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Since the publication of my retrospective article on Israel in the fall 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal, a few colleagues have wondered if I considered revising my somewhat “pessimistic outlook” (the way one of my correspondents put it) about the chances of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian with Barack Obama in office. So have I changed my tune?

First, what I was trying to do in my WPJ article was to highlight the gap between the high expectations that many of us seemed to share regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 1991 (the end of the Cold War, increasing globalization, etc.) with the depressing reality of today’s Holy Land—post-9/11, post-Iraq War, and amidst the present global economic crisis. If anything, my retrospective reflected my sense of realism about the ability and willingness on the part of Israelis and Palestinians—with or without outside intervention—to settle their differences and achieve peace in the near future.

I was not encouraged after reading David Unger’s article in the same issue of WPJ that seemed to be trying to lift our spirits by forecasting that “by 2033, two states, Israel and Palestine, will be living side-by-side in uneasy peace.” Unger makes all the right arguments to support his thesis that a resolution of their conflict would serve the long-term interests of both the Israelis and Palestinians. But same arguments that focus on the horrific human and economic costs of a long and protracted conflict and the potential enormous benefits resulting from a peace agreement could apply to the national, ethnic, and religious clashes over Cyprus, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kosovo, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Darfur. These are just few of the regional disputes that have remained unresolved and to some extent “frozen,” neither full-blown war nor peace. The main reason for that reality is that, for most players in these conflicts, the costs of challenging the status-quo outweigh the perceived benefits of taking action to end the dispute (either through military victory and/or a peace settlement).

This kind of cost-benefit analysis explains why President George W. Bush and his aides decided after 9/11 not to invest too much time or resources in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Operating under the assumption (or self-delusion) that the promotion of the “Freedom Agenda” in the Middle East, starting with Iraq, would create the conditions for resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians (witness the oft-repeated neoconservative argument that the “road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad”).

Indeed, Bush’s advisors were committed to the axiom that what is good for America is good for Israel (and vice versa). They argued that a Pax Americana in the region would also tilt the balance of power in favor of Tel Aviv, forcing the Palestinians to accept an arrangement that would favor Israeli interests. Hence, it made no sense to spend Washington’s diplomatic capital by pressing Israel, a so-called “strategic ally in the war on terror” to relieve the pressure from, and to make concessions to, the Palestinian leadership. Instead, Washington decided to “park” the Palestinian issue while trying to remake the Middle East by force. 

However, by moving beyond the Palestinian-Israeli issue and dealing with the threat of “Islamo-fascism,” the Bush administration has pursued policies that have only exacerbated Israel’s relations with other Arab countries. Hence, it tried dissuade Israel from pursuing Turkish-backed negotiations with Syria (a junior member of the Axis of Evil). Bush also gave Israel the green light to attack the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, leading to a war that ended with a strategic stalemate and possibly tipped the balance of power against the American-Israeli alliance.

In any case, when Bush’s Middle East “Freedom Agenda” crashed into the reality of the Hamas’s electoral victory in Palestine and the strengthening of Iran and its satellites in the region, the administration decided to placate the members of the Saudi-led Arab-Sunni coalition by going through motions of a grand peace-process in Annapolis earlier this year. This same Saudi coalition, based on neoconservative wishful thinking, was expected to form a “strategic consensus” with Israel to contain Iran. Read the rest of this entry »

When Barack Obama announced his Foreign Policy and National Security team, the best news was that journalists like Robert Dreyfuss, Leslie Savan, and Robert Kuttner weren’t impressed. Hoping for leftists in moderate’s clothing, they are now faced with a global affairs team that makes the President-elect look more like a moderate-conservative in liberal’s clothing. Hillary Clinton—judged by her Senate record and campaign positions on foreign policy—certainly appears more hawk than dove, though her all-too-clever triangulation on the Iraq did not serve her candidacy well. Either way, clearly she is someone most Republicans and Joe Lieberman Democrats (is there more than one?) can live with.

Naming James L. Jones, the trusty marine and former supreme allied commander in Europe, as national security advisor spells continuity. On Iraq he has been publicly non-critical of the war itself but pointedly critical of its implementation and forward strategy. If one believes Bob Woodward (a coin-toss these days), Jones always opposed the invasion in private counsel. More importantly, he is a tough customer who won’t be run over like Condoleezza Rice was by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Company in her hapless stint as NSA. And finally keeping George W. Bush’s nonpartisan Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is the epitome of “continuity we can believe in.” Read the rest of this entry »

On October 29, The New York Times published a major story entitled “Intelligence Agencies Face Austerity.” In the article, Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, is quoted as stating that spending on intelligence operations in 2007 increased by 9 percent, totaling $47.5 billion. Much of this increased funding understandably has been allocated to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the battle against Al Qaeda. All of these problems, as well as additional new threats including cyber warfare, will continue to dominate the intelligence budget over the coming year. That said, it is hard to predict just how the 2009 budget will play out in the context of the current economic crisis. In fact, there is speculation among some intelligence experts that the intelligence community might be vulnerable to significant cuts in future years.

This pressure needs to be resisted if we are to effectively face intelligence challenges of the future, described in my “Tomorrow’s Spygames” article in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal.

Intelligence history is replete with examples of scaling back intelligence spending only to pay a very steep price in the future. In fact, there is general agreement among intelligence professionals that the 1990s cuts to the CIA’s operating budget (which necessitated a serious cutback in personnel) helped to lay the foundation for a greatly weakened intelligence community that has faced 9/11, an ongoing terrorist threat, and two wars, with insufficient training, expertise, and capacity to effectively do so.

Resisting similar cuts today should include more than simple opposition to the move; we must make clear to the new decision makers how a reduction in budget will impact U.S. intelligence capability and national security. Hopefully, we will be able to put forth a convincing argument for why the intelligence budget in the future should remain as robust as it has been since 9/11.

Understanding that the United States is now officially in a recession, and that sacrifices need to be made, the intelligence community (almost more so than any) has strong grounds to argue that its funding should take priority.

Regardless of the exact budget dollar amount, it is important to make sure that increasingly scarce intelligence dollars are allocated appropriately. This will require the new administration to focus quickly on the challenges of the future, encouraging a bipartisan approach in Congress for the assiduous tracking of the use of intelligence dollars. The new budget must be sufficient to strengthen the analytical, operational, and technological foundations that if properly funded, will imbue the intelligence community with the expertise and flexibility to face a future full of challenges.

Jack Devine, a career clandestine services officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, headed the agency’s Afghan Task Force from 1985–87, and served as the CIA’s acting deputy director of operations. He is currently president of The Arkin Group, a New York-based intelligence consulting firm. His article “Tomorrow’s Spygames” can be found in World Policy Journal’s 25th anniversary issue, on newsstands now.

“Come home, America,” said U.S. presidential candidate George McGovern during the Vietnam War, before suffering a bad defeat against Richard Nixon. But these are the words President-elect Barack Obama should be uttering today, if he wants to live up to the credo he enunciates in his books.

The Republicans—and some Democrats—will try to tear him apart for this, tarring him with the brush of isolationism. But it is not isolationism. If handled with perception and commitment for the long haul, this new policy can be a better form of engagement with the world and its problems. It is merely a different way of creating greater political order and more individual freedom.

It can be characterized as a policy of substituting the carrot for the stick, but this simplifies it unnecessarily. The carrot should be offered, but with it a reciprocal sense of self discipline and a commitment by the opponent to measure progress against the Charter of the United Nations and the resolutions of the Security Council—for when the Security Council agrees, it represents a formidable consensus of world opinion.

This kind of engagement has a long American tradition going back to 1916, with President Wilson´s aim to create a League of Nations. He failed, not because of his idealism or his commitment to solving disputes without major war, but because his tactics with regard to Senate ratification of the treaty were unnecessarily stubborn. Wilson also decried the European balance of power system (a favorite geopolitical cause of Henry Kissinger): “Now, revive that after the [First World] war is over and, sooner or later, you will have just such another war.”

We can go even further back, although not many commentators do, to the time of Theodore Roosevelt. He successfully mediated the Russo-Japanese war, for which he received the Nobel peace prize. It was he in fact, not Wilson, who was the first president to propose a League of Nations. He called it the “World League for the Peace of Righteousness,” a title which would have him laughed out of court in today’s cynical world.

“Coming Home to America” means getting out of Iraq, probably Afghanistan too, and not getting mixed up in Iran. But it also means stressing to antagonists the good that America can do with private investment, foreign aid, and the development of a common security whereby both sides´ right to individual political postures is recognized as long as they are non-threatening to others. In return for peace, America can offer recognition and security.

It also means being more serious about the role of the United Nations and trying to recreate the benign veto-free period of former President George H. W. Bush and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. It means re-adopting a policy, never followed up on, of President Bill Clinton to offer up U.S. soldiers for peacekeeping missions that would operate under the command of UN generals.

If this is isolationism the problem is not with the articulator of such a purpose but those who cling to the status quo, stirring up a false patriotism at the cost of young lives.

Obama’s temptation will be to compromise to assure that victory is not undermined, as were the pacific policies of former president Jimmy Carter by a more macho Congress and press. But he mustn´t, even though his opponents will throw at him all sorts of problems that they believe might at some point require the use of America´s mighty force. The whirlpool of American military spending (that dwarfs all the rest of the countries of the world added together) will also be tricky to avoid.

Opponents will throw at him Iran, Taiwan, China, North Korea, a resurgent Russia, unrest in Saudi Arabia and the oil producing nations of Nigeria and the Central Asian ex-Soviet republics, not to mention Israel and Palestine. It seems a long time since Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “I´m running out of enemies.”

In Harvard´s quarterly International Security, Professor Harvey Sapolsky published an article on the theme, “Come Home, America: the Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation.” It was published in 1997 but it needs to be read again. Much damage to the world could have been avoided if its prescient observations and prescriptions had been followed.

“The U.S.,” he writes, “can spend much less than it does today and still be much more secure than it was during the Cold War. It is not at all clear what, if anything, Americans are getting for their extra defense dollars.”

Beginning with Europe, NATO should be dismantled. The threat that NATO was created to deter disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. U.S. soldiers and nuclear missiles should be withdrawn from European soil. Expanding NATO not only broke a solemn American promise to the Soviet Union, it unnecessarily created an uncooperative Russia. Let the European Union take the strain, by trade, investment, and political intimacy—Brussels’ hallmarks.

Likewise, most American troops in Asia should come home. No Asian ally faces an overwhelming threat, and what dangers they face they can handle themselves—as, say, Taiwan is doing with its mixture of a superior air force and clever diplomacy. Japan faces no serious threat, and China wants Japanese investment more than anything else. North Korea´s nuclear bomb is now being confronted, late in George W. Bush´s day, with sophisticated diplomacy which—if applied earlier—could have avoided the bomb and probably halted North Korea´s urge to produce plutonium and enrich uranium.

American oil interests are at the center of America´s Middle East policy. But for any other nation to conquer the majority of territory containing Gulf oil would require an enormous army to cover a vast area. Who can do that?

As for Israel, it is more than capable of defending itself—it out-spends and out-equips in military hardware all the Arab nations combined together.

As for an Indo-Pakistani nuclear war it would be a terrible thing, but it makes no sense for the U.S. to get in the middle.

One could go on and on with such examples. Wars on distant continents will only threaten American security if the U.S sticks its nose in the middle. An Obama foreign policy cast on these lines would show the American public that reconciliation is cheaper and more effective than confrontation.

Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of Prospect magazine, London. His most recent book is Conundrums of Humanity (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).

The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

There is one thing important to keep in mind when talking about Russia—it doesn’t change. Not that it doesn’t change at all, of course. Buildings, fashions, leaders, regimes, or at least regimes’ names, all these change. And over the next quarter century, inevitably, revolutions will roar, the ruble will collapse or soar, just as over the past quarter century Soviet dissidents or Russian oligarch, have been imprisoned or exiled. This all happens. But neither the late czarist system, nor late-communism, nor post-communism was able to generate a viable alternative to a society where changes, when they do happen, result in a destructive and malfunctioning social order. This, I fear, is what Russia has in store for itself—and for the world—over the next quarter century. Continue reading…

Since I wrote my piece on the arms trade for the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal, the Bush boom in arms exports has actually accelerated. Major offers that were made between mid-September and early October of this year include a $7 billion agreement to sell a Lockheed Martin missile defense system to the United Arab Emirates; a $15 billion deal for Israel to receive the United States’ latest fighter plane, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (another Lockheed Martin product, in partnership with Boeing); and over $6 billion in offers to Taiwan for anti-missile systems, attack helicopters, and anti-ship missiles. The Obama administration will inherit these mega-deals, which are very hard to roll back once an official offer has been made.

These deals come at an ideal time for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and other arms makers. The economic crisis will force some sort of re-evaluation of the Pentagon’s record budget, which is now at its highest level since World War II. Weapons systems on the chopping block could include Lockheed Martin’s F-22 and F-35 combat aircraft, Boeing’s costly and complicated Future Combat System (FCS) for the Army, and Northrop Grumman’s Virginia-class attack submarine. The big contractors won’t be out on the street begging for change, but they will be scrambling to support themselves in the style to which they have become accustomed during the Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney years.

That means more lobbying, both to block Pentagon cuts and to advocate for even more lucrative exports. In the Clinton years, the arms industry’s agenda included promoting a new multi-billion dollar arms export loan fund; pushing tax breaks for weapons exporters; and lobbying for policy changes like the expansion of NATO (whose most visible non-governmental advocate was Lockheed Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson) that were likely to open up new markets. The full agenda of the industry in an Obama administration is less clear, but watch this space for details as they emerge.

As elaborated in my piece, the outlines of a more responsible arms transfer policy are relatively clear—more transparency and accountability in the dizzying array of military assistance programs that have sprouted up since September 11; a greater emphasis on human rights and conflict prevention in arms transfer decision making; and support for existing international efforts to curb dangerous systems like land mines and cluster munitions. The question is whether the Obama administration will make these common-sense initiatives part of its early first-term agenda, and how much the fear of potential “push back” from the arms industry may sway their decisions in this regard.

All of which is to say that advocates of curbing irresponsible arms exports need to make their voices heard early and often, both to get the attention of the new administration and to offer a counter-balance to the industry lobby.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and the co-editor of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008). His article, “An Unstoppable Arms Trade,” can be found in World Policy Journal’s 25th anniversary issue, on newsstands now.

The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

Few would have predicted 25 years ago India’s dramatic rise as a global economic force, imagined that one day the iconic British luxury brands Range Rover and Jaguar would be purchased by an Indian company, or believed that the United States would form a strategic partnership with a staunch ally of its Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union. In 1983, India’s claim to international attention was pretty much limited to its surprise win of the Cricket World Cup in England. This was a turning point for the game, no doubt, but hardly an event that augured the birth of a world power.

Yet, on the basis of its surprise leap over the past decade onto the stage of emerging powers, many are now predicting a fantastic future for India. They see India as the tortoise to China’s hare, the second-place runner who may look like he’s far behind but who in the end will out-distance the complacent champion. Viewed through this prism, India’s democracy is supposed to confer a special advantage over China’s state-directed system, messier in the immediate term perhaps, but better able to withstand in the long run the buffeting social, political, and environmental winds of rapid economic transformation. Continue reading…

The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

Back 17 years ago, in the winter of 1991–92, when I was contemplating Israel’s future in World Policy Journal, it was supposed to be the dawn of a new age—and I was there. We were about to enter the roaring globalization years of the 1990s and to be downloaded into a borderless world in which the archaic nation-state would vanish.

Arabs and Jews, Muslims and Hindus, would cease fighting each other over holy temples and olive trees and emerge in our new and brave world as the prime agents of global commerce, competing over market shares and investment flows, as Tom Friedman’s McDonalds Law (“no two countries that had McDonalds had gone to war with each other”) had forecasted. The “new cosmopolitans” and “global hybrids” would be the winners in this nascent universe where the prime determinant for business, political, and cultural success would be a multicultural sense of self. Pass that Cuban-Chinese falafel, please. Continue reading…

The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

On September 23, 2003, just six months after the American invasion of Iraq began, President George W. Bush went before the United Nations General Assembly to announce that he was prepared to make “the greatest financial commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan” in order to help rebuild Iraq. At the same time, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian administrator in Iraq, was delivering the identical message to the Senate Appropriations Committee, telling the senators that America intended to do for Iraq what it had done for Europe following World War II.

In the five years since President Bush delivered his Marshall Plan speech, America has yet to restore basic services to many parts of Iraq, but the hope of providing the Middle East with foreign aid that will change it continues on. In his new book, A Path Out of the Desert, Kenneth Pollack, director for Persian Gulf affairs on President Clinton’s National Security Council, makes a passionate case for an American grand strategy in the Middle East that puts foreign aid front and center. Continue reading…

Several new developments have taken place since I wrote my retrospective article on Afghanistan a few weeks ago, an article that has just appeared in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal.

Firstly, the world financial crisis has worsened precipitously, which could impel a new American administration to break the cycle of expeditionary wars in Muslim countries in the Middle East.

Secondly, both the Pakistani Army in Pakistan and the American forces from Afghanistan have become more aggressive toward the Taliban and Al Qaeda, while at the same time offers of negotiation have been extended, mainly through the intermediary of the Saudis, to those who are considered the less extremist among the Taliban.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, a new cast of characters has arrived on the scene, principally: President-elect Barack Obama; and Gen. David Petraeus, the new head of the Central Command, whose writ stretches from Egypt and the Horn of Africa to the Indian subcontinent, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. Petraeus has already been to Pakistan to confer with the civilian and military leadership there.

Putting more troops into Afghanistan, as Mr. Obama recommended during the election campaign, would seem to be counterintuitive to history. The more Western troops that are introduced amidst the fiercely nationalistic Pashtuns and other Afghans seems likely to generate more resentment and more resistance. Meantime, civilian casualties continue to mount, both by American Predator drone attacks into Pakistan’s tribal areas and by Allied bombings and ground attacks in Afghanistan, provoking the legendary spirit of vengeance in that part of the world.

The Russian example in the twentieth century and the British example in the nineteenth century are there for all to see. Both were driven out of the country ignominiously. Afghans dislike intensely armed foreigners, especially Westerners, operating with impunity in their own country. Why turn our eyes away from this fact of history? Read the rest of this entry »