As co-chair of the editorial board of the journal International Security, I couldn't be more delighted by the attention that Michael Beckley's article questioning China's rise (and America's supposed decline) is getting. See here, here, and here. But I fear that people who are seizing on Beckley's article to pooh-pooh fears of U.S. decline -- including our own Daniel Drezner -- are mostly asking the wrong question.

As I've noted elsewhere, the issue isn't whether the United States is about to fall the from the ranks of the great powers, or even be equaled (let alone surpassed) by a rising China. The world may be evolving toward a more multipolar structure, for example, but the United States is going to be one of those poles, and almost certainly the strongest of them, for many years to come.

Instead, the real issue is whether developments at home and overseas are making it harder for the United States to exercise the kind of dominant influence that it did for much of the latter half of the 20th century. The United States had a larger share of global GDP in the 1940s and 1950s, and it wasn't running enormous budget deficits. The United States was seen as a reliable defender of human rights, and its support for decolonization after World War II had won it many friends in the developing world. It also had good relations with a variety of monarchies and dictatorships, which it justified as part of the struggle against communism. These features allowed the United States to create and lead combined economic, security and political orders in virtually every corner of the world, except for the portions directly controlled by our communist rivals. And the U.S. and its allies eventually won that struggle too, driving the USSR into exhaustion and watching the triumph of market economies and more participatory forms of government throughout the former communist world.

The United States remains very powerful -- especially when compared with some putative opponents like Iran -- but its capacity to lead security and economic orders in every corner of the world has been diminished by failures in Iraq (and eventually, Afghanistan), by the burden of debt accumulated over the past decade, by the economic melt-down in 2007-2008, and by the emergence of somewhat stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. One might also point to eroding national infrastructure and an educational system that impresses hardly anyone. Moreover, five decades of misguided policies have badly tarnished America's image in many parts of the world, and especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. The erosion of authoritarian rule in the Arab world will force new governments to pay more attention to popular sentiment -- which is generally hostile to the broad thrust of U.S. policy in the region -- and the United States will be less able to rely on close relations with tame monarchs or military dictators henceforth. If it the United States remains far and away the world's strongest state, its ability to get its way in world affairs is declining.

All this may seem like a hair-splitting, but there's an important issue at stake. Posing the question in the usual way ("Is the U.S. Still #1?", "Who's bigger?", "Is China Catching Up?" etc.,) focuses attention primarily on bilateral comparisons and distracts us from thinking about the broader environment in which both the United States and China will have to operate. The danger, of course, is that repeated assurances that America is still on top will encourage foreign policy mandarins to believe that they can continue to make the same blunders they have in the recent past, and discourage them from making the strategic choices that will preserve U.S. primacy, enhance U.S. influence, and incidentally, produce a healthier society here at home.

One of the nice things about writing for Foreign Policy is the energy and creativity of its leadership, as exemplified by their relentless quest for new publishing innovations. Just yesterday, for example, FP launched a new fiction section, clearly intended to highlight writing on international affairs that doesn't have much basis in reality.

I refer, of course, to Elliot Abrams' brief essay entitled "A Forward Strategy of Freedom," where he argues that neoconservative ideas and policies are responsible for the "Arab Spring." It's been apparent for a long time that being a neoconservative means never having to say you're sorry (or even admit that you're wrong), but this essay displayed a degree of historical amnesia unusual even by neoconservative standards. It's not really worth a sustained critique, so I'll just make a few quick points.

First, there's no evidence that the Bush administration's "forward strategy for freedom" had anything to do with the Tunisian's fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi's tragic decision to set himself afire, an act of protest that started the wave of upheavals that has convulsed much of the Arab world ever since. Or is Abrams' suggesting that Bush's 2^nd inaugural inspired Bouazizi? More tellingly, neither the liberal forces that drove much of the uprisings against the Mubarak regime nor the Islamic forces that have profited most from Mubarak's departure give credit to Bush & co. for inspiring their efforts. And it's not hard to see why: both the Muslim Brotherhood and the more fundamentalist Egyptian Salafis have been anathema for the neocons from the get-go.

Second, the entire neoconservative strategy for spreading democracy depended heavily on U.S. military power, and it focused almost entirely on countries like Iraq, Syria, and Iran.  The Bush administration in which Abrams served continued to coddle Mubarak, the Saudis, and America's other authoritarian allies, for the same reasons that previous administrations did. The Arab spring emerged elsewhere, however, and had little to do with the deployment of American military power. Obama's Cairo speech is a far more plausible candidate in this regard (though I'd have my doubts about its impact too), but strangely, Abrams doesn't mention it.

Meanwhile, in the one place where the neocon strategy was fully implemented -- Iraq -- it was a colossal failure. The United States spent trillions of dollars and thousands of its soldiers' lives, and the end result is a deeply divided society and a dysfunctional political system that is drifting steadily back towards authoritarian rule and is at least partly aligned with Iran. So what were the neocons right about?

Third, the neoconservative hypocrisy about democracy was exposed in 2006, when the United States refused to accept Hamas' victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. You don't have to like Hamas or its charter to concede that they won the election fair and square, but that didn't stop the Bush administration from ignoring the outcome completely. In fact, Abrams subsequently tried to foment a Fatah coup against Hamas in Gaza, only to have his putative allies routed and discredited. Another neocon blunder, in short. And isn't it a bit odd that this deeply committed apostle of democracy has no problem with Israel continuing to violate the human rights of the millions of Palestinians it controls via its illegal occupation of the West Bank and its continued restrictions on movement in Gaza? Why isn't he pressing Israel to either give these people the right to vote, or to let them have a viable state of their own so that they can vote there? Some neoconservatives (e.g., Paul Wolfowitz) have been sympathetic to such aspirations, but as far as I know Abrams is not one of them.

Finally, let's not lose sight of all the other things that neoconservatives got wrong. They were wrong about Saddam's WMD. They were wrong about his alleged links to Al Qaeda. They were wrong that the occupation of Iraq would pay for itself. They were wrong that it would be easy to create democracy there once Saddam was gone. And given America's toxic image in much of the Arab world, they were wrong to believe that fostering democracy in the Arab world would create legitimate and pro-American regimes.

Weighed in the balance, therefore, the neocons got far more wrong than right, and it would be refreshing if they'd just man up and admit it.

Imagine that you were the dean of a public policy school, and of course you wanted to boost your school's reputation and attract lots of outstanding applicants for admission. There are several ways to do this, but one familiar strategy would be to hire some really famous, world-class faculty: people with truly global reputations who would raise the visibility of your school and make more prospective students want to attend and rub shoulders with them.

I can think of lots of high-profile academics to go after in economics, political science, history, and a few other fields. For example, an ambitious dean could try to recruit global superstars like Paul Krugman, Robert Putnam, Amartya Sen, Joe Stiglitz, Theda Skocpol, Anthony Giddens, Martha Nussbaum, K. Anthony Appiah, Elinor Ostrom, John Lewis Gaddis, or Frank Fukuyama. Or you could go after a highly visible former politician or policy-maker (e.g., Kofi Annan, Condoleezza Rice, Javier Solana, etc.) and use their fame to generate buzz and attract more applicants.

So here's a puzzle: even though public policy schools are supposed to train people to work in and lead public sector organizations (to include government agencies, non-profits, I can't think of a scholar of public management or public administration with the same sort of marquee value as the people I just mentioned, and whose hiring would catapult a school up the rankings dramatically.

Please note: I am not saying that there are no excellent scholars in these domains -- among other things, I think I have some pretty terrific colleagues who work in this area -- and I'm not saying that an ambitious dean couldn't raise his or her school's profile somewhat by recruiting the best people in this area. And I'm certainly not suggesting that scholars who work in this area aren't doing useful work teaching students and advising government agencies and other organizations about how they could operate more effectively. But my sense is that the sub-fields of public management or public administration aren't producing highly visible "public intellectuals" or attracting a lot of attention outside of the sub-field itself.

But I'm not sure why this is the case. For starters, intellectuals studying the workings of public sector organizations used to be a prominent part of sociology and political science (going all the way back to Max Weber), and this body of work was a central part of the social sciences for much of the twentieth century. I am thinking here of scholars such as Dwight Waldo, Robert K. Merton, Aaron Wildavsky, Charles Perrow, James Q. Wilson, Charles Lindblom, James March, Herbert Simon, or Anthony Downs; all of whom cast long shadows over their respective fields and had an enormous impact on how we think about bureaucracies and public organizations. Moreover, management experts at business schools have and continue to enjoy a lot of global visibility -- think Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, Clayton Christenson, Michael Porter, etc. -- which suggests that it is not the topic of "management" or organizational behavior itself that is the problem.

Finally, it's hard to argue that there isn't a continued need for bold ideas that would help improve the quality of public management. The public sector consumes more than 40 percent of GDP in a lot of advanced industrial countries, and the lack of effective public institutions is a major obstacle to economic and social advancement in many developing countries. So the lack of superstar figures in this field isn't because the topic itself is unimportant.

So how might one explain this pattern? I'm not sure. One possibility, which I'm not sure is correct, is that the long effort to discredit public sector organizations and to encourage privatization has made studying such organizations less fashionable. A second possibility is that the field of organizational behavior has gradually become more "micro-oriented" -- drawing more on social psychology than on political science, sociology, or history -- and that this trend has made the field more rigorous in purely academic terms but also less interesting to anyone but specialists within the field. Or perhaps the lack of towering figures in the study of public administration at present is just a manifestation of the broader "cult of irrelevance" that I've discussed before: even though we need public institutions that work well, the scholars that inhabit elite departments of political science, economics, or sociology just aren't that interested in doing that anymore. Which is too bad.

While I was away, a friend sent me a link to an article from the online magazine Tablet, and asked me what I thought about it. The piece is by Adam Kirsch, and it's basically a critical summary of the impact of my book (with John Mearsheimer) on the Israel lobby.   Kirsch was clearly moved to write the piece by Robert Kaplan's laudatory profile of John in the Atlantic Monthly, which undoubtedly drove Kirsch and a number of our other critics crazy.

So what do I think?  On the one hand, I could be somewhat gratified by the piece, insofar as he describes the book as an "intellectual landmark, one of those rare books that succeed in altering the intellectual climate."  But on the other hand, Kirsch clearly thinks we've altered that climate for the worse, and his discussion of our work is filled with falsehoods.   Like most of our other critics, Kirsch seems unable to address what we actually wrote.  So he invents a straw man version of our argument -- in some cases accusing us of believing the exact opposite of what we actually said -- and proceeds to lambaste it instead.

Consider his very first paragraph, which purports to offer a summary of our argument (my emphasis):

"What [The Israel Lobby] did not do, to judge by the reviews, was convince anyone of its central argument, that an all-powerful "Israel lobby" had hijacked American foreign policy using illegitimate means…"

There are two problems here. First, "to judge by the reviews" doesn't tell you much about the book's merits (or its flaws), insofar as almost all of the mainstream reviewers in the United States were acknowledged Zionists who were bound to be hostile to our point of view. Not surprisingly, most reviews outside the U.S. -- including several in Israel itself -- were favorable.

Second, and more importantly, Kirsch's summary of our argument bears little or no resemblance to what we actually wrote. Indeed, he managed to pack three separate falsehoods into a single sentence, which is no small achievement. To wit:

1. He claims we said the lobby was "all-powerful." In fact, we wrote "we do not believe the lobby is all-powerful, or that it controls important institutions in the United States. As we will discuss in several subsequent chapters, there are a number of cases where the lobby did not get its way." (TIL, p. 14). We repeated this statement elsewhere in the book, in public presentations, and in several subsequent articles. So how did Kirsch manage to miss this?

2. He claims we argued that the lobby had "hijacked" U.S. foreign policy "using illegitimate means." In fact, we wrote "The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy or anything of the sort. It is engaged in good old-fashioned interest group politics, which is as American as apple pie." We also emphasized that "it is perfectly legitimate for any American to have a significant attachment to a foreign country" (TIL, p. 13). And we repeated similar statements throughout the book. Either Kirsch didn't bother to read it, or he is just inventing arguments that we did not make so that he has something to criticize. 

3. Kirsch alleges that "in our insinuations about secret Jewish power, Mearsheimer and Walt…had given a respectable imprimatur to old and sinister anti-Semitic tropes. " Wrong again. We have a lengthy section denouncing traditional anti-Semitism, and we never--repeat never--said one word or offered "insinuations" about "secret" Jewish power. On the contrary, we repeatedly emphasized that the lobby's activities were above-board and out in the open, like those of other prominent interest groups. We are both familiar with the long and sordid history of anti-Semitism, and we devoted a lengthy section of our introduction to a discussion of these various "anti-Semitic tropes" and our explicit rejection of them, emphasizing that they help explain why it is hard to even talk about this issue. Moreover, when discussing the neoconservative movement, we wrote "what may seem to some like a shadowy conspiracy (or even a "right wing cabal") is anything but. On the contrary.Tthe various think tanks, committees, foundations, and publications that have nurtured the neoconservative movement operate much as other policy networks do. Far from shunning publicity or engaging in hidden plots, these groups actively court publicity for the explicit purpose of shaping public and elite opinion and moving U.S. foreign policy in the directions they favor." (TIL, p. 131).

For that matter, we repeatedly emphasized that the term "Jewish lobby" was an inappropriate label, because many Jews do not support the lobby's agenda and because some key members of the lobby were not Jewish (most notably the so-called Christian Zionists). For this reason, we wrote "it is the specific political agenda that defines the lobby, not the religious or ethnic identity of those pushing it" (TIL, p. 115).

4. Lastly, Kirsch suggests that our book advocated "cutting Israel adrift," and implies that we believe "America's interests and problems in the Islamic world will be resolved…if and when a Palestinian state is created." This isn't even close to what we wrote. We repeatedly said that we supported Israel's existence, and that we believed the United States should come to its aid if its survival were in jeopardy." We repeatedly say the U.S. should have a "normal" relationship with Israel, akin to our relations with other democracies. How is this "cutting Israel adrift?" And we made it clear that our recommended policy approach "will not eliminate all the problems currently facing the United States in the Middle East…Israeli-Palestinian peace is not a wonder drug that will solve all the region's problems: it will by itself neither eliminate anti-Semitism in the region nor lead Arab elites to tackle the other problems that afflict their societies with new energy and commitment" (TIL, p. 348). Once again, Kirsch is either writing about a book he hasn't read, or engaging in willful distortion.

In short, Kirsch's supposed summary of our core argument, as well as his tortured effort to interpret the book's cover as anti-Semitic, is demonstrably false. It is not even a caricature of what we actually wrote; it is a wholly fictitious construction of his own. And the same could be said for virtually all of the reviews that he cites as "evidence" of our supposed errors and alleged bigotry. As I've noted before, our critics are forced to misrepresent our book because they cannot deal with the arguments that we actually made. The only way for them to challenge us is to distort or misrepresent what we said, or to pretend we said the exact opposite. And it is surely no accident that these distortions are always slanted to portray us falsely as anti-Semites, which has become the all-purpose way for hardline defenders of Israel to respond to those with different views.

Fortunately, there is a more parsimonious explanation for why our book may have helped open up public discourse on these issues. Not by legitimizing anti-Semitism, of course, which would be a deplorable development that both Mearsheimer and I would condemn in the strongest terms. Rather, our book may have helped open up a more fruitful debate on U.S. Middle East policy, and especially on the U.S.-Israel "special relationship," for the simple reason that we were pointing out obvious truths that many knowledgeable people already recognized. We may have succeeded because there was overwhelming evidence of the lobby's impact -- including testimony from a wide range of politicians -- evidence that no amount of distortion or slander could conceal. Eyes have also been opened by unfortunate events like the Lebanon War of 2006, the Gaza War of 2008-2009, and the Obama administration's failed attempts to advance a two-state solution, all of which cast a bright light on the lobby's clout in Washington. And it surely didn't hurt that our critics reacted in precisely the way we described in our book, resorting to misrepresentation and smear tactics instead of dealing with our arguments and evidence in a rational and fair-minded fashion.

If Kirsch is correct that we are "winning," in short, maybe it's because we paid close attention to facts and logic and did not attack our opponents with inaccurate smears or attempts at character assassination. Maybe we're "winning" because our core argument was correct: the various groups that make up the "Israel lobby" have been mistakenly advocating policies that were in fact harmful to the United States and to Israel itself, and more and more people have begun to figure this out.

Suppose you were a member of Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. You don't really want to run the country openly anymore, and turning it over to some sort of civilian rule would be ok with you. But you've gotten pretty rich over the past couple of decades and you're worried the secularists or Islamists might create a genuine democracy, strip you of your power, and then take away all your money and leave you and your family destitute. Or worse. Similarly, what if you were a member of the Alawite ruling elite in Syria, closely tied to the Assad regime? You're now facing the prospect of civil war, but giving the opposition any real share of power threatens your position and maybe your personal security. Alawites are only 12 percent of the population, after all, and there's no guarantee that sharing power won't ultimately put others in a position to persecute you. So compromise is inherently dangerous, and brutal repression starts to look like the only appealing option despite the costs and risks.

In these (and many other) cases, a central issue is the familiar problem of credible commitment. In order to convince unpopular rulers to leave power (or at least to give up a lot of their current privileges), you have to convince them that they are not signing their own death warrants or ensuring their own financial ruin. But it is difficult for a successor regime to guarantee that they won't go after the old elites at some point in the future; they cannot "credibly commit" to leave the old rulers alone once they have the power to prosecute them. Just look where Hosni Mubarak is today: if he had known he was going to be in trial for his life, I'm betting he wouldn't have left office so easily, or stayed in the country afterwards.

By the way, this is one issue where the so-called "Turkish model" is not so reassuring. Many people see the AKP government in Turkey as a successful illustration of moderate Islam, and one that has been economically successful, politically popular, and diplomatically innovative. All true. The AKP has also finally broken the back of the Turkish military, which dominated politics for decades (much to Turkey's detriment). So far so good. But the AKP has used its position of power to wage a far-reaching (and almost certainly excessive) campaign against former military leaders (who have languished in jail for months without trials) and to take a number of worrisome steps to restrict press freedom. So if I were a member of the SCAF in Egypt, I wouldn't find the "Turkish model" very appealing. Indeed, it's more of a warning.

There's no easy answer for this problem, although adopting constitutions that provide for various guarantees (including rule of law, judicial independence, property rights, etc.) and possibly even formal amnesties might be one possible avenue. My own view is that entrenched elites need to reassured that their immediate privileges won't be dramatically curtailed, even if they give up a lot of political power. In essence, current rulers need to believe that they will be able to live out their lives in reasonable comfort, and that their immediate families won't be ruined. The state can tax the hell out of their ill-gotten gains, however, so that the great-grandchildren don't get much, but by then it won't matter. The downside is that you're in effect letting the current elites get away with something, for the sake of the greater good.

The best analogy I can think of for this process is the long, slow decline of the English landed aristocracy. Beginning in the early 19^th century, the gradual expansion of the franchise and the rise of the middle class gradually led to a curtailing of noble privilege and political power. But the aristocrats weren't dragged to guillotine or have their estates confiscated, they just got a little weaker and a little less rich, on average, with each successive generation. But this ensured that the nobility didn't try to dig in its heels and stop the process completely, which would have created a far greater risk of a major explosion.

I think this process needs to happen a bit more quickly in the cases discussed above, but if the forces of change try to overturn the existing order in its entirety and destroy the current elites, then they are likely to face far more resistance. But as I said at the outset, it's hard to make pledges of restraint completely credible, which is why I expect the process to be pretty bumpy in the months and years ahead.

It was a beautiful day on Sunday in Singapore, and I listened to a live-stream of the Patriots game against the Broncos. (As I typed this, Tom Brady threw six touchdown passes far, which was gratifying for us New Englanders but didn't make for a very exciting contest).

It's been an interesting trip, but I have the distinct impression of having left the U.S. just when a lot of things got interesting. I was off the grid a good part of the time, and it drove home to me just how addicted I've become to having access to a constant stream of news. I didn't start catching up on events until I got to the airport in Dubai on Friday evening, and picked up a Wifi connection in the lounge. 

Here's just a few items that I wish I could have commented on in real-time.

 1. The Euro takes on water: As many of us expected, ratings agencies have started to down-grade the credit-worthiness of several Eurozone countries, including France. These agencies aren't infallible of course (i.e., several of them were complicit in the mortgage scandals that caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis), but this event confirms that all the activity last year to bail out Europe's finances haven't convinced these agencies (or the markets) that the problem is solved. Quite the contrary, in fact, which is why I think 2012 will be even rockier.

And I can't help but see the tragic grounding of an Italian cruise liner the other day as an apt metaphor for Europe's dilemma. For in the end the problem facing the Euro also arose from poor navigation and incompetent command, as well as a failure to prepare for rough seas or unfortunate accidents. And if the Euro ends up on the rocks, the people who steered it there are going to end up with prominent places in the annals of modern history. And not in a good way

 2. More Insanity about Iran:  I haven't been able to keep up with all of it, but the debate over what to do about Iran's nuclear program seems to be getting more and more unhinged. Another Iranian nuclear scientist was murdered, which fits the standard U.S. definition of an act of terrorism, and is surely something we would regard as an act of war were someone to do something like it here on American soil. The Obama administration says we were not involved, which doesn't leave a whole lot of other likely candidates.

As one would expect, the most bizarre ideas on Iran keep emanating from places like Commentary or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where Iran seems to be seen as a combination of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and North Korea, but on steroids and raised to the N^th power. So WINEP's Patrick Clawson tells us that murdering Iranian scientists is a good thing because it might provoke Iran into doing something truly nasty, which would then provide us with a pretext to whack them. He used the examples of Pearl Harbor (!) and the sinking of the Lusitania as historical analogies (which is both inaccurate and suggests a remarkable indifference to the human consequences of blithely bombing other countries. And some people accuse realists of being amoral!) And let's not overlook the truly bizarre announcement that Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham intend to introduce a resolution that would seek to rule out a strategy of trying to "contain" Iran.  Needless to say, their goal isn't to facilitate accommodation, but to hold Obama's feet to the fire about increased sanctions, or maybe preventive war. Gee, I wonder why some people in Iran think they might need a nuclear deterrent…

The Obama administration deserves credit for having assembled a more effective set of economic sanctions on Iran, which is clearly putting the regime under more pressure. But I keep wondering what the endgame looks like, and whether the United States would be willing to accept anything less than a complete Iranian capitulation and/or regime change. In other words, is there any Iranian offer short of complete surrender that we would say "yes" to?  I can't tell. Unfortunately, a diplomatic compromise would probably require the U.S. to accept Iran having its own enrichment capability and thus the potential to develop weapons if it so chose.   

In other words, we'd have to accept that Iran has legal rights (and also obligations) under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Of course, both Israel and the Israel lobby here in the United States are dead-set against that sort of deal, which means that Washington isn't likely to go that route. The confrontation is bound to continue, therefore, and therein lies the long-term danger. As we saw with Iraq in the 1990s through 2003, if a conflict keeps going with no resolution, and if well-connected hawks keep beating the drums for war, sooner or later the stars may line up as they did after 9/11, and somebody will decide to roll the iron dice. I think war is unlikely in the short-term, but I can't rule such folly out forever.

 4.  More "Help" from the "Special Relationship:"   Of course, we wouldn't even be discussing war with Iran if we weren't being egged on by Israel and by its supporters in the United States. Which is what makes Mark Perry's blockbuster reporting of an Israeli "false flag" operation so interesting and so disturbing. According to Perry, Mossad agents posed as CIA operatives in order to recruit a Pakistani-based terrorist group called Jundallah to conduct attacks inside Iran. They did this without U.S. approval, of course, and the obvious threat to U.S. interests is that we end up getting blamed for what was in fact an independent Israeli operation.

No good realists should be surprised when countries do deceitful or underhanded things to try to advance their interests, and if that's the way the Israelis want to play it, so be it. But this sort of behavior helps you understand why more and more U.S. officials are questioning the "special relationship," no matter what they have to say in public to keep the lobby quiet. And it's just another reminder that all that rhetoric you hear about the U.S. and Israel having nearly identical interests is a lot of nonsense. The United States and Israel have certain interests in common, but there are also important issues on which our interests diverge. Unfortunately, you can't say that if you're running for office, or if you're somebody who wants to have a high-flying career in Washington. 

In any case, you owe it to yourself to read Perry's article, and also the interesting interview he gave to the Israeli online magazine +972 here.

 5.  Burma Opens Up?   A top story in today's International Herald Tribune is the Burmese government's decision to release assorted political prisoners, as part of their continuing effort to get economic sanctions lifted and to restore better relations with the West, and the subsequent U.S. decision to restore fully diplomatic relations with it. One needs to be careful about direct analogies or comparisons wth other cases, but doesn't this positive development tell us something about the value of sanctions, of diplomacy, and most of all, patience? Might similar lessons apply in the case of Iran? Outside pressure clearly played a key role in Burma's change of heart, but notice that nobody was talking about going to war with them in order to get them to alter their policy. Burma wasn't pursuing a nuclear research program, of course, and its foreign policy wasn't as directly at odds with Washington's regional preferences. But threatening other states with military force isn't a very good way to convince them to reduce their own military potential, and repeated military threats aren't a very good way to conduct diplomacy. One really does wonder what U.S. diplomats could accomplish if we could deal with Iran in a more creative and patient manner.  

6. Tarnishing Democracy?   I like living in a democracy, and I frankly can't imagine ever choosing to live somewhere that I couldn't write or say what I thought. I also think the evidence shows that they have better human rights records than most (all?) authoritarian states and tend to do a better job (on average) of encouraging economic growth and social welfare. But some of the conversations I've had on this trip suggest that the current state of Western democracy isn't helping sell this system in some parts of the world. Defenders of autocracy point to the corrosive role of money in contemporary American politics, the gridlock and sheer nastiness that infects Washington, the unimpressive credentials of many members of Congress, the opera bouffe behavior of leaders like Silvio Berlusconi or even Nicolas Sarkozy, and the inability of Western democracies to take decisive action in the face of mounting problems.   Of course, monarchies, military dictatorships, and one-party autocracies have their own share of dysfunctions, and you aren't going to hear me defending them as an alternative.  My point is simply that the current state of Western-style democracy is making it harder for people like me to persuade others that they should move in similar directions. As I think I've said before, a lot of attack-dog media jocks and for-sale-to-the-highest-bidder politicians like to trumpet their patriotism, but their various antics are doing more to damage our global image than most of our genuine adversaries could even dream of.

Sean Kay offers the following guest post on the implications of the new Defense Guidance for the NATO alliance:

Last week, the U.S. Department of Defense announced new strategic guidance for force structure and budgets. Buried in the short public document is a single sentence, originally in italics for emphasis, which moves debates over European security after the Cold War into a new paradigm: "In keeping with this evolving strategic landscape, our posture in Europe must also evolve." If President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are faithful to their basic assumptions, then it is fair to anticipate dramatic, and highly appropriate, changes in America's role in NATO.

Three key elements of the new strategy make it hard to escape the logic of a major realignment in NATO. First, there is a clear statement that Asia is the priority for American national security planning. Second, major troop reductions are coming -- including shrinking the size of the U.S. Army from 570,000 to possibly as low as 490,000. These cuts have to come from somewhere and Europe is the obvious place to start. Third, the document states that (also with original italics): "Whenever possible, we will develop innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve our security objectives, relying on exercises, rotational presence, and advisory capabilities." If there is any place in America's global footprint where this approach is most immediately applicable, it is Europe.

America will not just "walk away" from its NATO allies. Rather, the challenge is to create new incentives for European members to assume lead responsibility for their own security. The strategic guidance asserts that the United States will "maintain our Article 5 commitments to allied security and promote enhanced capacity and interoperability for coalition operations. In this resource-constrained era, we will also work with NATO allies to develop a "Smart Defense" approach to pool, share, and specialize capabilities as needed to meet 21st century challenges."

NATO needs a radical new kind of American leadership if Europe is to be incentivized to assume new responsibilities in effective ways.  For generations, American officials have asked Europe to increase burden sharing and economize defense planning -- and repeatedly failed. George Kennan warned about this risk in 1948 when he wrote (in an internal memo for negotiators that were creating NATO): "Instead of the ability to divest ourselves gradually of the basic responsibility for the security of Western Europe, we will get a legal perpetuation of that responsibility. In the long-run, such a legalistic structure must crack up on the roots of reality; for a divided Europe is not permanently viable, and the political will of the U.S. people is not sufficient to enable us to support Western Europe indefinitely as a military appendage." Today, with the Eurozone in extended crisis, to expect "more" from Europe would be delusional.

What, then, might be done to align next steps policy with what the new guidance calls "a strategic opportunity to rebalance the U.S. military investment in Europe?"

First, declare victory! Europe is experiencing unprecedented sustained peace. If there ever was a moment to take advantage of that climate, it is now. The risks of defense re-nationalization are next to zero and potential conventional threats far over the horizon. Meanwhile, austerity programs are incentivizing Europe to economize military spending via deeper integration -- as Britain and France commenced in 2010. The European security dilemmas that required a heavy American military presence have long been resolved. As but just one recent example, late in 2011, Polish Foreign Minister Radislaw Sikorski stated that: "I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity."

Read on

I'm prepping for an overseas trip and am pressed for time, but I did get a chance to take a quick look at the new Defense Guidance (DG), available here. I didn't do a Talmudic reading -- which would probably be pointless anyway, but I did have a few reactions that I wanted to pass along.

First, and most obviously, an offshore balancer like me can find certain things to like in this document, and one could even argue that some of its central elements correspond to positions that I've been articulating here and elsewhere. My advocacy didn't have anything to do with these decisions, of course; both my analysis and the Pentagon's decisions reflect some pretty obvious underlying forces. But the pivot towards Asia, the downgrading of Europe, and the clear de-emphasis on counter-insurgency and nation-building (e.g., "U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations") are measures I can only applaud. Ditto the emphasis on "innovative, low-cost and small-footprint approaches to achieve our security goals."

Second, as I mentioned in my previous post, these changes do not herald a philosophical shift away from a highly interventionist outlook. The new DG says the United States will still "take an active approach to countering [terrorist] threats," meaning continued drone strikes, night raids, and various forms of covert action. The decision to "invest as required to ensure [our] ability to operate in anti-access and area denial environments" tells you that the U.S. intends to retain the capability to use force just about anywhere it decides it wants to. And although it declares that the U.S. "will continue to promote a rules-based international order," we will undoubtedly reserve the right to ignore any of those rules if they prove to be inconvenient.

Third, as is usually the case with such documents, they sound better when viewed from an American-centric perspective than from the perspective of other powers. We assume that our role in Asia provides "a vital foundation for Asia-Pacific security," for example, but I suspect a few Asian countries (e.g., China, North Korea, and maybe Pakistan) do not quite see it that way. What's missing here is the whole idea of a "security dilemma," whereby measures that we take to strengthen our position and enhance our security inevitably undermine somebody's else's position and make them feel less secure.

Similarly, the DG calls for the U.S. to maintain a "safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent," while hinting that "it is possible that our deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force." On the one hand, to even hint at that possibility is almost bold; on the other hand, to say that it is "possible" we could deter with less is as obvious as saying that the Sun will rise tomorrow. Remember that many American experts believe Iran would suddenly get tremendous bargaining leverage and a robust ability to deter us if it were to get a handful of nuclear weapons. If that is the case, then the thousands of warheads currently in our own arsenal are vastly more than we would need to deter. Sadly, the drafters of this document didn't feel quite empowered enough to make this obvious point.

Finally, no document of this sort would be complete without a few unsubstantiated bits of boilerplate. It invokes the familiar but still unconvincing claim that we must win in Afghanistan to deny al Qaeda a "safe haven," while acknowledging that al Qaeda is far less capable" and that future counter-terrorism efforts "will become more widely distributed." As I've said all along, the outcome in Afghanistan won't have a big impact on the threat from al Qaeda, and it's still a mistake to confuse the two.

Despite these various objections, the new DG (and the budget it implies) should be seen as a step in the right direction (even if not an especially bold one). But a final word of warning: the Defense Guidance is not a strategy; it is a political framework that is intended to inform the budget planning process that lead to the creation of forces and the development of specific capabilities. By itself, it doesn't tell you how those forces will ultimately be used. That will depend on what happens in the world at large, and I dare say on what happens next November.

Note: I will be traveling in the Middle East and Southeast Asia over the next ten days, and internet access and time to blog are likely to be scarce. I have some guest posts lined up for the hiatus and I'll try to chime in when I can, but feel free to spend some time with the people on my blogroll instead.