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anonymous

Israel's New Strategic Position - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...israels-new-strategic-position

shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • After two years of stress, its peace treaty with Egypt remains in place. Syria is in a state of civil war that remains insoluble.
  • Hezbollah does not seem inclined to wage another war with Israel
  • In other words, the situation that has existed since the Camp David Accords were signed remains in place. Israel's frontiers are secure from conventional military attack. In addition, the Palestinians are divided among themselves, and while ineffective, intermittent rocket attacks from Gaza are likely, there is no Intifada underway in the West Bank.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Clearly, a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv would be catastrophic for Israel. Its ability to tolerate that threat, regardless of how improbable it may be, is a pressing concern for Israel.
  • In this context, Iran's nuclear program supersedes all of Israel's other security priorities. Israeli officials believe their allies, particularly those in the United States, should share this view.
  • Israel understands that however satisfactory its current circumstances are, those circumstances are mercurial and to some extent unpredictable.
  • There are plenty of scenarios in which Israel would not be able to manage security threats without American assistance.
  • Thus, Israel has an overriding interest in maintaining its relationship with the United States and in ensuring Iran never becomes a nuclear state. So any sense that the United States is moving away from its commitment to Israel, or that it is moving in a direction where it might permit an Iranian nuclear weapon, is a crisis.
  • Israel's response to the Iran talks -- profound unhappiness without outright condemnation -- has to be understood in this context, and the assumptions behind it have to be examined.
  • Iran does not appear to have a deliverable nuclear weapon at this point. Refining uranium is a necessary but completely insufficient step in developing a weapon. A nuclear weapon is much more than uranium. It is a set of complex technologies, not the least of which are advanced electrical systems and sensors that, given the amount of time the Iranians have needed just to develop not-quite-enough enriched uranium, seems beyond them.
  • Iran simply does not have sufficient fuel to produce a device.
  • The idea that the Iranians will use the next six months for a secret rush to complete the weapon simply isn't the way it works.
  • Nations do not even think of deploying nuclear weapons without extensive underground tests -- not to see if they have uranium but to test that the more complex systems work. That is why they can't secretly develop a weapon: They themselves won't know they have a workable weapon without a test.
  • Of course, there are other strategies for delivering a weapon if it were built. One is the use of a ship to deliver it to the Israeli coast. Though this is possible, the Israelis operate an extremely efficient maritime interdiction system, and the United States monitors Iranian ports.
  • But these weapons are not small. There is such a thing as a suitcase bomb, but that is a misleading name; it is substantially larger than a suitcase, and it is also the most difficult sort of device to build.
  • even assuming Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon, its use against Israel would kill as many Muslims -- among them Shia -- as Israelis, an action tantamount to geopolitical suicide for Tehran.
  • If the Israelis forward-deployed to other countries, the Iranians would spot them. The Israelis can't be certain which sites are real and which are decoys.
  • Some will dismiss this as overestimating Iranian capabilities. This frequently comes from those most afraid that Tehran can build a nuclear weapon and a delivery system. If it could do the latter, it could harden sites and throw off intelligence gathering.
  • But ultimately, the real reason Israel has not attacked Iran's nuclear sites is that the Iranians are so far from having a weapon. If they were closer, the Israelis would have attacked regardless of the difficulty.
  • The Americans, on the other hand, saw an opportunity in the fact that there are no weapons yet and that the sanctions were hurting the Iranians. Knowing that they were not in a hurry to complete and knowing that they were hurting economically, the Iranians likewise saw an opportunity to better their position.
  • What the Americans wanted was an understanding with the Iranians, whereby their role in the region would be balanced against those of other countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, the Arabian emirates and to some extent Israel.
  • Washington wants to have multiple relations with regional actors, not just Israel and Saudi Arabia.
  • The Israelis tempered their response initially because they knew the status of Iran's nuclear program. Even though a weapon is still a grave concern, it is a much longer-term problem than the Israelis admit publicly.
  • if the negotiations fail, no one will be in a more dangerous position for trying. Six months won't make a difference.
  • The Israelis could not simply applaud the process because there is, in fact, a strategic threat to Israel embedded in the talks. Israel has a strategic dependency on the United States.
  • But they understand that the outcome of these talks, if successful, means more than the exchange of a nuclear program for eased sanctions; it means the beginning of a strategic alignment with Iran.
  • As Richard Nixon's China initiative shows, ideology can relent to geopolitical reality. On the simplest level, Iran needs investment, and American companies want to invest. On the more complex level, Iran needs to be certain that Iraq is friendly to its interests and that neither Russia nor Turkey can threaten it in the long run.
  • The United States is trying to create a multipolar region to facilitate a balance-of-power strategy in place of American power.
  • Egypt went from disaster in 1967 to a very capable force in 1973. They had a Soviet patron. They might have another patron in 10 years.
  • But the real Israeli fear is that the United States is moving away from direct intervention to a more subtle form of manipulation. That represents a threat to Israel if Israel ever needs direct intervention rather than manipulation.
  • it threatens Israel because the more relationships the United States has in the region, the less significant Israel is to Washington's strategy.
  • In the end, Israel is a small and weak power. Its power has been magnified by the weakness of its neighbors. That weakness is not permanent
  • anonymous on 03 Dec 13
     
    "Israel has expressed serious concerns over the preliminary U.S.-Iranian agreement, which in theory will lift sanctions levied against Tehran and end its nuclear program. That was to be expected. Less obvious is why the Israeli government is concerned and how it will change Israel's strategic position."
anonymous

Iran: A Rockier Road to U.S. Negotiations - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...n_rockier_road_us_negotiations

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 18 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced June 16 that Iran remains interested in talking to the United States but that the conditions for such talks have changed. After a sanctions move against Iran that effectively exposed the weaknesses in the Russian-Iranian relationship, Washington announced a day earlier that it is ready to talk when Iran is. Both Tehran and Washington have a strategic interest in pursuing these negotiations, but Tehran is now looking for new ways to regain the upper hand in these talks. All indications point to Iraq as Iran’s battlefield of choice.
  • anonymous on 18 Jun 10
     
    June 16, 2010
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

Russian Spies and Strategic Intelligence - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ies_and_strategic_intelligence

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The way the media has reported on the issue falls into three groups: That the Cold War is back, That, given that the Cold War is over, the point of such outmoded intelligence operations is questionable, And that the Russian spy ring was spending its time aimlessly nosing around in think tanks and open meetings in an archaic and incompetent effort.
  • First, it needs to know what other nations are capable of doing.
  • Second, the nation needs to know what other nations intend to do.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The more powerful a nation is, the more important it is to understand what it is doing.
  • Knowing what the United States will do, and shifting policy based on that, can save countries from difficulties and even disaster.
  • What they excelled at, however, was placing undetectable operatives in key positions. Soviet talent scouts would range around left-wing meetings to discover potential recruits. These would be young people with impeccable backgrounds and only limited contact with the left. They would be recruited based on ideology, and less often via money, sex or blackmail. They would never again be in contact with communists or fellow travelers.
  • Recruiting people who were not yet agents, creating psychological and material bonds over long years of management and allowing them to mature into senior intelligence or ministry officials allowed ample time for testing loyalty and positioning. The Soviets not only got more reliable information this way but also the ability to influence the other country’s decision-making.
  • There were four phases: Identifying likely candidates, Evaluating and recruiting them, Placing them and managing their rise in the organization, And exploiting them.
  • It is difficult to know what the Russian team was up to in the United States from news reports, but there are two things we know about the Russians: They are not stupid, and they are extremely patient.
  • If we were to guess — and we are guessing — this was a team of talent scouts.
  • One of the Russian operatives, Don Heathfield, once approached a STRATFOR employee in a series of five meetings.
  • We would guess that Anna Chapman was brought in as part of the recruitment phase of talent scouting.
  • Each of the phases of the operatives’ tasks required a tremendous amount of time, patience and, above all, cover. The operatives had to blend in (in this case, they didn’t do so well enough).
  • Were the Americans to try the same thing, they would have to convince people to spend years learning Russian to near-native perfection and then to spend 20-30 years of their lives in Russia. Some would be willing to do so, but not nearly as many as there are Russians prepared to spend that amount of time in the United States or Western Europe.
  • The United States has substituted technical intelligence for this process. Thus, the most important U.S. intelligence-collection agency is not the CIA; it is the National Security Agency (NSA).
  • In many ways, this provides better and faster intelligence than the placement of agents, except that this does not provide influence.
  • it assumes that what senior (and other) individuals say, write or even think reveals the most important things about the country in question.
  • The fall of the Shah of Iran and the collapse of the Soviet empire were events of towering importance for the United States.
  • Either of those scenarios would not have made any difference to how events played out. This is because, in the end, the respective senior leadership didn’t know how events were going to play out. Partly this is because they were in denial, but mostly this is because they didn’t have the facts and they didn’t interpret the facts they did have properly. At these critical turning points in history, the most thorough penetration using either American or Russian techniques would have failed to provide warning of the change ahead.
  • The people being spied on and penetrated simply didn’t understand their own capabilities — i.e., the reality on the ground in their respective countries — and therefore their intentions about what to do were irrelevant and actually misleading.
  • if we regard anticipating systemic changes as one of the most important categories of intelligence, then these are cases where the targets of intelligence may well know the least and know it last.
  • We started with three classes of intelligence: capabilities, intentions and what will actually happen.
  • The first is an objective measure that can sometimes be seen directly but more frequently is obtained through data held by someone in the target country. The most important issue is not what this data says but how accurate it is.
  • For example, George W. Bush did not intend to get bogged down in a guerrilla war in Iraq. What he intended and what happened were two different things because his view of American and Iraqi capabilities were not tied to reality.
  • But in the end, the most important question to ask is whether the most highly placed source has any clue as to what is going to happen.
  • Knowledge of what is being thought is essential. But gaming out how the objective and impersonal forces will interact and play out it is the most important thing of all.
  • The events of the past few weeks show intelligence doing the necessary work of recruiting and rescuing agents. The measure of all of this activity is not whether one has penetrated the other side, but in the end, whether your intelligence organization knew what was going to happen and told you regardless of what well-placed sources believed. Sometimes sources are indispensable. Sometimes they are misleading. And sometimes they are the way an intelligence organization justifies being wrong.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Jul 10
       
      This feels like that old saying, amateurs study tactics but experts study logistics. Perhaps that's the angle on this spying stuff that we haven't taken because we subconsciously imagine the crap of popular culture where knowledge should be.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Jul 10
       
      It certainly makes my thoughts here (http://longgame.org/2010/07/spies-like-them/) feel pretty damned quaint.
  • There appeared to be no goal of recruitment; rather, the Russian operative tried to get the STRATFOR employee to try out software he said his company had developed. We suspect that had this been done, our servers would be outputting to Moscow. We did not know at the time who he was.
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 10
     
    Some amount of spying is the cost of doing business for any power. By George Friedman at StratFor on July 13, 2010.
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

By the Numbers - 0 views

www.slate.com/2260461

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 15 Jul 10 - Cached
  • "The creation, selection, promotion, and proliferation of numbers are … the stuff of politics," the editors write in their introduction. No debate lasts very long without a reference to data, and as the numbers boil their way into the argument, you must challenge them or be burned blind by them. The essays presented in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts—about human trafficking, the Bosnian death count, the Darfur genocide, armed conflict, drugs, terrorism, and more—counsel exactly that sort of skepticism.
  • Often, the editors write, even the most rigorous-seeming statistics conceal squishy measurements. Inflated numbers are designed to create the sense that something must be done now. Depressed counts are intended to convince the recipients that the problem is too small to worry about. Whether it's body counts in Iraq or kilos of Colombian drugs, the creators and disseminators of the numbers usually have greater interest in their size than their veracity.
  • the drug bureaucracy spends extra billions to produce bigger numbers because the public associates "more" with "better."
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  • Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts performs similar forensics on the assertion, oft-repeated in government reports, that al-Qaida allots 10 percent of its budget to operational costs and 90 percent to administration and infrastructure. When you trace the claim to its origin—a report on terrorism—you find no footnote or sourcing at all. The author apparently concocted it from thin air.
  • The best advice in the book comes in the editors' concluding essay, which calls on everybody in the numbers racket—NGOs, government, academics, journalists—to confess humbly and honestly that they "don't know" rather than flinging dubious numbers.
  • anonymous on 15 Jul 10
     
    "A terrific new book of essays encourages us all to be skeptical about statistics." By Jack Shafer at Slate Magazine.
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

Turkey's Kurdish Strategy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...00917_turkeys_kurdish_strategy

geopolitics turkey stratfor

shared by anonymous on 20 Sep 10 - Cached
  • The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish militant group operating in Turkey, denied having any connection with a Sept. 16 explosion on a minibus near the city of Hakkari on Turkey’s border with Iran and Iraq.
  • anonymous on 20 Sep 10
     
    "Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is in talks with Kurdish militant group the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and its patron, Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government, to ensure that violence does not erupt after the scheduled Sept. 20 expiration of the PKK's unilaterally declared cease-fire. The AKP appears to be gaining ground on that front, as Iraqi Kurdish support for a recent Turkish referendum indicates. However, a Sept. 16 attack on a Turkish civilian minibus is a reminder of the spoiler potential attached to Turkey's Kurdish strategy." At StratFor on September 17, 2010.
anonymous

Elections and Obama's Foreign Policy Choices - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/..._obamas_foreign_policy_choices

geopolitics politics

shared by anonymous on 14 Sep 10 - Cached
  • While we normally do not concern ourselves with domestic political affairs in the United States, when the only global power is undergoing substantial political uncertainty, that inevitably affects its behavior and therefore the dynamics of the international system.
  • three things
  • First, while Obama won a major victory in the Electoral College, he did not come anywhere near a landslide in the popular vote.
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  • Second, he entered the presidency off balance.
  • Third, while in office, Obama tilted his focus away from the foreign affairs plank he ran on to one of domestic politics. In doing so, he shifted from the area where the president is institutionally strong to the place where the president is institutionally weak.
  • This is not because of the prospect of midterm reversals — that has happened any number of times. It is because Obama, like Bush, was off balance from the beginning.
  • This would indicate that Obama’s best strategy is to go into opposition, government against Congress. But there are two problems with this.
  • One of the underlying themes of the Obama presidency is that he is ineffective in getting his economic agenda implemented. That’s not really true, given the successes he has had with health-care reform and banking regulation, but it is still a theme. The other problem he has is the sense that he has surged in Afghanistan while setting a deadline for withdrawal and that his Afghan policy is merely a political gesture.
  • We come back to foreign policy as a place where Obama will have to focus whether he likes it or not. He takes his bearings from Franklin Roosevelt, and the fact is that Roosevelt had two presidencies. One was entirely about domestic politics and the other about foreign policy, or the Depression and then World War II
  • Obama will come out of the November election having to turn over his cards on the only area where he can have traction — Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. The question is what he might do.
  • a strike against Iranian nuclear targets alone would be the riskiest.
  • In 1971, Richard Nixon reached out to China while Chinese weapons were being used to kill American soldiers in Vietnam. Roosevelt did the same with the Soviets in 1941. There is a tradition in the United States of a diplomatic stroke with ideological enemies to achieve strategic ends.
  • The Republicans would be appalled, but Obama can’t win them over anyway so it doesn’t matter. Indeed, he can use their hostility to strengthen his own base.
  • I wouldn’t be so bold as to predict his actions, but I would argue that he faces some unappetizing choices that he could solve with a very bold move in foreign policy. His options on the domestic side will disappear if the polls are right.
  • anonymous on 14 Sep 10
     
    "We are now nine weeks away from the midterm elections in the United States. Much can happen in nine weeks, but if the current polls are to be believed, U.S. President Barack Obama is about to suffer a substantial political reversal." By George Friedman at StratFor on September 14, 2010.
anonymous

9/11 and the 9-Year War - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20100907_911_and_9_year_war

geopolitics stratfor 9_11

shared by anonymous on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • It has now been nine years since al Qaeda attacked the United States. It has been nine years in which the primary focus of the United States has been on the Islamic world.
  • Any American not frightened on Sept. 12 was not in touch with reality. Many who are now claiming that the United States overreacted are forgetting their own sense of panic. We are all calm and collected nine years after.
  • At the root of all of this was a profound lack of understanding of al Qaeda, particularly its capabilities and intentions. Since we did not know what was possible, our only prudent course was to prepare for the worst. That is what the Bush administration did.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Sep 10
       
      This is another example of the American tradition of underestimating your opponents and then suddenly overestimating them once caught off guard.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Al Qaeda learned from Soviet, Saudi, Pakistani and American intelligence during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and knew how to launch attacks without tipping off the target. The greatest failure of American intelligence was not the lack of a clear warning about 9/11 but the lack, on Sept. 12, of a clear picture of al Qaeda’s global structure, capabilities, weaknesses and intentions.
  • American policy became ready, fire, aim.
  • In looking back at the past nine years, two conclusions can be drawn: There were no more large-scale attacks on the United States by militant Islamists, and the United States was left with the legacy of responses that took place in the first two years after 9/11.
  • Even in hindsight, aligning U.S. actions with the apparent outcome is difficult and controversial. But still we know two things: It has been nine years since Sept. 11, 2001, and the war goes on.
  • an act of terrorism was allowed to redefine U.S. grand strategy.
  • the United States proceeded with a strategy whose goal, like that of the United Kingdom, was to nip potential regional hegemons in the bud. The U.S. war with Iraq in 1990-91 and the war with Serbia/Yugoslavia in 1999 were examples of this strategy.
  • The most significant effect of 9/11 was that it knocked the United States off its strategy. Rather than adapting its standing global strategy to better address the counterterrorism issue, the United States became obsessed with a single region, the area between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush.
  • as a long-term U.S. strategy — the long war that the U.S. Department of Defense is preparing for — it leaves the rest of the world uncovered.
  • The single most important result of 9/11 was that it shifted the United States from a global stance to a regional one, allowing other powers to take advantage of this focus to create significant potential challenges to the United States.
  • The fact that Afghanistan was the base from which the attacks were launched does not mean that al Qaeda depends on Afghanistan to launch attacks.
  • But let me state a more radical thesis: The threat of terrorism cannot become the singular focus of the United States. Let me push it further: The United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States. Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attack. That is a tragedy, but in a nation of over 300 million, 3,000 deaths cannot be permitted to define the totality of national strategy.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Sep 10
       
      Play the numbers again and you find that far more Americans died that year of far more mundane reasons. But this is never considered as one factor among many when tempers are flaring.
  • The issue there is not whether the United States can or can’t win, however that is defined. The issue is whether it is worth the effort considering what is going on in the rest of the world.
  • anonymous on 08 Sep 10
     
    "In order to understand the last nine years you must understand the first 24 hours of the war - and recall your own feelings in those 24 hours. First, the attack was a shock, its audaciousness frightening. Second, we did not know what was coming next. The attack had destroyed the right to complacent assumptions. Were there other cells standing by in the United States? Did they have capabilities even more substantial than what they showed on Sept. 11? Could they be detected and stopped? Any American not frightened on Sept. 12 was not in touch with reality. Many who are now claiming that the United States overreacted are forgetting their own sense of panic. We are all calm and collected nine years after." By George Friedman at StratFor on September 8, 2010.
anonymous

An Emboldened China Pressures Washington - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ned_china_pressures_washington

geopolitics china us

shared by anonymous on 12 Oct 10 - Cached
  • For the United States, then, these exercises amounted to watching Turkey demonstrate its independence and wealth of options against U.S. regional interests and Beijing exploit a rift in the U.S. alliance system and gain an opportunity to test out projecting air power unprecedentedly far afield.
  • The United States needs to come to some kind of agreement with Iran to form a regional power arrangement that enables a functional Iraq and an acceptable situation in Afghanistan.
  • the United States has not shown how it intends to handle China’s rising economic and military power and greater insistence on its strategic prerogatives. These trends are increasingly conflicting with U.S. objectives in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • All this raises the question of whether Washington is about to spring something on China, to gain leverage — for instance, on the trade front, where China’s reluctance to reform its currency policy has forced the U.S. administration into an uncomfortable situation immediately ahead of midterm elections.
  • anonymous on 12 Oct 10
     
    "China has essentially activated a bolder foreign policy than ever before, built around showing uncompromising commitment to following its core interests, especially in territorial disputes and its broader periphery, as well as using its economic might and various diplomatic relationships to show gradually expanding capabilities and rising potential. In contradistinction, the United States has become consumed with domestic politics and economic worries while trying to remove itself from a quagmire of foreign wars without giving the appearance of failure." At StratFor on October 12, 2010
anonymous

Energy Politics of the Middle East - 0 views

blackjacktmac4.blogspot.com/...y-politics-of-middle-east.html

geopolitics energy

shared by anonymous on 15 Oct 10 - Cached
  • If Iraq invaded Saudi Arabia, something that it probably could have accomplished in less than a week, Saddam could have potentially controlled 45% of the world's total oil reserves. It was no wonder that the U.S. was able to get quick international support for Operation Desert Shield.
  • anonymous on 15 Oct 10
     
    "One of the questions brought up in last weeks class presentation was how the presence of oil affects international relations within the region and with outside powers. Oil is by far the most important commodity in the Middle East, with up to 66% of the world oil reserves being located there. Furthermore, there are large quantities of oil located in the Caspian Sea, estimated to be worth up to $12 trillion. This makes dealing with Iran all the more important. But the point is, oil is one of the major reasons that large powers want to have a strong influence in the region, to ensure the stability (and the exports) of the states producing the oil." By Ted at Ted's Middle East Blog on October 14, 2010
anonymous

The Regional Implications of Ahmadinejad's Trip to Lebanon - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ions_ahmadinejads_trip_lebanon

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 13 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Israel does not have much to worry about with respect to Iran’s efforts to consolidate its influence on Israel’s northern border. The same, however, cannot be said of the region’s Sunni Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. These states have more to fear from Iran than does Israel.
  • Since the fall of the Baathist regime in Iraq and the subsequent rise of an Iranian-leaning Shia-dominated state, however, the Arab states have been terrified of Iranian power. King Abdullah II of Jordan in 2004 articulated this view when he spoke of the emergence of a “Shia crescent” stretching from Iran to Lebanon in the Middle East.
  • anonymous on 13 Oct 10
     
    "The extent to which Iran is able to project power into the Levant depends upon Hezbollah maintaining the upper hand in Lebanon. Even though it wields far more power than Lebanon's military, the radical Shia Islamist movement faces a number of challenges to its aim of dominating the Lebanese state. First, Lebanese demographic reality provides for sufficient arrestors in terms of rival sectarian, religious, ideological and political factions. Second, and more important, is the unique role of overseer enjoyed by Syria in the multi-confessional state. " At StratFor on October 13, 2010.
anonymous

U.S.-Iran Negotiations Redux - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...028_us_iran_negotiations_redux

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 29 Oct 10 - Cached
  • there are a couple of notable points to consider in analyzing the effectiveness of the U.S.-led pressure campaign against Iran
  • The most significant shift involves Russia, which has made a strategic decision to distance itself from Tehran in order to facilitate a broader understanding with the United States on respecting the boundaries of the former Soviet periphery
  • The United States also spent the summer revving up a sanctions campaign against Iran, this time going beyond weak sanctions in the U.N. Security Council and targeting Iran’s gasoline trade.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • If Iran is going to be compelled to negotiate seriously with the United States, it is likely going to take a lot more than the pressure tactics Washington has attempted thus far.
  • while the very visible and contentious nuclear issue takes center stage if and when this next round of U.S.-Iran negotiations takes place, the subtler question of Iraq and the wider region is where both Iran and the United States will remain fixated, if not gridlocked.
  • anonymous on 29 Oct 10
     
    "Discussion is picking up again in Washington and Brussels over another round of nuclear negotiations with Iran. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has reportedly issued an invitation to the Iranians to meet in Vienna in mid-November to discuss a fresh proposal aimed at containing the Iranian nuclear program. This time, the offer is supposed to be harsher than the one offered to Iran late last year, now requiring Iran to cease enrichment to 20 percent and to send roughly 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of low-enriched uranium (compared to the 540 kilograms of low-enriched uranium previously required) out of the country to compensate for any uranium enriched over the past several months." At StratFor on October 29, 2010.
anonymous

Obama: After the Election - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20101102_obama_after_election

geopolitics america election

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 10 - Cached
  • That means it is entirely possible that a slew of miscalculations are being made today. One of the most widespread misconceptions about the U.S. political system is that a president who is weak at home is by default weak abroad. This is a belief primarily promulgated by Americans themselves. After all, if one cannot get behind one’s leader, what business does that leader have engaging in global affairs? But in reality, a president who is weak at home often wields remarkable power abroad. The U.S. Constitution forces the American president to share domestic power with Congress, so a split government leads to domestic policy gridlock. However, the Constitution also expressly reserves all foreign policy — particularly military policy — for the presidency. In fact, a weak president often has no options before him except foreign policy. This is something that the rest of the world repeatedly has failed to grasp. Domestically weakened American presidents have often done more than engage in foreign policy: They have overturned entire international orders. Former U.S. President George W. Bush defied expectations after his 2006 midterm electoral defeat and launched the surge in Iraq, utterly changing the calculus of that war. Clinton launched the Kosovo War, which undid what remained of the Cold War security architecture. Most famously, John Kennedy, whom the Soviets had written off as a weak and naive dilettante who had surrounded himself with incompetent advisers (sound familiar?), gave the Russians their biggest Cold War diplomatic defeat in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States might be distracted and its president domestically weakened, and undoubtedly most of the world will assume that they know what this means. But history tells a very different story, and this president — like his predecessors — is not done just yet.
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 10
     
    "Nov. 2 marked midterm elections in the United States with more than 600 electoral contests, enough of which were resolved in favor of the Republicans to deny the Democrats full control of Congress. The country will be digesting the results and their implications for weeks. What STRATFOR will do now is address this simple fact: U.S. President Barack Obama, whose time in office began with a supportive Congress, has lost his ability to dictate the domestic policy agenda." At StratFor on November 3, 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

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

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.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • 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."
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