More "Followership" From The Hindmost

Coming late and out of breath from the unusual bout of exertion, the US today decided that the rebels, The Transitional Government" is the only legitimate game in Libya.  The US has extended full diplomatic recognition to the far less than coherent bunch in Benghazi.  The practical effect of this move is the freeing of the billions of Gaddafi bucks languishing in American custody, impounded under UN sanctions.

The American extension of recognition comes long after similar acts by the UK and France as well as other, lesser members of the anti-Gaddafi coalition.  The reasons for the lengthy American delay are inscrutable although it may be contended that Mr Obama has been too involved with negotiating a treaty over the deficit with his Republican interlocutors to have had much time to waste on minor matters such as Libya.

Arguably, there was no real need to grant diplomatic recognition and the international legitimacy that entails in order to give the Libyan money back to the Libyans in the personage of the Transitional Government.  Arguably, the granting of diplomatic recognition was premature in that the nature of the Benghazi crew is not exactly pellucid.  It is still unclear as to who holds the balance of power in the Transitional Government--the advocates of violent political Islam (some of whom have pulled triggers against Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan) or the secularists.  There is no way of being sure that the end result of the regime change will be more or less favorable to American national and strategic interests.

There is a larger reason to have not extended the prize of diplomatic recognition to the Lads In Benghazi.  The US has no direct stake in the country.  Other than the general imperative of countering the actions of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the US has no definite or definable interests in play.  That reality enough was enough to have militated against our involvement in the air campaign against Gaddafi and Company.  It is also sufficient to undercut any push to granting enhanced status to the rebels whose interests more likely than not do not run in parallel with our own.

There is something even more disquieting contained within the delayed but unnecessary recognition of the rebels as the only legitimate government in Libya.  It is the same disquieting factor already seen in play with the vacillating policy regarding Mubarak and the "Lotus Revolution" in Egypt or the similarly disconnected set of moves masquerading as policy regarding Syria.

The disquieting, not to say alarming, dynamic at work in Libya, Syria, and Egypt is that of indecision, lack of focus, and an apparent unwillingness to engage in the messier, less pleasant aspects of diplomacy.  The Nice Young Man From Chicago is too given to compromise, too willing to evade responsibility, too averse to making clear cut decisions and holding to them (unless a basic tenet of his ideology is at work) to engage in the risky business of establishing and hewing to a foreign policy.  While the Secretary of State may not be as averse to muscular diplomacy, it has become evident that Ms Clinton lacks the capacity to differentiate between that which is really important and those options which simply appeal on an emotional level.

One of the inevitable results of the Obama approach to foreign policy has been that of eroding confidence in the will of the US to undertake difficult actions.  An excellent example of this is the Saudi decision to broaden their weapons acquisition efforts to include Germany and Russia.  The movers and shakers among the gerontocracy running the Kingdom have concluded that the US is unreliable even as a source of expensive hardware.

The Saudis have noted with interest and no doubt considerable apprehension the way in which the US under both George W. Bush and Mr Obama has evaded the formal request by Taiwan to purchase sixty new generation F-16 aircraft.  In doing so the Obama administration has blatantly violated the law, specifically the law requiring the US to see to Taiwan's defense needs as defined by Taiwan not the US.  Considering that not selling the F-16s to Taiwan will result in the loss of thousands of good paying jobs during economically tenuous times, not even American self-interest can offset the stifling influence of Beijing on US policy.

If Beijing can put the screws to the US such that American jobs are sacrificed along with the law and US interests in Asia, Prince Bandar among others must have reasoned, what are the odds that at some point the US will go lame in an area crucial to Saudi existential interests?  Right now only one feature ties US interests to those of the Saudis.

No, bucko, not oil.  The only real coinciding national interests between ourselves and the Saudis is fear and loathing of Iran.  It is important in this context to underscore the importance of the recent high profile allegations of Iranian complicity in lethal attacks on US service personnel in Iraq.  These statements are aimed in part at the bootless excuse for a central government in Iraq to be sure.  But there is a far more important audience.

That more important group of auditors is located in Tehran.  In a real sense the comments regarding Iranian sponsorship of the attacks on Americans stands as a proxy for the most recent developments in the Iranian nuclear weapons program.  The Iranians have installed examples of two next gen centrifuges.  More importantly, these as well as hundreds of the older, less efficient models have been placed in hardened, underground facilities.

Taken together, these twin, interlocking developments make manifest the nature of the Iranian nuclear effort.  It is focused on getting the bomb.  Period.  There is no need for any more discussion on that aspect of the Iranian nuke program.

Rather, the only place for discussion is on the general question of options available to the US.  In this discussion the unique Obama approach to policy in the Mideast becomes relevant, highly so.  As the administration's fit-and-start facsimile of policy in Libya, Syria, and Egypt demonstrates, it is germane to ask whether or not the US will deign to lead from the front.

"Leading from behind" is not, as the White House creator of the term must have believed, a feat of brilliant statesmanship putting Obama on a par with Bismark or Talleyrand, but rather a total abdication of leadership. As the resulting mess in Libya shows in full color and stereo sound, the concept of leading from the rear is not only intellectually bankrupt but operationally equates with self-inflicted defeat.  A robust, albeit unpopular, US presence at the head of the NATO pack would have allowed a bad policy to be redeemed from the failure it so richly deserved.  The absence of the Americans in any meaningful, violent way from the effort has assured that the bad policy would fail, and, worse, would fail in a way which rebounded to the discredit of NATO as well as key allies.

Despite the documented successes of the sanctions imposed on Iran, most notably those impinging on maritime trade, the mullahs move closer to the "Mahdi Bomb" with every spin of every centrifuge.  This means that push-comes-to-shove time looms closer by the day, by the hour.  We the People place great faith in the efficacy of diplomatic and economic sanctions as the best form of coercive diplomacy.  In doing so, the American public overlooks the unpleasant reality that the effectiveness of sanctions rests in the last analysis on the perceived will and ability of the imposer of sanctions to use military force should the sanctions fail.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Iranian government and the mullahs behind it are convinced the US lacks the will to use military force.  They may (in private) be willing to grant that the US has the material capacity to destroy not only the nuclear facilities but Iran, but they are of the view that mere material ability is irrelevant.  The mullahs are right in this.  Ability without political will is simply so much very expensive hardware.

The Iranians are not alone in this appreciation.  The Israeli government shares it.  Benjamin Netanyahu along with the majority of his cabinet and party are convinced that the US is a toothless tiger regarding the looming Iranian threat.  They are also certain that the Obama administration is already willing to adjust its policy to an Iran with nuclear capabilities along with the implications this brings to the region and the world.  A similar sense of things must be growing as well in Saudi Arabia and other conservative Gulf states.

The current government of Israel is both crazy enough and filled with existential dread enough to go it alone in a strike on the Iranian nuclear plant.  There may even be a lingering belief that should Israel start the war, the US must join in.  If nothing else, the Netanyahu ministry probably believes that should Israel mount the first strikes and cause a mass attack in return by Iran and its closer adjuncts in Lebanon and Gaza, the American congress will do the necessary heavy lifting to assure the US moves fast and hard to bring the new war to a successful conclusion.

Given the power of the Israel Lobby in Congress, the Israeli calculus is not irrational.  It is a realistic reading of the political landscape of the US.  Even though an Israeli originated war with Iran would be devastating to the fragile American (and global) economic recovery, the US would have very few choices other than to join the fight with the goal of bringing the war to the most rapid and decisive conclusion.

The most rapid and decisive ending to an Israeli-Iranian war would be the total destruction of the Iranian governmental, military, and economic infrastructure.  The US could accomplish this using only conventional munitions, but the job would be longer and more difficult than might be presumed at the outset.  As the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya have shown, the ancient saw holding that wars are always longer and more difficult to end than seems to be the case at the beginning has not been obviated by changes in technology.

A war between Israel (and the US) on the one side and Iran (and its proxies) on the other would be a world historical event.  But, the obtaining of a nuclear capacity by Iran would prove to be such as well.  This means the matter is a choice regarding the perceived lesser of two evils.

To the Israelis, particularly the government of Netanyahu, the choice is a no-brainer.  To the US, the choice is not so simple and clear cut.  However, to be in the position to make a choice, the US, and, more specifically the Obama administration, must be universally perceived as a leader.  In this context it is critical to recall that the most effective form of leadership is leadership from the front.

The leader, as the Infantry School at Fort Benning makes plain, shouts, "Follow me!"  The leader does not say, "Go ahead, I'm right behind you."

As today's decision regarding the rebels in Libya shows, Mr Obama has not yet learned this vital fact.  By default he has handed control of the future of the US and the world to Benjamin Netanyahu.  That is not a failure of policy.  It is not even a simple error of judgement.  It is a world class blunder.

Memorial Day

The holiday we know today as Memorial Day started as a commemoration to Northern troops who were killed or died of disease during the War Between the States.  There were many to mourn.  The fatalities both North and South were massive, the largest ever experienced in relation to total population size by we Americans.

The awesome butcher's bill was the consequence not only of the size of the armies involved or the new technologies of killing developed and fielded during the war.  The greatest single cause of the body count, a body count so large as to permanently change the American way of warfighting arose from the nature of the war.  The American Civil War was a total war of national survival for each side.  The struggle was existential with a capital "E."

Since the guns fell silent over the battlefields of that war nearly one hundred fifty years ago, the US has engaged in only one war which might be described accurately as an existential affair, a total war of national survival.  That war was, of course, World War II.

Even if the Imperial Japanese government had not made entering the war easy as well as obligatory, there would have been no realistic way in which the US could have sat on its hands much longer.  It was apparent to many thoughtful people that desirable as the peace of isolation might seem, it was an impossible dream.  A world dominated by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan would have constituted a world entirely too hostile to both the defining core values of our country as well as its national interests to be long endured.

World War II may not have been as it has been termed "the good war" as no war can be said to be "good," but it was a most necessary war, a justifiable war, or, to be brutal, a least-worst option sort of war.  By the time the Japanese representatives signed the instrument of surrender in September 1945, the US had fought two existential conflicts, two wars of national survival in eighty years.

A lot of men were killed in each of these existential wars.  Only the fact that each war was existential and total provides justification for the great loss of life.  The lives of these men made and preserved the nation-state.  Without their violent deaths, the US would not have become and remained what it has been.   The modern United States, indeed, much of the modern world, has been erected on the corpses of these men.

(A point of personal privilege here.  The Geek cannot stomach terms such as "sacrifice" or "gave their lives" or "fallen," or any of the other commonly used terms in a vain attempt to cover up the brutal reality that these men were killed.  None sought out death.  Death, violent death, was inflicted upon them.  These men had done to them what they would have done to their enemy had the toss of fortune's coin only gone differently.  There ain't no way around it: War is a matter of killing or getting killed, of getting or getting got.  It cannot and should not be prettified.)

All  of the other wars we Americans have fought over the past century and a half, the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, all the myriad of skirmishes, interventions, raids, humanitarian relief missions gone awry, were not matters of national existence nor even material national interest but rather national policy.  All were limited wars in support of policy.  Arguably, most were neither necessary nor justifiable in any realistic way.

Being wars men were killed in all.  A lot of men.  Even the lowest cost of these many nasty little policy exercises saw scores of American men killed.

After the Civil War, the American view of war and how to fight it became one not of avoiding war but rather of finding ways to both fight and win which resulted in the fewest number of Americans being killed.  More than any other state, the US sought and employed technologies of killing which were most effective at the lowest risk to American lives.  The hectatombs of the War Between the States taught Americans that there is nothing heroic in getting killed.  As General George S. Patton Jr. put it, "You do not win by dying for your country.  You win by making the other sonofabitch die for his."

Even though the US has been very successful at limiting friendly deaths, the reality remains that American troops are killed in the course of limited wars in support of policy.  More importantly, these men are killed without the ultimate justification that their deaths preserved the nation from existential obliteration.

It is for this basic reason that We the People question and finally turn against the continuation of limited wars in support of policy should such not be successfully completed at a low body count in short order.  Our repugnance for "small" wars being waged for obscure reasons of state has had several equally negative ramifications for the way in which the US approaches the difficult subjects of national security interest and coercive diplomacy.

One of these is the predilection of administrations (of both parties) to oversell the war or to overstate what is at stake in the conflict or to expand the mission so as to make it more politically acceptable.  The prototype for all three courses of action was President Woodrow Wilson's framing of our entrance into World War I.  But the Wilson approach was eagerly, if even unconsciously, followed by later administrations.

The War in Vietnam was oversold and overstated.  So too was the invasion of Iraq.  The operation in Afghanistan was reprogrammed from one of a purely punitive nature to the impossible goal of "nation-building" in order to put a proper gloss on the underlying reality.  Even the most easily justified war in support of policy, the Korean "police action," fell prey to mission-creep following the invasion of Inchon when the goal changed from restoring the status quo ante to that of eliminating North Korea as a functioning state.

Another effect of addressing the American distaste for wars in support of policy is that of prevarication.  While the "Jive at Five" press briefings of the Vietnam period stand as the towering monument to this particular attempt to stave off the effects of public disenchantment, the same dynamic has been at work in every American war following World War II.  Successes have been magnified.  Difficulties have been downplayed.  Mood music intended to sooth the potentially savage beast of political disaffection has been played often and loudly.

Worst of all, the various administrations have seen it necessary to build coalitions in order to give the appearance that the US was not fighting a limited war in support of American policy and national interests but rather was acting in concert with other states in a common, preferably universally supported, cause.  By avoiding the public appearance of fighting a war by and for ourselves, the administrations have undercut the clarity of purpose, certainty of goals, and unity of effort necessary to bring the war to a quick and successful conclusion.

By yoking ourselves to coalitions which may be far more an artifact of diplomacy than an organic expression of coinciding national interests, the US both complicates the problem of pursuing critical national interests and renders the achievement of these interests less rather than more likely.  The chimera of multilateral action is sought in order to lower the political risks to an administration which seeks to wage a limited war in support of a policy which it perceives as critical to national or strategic interests of the US.

The history of limited war shows that such wars are the least likely to be successful.  That is, they are the least likely to lead to a better state of peace at the end of fighting.  In the past, these wars have been quite unlikely to provide a firm base for permanent peace in the contested area.  In largest measure this has been the consequence of failing to understand properly the linkage between diplomacy of the negotiation sort and diplomacy of the fighting variety.

More than a contest between organized bodies of armed men, a war is a contest of political wills.  Each party to a war is wagering that it has the greater political will.  Each party is putting the lives of its men at risk as a demonstration of its determination to win.  Battles are a way of upping the ante, corpses are chips pushed to the center of the table.

One of our limited wars in support of policy--the one in Korea--put this linkage in stark relief.  The most bitter as well as most pointless combats were waged over obscure terrain features of no intrinsic value while the armistice talks were in progress.  It took the Americans a while to tumble to the fact that these battles, exemplified by the one at Pork Chop Hill, were being used by the Chinese as a demonstration of their political will--and a test of ours.  The side which was willing and able to quite literally "waste" the greater number of lives was the side possessing the greater political will.

This key lesson taught by the killing of Americans on bleak hillsides in Korea during 1952 and 53 had been forgotten fifteen years later as the North Vietnamese used the same process during the Paris Peace Talks.  Nor has the US remembered these lessons today when they would be applicable to combining talking and killing in the context of Afghanistan.

To put the matter simply and in no way oversimplified, the only way in which the limited war in support of policy can achieve a better state of peace and thus begin to justify the leaving of American bones to (metaphorically) bleach in some far away place with an unpronounceable name is the proper combination of the diplomacy of talking and that of killing.  Simply declaring victory and heading home or (as in Vietnam) establishing a "date certain" and then cutting off all funding for the war neither redeems failure nor makes right the killing of American personnel.

In the total war, the existential struggle between peers, there is no substitute for victory as General MacArthur properly noted.  However, the reality in the limited war in support of policy is different.  In this kind of war, the "small" war of limited lethality, limited means, limited scope, and limited goals, there is a substitute for victory.  The substitute is the achievement of a better state of peace by demonstrating superior political will.  The means of doing this is the proper linkage between the killing kind of diplomacy and the palaver variety.

Talking does not mean--nor should it--that the shooting must stop.  Nor does the continuation of the shooting render talking either impossible or unproductive.  Now and in the future when wars will continue to be of the limited policy directed sort, the realization of the crucial nature of political will is needed along with a commitment to the capacity to talk and shoot at the same time.

Sure, it is a multitasking approach, but we Americans invented the concept so we ought to be good at it.  Why not give it a try in Afghanistan?  If we can  pull it off there we will be in very good shape for the many small wars yet to come.

The Power Of Values--And the Value Of Power

In his speech to parliament in Westminster last week, President Obama made much of the values shared between the US and the UK.  Leaving aside his total--and, hopefully, intentional--misstatements regarding the history of the Anglo-American relationship, his remarks did constitute a fair evaluation of the importance of shared values, norms of behavior, understandings of the nature of government and its relationship to the citizenry, as well as the ties of history and tradition.  His remarks were both accurate and long overdue.

The fine words were also in large measure irrelevant.

There is a very real and easily demonstrated potency resident in the core defining values and norms of both American and British origin.  The particular features of both make each quite attractive in the estimate of many people around the world.  While the greatest gravity well pulling people to American shores has been and is economic, the magnetic attraction of the values and norms, the world views, the understanding of the dignity and worth of the individual which provide the foundation of economic success must not be underestimated.  Even those who come to the US--or the UK--due to the potential of personal prosperity do not undervalue the benefits of those intangibles which constitute a definable "way of life."

The value of the cultural, social, and political aspects of a country's life is enshrined in the unfortunate phrase, "soft power."  What makes this phrase uniquely unsatisfying is the implication that "soft" aspects of a state's potency are somehow inferior to those of more kinetic sort, such as the size of the navy or the number of deployable battalions.  It is always necessary to keep in mind that it is the "soft" aspects of a country which provide the basis for the "hard" features of economic and military power.

Mr Obama was right to pay proper attention to and give appropriate credit to the shared values and imperatives which have served to bring the UK and US closer together, to provide a broad set of coinciding national interests which allow for expansion or particular expression by normal diplomatic means.  In a very real sense the root of the "special relationship" is the ease with which "vanilla" diplomacy can be employed.

However, it is necessary to point out that the operative word is "special."  In this context special implies unique.  The relative absence of any need for any coercion.  The same applies to American relations with other English speaking, UK descended states such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  While there are differences between Washington and the capitals of these states as has also been the case with the UK, these can and have been resolved quickly and with very little stress or pain by working from the extensive base of common values and shared interests.

What Mr Obama overlooked in his paean to the Magna Carta, etc. is the same does not apply with most other countries on Earth.  The US may have a wide set of common values with Western Europe.  Once that area is left behind, the number of shared values, norms, customs, imperatives and world views shared between the US and We the People on the one hand and the governments or citizens of other countries shrinks--often starkly.

Mr Obama implied that the West has been very successful in exporting its common values and imperatives.  This has been a recurrent theme in many of his recent statements.  It is also a something of a cliched meme within the elites of the West.  Like all cliches, this one contains a germ of truth.  But it is a truth which must not be taken too far, exaggerated too much.

The events of the "Arab Spring" provide a perfect context in which to see the potent temptation to believe entirely too much in the power of such made in the West values as democracy.  To Westerners in general and Americans in particular living in an environment in which all the hard, bitter but necessary preparatory work has been done, the inherent value of democracy is too self-evident to require parsing.  We run on the comfortable but hallucinatory belief that the voice of the people expressed in an election constitutes a sovereign remedy for all that ails a nation.

Our belief in the self-evident righteousness of human rights as we define such is similar.  If allowed to do so any people, all people, everywhere without regard to the larger cultural context or history will subscribe to the same understanding of human rights as we do.  Indeed, if one runs down the list of American values, norms, customs, and imperatives the same dynamic is seen.  If it works here, it will work everywhere.  If we believe in it so also will everyone everywhere.

This set of self-imposed delusions is particularly striking in its impact on the elites of the West, including that of the US.  It resides at the root of the two "multis" which so often confounds effective foreign and national security policy and manufactures social tensions which otherwise need not exist.  The first of these "multis" is "multiculturalism.  The second is "multilateralism."

The basis of multi-culturalism is the specious and pernicious notion that all cultures are equal in all respects.  No one culture may see itself as ethically superior to others.  No culture may be seen as legitimately dominate--even if its members constitute the defining majority of a population and have largely created that society's values, norms, and imperatives.

There is an irony here.  It is an irony which evidently escapes both Mr Obama and fellow members of the American elite.  On the one hand they celebrate the "soft" power strengths of Western and American culture.  On the other they maintain that it is wrong, even offensively arrogant, to maintain that the culture of the US and the rest of the West is superior to those extant elsewhere in the world.

Duh?

The second of the "multis," multilateralism, denies that the US or any country can act without the approval of others, the OK of the "international community."  On one level there is nothing objectionable about the concept of seeking allies in a common effort to a collectively defined goal.  That has long been at the heart of diplomacy.  It has long been at the center of effective warfighting.

The problem comes when the concept is taken too far.  This point comes when international structures are given priority over national sovereignty.  Mr Obama and his "team" crossed this point, at least as regards the UK, when he and they exalted the Lisbon Treaty and the new, improved European Union at the expense of the national sovereignty of the UK.

Mr Obama, again in common with the academics, journalists, politicians, and others of the elite, sees the supra-national as inherently superior to the national.  He and they view nationalism and national interest with the utmost of suspicion if not total hatred.  Collective fictions such as the mythical beast, "the international community," as well as supra-national entities such as the EU and UN are viewed by Mr Obama and his ilk as morally superior to individual sovereign states.  These people sincerely believe that supra-national bodies are both disinterested enough and broadly constituted enough to be trusted with solving any and all problems which might beset not only the world, or a region, but an individual state.

It is this understanding of the moral authority and disinterested nature of the supra-national entity as compared with the individual nation-state which has given rise to the new form of intervention in the affairs of a state.  The specific manifestations of this belief have been and are being seen around the world.  From the former Yugoslavia during the mid-nineties to the application of R2P in Libya, the causes and effects of reliance upon an overextended understanding of multilateralism are highly visible.

Equally obvious are the failures of a reliance on the "international community" and supra-national entities.  There is another irony resident at the edges of multilateralism of the expansive sort.  As is so evident today, the tensions between R2P and national interest are seen in the bombers over Libya as compared with the silent sky over Syria.  The failed state of Somalia as well as the failing state of Yemen stand as monuments to the inappropriateness or uselessness of the multilateralist approach to internal failures of a state.  Enough said.

In an ideal world predicated on the successful exportation of Western values coupled with the moral suasion of the "international community," Vladimir Putin would be the tribune of open, transparent, free wheeling democracy.  In that world the Trolls of Beijing would become exemplars of human rights.  Advocates of violent political Islam would take off their suicide vests and forswear even political subversion becoming open participants in the marketplace of ideas willing to accept defeat graciously should that be the will of the people.

Mr Obama was silent on the subject of force in his speech in Westminster.  This was to be expected.  He, once more in common with the Western elite generally, finds the use of "hard"power objectionable.  Even though Western aircraft were delivering hot metal on target in Libya and the president was riding a wave of popularity generated by the killing of Osama bin Laden, military force remained a subject not fit for polite company.

In some deep recess of his mind, however, Mr Obama is undoubtedly aware that in the real world values without the force necessary to protect them and even extend them constitute no particular advantage.  Absent a competent military and the political will to use it, the US and the West would rapidly become an endangered species.  Ultimately, the position and influence of the US (and the West) rests upon its ability and will to use force effectively and decisively in support of policy.

When night falls, it is impossible to separate the power of values from the value of power, military power.  That is a ground truth.  It may be a hard truth for Mr Obama and others of the elite to accept, but that is the way the world and its human cargo operates, like it or not.

Over the long sweep of history, the values of the US, of the West, may subvert those of other, arguably inferior origin.  Until that day comes (if it ever does), there is no substitute for force--except surrender.

We Will Not See The Likes Of Him Soon

Robert Gates gave a splendid example of why he will be missed sorely when he steps down as Secretary of Defense next month.  His remarks at Notre Dame University's commencement provided an excellent epitome of his intellectual honesty as well as his breadth of thought and imagination.

The subject of Gate's address was the future of American national security forces--and, thus, the role to be played by the US in the world.  Pointedly, he noted that the US cannot resign its role as a Great Power.  As he commented, his travels around the world as Secretary of Defense have impressed him with the number of countries which want the US to play a larger role in global politics and not a smaller one.

In short, Dr Gates saw first hand, up close and personal, proof of the historical maxim holding no country can resign its status as a great power--although that status may be taken away by the actions of others.  In this context, the Secretary commented upon the salient--but to many on the political Left, unpleasant--reality that the final shield of American core values has been the strength and reach of our military power.

As an add-on of key importance, the Secretary warned that there existed other Great Powers whose interests and goals were not completely compatible with our national and strategic interests.  This means that only the continued capacity of the American military exists as a check on these ambitions.  It was a very clear warning to and about the Trolls of Beijing.

In his reading of history, Gates drew a lesson regarding the ability of the American people to "avert their eyes" from events occurring in distant, remote places.  It has been difficult to the point of impossibility for We the People in the past (and the present, he might have added) to see how some affair in a small and far distant country may rebound to the immediate disadvantage of the US and its citizens.  It is this willful blindness conditioned by our history on a continent protected on both east and west by broad oceans which has given rise not only to our periods of isolationism but also this diminuendo form of being unable or unwilling to connect the dots linking us with some far off place filled with people having unpronounceable names.

The implication of these twin phenomena of large scale isolationism and small scale who-cares-ism for the Secretary is that of gutting the American military.  Gates has lived through several periods during which We the People allowed--even demanded--the hollowing out of our military, air, and naval forces.  In each case, a war had just been ended.  In each case, there were strong economic imperatives in play.  In each case, We the People were sick and tired of the sacrifices required of us.  And in each case--after World War II, after the Vietnam War and after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union--the ultimate impact on our capacity to conduct diplomacy as a Great Power was lessened along with our ability to wage effective war if and when required.

We are in a similar situation with these earlier periods today.  More so given the potential enervating impact of the federal deficit.  There is both a need and a set of political imperatives to engage the national debt and current deficit with effect and dispatch.  As the Secretary well knows and has publicly stated on numerous occasions, the defense appropriations cannot be held harmless during the process.  They will not be.  That is a for sure.

But, as Dr Gates argues in his Notre Dame speech, the process of reducing military expenditures cannot be done at the expense of our real world combat capacities.  Administration, overhead, some categories of personnel expenses, some force components can and should be reduced or removed all together.  Core combat and force/power projection capabilities as well as the research and development of next gen systems must be taken off the table.

As a Great Power, as the Great Power most trusted by countries around the world to act quickly and decisively in the face of threats, the US has the unique responsibility to maintain a significant full-spectrum capability which can do all missions.  The US military, air, and naval forces must be able to do it all--deter or, if necessary, defeat peer opponents, execute low or no lethality interventions, provide humanitarian relief, train and equip friendly forces--the entire ambit of war and warlike utilities.

Dr Gates made reference to a statement purportedly made by Winston Churchill after World War II, ""With greatness comes great responsibility."  It is obvious that Gates agrees with Churchill that the US cannot avoid either its greatness nor the responsibilities which come with it.  It is evident in Gates' remarks that he believes that continued American greatness depends upon getting our financial affairs in order--and by doing so without gutting our military capabilities.

Gates projects optimism regarding our will and ability to address the parlous financial condition of the country and maintain the basis of global diplomacy--our military potency.  He correctly notes all the times in our collective history when we have successfully overcome challenges as large or larger than those confronting us today.  His optimism is tempered by a clear headed understanding that the US--its military and civilian decision makers but not excluding We the People--must undertake a penetrating review of our strategic needs and national interests so as to separate properly those which are truly central from those which may be nice, desirable, optimal but remain on the periphery of core interests.

It is easy to infer from his speech that the Secretary does not think this necessary review will be accomplished either easily or quickly.  The debate will be both noisy and often uncouth, couched not in the national interest but in far more parochial concerns.  Nor will the debate end with all sides walking away with broad smiles.

The review and its consequences will be both long and not pretty.  It will be marked by missteps perhaps too many to be counted with ease.  But, when night falls Gates remains hopeful.  He demonstrated his hope by resort to another, perhaps apocryphal quote from Churchill.  "The United States will always do the right thing--after they have tried everything else."

Defense, Diplomacy, And Development

Those three words constitute a sort of mantra which issues from the mouth of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton at every opportunity.  They also define much of the debate soon to be entered into by the congress as the US makes another of its fitful attempts to come to grips with the deficit and the government's chronic inability to live within its means.

When congress in its collective excuse for wisdom makes the attempt to limit American expenditures, it will be traveling a road already passed over by the British Parliament.  The Coalition government of Cameron and Clegg  inherited a financial debacle from the Labor predecessor which has necessitated deep and painful cuts in all areas of the British budget.  High on the list of those cut was the Ministry of Defense.

The British military, naval, and air services were not simply cut, they were mangled.  The Royal Air Force now possesses the fewest aircraft since before the first shots of World War I.  The Royal Navy in its entirety would not be adequate to provide anti-air and anti-submarine screening for a single US aircraft carrier.  The Royal Army has shrunk to a level which would preclude a successful replay of either the Falklands War or even the intervention in Sierra Leone.

Bad is this seems, there are more cuts in the pipeline.  Dr Liam Fox, the Minister of Defense, has promised more whacks will be taken as soon as the British wrap up their ground presence in Afghanistan.  While Dr Fox specifically mentioned "redundant" vehicles, it is generally understood that the draw down in forces will go beyond vehicles and to the troops who ride them, drive them, and fire their guns.  At least another brigade equivalent in the general purpose forces will permanently case its colors.

Given that Prime Minister Cameron is chomping at his bit to hit the Afghan exit, the next ramp down of British military capacity will come sooner rather than later.  Even though the prime minister and his defense colleague assure the British public (and the US government) that the UK will remain capable of "broad spectrum" operations and will retain its "superb" special operations forces and will acquire more of the new generation of submarines, doubt as to British capacities to join with allied forces in combined and joint operations must linger.

It is clear that the British expect the US to retain its military capacities unscathed by the same budgetary and financial forces which have buffeted the UK.  The same thinking seems to apply generally across Western Europe.

How this wishful thinking can be maintained in the face of accelerating American force withdrawal from Europe boggles the imagination.  There are currently 42, 000 US personnel in Europe.  By 2015 the figure will drop to 37,000.  In comparison there were 213,000 stationed in Europe as the Berlin Wall fell.  And, that number was down from the high point in 1962 of nearly 277,000.

The American justification for the continued retreat from Europe is purely financial.  The aggregate GDP of the European Union is ten percent greater than that of the US.  At the same time the combined defense budgets of the EU states is a mere fraction of that imposed on the US.

It is worth noting that the logic of withdrawal has a momentum of its own.  Force strengths like rocks tend to roll down hill.  And, the imperatives of finance can far outstrip the power of gravity.

The US will lose some significant tactical flexibility and rapidity of response by pulling out of Europe.  It will take measurably longer to move force across an ocean.  More importantly, the interposition of an ocean between the US and the likely conflict areas of the Mideast and Africa provide an important political distance between any future flareup and the decision makers inside the Beltway.  Political and psychological distance is far more critical in slowing or preventing a response than the mere add-on of a few thousand miles.

It may be that this consideration will be moot by the time 2015 rolls around.  There is no way that the American defense department is going to be spared the budget trimming meat ax.  President Obama has made that clear.  Outgoing SecDef Gates has concurred, wholeheartedly.  At least four hundred billion dollars will go over the next decade.  Probably more.  Perhaps even a lot more depending upon the electoral fortunes of the defense conservatives of the Republican Party.

Implicit in the mantra of Secretary Clinton is the hope that insofar as the "defense" leg of the triad is shortened, the legs of "diplomacy" and "development" will be elongated in compensation.  This hope is both false and misplaced.  There is no powerful base of support for either diplomacy or development.

For many of We the People, even among those who are most aware of global politics and the Game of Nations, "diplomacy" is seen as a quasi-mysterious process involving gobs of talk, rounds of dinners, and photo ops.  Whatever it is that diplomats do and with whatever results, there is no belief that it should cost much money.  "Diplomacy" is something like a wand which is waved at vexing problems rather than a useful tool of state in the estimate of many outside of that dismal profession.  So, why does it need money?

"Development" is in even worse shape in the mind of many of us.  Foreign aid is tantamount to an obscenity in the estimate of many conservatives both in and out of congress.  At best it is seen as a form of bribery, a form of rent-a-friend which all too often does not pay off.  At worst it is conceived of as a way of furthering corruption in the recipient country while fostering tumor-like growth in the bureaucracy which doles it out.

Again the recent experience in the UK points at the limits of both debate and understanding when it comes to diplomacy and development.  Critics of the Coalition have pointed with disdain to the Cameron proposal to increase the development budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by more than a third at the same time that the British military is undergoing enforced, unilateral disarmament.

Advocates of the British move argue that by fostering education, good governance, and economic development in unstable or collapsing states, the need for military intervention or active defense against terror attacks originating in such places will be obviated.  The same points have been advanced here not only by Secretary Clinton and others in Foggy Bottom but also by Secretary Gates.  If anything Mr Gates has been a more robust proponent of foreign aid as a means of precluding later military action than have the denizens of State and USAID.

In principle it is hard to dissent from the perspective that prevention through foreign development assistance is far preferable to sending in the Marines at some future date.  In principle a strong case can be made for the effective use of foreign aid as a means of helping to create political and social tranquility within a recipient country such as to preclude it becoming a failing state.  In practice, though, it is far easier to identify the examples where foreign aid has not brought about either internal political and social harmony and progress or bribed the recipient government into accepting American policy leadership.

The Cold War landscape is carpeted with the corpses of failed foreign aid programs.  Africa is littered with the results of foreign aid driven corruption, inefficiencies, and betrayed expectations of a better life.  The same is true in large swaths of Asia and Latin America.  The aid has not been simply from the US.  Americans are not the only people to have failed in the development through aid game.  All who have played it have experienced more failures than successes.

Nor did the situation change with the end of the Cold War.  One need look no further than Pakistan than to see that truism at work.  But, if more convincing is necessary, all that is needed is to take a peek at the totality of those receiving development assistance at the government-to-government level to see that lack of success trumps success by a huge margin.

The palpable lack of success in the government-to-government development efforts will go a very long way to assure that budget cutters will find the funding for these programs a politically attractive target even though very few real dollars will be saved even if the totality of US foreign aid in all categories were to be zeroed out.  Slashing here is one of those look-good, feel-good votes that are so attractive to politicians unwilling and unable to make tough decisions.

While diplomacy is no magic wand to be waved at international problems and development no anodyne for internal debacles, both are necessary, even valuable, complements to defense.  The "vanilla" diplomacy of building upon coinciding national interests as well as carefully targeted development aid focusing on projects which are modest in scale, immediate in visible effects, and sustainable over time by local resources alone can go along way to limiting the need for more robust measures--and cost a lot less.

At the same time it must be recognized that "vanilla" diplomacy and targeted development have very real limits.  There are states which require a coercive approach.  There are states which will collapse and fail or have governments come to power which are not only adverse to the interests of the US and its allies but are willing to use asymmetrical means to demonstrate this.

In these contexts it must be remembered that all forms of coercive diplomacy rest finally upon the material ability and political will of the US to employ force in support of its policies.  Likewise the hostile state must be defanged.  The collapsed or collapsing state might well require outsiders come and impose peace.  In all these eventualities, eventualities which will become more rather than less likely over the next decade or two, credible and relevant military force is necessary if a positive outcome from the perspective of the US is desired.

Schoolrooms in Pakistan will not necessarily prevent violent political Islam from taking firm and continuing root there.  Nor will clinics in Yemen assure the place does not collapse into a welter of internal warfare.  Sudan will not become a thriving multi-ethnic, multi-religious, democratic state simply because some donor or another pumps in buckets of cash.  The same caveats may be made with respect to many other psuedo-states.

These unpleasant ground truths imply strongly that planners, both those dealing with budgets and those whose game is international strategy, must put defense first.  This does not mean the US is condemned to be an impoverished bunker, but it does mean that the existence of a full-spectrum and flexible military capacity cannot be sacrificed on the alters of diplomacy and development.

Nor does it mean the cost of budgetary sanity is surrender to hostile forces.

It does mean, however, that the congress and administration must be intelligent and realistic in their world view.  That, unfortunately, is probably too much to expect.

Coercion Is Not The Only (Or The Best) Way

George Kennan's "Long Telegram" of 1946 constituted a seminal moment in American foreign policy.  More, it served to define a strategic world view emphasizing the need to confront and contain threats.  While perhaps unintended by Kennan, there was a natural tendency on the part of American leaders both civilian and military to place an onus on coercion as the preferred instrument by which to confront and contain.

In his later years, the famed diplomat and historian bemoaned the "militarization" of his musings on containment as applied to one area--the Eurasian landmass--and one opponent--Russia under the Soviets.  He maintained that he had never implied containment to be a sovereign remedy of universal applicability or that coercive military threats should be the primary tool of diplomacy.

The Geek has always been of the view that Kennan's later appreciation of his thinking was honest and accurate.  Kennan had a profound mind capable of fine gradations of nuance.  Unfortunately the politicians and diplomats, the soldiers and operations analysts who were called upon to put containment into practice under the overall requirements of  the Long Telegram inspired NSC 68 were not so fine grained in their understandings of time and place, of world and politics, of threats and opportunities.  NSC-68 (signed by President Truman in 1950) has not only governed the warp and woof of American foreign and national security policies ever since but has served to make these policies increasingly irrelevant, increasingly unrelated to the contemporary realities of global politics and evermore counterproductive.

The reason for the persistence of the NSC-68 mode is simple.  It worked.  The doctrine of containment enforced primarily by coercive means headed by the US military did contribute significantly to the downfall of the Soviet Union.  While not the sole cause by any stretch, the American persistence in applying containment, in surrounding the Soviet sphere with a steel ring of bases and alliances, of being both willing and able to fight wars of dubious connection to the Kremlin, placed real and continued pressures on the inefficient Soviet regime with important consequences which served in aggregate to sap the political will of the Soviet elite to keep on keeping on.

Sanctified by apparent success, the draw-a-line-in-the-sand mentality of the Cold War soldiered on.  The natural inclination of people to divide groups into two categories--Us and Them--was reinforced by the intellectual legacy of containment.  The equally natural inclination of most people to rely on coercion first in the accomplishment of goals was likewise buttressed by the seeming success of militarily predicated coercion during the Cold War.

The short span of time which elapsed between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of attacks by advocates of violent political Islam did not permit for any sort of measured appraisal of the containment-by-coercion mode of the Cold War.  As a result, the default response of the American government and We the People was rooted in the Cold War paradigm: divide US from Them, draw a line in the sand, employ military coercion to bend Them to Our will.

The focus on military based coercion was seen as early as the mid-Fifties to be having the expectable albeit unintended consequence of warping all aspects of American foreign policy, the national economy, and virtually all aspects of our domestic society and polity in ways that might not be at all beneficial over time.

In foreign relations the Are-you-with-us? test dominated all other considerations.  Foreign governments which failed the test were put beyond the pale as Nasser, among others, found out.

The economic effects of NSC-68 gave rise to what Ike notably called "the military-industrial complex" which extended far beyond cabals of generals and industrialists to include academia, the media, and even entertainment.  (Recall the "mine shaft gap" line in Dr Strangelove, the perfect risible parody of all the many "gaps" which punctuated political discourse for thirty and more years.)

Investment in both human and physical capital alike which were completely appropriate were justified politically as being required by "national security."  (Think of the Interstate highway system or even the name of the first federal student loan project, the "National Defense Student Loan" program.)

Even the first stumbling efforts of the national government in the field of civil rights were explained as being necessary not for reasons of inherent justice or domestic tranquility but rather to deny the "Communists" from reaping a propaganda harvest in the context of the decolonizing Third World.  And, it is worth remembering the assaults on free speech made by those seeking to present a unified American public resolute in its defense of all rights and freedoms against the "Communist" menace.

We are now a full twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failed coup against the Yeltsin government in Russia.  We are now more than ten years into a seemingly endless confrontation with the forces of violent political Islam, seeking without measurable success to contain the new threat by coercion based primarily upon military means.

And, it might be asked fairly, "What have we learned?"

At the very least it might be asserted with accuracy that we have learned the limits or, to be more honest, the irrelevance of coercion based containment.  A sign, small but telling, that at least some of the American establishment has learned this highly valuable lesson.

Two serving officers, one Navy and the other a Marine, have delivered themselves of a very important "private" paper.  While "private," this product of two staffers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff would not have become public had it not been approved of by very senior members of the Defense Department.

Writing under the pen name of "Mr Y" in intentional imitation of Kennan who published an article in Foreign Affairs based on his Long Telegram under the pseudonym of "Mr X," the two officers, Captain Porter and Colonel Mykleby, have offered a viable alternative to the containment by coercion thesis of Kennan.  While not complete in itself, the paper points in a new direction, a direction which places far less reliance upon either coercion or the military and places far more emphasis on refocusing our efforts on traditional American values such as entrepreneurship and education and, in the foreign relations sphere, on engagement and influence rather than dominance.

At the center of the "Mr Y" paper is the contention that the world is not a venue composed of threats but rather a complex political ecology in which opportunities for engagement and influence far outnumber actual threats requiring deterrence or defeat by purely military means.  They argue forcefully against the contention that those who are not obviously "with us" must be resolutely "against us."  They also contend with vigor that the US has become destructively astigmatic in its focus on violent political Islam.

While there is room for debate regarding the second contention, the overall thrust against dividing the people of a complex and rapidly evolving global population into simple camps of threats and allies is well neigh onto impossible to defeat.  So also is a critical accompanying theme: The necessity of properly balancing the foundational reality of the nation-state with the need for and existence of supra-national entities.

This secondary theme deserves more consideration than the two officers give it.  For example, they overlook the critical reality that strong centrifugal forces are at work in a large number of "states."  The reality that some "states" are such in name only as well as the potent disintegrative pressures of language, culture, religion, and defining mythology are fracturing more than a few actual states, some of which have long historical existence.  The addition of sub-state entities to the mix gravely complicates the global political ecology.

With respect to the US the two authors are of the view that policy has gone very much astray.  They argue the self-evident but willfully ignored: the US has not invested well or enough in the development of its most important asset, its human capital.  In a way they are simply enlarging the perspective of that wise and insightful soldier, Dwight Eisenhower.  Ike held that the diversion of money into weapons and other military equipment came at the expense of human capital investment.  And that is a ground truth none can deny.

The same applies to the argument adduced by the captain and the colonel to the effect that the real strength, the fountainhead of all our instruments of national power, resides in the creativity, energy, and efforts of Americans in all fields of endeavor.  From those comes American prosperity, American self-confidence, the American optimism which has been such a notable feature of the American character for over two hundred years.  All aspects of national power, hard as well as soft, arise from the reality of prosperity, the actuality of confidence, the presence of optimism.

The authors contend for a diplomatic paradigm based on engagement and influence.  This approach, they imply but do not state, would allow for a level of American authority on the global stage which would equate to operational dominance without any of the obnoxious features of "with-us-or-against-us" which have so often blighted our relations with other states.  This assessment is so self-evident that the need to set it forth even by implication should not be necessary.  The fact that it was put forth serves to underscore just how drastically the Cold War model has skewed American diplomacy.

Mr Y has lit a candle against the current foreign and national security darkness.  One can hope it will ignite an intellectual firestorm, but as a historian, the Geek cannot be so optimistic.  As recent debates and votes on the budget demonstrate, the Congress is still stuck in the morass of coercion first and shows no sign of desiring otherwise. It is unfortunate, but it is quite unlikely that Mr Y's paper will have even a small fraction of the influence enjoyed by the Long Telegram.

Form Up The Battalions!

The French are not only punching above their weight in the tough arena of coercive diplomacy, the go-out-and-get-them approach of President Nicholas Sarkozy has taken France from the doldrums of diplomatic irrelevance where it languished as recently as February to the position of calling the West's diplomatic tune.  Not a bad record even for an inveterate gambler, addicted to high-risk, high-payoff ways of playing politics with enough personal energy to (if focused) replace the lost Japanese nuclear reactors.

Sarko currently has French forces deployed in six actual or nearly actual shooting wars--Ivory Coast, Libya, Afghanistan, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Somalia.  As one French observer noted recently, in comparison George W. Bush was a blooming pacifist.  While the French public has exhibited a fair degree of disenchantment with the Afghan operation, the other "overseas contingency operations" have not met with significant disapprobation.

More than a little ink--both physical and virtual--has been expended on the possible motives for the new French assertiveness.  To many onlookers, the prime reason has been assigned to Sarkozy's political ambitions coupled with his low standing in the polls, strong opposition, and poor showing in recent municipal elections.  While there is some measure of truth in this interpretation, it is doubtful it is the whole story.

Another input to the Sarko decision making process in recent weeks has been the embarrassment caused by France having botched policy during the "Jasmine" and "Lotus" revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.  Make no mistake about it, the French policy debacle was an embarrassment to Sarkozy, his party, and, most importantly, the French public.  Simply sending an inept--or merely unfortunate--foreign minister to the scaffold was not enough to repair the damage to both reputation and influence.

Another input may well have been a strong desire on the part of Sarkozy to step out from the shadow cast by Germany and its chancellor in the Eurozone.  Germany and France have not been good yokemates, to say the least, with respect to the economic challenges which have beset the EU the past several months.  But, foreign policy gave France--and Sarkozy personally--the chance to shine, shine much brighter than the timid Germans with their fear of all things military and love of all things financial.

Not to be dismissed without consideration is the gentlemanly pushing and shoving between Sarkozy and David Cameron regarding leadership in the newly emerging military relationship.  A robust policy backed by military force gave the French a leg up by demonstrating just which country had the real muscle now.

Nor is it possible to overlook the role played by the US.  Or, somewhat more accurately, the failure of the US to act in its traditional Great Power role.  Whether this deficiency was attributed to the cover story of American overextension and budgetary limitations or the weak kneed nature of the American president, the vacuum existed at the top.  And, Sarkozy well understands that international politics like nature abhors a vacuum.

Then, of course, one might take Sarkozy at his word.  France does have a set of norms, values, and customs by which right is parsed from wrong.  Acting quickly and robustly to protect unarmed civilians from mortal harm at the hands of a regime which had announced its intentions to inflict bloody repression was in complete tandem with French norms and values.  Bombing tanks in Libya or mortar positions in Ivory Coast were exercises meeting the highest tests of French morality regarding governmental conduct.

M. Sarkozy's motives were, as psychiatrists would put it, "overdetermined."  They were the expectable mix of the cynical and the principled, the transient and the eternal, the personal and the disinterested.  The issues which matter most are not those of motivation or intent but rather those of outcome and precedent.

Both Libya and the Ivory Coast constitute situations in which the outcome is not clear.  Should, as seems quite likely at the present, the war in Libya bog down into a protracted stalemate with a de facto partition of the place, the cheers which met Sarko's actions initially are highly likely to turn into jeers of disillusionment.  In the Ivory Coast should it prove out that the supporters of the internationally recognized incoming president, Ouattara, have been responsible for atrocities on a large scale (again as currently appears to have been the case) the applause within France will be replaced by shrugs of disengagement and sneers of disapproval.

In either case the presumption of failed overreach will go a long way to assuring that M. Sarkozy is a one term president.  High-risk, high-payoff gambles are like that.  And, as Clausewitz pointedly noted, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy".

Win, lose, or draw, the precipitous action of the French government has gone a far piece toward reinforcing the notion of R2P as an overarching responsibility of civilized states.  Arguably, R2P, as the Russians and Chinese have maintained, constitutes an unwarranted increase of UN authority.  It is ironic, but France's exercise in sovereign decision making particularly as regards two former colonial possessions and particularly the Ivory Coast intervention, transforms R2P into just what its opponents claim it to be--colonialism under a different and nicer term.

The reality is that most of the world's governments and publics accept the nation-state as the basic unit of global political organization.  This runs against the world view of the Western elites which hold the nation-state to be a relic of the past--and a very dangerous one at that.  The Western elites have embraced the supra-national organization with a lust which boggles the imagination.  The underlying proposition in the mind of the collective Western elite is that the planet is too small and common problems too large to allow nation-states the unfettered sovereignty which they have enjoyed for the past five hundred years.  The size and scope of problems coupled with the lethality of contemporary technologies of war fighting and the power of ideological conviction demand that power reside with international organizations alone.

The historical record of the past half century is littered with examples of governments run amok, of mounds of bodies piled up at the command of governments or non-state actors both fueled by racial, religious, or ideological hatreds.  The ability with which governments can and have killed their own people, generated refugees in the millions, inflicted fear along with physical casualties and destruction has been demonstrated with nausea producing regularity.

It is small wonder that the R2P doctrine was formulated and formally approved by an overwhelming majority of the UN membership.  It is equally of no surprise that the precursors of R2P all the way back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were similarly passed by universal acclamation.  In the waves of disgust and enthusiasm for having created a "better way" on paper, the assembled diplomats lost sight of what might occur when some country and some future time took the strictures seriously and demanded effective enforcement.

The inevitable result of such a demand would be the bringing into sharp conflict of the basic principle of sovereignty and the ideal of international duty.  The always realistic men in the Kremlin and Forbidden City have always held a firm line against the international community intervening in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.  Both have always relied upon their Security Council veto to protect against excesses of Western enthusiasm for intervention of this sort.

For reasons of short-term diplomatic interest both abstained on the Libyan no-fly/civilian protection resolution.  Both are probably regretting having done so as by not going the "No!" route, they have allowed for a crack of precedent to be formed.  How quickly the crack could be widened was seen by the UN peace keeping force in the Ivory Coast ordering four Ukrainian gunships into action against forces loyal to outgoing president Gbagbo.  This attack constituted a significant change in UN peacekeeping operational practice.

The French have pushed a precedent which seems good at the present moment but is fraught with problems for the future.  Chief among these are where will the line be drawn  At what level of international nausea will the civilized states or one of them seek R2P authorization?  What will happen if and when the Security Council does not give its blessings?  Or can the UN be bypassed, with reliance upon one regional organization or another acting in its place?  What happens if the UN says, "yes," but the regional entity decrees "no?"

There are other problems as well.  Some have been outlined in Libya.  Who is responsible for executing any specific R2P operation?  What about the internal mechanisms of any state for approving such expeditions?  This is particularly relevant with regard to the US while totally lacking relevance for the French whose president has royal level prerogative to employ armed force for reasons of state.

Nicholas Sarkozy has well and truly kicked the fire ant hill when it comes to looking ahead.  Without any intention to do so, he has created a precedent with more problems than solutions, more difficulties for tomorrow than certainties.  It may even prove that more civilians in the future will die at the hands of their governments than otherwise would have been the case as an unintended consequence of M. Sarkozy's  motives and consequent action.

Who ever said that irony is not a major feature of history?

Politics Does Not Stop At The Water's Edge

More than fifty years ago Republican senator and one-time isolationist, Arthur Vandenberg, allegedly stated in support of his bipartisan support of the Truman Doctrine, "Politics stops at the water's edge."  Either the senator was being economical with the truth or was caught in a moment of self-delusion.  Politics does not--indeed, cannot--halt at the beach.  Foreign policy is the export version of domestic politics.  It can be nothing else.

A truism well understood by diplomatic historians is that a country's foreign policy must be compatible with the values and norms of a society--particularly when that society has a democratic polity.  It is this organic rooting of US foreign policy and diplomacy in national norms, values, and worldview which gives foreign relations, American style, its uniquely schizophrenic nature.  It is also the reason that persuasive diplomacy--that is the diplomacy of identifying and building upon coinciding national interests--is most readily accomplished between states of common values, norms, and worldviews.  An example: The US and the UK can easily practice persuasive diplomacy particularly when compared with, say, Russia or China or any Muslim majority country.

The schizophrenic nature of US foreign policy--the dynamic and shifting tension between realpolitik and idealism predicated upon common American values and norms--came into sharp focus in a little noticed exchange between Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Republican representative Ron Paul the other day.  Dr Paul, who is today's equivalent of isolationist leader Arthur Vandenberg in the years prior to Pearl Harbor, excoriated Ms Clinton concerning American support for dictators such as Hosni Mubarak almost until the crowds in Cairo pulled the switch on the aging authoritarian.  Secretary Clinton offered the realist justification to Representative Paul's idealist critique.  She noted thirty years of cold peace between Egypt and Israel as well as the Egyptian opposition to the forces of violent political Islam.  She did allow that sometimes the US got the balance between the ideal of promoting democracy and the real world needs for stability and predictability wrong but maintained that the various administrations had gotten it right far more often than the opposite.

The bifurcate nature of American foreign policy has bedeviled one administration after another ever since the first Roosevelt dragged the US kicking and screaming onto the global stage over a century ago.  Woodrow Wilson practiced the diplomacy of idealism with a vigor no other president has matched.  We entered World War I purely for the idealistic notion of fighting a "war to end wars."  The end goal of Wilson for the war was the establishment of a permanent global organization with the chief mission of preventing aggressive war by punishing those states which embarked on aggression.  To the cynical and resolutely realistic leaders of the major European states, the American president was hopelessly naive about the ways of the world, and they worked in concert to so arrange the peace that regardless of the existence of Wilson's League of Nations, the nature of the peace treaty virtually assured another war.

By failing to take the political sensitivities of critical senators into account, by disregarding the privileges of the Senate, and by neglecting to focus public opinion correctly, Mr Wilson brought about the defeat of his own creation in the Senate.  The American public was too new, too unused to playing the part of a Great Power to turn its collective back on the previous generations of disengagement from the affairs of Europe or the rest of the world.  It took the massive shock of Pearl Harbor and the globe wide bloodletting of World War II to convince We the People that playing the Game of Nations as a Great Power was an inescapable reality.  The threats presented by the Soviet Union and China reinforced that view with the result that the American public monolithically rejected the old idea of being a symbol to the world, the "shining city on a hill," which had been our ideal during most of our national existence.

For a few years the tension between "realism" and "idealism" faded to nothing.  The Cold War allowed both realists and idealists to agree on methods and means.  Idealists, for example, did not carp at our support of authoritarian regimes against the much greater "evil" of international Communism.  Nor did realists cavil with the promotion of "democracy" and free enterprise even though many of our clients and allies were neither "democratic" nor given to unfettered free enterprise and capitalism.

The tension reemerged during and in the wake of the Vietnam debacle.  This reemergence came with a wrinkle, the idea that the US should withdraw from the affairs of the world because it was too "evil" and polluted the rest of the world with its purported greed, exploitative nature, and imperialistic goals.  The foreign policy realists became an endangered species caught between two varieties of predatory idealists.

President Jimmy Carter was an idealist.  He was not in the muscular Wilson school,  ready and willing to use coercion to achieve a goal of moral perfection.  Quite the contrary, Carter was almost of the blame-America-first variety of idealist given to feeling the US was much more the sinner than either a leader or a country much sinned against.  His contraction of the American military and intelligence services as well as his elevation of the vague and ambiguous subject human rights to the center of the diplomatic pantheon shows this tendency.  The lack of an effective response to either the Iranian two stage revolution or the unprovoked Soviet invasion of Afghanistan makes his position absolutely clear.

The American national character, the aggregate perception of historical experience by Americans generally, did not take kindly to the notion of a pathetically weak response to two direct, high profile provocations.  While We the People might have been willing to let the Soviets have a pass on the invasion of a country most could not locate on a map, such was not the case with respect to the capture of the American embassy and the kidnapping of US personnel.  The insult given to the American public by the Iranian "students" was not as great as that administered by Japan at Pearl Harbor but ran in the same direction.

As a result idealism was shunted aside in favor of realism.  Specifically, it was set aside in favor of the Reagan version of realism which centered upon a reinvigorated US military and the increased use of coercive diplomacy.  In the view of key members of the Reagan administration, a country needed not only a military capacity which was impressive on paper but one which was demonstrated to be both useful and used.  Only by demonstrating a political will as well as a military capacity would US foreign policy be seen and taken seriously by allies and adverse powers alike.  This is what made the unilateral actions such as the attack on Libya in 1986 and the sledgehammer invasion of Grenada important.

Cold, calculated, and unilateral use of military power provided an important context for the ongoing nuclear limitation talks with the Soviet Union.  The same applied to all American diplomatic initiatives.  When night fell, the minor uses of force proved sufficient to offset the potential debacle of sending troops to Lebanon only to withdraw them precipitously after a pair of high casualty terror bomber attacks.

George H.W. Bush broadened the definition of realist.  He launched the American military in the largest SWAT type operation ever with the invasion and consequent regime change in Panama.  This was unilateralism as last resort after lesser means of coercion failed.  But, only two years later H.W. catered to the strong American idealistic strain of multi-lateralism by the patient building of a coalition of very strange partners as well as creatively using the UN as a fig leaf covering American policy genitalia with Operation Desert Storm.  His approach seamlessly melded realism and idealism with good consequences which were very beneficial to US national and strategic interests.

Unlike the case with George W. Bush, no critic ever accused the US under H.W. of acting unilaterally or arrogantly or imperialistically.  Nor could any aver that H.W. was some sort of neo-Wilsonian.  He was coldly realistic in appraising American interests in play in the wake of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, but he was equally attuned to the music of idealism so important to so many in the American (and European) elites.  Even though the US in 1990-91 could have abated the Iraqi nuisance without the aid of any other country beyond Saudi Arabia and the assorted Gulf states, he correctly chose to take the time needed to deploy forces to the theater of operations and build a coalition and gain UN approval.

When Bill Clinton came along, the realism once more vanished.  Clinton was both uninterested in foreign affairs and indifferent to the concept of national interest.  One consequence was he viewed genuine threats to American national security and interests not as foreign policy challenges or military contingencies but rather as matters of law and its enforcement.  Another result of the Clinton idealist view was the belief that American good intentions, particularly when backed by UN sanction, would be obvious to all.

These two beliefs (not conclusions rooted in an accurate appreciation of real facts but rather beliefs rooted in values, emotions, and worldview) resulted in both the Somali debacle and the inept, limp wrist responses to terror attacks mounted by advocates of violent political Islam, most notably al-Qaeda.  It was as certain as day following night that countries generally would perceive the US as lacking both a realistic perception of the Game of Nations and the political will to use force when force was the only correct response.

Unfortunately for the US and the world, George W. Bush was not a realist any more than was Bill Clinton.  Pace the conventional wisdom, George W. Bush and his administration were Wilsonian idealists. This means they were quite willing to use military coercion to accomplish idealistic goals.

A realist would have seized the universal support given the US in the wake of 9/11 to mount a punitive expedition against Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

A realist would have told the government of Pakistan to take a hike rather than to agree to allow most of Taliban and al-Qaeda along with their Pakistani mentors to hot foot it across the border into the safety of the FATA.

A realist would have let a secular regime no matter how odious and loathsome to remain in power in Iraq as a bulwark against both Iran and the advocates of violent political Islam.  (Admittedly, there was one realistic but unanticipated good result from the invasion of Iraq and that was the sudden conversion of Gaddafi to the side of denuclearization and anti-jihadism, but that result was not worth the costs.)

George W. Bush, Wilsonian idealist, chose instead to embark upon the impossible--building Western style nation-states in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  This was identical to Wilson's landing the Marines at Vera Cruz in order to "teach the Mexicans to elect good men."  It has worked as well as that landing, which is to say not at all, but at infinitely greater cost to the US and the target countries.

Bush was supported at least at the outset because his approach, his goal of nation-building, fit perfectly with the crusading aspect of defining American mythology.  It was organic to the widely held feeling that if only other countries were like us the world would be a much better place.  It arose from the companion feeling that everyone everywhere wanted to live just as we did in all respects and regardless of cultural context.  This, bucko, is idealism.

The current incumbent is also an idealist.  His understanding of foreign affairs, insofar as he has one, comports well with the deeply held American belief in the rule of law and the primacy of democracy.  Again this belief is applied without respect to the specific context of other countries.  In his idealism Obama veers strongly to the Carter as opposed to the Wilsonian approach.  Arguably Obama is even more loath than Carter or Clinton to practice coercive diplomacy let alone use American military power.

This may be due to Mr Obama having accepted without reservation the blame-America-first form of idealism.  He appears to be sincerely convinced the world would be better if the US were weaker, less central to the affairs of the globe and less able to use its power (defined broadly) to seek its goals.  He seems to be firmly of the view that national and strategic interest is a very bad, even evil concept.

Mr Obama has put the realists very much in the shadows and has done so with a high degree of political impunity.  Americans, at least if some polls are to be believed, have resigned themselves to the idea that the years ahead belong to China and not the US.  At the same time it appears from all metrics of public opinion that the American public has lost the most important single component of its past worldview--optimism.  It is this factor which means the current, Obama orchestrated contraction of US influence may be irreversible.

In the past decade the pendulum has swung much too far under two presidents from two different parties in the direction of idealism.  In doing so the pendulum has swung not in spite of domestic politics but because of domestic politics.  The question which can--must--be answered in two years is simply whether domestic politics will shift sufficiently to allow a resurrection of realism in US foreign policy.  Arguably, the US cannot survive as a Great Power unless that happens.  And, unless the pendulum swings back hard and fast, there will not be any need for the sort of exchange typified by the Paul-Clinton dialogue.

The US will be too irrelevant for that.  A not particularly pleasant thought.

Gates And The Future Of The American Army

Robert Gates has a long and distinguished record of saying unpleasant things which need to be said.  He did it again today in remarks at West Point delivered to the Corps of Cadets.  Among his ruminations on the future of the US army were his view that the US should not again fight a ground force heavy intervention of the Iraq or Afghan sort anywhere in Asia, Africa, or the Mideast.  He also and correctly noted the army will have to change its culture regarding career development or run the risk of losing its best junior and mid-rank officers to the tedium of clerical and budgetary work.

His view of our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan merit close study  While he refrained from offering any direct criticism of the decisions leading to either war, his cautionary not to say pessimistic thought about any future repetition give a strong hint as to how he would have done the job had he been in the Pentagon back in 2001-3.

It is important to understand that Dr Gates did not retreat behind an update of the preposterous refrain of so many decades, "No more Vietnams!"  Rather he implied that the US may find it necessary to intervene in failed or failing states, or states which offer cover and comfort to hostile non-state actors, but any such future operations must not be massive exercises in regime change and nation building.  In his understanding, interventions must be of (to use an archaic but respectable term,) "punitive."  These would be conducted primarily by air and naval assets but of necessity would include specialist ground formations tasked with the neutralization or capture of designated personnel or facilities.

Interventionary operations, if the Geek is understanding the tenor of Gates' position correctly, would be short, sharp, well-defined as to goals but would leave the larger political questions up to some entity other than the US military.  Certainly, this is how it should have been in Afghanistan.  The military should have been focused simply on destroying al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime.  Much of this could have been undertaken successfully by air assets, but the use of ground formations would still have been necessary.  With the evolution of remotely operated aerial vehicles, this sort of operation could be conducted more efficiently now or in the future than it could have been a decade ago, but even so specialist ground troops will remain essential in the years to come.

The prime concept governing interventionary operations must be a combination of economy of force and economy of time.  The job must be done swiftly and with the lowest possible investment in the "men-at-risk" category.  Since political, social, and economic reconstruction and reform are both lengthy in duration and intensive in human capital requirements, this area of task must remain beyond the competence of the military.

It is legitimate to infer from Dr Gates' words that the best adventure in regime change is the one which is undertaken using indirect means.  This implies little if any role for the military particularly the ground forces.  The Gates view is historically justified.  The only sort of regime change which will work is one which is conducted by the locals, one which arises organically from legitimate political disaffiliation on the part of a segment of the population.  Indeed, that is an operational definition of insurgency.  The outsider may play indirect roles in applying pressure to the status quo regime and support to the dissidents, but must not go any further.

Dr Gates stated categorically that the army will have its hands full justifying the expense of maintaining its heavy formations.  With this proposition, the Geek disagrees.  The threats confronting American national interests are not confined to those of failed, failing, hollow, or captive states or the non-state actors which flourish in those soils.  The threats also include large, complexly organized, technologically advanced states with ambitions which will run counter to the interests of the US, its allies, and clients.  The two top candidates on this list are China and Russia.

Again, the primary tools of deterrence and the war fighting on which deterrence is based are air and naval in nature.  But the utility of heavy ground formations in this area where diplomacy and war intersect cannot and must not be minimized.  The hoary question attributed to Joe Stalin when told the Pope was opposed to some Soviet initiative, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" applies to the Men in the Kremlin and the Trolls of Beijing today and into the foreseeable future.

The credible capacity to coerce which includes the credible capacity to deter is based on the perception that a country possesses both the means and the will to wage war effectively.  As the nuclear deterrent slides down in direct relevance, the metric of war fighting will rest increasingly on conventional air, naval, and ground forces.  In the latter category the primary index will be the size, number, and perceived competence of heavy formations.

The essential task confronting both the Army and Marine Corps in the era of the Incredible Shrinking Budget will be that of maintaining a credible capacity to fight both interventionary and conventional inter-state wars.  This may require some very creative out-of-the-box thinking on the part of both services with the final result being some sort of division of tasks with the heavy, conventional conflict duty accruing primarily if not exclusively to the Army.  Admittedly, the notion of preparing for the least likely of wars is frustrating to those who spend entire careers doing so, but boredom is the price of deterrence.

The fundamental nature of war is essentially unchanged and unchangeable, but the devil now and into the future resides in the details.  The world is not on the verge of universal peace and long term stability.  Governments such as those in Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela show this as do events in the Mideast.  Russia has announced an enormous military redevelopment program which will see a quantum level improvement in the materiel basis of the Russian military forces over the next decade.  The Chinese show no indication of abandoning their drive for a military second to none across the board: air, sea, ground, cyber, and space.

Nor is there any use appealing to the fiction on the banks of the Hudson river.  The UN has unlimited ambitions but no real capacity in its primary, arguably only, reason for existence--keeping and enforcing the international peace.  Similarly, there is no joy in the position so often adopted by the self-appointed academic, media, and political elites in Western Europe and the US, the notion that nationalism and the nation-state are dead or rapidly dying.

The reality remains that the US will continue to have national and strategic interests which will need to be defended against the hostility of other states.  Another reality will continue: There are states and non-state actors who are hostile to the US--regardless of who is occupying the Oval this year.  So will a third reality: the US must look first and foremost to itself in pursuing and defending its national and strategic interests.  Then, of course, there is the inconvenient fact that the US remains a Great Power, not as great a Great Power as just a very few years ago but a Great Power nonetheless.  This is a status that cannot be surrendered; it can only be lost or taken away by the acts of others.

This means the US will have to fight more interventionary conflicts.  It means the US must be able to show each and every day for years to come that it has both the means and will to fight a high intensity war against a peer.  This means that the US Army and other services will still have a job and We the People must be both able and willing to pay the associated costs.

The alternative remains what it always has been: A curtailment of American freedom to act on the global stage, and, when night falls, surrender to the forces of fear and hate.

Uncle Sam, A Most Reluctant Cop

Some cables within the WikiLeak dump of diplomatic data, most importantly those coming from the several Gulf states, urge a re-asking of the old questions regarding the role of the US as a sort of global cop.  The position attributed to several Gulf governments actually serves to expand the old stand-by questions which have surrounded the American entry into an already extant conflict (a category which includes both World Wars, Korea and Vietnam.)

Assuming the cables accurately reflect the views of the local interlocutors, there is a consensus among the Gulf states that an Iran equipped with a nuclear capacity is so threatening, so much a danger to peace that the Arab leaders want the US to take military action even before the Iranians actually achieve a deliverable nuclear weapon.  The stated desire is for American preemption.  This, of course, is a course of action qualitatively different from what the US has done traditionally.

The several Arab states are using the US invasion of Iraq as the precedent.  This is unlike other, earlier wars from Korea to (at least arguably) Afghanistan, where the US has acted after the fact.  Historically, the US has entered a war already in progress as in Korea and Vietnam or, with an almost plausible local invitation, sought to restore stability and stave off a threatened war as in Lebanon.  The US has also, as in the case of the Dominican Republic and Grenada, deployed force to protect the lives of US nationals or, in Afghanistan, in retaliation for an armed attack on the US.

The Iraq precedent was another one of those recurrent slippery slope precedents.  There was no direct attack on the US.  There was not, as there had been in 1991, a breach of the international peace.  There were no US lives at risk.  There was certainly no plausible invitation from local political leaders.  In place of these assorted justifications for the use of armed force, there was a stack of UN Resolutions and a heap of less than accurate intelligence.  Judged by past American employments of force, the invasion of Iraq was even more poorly predicated than the war with Spain over a century earlier.  And, that is saying a lot.

The Arab desire for the US to do something robust against the Iranian threat is understandable.  No countries have more at risk than those of the Persian Gulf littoral.  The scale of the Iranian threat is easily measured--compared to it none of the Arab states seem to have a thing against Israel.  It is more than merely interesting that none saw the Israeli nuclear arsenal in being as a threat while all saw the Iranian nuclear arsenal in prospect to be terrifying.

Given this, it is not surprising that there was a monolithic call for the US to take out the Iranian threat regardless of other considerations such as how an attack might be justified to the world generally or the absence of a cause of war even as compelling as that provided by the pile of UN Resolutions directed at the Iraq of Saddam Hussein.  Put at its most basic level, the call by the Arab states was prompted by a genuine and highly compelling national interest.

To the diplomats and leaders of the Gulf states, their countries and the US had a coinciding national interest in nullifying the Iranian nuclear program (and, quite probably the current Iranian regime.)  And, as every person wise to the ways of international politics knows, the only reason that the Gulf states (or any state) has positive relations with the US is that doing so is vital to their national interest.

In this context it might be noted that Secretary of Defense Gates gave a short course in Diplomacy 101 the other day when he opined that other countries do not have relations with the US because they like us or because they trust us or because they believe we can keep secrets safe but only because such relations serve their national interests.  The Arab proposition was predicated upon this concept pure and simple.

The Arab request hints at what attracts some states to seek and maintain good relations with the US.  Even today as We the People drift in a depressant doldrums viewing our present to be poor and our future to be worse, there is a compelling attraction for states to seek and keep good relations with the US.

Put bluntly, other states are most impressed with our military capacities.  They are struck with the potentials resident in that hardest of hard power capabilities--the military's ability to break things and kill people.  It may be disconcerting to those Americans who value our economic power or the soft power appeals of our diplomacy, values, norms, culture, and so on, but in much of the world it is our military alone which gives appeal, which compels the seeking and maintaining of good relations, which defines coinciding national interests.

In short, there are more than a few governments--and not simply Arab autocracies in the Gulf region--which see the pistol on Sheriff Sam's hip and believe their interests (and ours) would be best served by using it against regional bad actors.  Whether we like the notion or not, there are many, important states which want to see us in the role of global cop.

(OK, bucko, the Geek acknowledges that there are also many states which see the US as the Great Global Cash Cow to be milked at will.  These states are also most likely to be most averse to Sheriff Sam ever pulling out the hog leg on his hip.)

Even the Western European countries which are quite willing, even eager, to accuse the US of being an international provocateur are quite happy to lay off the burdens both economic and political of global policing on the US.  This happiness is only going to grow as the assorted states of the European Union facing a collective as well as individual economic challenges downsize their national military capabilities.

In the good cause of deficit reduction, the Coalition government in the UK has taken measures which will shrink their military forces overall to a point that would make a replay of the Falklands Island War impossible.  Other NATO states are lessening their military expenses as well.  The net result will be the rendering of NATO to the status of military nullity at least as regards out of theater operations.  The longer term consequence of this downsizing trend is either shifting the burden to the US or surrendering the global insurgency to the purveyors of political Islam, including the adherents of armed Islamic insurgency.

The evil genii of the global Islamic insurgency will not skulk back to the bottle from which it has emerged over the past thirty or so years.  It is and will continue to be a feature on the global political scene regardless of what we or anybody might wish.  This means, quite simply, that war will not disappear soon from the experience of the human race.

The global insurgency will remain primarily a conflict of asymmetry, of wars almost too small to merit the name, of violence which is small scale but unending, of conflict which saps political will slowly but steadily over the years, the decades, perhaps generations.  It is nonetheless a war which will determine both the nature of the future and the quality of life in the present, each year's successive present.

Insurgency and its counter depend upon both violent and peaceful tactics and methods.  Within that truism the governing reality is that the violent portion is the more important.  It is violence which acts most directly and with greatest intensity upon the political will of the contestant populations.  And, as long as the violence continues, the conditions for that endgame necessity--conflict resolution--will not exist.  The ground truth is simply that the insurgents have to be cowed into submission before there is any possibility of developing a long term detente between differing world views and concomitant civilizations.

In this context it is critical to recall that diplomacy depends upon either the existence of coinciding national interests or a credible capacity for effective coercion.  With respect to coercion, when night falls, all the lesser means of coercion such as sanctions and diplomatic isolation rely upon the credible capacity and political will to employ force in support of policy.

Few governments question seriously the physical capacity of the US to employ force.  Most have a good handle on just how much destruction we can inflict even without using our nuclear weapons.  The quantum level improvements in all the many technologies involved in fighting wars made in recent years render even the observations from the Kuwait War no longer instructive.  The US way of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan has used only a small, even a very small, fraction of the lethality resident in our conventional capacities.  Still, most governments have a reasonably accurate appreciation of what the US could do should it need to.

Indeed, it has been American restraint in how it has fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan which has fed the long standing suspicions in many quarters of the world--including Iran and the purveyors of violent political Islam--that the US lacks the political will to use force in support of policy.  From the time the US withdrew from the Vietnamese War on to the present, there has been a broad sentiment to the effect that the US cannot muster the will to fight a seemingly endless war, to accept the deaths of American service personnel in a "no-win" war, to spend never ending torrents of money in pursuit of what at best constitutes a stalemate of the Korean War sort.

The much maligned unilateralism of George W. Bush went a long way to settling the doubts held by so many leaders around the world.  Unfortunately, the words of the Obama presidency have restored these doubts.  The doubts have been enhanced by some of the administrations actions, such as the apparent willingness of the president and his foreign policy "team" to toss Israel off the sleigh and to the wolves.  This lack of steadfastness disturbed the same Gulf state leaders who pressed the US to take swift and effective military action against Iran.  It might even have prompted the requests as a form of test of American realism and political will.

The sine qua non for success in foreign policy generally and war fighting in particular is consistency and persistence.  Radical shifts in either policy or action calls the reliability and predictability of the US into question in ways which do not further our national interests--or those of our more or less allies.  In a real sense, Great Powers are not allowed to change their minds without penalty.  That penalty is loss of credibility and with credibility goes the most important prize of diplomacy--influence.

For this reason the only rational choice for the Obama administration to make with respect to Afghanistan is to continue what we have been doing with one major addition.  The addition is convincing Pakistan that the governments there have been wrong for sixty years, that Pakistan needs the US more than the US needs Pakistan.

It is for the reasons of consistency and predictability, for the reason of credibility and influence maintenance, that the US must not only draw a line in concrete regarding Iran but must use all means at its disposal to bend that country's regime to our policy requirements.  The same applies to Israel and the Palestinians, choose a policy option which is in keeping with past American requirements and stick with it even if the Palestinians moan, groan, and toss a hissy fit.

While modifications in policy are a requirement of realism, these modifications must be on the margins and carefully explained to all parties.  The requirement for careful explanation also applies to assuring that We the People both understand and support policy including the use of military force should such be necessary.

In that connection this administration in common with all presidencies past and future must understand that We the People are very reluctant global cops.  The American public has never felt at home with the US being a Great Power.  Down deep inside most of us are just fine with Ron Paul's isolationist position.  Down deep inside where it counts, the majority of Americans past, present, and, probably, future see very few compelling reasons for Americans to leave their bones bleaching in the sun of some far away country the name of which most of us cannot pronounce let alone spell.  We see very few compelling reasons to spend vast sums of present and future money on weapons.  Most of us at the time agreed with Ike's "Farewell Address" and its warning against the "military-industrial complex."

We are not imperialists by nature any more.  Our period of seeking empire ended more than a hundred years ago.  Where we have been forced by reasons good or bad to send troops, we have never sought to stay.  (It might be noted that many foreign governments are quite well aware of this and thus are less uncomfortable with American troops being in the neighborhood than is the case with soldiers of other nationalities.)

The irony of the situation resident in the Gulf states request is simply that foreign governments are much more eager to see Sheriff Sam than We the People are willing to pin on the badge.  We Americans, pace many on the Left, are not seeking to be global cops on patrol.  The reality, however, is the world generally is not ready to see us be other than the Good Cop.