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anonymous

Syria and the Limits of Comparison - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...syria-and-limits-comparison

shared by anonymous on 29 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Syria has a population ten times the size of Kosovo's in 1999.
  • a low-intensity separatist campaign by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Violence was widespread but not nearly on the scale of Syria's.
  • Kosovo was more or less contained within the southern Balkans, with relatively limited chance for a spillover
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The Kosovo Liberation Army may have been a nasty bunch by some accounts, with criminal elements. But it was not a threat to the United States like the transnational jihadists currently operating in Syria.
  • Kosovo did not have a complex of chemical weapons facilities scattered throughout its territory
  • The Kosovo war campaign did not have to countenance a strong and feisty Russia, which at the time was reeling from Boris Yeltsin's incompetent, anarchic rule.
  • The Kosovo war did not engage Iran as this war must. For all of the missiles that America can fire, it does not have operatives on the ground like Iran has.
  • The Kosovo war inflicted significant pain on Serbian civilians through airstrikes, but the Syrian population has already been pummeled by a brutal war for two years now
  • The goal in Kosovo was to limit Serbia's geographic influence and to ignite a chain of events that would lead to Milosevic's ouster.
  • Those goals were achieved: Milosevic was forced from power in the fall of 2000, largely because of a chain of events stemming from that war.
  • Kosovo thus symbolized the power of human agency over impersonal forces in order to wrest a victory for human rights. This is a popular cause among liberal journalists and intellectuals, as is the desire to do something to punish the massive human rights violations of the al Assad regime.
  • The comparison between Kosovo and Syria follows from that. But it is a flawed comparison: Elegantly toppling Milosevic incurred no negative side effects. Toppling al Assad could lead to a power center in the Levant as friendly to transnational jihadists as the one in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was in the late 1990s until 2001.
  • If he chooses limited military strikes to send a message against the use of chemical weapons, he risks looking weak, especially following the powerful rhetoric employed by his secretary of state, John Kerry.
  • If he chooses regime change -- while not calling it that -- he threatens to unleash a jihadi nightmare.
  • He may try a middle option calibrated to seriously erode al Assad's power base while sending a message to Russia and Iran to help him negotiate a stable transfer of authority in Damascus -- something that might yet open up a wider diplomatic process with Iran. But that is obviously very difficult to do.
  • Keep another thing in mind about Kosovo. At that time, the United States had not been in a ground war for a quarter-century and thus the American people were not weary of war.
  • Even so, Clinton rightly calculated that the public would not tolerate casualties on the ground in a war that did not involve a naked American interest. But the American public is now tottering from more than a decade of bloody ground war, and so Obama has even less leeway than Clinton, even as Syria presents a greater military challenge than Kosovo.
  • Obama now faces a defining event that will test his commitment to keep America out of regional quicksand while being able to wield considerable power in the region at the same time.
  • anonymous on 29 Aug 13
     
    "Because so many war plans simply do not survive the reality of war itself, each war is a unique universe unto its own and thus comparisons with previous wars, while useful, may also prove illusory. One of the many wrong assumptions about the Second Gulf War before it started was that it would somehow be like the First Gulf War, in which the pessimists had been humiliated by the ease of the victory. Indeed, the Second Gulf War unfolded in vastly different ways, this time proving the pessimists right. That is why the recent media refrain comparing a military operation in Syria with the one in Kosovo in 1999 worries me."
anonymous

Think Again: Ronald Reagan - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...think_again_ronald_reagan

criticalthinking politics

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The Gipper wasn't the warhound his conservative followers would have you think.
  • These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald Reagan.
  • He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totaled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war -- the 1986 bombing of Libya -- was even briefer.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • at an early meeting, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that achieving this goal might require bombing Cuba, the suggestion "scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan," according to White House aide Michael Deaver. Haig was marginalized, then resigned, and Reagan never seriously considered sending U.S. troops south of the border, despite demands from conservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and William F. Buckley.
  • Reagan's political genius lay in recognizing that what Americans wanted was a president who exorcised the ghost of the Vietnam War without fighting another Vietnam. Although Americans enjoyed Reagan's thunderous denunciations of Central American communism, 75 percent of them, according to a 1985 Louis Harris survey, opposed invading Nicaragua.
  • So Reagan created Potemkin Vietnams. His biographer Lou Cannon calls him "shameless" in using Grenada to revive America's Vietnam-wounded pride. The war resulted in more medals per soldier than any military operation in U.S. history. When he bombed Libya in 1986, Reagan goosed American nationalism again, declaring, "Every nickel-and-dime dictator the world over knows that if he tangles with the United States of America, he will pay a price."
  • Reagan's role in winning the Cold War lies at the core of the American right's mythology.
  • The legend goes like this: Reagan came into office, dramatically hiked defense spending, unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative (his "Star Wars" missile shield), and aided anti-communist rebels in the Third World. Unable to keep pace, the Kremlin chose Gorbachev, who threw in the towel.
  • Reagan began abandoning his hard-line anti-Soviet stance in late 1983, 18 months before Gorbachev took power.
  • Reagan, who had long harbored a genuine terror of nuclear war reflected in his decades-old belief -- often ignored by backers on the right -- that nuclear weapons should eventually be abolished.
  • In 1983, two movies triggered Reagan's latent anti-nuclear views: Matthew Broderick's WarGames, which portrays a young computer hacker who almost starts a nuclear war, and ABC's The Day After, which depicts Lawrence, Kansas, in the aftermath of one.
  • According to Colin Powell, national security advisor from 1987 to 1989, Reagan had been deeply affected by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still
  • This combination of electoral and psychological anxiety led Reagan, late in his first term, to begin a dramatic rhetorical shift. Declaring that "nuclear arsenals are far too high," in January 1984 he told the country that "my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth."
  • When they did meet in Geneva, in November, Reagan whispered to Gorbachev, "I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands."
  • An initial meeting scheduled for 15 minutes lasted five hours.
  • By 1988, though the Soviet Union had not yet released Eastern Europe from its grip, Reagan was explicitly denying that the Soviet Union still constituted an "evil empire" and had begun calling Gorbachev "my friend."
  • Commentary's Norman Podhoretz declared that neoconservatives were "sinking into a state of near political despair."
  • By 1984, after Reagan withdrew troops from their peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Podhoretz moaned that "in the use of military power, Mr. Reagan was much more restrained" than his right-wing supporters had hoped.
  • In 1986, when Reagan would not cancel his second summit with Gorbachev over Moscow's imprisonment of an American journalist, Podhoretz accused him of having "shamed himself and the country" in his "craven eagerness" to give away the nuclear store.
  • Will wrote that he "is painfully fond of the least conservative sentiment conceivable, a statement taken from an anti-conservative, Thomas Paine: 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.' Any time, any place, that is nonsense."
  • the irony is that in Reagan's own "war on terror," his policies more closely resembled Obama's than Bush's.
  • Almost five years later, in his final moments as president, he told press secretary Marlin Fitzwater that "the only regret I have after eight years is sending those troops to Lebanon." Then he saluted and walked out of the Oval Office for the last time.
  • Of course, the 9/11 attacks gave Bush a massive jolt of popularity and sent Congress diving for cover, all of which made the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq much easier.
  • For many contemporary conservatives, being a Reagan disciple means acting as if there are no limits to American strength. But the real lessons of Reaganism are about how to wield national power and bolster national pride when your hands are partially tied.
  • That means understanding that America's foreign-policy debates are often cultural debates in disguise.
  • If Obama does not want to be Jimmy Carter, if he does not want Americans to equate his restraint with their humiliation, he must be as aggressive as Reagan in finding symbolic ways to soothe Americans' wounded pride.
  • Obama needs to remind Americans that their most successful Cold War presidents -- Reagan included -- saw the conflict as a primarily economic struggle.
  • In the nascent economic and ideological struggle between the United States and China, wars that Washington cannot possibly pay for -- and which leave the country more reliant on foreign central bankers -- don't make America stronger; they make it weaker.
  • anonymous on 07 Jun 10
     
    By Peter Beinart at Foreign Policy on June 7, 2010. I have always been fascinated by the difference between perception and reality when it comes to Reagan.
anonymous

War Games: Civil-Military Relations, c. 2030 - 0 views

www.worldaffairsjournal.org/...full-Cohen-MA-2010.html

predictions military generations

shared by anonymous on 04 Aug 10 - Cached
  • four leaders—two military, two civilian—sit around a table at the White House or the Pentagon
  • One is an Army general
  • The second is an Air Force general
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • The third is a Foreign Service officer
  • The fourth is a more traditional political appointee
  • The participants in this hypothetical meeting exemplify four very different types of leaders, who, if current trends continue, will all be coming to prominence and power by 2030.
  • Part of the baggage they will bring to this meeting is a complex history of civil-military relations during the post–September 11 era.
  • When they reached general officer rank, the Vietnam-era officers then found themselves sitting across the table from civilians who probably had avoided the draft, if not actively protested the war.
  • The emotional scars of a conflict that had taken place decades earlier, therefore, were part of their relationship.
  • Today’s member of the ground forces will spend, if current trends hold true, an even greater percentage of his time in combat than did officers of the Vietnam generation.
  • unlike his predecessors, he will not be sitting opposite a civilian who actively opposed his war. The challenge of this hypothetical meeting will be based not necessarily on inherent hostility between the warrior and civilian, but rather on whether the warrior and the civilian can comprehend each other.
  • With the growing presence of civilians on battlefields, there will be significant numbers of “civilian-warriors,” some with as much time in combat zones as their military counterparts.
  • It is conceivable, then, that a situation may arise in which an Army officer of 2030 might have more shared experience with a Foreign Service officer than with his Air Force or Navy counterpart.
  • As a result, the traditional competition of “civilian versus warrior” will be replaced by a series of new relationships and alliances.
  • What will be the profile of general officers in 2030?
  • they will have grown up in services at war.
  • They will be battle-hardened and somewhat removed from society, having spent six, seven, maybe eight years in combat and the intervening years recovering from one engagement and preparing for the next.
  • At the same time, there will be a second class of flag officers.
  • Ultimately, they have a very different exposure to irregular warfare than their ground counterparts, if for no other reason than that there are far fewer two-way air or naval engagements in asymmetrical conflict.
  • And what about the civilians these military elites will face across the table in 2030?
  • They likely will have gone to elite universities for undergraduate and professional degrees. Neither they nor any member of their immediate family will have served in the military.
  • They will look on the generals across the table from them in 2030 with a degree of puzzlement, if not actual mistrust, as inhabitants of a world they really do not know. 
  • There also, however, will be “civilian-warriors.”
  • this group is the most inscrutable but also the most interesting to study
  • retired soldier turned statesman
  • A second class of civilian-warriors will come from the ranks of other government agencies
  • Still a third group will come from entities outside of government
  • growing core of professional civilian advisers to military commands
  • this latter category may serve as the natural bridge between the political and military worlds. Ultimately, civilian-warriors may spend as much—if not more—time at war than some of their uniformed counterparts.
  • The gap between the military and the socially elite classes will have grown even greater than it is today.
  • what will the four talk about
  • Perhaps more importantly, unlike in previous eras, our Army general of 2030 will be as much at home discussing governance as weapons systems, having wrestled with the issues since his days as a junior officer coaching some small village in Afghanistan or supervising a district meeting in Iraq.
  • No matter the topic, our civilians and flag officers will approach the issues with certain biases.
  • the ground force general will be “conventionally unconventional,”
  • He will be accustomed to manipulating foreign media to serve his tactical ends, but not used to being criticized. Above all, he will be used to getting his way.
  • traditional political appointee has the weakest hand to play
  • there will be a tremendous temptation for our civilian to kowtow to the man in uniform.
  • This Air Force general, or perhaps Navy admiral, will be as conservative and as conventional, if not more so, as the Army general.
  • Enter our civilian-warrior. Sharing many of the traits and the experiences of our ground forces general, he may in some ways be his natural ally. It is not inconceivable that their careers paths may have crossed on some remote battlefield.
  • Ultimately, there are any number of alternative ways the balance of power between these four actors might play out. The military duo may unite behind the common fraternity of officers; the military may join with the civilian-warrior against the politico; the civilian-warrior may join with the Air Force or Navy officer in order to balance the natural clout of those fighting the ground war; one actor might dominate the rest simply by force of personality. Or they all might agree.   
  • Should the United States have to assist a counterinsurgency effort in a small, landlocked country in central Asia, for example, our ground forces general and our civilian warrior may take the lead.
  • Conversely, in a conventional conflict dominated by air and naval power—perhaps with China over Taiwan—our Air Force or Navy flag officer, now in his element, may take center stage.
  • Perhaps the more interesting case is a hybrid of the two—a mixture of low- and high-intensity conflict, particularly if it occurs outside the traditional turf of the current war on terror and, consequently, outside the realm of expertise of any single member of the quartet.
  • No one view is correct per se: each member of our quartet is merely viewing the scenario through the lens of his own experience.
  • anonymous on 04 Aug 10
     
    "The year is 2030 and four leaders-two military, two civilian-sit around a table at the White House or the Pentagon, perhaps, or at a military headquarters or embassy halfway around the world." By Raphael Cohen at World Affairs Journal on March/April 2010.
anonymous

History: The New Great Game - Matteo Tacconi | Reset Dialogues on Civilizations - 0 views

www.resetdoc.org/...00000021222

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 04 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Times change, as do situations, empires die and imperial democracies are born, but Central Asia, this vast portion of the world bordered on the west by the Caspian, on the east by China, on the north by Russia and on the south by Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, continues to be the theatre of significant manoeuvring.
  • anonymous on 04 Aug 10
     
    "China, Russia and the United States are the main competitors. The match is particularly intense in Kabul, Islamabad and Teheran and news reports confirm this. The Great Game, however, is also played in the five "stans" - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan. Laying hands on oil and gas fields, not to mention the vast network of pipelines, defining agreements and signing trade contracts with local governments is a priority. Not everything, however, revolves around energy. The post-Soviet part of Central Asia is also of extremely important political significance. Control over this area can mean "fencing in" the al Qaeda galaxy, monitoring its activities and studying countermeasures." By Matteo Tacconi at Reset DOC on June 9, 2010.
anonymous

The Geopolitical Consequences of Pakistan's Floods - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/..._consequences_pakistans_floods

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • In the past year or so, Pakistan had begun showing faint signs of improvement since the mounting of a massive counterinsurgency campaign and the retaking of large areas formerly under the control of Taliban rebels in the country’s northwest. Those efforts have been dealt a major blow by floods that have wreaked havoc on a national scale and threaten to potentially cause conditions to deteriorate further.
  • judging from the scale of destruction and the pre-existing problems that Pakistan has been facing, a number of potential scenarios can be sketched out
  • The most immediate concern is that a crisis of these proportions represents a massive logistical challenge, especially for a state with no shortage of other problems.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Some 60,000 troops have been deployed to deal with the flood situation, which means that the military has had to shift considerable resources away from the counterinsurgency efforts in the Pashtun areas along the border with Afghanistan.
  • Even if the floods had not happened, the security, economic, and socio-political circumstances in Pakistan demanded close observation. The floods have increased its importance especially since U.S. President Barack Obama’s entire war strategy involves stabilizing Pakistan.
  • anonymous on 13 Aug 10
     
    At StratFor on August 13, 2010.
anonymous

How do Millennials think about international relations? - 0 views

drezner.foreignpolicy.com/..._about_international_relations

geopolitics generations

shared by anonymous on 24 Aug 10 - Cached
  • 1)  An early childhood of peace and prosperity -- a.k.a., the Nineties; 2)  The September 11th attacks; 3)  Two Very Long Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; 4)  One Financial Panic/Great Recession; 5)  The ascent of China under the shadow of U.S. hegemony. 
  • anonymous on 24 Aug 10
     
    "I wonder whether the current generation of millennial twentysomethings will develop a worldview about international relations that transcends party and clique. If that happened, it would profoundly shape the contours of American foreign policy starting next decade." By Daniel W. Drezner at Foreign Policy on August 23, 2010.
anonymous

China, Russia and the World Beyond Afghanistan - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...a_and_world_beyond_afghanistan

geopolitics russia china

shared by anonymous on 14 Sep 10 - Cached
  • What is of interest is what is not being discussed in the Situation Room. By this, we do not mean Iraq — or even Iran. We mean the countries that will define American foreign policy for the next decade (or decades): Russia and China. These two heavyweights have interests most at odds with those of the United States and the power to do something about it.
  • The lack of meaningful competitors, in other words, allowed a relatively weak entity to take center stage.
  • Moscow is in the process of consolidating its influence all across its periphery from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus to South Central Asia. It is driven by an awareness of a looming demographic crisis that will force it to turn inward in the years ahead to sustain itself, meaning that the way it settles matters along its periphery and the strength of those arrangements will define Russian security far beyond the immediate future.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • China, meanwhile, is crafting an ever more powerful and robust anti-access and area denial capability to slow the approach of American naval power toward its shores. China, too, is driven by a need to achieve what it can in foreign policy while the United States is looking in another direction as China also works to contain and manage powerful internal tensions and cross currents that span the political spectrum from fiscal to cultural.
  • Ultimately, the strength and breadth of American national power that Washington has at its disposal is immense. But the potential adversaries that the United States will find itself faced with in Eurasia when it does finally break free of that focus will present far more daunting challenges than they did a decade ago.
  • anonymous on 14 Sep 10
     
    "What is of interest is what is not being discussed in the Situation Room. By this, we do not mean Iraq - or even Iran. We mean the countries that will define American foreign policy for the next decade (or decades): Russia and China. These two heavyweights have interests most at odds with those of the United States and the power to do something about it." At StratFor on September 14, 2010.
anonymous

NATO's Lack of a Strategic Concept - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...1_natos_lack_strategic_concept

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 12 Oct 10 - Cached
  • The gravity of the Soviet threat and the devastation of continental Europe after World War II left the European NATO allies beholden to the United States for defense. Any hope of deterring an ambitious USSR resided in Washington and its nuclear arsenal.
  • the Soviets were confident enough throughout the Cold War to maintain a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons in the belief that their conventional advantage in armor would yield quick results. NATO simply did not have that luxury.
  • Three major developments changed how different alliance members formulate their threat perception.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • First, 9/11 brought home the reality of the threat represented by militant Islamists.
  • Second, NATO’s enlargement to the Baltic states combined with the pro-Western Georgian and Ukrainian color revolutions — all occurring in a one-year period between the end of 2003 and end of 2004 — jarred Moscow into a resurgence that has altered the threat environment for Central Europe.
  • When the United States does fully reawaken to the Russian resurgence, it will find that only a portion of NATO shares a similar view of Russia.
  • Third, Europe’s severe economic crisis has made Germany’s emergence as the political leader of Europe plain to all.
  • Central Europeans are nervously watching as Paris and Berlin draw closer to Moscow while committed Atlanticists — Western European countries traditionally suspicious of a powerful Germany — such as Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom want to reaffirm their trans-Atlantic security links with the United States in light of a new, more assertive, Germany.
  • The United States launched proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam largely to demonstrate unequivocally to European governments — and the Kremlin — that the United States was willing to bleed in far corners of the planet for its allies. U.S. troops stationed in West Germany, some of whom were in immediate danger of being cut off in West Berlin, served to demonstrate U.S. resolve against Soviet armor poised on the North European Plain and just to the east of the Fulda Gap in Hesse. Recent years have not seen a reaffirmation of such resolve, but rather the opposite when the United States — and NATO — failed to respond to the Russian military intervention in Georgia, a committed NATO aspirant though not a member. This was due not only to a lack of U.S. forces but also to Germany’s and France’s refusal to risk their relationships with Russia over Georgia.
  • The disparate threat environment is grafted on to a membership pool that can be broadly split into three categories: the United States, Canada and committed European Atlanticists (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark)
  • Led by the United States, Atlanticists want the alliance oriented toward non-European theaters of operation (e.g., Afghanistan) and non-traditional security threats (think cybersecurity, terrorism, etc.); an increase of commitments from Core Europeans in terms of defense spending; and a reformed decision-making system that eliminates a single-member veto in some situations while allowing the NATO secretary-general to have predetermined powers to act without authorization in others.
  • Led by Germany and France, Core Europe wants more controls and parameters predetermined for non-European deployments (so that it can limit such deployments); a leaner and more efficient alliance (in other words, the freedom to cut defense spending when few are actually spending at the two percent gross domestic product mandated by the alliance); and more cooperation and balance with Russia and more consultations with international organizations like the United Nations (to limit the ability of the United States to go it alone without multilateral approval).
  • The Central Europeans ultimately want NATO to reaffirm Article 5 both rhetorically and via military exercises (if not the stationing of troops); commitment to the European theater and conventional threats specifically (in opposition to the Atlanticists’ non-European focus); and mention of Russia in the new Strategic Concept as a power whose motives cannot be trusted (in opposition of Core European pro-Russian attitudes).
  • The problem with NATO today, and for NATO in the next decade, is that different member states view different threats through different prisms of national interest. Russian tanks concern only roughly a third of member states — the Intermarum states — while the rest of the alliance is split between Atlanticists looking to strengthen the alliance for new threats and non-European theaters of operations and the so-called “Old Europe” that looks to commit as few soldiers and resources as possible toward either set of goals in the next 10 years.
  • Without that looming threat, other matters — other differences — begin to fracture the alliance.
  • During the Cold War, NATO was a military alliance with a clear adversary and purpose. Today, it is becoming a group of friendly countries with interoperability standards that will facilitate the creation of “coalitions of the willing” on an ad-hoc basis and of a discussion forum.
  • anonymous on 12 Oct 10
     
    "Twenty-eight heads of state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will meet in Lisbon on Nov. 20 to approve a new "Strategic Concept," the alliance's mission statement for the next decade. This will be NATO's third Strategic Concept since the Cold War ended. The last two came in 1991 - as the Soviet Union was collapsing - and 1999 - as NATO intervened in Yugoslavia, undertaking its first serious military engagement." By Marko Papic at StratFor on October 12, 2010.
anonymous

Russia's Expanding Influence (Introduction): The Targets - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20100304_russia

russia geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Moscow has already had some success in consolidating control over what it considers the four most crucial countries, but it would like to push back against the West in several other countries if it has time to do so before Washington’s attention returns to Eurasia.
  • Moscow is making progress in its grand scheme to solidify its position as a regional power in Eurasia once again, reversing what it sees as Western infiltration. The question now is how far Russia wants to go — or how far it feels it must and can go — in this quest.
  • Russia’s defining problem stems from its geographic indefensibility.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But in 1989, the Soviet Union lost control of Eastern Europe and had disintegrated by 1991, returning Russia essentially to its 17th century borders (except for Siberia).
  • While Russia reconsolidated, the United States became preoccupied with the Islamic world. As the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have developed, they have absorbed Washington’s focus, presenting Russia with an opportunity to push back against the West’s increased influence in Eurasia.
  • Russia’s most crucial victory to date has been in Ukraine, where the top four candidates in the country’s January presidential election were all pro-Russian, thus ensuring the end of the pro-Western Orange movement.
  • Essentially, Russia has placed the countries of its former sphere of influence and other regional powers into four categories:
  • Russia’s geopolitical imperatives remain: The country must expand, hold together and defend the empire, even though expansion can create difficulties in the Russian core. This is already a difficult task; it will be made even harder when the United States is free to counter Russia.
anonymous

Turkey's Challenge - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20100304_turkeys_challenge

stratfor middle east

shared by anonymous on 06 Mar 10 - Cached
  • TWO EVENTS OCCURRED ON THURSDAY that involved Turkey. In the first, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs forwarded a resolution to the House floor for full debate, which called for the condemning of Turkish actions in what many Armenians refer to as the 1915 genocide. The response from the Turkish Foreign Ministry was vitriolic, complete with an ambassadorial recall and threats to downgrade Turkish-American relations at a time when the Americans sorely need Turkish help in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • Here at STRATFOR these developments generated a bit of a “hmmm.”
  • The core territory of the Ottoman Empire of the past — as well as the Turkey of today — is a crescent of land on the northwest shore of the Anatolian peninsula, including all of the lands that touch the Sea of Marmara. In many ways it is a mini-Mediterranean. It is rich in fertile land, has a maritime culture and wealth that comes from trade. It is a natural birthplace for a powerful nation, and in time it became the seat of an empire.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This expansion left the Turks in a bit of a quandary. The size of their conquered territories was now larger than their home territories. The wealth of their conquered territories was potentially larger than that of their home territories. The population of their conquered territories was comprised of different nationalities and religions, and combined was larger than that of their home territories. The Turks very quickly came to the uncomfortable realization that they not only needed their conquered peoples to make their empire functional, but that they needed those conquered peoples to be willing participants in the empire. The Ottomans may have started out as Middle Eastern, but their early successes made them European.
  • And it was all held together by a governing concept the Turks called suzerainty: regional governments would pay taxes to the center and defer to Istanbul on all issues of foreign and military policy, but would control the bulk of their own local affairs.
  • After more than 90 years of being in a geopolitical coma, the Turks are on the move again, and are deciding what sort of power they hope to become. Within that debate are two choices.
  • The first would herald a “Great Turkey” rooted in the founding of the Turkish Republic that celebrates its Turkish-ness.
  • The second would herald a “Greater Turkey,” a multinational federation in which the Turks are the first-among-equals, but in which they are hardly alone.
anonymous

The U.S. Withdrawal From Iraq - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...al_coverage_us_withdrawal_iraq

geopolitics middle east

shared by anonymous on 05 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The United States plans to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq by the end of 2011, with the drawdown slated to accelerate following the March 7 parliamentary elections. However, those elections could upset the fragile political situation that has held in Baghdad for five years, albeit with considerable U.S. oversight. Internal ethno-sectarian tensions and external forces with interests in Iraq also threaten to complicate matters. STRATFOR examines the factors that could affect the withdrawal and determine the fate of the region for years to come.
  • The United States is attempting to roll back its military commitment to Iraq substantially, not only to extract itself from Iraq but also to better focus its resources and efforts in Afghanistan. It has done all it can militarily and is essentially waiting out the durability of domestic political circumstances in the country during and following the elections. In other words, the U.S. military is no longer the keeper of the peace in Iraq. The elections and following transition of power will be a test of whether the Iraqis can keep the peace themselves, and the U.S. withdrawal may depend on how the Iraqis answer that test.
anonymous

Bipartisan Spring - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...bipartisan_spring

longgame foreignpolicy

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 10 - Cached
  • How to explain this surprising if well-concealed comity? Some is due to the inevitable transformation that every party goes through when it moves from the opposition to the White House. Being in power tends to breed responsibility, just as being out of power breeds irresponsibility. Many Republicans during the Clinton years turned toward quasi-isolationism and opposed Clinton's policies -- even his hawkish policies -- simply because they hated Clinton. Many Democrats  showed great solidarity with Bush after September 11, 2001 -- a bipartisan moment that Bush helped squander. But they soon came to oppose almost everything Bush did, even policies traditionally associated with the Democratic Party, such as democracy promotion and nation-building, and even when, as in the case of the surge in Iraq, the most likely beneficiary of success would be a Democratic president.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Mar 10
       
      This is classically predictable behavior. To add to the example: Note how every time a Democrat inhabits the Oval Office, Republicans "rediscover" small government. You can practically set your watch to it.
  • The irony is that in some ways Obama has been fighting the war on terror at least as vigorously as his predecessor. He escalated the war in Afghanistan. He greatly increased drone attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan. Indeed, the Obama administration carried out more drone strikes in its first year than the Bush administration carried out in the previous five years combined, producing a record number of enemy casualties. Although the Obama administration may be more generous in providing legal defense to captured terrorists than the Bush administration, it also makes a greater effort to assassinate them, thus obviating the need for trials. 
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Mar 10
       
      A hypothetical president Nader would have even done this stuff, however reluctantly. I think the American electorate deeply misunderstands the degree of pressure on any sitting president to continue policies. *Inertia* is a powerful force in all politics.
  • The most absurd of the "un-Bush" policies of this administration has been its deliberate turn away from helping democrats against autocracies abroad.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Mar 10
       
      We have never seriously cared about the whole "democracy vs. autocracy" issue. It's a white-bread tool used to sway the electorate. It makes for good flag-waving but, in matters of foreign policy, is practically irrelevant.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 10
     
    "Washington may be deeply polarized on domestic matters, but when it comes to foreign affairs, a remarkable consensus is taking shape." By Robert Kagan on March 3, 2010 I've maintained for a while that foreign policy is one of those arenas where even when Republicans and Democrats differ, it's not *enough* difference to matter - obligatory histrionics aside.
anonymous

Europe: A Shifting Battleground, Part 1 | STRATFOR - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...e-shifting-battleground-part-1

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Russia fundamentally opposes the system not because it threatens Moscow’s nuclear deterrent, but because it represents an entrenchment of U.S. forces near its buffer states — Ukraine and Belarus in particular.
  • The Central European corridor, comprising the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria — the so-called Intermarium Corridor — is emerging as the area of contention between Russia and U.S.-supported states in the region.
  • This transformation is the result of a two-step process.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The first step was the end of the Cold War, when Soviet Russia withdrew from its positions established by the Warsaw Pact in Central Europe, and former Communist European states — including the Baltic states, eventually — entered the NATO alliance.
  • The second step was Russia’s resurgence into its former Soviet sphere of influence, a process that gained momentum in 2005 and culminated with the formal reversal of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine at the beginning of 2010 as well as the integration of Belarus further into Russian structures.
  • The first step formally released Central Europe from Soviet control; the second step showed that Moscow’s withdrawal was temporary.
  • The next phase in Europe’s geopolitical evolution was Germany’s response to the first two changes.
  • The end of the Cold War also moved the U.S. focus eastward to the Central European NATO member states.
  • Germany and to a lesser extent other Western European powers, such as France and Italy, have a fundamentally different view of Moscow’s resurgence. Unlike the Intermarium Corridor countries, on which foreign powers are now making geopolitical moves as they were in Germany during the Cold War, Berlin is not troubled by Moscow’s resurgence.
  • “Intermarium” is a term borrowed from inter-war Polish leader Gen. Jozef Pilsudski, who understood that Germany and the Soviet Union would not be permanently weak.
  • His solution was to propose an alliance stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, encompassing countries west of the Carpathians.
  • this term is useful as a way to group together countries abutting Russia’s sphere of influence that are wary of Berlin’s relationship with Moscow. This essentially includes the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
  • Although the BMD plan was later reconfigured, that initial trade-off between Washington and Moscow showed the Intermarium that the United States would not hesitate to put its more immediate concerns in the Middle East ahead of long-term strategic reassurances to Central Europe.
  • The Intermarium countries are responding to this situation with two main strategies.
  • The first is to maintain U.S. engagement as much as possible. The second is to create regional political and/or military alliances independent of NATO that can serve as alternatives to the preferred strategy of U.S. engagement in the region.
  • While Washington is extricating its forces from Iraq, it is still heavily engaged in Afghanistan. Given these circumstances, the Intermarium countries are also turning to two regional alliances to build relationships with one another and with other actors similarly concerned with Russia’s resurgence and Germany’s acquiescence: the Visegrad Group (V4)
  • The V4 decided in May to form a Visegrad Battlegroup under Polish command by 2016. The actual capacities of this battlegroup are yet to be determined, but the decision shows very clearly that the V4 is evolving from a primarily political grouping to one that places security at the forefront of its mission.
  • anonymous on 07 Jun 11
     
    "Defense ministers from NATO members states will meet with Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov on June 9 to discuss the ballistic missile defense (BMD) network that will be set up in Europe. BMD is just one way Central Europe is responding to geopolitical shifts in Europe that have created a strengthening German-Russian relationship as Russia resurges into its former Soviet sphere of influence."
anonymous

Sources: Raiders knew mission a one-shot deal - 0 views

www.navytimes.com/...mission-a-one-shot-deal-051711

history

shared by anonymous on 17 May 11 - Cached
  • U.S. officials believe Pakistani intelligence continues to support militants who attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and actively undermine U.S. intelligence operations to go after al-Qaida inside Pakistan. The level of distrust is such that keeping Pakistan in the dark was a major factor in planning the raid, and led to using the high-tech but sometimes unpredictable helicopter technology that nearly unhinged the mission.
  • The decision to launch on that particular moonless night in May came largely because too many American officials had been briefed on the plan. U.S. officials feared if it leaked to the press, bin Laden would disappear for another decade.
  • The plan unraveled as the first helicopter tried to hover over the compound. The Black Hawk skittered around uncontrollably in the heat-thinned air, forcing the pilot to land. As he did, the tail and rotor got caught on one of the compound’s 12-foot walls. The pilot quickly buried the aircraft’s nose in the dirt to keep it from tipping over, and the SEALs clambered out into an outer courtyard.
  • anonymous on 17 May 11
     
    "Those who planned the secret mission to get Osama bin Laden in Pakistan knew it was a one-shot deal, and it nearly went terribly wrong."
anonymous

What Happened to the American Declaration of War? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...pened-american-declaration-war

shared by anonymous on 29 Mar 11 - Cached
  • World War II was the last war the United States fought with a formal declaration of war.
  • the Constitution is explicit in requiring a formal declaration. It does so for two reasons, I think.
  • The first is to prevent the president from taking the country to war without the consent of the governed, as represented by Congress.
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  • Second, by providing for a specific path to war, it provides the president power and legitimacy he would not have without that declaration; it both restrains the president and empowers him.
  • But that’s what the founders intended: Going to war should be difficult; once at war, the commander in chief’s authority should be unquestionable.
  • In understanding how war and constitutional norms became separated, we must begin with the first major undeclared war in American history (the Civil War was not a foreign war), Korea.
  • Truman’s view was that U.N. sanction for the war superseded the requirement for a declaration of war in two ways.
  • First, it was not a war in the strict sense, he argued, but a “police action” under the U.N. Charter.
  • Second, the U.N. Charter constituted a treaty, therefore implicitly binding the United States to go to war if the United Nations so ordered.
  • It was understood that if nuclear war occurred, either through an attack by the Soviets or a first strike by the United States, time and secrecy made a prior declaration of war by Congress impossible. In the expected scenario of a Soviet first strike, there would be only minutes for the president to authorize counterstrikes and no time for constitutional niceties.
  • Nuclear war was seen as the most realistic war-fighting scenario, with all other forms of war trivial in comparison. Just as nuclear weapons came to be called “strategic weapons” with other weapons of war occupying a lesser space, nuclear war became identical with war in general.
  • In Vietnam, the issue was not some legal or practical justification for not asking for a declaration. Rather, it was a political consideration.
  • Johnson did not know that he could get a declaration; the public might not be prepared to go to war. For this reason, rather than ask for a declaration, he used all the prior precedents to simply go to war without a declaration. In my view, that was the moment the declaration of war as a constitutional imperative collapsed. And in my view, so did the Johnson presidency. In hindsight, he needed a declaration badly, and if he could not get it, Vietnam would have been lost, and so may have been his presidency. Since Vietnam was lost anyway from lack of public consensus, his decision was a mistake. But it set the stage for everything that came after — war by resolution rather than by formal constitutional process.
  • All of this came just before the United States emerged as the world’s single global power — a global empire — that by definition would be waging war at an increased tempo, from Kuwait, to Haiti, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and so on in an ever-increasing number of operations. And now in Libya, we have reached the point that even resolutions are no longer needed.
  • The goal in war is to prevent the other side from acting, not to punish the actors.
  • One of the dilemmas that could have been avoided was the massive confusion of whether the United States was engaged in hunting down a criminal conspiracy or waging war on a foreign enemy. If the former, then the goal is to punish the guilty. If the latter, then the goal is to destroy the enemy. Imagine that after Pearl Harbor, FDR had promised to hunt down every pilot who attacked Pearl Harbor and bring them to justice, rather than calling for a declaration of war against a hostile nation and all who bore arms on its behalf regardless of what they had done
  • A declaration of war, I am arguing, is an essential aspect of war fighting particularly for the republic when engaged in frequent wars. It achieves a number of things.
  • First, it holds both Congress and the president equally responsible for the decision, and does so unambiguously.
  • Second, it affirms to the people that their lives have now changed and that they will be bearing burdens.
  • Third, it gives the president the political and moral authority he needs to wage war on their behalf and forces everyone to share in the moral responsibility of war.
  • And finally, by submitting it to a political process, many wars might be avoided.
  • The declaration of war is precisely the point at which imperial interests can overwhelm republican prerogatives.
  • I am not making the argument that constant accommodation to reality does not have to be made. I am making the argument that the suspension of Section 8 of Article I as if it is possible to amend the Constitution with a wink and nod represents a mortal threat to the republic. If this can be done, what can’t be done?
  • As our international power and interests surge, it would seem reasonable that our commitment to republican principles would surge. These commitments appear inconvenient. They are meant to be. War is a serious matter, and presidents and particularly Congresses should be inconvenienced on the road to war. Members of Congress should not be able to hide behind ambiguous resolutions only to turn on the president during difficult times, claiming that they did not mean what they voted for. A vote on a declaration of war ends that.
  • anonymous on 29 Mar 11
     
    "In my book "The Next Decade," I spend a good deal of time considering the relation of the American Empire to the American Republic and the threat the empire poses to the republic. If there is a single point where these matters converge, it is in the constitutional requirement that Congress approve wars through a declaration of war and in the abandonment of this requirement since World War II. This is the point where the burdens and interests of the United States as a global empire collide with the principles and rights of the United States as a republic."
anonymous

The Continuing Challenge of Mideast Peace | STRATFOR - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...inuing-challenge-mideast-peace

shared by anonymous on 22 Apr 11 - Cached
  • Given the circumstances, the early collapse of Obama’s peace initiative was not surprising. It has now been nearly eight months since Obama painted himself into a corner with a September deadline, but the prospects for peace are not looking any brighter and the stakes in the dispute are rising.
  • Israel cannot be sure that domestic pressures within Egypt, particularly in an Egypt attempting to move the country toward popular elections, will not produce a shift in Egyptian policy toward Israel.
  • Israel is now in a bind: If it refuses negotiations and Abbas moves forward with his plans, it will risk having to deal with a unilaterally declared Palestinian state. Israel will then have to invest a great deal of energy in lobbying countries around the world to refrain from recognition, in return for whatever concessions they try to demand.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Obama administration has maintained that the path to Palestinian statehood must come through negotiations, and not a unilateral declaration. Such a declaration would place Washington in an uncomfortable position of having to refuse recognition while trying to restart the negotiation process after a red line has already been crossed. Obama can align his presidency with another peace initiative and try to use it to offset criticism in the Islamic world over Washington’s disjointed policies in dealing with the current Mideast unrest. On the other hand, if this initiative collapses as quickly as the last, Obama will have another Mideast foreign policy failure on his hands while also struggling to both keep in check a military campaign in Libya and shape exit strategies for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • No matter who ends up announcing their terms for peace first, there is one player that could derail this latest Mideast peace effort in one fell swoop: Hamas. Not a participant to the negotiations in the first place, Hamas wants to deny Fatah a political opportunity and sustain tension between Israel and Egypt. As Israel knows well, past attempts at the peace process have generated an increase in militant acts and that in turn lead to Israel not making meaningful concessions. A hastily organized negotiation operating under a deadline five months from expiration is unlikely to lead to progress in peace, but does provide Hamas with golden militant opportunity.
  • anonymous on 22 Apr 11
     
    "Another attempt at Israeli-Palestinian peace talks may be on the horizon. But this time, the United States appears reluctant to play host. This is a marked contrast from September 2010, when U.S. President Barack Obama's administration optimistically relaunched Israeli-Palestinian talks and declared that the negotiations should be concluded by September 2011. Obama reiterated his proposed deadline in his September 2010 speech to the U.N. General Assembly in which he stated, "When we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations - an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.""
anonymous

The Tactical Irrelevance of Osama bin Laden's Death - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...levance-osama-bin-ladens-death

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 02 May 11 - Cached
  • bin Laden’s elimination will have very little effect on al Qaeda as a whole and the wider jihadist movement.
  • Because of bin Laden’s aforementioned communications limitations, since October 2001 when he fled Tora Bora after the U. S. invasion of Afghanistan, he has been relegated to a largely symbolic and ideological role in al Qaeda.
  • anonymous on 02 May 11
     
    "The killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden represents possibly the biggest clandestine operations success for the United States since the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003. The confirmation of his death is an emotional victory for the United States and could have wider effects on the geopolitics of the region, but bin Laden's death is irrelevant for al Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement from an operational perspective."
anonymous

Hiding in Plain Sight - The Problem with Pakistani Intelligence - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...roblems-pakistani-intelligence

shared by anonymous on 04 May 11 - Cached
  • Clearly, Pakistan is coming under a great deal of pressure to explain how authorities in the country were not aware that the world’s most wanted man was enjoying safe haven for years in a large facility in the heart of the country.
  • It is no secret that Pakistan’s army and foreign intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, actively cultivated a vast array of Islamist militants – both local and foreign, from the early 1980s until at least the events of Sept. 11, 2001 – as instruments of foreign policy.
  • the policy of backing Islamist militants for power projection vis-a-vis India and Afghanistan had been in place for more than 20 years, and was instrumental in creating a large murky spatial nexus of local and foreign militants (specifically al Qaeda) that had complex relations with elements within and close to state security organs.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • One of the key reasons for this situation is that while the stakeholders of the country (civil as well as military) are engaged in a fierce struggle against local and foreign Islamist insurgents, significant societal forces and sympathetic individuals from within the state are providing support to jihadists. But it’s more problematic that there are no quick fixes for this state of affairs. Further complicating this situation is that the U.S. objectives for the region require Islamabad to address these issues on a fast-track basis.
  • anonymous on 04 May 11
     
    "The fallout continued Tuesday from the revelation that until his death at the hands of U.S. forces on May 2, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden been living in a large compound not far from the Pakistani capital. A number of senior U.S. officials issued tough statements against Pakistan. President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said that while there was no evidence to suggest that Pakistani officials knew that bin Laden was living at the facility, the possibility could not be ruled out. The chairwoman of the U.S. Senate's Select Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, sought more details from the CIA about the Pakistani role and warned that Congress could dock financial assistance to Islamabad if it was found that the al Qaeda leader had been harbored by state officials. CIA chief Leon Panetta disclosed that American officials feared that Pakistan could have undermined the operation by leaking word to its targets."
anonymous

Intelligence Turnover: After bin Laden, Who Will the U.S. Target Next? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-laden-who-will-us-target-next

shared by anonymous on 03 May 11 - Cached
  • There is only a short window of time in which any material from the bin Laden compound will hold actionable intelligence — information that will enable U.S. operatives to chase down bin Laden’s associates.
  • Often, the web of intelligence that leads to a breakthrough like the pinpointing of bin Laden, combined with the intelligence gleaned from a direct action, can have a snowball effect, with multiple hits in quick succession.
  • Photos taken inside the house indicated that the interior had been pulled apart quickly in search of any possible material of intelligence value. CNN reported May 3 that a U.S. official told them the raid collected 10 hard drives, five computers and more than 100 storage devices such as discs, DVDs and thumb drives. The number of electronic devices is surprising given that bin Laden had no communications links with the outside world and has not produced a propaganda video since 2007.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • unlike the success of special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior al Qaeda officials maintain higher levels of operational security and will be the most difficult to link together.
  • Even if the intelligence haul was limited and the U.S. statements are disinformation, it would likely represent an attempt to provoke a reaction from other major al Qaeda figures, which could result in operational errors that would expose them.
  • Even if intelligence analysis and retasking fails to find other al Qaeda operatives, longer-term operations will probably expose funding sources and allow the United States and its allies to shut them down.
  • anonymous on 03 May 11
     
    "U.S. media are reporting that an "impressive amount" of intelligence material was gathered during the May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It is unclear what, if any, actionable intelligence was collected, but U.S. analysts and special operations personnel are no doubt working quickly to exploit the intelligence and plan follow-on raids. Much of the media talk by U.S. officials could also be disinformation to scare other al Qaeda operatives into thinking the United States found a mother lode of intelligence and will soon be coming after them."
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