interesting back and forth and back about tour lengths and counterinsurgency best practices. The upshot of the exchange was that even though counterinsurgency demands familiarity with the area of operations, there’s a point of diminishing returns beyond which the human toll of longer tours interferes with units’ ability to be effective. Here’s Carter: [T]here’s a finite limit to the amount of combat that men and women can endure. So we must balance […]

Hampton forwarded me this Center for a New American Security monograph by Jim Thomas, and I’m real glad he did. Thomas develops an idea that I find pretty convincing, namely that the U.S. should husband its power and influence by redirecting its energies from resource intensive interventions to “indirect” support missions carried out by local actors. The crux of his argument is that instead of functioning as the world’s “first responder” in security crises, the U.S. needs to function as an underwriter, the “Lloyds of London” of global stability. Thomas’ strategic starting point is that failed and failing states pose […]

Everyone pinning their hopes on a new administration to jumpstart American diplomacy should keep in mind that the Foreign Service can’t do the job if they don’t have the money and the staff. This is from a radio panel discussion written up by Melinda Brouwer of the FPA’s U.S. Diplomacy blog: Because of the lack of funding, the State Department just doesn’t have the people to do the job they need to do. Kojo mentioned that there are less diplomats employed in the FS than there are musicians employed by the Department of Defense. I’m all for Army bands, but […]

Stephen Grenville of The Interpreter complains that discussion of BHP’s planned takeover of Rio Tinto is focusing on the market aspects of the deal, to the exclusion of the potential geopolitical consequences. Chinalco has already begun buying up Rio Tinto shares in an effort to block the deal, and there were reports that “China” also planned to buy a significant interest in BHP to hedge against the market share of the eventual merged giant. Here’s Grenville: Perhaps the longer-term issue this raises is even more important. Over time, it seems likely that China will want to assure its resource security […]

There’s been a lot of discussion about the president’s power to establish a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq in the absence of Congressional approval. Less has been given to just what those forces can be authorized to do, and by which branch of government. Fortunately, the House Committe on Foreign Affairs had another hearing last week, this time a discussion of the War Powers Resolution and the proposed bill revising it (which I was admittedly unaware of). Among the noteworthy testimony from constitutional scholars, that of Michael Glennon stands out, both for its treatment of the Iraq War […]