This is the last post I will write before the presidential election. I do not pretend to know what the outcome will be but if the polls are right it appears that Senator Obama will be the next U.S. president. If so, it is likely that it won’t be long before, as his running mate Sen. Joe Biden said, that he will be tested. The same thing could be said even if Sen. McCain wins.

The truth is that in respect to many different foreign policy and military issues the United States has been acting like a not very proficient juggler, tossing balls into the air in an effort to keep them from falling to the ground.

The truth is that the time that some dubbed the “unipolar moment” which all the neoconservatives were crowing about years ago, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and U.S. victory in Operation Desert Storm, is long gone.

Just consider what the next president of the United States will confront. In respect to Iraq there might not be an accepted Status of Forces Agreement, meaning U.S. troops will lack legal authority to remain there. U.S. officials say they would have to cease operations and confine troops to bases unless some other arrangement, such as an extension of the U.N. mandate, could be worked out.

In respect to Iran, aside from its nuclear program, a new president will have to deal with what seems to be an ongoing program of U.S. sponsored covert violence to bring about regime change. A new paper by the Century Foundation detailing this program concludes that:

We can expect more incidents, and we can expect the risk of retaliatory incidents to increase. As that happens, the point resurfaces. When does Iran reach its tipping point and begin to fight back, not with words, but with expanded terrorist acts?

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One might think that the current crisis roiling the American economy might be an opportunity for Senators Obama and McCain to spell out their differences on one important issue; U.S. military spending.

Consider the fact that on September 24th, during the fight over the Wall Street bail out, the House of Representatives passed, bill passed by a vote of 392-39, a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without any public protest or meaningful press comment. This show there is unlikely to be any significant pressure to cut military or related national security spending.

Instead, Senators Obama and McCain seem to be reading off the same page. That is the kind of bipartisanship we do no need. The time is long past for someone to stand up and say the obvious; that both military and associated “national security” spending is out of control and continually getting more outrageous.

The latter category includes nuclear weapons spending at the Energy department, plus the State department, as well as Veterans Affairs, and the intelligence agencies. All together that totals exceeds a trillion dollars annually.

Let’s stipulate that there are multiple factors which impact U.S. military spending. And yes, while the financial crisis will increase pressure to reduce military spending, other countervailing political factors will ensure that there likely will be no significant reduction.

Why is this? The primary reason is that the United States is at war, even if is an undeclared one and one which the country is largely disengaged and removed from. And no politician dares cutting military spending for fear of being accused being ‘soft on defense” or not “supporting the troops.”

Unlike the situation at the end of the 1980s and early 19980s there is nothing comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which drove significant reduction in U.S. military spending.

Today the situation is reversed. The United States is fighting the “long war” (formerly known at the global war on terror) and politically both the incumbent administration and the opposition party are reluctant to cut military spending at such a time.

Sadly, there is nothing in the campaign platforms of either Sen. John McCain or Barrack Obama to suggest that they would significantly reduce military spending.

In fact McCain says the United States must enlarge the size of its armed forces. That alone will guarantee that operation and support costs, traditionally one of the highest categories of U.S. military spending will stay high.

Likewise Sen. Obama supports plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marines by 27,000 troops.

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Another deal with North Korea is on the cusp of falling apart. Anyone who is actually surprised by this should feel free to leave a comment below.

So what happened this time? Mikhail Gorbachev says that the U.S. reneged on our deal with North Korea by leaving them on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. That’s a bit like the House Republicans saying that the first financial bailout bill failed because Nancy Pelosi made a partisan speech. It’s a convenient excuse, but it ignores the fundamentals of the situation.

The U.S.-DPRK deal failed because there may actually be no way to have a deal with the North Koreans. Sure, Christopher Hill, who has worked himself to the bone on this issue, just ended a visit to North Korea , defibrillator paddles in hand, to try and shock some life into this negotiation. It is unclear what effect his visit had.

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It would seem odd for this blog not to mention the agreement in the Six Party Talks to close the North Korean nuclear reactor at Yongbyon (covered in all of the major newspapers, but for the basic story, see the New York Times). But I find it difficult to get excited about this announcement, so I have little to say other than it’s “big news” — a point event compared to the daily feed of bombing announcements in Iraq, for example.

We’ve announced agreements with North Korea before, only to discover that the Korean language text differed from the English or Chinese text, so there was never a real agreement at all. Or as we found with the 1994 Agreed Framework (which seems quite similar in basic outlines to this new deal), perhaps neither side intends to follow through on its commitment (in the 1990s / early 2000s, the North Koreans continued their nuclear program despite the Agreed Framework, while the U.S., Korea, and Japan failed to deliver the heavy fuel oil or to build the “proliferation-safe” nuclear reactors that we promised to build under the Agreed Framework). Ultimately, this agreement is just a document that neither side has much ability to enforce; we’re in nearly the same situation we were in yesterday, where we can harangue each other at diplomatic conferences, but neither side has much compellance capability.

Dan Drezner posted some interesting commentary on yet another roadblock: the U.S. Congress might not agree to implement the deal, although Dan sees reason to believe that the Democrats might favor implementing something that looks a lot like the deal that a Democratic president negotiated in 1994. In his academic work, Dan has suggested that aid payments to adversaries are likely to elicit real policy change more often than we might think — more often than they might elicit real policy change from our friends. Perhaps so. This North Korea case might be a real test of the bribery side of economic statecraft (more generously called “linkage” by advocates): have we offered a big enough bribe to convince North Korea to make a real change to its national security policy? Such a bribe ought to be really big — but maybe we’ve found one that’s big enough. Or maybe they’ll just take the money and reneg. I’m no optimist on this one.

I am completely swamped by media requests on the North Korean nuclear test. I just wrapped up an hour-long program on KQED in San Francisco. All told, I’ve done over a dozen interviews in the past three days. Cato has published quite a few of studies on Korea over the years, and I have edited a number of these, so I am reasonably comfortable with the subject. And while I haven’t published much on the subject, that will soon change.

Rather than write a long post of my own, I wanted to point to some of the excellent articles that I have seen over the past few days, on the two most urgent foreign policy challenges facing the United States — North Korea and Iraq.

On North Korea:

Although most news stories and opinion articles have focused on what the United States must do, or has failed to do, with respect to the North Korean nuclear program, I have always argued that the threat posed by North Korea’s weapons program is far greater for its neighbors – especially China, South Korea, and Japan — than it is for the United States. Accordingly, these countries must take the lead in resolving the crisis, and this might mean putting aside long-standing suspicions and even hostility.

The United States obviously has an interest, not least because tens of thousands of American military personnel are stationed on the Korean peninsula and in Japan, well within range of conventional North Korean arms, let alone nukes, but it makes little sense for the United States to attempt to play a leading role in resolving the crisis. Much as leaders in both political parties would like to pin the blame on “the other guys”, there is in fact much blame to go around, and ultimately, this might be one of those truly vexing international problems that defy easy (or even palatable) solutions. In such a situation, one is frequently forced to choose from a list of unattractive options. That is where we are now. (Hint: That is where we are with Iran and Iraq, too.)

Two op eds which adopt the “less is more” approach (with respect to the U.S. role in the crisis) are:

Ted Galen Carpenter, “Chinese Must Pluck Kim From Nuke Perch,” New York Daily News, 10/10/06; and

Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, “North Korea Isn’t Our Problem,” Los Angeles Times, 10/11/06.

(Lieven and Hulsman discussed their book Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World at Cato yesterday. The book includes a discussion about what to do about North Korea, as well as Iran and other aspiring nuclear weapons states.)

On Iraq:

News organizations have picked up on the recent study of civilian casualties in Iraq, which estimates that 600,000 have died as a result of the war. A similar study, released in October 2004, received relatively little coverage by the major media outlets, but was the subject of an hour-long radio program on the series “This American Life.”

This most recent study has narrowed the margin of error from the earlier study by polling more Iraqis, but both studies were based on accepted statistical sampling methods. It will be interesting to see if this most recent study gets more attention. (Indeed, it already has. See, for example, the stories in today’s New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post, among others).

On the subject of the dire situation in Iraq, Cato will be hosting Peter Galbraith, author of The End of Iraq, at a book forum at Noon on Thursday, October 19th. I will comment, as well as Marina Ottaway from the Carnegie Endowment. For more details visit the Cato web site.

The U.S. alleged this week that North Korea is preparing to test fire a multi-stage missile with the theoretical range to reach American territory. Of course, such a missile, if deployed, would offer the North Koreans the next step of nuclear deterrence against the U.S. So it is not hard to understand why the North Koreans might want to test that capability, and it is also not hard to understand why the U.S. might not want them to take that step. A missile test is a matter of power and interests.

Japan and South Korea have more reasons than the U.S. to worry about North Korean military capabilities. They live close to North Korea and have direct, intrinsic conflicts with the North Korean regime. So it is little surprise that they have joined the American efforts to dissuade the North Koreans from their possible missile test.

What is curious in this tiff is the role of the UN. Japanese officials in particular have threatened the North Koreans that they will lodge a protest of the test with the Security Council [as if that "threat" would impose a real cost -- E.G.]. And the U.S. Ambassador to Japan got caught up in the same spirit, suggesting that the U.S. might seek UN sanctions against North Korea in the wake of a missile test. But on what grounds would the Security Council act in this scenario? (more…)