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Back in the Spring I wrote a few posts commenting on the Obama Administration's perceived lack of commitment to global development by noting that it had been more than 100 days of a new Administration and there was still no head of the Agency for International Development.
Well guess what, it's now around 250 and we still have no AID director.
In a strongly worded letter from John Kerry and Richard Lugar to the President they note that AID is the last major government agency to remain unfilled. That is ridiculous and considering the tenuous position that AID finds itself the need for a strong leader - or any leader for that matter - is incredibly important.
As Lugar and Kerry note, "USAID and its development perspective are conspicuously absent from our most significant foreign policy challenges in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq." What's more, AID needs to have a strong voice at the table in ongoing QDDR discussions (it is after all the Diplomacy and Development Review).
I know there's a lot going on these days with health care and Afghanistan, but if the Obama Administration is serious about improving US development policy and making it a key pillar of American foreign policy then they need to get someone at AID tout suite.
Well once again Mitt Romney has waded into, what for him, are the foreign shores of foreign policy. While addressing a neoconservative conference this week in Washington, Romney, according to reports, discussed a whole host of national security issues he has little to no experience with. Remember, this is the same guy that barely two years ago spent his time:
"...ticking through a presidential checklist, sometimes with perilous results. Where he lacked foreign policy experience, his staff arranged one-day visits to Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Check, check, check."
Romney's business experience probably makes him an expert at making lists and checking off accomplishments, but sadly, this is not suitable for successful leadership in the foreign policy world where nuance and policy experience actually matter. For instance, at the conference, Romney called Obama's foreign policy:
“a dramatic and revolutionary” redesign in American foreign policy unlike what we have seen over the past 50 years...[and] distance ourselves from our friends and move “closer to our foes.”
First, over the past fifty years, there has been a strong tradition in American foreign policy of American Presidents embracing our allies while also engaging with our enemies. Nixon went to China. Reagan helped end the Cold War by engaging with the Soviets and actually held a summit in Soviet Moscow with Gorbachev. All Romney and other conservatives seem to want is a new Cold War with Russia and China. Speaking of which, our foreign policy in 2009 should be far different than it was in 1959 since the Cold War is in fact over and our strategic imperatives and threats are far different today than they were then. If anything, we do need a new foreign policy direction that is "dramatic and revolutionary" when compared to the failures of the past 8 years, one that stands in stark contrast to the erratic and reactionary approach of the Bush administration.
Romney also went after the Administration's decision to revamp our missile defense system, saying he was “dumbfounded” by the president’s decision" and "derided the new and improved intelligence." Well, I'm sure the one-term Massachusetts governor has access to the latest information from our intelligence community, and knows better on this issue than the Secretary of Defense, the intelligence community, and of course the President, people who actually spend their lives reading high level intelligence and not just giving political speeches. He also seems pretty comfortable disparaging the work of all 16 agencies in the intelligence community who put together the May 2009 intelligence assessment on Iran from which the decision to bolster the missile defense system in the face of new threats was derived. But at the same time he attacked the Justice Department for investigating possible interrogation abuses at the CIA, asserting it may expose our "friends" there. So which is it, are folks in the CIA Mitt Romney's friends he wants to defend or inept government officials he wants to attack for their apparent inability to gather reliable intelligence on Iran's missile program? Here, he seems frantically confused.
Just like Hamlet I guess, whom Romney compares Obama to:
President Obama's skepticism about a troop build-up in Afghanistan came under fire on Monday from former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican who ran for president in 2008 and is actively laying the groundwork for a second run in 2012.
"This is not the time for Hamlet in the White House," said Romney. "How in the world can he be saying at this stage the things that he is saying?"
Not like Romney has never been compared to the erratic Shakespearean character before. But Romney here confuses indecisiveness with careful deliberation over an intractible issue. Romney, like most Republicans, views Afghanistan as a problem to be solved only through a purely military approach, and he doesn't understand that the role of the President is to distill different views into a coherent and comprehensive strategy, of which the military is a crucial, but not singular, part. This is something even CENTCOM Commander General David Petraeus acknowledged:
Military action is absolutely necessary but it is not sufficient…Political, economic and diplomatic activity is critical to capitalize on gains in the security arena.”
At a time when the political, economic, and diplomatic situation in Afghanistan remains uncertain, Obama is taking the smart approach and weighing all his options, not embarking on some strategy that fits into an quaint and elitist but factually baseless Republican Shakesperean allusion.
And Romney might want to be careful while quoting Hamlet. For a man John McCain said has "consistently taken both sides of any major issue [and] consistently flip-flopped on every issue," Romney should probably actually read the play and take guidance from perhaps its most famous phrase:
This above all — to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
It's pretty clear, though, that the only thing Romney is to true to is his own selfish political ambitions.
As a high-level diplomatic forum, the G-20 is a creature of financial crisis -- two times over, actually. It started bringing together finance ministers in the late-1990s during the Asian financial crisis, and the 2008 meltdown on Wall Street spurred President Bush to convene his fellow heads of state for the first time last November. The agenda of the G-20's third summit-level conclave this week in Pittsburgh is a direct descendant and focuses on financial reform and digging out of the global recession (this Treasury Department report tracks the status of earlier commitments).
In a longer-term perspective, though, there is a wider question of how established powers and emerging powers will work together at the highest political levels. The G-7 was the club of post-War industrial powers (essentially the key countries of the West). What will be the wider 21st century successor of group to provide leadership on urgent international problems? This is the lingering question about the future of summit diplomacy beyond the current economic crisis. For instance, we don't know whether the G-20 will continue convening summit meetings, or whether it will go back to its previous pattern of meetings of finance ministers. South Korea has expressed a keen interest in hosting a G-20 summit next April, but it isn't clear whether other G-20 governments want to keep holding summits. The G-8 has for several years been meeting with the leaders of Brazil, India, China, South Africa, and Mexico (a sort of G-8 + 5), but that has been a rickety two-tiered stratagem rather than a sustainable structure.
So how might G-grouping summitry unfold? I see three main options -- each with roots in the status quo, rather than being drawn up on a clean slate. One would be to cement the G-20 as a summit-level forum. Another would be to solidify the G-8 consultations into a G-13 or G-14; the 14th seat is usually seen as an Arab or Muslim nation (particularly Saudi Arabia or Egypt). The third alternative would be a G-15 or 16 to add regional or middle-powers seen as vitally important. There are experts who foresee a combination of the G-8, G-14, and G-20 all coexisting, but the important thing is to sort this out, so we can stop talking about who's in and who's out and put the focus more squarely on issues like the global economy, climate change, and nonproliferation.
Discredited neoconservative and failed former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton provides a pretty over the top and unhinged assessment of President Obama's UNGA speech filled with neocon code words such as 'naive', calling it ‘A Post-American Speech By Our First Post-American President.’
Of course, there is nothing more post-American than pursuing a foreign policy and national security course that alienates our allies, sends America to war under false pretenses, defies American law and embraces torture, and a generally adopts a go-it-alone mentality that flies in the face of over 200 years of Presidential leadership. Maybe Bolton can't see President Obama's restoration of American ideals and leadership because the President under which he served exhibited neither trait. But ostensibly, Bolton's myopic approach to foreign policy stands at the fringe of the fringe where he has no credibility left from which to criticize any serious foreign policy experts, let alone the President.
He criticizes Obama's speech for being "filled with talk about U.N. bodies, U.N. treaties, and sending Secretary of State Clinton to a conference on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which would be an incredible waste of time for her. The president’s speech showed a fascination with U.N.-centric issues." I'm glad Bolton is so overly concerned about the Secretary of State's time management skills, but he should be more worried about the time he has wasted writing this dribble. Last time I checked a speech at the UN should discuss UN-centric issues.
But the kicker at the end is Bolton infusing the politics of race into Obama's UN speech by asserting that "The president did everything he could to say: ‘Can’t we all just get along?’”
Yes, invoking Rodney King is a fairly intellectual way to examine the merits of the President's General Assembly address. But asking that question is far less pernicious than saying "Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
Iran’s President will be speaking at the U.N. this evening. He has made a lot of news recently, largely because of his continual outlandish and condemnable remarks denying the Holocaust. These are bizarre, yet well calculated statements. While we have grown accustomed to such statements from the Iranian leader, we would be well served to remember that he is doing this for a reason. What we should not do is take the bait.
I remember visiting the Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek in Poland in the early 1990s. I’ll never forget our tour guide telling us that thousands of Jews, Poles, Roma, political prisoners, homosexuals, and others were killed there by firing squads, their bodies then tossed into mass graves. I remember the bumpiness of the ground where those graves were located. And I remember praying at the mountain of human ash at the Majdanek mausoleum, unable to comprehend the enormity of the evil that was done there.
It is because of this that I will not allow Ahmadinejad to cheapen the memory of the Holocaust by using it for his own cynical, political purposes.
Ahmadinejad is a master of distraction. He knows that he has no credibility at home, having stolen an election in a coup d’état and then having proceeded to violate the human rights of his own citizens. As NIAC’s Trita Parsi pointed out yesterday, Ahmadinejad is attempting to change the conversation about what’s going wrong inside of Iran by using the Holocaust as bait. He doesn’t want to be questioned about his government’s behavior surrounding the June 12th elections, or about the show trials of political opponents underway in Tehran. And he certainly doesn’t want to answer the hard questions being posed by the international community about his country’s nuclear intentions.
Yet there is too much at stake right now for us to allow him to use the Holocaust as a distraction. President Obama’s consistent policy of engaging the Iranians is gaining momentum, as the P5+1 will meet with the Iranians on October 1st. This meeting should include discussions not only about Iran’s nuclear program, but also about broader issues related to our relationship, including human rights and democracy. Ahmadinejad should not be allowed to avoid this scrutiny, and the Iranian people should know that we are on their side.
When Ahmedinejad speaks at the General Assembly, his rants about the Holocaust should be ignored, precisely because ignoring them will weaken his position. A continual focus on these comments by us only serves to strengthen his hand internally, helping him to make the case to Iranians that the international community is against Iran. We should instead move right past these comments and demand that he answer the tough questions that the P5+1 discussion will bring.
As one of the 99.99% of humanity that knows that the Holocaust occurred, I believe that we have a responsibility to both remember and speak out about this horrific event. Yet it is also our responsibility to ensure that we are forcefully and directly resolving the problems of today. That is not what Ahmadinejad wants us to think about. But it is our choice on how we want to react. We should not take the bait.
According to the New York Times, President Obama may be putting his concerns about mission creep into action:
. . . Among the alternatives being presented to Mr. Obama is Mr. Biden’s suggestion to revamp the strategy altogether. Instead of increasing troops, officials said, Mr. Biden proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics.
The Americans would accelerate training of Afghan forces and provide support as they took the lead against the Taliban. But the emphasis would shift to Pakistan. Mr. Biden has often said that the United States spends something like $30 in Afghanistan for every $1 in Pakistan, even though in his view the main threat to American national security interests is in Pakistan.It's articles like this that remind me for all the hand-wringing of the AMCW we are blessed to have an adult in the White House who is willing to challenge assumptions and switch course on national security if the facts demand it. There are of course no guarantees that President Obama will adopt Biden's suggestions on what to do in Afghanistan, but I'm impressed that he is not allowing himself to be pressured into a decision by the McChrystal leak and that he is not enthralled by the absurd notion that contemplation is akin to capitulation.
It reminds me in part of one of the key tenets of the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine that is often forgotten:
That's precisely what the President is doing - and yet all too rarely happens in national security decision-making. It is ironic that there are some who accuse the President of going wobbly or undermining his commitment to winning in Afghanistan - they seem to be the same people who have believed for the past 8 years that every foreign policy problem demands the solution of "more troops." Re-considering strategy, challenging assumptions, weighing costs and benefits is not weakness; it's leadership.
Parag Khannaand I have the opposite worries about the future of the G-20. Parag warns against expecting too much of the G-20; I worry aiming too low. We actually have fairly similar ideas about holding the G-20 accountable for meaningful action, but where Parag sees constraints, I see comparative advantage. Where he sees a need for leaders to conserve their political will, I see a need to expend it. There are a lot of questions still to be figured out regarding how 21st century diplomacy and geopolitics will work, but the chief aim must be serious action on today's international challenges.
The paradox of summit diplomacy and the G groupings is that they convene top decision makers for discussions that don't actually make decisions as traditional inter-governmental organizations do. This poses a serious, yet by no means insoluble, practical problem. Leaders have to choose what kinds of commitments to make, with an eye toward implementation by their own governments, persuasion of other countries (the G-172), and links to more formal mutilateral bodies.
Closely intertwined with this question is the matter of what issues should be on the G-20 agenda? My answer is that the G-20 leaders (or alternative G-8 successor - what we call "G-X") should deal with issues that cry out for the political impetus that only they can provide. Notwithstanding the G-20's lack of formal or legal authority, it nonetheless represents an impressive aggregation of global power and influence, which I view as a precious commodity.
The G-7 is often described as a coalition of the like-minded (read Western). The value of a G-X is to have closer cooperation among the un-like minded. As outlined in my organization's summit reform guidelines, its agenda should focus on issues which have been fraught by deep but bridgeable divisions (particularly North-South) that have impeded progress on urgent problems. Parag has nominated agricultural subsidies and dispersal of green technology, and those are strong candidates indeed.
I also agree with Parag about the need for greater transparency and follow-through on leaders' summit commitments and avoiding getting caught up in flavor-of-the-month issues. In the end, it will come down to policymaking discipline. The fact that summit communiques can run to over 100 pages is a clear indicator of the remaining room for improvement. I'm sure that the sherpas that work on this process -- and the leaders on whose behalf they negotiate -- would be gratified to put their efforts toward maximum effect. Unlike Parag, though, I don't think the demands on leaders for follow-through serves as a constraint on the agenda to the same degree as the work of identifying common ground in the first place.
Here's another test. Looking at current challenges of non-proliferation, climate change, and economic development, how do we foresee problems worsening absent significant action and progress in the next two, three, or five years? Basically, it's a test of leadership. How will leading nations lead?
Today, in his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama called for a new era of global engagement based on “mutual interests and mutual respect,” listing four pillars for a safer world: non-proliferation and disarmament; the promotion of peace and security; the preservation of our planet; and a global economy that advances opportunity for all people. The president’s emphasis on non-proliferation and disarmament is a continuation of his efforts to restore American leadership on one of the most pressing challenges we face as a country and world.
The risk from nuclear weapons remains one of the greatest threats to American and international security and due to the nature of the threat, it is only though international agreements and engagement with the international community that the threat can be addressed. And because of America’s unique position in the world, especially regarding nuclear weapons, we hold a special responsibility in leading the efforts to reduce and eliminate them. In his first major address on nonproliferation in Prague, President Obama recognized that American leadership is essential to spur this international effort. He said:
“So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change.”
Today, he echoed this promise, setting forth an ambitious agenda for the United States on nonproliferation:
“America will keep our end of the bargain. We will pursue a new agreement with Russia to substantially reduce our strategic warheads and launchers. We will move forward with ratification of the Test Ban Treaty, and work with others to bring the Treaty into force so that nuclear testing is permanently prohibited. We will complete a Nuclear Posture Review that opens the door to deeper cuts, and reduces the role of nuclear weapons. And we will call upon countries to begin negotiations in January on a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons.
I will also host a Summit next April that reaffirms each nation’s responsibility to secure nuclear material on its territory, and to help those who can’t – because we must never allow a single nuclear device to fall into the hands of a violent extremist. And we will work to strengthen the institutions and initiatives that combat nuclear smuggling and theft.”
In stark contrast, neocons and conservatives in congress have attempted to derail efforts at international engagement. Sen. Jon Kyl and neocon Richard Perle wrote an op-ed this summer, during President Obama’s meeting with President Medvedev, where they said, “There is a fashionable notion that if only we and the Russians reduced our nuclear forces, other nations would reduce their existing arsenals or abandon plans to acquire nuclear weapons altogether.”
Yet a recent bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations task force, chaired by William Perry and Brent Scowcroft, disagrees and advocates for exactly the type of engagement and global leadership that President Obama is providing:
“The start of a new administration presents a fresh opportunity to reenergize international dialogue and cooperation on best security practices that would reduce the risk of loss of control of nuclear weapons or materials. Strategic discussions with other nuclear-armed states would also provide the United States with the necessary insight and foresight to determine how best to shape U.S. nuclear policy.”
In his speech, the president outlined a number of challenges that the world faces, and as he said, so far “the magnitude of our challenges has yet to be met by the measure of our action.” The proliferation of nuclear weapons is one of the most dangerous and frightening of these challenges. Yet it also one the challenge that through American global leadership and international cooperation can be addressed. Today the president took a major step in that direction.
UPDATE: The president's speech is here.
Over the last eight years the U.S. had become increasingly irrelevant on key global issues - such as nonproliferation, energy, climate change - and as a result lost influence globally and witnessed the world become increasingly fractured. Sitting on the sidelines as we did over the last years was a recipe for American irrelevance. President Obama's speech recognizes the simple fact that if the U.S. is going to remain the most powerful and influential actor in the world - it has to seriously engage.
By emphasizing in his speech the growing danger resulting from the spread of nuclear weapons and the increasing fragility of the global consensus on nonproliferation, Obama is not only attempting to ensure America's security, but America's continued global geopolitical standing.
We are a status quo power. And maintaining the status quo ensures are continued influence. Therefore, attempting to reduce nuclear arsenals worldwide not only serves to decrease the threat of these weapons falling into the hands of terrorists but attempts to ensure that countries cannot suddenly emerge to upset the current balance of power by gaining nuclear weapons. As the the President said:
This is not only bad for global security but undercuts our power and influence globally.