Earlier this week, President Obama signed into law the $680 billion FY 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, the largest such budget since the end of World War II. If you missed that aspect of the story, you weren’t alone. Many news stories chose instead to focus on the hate crime provisions tacked onto the bill.

I’ve often quarreled with the inclusion of superfluous legislative riders, and the hate crime provision is more superfluous than most. (Indeed, as my Cato colleague David Rittgers has pointed out, it might be worse than superfluous.)

But I want to focus on the president’s failure to halt the inexorable growth in military spending. His capitulation on a number of spending programs — even as he complains of rampant waste and abuse within the Pentagon — signals to American taxpayers that they should expect more of the same. It sends an equally harmful message to our friends and allies around the world: stand back, we’ll take care of it.

You see, most of the money we spend on our military is not geared to defending the United States. Rather, it encourages other countries to free-ride on the U.S. military instead of taking prudent steps to defend themselves.

The massive defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security budget weighs in at $42.8 billion. This comprises the visible balance of what Americans spend on our national security, loosely defined. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget, money dedicated to the care and maintenance of the country’s huge nuclear arsenal.

All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.

The massive imbalance between what Americans spend on our military, and what others spend, flows directly from our foreign policy. Several decades ago, Washington opted to be the world’s policeman, and has ever since discouraged other countries from spending more on their own defense. President Obama has tacitly questioned this approach in the past, and has called on other countries to step forward and do more. But by signing this monstrosity, his actions drown out his words.

The president has defended his support for continued bloated military spending, with additional monies going especially to a larger conventional army, as a way to reduce the strains on our troops and their families. This is a noble impulse. But a far better way to relieve the burdens on our overstretched force is to rethink all of our global military commitments, and align our strategy to our means. A new grand strategy, predicated on self-reliance and restraint, would relieve the burdens from the backs of our troops and from taxpayers. That new strategy would compel other countries to finally assume their rightful responsibilities in defending themselves and their respective regions.

The governing class in Washington has consistently resisted such a change. It is enamored of its ability to manage not just the rest of the country, but indeed the rest of the world, and sees no reason to change. Neither, it would seem, does President Obama. By embracing a military budget explicitly geared toward sustaining the status quo, the president virtually ensures that other countries will not share in the costs of keeping the world relatively prosperous and at peace.

I’ll be discussing our massive military spending and other aspects of U.S. national security policy next Friday with Daniel Wirls, a professor at UC Santa Cruz, and the author of a forthcoming book on U.S. military spending that looks terrific. The event is sponsored by the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and will be held at the UC’s Washington Center from 10:00 to 11:30. To learn more and to register, visit their web site.

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The early indications were encouraging, but largely anecdotal. The Pew Research Center provided data from surveys taken in May and June, and found a mixed picture: attitudes toward the United States were most improved in Western Europe, East Asia, and Africa (Nigeria and Kenya), but barely changed in the several predominantly Muslim countries, including U.S. allies Turkey and Pakistan.

The more relevant question is whether we should care. International relations is not a popularity contest. In the classical formulation, nation-states pursue policies that they believe will advance their interests. Sometimes these policies backfire. Sometimes they fail. But, all other factors being equal, we should assume that policies are directed from within, and not much influenced by without.

A recent study published by the American Political Science Association makes a reasonably convincing case that Americans should care about U.S. “standing” not purely for the sake of feeling good about ourselves, but also because improved standing is likely to contribute to more effective foreign policy. “Diminished standing may make it harder for the United States to get things done in world politics,” the report explains. In this context, the report continues, we should “think of standing…as the foreign-policy equivalent of ‘political capital.’” If we have a stored reserve of such capital, we can deploy this to mobilize international support. At a minimum, this will convince other countries to go along with us; in ideal cases, we might obtain their active support.

The report was commissioned by the outgoing APSA president, Peter J. Katzenstein of Cornell University, and co-chaired by Jeffrey Legro of the University of Virginia. The task force includes some of the most well-respected scholars in their fields. [The full report is available here, a shorter public version was made available here, and Katzenstein and Legro summarized the findings in a recent article at Foreign Policy.com.]

For the sake of argument, I will concede that America’s reputation is a factor in the extent to which other countries support or oppose our policies, and therefore that it is worthwhile to attempt to bolster our reputation. But the report inadvertently shows that, in practice, even concerted effort by policymakers and opinion leaders to improve U.S. standing is likely to fail, largely because of deep contradictions between what others expect of Uncle Sam, and what Americans expect from our government and from others.

Generally speaking, non-Americans like the United States playing the role of world policeman — provided we do the job well. If the U.S. military deters aggression against small or weak countries, those countries won’t have to devote resources to defending themselves. Oppressed people often welcome U.S. pressure on the autocratic regimes that are oppressing them; disenfranchised people welcome U.S. government efforts to give them some say in how they are governed, and by whom.

If the opinions of non-Americans were decisive in the formulation of U.S. policies, then we might be able to do all of these things. But they are not. Rather, Americans do and should have far more influence over the policies that Washington pursues, and the three goals that are arguably most important to non-Americans are the least important for Americans.

In a list of 14 foreign policy goals polled by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Americans rank “Promoting and defending human rights in other countries”; and “Protecting weaker nations against foreign aggression”; 12th and 13th, respectively. As far as democracy promotion goes, that falls dead last on the list; a mere 17 percent of respondents thought this a “very important” goal for the U.S. government. (The chart is is reproduced on page 2 of the APSA report.)

Despite public skepticism toward these goals here in the United States, non-Americans can be forgiven for believing that the U.S. government exists to do such things for them. After all, the notion that the United States should be the primary provider of global public goods has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades, and almost always in the face of strong opposition to such philanthropic impulses.

As I explain at length in my book, The Power Problem, the disconnect between what the public wants, and what the policymakers give them, is deliberate and by design. Most of the people in Washington dismiss public attitudes as misinformed, at best, isolationist, at worst. But while I agree that we should not conduct our foreign policy on the basis of polls and focus groups, in the grand scheme, the hand-waving and misdirection that our leaders have employed since the end of the Cold War to conceal and distort the true costs of our current grand strategy, is, well, unseemly.

Actually, Michael Lind has a better word for it: “Nothing could be more repugnant to America’s traditions as a democratic republic,” he writes in The American Way of Strategy, “than a grand strategy that can be sustained only if the very existence of the strategy is kept secret from the American people by their elected and appointed leaders.” (my emphasis)

I wholeheartedly agree. In a country which presumes some measure of popular consent, the current pattern is repugnant.

So what does this mean for improving American standing? If the rest of the world wants the United States to be the world’s cop, the world’s social worker, and the world’s election monitor, but Americans expect our government of limited, enumerated powers to do these things only when U.S. national interests are at stake (and they rarely are), is this the counsel of despair?

Not necessarily. There is another way in which the United States could improve its international standing without having to go out of its way to convince others of our good intentions, and without systematically concealing from the American people the true object of our foreign policies.

As formulated by the APSA task force, “standing” consists of two elements, “credibility” — “the U.S. government’s ability to do what it says it is going to do — and “esteem” — which “referes to America’s stature, or what America is perceived to ‘stand for’”. The right-leaning members of the academy, including George Washington University professor Henry Nau and Stanford’s Stephen Krasner, who submitted a spirited dissent from the report, question the importance of esteem. Tod Lindberg echoed these sentiments in comments at the National Press Club several weeks ago, at the time of the report’s public release.

I think it goes too far to say that esteem is essentially irrelevant, but I agree that credibility is the more important of the two. As such, it is crucial to fashion policies that are consistent with the wishes of the American people, and that can be sustained in the face of difficult circumstances and potentially high costs.

Which means we need a new grand strategy. We could drop the revolutionary impulse behind our foreign policies, declaring ourselves content with the international status quo, and therefore not an imminent threat to any other country or people that respects our rights and liberties. We could likewise disavow any attempt to overthrow the established social order in foreign lands, and reaffirm our respect for sovereignty under international law. Finally, and most importantly, we could reestablish our international reputation by keeping our promises, and that would begin by not making promises that we can’t — and have no intention to — keep.

I will have more to say about that last point in my next blog post, and at an upcoming discussion hosted by the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California’s Washington Center. To learn more, visit their web site.

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Specifically, Brian points to a BBC poll of Afghans concerning the US/NATO mission and their preferences for government — the current government wins overwhelming support (82 percent), the Taliban barely registers (4 percent).

He concludes, therefore:

if the military presence is done right and actually brings increased security to Afghan citizens, they will be inclined to support it rather than the alternative.

Of course, that’s the big “if” – if the military presence is done right. The problem is that for most of the past seven years, the US and NATO forces have been ill equipped and too few in number to actually execute a proper counterinsurgency strategy.  I agree that things have not been going well.  Most Afghans in the south and east see little security benefit from either Afghan or US/NATO security forces.  It’s no wonder that many have put their lot in with the Taliban.  It seems that one response to this problem would be a greater presence – not less – of security forces. (Emphasis mine)

This is a variation on the incompetence dodge, about which I have written much. Our past failings should not be taken as evidence that we cannot succeed in the future. We have a new military team (Petraeus and McChrystal), and still relatively new White House team (Obama et al). We’ve learned from our mistakes. We can fix this.

This betrays a particular faith in our government’s ability to reshape foreign cultures that is not supported by the evidence, and I’m not just referring the Bush administration’s particular shortcomings. Most nation-building missions fail, even those carried out by wise and far-sighted military and political leaders. Nor is it clear that all of the objectives that we’ve set forth for our troops are actually essential to advancing American security, a point that my colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter make in a just-published Cato paper.

The Obama administration’s strategy would surely require far more troops, and I think it incumbent upon the advocates of our current strategy to be explicit about how many more, for how long, and at what cost.

Of course, the chief advocate for our strategy in Afghanistan must be the president himself. In this regard, I wholeheartedly endorse Brian’s final recommendation, calling on the president to:

lay out the options to the American people, their likely costs, the stakes of the conflict, and why sacrifice is necessary.  For the past seven years we’ve had too many overly optimistic assessments about our military engagements and their costs.

This recommendation matches with that of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a clear successor to the now-discredited Project for a New American Century. In a recent letter, FPI implored the president:

to fully resource this effort, do everything possible to minimize the risk of failure, and to devote the necessary time to explain, soberly and comprehensively, to the American people the stakes in Afghanistan, the route to success, and the cost of defeat.

I’m curious why the president would listen to FPI, given that the signatories to its letter were uniformly wrong about going into Iraq, a point made not-too-subtly in this letter from the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy (full disclosure: I’m a signatory to the letter, and a founder of the Coalition). Be that as it may, if the president were to do as FPI asks, I’m confident that what limited support there is for the ambitious nation-building project in Afghanistan would collapse entirely.

But I guess we won’t know until it is tried.

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In keeping with the PSA’s charter, we’re seeing bipartisan consensus emerging around U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The bad news? There are actually two bipartisan consensuses.

Technically, that is impossible. Consensus means “general agreement” or “a view reached by a group as a whole” so there can’t really be more than one.

And that is the problem. So long as the right is fighting the right, and others on the left are fighting the left, policymakers will be inclined to focus on other policy issues, content to let Afghan policy drift, and hope for a miraculous turnaround (e.g. Karzai becomes less corrupt and more competent; the Afghan economy begins to produce something other than opium; the Pashtuns decide to make common cause with the Tajiks, Turkmen and Hazara; Afghan men decide that Afghan women should have rights, etc). Our men and women in uniform, engaged increasingly in armed social work are caught in the middle while the pointy-heads pull on their respective chins.

Certain leading voices on the right agree with others on the left that we must redefine our ends in Afghanistan, and begin exploring ways to draw down the military presence there. My colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter have just completed a comprehensive study making this case (you can get a preview here), and will present it for the first time at Cato on Monday, September 14th.

A familiar group of hawks and neocons dismiss such sentiments as defeatist bordering on treasonous. Others suggest that talk of withdrawal is simply premature.

The debate got a jolt this week when George Will’s Tuesday column in the Washington Post declared that it was “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

News of the Will column broke late Monday night. Bill Kristol — tipped off, no doubt, by the Post‘s editors who agree with him — had his response ready by 9 am.

The salient question: Would the GOP follow Will or Bill? By 4 pm, we had our answer when Michael Steele and the RNC weighed in…on Kristol’s side.

There is a debate on the left as well. George Will’s position echoes a stance adopted by Sen. Russ Feingold last month, and repeated this morning on NPR (with Rep. Jim McGovern). But scholars at the left-leaning Center for New American Security and the Brookings Institution have joined forces with those from AEI and CSIS in recent weeks to make the case for increasing the commitment to Afghanistan, and explicitly discouraging any talk of withdrawal any time soon. (See, for example, this account by The Nation‘s Bob Dreyfuss.)

The public favors withdrawal. A CBS News poll found that 41 percent of Americans want “troops to start coming home, up from 33 percent in April and just 24 percent in February. Support for increasing the number of troops dropped from 39 percent in April to just 25 percent now.” A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken last month found that for the first time since they began asking the question, a majority of Americans no longer think the war in Afghanistan has been worth the costs.

As noted, however, a vociferous — and bipartisan — group dismisses public sentiment, or else blames Obama for not expending sufficient political capital to rally public support. This faction says our objectives in Afghanistan are, if anything, insufficiently bold, and that we need more resources, and much more time, in order to achieve them.

The most outspoken of these is Max Boot, who weighed in on the pages of the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. After repeating a litany of claims that victory is within our grasp, and threats of dire consequences were we to narrow our objectives, Boot concludes:

Until now international forces and their Afghan partners have lacked the will and resources to implement a classic counterinsurgency plan designed to secure the populace. But that is precisely what Gen. Stanley McChrystal will undertake—assuming he gets the resources he needs from Washington.

In the end, the debate over what the public will support is based on unknowable factors. Polls are a snap-shot, and public opinion changes, sometimes quite dramatically.

Boot believes that the public will rally to the cause in Afghanistan, a mission to create a functioning democracy in a land trapped somewhere between the 12th and 14th century, if the message is delivered by a credible leader, and supported by a wise and far-sighted bipartisan coalition in Congress (think McCain-Lieberman).

I am skeptical.

There is only one way to know who is right.

The president should go before the American people and honestly explain: the likely costs of our current strategy; the likelihood of victory; and the likely consequences that would ensue if we were to adopt alternative strategies, including the small footprint advocated by George Will on Tuesday.

But President Obama must be honest. The costs of our current strategy will be very high. More troops, more money, more casualties. The likelihood of victory is 50-50, at best (most nation-building missions fail, so I’m being charitable here). We will have to be there for many years; honest analysts admit that the commitment would likely extend for decades. We might like allies to help us, but they aren’t much interested.

I’m hungry for this debate. The policy in Afghanistan might ultimately prove the decisive factor in rectifying the gap between what the public wants and what the policymakers are giving them. As noted at the outset, my only regret is that our men and women in uniform are paying the price in the meantime, while the policymakers and pundits dither.

But we cannot postpone this debate any longer. To pursue a chronically under-resourced strategy is worse than counterproductive — it is immoral. To pursue such a strategy because the leaders fear that they cannot be honest with the American people is repugnant.

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I don’t dispute that it is an exceptionally capable aircraft, and I don’t question the need for defending the airspace over, and the approaches to, the United States. But I long ago concluded that the F-22 is far too expensive (over $350 million per plane, when one takes account of all the costs of the program), and ultimately designed for a different fight, in a different era.

Indeed, in my book, The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free, I single out the F-22 as one of five weapons platforms that deserve special scrutiny. And I concluded that this expensive aircraft — the most expensive fighter plane in history – should be cut in order to make room for other programs, and other technologies, better aligned to our long-term national security needs.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, among many others, agrees. In a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago last week, Gates pondered aloud:

[I]f we can’t bring ourselves to make this tough but straightforward decision [to terminate the program at 187 aircraft] — reflecting the judgment of two very different presidents, two different secretaries of defense, two chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff, and the current Air Force Secretary and Chief of Staff, where do we draw the line? And if not now, when? If we can’t get this right — what on earth can we get right?

This Friday, July 24th, I will be discussing my book at the New American Foundation, and at the risk of tipping my hand too much, I plan to focus my remarks around Bob Gates’ plaintive question. I’m appearing at New America at the invitation of NAF Fellow Michael Cohen, and that seems the perfect venue, and this the perfect time, to focus on the topic of defense procurement and the opportunitity costs – the trade offs between public spending on defense and public and private spending elsewhere – that we too often take for granted.

I’m fortunate to have a very distinguished panel appearing with me. In addition to Michael as the chair and moderator, I’ll be joined by Gordon Adams of the Stimson Center, and Michael Lind of New America. All three individuals, along with other distinguished scholars at New America, including Steve Clemons, Bill Hartung, and Patrick Doherty, are perceptive and knowledgeable critics of our national security strategy. All are aware of the costs associated with maintaining global military dominance, and all have put forward sensible proposals for reforming the way we do business.

In The Power Problem, I offer my own alternative approach, but I’m looking forward to some healthy skepticism as much as words of support and praise, and I can count on NAF to put on a great program. So whether you are a fan or a critic of our current national security strategy, come out for the show. If you think the F-22 is worth price of three F-15s, come tell me why. If you think the defense budget is a bargain at 4.5 percent of GDP, be there to make the case.

I’ve had enough of stale Inside-the-Beltway debates where the panelists all jockey to affirm the conventional wisdom. Let’s see if we can generate a serious debate, over the most important function of government — our national defense.

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The subject on everyone’s mind: force levels. Saying that he was “a little light,” Nicholson hinted that he could use more forces, probably thousands more. “We don’t have enough force to go everywhere,” Nicholson said.

Of course he doesn’t. One senior military commander confided, in Woodward’s telling, ”that there would need to be more than 100,000 troops to execute the counterinsurgency strategy of holding areas and towns after clearing out the Taliban insurgents. That is at least 32,000 more than the 68,000 currently authorized.”

So, Nicholson and other commanders were asking: Can we expect to receive additional troops in Afghanistan any time soon?

Jones’s answer: don’t bet on it.

The retired Marine Corps general reminded his audience in Helmand that Obama has approved two increases already. Going beyond merely an endorsement of the outgoing Bush admiministration’s decision to more than double the force in Afghanistan, Obama accepted the recommendation of his advisers to send an additional 17,000, and then shortly thereafter another 4,000.

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops,…if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have “a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.” Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF — which in the military and elsewhere means “What the [expletive]?”

Nicholson and his colonels — all or nearly all veterans of Iraq – seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.

Nicholson and his Marines should be concerned. But so should all Americans. The men and women in our military have been given a mission that is highly dependent upon a very large number of troops, and they don’t have a very large number of troops. The clear, hold and build strategy is dangerous and difficult – even when you have the troop levels that the military’s doctrine recommends: 20 troops per 1,000 indigenous population. In a country the size of Afghanistan (with an estimated population of 33 million), that wouldn’t be 100,000 troops, that would be 660,000 troops.

Pacifying all of Afghanistan would be nearly impossible with one half that number of troops. It is foolhardy to even attempt such a mission with less than a sixth that many.

So, what gives? (Or, as the military folks might say, “Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot?”)

It is doubtful that anyone in the White House, the Pentagon, or on Capitol Hill honestly believes that 70,000 U.S. troops can turn Afghanistan into a central Asian version of Alabama – or even Algeria, for that matter. They might reasonably object that they aren’t trying to pacify the whole country, but rather the most restive provinces in the south and east. Perhaps barely 10 million people live there (which my calculator says would require a force of 200,000). Besides, they might go on, the 20 per 1,000 figure is just a guideline, just a rule-of-thumb. Some missions have succeeded with fewer than that ratio of troops, just as other missions have failed with troop ratios in excess of 20 : 1,000.

These seem to be nothing more than thin rationalizations. They reflect the fact that the American public would not support an open-ended mission in Afghanistan that would occupy essentially all of our Marine and Army personnel for many years. The “70,000 troops for who knows how long” is a political statement. They are pursuing a strategy shaped by focus groups and polls, rather than by doctrine and common sense.

No, that is not an argument for more troops. It is not an argument for ignoring public sentiment. It is an argument for a different mission.

The public’s growing ambivalence about the war in Afghanistan reflects a well-placed broader skepticism about population-centric counterinsurgency that are heavily dependent upon very large concentrations of troops staying in country for a very long period of time. Americans don’t support such missions, because the benefits don’t outweigh the costs. And they likely never will. They are equally skeptical of COIN’s intellectual cousin, ambitious nation-building projects.

And if I’m right, and if no one actually believes that killing suspected Taliban, destroying fields of poppies, building roads and bridges,  establishing judicial standards and training Afghan police is actually going to work, then, well,….

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

The mission in Afghanistan, especially the troop increases, appear more and more as face-saving gestures. A show of wanting to do something, even if policymakers doubt that it will actually succeed. It is a delaying action, a postponing of the inevitable, a kicking the can down the road.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that a miracle happens. I hope that the Taliban disappears. That Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Mohammed Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and every other bad guy I can name winds up dead on an Afghan battlefield. Tomorrow, preferably. I hope that all Afghans (girls and boys) get an education and earn a decent living. I hope that Hamid Karzai learns how to govern, Afghan judges learn how to judge, and that the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police quickly learn how to defend their own country.

In short, I hope that the people who are crafting our Afghan strategy know something that I don’t.

I fear, however, that the deaths and grievous injuries endured by our military personnel during this interim period, which may run for years or even decades, as we seek “peace with honor” or “a decent interval” (or pick your own favorite Vietnam cliche), will weigh heavily on the consciences of policy makers if, in the end, they have merely burdened these men and women with an impossible task.

Ask Robert McNamara how that feels.

[Cross-posted from Cato - at - Liberty]

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But the cognitive dissonance of those who would have the U.S. government actively promote democracy around the world, and who would have the President of the United States speak openly of his desire to overturn the established political order in dozens of places around the world, goes deeper still. Bush apparently never figured out that full-throated American support for would-be reformers often undermined their standing in the eyes of voters. Under the pro-democracy Bush, the relatively more pro-American politicians in, for example, the Palestinian Authority, Iraq, and, Lebanon, all fared poorly.

Bush speeches were often marked by sweeping assertions and moral clarity. Obama, however, is the master of subtlety. He mentioned neither Lebanon nor Hezbollah in his Cairo speech. Likewise, the name “Ahmadinejad” never passed his lips, and yet, when the president accurately characterized Holocaust denial as “baseless”, “ignorant”, “hateful” the obvious mental image in the minds of hundreds of millions of listeners was of a certain skinny, bearded man in a Members Only jacket, arguably the most famous Holocaust denier in the world.

Now, some have declared the United States the clear winner of the election in Lebanon, and have singled out Obama’s speech as crucial to the equation. This past weekend, Lebanese votes dealt a clear setback to Hezbollah and its Christian Maronite ally, Michael Aoun, and handed power to a diverse coalition under the leadership of Saad Hariri, son of the late-Rafiq Hariri, the multibillionaire and former prime minister whose killing in 2005 prompted a series of protests (beginning on March 14th, hence the name of Saad Hariri’s coalition — “The March 14th alliance” — and the Cedar Revolution).

Among those willing to credit Obama’s new approach with these fortunate results is blogger and University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, who weighed in earlier this week in Salon under the deliberately provocative title: “Obama Wins an Election in the Middle East.”

The evidence surely cannot support such an assertion, a point which Cole freely concedes. Elections are decided on the basis of local, even parochial, issues — jobs, quality of life, and vague notions of “right track vs. wrong track” — and it would be premature, at best, to suggest that the Obama speech, or even a series of subtle changes to U.S. foreign policy initiated over the past six months, were decisive factors.

Nor should we overlook the not-very-subtle threat issued by Vice President Biden during a recent trip to Beirut. At a press conference held in advance of the elections, Biden explained, “We will evaluate the shape of our assistance programs based on the composition of the new government and the policies it advocates.”

Cole continues:

Even before Biden’s visit and Obama’s speech, most of the Lebanese public had probably already made up its mind about the arrogant and presumptuous Hezbollah-dominated opposition. The March 14 Alliance won because of the strength of the local economy, the desire for tourism, and anger at Hezbollah for streetfighting in 2008 that left 11 dead, more than a year of protests and sit-ins, and the Hezbollah bloc’s ultimately successful attempt to strong-arm its way to effective veto power in the government.

[...]

Above all, this election was a referendum on which policies would lead to peace and prosperity. Whether they had their eye on Biden’s stick or on Obama’s carrot, the Lebanese voters made it clear that they did not believe [Hezbollah leader Hasan] Nasrallah could deliver.

These caveats aside, it is still useful to contrast the before and after pictures from the Bush years with what has happened in the past week.  We might have still more grist for the mill from today’s elections in Iran.

“It’s Obama’s time in Beirut, not Khamenei’s” declared Cole. Within a few hours (barring a run-off), we’ll know better if it is still Khamenei’s time in Tehran.

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President Obama’s much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world is just a few days away. We now know the location (Egypt) and the venue (Cairo University). We know that the president will also visit Saudi Arabia, another hugely important Muslim state. We know the context of his travels to the region: Obama enjoys relatively favorable ratings among Muslims, especially when contrasted with those of President George Bush, but many are reserving judgment, waiting to see if Obama will actually change U.S. foreign policy, or merely talk about doing so. The test case is the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian dispute. But the president will also want to talk about Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, he will hope that North Korea’s behavior doesn’t grow even more erratic at a time when his attention will be focused elsewhere.

The Peace Process: As I noted in January, no one ever said it was going to be easy to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Last week reminds us that 1) that the essential issues are well understood, 2) the two parties are at an impasse, and 3) the United States is caught in the middle. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reaffirmed the U.S. government’s opposition to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “A stop to settlements,” she said emphatically, “not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions.” The next day, the Israeli government responded with equal clarity. Israeli Cabinet Minister Benny Begin said “natural growth” of existing West Bank settlements would continue. “The Israeli Jewish towns and villages should develop according to the natural development rate and this must not be stopped,” he said. And just in case anyone questioned the official Palestinian position, Rafiq Husseini spelled it out: “No peace can be reached with one settler remaining in Palestine.” The expansion of the settlements is the key stumbling bloc to a resumption of serious negotiations. What is President Obama prepared to do to stop them? What can he do?

Iraq: The war still isn’t over, there are still nearly 140,000 U.S. troops on the ground there, and they won’t all be out until 2012. Gen. Casey hinted that the Army is prepared to stay longer. That isn’t consistent with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) negotiated between the outgoing Bush administration and the Maliki government in Baghdad, but Casey appears to be laying the groundwork for any last-minute change of plans. Regardless, the United States needs the cooperation of Iraq’s neighbors to prevent the country from falling back into sectarian chaos as U.S. troops do draw down, and to contain the violence if the worse-case scenario occurs.

Iran: With presidential elections less than three weeks away, President Obama is surely hoping that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s days in power are numbered. But there is little that the United States can do to hasten that end, and if Washington is perceived to be interfering in Iran’s internal politics, that will surely strengthen Ahmadinejad’s otherwise very weak hand. Obama was right to take a wait-and-see approach to Iran, and should urge other countries in the region to do the same until after June 12th.

Afghanistan/Pakistan: They aren’t Middle Eastern countries, but they are Muslim countries, and the conduct of military operations there clearly affects the United States’ global standing, and therefore on the level of support that we can expect going forward. President Obama should reiterate at every possible opportunity our essential goals, what we are prepared to do to achieve them, and what others can do to help us.

In general, during the course of his travels, President Obama is likely to adopt a conciliatory, even deferential tone. He will stress the need for cooperation over confrontation, and for problem-solving over trouble-making. But so long as the rejectionists and the extremists can dictate events on the ground, he will also need a strong dose of humility.
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He urges President Obama to resist the impulse to expand our objectives in Afghanistan, and should not dedicate far more resources to the effort if we appear to be falling short of a few modest goals. He wisely counsels that the United States is unlikely to convince Iran to forego nuclear enrichment or North Korea to give up its weapons, and we should therefore focus on the more essential and achievable tasks of intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities and pressure on North Korea (in concert with China) to prevent material and technology from being diverted to others.

He concludes:

Some will argue that defining success down is defeatist. And certainly, one can imagine an Afghanistan or an Iraq that becomes a Jeffersonian democracy and an Iran or a North Korea that gets out of the nuclear business. But such outcomes are improbable at best and more likely fantasy. Moreover, far greater involvement and investment would still fail to bring them about.

The alternatives are outcomes that are good enough and commensurate with interests and costs. The moment calls for defining success down. The United States is stretched economically and militarily. Better partial success we can afford than expensive failures we cannot.

Les Gelb, CFR’s former president, makes similar arguments in his latest book, Power Rules.

Few people in Washington rise through the ranks by talking about what we can’t or shouldn’t do, which partly explains why the voices of restraint are almost always drowned out by the vocal few calling for action. (For more on this point, see Steve Walt’s recent commentary at FP.com and Justin Logan’s observations on the Cato blog.)

At the end of the day, therefore, I’m not convinced that Haass or Gelb, or anyone else, can consistently prevail with their judicious counsel to not act. Haass was on the inside when the second Bush administration was spoiling for a fight with Saddam Hussein, and neither he nor Colin Powell was able to stop that disastrous war. (Haass told NPR’s Robert Siegel that he was only 60 percent opposed to the war, so it is not even clear that he tried that hard to stop it.)

As I explain in my book, The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous and Less Free, because even sensible people who are strongly opposed to foreign military intervention will often lose the intellectual battles within the executive branch, we should return to the Founders’ prescription that the war powers be controlled by the people, through the Congress, not the president. 

“This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it,” explained James Wilson to the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention. “It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress.” James Madison later saw this provision as perhaps the most important one of the entire document. “In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.”

Noble sentiments, for sure, but the Constitutional prohibitions against Executive Branch wars of choice (note to Haass: they’re almost all wars of choice) have completely broken down, in large measure because partisanship trumps institutional pride. We therefore also need a more restrictive attitude toward the use of force, to permeate all branches of government, but also among the public at large. We must understand before we go to war how a particular military mission advances U.S. national security, and that our men and women in uniform have been given a clear and achievable objective.

If we were to get away from the dangerous and counterproductive notion that the United States is — and should forever be — the world’s policeman, we could maintain a much smaller military. It would be designed to defend vital U.S. interests, not to fight other people’s wars, and build other people’s countries. And this smaller, focused military would constrain the president’s propensity to do something, and make it easier for him to turn aside the interminable requests for the U.S. military to ride to the rescue.

All states, even enormously powerful ones, need to make choices. Haass makes this point eloquently, and I welcome his important contribution to the debate.

[Cross-posted from Cato - at - Liberty]

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We do not need to reorient our grand strategy to deal with pirates. We don’t need to reshape the U.S. Navy to fight a motley band of young men in leaky boats. As my colleague Ben Friedman has written, piracy is a problem, but decidely minor relative to many other global security challenges.

But some are criticizing the approach taken to resolve last week’s standoff. They say that the only way to truly eliminate the piracy problem is to attack and ultimately clean out the pirates’s sanctuaries in lawless Somalia. This “solution” fits well with the broader push within the Washington foreign policy community that would deal with our security problems by fixing failed states.

I have gone on at length, usually with my colleagues Justin Logan and Ben Friedman, on the many reasons why a strategy for fixing failed states is unwise and unnecessary. I won’t expand on that thesis here, other than to point out that of all failed states in the world, Somalia is arguably the most failed of the lot. “Fixing” it would require a massive investment of personnel, money, and time — resources that would be better spent elsewhere.

Mackubin Owens offers one of the more intriguing defenses of this approach in a just published e-note for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Owens likens a strategy of fixing Somalia to Gen. Andrew Jackson’s military operations in Florida, a story that features prominently in John Lewis Gaddis’s Surprise, Security and the American Experience. As Owens notes, when some members of President James Monroe’s cabinet wanted to punish Jackson for exceeding his mandate — in the course of his military campaign he captured and executed two British citizens accused of cavorting with the marauders who had attacked American citizens – Secretary of State John Quincy Adams jumped to Jackson’s defense, and proposed a different tack. He demanded that Spain either take responsibility for cleaning up Florida, or else give it up. And we all know what happened. Under the terms of Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, Florida became a territory of the United States. 26 years later, it became our 27th state.

I’ve vacationed in Florida many times. Walt Disney World is wonderful for the kids; I’ve been there six times. I spent three memorable days watching March Madness in Miami a few years back. Spring training baseball is great fun.  Adams couldn’t have imagined any of these things when he acquired a vast swampland; he cared only that Florida under Spanish control, or lack thereof, posed a threat.

Here is where the parallels to the present day get complicated. I’ll admit that I’ve never been to Somalia. Perhaps they have their own version of South Beach, or could have some day. But I’m frankly baffled by the mere intimation that our national security is so threatened by chaos there that we need to take ownership of the country’s — or the entire Horn of Africa region’s — problems.

And yet, that is what many people believe. And this is not a new phenomenon. In many respects, we have chosen to treat all of the world’s ungoverned spaces as the modern-day equivalent of Spanish Florida.

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