WPR Blog Archive

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 […]

Thanks to Kevin Drum, I doubled back and caught the rest of this post by Intel Dump’s Phil Carter the second time around. (I missed it the first time due to the WaPo’s “Read more” function, which seems to be the new space-saving, content-masking trend in blogs.) By admitting to putting a veneer of victory on what amounted to a disastrous situation on the ground in Iraq throughout 2006, President Bush is basically confirming what Michael Feaver revealed in his Commentary article earlier this month. Namely, that the administration’s internal discussions bore no resemblance to its public declarations. Of course, […]

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, […]

Funny how for months we’ve been picking apart the Anbar Awakening from a tactical point of view, all the while failing to take into account its single most significant strategic implication. Namely, that al-Qaida’s blueprint for Islamic revolution does not work. The Military Review article I wrote up in an earlier post offered more evidence of what’s become the consensus explanation for the turning of the Sunni tribes: their disgust with al-Qaida Iraq’s murderous tactics and their resentment at the AQI “foreigners” trying to impose an internationalist jihadi ideology on what was essentially a nationalist insurgency. But al-Qaida, as a […]

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 […]

Via FP Passport, it looks like the EU got a promise from Turkmanistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov to deliver some gas. At 10 billion cubic meters, the deal is a start, even if it’s just a drop in the 500 bcm bucket of European demand. But there’s still the little question of how to get the gas to Europe. Nabucco, if it ever happens, won’t be operational for another five years. So the EU is looking at either building links to existing pipelines, or liquifying the gas and shipping it. Needless to say, Russia has remained stoic about the deal.

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 […]

If you’re interested in the actual operational details of how Anbar was Awakened, this Military Review article (.pdf) (via Phil Carter) is worth a read. It’s an account by Col. Sean MacFarland, commander of the Army brigade credited with implementing the tactical approach that culminated in the Awakening, and Maj. Niel Smith, one of his company commanders, and to my mind it demonstrates how resourcefulness and initiative remain fundamental American assets. Significantly, Col. MacFarland’s approach pre-dates the Surge, and seems to confirm Lt. Col. Gian Gentile’s assertion in a WPR interview that COIN tactics had been applied as early as […]

Silvio Berlusconi is back, and by the looks of his solid majority, he might even have the makings of a stable government, although in Italy that’s never a safe bet. I find that following Italian politics takes too steep a learning curve for the cost to benefits analysis to pay off, but outside of the community of Italian-based foreign correspondents (who’ve got some colorful coverage to look forward to) and an inner circle of industrial barons, it’s hard to see who in Italy this benefits. EU summits just got a bit more interesting, though, since the only person on Earth […]

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 […]

The House Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing the week before last on the funding of UN peacekeeping missions which slipped under the radar but deserves more attention. Chairman Bill Delahunt, in his opening statement (.pdf), made the good point that the billing formula needs to be updated to better reflect current economic realities: the U.S. is currently billed 25% of U.N. peacekeeping costs, compared to 3% for China and 1% for Gazprom Russia. Be that as it may, Delahunt also pointed out that U.N. peacekeeping missions address some vital American national security interests at one-eighth of the cost […]

Israel’s nuclear program remains the pink elephant in the Middle East nuclear room, despite the country’s longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity.” But as this Yossi Melman article from Ha’Aretz illustrates, the other problematic aspect of the Israeli program is our involvement with it, which just got expanded under the terms of an agreement to ensure the safety of Israel’s aging Dimona facility. The double-bind here is that this kind of cooperation clearly undermines the non-proliferation regime, since Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, and also lends credibility to Iranian claims of a nuclear double standard for the Muslim […]