International Affairs: March 2014 Archives
Austin Bay has some suggested hard-power responses we can make to Russia's annexation of Crimea. I particularly endorse the expansion of fracking and the exporting of American natural gas to Europe.
Russian hard-power aggression, annexation and expansion require a hard-power response. Here are some I recommend: (1) We can't flip-flop NATO Article 5, NATO's commitment to mutual defense. The U.S. must demonstrate it takes its NATO obligations seriously. So, deploy U.S. troops to Poland. The U.S. withdrew its last tanks from Germany in 2013. The Poland garrison needs a U.S. armor brigade. (2) Cancel all defense budget cuts. Faculty club snark aside, peace through strength means something. (3) Open federal lands to natural gas "fracking" and start shipping gas to Europe. Undermining Russian gas sales is a real economic sanction. (4) Arm the Baltic nations. They are also NATO allies. And (5) deploy the GBI's to Poland, and build a more robust missile defense system. As for permanently deploying U.S. Patriot PAC-3 short-range anti-missile missiles in Poland -- that's an idea whose time has come.
On Monday Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying "I told you so" on Russia -- that they are our greatest geopolitical opponent. When he first said so during a presidential debate with President Obama, he was widely ridiculed and Obama riposted with "the 80s called, and they want their foreign policy back". Well, Romney was right, and now he gets to rub the President's face in it.
Why are there no good choices? From Crimea to North Korea, from Syria to Egypt, and from Iraq to Afghanistan, America apparently has no good options. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, Russia owns Crimea and all we can do is sanction and disinvite--and wring our hands.Iran is following North Korea's nuclear path, but it seems that we can only entreat Iran to sign the same kind of agreement North Korea once signed, undoubtedly with the same result.
Our tough talk about a red line in Syria prompted Vladimir Putin's sleight of hand, leaving the chemicals and killings much as they were. We say Bashar Assad must go, but aligning with his al Qaeda-backed opposition is an unacceptable option.
And how can it be that Iraq and Afghanistan each refused to sign the status-of-forces agreement with us--with the very nation that shed the blood of thousands of our bravest for them?
Why, across the world, are America's hands so tied?
A large part of the answer is our leader's terrible timing. In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options. In foreign affairs as in life, there is, as Shakespeare had it, "a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries."
Romney is right: the reason we have "no good options" now is that Obama's foreign policy didn't protect our decision space. If I were to play chess with Garry Kasparov it might look (to a naive observer) as if nothing much happened for a while... but then I'd quickly find myself with no good options. I wouldn't run out of good moves because of misfortune, acts of God, or inevitability -- I would run out of good moves because I would be outmaneuvered and outplayed. That's where America is now. We've been strategically outmaneuvered and outplayed by our geopolitical opponents, and it's only becoming obvious now that we're out of good moves.
Final thought: maybe we should try to get some Reagan-era foreign policy going?
The missing Malaysian airliner is quite a mystery and most likely a tragedy; our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.
It appears that two passengers on the plane were flying with stolen passports, but it's unclear to me how common this is. The Malaysian Home Minister thinks that the security screeners should have noticed something amiss:
Malaysian Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said the unidentified passengers appeared to be Asians, and blasted the border officials who let them through while carrying passports from Austria and Italy."Can't these immigration officials think? Italian and Austrian [passport holders] but with Asian faces," Hamidi fumed.
Waltern Russell Mead concisely explains the nuclear angle to the ongoing Ukrainian crisis. By failing to protect Ukraine's borders, America reinforces yet again the value to every country to be able to guarantee it's own security with nuclear weapons. That's a huge failure.
Here's the rub. When Ukraine escaped from the Soviet Union in 1990, Soviet nukes from the Cold War were still stationed on Ukrainian territory. After a lot of negotiation, Ukraine agreed to return those nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for what (perhaps naively) its leaders at the time thought would be solid security guarantees from the United States and the United Kingdom. The "Budapest Memorandum" as this agreement is called, does not in fact require the United States to do very much. We can leave Ukraine twisting in the wind without breaking our limited formal obligations under the pact.If President Obama does this, however, and Ukraine ends up losing chunks of territory to Russia, it is pretty much the end of a rational case for non-proliferation in many countries around the world. If Ukraine still had its nukes, it would probably still have Crimea. It gave up its nukes, got worthless paper guarantees, and also got an invasion from a more powerful and nuclear neighbor.
The choice here could not be more stark. Keep your nukes and keep your land. Give up your nukes and get raped. This will be the second time that Obama administration policy has taught the rest of the world that nuclear weapons are important things to have. The Great Loon of Libya gave up his nuclear program and the west, as other leaders see it, came in and wasted him.
I've been watching the uncontested annexation of Crimea by Russia over the past several days with astonishment. President Obama, America, and the rest of the world have basically shrugged the whole thing off. Obviously everyone is "deeply concerned", but apparently no one is going to actually do anything.
Obama expressed "deep concern" over Russia's moves, suggested Putin's troops leave and warned the occupation "would negatively impact Russia's standing in the international community." ...Of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest Obama's passivity toward Putin is connected to the American's overheard promise of post-election "flexibility" to Putin's predecessor back in 2012. So, we won't.
Here's how Col. Putin responded to Obama's words of warning: He sent more Russian troops into Crimea.
Mead points out that Putin will probably keep Crimea and steal whatever aid the West gives to Ukraine.
Now Putin seems to be seizing the most important military assets Russia holds in the country and can reasonably hope to increase Russia's influence throughout the country as a weak government struggles with intractable problems. Meanwhile, he is probably licking his chops over the unpalatable choices Western statesmen now face. If the West doesn't ship billions of dollars to Ukraine, the current government will fail and national unity will fray. If the West comes across with the dough, Putin has a number possibilities for working the situation to his benefit. He can, for example, raise the natural gas price to a Ukraine flush with Western aid dollars, or demand repayment of Ukraine's existing debts to Moscow, transferring Western aid money into Russian pockets.
Maybe the calculation is that Russia is in a demographic death spiral anyway, so what's the point of fighting over territory that is full of people who seem to want to be a part of Russia.
It seems that Obama's calcuation in international crises is always to do nothing. Syria, Iran, Crimea, Snowden, Sudan, Egypt, Iraq.... It's hard to see how "do nothing" is always in the interests of the world's Superpower.
And yes, Sarah Palin anticipated the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2008.
