Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America

[akv]

I guess instead we wait and see...

Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America

NEWSWEEK’s new columnist on Obama’s Egypt debacle and the vacuum it exposes.
by Niall FergusonFebruary 14, 2011

“The statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all.” Thus Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who united Germany and thereby reshaped Europe’s balance of power nearly a century and a half ago.

Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity … and missed it completely.

In Bismarck’s case it was not so much God’s coattails he caught as the revolutionary wave of mid-19th-century German nationalism. And he did more than catch it; he managed to surf it in a direction of his own choosing. The wave Obama just missed—again—is the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy. It has surged through the region twice since he was elected: once in Iran in the summer of 2009, the second time right across North Africa, from Tunisia all the way down the Red Sea to Yemen. But the swell has been biggest in Egypt, the Middle East’s most populous country.

In each case, the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave, Bismarck style, by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail. In the case of Iran, he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. This time around, in Egypt, it was worse. He did both—some days exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, other days drawing back and recommending an “orderly transition.”

The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak’s cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn’t end there. America’s two closest friends in the region—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, are appalled at Washington’s failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration’s apparent cluelessness.

Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo’s Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy.

This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried. The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues.

Yet no president can be expected to be omniscient. That is what advisers are for. The real responsibility for the current strategic vacuum lies not with Obama himself, but with the National Security Council, and in particular with the man who ran it until last October: retired Gen. James L. Jones. I suspected at the time of his appointment that General Jones was a poor choice. A big, bluff Marine, he once astonished me by recommending that Turkish troops might lend the United States support in Iraq. He seemed mildly surprised when I suggested the Iraqis might resent such a reminder of centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule.

The best national-security advisers have combined deep knowledge of international relations with an ability to play the Machiavellian Beltway game, which means competing for the president’s ear against the other would-be players in the policymaking process: not only the defense secretary but also the secretary of state and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. No one has ever done this better than Henry Kissinger. But the crucial thing about Kissinger as national-security adviser was not the speed with which he learned the dark arts of interdepartmental turf warfare. It was the skill with which he, in partnership with Richard Nixon, forged a grand strategy for the United States at a time of alarming geopolitical instability.

The essence of that strategy was, first, to prioritize (for example, détente with the Soviets before human-rights issues within the U.S.S.R.) and then to exert pressure by deliberately linking key issues. In their hardest task—salvaging peace with honor in Indochina by preserving the independence of South Vietnam—Nixon and Kissinger ultimately could not succeed. But in the Middle East they were able to eject the Soviets from a position of influence and turn Egypt from a threat into a malleable ally. And their overtures to China exploited the divisions within the Communist bloc, helping to set Beijing on an epoch-making new course of economic openness.

The contrast between the foreign policy of the Nixon-Ford years and that of President Jimmy Carter is a stark reminder of how easily foreign policy can founder when there is a failure of strategic thinking. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, which took the Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater than the loss of South Vietnam.

Remind you of anything? “This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” an anonymous American official told The New York Times last week. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”

I can think of no more damning indictment of the administration’s strategic thinking than this: it never once considered a scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt. Yet the very essence of rigorous strategic thinking is to devise such a scenario and to think through the best responses to them, preferably two or three moves ahead of actual or potential adversaries. It is only by doing these things—ranking priorities and gaming scenarios—that a coherent foreign policy can be made. The Israelis have been hard at work doing this. All the president and his NSC team seem to have done is to draft touchy-feely speeches like the one he delivered in Cairo early in his presidency.

These were his words back in June 2009:

America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Those lines will come back to haunt Obama if, as cannot be ruled out, the ultimate beneficiary of his bungling in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains by far the best organized opposition force in the country—and wholly committed to the restoration of the caliphate and the strict application of Sharia. Would such an outcome advance “tolerance and the dignity of all human beings” in Egypt? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Grand strategy is all about the necessity of choice. Today, it means choosing between a daunting list of objectives: to resist the spread of radical Islam, to limit Iran’s ambition to become dominant in the Middle East, to contain the rise of China as an economic rival, to guard against a Russian “reconquista” of Eastern Europe—and so on. The defining characteristic of Obama’s foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so. A succession of speeches saying, in essence, “I am not George W. Bush” is no substitute for a strategy.

Bismarck knew how to choose. He understood that riding the nationalist wave would enable Prussia to become the dominant force in Germany, but that thereafter the No. 1 objective must be to keep France and Russia from uniting against his new Reich. When asked for his opinion about colonizing Africa, Bismarck famously replied: “My map of Africa lies in Europe. Here lies Russia and here lies France, and we are in the middle. That is my map of Africa.”

Tragically, no one knows where Barack Obama’s map of the Middle East is. At best, it is in the heartland states of America, where the fate of his presidency will be decided next year, just as Jimmy Carter’s was back in 1980.

At worst, he has no map at all.

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/w...ica.print.html

[uplink5]

Originally Posted by akv

I guess instead we wait and see...



http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/w...ica.print.html

This is becomig very reminiscent of 1980. Different events....same calamity

Jimmy Carter and the UN hand Rhodesia over to the ANC (Communist), then he screws the Shah and basically hands Iran over to a bunch of nuts, the South Korean President was assassinated in October 1979, Iranian Hostages taken in November, the Soviets invade Afgahnistan in December and in 1980, our embassies are all under attack and the world is left wondering what's next.

I arrived in the 82d around May of 1980 in time to become part of Jimmy's Rapid Deployment Force. We just new a good day to die was coming....

Jimmy's bumbling gave us Reagan and we recovered. I hope theres another Reagan out there for this mess but, I don't see him yet.

.....jd

[Richard]

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Richard

[akv]

Originally Posted by Richard

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Respice, adspice, prospice?

[silentreader]

To my thinking, this article makes much more sense. Ferguson claims that Egypt was some giant failure on the part of Obama's administration, but offers no suggestions for what should have been done. Only that we need a grand strategy.

When drama fills the headlines, reason deserts the pundits. Here are just a few thoughts:

1. Egypt says nothing about Obama. The United States had no control over events in Egypt. It is silly to proclaim that events in Egypt proved Obama either feckless or brilliant in his foreign policy. All he could do is watch, make carefully-moderated public statements, and place a few private phone calls. Making that a test of his foreign policy acumen is like judging the Super Bowl by the coin toss. Obama's foreign policy mettle is tested on issues in which he actually has a role to play, like the war in Afghanistan.

2. If Obama gets any credit, so does Bush. Obama rightly sided (albeit cautiously) with the protesters. His pro-democracy rhetoric would have been stupendously hypocritical and opportunistic if George W. Bush hadn't given Obama legs to stand on. Bush reversed decades of U.S. foreign policy by publicly criticizing Egypt and Saudi Arabia for their political oppression. Obama sounded more plausible as a result when he threw Mubarak under the bus and reached out a hand to the protesters.

3. Despite the basic goodness of people rallying against autocracy and corruption, their movement won't seamlessly usher in a golden age of good governance. Recent pro-democracy movements across the developing world are largely discouraging about the long-term effects of such popular outbursts.

The Georgian government never succeeded in exercising full control over its territory after the 2003 Rose Revolution. Disputes with breakaway regions helped trigged the 2008 war with Russia, which hobbled Georgian sovereignty.
Six years after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine toppled Viktor Yanukovych for corruption and fraud, Ukrainians reelected him.
The 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon created an ephemeral sense of national unity that vanished in 2007. The national assembly couldn't agree on a President, the office went vacant, violence erupted in Beirut, and the country veered towards civil war. A national unity government was patched together in 2008. It collapsed last month.
The 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan installed Kurmanbek Bakiyev as President on a platform of reform and clean government. Bakiyev was as bad as his predecessor. He faced down violent protests in 2007, rigged his reelection in 2009, and finally caved to more protests and violence when he fled the country in 2010.

4. Be careful what you ask for. Every day I expected The Onion to run the headline, "Egyptians Demand Military Rule," because that, for now, is exactly what they have got. Democracy is possible, contrary to cultural determinists who think Arabs are barred by the laws of history from self-government -- but neither is it inevitable, or even particularly easy. The eventual emergence of good government and democratic elections would be a better test of Obama's handling of Egypt than parsing his utterances of the last month.

5. No one knows how the Muslim Brotherhood will react, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Elections have a track record of blunting the hard edge of some revolutionary, illiberal movements (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq), and empowering others (the Nazis). The Brotherhood's greater freedom of action in the post-Mubarak Egypt is something to watch closely. The Brotherhood's choices in the coming months and years will be more important to Egypt and the Middle East than the toppling of one autocrat. They may be a bellwether for political Islamist movements across the world.

6. James Clapper should resign.

[uplink5]

Originally Posted by Richard

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Richard

So in other words, believing that the rooster’s crowing causes the sun to rise?

interesting

[incarcerated]

1. Egypt says nothing about Obama. The United States had no control over events in Egypt. It is silly to proclaim that events in Egypt proved Obama either feckless or brilliant in his foreign policy. All he could do is watch, make carefully-moderated public statements, and place a few private phone calls. Making that a test of his foreign policy acumen is like judging the Super Bowl by the coin toss. Obama's foreign policy mettle is tested on issues in which he actually has a role to play, like the war in Afghanistan.

This argues essentially the same thing that the Newsweek piece does, namely, that Obama was not directing or influencing a particular outcome in the Egyptian unrest. It wasn’t him. He wasn't a factor.
As we have already discussed, we have this:
http://www.professionalsoldiers.com/...ad.php?t=32109

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...uprising.html#

And now this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/wo...ef=global-home

Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings

By MARK LANDLER
Published: February 16, 2011
WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.
Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said….
“There’s no question Egypt was very much on the mind of the president,” said a senior official who helped draft the report and who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss its findings. “You had all the unknowns created by Egypt’s succession picture — and Egypt is the anchor of the region.”
….The White House held weekly meetings with experts from the State Department, the C.I.A. and other agencies. The process was led by Dennis B. Ross, the president’s senior adviser on the Middle East; Samantha Power, a senior director at the National Security Council who handles human rights issues; and Gayle Smith, a senior director responsible for global development.
The administration kept the project secret, officials said, because it worried that if word leaked out, Arab allies would pressure the White House, something that happened in the days after protests convulsed Cairo…
Indeed, except for Egypt, the officials refused to discuss countries in detail. The report singles out four for close scrutiny, which an official said ran the gamut: one that is trying to move toward change, another that has resisted any change and two with deep strategic ties to the United States as well as religious tensions. Those characteristics would suggest Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen.
By issuing a directive, Mr. Obama was also pulling the topic of political change out of regular meetings on diplomatic, commercial or military relations with Arab states. In those meetings, one official said, the strategic interests loom so large that it is almost impossible to discuss reform efforts.
The study has helped shape other messages, like a speech Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave in Qatar in January, in which she criticized Arab leaders for resisting change.
“We really pushed the question of who was taking the lead in reform,” said an official. “Would pushing reform harm relations with the Egyptian military? Doesn’t the military have an interest in reform?”
Mr. Obama also pressed his advisers to study popular uprisings in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to determine which ones worked and which did not. He is drawn to Indonesia, where he spent several years as a child, which ousted its longtime leader, Suharto, in 1998.
While the report is guiding the administration’s response to events in the Arab world, it has not yet been formally submitted — and given the pace of events in the region, an official said, it is still a work in progress.

[Pete]

You just may get it.

We shall soon see if the second part of the Egyptian Constitution remains or if the Constitution is rewritten to include all peoples and all faiths.

My money is on "remains" and that means...............

[Sigaba]

Niall Ferguson is well on his way to being this generation's version of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

IMO, it is unsound for a historian to comment on what a sitting head of state has done nor not done without access to documentary evidence. (This point is the second biggest lesson of Eisenhower revisionism.)

Ferguson's implication that the U.S. does not have a "coherent" grand strategy flies in the face of the open source document available here. The question isn't of coherence but of execution and efficacy.

[incarcerated]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

Ferguson's implication that the U.S. does not have a "coherent" grand strategy flies in the face of the open source document available here. The question isn't of coherence but of execution and efficacy.

Eight attempts to open the link, including a computer restart and accessing it from Google, all failed. Must be something wrong with my computer. Too bad. I am still waiting for someone to explain to me how turning our back on an important, peaceful ally and siding with soft revolutionaries who seek to overthrow its legitimate government is in the national security interests of the United States. What does that do to the efficacy of our other alliances, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan? For that matter, how are American national security interests furthered by conducting outreach to Islamic ‘activists’ in Egypt and France, while secretly studying the Middle Eastern and North African nations for vulnerabilities to revolution?
Do we have a national security document, or an unstated strategy?

[silentreader]

Originally Posted by incarcerated

Eight attempts to open the link, including a computer restart and accessing it from Google, all failed. Must be something wrong with my computer. Too bad. I am still waiting for someone to explain to me how turning our back on an important, peaceful ally and siding with revolutionaries who seek to overthrow its legitimate government is in the national security interests of the United States. What does that do to the efficacy of our other alliances, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan? For that matter, how are American national security interests furthered by conducting outreach to Islamic ‘activists’ in Egypt and France, while secretly studying the Middle Eastern and North African nations for vulnerabilities to revolution?
Do we have a national security document, or an unstated strategy?

Sigaba's link worked for me, try a new browser if it's not working for you (I'm using Chrome). To answer your last question, it's a 52 page open source national security strategy, so yes, we do have a document.

As for your first question, what alternatives did Obama have? How would Reagan, for example, have dealt with the situation any differently? The people of Egypt seem to have overwhelmingly decided that Mubarak had to go. It is hard for me to imagine a way the US could have interfered and kept Mubarak in power.

Finally, you call Mubarak's government legitimate. What is your criteria for legitimacy? The country has been in a continuous state of emergency rule for 30 years and has never had open or free elections. It's been notorious for corruption and inefficiency.

I think your concerns are well founded- Egypt was a useful ally in the Middle East and is not the only country we have unsavory relations with. There's certainly potential for all of this to go very wrong. But there's also hope that things will get better. The ideal outcome of all of this is that we maintain our partnership with the country while helping it usher in a new, peaceful and more open government. Had we made a stand against the protestors (which seems to me like it would have been futile) the odds of this best-case scenario would have dramatically dropped and Mubarak would have died in a year or two anyways, leaving us in the same place with a lot less leverage.

Perhaps there's another angle that I don't see. I am genuinely interested to know what you think they US could have done differently, as I really can't conceive of an action we could have taken that would have saved Mubarak.

[incarcerated]

Originally Posted by silentreader

As for your first question, what alternatives did Obama have? How would Reagan, for example, have dealt with the situation any differently? The people of Egypt seem to have overwhelmingly decided that Mubarak had to go. It is hard for me to imagine a way the US could have interfered and kept Mubarak in power.

He could have kept silent. Exactly how is his support for the revolutionaries consistent with the national security interests of the United States?

Finally, you call Mubarak's government legitimate. What is your criteria for legitimacy? The country has been in a continuous state of emergency rule for 30 years and has never had open or free elections. It's been notorious for corruption and inefficiency.

The emergency rule was in place to control the Muslim Brotherhood and domestic extremists. Those are the only people likely to derive freedom from this revolution. Yes, they have no elections. So what? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an elected official: does this mean that Iran is a Democracy? IMO, without Western traditions of human rights and the concept of the individual (none of which have ever existed east of Palestine), Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East will mean little more than they did in the Soviet Union.
The Mubarak government was legitimate insofar as it was recognized and accepted by the United States until these events. We did not have a problem with the Egyptian government 60 days ago. We maintained normal relations with them. They were an ally. Are all governments that are subject to substantial demonstrations, by definition, illegitimate? The MSM would have us think so.

I am genuinely interested to know what you think they US could have done differently, as I really can't conceive of an action we could have taken that would have saved Mubarak.

I am not particularly interested in how Obama could have saved Mubarak. Given that the White House has been working clandestinely with the demonstrators for months, saving Mubarak was never in the cards. My interest is, having done what he has done by supporting the demonstrators, how does Obama explain himself? His course of action has alienated Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and France. It has pleased Iran. By supporting the demonstrators, we have helped destabilize the region. This is all being sold to us, vigorously, as Freedom and Democracy. Those are terms which we understand, and cherish. It is, in my opinion, a sales job. IMO, the Middle East doesn’t want Democracy: it wants the Quran.

[Richard]

Originally Posted by uplink5

So in other words, believing that the rooster’s crowing causes the sun to rise?

interesting

No. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/post-hoc.html

For anyone having trouble with the link in post #9, you can find it by going to the following link and scrolling down and then clicking on the blue link titled "Read the full National Security Strategy (pdf)":

http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/defense

And can often be the case in foreign affairs, the following may aptly apply:

“There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”
- Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin

And so it goes...

Richard

[Dusty]

Originally Posted by Aloysius

Here I am going to shed some light on my ignorance but here goes:

He (Obama) is the leader of a country that decided long ago that we will support any people who decides to take control of the direction of their nation, but we only support that right when is serves us? Doesn't work that way IMO.

Excluding Israel, right?

[Dusty]

Originally Posted by Aloysius

We can call that government legitimate all we want, but we'd have to seriously consider redefining the term "legitimate."

Who's "we"?