Archive for the ‘Foreign Policy’ Category
March 14th, 2010
Vice President Joseph Biden’s visit to Israel last week was a strategic disaster — a strategic disaster of Israel’s making. Biden arrived in Tel Aviv to affirm America’s commitment to the long-term security of Israel. At the moment of his arrival, the Israeli government announced an expansion of government-built housing for ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Israel has occupied this territory since the 1967 War, but the long-term governance of the area remains internationally disputed. It is territory where Palestinians have widely recognized claims, violated by forced Israeli settlement of Orthodox Jews.
The entire region is watching how the United States reacts to this recent Israeli settlement expansion. In response to pressures from Washington, the Israeli governmnet had instituted a temporary and partial freeze on new settlements in late 2009. That pledge now appears irrelevant. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that he was not informed of this new settlement in advance of Biden’s visit, and that it came from more extreme elements of his governing coalition that control the Interior Ministry. That is also irrelevant for the regional strategic context.
Faced with a fragile political situation in Iraq after the recent elections there, a belligerent and nuclear-arming Iran, and continued insurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the United States must build credibility in the Middle East as a fair broker between warring sectarian groups. President Obama is deploying force and capital primarily to build coalitions that can govern the region in a stable and productive way. This is the American approach to nation-building amidst a region of failed (and failing) states. Since his extraordinary speech in Cairo last year, Obama has worked to nurture effective American relationships with diverse players in the Middle East — including many Islamist groups in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
The Israeli settlement announcement during Biden’s trip undermines everything that the United States is trying to achieve. It contributes to a widely-held image of the United States as an unequivocal supporter of Israeli expansion. It belies pledges to even-handedness and compromise. It makes Obama’s promises in Cairo appear baseless and insincere. The United States has a huge credibility problem in the region and Israel has just deepened difficulties for the United States, just when Washington needs regional partners more than ever before. How can we convince countries to impose sanctions on the extremists in Iran under these circumstances? How can we procure assistance for nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan with Israel acting this way, in our name?
I strongly support the security of Israel, but I also strongly object to Israel undermining our security (and the security of the region) for its own domesitc purposes. That has to stop. The expansion of settlements in occupied areas has to stop.
The time has come for the United States to raise the costs of this dangerous and regionally destabilizing behavior by our friends in Israel. Serious alliances often involve friendly pressures that go hand-in-hand with continued basic support. While voicing a continued commitment to Israel, President Obama should issue a statement with two clear provisions:
1. The United States will not authorize any future increase in aid of any kind to Israel until it issues an iron-clad pledge not to expand settlements for the next 12 months. Without an Israeli pledge, Obama will veto aid legislation that includes an increase in funding from present levels.
2. The President should suspend all deliveries of military equipment and supplies to Israel for 6 months as a penalty for the recent affront to mutual security commitments in the region. Future Israeli settlement expansions should incur an extension of this suspension. American military supplies should not support or protect Israeli expansion.
These measures will elicit strong criticism from various supporters of Israel, but the President can enforce them at manageable political cost. The measures will show the world that the United States is serious about acting as a fair broker in the region, unwilling to accept unilateral trouble-making by anyone. The measures will also create incentives for Israelis to re-think their settlement policy in the context of broader regional security aims.
The United States will continue to support Israel, but Netanyahu and others must know that this support is not unconditional or unequivocal. Israel must come to respect how its interests, the interests of the region, and the interests of the United States require control of Israel’s own internal extremists. If Israel does not adjust, it will only contribute to its further isolation. The greatest threat to Israel’s future is, in fact, found at home among its militant expansionists.
This blog post initially appeared at http://www.globalbrief.ca
February 24th, 2010
New, more complex global problems call out for a new generation of synoptic thinkers – in GB-speak, ‘geocrats’ – who understand power and dare to act.
Henry Kissinger never attended a public policy school, he never took an economics course, and he never worked for a law firm, a large corporation or a traditional government bureaucracy. His career belies the assumptions about professionalization that dominate our 21st century discussions of leadership. Kissinger was never really certified as an ‘expert’ of anything. His famous doctoral dissertation on the Congress of Vienna, for example, was a work of History written in a Department of Government. The historians considered him a dilettante; the political scientists believed that he was too unscientific. Kissinger only found a permanent academic position at Harvard University when the dean of the college, McGeorge Bundy, created a controversial and experimental new home – the Center for International Affairs – to nurture interdisciplinary projects and acquire large grants from foundations, the federal government, and the intelligence agencies of the US government.
Kissinger was a cosmopolitan generalist with an eye for pragmatic policy, living in a time of hyper-specialization and growing separation between thinkers and doers. That is what made Kissinger so special. He lived between separated worlds, and he brought those worlds together for concerted action on behalf of clearly defined national purposes. This was not just a form of work for Kissinger; it was his life story. As an Orthodox Jew in Nazi Germany, an immigrant in the US Army, a non-traditional scholar at Harvard, and an unelected White House adviser, Kissinger always operated on the edge of respectability. He was always the eccentric, the pusher, and the climber. Among respectable and smug pin-striped specialists, these were the qualities that allowed Kissinger to be more creative and daring in his policy advice. These were the qualities that also made him attractive to powerful figures in search of new initiatives.
Leadership, at its core, is about connections and calculated risk-taking. Kissinger excelled at both. He was a big-picture thinker who drew actively on the work of people with diverse areas of expertise. Kissinger might not have done the original research, but he knew how to identify and exploit valuable new knowledge. He brilliantly synthesized the talent around him to address pressing problems in pragmatic ways. In the decades after WW2, Kissinger guided policy-makers in their responses to the challenges of post-war reconstruction, communist containment, the nuclear arms race, limited warfare, third world revolutions, and détente. He mastered these subjects, and he kept a clear focus on the strategic need to expand American foreign influence, while limiting direct commitments.
Kissinger understood that leadership in a complex international environment frequently offers a first-mover advantage. He had lived through a decade in the 1930s when the powerful democratic states were paralyzed by their hesitance to take action against emerging threats. Kissinger was driven to prevent a recurrence of those conditions. As he put it, the successful statesman must anticipate, as well as react; he or she must “rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” Leaders, Kissinger recognized, must define their times, rather than let their times define them. He succeeded in those terms as almost no one else has in recent memory.
Kissinger made many mistakes, but he managed to transform major regions of the world in ways that served American interests. The enduring peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, and the uninterrupted Western access to Middle East oil were negotiated by Kissinger personally over the course of his famous ‘shuttle diplomacy.’ The US opening to China was also orchestrated by Kissinger through a series of personal overtures that challenged conventional wisdom. Nearly every major international politician of the last two generations – from Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong to George W. Bush and Hu Jintao – has recognized that if you want to initiate international change, Henry Kissinger is a key catalyst. That is why he remains so influential, more than 30 years since he ended his term as Secretary of State under President Gerald Ford.
Whether one approves of Kissinger’s policies or not, the challenges of the 21st century require new Henry Kissingers. The problems – from failed states and the proliferation of violence, to environmental degradation, fossil fuel depletion, and global disease – require leaders who can synthesize gigabytes of information without getting lost in the details. Leaders will have to connect apparently incompatible ideas and people, and they will have to take calculated risks. The early crises of the 21st century – terrorist attacks, North Korean nuclear sabre-rattling, the near collapse of the global economy, and the devastating earthquake in Haiti – have shown that creativity and vision are at a premium. The old language of ‘deterrence,’ ‘development,’ and ‘democracy’ does not offer much help. The leaders of the 21st century will have to invent new intellectual anchors for action.
So far, the required international leadership has been in short supply. The most decorated economists around the world have mobilized to address the global financial crisis, and yet the structure of the international financial system remains largely unchanged. Where are the inspiring reform ideas? The same can be said for global energy, health and the environment. Experts have held countless international meetings – the latest in Copenhagen – and they have had the ear of many powerful politicians. Despite these opportunities, where is an inspiring programme for new energy production, improved human health and environmental sustenance? The international community has lots of pet projects and powerful ideas floating around, but where are the figures who can bring all of them together and implement a coherent strategy?
Politics within and among societies is clearly a hindrance to collective action. Resources are also in short supply, and citizens – especially in North America and Western Europe – are comfortably ensconced in self-defeating modes of behaviour. All of these observations are valid, but they are only part of the story. They are more of an excuse, rather than an explanation for poor leadership. The political, resource and habitual hindrances to effective policy in the 21st century are neither new nor overwhelming. They are, in fact, sources of creative opportunity that await a visionary transformation. Almost everyone recognizes that change is necessary, but no one has yet painted a persuasive picture of it.
The most advanced societies are, quite frankly, visually challenged in their approach to policy precisely because they are so technically capable. Scientists and engineers have proven ingenious in developing machinery and medicine that allow societies to put off tough choices. Instead of addressing growing inequalities in access to basic resources, the impoverished get connected to the Internet. Instead of deliberating about the behaviour changes necessary to improve human health, some of the sick get expensive new treatments, while others languish in Dickensian squalor. This cannot continue, but science and engineering have put off the day of reckoning – at least for a while.
Despite these deep forebodings, there is cause for optimism. Human history is filled with remarkable examples of creative leadership in the face of imminent disaster. We might have reached a similar juncture in recent years. The new Kissingers of the 21st century do not look or sound like Kissinger. They do, however, share his talent for connection and calculated risk-taking. They are cosmopolitan generalists – not narrow specialists – and they congregate in the spaces between established professions, disciplines, and political institutions. Like Kissinger, the new leaders of the 21st century are thinkers and doers at the same time – eccentric and indispensable.
They are also young. Active leadership is, in fact, a youthful enterprise. The men and women who are devising and implementing a new vision for international change do not have fancy titles, large incomes or even big offices. They work long hours, communicating with colleagues around the world, and pushing for change within existing business and government institutions. They often disagree on details, but they see themselves as part of a larger, serious, world-historical enterprise.
Who are they? They are the restless academics and journalists who left universities and newspapers because they wanted to be more relevant. In some cases, they found their generalist interests made them unacceptable for professional gatekeepers. In other cases, they achieved professional success, but quickly found themselves frustrated with the narcissistic combination of moral outrage and behavioural indifference that characterizes much of intellectual life in the most advanced societies. Like Kissinger, these new leaders have used hard work, eccentricity and opportunism to build careers in-between institutions – often floating among think tanks, foundations, government appointments, non-governmental institutions and temporary academic positions. These are the creative thinkers and doers of the 21st century, and they are evident in every major national capital.
What have these new leaders done? Quite a lot, in fact. They are the staffers who converted the 9/11 Commission Report into a stunning re-evaluation of security and government organization in age of stateless threats. They are the writers who, working with General David Petreus, redesigned American counterinsurgency doctrine on the eve of the ‘Surge’ in Iraq. They are also the itinerant scholars around Europe who are working every day to make the EU into a new kind of transnational government. In China and India, these are the thinkers who are pushing for more openness to outside influences, and better adjustment to domestic needs. The youthful generalists in these and other settings are Kissingerian in their non-traditional efforts at connection, and in their unwillingness to divorce ideas from action, as most bureaucracies require.
The problem is not finding these men and women, or encouraging them to continue their activities. They are highly motivated by the challenges, and they are smart enough to find mechanisms for support in large and wealthy societies. What they lack is intellectual fertilization from the academy and the business community. Kissinger came of age in a more clubby, face-to-face world, where people met frequently for discussions about the big problems of the day. The conversations emphasized understanding and empathy more than labels and political positioning. Despite differences and specializations, these discussions brought people together to listen, and they allowed generalists like Kissinger to acquire new ideas and nurture new supporters.
More often than not, the humanities communities at the great universities in the US, Canada and Western Europe provided the inspiration and the infrastructure for these wide-ranging discussions. Major post-war figures in History, English, Language and Arts departments saw it as their role to seed civic community around the pressing issues of the day. Scholars like Lionel Trilling at Columbia University, Raymond Aron at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, A.J.P. Taylor at the University of Oxford, and George Mosse at the University of Wisconsin brought in artists, policy-makers, business people and, indeed, the young Kissingers to enrich one another. To be a humanist was to be part of a society-wide conversation about the values of our civilization and the aspirations for the future. To be a humanist was to be in dialogue with the creative arts, the technical sciences and the policy-makers of the day. Many of the latter group, including Kissinger, were the students of the humanists.
The cosmopolitan generalists of the 21st century need the humanities, and the humanities need them. The young men and women around each nation’s capital are poised to exert ever more influence – especially as global crises mount. They risk, however, becoming too much a part of the governing system. They must make policy, but they also must remain connected to the creative thinkers who do not make policy. In Kissinger’s later life, one could argue that he lost this connection, and that his policies suffered.
The humanities are an incubator for the creativity and imagination that policy needs more than ever before. The humanities are also a natural connector for the arts, business and policy. The new Kissingers will not be traditional scholars of literature and history, but they will draw on the discussions surrounding that vital work. They will pioneer new humanistic applications of the modern world’s incredible technical capabilities.
Jeremi Suri is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History, Director of the European Union Center of Excellence, and Director of the Grand Strategy Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a featured GB Geo-Blogger at www.globalbrief.ca.
(Illustration: Philip Burke)
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February 10th, 2010
Check out my new blog on contemporary politics and foreign policy. This blog is part of a larger Canadian-sponsored effort to bring strategic thinkers together from across the globe. I will be blogging two or three times a week on the GLOBAL BRIEF website: http://globalbrief.ca/
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January 15th, 2010
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy, Kissinger, Speaking events, Teaching, history |
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January 9th, 2010
This is a short review that I have written of a recent book for an online discussion about the lessons from the Vietnam War.
I will host a live online discussion on Sunday, January 10 from 4:PM to 6:PM Central Time at: http://firedoglake.com/
If you cannot join the live online discussion, please add your comments below.
Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster (Holt, 2008) is a remarkable and very relevant book. The author spent more than a year working with an icon from the second half of the twentieth century, McGeorge Bundy, as he struggled to compose his memoirs. Bundy was one of the most influential figures in a postwar generation of smart, energetic, confident, well-born men who transformed universities, politics, and foreign policy in Cold War America. As Goldstein explains, Bundy was the central character in David Halberstam’s rueful parable of The Best and the Brightest. He was one of the Masters of the Universe who brought the United States into a terribly self-defeating and enormously destructive war in Vietnam. Readers today might naturally wonder about the parallels with the architects of the twenty-first century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the investment strategies and corporate management philosophies that brought the world economy to its knees.
“Why do smart people make stupid decisions?” My undergraduates frequently ask this question in reference to both Vietnam and Iraq. Goldstein’s book is very helpful in beginning to formulate an answer. His focus on Bundy and the decisions surrounding the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1964-1965 escalation of the Vietnam War highlight the traps that Bundy and his colleagues repeatedly fell into. In the case of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Bundy and others (including President Kennedy), did not question the political and strategic feasibility of military plans rigorously. They over-estimated American power and accepted promises of quick success. As Bundy told Kennedy after the fiasco: “The President’s advisers must speak up in council…Forced choices are seldom as necessary as they seem” (41-42.)
Goldstein is convinced that Kennedy learned this lesson well. He began to question basic assumptions about American military power, the domino theory, and even the necessity of global communist containment. Goldstein recounts how the young president opted for neutralization, rather than intervention in Laos. He also restrained the hawks who wanted to use greater American force in the crises surrounding Berlin and Cuba. Most of all, Goldstein emphasizes that Kennedy refused to authorize U.S. combat forces in Vietnam, even as he increased American aid and indirect military support to the regime in Saigon. “If you had poked President Kennedy very hard,” Bundy later recalled, he would have answered that it was “essential to have made a determined effort…because we mustn’t be the ones who lost the war, someone else has to lose the war” (230.)
Observers will forever debate what the slain president might have done in Vietnam if he had only lived longer. Goldstein’s book does not offer anything new on this score. The author does, however, show how Bundy, Robert McNamara, and President Lyndon Johnson could not bring themselves to let someone else lose the war in Vietnam. All three had serious doubts about the prospects for success, but none of the three could bring themselves to advocate a shift away from escalation. In seeking to avoid a massive commitment or a complete withdrawal, Bundy, McNamara, and Johnson consistently chose the easy middle ground – limited expansion of American military efforts. In the crucial months between the late summer of 1964 and the spring of 1965 this meant American bombing of North Vietnamese positions, followed by more bombing, and then the deployment of 3,500 Marines to combat positions in South Vietnam. The first Marine deployments were followed quickly by many more as the security situation continued to deteriorate. Goldstein does an excellent job of showing how Bundy encouraged this outcome with his famous “fork in the road” memorandum of late January 1965, and his visit to Pleiku, under attack from National Liberation Force units, a week later.
Why did Bundy encourage this escalation? For all his articulate statements, Bundy could never explain himself to his own satisfaction. Goldstein recounts Bundy’s struggles. He also tells us that after Bundy’s death in 1996 his family decided to prohibit the publication of his last thoughts. Goldstein’s book represents his effort to capture Bundy’s “lessons” for contemporary readers. Above all, Goldstein blames President Lyndon Johnson for failing to ask the serious questions and push for better answers – as Kennedy did in Laos, Cuba, and perhaps Vietnam after the Bay of Pigs. Goldstein titles his final chapter with the powerful statement: “intervention is a presidential choice, not an inevitability.”
This makes sense, but it is much too incomplete. Presidents are politicians and they rarely make decisions that run against the best wisdom assembled around them. The most successful presidents – Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower – almost always pursued policies that they could justify with the support of their most respected advisors. That is why Lincoln waited so long to remove McClellan, why Roosevelt spoke of balancing the budget during the early days of the New Deal, and why Eisenhower never firmly rejected the false allegations of a “missile gap” in favor of the Soviet Union. Corporate leaders and university presidents act the same way – they seek consensus from boards of wise heads to justify their decisions and displace blame when things go wrong.
Goldstein follows a number of other excellent historians – Fredrik Logevall, Andrew Preston, and David Kaiser, among others – in recounting how George Ball, Maxwell Taylor, Walter Lippmann, and other figures close to the White House encouraged President Johnson to reject escalation in 1965. The problem is that Johnson knew very well that Bundy and McNamara were the real Best and the Brightest. When he expressed his serious doubts about Vietnam, as President Johnson did repeatedly, he needed Bundy and McNamara to reinforce these doubts. They did nothing of the sort until a few years later, when they sought to separate themselves from their mistakes. Instead, the Masters of the Universe refused to accept the limits on American power. They refused to accept that they did not have all the answers. In the mid-1960s they refused to take risks for diplomacy and compromise, rather than force and full achievement on their own terms. Goldstein captures this when he writes that Bundy believed “it was better to fight and lose in Vietnam than not fight at all” (183.)
David Halberstam was right. The problem was that the Best and the Brightest were too smart for their own good. They refused to accept their own limitations. The same was true for American society as a whole. Goldstein’s book reminds us that successful policy requires much more than brains and brawn. Every president, CEO, and college chancellor needs advisors who will actively probe assumptions about power, purpose, and possibility. More than courage, leaders need people around them with imagination. For all his intelligence, Bundy lacked the imagination to envision an alternative future for Vietnam, and the Cold War in general. Do today’s advisors around the White House, Wall Street, and College Avenue display better imagination?
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy, Kissinger, Speaking events, Teaching, history |
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December 6th, 2009
President Barack Obama’s plan to increase American activities in Afghanistan will transform the political and strategic landscape. His decision to send 30,000 more U.S. soldiers to the region, increase counterinsurgency activities, and work more closely with Pakistan will commit American power, treasure, and credibility to the creation of a stable state in Afghanistan. This is a worthwhile, but very difficult endeavor. For more of my thoughts on Afghanistan, and the role of scholars and educators, see my 7 minute news interview from 4 December 2009:
http://wpt2.org/npa/han823_suri.cfm
