North America Archive

MADRID, Spain — FRIENDS AT LAST: Every Wednesday, a large crowd gathers at noon on the edge of the parade ground of the Royal Palace in Madrid to watch the ceremonial changing of the guard. Started a year or so ago, the ceremony involves all the traditional elements of military choreography — colorful uniforms, a band, cavalry, and even two horse-drawn field artillery pieces. Unlike at Buckingham Palace, where a similar drill has been carried out every day for centuries, the guard does not have the symbolic duty of protecting the Spanish monarch: Spain’s king and queen live some distance […]

More smart stuff from Sam Roggeveen, who points out that alert is not the same thing as alarmed, but nevertheless admits to a case of nerves: The thing to remember is that China does not have to match the U.S.in global capability terms for U.S. allies in the Pacific to startgetting nervous about the strategic balance. All China has to do is bea credible competitor in the region, and that is already the case. Roggeveen goes on to argue that “. . . we have already passed the point at which the U.S. could militarily intervene in a Taiwan conflict […]

A fight is brewing in the U.S. military between manpower and technology. With the economy cratering and defense budgets flattening, we can no longer afford both large armies meant to pacify hostile populations, and legions of high-end air and naval platforms that fulfill our technological dreams. Because of the powerful political backing those high-end platforms enjoy, this budget conflict might spark a broad backlash to our recent fascination with wars of occupation. Our fetish for counterinsurgency campaigns has now made us a land power. We reacted to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by expanding the ground services, even as […]

Anyone who hoped President Barack Obama would return to Washington with a suitcase full of gifts from his mostly European tour will find the souvenirs largely disappointing. While Obama managed to bring back some important achievements, most of them came in the form of warm feelings. Those are hard to gift-wrap. Following his maiden overseas voyage as U.S. president, Obama arrived home to find the same urgent crises he had left behind, compounded by new foreign policy challenges that had arisen during his absence. Making matters worse, the trip itself, while undeniable fruitful, produced few tangible results. When viewed through […]

I took a bit of a drubbing around the web for my post about President Barack Obama’s Prague speech yesterday. Matt Stone pointed out that our NPT commitment to “methodically disarm” (his words) is the flip side of the deterrence coin, while John Boonstra suggested that “bad timing” is a weak reason to foreswear the goal of no nukes, because “it will never be a good time to pursue nuclear disarmament.” I don’t disagree with either. In fact, having gone through Obama’s speech again, I find myself in agreement with all of the actual policy initiatives he identifies, ably summarized […]

Sam Rogevveen and Rory Medcalf offer some thoughts over at the Interpreter on what the recently announced U.S. defense budget looks like from an Australian perpsective. Here’s Roggeveen: . . . [T]o the extent that Gates has decided to cap America’s ‘big war’ capabilities — by cuttingprograms like the F-22 and the Zumwalt-class destroyers and slowlyreducing the number of aircraft carriers — he is signaling that the U.S.is not intending to increase America’s margin of superiority againstChina. Indeed, given the leaps China is making, he is effectivelychoosing to reduce that margin. It’s really not that surprising or radical — the […]

Tom Barnett pushes back against the Global Zero goal evoked by President Barack Obama with what is certainly today’s quote of the day, and might even be the quote of the year: The system is nowhere near prepared or integrated enough to abolishnuclear weapons, and even if it was, I’d keep them on the sheerassumption that not everybody and everything I might meet in spacesomeday is going to like me. Anne Applebaum pushes back, too, with a point that is often obscured by the bilateral U.S.-Russian lens through which we see nuclear arms control: Plus I’m not sure the French, […]

“This is a reform budget.” More specifically, though, this a formal indictment of the defense procurement process. Even where weapons systems have ostensibly been “cut,” it’s the procurement process and not really the weapon itself at issue. The FCS armored vehicle, for instance, was killed in its current conception in order to be relaunched in a form the army actually needs. The controversial, cost-overrun F-22 will run out its string, but will be replaced by the joint F-35, which offers more applications across the branches without the symbolic procurement albatross around its neck. (Do we really 2,443 of them, though, […]

A final thought on this weekend’s NATO summit. In his WPR Briefing on the subject, Soeren Kern had this to say: Obama put a brave face on the paltry results by saying they werea “strong down payment on the future of our mission in Afghanistan andthe future of NATO.” Butby providing only modest assistance incomparison to Obama’s 21,000-troop surge, NATO as an alliance hasessentially failed in Afghanistan. Indeed, the mission in Afghanistanis becoming increasingly Americanized: By the end of 2009, nearlytwo-thirds of the estimated 95,000 permanent foreign military personnelin Afghanistan will be American. Not only do I think that’s right, […]

One of the more prevalent military hardware stories that’s been flying just under the radar for the past few years is the shortage of helicopters for multilateral deployments. The EUFOR Chad force ultimately had to accept a Russian offer of eight copters, along with their operating teams, in order to cover the huge theater of operations under their jurisdiction. This Defense Industry Daily article describes how Coalition forces in Afghanistan have been forced to lease copters for non-military use from private contractors, in order to free up military copters for operations. This is a false shortage, to the extent that […]

Andrew Bast’s accompanying interview with Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF and currently a professor atMIT and editor of the Baseline Scenario blog, can be found here. Low expectations preceded last Thursday’s G-20 summit in London, but by day’s end a curious consensus had emerged. Prior to the summit, a rift had emerged between the United States, which was pushing for more economic stimulus, and the Europeans, who urged stricter regulation reforms. French President Nicolas Sarkozy had even threatened to walk out were he not satisfied with the measures taken. (Asked about it upon landing in London, he […]

U.S. President Barack Obama’s debut NATO summit at the Franco-German border over the weekend was a triumph of style over substance. Although allies put on a public face of unity, they were unable to agree on any of the major problems facing trans-Atlantic security. As NATO marks its 60th birthday, the alliance is mired in a profound identity crisis offering little reason to celebrate. The summit was dominated by the problem of Afghanistan and what to do about it. European allies heaped praise on Obama’s new Afghan strategy, which sets benchmarks for progress in fighting al-Qaida and the Taliban in […]

STRASBOURG, France — It’s a virtual certainty that the concerto played by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter at NATO’s 60th anniversary dinner Friday night wasn’t chosen because of its nickname. Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 is known as the “Turkish Concerto” because the composer used oriental themes in the final movement. But as it happened, the one discordant note in an otherwise harmonious summit was the down-to-the-wire threat by NATO member Turkey to veto the nomination of former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the alliance’s new secretary general. It took frantic, behind-the-scenes efforts, which delayed the start of the Saturday […]

Perhaps the most significant development coming out of last week’s G-20 summit meeting in London is the news that the world’s leading economies will triple the International Monetary Fund’s lending powers to some $750 billion. The massive investment raises an immediate question: How is influence shifting within the workings of the Fund? To tease out the nuances of these developments, WPR columnist Andrew Bast spoke with Simon Johnson, chief economist of the IMF in 2007 and 2008, and currently a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Many consider Johnson’s blog, The Baseline Scenario, a must-read on the global […]

I’m not going to make a habit of doing this, but today’s two selections reflect my previous post about the disconnect between the political theater of this weekend’s NATO summit, and the political substance that underlies it. And in trying to make a final choice between the two of them, I realized that neither one fully does justice to the situation, whereas together they describe it perfectly. The first selection reflects the political theater and its theme of conciliation, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the song was loaded into President Barack Obama’s iPod before he left for […]

Yigal Schleifer gives a rundown of Turkey’s opposition to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s candidacy for NATO secretary general. Essentially, because Rasmussen refused to condemn the publication of the Mohamed caricatures way back when, Turkey is considering vetoing his appointment (NATO operates under consensus rules). T(here’s also the question of a Danish news outlet that allegedly serves as a PKK mouthpiece, but that doesn’t support the point I’m about to make, so I’ll downplay that part.) Turkey’s argument is based on the image problems Rasmussen’s “involvement” in the incident will create in the Muslim world. I would argue that […]

What stood out most in President Barack Obama’s various press conferences I watched today was the divergence between the political theater in the run-up to the NATO summit, and the political substance that underlies it. On the political theater side, Obama acknowledged the French and German contributions to the war effort, while French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared their full support for Obama’s Afghanistan strategy. On the political substance side, Obama made it clear that France and Germany need to contribute more troops, and Sarkozy and Merkel said, Non, and Nein, respectively. It’s not that there’s no […]