Jeremi Suri

Archive for the ‘Foreign Policy’ Category

We have been here before. Think of other late August and early September days in recent years past — 1990, 2001, 2008. In each of these years the international system entered a period of flux as the summer ended. In 1990 the end of the Cold War left a major power vacuum in the Persian Gulf. In 2001, a contested election and a distracted American electorate left the most powerful nation on earth paralyzed against its plotting enemies. In 2008 profound discontent with the “Global War on Terror” hamstrung the Western powers against constructive action as Russia invaded its Georgian neighbor. These periods of later summer flux, like those notorious August days of 1914, enabled determined small actors in the international system to re-direct and often undermine the strongest states. Late summer strategic flux is very dangerous.

We have definitely entered one of these moments again. The challenges for the most powerful actors are plentiful and the promising solutions from their leaders are paltry, to say the least. The United States has withdrawn its combat forces from Iraq, it continues to fight in Afghanistan and sanction Iran. What is the American program for a more peaceful and stable Middle East? How is the Obama administration pursuing a constructive vision in its daily reactions to recent events, including the terrible floods in Pakistan?

The same questions arise in East Asia. The United States has managed cautious, amicable relations with China, and it has isolated North Korea. What is next? What is the Obama administration’s program for assuring continued access to Chinese capital, economic growth in Japan, and, most important, security on the Korean peninsula?

Strategic flux is the confused and passive position that pragmatic policy-makers adopt when they feel overwhelmed. It represents an abdication of leadership, a clinging to cautious tactics and myopic time horizons. Leaders must do more than react tentatively to the crises of the day, they must do more than promise to keep the ship of state above water. As Max Weber recognized more than a century ago, leaders must articulate aspirations that create a new reality, that mobilize energies and capabilities, that create change amidst flux.

Obama better get to work. For all his intelligence, good judgment, and rhetorical talent, he has fallen down on the job. America’s greatest asset as a powerful nation is its ability to re-define the international system in constructive ways. At a time when old models for economy, governance, and war are in decline, the United States must articulate alternatives. Many will disagree with an American vision, but debate on American terms will silence the much more dangerous, destructive, and degenerate voices that wash across the landscape as the United States sits silently, a ubiquitous Goliath defined by the Lilliputians all around it.

Jonathan Swift would be the first to tell Obama that he must find the vision to engage and motivate observers, rather than allow them to tie him down. Late August is a time to leave the beach renewed for creative, integrated, visionary strategic leadership. The only other possibility is a long winter of suffering. We need an Indian summer of strategic courage, and we need it now.

This blog was originally posted at http://globalbrief.ca

Classes on the go: Distance education becoming more popular

By TODD FINKELMEYER
The Capital Times tfinkelmeyer@madison.com
Posted: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 5:00 am

Unlike many who take courses during UW-Madison’s summer session, Peter Owen hasn’t spent any hot evenings catching up on his studies while sipping a cold beer on the Memorial Union Terrace.

Owen is a 24-year-old first lieutenant stationed in Iraq with the 724th Engineer Battalion of the Wisconsin Army National Guard. So instead of sitting near the shore of Lake Mendota while finishing coursework, he’s knocked off some required readings and listened to recorded lectures on an MP3 player while seated in the back of a military transport aircraft waiting to take off on another mission.

“I have really enjoyed the opportunity to keep working toward my degree while deployed,” Owen, who is taking a foreign policy history course from UW-Madison professor Jeremi Suri, says in an e-mail interview. Owen was a graduate student at Valparaiso University pursuing a masters in International Commerce and Policy prior to being deployed.

Welcome to the modern world of “distance education,” a field that incorporates various styles of teaching and a range of technologies to deliver education to students who aren’t sitting in a traditional classroom. While evolving technology continues to drastically change how people communicate, get their news and make purchases, it’s generally having a less dramatic impact on how higher education is delivered — at least at a place like UW-Madison, where just 2.5 percent of all credit hours are taken through distance education courses.

“One of the motivations for this course is my sense that teaching is often not as innovative as it can be,” says Suri, who is teaching this online course for the second straight summer. “We fall into patterns and ruts, and that’s probably true of any profession. I’m not saying we should throw out the traditional ways of teaching, but I’m interested in shaking things up and experimenting in different modes of delivery.”

It’s no secret, however, that many professors on campus still thumb their noses at online-based courses and view them as something only lowly regarded, for-profit institutions put out for public consumption.

“Many of these online universities are offering an inferior product,” says Suri. “I’ve looked at some of them, and they’re crap. So why are some of these places thriving? It’s because they’re delivering a product people want. So I think it’s time that real institutions with quality products get into delivering more distance education.”

Everything in Suri’s eight-week, three-credit summer course — “American Foreign Policy: A History of U.S. Grand Strategy From 1901 to the Present” — is online. The class website includes a syllabus, which spells out course details and links to the online journal and newspaper articles that are required reading. The site also hosts short video lead-ins to preview each of the three, hour-long, audio-recorded Suri lectures students listen to each week. Those in the class – which include 100 typical undergraduate and 30 graduate-level students, most of whom have ties to the military – can download the lectures onto an MP3 player or other recording device to listen to at any time, anywhere. Or they can sit at their computer and listen to the hour-long talk, which includes additional information via PowerPoint slides. There are online discussion sessions and online office hours, with one main written assignment, a midterm and a final exam.

“The combination of a rigorous military schedule and improvements in modern technology made the distance class ideal for me,” Kimberly Jones, a 25-year-old Army captain who took the course to learn more about U.S. foreign policy, says in an e-mail interview. “I was able to use my phone to download all the lectures, so when I found that I had time and opportunity I listened to the lectures and took notes. Due to my commitments to work, church and continuous house guests (we live in Hawaii), the distance learning allowed me to listen to lectures, conduct readings and post discussions with flexibility and thoroughness.”

Jon Pevehouse, a political science professor, is teaching a similar set of students this summer in an online-only course titled, “Problems in American Foreign Policy (Poli Sci 359).” He agrees that the flexibility distance education courses offer students is the biggest positive, but notes there are some drawbacks.

“It does cut off some flexibility on my end,” he says. “Last (month), with the WikiLeaks incident (where the website leaked tens of thousands of classified military documents), I would have loved to have spent the next day’s lecture digging into that. But a lot of these things have to be recorded two and three weeks in advance, so it does cut off some pedagogical flexibility.”

Jesse Pruett, a 39-year-old Army reservist living in Alexandria, Va., who is taking Suri’s course, also feels some loss: “Although there was some give and take in the online discussion forum, I did miss the exchanges, debates and interactions that seem to be a big part of traditional brick-and-mortar classroom settings.”

In the end, however, most agreed these were relatively minor drawbacks for the opportunity to take a course from a highly regarded professor at a name-brand university.

“A key benefit is the flexibility and the lack of an attendance requirement,” says Pruett, who has a newborn at home and is pursuing a master’s in international relations. “Obviously, living in the D.C. area, I would not have been able to take the course in a traditional format. I also traveled during the course, coincidentally to Fort McCoy, Wis., for a couple of weeks of military training and to California for civilian purposes. It was difficult, but the online format meant it was still possible to maintain the workload, something that would have been impossible with a conventional route.”

Basic idea is nothing new

Although the basic idea of distance education is nothing new — UW-Madison professors in the agriculture department were sending informational pamphlets to farmers across the state in the late 19th century — upgrades in computer and online technology in recent years have led to an explosion in this form of teaching and learning.

According to a report from the Sloan Consortium titled “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009,” some 4.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the 2008 fall semester — a whopping 17 percent jump over the previous year. That hike far exceeds the 1.2 percent growth during that time in the overall higher education student population, with more than one-in-four college students now taking at least one online course.

And there is no indication this trend will slow anytime soon.

In June, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels established WGU Indiana, a partnership between the state and Western Governors University aimed at expanding access to higher education for those in the Hoosier state. Under the partnership, this online university will technically remain a private school, but Indiana residents will be able to use state scholarships to pay for tuition there. Just last week, a committee of education and business leaders in Texas recommended that students there complete at least 10 percent of their coursework toward a degree outside the classroom through options such as online courses.

At UW-Madison, 152 “distance education” courses — which the university classifies as those “taught primarily by means of interactive video, recorded electronic media or the internet” – were offered in 1999-00. By 2008-09, the most recent year for which figures are available, that number more than doubled to 365.

Despite that jump, just 2.5 percent of all student credit hours at UW-Madison in 2008-09 were through distance education courses according to the school’s Data Digest.

“We’re having ongoing discussions about how do we find this sweet spot, so to speak, between making sure students get the whole Wisconsin experience as a resident student on campus — that includes research opportunities and service learning and all the high-impact, traditional practices — with the latest technologies,” says Aaron Brower, UW-Madison’s vice provost for teaching and learning. “It’s a very deliberate discussion about how can we best use technology in our teaching.”

Conference in Madison

Madison was the center of the distance education universe last week as 1,000 people from across the country took part in the 26th annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, a three-day event at the Monona Terrace Convention Center.

Jane Terpstra, the conference’s director and an outreach specialist with UW-Madison’s division of continuing studies, says there are numerous valid reasons for a college to consider adding more distance education options. A sometimes overlooked advantage, notes Terpstra, is that it gives students an important leg up in experiencing different ways of learning and communicating.

“Computer learning and communication is so important these days,” says Terpstra, who also teaches courses in UW-Madison’s two distance education certificate programs. “It’s important to become comfortable with new technologies and to learn how to communicate even if you aren’t face-to-face with someone.”

Another reason for adding online offerings is if there is a backlog of students attempting to get into courses that are a prerequisite to numerous higher-level classes. Most online courses can be taken at any time of the day, so they don’t interfere with other classes that meet on specific days at specific times. Offering these high-demand courses online can then help alleviate bottlenecks that keep students from graduating in a timely fashion.

Adding distance education courses can also make sense for schools trying to reach students from a large geographic region. Perhaps these students don’t have time to drive all the way to campus, but are willing to log on at home to take a class.

“Accessibility, to me, is the biggest issue for looking at offering more online courses,” says Suri. “We can not assume anymore that all the people who need to learn in our society want, or can afford, to show up on campus. Especially in the summer. This way, if you have to leave campus and work in Milwaukee or help out on the family farm, you can still get some credits taken care of and graduate earlier.”

And the faster students get through school, the more slots that open up for new students. This could help alleviate some of the political pressure there always is to allow more students into UW-Madison.

“One problem we’re trying to crack is it would be nice to have more students, but we don’t have enough dorms and classrooms,” says Kathy Christoph, the director of academic technology in UW-Madison’s Division of Information Technology. “So I’d love for people to think hard about, ‘How can technology help with that problem?’ Then measure whether we’re successful by seeing if we are able to teach more students successfully without having to build more dorms and classrooms. But there is definitely an art to designing online courses where the students really have a good learning experience, so that won’t be easy.”

Wedemeyer led the way

Charles Wedemeyer, a former professor of education at UW-Madison, is considered one of the fathers of modern distance education, says Bill Tishler, a media specialist with the university’s Division of Continuing Studies.

In the late 1930s, Wedemeyer expanded his reach to those off campus by using the university’s radio station to broadcast English lectures. After serving in the Navy in World War II, he worked as director of UW-Madison’s correspondence study department from 1954-64, where he devoted his energy to nontraditional education research. These studies are recognized as the foundation for distance education practices, and Wedemeyer became an independent study and continuing education consultant to a dozen foreign countries — including Great Britain, where he was a chief consultant to the Open University, the world’s first successful distance teaching institution which opened in 1971.

Tishler says UW-Madison started offering statewide distance learning programs on television in 1959, and that continued through the early 1990s, before the Internet came along and started to quickly change the game.

“This university has really been a pioneer in distance education,” says Tishler, a proponent of expanding distance education options on campus, and who produces the classes taught by Suri and Pevehouse. “But I’m not sure we’ve ever really embraced our own pioneering work. As a research institution, I guess we’re doing well. But as a teaching university, we don’t always practice what we preach.”

Unlike UW-Madison, the University of Wisconsin System as a whole is making a concerted effort to expand its distance education offerings, and today features a website which serves as a gateway to the roughly 1,200 courses across the system that require no campus visits to complete.

UW-Madison, which became one of the first universities to offer a Certificate of Professional Development in Distance Education back in 1993, today features a range of graduate and professional development programs in engineering, business, education, pharmacy and nursing, to name only a few, that are distance education based.

For now, however, there is little pressure to significantly expand distance education offerings for undergraduates at a state flagship institution. UW-Madison, like its peers, already is at capacity and turns away thousands of applicants each year because most young students straight out of high school still want that on-campus “college experience.” They look forward to moving away from mom and dad, to the face-to-face interactions with professors and other young people, and to attending college football games.

Conversely, universities which don’t continually reassess their distance learning options could quickly find themselves behind the curve.

“I really think these online-only classes are going to mushroom,” says Suri. “Not only because more and more of us (at UW-Madison) are trying it, but because students are demanding it.”

The tensions around the Korean peninsula have escalated yet again, following the release of evidence that Pyongyang ordered the March torpedo attack on a South Korean ship. In recent days, the two Koreas have cut off most relations with one another, and the North has unleashed a new series of threats. The United States has voiced strong support for its South Korean ally, and the United Nations Security Council will discuss a new resolution on sanctions against Pyongyang.

This is serious stuff. It appears that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is using his recent belligerence to build internal support for a transition in power to his youngest, and largely unknown, son. For the conservative South Korean government and the United States, a direct and unprovoked attack on a sovereign state´s naval forces, operating in international waters, demands retaliation. The North Koreans and other observers must not think they can attack the ships of other states at their whim. They also must not believe that a small nuclear capability offers protection against reprisals. Otherwise, the incentives for more attacks and more nuclear proliferation, in East Asia and other parts of the world, will only increase.

The U.S. strategy toward North Korea, from the second term of the Bush presidency through the first two Obama years, has focused on containing Pyongyang through close cooperation with regional allies, awaiting the regime´s internal collapse. This still appears wise, but also insufficient. Recent aggression reinforces the long-standing fear that Kim Jong-il is willing to immolate the entire region for the sake of prolonging his regime, or at least making its self-destruction globally devastating. Kim will not follow the path of Erich Honecker and the other East German leaders who peacefully accepted the post-communist transformation of their government in 1989.

So what else should the United States and its allies do? There are no good options, but that observation does not justify strategic inertia. Here are 3 ideas the United States should consider for a new strategy against North Korea, short of war:

1. Increase forced information penetration of North Korean society. The South Koreans recently set up new loudspeakers near the border. We could also initiate aerial leaflet drops, new radio broadcasts, and other efforts to undermine Kim Jong-il´s totalitarian control of information in his society. Even if these actions show limited results, they will raise the costs of the regime´s recent aggression for its leader. If Kim wants to remain unchallenged at home, he must limit his belligerence abroad. Otherwise, we will use our technology and other means to bring our message into his society.

2. Cut off energy supplies. North Korea is dependent on energy imports, mostly from China, to fuel its military machine. Its citizens live energy-starved lives so that the military can threaten its neighbors. Its nuclear technology supports destructive weapons rather than basic societal needs. If we want to halt the continued functioning of the North Korean military, embargoeing energy imports is a fast and easy path to that outcome. The North Koreans will surely threaten a military reprisal, but we can respond with the offer for renewed energy imports after evidence of North Korean non-belligerence. This approach does risk a North Korean decision for war, but that might be an unavoidable risk under present circumstances. An energy embargo can have real effects on North Korea and force a possible change in its policies, if the U.S. is firm and builds support for this approach in China, South Korea, and Japan. If all of these states do not immediately agree, even the threat of an energy embargo might inspire a rethinking in North Korea.

3. As much as we might not like it, the time may have come for strategic military strikes against North Korea´s nuclear facilities. We cannot allow a regime that has attacked its neighbor´s navy to follow with threats of similar unprovoked nuclear attacks. We cannot allow a regime with this record of aggression to continue loose talk of launching nuclear missiles. If this continues, Japan and South Korea will surely feel more internal pressure to develop their own nuclear capabilities, setting off a greater arms race in the region and around the world. Nothing could have worse implications for U.S. non-proliferation efforts. The North Koreans and other observers (especially in Iran) must know that their nuclear efforts will become military targets if they are coupled with aggressive moves against their neighbors. This approach might induce a North Korean act of war, but that again might be a risk worth taking. Otherwise, we have set a precedent for accepting aggression and nuclear proliferation in East Asia and other regions. The future war that is likely in this scenario is worse than anything that would come from military strikes on nascent nuclear belligerents today.

As I said earlier, none of these are good options. The present course of containment, however, appears worse as it allows North Korea to attack its enemies at whim, pay few costs, and procure concessions that prolong the regime and its threatening behavior. To break out of this vicious cycle, the U.S. and its allies should consider some difficult alternatives. Effective strategy requires exactly this kind of thinking, staring into the abyss and contemplating necessary sacrifices and lesser evils.

This blog post originally appeared at www.globalbrief.ca

UW History Professor Takes Students on a Cold War Ride

By Bill Glauber
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/90547059.html

April 11, 2010
Page B1

Madison — It’s 8 a.m. and historian Jeremi Suri is working the room.

He’s on a 75-minute tear, taking students just back from spring break on an intellectual journey, “Cold War Society and Culture.”

He might as well subtitle the lecture: Your Grandparents’ World.

The trip is riveting, from China to the Soviet Union to Wisconsin, from Mao to Stalin to Joseph McCarthy. It’s a stem-winder of a lecture delivered by a rising academic star, the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History who writes, teaches and focuses on America’s place in the world. He used pluck and scholarship to land a series of off-the-cuff discussions with the subject of his first big biography, Henry Kissinger.

Suri is into it now, and so are the students. You can hear the furious clicking of computer keyboards and see the students sit up straight in hard wooden chairs.

And then, Suri brings the journey full circle, right into the bare-bones lecture hall.

On a large white screen, he projects a 19th-century photo of the University of Wisconsin – three buildings surrounded by farmland.

And then, he puts up another photo of the university in the present day, a rich assortment of buildings that sprawl for as far as the eye can see, the growth fueled during a post-World War II boom of enrollment, scholarship and federal funding.

He calls it the “Cold War University.” From Harvard to Stanford to other major colleges, Suri says that the American university system was long ago placed on a Cold War footing to advance American causes through scholarship and leadership, especially during a perilous time when the U.S. faced off against the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union is gone, but the Cold War University remains.

“We are all part of a Cold War apparatus,” he says. “This is not an academic story. It is a personal story. It is all a part of our lives.”

Connecting with students
Suri is the historian who wants to make history. He’s not merely content to write books, he wants to serve up provocative ideas, challenge students and help create the leaders of tomorrow.

Most of all, he brings the past to the present, ties it together in a way that is understandable even to students not majoring in history.

“Students have a hunger for narrative,” Suri says. “They don’t want sound bites. They want someone to tell them an extended story. That is what history is. You’re telling meaningful stories.”

At 37, Suri has already told his share of great stories. And he also has lived a great American story.

Suri’s father is an émigré from India and his mother is Jewish. Suri identifies himself as a “Hin-Jew,” part Hindu, part Jewish.

His accent and his attitude are pure New York: energetic and a little brash.

Raised on Roosevelt Island in New York, Suri’s love of history was fired at Stanford University, where he studied under Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy. History is often a springboard to law school, which was Suri’s original goal. But he was hooked on the possibility of following in Kennedy’s footsteps.

“I looked at his life. I said, ‘Wow, this is the kind of life I’d like to have,’” Suri says. “You get to be a professor around interesting people doing research on interesting stuff. You get to do some informal policy advising but you’re not a politician.”

Suri’s rise has been fast, earning a master’s degree at Ohio University, a doctorate at Yale and coming to Madison as a professor in 2001.

His wife, Alison Alter, is the associate director of the Center for World Affairs and Global Economy at UW-Madison. They have two children, Natalie, 7, and Zachary, 5.

Besides teaching, he directs two centers that aim to bring together scholars and policy-makers, the European Center of Excellence and the Grand Strategy Program.

“History is old, the individuals who teach it are not,” says Paul M. DeLuca Jr., UW-Madison provost. DeLuca says Suri is one of those individuals “who take a campuswide perspective. They look to do scholarship that cuts across areas.”

Suri is a big thinker about a lot of things. He uses a blog to spread his opinions on subjects as varied as creating an ROTC-type program for the U.S. State Department to cultivating the creative leaders for a new century.

By referring to UW-Madison and other major campuses as Cold War universities, Suri focuses on research money that comes from federal grants “designed to produce things that will make the country stronger internationally. The university is seen as an extension of that enterprise.”

In previous decades, that meant creating area studies focused on the world’s potential hot spots, such as Russia and South Asia, creating language programs, and cultivating student and faculty overseas exchanges.

Eye toward the future
Suri says a post-Cold War university “should rethink the way we organize knowledge and money.”

“Why is it we have scientists on one side of campus and social scientists on the other?” he says.

He says universities “need to train young people to be more independent, take more initiative, to be free and nimble thinkers, less professionalized, less on particular tracks.”

“We don’t need to measure how many engineers we create relative to the Soviets in the way we did during the Cold War,” he says. “We should be measuring how many innovative creative thinkers we’re creating and sending them off to do their own thing.”

Suri’s focus is America’s place in the world. The book “Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente,” put Suri on the map and marked him as a serious thinker about superpower diplomacy during the 1960s, a decade of tumult and change.

He followed that work with a provocative look at one of history’s most controversial diplomats in a book called, “Henry Kissinger and the American Century.”

Suri analyzed Kissinger’s career, trying to strike a middle ground between those who view Kissinger as a diplomatic hero, and those who view him as a villain. Born in 1972, Suri was able to achieve some distance from Kissinger’s diplomacy in places that ranged from Vietnam and Chile to the Soviet Union and China.

But he also had a pipeline straight to the source. Kissinger talked with Suri periodically during the project.

“It’s a strange story, a Woody Allen story,” Suri says about his initial contact with Kissinger. The former U.S. secretary of state reached out to Suri when he heard the historian was embarking on the project.

“He does this sometimes,” Suri says. “He is acutely sensitive about his reputation. We had this very uncomfortable meeting for an hour and a half in his office on Park Avenue in New York.”

A surprise meeting
After the meeting, Suri figured it would be one and done, that there would be no further contact with Kissinger.

But in the summer of 2004, the two met again. Suri was doing research in the Jewish archives in Kissinger’s hometown of Fürth in Germany. It turned out that Kissinger also was in town, visiting with the mayor. The two met again in front of Kissinger’s boyhood home.

“He never thought I understood him, but I think I won his respect,” Suri says. “I was there, speaking German. I was there, doing research. To him, this symbolized the serious work in the Germanic tradition. It didn’t symbolize what he calls journalism. He thinks journalists are out to find embarrassing things.”

Over several years, they had around six meetings, Suri says. After the book was published, the two men appeared on the same New York stage to discuss the work.

Next up for the scholar is a book called “A Nation Building People.” The book will detail America’s role in nation building, not just in places such as Germany, Japan, Iraq and Afghanistan, but at home, in the original founding of this country.

He says the manuscript is due to his publisher at the end of this year.

A lot of writing remains for this young historian on the rise.

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

URL to article: http://globalbrief.ca/blog/2010/02/19/where-are-the-kissingers-for-the-21st-century/

Click here to print.

Copyright © 2009 Global Brief. All rights reserved.