"From Merely Stupid to Dangerous"

The Bipartisan Policy Center has chosen a moderately provocative title for its new briefing on how sequestration will affect the military.  There's a lot in there, so let me pull out a few key points:

• There's hasn't been all that much pain so far, because sequestration cuts defense authorization (what we plan to spend over the next several years) not defense outlays (what we spend each year). (Slide 49)
• Half of all sequestration cuts fall on DOD even though it accounts for only 20% of the federal budget. (Slide 4)
• The entirety of the DOD cuts fall on only half the organization -- its operations budget, purchasing new weapons, and research. (Slide 18)
• The cost of personnel has doubled since 2000. We now pay $110 billion more per year for a force with 100k fewer troops. Sequestration does nothing to fix this. (Slide 27)

When Will the Last Pair of American Boots Leave Afghanistan?

Max Boot reads the tea leaves in the WaPo and fears that all previous talk of a long-term partnership with Kabul will be soon be rendered meaningless.

I think significant elements of the administration, starting at the top, are looking for a way out of Afghanistan and they are using disputes with Karzai as an excuse. The president who once called Afghanistan the necessary war appears to be motivated now primarily by the necessity of disengagement, at least as he sees it. [Not just "necessary" but the "war we must win"! --ed.]

The results for U.S. interests and for Afghanistan are likely to be dire, because if U.S. troops leave, so will our NATO allies. And the U.S. and its allies will be unlikely to continue pouring in the billions of dollars necessary to keep the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government functioning. That makes a collapse, of the kind that occurred after the Soviet withdrawal, much more likely–and with it a return of the Taliban and Haqqanis and their al-Qaeda allies.

In the old days, people talked about the lessons of the US being deeply involved in Afghanistan in the 1980s then suddenly pulling out and the whole thing becoming such a mess we had to go back in. Not much talk about that anymore.

Incredible, in the Sense of Not Being Credible

Dan Drezner, one of my favorite bloggers, has been thinking about the concept of credibility.  It's been invoked throughout recent decades in US foreign policy, from the Cuban Missile Crisis, to Vietnam, to the Balkans. But is there hard evidence (of the kind that scholars like) which proves that credibility exists and that it helps a country achieve its interests?

Last month, Dan tried to dismantle the arguments for credibility's significance made by former SecDefs Gates and Panetta. Yesterday, Dan added a twist by arguing that credibility is crucial in domestic political conflicts -- apparently there is one going on in the United States right now although I am unaware of the details.

My Kind of American Exceptionalism

Today on Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf has penned a column entitled Power Paradox: Why America Can Only Be Great by Being Unexceptional. In it, he sympathizes Vladimir Putin's op-ed assault on American exceptionalism, although Rothkopf's arguments manage to be misguided without descending to the level of Soviet hilarity that Putin achieved. Rothkopf writes,

As the president himself has asserted as recently as his U.N. General Assembly speech, the United States believes that it alone among nations has the right to go "on a break" from international law whenever it suits us. This is the fundamental dimension of American exceptionalism.

I don't often put on my Obama-defender hat, but Rothkopf's interpretation is remarkably unfair. What the President said was

While the U.N. was designed to prevent wars between states, increasingly we face the challenge of preventing slaughter within states...I have made it clear that even when America’s core interests are not directly threatened, we stand ready to do our part to prevent mass atrocities and protect human rights.

In other words, when international law is held up as an excuse for passivity in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide, America will consider doing what is right, not what is legal according to an incoherent regime that is mainly honored in the breach by those who seek legitimacy for their crimes, not protect the innocent (cf. Putin, Vladimir).  

Very Soft Power

Although Joseph Nye coined the term 'soft power' in his 1990 book Bound to Lead, it's always striking to come across examples of Americans in previous generations who had tremendous faith in the concept, although the never coined the phrase.

For example, as the US weighed the question of whether to intervene in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1824, Rep. Daniel Webster informed the House that

The age has undergone a change; there is a force in public opinion, which, in the long run, will outweigh all the physical force that can be brought to oppose it." (Quoted in Marion Smith, The Myth of American Isolationism, p.19)

In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson explained that public opinion "is a sanction which is growing stronger every day where public is growing more enlightened." Thus the surest way to enforce the Kellogg-Briand peace pact was

"Not by seeking to add extraneous sanctions of force, but by providing the machinery for enlightening and strengthening the present sanction of public opinion." (Quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy in the Great Depression, p.26)

Thankfully, this kind of naivete doesn't prevail today among any serious policy analysts, but it is a sober reminder of the excesses to which we are prone.

Thucydides, the Shutdown, and the Tea Party

William Galston writes in the Journal,

Tea-party Republicans, who are driving the GOP strategy, seem to view the conflict as a replay of the Peloponnesian War which started, argued Thucydides, because Spartans thought they had to act against the rising power of Athens before it was too late.

I wonder, is this the first and only time a columnist will attribute to the Tea Party such profound historical literacy? Of course, as a student of the great Donald Kagan, I feel compelled to point out that Thucydides may have oversimplified quite a bit.

How the US Military Became Cool

It certainly isn't the haircuts. But as my friend Phil Carter and his co-author observe in the Post,

For Gen-Xers like us, Clancy’s novels provided our first view of the inner workings of national security: the weapons systems, the sensors, the command structures and the acronyms. (Oh, did Clancy love acronyms!) Of course other books and movies covered similar ground, but none with Clancy’s technocratic detail. Unless you subscribed to various Jane’s publications — one of which is on Jack Ryan’s desk in “Red October” — you would never have been exposed to minutiae about sonar buoys near Iceland. You felt like a 12-year-old military expert reading those books.

A Proud Moment for Human Rights

Michael Rubin gives credit where it is due. The European Parliament just bestowed its Sakharov human rights prize on Malala Yousafzai, the teenage blogger from Pakistani who survived a Taliban bullet to the head, because of her advocacy for women's education. Also nominated for the prize: Edward Snowden.

A Heartbeat Away from a Communist White House

This week, the New Yorker reviews Thomas Devine's new book about Henry Wallace's third-party campaign for the White House in 1948. The big surprise is that the reviewer, Alex Ross, endorses Devine's book as a rigorous and devastating account of just how thoroughly the Wallace campaign was dominated by Communists.  Literal, pro-Moscow, pro-Stalin Communists -- not just well-meaning liberals branded as Communists by McCarthyites and Republican spin doctors.

Wallace in 1948

Arguably, this is old news, since Emory historian Harvey Klehr reviwed Devine's book four months ago for the Weekly Standard and said exactly the same thing.  Or, you might say this is very old news, since UT-Austin historian Robert Divine wrote in 1974 that

By the end of 1947, Wallace had lost the support of much of the liberal constituency and himself surrounded more and more by Communists and fellow travelers who were out to use him for their own purposes. (Divine, Foreign Policy and US Presidential Elections, 1940-1948, p.171)

On the other hand, as Ronald Radosh points out, also in the Standard, there continues to be an active cadre of Wallace hagiographers who believe that his pacific intentions could've prevented the Cold War.

In the past decade, scores of books have celebrated [Wallace's] life and record, all in the same mold. They include leftist journalist Richard J. Walton’s Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War, Communist historian Norman D. Markowitz’s The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948, a biography by Edward and Frederick Schapsmeier, Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and the War Years, Allen Yarnell’s Democrats and Progressives: The 1948 Presidential Election as a Test of Postwar Liberalism, and John C. Culver and John Hyde’s American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace.

Of course, one of the great hypotheticals of history will remain, "What if Wallace had kept his place on the Democratic ticket in 1944, instead of yielding it to Harry Truman?" As David McCullough documents in his Pulitzer-winning biography of Truman, the ailing Roosevelt pursued a vacillating and byzantine approach to the selection of his running mate (pp.292-320). Had the anti-Wallace faction been less astute, it might have been Wallace sitting next to Stalin at Potsdam.

Great Moments of Presidential Optimism

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Often attributed to Yogi Berra, the actual source of the quotation seems to be the physicist Niels Bohr, who himself borrowed it from others. Anyhow, as a rogue political scientist who frowns on his discipline's unquenchable thirst for predictive power, it's a quotation of which I am very fond. It came to mind because I was recently struck by two examples of presidential optimism that, at least in hindsight, seem shockingly naive.

Summit at Potsdam

In his Pulitzer-winning biography of Harry Truman, David McCullough says that Truman, upon his arrival at Potsdam, retained

his fundamental faith that most problems come down to misunderstandings between people, and that even the most complicated problems really weren't as complicated as they were made out to be, once everyone got to know each other...He was sure if he could meet Stalin and deal with him, then he could get to know Stalin and understand him. (pp.409-410)

Thankfully, Truman wised up later on. On a related note, I also came across this quote from Herbert Hoover, from a letter to his Secretary of State Henry Stimson, written in September 1929.

It seems to me that there is the most profound outlook for peace today that we have had at any time in the last half century...it occurs to me that the dangers of war during the next six or ten years...are inconceivably less than they have been at any period since the Great War.

Oops.  Btw, Hoover's quote can be found in Robert Ferrell's American Diplomacy in the Great Depression, p.19.

Welcome to Rogue State

Iran. Syria. North Korea. Zimbabwe. Venezuela. Belarus. Why not add one more rogue statue to the list? After all, this will be a kinder and gentler rogue that slices through illogical arguments and inflated pretensions, not political prisoners.

Although rogue states tend not to be concerned with intellectual property rights, once I came up with the name, I decided to see whether anyone else had gotten there first. As it turns out, there is another blog called Rogue State, which is an empty shell without a single post to its credit.  The proprietor of said blog is the mysterious "Mr. Incognito", who probably discovered that he could make better use of his time on the Craigslist casual encounters page.

This, however, is a blog about foreign policy and national security, with occasional forays into other political issues. It's a family-friendly blog, so I won't use cusswords, except for 'fracking', which still elicits a chuckle from Battlestar Galactica fans, but now mostly refers to a novel technology for producing natural gas.

Finally, I should mention that the name of this blog is also a tip of the hat to the late, lamented Rogue State Burgers, a fine purveyor of charbroiled goodness just a few blocks from my office. However, the proprietor of RSB has opened another pair of burger joints under the name Black and Orange, where nostalgic individuals such as myself can even order a "Rogue State" burger with spices, chipotle and cilantro. Yum.