Group items tagged

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.

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 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.

Some of the countries on Russia's periphery do not want to be dominated by her. Russia, in spite of some strengths, is inherently weak and does not require U.S. exertion

Putin is now in a position where, in order to retain with confidence his domestic authority, he must act decisively to reverse the outcome. The problem is there is no single decisive action that would reverse events.

One is simply to accept the reversal, which I would argue that he cannot do. The second is to take action in places where he might achieve rapid diplomatic and political victories against the West -- the Baltics, Moldova or the Caucasus -- while encouraging Ukraine's government to collapse into gridlock and developing bilateral relations along the Estonia-Azerbaijan line.

The United States has been developing, almost by default, a strategy not of disengagement but of indirect engagement. Between 1989 and 2008, the U.S. strategy has been the use of U.S. troops as the default for dealing with foreign issues. From Panama to Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States followed a policy of direct and early involvement of U.S. military forces.

Because the current Russian Federation is much weaker than the Soviet Union was at its height and because the general geographic principle in the region remains the same, a somewhat analogous balance of power strategy is likely to emerge after the events in Ukraine.

The coalescence of this strategy is a development I forecast in two books, The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years, as a concept I called the Intermarium. The Intermarium was a plan pursued after World War I by Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski for a federation, under Poland's aegis, of Central and Eastern European countries. What is now emerging is not the Intermarium, but it is close. And it is now transforming from an abstract forecast to a concrete, if still emergent, reality.

First, Ukraine is a large country, and the force required to protect it would outstrip U.S. capabilities.

Second, supplying such a force would require a logistics system that does not exist and would take a long time to build.

Finally, such an intervention would be inconceivable without a strong alliance system extending to the West and around the Black Sea.

If the United States chooses to confront Russia with a military component, it must be on a stable perimeter and on as broad a front as possible to extend Russian resources and decrease the probability of Russian attack at any one point out of fear of retaliation elsewhere.

The problem is that NATO is not a functional alliance. It was designed to fight the Cold War on a line far to the west of the current line. More important, there was unity on the principle that the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to Western Europe. 

That consensus is no longer there. Different countries have different perceptions of Russia and different concerns. For many, a replay of the Cold War, even in the face of Russian actions in Ukraine, is worse than accommodation.

The countries that were at risk from 1945 to 1989 are not the same as those at risk today. Many of these countries were part of the Soviet Union then, and the rest were Soviet satellites.

The rest of Europe is not in jeopardy, and these countries are not prepared to commit financial and military efforts to a problem they believe can be managed with little risk to them.

the Baltics, Moldova and the Caucasus are areas where the Russians could seek to compensate for their defeat. Because of this, and also because of their intrinsic importance, Poland, Romania and Azerbaijan must be the posts around which this alliance is built.

. Poland is eager for a closer military relationship with the United States, as its national strategy has long been based on third-power guarantees against aggressors.

In Western hands, Moldova threatens Odessa, Ukraine's major port also used by Russia on the Black Sea. In Russian hands, Moldova threatens Bucharest.

Should Dagestan and Chechnya destabilize, Azerbaijan -- which is Islamic and majority Shiite but secular -- would become critical for limiting the regional spread of jihadists.

Azerbaijan also would support the alliance's position in the Black Sea by supporting Georgia

To the southwest, the very pro-Russian Armenia -- which has a Russian troop presence and a long-term treaty with Moscow -- could escalate tensions with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan serves a more strategic purpose. Most of the countries in the alliance are heavy importers of Russian energy

The key to the pipeline will be Turkey's willingness to permit transit. I have not included Turkey as a member of this alliance.

I view Turkey in this alliance structure as France in the Cold War. It was aligned yet independent, militarily self-sufficient yet dependent on the effective functioning of others.

This is not an offensive force but a force designed to deter Russian expansion.

In each case, the willingness of the United States to supply these weapons, for cash or credit as the situation requires, will strengthen pro-U.S. political forces in each country and create a wall behind which Western investment can take place.

There are those who would criticize this alliance for including members who do not share all the democratic values of the U.S. State Department. This may be true. It is also true that during the Cold War the United States was allied with the Shah's Iran, Turkey and Greece under dictatorship and Mao's China after 1971.

The balance of power strategy allows the United States to use the natural inclination of allies to bolster its own position and take various steps, of which military intervention is the last, not the first.

Weak and insecure states with temporary advantages are dangerous. The United States has an interest in acting early because early action is cheaper than acting in the last extremity. This is a case of anti-air missiles, attack helicopters, communications systems and training, among other things.

These are things the United States has in abundance. It is not a case of deploying divisions, of which it has few.