Category: Foreign Policy

Categories
Foreign Policy Iran Politics The Opinionsphere

Signs of Hope: Iran

Roger Cohen in the New York Times has become a major supporter of engagement with Iran. After describing the continued provocations by Ayatollah Khamenei in response to Obama’s latest peace offering of sorts, he explains:

Khamenei also quieted the crowd when it began its ritual “Death to America” chant and he said this: “We’re not emotional when it comes to our important matters. We make decisions by calculation.”

Cohen sees the same opening with Iran that the esteemed foreign policy expert Les Gelb as interviewed by Barbara Slavin does (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

Iran as a society is more middle class and more prone to democracy than any other country in that part of the world. Within ten years, Iran will be our closest ally in the region.

Categories
Colombia Foreign Policy Mexico National Security Politics The Opinionsphere War on Drugs

The Price of Prohibition I: Propping Up The Mexican Cartels

[digg-reddit-me]We are keeping the finger in the dike.

Sgt. David Azuelo of the Tuscon, Arizona police force as quoted by Randal C. Archibold in The New York Times.

I’ve been arguing for some time that the War on Drugs and the prohibitionist policies underlying it must be ended for the sake of our national security. I’ve made the argument from a civil libertarian point of view; I’ve made the argument that the War on Drugs is interfering with the fight against terrorism; and I’ve made the argument based on the fact that this war is destabilizing our neighbors. 

Here’s a parallel argument:

The Pentagon listed Mexico as a country that might collapse suddenly into a civil war between the central government and the cartels. A top cabinet official in Mexico claimed that “unless [the cartels are] confronted, ‘the next president of the republic would be a narco-trafficker.” The levels of violence in the country now are astounding – with higher rates than those in Iraq in recent months – and they are continuing to spill over the border into America. We are currently supplying both sides of this conflict with weaponry and funds – and the conflict is escalating. Mexico is now following the route of Colombia by militarizing it’s approach to the problem of drugs. For decades, war raged in Colombia to stop the drug smugglers – inflicting an enormous cost on the country as they – in the words of an influential and prestigious report by former Mexican, Brazilian, and Mexican presidents, “implemented all conceivable measures to fight the drug trade in a massive effort whose benefits were not proportional to the vast amount of resources invested and the human costs involved.” The report explains that the “traumatic Colombian experience” should teach other nations “not to make the mistake of adopting the US prohibitionist policies.”

Yet, that is what Mexico is doing. For decades, America has waged a war on the suppliers of drugs and on drug users at home and abroad. The casualties have been high – but no matter the body count or the number of arrests has gone, the War on Drugs has remained “an utter failure.” This failure has allowed the reach of the Mexican cartels to extend far into America:

United States law enforcement officials have identified 230 cities, including Anchorage, Atlanta, Boston and Billings, Mont., where Mexican cartels and their affiliates “maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors.”

As Stephen Walt explained in Foreign Policy:

[O]ur policy helps enrich drug lords and make it possible for them to destabilize whole governments, as they are now doing in Mexico and Afghanistan. 

As The Economist reported:

[P]rohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before…[T]he war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless…

At the same time, the harm reduction strategy of the European Union, while mitigating the effects of drugs locally, has exacerbated the effects of drug production and smuggling elsewhere.

The failure of both the War on Drugs and the harm reduction strategy has created an enormous market incentive for smuggling, for money laundering, and for corrupting government officials. Together, these and other effects of the Drug War create a sense of lawlessness which is exactly where the cartels thrive. The cartels are able to thrive in part because the scale of their operations and the enormous profits generated give them both incentive and means to experiment with different methods of smuggling, money laundering, and corrupting officials. If there were a way to reduce these profits, it could undercut their successes in all of these areas and undermine the incentives that drive them to take these steps. The cartels might no longer be able to acquire military-grade weaponry; they might not be able to afford to buy subs to smuggle items in; they might not be able to afford to buy off the top Mexican drug enforcement official. 

We have reached the point that The Economist has characterized as a choice between “A calculated gamble, or another century of failure.” The calculated gamble is to legalize drugs, or at least marijuana.

People have asked me if legalizing marijuana would really make a difference in undercutting the Mexican cartels.

Marijuana represents 60 to 70% of the profits that fuel the Mexican drug cartels. Legalizing it would take away one of the main props holding them up – just as legalizing alcohol helped rollback the gangs that dominated American cities in the 1920s.

Violence in Mexico stemming from the drug war is destabilizing the country and spilling over into America. With a single move, we could remove the monopoloy which gives them 60 to 70% of the cartels’ revenue – in a single move, we could take away their “king crop.” Without the enormous profits of marijuana propping up the rest of the drug market, the costs of smuggling would increase. The distribution network would be pressured. The cost of bribing officials would likely increase as harder drugs would be the only things being smuggled and enforcement could focus more on these drugs. The pressure on our criminal justice system that is currently imprisoning a higher percentage of our people than any nation on earth would be eased. Border guards would be able to focus more on harder drugs, or even on serious threats to our security, rather than searching teenagers for pot. All of this would undermine the cartels – most of all, taking away 60-70% of their profits.

We have reached a point where one of our most aggressive drug czars has publicly stated that he “wouldn’t care” if marijuana were legalized! Where another former drug czar has acknowledged that marijuana “pose[s] no significant public health problem.”  These are men who led the fight against drugs. A massive propaganda campaign, $40 billion a year, millions of arrests, and untold casualties and – and the price of drugs has remained the same and the extent of drug use has barely been affected.

Why are we continuing a failed policy that only serves the interests of the Mexican cartels it is propping up?

Categories
Foreign Policy National Security Politics

Sarkozy: Right on nothing, prescient on everything

Judah Grunstein in Foreign Policy:

Yet if Sarkozy has been right on almost nothing, he has been prescient on almost everything, guided by the attention-seeker’s instinctive flare for tomorrow’s crisis today. (For instance, his decision to engage Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the time of Lebanon’s presidential impasse in January 2008 later paid off in access to crucial back channels during the Gaza war.) His logic is the logic of the deal, where both fault lines in opinion and emerging consensus create leverage points that maximize France’s influence. His handling of last year’s NATO summit – where he sided with Germany to successfully oppose expansion to Georgia and Ukraine, while pacifying Washington with a much-needed troop increase to the Afghanistan deployment — is a perfect illustration of how he manages to turn France into either the tiebreaker or the consensus sealer.

France’s return to the heart of NATO will certainly not spell the end of France’s independence and autonomy, nor will it prove the alliance’s undoing. But both will be changed, in ways that no one – least of all Sarkozy – can foresee. Rich in symbolism, profound in consequences, unpredictable in effect: The move is typical Sarkozy, for whom it is the deed, and not the outcome, that matters

Categories
Foreign Policy Iran Iraq National Security The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

The Iran-Iraq Balance

Musings on Iraq writes:

For the last several decades, security in the Middle East has been largely defined by outside powers. From the 1970s on the U.S. tried to play Iran off of Iraq. The 2003 invasion disrupted this balance of power, and the U.S. has been attempting to rebuild it ever since. Iran has been adamantly opposed to re-creating this system, preferring a friendly Iraq rather than a new enemy. This conflict over ideas about security is at the heart of the dispute between Iran and the U.S.

(H/t Andrew Sullivan.)

This observation is not new – but it is concise and distills the essence of Iran’s moves with regards to Iraq – whether they be asserting influence over the Iraqi leadership, undermining the American occupation by supplying weapons and other support to the Shiite insurgency, pulling back the Shiite insurgency to allow the surge to succeed, offering help in the run-up to the war. A less charitable phrasing of the above – which states that Iran just wants to avoid having Iraq as an enemy – is that Iran wants to have significant control over Iraq, or at least influence there. But either way, the essential dispute between America and Iran in Iraq is not over issues but over Iranian influence itself. This is true if you look at most Iranian-American disputes – they are not over issues as much as they are over limiting or expanding Iranian influence. 

In the end, there are only two real points of contention: Israel and nuclear arms. They are serious issues, but it seems likely that a pragmatic Iranian leadership could make bargains on each. If America is able to finally create a Palestinian state – or make significant progress on this front – it will give Iran an opening to accept Israel. On nuclear weaponry, a pragmatic government might be persuaded to refrain from taking the final steps in developing a nuclear weapon once it could prove that it had reached the point where it had the knowledge and equipment to do so. If Iran remained an adversary in the region, the prospective nuclear weapon could still cause significant trouble – but if it were brought into an alliance with America, it would not.

And as I have maintained before – Iran and America are natural allies on most issues – even if the current president Ahmadinejad represents the part of Iran Americans are most suspicious of.

Categories
Foreign Policy Morality National Security

The Opposite of Counterinsurgency

Simon Romero in the New York Times:

Military officials chafe at the reports of abuses. “Human rights people say, ‘Some civilians have been killed, how horrible,’ ” Defense Minister Ántero Flores Aráoz said in an interview in Lima. As for Rosa Chávez Sihuincha, the pregnant woman killed in Río Seco, he suggested that she got what she deserved.

“What the hell was she doing in Vizcatán?” he said. “Was she praying the rosary? No way. Either she was transporting coca leaves for processing or she was taking chemical products or she was part of the logistics of this Shining Path group.”

It’s incredible what can be justified by war.

Categories
Foreign Policy Pakistan Politics

The Primal Politics of Pakistan

[digg-reddit-me]The stories that have been coming out of Pakistan in the past few days have been extraordinary. It is politics being shaped by individuals at a basic and primal level, in a way only possible in an unstable nation. Just a few weeks ago, Simon Tisdall in the Guardian would write that:

Pakistan’s disintegration, if that is what is now being witnessed, is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, a riveting spectacle, and a clear and present danger to international security. But who in the world can stop it?

As President Zardari seemed to buffoonishly wield power – ham-handedly using the power of the government to sideline his opponents, resistant built up. First, he refused to honor a deal he made with his main opponent, Nawaz Sharif, to reinstate the chief justice of the Supreme Court Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry who had been dismissed by President Musharraf. This was especially significant as the civil society movement or the Lawyers Movement which was formed to protest this move of Musharaff’s was one of the primary factors forcing him to step down. Then – and I skip over a great deal here, Zardari closes down a television station for seemingly political reasons prompting, as The Daily Times reported:

Federal Information Minister Sherry Rehman resigned from her ministerial slot on Friday night to protest the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA)’s blocking of a private TV channel.

With Sharif and Sharif’s brother still agitating for change – specifically the reinstatement of Chaudhry – the current Supreme Court, which is seen to be in the pocket of Zardari, rules that neither Sharif nor his brother can hold any public office. Sharif and his N-League party begin to stage mass rallies to protest this decision – which then prompts Zardari to take even more drastic action. He places all of his political opponents under house arrest – for their own protection – and bans rallies. Over the weekend, Sharif breaks out of his house arrest to go to a large demonstration as Jane Perlez reports in the New York Times:

Sharif, who had planned to address the demonstration, left his house in a convoy of cars that broke through a ring of barriers, including barbed wire and parked buses that had been placed by the police.

When he arrived at the rally in Lahore, Sharif was aided by elements of the police sympathetic to him – and embraced by the crowd:

As his bulletproof four-wheel-drive vehicle entered the main thoroughfare of Lahore, it was showered with pink rose petals from the crowd, made up of lawyers, party workers and couples who came with their children to join what turned out to be a celebration of Mr. Sharif’s nerve.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik meanwhile urged all Pakistanis to refrain from joining the long march which was supposed to converge on the capital of Pakistan yesterday:

I urge all Pakistanis not to join the long march as we have credible information that enemies of Pakistan could take advantage of the situation.

Yet, despite this, people came out. They confronted the police and military who tried to break up the rallies – and the police and military turned back. According to Jane Perlez again:

The army did not stage a coup, but insisted that the government accept a compromise.

Perhaps it was this factor more than Sharif’s nerve or Zardari’s ham-handedness that prevented this from going down as power plays usually do in Pakistan – in bloody violence. Zardari agreed yesterday to meet the demands of the Lawyers Movement and Sharif – and to restore Chaudhry as Chief Justice. Sabrina Tavernise described the scene in Islamabad in the New York Times:

In the crowd, whose members included a radio announcer who was researching homosexuality and an illiterate mechanic who wore a flower pot on his head to stay cool and admitted to stealing monkeys to get by, one word was on everybody’s lips.

“Justice,” said Mr. Khan’s wife, Rubina Javed, smiling broadly. “We came for justice.”

The word was apt for the victory at hand: the restoration of the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, to his court. But others in a jubilant crowd celebrating on Mr. Chaudhry’s lawn on Monday were working from a broader interpretation…

“This movement has given an awareness to the common people in Pakistan of their rights,” said Shamoon Azhar, 26, a doctoral student at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, sitting on the lawn with a large group of his friends. “This is about awareness. It’s given people confidence. It’s shown people it can happen.”

Ashtar Ali, a corporate lawyer was quoted by Jane Perlez:

This is the first time in the history of Pakistan that the police and civil administration have defied orders by the government to control public demonstrations. The writ of the government has failed.

The big winner in all of this is – of course, Sharif, as a Pakistani columnist put it:

He understood the pulse of the country.

Yet at the same time, the basic story of the American relationship with Pakistan remains the same. Richard Holbrooke summed it up when asked whether Pakistan’s security forces were committed to rooting out terrorists:

I’ve rarely seen in my years in Washington an issue which is so hotly disputed internally by experts and intelligence officials.

Categories
Foreign Policy National Security Politics The War on Terrorism

Colin Gray on China, Terrorism, and Proliferation

Colin Gray, a professor at the U. S. Army War College writes in Parameters (H/t Tom Ricks) gives lays out one of his expectations for solid national security planning:

Expect to be surprised. To win as a defense planner is not to avoid surprise. To win is to have planned in such a manner that the effects of surprise do not inflict lethal damage.

The statement, with some modifications, is a good baseline for any type of long-term planning. What I find most refreshing about Gray is the common-sensical approach he takes – and the lack of regard for what is politically acceptable to say. This of course is necessary to be an effective military planner – as a clear-eyed view of the world forces one to tackle politically fraught issues. I do not agree with all of Gray’s assessments, but unlike the opinions advanced in op-eds, they seem to be the result of a genuine engagement with the issues rather than of domestic political arguments. 

The article as a whole should be read. But here’s a sampling of his assessments:

On China:

Assessed materially, China will not be a credible near-term peer competitor for power and influence; she cannot spend enough to overcome the US lead. But China does not, and will not, accept the position of prominent member of a posse for world order led by the American sheriff. Considerations of guess what?—fear, honor, and interest—will ensure a conflictual relationship between Washington and Beijing. Both sides currently recognize this.

[At the same time] Warfare is quite likely between China and America over Taiwan, though not about Taiwan…

It is possible that the current loose strategic alliance between China and Russia will mature into a full security marriage, but this is uncertain. These nations share a strong dislike for most western values—though they agree that it is healthy to be wealthy—as well as US hegemony, but they do not share much else.

On terrorism:

Terrorists can succeed, however, only if the counterterrorists beat themselves by over-reaction. Principally, counterterrorism is a mission for the afflicted nation’s security services, not for soldiers. Terrorism does not threaten our civilization, but our over-reaction to it could do so. Terrorists do need to be hunted and thereby kept off balance, dealt with as criminals, and sometimes even shot on sight according to the permissive tenets of irregular warfare.

On nuclear proliferation:

[W]e need to recognize that our current conventional superiority obliges our enemies to seek asymmetrical offsets. The more effective are NATO’s conventional arms, the more likely it is that regional great powers would choose to emphasize a nuclear-based deterrent and defense. If you do not believe this, you are in effect claiming that, say, China or Iran would choose to be defeated in conventional war, rather than raise the stakes through nuclear escalation. That would be a heroically optimistic assumption.

Categories
China Economics Financial Crisis History

The Reagan Revolution (cont.)

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve gotten a bit of feedback/blowback about having simplified what went on the in 1980s that led to the indisputable higher levels of income disparity, the concentration of wealth, the decimation of manufacturing, and the rise of finance. This wasn’t about Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal policies – it is claimed – but about basic economic forces. I tried to take that into account by pointing out that Reagan was only accelerating the trends that started in the 1970s – but let me go further now.

Another major factor that aided these trends was not entirely within Reagan’s control. As John Judis explained in The New Republic, in the 1980s:

…Japan was threatened by a cheaper dollar. To keep exports high, Japan intentionally held down the yen’s value by carefully controlling the disposition of the dollars it reaped from its trade surplus with the United States. Instead of using these to purchase goods or to invest in the Japanese economy or to exchange for yen, it began to recycle them back to the United States by purchasing companies, real estate, and, above all, Treasury debt…

With Japan’s purchases, the United States would not have to keep interest rates high in order to attract buyers to Treasury securities, and it wouldn’t have to raise taxes in order to reduce the deficit…[That] informal bargain…became the cornerstone of a new international economic arrangement…

Judis goes on to explain how this arrangement evolved through the 1990s:

Asian countries, led by China, adopted a version of Japan’s strategy for export-led growth… They maintained trade surpluses with the United States; and, instead of exchanging their dollars for their own currencies or investing them internally, they, like the Japanese, recycled them into T-bills and other dollar-denominated assets. This kept the value of their currencies low in relation to the dollar and perpetuated the trade surplus by which they acquired the dollars in the first place…

Until recently, there have been clear upsides to this bargain for the United States: the avoidance of tax increases, growing wealth at the top of the income ladder, and preservation of the dollar as the international currency…

[The current financial system] is sustained by specific national policies. The United States has acquiesced in large trade deficits – and their effect on the U.S. workforce – in exchange for foreign funding of our budget deficits. And Asia has accepted a lower standard of living in exchange for export-led growth and a lower risk of currency crises.

This financial arrangment was not created by Ronald Reagan – but he did acquiese to it – and spent America into a level of indebtedness it had not been in since World War II. This arrangment would not be consistent with a ideological neoliberalism that was discussed before – but this arrangment, most importantly, did benefit many of those who were vocal proponents of neoliberalism. 

The revolutions of the 1980s then, was not merely the result of a political movement within America – not anymore than the revolutions of the 1960s were. There were international factors that helped along both domestic movements. The combination of this special relationship with Japan – and later China and other Asian countries – with the neoliberal revolution of Ronald Reagan – led to a concentration of wealth and power within a small class of people rarely seen in a developed country. As Paul Krugman observed:

It’s important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable surge in inequality – even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain was a faint echo of trends here.

Combined with the neoliberal principle, as described by Stanley Fish, that “Short-term transactions-for-profit [are better than] long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society,” it becomes more clear how we ended up in this enormous financial mess. 

Take away the regulations; encourage short-term profits; reduce taxes; trim the social safety net; “starve the beast” by spending without taxing; and then supercharge the economy with constant stimulus spending (which is what “starve the beast” is) and easy debt from China and Japan. What you get from this is not only a revolution that undermines the American way of life in the mid-term – as wealth is concentrated and middle class and manufacturing jobs dry up – but an unsustainable economy that is going to collapse, and collapse hard. 

In other words, you get what we have now.

Today, we are reaping the effects of the generational bargain at the heart of the Reagan presidency.

Categories
China Economics Financial Crisis Politics

Stimulus and Stability

[digg-reddit-me]This Wall Street Journal article by Bob Davis accompanied by this graph to the right illustrates just how far from world opinion the Republican right is in it’s rejection of stimulus spending. This is not necessarily a bad thing – but it should give pause to those who are defending the fiscal austerity Republicans are proposing in the middle of this crisis. This issue is not considered a partisan issue for most of the world – and it is mainly Republicans in power today who see stimulus spending during a sharp downturn as something “liberal” or controversial.

David Brooks’s expressed his fair-minded exasperation this Sunday – as he pronounced the idea of the Republican-proposed government spending freeze “insane.” 

The International Monetary Fund – not normally known as a squishy, leftish organization as it promoted free trade and capitalism around the globe – is in favor of large stimulus packages:

The IMF has been urging nations to increase fiscal stimulus by at least 2% of gross domestic product to boost growth. Of the G-20 nations, only the U.S., Spain, Saudi Arabia, China and Australia are expected to reach that goal in 2009, according to the IMF.

More importantly, and more interesting then discrediting an almost powerless political party, is to notice that there seems to be some sort of inverse relationship between a society’s social safety net and the amount of stimulus spending they are proposing. 

This makes sense on a number of levels. Automatic stabilizers which should take some of the pressure off a need for a stimulus are not included here. On another level, these nations without a strong safety net must rely more heavily on economic growth for societal stability. 

If this is true, China and America would be more reliant on constant economic growth to relieve social and political pressure and would be more likely to have larger stimulus packages. France and Germany with stronger safety nets would feel more insulated and be less likely to push for large stimulus packages. This is exactly how this matter is playing out on the world stage today – with some exceptions due to political leadership. 

But both states with strong social safety nets and those without them are dependent on growth over time. But those states without strong safety nets feel the economic bumps more strongly – and downturns end up being more disruptive.

Categories
Foreign Policy Libertarianism Mexico National Security Politics The Opinionsphere War on Drugs

The Unintended Consequences of a War on Drugs

American libertarian Alan Bock at Antiwar.com:

The most efficacious approach [.pdf] to stemming the violence in Mexico is to recognize that just as what most newspapers blithely call “drug-related crime” is actually drug-law-related crime or even drug-law-caused crime, the wave of violence in Mexico is not caused by the inherent viciousness of the Mexican underclass or the physiological properties of drugs deemed illicit, but by the set of perverse incentives that arise when governments treat adults like children and dictate what they can ingest, attempting to prohibit plants and substances that are easily grown and formulated and for which there is a steady demand. The violence in Mexico is not “drug-related” but “drug-law-related” or even caused directly and indirectly by the laws attempting to prohibit the use of some substances.

While I do not agree with the moral aspects of Bock’s approach – which attribute the moral failings of individuals to government policy – and place the moral blame for these actions on the government – his policy analysis here strikes me as fundamentally sound.